by R. G. Belsky
It wasn’t that easy for Anne and Patrick Devlin. The police told them that Lucy was probably dead. That the most likely scenario was she’d been kidnapped outside the school that day, her abductor had become violent and murdered her. He then must have dumped her body somewhere. It was just a matter of time before it turned up, they said.
Anne Devlin refused to believe them.
“I can’t just forget about my daughter,” she said. “I know she’s still alive. I know she’s out there somewhere. I can feel her. A mother knows. I’ll never rest until I find her.”
Her obsession carried her down many paths over the next few years. Every time a little girl turned up murdered or police found a girl without a home, Anne checked it out. Not just in New York City either. She traveled around the country, tracking down every lead—no matter how slim or remote it seemed.
There were moments of hope, but many more moments of despair.
A woman who’d seen the story on TV said she’d seen a little girl that looked like Lucy at an amusement park in Sandusky, Ohio. She was standing with a man holding her by the hand near the roller coaster, looking confused and scared. At one point, she tried to break away, but the man wouldn’t let her go. The woman told one of the security guards that there was something suspicious about the man and the little girl, but never found out what happened. Anne went to Ohio and talked to everyone she could find at the amusement park. She eventually tracked down the security guard and finally the little girl herself. It turned out that the man was her father, and she looked scared and tried to run away because she was afraid to ride the roller coaster.
Another time a group of college coeds thought they spotted her in Florida during spring break. Some fraternity guys who tried to hit on them had a young girl in the back seat of their car, and she seemed out of place amid the beer swilling Neanderthals partying up a storm in Fort Lauderdale. The coeds told Anne they were convinced it was her missing daughter. That lead turned out to be a dead end, too. She was the daughter of a woman the fraternity guys had picked up the night before. The woman had passed out back in their hotel room, and they were just driving around with the girl because they didn’t want to leave her alone.
And then there was the time the body of a young girl about Lucy’s age and description was found alongside a highway in Pennsylvania. The state troopers found Lucy’s name on a list of missing children and contacted Anne. She drove ten hours through a blinding snowstorm to a morgue outside Pittsburgh, where the body had been taken. The entire time she had visions of her daughter lying on a coroner’s slab. But it wasn’t Lucy. It turned out to be a runaway from Utah. A truck driver had picked her up hitchhiking, raped and killed her, then dumped the body alongside the road. Anne said afterward she felt relief it wasn’t Lucy, but sadness for the family in Utah who would soon endure the same ordeal as she did.
Once a psychic came to Anne and said she’d seen a vision of Lucy. Lucy was living somewhere near the water, the psychic told her. Lucy was alright, but lonely. Lucy wanted to get back to her family, but she didn’t know how. Eventually, the psychic said she saw a sign in the vision that said La Jolla. La Jolla is a town in Southern California, just north of San Diego. The psychic offered to travel with Anne there and help search for her. They spent two weeks in La Jolla, staying in the best hotels and running up big bills at fancy restaurants. The psychic found nothing. Later, it turned out she just wanted a free trip to the West Coast and some free publicity for her psychic business.
Worst of all were the harassing phone calls. From all the twisted, perverted people in this world. Some of them were opportunists looking for extortion money by claiming they had Lucy. Others were just sickos who got off on harassing a grieving mother. “I have your daughter,” they would say and then talk about the terrible things they were doing to her. One man called Anne maybe two dozen times, day and night, over a period of six months. He taunted her mercilessly about how he had turned Lucy into his sex slave. He said he kept her in a cage in the basement of his house, feeding her only dog food and water. He described unspeakable tortures and sexual acts he carried out on her. He told Anne that when he finally got bored, he’d either kill her or sell her to a harem in the Middle East. When the FBI finally traced the caller’s number and caught him, he turned out to be one of the police officers who had been investigating the case. He confessed that he got a strange sexual pleasure from the phone calls. None of the others turned out to be the real abductor either. But Anne would sometimes cry for days after she got one of these cruel calls, imagining all of the nightmarish things that might be happening to Lucy.
All this took a real toll on Anne and Patrick Devlin.
Patrick was a contractor who ran his own successful construction firm; Anne, an executive with an advertising agency. They lived in a spacious town house in the heart of Manhattan. Patrick had spent long hours renovating it into a beautiful home for him, Anne, and Lucy. There was even a backyard with an impressively large garden that was Anne’s pride and joy. The Devlins seemed to have the perfect house, the perfect family, the perfect life.
But that all changed after Lucy disappeared.
Anne eventually lost her job because she was away so much searching for answers about her daughter. Patrick’s construction business fell off dramatically, too. They had trouble meeting the payments on their town house and moved to a cheaper rental downtown. Their marriage began to fall apart, too, just like the rest of their lives. They divorced a few years after Lucy’s disappearance. Patrick moved to Boston and started a new construction company. He remarried a few years later and now had two children, a boy and a girl, with his new wife. Anne still lived in New York City, where she never stopped searching for her daughter.
Every once in a while, at an anniversary or when another child disappeared, one of the newspapers or TV stations would tell the Lucy Devlin story again.
About the little girl who went off to school one day, just like any other day, and was never seen again. But mostly, no one had time to think about Lucy Devlin anymore.
Everyone had forgotten about Lucy.
Except her mother.
CHAPTER 3
I’VE BEEN MARRIED three times. The first time was to a doctor when I was a reporter at the Tribune. The second was to an attorney after I left newspapers to become an on-air reporter at Channel 10. And the third was to an NYPD homicide detective that ended not too long ago. A doctor, a lawyer, and a cop—I’d hit the trifecta in divorce by the time I was in my midforties. I think it’s safe to say that I don’t do marriage well.
Not that I’m blaming any of my ex-husbands for the way it turned out. They were all good guys. Well, mostly good guys. Especially Sam Markham, the cop and the most recent of my ex-husbands. I still felt badly that one hadn’t worked out. No, if there was a finger of blame to be pointed for me not living happily ever after with any of these three men … it had to point right back at me.
It was my devotion to the job—some might call it an obsession—that ultimately led to all the marital disasters I’ve experienced. Funny, because with a doctor, lawyer, and a police officer—well, you’d think they would be the ones with the stressful, high-pressure jobs that could bring down a marriage. But it was always me. You see, I could never just walk away from the news at the end of the day. It was always the biggest thing in the world to me. It became the most important thing in my life. And so, in the end, it became my life.
I remembered a conversation I’d once had with Sam about all this. It happened a few months after we met. Before we were married. Maybe I should have realized then that marriage to Sam wasn’t going to work any better for me than the previous two.
We were lying in bed at his apartment after having sex when he turned to me and said, “Let’s talk about the future, Clare. Our future.”
“Oh, that,” I said.
While we were talking, I took out my cell phone and checked to see if there were any updates or big stories breaking.
“A
ll you ever think about is chasing the news. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Why is that?”
“Uh … it’s my job.”
He sighed.
“Have you thought any more about the idea of giving up your apartment and moving in here with me?” he asked.
“I’ve pondered it from time to time.”
“How about marrying me?”
“Also under consideration.”
“And how about starting a family?”
“Do I get any kind of a break between all those things? Or do I have to hire the moving van, put on a wedding dress, and go through childbirth all in the same day?”
“I want to marry you, Clare.”
“I’ve been married, Sam. Twice. I’m not the best candidate you can find.”
“I don’t care about your past. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to marry you. I want to wake up every morning and be able to see you lying next to me.”
“I can be a little cranky sometimes in the morning.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
“Okay, full disclosure time here, I’m really a lot cranky in the morning. Every morning.”
“I understand.”
“What I’m trying to say is I’m not exactly a morning person.”
“No problem.”
“Well, good to know that’s not a deal breaker,” I said.
Yep, Sam was probably the best of them. The one marriage I really wanted to make work. But it went down in flames just like the previous two because I was always working at the office and hardly ever around for him. He even had our divorce papers sent to me at the Channel 10 newsroom. Figured that way I’d be sure to get them. The envelope with them inside was delivered there while I was running coverage of a big fire at a Manhattan high-rise building. I didn’t open them until the fire was out.
Sometimes I think that my only true love is that damn newsroom.
And that … my children are all the big stories that I’ve covered and broken through the years.
I have a scrapbook on my shelf at home where I pasted all the big stories I covered back when I was a newspaper star.
I took down the scrapbook now and paged through it to the Lucy Devlin coverage. There were pictures there of Lucy riding a bike, petting a dog, opening Christmas gifts—having a great time growing up as a little girl in a loving family until that nightmarish morning when someone took it all away. There were pictures of her parents, too—Anne and Patrick Devlin first in happier times with their little girl, then wearing the haunted looks of anguish, despair, and fear that I saw so many times in the days while we waited for some word about what might have happened to Lucy. Of course, that word had never come. And now, fifteen years later, her disappearance was still as much a mystery as it was when she first vanished.
Finally, I forced myself to put the scrapbook down.
I needed to stop thinking about the past.
I really needed to focus my attention on something different than my own marital woes and the long-ago sad saga of Lucy Devlin.
That was the right thing to do.
The smart thing to do.
And so—from long practice of doing the wrong and the stupid thing at critical moments—I picked up my phone and made a call.
“Hi, it’s Clare,” I said when Sam picked up the phone at the East Side precinct where I’d called him.
There was a long silence.
“Clare Carlson.”
More silence.
“Your ex-wife.”
“You and I were married?” he said finally.
“Briefly.”
“Gee, I hadn’t noticed.”
“How’s life as a police officer on the mean streets of New York these days? Do you still get to ride around in that squad car and scare people with all those flashing red lights and that cool siren?”
“Yes, that’s one of the perks of the job.”
“How about we take a ride one day and you let me play with the siren?”
“We’re not allowed to do that. Only authorized law officers have access to police cars. No one else.”
“Not even your ex-squeeze?”
There was a long silence on the other end. One of the problems of being married to someone—no matter how briefly—is they get to know an awful lot about you. You can’t fool them the way you do other people.
“What do you want, Clare?”
“What makes you think I want something?”
“Well, I haven’t heard from you in months. You suddenly call me up out of the blue and start trying to turn on the charm. I’ve seen you on a story, Clare. I know how you work. Don’t try to work me. Why don’t we just cut through all the bullshit and get right to the point of your call?”
I told him my station was doing a story about the fifteenth anniversary of the Lucy Devlin disappearance. And that the mother claimed she’d come up with some new kind of lead that I was going to talk with her about the next day. I asked him if he’d heard of any new developments about the case after all this time.
He didn’t know anything, which wasn’t really a surprise. He said the NYPD and the FBI still carried it as an open case—a kidnapping case was never closed until the victim was either found or determined definitely to be dead—but this clearly was an investigation that no one spent any time on anymore.
“Anne Devlin claims she’s got some kind of new lead,” I told him.
“Good luck with that. She still comes to us once in a while with these far-out scenarios about what really happened to Lucy.”
“Yeah, I understand. God knows what this latest theory of hers is—she probably thinks the kid got abducted by a UFO or something.”
“I guess it’s a way for her to avoid confronting the obvious fact that her daughter is long dead. Think about it: If Lucy were alive, she’d be twenty-six years old now. Probably married. Possibly with children of her own. Christ, maybe someone out there really does know that Lucy is alive and where she is. And we just haven’t found them. Stranger things have happened.”
“Probably not, though,” I said.
“Probably not,” he agreed.
There wasn’t much else to say. I didn’t want to just leave it like this between us, though.
“It was good talking to you, Sam. It’s been too long. Maybe I’ll call you at home sometime soon when you have more time to talk. We’ll catch up on everything. I’d really like that.”
“That’s probably not a good idea for you to call me at home,” he replied.
A warning bell went off in my head.
“Why not?”
“I’m living with someone.”
“A roommate?”
“My fiancée.”
“You’re getting married?”
“Her name is Dede. I probably should have told you …”
“You sure work fast.”
“Well, Dede’s ten weeks pregnant.”
“Yep, you definitely work fast.”
We made some awkward small talk for a few more minutes, and then I got off the phone.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. I was pretty sure that I didn’t want to remarry him or anything. But I suppose that somewhere in the back of my mind I hoped we might get together again.
Now I knew that was never going to happen.
He was moving on with his life, having a child with another woman—and leaving me behind.
Somehow that depressed me.
CHAPTER 4
“YOU LOOK GOOD, Clare,” Anne Devlin said to me when she sat down in my office, and she sounded like she meant it.
“So do you,” I told her, even though she didn’t.
The truth was the years had taken a heavy toll. Her hair was thinning and gray. Her face looked wrinkled and tired. She seemed gaunt, too, almost frighteningly thin. The death of a loved one can do that. It not only kills the victim, but it destroys the family members around it, too. I could only imagine the horror of what this woman had been through sin
ce that dreadful morning.
“My, my, look at you,” she said. “They tell me you’re a real big shot here now.”
“I’m the news director.”
“The last time we talked you were just a reporter.”
“Well, you know what they say: Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. And those who can’t do either become TV executives.”
She smiled. We’d always had an easy relationship, the two of us. That was probably one of the reasons I got so close to her and her husband while I was covering Lucy’s disappearance for the Tribune. We felt comfortable together. I was never quite sure why, since the only thing we seemingly had in common was finding out what happened to Lucy.
Devlin said she still lived in New York City, in a studio in the Chelsea area. She got some money from her husband in the divorce settlement, and worked part-time as a paralegal. There were no men in her life anymore, she said—all that was in the past for her.
“Your husband got remarried,” I pointed out. “You could, too.”
“Oh, I’m long beyond that. I haven’t been with another man in years. I can’t even imagine being intimate with someone like that again. I mean, it’s been so long I wouldn’t even know what to do …”
“They pretty much all still do it the same way,” I said.
Maggie came into my office to join us. I introduced her to Anne Devlin. She was polite, but not overly friendly to Maggie. She clearly focused all her attention on the woman in the room that she knew—the woman that she trusted. That would be me. And why not? I’d been her friend, her rock, her shoulder to lean on from the very beginning of her nightmare.
“What about your personal life, Clare?” Devlin asked me now.
“Oh, that …”
“Are you married?
“Not at the moment.”
“But you were?”
“Uh … yes. Several times.”
“How old are you, Clare?”
“Forty-five.”
“What about you? Do you think you’ll ever get married again?”
I shrugged. “I have some commitment issues.”
