Blessed Are Those Who Mourn (8 page)

I exhale in a long, jagged breath. “Okay.”

What I really want to say is
Don
't hang up. Don't leave me here alone.

 

Chapter 13

O
NCE
I
GET
off the freeway, the drive to the beach through San Francisco is a blur. I don't remember a second of it. All I know is that when I pull up into the parking lot at Ocean Beach, it is full of ambulances, fire trucks, and more police cars than I've seen in one place in a long time. The beach, the scene of so many happy memories with Grace, appears nightmarish, even though I know it's my own dread playing tricks on me. Everything casts long shadows. Voices sound eerie, whipped around by the wind. ­People trudging through the deep sand seem to be in slow motion.

As soon as my tires hit the parking lot pavement, everything speeds up. I don't even bother to close my car door, just leave it open and race like I've never run before for the beach, where I see Donovan huddled with a group of cops.

I race past a reserve officer, who puts out a hand to stop me. I push his arm away like he's a rag doll. Before I get to the group, they notice me. Donovan looks down at the sand, and I stop in my tracks. They found her. She's dead.

For a second, I don't notice that Donovan is in front of me, speaking to me. “Pull it together. Grace needs you to be strong. If we're going to find her, you need to be the strongest you've ever been in your life. Do you understand?”

I nod, slowly, staring over his shoulder at the group on the beach.

“They need you to go to our place.”

“No. I'm not leaving here without my daughter,” I say, jerking away from him, my hair flying in my face.

He grabs my face and waits until I meet his eyes. “She's
our
daughter, Ella. And you're going to do this. You're going to do this for Grace. Do you understand?”

I don't answer.

“You have to trust me to make sure everything is done right here, and you need to make sure everything we need to do at home is done. There are certain things that need to be done when a child is missing. You know this . . .”

The days following Caterina's kidnapping are a blur of nightmarish proportions. It only comes back to me in snapshots. Now, on Ocean Beach, more than twenty-­five years later, everything rushes back to me in sharp slices.

M
Y MOTHER AND
father holding each other and weeping.

The first and last time I ever saw my father cry.

My dad's body at the bottom of the basement stairs.

My mother being taken away in a squad car to identify Caterina's body. Her ramrod posture. Her vacant eyes. Her pale face. All the members of our big Italian-­American family calling and bringing food by our house.

My brothers, both angry at the world, punching each other until they are out of breath, then punching holes in the wall, overturning furniture, blasting rock music. And my mother, ignoring my brothers' bad behavior as if they are ghosts only I can see. And throughout all of it, our home invaded by police officers. Some in uniform, some in regular clothes. All with grim expressions on their faces.

I watched all of it as if I'd been a ghost myself, spying on this family that was wailing and screaming after the last guest left for the night. Wondering why I didn't feel anything. I didn't feel sad. I didn't feel angry. I wasn't like them.

I was six years old and wondered if maybe I was
dead
. Every once in a while I would bite the inside of my mouth to prove I was alive and could still feel pain. I crept around the outside of my family as a specter. The week she was missing, I didn't sleep in the room I shared with Caterina. I grabbed my blanket and stuffed rabbit and slept on the couch in the den and nobody said anything to me about it. Nobody even noticed. Once, the entire family went to the police station and left me behind. They were halfway there before someone noticed I wasn't in the car. Instead of turning around to come get me, my mother called a neighbor, who came to sit with me until night fell and my family came home with defeated expressions and posture.

“B
E STRONG,
E
LLA.”
I snap out of it and realize Donovan is standing in front of me at Ocean Beach. He has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. I stare at it, mesmerized. I haven't seen him smoke for six years. When he said I know what happens when a child is kidnapped, I realize he didn't mean Caterina. He meant from my work as a reporter. “Grace needs you to be strong. Do you understand?”

“My mom?”

“Unconscious. Your mother is a strong woman. She's a fighter,” he says as he takes a long drag of his cigarette and his eyebrows draw together. He exhales over my right shoulder. “We'll find Grace. She's a survivor like you and your mother.”

“Are you sure?” I'm begging him to tell me everything is going to be okay, even though I know he can't.

A man starts slogging through the sand, headed our way. Gray tips his tightly trimmed Afro. He wears a black suit with a Garfield tie resting on his belly. “I'm Sergeant Jackson.” He is all business. “Mrs. Giovanni? I'm going to need to go back with you to your place and explain what we need to do there. I promise you, ma'am, we will do everything in our power to find your daughter and bring her home safe. I give you my word that I will not stop looking until she is found.”

Donovan has let go of my arm and is talking to some detectives a few feet away on the beach. Someone hands him a cigarette, and he lights it from the small nub that his cigarette has become.

“I need to go see my mother.”

“I understand your need to go to the hospital, but right now, it's really important we take care of some matters at your home. Right now your mother is unconscious.”

“She's in a coma?”

“Why don't we head back to your place and do what we need to do. I have a call in to the hospital to alert me the minute your mother's condition changes.”

“But she can't be alone. I have to go to her.” I start to rush away but stop. Instead of rushing to my mother's bedside at the hospital, I need to help the police find Grace.

Donovan is back with us, eyes darting this way and that, as if he can't decide what to do or where to go. I know how he feels.

Sergeant Jackson stands right in front of me so that he is all I can see.

“You need to come with me back to your place. We need to get some pictures and set up a phone line. I promise you as soon as your mother's condition changes you will be the first one to know.”

I feel a hand on my arm at the same time I hear the bone-­vibrating thud of helicopters. When I open my eyes, I see it's the sergeant's hand. Donovan has his fingers over his eyes, rubbing them as if trying to wake up from this nightmare we're in. He wraps me in his arms and whispers in my ear. “I'm going to find her, Ella.”

When he pulls back, the pain in his eyes nearly shatters me. He can say whatever he wants. I've heard and seen it before: a cop promising to find a missing child and then going to his deathbed regretting the promise he couldn't keep.

Donovan takes his cigarette out of his mouth and kisses me on the forehead like I'm a child. Then he turns away and heads back to the group on the beach.

Sergeant Jackson takes my arm, and I let him guide me back to the parking lot.

 

Chapter 14

T
HE SKY IS
darkening as night falls upon the city. As we make our way to the parking lot, time becomes distorted. It feels like I'm in purgatory on this walk that seems like it is taking forever. Every fiber of my being wants to stay on this beach. The last place Grace was seen.

She must be so cold in just a swimsuit. She must be so scared.
Stop. Don't go there. You can't go there
.

Over the years in therapy, I've learned how to compartmentalize my fears and anxieties, to redirect my thoughts, but this—­this is the off-­the-­charts terror. So I chant,
Grace will come home safe. Grace will come home safe. Grace will come home safe.

Don
't think anything else. Don't go there. Stay strong for Grace
.

I'm not sure if it works, but it keeps me from toppling to my knees.

I give the sergeant my keys so a reserve officer can follow in my vehicle, then I get into the passenger seat of the sergeant's squad car. I'm a mass of mush, as if my bones had disintegrated. Another officer carrying a small notepad wordlessly hops in the backseat behind the Plexiglas.

“I'll ask you all this at your place, but just off the top of your head, has anyone threatened your mother or daughter?” the sergeant asks, staring straight ahead as he pulls out of the parking lot.

“No,” I say.

“What about you?”

“Where do I start?” I give a strangled laugh at the irony, and the sergeant shoots me a concerned look. I tell him about my sister's kidnapping and murder. I tell him how the FBI suspects Frank Anderson took my sister, and now I'm worried he's back and killing women. My teeth chatter as I say this. I'm shaking.

Even though it is seventy degrees outside and he has small beads of sweat on his brow, Jackson cranks the heat full blast, reaching into his backseat with one hand and pulling a blanket around me as his car screeches through the city streets. When I finish telling him about Anderson, he exhales loudly.

“Detective Donovan mentioned this Anderson guy,” he says and quickly darts a glance my way. “He said the feds are working on it, but we need to put out the word, as well.”

The sergeant grabs his phone and makes some other calls. I tune out, saying the chanting prayer in my head to keep it together.
Please bring Grace home safe. Please protect Grace. Please help us find Grace
.

I want to get the words right, but I don't know what to say. Protect her? Bring her home? Keep her safe? All of it.

The sergeant hangs up. “Anything else odd lately?” he asks me while he looks straight ahead out the front windshield, hands gripping the wheel at ten and two o'clock like they taught us in driver's training.

I flash back to the man on the beach last weekend. I describe him to the sergeant as best as I can.

“At first he seemed young, twenties, although I think he was my age, thirties. His hair was dirty blond and cut like a little boy's in a sort of bowl haircut. I think that's what made him seem boyish. And his sort of effeminate facial features, like pink lips. And his eyes. They were weird. Icy blue. They weren't evenly spaced. It's hard to describe, but there was something odd about them.” My voice is shaky.

“Yes, your husband mentioned that man.”

I don't tell him I'm not married.

I squeeze my eyes together, trying to remember what the man was wearing.

“He had on Converse sneakers. I remember that. I think white or maybe black.”

What else?
I think.
What else?

“And baggy jeans. He said he was from Marin and was having drinks in the city or something.”

“Did you see him get in a vehicle at all?”

“No, he just walked off down the beach,” I say. “We packed up and left.”

Sergeant Jackson is quiet for a minute.

“Do you think he took my daughter?” I ask. “Someone took her. Why else would they attack my mother?”

“I'm calling in a sketch artist,” Jackson said.

“If Frank Anderson took my daughter, I don't want to waste time looking for this guy just because he was weird. Who do
you
think took my daughter?” I'm verging on hysterics.

“Ma'am, we will follow every lead we can until we find her. First let's go over what she was wearing. The witness said the little girl had on a swimsuit. Maybe yellow and white. Do you know which one? We'll want to look through her clothes at your house to make sure that is what she was wearing.”

“No. She doesn't own one like that,” I say. Then I remember she was probably wearing a hand-­me-­down swimsuit that had been one of her cousins. “Maybe it was borrowed. Oh, God, I don't know. My mother would know. I don't know.”

“Does she have any physical characteristics that might stand out,” he asks. “Such as a scar or missing front tooth? Or has she ever had surgery or broken bones?”

“Yes. Her pinky. She broke her left pinky last year running down a hill. It is still a little bit crooked. It healed oddly, and the doctors didn't want to do surgery just to straighten it.”

It was so silly. It was the first day of spring. She was running in the park and got carried away running down a steep hill, falling and bending her finger back. We had to keep her pinky duct-­taped to her ring finger for a month. I bought pink, purple, and polka dot duct tape to keep it interesting. The sergeant is going to ask for X-­rays. As soon as I think it, he does.

“I need the name of her medical doctor so we can get copies of those X-­rays. How about missing teeth? Any teeth come out yet?”

“No. Not yet. Just a loose front tooth. None missing yet.”

A memory of her asking about the tooth fairy streaks into my mind. “Mama, how does the tooth fairy get in our house? Does she fly through the window or use the front door?”

“Nobody knows,” I told her. “But I think she must use magic, don't you think?”

Grace nodded her head vigorously so her curls bopped around. “Yes. Magic. Like the leprechauns, right?”

“Exactly.”

A
T OUR CONDO,
I sit on the couch as a team of cops goes through Grace's room. I can't bear to see what they take. I know another team is at my mother's house.

I've called my brothers. I didn't stay on the line to talk, just blurted out what was going on and hung up.

A spasm of guilt streaks through me that I haven't called to check on my mom at the hospital, but I know my brothers and sisters-­in-­law are going to be with her. Plus Sergeant Jackson promised me I'd be the first to hear if her condition changed. I can't bear to call my grandmother. I'm worried she might have a heart attack or stroke from the news.

I found two pictures of Grace—­her school picture and one of her profile as she tries to catch a butterfly hovering by her face. A police reserve office takes them out of my hands as if they are delicate and precious and breakable and puts them in an envelope before he takes off at a run out the door. Our condo is filled with ­people I don't know. Some in uniform, others in plainclothes. They all blur into one big mass to me.

The clock on the wall, a big retro school clock, ticks away like a doomsday bomb. It is 4:00 p.m. The police say it was 3:00 p.m. when the woman who found my mother on the beach saw a man carrying a little girl near the parking lot.

Grace has been missing for one hour. None of this is real. It can't be. This isn't happening. It's all a bad dream. I've written so much about missing children that the statistics are engraved on my brain. Every second that passes is vital. The first three hours are the most critical when it comes to finding a child alive.

Statistics show that about 75 percent of abducted children who are killed are dead within three hours of being abducted. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, the first forty-­eight hours a child is missing are the most critical in terms of whether the child will be found safe.

The DOJ stats show that out of the more than seven hundred thousand children reported missing each year, most end up being communication misunderstandings, runaways, or custody disputes. Only about 115 kids are stranger abductions.

These facts run like ticker tape through my brain, and at the end, there is only one conclusion: We are running out of time.