by Susan Shreve
“What you do know is your sister and you can be very helpful with that.”
“How do you mean?” Teddy asked.
“So let’s say Jess is in the car with the kidnapper, maybe with the baby, maybe not. But with the person who kidnapped the baby.”
“She’s probably blindfolded so she won’t be able to identify the kidnappers,” Teddy said. “And Baby Ruby will be crying her head off. That’s the kind of baby she is.”
There was traffic, surprising for the middle of the night, and Teddy had a sense that it was coming on morning. Something eerie about the night — damp, cloudy, no stars in sight, a pale, ghostly sliver of moon on the horizon. The cars seemed to be floating down the highway.
“Jess would be practical,” Teddy said. “In an emergency, she’s calm, like my dad, who goes into slow motion when there’s a problem. But not slow motion without thinking. She will be trying to put things together. She’ll be afraid, but not scared to death.”
“That’s good,” Detective Van Slyde said. “No hysterics. Hysterics get in the way of common sense.”
A disembodied voice coming from the police radio filled the inside of the car.
“Van Slyde?”
“Here,” he said.
“Where are you?”
“Just by Pacific Palisades.”
“Do you have a description of the baby?”
“Did you find her?” Teddy asked, her heart beating in her throat.
“We just need a detailed description.”
Van Slyde reached over and touched Teddy’s arm.
“Repeat the description for the officer.”
“She’s four months old, with red-and-yellow hair, sort of golden, in circles around her head, like it’s going to be curly. And she has a dimple on the right side of her mouth and a little brown birthmark in the middle of her forehead, sort of beigy brown in the shape of a pear, and her feet, her little feet are skinny and long for a baby. So are her hands. And, I almost forgot, she has webbed toes, two of them webbed together on her right foot.”
“Good,” Detective Van Slyde said.
“Thank you,” the voice said. There was a pause and then he went on.
“Paul?”
“Yes.”
“Keep heading north.”
So his name was Paul. Detective Paul Van Slyde.
“You should know we had a call from Venice Beach,” the voice on the radio said. “A neighbor reported that a car pulled up to a house and a woman, big, athletic woman, in a long skirt and a halter top, came out the back door of her place with a baby and slid the baby through the car window of a stopped car that had a man in the driver’s seat.”
“Okay,” Van Slyde said.
“The neighbor called the police because he’d heard the alert about the baby on the radio.”
“Interesting.”
“Someone has been dispatched to the address of the neighbor to check it out.”
“Long shot, but maybe,” Van Slyde said.
“Now what?” Teddy asked.
“Now we’re just about at the place where the phone was found, so if we head up the highway another half mile, that’s the spot.”
“Then we’ll go to Venice Beach?”
“I’m just following instincts and waiting for more word from the station.”
He pulled off the highway, stopped the car, and got out.
“This is where they found your sister’s cell phone,” he said. “Don’t get out.”
He walked up and down the grass strip, where another police car was parked. Teddy watched him, watched him talk to another officer for a second, watched him stop, kneel down on his haunches observing the traffic, and then get back in the police car.
“What did you see?” Teddy asked.
“Nothing,” he replied. “I was watching the traffic to see how fast it was going and whether a phone thrown from a window at that speed would have shattered, or whether they might have slowed down or even pulled over to the side of the road and dropped the phone, which then hit the asphalt and bounced away off the road.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“Probably not. It’s a way of thinking.”
“I know about that way of thinking,” Teddy said. “We had this game.”
“You told me.”
“I’m glad we’re going to the house where the woman put a baby in the car.”
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Isn’t it strange to slip a baby through a half-opened window like that?”
“We don’t know who was in the car.”
“I just want to think that this is important.”
Detective Van Slyde turned on the engine but didn’t immediately pull back onto the highway. His hands on the steering wheel, his eyes checked the rearview mirror.
“Now?” Teddy asked. “Venice Beach?”
“Not yet,” he said, pulling back onto the highway, into the middle lane, accelerating and heading north.
“So?”
“So the car was headed north. Otherwise, we would not have found the phone on the right side of the road, correct?”
“Correct.”
Teddy felt a shiver of excitement.
“And your sister was in the car. We must assume she was in the car or they wouldn’t have headed north with just her cell phone, right?”
“I think so.”
“So I’m guessing they were traveling this road on their way north out of Los Angeles or maybe planning to go inland. With your sister or not.”
“It’s been a while since they found the phone, right?” Teddy asked.
“If they are ahead of us, that’s about an hour ahead, and it’s possible, if they are driving fast, they might have driven a long way.”
“Or they could have decided that they didn’t want Jess in the car any longer and dumped her.”
“Why would they dump her since she could identify them?”
“Not if she was blindfolded.” Teddy drew her knees up and rested her chin. “Except …” she began.
“Except,” Detective Van Slyde said. “If it was the same man she had seen in the corridor on the sixth floor, then she could already identify them.”
“Right. But maybe he wanted to dump her and then drive inland out of town. Maybe Baby Ruby was in the trunk of the car.”
“Let’s hope not,” Detective Van Slyde said.
Ahead on the highway, to the right, there was a lot of commotion: two police cars, a truck pulled over to the side of the road, people standing just off the asphalt, sirens in the far distance.
“Ambulance,” Van Slyde said.
“Is it an accident?”
“Looks that way.”
They drove up to the back of a crowd of people, cars, a fire truck, the two police cars, and more on the way. The sound of the ambulance came closer.
Detective Van Slyde pulled the car to a stop.
“I don’t want to look,” Teddy said. “I’ll throw up.”
“Good idea to stay in the car, then,” he said. “I’ll only be a minute.”
He got out of the car and headed to the crowd. Teddy, her head down, closed her eyes and waited.
Waited and waited but Van Slyde did not come back. The ambulance arrived. Two men got out and headed just beyond her line of vision. Policemen gathered in a huddle but Teddy couldn’t make out what it was they were watching. Then the men from the ambulance returned, opened the back door, and took out a stretcher.
Behind them, Teddy saw Paul Van Slyde walking back toward the car.
She was huddled in the front seat when he opened the car door.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
She nodded.
“It’s not an accident,” he said. “Come with me.”
Jess lay very still, twisting her wrists back and forth. If she was calm, she thought, if she didn’t permit herself to be so frantic, then maybe she could slowly get free. But only if she didn’t get impatient.
The rope
was thin, not twine but more like wire, and would not budge. On her stomach, she tossed her head back and forth against the ground, hoping to dislodge the blindfold. It felt tight on her head but it was cloth, soft cloth, so she ought to be able to move it.
The gray light of early dawn slipped in under the cloth and Jess was conscious of where she was, what was around her: a large field with high grass, a big sky, the highway. Almost as if she could actually see. There were a lot of cars on the highway. The speed of traffic drowned out any other sound. She stopped struggling and lay very still. Thinking. That was what she used to do when she played SLEUTH with Teddy. Think and imagine what terrible crime might have taken place and how had it happened and who was responsible.
Where had Angel and Jack gone when they dropped her? Did they kidnap Baby Ruby as she certainly believed they had done? Or had the coincidence of the small man coming toward room 618 and the stealing of Baby Ruby been only a coincidence? If Angel and Jack were the ones who had taken Ruby, where was the baby? At Angel’s sister’s house or lost or even in the car with Jess? If she had been in the car, why hadn’t Jess heard her whimpering?
She was becoming less desperate.
She thought about what she now knew that she had not known before Jack had dragged her into the car.
What got said between Angel and Jack while Jess was tied up in the car had to do with babies. There was the sister, Maria, who asked to be paid a lot of money for a favor. A thousand dollars. And what was the favor?
There was Angel weeping and weeping. Something about a baby and the cemetery.
If only she could see them face-to-face and tell them how sorry she was about what happened.
“I’m so sorry for whatever terrible thing happened to you,” she would say to Angel.
Then she would ask them where Baby Ruby had been taken.
Would they tell Jess? Or were they going to ask for money to give the baby back?
Jess was beginning to get sleepy when she heard the scream of brakes. A car pulled up very close to where she was lying.
A door slammed.
“Jake?”
It was a man’s voice.
“I was right, Jake,” he went on. “It’s a body.”
“Coming!” another man said. Probably Jake.
“A girl,” the first man said. “Tied up. She isn’t dead.”
“Well, I’ll be darned, Buddy,” the man, Jake, said softly.
“A girl.”
“Right here near the highway for anyone to see her.”
Buddy leaned down and untied the blindfold, took out the rag stuffed into Jess’s mouth, almost halfway down her throat. Her mouth was as dry as sandpaper.
She could actually see.
The men were young, maybe twenty, maybe a little older, both bearded with longish hair, one dark, the other — the man called Jake — very blond with a short, square beard and glasses. They smelled of alcohol.
Jake untied the ropes around her ankles and wrists and lifted her to her feet.
“Jeez,” he said. “You’re wobbly. How long have you been tied up?”
“Long,” Jess said. “All night. The ties were really tight.”
The dark-haired scruffy man, Buddy, stood back and looked at Jess.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Jess nodded.
“Can you talk?”
Her tongue seemed to have expanded to fill her mouth.
“I think I can.” She was tentative.
“So what happened?”
She spoke slowly, as if she had a wad of cotton in her mouth, but she could speak.
“I was tied up and blindfolded and driven around in a car by two people who I’d seen before but didn’t know.”
“Just tied up for no particular reason and left on the edge of the highway?”
“There was a reason,” she said. “I was babysitting and Ruby was on the floor of our hotel room and I went into the bathroom to try on my sister’s wedding dress and then someone kidnapped my baby niece.”
“That’s a lot of information,” Jake said.
“So they kidnapped you?” Buddy said.
“More or less.”
“Call the police,” Jake said.
“Are you crazy, Jake? We’ve been drinking. We’ll be arrested.”
“This is more important, Buddy. Just call them.”
“Where do I tell them we are?”
“About a mile south of Pacific Palisades on the right shoulder going north. Tell them we have this kid.”
“How old are you?” Buddy asked.
“Twelve.”
“And you live around here?”
“I live in Larchmont, New York.”
“Larchmont, New York. Never heard of it.”
The dark-haired man put his hand on her shoulder and led her to their truck, opened the door, and lifted her into the passenger seat. “You must be hungry,” he said.
“Sort of.”
“All we have is cashews and M&M’s.”
“Beer!”
“Make sense, Jake. Don’t bring up the beer.”
“Were you scared?” Buddy asked.
“A little,” she said. “Could I have the cashews?”
Jake bit the package of cashews with his teeth, turned Jess’s hand over, and poured cashews into her palm.
“You’re a pretty chill girl,” Buddy said. “I’m impressed.”
“How long do you think you’ve been here?” Jake asked.
“Not very long. The man lifted me out of the car. He was kind of nice.”
“Real nice,” Jake said. “Tie you up, blindfold you, gag you. A really great guy.”
“He said ‘Sorry, kid’ when he left, like he meant it. That’s what I mean by nice.”
“So we’re calling the police, is that okay?”
“It’s okay. They already know about Baby Ruby.”
Buddy dialed 911.
Just short of Pacific Palisades going north, he told them.
“So we’ll cool our heels and the emergency teams should be here soon.”
The sirens, off in the distance, were coming from the south and the north, screaming into the sunrise.
Jess put her hands over her ears.
“You’re a big deal,” Jake said. “Listen to that noise. They’ve sent the whole Los Angeles police force. Ambulances, fire engines, probably the bomb squad out to get you. One little girl with that much power.”
Jess’s eyes filled with tears.
There were the flashing lights of an ambulance, two police cars, and then more coming from the north, and a fire engine, although there was no fire. And then the police, and the ambulance driver and the paramedic, and a fireman hopping out of the front seat, all converging on the truck belonging to Jake and Buddy, and on Jess O’Fines sitting in the passenger seat, her hands folded in her lap, tears pouring down her cheeks.
“It’s the girl who disappeared. The one who’d been watching the baby,” one officer said. “Your name?” he asked.
“Jess O’Fines.”
“And what are you doing here?”
Jess told him the story as the other officers gathered around, a crowd around her — “like you’re famous,” Jake said, patting her on the back.
“And these gentlemen?”
“They saved me,” Jess said.
“Jake Brown.”
“Buddy Brown. We’re brothers and we were driving up to Topanga and saw this body of a girl lying so close to the highway we could see her, so we stopped.”
“And took off my blindfold and untied the rope around my legs and wrists and took out the gag in my mouth.”
“And do you know who did this to you?”
“I do,” Jess said.
“And you could identify them?”
“I could identify the man and I am sure I know the woman although I didn’t see her when the man dragged me into the car and tied me up,” she said. “I had seen her earlier at the hotel. She had this rosemary smell.”
“Rosemary?”
Jess nodded. “That’s how I knew it was her.”
He shrugged and she told him about the woman crouched in the corner of the sixth-floor linen closet of the Brambles Hotel and how she smelled of rosemary, just like the woman smelling of rosemary in the backseat of the car she had been in.
“We have the background of this story,” the officer who was questioning Jess said to the others who had gathered around. “A baby girl was taken from the Brambles Hotel last night while this young lady was babysitting her. Detective Van Slyde in my station is on this case.”
“It was my fault,” Jess said. “Also, you should know that the man and the woman in the car were not unkind. When the man took me out of the car and put me on the ground, he said ‘Sorry, kid,’ as if he were really sorry.”
Light was beginning to spread over the horizon, coming on morning, the day of Whee’s wedding, the day for which the O’Fineses had been waiting all year.
And now this.
She could not imagine what was happening with her family right now. Where they were and what they were saying about Jess and whether they would ever want to see her again in their lives.
“Hey, Paul,” the officer taking notes called out and then he turned to Jess.
“Here comes Van Slyde,” he said, “and he’s probably got something to tell us.”
Jess looked across the field where the highway met the high grasses.
Her breath caught in her throat.
It was Teddy. Teddy coming through the dawn light in Jess’s direction.
Jess and Teddy climbed into the back of Van Slyde’s patrol car and held hands. Neither spoke.
“I thought you might be dead,” Teddy said finally.
“I didn’t think — I mean most of the time I didn’t think that something awful would happen to me.”
“Was it incredibly scary?”
“Being tied up, especially with a gag, was scary. But I’m okay. I’m pretty much fine.”
“Fine, I bet.” Teddy threw her arms around her sister. “So tell me everything.”
And Jess did, starting at the beginning when she was following Angel and got pulled inside the car.
Detective Van Slyde did a U-turn heading south.
“Okay, girls. We’re headed to Venice Beach,” he said. “I don’t have time to take you to Santa Monica and Jess especially can help us on this. At least you heard the voices of the kidnappers and can identify them.”
