“Beth,” said Candy, not pausing, “maybe you don’t have to believe everything. Maybe you don’t have to know how to pray. Maybe you have all you can do right now just to hold on. Maybe holding on is enough.”
Beth looked up at the statue of the Virgin. “Hold on, huh?” she whispered. “To what? To her?”
“If you want. Maybe.”
“And what if there’s nothing there?”
“Then…you can hold on to me.”
CHAPTER 6
Even Laurie really couldn’t stay forever.
“I’ll come back every weekend until Ben’s found,” she told Beth, her hand cupping Beth’s chin, her eyes fastened unwaveringly on Beth’s eyes with Laurie’s special earnestness. They both knew she could not come back every weekend—would not—and yet nothing about that reality negated the loving hope that underlay the promise. “There’s still a lot more that we can do. Everybody says so. The woman from Crimestoppers says. This week, we’ll do the bulk mailings to all the states where every graduate lives now, and they’ll be distributed by volunteers there. I’ll do a bunch of them from home. By Sunday, we’ll have the highway billboard the Firefighters’ Association is buying—Bethie, a hundred thousand people are going to see that every day. Jimmy’s wife is going to work on that connection with the National Center for Missing and Abused Children. And then there’s that TV special coming up, the one called Missing—Sarah Chan says we have a very good chance of getting on that, especially now that Ben’s been…” She stopped.
“Gone so long,” Beth finished for her. “Gone so long that the fact of him being gone so long is the story now.”
“Oh, God,” Laurie said.
It was the end of something. No one would say it, but they felt the decline, saw it in the faces of the Parkside officers, fewer each day, in the eyes of the volunteers, down after two weeks to a core group of twenty or so. The scent of Barbara Kelliher’s Chanel No. 5 had become a kind of leitmotif in Beth’s days; it preceded Barbara into the basement room at Immaculata, and behind it would come Barbara’s unfailingly strained smile, and the single-minded devotion with which she attached her stack of marked maps and phone messages that had come in the night before. It had occurred to Beth that for a few of the volunteers, the search for Ben was a real labor of love—but not love for her. They hoped, by finding him, to keep lightning from striking their own houses. It was the best, most defensible kind of guilt, the kind that made bystanders jump into freezing water to save collies or derelicts—and thereby save themselves. Beth loved the center, its smell of newly opened reams of medium-weight bond and stale coffee, with a near-romantic fervor. It, and Candy’s obsessively cluttered office on the second floor of the Parkside Police Station, were the only places Beth felt sheared, however briefly, of Ben’s loss; of the weight she sometimes felt would compress her into a flake of skin.
It was at the center, just after saying goodbye to Laurie, that Beth found out about the tip. A sighting that, unlike others, sounded real. A woman from Minnesota, who refused to leave her name, had called to describe a little boy she had spotted in a shopping center in Minneapolis, walking beside a gray-haired woman in a huge hat and sunglasses. The little boy, she was certain, was Ben. He had been eating a hot dog. It was the hot dog that somehow certified the tip for Barbara. “I think you should go talk to Candy and see if she’s going to follow it up,” suggested Barbara. “I could drive you.”
“I can drive,” Beth told her. “Thank you.”
She didn’t, in fact, have to drive. The car piloted itself into the Parkside Police Station parking lot; she simply had to hang on to the steering wheel. But without quite recognizing why, once she got there she drove out again, the few blocks to Golden Hat Gourmet, where she went into one of the cold cases and got a few cannoli.
Joey, who was working the lunch takeout, wrapped them up for her. “Hungry, Bethie?” he asked hopefully, glancing at Beth’s loose jeans, cinched tight with one of Pat’s belts. Her hipbones now poked at the pockets like bunches of keys.
“Yep,” she told him, stretching her mouth in what she believed still looked like a smile. “Got a cannoli craving, like Tree.”
He hugged her, slipped her a Camel, and Beth left, settling the white box with its bowed string beside her in the passenger seat.
No one in the locked offices at Parkside questioned Beth’s presence anymore; they simply buzzed her in wordlessly. Though there was an elevator, Beth always took the stairs, and today when she opened the steel door that would lead directly around a corner into Candy’s open office, she heard Candy say, “…to have somebody go up there and check things out.”
“You have to pardon me, Candace,” an unfamiliar male voice replied, “but there’s no way he’s going to free up a team to drive to fucking Minneapolis to talk to some coupon shopper who thought she saw a kid. I mean, Minneapolis? There wasn’t one person at that reunion from Minneapolis. There are sixty full-time cops on this department, not six hundred.”
“How far the hell away is Minneapolis? People drive all the time, McGuire,” Candy said, her voice stiffening. “It’s a mobile society.”
Beth made herself still to listen.
“Candace, I know how you feel about this, but this kid is dead. This kid is dead, and from his point of view that’s probably a good thing, and—”
“Don’t say I know it, because I don’t know it.” Beth heard the familiar sound of Candy tapping her eraser on her blotter. “Anyway, this is interstate. I’m going to call Bender.”
“And he’s going to say, ‘Good afternoon, Detective, call me some time in the next century or when hell freezes over.’”
“It’s a legitimate alleged sighting across a state line.”
“It’s just another—” The plainclothes cop, whom Beth had never seen before, turned and noticed her. “Uh, hi, Mrs. Cappadora.” Beth smiled.
“Beth, come in,” Candy told her fiercely. “See you later, McGuire.” The detective left. “You heard, didn’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“I heard the part about some guy named Bender.”
“No, you heard the whole thing. But what you need to know is that this is going to be my excuse to call the FBI, and that’s who Bender is—Robert Bender, he’s the agent who heads up the bureau in Chicago.”
“The FBI,” said Beth. “Why?”
“Well, not because we couldn’t do the work ourselves,” said Candy Bliss. “Though we do have this delicate resource problem. We do have this problem of brass who get fretful if we don’t solve a case and get an airtight confession by lunch.” She coughed. “But this is supposedly the reason why the FBI exists, to support local jurisdictions involved with federal offenses.”
She got up and paced. “My own personal perspective on FBI agents is that as criminal investigators, they’re great accountants. The actual reason they exist is to hoard computer data banks and show up briefly when it’s time to make an arrest. Particularly if there are cameras. But I don’t want you to share this sick perspective. So why am I telling you? I’m thinking out loud. Tired.” She pressed her forefinger on the minute lines between her eyes. “Fucking suits. But hell, maybe Bender’s having a good day. I think I’ll call him. He tried to pat my rear once. Maybe there’s a sentimental attachment.”
Beth sat down, without being asked, and watched as Candy dialed the telephone.
“Bob!” Candy’s voice was so genuinely jovial Beth couldn’t believe her previous rancor had been equally authentic. “Yeah…. Oh, sure, well preserved, that’s me.” She paused. “No, actually, three guesses and I’ll give you a bump on the first two…. Bob, yes, you are a genius. The thing is, we have a sighting in Minnesota.” Pause, during which Candy took the receiver from her ear and placed it against her forehead. “No, Bob, it feels just right…. How did you hear that?…Well, of course, we’ll check it out first, but she could’ve walked in off the street, too, Bob. Shit, there’s nothing that prevents old ladies from walking into hotel lobbies…. Okay…. Okay. I
’ll call you back.”
Candy buzzed her secretary and asked her to send Taylor to go over the Tremont guest lists again for unaccompanied senior citizens, women or men, and chat with the manager and the staff. As she talked, an anxious-looking intern brought in the mail. Candy began to slip through it absently, finally coming to an oversized bubble-lined book mailer stuffed nearly to bursting. Hanging up the telephone, she grinned at Beth.
“Another one,” she said.
“You mean, stuff from a confessor?” They’d sent hand-drawn maps leading to nonexistent addresses and abandoned buildings where they said Ben was being held. They’d sent articles of brand-new clothing they said were Ben’s. They’d sent photos of husbands they believed were responsible for the kidnapping, and—eeriest to Beth—long, rambling audio tapes in which they described how happy Ben was now that he was finally living in a Christian home. She suspected there were other tapes, sinister ones, that Candy never shared.
Candy had told her early on that there were only three reasons someone would take a child: to get at that child’s parent, economically or personally; to want a child and be crazy enough to think it was okay to take someone else’s; or, in the very slimmest slice of a single percentage, to savage that child. Of the three, Candy told Beth, you hope for the crazy wanna-be parent, because that person will care for the child tenderly.
So the package could contain anything: a bloody T-shirt, a pair of already threadbare purple shorts, slashed and stiff with—
But Candy said, “No, I mean stuff from Rebecca, my former buddy in the academy, who is now a stockbroker.” Using her thumbnail, Candy stripped open the mailer and shook out an astonishing pile of fuchsia and aqua garments—a tunic, elastic-waisted pants, a scarf, and a belt. “See, my buddy Rebecca gains and loses about thirty pounds every six months or so. It’s a very expensive habit, because as soon as she starts getting fat, she starts mailing all her thin clothes to me.” Candy shook her head. “The thing is, even when she looks good, Becks looks like the fortune-teller at a street fair. And so I end up taking these clothes to Saint Vincent De Paul—fortunately, Becks lives in California, so she never knows. And they probably cost hundreds of bucks.”
Beth smiled. “Sounds like a muffled cry for help to me.”
Candy held up the mailer. “Actually, it’s a padded cry for help.”
And Beth, to her horror, laughed, instantly covering her eyes and feeling that she was about to choke. Candy was on her feet and around the desk in seconds.
“Beth, Beth, listen,” she said. “You laughed. You only laughed. If you laugh, it doesn’t mean that’s a point against our side. If you laugh, or read a book to Vincent, or eat something you like, it’s not going to count for or against us on the big scoreboard of luck.” Beth began to cry. “You have to believe me,” Candy went on. “It feels like if you watch a movie, or listen to a song or do anything that makes you feel anything more than like absolute shit, that little moment of happiness is the thing that’s going to be punished by losing Ben forever. But Beth, that’s just not it. You’re not going to kill your son because you laughed.”
Humiliated even as she did it, Beth reached out and took Candy’s hand, holding it against her cheek. Abruptly, Candy snatched it away, and Beth jumped up, nearly knocking over the chair.
“I didn’t mean anything…” Beth said.
“I know, I know,” Candy said. “I’m a jerk. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what you just did. I’m just an oversensitive jerk.”
“You can’t get involved,” Beth said uncertainly.
“No,” said Candy. “I mean, yes, to an extent. You can’t get so involved you lose sight of things that could help people. But what that was about was…I’m a woman, I’m a detective supervisor, I’m Jewish. And I’m gay, did you know that? Every possible kind of weirdness. So, I feel like the eyes of Texas are upon me, all the livelong day. I feel like every time I hug Katie Wright from Crimestoppers, somebody thinks I’m making a pass at her….”
“I wasn’t trying—”
“I know you weren’t. Jesus, I’m a jerk.” Candy sat down. “But you know what? These bad clothes have given me a good idea. There’s somebody I want us to go see, okay, Beth? You game?”
“Who?”
“There’s this lady—the guys call her Crazy Mary; her name is actually Loretta Quail. Bad enough. Anyhow, what Loretta does is she helps people find stuff. Lost dogs. Lost money.” She looked hard at Beth. “And sometimes, lost people.” Once, Candy said, a young mother from Parkside drove off a bridge into a creek in the middle of a snowstorm. Her car went in head down and sank; the seat belt apparently malfunctioned. “She drowned in five feet of water, Beth. But the thing was, we didn’t know. We didn’t know what the hell had happened. This woman was going out for a bag of diapers. And she just never came back. The husband was a weasly little guy—we thought, you know, this woman’s in the backyard under the play structure. They hadn’t been having too good a time. But no, he was home the whole time with the baby—this lady was just gone. And so was her car. And none of her friends had seen her. She never got to the store. Just, you know, into the fourth dimension.”
And so, Candy said, somebody mentioned Loretta. “You have to know, Beth, I’m a very kind of this-world person. So I thought, Well…you hear departments have pet psychics, but you never think…Anyhow, old Loretta sniffed this young mother’s ski jacket just like those dogs Holmes and Watson, and said she was in her car under a mountain of snow, looking up. And Beth, that’s just where she was. We found her the following March when the creek thawed, still in her seat belt, looking up at the roof of her car. The mountain of snow was what the village plowed off the street into the creek.”
“So you think she might help find Ben.”
“I think I’m going to offer this as an option to you, which I want you to keep under your hat. Except you can tell Pat, of course.”
“I don’t want to tell Pat.”
“I think you should.”
“Well, I don’t want to tell Pat. When can we see her?”
“I’ll call her now,” said Candy; but the telephone rang, and Candy made a despairing motion that sent Beth out the door. As she watched through the glass, she got the impression Candy was arguing; her hands gave her away—she cradled the phone between her cheek and shoulder to gesture as if the caller could actually see her. She hung up and immediately made another short call.
Finally, looking spent, she came out and smiled. “Bender. He’s decided as how he might mosey on over. Later,” she said thinly. Beth, suddenly remembering the cannoli, handed over the box. Opening it, Candy said, “You keep doing this and I’m going to need Rebecca to mail me the other size.” Grabbing a chunk off one end of the cannoli, she said, “Let’s go see Loretta. She’s home.”
Loretta Quail’s house was in what Beth’s dad liked to call a “changed neighborhood”—in other words, in Bill’s opinion, a block that had long since lost the battle. Black middle schoolers, including one girl that Beth noticed to her shock was hugely pregnant, were playing pavement hockey in the street. Loretta’s house looked like a threadbare fairyland in the midst of boarded windows and defeated lawns. From one end of the long hedge to the other, garishly painted ceramic elves disported themselves in various pursuits, from carving pumpkins to playing cards on a toadstool. When Loretta herself opened the door, a gust of trapped interior air, smelling of onions and spray starch, fastened itself to Beth’s face like a wet washcloth. The inside of the house was as precious as the outside—every available surface was covered with china cats, carved wooden cats, stuffed cats, and not an insignificant number of the breathing variety. Beth counted six cats as Loretta took Candy’s hand and led them inside, bustling back from her kitchen with a tray of mugs and a covered pot of tea. It must have been eighty degrees in the room, and Beth could see stray hairs clinging to the mug even at a distance; but she followed Candy’s lead and bravely accepted herb tea and took one of the muffins that
Loretta, to Beth’s dismay, said she’d made herself.
“So, Loretta, you know we’re here about Beth’s son,” Candy began.
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Loretta. “And I knew you would come. But I thought it would be Friday. I had a dream last night that it was going to be Friday. I saw Beth in it.” Dear God, thought Beth, madly glancing around the room at the hell of cats, she’s nuts. Why do nuts women always have cats? Why not dogs, dogs who are just as excited to see you after you drive up to the corner to get milk as they were when they first met you, instead of cats, who, as Pat always said, regarded people as warm-blooded furniture? To keep her eyes to herself, Beth stared down at Loretta’s ample thigh in its armor of polyester, a blue that did not exist in nature. Why did nuts women aged about sixty-five who kept cats also wear stretch pants? With flowered blouses that looked chosen carefully for their potential to make the wearer look like ten miles of bad road under a tablecloth? Because something like these clothes had looked good on them when they were young? Because everything else looked worse? As she let her glance slide upward to Loretta’s tightly furled perm, like a head full of late-spring buds, she heard the woman ask Candy, “So, do you want me to do a trance? Or just give you some impressions?”
Beth thought, How about a side of slaw with that? She felt wildly, hideously embarrassed. Not ever in her life—not once, even the single time she’d dropped acid as a college senior—had Beth ever had an experience she considered truly extrasensory. Hunches, feelings, semiprayers overlaid with coincidences—those, yes; her family of origin ran on those things, as if superstition were gasoline. But though the inside of her brain was lined with her grandmother Kerry’s tales of dead aunts whose spirits jetted to Chicago without benefit of airplanes to warn that Katie or Mary from Louisiana had died in the flu epidemic, Beth herself had never smelled Evie’s cologne, or felt her mother’s spirit brush past her, even though several intelligent friends who had lost parents had assured Beth that these things would happen to her.