“To Rosie and Angelo Cappadora’s?”
“Right. Pat’s folks. I know them, but we don’t need to broadcast that we’re coming.”
“You mean you think that Rosie and Angelo could have Ben?”
“Anything’s possible. A family feud—”
“Oh, that’s so nuts, Jimmy. Rosie and Angelo worship Ben.”
“That’s just what I mean.”
“And there’s nothing with Pat and me or anything. They don’t even know I’m in Chicago. Neither does my dad.”
“People do strange things, Bethie.”
Cop wisdom. Full-moon talk. This was all happening too quickly. All these people were too concerned all of a sudden. Couldn’t Jimmy see how time-wasting and absurd it would be to send a police car to Rosie and Angelo’s manicured ranch house to ask them if they’d stolen their grandson whom they didn’t even know was in town? Didn’t Jimmy grasp that she didn’t want to see her dad or Pat’s parents? To have them see her? She had always seemed unusual to Angelo, unusual to her father, perhaps even to Rosie, who liked everyone. But now, with this, if the parents came, there would be no escaping.
Jimmy led her to the telephone, wrote down Beth’s home number in Madison, and dialed it for her. But when the phone began to burr, she felt as if she would have diarrhea, right there, and handed the receiver to Jimmy. Ellen came back and took her to the bathroom, and because Beth’s legs would not bend, actually helped her sit down. Then Beth went into the bar and ordered another vodka and tonic; she didn’t even attempt to pay. She had no idea where her purse was, or her shoes. Or Jill. Nick Palladino had come down and brought Vincent a small football on a rubberized string. Vincent was batting it up and down. Wayne and Nick and a couple of the cheerleaders’ husbands stood around the bar. Beth watched their jaws work up and down.
“…to help,” said Nick.
“Huh?” asked Beth.
“She’s torn up. She wants to go home,” said Nick. “But I’ll come back.”
Trisha wants to go home to the children, Beth thought. To their two little girls, make sure they are safe, hold them and smell them. She said, “No, you don’t have to. Unless you want to go to the party.”
“Oh, Beth, I don’t think they’ll have the party,” said Nick. “At least, not unless they find Ben, you know?”
So grave. So grave so fast. Grave enough, this perhaps-not-temporary loss of her child, to cancel a year-planned event for two hundred couples? If it’s so grave as that, Beth thought, logically I should cry. She tried to let her eyes fill. But they would only lock, pasted open, staring at Nick’s suit buttons, which had little, silver whales on them.
“I’d do anything for you, Beth,” Nick told her.
“Oh, okay,” Beth answered. Was that an appropriate reply? She searched Nick’s face. His beautiful eyes looked puzzled. I should have married Nick, Beth thought, no matter how unintellectual he is. Then I wouldn’t have had Ben to lose. That would be better. Her glass was empty.
Jimmy Daugherty came back and said he’d phoned Pat—Pat wasn’t home.
“You have to call the restaurant.”
“You guys have a restaurant?”
“His uncle’s. Cappadora’s. 741-3333.”
Jimmy wrote it down. On the way to the phone, he added, “Don’t worry, Bethie. Look around you. The Marines are here! And bliss is coming.”
He sounded sure. She sipped her drink, prudently.
Ellen had ordered a pizza. Vincent wanted pizza, and the hotel didn’t serve it. Discipio’s was only a mile or so away, said Ellen. Jill, she told Beth, was lying down…upset. Ellen had given Kerry to Barbara Kelliher. “And don’t worry, Beth, she’s right in her room, number 221, and Becky’s with her. Kerry’s safe, Beth.”
Beth decided against telling Ellen that it didn’t matter; she didn’t really care whether Kerry was safe, unless Ben was found. She said, “Oh, good.”
Wayne, the police, and the purple security men were rounding up everyone in the hotel who was connected with the reunion; they’d assemble in the ballroom, for what Beth pictured as a sort of ghastly dress rehearsal of the evening’s planned assembly. The police would make small groups and then search the hotel rooms left vacant once again, in case they’d missed something. Everyone not connected with the reunion had been shuttled to the Parkside Arms, three blocks away, because the ordinary customers, only half a dozen couples, had been unnerved by the droves of uniforms in the lobby and the cordons outside.
The manager was furious and kept asking when the investigation would be complete. “Hasn’t started yet, buddy,” Jimmy told him.
“I thought this place didn’t have a shuttle,” Beth remarked to Ellen.
Ellen stared at her, glared at her. “What?”
“Never mind.” Beth’s glass was empty. She held it up and Ellen took it to the bar.
It was five p.m. Ben had been missing four hours.
Beth could feel her stomach boiling; she was actively nauseated; she probably needed to stop drinking. But there was the process of getting smaller, which had started when she first met the sergeant. That was wise to continue, Beth knew for sure. She accepted another drink from Nick. The brown-haired bun officer was back.
“Now, Mrs. Cappadora…” she began.
“Beth,” said Beth. It was such a long name, hers and Pat’s; if she kept using it, this would take all night. Night. No, not yet. Outside the window, it was still bright afternoon, the sun spilling wavelike over the round shadow caves made by the hotel awnings.
“Well, you can call me Grace then,” said the bun.
“Grace Clemons,” said Beth.
“Right!” said the officer, as if Beth were very, very bright for her age. “One thing that sometimes happens is, parents sometimes have fingerprints taken of their children—”
“Fingerprints?” Beth shouted. The lobby went still for a long instant; then a phone rang and the burble of voices quietly resumed. And then Beth remembered: “I did, actually. We had this school program—Identa-Kid, through Dane County. We did both boys.”
Beth thought Grace Clemons might literally jump up and down. “That’s so wonderful, Mrs. Cappadora! Now we have a good tool, a real helper, for finding Ben.”
Am I thick, Beth thought, or is she talking to me in layers? If they were to find Ben, why, they would bring Ben to his mother, and he would wrap his legs around me like a cub on a trunk. Who would need fingerprints? Fingerprints were for criminals—and victims.
Beth felt as if she heard a far-off engine sputter and then catch. That was it. So far, so fast. Children taken to hospitals, found in weeds, children whose hands were not damaged, but their faces…
“Now, this Identa-Kid program, Mrs. Cappadora, would that be through your local police department?”
“Uh, no—Dane County, I said.”
“County sheriff?”
“Yes.”
“And that’s which county?”
“Dane County.” Didn’t I just say this? Beth wondered.
Grace Clemons summoned one of the cops manning the phones and told him to get in touch with Dane County stat and get a fingerprint fax. You don’t understand, Beth wanted to explain. I had Ben’s fingerprints taken so that he would not ever be stolen or lost. It was preventive medicine, kept in the cabinet like Ipecac, to ward off poison by the fact of its presence; it was not ever intended to be used.
The brown-haired bun was talking again. Clemons. Yes. Grace. “Tell me what happened when you first came into the hotel. Now, your friend Elaine—”
“Ellen.”
“Ellen was with you?”
“She met me in the parking lot.”
“In the parking lot?” said Grace Clemons. “How did she know you were in the parking lot?”
“Well, she was looking for me. She would come out and look, and go back in. And then we got here.”
“And besides Ellen, who was the first person you talked to?”
“Well, my boyfriend…I mean, my
ex…I mean, my boyfriend from high school, Nick. And Wayne. My friend Wayne. He’s Pat’s friend, too. And the cheerleaders.” Grace Clemons looked disappointed. Beth wondered what she’d done wrong. Her glass was empty. She held it up. Ellen materialized from somewhere and took it.
Beth said, “I have to get up for a minute.”
Jimmy Daugherty had somehow found time to take off his suit and put on an ordinary summer-weight jacket and shirt. Jimmy was still as lean as the swimmer he’d been senior year, with crisp brown curls and a Marine-recruitment-poster jaw. Beth thought absurdly of Super-man, ducking into the cloak room. He had told Beth he was a detective in plainclothes, and these were certainly plain. He’d even showed her his gold shield, as if to reassure her that they were both grownups now and not going to fight about who had to pith the frog in lab.
Now Jimmy approached Beth with a tall, willowy woman, ash-blond, with the kind of languid, manicured hands Beth associated with the Shorewood mothers for whom she sometimes shot photos of garden festivals. She wore a short plaid skirt and a long cotton sweater. He’s going to introduce me to his wife, thought Beth. Is this possible? And then she remembered, Jimmy was married to the little Ricarelli girl, Anita—a child bride who had given him four boys before her thirtieth birthday.
“Beth, this is my boss,” Jimmy told her. “This is Detective Supervisor Bliss.”
“I’m not really his boss—who could boss Jimmy? I just head up the detectives,” said the woman, smiling.
“You’re a police chief?” she asked stupidly.
“No, just of detectives…. Well, my name is Candy Bliss.”
Beth laughed, snorted; she couldn’t help it, but was instantly mortified.
The woman’s green eyes lighted with a kind of conspiratorial joy. “I know—it sounds like a stripper, huh? My sister’s name is Belle, can you beat that? Belle Bliss? I’m the stripper; she’s the gun moll. The stuff parents can do to you, huh?”
She stopped, and pressed one slender finger against a deep line just between her arched brows. “I can’t believe I said that. Mrs. Cappadora, I want you to know, we are going to find your little boy. Can we sit down?” Jimmy drifted away.
“Jimmy doesn’t have to work; he took a night off,” Beth said helplessly. She did not want Candy Bliss to think her a greedy person.
“Oh, I think he wants to,” said Candy Bliss. She gave Beth her dazzling smile, then turned to Grace Clemons, and Beth saw the smile vanish, as if Bliss had run a washcloth over her face.
She said, “Description?”
Grace Clemons said, “Already out, and they’re doing the leads now.”
“What leads?” Beth asked. “Who saw him?”
“Not those kinds of leads, Mrs. Cappadora. It’s a computer network,” Candy Bliss explained. “Law Enforcement Agency Data Systems. If anyone were to be able to run this child by obtaining his name or date of birth—”
“He has no idea what his date of birth is.”
“Well, his name, then—it would come back on the computer as a hit. We’d have a location for him.”
“A location?”
“A hospital, if he got hurt—a lone child if he was picked up by a unit.” She turned her attention back to the other woman. “Detective Clemons, I can take over here now. I’m going to want you to do press if this keeps up for very much longer, so start preparing a statement.” She shot a look at Beth. “Ben answers to his name?”
“Yes.”
“So I guess, maybe, okay, use the name, and heavy on the description. Just…let me have a look at it before you go with it.”
Switch. Turn. Radiant smile again. “Now,” she said, “here’s the deal.”
Odds strongly favored finding Ben within the next hour or so. “Children disappear all the time. Even in a little town like this. We have kids wander off from the carnival, from the playground, the library. From day care—there’s major hell to pay when that happens. They walk down the block, turn the wrong way, and get lost. The thing is, someone always finds them. And what we’re seeing now, I think, is just that gap in time between someone finding Ben and bringing him to a police station, or calling the police while they have Ben at their house….”
“So you’re saying you think he’s no longer in the hotel, period,” Beth began.
“It’s been a little too long for that now. And this search has been pretty thorough.”
The next step, said Candy Bliss, would be to create target maps of the immediately surrounding area; then search systematically—go door to door along the short block of stores that ran parallel to the cemetery, cut over to the high school to check the sports equipment sheds, the fields, the bleachers, any place that might attract a kid’s attention.
“There are a lot of fathers and grandfathers here who are pretty upset,” said the detective. “We’re getting a fair number of volunteers dropping in who are off-shift tonight. By the way, that’s why it took me so long to get here. I wasn’t working tonight. I apologize. It was my nephew’s birthday, way up in Algonquin.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Beth nodded.
“You mean, to take me away from it? Oh come on, that’s fine. He got what he wanted out of me anyway. Little Tykes wagon.”
“Ben has that, too. Santa Claus. How old is your little nephew?”
“Well, actually, he’s three today. He’s three.”
Beth reached for her glass and drained her drink.
The pizza arrived then.
It was five-thirty. Ben had been missing four hours and thirty minutes.
The pizza delivery kid in his red-and-yellow smock barely made it through the revolving glass door when Pat flew in as if out of a hailstorm and jostled the kid to one knee. It was 150 miles from the restaurant to Parkside, maybe more. Pat would later tell Beth he didn’t really know how fast he drove; but she calculated it had to be close to a hundred miles an hour. No one stopped him; he paid no tolls. He left the door of the freezer open at Cappadora’s and the lip of the cash register hanging out, the tray stuffed with money. Augie wasn’t there, only a seventeen-year-old waitress and the busboy, Rico.
“Where is he?” asked Pat of the manager, who happened to be the first person in his line of vision.
“The little boy?” said the manager. “You’ll have to talk to the police about that matter.”
“Paddy,” said Jimmy Daugherty with the kind of easy, instant intimacy Beth craved from fellow Irish. “We haven’t found him yet. It shouldn’t take long, though.”
“What?” Pat cried. “What? Where’s Ben? Where’s Beth?”
Hastily, Beth stuck her half-filled glass behind her and scrambled to her feet. Pat rushed at her, grabbed her, held the back of her skull in his free hand as if she were a child. “Bethie,” he told her, speaking slowly, as if she were hearing-impaired, “tell me how this happened. Tell me where Ben is.”
Beth made a small motion; should she shrug, try to speak? Explain?
Pat let her go, not entirely gently, and said, “Okay. Okay. Can I smoke in here?” Four people offered him a light. “Okay, okay,” Pat said again. “Now, where is there in the hotel nobody has searched? The basement?”
“Just food storage down there,” said the manager. “And it’s locked. All the doors leading to storage are locked from the outside.”
“Ben would love food storage. He grew up in a restaurant. Freezers and cabinets.” He gestured to the manager. “You take me there.”
“I don’t see why,” said the manager.
“We were going to anyway,” said Calvin Taylor, appearing. As they walked off, Vincent appeared screaming, “Daddy!”
Pat waved for Vincent to stay back, stay with his mother.
“Your husband,” said Candy Bliss. “That’s okay. He needs to do something. We all do. And what we’ll do is just go through that first half-hour once more. Is that okay, Beth?”
This was liturgy, then. Christ have mercy upon us. Lord have mercy upon us. Mercy upon us as many ways and by as man
y names as possible, over and over. Beth’s part was to answer.
Had she seen Ben wander off? Had Vincent? Did Ben have a history of attention deficit or other neurological disorders? Did Ben have seizures? Was he drawn to shiny objects?
Seizures? Shiny objects?
“Huh?” Beth asked her. “Of course he liked shiny objects. All kids like shiny objects.” She explained to Candy Bliss that she had seen nothing, nothing but one glimpse from the check-in desk of Vincent’s head bobbing up and down.
“Well, then let’s ask Mister Vincent,” said Candy Bliss. She got up and settled herself on the luggage trolley, where Vincent cringed. “You wanta help the cops, Vincent? We got a lost brother here.” Vincent stared around her, at Beth. Beth nodded faintly. “First, I want you to point for me in which direction Ben walked away.”
Vincent sat back down on the luggage trolley and coiled back against the wall beside the elevator, hiding his eyes with uncharacteristic reluctance, until Beth walked over and settled him on her lap. Then he buried his face against Beth’s midriff and violently shook his head. Beth eased him up and brushed the sweaty hair off his forehead.
“You can help find Ben. Old fuzzhead Ben needs you,” she told him. Vincent squeezed his eyes closed; like her, Beth thought, he wanted to shrink to a dot.
“He’s shrinking,” she told Candy Bliss, who blinked once, quickly, and then looked away.
“Come on, buddy,” the detective urged Vincent. “Show me where your brother went.”
Vincent stuck out one limp and skinny arm and pointed toward the center of the room.
If Ben had toddled—Beth caught herself using the word, making Ben tinier, more babylike than he really was—off in that direction, he would have come gradually closer and closer to Beth.
He had been trying to come to Beth.
“Did you poke him?” Beth asked Vincent, suddenly, ferociously.