In the morning, Alvirah met Fr. Aiden in the Friary adjoining St. Francis of Assisi Church. Together with Neil the handyman, they went to the office to view the playback of the tapes from the security cameras starting at 5:30 P.M. on Monday evening. For the first twenty minutes there was nothing unusual in the frames of people entering or leaving the chapel. As she waited, Alvirah, her voice filled with concern, told Fr. Aiden that the media was reporting that Zan might be involved in Matthew’s disappearance.
“Aiden,” Alvirah said, insistently, “they might just as well be saying that Willy and I stole Matthew from his stroller. It’s so absolutely ridiculous that you wonder how anyone would swallow it. If they have some kind of pictures, I can only say that that guy in England doctored them to make money from that magazine.” Then she leaned forward and gasped. “Neil, can you stop the video? That’s Zan. She must have paid a visit here on Monday evening. I know how upset she had to have been because Matthew was turning five yesterday.”
Fr. Aiden O’Brien had also recognized the expensively dressed young woman in the dark glasses with the long hair. It was the woman who had come into the Reconciliation Room and told him that she was involved in an ongoing crime and that there was a murder about to be committed. He tried to keep his voice calm as he asked Alvirah, “Are you sure that is your friend Zan?”
“Aiden, of course I’m sure. Look at that suit. Zan bought it last year after it was reduced. She’s so careful about money. She went through every cent her mother and father had left her, spending it on private detectives to help find Matthew. Now she’s saving so that she can get someone new to start hunting for him.”
Before Aiden could reply, Alvirah urged Neil to start running the tape again. “I’m dying to see if I can pick up the guy who was eyeing you, Aiden.”
Aiden phrased his words carefully. “Do you think he might have been accompanying or following your friend, Alvirah?”
Alvirah seemed not to have heard the question. “Oh, look,” she exclaimed, “there he is coming in, the guy I’m looking for.” Then she shook her head. “Oh, you can’t see his face, and his collar is up. He’s got those dark glasses on. All you can see is that mop of hair.”
For the next half hour, she reviewed the rest of the tapes. They could easily distinguish the agitated figure of the woman Alvirah identified as Zan leaving the church. She was still wearing her dark glasses, but her head was bent and her shoulders shaking. Holding a handkerchief to her mouth as if she were trying to stifle sobs, she had rushed out of the church and out of the sight of the camera.
“She didn’t stay five minutes,” Alvirah said sadly. “She’s so darn afraid of breaking down. She told me that after her parents were killed in that accident, she simply couldn’t stop crying. She was afraid to go out in public. She said that if that happened again because of Matthew, she wouldn’t be able to work and she needed to work to keep herself from going insane.”
“Insane.” Fr. Aiden whispered the word so softly that neither Alvirah nor Neil could possibly have heard it. “I am an accessory to a crime that is ongoing and to a murder that is going to happen very soon. I don’t want to be part of it, but it’s too late to stop.” In the last two days that frantic statement was embedded in his mind.
“There’s that guy again, leaving. But you can’t tell anything about him.” Alvirah signaled to Neil to turn off the tape. “You see how upset Zan appears Monday night? Can you imagine how she feels right now with the news story about her kidnapping Matthew?”
That was the other thing the young woman told him, Fr. Aiden thought: You’ll read about it in the headlines. Had the murder she claimed she could not prevent already been committed? Had she already killed her own child, or probably even worse, was the poor thing still alive and about to die?
12
After Ted’s explosive accusation, Josh grabbed Zan’s hand and pulled her through the tables of shocked diners at the Four Seasons, rushed her down the stairs, through the lobby, and onto the street. “God, they must have followed me,” he muttered as paparazzi lunged forward and cameras began flashing.
A cab had stopped in the street in front of the entrance. Josh, his arm now around Zan, sprinted to it and the instant the previous occupant had both feet on the ground, pushed her into it. “Just move,” he snapped to the driver.
The driver nodded and started the cab, catching the light at Fifty-second Street and Third Avenue. “Make a right on Second Avenue,” Josh told him.
“Is she a movie star or a rock singer?” the cabbie asked, then shrugged when he did not get an answer.
Josh still had his arm around Zan. Now he removed it. “You okay?” he asked her.
“I don’t know,” Zan whispered. “Josh, what does it mean? Are they crazy? How could they possibly have a photo of me taking Matthew out of his stroller? For God’s sake, I have proof that I was at the Aldrich town house. Nina Aldrich had invited me over there to discuss doing the interior for her.”
“Zan, take it easy,” Josh said, trying to sound calm even as he visualized what it was going to look like when Ted’s outburst hit the news. “You can prove where you were that day. Now what do you want to do? I’m afraid if you go home, the paparazzi may be waiting for you there.”
“I have to go home,” she said, her voice becoming stronger. “You can drop me off, but if there are any photographers, have the cab wait and walk with me until I can get inside. Josh, what’s going on? I feel as if I’m living in a nightmare and I can’t find my way out of it.”
You are living in a nightmare, Josh thought.
They were silent the rest of the way to Battery Park City. When the cab pulled up to Zan’s apartment building, as Josh had anticipated the cameras were waiting for them. Ducking their heads, they ignored the cries to “Look this way, Zan,” or “Over here, Zan,” until they were safely inside the lobby.
“Josh, the cab is waiting. You go ahead home,” Zan told him as they stood at the elevator.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“Zan …” Josh bit off what he was about to say. He was going to warn her that the police would undoubtedly want to question her again and that before she spoke to them, she had better get a lawyer.
Instead, he squeezed her hand and waited until she was safely inside the elevator before he left. Outside, the paparazzi, seeing him alone and sensing that there would be no more photo opportunities, were beginning to disperse. They’ll be back, Josh thought, as he got back in the cab. If there’s anything at all we can be sure of, it’s that they’ll be back, damn them.
13
After his outburst in the Four Seasons, Ted Carpenter had gone down to the men’s room. When he had jumped up and grabbed Zan, the glass of red wine he’d been holding had spilled all over his shirt and tie. Grabbing a towel, he’d futilely dabbed at the spots then looked in the mirror.
I look as if I’m bleeding to death, he thought, momentarily distracted from the stunning revelation that a tourist’s camera had caught Zan taking Matthew from Central Park.
He felt the vibration of his cell phone in his jacket pocket. He knew it would be Melissa.
It was.
He waited until he was sure she had finished leaving a message, then listened to his voice mail. “I know you can’t talk now, but meet me at Lola’s by 9:30.” There had been nothing of Melissa’s normally sexy voice in her message. Ted knew it was clearly an order. “It’ll be just the two of us. Then we’ll go down to the Club around 11:30,” Melissa continued. Then her voice turned petulant: “Don’t kiss your ex good night.”
I can’t be seen out partying when it’s just been reported that my ex-wife has kidnapped and probably hidden my child, he thought, aghast. When I call Melissa back and tell her what has happened, she’ll surely understand that.
The photos.
She probably hasn’t heard about them yet.
Why am I worried about Melissa? he asked himself. The question I should be screaming i
s: Are those photos fakes?
I know how photos can be manipulated. How many times have we eliminated unimportant people from our publicity shots? If you can take them out, you can put them in, too. It’s common practice to put a star’s face on a better-shaped body. Is this claim that Zan took Matthew just trick photo editing? How much did that tourist get for selling them to that Tell-All rag?
A man entering the restroom looked at Ted sympathetically. Ted exited quickly, not wanting to engage in conversation. If those photos turn out to be phonies, I’ll look despicable for attacking Zan the way I did, he thought in near despair. I’m supposed to be a master of public relations when it comes to crisis management.
He had to talk to Melissa. He would meet her. He had time to go home, change his shirt, and meet her at Lola’s. If the media was waiting outside, he would tell them that, on reflection, he abjectly begged Matthew’s mother’s pardon that he had been so quick to believe she had abducted their son.
Bracing himself, he walked out the lobby door where, as he had expected, camera crews were waiting for him. A microphone was stuck in his face. “Please,” he said, “I want to make a statement but can’t if you won’t give me room.”
As the shouted questions diminished, he took the microphone from the hand of one reporter. His voice firm, he said, “First, I must apologize to Matthew’s mother, my former wife, Alexandra Moreland, for my unspeakable behavior this evening. Both of us are desperate to find our little boy. When I heard that there were photographs in existence showing that Matthew’s mother had taken him, I quite literally lost it. A moment of reflection would have made me realize that those photos have got to be fake, or doctored, whatever name you want to give it.”
Ted paused, then added, “I am so sure that the photos are a hoax that I am going now to meet my client, the talented and beautiful Melissa Knight, for dinner at Lola’s Café. As you can see, in my unfortunate response to hearing about those pictures, I spilled wine on my shirt. I am going home to change, then to Lola’s.”
Ted could not conceal a tremor in his voice. “My son, Matthew, is five years old today. Neither his mother nor I believe that he is dead. Someone, perhaps a lonely woman who desperately wanted a child and seized the opportunity to steal him, is with him at this moment. If that person is watching us, please tell Matthew how much Mommy and Daddy love him and long to see him again.”
The reporters kept a respectful silence as Ted walked to the curb where Larry Post, his high school friend and long-time driver, was holding the car door of the backseat open for him.
14
After Josh left her, Zan went upstairs, double-locked the door of the apartment, and stripped off her clothes, wrapping herself in her warm old bathrobe as she had done when she woke up in the morning. The message light was blinking on the telephone. She walked over and turned off the ringer. For the rest of the night, she sat in the bedroom chair with one single light shining on Matthew’s picture. Her eyes searched each feature of his face longingly.
The spike of hair that by now had probably developed into a cowlick. The hint of red in that mop of sandy hair. Was he now an outand-out redhead?
He had always been a friendly child, sunny and welcoming to strangers, not like some children who are naturally shy at age three. Dad was an extrovert, Zan thought. So was Mother. What happened to me?
So many of those months after they died are a blur. Now they are saying that I took Matthew out of his stroller that day.
“Did I?” she whispered aloud.
The shock of the question, the enormity that she could actually voice it, stunned her. She forced herself to ask the logical next question. “But if I took him, what did I do with him?”
She had no answer.
I would never have hurt him, she told herself. I never laid a finger on him. Even when I had given him a “time out” if he was behaving badly, my heart would melt for him, sitting in his little chair, looking so miserable.
Is Ted right? Do I wallow in self-pity and want other people to pity me? Does he mean that I’m one of those crazy mothers who harm their children because they need to be pitied and comforted?
She had thought she was beyond it, that sense of numbness, the feeling that she was withdrawing into herself from the pain. In the airport in Rome that day, when she had called Ted only minutes after she learned of her parents’ death, she had felt her legs crumble under her. But even though she could not reach out to the people who had gathered around her, who had lifted her onto a stretcher, who had rushed her to the hospital in an ambulance, she had been aware of every word they said. It was just that she couldn’t open her eyes, or make her lips form words, or lift her hand. It was as if she had been in a sealed room and could not find her way back to tell them that she was still with them.
Zan knew that was happening to her again. She leaned back in the soft armchair and closed her eyes.
A merciful emptiness engulfed her as she whispered his name: “Matthew … Matthew … Matthew …”
15
How much had Gloria told that old priest? It was the question that haunted him day and night. She was beginning to crack, and now at this crucial time, when it all was coming to a head, when everything he had planned during these two years was about to happen, she had rushed into that room.
He had been born a Catholic, and knew that if what Gloria said was under the seal of the confessional, the priest would have to keep his mouth shut. But he wasn’t sure if Gloria was a Catholic, and if she wasn’t, and just had gone in for a little heart-to-heart chat, maybe the old priest would consider it okay to say that Zan had a lookalike, someone who was impersonating her.
If that happened the cops would keep digging, and it would soon be all over… .
The old priest. That neighborhood around West Thirty-first Street wasn’t any great shakes, he thought. And stray bullets were hitting people all over the city these days. Why not one more?
He would have to take care of it himself. He couldn’t take the chance of having one more person alive who could tie him to the disappearance of Matthew Carpenter. The best thing would be to go back into the church, and try to get a line on when that priest was hearing confessions. There must be a schedule.
But that might take time. Maybe if I call, he thought, and ask when Fr. O’Brien is scheduled to hear confession next, whoever answers won’t think it unusual. I’m sure some people want to talk to the same guy about their problems every time they go. Besides I can’t sit around like this and wait for him to go to the cops.
The decision made, he placed the call and was told that Fr. O’Brien was scheduled for the next two weeks, Monday through Friday from four to six P.M.
It’s about time for me to go to confession, he thought.
Before he paid Gloria to mind the child, he’d known that she was a consummate makeup artist. She told him that she sometimes made up herself and her friends to look like celebrities, and that they’d fooled everyone. She said they all had a good laugh when according to Page Six of the Post the celebrities they were mimicking were sighted having a quiet dinner at an out-of-the-way spot and graciously signing autographs.
“You wouldn’t believe how often we don’t get a check,” she had giggled.
I always wear the wig she gave me when we meet in town, he thought. With that wig and the raincoat and dark glasses, even my best friends wouldn’t know me.
He laughed aloud. As a kid, he’d always enjoyed being in plays. His favorite was when he had played Thomas à Becket in Murder in the Cathedral.
16
After speaking to the reporters outside the Four Seasons, Ted Carpenter turned on his iPhone on his way downtown and found the photos of the person who seemed unmistakably to be Zan taking Matthew from the stroller. Shocked, he stopped at his duplex condo in the newly gentrified Meatpacking District of lower Manhattan. There he had agonized briefly about whether or not to meet Melissa at Lola’s Café. What will it look like for me to be there when these photos a
re showing my ex-wife stealing my child?
He phoned the Central Park Precinct and was put through to a detective who told him that it would be at least twenty-four hours before they could verify that the pictures were not doctored. At least if I’m questioned by the paparazzi, I can tell them that, he thought, as he changed his shirt and rushed back to the car.
The paparazzi on the sidewalk outside the popular café were kept back behind velvet ropes. One of the bouncers had held the door of his car open and he had ducked out toward the entrance. But then he stopped, unable to ignore the shouted question, “Have you seen those photos yet, Ted?”
“Yes, I have and I have been in touch with the police. I believe they are a cruel hoax,” he snapped.
Inside the café he braced himself, knowing he was a half hour late meeting Melissa. He fully expected to find her in a filthy mood, but she was sitting at a large table with five old friends from the band she had once been in as the lead singer. She was clearly enjoying their adulation. Ted knew all of them and was grateful for their presence. If Melissa had been waiting alone, there would have been hell to pay.
Her greeting to him, “Hey, you’re getting more coverage than I am,” was met with hoots of laughter from her tablemates.
Ted leaned over Melissa and kissed her on her lips.
“What’ll you have, Mr. Carpenter?” The waiter was at the table. There were already two bottles of their most expensive Champagne chilling in a bucket beside him. I don’t want that damn Champagne, Ted thought as he sat down next to her. I always get a headache from it. “A gin martini,” he said. Only one, he promised himself. But I need it. What in the hell does it look like for me to be here when there may be a break in the search for my son?