Cold Tears

by AR Simmons

  •••

  October 16

  Richard spent the next two weeks filling out job applications and running into what he considered reverse discrimination. His college credit, military service, and age all worked against his chances of landing a low-paying position. Molly dropped over for an occasional prod, but he put her off with the excuse that all his time was taken up job hunting, which was close to true. He tried to smooth it over with Jill by mentioning the possibility of re-enrolling in college for the spring semester in order to pick up a G.I. benefits check.

  The first week of October had come with a killing frost, which was depressing. The second week of the month his ship came in—rather his “scow” docked. Quick Fill hired him part-time to perform oil changes, transmission checks, and lube jobs. Moiling in the gloom and muck of a grease pit periodically swept by cold air wouldn’t provide the optimum winter occupation, but Richard figured he’d probably get fired before cold weather anyway if he ran true to his recent form.

  Another heavy frost came in the night. He hated what it foreshadowed, but decided to shake off all portents by surprising Jill with breakfast. Friday was his day off, but Jill had to go in early. Although he was still working for the minimum wage, and was held to less than forty hours a week, he was beginning to feel better about his contribution to the finances. He planned to go in for his check and pay the utility bill. She came into the kitchen as he was carrying milk and eggs to the stove.

  “What are you doing?” she asked with a yawn.

  “I was going to make French toast,” he said. “But the only bread we have is that leftover baguette that’s as hard as a rock, so I guess it’s scrambled eggs.”

  A laugh interrupted her yawn.

  “What?” he asked, puzzled at her amusement.

  “You had a wonderful idea. It was sweet, but let me do it.”

  “I can scramble eggs,” he objected. “And what’s so funny.”

  “Being unable to make French toast because the bread is stale,” she said. “The French term for it is ‘pain perdu,’ which means ‘lost bread.’ It’s what one does with stale bread. Let me prepare it Aunt Mirabelle’s way for you.”

  “Do I have time to shave?”

  “Plenty. The bread must be allowed to absorb the liquid, and it must be heated slowly to cook through without burning the surface.”

  “I kind of like it gooey on the inside.”

  “You shouldn’t eat undercooked eggs. Salmonella is present in many commercial eggs now.”

  “Food poisoning? Must be quite a blow to the eggnog industry.”

  “They pasteurize that.”

  •••

  “This is a little thin,” said Jill as she spooned a lumpy reddish concoction over Richard’s French toast. “Aunt Mirabelle made it better. I didn’t have time to reduce it properly. It is compote. Think of it as strawberry syrup.”

  He took a tentative taste. Although he would have preferred maple syrup, it wasn’t bad.

  “Who knew that recycled stuff could taste so good,” he said.

  “That’s what cooking is all about.”

  “It’s becoming a lost art,” he said. “I don’t guess most young women have been exposed to it the way you have.”

  “One only has to care. If one can read, one can learn to cook.”

  “This is good,” he said. “My compliments to your Aunt Mirabelle.”

  Tears came to her eyes.

  “Sorry, Jill. I didn’t think,” he stammered.

  Jill shook her head. “No. I just wish the two of you could have known each other.”

  A knock at the back door interrupted the conversation. They exchanged exasperated smiles. “I’ll let her in,” said Jill, patting his hand as she got up.

  Molly stood on the back stoop, coatless and hugging herself against the frosty air. Her face fell when Jill opened the door.

  “Come in, Molly,” said Jill. “We were just having breakfast. Have you eaten?”

  “No, ma’am, but I’m not hungry. I just came to tell Mr. Carter about what they found out.”

  “About what, Molly?” he called out.

  “I would have told you last night, but it was late when you guys come in. Mr. Adams told me yesterday afternoon. The tests come in, and it wasn’t Mancie.”

  Richard didn’t know how she had managed to misunderstand Adams, but he was sure that she had.

  “What did he say exactly?”

  “He said, ‘The DNA don’t match up with yours, Molly.’ Them’s his exact words. I told you it wasn’t her.”

  Then what the heck is going on? he wondered.

  •••

  7:58 AM

  “I didn’t say you shouldn’t help her,” said Jill as they arrived at the campus. “I just said that this has to end sometime.”

  “You mean I need an exit strategy?”

  “Exactly. Sooner or later you are going to have to disengage yourself from her.”

  “You make it sound like she’s a leach or something.”

  “An apt description. She’s attached herself to you.”

  “I’ll … detach her as soon as this is over,” he said irritably.

  “Over? When will it be over, Richard? When Molly gives it up? What if she doesn’t do that? What if they never find any trace of the baby? That woman is tenacious. She won’t give up until someone proves to her that her baby is dead. I sympathize with her—I really do, but she’s … co-opted you into this hopeless pursuit. Don’t you understand? The only way she’ll let you go is if you prove a negative. And no one can do that.”

  “So what? I just wrap it up and walk away?”

  “You have to.”

  “How?”

  “Find a way,” she said, getting abruptly from the car.

  Before shutting the door, she opened her purse and then leaned back in to hand him the checkbook. “Here. Pay the utility bills after you put your check in the bank.”

  And with that she was gone, leaving Richard alone in the idling car with nothing but the aura of her discontent and his own irritation. He was angry with both women and berated each in turn on his way to Quick Fill, rehearsing all the things he would never say to either. The problem was that, given their individual perspectives, both were right, and he was their bone of contention.

  “And I’m beginning to feel well gnawed,” he grumbled to himself as he went in to pick up his check.

  Unlike Jimmy Pete, his new boss handed him his pay cheerfully, even taking time for idle banter. After that, Richard drove. Thinking seemed easier when he gave himself something to do. Mulling over his dilemma, he came to the obvious conclusion that Jill had to come first. However, Molly had become a burden that he couldn’t just shrug off. Rightly or wrongly, she saw him as a literal godsend come to get her baby back. Jill was right. That was a terrible responsibility to impose on someone. Yet how could he blame Molly?

  Although it felt like hastily cleaning up and walking away from an incomplete job, he saw a way clear of the mess. Ignoring the feeling that he was only running away from Molly’s desperate petition, he thought through his rationalization.

  Okay. I’ve questioned her friends and co-workers, I’ve talked to Adams, and I’ve reconstructed the night it happened. Let’s just finish with a canvass of the neighborhood, and when nothing turns up, I’ll just tell her that I’m at my wits’ end—which will be the truth. I’ll have given it my best shot and come up dry.

  Richard came to a tee in the road and stopped. He realized that he didn’t know where he was, and he couldn’t remember how he had gotten there. Popping the glove box, he pulled out the map. It did no good. Neither the county blacktop he was on nor the one he had come to were shown. He took a left because Springfield and James Mill had to be somewhere off in that direction.

  •••

  He turned back onto his street a little after noon, with two hours still to kill before picking up Jill. To avoid Molly, he drove by. At the end of the block, he slowed and stop
ped, deciding to canvass the neighborhood. Beginning on the opposite side of the street, he knocked at the corner house, but got no answer. Nor did he get a response at the next one. The third house held more promise. The college boys lived there. The number of cars at the curb and in the drive suggested that all of them couldn’t be gone.

  Repeated knocks actually went unanswered, and he was about to give up when he heard an excited whoop from inside.

  Probably the idiot that nearly backed into us, he thought.

  Making a fist, he pounded on the door, determined to draw attention. His banging finally elicited a response.

  “Hold on!” someone yelled.

  He held on. And held on. Then he commenced banging again.

  Finally, the voice called out. “It’s open!”

  Trying the knob, he found it unlocked. He pushed open the door and peered into what had once been a living room and was now who knew what. Sheets and blankets covered the windows. Light from three flickering computer monitors on the back wall alleviated the gloom. The walls were lined with computer stations, most with darkened monitors. Glowing specks indicated that all the towers were on, however. Two young men were recumbent, but intently riveted at adjoining stations, while a third sat upright and equally intent at one on the opposite side of the room. Absorbed in video games, none paid the slightest attention to the stranger who had walked in.

  “Do you think one of you guys could spare a minute to talk to me?” asked Richard.

  None seemed to hear. “Hey!” he repeated, raising his voice. “I want to talk to one of you guys.”

  “Minute,” said the one off to his left without looking up.

  Richard waited. And waited. Evidently a minute was of a different duration in cyberspace. “Come on guys,” he said. “I don’t have all day.”

  “I was almost there!” lamented Richard’s lone respondent, jerking his controller above his head in frustration.

  The boy placed his controller on the desk and swiveled his seat to blink at Richard. He looked to be in his early twenties, and had the scruffy whiskers of a late-season deer hunter.

  “What you want?” he asked Richard with a cough as he stood and stretched.

  “Whoa!” he said before Richard could answer. He steadied himself on the back of the chair.

  “Fat rush,” he explained.

  “You surfaced too quick,” said one of the others distractedly.

  “I live down the block—next to the lady whose baby disappeared,” said Richard.

  “A kid disappeared? Wow.”

  The response surprised him until he considered the darkened room and the obsession with gaming. “Yeah, about three months ago. You didn’t hear about it?”

  A shake of the head and a shrug.

  “Well, I’m trying to find out if anyone in the neighborhood saw or heard anything out of the ordinary at the time. No one’s asked you about this before now?”

  “First I’ve heard,” he said with another shrug. “Either of you guys heard anything about a missing kid around here?”

  “Alien abduction, Boots,” tossed out one without removing his attention from the screen.

  The other might as well have been on the moon, which he probably was.

  “None of you remember anything unusual around then?”

  “You a cop?” asked the lone respondent.

  “No. I’m not a policeman. I’m just trying to help the lady whose kid disappeared,” said Richard, taking a closer look at the room.

  It reminded him of something he’d seen, but he couldn’t quite place it. “How many people live here?” he asked.

  “Nine after we voted the Tuke out.”

  “The Took?”

  “The Tuke,” said the young man, correcting Richard’s pronunciation. “He never put anything in the pot, so we exiled him.”

  “And you’re all college boys, right?”

  “Not,” corrected the young man with a grin. “Gamers. We’re like a colony, you know. Shared responsibility. Everyone’s gotta throw in to keep it going. Gotta eat, pay rent, keep the power on—stuff like that. A guy don’t put nothing in, we gotta cut him off. Sic transit el Tuke.”

  “So you do work?”

  “We all got jobs but Grant. He gets money from his parents.”

  “So, it’s all guys here, huh?”

  “We had a chick for a while. Didn’t work out. She was as much a slacker as the rest of us. I think we were like expecting maybe she would be like our momma or something. She was mad all the time.”

  Richard counted the empty chairs in the room. “So you got what, six guys at work?”

  “Yeah. It takes a lot of money.”

  “But you’re splitting it nine ways, right?”

  Using terminology that Richard didn’t know, and probably couldn’t find in any dictionary, the young man, Brent Goins, explained the world in which he and his housemates lived. Online video gaming evidently cost a lot. Richard got the distinct impression, although he didn’t understand it, that there was real money to be made, albeit e-cash or credit accounts with various gaming services. Most of the housemates had low-paying, part-time jobs, but Goins and one of the others present worked full-time in the medical field, perhaps as male nurses, orderlies, or technician’s assistants. Their jobs were only necessary, if regrettable, forays for cash. None of them seemed interested in anything remotely resembling reality. Richard figured that if any of them were a pedophile, he would indulge vicariously. Considering the living arrangements and the relative disinterest of the gamers, Richard ruled them out as far as involvement in whatever happened to Mancie Allsop.

  Back outside, he saw Adam’s car parked behind his, and knew what was coming before the window rolled down. “Get in.”

  His blood pressure didn’t even spike when the sour detective barked at him. “What’s on your mind, sir?” he asked as he got in.

  “Just keeping in touch with the other investigator on the case,” said Adams sarcastically.

  “It’s getting complicated, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not a game, Carter. We got two murdered kids. Molly Randolph may be all atwitter about the DNA results because she sees it as proof that her baby is still alive, but you ought to know better.”

  Richard saw the implications of the DNA analysis—he had seen it all along, and he sympathized with what he now realized was Adams’s genuine concern.

  “I know what it means,” he said. “It means that Mancie is most likely dead, and probably has been all along.”

  “So if your little friend didn’t have nothing to do with it, then she really believes her kid is still alive.”

  “And the second dead child means there’s a homicidal pedophile out there, right?”

  “That’s my problem!” snapped Adams. “What I don’t get is you. Why do you keep feeding Molly’s delusion? What’s the point? Are you just so eaten up with playing detective that you can’t let it go?”

  “No. It’s not fun. I made a promise to Molly, and honestly, I’m trying to find a way to break it. I’m going to finish what I started. That’s what I was doing today. I’ve talked to her friends and the people she worked with. Today I’m canvassing the neighborhood. As soon as I can tell her honestly that I’ve done all I can, then I’m going to walk away from it.”

  Adams just stared at him. “And you aren’t curious about the babysitter?”

  “Has something come up?”

  Adams shook his head.

  “Oh, I see. You think that if I really believed that Katie’s murder had something to do with the disappearance of Mancie, then there’s no way I’d just walk away from my … investigation.”

  “I don’t read you as a guy who gets bored and quits. And I’m pretty good at reading people.”

  You didn’t read Molly worth a damn, thought Richard.

  “I’m not bored. I just can’t find anything. It’s time to give it up.”

  Adams dismissed his explanation. “You told me that Katie Nash’s murde
r was staged as a sex crime,” he said. “Tell me how you thought that might fit into the theory you had.”

  “Maybe the abductor was afraid she could identify him.”

  “Okay. So what about the second baby?”

  “What do you mean? I don’t know anything about the second baby.”

  “No one seems to,” said Adams. “It doesn’t match any missing person’s report by age, sex, and time of death except the Randolph kid. It wasn’t a newborn someone just threw away. The DNA should have matched Molly’s baby, but it didn’t. And Molly did have a child in case you’re wondering. I talked to the O. B. So it wasn’t someone else’s baby that she adopted or anything like that.”

  Richard was barely listening. He was thinking about what Adams had said earlier.

  “Wait a minute. No one reported another missing baby? That’s impossible. How far did you check the missing persons’ reports?”

  “The whole state as well as Arkansas, Kansas, Oklahoma. I got nothing.”

  “It had to have been brought here from somewhere.”

  “So we’ve got this traveling pedophile?”

  “Why not? Maybe a truck driver or salesman or something like that.”

  Richard remembered an idea he had earlier when viewing Mancie’s photographs with Molly.

  “For example—and I’m not saying this is the way it was, but those guys who set up photo sessions in the discount stores. What would be a better way to troll for kids? You got all the pictures you want, and you got their names, addresses, and phone numbers. And they travel all the time.”

  Adams stared at him soberly. Then he grimaced and shook his head. “That’s what I like about you, Carter. You got a theory for everything. Get out and go on about your detecting business.”

  “Listen, Adams,” he said. “I’m serious about getting out of this and—”

  “Yeah. Yeah. I’ll believe it when I see it. Go on. You’re giving me a headache.”

  •••

  2:15 PM

  On the way to campus, Richard decided that Adams’s sudden willingness to discuss the case was nothing more than an attempt to pump him for information, which meant that he was drawing a blank too. He now had three crimes and no leads. Adams had no idea where the body at the dump came from, who might have killed Katie, or what had happened to Molly’s baby. Circumstance suggested that the three crimes could be related, but Richard couldn’t envision a believable scenario.