Endings

by Linda L. Richards

We don’t say what we’re maybe both thinking: cheaper isn’t always better. And some things arrive with a cost.

  When we get to the final turn, I am taken aback. A huge sign swings ranch-style over a wide driveway: “Valley de Oro Day Care.”

  “This is Valley de Oro?” I ask from between lips that are suddenly parched.

  Arden looks at me quickly. “I thought you weren’t from around here.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Then how do you know about the Valley? No one who’s not from here knows about it.”

  “Long story. Let’s go in and talk to them, okay?”

  Arden nods and gets in motion. She doesn’t need to be asked twice.

  Inside, the little-kid smells nearly kicks me off my feet. I did not prepare myself for it. The smell of innocence. Of senseless joy. My heart quivers under it. I am briefly undone.

  The day care is in a former house, but now the place is dedicated to very young children. I stand just inside the front door. In every direction, I see tiny furniture and brightly colored bits of learning and fun. It looks like a fairy tale. The place is more quiet than I would have expected. Subdued. You can taste the sense of hush. Something has gone terribly wrong.

  We are met at the door by a young woman. She is in her late twenties, the kind of open-faced girl who gravitates to working with kids. I suspect that on a different day she would be beautiful. Tall and slender like a flower, with hair the color of the far edge of sunset. But now her face is gray, her brow furrowed, eyes rimmed in red. She has been crying. She looks like hell.

  “Ohmigawd, Arden,” she wails as soon as she sees my companion. “Ohmigawd. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  Arden’s lips are stretched so tightly across her teeth, I imagine I can hear them squeak. She cuts the apologies off in mid-wail.

  “Please. Don’t. Just … the police?”

  “They just left.” Her breathing is returning to normal, but one gets the sense that tears are not far. On this day.

  “And …” Arden prompts.

  An empty look. A voice so low, we have to strain to hear. “They took our statements. Searched the premises …” She lets her voice trail off, and we understand: they searched and did not find. And now here we are.

  “What happened, Jenn?” Arden’s voice is low and deadly.

  “I’m not … that is, we’re not … well, we’re not really sure. She’s just” —tears advertised by the red-rimmed eyes start again— “gone. I told the police that all we can think is, we had a repairman in for the air-conditioning at nap time.” The girl looks even more stricken. Her voice drops to just above a whisper. I have to strain to hear. “Afterwards, we looked. We looked, Arden. We really did. And Ashley was gone. When we couldn’t find her, we called the police. And then we called you.”

  Arden’s face fell at this. Her expression is mostly not there. What is the correct order, I wonder? The parent, the police. Who do you call? And you can see all of this on Arden: a part of her wants to blame, to lash out. To her credit, she doesn’t do it. She just wants her child back. I get that. I get that a lot.

  “Where are the other kids?” I ask. The girl looks at me for the first time. “No other kids missing?”

  “This is my friend,” Arden says, answering Jenn’s unasked question. “She drove me here.”

  Jenn looks me over but not that carefully. She’s got other things on her mind.

  “Stephen and Loret have the kids in the big playroom. They’re doing a quiet time. It just seemed best to keep everyone in one place while we looked for Ashley. And, yes”—she manages to look even more stricken—“just Ashley. I’m so sorry, Arden. I don’t know what to say.”

  “She didn’t just wander off ?” Me again.

  Jenn shakes her head. “We’d hoped so, even though it’s not like Ashley to do something like that. But we’ve looked everywhere.”

  Clearly not everywhere, I thought. But I didn’t say it out loud.

  “That’s true,” Arden agrees. “Ashley would never just go off by herself. She knows better.”

  “I’m guessing the police will be calling you,” Jenn says. “I gave them your number.”

  Arden nods, but we all know the drill. It will be form: eliminating all possibilities. Did the child’s father take her? Some other relative? Was it Arden herself ? And they’ll hope that. And we’ll hope that, too. Because any of those things is better than what we suspect.

  “So the air-conditioning went, you said. Someone came to fix it. What was the repairperson driving?”

  “I didn’t look,” Jenn says, sounding sheepish. “He just came in and we were so glad to see him. It was so hot. The kids were whining and stuff.”

  “When did it stop working?”

  “The air-conditioning? Just this morning.” She stops and looks at me fully, her face full of thunder. Like a cloud. “Wait. You think maybe this wasn’t a coincidence?”

  I shrug. I don’t know what to think. “It’s possible, I guess. What did he look like? The guy that came?”

  “Maybe six feet. Heavyset. Not fat, you know. But he was a big guy. Hipster beard. Ball cap.”

  I try not to say what immediately comes to mind. Saying instead, “He looked like a lot of people.”

  “Exactly.”

  So there is an obvious conclusion, but I don’t want to go there, not without eliminating every other possibility.

  “Is it all right if I have a look around outside?”

  Jenn nods that it’s okay. “I’m sure you won’t find anything. Like I said, we looked everywhere. The cops looked, too. But, yeah: you’re welcome to have a poke around. And I’ll ask Loret if she saw what he was driving. I’m pretty sure he was already here when she arrived today.”

  I start to head outside, and Arden looks like she’s not sure what to do with herself. In the end, she tramps down into the garden after me. I ignore her. I just want to focus my senses on what is all around me. I’m sure that Ashley is not here, but I want to look anyway.

  And, of course, once in the garden, there is nothing, really, to see. The yard itself is a currently empty outdoor play area, fenced off as though for small dogs, which is quite sufficient for keeping little kids corralled. In addition to a well-used jungle gym and a swing set, there is a playhouse. Empty. And many of the kinds of nooks and crannies kids love to play hide-and-seek in. We check them. They are empty, as well.

  “Ashley,” I hear Arden say at one point. It is not a shout, more like a plaintive statement of fact. Like she just wanted to put the name into the air. “Ashley.”

  I check the fence for holes, or other places a small child might have crawled under or climbed out. Nothing. Valley de Oro Day Care had done a good job on the fencing. There is no way they would have lost any kids this way, which probably leaves only one other possibility and it’s not a good one.

  “Arden, you stay here, okay? I’m going to take a drive around the area.”

  I start towards the car, but she follows me.

  “No,” she says firmly when I indicate she should stay behind. “You have something in mind. I can see it on your face. I’m coming with you.”

  One look tells me I won’t be able to dissuade her. And I realize maybe I don’t fully want to. Maybe a part of me understands that, as far as stakes go, hers are the highest. And what am I asking her to do? Sit at the day care and wring her hands?

  “Okay,” I tell her. “But you have to do everything I tell you, all right?”

  Arden gets into the passenger seat of the rental car without another word. She is nearly beside herself with fear and grief. It has a metallic smell. But I am the best game in town, at least from where she is sitting. We both understand this.

  Just as we’re about to pull out, Jenn puts her head out the door.

  “You coming back?” she asks Arden, but I answer.

  “Yeah. We’re just going to explore.”

  “Okay. Well, see you in a while,” she starts to retreat, then catche
s herself. “Oh, Loret says she saw the vehicle, but it’s not very helpful.”

  She has our complete attention now.

  “She said it was a white van. Some kind of lettering on the side. She doesn’t remember what it said.”

  And she’s right, as far as vehicle descriptions go, there’s not much less helpful. How many white vans on every road, in every community? I’d hoped for an identifier, but this isn’t that. I feel myself sag in disappointment as I start the car.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “WHERE ARE WE going?” Arden asks as I point the rental out of the driveway. It is a valid question. I just really have no idea. Or maybe I do, but that idea is not yet fully formed.

  “I’m just going to look around at first,” I say honestly. “I did some research before I got here. But I don’t know the area at all.”

  “There’s a park not far from here. Might be worth a peek.”

  “Show me,” I say.

  Arriba Park is a ten-minute run from the day care, further down Highway 46. There’s not much to it. A stand of trees, a dog park, a baseball diamond. A single glance at the parking lot tells us we’ve struck out. The thing about a purely urban setting: it is both easier and more difficult to go to ground. In a small town, it is possible to keep your eyes out for a certain vehicle or a distinctive type of person, unlike in a city, where every street might be bristling with people and white vans. But in the country, there are barns and forests and other natural landscapes; places to hide. Atwater is the needle, the countryside the haystack. We roll on.

  We take a run through the sweet and tiny hamlet at the northernmost point of the county. A sign swings on the roadside as we head into town: SANCTUARY, POPULATION 7674.

  There is a grain elevator at the feed store, a gas station, a donut shop, a town square, a barbecue place, and several country bars, all on a couple of main streets. In all of that, we see one white van. It is stopped at the gas station. I feel my heart jump to my throat as I pull up and then get out of my car, leaving Arden behind.

  My hands are almost shaking by the time I reach the driver’s side, lean in. But the van is filled with electronic equipment, and the driver is a fresh-faced kid with a skinny ponytail and wispy facial hair.

  “Can you … can you tell me how to get to the freeway?” I don’t know what else to say.

  He directs me politely, looking slightly curious. There are, after all, signs indicating the freeway is this way or that every few feet.

  “Nothing,” I say with a sigh when I get back into the car.

  “Do you know about Hoyo Lago?” Arden asks, like she’s been thinking while I was otherwise occupied.

  “I don’t. Tell me.”

  “It was a gravel pit. Hoyo. Long ago. Now it’s sort of a weird little lake. Dried out half the year. More than that. More like a pond most of the other time. But it seems like … like a place …”

  I look at Arden for several seconds that stretch into a minute. I think about strength and fortitude and the things mothers are sometimes called upon to deal with. Things beyond normal human endurance and certainly expectation. And I hope that, whatever the outcome we have here and despite the evidence of my own search to the contrary, the child has merely wandered off and is even now being discovered waking from an innocent nap in the day care garden, dirt on her face, a leaf in her hair, hungry and maybe afraid and looking for her mom.

  But I don’t really think so.

  “Okay. Hoyo Lago sounds like a good next step. And it is consistent with what I’ve been thinking. Tell me which way to go.”

  I send the car in the direction Arden shows me, making turns along the way as she instructs. “Here,” she says finally, indicating a driveway so lightly used, I would have missed it without her keeping watch for it. I say as much.

  “Yuh,” she says, coloring slightly. “You pretty much have to have grown up around here to know about this place.”

  Unspoken: parking with boys. Fast cars. Torrid summer romances. Crickets in the dark and the smell of cum on upholstered seats. Memories I don’t possess anymore, if I’d ever had them at all.

  The road is bumpy and overgrown, but nowhere near impassable. It’s not ideal, but I push the rental down it, beyond the place where rental cars are meant to go.

  Here, further off the road, there are indications of forgotten activity. Old road signs with bullet holes in them; someone’s long-ago weekend target practice. Faded fast-food wrappers. Discarded cans, some with still more bullet holes. After a while, the overgrown road thins out and the old gravel pit comes into view, looking more like a small, dried out lake than the center of the beginning of urban growth it had been a hundred years before.

  “Not much to see,” I say.

  Arden’s eyes scan the area closely. She is familiar with this place. She knows better what to look for. She gets out of the car and I let her go, watching closely as she looks at the ground and the immediate vicinity, a mother animal on the hunt. She looks frightened and dangerous in the same moment, though maybe heavier on the side of dangerous. She seems calmer than she did at the day care. We are hunting now and we are hopeful, but I feel she has resigned herself for the worst; whatever small hope she’d had having been squashed by miles and time.

  “Someone has been here,” she says, getting back into the car.

  “Are you sure?”

  “No,” she says. “But I feel it.” It doesn’t occur to me to disagree.

  “Where does the road go?”

  “More of the same, just like how we got in here. And then it just stops after a while. Or it used to. But it will be harder going. And there’s not really anything up there to see.”

  I start to turn the car around. “Wait. What was that?” The urgency in her voice brings me to full alert.

  “What?”

  “A flash of … never mind. It’s gone.”

  “Say it.” My voice is quiet, but insistent. There is nothing. And there is everything. The sense of something that matters.

  “Well, I thought I saw a flash of white,” she says. “Like metal? But then it was gone.”

  I strain in the direction she’s looking. I can’t see anything. But her face—tense and certain and urgent—tells me she isn’t making it up.

  “Like a car maybe?”

  “Maybe,” she says hesitantly, not like she’s afraid I won’t believe her, but like she doesn’t dare believe it herself.

  “Look, Arden, I believe you and I want to go in and investigate, but I don’t want to endanger you. Please take the car back to the day care and call the police. If it is him and he’s here, we’re going to need help.”

  “No,” she says. Firm and solid. Nothing of movement in her voice. Or weakness.

  I look at her in surprise. “No” hadn’t been on the table. I hadn’t thought she had it in her.

  “I’m not arguing this, Arden.”

  She crosses her arms. “Whatever. I’m going with you. If Ashley is here … with him … you’ll need me.”

  I regard her. Think it through. She actually has a point.

  “Okay. Fuck. Okay. Stay close, all right?”

  She nods silently. She is pale. Barely there. But the hope that had been nearly dead minutes before has been flamed slightly. She has everything at stake. I can see that in the profile she’s turned to me; the firmly set jaw, the tilt of her little chin. And I get it. If it were me, I would be the same. I don’t have the words in me to make her do what I’ve asked. Instead, I move to the trunk of the rental, open my suitcase. Arden has followed me and her eyes go wide when I pull the Bersa out of the place where I used to keep my underwear.

  “Holy,” she says quietly. “Are you some kind of cop?”

  I laugh. It sounds humorless, even to me. “I am no kind of cop, for sure.” I pop a magazine into the gun and rack the slide. Get her ready for business. “But I do know how to use this.” The reflection in her eyes makes me feel like an action hero. It’s an odd feeling, but I don’t hate i
t.

  I put the gun carefully into my purse and we follow the trail. It is not much more than deer might have made. We are silent, like the leaves. We move slowly. Carefully. Feeling the dense oaks all around us. Feeling, also, every disturbance, every crack of every branch beneath our feet. Every sound ahead. We haven’t been moving like this for very long when we hear a sound that stops us both cold. The cry of a child, more shocking in the quiet of the oak forest than it would otherwise have been. I look at Arden and see a bouquet of emotions in her eyes: hope, anticipation, fear. I don’t need to motion at her to be quiet. We both understand what is at stake.

  Everything.

  Our eyes meet and neither of us breathe, let alone speak, but we don’t doubt it is Ashley. Arden has recognized the sound of her daughter’s cry. Something primal come home to roost.

  I blink at Arden. I can almost see her thoughts. Her daughter is alive, when minutes ago she feared she might be dead. But, if we find her, will she be hurt or damaged in some way?

  I nod, reassuring and silent. Her child is crying. I can see her gathering up her energy, as though she might bolt towards the sound. It might even be pure instinct. I restrain her with a look, almost a wish. The wrong move right now can change outcomes. She understands this; I see that, too. See her settle into what must be done. Her expression becomes stoic.

  The cry comes again. The cry of a child who is frightened, but not in pain. I can see Arden have this thought, as well. It is all we have, in any case. We inch ahead on hope.

  The oaks thin. The trail widens. The source of the flash of white Arden saw in the first place becomes apparent: a van tucked amid the trees. Magnetic signs on the side advertise Liam’s Air Conditioning. I feel a surge of anger so pure I can almost touch it. Liam. A short form of William. He is so bold! And he feels so superior, so smart, he thinks he can flaunt such a thing and get away with it.

  I calm myself. Focus on breaths in. Breaths out. Anger won’t serve me here. In any case, he’d been right: he’d sailed in there and taken a child from right under their noses. And now here we all are.

  I do a fast calculation. We have moved quickly. The child was taken less than three hours ago, and we have heard her, albeit briefly. She is alive and she seems unscathed. I say a prayer to someone’s unseen god and move forward, inch by careful inch, and then—suddenly—there they are, across a clearing from us. A tarp is spread on the ground next to the van. I try not to think about its purpose, why a child on a tarp. A naked child. She is spread-eagled. She is tied down. I try not to ask myself about any of those things, in part because I am so relieved about the final piece: she looks unhurt. I breathe, but not much. We’re not there yet.