by Brad Parks
I was more confused than ever. “Can you tell me what this was about?”
“Do you know a young man named David Montgomery? David J. Montgomery?” Curry asked.
“No,” I said.
“You’d remember him if you met him. He’s got this tattoo on his arm he’s very proud of. It’s . . . well, it’s a topless mermaid.”
I did my best not to let the recognition show in my eyes. David Montgomery was Bobby Rowe. The kid had given me a fake name.
“I’ve never heard the name David J. Montgomery before,” I said, because that was true.
“Yeah, I didn’t think so,” Curry said. “David is what you might call one of our frequent fliers. He has a bunch of charges pending against him right now, and he’s pretty desperate to make them go away. As I understand it, he approached his probation officer early this week with some wild story about two guys living at this address who had kidnapped someone. I think he got it in his head he could get some consideration from the prosecutor. I can only assume he was high at the time.”
I thought back to Bobby Rowe, yapping about us being kidnappers after Jason had been unable to control his mouth.
“Drugs are a scourge on the community,” I said, trying to sound appropriately judicial.
“The probation officer had to report it to us. And on the one-in-a-million chance David Montgomery was telling the truth, we had to check it out. I don’t think anyone thought . . . Well, like I said, due diligence. I really am sorry to have disturbed you, Judge.”
“Not a problem,” I said, even though it was.
I showed them out, hoping—praying, really—that the people who had Emma didn’t see any of it.
As they drove away, the memory of something that happened to Sammy when he was a toddler leapt into my head. This was maybe a few months after his first birthday. He was at that hell-on-wheels stage where he just tore around, oblivious to the dangers that lurked everywhere. It was exhausting to even try to keep up with him—much less him and his sister.
The two of them had wandered into our bedroom in our town house in northern Virginia. I probably wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been. They were playing, mostly agreeably, near the door. Then Emma closed the door on Sam’s hand. In his panic, he ripped his hand away—leaving the nail on his pointer finger behind.
On some level, I knew I was supposed to be the calm, collected grown-up, reassuring and steady. Certainly, if had been my own finger, I would have just cursed, bandaged it, and moved on.
But seeing my son’s blood gush, my body actually went into shock. I had to call a neighbor to come over and dress the wound. This was when I learned something most parents eventually come to realize: It’s far more distressing when something happens to your kids than when it happens to you.
I thought of that now as I looked down at my hand, which I opened, clenched into a fist, and opened again.
* * *
Before I got myself totally rattled, I called Alison to let her know it was safe to come home. She didn’t answer her cell, so I rang Gina’s landline instead.
It was not Gina but Karen who answered with an officious-sounding, “Powell residence.”
“Oh, hey, Karen, it’s Scott. What are you doing over there?”
“Just brought the kids over to play with Sammy after school.”
“Everyone getting along okay?”
“They wrecked the kitchen, then we shipped them outside before they could move on to the rest of the house.”
“Sounds like a perfect afternoon at Grammy’s,” I said. “Is Alison there?”
“She’s napping,” Karen said apologetically. “She was tired when she got here, so we sent her off to the rack.”
The rack. Short for barrack. Alison had long ago told me she hadn’t been born into the Powell family. She had been enlisted.
“You want me to wake her up?” Karen volunteered.
“Absolutely not. Just let her know I called and that everything is fine and she and Sam can come home whenever they like.”
I heard Karen lower the phone and say, “It’s Scott”—presumably because Gina was inquiring—and then she returned with, “What was up with that business card anyway?”
“Nothing. Just . . . tell Alison it was fund-raising for the Fraternal Order of Police, that the cop came to our house in civilian clothes, and that there’s nothing to worry about.”
“Is any of that true?” she asked.
“Not really. But I don’t want her stressing out any more than she already is.”
“Jason told me about the other night,” she said. “Did it have something to do with that?”
“Yeah. Sort of. The cops came and searched the house. They went away, but—”
“But now you’re worried there’s going to be a delivery tonight,” Karen finished for me.
“Yeah. And if it’s bad, it might be something they’d feel compelled to deliver themselves, without using a courier. Maybe you should think about adding some manpower?”
“I hear you. Thanks.”
“I mean, there’s a chance they won’t—”
“But there’s a chance they will,” she said. “Don’t worry. I’m on it.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
There were still rings under Alison’s eyes that the nap hadn’t fully erased when she and Sam arrived home early that evening.
We hadn’t seen each other since Tuesday morning. She looked tired. More tired than I remembered. The other thing I noticed as she walked into the kitchen, where I had been making a salad, was just how loose her blouse seemed—except where it was tucked into her waist, which was even smaller and tighter than usual. She had lost weight. Food just hadn’t been a priority for either of us lately.
As far as I knew, she also hadn’t chopped any wood recently, not since the day Sam had returned to us. My tireless wife had lost the energy.
She crossed the room and sagged into me. Her bones had never felt closer to the skin.
Being able to feel this physical manifestation of her stress—she was, without exaggeration, wasting away from worry—was another argument against thinking she had anything to do with Emma’s kidnapping. You couldn’t deceive your own body, could you?
“Hey,” I said. “How was your mom’s house?”
“Fine. She’s worried about us, of course. But everything there was fine.”
“How’s Sam been doing?”
“Okay, I guess. It’s always better when he’s with his cousins or at Grammy’s. Around here, all there is for him to do is dwell on Emma being gone. At least somewhere else he’s a little distracted. The cousins are great for that. And Grammy keeps him busy with games when it’s just the three of us.”
“Well, that’s good. How was your nap?”
She separated from me and yawned. “I think I’m actually more tired now.”
I looked back at the carrot I had been slicing and suddenly didn’t have the energy for even one more chop. Mindful of the need to stuff some calories in my wife, I said, “Do you want to do Chinese tonight? I really just don’t feel like cooking.”
“Me neither,” she said wearily.
“Great. I’ll make the call on the way,” I said, already walking out of the kitchen.
“No, I’ll pick it up. Why don’t you spend some time with Sam? He misses you.”
I missed him too. So I said, “Okay, good idea.”
Alison soon departed. After cleaning the remains of my stunted salad preparation, I wandered into the family room, where Sam was setting up an elaborate ramp system for racing his Hot Wheels.
“Hey, buddy,” I said. “Give your old dad a hug.”
He complied. It felt good to be able to hold him again, for however briefly he allowed it before he wiggled away.
“Do you want to race cars?” he asked.
&nbs
p; “Sure, pal.”
“Okay. Let me just finish the track.”
He set to work on a particularly harrowing-looking loop, pouring his concentration into linking a series of orange plastic pieces together. For a while, I just watched him, mesmerized by the sureness of his movements.
Then, knowing Alison would be gone only so long—making this my best chance to talk with him alone—I began my routine scrutiny of his activities.
“So how was your day, buddy?” I asked.
“Good,” he said. And not necessarily because it had been. Sam had this tendency to seize a monosyllabic answer whenever it was available.
“What did you and Momma do?”
“We went to Chick-fil-A,” he said, not looking up from his work.
“The one next to Walmart?”
“Yeah.”
“And then you went to Grammy’s house?”
“Yeah.”
“How was that?”
“Good.”
“What did you do?”
“Grammy and I played Uno. Then the cousins got there and we played outside.”
“I heard about that from Aunt Karen,” I said. “It was nice of you guys to let Momma nap.”
Sam, still with his eyes on his track, said, “Momma didn’t nap.”
“Oh?” I said, the now-familiar alarms going off in my head. “So what was Momma doing while you were outside?”
“She wasn’t there.”
Again.
I tried to make like it wasn’t a big deal, like my ears weren’t perked up, like this wasn’t reawakening every doubt about my wife I had, mere moments earlier, been convincing myself I could suppress.
“Where did she go?”
“I don’t know,” he said, having put the finishing touches on his track. “Do you want to race now, Daddy?”
“Yeah, hang on a second, though. Momma wasn’t at Grammy’s house with you?”
“Well, she was. Then she left.”
“Where did she go?”
“I dunno.”
“How long was she gone?” I asked.
“I dunno. A while.”
“Like, an hour?”
“Maybe.”
“Two hours?”
“Yeah, maybe. I don’t know.”
I nodded, unsure of what else to ask him. My wife had once again disappeared in the middle of the day. And, given the opportunity to tell me about it, she had maintained the lie that she had taken a nap at her mother’s house.
A car door slammed outside. Alison was back. I had to shut down the questioning. Not that I even knew what to ask.
“Dad, can we just race cars?” Sam asked insistently.
“Sure, buddy.”
“Pick a car. I’m going to be red. Red is superfast.”
The front door opened and Alison announced her return. As I settled in to give the yellow Hot Wheels a go down the track, something else occurred to me: Karen had covered for her. And Gina had overheard her doing so.
So not only had Alison snuck off again—to be with Paul? to see Emma?—her family was complicit.
* * *
I ate the Chinese food without really tasting it, sitting across from my wife without really looking at her.
She made a few attempts at conversation, but the tumult in my head drowned out whatever she was saying. Eventually she gave up and turned her attention to the food she kept pushing around her plate. The only sound coming from our dinner table was the occasional scrape of a fork.
I just couldn’t reconcile the discrepancy between the Alison I saw—and felt with my own hands—and the Alison who seemed to be operating the rest of the time. That Alison was this shadowy figure, darting in and out of view in the hazy distance. And my only real lens on her was a six-year-old who barely understood what he was seeing.
It made me feel more estranged from her than ever. Whether she was involved with Emma’s disappearance, whether she had rekindled with Paul, what role her family was or wasn’t playing—that stuff was all, in some ways, potentially nothing more than supposition. The very real, very nonsuppositional impact was that my suspicion, and the silence it brought with it, was playing hell on our marriage. At a time when we should have been falling in on each other for support, we were instead falling apart.
I might have attempted to talk to her about it, even in a way that didn’t directly challenge this latest lie, except my head was hammering from the possibility of that dreadful delivery that might have been on its way. And the aspirin I was gulping didn’t even dent it.
After we got Sam to sleep, I lay down on our bed with a National Geographic, hoping pictures of faraway places could transport me somewhere else. Alison, who had no idea what might be coming, slipped away into the bathroom, where she took a leisurely shower.
Then she spent a long time with the hair dryer going. She had done this many times before: sit on the floor, allowing the air to rush over her and the white noise to soothe her. It was her version of meditation.
When she emerged, she was wearing only a towel. She walked over to my side of the bed and put her hand on my hip.
“Hi,” she said.
I looked up from my magazine without a word.
“Do you think we could . . . ,” she said, and began running her hand along my side.
“Oh,” was all I could manage. To say sex had been the last thing on my mind was a huge understatement.
“I just . . . I need you right now. I need to feel you,” she said quietly. “I miss you. We’re . . . I mean, we’re barely talking, Scott. And I get it. I really do. Words are . . . they’re just impossible sometimes. But I still want to feel like we’re connected somehow. Even if it’s just for a little while.”
In the twenty-five years we had been together, I had never denied one of her advances. Why would I? I loved being with her, loved every inch of her. I firmly believed that couples who kept talking, laughing, and having sex would never have to worry about divorce. The first two had been dangerously disrupted, so shouldn’t we at least keep the third one in place?
But there was just no way. Not with her lies. Not with the thought the sex might be another smokescreen, a piece of artifice designed to distract me. Not with Jason, Karen, or Jenny outside the window. Not with the Gloucester County sheriff’s detective having been in this room a few hours before. Not with Paul Dresser dancing in my nightmares. Not with Emma, possibly in the worst pain of her life at this very moment.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just don’t think I—”
She looked away for a moment. When she turned back, her eyes had welled up.
“Can I just . . . Can I just lie here with you for a second?”
I couldn’t say no. I scooted over and she curled up next to me.
“Can you hold me?” she asked, her voice even smaller than before.
I draped an arm over her. I could feel her body shaking. She was crying, but she wasn’t making a sound. I knew I should have been weeping along with her.
If only I was convinced it was real.
THIRTY-NINE
Once I was sure Alison was asleep, I covered her with a blanket, then rolled off the bed.
I crept into the guest room, where I didn’t bother peeling back the bedspread. There was no point in dirtying sheets with the act of not sleeping. I waited with the light off, keeping myself braced for the sound of a gunshot outside.
Perhaps an hour later, I heard a different noise on the nightstand. It was a buzzing, coming from my phone. I picked it up, swiped at it.
There was a text message. From Alison. Or, I should say, “Alison,” since the real Alison was in the other room, asleep.
The message read, NO MORE POLICE. There was a video attached.
My heart was thumping as I hit the play button. For twenty tormenting seconds,
I waited for it to load.
Then it started. The screen was perfectly black, like someone had covered over the lens.
There was audio, though: a high-pitched whimpering, albeit muffled—like an injured animal making noises with its throat.
Then the volume suddenly spiked. The noise had a human grunt mixed into it. Which was how I knew it wasn’t an animal. It was Emma. And she was hurting. Badly.
I brought my face closer to the phone, but there wasn’t anything to see. There was only the horrible sound of my daughter yelping with pain.
Pain and maybe shock. It was the kind of noise you never wanted to hear any child make, much less your own.
Adrenaline coursed through my body. I couldn’t keep the phone steady. My breath had grown short. I recognized another panic attack coming, and I willed it to stay away.
“Oh God, please help her,” I moaned quietly. “Oh God.”
Her screams died down for a moment, to be replaced by the same whimpering sound as before. What was happening to her? And who was doing it?
Another round was coming. Emma’s cries were building, like she was anticipating something terrible. I could make out a pleading, “No, no, no, no—”
Then there was another shriek. It was so sharp it momentarily overloaded the phone’s simple speaker.
Then, suddenly, there was video. And it made me wish the screen had just stayed black.
It was a close-up of Emma, lying on a dirty linoleum floor in what appeared to be a bathroom. She had been hog-tied. I couldn’t see her ankles and wrists, because they were somewhere behind her, off screen. But it was apparent that the ropes were tight, because her tiny body had been forced into a backward C. She was sopping wet. She wore only a pair of panties. She was shivering. And twitching.
Her face was bathed in blood. There were smears of red on the floor near her stubbly head. She was clearly bleeding from somewhere on her head or face, though there was so much of it I couldn’t tell where the wound originated.
There was also blood pouring from her mouth. Like maybe she had bit through her tongue. That wasn’t the worst part, though. It was her eyes, which were wide and terror filled. Just seeing them made me want to scream myself.
