All The Hidden Pieces

by Jillian Thomadsen

  “Read it,” Greta urged, smiling at him.

  “It says I love you,” John said with a scowl.

  “It doesn’t just say that,” Greta said. “Read the rest.” She stayed smiling at him as she waited. This wasn’t a fool’s errand; John’s teachers routinely send home notes about how well the class was progressing. Greta knew they had all surpassed the standards for phonetic reading of two and three letter words. John’s main problem was that he needed to slow down…he tended to race through words as though they were quaffs of liquid, satisfying a thirst. It was always the same books – the ones with clever rhymes and anthropomorphized animals…the books she used to read to him religiously that he now read to her and in the classroom. Now, she stood next to him patiently as she waited to hear the remaining two words of the little note she’d written inside the card.

  John turned the card upside down, studied it for a moment, and then threw it into the grass along with the discarded shreds of red envelope. “I can’t,” he said hopelessly.

  “What do you mean you can’t?” Greta asked. She picked up the card and crouched next to him beside the fence. She pointed to the word to. “What’s that word?” Greta asked.

  John refused to look at the card. “I don’t know.”

  “What letters are here?” Greta asked.

  John shrugged but looked at her index finger. “T.”

  “And what sound does ‘t’ make?”

  “Ta-ta-ta.”

  “Right. And what’s that letter?” She moved her index finger one centimeter over.

  “That’s an O.”

  “Right, and what sound does that make?”

  His eyes searching, John gave her a blank look. “Aaah?” He conjectured. When he was able to read the response in her face, he gave a few other stabs. “Ih? Uh?”

  “No, Johnny, it makes the sound oh or ah. Although in this case, ooh,” Greta said. She tried to mask her surprise, her mental revision of all the notes sent home in his backpack, trumpeting the class’s literary achievements.

  “So what does this word say?” Greta pressed.

  John stared down at the card and took a deep sigh. “It says ooooooh…”

  “Johnny, the t comes before the o, so it should start with tttt…”

  John ripped the card from her hands and threw it down. “I hate this stupid card!” he yelled, just loud enough to attract the attention of some parents at the periphery of the playground. He then ran several yards away from her and resumed his exercise of counting flora – tiny red berries dangling from the branches of a tree.

  Greta picked up the shreds of the envelope and threw them into her bag, then opened up the card again and stared at the note she’d written. I love you to death!

  To death…She hadn’t hesitated when writing the end of the sentence but now it seemed inappropriate, or even worse, a harbinger of some kind. Perhaps it was fitting for John not to finish the sentence; doing so would have undoubtedly brought about queries or nighttime anxieties. Greta exhaled sharply and tried to console herself. Maybe a different, more child-friendly set of words would have had a different result.

  But no, that wasn’t really the problem. Greta knew the truth. It was a certainty that had been lingering in the back of her mind for a while, a query that John had just answered. Even if death was a word too advanced, too forbidden, too daunting for her kindergartener, he should have been able to sound out the word to.

  Looking down at that short, seemingly innocuous sentence, Greta realized how John had been able to race through books so impeccably. He could adopt the right cadence, the right inflections, all the right words – while having no idea how to actually read. His memory was strong and sharp, and it could do its job after hearing words only one time.

  Greta walked a few yards and found John’s kindergarten teacher, Miss Alice, administering a Band-aid to one of the kids on the playground. Alice was a young woman – perhaps just out of college or maybe closer to Greta’s age. She had dark hair, a slight build and a sweet smile.

  “Hi Greta,” Alice said warmly, once the wounded child had recovered and returned to the playground.

  Greta returned the greeting and then surprised herself with a litany of worries about John. She mentioned his difficulty getting along with other children, his inability to follow complex directions, his reluctance to write any letters, his lack of knowledge about vowel sounds and his most recent difficulty sounding out the word to. Most of these concerns Greta had never discussed with anyone – not even John’s father. They occupied a place in her mind along with terrorism, kidnappers and dangerous weather. Concerns that could run unrestricted if they weren’t checked, concerns that weren’t likely to be fully realized, that were products of an overactive imagination. Only talking to Miss Alice did Greta realize how strong her worries about John really were, and she was surprised by her fortitude even as she pressed his teacher.

  Miss Alice responded with reassurance, summing up all of Greta’s fears into one word: developmental. All of John’s issues were perfectly age appropriate and he would grow out of them.

  Greta left the conversation both optimistic and deflated. She hoped that everything Miss Alice said was true…but she couldn’t shake the notion that the teacher just wanted to enjoy her end-of-year picnic and be done with it all.

  Greta, on the other hand, would have to sit back and trust that things would work themselves out over time. Meanwhile…her child whose report card said he could read was unable to figure out a two-letter word.

  Chapter Five

  September 15, 2017

  Griffin Brock was a commanding presence. Six-feet six inches tall, wide shoulders, and a bristle of gelled black hair only starting to recede. He stood at the counter of the Vetta Park Police Station as though he belonged there – seeming completely unfazed by the bustle of police activity, the handcuffed transient sitting on a metal chair, the buzz of police radios that officers wore on their hips as they brushed by him.

  Detective Hobbs walked over and claimed him. “Mr. Griffin Brock?” she asked. Griffin was the only person in the waiting area wearing a suit – the only one with expensive leather shoes and a clean shave. In the mid-September heat, when the waiting room’s ancient AC unit was sputtering and stammering, Griffin Brock was the only one not breaking a sweat.

  “Did you find the station okay?” Hobbs asked conversationally, as she led him down a hallway and into a conference room. Everything about the room was bare: white walls, white table with wood-colored folding chairs and an uncovered white light bulb dangling inches from the ceiling.

  “I got here fine,” he answered curtly as he assumed a seat. He moved as though he’d been through the motions before – or at least seen enough of it on TV that he didn’t need to be coached through the gestures. When Hobbs took a seat across from him, he sighed, looked pointedly at his watch and then leaned back in his chair.

  “Are you aware of why we asked you to come in?” Hobbs asked.

  “You told me over the phone,” he said in an irritated voice. “My ex-wife and her family took off.”

  “Do you know anything about their disappearance?” Hobbs asked.

  “No, I do not. If I knew anything, I would’ve said something over the phone. You think I want to be brought in here in the middle of the day on a Friday? I had to rearrange meetings, reschedule conference calls. I’ve already told you everything I know.” Griffin folded his arms across his chest and glared at her.

  “Are you concerned about your ex-wife?” Hobbs asked.

  “Concerned how?”

  “Are you concerned about her safety? And concerned about the safety of John, your son?” Hobbs lingered on the words your son for a few extra beats, hoping to shake some paternal obligation from his seeping self-importance.

  “No I’m not concerned, Detective. Greta always had a flair for the dramatic. I’m not at all surprised that they just took off this way. It would have been courteous for them to let someone know they were t
aking a trip but I don’t think courtesy is a characteristic Greta is familiar with.”

  “I see,” Hobbs said, peering down at her notes. Griffin was obviously irritated but she tried to gauge whether he was merely annoyed with his ex-wife or if there was a more pernicious rage lingering underneath. She decided to start from the beginning of their story.

  “How did you meet Greta?” Hobbs asked.

  “She was my waitress at this diner I used to go to. I was an undergraduate at Wash U in St. Louis. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen, and one day when she was serving me toast, I asked her out.”

  “Was she a student there too?”

  “No. She never finished high school.”

  “How would you describe your marriage?”

  “We had fights, like any couple. We had a lot of fights – especially as Johnny got older.”

  “What were the fights about?”

  Griffin glowered at her but answered her question. “Money…and Johnny. Like I said, Greta could be very dramatic at times. She always thought something was wrong with the kid when he was just fine. Drove me crazy.”

  “Were your fights ever violent?” Hobbs asked. She and Martinez had pored through the police records earlier in the day and there was no record on file of domestic assault…but Hobbs was as certain as ever that she’d interacted with Greta in the past and maybe an unreported crime had something to do with it.

  Griffin clasped his hands together and looked straight at at her. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t violent.”

  “What do you do for a living Mr. Brock?”

  “I work in real estate.”

  “Are you a developer?”

  “No, Detective. I buy and sell land to developers.”

  “I see. And what did Greta do during the time that you were married?”

  “Not very much. She stayed at home and watched Spanish soap operas for all I know.”

  Hobbs looked down at her notes while she thought of her next question. Griffin clearly didn’t think very highly of his ex-wife. She was prone to dramatics, unreasonable and lethargic. Even her absence had roused him from his busy workday and compelled him to sit in a small room and answer uncomfortable questions about his past.

  But was this normal acrimony among exes or was there something deeper? Hobbs still felt no closer to discerning whether Griffin had anything to do with their disappearance. She tried another approach.

  “Can you think of anyone who may have wanted to harm your ex-wife or her family, Mr. Brock?”

  Griffin answered quickly. “No, Detective…but I wasn’t too close to them. I didn’t talk to them very much.”

  Hobbs scribbled on her pad, taking notice of the fact that Griffin was now speaking in the past tense. “Not John?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t talk to him much either.”

  “Do you know who your son associates with?” Hobbs asked. She thought about Mary Miller, the concerned neighbor. Inconsiderate young teenagers, up to no good.

  “No,” Griffin answered. “Greta didn’t keep me in the loop very much.”

  “When’s the last time you saw them?”

  “Last month.”

  Hobbs stopped writing and looked up at him. Her heart skipped more furiously inside of her chest, as it always did when she felt she was onto something. “Last month? That recently?” she asked.

  “Yes, I stopped by the house to let them know that my mother had had a stroke. And that my wife was expecting.”

  “Oh I see. I’m sorry to hear that…about your mother. How’s she doing?”

  “She died. The funeral is Monday, in Winnetka.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” Griffin said. His response was emotionless, a dry mutter. Perhaps it was because Hobbs had grown accustomed to seeing witnesses and suspects open up under questioning. If they didn’t end up weeping by the end of it, they typically appeared moved, sentient. Griffin seemed as reticent as the room itself. Even the topic of his mother’s death wasn’t enough to affect his stance.

  “Were Greta or John close with your mother?” Hobbs asked.

  “No.”

  “How about your wife? Did she have the baby?”

  Griffin nodded and responded in the same robotic locution. “Yes, she had a boy last week. Marshall Owen Brock. We named him after my mother.”

  “Congratulations,” Hobbs said. “A lot of life changes in a short time.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Griffin said. The room was silent for a moment and then he added, “Detective, I don’t know what happened to Greta or John…or Tuck or the other little girl. I want you to know that I had nothing to do with it. I’m in a good place right now. My wife just had a baby and now I’m a father to a young boy. I would never do anything to jeopardize that.”

  Hobbs nodded and smiled at him. “Thanks for coming in, Mr. Brock. I appreciate your time during what I know was a busy day.”

  She stood up and Griffin did the same. They shook hands and then she led him through the hallway and out of the building. Throughout their brief good-bye, she was calm and polite, smiling pleasantly while she encouraged him to call if he thought of anything else of interest.

  But once Hobbs was free of him and back at her desk, she sunk into her chair and ran a loop of his final few comments over and over in her mind. All she could think were words she hadn’t thought to say at the time: You already are the father to a young boy.

  Chapter Six

  September 15, 2017

  An hour after saying good-bye to Griffin, Detective Hobbs found Captain Weaver in the kitchenette. The Captain looked especially tired – hunched over the coffeemaker as though it was about to perform a trick, with sunken cheeks and bags beneath his eyes.

  “Everything okay?” Hobbs asked him.

  “My daughter in law and her kids moved in with us while their house is being renovated,” Weaver explained. “Nothing that a few jolts of caffeine won’t fix.”

  Hobbs waited patiently for the coffee machine to oblige, and the two of them headed into Captain Weaver’s office. There they found Detective Martinez seated on one of the vinyl chairs, waiting for them.

  “You watched the interview with Griffin Brock through the glass?” Hobbs asked Martinez as she sat down next to him.

  Martinez nodded.

  Captain Weaver assumed his place behind the desk and took a giant sip of his coffee. He swallowed and looked expectantly at his two senior detectives. “Well, it’s been a day and still no word from the family. Fill me in on the interview.”

  Hobbs rummaged through a few pages on her notepad. “Griffin seemed very unfazed by the experience,” she said. “Aside from learning that his mother recently passed away, we didn’t learn much else.”

  “When’s the funeral?” Weaver asked.

  “Monday, in a Chicago suburb,” Hobbs said.

  “Get an officer to go and take a look around, talk to people,” Weaver ordered. “You never know.”

  Both detectives nodded and the room was silent. Weaver sighed and looked outside his window. It was an especially windy day for Vetta Park – gusts pushing the branches of a nearby tree against the windowpane.

  Hobbs thought about her small apartment a few miles south. It was on the third floor of a structurally dubious apartment complex that seemed to be made out of sticks. Every time there was a windstorm, her walls shook and her appliances rattled. At least the police station was solid. Erected so it could withstand a tornado, the building neither swayed nor nudged every time the wind squalled.

  “You know what bothers me…” Weaver said, still looking vacantly at the tree branches. He didn’t wait for a response. “Where the hell are all the concerned neighbors? Where are the candlelight vigils? Where are the family members passing out posters, yelling at us that we better do our jobs right? Where’s the anger over this family, who hasn’t been seen in eight days?”

  Detectives Martinez and Hobbs were quiet as they considered t
his. Since Tuck’s legal secretary had first filed a missing person’s report, no one else had come forward. It was as though the Carpenter family lived in a self-contained vacuum.

  “Well…” Martinez said with a sigh. “Greta Carpenter stayed home with the little girl all day. The girl wasn’t old enough for public school and the mom didn’t work. John Brock dropped out of high school at some point and spent his time at Avery Auto Body, whose employees have already spoken with us. And then there’s Tuck Carpenter, whose colleagues were the ones to file the initial report. I’m not sure there’s anyone else, you know, out there.”

  “What about their extended family?” Weaver asked.

  “Greta has a mother, living somewhere in southwestern Missouri. We’re still trying to track her down. Tuck’s parents are both deceased but he does have a brother, Richard Carpenter, who lives in Orlando.”

  “Have you talked to him yet?”

  “I called and left a message but no one’s gotten back to me yet.”

  Weaver shifted so he was facing Hobbs. “What did the phone records say?”

  Hobbs blinked and stammered. “I…it’s only been one day since we requested…”

  Weaver pushed a button on his desk phone. “Get Lt. Adams in here,” he ordered, then looked up at the detectives. “We were able to get an emergency court order for the phone records. I asked Adams to look after it.”

  Lt. Adams was burly, with spiky brown hair and a partially shaved beard that stretched from jaw to jaw. Mid-twenties and intensely loyal, Lt. Adams was Captain Weaver’s favored son – his go-to errand man whenever he wanted to get a job done quickly or quietly.

  After his beckoning, Lt. Adams appeared in the doorway with a few sheets of paper.

  “What have you got on the Carpenter phone records?” Weaver asked.

  “We haven’t received all the cell phone records yet, but I just finished looking through the calls to their house phone. At seven forty-six on the morning of September 7, a call was made to the Carpenter house.”