A Child Is Missing

by David Stout

  “Oh, he already has been, Mr. Shafer. Nothing will happen, of course, until Mr. Spicer is … able to respond.”

  “There isn’t any doubt, then, I guess? About Fran’s being drunk, I mean?”

  “I’m afraid not. I know the police at the scene took pictures of the interior of his car. That’s standard practice in such cases. There were several empty beer cans in the car. And I drew the blood sample myself right here at the hospital. He tested one point five. Well into the drunk-driving area, I’m afraid.”

  “And a young woman was injured. And she was lucky she wasn’t killed. Lord. Fran was doing so well for a while. He was a recovering alcoholic. I mean, he wasn’t a common drunk. Isn’t a common drunk.”

  “I’m sure not.” Heather Casey smiled kindly. “My father was an alcoholic, Mr. Shafer, so I have some personal knowledge in this area. So was my … Well, I guess that’s why I don’t drink. I have to go.”

  “Thank you. I do appreciate your kindness. Should I stop by later, do you think?”

  “If you wish. If you’re here much later, I may be gone.” Heather Casey turned to leave but paused. “If you see a policeman outside the IU unit, it’s because he’s keeping a watch on Mr. Spicer. They’re not being mean. It’s just that technically…”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  Will decided to go back to his room. He had nothing better to do now than file his story. Besides, he would be writing it on a portable computer and sending it to the Bessemer Gazette via telephone. Young reporters did that all the time, but Will, while not a total computerphobe, had started his career in the typewriter and pencil era. He thought he had best allow himself extra time.

  Back in the hotel, Will called Tom Ryan at the Gazette and told him he thought a thousand words would be adequate for his story. Ryan sounded nervous and obsequious.

  “Any change in Fran’s condition, Will?”

  “Nope.”

  “Reason I ask, publisher’s been in and out of the newsroom all day. Asking about Fran, mostly. Once or twice, he asked if you’d filed your story yet.”

  Will shook his head in annoyance: Ryan tended to get nervous with big stories. Now Ryan was clearly worried that Will would screw up badly and it would reflect on him somehow. “Ry, don’t worry. If I can’t hack it, it’ll be my ass, okay?”

  “Ha! Will, you can do this. We have faith.”

  Will sent a test message, heard back a minute later that his computer was sending garble-free copy back to the Gazette. That was a relief, because he thought he heard thunder outside. Electrical storms could play havoc with computers.

  Then, with his homesickness momentarily banished by the butterflies, Will began to write.

  The hunt for Jamie Brokaw and his kidnappers took a new turn today as investigators received an ominous new ransom demand. And the boy’s parents issued emotional pleas for the child’s release before going back to their separate homes to pray and wait.

  Will paused after that first paragraph, read it several times. As an editor, he was constantly preaching clean, terse lead paragraphs with a minimum of cluttering clauses, abbreviations, and proper nouns. Now he dare not violate his own principles, or he would lose face among the people he was supposed to be supervising.

  This isn’t bad at all, he decided finally.

  Will wrote swiftly and smoothly. He had made a list beforehand of the points he wanted to cover, and roughly in what order, and his prose had always been clear, if not always beautiful. The only trouble was deciding how far he could go in reporting some of the things Graham had told him. Well, he knew damn well that journalism courses didn’t cover every situation.

  In about an hour, Will was done, and he pressed the TRANSMIT command. After a minute or so, he got the message that his story had arrived intact and that he would hear in a little while whether there were any questions. As he waited, Will made a note to himself to be more understanding from now on when reporters on the road got irritable.

  The phone rang.

  “Will, your story is fine. Just fine,” Ryan said. “Us old guys can show the young squirts how it’s done, huh?”

  “You betcha, Ry.” And that was as far as Will would go with Ryan on the forced camaraderie; even that took some effort.

  “Can I ask you a few things?”

  “Shoot.”

  Ryan’s questions (most likely some had been relayed from other editors) were good, sensible, to the point. Will fielded them all, after which Ryan said, “I mean it, Will. It’ll be good for the staff to see that their boss can do a story like this.”

  “Thanks.” And because Will wondered whether he’d been too curt before, he said, “I appreciate your help.”

  “Now the publisher wants to talk to you, Will.”

  And Will was instantly on his guard.

  “Will? Will? Can you hear—?”

  Will recognized Lyle Glanford’s voice, knew that the publisher had become confused, as always, by the phone system. Over the line, Will heard feet scurrying as Ryan tried to prevent the publisher from cutting himself off.

  “Now I … Will? I’ve got it, I think. Can you hear me, Will?”

  “Loud and clear, sir.”

  “Nothing new on Fran, Will?”

  “No, Lyle.” No sense telling him more right now, Will thought.

  “You’ll let me know soonest, I’m sure. Will, I had a story idea. I already bounced it off Ry, and he thinks it’ll fly. What about a roundup of other famous kidnapping cases of the past?”

  “We could do that if we have space, Lyle. I’m sure the wire services are moving something like that, if they haven’t already.”

  “We thought you could do a better job from where you are, Will. I know you can. And we’re going to make as much space in the paper as we need. Did Ry tell you yet about the editorial?”

  “Editorial? No, Lyle.”

  Will was baffled, but only for a moment. Then the tentative, trying-to-please voice of Tom Ryan came on the line again: “Page one day after tomorrow, Will. The Gazette’s coming out in favor of reinstating the death penalty in this state for kidnappers.”

  “That’s why I want this backgrounder, Will. I want it under the byline of our executive editor. You are there, after all. And it’ll lend a little weight to the package, don’t you think?”

  “That could be, Lyle.” What else could he say?

  “Will, this whole thing has made me sick,” the publisher went on. “I don’t know if you remember, but I was on the State Parks Commission for a stretch when Jamie Brokaw’s father was a member. Salt of the earth, salt of the earth…”

  In an instant, everything was much clearer to Will: the publisher’s early and intense interest in the kidnapping, his eagerness to send Will. Hell, seeing to Fran Spicer’s welfare was only part of it. Maybe the smaller part, at that. The publisher had it in his head that the presence of the Bessemer Gazette’s top editor (never mind that he was functioning as reporter and errand boy) would—what? Make the FBI try harder? Put a hundred police officers on the case, instead of fifty? What?

  “Salt of the earth, Will.”

  “I’m sure, sir. If you want a background story with my byline, then I’ll get you one. I really can’t do it for tomorrow, though.”

  “Day after tomorrow, Will. Your background story, plus the lead-all on whatever breaking news there is, plus an editorial on page one.”

  Overkill, Will thought. He heard himself say, “We’d better pray there’s no other news we have to get into the paper.”

  “What?”

  “I said, we can all pray that our newspaper, that getting something into our newspaper will play a part in the safe return of the boy.”

  “Amen, Will.” The publisher was saying good-bye, Will knew.

  “Will? I’m still here, Will. Just one thing.”

  “Yes, Ry?”

  “I wonder at the beginning of your story, Will. I mean, I was brought up short for a moment by the reference to the parents in their separate
homes.…”

  “Why? The parents are divorced, in fact. It lends a little poignancy, I thought.”

  “Yeah, but the publisher kind of tripped over that part.…”

  Will shook his head in disgust. No wonder his reporters complained about the editing they got at the Gazette. Ryan was probably reacting not to something the publisher had said but to something he thought he might say.

  “Ry,” Will said evenly at last, “you just go ahead and do whatever you have to.”

  Will hung up, went to the window, and stared out. A gray sky hanging over a gray city, almost low enough to smother it.

  He lay down, closed his eyes, tried to let the tension flow out of him. He’d better; otherwise, he’d have a dandy headache.

  He tried to remember what a therapist had told him again and again about self-esteem and control and thinking and acting in ways that were “appropriate”—appropriate not in a social sense but in a psychological one.

  He knew that some people thought of him as a “lifer” at the Gazette. Sometimes he thought of himself that way, although he doubted if his job was that secure lately. The publisher was too mercurial, and Will had committed the unpardonable sin over the years of finding out too much about the personal problems of the publisher and his family. It wasn’t that Will had tried to find out such things; it was just that inevitably he had. And he sensed sometimes that Lyle Glanford held it against him.

  Sometimes Will chided himself for not having had a sense much earlier of his own entitlement. He had gone to college on a scholarship provided by the Gazette for being a good delivery boy and, later, a good copyboy. He might not have gone to college at all (even if his father hadn’t committed suicide in the midst of his money problems) if it hadn’t been for the Gazette. So Will had gotten a job as a cub reporter, then as an editor—feeling all the while that he was paying back what he owed.

  In fact, he was a pretty good journalist. He knew that now—intellectually, he knew it, even if in his heart he still sometimes felt as if he was in debt to the Gazette—but he was on the wrong side of forty, and his wife was well established in the counseling she sometimes did in Bessemer, and his kids loved it, and they had a lovely comfortable house with a porch deck and a big backyard, and his life really wasn’t so bad.…

  Enough of those thoughts; they were the last thing he needed now. Should he call home? No; later would be better, when his mood would be mellower.

  First, he had to do some research.

  It is one of the paradoxes of newspaperdom that a paper in a poor, small town can not only survive but make a lot of money. The reason is simple enough: A lot of people still need a newspaper for something, whether to check the TV schedule, or the supermarket ads, or if any of the neighbors have died.

  Will knew that the Long Creek Eagle made money, although Will’s own paper had nibbled into its circulation with its Country Edition. Will knew, too, that he would get a cordial reception at the Eagle. Competitor or not, he was a fellow newspaperman.

  His pant legs felt damp as he went up the steps of the Eagle (Have to see about some laundry, depending on how long I’m going to be around, he thought), and the wind-driven sleet and rain seemed to chase him inside.

  In the lobby of the Eagle stood a globe perhaps six feet wide. It reminded him briefly of the globe in the lobby of the New York Daily News, except that the Eagle’s was smaller and dust-covered and the lighting around it much dimmer.

  A small man in his sixties sat behind a wooden counter. He seemed to have his hands full with the switchboard and a tuna sandwich, so Will ignored him. Instead, Will followed the arrow that said NEWSROOM and that pointed to a winding staircase.

  At the top of the stairs was a door, and just inside a teenage girl sat behind a desk. She was wearing a Madonna sweatshirt, eating french fries, and carrying on a giggling conversation by telephone. She put down the phone and swallowed long enough for Will to introduce himself and ask to see someone in charge. The girl nodded, pressed a couple of buttons, mumbled something into the phone, pressed another button, and went back to the french fries and giggling chatter.

  Before long, a young man with a firm handshake and an eager manner came out and introduced himself. If he was surprised that the Bessemer Gazette had sent its executive editor to Long Creek, he had the tact not to show it.

  Will and the younger man traded small talk about what a terrible thing the kidnapping was and how busy everyone was on the Long Creek Eagle because of it.

  The young man led Will to a small, narrow room lined with metal file drawers, showed him how to work the microfilm machine, and explained how the rolls of film were filed.

  “I think you’ll find this useful,” the Eagle editor said, putting a small metal box of three-by-five index cards on a table. “Ruth, our old librarian, was what you’d call a human-misery buff. She kept her own file of the biggest disasters and most celebrated crimes of the twentieth century. The cards here give the names of the principals, whether we have separate bio files and art on them, and the numbers of the microfilm spools that apply.”

  “Beautiful. This has to be better than the public library.”

  “The Long Creek Public Library’s a joke, unfortunately.”

  “I know. I stopped on my way over here. They don’t even have complete New York Times microfilm.”

  “We have that, as well as microfilm of the Eagle. ’Course, for national stuff, you’re better off with the Times. One reason we have a better microfilm collection than the public library is that we have more money coming in. It’s one of the few things our publisher’s family isn’t doing on the cheap these days. Listen, if you need anything else, press that buzzer right there. That’ll bring a copy kid.”

  Will didn’t bother to look up the most famous of all American kidnappings, that of the Lindbergh baby in 1932. He had read a couple of books on it.

  He half-remembered another case, from when he himself was a small boy. Yes, that must be it on the index card. A six-year-old boy had been abducted from a school in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1953. His father, a wealthy car dealer, had agreed at once to pay a six-hundred-thousand-dollar ransom. A lot of money back then, Will thought. A lot of money today, for God’s sake.

  Will found the microfilm he wanted and threaded it into the machine without too much trouble. It took him only a few minutes to realize that scanning the microfilm was going to be as draining as it was interesting. He had to squint to read, unless he positioned the film just right on the screen, and to get it just right he had to go so slowly that it tried his patience.

  The Kansas City boy had been killed soon after being taken, it was later found out, and his body buried in a hole filled with lime.

  Will remembered his own parents talking about that case: how terrible it was that the kidnappers had demanded the money after they had already killed the child. That they had meant to kill him all along. His life didn’t matter to them, except as an annoyance.

  Will recalled how horrified he had been to imagine the boy thrown into a lime pit. No matter how many times he had told himself that it didn’t matter—the boy was already dead, his soul gone to heaven—the image had brought him near tears.

  “God Almighty,” Will muttered. “You couldn’t make this stuff up.” Even though he didn’t believe in capital punishment, he was glad that two kidnappers had been caught and executed.

  The case had been a cause célèbre for a long time. But even four decades later, Will was disturbed reading about it. He advanced the microfilm.

  Will picked up his pace. He selected only the most celebrated cases, got the microfilm, scanned it as quickly as he could while still taking accurate notes. He felt the strain in his eyes. Yet while he was eager to be done with the task, he couldn’t help pausing now and then. It was fascinating to see again what had been popular on television, what the clothing styles had been, how much chuck roast and eggs had cost a decade or two or three ago.

  And something else, something he hadn’
t expected and most definitely wasn’t ready for: As he rolled the microfilm, he couldn’t help thinking how old he had been back then. I was little Will Shafer, he thought. A shy boy who thought he was doing the best he could, and who was ashamed of his parents sometimes, the way they fought and never had enough money.…

  Will shook those thoughts out of his head and wound the roll to the end in a blur.

  Giving his eyeballs a break from the microfilm, he flipped through the cards again. Oh, there was a case he remembered from the late 1960s. A young woman, daughter of a wealthy executive, kidnapped and buried in a coffin-size ventilated box. Found alive by the FBI a few days later. Will remembered the case. God, he was only in his twenties at the time. He hadn’t met Karen yet, and he was still going to church. Hell, he had even prayed for that girl. Maybe it had worked: She had been saved, and the kidnappers had been caught and sent to prison.

  In the few minutes he spent taking notes on that case, he was visited by another wave of sadness he hadn’t anticipated. When he saw the headlines from the late sixties—race riots in the big cities, the counterculture, hippies, and, most of all, Vietnam—he thought of his own youth, and the big stories he had dreamed of covering and never had. And now never would.

  Of course you didn’t, you dumb bastard. You were at the Bessemer Gazette. You could have moved on, if you’d had the guts.…

  “Enough,” Will said to his demons. “Leave me alone, for God’s sake.”

  He thumbed the cards again, stopped at a case from the late 1980s. The heir to a newspaper business in the Midwest had been seized and buried underground in a box (son of a bitch, the bastards must have gotten the idea from the case of the young woman), but the crude ventilation system had failed, and the man had died.

  “Dirty bastards,” Will hissed. He was sorry the kidnappers had only been sent to prison.

  And here was a case from South Carolina. A businessman had been abducted, and a big ransom demand had been made. Will thought that the case might be worth a look, so he got out the microfilm.

  The kidnapper had specified that the money be left attached to a piling under a bridge that spanned a river. Lawmen had kept the bridge under surveillance, of course, and, when a man rowed quietly up to the bridge in a boat and started nosing around the pilings, they had arrested him without trouble. After all, it is hard to escape quickly in a rowboat.