by Chaz McGee
Yeah, probably because your uncle was the scout-master.
Calvano carefully drew a small square, then sketched a miniature sign next to it and printed CVS neatly on it. Well, what do you know? I bet he’d gotten an A in drawing in third grade.
I wanted to be Maggie’s partner. I was not taking this well.
“What’s the name of the street we’re starting with?” he asked Maggie, pen ready.
“Hope Valley,” Maggie told him.
Hope Valley indeed.
Chapter 29
For almost two hours, Maggie and Calvano faithfully followed every road that led away from the lake, and then just as faithfully made each right turn, cul-de-sac or not. They checked each house for signs of occupancy, seeking out any that looked deserted. Just to be sure, they even checked the second right turn off each side road. They had to work slowly, to avoid detection and panicking the neighbors. They kept at it.
In the course of those first two hours, they did not find Tyler Matthews—but they did become real partners. Calvano marked down each road on their homemade map, they muttered back and forth to each other with their hopes of each road being the right one, and they reassured each other that the boy was safe and probably sleeping soundly, oblivious to all, and that no one else had been involved in the abduction scheme or they would have known by now. Maggie called the shots, Calvano obeyed without argument, and both seemed content with the arrangement.
This growing cohesiveness kept them going despite one discouraging turn after another. Whatever jealousy I felt at Calvano being Maggie’s partner was overshadowed by my gratitude that they had become a team. I wasn’t worried about Maggie quitting. Maggie would not quit until they had checked every single road that led off the lake. But I was worried Calvano would throw in the towel and distract Maggie from her task.
Calvano surprised me. He hung in there for every turn and every block they searched. Four times he got out of the car and crept around homes that looked like candidates for the hiding spot they were seeking. Each time he announced them as either shut down, without power or heat, or clearly not capable of housing the type of layout they had both seen on the colonel’s video of the boy. Calvano was confident of his architectural prowess, as he had scored in the ninety-ninth percentile on the spatial sense section of his standard achievement tests as a sixth grader, a fact he only mentioned about three hundred times to Maggie over the course of two hours.
If he was so good at spatial relationships, why the hell had he shot a man running away in the back twice, missed with a third shot, and done this all in a yard clearly illuminated by a raging fire?
Still, he stayed. He did not abandon Maggie. He stayed, and he watched her back, like a partner’s supposed to do. Not every guy on the force would have done that. I had to give him credit.
They finally reached the road that led to the house where Tyler Matthews was being kept. That was when a horrible new fear overcame me. What if Calvano hopped out of the car, confident he could assess the dark house accurately, and missed the fact that a little boy lay sleeping in a back bedroom—sleeping with the unbreakable pull of childhood slumber. I’d had two boys of my own. I knew that sleep. It was almost narcotic. A child could dream through anything. If they pounded on the doors, it would do no good. If they shouted his name, he wouldn’t hear it.
I beat them to the house, determined to do what I could to make sure Calvano did not simply peer in a window and walk away.
The living room was deserted, its interior illuminated by an odd glow. My heart soared as I entered the kitchen and saw the refrigerator door hanging open, drops of chocolate milk leading across the linoleum floor. Tyler Matthews had helped himself to a snack and, with the single-mindedness of a four-year-old, walked away and left chaos behind him. I followed the drops of chocolate milk out to the hall. An empty plastic quart bottle had been dropped on the carpet, a half-eaten doughnut next to it.
Tyler was in the back bedroom, fast asleep on the rug. His cheek was pressed against the carpet and his body was curled up tightly in a ball. He clutched a plastic soldier in one hand. The rest of his toys had been carefully divided into two equal piles, evidence of his willingness to share.
The oddest feeling came over me then: There’s someone else in the room.
I looked under the bed, remembering when my own boys had asked me to check for monsters. Nothing. I searched in the closet and in every corner, trying to pinpoint the origin of what I felt—it was a pulsing of energy, a thickness of the air. It was an undeniable feeling more than anything else. Or maybe the faint smell of sweat and . . . was it gunpowder? A memory came to me, one from long ago—I was hunched over in a hallway outside my elementary school cafeteria, wrapping dozens of wooden matchstick tips in layers of aluminum foil. I was making a ball I would light and toss inside, filling the massive room with smoke and successfully clearing out the school for an hour, allowing me to avoid a math test I was unprepared for.
How had I ever become a cop?
Perhaps because of the firing range. The same smell reminded me of the firing range where I had once practiced for hours, early in my career, wanting to qualify with the highest possible marksmanship score.
But those were just memories. I saw no one in the room, no one but Tyler Matthews.
Leaving the boy behind temporarily, I checked the other rooms and assured myself that no one else was hiding nearby. Confident we were alone, I returned to the hallway and got down on my hands and knees, not to pray, but to exert all my otherworldly will toward something as inconsequential and yet as monumentally important as blowing a plastic bottle into the view of someone peering through the kitchen window.
It was all I had to offer. I had a little power over wind, and so could affect fire and water, at least a little, but that was all—that, and my ability to roam people’s minds, sometimes shaping their thoughts or, more likely, their memories. It was a pitiful set of powers, one that made me no superhero. I wasn’t even an ordinary man.
A familiar sense of futility flooded through me; the feeling was a remnant of my old life. I’d had few strengths as a detective. In fact, remaining upright was about the peak of my powers when I had been sleepwalking through work each day. I had celebrated my ineffectualness and exercised my sense of futility daily, wallowing in my failures and daring anyone to point out that I was impotent in every way. And it had gotten me nowhere but where I was now, trapped between the living and the dead. Yet, the familiarity of the feeling was hard to resist. Like Robert Michael Martin, I had been born to lose.
I would not let that feeling win. I was all Tyler Matthews had. I would have to be enough. Besides, that little boy had had even less to get him through the past few terrible days, and he had done it at the age of four. He had survived with absolute faith in the world and a handful of plastic toys.
I needed to make the most of what I had, instead of dwelling on what I did not have. However humble and ridiculous it seemed, I would kneel and do what I could to move that plastic bottle into the light. The world has been changed with less.
The irony of pushing a simple plastic bottle toward the light, instead of my own yearning soul, was not lost on me. But who among us has ever chosen our path to glory? Heroes are made from the smallest of gestures every day. It was my time to try, and I would not squander it.
I blew, and the bottle trembled. I concentrated on the atmosphere around it, focusing every scrap of energy I could gather on a single point in front of the bottle.
The damn thing skittered over the rug, jumped the metal strip divider, and spun crazily right smack dab in the middle of the kitchen floor.
What the hell? Or perhaps more accurately: What the heaven?
Someone—or something—had helped me with the task. I could feel it.
Would that empty bottle be enough? Would an idiot like Calvano put two and two together, notice the refrigerator door hanging open and chocolate milk on the floor, and have the sense to think small child?
/> I couldn’t be sure. I needed Maggie at that window.
I saw their headlights turn into the cul-de-sac. The car crept along the road, slowing as Maggie counted off the houses. She finally stopped at the end of the cul-de-sac and cut her lights. In the glow of the dome light, I could see her examining the child’s picture, comparing the crude brown squares that represented cedar shingles on the drawing to the structure in front of her.
Come on, Maggie—see the glow from the refrigerator in the kitchen window? Weird, huh? Not a light, exactly, just some sort of reflected glow. And why in a kitchen window at this time of night? Get out of the car to see.
It wasn’t going to be enough. Maybe the blinds or curtains were blocking all the light. I raced to the window and concentrated again, willing the air to move the curtains. They fluttered. I concentrated again, falling into a rhythm, making the curtains sway back and forth, hoping it would send a signal to Maggie and Calvano.
Two car doors gently clicked shut, followed by the crunch of feet on mulch.
“See what I mean?” Maggie said right outside the window.
Yes.
“It’s odd,” Maggie added. “It’s like a signal or something.”
“This whole thing is weird,” Calvano muttered.
“Can you see inside?” Maggie asked in a low whisper.
“There are no cars in the garage. There should be no one home.”
“Hold on,” Calvano said. I heard a rustling and a thump. “I found a concrete block. Help me with it.” I heard dragging sounds and more thumps beneath the window.
I stopped my efforts. They would either get it or they would not.
Calvano’s eyes appeared between two slats of the blinds. He searched the room, not seeing me, of course. His eyes lingered on the open refrigerator door and the empty bottle of milk on the floor. “It’s kind of weird,” he whispered to Maggie behind him.
“You’re really going to have to be more specific than that,” she said tersely.
“The refrigerator door is hanging open, and there’s an empty bottle of milk in the middle of the kitchen floor.”
“Break the door down, Adrian,” Maggie ordered him in a firm voice. All hesitation and doubt was done. In a heartbeat, Maggie knew.
“This could backfire,” he warned her. “If we’re wrong, what the hell are we going to say? We saw a vision in a kid’s drawing?”
“Break the door down, Adrian,” she repeated—and Calvano could tell as well as I could that, until he actually did what she said, he would hear nothing but that phrase over and over again from her.
“Side doors are more vulnerable,” he muttered. “That front door is going to have multiple dead bolts.”
“Just break a door down,” Maggie said. “Or pry open a window. I don’t care. I want us inside that house now.”
Calvano knocked over a trash can, and a dog started barking a block or so away. It didn’t matter. They were on their way in. Without so much as a scratch of warning, he came crashing through the side door that opened into the kitchen. The door splintered in its frame and banged against a wall. The noise was as loud as a bomb going off.
Thank God. The noise was enough to wake Tyler.
He began to cry, his wails drifting in from the back bedroom. He had risen from sweet, childhood dreams, sleepy and confused, into an unfamiliar room without his mother nearby.
“Do you hear that?” Maggie asked Calvano.
“Holy shit,” Calvano said, and crossed himself. “This can’t be happening.”
“Stay behind me,” Maggie told him. “I’m not taking any chances.”
She drew her gun and crept down the hallway, following the sounds of Tyler’s sobs. Calvano cowered behind her comically. She flipped on the hall light and stopped outside the back bedroom. Tyler’s sobs subsided when he heard someone at the door. His voice floated out into the hall, sweet and high. “Mommy? Daddy Two?” he asked.
Maggie opened the door to the bedroom, and Tyler Matthews sat up, blinking at her. He saw her gun and looked down at the plastic toy still clutched in his fist, then held it up to her and touched the gun painted on its hip as if to say, See? I have one, too.
Maggie lowered the gun and stared at the boy.
“Is it him?” Calvano asked, his voice full of disbelief.
“Yes,” Maggie said. “It’s definitely him.”
“Holy shit,” Calvano said, then reconsidered his choice of words. “I mean, holy something. No one is going to believe this.”
“You’re not going to tell them,” Maggie told him. “We’ll think of something else.”
She scooped up Tyler Matthews in her arms. He was perfectly willing to let her hold him—which told me that, despite what had happened to him, Tyler Matthews’s innocence was still intact. He still saw the world as full of one friend after another, all of them there to love and adore him. Talk about miracles.
I was so profoundly overcome with gratitude that this part of Tyler had been saved that I thought I might collapse. I did not understand why it had so much power over me, but the fact that I had helped save such purity, that he was still a little boy, even if only for a few more years, well . . . it overwhelmed me. It made me glad that I was what I was.
“I better call this in,” Calvano said, forgetting he was on suspension.
“No,” Maggie disagreed softly, holding Tyler against her. Inside her heart, a warmth had bloomed, a desire to protect and nurture and hold. Odd. I had never felt it in Maggie before, ever. This small boy had brought it out in her. “We’re going to take him right to his mother.”
“Mommy?” Tyler raised his head. He was still very sleepy, and his eyes had a dreamy faraway look in them. “I want my mommy and my daddy and my mommy.”
“Shhh,” Maggie said, patting his back. He obediently laid his head back down on Maggie’s shoulder and drifted off to sleep again, perfectly confident that he was safe.
“We can’t leave the scene,” Calvano whispered, trying not to wake the boy.
“We are,” Maggie said. “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life. You drive. And you better drive carefully. Just get us there as fast as you can.”
She carried Tyler Matthews out the front door of the house, and the little boy fell deeper asleep with each step she took. Life can be kind sometimes. He’d wake in his mother’s arms.
Maggie sat in the backseat and cradled the boy during the ride to the station, her thoughts a jumble of so many memories from her life: the votive candles from the church she had attended with her father and mother each Sunday of her childhood; the moment in the hospital room when the little girl had handed her the drawing and said, “I made this for you”; the top of a stained-glass window flooded with light on the day of her mother’s funeral; the instant she had spotted Tyler Matthews asleep on the rug, safe, and the faith it had restored in her.
“I don’t believe this,” Calvano said, just once, from the driver’s seat. But he did believe it, I could tell. He was like the family dog. He didn’t sit around and do a lot of questioning about life. He just lived. Things were. That’s the way it was.
In an odd way, I envied him.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” Maggie said. “Let’s keep it between us. We’ll say the man in the hospital told us enough that we could guess where to find the kid. It’ll go down better for you, too. The guy won’t remember what he said or didn’t say.”
“If he lives,” Calvano said grimly, his own fate once again on his mind.
“We should know that by now.” Maggie turned on her cell phone and it immediately began to vibrate. “I’ve got two messages from the hospital already. Are you ready to find out?”
Calvano let out a deep breath. “May as well. We’re almost to the station.”
Maggie held Tyler gently with one hand, his head slumped against her shoulder, and pressed redial on her phone. It rang through, and I recognized the voice that answered: the hallowed Christian Fletcher himself. Waiting for Maggie
to call back.
“He made it,” Fletcher told Maggie. I could feel the relief in her. “You’ll be able to talk to him within an hour or so.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said as Tyler stirred in her arms. “I’ve got to go. I’ll explain later.” She snapped her phone shut and tossed it into the front seat, where it landed next to Calvano. “You’re off the hook,” she said. “He made it.”
Calvano’s whole body relaxed. He spread his hands wide over the steering wheel and breathed deeply. “I’m going to church when this is all over,” he declared, and it was as if he were channeling a different Calvano, one that had lived long before the bravado and shiny shoes and good suits and ridiculously styled hair took over. “I’m going to ask for a second chance at the job.”
“We all deserve a second chance,” Maggie agreed quietly.
I wasn’t sure who she was referring to, exactly, but I seconded the emotion wholeheartedly.
Chapter 30
I will never forget the next five minutes, no matter how long I roam this earthly plane. As Maggie entered the station house, Tyler Matthews nestled in her arms, she was spotted by a handful of detectives and staff heading home for a few hours sleep. They recognized Tyler and immediately reversed direction without uttering a word, following her back upstairs. Calvano took the lead, gallantly opening doors and clearing the way for what quickly became a parade of people needing to be part of a happy ending for once, wanting to witness the miracle after so many days of nonstop effort and increasingly dark hours of despair.
It never ended like this. They wanted to be there when it did.
By the time they reached the task force room, Tyler still asleep in Maggie’s arms, they looked like a mini-platoon on a rescue mission pushing through the doors. At first no one noticed. But as Maggie strode wordlessly across the room, pockets of people fell silent one by one, their conversations falling away in waves until the room was as quiet as a library. Callie Matthews was the only one who did not notice. She was still watching the footage of her son, unable to stop.
