Say Nothing

by Brad Parks

  Some lawyers refer to federal judges as Little Caesars, like the pizza chain, except it’s not totally a joke. We really do have an astonishing degree of authority. Some of my decisions can be overturned or amended by higher courts, yes, but a surprising number of them are, for all practical purposes, unassailable.

  With little more than my own gut to guide me, I routinely make pronouncements that will shape the remainder of people’s lives. The wealthiest lawyers in the land kowtow to me. Huge bureaucracies are forced to follow my orders. The most formidable people in our society are but one bad decision away from winding up in my courtroom, begging for my mercy, sometimes literally trembling before me.

  I realize it’s the position, not the person, that inspires this sycophancy. I certainly do nothing to encourage it. I am something of a reluctant Caesar. The constant fawning embarrasses me.

  It comes with the job all the same.

  Whether I like it or not, I represent power.

  Whether I want it or not, I have power.

  Or at least I used to.

  FIVE

  Around midnight, I went up to our bedroom to begin an ill-fated attempt at sleep. What this soon became was me lying there, with that extra region in my brain—the kid part—in overdrive.

  I thought of Sam. Brave, lovely Sam. Alison and I have done our best to eschew gender stereotypes in how we raised our children. Yet Sam is still one hundred percent boy. There’s a certain amount of energy he simply has to expend each day. And if he doesn’t? Woe to all furniture, walls, and human beings in his path. Sometimes in the late afternoon, when his rambunctiousness is about to overwhelm all of us, we’ll send him to run laps around the house.

  Then I thought of Emma. Sweet, thoughtful Emma. She also has her share of energy, except she expresses it emotionally, rather than physically. She is incredibly perceptive. If Alison and I have a loud conversation—even if we aren’t disagreeing about something, just talking boisterously—she’ll ask us to stop fighting. On the rare occasions I’ve had to reprimand her, I had learned to do so gently, beginning with assurances that I loved her endlessly and forever. Otherwise, one cross look could make her burst into tears and end all hope of discourse.

  As I considered some of the questions Alison had asked—where were they? what were they doing?—I concocted a scenario under which they were safe and unharmed.

  Under this wishful thinking, their kidnappers had invented some kind of lie to make the children think the whole thing was a game, so they didn’t fully understand what was happening. They were not being fed peanut butter or other tree nuts (Emma was allergic). They were being given the Big Three of a six-year-old’s diet—pizza, pasta, chicken nuggets—and allowed to gorge themselves on television.

  They knew something was a little strange, yes, but they were basically okay. After all, Sam had his Emma. And Emma had her Sam. On some level, twins are always okay as long as they have each other.

  That was the best-case scenario.

  The worst-case scenario was something I was fighting desperately to keep out of my head.

  Time passed in small increments. Around two A.M., Alison crept into the room, peeled back the covers, and slid under them. We lay, side by side, each of us quiet in our own misery.

  The house was dark and still and making all its usual house noises, though none of them sounded right without the twins there. We had been drawn to this place for them, not for us. We bought it because we knew they’d grow to love the river, with its white-sand beach and its gently sloping shoreline; because its ample acreage included a thousand trees to shade their summer days; because it was this big, rambling former farm with a million memories waiting to be made. Alison often talked about how special it was to her that we were giving the twins a childhood that was so different from the usual cul-de-sac existence of most upper-middle-class kids.

  But ultimately, we bought it because before The Incident I had been the kind of blithe optimist who trusted in the goodness of my fellow man. After it, having seen the human potential for wickedness, I wanted to raise my children in a place that was as safe as possible. I had thought all those trees and all those acres would act as a kind of fortress; and that our driveway, a dirt road spanning four-tenths of a mile, was long enough to effectively seal out the worst of the world.

  It was only now that I understood the falseness of that. Security was a myth, a grand lie we told ourselves to mask the jarring reality of the human condition: that the social contract was written in sand, not stone, and it could be blown away at any time, by anyone with sufficient breath in his lungs.

  This was the thought going through my head in a relentless loop as I lay in bed and the night plodded on. I tried to steer my dreams toward the happier times that would come. This would end. Soon. I had to believe that.

  Slowly, I felt my body sinking into the mattress. Alison’s breathing had become more steady. I was just starting to think I might be able to drift off for a minute or two.

  Then someone rang the doorbell.

  * * *

  I was on my feet before the bong-bong chiming of the bell had played out. Alison was sitting up. I could see the whites of her eyes, looking wild in the blackness. The clock read 3:17.

  Operating without much thought, I was already striding toward the door of our bedroom.

  “Wait, where are you going?” Alison asked in a ferocious whisper.

  “What do you mean? What if that’s the kids?”

  “The kids? Just walking up to our door and ringing the—”

  “Well, a sheriff’s deputy with the kids.”

  I wasn’t waiting around to debate her. I had arrived at the door to our bedroom and was reaching for the door handle.

  “Wait,” she said, having jumped out of bed and grabbed me by the wrist. “Don’t you think the sheriff’s office would have called us first? What if it’s the kidnappers? What if they have a gun?”

  “Just stay here,” I said, tearing my arm away.

  “Scott,” she called after me, but I was already out the door, on my way downstairs.

  We own a gun, a Smith & Wesson nine millimeter we bought when Alison was pregnant and I was gone most of the time. She had joked—well, half joked—that her momma-bear hormones were telling her she needed it. Woe to the criminal who tried to take on Alison. She was an army brat whose dad’s idea of father-daughter bonding was an afternoon of target shooting. As a kid, she had won a trunkful of marksmanship ribbons. Judging from the way she handled the Smith & Wesson on the range the day we bought it, her skills had not faded much.

  Unfortunately, the weapon was currently disassembled, with half in the attic and the other half hidden under the sink in the master bathroom. I had insisted on this after researching the statistics on accidental gun deaths for a bill I drafted. The numbers were clear: A functioning gun inside a house was a far greater danger to children than anything lurking outside it.

  This was the first time I regretted that decision. I quickly catalogued the possible weapons at my disposal—kitchen knives, screwdrivers, a fireplace poker—and opted for a golf club from the hall closet.

  The absurdity of it—a soft, middle-aged man thinking he could confront armed assailants with a six iron—had not yet dawned on me. I flipped on the switch that controlled the outside lights. Then I skittered around to our sitting room so I could look out the window and at least have some idea of what I was about to face.

  Like a lot of southern farmhouses, ours has a generous front porch, one that wraps around two sides of the house. It is decorated with wicker furniture and a series of bird feeders, which had been painted by the kids when Justina had gone on an arts-and-crafts kick the previous summer. Beyond the porch is a front yard dotted with magnolia trees and loblolly pines, and that long dirt road.

  Peering out the window, I couldn’t make out much. The porch and the part of the yard that was no
w illuminated appeared to be absent of humanity. The trees and the road beyond it were mere suggestions in the gloom.

  Regripping the golf club, I returned to the front door, which was old and heavy. I unchained it, then eased it open, hiding most of my body behind its bulk in case there was some ambush awaiting me.

  There was no need. No one was out there. All I heard was distant yipping from a small pack of semiferal dogs that sometimes patrol our woods.

  Then I looked down to see a knee-high cardboard box with a Home Depot logo printed on the side. A line of silver duct tape had been used to seal the top.

  I toed the box to get a sense of its weight. Whatever was in there wasn’t much heavier than the box itself. I listened—for, what, a ticking sound or something?—but heard nothing.

  Then I finally realized I was being paranoid. Whoever was doing this needed me alive, at least until sometime after eleven o’clock in the morning, when I followed whatever instructions awaited me. I let the golf club drop to my side and tore open the box.

  Inside were two clear Ziploc sandwich bags, filled with hair clippings. Specifically, my children’s hair. Sam’s was straight and sun bleached. Emma’s was curly and, while still blond, ever so slightly darker.

  My hand went to my throat, a classic gesture of vulnerability. A judge spends his life examining evidence. This was all I needed to see to know this nightmare was real. I had to grab on to the doorframe to keep my balance.

  Once I steadied myself and took some deep breaths, I saw there was also an envelope. It was small, the kind you might see attached to a bouquet of flowers. I pulled it open. There was a piece of card stock, folded in half. The message it contained was printed in block lettering:

  JUDGE SAMPSON,

  FOLLOW YOUR INSTRUCTIONS OR NEXT TIME WE’LL CUT MORE THAN JUST HAIR.

  —FRIENDS OF RAYSHAUN SKAVRON

  I gazed out into the darkness one more time. Nothing about it had changed. Except as my eyes returned to the porch, I noticed something strange about the post nearest the steps.

  One of the bird feeders was missing.

  SIX

  The chiming of the motion sensor was loud enough to wake the younger brother from the easy chair where he had been dozing. He rose and grabbed an assault rifle that had fallen to the floor, then went to the window.

  A pair of headlights burst into the clearing in front of the house, then flicked on and off several times.

  The all-clear signal. The younger brother stepped back from the blinds and disarmed the security system. It was old, installed by the crackpot who built the place, and no longer connected to central monitoring. But it still wailed plenty loud if anyone opened a door or window. He returned the gun to the hook on the wall where it belonged and was seated at the kitchen table with his iPad when his older brother entered.

  “How did it go?” the younger asked.

  “Fine,” said the older as he rearmed the security system.

  “No problems with the delivery?”

  “None,” the older said. “Any trouble here?”

  “Not really. The boy started complaining he needed food. I fed him just to shut him up.”

  “I told you they’d be more docile that way. What did you give them?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly on bread. You said that’s what American children like.”

  “Did they eat it?”

  “The boy did. The girl wouldn’t touch it.”

  “She will when she gets hungry enough.”

  The younger gestured his head toward one of the bedrooms. “The boy has been crying a lot. He keeps asking for his mother and father. It’s getting on my nerves.”

  “Well, then I guess that settles it.”

  “What?”

  “Which one we get rid of.”

  SEVEN

  There was no sleep the remainder of the night. Just a lot of tangled sheets.

  In the morning, the early-autumn sun rose over Gloucester, Virginia, cruelly unaware of the two agonized lives it was illuminating. Alison was already out of bed. I heard her in the shower and may have lightly dozed to the sound of the water running.

  The next thing I knew, she was back in the room, dressing.

  “Are you going to work?” I asked.

  “God no. I already called in. I’m going to the kids’ school.”

  I propped myself up on my elbow. “You can’t. Say nothing, remember?”

  “I won’t. I just . . . I just have to ask some questions, that’s all. I’ve been thinking about it all night. I mean, what happened? Someone just came and took our kids? I have to understand. Or at least try. For my own sanity. They’re going to want to know why our kids aren’t in school, anyway. We have to come up with something.”

  “I’ll come with you,” I said, swinging my legs down onto the floor.

  “It’s better you didn’t. You being a judge, it intimidates people sometimes.”

  “Then you do the talking,” I said. “I just want to be able to hear their answers.”

  “I don’t—”

  And then she stopped herself. “Okay,” she said.

  With that concession, I forced myself into the shower. We left quickly after I got dressed. The house was excruciatingly quiet without the twins.

  We took separate cars and within fifteen minutes had arrived at Middle Peninsula Montessori. Gloucester was not an especially affluent county, and the school’s simplicity reflected this. It was just a small steel building set at the edge of a gravel parking lot. The student artwork that decorated the outside had always made me think of it as a cheerful, welcoming place, this little haven of love and learning where I sent my children each day.

  Now it seemed grotesque.

  It was a few minutes past eight o’clock when we arrived. The school day would start in less than half an hour.

  “I’m doing the talking,” Alison said again when I met her at the door of her car.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  We walked across the parking lot, our feet crunching on the stones. The front door was locked—that was policy—so Alison rang the doorbell.

  Suzanne Fridley, the head of school, soon appeared. Miss Suzanne, as everyone called her, was one of those preternaturally calm people who would have been wasted in anything other than an educational environment. She had a simple magic with children.

  “Well, good morning, Mrs. Sampson. Judge,” she said as she opened the door. “Come in, come in. To what do we owe the pleasure?”

  We were standing in the small school’s entryway, which also doubled as a library. I looked at Alison, to make it clear to all she was taking the lead.

  “This may sound like a strange question,” she said. “But who picked up the twins yesterday?”

  Unruffled, Miss Suzanne grabbed a clipboard on a small table next to the door. Every pickup was recorded there. Miss Suzanne flipped a page.

  Then her brow crinkled. “Why, you did.”

  She turned the clipboard around so Alison could inspect the page. Sure enough, at 3:57 P.M., Sam and Emma were recorded as having departed. The “Picked Up By” column had “mom” in it. Next to that were the scrawled initials of a staff person.

  I think if it had been me, my mouth would have been hanging open. Alison, to her credit, simply said, “That’s Miss Pam’s signature, yes?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Is she here?” Alison asked.

  “One moment, please.”

  Miss Suzanne walked serenely into the next room and returned fifteen seconds later with Miss Pam, the grandmotherly sort who served as a teacher’s assistant.

  “Judge Sampson and Mrs. Sampson were just asking a few questions about pickup yesterday,” Miss Suzanne said. “Do you remember checking out the twins yesterday?”

  “Yes,” Miss Pam said blankly.

 
“Who picked them up?”

  “It was . . . Mrs. Sampson,” Miss Pam said, eyeing Alison, whose face had flushed.

  At this point, I jumped in: “We’re just having some confusion. Someone picked up the kids yesterday, but we’re not sure who. So I know this is going to sound weird, but are you sure it was her?”

  Miss Pam’s head snapped from me to Miss Suzanne, back to me, then to Alison. “Well, yes, I . . . I think so,” she said. “You were wearing a . . . a ball cap and sunglasses, weren’t you?”

  Alison hadn’t worn a baseball hat in public since the days of college all-nighters.

  “Did you actually see her face?” I pressed.

  “No, I . . . Just the back of her head. She had her hair in a ponytail.”

  “Did she speak at all?”

  “Well . . . no,” Miss Pam said.

  Which, for me, confirmed it wasn’t Alison, who was a please-and-thank-you kind of woman. Someone had obviously impersonated my wife, trusting in the hat and shades to hide the differences between her and another thin blond woman.

  “And it was the right car?” I asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Miss Pam said. She was looking at Miss Suzanne again, a desperate look that said, Help me out here.

  Finally, Miss Suzanne came up with: “We had that security camera installed last year. If you like, we can look at the video from yesterday afternoon.”

  “That would be great,” I said.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  We followed her into a cramped office that was just off the entrance. She sat at a chair in front of a computer monitor, which was soon filled with a current view of the school. The camera was really aimed at the front door but captured at least a little bit of the parking lot.