Little Lovely Things, page 6
“Ever since Mom and Dad died, you’ve pushed yourself so hard.”
Both of their parents had been teachers and lived modestly. Claire becoming a doctor would’ve pleased them so very much.
Now her residency was on hold, as the University Hospital had generously provided a leave of absence for an undetermined amount of time. But losing her children and her job in one fell swoop meant Claire had gone from being frantically busy to quiescent. Her surroundings in the kitchen now seemed hideously amplified, the volume turned way up. The wallpaper—an aging pattern of red-and-yellow teapots—appeared to be closing in. The day they’d bought the house, she’d told Glen excitedly how she would tear it out and paint the room something cheerful instead. Maybe yellow. That was close to seven years ago.
Vicki stood behind her sister and pressed her palms into her shoulders.
“All this stress,” Vicki said softly, “your poor stomach.”
Claire knew there was also a deep place inside that connected this with her pregnancies. As long as she remained nauseated, her girls remained very much a part of her. Safe from the ugly forces of the world beyond her body.
“I need to pack now, honey.”
Claire nodded. Vicki would be back once they heard something. Which was only a matter of time, right?
She followed Vicki toward the small bedroom where she was staying. But it was Gretchie who stopped and set her paw on the girls’ bedroom door. Turning her square muzzle, she faced Claire and whined.
“No, girl, we promised.”
But it hurt too much to stay away.
As Claire opened the door slightly, Gretchie pushed full throttle with her nose and they were both inside. Claire sat gently in the Mother Goose rocking chair, opposite the twin beds covered by chartreuse and yellow spreads. The one closest to the door was Andrea’s. The other bed was untouched, ready for Lily when she finished transitioning from her crib. Claire moved from the chair, snow-angeled onto her back in the tufted chenille, and inhaled, trying to remember the perfect smell of Lily. A hint of flower petals along with sun-bleached shells and unspoiled skin. No, that really wasn’t close at all. But it would do. And Andrea, what did she smell like? Claire couldn’t remember. But she forced it, something that fit her personality—Elmer’s glue and the bold fruitiness of powdered Jell-O.
Gretchie pressed her muzzle into Claire’s leg and appealed with worried eyes. Claire found the top of her dog’s head and stroked, the warmth of her fur a small comfort.
Butkus cackled from the adjoining room.
“Count the clouds…” Claire called, waiting for it, for the girls to chime in. “See the birdie in the tree.” All she needed was one small sign, a tiny foothold of hope. “If he has a broken wing, he will never sing, sing, sing.”
Glen stood in the doorway.
“Hey.”
She looked up. He didn’t seem to mind that Claire was there, had breached their agreement to stay out of the room. He had an orchid in his hand, the color of soft lavender.
She smiled. “Hey back.”
His eyes were bright with purpose, yet his skin was pallid.
“Glen, I’m so sorry about the girls.” She wouldn’t cry. It wasn’t fair to him. “I…”
He looked past her. “Don’t Claire…not now…” He cleared his throat. “I think we may have another shot at Chicago Live at Five!” The local show did interviews that could be picked up by national news programs. They’d been featured once, but only as a quick vignette as part of a larger story on kidnapping. That was the first week the girls were abducted. Now they were lobbying for a full-on interview with a live audience. They couldn’t let people forget. Someone out there had to know something. “The station called earlier, when you were asleep.”
“That’s really great.” She sat up and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. “Glen, I don’t want to change the girls’ room, ever, promise me that.”
“Claire, the girls are coming back.” Impatience creeped into his voice. “We have to think that way.”
“I know. But promise me. It needs to stay exactly as it is right here, right now. Regardless.”
“Of course.” He set the flower, wrapped tightly in a cone of florist paper, on Andrea’s dresser.
“C’mon, let’s help Vicki pack.”
Just as Claire set her feet onto the floor, the telephone rang. She followed Glen into the kitchen where he answered it.
“Yes?” He pointed to the receiver and mouthed Detective Hearns at Claire. “Oh man, oh God!”
What? Claire wanted to scream.
“Yes, yes. Immediately.” His face flushed bright pink. “We’ll be right there.”
He hung up. “Hearns has some information.”
“What kind of information?”
“She didn’t say. She wants us down there right away.”
Claire turned to Vicki, who along with Gretchie, had blown into the room, caught up in the new energy.
“Go. You two.” Vicki dropped her bags to the floor. “I can’t leave now. I’ll reschedule my flight.”
Glen touched Claire’s arm gently as he moved past her to grab the keys hung near the bulletin board. She hurried after him, snatching her coat from the back of a chair.
“Her voice, Glen. What did it sound like?”
“I don’t know.” He stopped and shook his head. In that moment, Claire’s husband looked like a small child, a little boy filled with hope. “Cautious, I guess. But not dismal.”
Claire locked her eyes with Glen’s as if holding him in a nonphysical hug, and then set her jaw with determination.
“Let’s go.”
They were at Cook County Headquarters in twenty-eight minutes. They raced through the industrious atmosphere and straight to a room where Detective Hearns stood over a table, examining an array of papers. She was as impeccably tailored as cut crystal, her curls still tight as snails. Her expression warmed when they entered.
“Let’s shut that door. The noise in this office sometimes! Sit, sit. I have a lot to show you.”
Claire and Glen found chairs and sat side by side, rigid with anticipation.
“It’s all a little rough right now. Not super solid, but still…a possible suspect is good news.”
A suspect! Claire could barely breathe.
“As you know, we’ve been re-canvassing the neighborhood behind the Shell station.”
Claire and Glen nodded.
“We’ve heard hints, rumors, of a strange man…”
No! This should be a woman. Claire had willed it. She must’ve gasped, because Glen grabbed her arm in a gesture to hush her.
“I’m so sorry. Do you need a minute?”
Glen sighed as if his lungs were deflating. Of course they did, but a minute longer was too long. Claire shook her head.
“Please, Detective, continue.”
“As I said, a man, a junkie or pusher, one even said gypsy, appeared and then disappeared just as mysteriously. Possibly squatted in an abandoned garage two blocks west of Hardwick. Might’ve been nearby on the day of the abduction. So we knocked on every door, talked to every junkie, to find out whatever we could about this possible suspect. I want to emphasize here that we don’t know anything for sure, but a drifter does seem to have been in the area of the Shell station on the day in question.”
Claire sat further upright.
“But first…” Hearns looked at them. “I didn’t want to bring this up on the phone. Physical evidence is difficult for the family.”
Huh? What does she mean? Claire’s blood contracted in her veins. What on earth does she have?
“We were able,” the detective continued, “to get a search warrant for that garage near the gas station. Found it in a corner, under a pile of sawdust. Please hold on.” Juanita Hearns’s voice trod gently. “It might be a little tough.”
The detective reached into an oversize envelope and then held out a sealed plastic bag. “Is this the little bunny you described?”
Jumpers!
Claire reeled back in her chair as if punched in the chest. Glen made some sound that defied categorization, like a cry, only dull, as if he, too, had been hit.
“Yes. It’s…” Glen started but just shook his head.
“Detective,” Claire whispered hoarsely. “It’s Andrea’s rabbit. It was in the car when—” She couldn’t finish, couldn’t say When our daughters were abducted. She quietly took the sealed bag when Juanita held it to her. Claire knew it couldn’t be opened. But, oh, how she longed to touch Jumpers, run her finger along the outline of one of his long loopy ears. No longer a lovey, he was evidence now, an item to be catalogued, tested in a laboratory.
Claire kept her voice steady. “Did you find anything else with him?” She pointed to a spot on Jumpers’s right paw. “There was a little felt carrot that went right here. Lily had it in her hand when…” Claire’s voice wavered. She set the bag on the table and smoothed it over Jumpers’s foreleg.
“No, nothing else. I’m sorry.”
She set the bag back onto her lap. Jumpers looked two-dimensional inside, like some cartoon rabbit that had been steamrolled or punched with a mallet. He was dirty and twisted too. But his eyes were clear enough. Overlarge, surprised. Still goofy. If only he could talk. She wanted to apologize to him, tell him how sorry she was about his carrot, how sorry she was about this whole unbearable thing. Hearns gave them a moment.
“We have a sketch we are releasing today.” Hearns’s voice stayed even. “This is what we do know about the suspect. Two witnesses—I’ll be honest, both junkies—said an outsider, some lone wolf, was trying to peddle drugs. Takers were slim, since the area is pretty well covered and suspicious of newcomers. So far as names go, he’s possibly Brian or Eamon.”
“Eamon,” Claire whispered to herself. Rhymes with demon.
“Keep in mind,” the detective said, sliding a large piece of thick paper across the table, “this is a work in progress.”
Claire looked into the sketch of a dark-haired man’s face. Memorizing and then rememorizing each contour. A chill worked its way slowly along her spine. The tight features and the long thin lines of a goatee. And the eyes. Just a shadowy smear of charcoal in each socket. She imagined the sound of his voice, high-pitched, irritatingly percussive. Could smell him too—stagnant pond water covered in velvet scum.
“The day the girls went missing, our mystery man disappeared too.”
Glen pulled the sketch toward him. The disbelief in her husband’s face frightened Claire.
“I… We…uh, don’t know what to say, Detective.” Glen’s voice wavered. He pulled Claire’s hand into his own and squeezed.
“Remember, a suspect is a really good thing.” Hearns was trying to help, to soften this blow. But it was a bad thing too. What in the goddamn world was in that man’s—no, that creature’s head?
“Anyone else? An accomplice?” Glen squeaked. This face was too ugly to contemplate being alone with their girls.
“No. No one so far. He was always seen alone.”
Thick silence.
“Motive? Do you… Can you imagine a motive?” Glen asked. Of course, they’d gone over every plausible reason for the abduction ad nauseam. About predators, predatory behavior. Pedophiles. Desperate people or schemers who sell kids. Yet somehow, this face changed everything.
“As we discussed before. Could be so many things. I mean, if he’s a junkie, which he fits the profile, then maybe he’s just trying to get money… Probably an impulse when he saw the car running.”
Why did Hearns have to say that? Glen dropped Claire’s hand.
“So maybe he’s not a pedophile?” Claire said, her voice thinly veiled with hope. “But how do two little girls help him buy drugs?” She knew this answer somewhere in her head. But the information flow had changed direction inside her. She could barely measure out granules for a simple cup of instant coffee much less hold the notion that her girls were being bartered.
“There is a market for children, Claire.”
“What’s next?” Glen’s voice rose. “What do we do next?”
“We’ll get this out there, to the media. Reactivate their attention. We’re continuing to follow our leads, of course. Details can make all the difference. Did someone suddenly remember something they’d seen that day? We go back and talk. And search. I’m asking you to keep working on the TV stations, reporters. As you know, right now that’s key. Keep going with it. Get the information out there.”
Glen squeezed Claire’s arm. “It’ll be all right.” But he stared forward. “The girls will be home soon.”
Claire forced herself to look again at the two-dimensional face flat on the table. She swallowed hard against the bile rising in her throat, fighting the urge to throw up. You’re not getting the best of me right now, you bastard. She tightened her grip on the bag with Jumpers in one hand and grasped the top of Glen’s forearm with the other.
They could do this. Build on this little bit of hope together.
Chapter 7
Jay
Jay White inched his ’72 El Camino, fitted with a camper shell, onto the shoulder of the interstate in rural Illinois. Squinting into a shadowy notch of trees, he searched for the entrance to an old logging road that appeared as a mere broken line on his map. Ah, there it was. Perfect. Nobody to mess with him here. Still, with October tapering to a close, time was running out for this type of camping. At thirty-five, Jay was feeling old and stiff-limbed from nights in a truck bed.
Entering the canopied woods, he shrugged off an immediate sense of foreboding. “Feelings,” his mother had simply called them. He’d had them often since he was a young child, and just as often tried to ignore them, pretend them away. Profound impulses, they were “passed through blood,” his grandmother told him as she worked fry bread dough through her floured hands. Jay knew she was referring to his mother, whose angular face; dark, straight hair; and willful jawline Jay shared, the stony features of the Sioux—a warrior tribe. But while his mother’s eyes were black as obsidian, Jay’s were a startlingly gray-green, the shade of lichens. Jay had no memories of a man in his life, other than his mother’s boyfriends—all seedy drunks with oily gazes.
His gut tugged again. It had been a long time since he’d experienced this sensation, a pull from inside, like self-generated gravity.
He cranked the radio. His musical preference, especially on dark nights, tended toward ballads, sappy stuff. Stumbling onto Patsy Cline was a stroke of luck. He sang along as much to take his mind off a growing uneasiness as anything else. He almost decided to turn around at the first bulge in the road. But he was determined to keep his forward momentum, toward his new life, through these towering jack pines blackening the hurry-down dusk.
Seemed like half his lifetime he’d been working through some deep subliminal pathway on a slow migration away from his roots in North Dakota. And yet, he never got quite far enough away. Always, even among this flat terrain of northern Illinois, he imagined the severe hills that loomed in the distance just outside the border of Devil’s Lake Reservation, where he and his mother, Sioux members of the Lakota nation, lived as outsiders. It was time for “the big change”—to settle permanently somewhere, anywhere. Just after leaving jail a week ago, he’d opened an atlas. After blocking out the Dakotas with a book of matches, he closed his eyes and swept his hand gently over the map. And then stopped. There. Opening his eyes, Jay discovered the western edge of what looked like a mitten trapped under his thumb. Michigan. Far enough away to start a new life. Hopefully, a decent place to nurture his fragile sobriety. He’d head east—his first firm decision since putting that last drunk and disorderly charge behind him.
“Just you and me now,” Jay said to the dirt-filmed mirror. He tried to laugh at how ridiculously like a stereotypical Indian he looked, with a scar to boot—a thick furrow that ran from his forehead, barely passed over his right eye and ended in the hollow between his cheekbone and jaw. The angry red raised skin on his face served as a reminder of home, the Badlands etched in his flesh like a geological fault line. Seeing himself backlit by moon glow, he grimaced. How many days since he’d showered? He’d lost count. His hair, falling just below his ears, slicked back a little too easily. The hole from the gold stud he’d pawned six months ago looked like a tiny crater on one ear. Hey, Moon Man. You’ll need to clean up as a short order cook, he thought. He was smart enough not to risk bartending again. Too close to the bad stuff. He’d been out a week now and made himself a promise: this time would be different.
This time he was facing up to himself.
The El Camino swung along a curve in the road, which ran parallel to a creek. The presence of water nearby comforted Jay, as did the reflection of the moon in the braids of icy liquid on the tops of the rocks. He cracked the window, and the windshield misted with moisture from the densely packed trees. The creek dropped from sight, but he could hear it and smell its tannic crispness. Maybe he should rethink this path, return to the interstate. Crash instead at a truck stop or rest area. But he pushed on, even as the stirrings of an old familiar longing began to deepen in his gut. He sang louder, trying to suppress the feeling. But it only intensified, like some ancient creeping instinct that was beckoning to be explored.
The path narrowed quickly as the dark bruise of the September sky deepened into thick purple overhead. A gibbous moon rose over the treetops, cutting a swath of light. Jay had never known just one moon. Aside from the phases, there were also different lunar personalities for each season: heat moons in summer, mud moons in spring. Tonight was a monster, low in the sky—a big orange-gathering or harvest moon. He knew it well. It pulled him back to his childhood, to the small kitchen of their tar-paper home with the pilot light in the stove glowing. It was always warm there, despite being cold throughout the rest of the house. His grandmother had looked over at him, pleased with a question he had posed.
