Birthday Girl

by Matthew Iden

  Julie shot Evan an over-the-shoulder look as they shuffled down the row.

  “I know,” he said. “Madhouse.”

  He smiled at her back, wondering how he’d gotten lucky enough to find a woman willing to enter a relationship with a ten-year-old already in the picture, to put up with Lydia and Graham when they came over for their custody visit, or to put up with him when he fell into a funk about how things had worked out.

  The memories still stung, the accusations Lydia had leveled at him, the hell she’d put him through, but all that mattered was that he’d been cleared. The last year had been rough going—the hearings especially so—but the problems finally seemed to have worked themselves out, and life was moving forward. He’d never be happy with Graham in his life in any capacity, but the guy wasn’t the worst thing that could’ve happened, and, he had to admit grudgingly, that as bad as Lydia had been as a wife, she was a doting mother.

  Julie took his hand and squeezed as they finally made it into the aisle. They headed up the ramp to the lobby with everyone else. “No moping, right?”

  He squeezed back. “No moping.”

  Jeremy

  Jeremy ducked under Ms. Parson’s outstretched arm, but he forgot about his hat and his social studies teacher clotheslined it clean off his head.

  “Mr. Weir, there is no running,” she called, giving him a hard look that normally made his stomach turn to water, but he was half-crazy with adrenaline and he just laughed as he sprinted down the narrow corridor created by the layers of stage curtain. She clapped her hands and called after him, “Your parents are waiting for you in the lobby!”

  He and Will and Trey horsed around for a while, but eventually enough teachers showed up to herd them into the music room to get changed out of their Thanksgiving costumes. There was still plenty of screaming and shouting, but he was definitely ready to lose the Pilgrim outfit. The material was something cheap and scratchy, and he already had a rash around his neck from where the high white collar had chafed.

  Despite how much he hated the costume and how much he’d hated being in the stupid play, he folded each piece of the outfit carefully, matching seams and smoothing out each wrinkle, then placed it in the bag so that nothing would crease. If he didn’t, his mom would freak, and that meant a lecture and maybe worse. It look so long, in fact, by the time he was changed, Will and Trey were done and he was the last one in the music room. He snatched up the garment bag and ran out.

  The hall rang with the distant noise of conversation filtering down from the lobby. He hurried toward the noise, past glass cases full of trophies and bulletin boards with blue-and-gold construction paper cutout letters cheering GO SAINTS! He glanced at the case as he hurried past—he was fascinated by the old pictures of football players with their slack faces and leather helmets—and dropped the bag. He cursed and knelt to grab it, scared that he’d undone all the good work to keep the costume wrinkle-free.

  “Jeremy?”

  Startled, he looked up. An older woman stood in front of him, smiling, with her hands on her hips. She was dressed like a teacher—long plaid dress and sweater top with a frilly collar, just like Ms. Parson—but he’d never seen her before.

  She arched an eyebrow. “It is Jeremy, isn’t it? Jeremy Weir?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said automatically. Mom didn’t like when children didn’t answer correctly.

  “Well, I’m glad I found you in all of this mess. Your father said you’d be back here,” she said. Her smile was genuine, but tight, as if it were hard for her to keep on her face. Wrinkles around her eyes reminded him of his mother, but where his mom’s eyes were gray, these were dark and intense, like buttons on a coat. “Apparently there wasn’t any parking out front, so he wants you to meet him in the bus lot.”

  “He does?”

  She ignored his question and pointed at the garment bag. “Did you fold your costume correctly?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Give it to me,” she ordered, holding out a hand. He surrendered it to her and she pulled the flaps up to take a look, then tsked and straightened out several of the folds. “It’ll do, I suppose. I’ll carry it for you.”

  “But . . .”

  The smile disappeared as she gave him a sharp look. “Do you always talk back to adults, Jeremy?”

  A flush crept up his neck and he shook his head.

  “Then we’d better get you to your father. Are you ready?”

  He looked over his shoulder, but there was no one else around. He turned to meet the stare of the woman, expectant and waiting.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Evan

  Evan rocked in place, dazed. He’d thought the inside of the theater was chaos, but nothing could prepare him for the scene in the lobby. Sounds piled on top of each other in so many layers that he wasn’t going deaf—he was going crazy. Children from three to thirteen were running across the lobby at track-meet speed. Buckles and bonnets littered the ground to join dropped gloves and winter hats and programs. Parents, many of whom had never been anywhere but the guidance office, hovered and chatted around the edges of the maelstrom.

  Out of the mess, Lydia appeared next to him, suddenly and without warning, and he had to smother the bitterness and anger that welled up every time he saw her. Trailing her, storklike and severe, was Graham in all his crew cut and Burberry glory.

  “Evan,” his former wife said. She’d cut her hair, he noticed, her beautiful black hair, something he’d asked her not to do while they’d been married. It was an angular pageboy cut that put her looks on par with Graham’s.

  “Lydia.” He pivoted a quarter turn. “You know Julie. Julie, this is Graham.”

  Julie was gracious as always, with a genuine smile that made Lydia’s grimace dull in comparison. He noted grudgingly that Graham, despite his Marine Corps demeanor, was pleasant and his smile sincere as he shook hands with Julie. Well, he thought, it’s not like they have a history.

  “Jeremy did well,” Julie said. Evan winced, waiting for Lydia to pounce. If it wasn’t a superlative nor a criticism . . .

  “I suppose.” Lydia pursed her lips. “He forgot one of his lines and threw off the poor thing after him.”

  “It’s an elementary school play,” Evan said. “I thought he did fine.”

  Lydia shrugged with a look that said, Of course you would, and turned to glance at the lobby. Threads of people were slowly making their way to the exits, although the lobby was still packed with kids, parents, and teachers.

  “You did a nice job on the blunderbuss, Evan,” Graham said with a smile.

  “Thanks,” he said cautiously, trying to decide if he should read anything into the comment. “I was just happy it didn’t break in half when Jeremy shot the turkey. It’s been a while since I messed with papier-mâché.”

  “Like thirty years, I guess?”

  Evan relaxed and offered a small smile. “Something like that.”

  “The only thing I learned in art class was how to eat paste,” Julie offered, and the three of them laughed.

  Lydia turned in a circle, a sour look on her face. She checked her watch. Her new diamond watch, Evan noticed.

  The conversation continued along safe lines—sports, traffic, work—with only the occasional barbed comment from Lydia and the riposte from Evan. He found himself laughing at one or two of Graham’s jokes and wondered how he ever thought the man was a humorless government hack. Divorce proceedings following hyperbolic charges of child abuse will do that, he thought. He might even have Graham to thank for Lydia finally admitting she’d exaggerated a few details here and there. As in, made them up.

  “Where is that boy?”

  Evan looked over at Lydia, startled, then around the lobby. Most of the crowd was gone, he saw with surprise. He’d had the impression it would never actually empty. “He’ll be along, Lydia. Relax.”

  “Don’t tell me to relax,” she snapped and just like that, the tension was there. Not just emotionally, but physi
cally: his neck seemed to fuse with his skull into a single plate. Julie’s hand appeared at the small of his back, tracing tiny circles.

  “He’s probably screwing around with Will or Trey.”

  “I’m sure that’s it,” Graham said, squeezing Lydia’s upper arm. “How often do kids get to mess around in school after dark?”

  “Why don’t we split up and look for him?” Julie suggested. “There are only these two main corridors leading from the lobby into the school. We’ll find him in ten minutes, I bet.”

  Graham led Lydia away to one of the halls before she could comment, while Evan and Julie took the other. Somewhat self-consciously, then more boldly, they pulled on doors and peeked down halls, calling Jeremy’s name. The burr of noise that had seemed so aggravating not long ago had faded, and the only sounds were the sharp clap of their footsteps on the tile floor and the echo off the institutional walls.

  “The music room?” Julie said in front of a set of double doors. “Jeremy said they’d be changing here, I thought.” But there was no one inside, just the smell of disinfectant.

  Evan felt the first prickle of uncertainty. Someone has to be last, he tried to tell himself, but the halls felt inert, abandoned. Their footsteps were hurried now, just under a jog.

  “Maybe Lydia and Graham found him first,” Julie said, trying to sound hopeful. “You know she’d take her time chastising the poor kid.”

  Evan didn’t answer. He’d heard a rattle like a chain hitting metal somewhere up ahead. They turned the corner to see a stooped man in gray-green overalls drawing a portable security fence, like a metal accordion, across the mouth of a set of glass double doors.

  “Excuse me!” Evan jogged up to the man, hating the high pitch of alarm in his voice. “Excuse me. I’m looking for my son. He was in the play tonight. About yea tall? Pale? Red hair and freckles?”

  The man looked at him from the other side of the gate like a prison guard. “Well, a woman came through with her son a little bit ago. Seemed a bit old for him, but that’s not for me to say. I tried to tell her she wasn’t supposed to come through here, you know, ’cause this entrance is for the principal and the teachers—hey!”

  Evan yanked the gate wide enough to squeeze through. The man yelled for him to stop, but Evan was already at the glass doors, throwing them open and sprinting out into the night. Cold lights shined onto an empty lot, and his breath steamed in white clouds. He turned to his right, just catching sight of a big boat of a car leaving the parking lot.

  “Jeremy? Jeremy!” He sprinted after the car, screaming his son’s name as the bright red brake lights turned the far corner of the school and disappeared.

  Jeremy

  “Where are we going?” His words came out slow, like he had a mouthful of peanut butter.

  “I told you,” the woman said patiently. “I’m taking you to your family.”

  Jeremy looked out of the window of the car, trying to concentrate, but the bright orange and white lights of the school seemed to dim and enlarge, shrink and grow, going from pinpoint stars to diffuse planets. His head lolled on top of his shoulders like a broken action figure.

  The lady was next to him, driving the car. They’d waited for a minute or two for Dad to show up, but nobody used the back lot except when they had gym class outside and the weather was nice. He was screwing up the courage to tell her he thought he should go inside when she’d reached into her handbag and offered him some hot chocolate from a thermos. It felt impolite to say no, he was cold, and besides she had his costume, which he couldn’t leave behind.

  He wasn’t even done with the cup before he started feeling strange, like his feet were floating skyward past his shoulders, while the rest of this body stayed still. He felt nauseous and giddy at the same time. The lady had led him by the elbow to an ugly old car like his grandmother drove, then buckled him into the front seat before climbing in herself. Fear tried to push itself off the mat—this was wrong, it shouldn’t be happening. But he was too tired, felt too weird to actually do anything.

  Dimly, he heard a yell from outside the car, but when he twisted around to look back, the seat belt got in the way. He fumbled with the buckle, but his hands were mitten-clumsy, and suddenly the woman had a hard-nailed hand across his chest and was pushing him into his seat.

  “Who are you? Where are you taking me?” he tried to ask, but his words were slurred, and he was having a hard time keeping his eyes open.

  She looked over at him and smiled once again. Her eyes were small stones in her head, dark and shining very bright. “No questions now. Face front. I have to concentrate on driving if I’m to get us home in one piece. You wouldn’t want us to have an accident, would you?”

  17

  Elliott

  “Do you think this is it?”

  Elliott glanced down at the patch of asphalt, partially shielded from the parking lot by a dumpster. A hundred cigarette butts, tan and white worms, littered the ground. “Yes.”

  “I mean, do you think she’ll talk to us?”

  “She could’ve said no.” Elliott glanced at Amy sidelong. Watched her bite her lip, nudge a flattened soda can with a foot. Put her hands in her pockets, take them out.

  He didn’t blame her for being nervous. After months of guesswork and planning, she was actually on the ground, about to talk to a person who might, if they were lucky, give her some answers. That kind of discovery brought with it all kinds of emotional turmoil.

  The night before, Amy had been almost inconsolable. Tears streaked her face. “I’ve looked for Lacey for almost a year, Elliott. Ten days isn’t going to make a difference.”

  “Of course it will,” he’d said, trying to believe it himself. “We just have to follow through on this information.”

  She cuffed at her nose. “I want to believe you, but . . .”

  “Look, eight years ago, I would’ve given anything to have ten more days.” He squeezed her arm clumsily. “We have to use what we’re given. With luck and some hard work, we might just make some headway.”

  She nodded.

  “And don’t just think about Lacey,” he continued. “This is about getting to the truth, about saving some other parent the same heartache you’ve been through.”

  “So what do we do?”

  He stood and started pacing, unable to sit any longer. The space was so small he had to turn every four steps. “Someone is out there grabbing kids and, eventually, killing them. We don’t know why or for what purpose, but the first psychologically significant thing is, obviously—”

  “The birthdays.”

  “Right. Which could stand for any number of things to this person. Until we know more, we have to go with the basics of what the event means socially for any of us, which is to say they are milestones, transitions, thresholds.”

  “Departures, too,” Amy said, straightening in her seat. “Leaving things behind. Childhood, adolescence, innocence.”

  “True,” Elliott said, impressed. “So, we have to build a psychological model of the person doing this as we move along—what birthdays mean to him—so that we figure out which social constructs make the most sense and help us fill in the remaining pieces.”

  “We have to find the connection, the thing in common,” Amy said, then gazed down at her stack of papers. “From the kids who fit the pattern.”

  “Exactly. And those children had families, families we need to talk to. What did these six kids or families or parents have in common? Did they know each other or share something we can tease out and examine? Talk to enough people, ask enough questions, and we’ll be able to build a profile that will get us to the next stage.”

  “Do we have time for that?”

  Elliott spread his hands. “We’ll have to make the time.”

  “That’s going to be . . . so hard for them. The parents, I mean.”

  “Yes. But it’s all we have.”

  Amy shook her head to clear it. After months of struggling in isolation, things were suddenly
moving fast. “What will we ask them?”

  “Most people want to talk if you give them the chance. And these parents, once they find out we’ve walked a mile in their shoes, might open up even sooner.”

  The first name on their list was a girl named Tammy Waters, abducted nearly four years before, her body found the previous December. A Janine Waters was listed in the case file as the mother, but a clumsy black marker smear covered where the woman’s address had been—one of the redactions Dave had mentioned. Luckily, Amy had spotted the name of her workplace in the summary, a Tire King on Wheaton Pike.

  A direct approach seemed better than a call, so they’d driven straight to the strip mall, where they found the sad little tire shop with its checkered flag motifs stuck between a Chinese takeout on one side and a check-cashing store on the other. From behind the counter, a wary-looking Janine had agreed to talk to them when they mentioned they were with the police, but—with a glance and a shrug at her manager—could only spare them fifteen minutes during her smoke break. The beady eyes of her boss followed them as they left.

  They turned as the steel security door opened from the inside with a ka-chunk. Janine, wearing a polyester smock with the Tire King logo and her name embroidered in yellow thread, poked her head through, then followed it out when she saw them standing there. She jammed an old plastic cup in the gap to keep the door from closing.

  She sized them up, then asked without preamble, “You got a smoke? I’m all out.”

  Amy shook her head, but Elliott pulled out a battered soft pack of Marlboros, shook one free, and offered it to her. He lit it and Janine took a deep, sucking drag, holding it for a long minute before tilting her head back and blowing the smoke sky-high. Balancing an elbow on her hip, she looked Elliott up and down, taking in the tattered army jacket, ragged shoes, and dirt-encrusted hands.