When Time Is a River

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  “Okay,” the operator said. “Describe Emily for me.”

  “She has long hair. Curly. It’s dark brown, but it looks kind of red in the sunlight.”

  “Eye color?”

  Brandy fought for breath. “Blue. Dark blue.”

  “You’re doing great. Now, what did she have on?”

  “A…a…T-shirt…some blue pants.” Brandy gripped the receiver and pounded her forehead against the Plexiglas. “She has new sneakers. They’re rainbow-colored with glow-in-the-dark pink laces.”

  “That’s real good, Brandy,” the operator said. “But can you be more specific about the pants and T-shirt? Color? Any design?”

  Brandy knew the pants were blue. But what about the T-shirt. How could she not remember? She’d just dressed Emily.

  “Take your time,” the operator said.

  Clamping her eyes shut, Brandy re-envisioned the scene in her little sister’s bedroom. Emily waking up from her nap, the wet pants. The sleep creases in her red cheeks. Tears clinging to her eyelashes. How impatient and mean Brandy had been to her—the way she’d slammed the bedroom door.

  As if teetering on top of a waterfall at that pent-up instant before it all cascaded over the ledge, Brandy lurched forward, nearly dropping the phone.

  The scene focused. Her own hand pulling the pants and shirt from the second drawer. “Blue denim pants with an elastic waistband. The kind you can pull down quickly. She’s almost potty-trained, but she has accidents sometimes.”

  “You’re doing good. Anything else?”

  “A yellow sunflower T-shirt and a bright red, corduroy jacket.” As she talked into the telephone, Brandy’s voice faded in and out and the whole scene took on that slippery sensation of a dream.

  “Does she have any distinguishing marks? Any scars? A mole or a birthmark?”

  Brandy swallowed. “No. Emily is perfect.”

  “I’m putting this on the air,” the operator said. “Broadcasting your description to alert officers on the streets and the cadets in Lithia Park. I want you to stay where you are.” The operator’s voice was calm and held a sure steadiness. “We’ll send someone right over to talk with you.”

  “No,” Brandy said. “I have to go back to the park. What if Emily returns to the restrooms? What if she’s looking for me? What if she’s scared?”

  “Breathe for me again, Brandy,” the operator said. “Tell me where in the park you’ll be so I can have an officer meet you.”

  Brandy told her she’d be on the playground near the swings, then dropped the receiver into its cradle and hurried back to the park. She took deep breaths, willed herself to calm down. When another search of the areas surrounding the pond and theatres yielded nothing, she charged back to the playground. She climbed onto the play equipment, a center platform between two slides. “May I have your attention please? We need your help. We’ve got a lost child. A little girl.”

  The busy playground grew silent. Faces angled toward her like flowers to the sun. “She’s almost three years old,” Brandy said. “About this big.” She held her hand out to indicate Emily’s height. “Lots of dark curly hair. Her name is Emily.” Brandy told them what Emily was wearing. Oh God. I can’t believe this is happening.

  A few mothers and nannies leapt from their benches, grabbed their charges and hurried out of the park. Others, wanting to help, took their kids by the hand and began to look behind trees, under the skirted tables of the vendors. They searched behind privacy screens set up for vaccinations, in the bushes and under the wooden fort. One member of the teddy bear quartet turned up his microphone and asked everyone to help. Another one flipped the wastepaper baskets upside down, fished through the contents with a long stick.

  Stone returned. He shook his head. “No sign of her along the creek.”

  Emily. Emily. As if there were stereo speakers in the treetops, her name rang out everywhere.

  No one answered.

  * * *

  Detective Winston Radhauser, known as Wind to his family and friends, was enjoying a rare Saturday off from work. He stood with his right boot on the bottom rail of the horse fence around their arena. His arms were folded over the five-foot high top rail, chin resting on his hands. He took a deep breath. The air around him filled with the smells of the cedar sawdust he’d used to bed the stalls, the grassy aroma of alfalfa bales and sweet feed laced with molasses.

  His beeper went off.

  He slipped it from his pocket. It was Robert Vernon, the other detective from the Ashland Police Department.

  Damn. He’d put in for this day off months ago. It was his wife’s birthday, for Christ sake. Vernon knew better than to page him today.

  Out of nowhere, he thought about his other life in Tucson, the one with Laura and their thirteen-year-old son Lucas—the little boy who’d wanted to be a rodeo cowboy. Just over a decade ago, a drunk driver had killed his first family. He’d been working a case and hadn’t been with them that night.

  Radhauser decided to ignore the page—wouldn’t let the job come before his family. Not ever again. He watched his wife, Gracie, ride Mercedes—the six-year-old bay mare he’d bought for her thirty-second birthday. Gracie had grown up around horses, and once she’d completed her nursing degree in Tucson, it had been her idea to move away and buy this small ranch in Talent, Oregon—just on the outskirts of Ashland. She was right. It wouldn’t have been a good idea to start their married life with the ghosts of his first family hovering over them.

  They’d met while Radhauser was working on a murder case in Catalina, just miles north of Tucson. Gracie was a friend of the victim. And there was something about the way she’d looked at him, something in her smile and in the warmth of her dark eyes that made him want to know more about her life. It was the first time he’d felt the slightest stirring for a woman since his wife and son had died. Once the case was solved, he’d asked her to go on a picnic to watch the sunset at Gate’s Pass in the Catalina Mountains high above Tucson. And when she’d brought a bouquet of flowers to Lucas and Laura’s grave, he knew she was the one. The rest, as the old cliché goes, was history.

  Now, she wore a pair of worn Levis, boots, and one of his plaid western shirts, tucked in tight at the waist. Elisabeth, their four-year-old daughter seated in the saddle in front of her mother, had insisted her mother wear the birthday hat. Gracie’s mahogany hair was loose, the way he liked it best, and it flew out behind the cone-shaped paper hat with green and blue balloons printed on it.

  Gracie talked to the horse in a soft voice and patted her neck. Each time Mercedes passed by him, Lizzie smiled at him and waved. Ever since he’d read her a picture book about cowgirls, Lizzie wanted to wear the same outfit—a short, denim cowgirl skirt with suede fringe, an orange gingham blouse, tiny boots, and a black cowgirl hat with a bright orange band around the crown.

  His beeper sounded again.

  Gracie maneuvered Mercedes to the fence. “Whoa, girl.” She brought the mare to a halt in front of him. “Mercedes is well-trained. Really responsive to my leg signals.”

  He smiled. “In case you haven’t noticed, so am I.”

  He looked at his daughter, at the dark, sun-streaked hair Gracie had braided into pigtails and tied with orange ribbons. She looked like her mom, with those big brown eyes he could never get enough of. “Do you have any idea how much your daddy loves you?”

  She grinned and lifted her arms to the sky. “To outer space and back a thousand million times.”

  He turned to his wife. “And how about you, Mrs. Radhauser?”

  “I know that look,” Gracie said. “You got a page, didn’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “Phone Vernon. Tell him no way.”

  “I’ve decided to ignore it.”

  “You won’t be able to do that.”

  “Watch me.”

  She’d often told him he had an obsessive personality, especially when it came to his work. “Call him right now and get it over with.”

  He
couldn’t argue with her. She was right. “I suppose I should check in.”

  From the phone in his barn office, Radhauser called Vernon.

  “A kid went missing in Lithia Park,” Vernon said, then filled him in on the details. “I need your help.”

  “Have you turned that park upside down and shaken out the crumbs?”

  “Officers Corbin and Murphy are on it. I’m heading over as soon as we hang up.” He told Radhauser about the Children’s Health Fair, and how the park was overflowing with kids and costumed workers trying to cajole toddlers into getting their fingerprints and photographs taken. How the sister had searched all the places the toddler liked to hide.

  “Call search and rescue to wade the duck ponds. And see if you can round up some help from Josephine & Jackson County Sheriffs’ Offices to check along the banks of Ashland Creek.”

  “It’s running pretty swift,” Vernon said. “All that snow melting in the mountains.”

  Radhauser cringed. “Girl or boy?”

  “A little girl,” Vernon said.

  Radhauser imagined what it would be like to find Lizzie caught up in the roots of an old oak tree at the edge of that rock-lined creek. He shook his head hard. “I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

  Having lost a wife and a child, death was too real to him now. He understood it, like he never had before. And he worried about Lizzie getting sick or hurt. He knew there were no safe places, but surely this small ranch in Talent, at the southern end of the Rogue River Valley with its population of five thousand, must be as good as it got.

  He grabbed his western-cut blazer from the hook in the barn and told Gracie what had happened and that he’d most likely be late. “I know I promised, but…”

  Her arms tightened around Lizzie. She kept her gaze on him a beat too long, then shivered, as if trying to shake off a thought. “We’ll have the birthday cake when you get home. I don’t care if it’s breakfast tomorrow morning. Just find her.”

  * * *

  Brandy clutched Emily’s Pooh bear to her chest as she raced around the pond and the thick nests of bushes surrounding it. Praying for a flash of a red corduroy jacket, she searched for any sign of Emily.

  Two squirrels at the edge of the creek stopped feeding on a dead crow and chased each other up the trunk to the high branches of an oak tree. Their short-muscled bodies disappeared into the green until they were visible only through the commotion behind the leaves. The air smelled like decomposing pine needles and wet leaves. She could hear the sound of Ashland Creek plunging over its rocks. Emily wouldn’t go near that rushing water, Brandy assured herself. Emily was too afraid of the roaring noise. Who loves you, Em?

  Stone ran back from the Japanese Garden. He set his hat on a bench and stood by the pond brushing his damp hair back from his forehead. He was out of breath and there were big circles of perspiration under his arms. “No sign of her.” He shook his head. “Did you hear anything strange while you were in the bathroom?”

  “Just kids. Nothing unusual. One of them asked another one for a balloon.”

  “Wouldn’t Emily have cried if a stranger tried to pick her up?” Stone said. “She probably got bored…I mean…climbed out of her stroller. Maybe the singing and all the bears distracted her and she wandered off.”

  Brandy shook her head, wanting so much to believe that was what had happened. “How far could she have gone? We’ve searched the park. Why haven’t we found her?”

  “She’s got to be here someplace,” he said, looking straight into her eyes.

  “What if some child molester snatched her?” Brandy said.

  “I have a three-year-old cousin who memorized whole books. Little kids are smarter than most people think. Is there any possibility she could find her way home?”

  “I don’t know,” Brandy said. “What if she tried to cross the street? I’ve told her to look both ways a million times, but… What if she got hit by a car?” Brandy’s chest felt caved in and she could barely breathe, it hurt so bad.

  “Someone would have called an ambulance. We’d have heard sirens or something.” He stared at her, then looked away. “Head up to your house.”

  Maybe he was right. What if Emily tried to walk home? Could Brandy catch up with her before anything bad happened? “I told the 911 operator I’d wait for the police.”

  “If they arrive before you get back, I’ll tell them what happened,” Stone said.

  Brandy shook her head.

  “Do you want me to go?”

  Emily barely knew Stone. She might be afraid of him. “I’ll check with the police first and then I’ll go,” Brandy said.

  When the first officer arrived, he introduced himself as Officer Corbin from the Ashland Police Department. Brandy gave him the details of what had happened and where they’d searched. She asked if she could run home to see if Emily was there.

  Corbin took down Brandy’s home address. “Detective Vernon will want to talk to the person who reported her missing. So, come right back.”

  Stone touched her arm. “I know you’re scared, but I have a good feeling you’ll find her before you get home.”

  Relief spilling out of her with his words, she handed him Emily’s Pooh bear. “Watch this for me.” She raced across the park, over the bridge, and up Nutley to Granite Street.

  The relief was gone and everything felt wrong. The bright spring colors that swept by in liquid shades of green and yellow. A sweet-smelling flower garden. And the sun, too warm on her neck and shoulders. She couldn’t fit it all together with the dread inside her. Running in the wrong direction, every step took her farther away from the place she’d last seen Emily.

  Brandy drove her legs forward. Within moments she stood, panting, in front of their house. The garage door was open. Christine’s Mazda RX7 convertible parked in its usual spot. Please, God. Please. She’d never ask for anything again. Please, just let Emily be safe inside. Their yard was hilly and thick with big-leafed maple trees. Double-winged seeds, the color of bones, dropped onto the driveway.

  Brandy sprinted up the drive, through the garage, and burst into the kitchen. The magnetic click of the door echoed in the quiet room. Her stepmother peeled an onion at the sink, its brown skin rustling like paper. She still wore the white linen suit she’d worn to her mother’s luncheon, but had replaced her high heels with furry bedroom slippers and pulled her hair up off her neck into a ponytail. Christine turned to Brandy. “I ran a little late, but I almost have your picnic ready,” she said, nodding toward the half-filled wicker basket on the counter. “And I picked up the—”

  “Is Emily here?”

  When she turned to look at Brandy again, Christine’s face seemed to rearrange itself. “Here? What do you mean here? She’s with you.”

  As if Brandy had pushed a button that ejected Christine from her spot in front of the sink, her stepmother wheeled around, then shot forward. The onion dropped from her hand, bounced once on the kitchen floor before it rolled into the corner and stopped.

  Christine rushed at Brandy, grabbed her by the shoulders, jiggled her back and forth, and then stared into her eyes. “Please. This isn’t anything to joke about. Just tell me where Emily is.”

  The facts surrounding Emily’s disappearance swelled inside Brandy like waves, silent and unstoppable. She tried to tell her stepmother what had happened.

  Christine looked at Brandy’s face and then staggered back, pulled on her ponytail until the elastic band broke and a red mass of hair fell over her shoulders. Her mouth opened.

  Brandy felt her stepmother’s breath rushing toward her, like the gust of air from a passing car. She tried to say something to calm Christine, but it was impossible.

  Her gaze locked onto Brandy’s and, in a flash, something significant passed between them—an acknowledgment of the awful possibilities that might await them.

  The kitchen seemed unnaturally quiet. In the dream-like silence, Brandy heard the tick of the clock on the back of the stove and the sound of her
stepmother’s breathing.

  All of a sudden, Christine squared her shoulders and barked orders at Brandy. “Find your father. Tell him what’s happened. Tell him to meet me at the park. Turn off the oven. And lock up the house.”

  She grabbed her purse, then dug inside, searching for her car keys. When she didn’t find them, she dumped the entire contents on the kitchen counter. A gold tube of lipstick rolled across the granite and tumbled onto the floor. Christine’s whole face was red. She picked up the keys. “It will be all right,” she said, more to herself than to Brandy. “Emily will come for me.” Christine’s voice cracked. “I’m her mother. She’ll come when I call her.”

  Chapter Six

  Radhauser parked his Crown Vic on the Plaza, grabbed his crime-scene kit and his camera, and hurried toward the 93-acre park. He wasn’t a religious man, but he prayed the little girl had merely wandered off and would soon be found, if she hadn’t been already. He walked past the roadblocks, the flashing red and blue lights of other patrol cars, and the Saturday afternoon onlookers with their shopping bags.

  Vernon had cordoned off the area, and two uniformed police officers were posted beside the Plaza entrance to question anyone who entered or left the park. Two others were canvassing the area around the pond.

  Just as Radhauser requested, his partner had cordoned off the bathroom with police tape and designated it as a crime scene. Officer Murphy stood guard to stop any unauthorized person from entering.

  “Any sign of the little girl?” Radhauser asked.

  Corbin shook his head.

  Red and blue flashing lights caught Radhauser’s attention. A siren stopped screaming as a Medford police car came to a stop near the park entrance. Good—if this turned out to be a child abduction, they’d need all the help they could get.

  He snapped on a pair of latex gloves, ducked under the tape, pushed open the door and entered the women’s bathroom. He stood still for a few moments, waiting for the room to talk to him. He imagined the carbon and oxygen molecules shifting slightly because he’d entered, and then slowly settling back into place.