Capturing Angels (18 page)

“Well, let’s get to it,” Margaret said. “They’ll be on us like locusts in two shakes of a rabbit’s tail.” She turned to me. “Whoever said older people have small appetites was either a hog himself or dumber than a doornail.”

The other two women laughed, and then we all headed for the kitchen.

After I was introduced to Irma Kaplan and Simon Packwood, the head cook, Margaret announced that I made the best potato salad she had ever eaten, and that was quickly my assignment. Neither of them had much of a reaction to the mention of my name. I glanced at Margaret. She kept her
Mona Lisa
smile, but I could see that she was proud of the way everyone was heeding her warnings.

I was ambivalent about it. Even though it made things easier for me, I couldn’t help being a little upset that anyone could put aside my tragedy as easily as they might a flat tire or a broken appliance. To stop thinking about it, I got busy quickly. Less than a half-hour later, the seniors began arriving. I could hear the chatter and the laughter, but I kept to working in the kitchen. I was hoping for an opportunity to speak with Sheila alone.

But that didn’t come easily. Margaret had been right about how demanding the seniors were. As soon as we had the luncheon prepared, we were all out there serving and rushing around to get this or that. Someone wanted colder water, someone else asked for more macaroni and cheese, others wanted the bread that was on another table, someone else complained about her chair and needed another. I found most of them cheerful and appreciative, however, all the men giving me compliments when I was introduced to them. When there was a pause before dessert, the head of the center, a man named Carl Souter, began to speak, introducing officers and some benefactors who had attended.

Sheila retreated to the kitchen with Irma to prepare the desserts. I followed, and when I had the chance, I asked Sheila to tell me exactly what Laurie James had told her about her friend.

“Oh, you heard that story?” she asked in return.

“Of course. Where were you when Laurie told it to you?”

“We were at lunch in Century City, that fusion place.”

She described the incident on the steps of the church exactly the way Margaret had described it to me.

“Who else heard the story?”

She listed the names of the other women. I knew one of them, Carla Shanley, but only because of her infamous sister, Alice Francis, a Sister of Mercy who had received an automatic excommunication because of her role in an abortion for a critically ill pregnant woman at the hospital in Nevada where she had worked for nearly twenty years. Sister Alice claimed that a nurse had merely laid her hands on the woman’s stomach and she went into a spontaneous abortion. The church did not accept her story. It was the subject of debates at our church for a long time. John supported the church’s decision, of course. Margaret felt sorry for Sister Alice.

“I imagine your daughter was bothered a lot by people looking for miracles,” Sheila said. “That’s what everyone at the table predicted, and everyone felt sorry for her. It can be quite traumatizing for a little girl like yours, although I must say, she didn‘t seem at all disturbed when I saw her.”

“If any more of that was happening, I didn’t know of it,” I said. “I didn’t even know about that time you’ve described.”

She looked at me oddly. “We all feel so sorry for you and your husband. I know it’s been so long. Is it hopeless?”

Suddenly, I felt a wave of nausea and was a little dizzy.

“I’ll never accept that it is,” I said, and walked out of the kitchen.

The speeches had just ended. Not everyone was staying for dessert. Margaret was helping a woman to her walker. I tapped her on the arm as soon as she was finished.

“I’ve got to go home,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not feeling well.”

“Oh. Well . . .” Helplessly, she looked around at all the work left to do.

“Don’t worry. I can call a cab,” I said. I took out my cell phone and started for the lobby.

“Oh, no, Grace. I’ll take you home.”

“It’s not a problem, Margaret. Finish what you have to do here, please.”

I kept walking. Less than ten minutes later, a taxi arrived at the front of the center, and I got in and gave the driver my address. When I got home, I went up to the bedroom to lie down. I thought about taking one of my pills, but thankfully, I fell asleep on my own and was awoken when the phone rang. It was nearly five.

“How are you doing?” John asked.

“Oh.” I sat up, scrubbed my cheeks with my palms, looked at the clock, and said, “I fell asleep.”

John laughed. “The seniors exhausted you? Margaret said that might happen.”

“I guess,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Just getting a little rest and preparing to go to a dinner meeting. What are your plans for tonight?”

“Tonight? I have no plans, John. I’ll just make something simple for myself. I have that new novel I want to start. It will be an early night.”

“Okay. I’ll call you sometime late in the morning tomorrow,” he said. “You know how to reach me if you need me for anything.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, someone’s buzzing. These guys are exhausting me with their questions. I swear, I don’t know what they’re teaching them in business schools these days. Call you tomorrow,” he repeated, and hung up before I could respond.

I rose, soaked my face in cold water, and then went down to think about what I actually would eat. I hadn’t had any lunch and did have an appetite. Almost everything I could think to prepare would be too much for one person. I ended up doing some eggs and cheese and onions in an omelet. Just as I sat down to eat, Margaret called to see how I was.

“I just needed some rest,” I said. “I’m fine.”

“Sheila told me what she told you. She was quite worried that she caused you to be upset.”

“It had nothing to do with her. Please tell her so.”

“Would you like me to come over and prepare something for you? I have a casserole that’s way too much for me. That’s the burden of being a widow and a good cook,” she added.

“I’ve already made something for myself, thanks. Please, don’t worry about me, and thank you for taking me today. I did enjoy doing something at the center. Most of the people were delightful.”

“Good. Maybe you can go again.”

“Maybe,” I said with enough drift in my voice to indicate that I didn’t want to commit to any specific day or date.

“Call me if you need anything, anytime.”

“I will. Thanks, Margaret.”

My parents called a few minutes later. It seemed that getting some food into myself was going to be a real task after all. My mother went on and on, telling me one insignificant little detail after another about her and my father’s day, just to fill a phone conversation and avoid asking or saying anything that would bring up Mary. When she was finished, my father got on. He did get me to laugh by describing an argument he’d had on the golf course with one of his regular foursome, a man name Charles Branson, whom he had caught cheating twice before.

“I told him he moves his balls better than any stud I know.”

I could feel how my laugh comforted him. He asked about John and then became a little concerned when he learned that I was home alone for nearly three days.

“We could come to L.A.,” he said.

“I’m fine. I’ll call you if I need anything,” I promised.

Especially since Mary’s abduction, whenever I spoke to my parents, I found myself becoming a little girl not much older than Mary was. A child never really grows out of thinking of his or her parents as Mommy and Daddy. They might be more formal and think of them as Mother and Father or even a little less formal and think of them as Mom and Pop. When you’re older and your friends hear you refer to your parents as Mommy and Daddy, they either smile because they do the same thing or ask, “Do you always call your parents that now?” Referring to your mother as Mommy if you’re in your thirties, forties, and fifties might seem odd, I suppose, but I found some comfort in doing so. It was as if they were really still able to protect and care for me, when, in fact, it was becoming clearer and clearer that I was or soon would be protecting and caring for them.

Maybe I was wishing I was back to being a little girl at an age when the biggest worry I had was whether I could play with my dolls or my friends a little longer. Why do we want so much to get out of that warm and comfortable world of innocence in which responsibilities are so simple and world events so unimportant?

I once mentioned this thought to John, and he sat for a moment and thought seriously about it and then said that what I was asking was exactly the point of the story of Adam and Eve. “God originally created us to be children,” he said. “We ruined it, and so we have the burden of adulthood and responsibility. We have the burden of winning back God’s favor.”

“I’d rather be Eve,” I said.

He laughed. “Be careful what you wish for. She suffered from vanity and screwed it up.”

I called him a chauvinist, and we both laughed, but that was back then. Now I wondered if I had screwed it up, if what was driving me toward Sam was not my need to feel like a woman but my vanity, my need to have someone else look upon me again as beautiful and desirable. I was full of contradictions. As I told Sam, John would quote Walt Whitman.

I finally finished eating and even had some coffee and a piece of a pie that Margaret had recently brought. Then I did try to start a novel, but my gaze would float off the page like the movable indicator on a Ouija board, leading me to the clock and the hour when Sam might call. Finally, just after nine, he did. I had been really afraid that he wouldn’t call at all, so I practically lunged at the telephone.

“I could see you in the morning,” he began after I said hello. “Do you really want to come over now?”

“I’m half out the door,” I told him.

“All right. I’ll wait for you in front. I’m almost there.”

“You weren’t going to call me, were you?”

“No,” he said, “but I thought of . . .”

“What?”

“The desperation in your voice and the pure lust in my heart.”

“Sounds like the perfect combination.”

“For what?” he asked with a little laugh.

“The strength to face another day,” I told him.

And I was off.

15

Transience

I followed Sam into the garage and took what was becoming my personal parking space.

The first words out of my mouth when he and I met at the elevator should have been, “What have you learned to help find Mary?”

Instead, neither of us spoke. We kissed, he took my hand, and in silence we got into the elevator. He put his arm around my shoulders and held me close to him as we rode up, and then, still without either of us speaking, he opened his condo front door and we entered together.

“I need a little after-dinner drink,” he said, heading for the bar. “You?”

“Whatever you’re having.”

I took off my light blue leather jacket and dropped it on the sofa. Then I watched him prepare our drinks. He remained behind the bar. I sat on a bar stool and looked at him. He seemed to be avoiding looking at me and went right at his drink. I sipped mine.

“What is it, Sam?”

“This is going to bite us both in the ass,” he said, swinging his left arm as if the apartment was all he had meant.

“If that happens, I won’t feel it. I don’t feel much these days.”

“Yeah, well, for now, at least, neither David nor any of his agents knows we’re seeing each other like this.”

“You’re telling me the FBI is that oblivious? Not a good thing to tell someone who is so dependent on them to save her little girl.” I finished my drink.

“Maybe I’m just good at hiding things.”

I stared at him. He looked down and twirled his drink.

“Are you going to tell me anything about today, anything more?”

He looked at me as if he was making that decision right at the moment. Then he nodded. “The only reason I’m still in on what they’re doing,” he began, “is that my instincts about Mary’s abduction were right in line with what they have been investigating. Over the past three years, five children, all about Mary’s age, have been abducted in three Southwestern states—two in California, one in Arizona, and two in New Mexico. One of the children was a boy, so it’s not just a girl thing.”

He came around the bar to sit beside me, continuing, “As you can imagine, missing children are a major concern for the Bureau and local law-enforcement agencies everywhere because of how dramatic and traumatic it is not only for the parents who’ve lost these kids but also for parents who fear losing their own. Most of the abductions that occur every year are family abductions for a variety of reasons. Some are runaways, of course. The least number of missing children are classified as not family abductions. Statistically, that falls somewhere between three thousand and five thousand a year, which is still a big number. A serial abductor is always a fear.” He reached for my hand.

“What happens to them? Are they the children being sold into Mexico?” I asked.

“Some for sure. Something like forty percent of these kids are sexually abused.”

I gasped.

“I have no evidence, nor does the FBI, that sexual abuse is taking place in Mary’s case or that it was the motivation for her abduction,” he quickly added.

“But it could be?”

“Anything could be, but I told you that because I’m confident that where I’ve been heading in Mary’s case—and apparently, along with what I’ve got and what I’ve done, not where they are heading—involves a different motivation.”

“Where are we heading, then?”

He sat back. “A lightbulb went off when you mentioned that boy, Bradley Middleton, who suffered from acute lymphoblastic leukemia.”

“Mary’s supposedly miraculous cure of him,” I said, nodding. “And the two others you now know about.”

“Exactly. I keep up with all of our bulletins, maybe better than most, and I recalled reading about one of those other missing children in California. There was just a one-line reference to a story in the local newspaper about how she was thought to have miraculously cured a little boy who was suffering from the same illness. They had met only once at a playground, and immediately thereafter, the sick boy went into an unexplainable full recovery. Apparently, she had been involved in three other so-called miracle recoveries, one involving an older man with lung cancer, whom she again had met only once, another involving a teenage boy who had a brain tumor, and another with a teenage girl who had a serious ovarian tumor. In all of those cases, the disease and the tumors appeared to have evaporated soon after contact with her.”

“Was that whom you saw today, the mother of that child?”

“And the father, yes. They told me about a woman who visited them after the fourth story had appeared in the newspaper. She wanted to see their daughter and speak with her. The parents saw no harm in it. I think they were basking in the glow of such a story about their child, maybe wanted it all to be true.”

“The fools.”

“Can’t blame them. Most people are innocent and naïve when it comes to the evil that lurks around them.”

“Adam and Eve.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing. Forget it. What about this woman?”

“I know she was not who she claimed to be. She claimed to be a reporter for a national religious newspaper. After I interviewed these parents and got a description of the woman, I called the newspaper, and they had no one by that name on their staff now or back then, ever, in fact.”

I waited, my heart thumping. “What does that mean, Sam?”

“Well, I brought everything I had to our dinner meeting tonight. In three of the other missing-child cases, a woman fitting the same description and claiming similar credentials had appeared to see and speak with the children. They have cast a wide net, hoping to pick up on this woman, but she hasn’t surfaced anywhere else. It’s a little more difficult for a woman to disguise herself. No beards or mustaches, but hair color, different styles of clothing, maybe different makeup could go a long way. Of course, we can’t discount that it might not have been a woman at all. That’s happened, too. There are great female impersonators out there.”

“No such woman came to see me or John. At least, not that I know of,” I said.

“You hadn’t mentioned her, so I assumed not.”

“So, there’s nothing concrete yet?”

“Nothing pointing us to a specific person or place, but we have concluded—and when I say we, I mean the FBI, of course, with me tagging along—that this, Mary’s abduction, is part of a serial abduction narrowed down by the characteristics I described. I’m sorry,” he said, taking my hand again. “We’re not there, but we’re closer.”

“What if you get there too late?”

“We don’t know exactly why they’ve been taken, Grace. We can’t speculate on it ever being too late. It would make no sense for them to have taken such children and then to harm them, would it?”

“Yes, if my neighbor is right about what’s out there.”

“Margaret?”

I nodded.

“Meaning what?”

“Satan and his followers . . . they wouldn’t want to see God working miracles through little angels.”

“Somehow I don’t think it’s that,” he said.

“Police instincts?”

“It’s gotten me this far.”

I took a deep breath. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on like this. Today I decided to go with Margaret to the senior center to help with the luncheon. She thought I was going to distract myself and do a good deed.”

“Why were you really going, then?”

“I knew that woman, Sheila Bracken, was a volunteer, too, and I wanted to hear from her directly about my Mary and this woman who had come to the church one Sunday, wanting Mary to touch her. John had never mentioned it. I’m sure he thought that it would be disturbing for me. If I had been there, I wouldn’t have permitted it. Who knows what sort of emotional turmoil it could cause in a child?”

“Did Sheila tell you anything that you hadn’t heard before?”

“No. Well, she told me that she’d talked about it at a luncheon.”

“So, other people heard it and could spread the story?”

“Yes. She said they all predicted that people looking for miracles might bother us, bother Mary. One of the women, Carla Shanley, has a sister, a nun who was excommunicated for claiming that she didn’t assist in an abortion but that the abortion was miraculously spontaneous. It was a well-publicized case, a national story.”

“I don’t recall it.”

“Alice Francis. She was a Sister of Mercy nun. She worked in a Nevada hospital. Claimed the nurse she was with merely laid her hands on the woman. John and Margaret had a bit of a tiff over it. Margaret expressed some sympathy for Alice Francis, but John is relentless when it comes to his support of the church. Anyway, that’s what I got from Sheila. It didn’t make me happy to hear that they all predicted that Mary would be some sort of hope to desperate people.”

Sam narrowed his eyes. “But from what you’ve been telling me, Mary didn’t seem to be bothered. She was close to you, of course, but she never told you about the other little boy and the woman?”

“No. I suspect my husband told her not to tell me, even though he says he didn’t. Now I wish he had not treated me as if I was so damn fragile.”

He sat back thoughtfully.

“What?” I asked. Suddenly, it was more difficult to get words out of him.

“Yesterday, when you phoned, I had the sense that things were better between you two.”

“I’m so confused,” I said. I felt my throat closing, my eyes starting to soak in tears, tears that had always been hovering under my lids, threatening to appear. “I don’t know what’s right or wrong anymore. Yesterday John seemed like the sensible and caring person, and I came off like the insensitive, unappreciative, irrational one. It’s difficult enough living with the guilt around Mary’s abduction. I can’t carry anything additional.” I took another deep breath. My lungs felt as if they were filled with water, not air.

He nodded. “I understand.”

“Good. I don’t. For a while, I thought that maybe I could be more like John and assume my life again, sort of be seventy-five percent instead of zero. I tried and still try, but every time I do, I shudder, wake up, and have this heavy panic that it will lead to giving up on Mary. Does that make any sense to you?”

“Perfect sense. It’s too soon to live like you’ve lost her for good anyway, Grace. Some of these missing children have been found after years.”

“Years,” I repeated. It was like trying to swallow a cup of sour milk.

Sam looked at his watch. “Isn’t John going to call you tonight?”

“He did already. John doesn’t call more than once when he’s away. He’s probably already asleep or preparing for his meetings tomorrow. Besides, if he didn’t find me at home, he’d call my cell phone.”

Sam shook his head.

“I know,” I said. “It’s going to bite us in the ass.”

We looked at each other. Neither of us smiled.

“I don’t want to be alone tonight,” I said practically in a whisper.

“You’re seducing me, Mrs. Clark,” he kidded.

“I guess I’m not bad for someone out of practice.”

“No, you’re not bad at all,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss me.

We slipped off the bar stools together and walked hand-in-hand into his bedroom. “I hope I’m not just any port in a storm,” he said.

“Don’t mention ships,” I told him, and kissed him again.

Minutes later, both of us naked, I embraced him under his blanket and buried my face in his chest. He kissed my hair, stroked my shoulders, and kissed my neck, slowly moving down to my breasts and my stomach. I moaned softly and leaned back on the pillow.

Sex was rapidly becoming a respite, a time-out from my sorrow, my anxiety, and my anger. When he entered me, it was truly as if I could step out of not only my body but my entire life. The past and the present, even the future, evaporated. I was nameless, floating on the rhythm of the ecstasy being created between us. I didn’t see him or hear him. It was like making love to a ghost, my orgasm sending me farther and farther away from myself, until I had drifted too far and cried out with a mixture of grand pleasure and fear. He tightened his embrace around me and whispered my name as if he knew I needed to hear it. Moments later, luxuriating in our comfortable exhaustion, we lay still and silent, as if we were both afraid that a single vowel or consonant, even too heavy a breath, would shatter the glow.

He brought my hand to his lips and kissed it. Then he put his arm around my shoulders and closed his eyes. I curled up against him. His body was harder than John’s, more muscular and, dare I think, more manly. Strangely, I didn’t feel guilty until I thought that. That, even more than my lovemaking, seemed to be more of a betrayal. It was as though I hadn’t really committed adultery until I admitted to myself that I enjoyed Sam’s body more than I enjoyed John’s.

As I lay there drifting, I was struggling with the thought that I was really drawn to Sam for one reason. He was more determined than John to find our daughter. He was my hope, and for that, I would gladly sell my soul, which I knew was something John would truly believe I had already done. Every other reason for my being there was probably a rationalization, but I could live with that. In fact, it amazed me now how much I could live with after Mary’s abduction. Nothing was off the table. The mother in me was that strong.