The Thief of All Light

by Bernard Schaffer

  Carrie let herself into the house, calling out, “Papi, it’s me.”

  “Oh,” he said, sounding happy. “Come in, come in. Are you hungry?”

  She opened the refrigerator and frowned. The shelves held nothing but blocks of half-eaten cheese, a bag of sliced pepperoni, and several tomatoes. The bottom two shelves were stacked with beer. “It’s not like you have anything to eat anyway, so I guess not,” she said.

  He waved for her to come into the living room. “I will order anything you want. Just tell me. You want a pizza?”

  “Are you hungry?” She looked him over like a school nurse inspecting the dirty kid in class. His skin was sallow, and his cheeks sagged under dark circles. “It doesn’t look like you’re eating much.”

  He patted his stomach and said, “I eat all day. Nothing but health food.” He shifted in his chair to turn toward her, careful not to spill his drink. “So what brings you by? Everything okay in the police world? You shoot anybody today?”

  “Not today.” She looked down at her pocket, buzzing and lighting up with an incoming call, but ignored it.

  “You need to get that?”

  “Nope,” Carrie said, keeping her eyes fixed on Rosendo.

  “Is it a boy?” he said, eyes sparkling.

  That made her laugh. “Not likely. Unless it’s someone from work.”

  “You stay away from those police officers,” Rosendo said. “I know all about men in uniform. We called them pigs back when I was young, because that is how they act. Trust me.”

  “People call us pigs now too, Papi,” she said.

  “These people today,” he said, waving his hand. “They are just crazies. You remember what I tell you. Shoot first, ask questions later. They see you are a police officer and all they do is try to kill you. This place is worse than Cuba now, even back during the bad times. So listen to me, okay? You see anyone that looks dangerous, you just pull out your gun and take care of business. If anyone asks why you did it, you tell them I said to. No problem.”

  “Okay,” Carrie said, chuckling.

  “Good. Now, how about some pizza?”

  “I’m okay, really. I had a long day and have to be back in tomorrow, but I wanted to stop in and check on you.”

  “I’m good. I don’t see you enough, though. You working too much. Take tomorrow off. Tell them I said so.”

  “All right, I’ll tell them you said so,” she said, getting up from the couch. She leaned over her father and wrapped her arms around him, kissing him on the side of his face. “You need to shave.”

  “I need a haircut, too. You think you can bring your scissors over tomorrow? Otherwise I have to pay the girl twenty dollars, and she don’t cut it as good as you.”

  “I just told you I have to work tomorrow.”

  “Oh, right, right,” he said, descending into the fog once more. “Okay, but soon, then.”

  She kissed him top of the head again and said she promised.

  * * *

  Her phone was buzzing again by the time she walked to her car. She pulled it out of her pocket, hoping to see Chief Waylon’s name on the call screen. She wanted to hear there’d been a shooting, or a big burglary, or something that needed her to come back to work. The thought of returning alone to her quiet apartment seemed depressing. She wanted the kind of action that comes from putting together leads and chasing down a suspect, not an evening of folding laundry and putting it back in the basket, unable to muster enough interest to put it away. She looked at her phone and groaned when she saw Penny’s contact picture on her screen. Another call with no promise of action. “Hey, you. What’s up?”

  Penny’s voice was anxious and angry. “Is Molly with you?”

  “No.”

  “Goddamn it. I’ve been trying to call her all evening. She was supposed to take me to get my hair done.”

  “Do you want me to swing by and get you?”

  “No. I already canceled.”

  “Where’s Nubs?”

  “With Molly,” Penny said. “When’s the last time you talked to her? Did she say where she was headed?”

  Carrie closed her eyes in thought. “She was taking Nubs to the park today.”

  “Well, it’s already eight o’clock and that little girl has school tomorrow. She better get back and put her to bed, or else.”

  “Listen, let me call around for her,” Carrie said. “I’ll figure out what’s going on.”

  Typical, Carrie thought as she slid into her car. Typical and irresponsible. This is the shit I’m talking about. Sure, Molly is a caring mom, but where’s she going in her life? What kind of example is she setting for Nubs? She doesn’t have a job, she lives with her mom, and her and Nubs still sleep in the same room, in the same bed. Whenever I try to encourage her to come up with some sort of plan, it turns into a fight. If it wasn’t for the baby, I’d give up on her and be done. Really, really done.

  She scrolled to the last text message from Molly and opened up the bizarre photograph once more, studying it in greater detail. Molly was posed with her hands up, looking at the lens like she was trying to appear scared. Since Nubs wasn’t in the picture, it was easy to assume the child had been the photographer. Carrie pictured Molly telling Nubs they were going to play a prank on Aunt Carrie and it was going to be epic. Pathetic was more like it, she thought. It was one thing to involve meth-snorting frat boys in her shenanigans, but now she was dragging the kid into it too?

  In the furthest depths of her being, Carrie had always imagined that Molly got pregnant for the attention. Now it was her excuse for not doing anything else.

  Stop fucking around and call me, Carrie wrote. No more pictures. Your mom is scared shitless and I have work tomorrow.

  * * *

  By the time she arrived home, she’d sent text messages to everyone in her phone and reached out to everyone on Facebook who knew Molly, copying and pasting the same message over and over. Had they heard from her? When they did, she told them to let her know right away. After the last message was sent, she called Penny. “Anything yet?”

  “No, not yet.”

  The older woman was starting to sound worried, and it chilled her. Penny had lived more and seen more than all her girls combined, and it wasn’t easy listening to her get rattled. “Everything is going to be fine,” Carrie reassured her. “I reached out to everybody we know. She will pop up somewhere.”

  “If she didn’t have Nubs, I’d agree with you,” Penny said. “But she’s never done this before. Not with the baby.”

  “Is she seeing anyone?” Carrie said. “Any chance she met a guy and they’re over his house or something?”

  “Not that she mentioned.”

  Carrie paused, unsure of how to phrase the words on the tip of her tongue. “Penny,” she started, then backed off, searching for the right words. “She’s been going out a lot lately. Have you seen anything . . . bad?”

  “What do you mean bad?”

  “I mean anything that will help me find her.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Penny snapped. “No, Carrie. I didn’t find any crack pipes or heroin needles, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Look, I’m just trying to help.”

  “I know, I know, baby,” Penny said. “You probably hear about this kind of thing all the time. The worst part is, I keep hearing car doors slam and seeing headlights come down the street, thinking it’s them. But it isn’t.”

  “They’ll turn up,” Carrie said. “Let me know as soon as you hear something and I’ll do the same.”

  * * *

  Carrie only had two kinds of dreams. The first involved searching for something she needed and not being able to find it. Her dream would be wonderful, involving a night out in the city, or being invited to a party, but then she could not remember where she parked her car, or could not find one missing shoe. She’d spend the rest of the dream scrambling around, desperate to find whatever was missing, until she awoke.

  The second kind of dream was
about someone she needed to say something to. Someone she was trying to forget, an old boyfriend who’d broken her heart or a particularly awful person at work. She’d berate them as they stood there making flimsy excuses, but nothing was ever resolved, because none of it was real. Those dreams were so potent, she’d spend the rest of the next day dwelling on it. The person who appeared most frequently was her mother.

  Beth Anne Richards still wandered the corridors of Carrie’s mind, for all her efforts to forget the woman. Sometimes, Carrie dreamed she was on duty and pulling over a car. When she walked up to greet the driver, she’d see an older, sadder-looking version of herself and know it was her mother.

  Sometimes, she dreamed about finding the skeletal remains of a thirty-year-old woman someone had left buried in the woods, and she would find the photograph of a young, smiling child in the woman’s belongings and recognize herself.

  That night she was so tired, she began dreaming the moment she closed her eyes, only to wake up several minutes later to check her phone for any calls or texts. As she reached the part of her dream where she was digging through her closet fruitlessly searching for a matching high-heeled shoe, the loud song of her phone’s ringtone sounded. Carrie bolted upright in the darkness and slammed the phone to her ear. “Is she back?”

  Someone was screaming on the other end, a high-pitched scream interrupted only by sputtering curses. “Is this Carrie? Officer Santero?”

  “Yes,” she mumbled. The name on the screen said Sgt. Kenderdine, Hansen Twp PD.

  “It’s Dave Kenderdine, from the task force. Listen, I’m over here at the Michaels residence, and a woman named Penny is freaking out. She said she knows you and demanded I get you on the phone. I wouldn’t have bothered you, but she’s really losing it.”

  “Why is she freaking out?” Carrie said, sitting up. “What happened?”

  He started to reply, but his voice was drowned out by Penny’s cries of “My babies! My baby girls! Go find her, you useless piece of shit!”

  “Ma’am! Do not touch me, do you understand?” Kenderdine barked, away from the phone. “I know you’re upset, but do not put another finger on me or I will put you on the ground.” His voice was calm again as he came back, saying, “I was checking the park after hours and I found a car registered to someone named Molly Michaels at this address,” Kenderdine said. “When I came here to ask about the car, this lady started going nuts. Is this Molly person missing or something?”

  The voice on the phone was still speaking, and the woman’s voice behind him still screaming, as Carrie leaped from her bed and stumbled through the darkness, snatching whatever clothes she could find.

  11

  AS CARRIE PARKED HER CAR, PENNY RACED DOWN HER FRONT STEPS, flapping her hands in the air, shouting, “There! There she is! Maybe you’ll listen to her, you prick!”

  Several neighbors stood on their front porches, smoking and hunched forward to get a better view. They eyed Carrie as she hurried past them, none of them bothering to ask what was wrong. They were content to watch the spectacle unfold.

  Penny latched on to Carrie’s arm as soon as she drew close. “Please, please tell this idiot that my daughter and granddaughter are missing and we need to put out an alert right now. What do you call those things? Amber Alerts? That’s what we need. Tell him!”

  Sgt. Kenderdine lowered his voice to say, “It’s my understanding Molly is an adult. You already know what I’m going to say, right?”

  Penny’s face quivered with anger even as her eyes swelled with tears. “You’re not going to tell me the same thing, Carrie. Are you? Please tell me you’re not.”

  “Listen to me,” Carrie said, trying to find her mental footing. “Go sit down on the steps and give me a minute to talk things over with the sergeant, okay? I will figure out what’s going on. Go have a cigarette. I’ve got this.”

  Penny jabbed a finger in the air at Kenderdine as she walked past. “All because this asshole is too lazy to do his damned job!”

  Carrie followed the sergeant around the side of his car. “I’m sorry, Dave. She’s just upset.”

  “I get it,” he said. “What’s up with your friend Molly? Does she bug out like this a lot?”

  “Not like this, not with her daughter. I can’t imagine she would just leave without telling someone.”

  “I tried telling the old lady we can’t put her in as a missing person. We can’t put the kid in as missing, because she’s with her mother. My hands are tied here, Carrie. It sucks, but they really are.”

  “I know, I know. I just had the same conversation with someone earlier on,” Carrie said, looking at the front steps where Penny was sitting, sucking a cigarette down to the filter. Her neighbors from either side had come over to her, pretending to console her by rubbing her back but actually just being nosey. Penny’s eyes were fixed hard on Carrie.

  “How did the car look?” Carrie said.

  “Fine to me. A little messy inside, but nothing unusual for someone with kids.”

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” Carrie said. “What the hell is going on here?”

  “Listen. I’ll put a general broadcast message out that we’re looking for those two. Not an alert or anything. Just a stop and ID or something, okay? I’ll check all the local spots and see if anyone has seen her.”

  “Thanks, Sarge,” she said. “I’m going to go search the park, see if I can come up with something. Do you have a flashlight I can borrow?”

  “Sure. There’s a spare in my trunk.”

  She hoisted the trunk’s lid up and reached inside for the long metal flashlight. It was heavy and good, stuffed with D-cell batteries. The kind that cops had used in the old days to cave in people’s foreheads. So help me God, Molly, she thought, smacking the metal against her palm. If this is another stupid escapade of yours, I’m going to use this on you.

  * * *

  The park was quiet and dark, the metal gate rattling back and forth in the wind as Carrie exited her car and closed the door. She left the flashlight off, preferring to move in darkness. Her right side felt empty without the weight of her duty weapon. She’d run out of the door so fast, she’d forgotten her gun.

  Gravel crunched under her sneakers as she walked across the parking lot, keeping a constant vigil on the dark woods surrounding her. Molly’s car was at the far end of the lot, a ten-year-old four-door with a taped-up rear taillight and stickers across the back window that read 90.2 COUNTRY ROCK and KEEP HONKING, I’M RELOADING.

  “Why do you have that on your car?”

  Molly just rolled her eyes. “So people know not to mess with me.”

  “Yeah, but when they find out you don’t really have a gun it’s going to be bad, real fast. And with Nubs in the car, it’s almost like you’re asking for trouble.”

  “Would you listen to yourself right now? Jesus, you sound like Coppy McCoperson all the damned time! I knew you when you were smoking reefer in the back of the record shop, bitch, so don’t sit there and try to be something you aren’t.”

  Carrie jabbed her finger into Molly’s side, poking her so hard in the ribs, she yelped. A hand came flying around the back of Carrie’s head, and Carrie swatted the nearest thing she could reach: Molly’s swollen right boob. “Shit! You hit my tit! What the fuck?” Molly shouted, backing up and clutching her chest.

  “Language!” Penny shouted from the kitchen.

  “Well, it’s not my fault they’re all ginormous now because you had a kid,” Carrie hissed.

  “Don’t worry, yours will grow in someday, flattop.”

  Carrie looked down at her chest and frowned. “They’re not small. They’re just not all saggy and gross like yours.”

  “If I had milk I would so seriously whip one out and squirt you right now.”

  A pot clanged against the sink in the kitchen and Penny called out, “Not in my damned house, you wouldn’t!” She emerged, staring at them, her pink sweatshirt pulled up to her elbows, a cigarette dangling from the
side of her mouth. “It was bad enough I had to listen to this when you two were fourteen and one got tits and the other didn’t, but now you’re grown up and I’ve had it! Can you knock it off for once, please? I’m trying to make dinner, and you’re going to wake up the goddamned baby.”

  Molly waved the air in front of her and gagged, saying, “I hope the food doesn’t smell like an ashtray. Can you put that out? It would be nice for the kid to at least wait ’til she’s five to get cancer from secondhand smoke.”

  “I left the windows open. She’ll be fine. I smoked around you your whole life.”

  Carrie rolled her eyes. “Oh shit. Then I’m calling Children and Youth tomorrow. Lord, we need to save this child.”

  Molly draped her arm over Carrie’s shoulder and said, “You better listen to her, old lady. She’s the law.”

  Carrie winked and said in her best Texan accent, “That’s right. The law. And this here’s my deputy.”

  “Much obliged, Sheriff,” Molly said.

  “Anytime, partner.”

  Penny gave them both a look and said, “Don’t gang up on me, bitches. I’ll cut you both.”

  Carrie aimed the flashlight at Molly’s car and turned it on, checking the doors and locks. Everything was intact. The steering wheel and column had not been tampered with and neither had the ignition. Everything looked normal, except for the fact that it was sitting in the middle of a park in the dead of night.

  “Fine,” Carrie told herself. At least we know she and Nubs arrived here in one piece.

  She looked around the outside of the car, checking for signs of struggle, or even blood. There was nothing. The gravel around the car was undisturbed.

  That’s good news too, she thought. If people had tried to snatch her or Nubs as they got back in the car, there would have been chunks of human flesh everywhere from Molly scratching their faces off. Even if they got her, it would not have been an easy battle.

  “Think, Carrie, think,” she told herself. “What do you know? Think like a detective.”

  She knew Molly and Nubs had not come home. She knew it was past Nubs’s bedtime and Molly was generally pretty good with things like that. She knew their car was in a public place, after hours, with no explanation. There was no indication of a struggle. No evidence of a crime.