convenience store. He hustled across the street, the bag with the milk and Skittles in it swinging as he ran. When he reached the car he opened the back door and placed the bag on the rear seat, then moved to the front of the car and got in.
“I got you some candy; guess which kind?” he asked.
But when he turned to the seat next to him Sam wasn’t there. He looked toward the park, but the rain running down the windshield obscured his view. He got out of the car so that he could actually see the playground. He didn’t see Sam anywhere. He looked toward the plastic tunnels that twisted and turned beyond the jungle gym. That was where she must be. He jogged over to the tunnels, trying to remind himself not to get angry with Sam. She was only five years old, after all.
“Sam, come on; we’ve gotta go,” he called
There was no response from within the tunnels. There were two openings in the maze of tunnels. Paul moved to the opening closest to him, leaned down and peered inside. Barely two feet inside the entrance the tunnel twisted sharply to the right, and he couldn’t see beyond this bend.
“Sam, it’s time to go,” he called, his voice echoing along the plastic walls.
He ran around to the other opening and leaned in. This time the tunnel twisted to the left just inside the opening.
“Sam, I’m not playing. Get out of there now!”
He had spoken more sharply than he had intended to, but he couldn’t help it. His heart wasn’t racing, exactly, but it was definitely taking a brisk jog.
“Sam, say something!”
No response.
Paul stood up and surveyed the rest of the park, looking for any other place she could be hiding, but the tunnels were the only place that was hidden from view.
“Sam!” he yelled against the sound of the rain and the occasional rumble of thunder. “Sam, where are you?”
And yes, his heart was racing, and was determined to beat all contenders to the finish line. Paul spun in circles, trying to think of where she could be. A thought struck him then:
Where’s the Taurus?
The blue car hasn’t been in the parking lot when had come back across from the store. Both the car and its hapless driver (the guy with luck so bad that he thought the tow truck would blow a wheel before it got to him) were gone.
Paul ran to the parking lot and stood at the spot where the blue Taurus had been parked. He looked for something, anything, but there was nothing; no cigarette that had been tossed aside, no tire marks, nothing. Just an empty space where a car had been.
Paul took his cell out of his pocket and dialed 911. He had to try three times before he could push the right buttons.
“Nine-one-one emergency,” a calm female voice answered on the first ring. “How can I help you?”
“It’s my daughter. I think…I think she’d been kidnapped.”
“Excuse me sir, could you repeat that? I didn’t catch what you said.”
“My daughter has been kidnapped.”
His voice broke on the last word.
2
The search for Samantha officially lasted for fifteen days. The unofficial search, conducted by volunteers, neighbors and relatives, went on for three weeks after that. The number of people who showed up for the searches through the woods and back alleys, and along Sag Creek, dwindled until it was just family. Even family eventually had excuses for why they couldn’t come.
The police brought Paul in for questioning on four separate occasions, and they had him take a polygraph test on three of them. They claimed that the first two were inconclusive, and he didn’t bother asking for the results of the last. They had him tell the story of everything that had happened on the day of Sam’s disappearance too many times to count, even having him write it out. He had seen enough cop shows to know that they were looking discrepancies in his story, for him to tell the story differently than he had told it before; even the slightest deviation from an earlier telling of the tale could be used as evidence that he was making the whole story up.
It was true that he had been at the Quick Shop that day, because the surveillance footage from inside the store recorded his purchase of the milk and candy. This didn’t necessarily prove, he was told, that he had ever been at the park with his daughter. If she was with him, they asked, then why didn’t she accompany him into the store?
She wanted to swing just a little longer, that was why. She was so happy that she was finally able to swing by herself.
“You should be trying to track the guy with the blue Taurus,” Paul said to them.
Did he notice the license plate number of the vehicle in question? No, he hadn’t. Was there anyone else who could attest to the fact that there had been a man with a blue Taurus in the parking lot that day? No, there wasn’t. Didn’t Paul think that his story sounded a little suspicious? No, he really didn’t so, but they obviously did.
Later, he wouldn’t be able to remember the first time he had noticed Sarah looking at him differently, with an air of suspicion. He could remember the day she left to stay with her sister, though. He also remembered the day she told him that she wanted a divorce.
He couldn’t remember the day he had first started drinking more than he usually did, but he could remember the day roughly two years later when he was nearly hit head-on by a semi-truck when he dozed off and swerved onto the opposing lane. The blare of the truck’s air horn had snapped his eyes open, and he managed to swerve back into his own lane just in time. He had spent ten minutes parked on the side of the road, catching his breath, before he started for home. He drove home that day very slowly, and promised himself that he would never drink again. Eventually he even made good on this promise.
Paul was never arrested or charged in connection with his daughter’s disappearance, even though the detective handling the case could barely hide his animosity toward him. Eventually even the local TV news stations stopped calling him for a comment, moving on like vultures to fresher kill. Sam’s case went cold.
After the house was sold he moved into a small one bedroom apartment. He had managed to keep his job after convincing his boss that he was finally off the sauce. Surprisingly he found that passing by bars was never a really big temptation for him; he had always preferred to drink alone. He went to work, caught a movie every other weekend, and hung around the apartment. He became a connoisseur of bad reality television, of shows that he could never admit to watching.
Every year on Sam’s birthday he bought a chocolate cupcake, just as he had bought for Sam on her birthdays before she was taken from him. Now there was no candle set into the cupcake though, and there were no wishes made. Sometimes he would eat the cupcake, and sometimes he would toss it out the next day.
Then he met Georgia, and those reality shows didn’t hold so much appeal for him anymore. He left behind his bachelor life and took the plunge for the second time in his life, and for a little while they experienced happiness together in the little house on a shady lane that they had made their home. There were good times; he would always try to remember that.
But life does not allow for too many happy endings. The walls around the man and his second wife started to show cracks when she decided that she wanted to have a baby. He didn’t want to have another child. Neither would back down from what they wanted (or didn’t want). The cracks in the walls got larger, and eventually those walls fell down. She moved out, but there was no divorce. He knew that eventually one of them would get around to filing the paperwork, and that it would probably be her.
Once again he found himself living alone in an empty house that was too quiet. The bottle called to him, but he was able to resist the call, even on those nights when it sounded so sweet to his ears. He stayed sober, and again became acquainted with those shows he had left behind, and some new ones as well. Life settled into a glacial rhythm, or rather he did; he often had the impression that he was standing still while the world sped by around him.
And this was his life. It wasn’t much, but it was life, and life was so muc
h preferable to the alternative.
3
Shortly after the tenth anniversary of his daughter’s disappearance, Paul left his house to walk to McDonald’s for lunch. It was his day off. He knew he should stop eating junk food (his doctor wasn’t happy with his cholesterol numbers, and his blood pressure wasn’t so great either), but he was hungry, and damn it he was grown, and he could eat whatever he wanted to eat. He thought about leaving the car behind and walking; the McDonald’s wasn’t too far, and the walk would do him good, burning off some of the calories he was about to consume. He drove instead.
A man walks out of his house to go get some Mickey D’s, not realizing how his life is about to change. It was another funny little thing he would think about later.
His lunch was uneventful; he washed it down with a diet coke, figuring that it wouldn’t help any to add thirty grams or so of sugar to his meal. He made a trip to the lavatory before leaving, draining his bladder to his great relief, and stopping to wash his hands, a thing he was surprised that a lot of people didn’t do. It was something he didn’t like to think about, especially after eating a meal that other people had handled with their bare hands.
When he was finished washing his hands Paul headed out to his car, which he had parked in the shade of a tree so he wouldn’t have to sit on an unpleasantly hot seat. He got into his car, buckled himself in