Here After

by Sean Costello

  He started up the stairs, every footfall creating a dry creak that echoed through the empty house. Then he was in the hallway at the top, the same hallway the kidnapper had trod with the same deliberate stealth. Had he felt the raw fear Peter was feeling now? The same withering sense of trespass? Somehow Peter didn’t think so.

  He crept past the master bedroom and picked up his pace, his fear of getting caught doubling with each frantic breath. Jason’s door was closed and Peter got that same whiff of stale air when he pushed it open. The room was dark, the only light that eerie orange wash from the streetlights outside, filtered through gauzy curtains. He gave his eyes a few seconds to adjust, then tip-toed to the train set, as if Jason were asleep in here rather than lost to the world. He did not look at the bunk bed.

  The train cars were small, each an easy fit for a child’s palm, and Peter reached for the shiny black engine. Then he paused, wondering if Roger came in here at night, the way he, Peter, sometimes did in David’s empty room. Wondered if he’d notice the missing engine.

  There were about a dozen boxcars between the engine and an authentic-looking caboose, and Peter took one of these instead, joining the remaining ones together to hide the gap. Then he tucked the boxcar into his pocket.

  He left the house quickly, replacing the screen in the window, then briskly retracing his steps to the front of the house, trying not to run. Halfway down the front walk, he saw a police cruiser roll to a stop at the curb, the passenger window humming open. Hesitating only slightly, he continued his strolling pace to the sidewalk, returning the nod of the female officer who looked up at him from the shotgun seat. From this angle he couldn’t see the driver. Absurdly, he found himself picturing which way he’d run if it was him they were after.

  “’Evening, sir,” the officer said.

  “’Evening,” Peter said.

  There was a burst of chatter over the radio in there, then the woman said, “You didn’t happen to see a gang of about five boys run by here in the past few minutes, did you?”

  “Afraid not,” Peter said, pointing back at the house. Sweat was running into his eyes. “I was just visiting a friend. Watching a movie.”

  “Where are you parked?”

  He pointed at the Corolla across the street. “Right over there.”

  “All right. Get to your car quickly, sir. These boys just assaulted an elderly gentleman walking his dog. Beat him up pretty bad. We’ll wait right here until you’re safely inside.”

  “Will do,” Peter said and started away on legs made of rubber. “And thanks.”

  The woman nodded again, her expression sober, and Peter wondered if that was part of their training, that stern look they all wore, like those palace guards in England who stood like mannequins no matter what distractions were aimed at them.

  Verging on hysterical laughter, he gave the cops a wave and climbed into his car, starting the engine as they pulled away, Jason Mullen’s tiny metal boxcar digging into his hip.

  * * *

  Peter said, “Sorry to call so late.”

  “Not a problem,” Erika said, sounding wide awake. Peter heard the bright chatter of ice cubes against glass. “Just having a drink and watching the tube. Where are you?”

  “In your driveway.”

  Erika laughed. “Are you stalking me, Doctor Croft?”

  “You’re right, I’m sorry, it’s late.”

  “Nonsense. I was kidding. Come ahead in.”

  Peter hung up and went to the door. Erika was already there, waiting for him in the narrow foyer. She led him inside and offered him a drink, which he gratefully accepted. “All I’ve got is gin and tonic,” she said and Peter said that would do fine. She brought it to him on the couch and Peter took a long swallow, the liquor bringing water to his eyes.

  “Whoa,” Erika said, settling in beside him. “Rough night?”

  Peter said, “You have no idea,” and dug the toy boxcar out of his pocket.

  Erika gazed at it with widening eyes. “He didn’t give that to you, did he.”

  Peter said, “No,” and held it out to her. “Can we do this?”

  Erika put her drink on the table but didn’t take the boxcar. She said, “He hasn’t been back to group, you know,” and Peter lowered his arm. “Not since the last time you guys were there together. Have you seen him lately?”

  “No.”

  She pointed at the boxcar. “Then how did you get that?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “You broke into his house?”

  Peter held the toy out again. “Please, Erika. Can we do this?”

  Erika was silent for a beat, her eyes unreadable. Then she looked firmly at him and said, “If we do, Roger can never know.”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean it, Peter. No matter what the outcome. My instincts are telling me to refuse you. This is very personal stuff, and if it were me, I’d be furious to learn that people I trusted had gone behind my back.”

  She was right, of course, and though Peter’s own instincts were screaming at him to pocket the stolen toy and forget the whole thing, he said, “You have my word.”

  “The only reason I’m even considering this is that you’ve got a vested interest. Like it or not, you’re involved.”

  “I understand.”

  She stared at him a moment longer, as if reading him, then began rubbing her palms against her thighs, shifting her gaze to the boxcar now, a prosaic object that had once brought happiness to a child. Her breathing deepened and slowed, and Peter heard her whisper something, like a monk at prayer. Then she picked up the boxcar, her hand folding into a fist around it, and now her whole body stiffened, a pained gasp coming from her throat. Just as abruptly she relaxed and a tear escaped one staring eye. As she turned to face Peter, she dropped the boxcar into her lap.

  “Jason is alive,” she said, her voice breaking. “I saw him...sleeping in the dark. But he’s in danger, Peter. They’re going to let him die...”

  “Who’s going to let him die?”

  Erika was sheet white now, breathing hard. She pointed at the boxcar in her lap, saying, “Take it. Please.”

  Peter picked up the toy and put it back in his pocket. “Who’s going to let him die? Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Erika said, rising now, stumbling over his feet as she brushed past him, heading for the back of the apartment. “I need you to leave now, Peter. Please. Just twist the lock on your way out.” She paused by the planter separating the living area from the rooms beyond; to Peter she appeared on the verge of collapse. “That’s all I can tell you right now,” she said. “Really. But if you’d like, maybe we can talk about it more another time.”

  Peter stood. “Are you all right?”

  “Just go,” Erika said.

  Then she was gone and Peter heard her footfalls, heavy and fast, and now the slam of a door followed by the unmistakable sound of retching. He considered going back there to check on her, but decided against it. She was a grown woman.

  He let himself out, locking the door behind him. The night sky was flawless, a vast indigo vault flecked with diamonds, and Peter walked beneath it to his car, feeling even more bewildered than he had when he came here. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected from all of this, but what he’d just witnessed, authentic or otherwise, was of little value to him. The only thing he knew for certain was that David—his spirit, his essence, some immutable part of his son—was trying to tell him something. And about that part of it Erika had been correct: he needed to keep his mind open, do his best to decipher the signs. What he could not do anymore was sit passively by and wait. Whatever this was, it was about Jason Mullen and his missing look-alike, Clayton Dolan. That seemed as good a place as any to begin.

  Peter knew he wasn’t a detective or even particularly intuitive. He’d spent the better part of his life believing only in what his senses told him was real. And what that brand of self-reliance had taught him was that knowledge was power, and
that the path to knowledge was simple: research. He also knew that a hundred different people could examine the same body of evidence and see it in only one light—and that sometimes, all that was required to uncover the truth was a fresh pair of eyes.

  He drove home and opened the Child Find site, bringing up the image of the boy who had lured him into this nightmare in the first place. Little Clayton Dolan.

  * * *

  The information on the site was surprisingly scant, something Peter hadn’t noticed before, his attention at the time focused almost exclusively on the boy’s image. What he did notice now was the age-enhanced photo of Clayton Dolan, displayed next to the one he’d first seen on the hospital bulletin board. Clayton had been almost six when he was abducted. The age-enhanced photo depicted him at twelve, digitally bridging the years since his disappearance.

  At first glance, the twelve-year-old Clayton bore little resemblance to Clayton at six. The facial features were longer and more lean, the hair style modified to reflect current trends, the kid’s missing baby teeth replaced by a more mature set. And yet, on closer inspection, one could easily discern the likeness, most notably in the eyes, but also in the shape of the nostrils and ears, and in the way the boy’s smile altered the rest of his face. Peter could see how it might be a useful tool.

  He printed the page in color, then did the same for Jason Mullen—whose photo had not yet been age-enhanced—starting a hardcopy file for each of them. He turned up similar information on another site, The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, but learned little more beyond the salient details of time and place.

  He wanted to find out more about the Dolan case in particular, the kind of in-depth information Roger had given him about Jason’s abduction that day on the porch. It occurred to him then to look for any pertinent news articles. The abduction of a child was always big news, at least for the first several weeks.

  He referred again to his printed information on Clayton Dolan. The boy had been taken in broad daylight from the back yard of his parents’ farmhouse in the Ottawa Valley, near the village of Fitzroy. The contact numbers at the bottom of the page included one for the Center for Missing & Exploited Children and a second for the Arnprior Detachment of the Ontario Provincial Police. Peter had been to Arnprior a few times during his residency, visiting a respiratory tech who’d moved there after completing her training in Ottawa. He remembered it as a quaint rural town west of Ottawa, about an hour’s drive from the U of O campus. Fitzroy he’d never heard of.

  He typed ‘Arnprior’ into the search engine and came up with a site called Welcome to Arnprior. Under Municipal Services, he found a map that showed the town nestled along the south bank of the Ottawa River. Using the zoom function, he located the village of Fitzroy about fifteen miles east of Arnprior. He printed a copy of the map and added it to the Dolan file.

  He thought of another site he wanted to check, one David had introduced him to called Google Earth, and as he opened it he recalled his son getting off the bus one day last fall, excitedly digging through his school bag, bringing out a dog-eared satellite photo of a residential street. “Look, Dad,” he’d said, standing on the lawn with his school bag sliding off his shoulder, pointing at the greenish printout. “Know what this is?” Peter studied it briefly before admitting he had no clue. “It’s our house, Dad. See?” And there it was, the brown-shingled roof he’d paid a fortune for the previous spring, and the pool in the back yard, a turquoise gem in a bed of green. He thought he could even see his car in the driveway. It made him think of some of the things he and Dana had done in what they’d believed was the privacy of their own back yard. He and David had spent hours on the site that evening, zooming in on everyone’s house they could think of, making copies David wanted to give to them later. They’d had a ball with the thing.

  He typed ‘Fitzroy’ into the search window and a lifelike globe of the earth spun slowly toward him, the focus sweeping out of the northern United States to zoom in on a rectangle of land centered by the village of Fitzroy, the illusion of movement giving Peter a brief sensation of vertigo. The place looked small and remote, an oval-shaped collection of quiet streets and rural souls, perched like its nearest neighbor, Arnprior, on the bank of the Ottawa River. Zooming out, Peter could see little for miles around but farmland, a tidy quiltwork of open fields and scattered homesteads.

  Somewhere in this idyllic setting, a monster had surfaced and taken a child.

  Peter reopened the Arnprior site, searching without success for the name of a local paper. Trying a different tack, he entered ‘Canadian Newspapers’ and found a comprehensive list arranged by province, but the only ones he could come up with for the Arnprior area were weeklies. Getting discouraged, he scrolled down to the listings for Ottawa, the nearest major city, and opened a link to The Ottawa Citizen, a paper he’d delivered as a boy. The site offered a 7-day archive, which Peter opened in the hope of accessing a wider time frame. Next to the 7-day search window was a second option offering articles from 16 major papers ranging as far back as 1997. The catch was, full text printouts cost $4.75 CDN per document, plus applicable taxes. The documents, once chosen, were then delivered by email.

  Peter grumbled his way through the registration process and carried on.

  Soon he was into the meat of the story, a deluge of information detailing the early days of the case, then, over the course of the ensuing weeks, the gradual—and inevitable—tapering off.

  * * *

  By sunup Peter had compiled a fairly comprehensive profile of the Dolan case, many of the details of which filled him with sorrow. The boy’s mother, Margaret Dolan, was clearly the hardest hit by the child’s disappearance. For this unfortunate woman, it was as if one tragedy spawned the next, an insidious ripple that grew into a tsunami, engulfing everything in its path.

  Prior to her son’s abduction Mrs. Dolan had been the family’s principal breadwinner, her spouse, Lionel Dolan, on long-term disability due to chronic back problems. The Dolans had one other child, Aaron, twelve at the time of his brother’s kidnapping. According to one article from a tabloid called The Seeker, Aaron had been playing outside with his brother that day, the kidnapper striking the older boy from behind with a rock and leaving him for dead, the whole incident taking place not ten feet from the house. Though Peter had always shunned the tabloids, The Seeker article was among the most detailed he could find, providing a thoughtfully worded account of that terrible day and the lengthy ordeal that followed. The website also gave access to a photo gallery that included ground-level and aerial views of the farm itself, and a video clip of the tearful appeal the boy’s mother had made on national television just hours after the abduction. Watching the video, Peter couldn’t help but imagine Roger and his wife making a similar plea, using their son’s name repeatedly during the interview, as Margaret did, attempting to humanize the child to a faceless deviant who almost certainly didn’t care, who was perhaps even amused by the entire spectacle, or in his own mind, deified by it.

  From other sources he learned that Margaret Dolan later spent thirteen months in a psychiatric hospital following a vicious attempt she made on the life of her husband, whom she blamed for allowing the abduction to occur. Apparently Lionel Dolan had been in the house at the time of the incident, nursing his back pain with a bottle of scotch. According to another article, Margaret’s break with reality progressed from a period of unappeasable rage to a state of catatonia, which persisted for the first three months of her incarceration. And though her husband’s lawyers pushed for an attempted murder conviction, Margaret was remanded to the care of a team of psychiatrists until such time as she was deemed fit to return to her home and her remaining son. A few weeks after the brief trial, Lionel Dolan went on a drinking jag with a couple of his buddies and slammed Margaret’s car into a bridge abutment, killing all three of them instantly.

  Peter ran the video clip again, his heart going out to this tall, big-boned woman left to face this tragedy alo
ne. She stood in sunlight on the steps of a quaint, well-kempt farmhouse, whitewashed clapboard with lush flowerbeds and a cane rocker on the porch, doing her best to dam back the tears until she’d had her say. “I’m begging you,” Margaret Dolan said, the camera gliding in smoothly to lock on her dark eyes, her trembling, down-turned mouth, “whoever you are. Please, let my son go. Let Clayton go. I’m his mother and he needs me, Clayton needs his ma. Clayton’s a brave boy and he’s smart. Just let him go. He knows his phone number and his address. Let Clayton go now and he’ll find his way home. Do that and I promise, I’ll do anything you ask. I’ll—”

  Unable to stand any more, Peter clicked on the pause button and stared at the woman’s face, thinking, What now?

  And then he knew.

  He dug the boys’ pictures out of the files he’d created and lined them up on the desk in front of him. What he needed was a willing confederate, someone with nothing to lose and everything to gain from the resolution of this maddening puzzle. And since Roger had withdrawn his involvement, his next most logical ally was staring out at him from the computer screen, her plain face frozen in torment.

  Peter closed the video window and returned to the photo gallery on The Seeker site, finding an aerial shot of the Dolan property that had caught his eye earlier on. Though the shot was blurry, he could discern the general layout of the area—a dirt road cutting in from route 22, ending in a T with a short arm on the right that led to what Peter assumed was another farm, the arm on the left, this one much longer, running on a gentle curve to the Dolan place. He flipped back through his notes until he found the name of the cutoff from Route 22: Muldoon’s Crossroad.

  Now he brought up the Google Earth site and typed Fitzroy, Ontario into the search window. When the image resolved into focus, he found route 22 and followed it east, zooming in closer as he soared overhead, pulling the smaller side roads into focus.

  And there it was, Muldoon’s Crossroad, neatly bisecting Route 22. Peter followed it north to the T, zooming in to bring the Dolan farm into focus at the center of the screen. A sidebar showed the viewing altitude at twelve hundred feet, but when he tried to move any closer the image started to blur. He printed a copy and added it to his files.