Three Days Missing

by Kimberly Belle

  He looks like hell. His skin is pale. His shirt is untucked. He needs a haircut and a shave. Under the frayed orange rim of his ancient University of Tennessee baseball cap, his hazel eyes are crinkled with strain.

  But he’s here and I fall into him, even though Lucas is the kind of guy who’d sooner put me in a headlock than a hug, and I’d sooner punch him in his stomach than throw my arms around his waist. As unaccustomed as I am to this embrace, I’m awfully glad for it. I press my face into his chest and fall apart.

  “You gotta stay strong, Kitty Kat.” A nickname I haven’t heard from him since my high school days. He drapes a big palm on the back of my head. “For Ethan. You have to stay strong for him.”

  I tip my head back, look up at Lucas through my tears. His face may have a few more wrinkles, his once-thick hair thinned out on top, but for me he’ll always be that solemn-faced man-boy who lived across the street, the one who took me in after my mother’s death made me an orphan at sixteen. “You would get eaten alive by foster care,” he said to me then, and Lucas would know. He spent more than a decade in the system, and to this day, the only thing he’ll tell me about it is that it was no place for a girl like me.

  “I am. I will be. I’m just so glad you’re here.”

  “Yeah, well, those two cops down at the turnoff didn’t make it easy on me. It would have saved me some trouble if you’d told them I was coming.”

  I don’t ask how he got by, mostly because I don’t care. All that matters is he’s here.

  He untangles us, heaves a battered duffel from the porch floor and walks me backward until we’re both inside the cabin. Behind him, the rain has stopped. A hazy mist rises up from the woods, smoky puffs that hang suspended in the air like ghosts.

  While I mop up my face with a paper towel, Lucas introduces himself to Dawn. Like pretty much every other red-blooded female on the planet, she eyes him with interest. “Dawn Whittaker,” she says, shaking his hand.

  I toss the towel in the trash and point to the duffel in Lucas’s fist. “What’s that?”

  That is no overnight bag. It’s a bag big enough to carry every pair of jeans, T-shirt and sweater in Lucas’s very meager wardrobe, but a clinking of metal on metal sounds from inside the canvas. He drops it on the floor, where it lands like a chunk of concrete.

  “My tracking gear. GPS. Night goggles. That kind of stuff.” Lucas pulls out a chair, flips it around and sits on it backward, his big body facing me. “What’s the word? You never texted.”

  I fall onto the couch while Dawn spouts off acronyms I only vaguely recognize and will never be able to remember: NCIC and BOLO and GBI. She gives him a quick rundown of everything we’ve learned until now, which is frustratingly little. That there was a fire just outside the cabin while everyone was sleeping. That Ethan disappeared somewhere between the rush outside and the chaperone putting out the fire. That the dogs had some trouble catching his scent at first, until one of them led searchers a mile and a half through the woods, where it dried up at a road. Lucas’s reaction to the last one makes me grip the table tighter.

  “Sounds like a trap,” he says, and Dawn doesn’t argue. She thinks it sounds like a trap, too, and honestly, who wouldn’t?

  I turn back to Lucas. “They think it might have been Andrew.”

  He frowns, but he doesn’t look particularly surprised. “Of course they suspect Andrew. Don’t you ever watch Law & Order? It’s always the parent.” He turns to Dawn. “Did you call him? Did you send somebody to bust down his door?”

  “Yes to the first, but we can’t do the second without a warrant, which the Atlanta PD is working on. By now they’ve knocked on his door often and loud enough to wake the neighbors on either side. It looks like nobody’s at home.”

  He curses.

  Dawn examines him carefully, her pen stilled. “It doesn’t seem like I need to ask whether or not you think Andrew would be capable of kidnapping his own son.”

  “Hell yeah, I think he would. He’s smart, he’s sneaky and don’t even get me started on that man’s mental state.”

  That Man. The Wife Beater. Captain Douchebag. Just a few of the nicknames Lucas has coined for my soon-to-be ex so he would never have to say Andrew’s name again.

  But Lucas is right about one thing: don’t get him started on Andrew. Lucas is the kind of man who makes a decent living off sweat and elbow grease. Who values pulling your own weight, making an honest buck and taking care of your own. God. Country. Family. Maybe he could have respected Andrew if he’d built his company from the ground up instead of using a significant chunk of his parents’ life insurance settlement. The other half he sank into our six-bedroom home on a half-acre lot in Dunwoody, where he now lives alone. Lucas has never been shy with his opinions, and he’s always had a long list of reasons I should have never married Andrew: too self-important, too focused on the material, too headstrong and controlling. Later, after his drinking had become a problem, he was too quick-tempered and unpredictable. By the time I saw what Lucas did in Andrew, it was too late. We already had Ethan.

  But the last thing I need right now is to rehash yet another I told you so. “So now what?”

  Dawn pushes up from the couch. “Now I need to do a quick check-in with Sheriff and the team over at the dining hall. In the meantime, I want you to start making those lists we talked about. Places Ethan goes on a regular basis, people he knows and interacts with, websites he visits and people he talks to. I want the names of every adult Ethan has come into contact with in the past year. People he knows well. People he knows not so well. We want to take a look at anyone he might have formed an attachment to.”

  I know what she means.

  She means anyone who might have formed an attachment to him.

  She points to the legal pad balanced on the arm of the couch, where she scribbled a phone number across a fresh page. “That’s my cell. If you need me, I can be back here in less than five minutes.”

  Lucas watches her shrug into her coat and collect her things, jaw clenched. Muscles and tendons twitch under the cotton of his T-shirt.

  Dawn slips out the door, and he turns to me. “What do you need me to do?”

  I don’t hesitate. This is the reason I called him here, to bulldoze the woods and search for clues, to follow my baby’s footsteps through the terrain. As much as I want him to stay here and comfort me, I need him to find Ethan. Never have I needed anything more.

  “Find him, Lucas.” I hold his gaze, and his eyes glisten with marching orders. “Go out there and find Ethan for me.”

  Lucas jumps up, swipes his duffel from the floor and disappears out the door.

  * * *

  As soon as Lucas is gone and I’m alone in the cabin, I try Andrew’s numbers but get flipped to voice mail again. The sound of his voice after all these months scrapes across my nerves like a patch of stinging nettle.

  At the beep, I take a deep breath.

  “Andrew, this is Kat... I’ve been trying to reach you for hours now. Ethan’s missing. If you had anything to do with it, if he’s there with you right now, I’ll do anything you want. I’ll give you anything. I’ll cancel the restraining order. I’ll beg the judge to give you fifty percent custody. I’ll take out a full-page ad in the AJC and tell everybody you never laid a hand on me if you want me to...” My throat threatens to funnel shut, but I force myself to shove the words over my tongue. “Just please. Don’t take Ethan from me. I’m begging you. Please don’t take my baby away.”

  I hang up just in time, right before a sob pushes up my throat and steals my voice. I toss the phone on the table, cover my face with my hands and let the tears come, the images flitting through my mind like a horror show. Ethan on the backseat of Andrew’s Mercedes, wondering where they’re going. Andrew laughing every time he sees my name pop up on his cell phone screen. Are the police tracking it? Are they watching the blips move f
arther and farther away on some computer screen? It’s almost nine. They could be halfway to Mexico by now.

  I jump out of my chair and begin pacing.

  I think about what it would be like to never see Ethan’s face again, to live the rest of my life not knowing, never finding answers. I think about Ethan, blindfolded and bawling, in the back of some unmarked van. His little body, mangled beyond recognition. My thoughts are wild things, chasing me around the tiny room.

  “No.” My voice is thin and reedy in the cabin, and I try it again, this time louder. “No.” I can’t do this to myself. I swipe the legal pad and pen from the couch and force myself to sit still long enough to make a list of names.

  The first dozen or so come without much effort. Lucas. Izzy and two—no, three of her ex-boyfriends, none of them lasting more than a few months but long enough that Ethan remembers their names. Our old neighbor, Mrs. T, who still drops by on Christmas with hand-knit socks nobody ever wears. Andrew and our old friends, most of them people I haven’t seen since the afternoon outside the CVS. Are they still in his life? Are there new friends I don’t know about? I have no idea.

  And what about my neighbors? I don’t know their names, but I know I don’t trust them. Ethan is not allowed to play in his own front yard without me there, a lioness watching her cub. Though why would any of them drive all the way here to steal the kid who lives across the street?

  I make a list of places we go—school, the Publix down the street, the deli on the corner where Ethan once asked me why a homeless man was rummaging through the Dumpster. “Because he’s hungry, I guess.” Ethan gave the man his sandwich. Fresh tears prick my eyes, because that’s the kind of child I have, one who is constantly reminding me there are people in the world who have it worse.

  I think back to what Dawn told me earlier, about roadblocks and neighborhood canvasses and all those strings of letters that sounded straight out of a crime show. One pops miraculously in my mind: BOLO. Be on the lookout for. But did she mention where they were looking? Which direction? I wish I’d thought to take notes.

  The questions beat an insistent drill in my skull. Where else are they looking? How many police officers are on the case? Has the media been alerted? What about an AMBER Alert? Are there other state and national alert systems for missing children? Are there others working to spread the word, too?

  I flip to a clean page, start jotting down the questions before they can flit away. I’ve barely recorded one before the next one thrums its way into my consciousness. Before long, the paper is covered in blue ink and scribbles. I flip to the next sheet and keep going.

  What about the teachers and chaperones? How certain are the police that they were where they said they were? Have they all been questioned, accounted for? What about the camp staff, the other kids? Surely somebody heard or saw something. Who’s talking to them?

  And then there are the more sweeping questions about missing children, morbid generalizations I can’t help but consider. What are the statistics on the first few hours, the first few days? If we don’t find him soon, what does that mean for the likelihood of finding him at all? At what point will Dawn sit me down and tell me to start preparing for the worst? After two days? After three days missing?

  Before I know it, I’m crying again. I think about Ethan climbing onto the bus at school, my mind already flitting to my endless to-do list at work, and my stomach aches. I see myself standing on the sidewalk, waving up at the dark smudges behind the bus’s tinted glass. I couldn’t even tell if he was waving back, or for that matter, if it was even Ethan. I just picked out one shadowy lump and waved and waved and waved, because the sooner that bus left, the sooner I could race off to work.

  The last time I saw Ethan, I didn’t see him at all.

  STEF

  6 hours, 58 minutes missing

  My mother arrives as I’m working my way through the Cambridge staff directory, so far with zero success. She barrels into the foyer, dumps her stuff, clasps my face in both hands and kisses me on each cheek despite the cell phone pressed to my ear. She smells of incense and Chanel perfume—the scent of complicated nostalgia. Screaming and door slamming, that’s what I remember most from my childhood.

  “Hi, Mom.” I point to my cell, which has been bleating an old Norah Jones song on repeat for the past six and a half minutes. “I’m on hold with the school. I can’t get anybody on the line.”

  It’s been almost two hours since Sam told me the news—hours I’ve spent pacing the floor and waiting for the school to call. I realize they’re dealing with a crisis, but honestly, so am I. My need to see Sammy, to know he’s okay, sizzles like electricity in my chest.

  “You go right ahead, dear.” Mom plucks a canvas shopping bag off the floor and shoves it in my free arm. “I baked.”

  The scent hits me, nuts and butter and cinnamon, as does the bigger picture. “You came all the way from Woodstock to bring me some banana bread?”

  “You say that like Woodstock is halfway across the country or something.”

  Twenty-six point three miles, to be exact. Fifty-two minutes door-to-door. A distance you’d think would be too far for unexpected drop-ins, but you’d be wrong.

  I take in the other bags behind her—a beat-up Michael Kors bag I gave her six Christmases ago and a black pleather duffel that looks suspiciously like an overnight bag. I want to ask what she’s doing here, but I’m afraid I already know the answer.

  The music stops, and I hold up a finger as a female voice comes down the line. “You’ve reached the voice mail of Nicolien Eckelboom, Lead Early Learning Teacher at Cambridge Classical Academy. I’m sorry I missed your call. Please—”

  I hang up and hit Redial on the school’s main number, waving Mom deeper into the house. The lights flip on as we pass, a combination of motion sensor and magic. Villa Eco is Sam’s baby, a sleek and sustainable work of art constructed of 100 percent repurposed materials, with photovoltaic panels on the roof, solar tubes that light up the interior rooms, geothermal heat pumps and rainwater-collecting cisterns. Sam likes to think it was part of the reason he got elected—this living off the grid, practicing what he preaches when it comes to saving our planet—but he’s kidding himself. Samuel Joseph Huntington IV has ridden the coattails of his baronial name his entire life.

  “I’ve been getting a lot of conflicting information this morning,” Mom says as we come into the kitchen, “and it all involves you.”

  A line plenty of people would pay good money to hear. Dr. Melody King—Dr. Mel to her fans, a list that includes every last one of my girlfriends—normally charges $425 an hour for her party tricks. Now Mom’s giving it unsolicited and for free.

  I check the school directory, running my finger down the list for the next name. “I swear, it’s like they ordered every staff member to not answer their phones or something.” My finger lands on the extension for the head nurse. I punch in the number, but it goes straight to voice mail. I hit End and drop my cell on the counter with a clatter. “I think I should drive over there.”

  “To the school?”

  I nod. “It’s Friday. Every class but Ethan’s will be in session.”

  “What for?” Mom shakes her head. “Nobody there has the answers you’re looking for.”

  “So, what, you think I should go up to the camp? Sam told me not to, that I’d only be in the way. He said to wait for the school’s call.”

  Mom empties a pocketful of rocks onto the marble counter. “Carnelian, agate, smoky quartz. These are all for physical protection, and this one.” She taps a murky purple stone streaked with white. “This is a particularly strong amethyst. It’s for protection during travel, though I’m also getting some information that feels like that boy is fixed to one spot.”

  “Did you bring some rocks that will tell you where he is?” I don’t bother muzzling the sarcasm in my tone. Whatever window my mother thinks
she has into the supernatural, I’ve never bought it.

  Mom gives me one of her ever-patient smiles. “That’s not the way it works, darling—you know this. I can’t change what has happened or what is to come, only transmit the wisdom of what I receive. But the angels’ chatter is confusing. The energy is conflicting. The spirits are telling me he’s safe and in danger at the same time. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Can you at least see where his energy is coming from?”

  “Sweetheart, have I taught you nothing? I don’t see his energy, I feel it. More specifically, I feel the distortions in his energy systems, and though I can do some healing of them from afar, I can’t actually see his physical location. I’m getting only a vague sense of his thoughts and emotions, though they might provide clues.”

  “Such as?”

  She closes her eyes, tilts her face up to the ceiling and the heavens beyond. “I’m sensing fear, of course, that’s to be expected, and I think he might be cold because look.” She shoves up her sleeves to reveal skin covered in chill bumps. “But I’m also getting boredom. Why would a kidnapped child be bored? Maybe the mix-up is coming from electromagnetic pollution. It can distort the energy sometimes, you know, if the sender is surrounded by things like antennas or wireless devices.”

  “So what you’re saying is, the kidnapper is hiding out at a place with Wi-Fi. A Starbucks, maybe?”

  She raises a brow. “You were always such a skeptic.”

  As was my father. As is my sister, Amelia. As is Sam. The only true believer in the family is Sammy. My mother would say it’s because he is a natural empath, too, but I pray it’s because he’s eight and my mother is the only grandparent he has left. Mom’s spiritual mumbo jumbo may have sold a shit-ton of books, but it doesn’t exactly make for the most practical of role models.

  Like now, for example. Mom pushes plates away and closes her eyes, balancing a crystal in the center of each skyward-facing palm. Her breaths come long and loud through her nose, hissing like waves washing onto shore. Her lips are moving, but her mouth isn’t making a sound. A marching band could come through the kitchen and she wouldn’t notice.