Not everybody looks like their mom.
Ellen zoomed out to the original photo, outlined the man’s face with the mouse, then clicked. Her heart beat a little faster. The man did look a little familiar, and his smile was like Will’s, with that downturn on the right. She sipped some coffee and clicked Zoom again, enlarging his face to fill the screen. She’d hoped the blur would let her sense the general configuration of his face, but it didn’t. She set down her coffee, almost spilling it on her notes, so she moved the notebook out of the way. Sticking out from underneath was the white card with the photo of Timothy Braverman.
Hmmm.
She slid out the white card and looked at the age-progressed version of Timothy, then set the card down, went back into My Pictures, and found Will’s last school picture. She enlarged it and set it up on the screen next to the photo of the man on the beach. Then she compared the two photos—the most recent of Will with the man on the beach—taking a mental inventory:
Will, eyes blue and wide-set; Beach Man, eyes close together and blue
Will, nose, little and turned up; Beach Man, long and skinny
Will, blond hair; Beach Man, light brown hair
Will, round face; Beach Man, long, oval face
Will, normal chin; Beach Man, pointed chin
Similarities—blue eyes, lopsided smile
Ellen reviewed the list, then leaned back and eyeballed the photos from a distance. She wasn’t able to reach a conclusion, as much as she wanted to. Beach Man could be Will’s father, or maybe he was someone Amy was dating around the same time, or a random guy with a beer. Or maybe Will didn’t look that much like either of his parents. He looked like Cheryl, and that counted for something.
Ellen went back online. She clicked through to the Braverman family’s website, then captured the age-progressed photo of Timothy and saved a copy to My Pictures. She was going to put it on the screen next to Will’s and Beach Man’s, then compare all three of them when something else on the Braverman family website caught her eye.
The composite drawing of the carjacker.
On impulse, Ellen captured the composite and saved a copy to My Pictures, then uploaded it and placed it next to recent Will, age-progressed Timothy, and Beach Man—all four images in a line. She blinked, and her heart beat a little faster. She captured the composite drawing and the photo of Beach Man, then placed them side by side on their own page. The photos were different sizes, so she outlined the composite drawing and clicked Zoom to enlarge it to the approximate size of Beach Man, and clicked.
She froze. The composite drawing of the carjacker looked like Beach Man. She double-checked, and there was no doubt that they looked alike.
“Oh my God,” she said aloud, and Oreo Figaro raised his chin, his eyes angled slits disappearing into the blackness of his fur.
Ellen looked back at the screen, getting a grip. It was impossible to compare a black-and-white pencil drawing with a color photo of a flesh-and-blood man. She flashed on Will’s tracing of a horse from the other day, and it gave her an idea. She clicked Print, and her cheap plastic printer chugged to life. Then she got up and hurried downstairs, rummaged through the toy box, and ran back up with a roll of tracing paper.
The printer had spit out a copy of the composite drawing, and she took a black Sharpie and went over the lines of the carjacker’s features, blackening them so they’d be darker and thicker. Then she took the piece of tracing paper and placed it on top of the composite drawing, tracing the image onto the crinkly transparent paper, ignoring the thumping in her chest. She set the traced composite aside, slid the copy of the Beach Man photo from the printer tray, then moved her computer keyboard to the side and set the printed photo on the desk.
Then she stopped.
She wanted to know and she didn’t want to know, both at once.
“Get over it,” she said under her breath, and she took the traced composite of the carjacker and placed it over Beach Man’s face.
It was an exact match.
Ellen felt her gorge rising, and she jumped up and bolted for the bathroom.
Chapter Thirty-three
Ellen lingered on the threshold to Will’s room, lost in her thoughts. She couldn’t work any longer, not after what she’d learned, or what she thought she’d learned. She could barely give it voice inside her own head, but she couldn’t ignore it, either.
Is Will really Timothy?
She tasted bile and Colgate on her teeth and sagged against the doorjamb, willing her brain to function. Tried to reason it out and spot any failures of logic.
Begin at the beginning. Remain calm.
Ellen thought a minute, trying to articulate the scenario she feared. If the composite matched the photo of the man on the beach, then Beach Man was the carjacker. He had shot Carol Braverman’s nanny. Kidnapped Will. Taken the ransom money but kept the child. He had a girlfriend who pretended to be the baby’s mother. Amy Martin.
Why not kill the baby right after the kidnapping?
Ellen shuddered, but she could guess at some answers. Amy wanted a baby and couldn’t have one. Or they thought they could sell the baby on the black market. She folded her arms against her chest, hugging herself, and picked up the narrative in her mind, detecting another fallacy.
Why give him up for adoption?
That answer, Ellen knew for sure. Because he got sick. Will had a heart problem no one knew about. At least she assumed as much, because the Braverman site didn’t mention that Timothy had any heart problems. The doctors at Dupont Hospital had told her that his murmur had gone undetected, which wasn’t unusual. Will would have failed to thrive. He wouldn’t eat well and he’d have been sickly. That would have overwhelmed Amy, even her mother said so, and it would have made it too risky to keep him. Too many blood tests, forms, and questions that could show Amy wasn’t the mother and the boyfriend the father.
So what do they do next?
Ellen composed it like a nightmare news story. They’d take the baby to a hospital far from Miami, back to where Amy had grown up. They’d essentially abandon the baby in the hospital, and then a solution would come, in the form of a nice lady reporter, who falls in love with the baby. She adopts the baby and takes him home, where he sleeps under a sky of ersatz stars.
My God.
Ellen let her gaze wander around Will’s bedroom, over the shadows of Tonka trucks and Legos, over shelves of skinny books and Candy Land and plush bears and bunnies, their soft pastels reduced to shades of gray. The window shade was up, and outside the sky was oddly bright, the world aglow with a new snowfall that insulated the house like a sheet of practical cotton, keeping her and Will safe inside.
“Mommy?” he asked sleepily, from the bed.
Ellen wiped her eyes, padded over to the bed, and leaned over Will, brushing his bangs from his forehead in the light from the doorway. “Sorry I woke you.”
“Are you home?”
“Yes, it’s night and I’m home.”
“Connie says you have to work hard.”
“I do, but I’m home now.” Ellen swallowed the knot in her throat, but she had a feeling it would only travel down to her chest and cause a heart attack, or maybe she’d just spontaneously combust. She eased onto the guardrail and tried to regain her composure. “Sorry I forgot your crazy shirt.”
“It’s okay, Mommy.”
Ellen’s eyes welled up. She reached down and stroked his cheek. “You’re the best kid in the world, do you know that?”
“You brushed your teeth.”
“I did.” Ellen was uncomfortable, sitting on the guardrail. “I hate this guardrail. I’m taking it off.” She stood up and began to slide the wooden rail from the bed, jiggling the frame.
“I won’t fall out, Mommy.”
“I know that. You’re too smart to fall out of your own bed.” Ellen jiggled one last time and finally wrenched the guardrail from the bed. “Sorry.”
Will giggled.
“Stupid guardrail.”
/>
“Stupid guardrail!”
“See ya, guardrail.” Ellen took the guardrail to the other side of the room and set it on the floor. “Wouldn’t wanna be ya.”
Will giggled again.
Ellen came back to the bed, where she could see Will wriggling in his bed. “Are you being a wiggle worm?”
“I am!”
“I’m coming in. We’re having a slumber party.”
“What’s that?” Will scissored his legs.
“It’s people having a party when they should be sleeping.” Ellen eased onto the skinny bed, on her side. “Scoot over, wigglehead.”
“Okay.” Will edged backwards, and Ellen reached for him and wrapped him up in her arms. She didn’t want to think about Amy Martin and the Bravermans anymore. She wanted to be where she was, right this moment, holding her son close.
“How’s that feel? Good?”
Will hugged her back. “I made a snowball.”
“You did? Cool.”
“It’s on the porch, did you see?”
“No.” Ellen gave him a squeeze. “It’ll be there tomorrow. I’ll look at it in the morning, first thing.”
“Do you have to go to work tomorrow?”
“Yes.” Ellen didn’t know what would happen at work tomorrow, with her story unfinished. Right now, she didn’t care.
“I hate work.”
“I know, sweetie. I’m sorry I have to work.”
“Why do you?”
Ellen had answered this more times than she could count, but she knew it wasn’t a real question. “I work so we have all the things we need.”
Will yawned.
“Maybe we should settle down and go to sleep. Party’s over, and slumber is beginning.”
“I won’t fall out,” Will said again, and Ellen hugged him close.
“Don’t worry. You won’t fall out. I’m here to catch you.”
“Good night.”
“I love you, sweetie. Good night.” Ellen cuddled him, and in the next minute, she could feel his body drifting back to sleep. She caught herself beginning to cry and willed herself to stop. If she went that way, she’d never come back, and this wasn’t the time or the place anyway.
Flip it.
She really couldn’t be sure that Beach Man was the carjacker. A tracing couldn’t tell anything with accuracy, and composites were based only on a verbal description. Lots of men had narrow eyes and long noses. If the composite was too unreliable to prove that the carjacker was Beach Man, then there was no link between Will and Timothy.
Ellen smiled in the dark, feeling a tiny bit better. Maybe Amy would email her, tell her the story of Will’s birth, and explain why she’d put him up for adoption.
Will shifted in his sleep, and she snuggled him. She couldn’t resolve tonight whether her fears were founded or completely insane. But behind them lurked an unspoken question, one that she couldn’t begin to acknowledge, much less articulate to herself. It had been lurking in the back of her mind from the moment she’d seen the infernal white card in the mail.
She hugged Will closer, there in the still, dark room, and the question hung in the air above the bed, suspended somewhere between mother, child, and the false stars.
If Will is really Timothy, what will I do?
Chapter Thirty-four
Ellen entered the newsroom the next morning, exhausted after only two hours of sleep. She hadn’t been able to stop her brain from thinking about Will and Timothy, and she felt raw, achy, and preoccupied. She had on the same jeans and shirt she’d worn yesterday, but with a different sweater, and she hadn’t had time to shower. She’d checked her email too many times on the way in, but there’d been no email from Amy Martin.
Get a grip.
“Good morning, dear,” Meredith Snader said, passing her with an empty mug on the way to the coffee room, and Ellen managed a smile.
“Hey, Mer.” She tried to put the Braverman business behind her, but her head was pounding. The newsroom was mostly empty, and she hustled down the aisle, trying to get her thoughts together for the meeting about the hom i cide piece. Through the glass wall of his office, she could see Marcelo at his desk and Sarah sitting across from him, laughing about something.
Great.
Ellen figured the laughter would stop when she told them she’d be late with her end of the story. She dropped her handbag on her desk, shed her jacket, and hung it on the coatrack, seeing that Sal and Larry were entering Marcelo’s office, holding styrofoam cups of coffee and looking like the journalists Ellen had grown up idolizing. She hated that she was about to crash and burn in front of the local Woodward and Bernstein. She girded herself and headed to Marcelo’s office, where he looked up expectantly from behind his desk.
“Come in, Ellen.” Marcelo smiled, his eyes flashing darkly. “I didn’t get your draft. Did you email it?”
Ellen arranged her face into a professional mask. “Marcelo, I don’t have the piece done. I’m sorry.”
Sarah looked over. Larry and Sal turned around. Marcelo blinked. “You don’t have it?” he asked, lifting an eyebrow.
“No, sorry.” Ellen’s temples thundered. “I got a little bogged down and I need a few extra days.”
“Maybe I can help. That’s what they pay me for.”
“No, you can’t,” Ellen blurted out, but Marcelo was still smiling, his head cocked and his eyes sympathetic.
“Let me see what you have so far. I’m not looking for perfection. I can’t be, with these two slackers on the story.” Marcelo gestured at Larry and Sal. “Their draft needed the usual overhaul.”
“Kiss my ass,” Sal said, and they all laughed except Ellen, who had to come clean.
“Marcelo, to be honest, there is no draft. Not yet.” She felt vaguely sick, unmasked and vulnerable. They were all looking at her in surprise, Marcelo most of all.
“Nothing?” Marcelo frowned, confused.
“No worries,” Sarah chirped up. “I’ve got it covered.”
“Please wait.” Marcelo held up a large palm, but Ellen was looking over at Sarah, too angry to let it go.
“What do you mean, you have it covered?” she asked.
Sarah ignored the question. “Marcelo, Ellen refused to talk with my source, Julia Guest, so I did and wrote it up. I think it puts a human face on the issue quite nicely.” She handed him some sheets from a stack she cradled against her chest. “Check it out.”
Ellen felt stunned. Sarah had just stuck a knife in her back. The girl wanted her job and was taking no prisoners.
“Who’s this source again?” Marcelo was asking, eyeing the pages.
“She’s been active in the efforts to stop the violence and has or ganized the community on the issue. She knows all the players and she feeds to the Mayor’s Office.”
“What’s her stake in this?”
“She organized last month’s demonstrations and one of the vigils.”
“Is she in local politics?”
“Not officially.”
“Thanks, but that’s not what I had in mind.” Marcelo, troubled, handed her back the pages. “It sounds to me as if she has no stake. If she doesn’t have a stake, she’s not the story.”
Ellen cleared her throat. “I interviewed one of the mothers who lost a son, a second-grader who was murdered. I also spoke with the boy’s teacher and the funeral director who prepared his body.”
Sal whistled. “Grieving mothers are a homerun.”
Larry nodded. “I like the funeral angle, too. It’s different. Original.”
Marcelo looked relieved. “Okay, Ellen. Good. So you just don’t have the draft yet. When can you finish it?”
“Next Friday?”
“She’s been working on that Sulaman follow-up,” Sarah interrupted, and Ellen turned on her, not bothering to hide her feelings.
“What are you talking about?”
“You’ve been working on Sulaman, right?” Sarah asked calmly, lifting an eyebrow. “That’s the real reason
you blew this deadline, isn’t it?”
“That’s not true!” Ellen shot back, but she could see that Sarah had gotten Marcelo’s attention.
“Yes, it is,” Sarah continued, her tone measured. “I know because Susan Sulaman called yesterday. She said she’d been calling you and couldn’t reach you, so the switchboard sent the call to the newsroom, and I picked up. She said you’d interviewed her and wanted to know if you’d talked your editor into running the story.”
Marcelo’s eyes flared, and Ellen’s face burned.
“You have no idea what I’ve been doing, so stay out of my business!”
“I knew you wouldn’t make the deadline.” Sarah remained calm, but Ellen raised her voice.
“Your story is separate from mine!” She couldn’t stop herself from shouting even though everyone had fallen into shocked silence. Her head was about to explode. “It’s not your concern whether I make my deadline or not!”
“Beg to differ.” Sarah sniffed. “I pitched the piece in the first place and you’re screwing it up. We’re all ready, why aren’t you?”
“Ladies, hold on.” Marcelo stood up behind his desk, raising his hands. “Everyone, please, give Ellen and me a minute.”
“Good luck,” Sal said with a smile, plucking his coffee from the edge of the desk, and Larry followed suit, both of them edging past Ellen, who turned her head away when Sarah brushed by her, trailing perfume and adrenaline. After they had left, Marcelo put his hands firmly on his hips.
“Close the door, please,” he said quietly.
Ellen did, then faced him.
“What’s going on? You never miss a deadline.” Marcelo looked mystified, and his tone sounded more disappointed than angry. “Is she right? Was it the Sulaman follow-up that delayed you?”