When Time Is a River

by Susan Clayton-Goldner

  “I’m sorry, we don’t give out home numbers. And you won’t find him there anyway. I’d bet my eyeteeth he’s still out looking for your sister. Tell me the nature of your call and I’ll relay the message to him.”

  “Never mind.” Brandy hung up without leaving a message. She walked toward the park restrooms. And though she knew it was irrational to think Emily might still be there, Brandy lifted the crime scene tape and slipped underneath it. When she tried the door, it was locked. Fingerprint powder rubbed off onto her hands. She tried to wipe it on her jeans.

  Brandy didn’t know what to do. The worst thing she could ever imagine had happened. But she had a solid clue now. Maybe she’d remember seeing a bear walking away, the back of its yellow T-shirt. Or perhaps she’d find something else. Surely if she looked long and hard enough, she’d find something that would confirm the Pooh bear story—something that would lead her to Emily.

  She stood, propped against the rough cinderblock wall. She wasn’t cold, but her teeth chattered.

  Brandy retraced the steps she’d taken with Emily, the way she’d held the door open with her foot and pushed Emily’s stroller inside. She stopped every few seconds, closed her eyes and tried to remember what she’d seen. But there’d been so many people in the park today. So many children and adults dressed in bear costumes.

  Though she knew the police had already searched, Brandy walked slowly around the restrooms, shining her flashlight along the footings, looking for anything that might provide a clue to who took Emily and why.

  Finding nothing, she roamed around the empty playground, looking for something only she might recognize. Her flashlight punched a bright hole in the darkness. In order to get to the parking lot, the kidnapper would have taken Emily over the bridge. She always begged Brandy to hold her up to see the water. Had the man in the Pooh bear costume carried her over this bridge?

  Brandy raced to the center of the bridge and shined her flashlight into the creek—slowly moving it across the boulders, then leaned over the rail to flash the light beneath the bridge. She held her breath. When she saw nothing, she breathed, then walked along the banks, shining the beam from one deserted side to the other. Heavy dew shone from the cobwebs in the trees. Every few moments, she called out Emily’s name, tried to imagine what else might have lured her little sister away from the park.

  There’d been that adorable Spaniel puppy chasing after a red ball. What would Emily do? Maybe she followed him—a little girl innocently chasing a puppy. She imagined her giggling as she ran. Brandy closed her eyes and could hear the musical sound. Emily was okay. She had to be. But if she’d chased after the puppy, wouldn’t someone have seen her and brought her back?

  Again, Brandy retraced the steps they’d taken that afternoon. She tried to sift through each tiny detail, trying to find something, anything that might lead them to her little sister.

  She got down on her knees and crawled into the thick nests of rose and rhododendron bushes where Emily liked to hide. Branches scraped the sides of her face. Her hair caught in brambles. She pulled it away. The ground smelled like bark, decaying leaves, and wet soil. As she moved farther into the undergrowth, the space opened up, as if someone had trimmed the lower branches. Her hands felt something soft, slippery and padded like a sleeping bag.

  She shined the flashlight.

  A man’s face, lined, dirty, and stubbled with gray whiskers, leered up at her. “Get out,” he said, putting his hands over his eyes to shut out the light. “This here’s my private bedroom.” He smelled like body odor and alcohol.

  The scream rose in her throat, a knot of fear so hard and tangled she thought she might choke. Brandy crawled backwards. “I’m sorry. I’m looking for my little sister. She’s almost three.”

  “Well she ain’t here. And I’m trying to get some sleep. So get the hell out.”

  She scrambled from beneath the rhododendrons. Small stones and bark bit into her hands as she moved.

  When she cleared the bushes, she tried to stand. Her legs trembled and the palms of her hands stung, but she forced herself to get as far away from him as possible. She kept looking over her shoulder. After a few moments, when she still saw no one, she walked around the pond three more times, shining her flashlight into every dark nook. When she grew too tired to think any more, she stared up at the theatre on the hillside where one of this year’s plays, King Lear’s tragedy, had just ended. She heard the sound of applause and a few minutes later, a buzz of conversation, an occasional burst of laughter as the audience stumbled out into the brick courtyard.

  Brandy pulled Emily’s Pooh bear from her backpack and hugged him against her chest. She sat on a bench outside the restrooms where there was moonlight and the pulse of crickets. She looked down at the muddy knees of her jeans, her scraped and bloody palms.

  After the theater closed and the attendees returned to their homes or hotels, stillness as quiet and eerie as an empty church settled over everything.

  When she heard footsteps, Brandy’s throat seized. She wondered if the man in the sleeping bag intended to hurt her.

  In the dim light, she spotted the cowboy hat. Radhauser stepped from behind the restrooms. He carried a big flashlight, shining it against the concrete footings as he walked around the cinder block building. He pushed a candy wrapper aside with his foot, and inspected the shrubs on either side of the walkway with his flashlight. He picked up a twig in his right hand and snapped it into small pieces, dropping them, one by one, onto the asphalt path.

  She remained on the bench, still clutching the Pooh bear. “Are you following me? Or just an insomniac?”

  “Yes to both questions.”

  “I talked to Mrs. Wyatt again.”

  “I know. I asked you to leave the investigating to the police.” There was a trace of irritation in his voice.

  Brandy said nothing.

  “Do I need to get a restraining order?”

  “I’m only trying to help.”

  “I suppose Mrs. Wyatt has consulted her psychic and knows exactly where Emily is.”

  “She said the bear in the costume was wearing a yellow T-shirt.”

  “That’s interesting,” Radhauser said. “She denied seeing anything when I asked.”

  “She doesn’t trust you.”

  Brandy described the bear in the toy store window. “Emily would trust someone who looked like her friend at the toyshop.”

  “I’ve got officers checking it out,” he said. “And I’ve assigned someone to talk to the fair coordinator, get the names of every costumed worker.”

  “I think Mrs. Wyatt is telling the truth.”

  “We can’t waste any more time with a known quack. Do your parents know you’re here?”

  When she didn’t respond, he shone his flashlight over the muddy knees of her jeans, her damaged palms. “You shouldn’t be here at night. It’s not safe.”

  “I did something really stupid tonight.” She hung her head.

  “I know. Marvin is pretty territorial when it comes to his bedroom.”

  “You saw me?”

  “I was following you, remember?”

  “Emily likes to play hide and seek in those bushes. Do you think he—?”

  “Marvin is loud, but harmless. Otherwise, I’d never allow you to disturb his sleep.”

  “You can’t know that. What if he took Emily?”

  “It’s my job to know. Marvin sleeps here. He goes somewhere else during the day.” Radhauser sat beside her and set his flashlight on the ground. “Want to talk about that stupid thing you did? How it might have played out if Marvin wasn’t harmless and I wasn’t here?”

  “I was talking about something else.” She told him about the broken mirror. “As if my dad doesn’t have enough to worry about, I had to go all psycho.”

  “We all do crazy and irrational things when we’re stressed. Come on, Brandy, I’ll take you home.”

  “But what if Emily is out here in the dark? You just said it isn’t safe
. What if she’s cold and scared? And she can’t find me.”

  “I don’t think she is. I’m no fingerprint expert, and I won’t know for certain until Monday, but I’m pretty sure Emily’s prints are on the animal cracker package Kent claims Emily gave him.”

  “That means he really did see her after I took her into the bathroom.”

  “The hotline is getting calls now. We’ll have a solid lead soon. Someone had to see something.”

  “Kent saw her being carried out of the park. By someone in a Pooh costume. Mrs. Wyatt saw the same thing in the parking lot. The timing is a match.”

  Radhauser shook his head. “Kent’s mother told us he makes up stories about stuffed animals all the time. He thinks they are real. And Mrs. Wyatt has basically recanted her story. Chances are, if she saw anything, it was someone putting his own child in his car seat.”

  “You shouldn’t have talked to her. She made me promise I wouldn’t tell you.”

  For a few moments neither of them said anything.

  “I believe her,” Brandy said. “She had details. Like the color of Emily’s jacket. And the yellow T-shirt.”

  “She could have gotten the jacket information from the news broadcast.”

  “What about the yellow T-shirt?”

  “How much did you prompt her?”

  “I’m not stupid,” Brandy said. She told him how she’d asked if the bear might be wearing a shirt and that Mrs. Wyatt had closed her eyes and remembered it was yellow.

  “If anyone rented a Pooh bear costume, we’ll find him.”

  “What if my little sister is roaming around somewhere?”

  “She couldn’t go far on her own without shoes. Besides, I’ve got police cars cruising up and down the streets. And others who spent the entire afternoon knocking on doors and showing Emily’s picture. By Monday, that picture will be on the front page of the Medford Tribune, the Grants Pass Courier, and the Ashland Daily Tidings.”

  “Monday is a long way off.”

  “I know. I’ve faxed it to Portland. With any luck, it will appear in their Sunday paper, too.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time you went home.”

  She wanted to tell him how strange everything seemed at home. How she moved through the house afraid to sit down. Just staring at things she’d seen every day for most of her life. Only now it seemed like she was a visitor in that house and everything belonged to someone else. “What time is it really?”

  He lifted the cuff of his jacket.

  She pointed her flashlight at his wrist.

  He hastily pulled down his sleeve, but not before Brandy read the blue name tattooed in a white circle of skin protected from the sun by his watch.

  She shone the light on his face.

  “I was supposed to have today off,” he said. “It’s my wife’s birthday. I never wear a watch on my days off.” He gently pushed her flashlight away from his eyes.

  She turned it off. “Who’s Tyler?”

  He rubbed the sides of his face as if they hurt. “Does your dad know you’re here?”

  “Is Tyler your son?”

  He puffed out his cheeks, then slowly released the air. “No. Come on, I’ll see you home. I’ll even be a gent and walk you up to your window.”

  She didn’t move. The night was so quiet she could hear sounds from the pond, a Mallard dipping into the water, the croak of a nearby frog.

  “Come on,” he said again, reaching out a hand to help her up.

  She stood and they walked side by side across the bridge. When Brandy saw his patrol car parked in the Winburn lot, she told him to go ahead, she’d be fine. But Radhauser kept walking toward her house.

  “I know you want to help,” he said. “And you can do something important for me. Find a quiet place. Close your eyes and try to remember every single moment from the time you headed to the restroom, until you called 911. Write it down, minute by minute. Everything that happened. Then keep adding details as you remember them. I don’t care how small or insignificant they seem. Think about sounds and smells. People you saw there. Write it all down.”

  “Was Tyler kidnapped?”

  He cleared his throat, tapped his fingers against his pant leg. “Yes.”

  She swallowed. “Why do you have his name on your arm?”

  He came to an abrupt stop.

  “Is Tyler dead?” she asked. In the moonlight, Brandy could almost see the thoughts in his mind as he looked for a way around her question.

  “He was six years old and went missing from a Little League Park in Tucson where I used to live and work.” His gaze shifted off Brandy’s and looked at nothing. “I screwed up. It shouldn’t have come down the way it did.”

  They walked along, the silence ticking between them. When the tears rose, she didn’t attempt to wipe them away—merely let them roll down her cheeks and drop into the neck of her hoody.

  At the edge of their front yard, he handed her a card printed with both his office and home phone numbers. “I want you to have this. Call me if you remember anything important. Or if you just need to talk. I mean it. And I don’t care what time it is, either. If I’m in my office, I’ll tell the front desk to give you access.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder and gave her a quick, reassuring squeeze, the kind her dad used to give her before she performed on stage. “Emily is lucky to have a sister like you.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brandy pulled her old corkboard from the back of her closet and set it on her desk. She counted out fifteen three-by-five index cards and numbered them—one for each of the fifteen minutes between the time she’d started toward the restroom and the time she’d run into Stone at 3:30 and then called 911.

  She’d do exactly what Radhauser suggested. She’d keep replaying that time, minute by minute, over and over, until she remembered something new. She used pushpins to tack the cards onto the corkboard. One by one, she took them down, closed her eyes and tried to recreate the scenes. She wrote out the details.

  On the first card, she remembered the look on Emily’s face when Brandy told her not to unhook her safety belt. A look that said it was exactly what the toddler would do. She put a red star beside it—a reminder to tell Radhauser.

  By card three, she remembered how she’d bent to tie Em’s shoelaces, but then Emily had distracted Brandy by pushing her little Pooh bear into her face and telling her he needed a nap. Brandy had forgotten to tie Emily’s shoes. This could be important. The rainbow sneakers were untied. Someone tied them in double knots and tossed them into the creek? Why? Another red star. She made more notes to tell Radhauser.

  On card five, she wrote about the way she’d sat on the commode and took off her boots and jeans. How Emily had squealed, “Bumblebee no sting big Pooh. He no nap.” Holy shit, Brandy thought. Emily had sounded excited. Maybe she hadn’t been talking about her own Pooh. Maybe she meant the one in the toyshop window. The one Emily called big Pooh. Did that mean someone brought the big stuffed animal to the restroom? It must have been sold on Thursday or Friday, because she and Emily had seen it Wednesday afternoon. Had someone bought that bear to entice Emily? Or was it a coincidence? Maybe what Kent saw wasn’t entirely make-believe. Maybe he really did see a big Pooh wearing a yellow T-shirt, and imagined it carrying Emily. Another red star. Another note for Radhauser.

  There’d been a little girl in the restroom, not Emily, asking for a balloon. “I want a balloon, too,” she’d said. “Please. A red one.” Who was she asking? Emily didn’t have any balloons. Was there an adult in the bathroom handing out balloons? Another child? Had that person given a yellow one to Emily? Something else to mention to Radhauser.

  For two hours, she studied the cards as if her brain had no off switch. She closed her eyes and tried to recreate every second of those fifteen minutes. Tried to remember what she’d seen when she stepped out of the restroom.

  Over and over, she asked herself the same questions, trying to find a way to connect the
dots. Think. Think. A birthday party going on. Balloons tied to the corners of a long table. Children laughing and standing in line. Had they hired a clown to hand out balloons and twist them into the shapes of animals? Had the big Pooh bear been a gift for another little girl’s birthday?

  When the index cards started to blur together, Brandy flopped, fully clothed, onto her bed. She’d swallowed the pill her father had given her earlier, but didn’t sleep. Instead, she thought about all the words she might never have a chance to say to Emily. Words that now seemed too sad to ever come out.

  She picked up her guitar and strummed some soft chords in G major. Before she knew what happened, she played music and sang words she must have stowed away in the back of her mind. Within minutes, the song for Emily coursed through Brandy, like some swollen river after the spring snows thawed.

  I’ve heard love can conquer anything,

  Be a fortress in the storm.

  It can lift you to the mountaintop,

  And hold you safe and warm.

  She wrote three more stanzas, then called Stone on the private number he’d given her and sang it to him.

  He was quiet, and when he spoke his voice sounded gentle and almost breakable. “I don’t know what to say. Wasn’t it Chagall who said that art must be an expression of love or it’s nothing?”

  Brandy told him how the song had arrived in her head, fully formed as if her mind had been working on it without her knowledge.

  “Coach Pritchard and the drama team want to put together a candlelight vigil. We can hold it in Lithia Park. He said it will raise community awareness. The more people we can get looking for Emily, the greater the chances of finding her. Would you be willing to sing that song?”

  “I don’t know if I could without breaking down.”

  “You sang it to me.”

  “That’s different.”

  “I’ll work out an accompaniment,” Stone said. “You’ve already done the hard part. Creativity takes real courage. Singing is only a performance. Please. We have plenty of people to take care of the details. All you have to do is show up and sing to me.”