Scott’s twenty. He’s never going to get over this. And then Charlotte will have lost two children.
“Is there, Eve?” Charlotte asks. “Is there someone I’ve forgotten?”
All these innocent people who are going to be getting a knock on the door. Innocent. The word is so lovely and round. “I don’t think so,” Eve says.
“I need you to keep thinking,” Detective Watkins says. “The fact is, most child abductions are committed by people the child knows.”
“I don’t know anyone who would steal my daughter!”
An accident. It had all been an accident and now she’s sitting here, in this airless room beside her friend whose agony is so raw that it’s reeling Eve back to that time when she had been filled with an endless dark despair. She had clawed her way out of it. She thought she’d been successful.
“Someone will have seen something,” Detective Watkins says. “It’s just a matter of time before someone comes forward.”
That car in front of her, had there been a brief red flare of brake lights? If the driver had seen something, they would have turned around. They would have called the police.
“Do you really think so?” Charlotte asks. Her hope is so raw, so vulnerable. Detective Watkins gathers the binders toward her. “I do. That’s how most of these cases are solved.”
Eve focuses on the dingy beige wall with a crack running through it. Her secret stretches out like a fissure. When Tyler doesn’t need her anymore, she’ll tell Charlotte. Three years, maybe longer if he’s sick. The crack on the wall wavers.
“You haven’t heard anything from the search teams?” Charlotte asks, and the detective shakes her head.
“Nothing yet.”
Owen’s out there, organizing people. They’re meeting in front of his store. He swears he’s going to find his daughter, and Eve knows that if anyone could, it would be him. But he hasn’t called, either.
How can Amy have vanished so completely? Is it possible that Eve’s imagined the entire thing? Just as soon as these questions flicker through her mind, she pushes them away. She’d been wrong. There had been some hope left in this room after all.
They find a deli a few blocks away. Charlotte would have kept on walking if Eve hadn’t taken her elbow and steered her toward the open door. The place is quieting down after the lunch rush, and only a few of the tables are occupied. They sit by the window, and Eve orders matzo ball soup for both of them. Charlotte sets her cell phone on the table in front of her, and so does Eve. David’s with the search teams. He’ll call to let her know if they find Amy.
“That little girl in California,” Charlotte says. “They found her two years later. I mean, she went through hell, but she’s okay now. And what about that girl who wrote a book? It’s hideous what happened to her, but she’s alive. She’s back with her family.”
“That’s true.” The words are broken pieces of glass in her mouth.
“And what about the baby who was taken out of her crib? They got her back almost right away. They got it on the news and the babysitter confessed.”
Yes, Eve remembers that case, too.
Charlotte sets down her glass. Her nails are bitten to the quick, the red polish worn to smears like drops of blood. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” Eve says, startled. Her guilt must be plain.
“Like it’s the end of the world. It’s not. It’s not. We’re going to find Amy. Tell me that. Say it right now.”
“Yes,” Eve says. She forces herself to smile. The muscles in her face ache. “We’ll find Amy.” They will find Amy, but Charlotte will never get her back. Eve’s falling from a great height. The air whizzes past her ears. Her stomach’s cramping. It’s a second before Charlotte’s face comes back into focus. Her friend is staring around the restaurant. Thank God she’s not looking at Eve.
“We have to get the flyers up,” Charlotte says. “We can start here. I’ll put one in the window.”
“We’ll ask.”
“It’s a good picture. Tyler always takes great pictures of Amy.”
Tyler had held up his camera as Amy grinned wide, her bangs crooked across her forehead. She’d followed Tyler around like a puppy and Charlotte and Eve had joked how Amy would eventually wear Tyler down. They never took the joke too far. There was that line that stopped everything.
“I just don’t understand why she went out,” Charlotte says. “She’s so scared of storms.”
The pieces of last night don’t fit together. Nothing makes sense. Amy’s backpack had been found in the park, but she had dashed across the road in front of Eve a full mile away. There’s that hope again, lifting its coy little head, murmuring that maybe none of this has happened the way she remembers. Hope is a liar.
“The police won’t let me have her teddy bear,” Charlotte continues. “It was in her backpack and they say it’s evidence.”
Eve had cradled Amy, kissed her cheeks. She’d cried, her tears dripping into Amy’s hair. She’d left behind plenty of evidence. But it had been raining so hard. Water had poured from the sky, washed across the landscape, drained into the rivers and creeks. It could have swept everything away, even fingerprints.
Their soup arrives. Eve craves a glass of white wine, something crisp and clean to drink. It would taste good going down and she would order another one, just keep drinking until either her phone or Charlotte’s rings and someone tells them something has happened, that Amy has been found. But by the time they finish their meal, neither phone has sounded.
DAVID
“There’s more to life than chocolate,” he tells Melissa, who’s holding her cone carefully over a paper napkin. She never eats any other flavor, no matter how long and tempting the list is. Raspberry swirl, apple pie, mocha hazelnut fudge. She doesn’t so much as glance at the selections. She just steps up to the counter and places her order.
“Chocolate’s good,” she replies, though she hasn’t taken a single lick.
He turns onto their street.
“Who’s that, Dad?” she says, squinting.
A woman stands at their front door, her black sedan parked at their curb. She turns to look at them as he steers the car into the driveway. She’s wearing a navy pantsuit and her expression is grim.
“I don’t know.” He parks the car, gets out to greet the woman walking down the path toward them.
“Mr. Lattimore?” She holds up a badge. Now he sees the gun holstered at her hip. “I’m Detective Watkins. I’m looking into Amy Nolan’s disappearance. I understand you spoke with an officer last night, and I wanted to ask you a few follow-up questions, if you don’t mind.”
They haven’t found Amy yet. Dread settles in his gut. Charlotte and Owen must be going through hell. “Of course.”
She’s looking at his daughter. “You must be Melissa.”
Melissa frowns. “Yes.”
“I’d like to talk to you, too. Is that all right?”
“If I have to.” Melissa drops her uneaten cone into the trashcan.
David would never have spoken to an adult that way, especially not a police officer. Melissa’s just frightened, he reminds himself. “Hold on,” he tells the detective. “I need to close the garage door.”
Gone from home so much of the time and yet this is his conditioned response, to make sure the exterior door is closed before opening an interior one. He finds himself doing the same thing hundreds of miles away, puzzling his coworkers as he scans the room before standing to open a door.
Detective Watkins makes no comment as the door thuds all the way to the pavement, sealing them in darkness. He opens the kitchen door, and she precedes him into the house, her gaze skimming the dishes in the sink, the sun chart pinned to the doorway. Melissa’s taken off her boots and is standing there in her tank top and jodhpurs.
“I have to take a shower,” she says, and he puts his arm around her slim shoulders. Can’t she understand the urgency? “Let’s talk to the detective first,” he tells her
. “Okay?”
“Whatever,” she mutters, scowling. She won’t look at Detective Watkins. She stares at the ground, recalcitrant as the police officer guides her through the events of the previous evening. I don’t know. I guess. No. It’s a relief when Watkins finally says, “All right. I guess that’s it.”
“So can I shower now?”
David’s embarrassed. He looks at Watkins, as if to say teenagers, but the woman’s not looking at him. She’s looking around the dark room, the lamps on in various corners. “Go ahead,” he tells Melissa, and Watkins turns to him. “Is your son home?” she asks.
Of course she’d know he had a son. The uniformed officer who’d been by the night before had made a note of all their names, but this sudden request of hers sets him on edge. She knows more than she’s saying. “I don’t know if anyone’s mentioned this to you, but my son’s got xeroderma pigmentosum. He can’t be exposed to ultraviolet light. It will kill him.” Blind him, deafen him, take away the use of his arms and legs, eat into his brain and make him a vegetable. A rare disease, and only a few thousand in the world had it. Even with the best of care, the specialist had said, Tyler most likely won’t live past twenty.
“Is there somewhere we can talk?” Detective Watkins asks.
“This way.”
They go up the narrow flight of stairs. This was one of the first things he and Eve did when they learned of Tyler’s disease—install a lightproof door here and give up the second floor of their house to their son.
“Tyler,” he calls through the closed door. “A police detective’s here to talk to us about Amy.”
“Okay. Hold on.”
No doubt his son’s lounging in his desk chair, feet up on the desk, or feeding photo paper through the printer and waiting impatiently for the results. The multicolored lamp will be throwing out its crazy colors. The overhead light will be shining, and the desk lamp, and the bathroom light. Even the nightlight on the floor will be switched on. Why does he do that? he’d once complained to Eve, and she’d answered, Because he can.
“He’s putting on sunscreen,” he tells the detective, and she nods. But it’s more than that. Tyler’s going through that strange ritual of patting his face in a certain order. He won’t open a door until he does it. He’s just checking to make sure his sunscreen’s on, Eve said when David brought it up in therapy. It’s more than that, David argued, and Eve had snapped, What are you trying to say, that our child’s not normal?
The snick of metal on metal. Watkins looks at him with surprise. “Your son locks himself in?”
“Yes,” he says shortly. Ever since that friend of Melissa’s had inadvertently opened Tyler’s door while he sat at his desk doing homework. Eve had heard the shrieking and come running. He thinks this is why Melissa has so few friends—she’s careful about who she brings into the house.
These are the rules: during the day, they go through the garage door and then through the kitchen door, which, positioned as it is behind the wall, doesn’t let in the light. Just after sunset to just before sunrise, when the air is completely drained of UV, they can go through the front door or the French doors that lead out onto the patio. At all other times, the drapes are to be kept drawn tightly, and every week, the UV-filtering films they’ve adhered to the windows are to be checked for peeling, cracking, or scratches. They track the passage of the sun closely. Its movement across the sky has made this house a prison.
“Okay,” Tyler calls, and David turns the knob.
“Move quickly, please,” he tells the detective.
Ahead is Tyler’s small bathroom, then a room on either side. David turns right. Tyler sits at his desk, in front of his two computer monitors and television, looking like an air traffic controller, with all those screens arrayed in front of him.
The walls are covered by scraps of paper that flutter as the door opens. David used to think there was no order to what’s essentially a massive collage, until Eve pointed out how Tyler had arranged his kindergarten drawings on one row, then his crayoned attempts at forming letters, his first story written on huge lined sheets of paper. Tyler went through a self-portrait phase, the earliest ones at the bottom, in colored pencil and marker, graduating up to art pencil and charcoal, each tooth drawn with accuracy, each hair in his eyebrows waved more or less the way his eyebrows really grow. Weaved throughout are his brief foray into Cub Scouts, his early interest in dinosaurs, the map that Eve made of the neighborhood for one of his birthday parties, and Tyler’s later, and more comprehensive, focus in photography, evidenced in the plethora of photographs Tyler has taken, of his friends, Melissa, Amy. Receipts from the purchase of his laptop, binoculars, skateboard, and tennis shoes—everything has its place somewhere on Tyler’s walls.
“Hi, Tyler,” Detective Watkins says, looking around with curiosity. David wishes he could stop her. “I’m Detective Watkins. I’m trying to find Amy so that I can bring her back home. She’s not in any trouble, but if there’s something either of you know that could help us, that would be really great.” Is it his imagination or is she studying Tyler with particular curiosity? David moves toward his son, stepping into her line of vision.
“Okay,” Tyler says. “But I don’t know what.” He’s studying her in his usual focused way, with his eyebrows drawn and his chin lowered, and David realizes that maybe letting the detective get a good look at his son is worth it if his son is getting a good, long look at a police officer, a rare up-close-and-personal examination of something he’s heretofore witnessed only on a television screen.
“I hear Amy’s a friend of yours.” Watkins steps sideways, her angle now oblique.
“I guess.”
“When was the last time you talked to her?”
“At my birthday party.”
“When was that?”
“Thursday night.”
“What about last night?” Watkins asks. “I understand she texted you.”
“She wanted to come over. But I didn’t talk to her,” Tyler says, emphasizing this, letting the detective know that’s not the question she’d asked. Good for Tyler.
“Did she say anything to indicate that she wanted to run away?”
“No.” Tyler shrugs. “But she’s always running away.”
“Why is that?”
“Because of the divorce?” Tyler says this as though it had been a trick question.
“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
“No,” Tyler answers. “I mean, usually she came here.”
“But she didn’t this time?”
“No.”
“She didn’t knock on the door or ring the bell?”
“We don’t have a doorbell,” David interposes. He’d disconnected it when Tyler was little and sleeping through the days. Even now that Tyler’s on the same schedule as the rest of them, David hasn’t gotten around to reconnecting it. But this is a small detail and he has no idea why he’s volunteered it. Maybe it’s because of the intent way this woman’s looking at his son. David had wanted to jump in and disrupt the flow.
“Did she ever mention anyone she was afraid of?”
Tyler hesitates. “Not really.”
“Not really?”
“I mean, not anyone real. She didn’t like it when I played war games; she hated the vampire stuff on TV.”
“Did she ever talk about a special relationship with an adult?”
David’s dismayed at the angle her questions are taking, but of course this has to be the natural progression. Amy’s gone. The world’s an ugly place. You have to be suspicious.
Tyler makes a face. “Gross.”
“A teacher? A neighbor, maybe someone from church?”
Tyler shakes his head.
“Okay, well, do you think she’s the type of girl who might get into a stranger’s car?”
David leans forward. “Is that what they think happened?”
“We’re considering all possibilities. So, is Amy that kind of girl?”
&n
bsp; “No way. Not Amy,” Tyler insists. “She wouldn’t get into anyone’s car, not even if they had a kitten or something like that.”
“A kitten?” David asks, and his son nods.
“Creepers use kittens and puppies to lure kids, stuff like that.”
David hadn’t known that. What kind of world is it that his children are growing up in? He looks at the detective. “Is that what you’re thinking now, that someone took Amy?”
She closes her notebook and nods at Tyler’s computer screens. “That’s a pretty cool setup. You like to play video games?”
“Yeah.”
She nods again. “What else do you do?”
What does she expect to hear, about Tyler’s soccer team and his plans for Homecoming?
“I don’t know. Ride my bike, maybe.”
“And photography, right?” Her voice is pleasant, her gaze serenely intent on Tyler. “You sure took a lot of pictures of Amy. Was there something particularly interesting about her?”
“They’re friends,” David says. Where the hell is she going with this? More than that. “She’s like a sister to Tyler.”
“She was always over here, wasn’t she?” She’s not answering him. She’s looking at Tyler. “Hanging out with you when she could have been playing with kids her own age.”
The inference hangs poisonous in the air. Is she crazy? “My son takes a lot of pictures of everyone.” He yanks open a desk drawer, pulls out a thick handful of photographs.
“Dad,” Tyler says, reaching for them. “Stop. They’re in order.”
David ignores him. “See?” He fans them out. His hands are shaking. “Nikki, Scott, Charlotte. Melissa, her friends. My wife.”
“Sir …”
“This interview is over,” David says. “Stay here,” he tells Tyler. “I’ll be right back.”
Outside, he draws the front door closed behind them. “Look,” he says. Watkins stands on the lower step, squinting up at David in the early afternoon sun. “My son just has a disease. That’s all. He’s not some kind of freak.”
“I understand that, but a little girl is missing.”
The Deepest Secret Page 8
