Pat stood up. “Do you want coffee?” he asked the room at large. And everyone nodded. Pat said, “Eliza, you drink like what Bethie does. Vanilla something large with skim. And Candy, a gallon of black with nothing, right? And George …”
“Sure, Pat, I’ll have a large one with milk …”
“And about eight sugars. It’s been twenty years, George. I know how you take your coffee.”
Then Ben said, “Shut up.”
“What?” Pat asked slowly, his voice hoarse. “What? I … didn’t hear you, son.”
“I said shut up. Don’t interrupt my dad and talk to him like he’s scum. You interrupt him. You act like you let him come to your fancy house and eat your fancy food because you’re such a nice guy …”
“Sam, all I meant was, I know how he takes his coffee. I’ve known George a long—”
“That’s not what you meant. You always have that sneer, like, in your voice when you talk to him.”
Vincent got up and said, “Stop. Stop. Pop. Sam. Stop. Nobody has slept. Everybody’s scared to death.”
“You should be scared to death,” Ben said. “Vincent, you should be scared to shut your eyes in case you die and there really is a hell. I let you talk me into doing this movie and you know why? Because I figured, he’s a loser. He’s been a loser all his life. I got a wife I’m crazy about. I got a life. I’m having a baby. What’s he got? He’s making Internet cartoons and he’s almost thirty, so I think, maybe this will do him good. Make him act not so much like an asshole. But what happens instead … to me? To Eliza and Candy and your own dear, dear parents? What happens is what always happens when you touch it …”
“Oh Ben,” Vincent moaned. “Don’t. Oh, don’t do this. I know I deserve it. But I would never, I swear to God, I would never hurt Stella or Liza or you. You’re my brother, Ben …”
“Which is that it turns to shit. Everything you touch. Vincent. You and your big hood friends. Your Cosa Nostra bullshit. Every thing. Every person. It all turns to shit. So go away. All of you. Go away and leave me with my father. Give us our privacy,” Ben said, taking Eliza’s arm.
Vincent said, “I’m sorry! Just listen, please. I’ll do anything …”
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough for one lousy lifetime?” Ben asked.
“What happened then?” Kerry asked Vincent later.
“And then Ma slapped Ben,” Vincent said.
“No she didn’t,” said Kerry. “No way.”
“She said she couldn’t hear him whip me like that. Because it wasn’t just now. It wasn’t just Stella. She said …” Kerry grabbed her brother’s arm.
“What, Vincent? What?”
“She said that … I would die for Stella. Or Ben. And that I thought it was all my fault. As long as I could remember.”
“What else?”
“Ma said that what I tried to do was good …”
“Did Pop try to help?”
“Everyone tried. George did. Candy did. But Ben just held the door open and I ran out and Pop ran after me. Ma tried to go back but Ben wouldn’t look at her and neither would Eliza. And he shut the door.” Vincent stopped, his breath ragged, not caring that Kerry saw the tears that dripped off his chin. “It’s worse, though.”
How could it be worse? Kerry thought. The mockery of March sunlight made sequential pools on the bedroom carpet. “I guess Candy got up and followed Mom.”
“She left Eliza?” Kerry gasped.
“She came out and I heard her say, ‘Sam, you’re going to use words that can’t be taken back. That is your mother. And you need her now. And I need her now. You know what you said isn’t true. Nothing that happened here was anyone’s doing except someone who knows too much about your family. We need to be together on this.’ But Ben just sat there. Candy finally said, ‘Okay, I’m going, too, pal.’ The door was open and I heard Eliza start to cry and say, ‘Mommy! Auntie!’ And Ben tried to calm her down. He said, ‘Your mom can stay.’ But Candy kept going.”
“Where’s Ma?”
“I can’t find her, Bear. She ran and Pop and I can’t find her. She took her big backpack and … crazy stuff like all the iPhones she got.”
“Vincent, did you ask downstairs?” Kerry asked, but had pulled a rugby shirt on over her sweats and strappy T-shirt before he could answer.
Mrs. Cappadora had taken a cab to meet a relative, said the doorman.
“Where?” Kerry asked.
“She said the airport,” the guy in the black uniform with red piping told Kerry. He was British and a flirt.
“How soon can I get a rental?” Kerry asked.
That was forty-five minutes ago. Now, she stalked back into the scented cool air of the Paloma with her hands grasping the roots of her long auburn hair. “The car that you ordered for me hasn’t come! My mom needs me. Can you please call them back?”
“Josh, I’m taking my lunch,” said the doorman, pulling off his hat. “Here, I’ll run you up there …” He took the keys to one of the Paloma vans and hopped in.
“You don’t have to do that, and all I have is a credit card,” Kerry protested.
“No worries. You’ve been through enough, you lot.”
And so they careered through back roads and down canyons and on and off the freeway, the Brit, who called himself Craig, madly trying to interest Kerry in something other than his driving prowess, while she tried to think of what airline they’d taken out here, five days and a lifetime ago. “United,” she said suddenly. “United.”
“You go in and I’ll park,” he said.
“How will I know you?” Kerry asked.
“Me, I’ll be the one wearing the black uniform with the brass buttons.”
“I’m sorry,” Kerry said. “Of course. Of course. I’m so grateful.” She ran through the automatic doors and sprinted for the United counter but, before she could engage the attention of the woman herding the departing passengers into the line, she saw Beth, about to put her bag onto the conveyor belt at the security line.
“Mom!” Kerry cried. “Mom!” Kerry began to push past the others in the lines leading to the screening machines.
“Where is your boarding pass, ma’am?” said a brusque woman who, until Kerry slid under the rope, appeared to have been asleep. “You get back here.”
“That’s my mother,” Kerry said. “I have to stop her!”
“I don’t care who she is. I need to see your boarding pass.”
“I don’t have a boarding pass. I’m not boarding!”
“Then you need to get out of this line before I call security,” the uniformed woman said, her voice rising.
Kerry yelled, “My mom is out of her mind!”
Everyone stopped then.
Beth slowly removed her bag from the belt and walked back. In instants, mother and daughter were surrounded by security, who whisked them into a glass-walled office. A man with a gold bar ID badge asked Beth’s permission to search her bag. Out tumbled her wallet, her Carolina Herrera dress, and eight iPhones. “What are these?” he asked
“They’re from the Oscars,” Beth explained. The fellow glanced at Kerry.
“They really are from the Oscars,” Kerry said. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“It never is,” the man told them.
“It really isn’t. My brother won an Oscar for Best Documentary Film and the same night my baby niece was kidnapped …”
“Let me see your ID,” the man said, suddenly gentle.
“Look there,” Kerry said. “Look at your newspaper.” Behind him on the desk was a copy of the Los Angeles Times with the headline SEARCH FOR OSCAR BABY ENTERS THIRD DAY and a picture of Eliza and Beth with Stella. There was also a blowup of the security-camera picture of the couple at the elevator.
“That’s you?” the man asked, pointing to the photo of Beth’s face. Beth nodded. “Why were you getting on the plane to Chicago?”
“Mom, it’s a good question,” Kerry interrupted. “Were you going t
o leave Candy and Ben and Vincent and me? Like you did before? Duck out on us? Because it hurts too much?” Kerry began to cry. “It hurts me too, Mom. It’s killing Candy. Don’t you care? Or is it all about you?” Beth shook her head and let Kerry embrace her.
The security officer held out the newspaper for his colleague to see. “Let’s get you two back,” he said.
“I’m sorry, Ker,” Beth said to her daughter. “It’s so bad now. Candy is me now but I’m still me too.”
“Wait,” Kerry said. “Let me see the newspaper.” She hadn’t even looked at one. She’d avoided the coverage on TV. For the first time, Kerry took time to study the photo the police had isolated from the hotel video footage. She said, “Mom. Mom. I think … no, I’m sure that was the lady who came to our house.”
“What lady?” Beth asked.
“The lady who was a reporter, who I didn’t think was really a reporter, who came to our house so late on the night before Stella’s christening? The night when everybody found out Vincent was nominated?”
“I don’t remember, Kerry,” Beth said. “There were so many people there.”
“She asked for Ben, Mom! Think. She wanted to see Ben and Eliza. We didn’t let her in.”
Beth took a deep breath. “I remember now.”
“It was late, so she could have come from somewhere else, far away, but it means, if it is her …”
“Somebody was planning this even then,” said the airport security guard. “You’d better call … whoever’s on this from one of those phones. No, here, use mine. Sometimes cell phones don’t work from inside the airport.”
“None of them is charged,” Beth said.
“Well, that would make a difference too,” the man said.
“Mom, how could they possibly track her down, months later?” Kerry asked.
No one had an answer.
They were pulling into the crescent drive at the Paloma Hotel in a police cruiser when Kerry remembered the cute Englishman who was probably still parked in the van at LAX.
Bill Humbly was worn out.
They had a strange case. Almost too much information and not a blessed thing to connect any of the dots.
For the first time in his life, he was glad to see a guy from the FBI.
“Agent Joel Berriman,” he said, his thick trench coat absurd for the weather.
They went over everything Humbly had tried.
Although it was impossible to interview everyone who knew the Cappadoras, anyone who might have had a grudge that was tripped by No Time to Wave Goodbye had come under their scrutiny in some way—even Cecilia Lockhart’s brother, who had told people he thought Vincent was a pig for raking up old grudges. But when they called him, he choked up and said he was a jerk for saying such a thing. The local detective, one of Candy’s, found out also that the brother was alibied from here to eternity … that he had, in fact, been at an Oscar party at The Old Neighborhood restaurant, which was where he made the remarks. No one could connect the lady in the photo to any photo of any known perp in Los Angeles or Chicago. This lady had never even gotten a traffic ticket. Humbly’s next-in-line, Detective Rafferty, had even called Ruth Fellows, the now ancient mother of the long-dead Fellows sisters. He sent her a picture of the woman using her daughter’s name. Ruth Fellows said the woman looked something like Patricia might have looked if she had lived to grow up—Patricia had been only thirteen—which opened a whole other dead-end avenue. At its conclusion, it was established by a former coroner that Patricia and Nancy were indeed Patricia and Nancy and that they had slept side by side for thirty years under an oak tree in Mount Carmel Cemetery.
Together, Humbly and Berriman visited a lawyer famous for those multi-hundred-thousand-dollar “adoption” deals. He was coming out of his mansion in Brentwood when they approached him.
“I know what you’re here for and I know why,” he said. “In fact, I called some people this morning and I would actually tell you if one of them had said a single thing that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck because this thing stinks, it really stinks. I would never do it. I swear on my mother’s grave and I can prove it.”
“You’re breaking my heart,” said Bill Humbly. “You remind me of my Boy Scout leader.”
“But here’s the truth. I’ve done some stuff in my life. But I never took a baby away from anyone who loved her baby,” the lawyer said. “If I could help those people, I’d pay my last year’s profits. Well, half of them.”
It was the last sentence that convinced Humbly.
Humbly later told Ben and Eliza, “Even so, that’s the kind of avenue where our tip will come from. Maybe not from a couple who thinks they adopted a baby, but from their neighbor. Everyone in the world has seen Stella’s face now. What if your neighbor shows up all of a sudden with a baby old enough to crawl?”
Eliza said, “It could be worse.”
Ben gasped. “What?”
“If they love her, it could be worse,” Eliza said. “In my village, a girl was … was forced …”
“Raped,” Humbly said.
“Which was a sin. And she put the baby in the woods to die. And it ruined the fields and the corn. And so she put her dress around her neck and hung from a tree, far away, across a river from where her parents lived.” Where the hell did she grow up? thought Humbly. It sounded like the fourteenth century. “Adopted babies are the most loved babies. I could almost stand it with knowing someone loved her as much as we do.”
“That’s crazy!” Ben said. “Honey! She’s my daughter. Our flesh and blood.”
“What am I?” Eliza asked simply, her tiny hands folded on the table. “What is George?”
“That isn’t what I mean.”
“But it’s what you said,” Eliza continued. “You threw your mother, your flesh and blood, out the door.”
“Eliza! They’re going to start saying you killed her!”
“You’re a fool, Sam.”
“Liza, you don’t know what you’re talking about. Even if they care about her, they’ll never be her parents.”
“Candy is my mother. She loves me. She cares for me. George loves you. Beth and Pat love you. You just never had anything bad happen in your life, Sam. You had an easy life.” She made a sign with two fingers on her cheeks like two tears running down. “I know what you went through. But Mother Superior used to say that a few tears isn’t drowning.”
Humbly excused himself before Candy could get back from the quick run she’d made to buy everyone sweatshirts and underwear and pajamas. Candy would know that what Humbly was saying added up to sum zero shit.
On the fourth day, a freak snowstorm in the San Juan Diego Mountains trapped a young couple camping with a two-year-old and a four-year-old.
Idiots, Humbly thought. Who took kids who could barely even eat on their own up a narrow pass to do a little mountain camping? Everyone knew it could snow in March on a dime up there.
Stella slipped below the fold as rescue workers from the U.S. Forest Service searched frantically through ten inches of powder in a featureless wilderness. It was a fast and very bad find: The mother was delirious; the baby was dead, fifty feet from the tent. The father’s hands were frozen. Only the four-year-old was basically fine.
But then, to Humbly’s relief, the strange story of the kidnapping made the cover of People, a six-page story under the headline FALLING STARS: OSCAR WINNER’S NIECE KIDNAPPED, TWENTY YEARS AFTER HIS BROTHER with eight pictures that chronicled the abductions, in successive generations, of Ben Cappadora and his daughter, Stella. Bill Humbly was relieved that it pumped life into the story again, even if on the cheesy cable stations with blond starlets playing newscaster.
With Humbly’s permission and an officer listening in, Vincent made his own calls.
After Vincent had called and Blaine Whittier had consoled him, she was shocked when the phone rang again and it was her father, who called her twice a year. Blaine asked, “Is Mom okay? Have you spoken to Vincent Cappadora?”
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Bryant said, “I haven’t spoken about it with Mother … or certainly Vincent. I’m very busy. Mother and I are going to Italy as you know, and I have a good deal of business to tie up. Just things about the office.”
“Oh Dad, it’s so horrible,” Blaine said softly.
“They have no leads at all,” Bryant answered. “It savors more of planful professionalism than of psychopathology, don’t you think?”
“Gee, Dad,” Blaine said. “Always the lawyer. All I can think of is that poor family. On the happiest day of their lives.”
“Well, I’d look for some individual who wants to draw attention to how easy it really is to abduct a child. Perhaps this can do some good. The issue is not addressed or resolved by ‘awareness’ or ‘compassion.’ It takes more, much more. In a sense …”
“But that’s what Vincent was trying to say,” Blaine interrupted.
“In a treacly way that brought glory to him but no real change. And now, much, much more trouble.”
“Dad! Let me talk to Mom. I can’t believe you said that! Whoever did this was insane, Dad. Or the most evil person on earth.”
“I don’t think either is necessarily the case, Blaine,” Bryant said. “Insane people would hurt the child.”
“I hate what you said about Vincent.”
“Now, Blaine, calm down. I believe Vincent was sincere. Just naïve. I’ll have Mother call you later.”
Blaine stood in her room, looking out at the early, snow-tipped buds in the Massachusetts snow and thought, What is he saying? Not only is this the most my father has ever said to me, what he’s saying is gobbledygook.
“Well, have fun in Italy, Dad,” Blaine said. But Bryant had already hung up, as he customarily did, without saying goodbye. Where was her mother? Except to the screening and then not willingly, Mom hadn’t gone farther than the mailbox since Jackie disappeared. Immediately she called home and Claire picked up.
“Blaine, darling,” she said. “I’m beside myself.”
“I am too. Is there anything at all we can do? I just talked to Dad. I forgot to ask him if there was anything he could suggest …”
Claire paused. “You talked to your father?”