“Weren’t you watching him?” And there it was. He had wondered how long it would take her to come around to accusations. Less than a minute, record time.
Biting his lip to prevent a harsh comment, he responded, “I stepped in the back to repair that jewelry box—you know, those hinges? The one you asked me to fix because no one would buy it like it was.”
Jeannie turned from the tin sea trunk she was peering into. “You shouldn’t leave him out here by himself; you know how he gets into trouble.” She let the lid slam down and continued on to the 1920s pine dresser.
“It was just for a moment. I wanted to get the wood filler on it before we closed up for the night and there was no one here. Benny always listens to me when I tell him to stay put.”
Jeannie snorted but didn’t pursue the matter. “Did he go outside?”
“Bernard didn’t see him.” Ben slid the heavy oak chair back into the leg well of the desk he had been checking.
“That man is blind to anything beyond his awnings, you know that.” She opened and slammed every drawer in the dresser, even though they were entirely too small to fit a five year old boy.
Losing patience with her sniping, Ben slammed the next chair under its desk. “I didn’t see him out there. I’ll take a walk down to the park, just to be sure. I think you should call the police.” By now they were opening the same pieces of furniture for the third time, just in case. The store was not that big and there were not that many pieces of furniture for a young boy to hide behind. And he needed to get away from the anger radiating from his wife. She was acting like he wasn’t worried at all, like he didn’t care that his son was missing.
Jeannie closed the brass-bound hope chest she had been looking in and held her hand out for the cordless phone still in Ben’s hand. “Go.”
Ben jogged out the door and turned to the little park at the end of the street. Benny liked to come and terrorize the squirrels and pigeons that occupied the unkempt green space, though he had always been told to never leave the store by himself. The park was empty except for a pair of teenagers necking on a bench. When he asked them if they’d seen his son, they only looked annoyed at being interrupted but promised to keep an eye out for him. But as soon as he turned away, they went right on back to swooning at each other.
His wife was still on the phone with the operator. “Yes, yes, we’ve looked everywhere.” She covered the phone with her hand, mouthing, They’ve sent someone out. Anything? Ben shook his head. “My husband just came back in. He says Benny’s not at the park or on the street.”
A patrol car pulled up in front of their store and two officers climbed out. They conferred for a moment and then came into the store.
Jeannie disconnected the phone with a “Thanks, they’re here,” but clung to it instead of putting it back on its charger.
The shorter of the two officers addressed Jeannie. “I understand your son is missing?”
“Yes, thank you for coming. We can’t find him anywhere.” She turned to Ben and slipped under his arm. At least her anger seemed spent for now, taken over almost entirely by her worry. He pulled her close, taking as much comfort from the contact as she did.
The officers asked all the questions he was used to hearing from the cop dramas on TV—did they have a recent photo, how long had he been gone—and Ben answered them woodenly as Jeannie ran for a picture. It didn’t seem real that those TV cops had stepped into his world now, that the questions actually were meant for him.
Jeannie came clattering back down the stairs, a wooden picture frame in her hands. She was struggling to get the back off the frame as she came down and nearly missed the last step, stumbling into the shop. “Here, this was from soccer this spring. He’s grown a half inch since then.”
The shorter officer passed the photo to the taller one. “That’s fine. Does he have any unique identifiers right now? Cuts, scrapes? Missing teeth?”
“No, no, he got a cast taken off a month ago now. He’d broken his arm on the jungle gym at school.” Jeannie moved back to lean against her husband.
Ben’s mind was only half there, the other half was a mess of questions, like, had he seen anyone on the sidewalk before going back to work on the box, had he heard the front bell chime? He just couldn’t remember, and the harder he pushed at the recent memories, the more indistinct they seemed to become.
“The right or left arm, ma’am?”
“Right.”
“Thank you.” The taller officer had moved off to speak into his radio while the shorter one continued to talk with them. “We’re going to call in a few more officers to help us look around the neighborhood while my partner and I start looking around here and your apartment; is that alright?”
Of course it was okay, why wouldn’t it be okay? If the officers found him sleeping under his bed or hiding in the pantry, Ben would be ecstatic. The men wasted more time asking questions about security cameras (there were none) and giving Ben and Jeannie instructions about calling their friends before starting their search. The taller one started in the store while the shorter one headed up to the apartment.
Jeannie turned and buried her head in Ben’s shoulder, shaking more than ever. “Ben, where do you think he is?”
“I don’t know, but we’ll find him. I promise.” Ben steered her to the stool behind the counter and sat her down, handing her the phone. “Start calling our friends like the officers asked.”
She clutched at his arm as he moved away. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to go see if there is anything else I can do to help. I have to do something. I feel like I’m going to explode if I just sit here.” When she didn’t let go, he added, “I’ll be right back. Call.” He gently removed her hand and headed over to talk with the tall officer. “Officer, are you sure there isn’t anything I can do? Go check other places or something?”
The taller man simply looked at him for a moment, and Ben felt as though all his faults were laid bare in that moment, the officer passing judgment on him as a man and a father and finding him wanting. “No. You need to stay here, just in case. I’ll let you know if there is anything else you can do. For now, go help your wife call your son’s friends.”
Ben seethed at the officer’s dismissal as he turned away and resumed his search. Jeannie’s phone was the one with all of Benny’s friends’ numbers programmed into it, so it was no use trying to help Jeannie call around. Instead, he paced around the shop, straightening the antiques, brushing dust off of desktops and shelves. It was not what he wanted to be doing, but at least it kept him moving. As the search team started to arrive, Ben moved to the back workshop to get out of the way since they made it clear he wasn’t going to be allowed to join them. His wife was still on the phone with one of her church friends it sounded like.
Their friends started arriving ten minutes later and were quickly absorbed into the search force. Everyone was given a copy of Benny’s photo, which an officer had taken to the copy center down the street earlier. They dispersed to their respective search quadrants, milling in and out all evening and well into the night.
Every time the door opened, Ben’s head shot up and he started to head over. When he realized it was just another searcher coming in for a break or new assignment, he settled back in behind the counter, his mind running over and over the five minutes before Benny had vanished, trying to tell if there was anything at all that might help the search effort.
All night, instead of being allowed to go out with the search teams as he wanted, Ben kept himself busy, making coffee, tea, and putting out snacks to keep everyone fortified. Bernard brought some party platters over from the grocery that had been meant for a customer the next day. When asked, he shrugged and simply said he’d make others. At its peak, the search force numbered fifty officers and volunteers combing the Savannah streets around the store, but they fo
und nothing. Five separate officers searched the apartment and store and declared definitively that the boy was not hiding there. Around two in the morning, the police officers called the volunteers in and told them to go home and rest. Some of them had been on their feet for nearly seven hours. Through all of it, Ben hovered at the side of the men with the walkie talkies, straining to overhear the crackling conversations, his heart leaping at each possible suggestion of a sighting. He forced coffee and finger sandwiches into the hands of people he swore he knew but couldn’t recognize through the pity on their faces.
Jeannie thanked them as they left and then sat in a chair by the door, staring out into the dark streets. Ben approached the two officers who had led things all night. “What do we do now?”
“We’ve put in a call to a detective, he should be here soon, and they’re going to release an Amber Alert on the morning news.”
“Isn’t there something more we can do now? Someone else we can call?”
“If we had caught a single whiff of your son, maybe, but we haven’t found anything. Nobody saw anything. There are no cameras on this street that can see your store. We need to stop and regroup. Detective O’Connor is a good man; he’s found a lot of missing people. Just hold tight a little longer.”
Ben ferried empty platters and cups and mugs back up to their apartment, ignoring Jeannie’s silent stare every time he came back down the stairs. The vacancy of it was what frightened him; he knew how to handle her when she was screaming mad and when she became neurotic, but he had no idea how to approach this silent incarnation of his wife.
The detective, when he finally arrived, was a brisk man and going grey, but his eyes were alert and focused despite the late hour. “I know you’ve gone through this more times than you’ve cared to today, but please, one more time, what happened this afternoon?”
Ben shifted impatiently and Jeannie rubbed her hands over her face; they were desperately tired, but Ben knew that neither of them were going to be able to sleep anytime soon. So Ben retold the beginning of the story while Jeannie summarized the evening’s search efforts.
She finished and briskly wiped a tear off her cheek. Not the first that evening. “He’s only five, Detective. Where could he be?”
“I don’t know, but it’s my job to find out. Now, I want the two of you to go to bed tonight. Try and get some sleep. I know it sounds hard, but you’re probably so exhausted at this point that you’ll fall asleep as soon as you hit the bed. We’ll start fresh in the morning. Give me a call when you think you’ll be up to answering some questions.”
Ben stood and offered his hand. “Thanks, Detective. Will do.”
The detective left and Ben and Jeannie headed toward bed. They lay there silently, barely touching. The detective’s prediction held true and Ben fell asleep quickly, though he kept waking up all night convinced Benny was calling from his room for a glass of water or to go to the bathroom. His boy was terrified of getting out of his bed at night. There were monsters underneath that would grab his ankles and haul him away.
At seven, Ben sat up, at first unable to figure out what was wrong, what was missing. Jeannie wasn’t beside him, and he padded down the hall to find her curled up, still fast asleep, in Benny’s too-short bed. His chest felt tight, and he had a moment of irrational jealousy for his son’s bed, the fact that it could offer his wife some sort of comfort while he could not.
He closed the door, careful not to wake her, and made himself some coffee and toast and called the detective. A recording picked up and Ben left a message, simply saying that he was up and ready to get to work whenever the detective was.
Jeannie came out to the kitchen a half hour later, giving Ben a tight smile, but not saying much. She pulled out the SpongeBob SquarePants bowl and filled it with Benny’s favorite cereal, without milk, and sat down at the table, poking at it with a spoon and only occasionally taking a bite.
Detective O’Connor rang their bell at nine sharp and Ben hurried down to let him in. Jeannie placed three mugs, creamer, and sugar on the table, still without saying anything. The detective thanked her.
Ben watched his wife putter, wishing she’d say something, anything really, even if it was more recriminations aimed at him. He finally turned to the detective. “Anything?”
“Not yet. It’s only a matter of time. I have uniforms out canvassing a four-block radius. Someone had to have seen something, so we’re checking everything. Cameras on ATMs, store cameras, every last thing we can think of. We have pictures circulating on the news every fifteen minutes, and the tip lines have been open since late last night. We’re moving as fast as we can, but we don’t really have much to go on.” The second pot of coffee finished brewing and Jeannie filled the mugs. “I was hoping we could start today with a more comprehensive history of you and your family.”
“Absolutely. Honey, come sit down, please.” She shook her head and kept washing the dishes from all of the volunteers the night before.
Ben watched the detective watch Jeannie. “It’s alright. I understand the urge to keep doing normal things. All I ask is if you think of something while I’m asking the questions that you speak up.” He got a shrug in return. “We already have all of the basics of what happened. Let’s go over his favorite places to go, in case we forgot any yesterday.”
Ben waited for his wife to speak, but when she didn’t, he responded, “He loves the zoo and that corner park. He always wants to go to McDonald’s, you know the one with the great big play area on Montgomery?” The detective nodded and made a brief note in his ragged notepad. Ben noticed that most of the book was already full. How many of those notes were about children? How many were still missing? “We did his last birthday there.”
“Anywhere else in particular?”
Again, Ben waited to see if Jeannie would say anything before answering. “Not really, he likes being in the store and at school, I guess.”
Another small notation in the account ledger of the missing. “Did he ever have any conflicts with the kids at school?”
Ben couldn’t remember, but he thought he would know if anyone had been picking on his son. He was as transparent as a window when something was bothering him. “No, he’s a great kid, got along with just about everybody.”
Detective O’Connor didn’t write anything down about school. “Just about?”
“All kids get into scrapes on the playground, tussles over balls or the like. Nothing major though, no problem cases.” Ben vividly remembered convincing Benny to sit still while he applied hydrogen peroxide to his elbow from a particularly rough spill. Ben had to tell him that even stormtroopers in Star Wars were man enough to endure the sting of the foaming liquid. After that he had behaved: stormtroopers were the pinnacle of manliness that month.
“Alright. Anybody ever show an undue interest in your son?”
Ben wrenched his mind back to the conversation. “Undue interest?”
The detective gestured vaguely with one hand. “Men in the park coming up repeatedly, customers who paid too much attention to the boy.”
Ben tried to think back. All he could remember was a faceless mass and the occasional encounter with a friend. “I never saw anything. Honey? Did you?”
Again, all the men got was a head shake. Ben opened his mouth to say something about her taking an active interest in the conversation but thought better of it. On any other day that would have brought her full attention to bear, mainly on berating him, but he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t chase her off now.
“Ben, how was your son at home? Any trouble?” The little notebook was nearly full at that point. How many pages did each child get?
“What? No. He is a good kid.” Except for his constant pestering for a puppy. When he came back, they would have to remedy that. A small one that wouldn’t break things in the store. Or chew on things. He thought he knew where the county
shelter was.
“How was discipline in the house? Strict?”
“Well, yes, I guess. He doesn’t get away with things if that’s what you’re asking. He knows the rules.” First rule, listen to your parents. Second rule, don’t talk to strangers. Had Benny listened to those two?
The detective had filled a page of notes and turned to the back of the sheet. “How did you enforce them?”
Ben shrugged. “Oh, time-outs, no dessert, the like.”
“You never hit him?”
A bowl shattered and Jeannie leaned hard against the sink. A cut on her wrist formed a slender line of blood, which began to drip onto the floor, but she didn’t raise her voice. “Never.” Ben started from his chair and grabbed a towel to press to his wife’s wound, though the detective didn’t move.
“I have to ask these questions, ma’am. You’d be surprised by the number of young kids that run away from home because they feel they have been treated unfairly.” Detective O’Connor didn’t meet her gaze, instead he focused on his full coffee cup, which he turned in circles on the table. “Forgive me if what I ask seems harsh. It’s necessary.”
Jeannie didn’t seem to notice Ben’s attentions. “This is a good house. We’re good people, Detective O’Connor.”
“By all accounts, you are. But your husband was the last one to see your son, Mrs. Grant, and we have to rule out all possibilities.”
Ben rooted through the junk drawer for the box of Band-Aids and antibacterial ointment while the detective and his wife stared each other down. Finally Jeannie looked down at her arm as Ben adhered the bandage. She ran her fingers over the spot, as if noticing the pain for the first time.
“We’re a good family,” she whispered. She wandered back toward the bedrooms, and Ben had the unsettling feeling that he would find her curled back up in Benny’s bed when he went to look for her later.
“Do you have any more questions, Detective?”
“No, not for now, thank you. You should look after your wife; she’s taking this hard.”
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