by Chris Mooney
The flutter turned into a cold, hard lump that knocked against the walls of his heart. He stumbled to his feet, a scream rising in his throat:
“SARAH,WHERE ARE YOU?”
Please God, please answer me.
All around him cars were leaving the parking lots, waiting for their turn to merge onto the mess on East Dunstable, the traffic moving forward in inches.
She still could be here.
No,Mike said to that rising, panicky voice. No way. Sarah wouldn’t leave here without me or Bill.
But what if she did?
Almost slipping on the snow, Mike ran up to a Honda Accord parked only a few feet from Sarah’s sled. He banged on the window until the guy with the Red Sox baseball cap, a guy Mike didn’t recognize, rolled down the window. The man’s son, all of four or so by the looks of him, sat in the passenger seat.
“A girl in a pink snowsuit,” Mike said. “She was standing right over there next to the sled.”
“I didn’t see her.”
“You sure?”
“I can barely see the car in front of me.”
“I can’t find her. Help me look, would you?”
The guy nodded and tried to pull over to the side. Mike ran toward East Dunstable, dodging his way through the spaces between the cars, a tightness growing inside his chest.
She’s here, Sarah’s still here.
“Sully?” Bill called out. “Sully?”
An Explorer was about to pull onto East Dunstable when Mike jumped in front and held out a hand. Car horns blared as the driver rolled down the window, Mike seeing it was the guy from the lumber yard at Home Depot, Billy something.
“What’s wrong?”
“I can’t find my daughter,” Mike said. “She’s wearing a pink snowsuit.”
“Haven’t seen her. You want some help?”
Mike nodded, said, “Do me a favor. Block off this road with your car, tell everyone what’s going on.”
“You got it.”
“And make sure you check the backseats and under the cars. She might have got hit or something.”
People had stepped out of their cars and were swearing at Mike to get out of the road. Mike was about to stop the next car, a Ford Mustang, when Bill appeared out from a curtain of snow, Paula beside him.
“I found her glasses next to her sled,” Mike said. “Paula, what happened up here? Tell me what happened.”
Paula flinched at the sound of Mike’s voice.
“Sully, it’s okay, calm—”
“Sarah can’t see without her glasses.”
“I know.”
“She’s terrified when she can’t see.”
Bill put his meaty hand on Mike’s neck and squeezed. “I’m sure someone saw her all worked up and had the good sense to bring her inside Buzzy’s. She’s probably in there right now pigging out on a burger and fries. Don’t worry. We’ll find her.”
CHAPTER 3
With the foul weather and traffic, it took the police almost an hour to arrive at the Hill. The first unit—Patrolmen Eddie “Slow Ed” Zukowski and another guy Mike knew, Charlie Ripken—were relieved to see that Mike had the smarts to block off the Hill. The second unit that answered had blocked off the lower parking lot, the one where Mike was parked.
Slow Ed brought Mike next door to the Tick-Tack-Toe liquor store. Mike stood underneath a ceiling vent blasting hot air, melting snow dripping off his jeans and coat, forming a puddle around his soaked boots. He dried off his face and head with a towel the liquor store owner had given him.
“About what Sarah was wearing,” Patrolman Eddie Zukowski said, and flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. Slow Ed’s pie-shaped face was bloated, shaped by too many late nights and too much fast food, but his tall frame was in good shape, still as thick as a telephone pole and no doubt packing the same explosive power that had made him a football star at Boston College.
Mike said, “It hasn’t changed since I told the dispatcher.”
“We’ve got three kids next door wearing a pink snowsuit—one of who’s a boy, go figure. What I need from you, Sully, are the details. The snowsuit, the hat and gloves—that stuff.”
What Mike heard in Slow Ed’s voice was the same listless quality of the two patrolmen who came around asking Lou questions about the whereabouts of his wife. What Mike also heard were the traces of dumbness that had defined Slow Ed’s father’s life, Big Ed Zukowski, a man who wanted to take his wife on a two week cruise to Aruba for their ten year anniversary and came up with the bright idea of robbing the bank across the street from the car repair shop where he had worked as a mechanic since high school.
The wind howled, rattling the storefront glass and door. Sarah was out there in this mess. She had wandered away from the sled, had, he was sure, slipped down the embankment and was now wandering somewhere around the woods that stretched all the way back to Mike’s house, to Salmon Brook Pond and Route 4, Sarah lost in the blinding snow and calling out for him, her voice lost in that wind, Sarah blind and terrified without her glasses.
“I already went over all this with the dispatcher,” Mike said. “You want the info, get it from him.” He tossed the towel on top of a stacked column of Bud bottles, got maybe two steps before Slow Ed grabbed his arm.
“Sully, you’re soaked to the bone.”
“I’m fine.”
“That’s why your lips are purple and your teeth are chattering. Don’t bullshit me, Sully. I’ve known you too long.”
“I’ve got to get back out there. She’s wandering around the woods without her glasses—”
“What glasses?”
Mike removed the glasses from his jacket pocket and slapped them down on top of the towel. “Sarah’s terrified when she doesn’t have them on,” he said. “I’ve got to get out there before she stumbles off one of those trails and steps onto Route Four.”
“Volunteers are already out there. Now tell me where you found those glasses.”
“I’m going back out.”
“Hold up.” Slow Ed tightened his grip, moved his big round face closer. “We’re going to cover every inch of this place, but with the visibility for shit, you can see why I need as much information as possible.”
“I already did.”
“You didn’t tell the dispatcher about the glasses.”
“So now you know.”
“Where’d you find the glasses?”
“Next to the sled.” Again Mike tried to step away but Slow Ed wouldn’t let go, Slow Ed digging his fingers in just hard enough to remind Mike who was in charge.
Mike wanted to scream. He wanted to scream out that sick feeling coiling its way through his gut, wanted to knock Slow Ed down with the strength of it. Ed, you stupid shit, you’re talking too slow and you’re wasting time.
“Sarah’s six years old and is wearing a pink snowsuit,” Mike said. “Pink snowsuit with blue mittens—they’ve got reindeer printed on them. Pink Barbie snow boots. What else you want to know?”
Slow Ed released his grip but blocked the path to the door. Mike ran down the list: Sarah’s height,weight, eye and hair color, the Cindy Crawford beauty mark above her lip, her two bottom missing teeth and the slightly crooked uppers—he even mentioned the bruise on Sarah’s rib. He had discovered it last night when he gave Sarah a bath.
“How’d she get this bruise?” Slow Ed asked.
“Ran into the coffee table. Least that’s what Jess told me.”
Slow Ed stopped writing, looked up. “You don’t believe her?”
“I’m saying I was at work.” Mike removed his pack of cigarettes, saw that it was soaked.
“Sarah’s snowsuit have any unusual markings on it?”
“Like what?”
“Decals, prints. Along those lines.”
Mike rubbed his forehead, then closed his eyes
(Daddy, where are you?)
(Jess’s voice: Get out there and search for your daughter,NOW)
and tried to picture details, the
se stupid, meaningless details—what mattered now was getting back outside to find Sarah. But how was he going to get around Slow Ed?
“Her name’s written on the inside tag in black marker,” Mike said. “Jacket’s got a small tear in the front pocket. Right front—no, it was the left. Yeah, the left. Fang did that.”
“Fang?”
“Our dog,” Mike said, opening his eyes. “That’s all I got.”
Slow Ed stopped writing. He fished out a plastic baggie from his pocket and with a flick of the wrist he snapped it open. “When’s the last time you saw your old man?”
“Years ago. Why?”
“How much time we talking about?”
“I don’t know. Three, four years. Last I heard, he was living somewhere in Florida.”
“But he kept his house, right?”
“Ed, no offense, but what’s this got to do with finding my daughter?”
“Lou’s been spotted around town.”
Then Mike understood.
“Sarah’s never met him,” Mike said, watching as Slow Ed used his pen to push the glasses into the bag. “He wouldn’t come near her, and even if he did—he wouldn’t, but if he did, Sarah wouldn’t believe him because I told her that her grandfather died before she was born. Sarah wouldn’t leave with him or anyone else. Sarah knows about stranger danger. She wouldn’t leave with anyone but me or Bill.”
“Kids do funny things when they’re scared, Sully. Way the snow’s whipping around out there, everyone’s dressed different, got their faces covered up, you don’t know who’s who. Sarah probably latched onto the first person she recognized.”
That sick, sharp-edged worry he had been carrying for Sarah formed a wiry, heated energy that made his skin tingle. Mike judged the space between him and Ed, thinking of a way to get around him when Ed’s cell phone rang.
“You call home and check your messages?” Ed asked as he unclipped the phone from his belt.
“Did that right after I called nine-one-one.”
“That was a good forty minutes ago. Call and check again.” Ed brought the phone up to his ear as he walked away and stood in front of the door, blocking it.
Mike took out his cell phone and saw that the battery had crapped out, this being the time of day when he normally recharged it. He walked past Slow Ed and moved up to the counter where a big, round bald guy was pretending to read a Herald.
“Use your phone, Frank?”
Frank Coccoluto handed him the cordless.
After having two answering machines break in the past year, Mike had opted for the phone company’s voice-mail service. He dialed the number for his voice mailbox and entered in the code, his hopes rising and then crashing when the prerecorded operator said, “No new messages.”
The wind rattled the glass again and Mike pictured Sarah up alone on top of the hill, Sarah trying to find her glasses in the blowing snow, everything a blur. Okay, Sarah was upset but she was also smart. Sarah knew all about monsters disguised as kind and smiling people who offered candy and told kids they had lost their puppies or kittens and needed help looking for them, so if someone came by and offered his daughter help, Mike knew that Sarah, even at her most hysterical, would be smart enough to go only with a voice she recognized, a friend or parent she knew from school, someone from the neighborhood, maybe.
“Ed’s right about kids doing funny things when they’re scared,” Frank said. “Few years back, I’m in Disney World with my daughter and my eight-year-old granddaughter? We turn our heads for, I don’t know, maybe three seconds and when we looked back, Ash is gone. Swallowed into the crowd, poof, just like that.” Frank snapped his fingers. “The Disney people, they ripped up the park, I swear to God I thought I was going to have a stroke I was worried so much. Guess where we ended up finding her? Back in the hotel, in my bed, sleeping like an angel. Park security guy found her. Ash was so hysterical about being lost, all she could do was say the hotel we were staying in, room number three-twenty-one, so that’s where they brought her.”
Mike glanced at his watch. Almost ninety minutes had passed since he had found the sled.
Slow Ed snapped his phone shut and Mike felt his hope rise again.
“Goddamn lousy weathermen dropped the ball again,” Ed said. “The blizzard scheduled for yesterday’s about to head straight up our ass. Let’s go, Sully. We’ve got to get a move on to your house. State’s on their way with the search dogs. I’ll explain along the way.”
CHAPTER 4
Slow Ed talked about bloodhounds, about how these dogs had sixty times more scent power than German shepherds and could follow the scent of a person, no matter how faint, in the air or on the ground for days, even weeks, day or night, rain or snow, it didn’t matter. Example: a convict who had escaped a prison in Kentucky thought he was smart by lying on the bottom bed of a pond, using a cutout section of a hula-hoop as a snorkel, thinking the dogs wouldn’t find him. Bloodhounds were so smart, Ed said, they could pick up the convict’s scent coming through the piece of hoop. There had even been a case of a bloodhound who had trailed a person being carried away in the trunk of a car, the person’s scent mixed with the car’s exhaust, the bloodhound picking right up on it, Slow Ed going on and on with more stories, his voice growing dimmer and dimmer as a singular thought took root in Mike’s mind:
You called in the dogs when someone was missing. Not lost, missing.
They hit a bump and Mike felt the St. Anthony medallion bounce against his chest.
Always have faith, no matter how bad it looks.
It got bad, real bad, those first few months after his mother left, Lou so angry and so sure she was never coming back he took all of her stuff and burned it in an aluminum trash can in the backyard. And while God had turned a deaf ear to that mess, He had been paying attention on a Sunday afternoon in late March, Jess coming up on the seventh month of her pregnancy with Sarah, Mike thinking—believing—that everything was going to turn out okay this time around when Jess felt faint, then dizzy, then started throwing up. They had survived two miscarriages—no, it was more like endured, both of them separately coming to grips with the possibility of a life without kids until Jess got pregnant for the third time, a girl, Sarah. Each day lived with a held breath, Mike hitting the pillow every night and thanking God for keeping watch on his family, Mike calling on God again as he rushed Jess straight to Mass General. By the time he pulled up to the ER, Jess’s blood pressure had dropped, her blood already poisoned from, he was about to learn, a life-threatening condition called preeclampsia.
In the end, it always came down to faith. God or Buddha, Mother Earth or that private space you went to when you made love—whatever you believed, in the end it all came down to faith. Faith that your life would work out the way you designed it. Faith that the people you loved would stick by you and stick around long enough. So when the surgeon explained the situation and the possibility that one if not both of them might not make it, Mike thought about the St. Anthony medal around his neck and called in his chits—Mass every Sunday; he didn’t cheat on his wife, both he and Jess generous with their time and money when it came to St. Stephen’s Church; and hey, while we’re at it, let us not forget all that time served with Lou Sullivan. Save them both, Mike said. Save both of them and you can take me, I don’t care because I couldn’t live through losing either of them.
That day God listened and came through, and as Slow Ed forced his way through the middle lane of traffic on East Dunstable, sirens wailing and lights flashing, Mike reached under his shirt, clutched the medallion in his hand and prayed for God to intervene a second time.
Slow Ed was saying, “Like that kid from last year, the three-year-old from Revere. Snowing like a bastard and the idiot mother went inside her house and left her kid unattended in the front yard. When she came back out, her son was gone, right? Dogs came in and five minutes later tracked the kid to a neighbor’s garage. Kid was unconscious, pinned underneath the car. Old man didn’t know he hit him and
dragged the kid down the street.”
Another success story to give Mike hope, to dim the growing collection of doubtful voices rising like a chorus in the back of his mind: And if the dogs don’t find her, then what? What will I do?
Slow Ed shut off the siren and turned left onto Anderson, the storm having already dumped a good six to eight inches on the sidewalks and street. “We need something with Sarah’s scent. When’s the last time you washed Sarah’s sheets?”
“Last Sunday,” Mike said.
“You’re sure?”
“Jess does laundry every Sunday morning. Strips the beds before we go to church.” The kitchen and living room lights were on, Mike saw. He had shut them off before he had left. Jess was home. “Do me a favor and kill the lights and siren. Last time Jess saw a cop pull into her driveway, they told her that her father had died.”
Slow Ed killed the lights and siren, Mike hearing the tires cutting their way through the slushy snow. Mike pointed over to a mailbox at the end of a driveway. Slow Ed pulled over and parked the car.
“You want me to come in with you?”
Seeing a blue uniform standing in her home would send Jess’s paranoia into overdrive.
“No, I’m all set,” Mike said and opened the door.
“Hold up. You got a recent picture of Sarah?”
“We do the Sears portrait thing every Christmas.”
“A Channel Five news van happened to be in the area, on Route One, you know, doing the storm coverage. They agreed to come over, get Sarah’s face on the airwaves. It wouldn’t hurt.”
Mike nodded, shut the door and jogged up the driveway, telling himself that Sarah wasn’t missing, she was only lost. He was sure of it in the same way he had been sure that day in the emergency room, knowing that both Jess and Sarah would make it. Sarah had slipped and fallen down the embankment and was wandering somewhere in the woods, huddled against a tree, maybe, cold and scared out of her mind, and he knew by the time he got back down to the Hill, he’d find her cradled in Bill’s arms or drinking a hot chocolate at a booth at Buzzy’s, Sarah surrounded by smiling, relieved cops. Jesus, Sarah, you gave us all quite a scare.
