His voice broke, and he stepped back and hugged Anne, who was beside herself already.
Questions broke out from the crowd. “Mr. Robinson, does this kidnapping have anything to do with the murder charges that have been filed against you?”
“I’ll take that.” Tony came out of the crowd and trotted up the steps. “I’m Tony Danks with the St. Clair PD, and I can tell you that the charges against Mr. Robinson have been officially dropped as of this morning. The kidnapper is our primary suspect in this murder, and if you’ll read the statement that I passed out to you, you’ll see what the ransom demand was and how it fits into this kidnapping. Again, we will begin a citywide search at 10:00 A.M. this morning, at Roosevelt Park. We need everyone who can come to help us find these children.”
He stepped back, and Lynda Barrett took his place. “As an added note, I’ve been asked to speak for the family to tell you that the $25,000 reward is still being offered to the person who finds and returns these children.”
“Are you still trying to get the information out of the kidnapper?” someone asked.
“Yes, of course,” Tony said. “He just isn’t being very forthcoming.”
“Mr. Robinson, is it true that these children are half-sisters?”
Ben stepped forward. “Yes. Christy is my daughter with Sharon. Emily is my daughter with Anne. But they’re only a year apart in age. They’re very close.”
Sharon looked at him and saw the shame, the remorse, on his face at having to admit that their family was such a tangled web. She, too, hated the way it looked. Instantly, they would be labeled a “dysfunctional family.” It was a term she hated even more than the word “divorce.”
They stood there for a few moments longer as questions were fired at them from the crowd. Enlarged photographs of the girls were passed out to everyone, videos were copied and distributed to the television stations, and finally, the family went back in as Lynda and Tony fielded the rest of the questions.
Two hours later, as Larry and Jenny and Lynda manned the phone lines, Sharon, Anne, and Ben joined Tony and what looked like the rest of the town of St. Clair at Roosevelt Park. Hundreds of people had turned out to search for the children, and a mob of reporters, even more than she’d met on the front lawn of her house, recorded the event.
Sharon was so moved as they drove up that she couldn’t speak. Tony saw the emotion on her face, and reached for her hand. “Are you all right?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I’m just surprised.”
“St. Clair has a great community spirit,” he said. “I knew they’d come.”
Anne and Ben got out of the car, but Sharon held back.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Sharon?” Tony asked her.
She sat there for a moment, not answering, just staring at the mob of people waiting to find her child. “I guess that . . . I’m just afraid . . . of what they might find.” She wiped her tears away.
Tony scooted closer to her on the seat and wiped a tear rolling down her cheek. “Sharon, last night you said that they weren’t dead. You said you would have known it. You trusted. Don’t you still feel that?”
“Yes,” she cried. “But maybe that’s just what I want to feel. What if they’re dead? I just don’t want to know.”
“They’re not dead,” Tony whispered. “Chamberlain is a high-brow art dealer. It would go against his nature to kill two little girls.”
“It was in his nature to kill Dubose.”
“But this is different. He would have no reason to kill them.”
“When he left them, he knew they could identify him. He may have wanted to make sure that they didn’t.”
Tony grew quiet for a moment. He’d thought of that himself. “Sharon, those children need you right now. They need your faith. Now, I’m not even sure I believe in the same things you do, but I’ve got to tell you. Your faith has been a comfort to me during this whole thing. I may not believe in God, but I believe in your faith in God. What was it you said just yesterday, about God knowing where they are?”
She leaned her head back on the seat and closed her eyes as more tears poured out. “They’re in the palm of his hand.”
“Maybe he’ll show us where they are,” Tony whispered. “Now, come on.”
They got out of the car and pushed through the crowd to the raised platform where Anne and Ben were already standing.
Jake Stevens was in the crowd, passing out flyers and pictures of the girls. His mother, Doris Stevens, who’d developed a reputation around town for being a Porsche-driving-teenager-in-a-fifty-five-year-old-woman’s-body, was standing in a crowd of people telling the tidbits she knew that no one else knew.
“Jake, my boy, is good friends with the parents, ya see, and he says that the daddy and his family moved in with wife number one on account of that bum murder rap they pinned on him, so the girls were together with their older sister when she went to the grocery store . . . You know, this was all over a painting, and that man, Somebody Nelson, the kidnapper, he killed that Dupuis fella who ran the art gallery . . .”
Tony couldn’t help grinning slightly, but Sharon was too focused on starting the hunt.
She stepped up on the platform, and looked at Ben. “Who’s gonna do the talking?”
“I will,” Ben said.
He stepped up to the microphone and tapped it. There was instant feedback, and someone adjusted it as the crowd got quiet.
“I really appreciate you all coming here today,” he said, his voice wobbling. “Some pictures of my girls, Christy and Emily, are being passed out right now, along with the phone number to call if you see anything or think of anything that might help us. Uh . . .” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Christy’s six, and she’s real bright and real strong. And Emily is five . . . not as athletic as Christy, or as daring. But they’re survivors. We . . . uh. . . . don’t know how long since they’ve eaten. And the weather’s been getting colder . . . they didn’t have their coats . . .” His voice broke and he stepped back, unable to go on.
Tony gave them a few more instructions, organized the groups into sections of the city to cover, then escorted them all back to the car.
“I think the three of you should go home now,” he said. “Let these people look for them.”
“No,” Sharon said. “I’m going to look, too. I can’t sit in that house any longer doing nothing.”
“But what if someone finds them? You’ll need to be home.”
“I can take my cellular phone with me. I’m going, Tony. Don’t even try to talk me out of it.”
“Take us home,” Ben said. “We’re going, too, but we’ll take our own car.”
“All right,” Tony said, and headed back to Sharon’s.
CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN
They searched the town high and low, from abandoned buildings to hotel rooms. Tony spent five more hours trying to intimidate the information out of Chamberlain, but to no avail. Even at his arraignment, when the judge ordered him to tell where the children were or be held in the same cell until the Grand Jury investigation, Chamberlain maintained that he knew nothing about them.
Sharon searched in the most destitute part of town, where crack dealers and druggies and prostitutes loitered on the streets. She searched the buildings there with a vengeance, calling out the girls’ names at the top of her lungs, until she was too hoarse to be heard any longer.
She had no luck, and her cellular phone never rang. Hourly, she checked at home to see if anyone had given them any leads at all, but any that had been given had already been checked out.
Finally, she drove to the beach, to her favorite spot where she often took the girls, and sat in the car, staring out across the sand and the blue waters of the Gulf.
Why aren’t you answering, God? Why have you turned away?
The mighty pounding of the waves were her answer, each white-topped crest tipping toward her like an indictment. For a long while she sat, staring at those angry waves, searching her own hear
t and mind for the answers she needed.
She had come close to admitting the problem with Ben once, when they’d stood out on that porch and she’d told him of her ulterior motives in inviting him to live in her home. She had con fessed, partially, to him, though it hadn’t been a confession that sought forgiveness. It had been merely a statement, without heart, without much remorse. It had even been flung out in anger.
Now she wondered if it had been enough. God was dealing with her, she thought. He had something to teach her about her own faults, her own shortcomings, her own sins.
“Oh, God, help me to see what you see,” she whispered. “I really want to be pleasing to you.”
And then she knew.
She started the car and headed home. Maybe if she got her heart right, once and for all, she could pray effectively, she told herself. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel this wall between herself and her Savior.
It was late afternoon when she finally returned home, not ready to give up, but desperately needing some cleansing.
The house was quiet—the phone wasn’t ringing. Jenny’s eyes were swollen as she sat in front of the telephone, waiting for something, anything, to happen. Lynda was studying a map of the town, trying to figure out any places that had yet to be searched.
“Have Larry or Tony called in?” Sharon asked.
“No,” Lynda said. “They’re apparently not having any luck with Chamberlain.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “I wish they would let me at him. I’d get the information out of him!”
Sobbing quietly, Jenny lowered her face into the circle of her arms. Sharon softened and went to hug her. “Honey, have you eaten?”
“No,” she said. “But neither have you. And neither have they . . . at least not since Chamberlain was found.” She looked up at her mother. “Mom, why didn’t he get me, too? Why didn’t he just take me with them? Then I could be there taking care of them, making sure they were all right.”
“You are taking care of them,” Sharon said. “You’re here, doing everything you can.”
“Mom, I’m so afraid they’re dead!” she said in a high-pitched voice. She fell into her mother’s arms, and they clung to each other for a moment.
The phone rang, and Jenny jumped for it.
“I’ll get it,” Lynda said, but Jenny jerked it up. “Hello?”
She wilted as the caller spoke, then said, “Okay. I’ll tell them.”
She hung up. “It was Tony. He wanted to check on you. He said he’s on his way over.”
Sharon went cold. “Does he have news?”
“No,” Jenny said. “He said he didn’t. But they’re still looking.”
Sharon leaned heavily back against the wall. “Where are your father and Anne?”
“They got back about half an hour ago. Anne’s taking care of Bobby, and Daddy’s out on the back porch.”
Sharon glanced through the den and to the back door. Sighing, she said, “I need to go talk to him.”
She left them there and headed back through her house, to the back porch where Ben stood against the screen, gazing out at the tree house where he had sat with his little girls just days ago.
He heard her coming out and turned his head. She came to stand beside him and looked at it, too. “We were going to paint the tree house,” he said quietly. “Since I wasn’t here for the building of it, I thought I could at least do that. They wanted to paint a mural.”
Sharon swallowed. “God willing, you’ll still have the chance.”
“Well, that’s just it,” Ben said. “I don’t know if God is willing. I haven’t done much for him.”
She looked down at the tiles beneath her feet.
“You have, though,” he whispered. “I guess I’m counting on him listening to you. You always did the praying for both of us.”
Sharon shook her head. “It’s occurred to me that maybe my prayers are worthless,” she whispered on the edge of tears.
Now he looked fully at her. “Worthless? Why?”
“Because I’m still holding so much against you.”
He breathed a mirthless laugh. “Yeah, well, I guess you deserve to.” He turned away from the screen and went to sit down on one of the cushioned patio chairs. “You know, it’s strange, looking back on what I did to you. It didn’t seem so bad at the time.”
Sharon couldn’t look at him. She kept her eyes on the floor.
“You were doing so great professionally, and I was struggling. You weren’t that naive little woman who used to look up at me like I was the one who hung the moon.”
“I found out you weren’t,” she admitted.
“I missed having someone to look up to me,” he said. “And when I met Anne—”
Sharon shook her head, unable to bear the explanation again. “Don’t, Ben. You don’t have to do this.”
“Yes, I do,” he said.
“Why? I didn’t bring it up so we could salt old wounds. I came out here to forgive you.”
“Is it really forgiveness, Sharon, when you can’t even discuss it?” He rubbed his face and looked at her over his fingertips. “I really need to say these things to you.”
She glanced at the door back into the house and wondered if she could make a clean exit. But he was right. That was no kind of forgiveness.
“My children live in two different families because of what I did, Sharon. Two of them I only get to see on weekends. Moving in here and seeing how unnatural everything is . . . well, it started me thinking about how drastically I’ve altered all of our lives.” He looked up at her, struggling with the words. “Sharon, I never meant to hurt you. But even worse, I never meant to hurt Jenny or Christy. When I think of leaving you when she was just a little baby . . . giving up that daily experience of watching her grow . . .”
“You were the one you hurt,” she whispered.
He nodded, as if he knew that was true. “I told myself that you were strong. And you prospered so over the years. I mean, look at this house. You did it yourself.”
“I didn’t do it myself,” she whispered. “I leaned on God, and he took care of me. He does that. He makes provision.”
“There have been times, over the years, when I looked back on my affair with Anne, and I realized how I deceived myself, and you, and her. There were really no winners. Everybody had to pay.”
“That’s divorce,” Sharon said.
A long moment of silence stretched between them, and she looked down at her former husband, collapsed on the chair, in turmoil over the present, and in just as much turmoil over the past.
“I’m gonna say something that isn’t easy for me,” she said, sitting down opposite him and leaning her elbows on her knees as she knitted her fingers together.
“What?” he asked.
“It wasn’t just you. I had a part in ending our marriage.”
Wind whipped through the screen, ruffling his long hair. “How do you figure that?” he asked. “You were faithful.”
“That’s true. I never cheated on you. Not with a person. But with my work. And with my affections. Maybe it was my job to keep looking at you the way I had in the beginning. Maybe I set myself up for an Anne to come along.” She swallowed, and made herself look at him. “All those times you wanted affection, and I was distant, cold . . . I told myself you were just a passionate artist, that your feelings didn’t have to be taken seriously.”
His face changed as he gazed at her. “I never in a million years thought I’d hear you say this.”
“I should have said it a long time ago, Ben. Yes, you hurt our family when you left. But I hurt them, too. Maybe I left the marriage long before you did.”
He struggled with the emotion twisting his face.
“I forgive you, Ben,” she whispered. “I hope you can forgive me.”
“I do.” They were the words he’d spoken on the day they’d exchanged vows, and now they were spoken to heal them of their broken vows. He got up and hugged her, tightly, desperately, then qui
ckly let her go.
“Now maybe God will listen to me,” she whispered. “Maybe he had to bring us through this to get us to this point. Come in with me. We’ll get Anne and Jenny, and start praying again.”
He rubbed his red eyes and followed her in.
CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT
Tony pulled into Sharon’s driveway and sat for a moment in his car, wishing with all his heart that he had some good news for her. He hated to go in there empty-handed again, but he felt a compulsion to be here with her, as though he had some part in this loss they shared. He got out of the car and walked to the door, but before knocking, decided to walk back to the gate that led into the backyard. He opened it and went through, and looked around the yard at all the signs of the little girl who lived here. Her Barbie bike with glittery iridescent ribbons streaming from the handlebars stood on the patio next to a little toy stroller. Across the yard, her tire swing sat motionless, empty. He walked across the lawn to the tree house, and looked up. Something drew him up there, so he shrugged off his sport coat, dropped it on the ground, and began to climb the ladder.
He opened the hatch at the top of the ladder and went in to the little room where she’d stored so many treasures. Milk cartons and shoe boxes and rolls of string and glue . . .
He could just imagine the little rascals up here playing to their hearts’ content, never worried that some stranger might come along and rock their world.
Unable to handle the emotions suddenly coursing through him, he slipped out the hatch and climbed back down. He grabbed his coat and hurried across the yard.
When he knocked on the door, Lynda let him in. “Any word?” she asked hopefully.
Tony shook his head and sighed. “No. Chamberlain’s not saying a word. And now he’s got this bigshot lawyer with him trying to strike a deal.”
“What kind of deal?”