Lost Innocents (4 page)

“I wanted a chance to meet with your family first,” said the doctor.

“Dr. Foreman,” Mary Beth began in a confidential tone, “I know you wanted to meet with the family. The reason my son is not here is that I didn’t see any reason to involve him in this. He has an important, highly paid position, and a wife who’s pregnant with their first child, and they live a good fifty miles from here—”

“Frank junior is perfect,” said Heather. “He never got in trouble. He’s their hero.”

“Heather, keep quiet,” said Frank.

“No, it’s all right,” said Larry. “We’re here to talk. To say whatever is on your mind…”

A beeper went off, and everyone looked at Frank, who fumbled with the receiver in the pocket of his leather coat. “May I use your phone, Doctor?”

“There’s one outside,” Larry said evenly. Frank rose from the chair and left the room.

Mary Beth rolled her eyes. “This is typical,” she said. “You’d think he was a brain surgeon.”

“Well, Taylorsville may be peaceful, but it’s a big town.”

“And he likes to be important,” said Mary Beth. “He has to be the big boss all the time.” Heather walked over to the window and stared out. Rain covered the windowpanes by now. In a moment Frank came back into the office.

“I’ve got to go,” he said.

“Frank, you promised me,” said Mary Beth in a shrill voice.

“I’ve got a teenage baby-sitter and the baby she was watching who didn’t come home tonight,” Frank said, a warning in his voice.

“Oh,” said Mary Beth, sinking back into her chair, chastened by this news.

“Sorry, Doc. If she’d been here on time…But this is an emergency. Heather, honey,” he said to his daughter, “it’s going to have to be another day.” Heather stiffened but did not respond.

Larry looked at the girl’s face, pale and frozen as an angry moon, and her father, dressed head to toe in the uniform of unquestioned authority, forbidding her to defy him. Larry glanced at the clock. “Heather,” he said gently, so as not to startle her, “why don’t you sit down and we’ll try to sort some things out.”

Heather responded to his quiet voice and turned away from her father. Obediently she took her seat.

F
rank Cameron strode into the chaos of the Taylorsville Police Station, his wary gaze sweeping the room as six people approached him, all clamoring for his attention. Frank’s height, his barrel chest, and his iron gray hair gave him an imposing presence. His entrance seemed to calm the room, to give people the impression, however brief, that everything would soon be all right.

Directly in front of him, seated by herself like a quiet island, a fortyish woman in waitress uniform clutched a school picture of a teenager. She did not look up and appeared to be almost in a trance.

“Who’s that one?” Frank demanded in a low voice of Len Wickes, one of his officers.

“Mrs. Starnes, mother of the missing girl,” Len whispered.

Frank nodded and glanced at the young couple leaning over the desk of Chief of Detectives Pete Millard. They had whirled around as he entered and were looking at him plaintively—the baby’s parents.

Pete looked up from his desk. “Chief,” he said, “these are the missing baby’s parents, Donna and Johnny Wallace.”

Frank shook their hands gravely. Donna’s face was red from weeping. Johnny, who was hardly more than a boy himself, was doing his best to comfort his wife. Despite his efforts, he was struggling to maintain his composure. Johnny was dressed in the jeans and flannel shirt he wore on the job as a construction worker for DeBartolo Brothers. Donna was dressed in an ill-fitting flowered dress and pumps, which she had worn to work at the bank and then to the bridal shower for one of her former high school classmates afterward.

“They were just telling me what happened,” said Pete.

“He’s the third one we’ve told,” Donna protested.

Frank nodded. “Tell me,” he said.

“Well,” Donna said, exhaling a gust of misery, “usually he stays with my mother, but she had two doctors’ appointments today, and since Rebecca was off from school…” Donna began to wail and wring her hands. “Why did I ever let her take him?…”

Sandi Starnes, the mother of the missing baby-sitter, flinched at the implied accusation. She wanted to shout that Rebecca was a good girl, and they knew it, and that whatever had happened to the baby had happened to Rebecca, too…. She forced herself to stop thinking. She just turned off her thoughts. She had decided that the only way to survive this was to sit in stillness and try to let her mind float free from her body. She had seen a show on meditation on the Lifetime Channel, about how you could use it to deal with stress, and now she was trying it. Something like it.

“All right,” Frank thundered, pointing to Pete Millard, the middle-aged detective in a gray suit who was taking the Wallaces’ statement. “Get to the bottom line, Pete. Sum it up for me.”

Pete gave Frank a quick rundown of the situation, or what they knew of it. Rebecca Starnes had kept the baby at her mother’s house all morning. At lunchtime, after Sandi went off to work, Rebecca had planned to take the baby out for a walk. They never came back. Donna Wallace, husband in tow, came up close behind the detective and tried to interject details into his account in a voice shrill with fear. Frank, who was not a patient man, nonetheless appreciated the distraught mother’s situation and only told her once, in a mild voice, that he was having trouble understanding his officer.

When Pete Millard finished, Frank glanced at the photograph of Justin Wallace that his parents were waving at him. There were so few really innocent things, he thought, looking at the gentle, formless face. In this job he had seen every kind of cruelty visited on the innocents of the world—often by those who claimed to love them most. It was enough to make you sick. He hated the helpless way he felt, looking at the picture. In the pit of his stomach there was a knot of fear that he intended to ignore. He pushed the photo away. “All right, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace. Here’s the situation. Normally, with missing persons, we don’t begin a search until forty-eight hours have—”

“Forty-eight hours!” Donna shrieked. “You’ve gotta be…”

Frank raised a hand to silence her. “But,” he said loudly, “in the case of children—and both of them technically come under that heading—we will begin to search immediately.”

He turned to Pete Millard. “I want a tips hot line set up right away on this one. We need to get the word out to the public. Get the press liaison working on this. We can use the cooperation of the local stations.”

“I’ve already got it in motion,” Pete assured him.

“Good,” said Frank in a low voice. “It may be premature, but you can’t be too careful with missing kids.” He turned around and his piercing gaze fell on Sandi, who remained seated. She had ketchup on her white blouse, and she looked dazed, as if she had just awakened. Frank walked over to her and sat in the chair beside her.

“Now,” he said. “Rebecca is your daughter.”

Sandi stared at the police chief with a bewildered expression on her face. “Something terrible has happened,” she whispered.

Frank nodded. “Well, yes, but we just don’t know exactly what, right now. Do we? That’s what we have to figure out. Could this possibly all be some big misunderstanding? I mean, we’ve got everybody here screaming about kidnapping and so on—is there any chance Rebecca just decided to take the baby and go visit someone? Can you think of anyone she might have gone to see? Maybe a friend, or a relative?”

“I already asked her that,” said Detective Millard.

“Now I’m asking her,” Frank barked. Then he turned and spoke quietly to Sandi again. “How about it, Mrs. Starnes?”

Sandi knew what he wanted her to say. He wanted her to give him a list. A list of people an absentminded teenager might have run into, or called up and decided to while away the time with. Someone who might have absorbed her scatterbrained adolescent attention so completely that she would forget to bring the baby back on time, or even to call. Someone like that.

Sandi shook her head. “There is no one,” she whispered.

“Are you saying you have no friends or relations? What about her father? Where is he?”

“He’s remarried. He lives in Massachusetts.”

Frank Cameron shrugged. “Maybe he was in the area…. Maybe he came by the house after you left.”

Sandi tried to think about this. Bud Starnes was not the worst father in the world. But he was not given to surprise visits. He dutifully fulfilled his responsibilities toward Rebecca. That was all.

“I see you hesitating,” the chief said. He twisted around to look at Pete Millard. “Have we got the father’s address?”

“I called there already,” said Pete. “Nobody home.”

“Call again,” said Frank. “Now, Mrs. Starnes, did Rebecca mention where she might be taking the baby? Was there anywhere special she liked to take him?”

This was something Sandi could answer. “She liked to take him to the river to see the fishermen,” she said. “Or the mall sometimes. To shop. Or the park. She liked to walk in Binney Park. She didn’t say.”

“I want every man we’ve got scouring those places,” Frank instructed his officers, who were gathered around to listen. “I want anyone who might have seen them questioned. You got me? Anyone. Anyone with a business, or any business, in any of those places. They didn’t just disappear. Somebody saw them. We need to establish a time frame—find out where they were last spotted. This is critical.

“Also, I want you to find out who was working at the train station and the bus stop. I want to know if Rebecca bought any tickets this afternoon. If so, I want to know where she was headed, and with whom. We need all hands on deck. I don’t want anybody standing around here.”

“Done,” said Pete. “We’re on it.” He spoke in a low, urgent voice to the other officers, who scattered out the door to their various phones.

Frank turned back to Sandi. “Do you know these people well?” he said, indicating the Wallaces. Donna was collapsed against her husband’s shoulder, her tears a dark stain on Johnny’s plaid shirt.

Sandi looked vaguely at the Wallaces. She would have said yes, this morning. They were neighbors. They lived two doors down and had always been friendly. Johnny shoveled her walk when it snowed because she had no husband to do it for her. She and Donna sometimes had sat on Donna’s cement patio together when she was home for maternity leave. Sandi loved seeing the baby. She loved babies anyway, and Donna loved showing him off, as any mother would. She would have said they were friends. That they knew each other well.

Now she knew that wasn’t true. Because she heard them, with her own ears, accusing Rebecca. Saying that Rebecca took their baby. No one would ever say that who really knew Rebecca.

“We know each other,” Sandi said flatly. “We live on the same street.”

“And Rebecca has taken care of Justin before,” said the chief.

“Quite a few times,” said Sandi, nodding, her gaze beginning to drift again.

“Mrs. Starnes, does your daughter have any history of mental illness?”

Sandi looked at him again. She stared at this strange man, asking her these questions about Rebecca as if she were some kind of nut…some kind of criminal.

Sandi tore her gaze from the chief’s face and stared down at the picture she was clutching in her damp fingers. She licked her lips, which were incredibly dry, and she tried her best to form her thoughts into a sentence that would make him understand.

She pressed her cracked lips together and peered at him as intensely as she could. She lifted the picture of the beautiful, smiling teenager with a gold heart locket at her throat and held it until he was forced to look at it.

“This…is…Rebecca,” she explained.

She could see from the look in his eyes that he did not understand.

C
harles Henson opened the front door and frowned at the rain.

Maddy peered past him out at the long cobbled drive, now shiny under the gaslit lamps that lined the long driveway and shivered.

“That wind moaning makes it sound like someone is out there,” she said. “Doesn’t it?”

“It’s turned nasty,” Charles said. “Do you need some umbrellas? We have extras.”

Doug looked out over his wife’s shoulder. “No, we don’t have far car to go,” he said. “Just to the car.”

Wind lashed the chilly rain against their backs as they said their hasty good-nights on the Hensons’ doorstep.

“Wait,” Ellen cried as they prepared to make a dash for the the car. She ran to hall closet and pulled out a slicker.

“What is it, dear?” Charles Henson asked in an apprehensive tone as his wife darted past him into the terrible night. “Where’s she going?”

“I don’t know,” said Maddy. “Honey, will you carry Amy?”

“Sure,” said Doug, crouching down and scooping up his daughter and her stuffed monkey. Amy laid her head against his shoulder with a little whimper.

“She’s tired,” Maddy said with a smile. She was killing time, knowing they were all waiting for Ellen to return. “Well, it was a lovely evening,” she said, not for the first time.

“We’re glad you could come,” Charles said politely, peering into the darkness.

“Here I am,” Ellen cried, materializing like a yellow vinyl apparition out of the darkness. She was carrying a covered wicker basket. She lifted the lid with a shy smile and held it in front of Amy, who was high enough on her father’s shoulder to look down into the basket. The child let out a cry of delight. “Kitty,” she exclaimed.

Maddy frowned and looked into the basket. A small black cat was inside, resting on a folded-up newspaper. “Oh,” she said, a little dismayed.

“You did want one, didn’t you?” asked Ellen.

Doug gave his wife a warning glance. “Of course we do. We’ve been thinking about getting a cat.”

“He’s adorable,” said Maddy. “Its just that we’re not actually prepared…”

“Ah, but I thought of that,” said Ellen. “Before I came in for dinner, I filled you up a bag of litter, and put that and two cans of cat food in your car. That’ll hold you till tomorrow.”

“My kitty,” Amy exclaimed.

“We can’t thank you enough,” said Doug. “That was very kind of you.”