A banner fluttered across the screen and was again ripped away: The First Days.
There they were on-screen. Claire and Bryant Whittier. The Puritan couple who looked to be an advertisement for New England vitality were, in fact, Californians. They divided their time between a tiny suburb of San Francisco, called Durand, and their second home, a vast, rustic lodge they owned, some miles away in the San Juan Diego Mountains.
Filmed in the living room of their primary residence, the Whittiers sat like matching china figurines on matching Queen Anne chairs, their German shorthaired pointer, Macduff, between them, his head on crossed paws.
“At first, I slept in her bed every night. And Macduff slept under it, every night,” said Claire Whittier. “He was her birthday puppy when she was twelve. When he gets to the end of the drive up at our summerhouse, he will still start to howl.” Claire Whittier compressed her lips. “That’s where we found Jackie’s shoes, side by side. She just stepped out of them. It was because they were new, very nice ballet flats. She only wore them once, for graduation the day before. She didn’t want to ruin them. Bryant says that Jackie left them because she knew she wasn’t coming back. Bryant was far better able to cope than our other daughter, Blaine, and I. We were in shock. We didn’t know how much at the time. We were no help at all to the police. The worst moment was waking up. I would forget, until I woke up, and then it would be real. I slept and slept and tried to sleep some more. I needed pills to make me sleep, sleep, sleep. I craved them. I don’t believe I got out of bed for a month. And when I did, I wore those shoes everywhere. I still do. They make me feel close to Jackie.”
The riddle of Jacqueline Whittier’s shoes so perplexed the police and the FBI that, at first, they harbored doubts about the Whittiers. Why wouldn’t Macduff have followed the girl he loved so extravagantly down the road that led to a patchwork of woods and river ponds surrounding the Whittiers’ vacation lodge? To Bryant Whittier, it was obvious: Jacqueline was practical and logical. Macduff was as well bred and obedient as his mistress. She had told him down-stay; Macduff had no choice except to do that until he was released by Jacqueline or another family member. Jacqueline would have known that. She took after her father, Bryant said. He was the only defense lawyer in tiny Cisco County, sought out by families from around the state. Jacqueline, an honor student, the yearbook editor, and a star swimmer who also ran cross-country, hoped one day, Bryant said, to practice law with her dad.
The Whittiers did not dispute that, in the strictest sense, the case of Jacqueline Bryant Whittier remained an unsolved stranger abduction.
But Bryant Whittier quietly asserted that Jackie, who had suffered serious periods of depression since just before her fourteenth birthday, had taken her own life, although no body had ever been found.
Kerry’s voice explained, “According to her parents and sister, Jackie was indeed prey to periods of pain so intense, almost physical on rare occasions, that she would have committed suicide long before if she hadn’t loved them so much and hadn’t been so afraid of dying alone. But that doesn’t mean she was really ready to die. Recent months had been kind to Jacqueline. She seemed to have turned a corner. Her mother and sister don’t believe that she left her family voluntarily.”
“There are these Internet sites,” Jacqueline’s sister, Blaine, told the camera as it walked beside her, “where kids who are fascinated with suicide talk about it. We found conversations on Jackie’s laptop. Personally, to me they sounded just like overheated dramatic teenagers carried away by the romantic idea of dying young. But this one boy, Jordan? Who used a café in San Francisco as his return address? How many guys are named Jordan? If that’s even his name? How many Internet cafés?” Blaine wrapped her scarf around her neck and slipped her hands into leather gloves. “Maybe it wasn’t even his real name.” After walking a few more paces, Blaine sat down on a stump in the woods and said, “Do you know what I really think? I think maybe he took Jackie’s ideas too seriously and came to get her and drove her up to our summer place in the mountains. And maybe he helped her kill herself. Maybe it was all him. But the police never found any evidence of … that. They went over the whole area up there by our house. You know? No … evidence. No Jordan. Nothing.” She paused and continued slowly, “It’s not impossible Jackie ran away, with no intention of dying. She … we … she minded all the expectations from our dad more than I did.” The camera pictured Bryant Whittier making a tent of his lean, patrician hands, shaking his head, presumably in reaction to his older daughter’s words.
Then Kerry’s voice read a poem Jacqueline had written: “I cherish the smallest spear of light / But inside me is a pool of night / For one whose soul longs just for rest / What may be hardest may be best. Despite her apparent upswing in mood, this was the poem that Jacqueline left behind in observance of her seventeenth birthday, the day before she disappeared, the day after she graduated first in her class, and told her fellow students to embrace their dreams as the purest reality. Two years later, her case remains open. She is still missing.”
Beth glanced at her watch. Twenty-four minutes into the film, Beth finally knew what it was about. She simply had no idea why Vincent had chosen to drag this dark river where his whole family had nearly drowned.
CHAPTER TWO
Beth sat immobilized. She now knew the answer to one question but not to the fifty others it raised.
In public, in row three, in her hip-but-modest clothes, she felt her mouth filling with saliva, the way it had when she’d had morning sickness. She tried to breathe slowly through her nose. What a sight it would be for Beth to run from the theater with a handful of bile. Why choose this topic, and why involve her other children in raking her over the coals—along with his father and his elderly grandparents?
Was it some form of payback—“gotcha”—for the person she no longer was, the mother that Vincent had endured after the kidnapping, the skeletal scaffolding of a human being who lived years, woke and slept in the same clothes until Pat ran a bath and led her to it?
As Candy used to say, the answer was usually in the question.
Beth believed that she and Vincent had reached a kind of peace over the past years. If they were not jolly pals, they were not, at least, people with the same blood type who spoke on the telephone once every two months.
Beth lowered her hands and grounded herself to the seat with the grip of her palms. She stared unblinking at the screen. There. That was good. She looked calm and stoic, engaged and thoughtful.
But eyes saw through her pretense.
From a couple of rows back, Walter Hutcheson noticed that the woman he’d observed laughing and chatting earlier had gone still and grim. He’d first looked at her because something about Beth’s graceful hands reminded him of Sari just a few years ago, before Sari armored herself in fat and chopped off her waist-length brown hair, the skein of hair he once slipped over his fingers like the lengths of cashmere Sari carded from her goats and spun for weavers. It was wrong, given everything, for Walter to miss the physical love of his wife. But there were times he shook with longing for the jasmine scent of her freckled private skin. For him, she was still the leggy twenty-one-year-old he’d kissed at Big Sur the summer before senior year. Once, in the dark, he suggested to Sari that they were young enough to have a child still.
After that, she slept in the loft.
That woman was probably as old as Sari.
She must be family to Vincent and Sam, for she sat in the section cordoned off from the rest by gold rope. Vincent had told him that his family’s last name, Cappadora, meant “gold hat.” They looked like their name. All the people in that section were shiny with health and wealth. Why should the woman cover her face and then slam her hands down on the arms of her seat? Their lost boy was right there, just feet away from them. Their suffering was all over.
Walter’s suffering would not end until his eyes closed for the last time. He tried to believe that Laurel was happy, somewhere, in this world o
r another.
But what had come before? What agonies?
Had the Cappadoras once been the way Walter was now, all bones and overlarge clothes? Walter sometimes thought he would look into the mirror above the sink and see a man whose frame was crumbling like the piecrust earth of an eroded bluff, but the bluff was made from his dreams.
As the camera panned mountain majesty over the crescent of a hazy ocean bay, in a voice growling like a rock tumbler with the echo of ten thousand cigarettes, the man identified as Walter Hutcheson of Spinnaker, Washington, said, “Laurel’s a free spirit, like her mom and me. We tried to be upbeat at first and we still try to do that. Of course we miss her all the time and we worry. But she’s self-reliant.”
Beth realized that this was the Earth Shoes man she’d spotted earlier in the audience. He was alone here in the theater, but on the screen, he introduced his wife, Sari, who nodded along with Walter—but perpetually, nodding and smiling even when there was nothing to nod or smile about. “I’m half sure she’s just found a new way of trying out the independence we all want. I mean, what were we like when we were fifteen?” Walter smiled broadly and his wife began to nod again, her smile collapsed like a Halloween pumpkin too soon carved and frozen. “We still think Laurel will come back when she’s ready. Maybe …”
But Laurel Hutcheson’s backpack was found in the trunk when a feral, fox-faced drifter called Jurgen Smote was arrested in Washington State for a traffic violation. He was only eleven miles from what the police called the PSL—the point last seen. The Hutchesons had taken their daughter Laurel to an Equinox Festival near their home, a festival they had attended a dozen times, where they felt comforted and welcomed.
Smote, interviewed by Vincent for a brief segment in a visiting room at the prison where he was doing what Smote described as “a nickel” for statutory rape, said, “I might’ve met a girl named Laurel. I’ve met a lot of girls. Some of them … don’t stay in touch. They disappear. From my life, that is.” His slow smile forced Beth to shrink back in her seat.
Another shot was taken in a moment of sepia light, with Walter’s face illuminated from below by a coal fire. “There are people who say we let her go on her own too long. Let her go camping with groups of boys and girls, let her hitchhike. Well, I say to that … that they’re right. Oh, they are right. We never thought it would be anything but safe for her here …”
Laurel’s friends, doe-eyed, faces plain of makeup, as much like unicorns as Laurel seemed in the photos, had identified Jurgen Smote as having danced with Laurel at the festival. Smote had taken Laurel’s hand, a girl named Echo said in her interview. Laurel had pulled her hand away.
As Echo’s voice in the film continued, Sari, filmed listening to Laurel’s friend, hid her face in her husband’s shirt. Hutcheson put his arm around her shoulders but, abruptly, she pulled away. Beth remembered exactly that, wanting Pat’s touch desperately—wanting only one thing more, for no one to touch her at all.
How bad would it get? Beth thought.
Would there be footage of her—a crazed, dirty, and sleep-famished Beth from long ago? Would this whole crowd see her telling the glossy, wide-eyed young anchorwoman who’d asked her to film a “plea” to the kidnapper, I don’t expect you to bring Ben back, because you are a sick, heartless bastard…. If you could do this thing, you either don’t understand the nature of the hell we are going through, or you don’t care…. No.
No. Vincent would spare her that at least. Those were nightmare moments that she had shoveled for years to bury deep.
Tonight, coming in, Beth had seen press people outside, including a few she knew to nod to from her newspaper days. Vincent’s partner, Rob, a former radio guy who could have sold parkas to people living in Death Valley, must have dropped choice hints to the press—if not leaflets from a helicopter.
How elated she had been, when she saw those reporters! Now, the possibility of scrutiny made her sick.
Sit still, she thought. Just sit still.
A banner fluttered across the screen: Searching.
On the screen, around a young, pretty black woman, sat three children, an older boy reading and two small girls coloring elaborate, large paper dolls. Identified by a caption as Janice Dicksen of Chicago, Illinois, the woman said, “This new playground guy organized dodgeball games, and DuPre loved that game. One day I was in the park by the school, talking to my sister Tanya, about the gifted class DuPre was going to be in, and there was this short white guy in a black hoodie and jeans. And DuPre was calling, ‘Hey, hey Coach.’” The lively young woman’s face bled into a video clip of a chubby little mustang of a boy high-footing it out of the goal on a city soccer field. “So I told him, you run over and say hi and then we got to go pick up your little sister.” Her brown eyes shined with unspilled tears. “It wasn’t more than one minute that I talked to Tanya. Not five like they said.” The camera waited in silence as Janice Dicksen’s face broke open. “I sent my boy to that man.”
A Channel Five reporter in flight-attendant blue said, “Police tonight are seeking a man who allegedly abducted a six-year-old boy, DuPre Dicksen, from Hamlin Community Park near Our Savior Baptist Church on Seventy-fifth Street. The boy’s mother, Janice Dicksen, says the man who allegedly took her son was a playground supervisor at John F. Kennedy School. But officials there say that this was no official playground helper. The only man seen that day in the park was an unemployed carpenter who volunteered to help with after-school activities. That carpenter was identified as Joseph Jackson, but the man’s ex-wife knew him by the name Joseph Jackson Plimoth. The whereabouts of the little boy and Plimoth are unknown. This photo of DuPre was taken at the beginning of the school year. When he was last seen, he was wearing a red baseball cap, navy blue shorts, and red Converse high-tops.”
Like Ben, Beth thought. Ben had been wearing a baseball cap, too.
Ben had worn new red tennis shoes.
“They blamed me,” Janice Dicksen said. “One of the officers asked if I was having a relationship with the man who took DuPre. I never even met him!”
Beth thought it might be possible for her heart to fall out of her chest. Putting her hands on her sternum, she pressed hard. Ben was just two seats down. A muscle in his cheek quivered, but he studied the screen as though he’d never seen a movie before. To avoid his mother’s hot gaze? Or did all this feel as removed from reality for Ben as it did for Beth? That had been Ben’s own three-year-old face up there, a face he didn’t remember having been his.
She turned slightly in her seat. There was the real-life Janice Dicksen beside an older version of the boy who’d been reading while Janice was interviewed. He must be nearly a foot taller, wearing a suit that almost fit him, except for the gap at the end of the jacket cuffs that exposed two inches of shirtsleeves. Would they come later to the reception? Could Beth touch her, hug her—and not seem patronizing?
With a physical tug, Beth forced herself to turn back to the mammoth moving mouths and foreheads above her.
She peered at her watch.
Eighty-one minutes had passed. Vincent had snagged her, pulled her into the heft and tenderness of his images and vistas, his hard-won moments of naked emotion. In silence, a man’s big face fell like a crumbling cliff as he stroked a good-luck teddy bear, decked out in a silver gymnastics leotard, that his daughter had dropped when she was taken. DuPre Dicksen’s older brother, small and alone against a background of battered tenements, irregular as ruined teeth, was captured sinking shot after shot through a hoop with a single string of metal mesh, the setting sun a fragile orange gauze.
Beth began to forget time, except to wish that the film would not end.
The interview with the Caffertys hit her with maximum force. The Caffertys were … they were like Beth and Pat had been, so much like them—not rich, not connected, ordinary working people. She recognized from the audience the big man who took up his own row; his elfin wife had apparently not come. Two wives had chosen to absent themselves fr
om this screening. Their little daughter Alana was only six when she was snatched from a crowded hallway at a gymnastics meet nearly seven years before.
When Beth looked up, Candy had taken the seat beside her. Pat had disappeared. Beth glanced down the row and saw him with his arm around Rosie, his mother. Hey, thanks, Beth thought.
“It’s hard for me, too,” Candy said. “You holding up?”
“You know, I’m good,” Beth said. “He earned it.”
They hugged briefly and sat back.
Standing hand in hand with his sister in the wings, Vincent took his first deep breath when he saw his mother hug Candy. The inhalation made him giddy, like his first pull on a cigarette at the age of thirteen. How long had he been holding his breath? He watched her face—the tears she held back by tipping her face upward, the times she pressed her palms to her cheeks or bit her lip. He’d waited for the volcanic leap out of the seat, the flight from the auditorium. Her stillness scared him even more. He had flanked her. He had gone behind her back. Studying her expression, he saw that she hated it but she couldn’t help but appreciate it as a film. How would she act, though, when it got to the parts about Candy and about her? Oh Christ. Kerry had let go of his hand. Vincent reached out again and gripped it tighter.
His mother had taught him that the lens was not human; it couldn’t lie. Computers could tweak things away. Even the eye could fool the mind about what it saw. But a film camera was the incorruptible witness. His mother had come all this way and not seen the worst of it yet. She had not seen the old footage of their own family.