Edgar and Lucy

by Victor Lodato

  “Children run away,” the woman had replied, as if she were saying birds fly or dogs bark. Ultimately, Lucy had been told it was just a matter of waiting. “They often turn up in a few days.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “Then we’ll get concerned.”

  “I’m concerned now,” Lucy said. “I’m not gonna just sit on my ass and wait.”

  “Of course not. While we do our job, there’s a lot you can do, too.” At which point, the woman pushed forward a batch of stapled pages with a pale blue cover: For Parents of Missing Children: An Informational Overview. There was a teddy bear in the upper left corner and a bicycle in the upper right—childless relics floating like pieces of space junk.

  Lucy’s heart had caved. “Oh God.”

  “But think how easy he’ll be to spot,” the woman said, reaching across the table to pat Lucy’s hand. “Not every child is so distinctive.”

  * * *

  Tip number one: start in your own house. Look everywhere. Under all beds, tables, piles of laundry; inside storage chests, closets, car trunks. Check doghouses and large appliances; under raked leaves or shoveled snow, depending on the season. Don’t consider any place unlikely. If a child might fit, even if it seems a tight squeeze: LOOK!

  * * *

  The first night Edgar was gone, Lucy tore apart the house. In the backyard she looked under single leaves, as if Edgar had somehow managed to reduce himself to the size of a beetle. She went into his closet and sat on the floor.

  When they come, if they come to hurt you, they will look like anyone, you will think you know them. Sitting in the closet, Lucy regretted burning Frank’s letter, thinking it might contain clues. She barely checked her logic when it struck her that Frank might be responsible for Edgar’s disappearance.

  Later, Lucy discovered that the Virgin’s head was gone, as well as two tubes of sunscreen and the boy’s bottle of pills. There also seemed to be a photo missing from the top of the piano.

  “That’s good,” the woman at the police station said when Lucy mentioned the items. “That helps us rule out certain things.”

  “Don’t rule out anything,” Lucy replied. “What are you ruling out?”

  The woman paused. Never use the word abduction, her superior had told her. “Packed items,” she informed Lucy, “suggest premeditation.”

  “I already told you. He’s not the runaway type.”

  “You’d be surprised what goes on in kids’ minds. We’ll do another search by the school tomorrow. And we’d also like to take another look at your house. Ten-thirty okay?”

  “Fine,” said Lucy.

  “If you could have an article of Edgar’s clothing handy, that would be great. Preferably something unwashed.”

  “Dogs?” Lucy asked, her voice rising a notch. “Are you using dogs?”

  “Yes,” the woman said flatly. It wasn’t something she liked telling parents.

  “Bloodhounds?”

  “No,” the woman replied. “German shepherds.”

  * * *

  “German shepherds?” the butcher said. “Are you kidding me? German shepherds are crap, they need to use hounds.” Ron was now the self-appointed expert; he’d done some research, made some calls. Lucy was grateful for his help. In addition to everything he was doing to assist in the search, he’d found time to take care of a few things at the house. Already he’d fixed the front door, raked the yard, scraped and repainted the burnt wall in the old woman’s bedroom. Lucy had laid out drop cloths, and while Ron painted she’d put a number of Florence’s possessions into a box (the blackened wedding photo, the night-light with the angel and the bridge, the blue glass votive cups, the body of the Virgin). At first, she’d planned to throw these things out, but then she’d thought of Edgar. With a black marker she wrote Florence on the top of the box before setting it at the back of a closet. Afterwards, the butcher helped to rehang the old woman’s dresses the boy had piled on the bed.

  Of course, Lucy recognized that it might be unwise to let Ron spend time at the house. Edgar wasn’t a fan. What if the butcher was the reason the boy had run away? Even as Lucy thought this, she was conscious of the thought’s attempt to shift blame off herself. Still, the idea of Ron’s culpability offered some relief. There were only so many hours a day a person could condemn herself before she wanted to rip off her own head. Lucy drank a lot of beer.

  * * *

  Take good care of yourself. Your child needs you to be strong. As hard as it may be, force yourself to rest, eat nourishing food, and talk to someone about your tumultuous feelings. Don’t be afraid to ask others to take care of your physical or emotional needs.

  * * *

  Ron was still babbling about the dogs. “… sixty times the tracking power. Plus, a bloodhound can pick up the scent in the air as well as on the ground. So, say if Edgar was, like, carried or—”

  “Ron, stop—they’re using German shepherds. What am I supposed to do, pull some bloodhounds out of my ass?”

  “I’ll call ALFJ tomorrow,” he said. He’d been using a lot of acronyms lately. ACIM, NCIC, NCMEC. The police had issued a BOLO. Lucy found none of this comforting. One morning, on the pad by the phone, she’d seen the telephone number 1–800–THE–LOST.

  Feeling a wave of nausea, she dashed toward the bathroom.

  “Are you okay?” the butcher said.

  “Nerves,” said Lucy—still unaware, at this point, that she was pregnant.

  For the first few nights, Lucy slept no more than an hour or two. She found herself going through the dark house with a flashlight—as if a small beam trained on the blackness might be the best way to find something that was hiding. Turning on all the lights would only frighten hope, which seemed, to Lucy, a timid thing. When she took her daily walk between the house and Edgar’s school, the butcher sometimes came with her, hanging a handmade sign on the door of his shop. FAMILY EMERGENCY.

  * * *

  When the Ferryfield Police conducted its first search at 21 Cressida Drive, it had been cursory, little more than a formality—since, in the opinion of Rebecca Mann, the inexperienced search coordinator who’d interviewed the mother, the situation seemed nothing more than the obvious: a careless, self-involved parent and a sensitive, confused—now runaway—child. Very likely, the boy was still mourning the loss of his paternal grandmother—with whom, from all accounts but the mother’s, the child had been quite close. When Ms. Mann had visited the school, the boy’s science teacher, Daniel Levinson, had showed her a morbidly obsessive paper handed in by Edgar only days before his disappearance. The boy seemed to be fixated on dead people. Check cemetery, Ms. Mann mental-noted to herself. Is father buried there, too?

  The more Rebecca Mann thought about it, the more she was certain she’d find the boy in a day or two, with a tear-stained face and a melted candy bar in his pocket. A quiet child, as she herself had been, he was very likely acting out by hiding from his mother—if not at the cemetery, then perhaps in the wooded area behind the house. Nothing she’d learned at the boy’s school or from neighbors had led her to believe she was dealing with anything worse. Still, an eight-year-old runaway was a legitimate concern. She wasn’t taking any of this lightly. Rebecca Mann was a serious woman.

  When the mother had first brought in photos of the child, as requested, Ms. Mann assumed they were overexposed. She’d sighed audibly at what she considered yet another example of the mother’s inadequacy; but then she recalled the child’s congenital disorder. Now, Ms. Mann had one of the photos of the angelically pale boy on her bulletin board. She felt a surprising amount of affection for him. He was her first missing child.

  After several days, when Edgar still hadn’t been found, Ms. Mann jumped up the search and investigation. She held to her hunch that the mother lay at the root of the problem. A second, more penetrating excavation of 21 Cressida Drive, though revealing no evidence of foul play, did bring up some oddities. An electric dildo in the boy’s sock drawer; a sketch pad featuring
eccentric doodles, including flying teacups and numerous studies of men with beards. Ms. Mann picked up a pig-person made of modeling clay into which the child had stuck a tiny plastic sword. A search of the boy’s computer revealed only a single visit to a porn site—a surprisingly low number these days, even for an eight-year-old. Supersluts, Ms. Mann jotted into her notebook. Other recently visited pages included several offering recipes for meatballs; a “How to Draw Fruit” video tutorial; and the Wikipedia listing for Mount Vesuvius. An alien abduction website, GreenRabbit.com, overflowing with first-person accounts ranging from the horrific to the sublime, had received the most hits.

  “He seems like a very interesting young man,” Ms. Mann said later, to Lucy. And then, not flinching from her practiced smile: “It would be great if you could come down to the station this afternoon, and we can chat more. And maybe we’ll have you take a finger-flutter test.”

  “A what?” asked Lucy.

  “It’s what we use now instead of a polygraph. Just standard procedure.” A dildo, a stuck pig, the broken front door, now shoddily repaired with plywood—not to mention the collection of beer bottles scattered around the house and the fact that the mother couldn’t even remember what the child was wearing on the day of his disappearance. Ms. Mann had suspicions. “Why don’t you come to the station at four,” she said to Lucy.

  * * *

  Phone records had revealed one item of interest: a call made from the house’s landline to a temporary, disposable cell. Untraceable. The mother didn’t recognize the number—and when checked against the woman’s address book, as well as the grandmother’s, still no match was found. The number had been called only once; the night before the child’s disappearance.

  The boy didn’t have a cell. “How do you keep track of him?” Ms. Mann had asked, and Lucy had stammered, “Some-someone else used to do that. I’m just, uh … it was on my list of things to do.”

  The German shepherds, middle-aged sisters Nora and Dora, had found nothing. But now it seemed that Ms. Mann was going to have to initiate another sniff-search. The mother’s buttinski boyfriend had contacted a national organization for missing persons—and a few hours before Mrs. Fini’s scheduled polygraph, representatives of the national organization arrived like prophets: stepping out of a white van, wearing white sweatshirts, flanked by two enormous bloodhounds. The depressed-looking animals seemed ridiculous in white collars embossed with the same gold letters that emblazoned the representatives’ sweatshirts: ALFJ (A Light for Jimmy), named for the boy who’d made the organization famous, Jimmy Papadakis, a politician’s four-year-old son. He’d been found after a seventeen-week search, miraculously alive at the bottom of a drainage ditch (the ditch had contained a shallow pool of potable water and a sustaining scum of blue-green algae). Jimmy was now twenty-nine, a vegetarian, and a salaried spokesperson for the organization.

  Ms. Mann didn’t believe in miracles; she believed in a job well done. A job she could handle on her own. She was not, by nature, collaborative. Plus, ALFJ had a history of stirring up a storm, making a national circus out of small-town tragedies to promote its own name. Still, she agreed to the bloodhounds and sincerely hoped for the best. It had been three days already, and if they didn’t find Edgar soon, she knew—even if ALFJ liked to pretend otherwise—the light of hope dimmed considerably.

  * * *

  “It’s better if you don’t come with us, Mrs. Fini.”

  The bloodhounds were in the boy’s bedroom, sniffing one of his T-shirts. They sniffed his bed, his sneakers; they sniffed the pale blue carpet across which his tiny feet had rasped, countless times, to produce small sparks of electricity. The dogs became full of Edgar. He became their sole reality—a promise, a being undoubtedly wonderful to lick. The dogs now longed for him as much as anyone.

  On the lawn in front of the house they tried to pick up a scent they could follow. The creatures looked confused and kept returning to Edgar’s T-shirt in the hands of the houndsman. “Give them a minute,” he said. “They’re two of our best.”

  Hopeless, Ms. Mann thought—too much time had passed. But then one of the dogs stiffened, his nostrils flaring. It was obvious he’d picked up something in the air. “Oh my God,” Lucy cried. “Is that him?” She moved toward the empty space where both dogs were now sniffing.

  “Could be,” said the houndsman. And now the dogs were moving with visible purpose around the side of the house. “Yes, yes,” the man said. “We’ve got him.”

  Lucy faltered, and Ron held her.

  “Keep her here,” Ms. Mann said to the butcher.

  “No,” Lucy said, crying now, following the dogs, who were following Edgar, some part of him she couldn’t see.

  “Really,” Ms. Mann said with some force. “You need to stay here.”

  “Lucy,” Ron said, stopping her—and Ms. Mann, too, touched Lucy, adding with some gentleness: “You don’t want to confuse the dogs. Let them do their job. Okay?”

  In the yard, Ms. Mann watched the fierce determination of the animals as they circled three times a mound of dead tomato plants, then headed off into the trees at the back of the property. In the woods, the dogs barked and yanked the houndsman forward. Ms. Mann’s heart raced, pumping into her body equal doses of dread and hope. She didn’t want to fail—and as the animals moved across the ground, following an emptiness that had the grandeur of faith, the detective experienced a wave of gratitude toward the eerily sensitive beasts.

  Through the trees, over beds of fallen leaves; past scattered acorns, chestnuts, pinecones, rooms of light and shadow, and finally emerging again onto pavement. Onward the dogs went, pausing before a candy store, racing down sidewalks, around corners, across lawns, until they arrived at a supermarket, pulling the houndsman to the side of the building, to the back: a parking lot, a dumpster, before which the barking grew frantic. Ms. Mann herself climbed up and opened the container, a recycling bin full of flattened boxes. Immediately she saw the arm. “Oh no,” she said, turning on her flashlight to reveal the puffy sleeve of a red quilted jacket. “Gloves,” she cried to her assistant, who handed them over. She snapped them on and touched the arm of the jacket. Empty. She pulled it from between the boxes, along with a yellow shirt so small that she understood, finally, the preciousness of the child. She dug among the boxes, but there was no body.

  The dogs were crazy now. As Ms. Mann climbed down from the dumpster, the animals rushed at the clothing, breathing it in as if it were air at the surface of water. Reinvigorated by the child’s essence, they immediately set off again, racing across the parking lot until they came to the street, where they slowed, and then stopped. They looked left and then right—and finally upward, toward the sky. The dogs seemed confused, as if they’d lost not only Edgar, but themselves as well. “No, no,” Ms. Mann said. “Keep them going.”

  The houndsman shook his head. “Sorry. They’ve lost him.”

  Everyone, even the animals, breathed in silence, standing at this place where the boy ended. When the larger of the dogs walked in a circle and made a plaintive sound of distress, the smaller one turned and licked his companion’s face.

  * * *

  Lucy waited alone at the police station, having encouraged Ron to take care of his own business. While looking through some mug shots, she came across the young man who’d attacked her outside Slaphappy’s. She decided not to mention it, though. It would only make her look worse. Plus, it had nothing to do with what mattered—and that was her son.

  When she was finally shown into the conference room and presented with photos of the red jacket, the yellow shirt, she felt wobbly. Yes, they were Edgar’s. Yes, she was sure. She kept staring at the Polaroids, which made the clothes seem even more miniature than she knew they were. “Why can’t I see the actual clothing?” she asked.

  “We’re still examining them,” Ms. Mann said. “But a preliminary test has revealed no blood or semen. So that’s—”

  “Semen?” Lucy said, confused. “He’s eight.”<
br />
  “Yes,” Ms. Mann said, swallowing. “I meant, someone else’s…”

  “Oh God.” Lucy closed her eyes. “It’s too cold.”

  “What is?”

  “For him to be naked.”

  “Well, someone may have provided something.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s what we need to find out.”

  * * *

  Ms. Mann had done some research on Lucy Fini. Not pretty. Currently unemployed, husband a suicide, lived with her in-laws until they died, still lived in the same house. Numerous outstanding parking tickets, poor credit rating, possible alcoholic, arrested twice—once with her husband for public indecency (backseat coitus); once for shoplifting at fifteen, when she was still Lucy Bubko of West Mill, New Jersey. The same Lucy Bubko who’d had an abortion at seventeen and was married a year later. Not long before her husband’s death, she produced a son—the albinoid, now missing, Edgar.

  A hard road that, surprisingly, had not turned the woman into a hag. Certainly she was chunky, but she was also, Ms. Mann allowed, fingering the top button of her Ann Taylor oxford, what men called a hottie. The woman was clearly impulsive, reckless. And though there were no prior reports of Lucy Fini abusing the child, Mann did find a number of complaints filed by a teenaged Lucy Bubko against her own father, on behalf of her mother, Elena Bubko. (“He beats the fucking crap out of her,” the girl stated in one report. When questioned if she was beaten, too, the girl replied, “No fucking way.”) The officer that had taken the report noted that the girl was “foul-mouthed, dressed in a halter top, and possibly inebriated.” A call to the Bubko residence at the time of the complaint had resulted in the mother’s denial of her daughter’s allegations. No recommendation had been made to investigate further.

  And though it would be inaccurate to say that Ms. Mann had no sympathy for Lucy Bubko, the fact was: the boy was her priority now. What had to be faced was the sad truth: abuse breeds abuse. The detective had no evidence of this yet in the Fini case, but considering what she’d learned about such families in her training, she had a hunch about what was going on.