Vincent smirked.
“He loves you,” Beth said. “Can’t you be nice?”
“I love you, Ben,” said Vincent wearily. “I’m hot, Mom. My neck is killing.”
And then—and Beth would never be able to banish it, no matter what other random, dangerously precious scenes she was able to sweep from her mind—Vincent had one of those flashes of egregious tenderness that he had only with Ben or Kerry, never with Beth. And never, even, with Pat, because Vincent’s love for Pat didn’t flicker between attachment and irritation, it was utter.
Vincent reached out and clasped Ben around his belly and pretended to get one of his fingers stuck beneath Ben’s arm. “Tickle, tickle, you old fuzzhead Ben,” he said, and Ben writhed in ecstasy.
Well, good, thought Beth.
She said, “This will only take one minute, now. See? Jill is getting the bags. You just stand here.” Nick had drifted away. She could see Ellen, a sherbet-colored crown above the other women’s heads, surrounded by men, making Kerry’s hand wave bye-bye, up and down. Beth pushed through the backs in front of her. The counter girl was on the phone, talking to someone at the airport, explaining nastily that no, there was no shuttle of any kind, and no, she had no idea what taxi companies operated in the area, and in any case she was very busy. Bored, she finally turned to Beth, who could barely see Vincent, bobbing up and down on the luggage trolley, and said, “Yesssss?” Beth was caught unawares; she’d been scanning the doors for a glimpse of Jill; how long did it take to park a car? She plopped her purse on the counter, nearly spilling it into the girl’s lap.
It probably took five minutes. Even though the girl was slower than weight loss, even though Beth gave her a gas card by mistake first, and the girl ran it without realizing it wasn’t a Visa. Absolutely not ten minutes, Beth would tell the police later, even though Beth ran into a cousin of Pat’s, and her old lab partner, Jimmy Daugherty, now a cop in Parkside. Ten minutes at the outside, no more.
At last, clutching a sheaf of carbons, her wallet, and Kerry’s pacifier, Beth made her way back to the elevator. Vincent was standing slumped against the wall, slowly pushing the trolley back and forth with his feet.
“Where’s Ben?” she asked.
Vincent shrugged expressively. “He wouldn’t let me hold him. He wanted Aunt Ellen. My neck is killing, Mom. I got a heat rash.”
Absently, Beth checked his neck. It was ringed with small red blotches. “Wait,” she said. She scanned the lobby for Ellen; there she was, easy to see. Beth whistled. Ellen plowed toward her, Kerry in her arms.
“Do you have Ben?” Beth asked, and she would recall later that it was not with panic. Not the way she had felt, instantly, at state fair when Ben was two and wandered away, and the crowd closed around him. She didn’t feel that bottom-out sensation that preceded frenzy. Ben was in the room. The room was filled with people, all good people, grownups who knew Beth, who would ask a little kid where his mama was. “Ellen, Ben took off. We have to find him before we can do anything.”
Ellen rolled her eyes and headed for the newsstand. There were toys on spinning racks there—kid bait. Beth went outside and scanned the sunny street in both directions, then came back in, circled the elevator, and darted into the deserted coffee shop. Had the lone waitress seen a little boy in a red baseball cap? No. Beth squatted down on her knees and looked through the crowd Ben-height. But all the legs ended in heels or oxfords. She ran back to the elevator. “Vincent, think hard, which way did Ben go?”
“I don’t know.”
“Didn’t you watch?”
“I couldn’t see him.”
It was then that Beth’s breathing came in gasps, and her hands tingled, the way they did when she’d narrowly avoided smacking another car, or almost turned her ankle. Ben! she thought. Listen to me with your mind. Ellen came slowly through the crowd, pulling Beth to her with a look.
“He wasn’t over there.”
“Ellenie…”
“We should get the manager.”
“I don’t know; maybe if we just wait…”
“No, we should get the manager.”
The counter girl said the manager was at lunch, and if they wanted, they could fill out a form describing what they lost.
“What we lost is a kid!” Ellen screamed at her.
The girl said, “Whatever. The manager should be back at—”
Ellen charged across the room and leapt onto the luggage trolley. She was five feet ten, and even before she yelled “STOP!” a score of her old classmates had turned to look at her. But when she did yell, talk ceased in the lobby as if a light switch had been flicked. A phone was ringing. A bellman, outside, called, “Chuck!”
“We need to all look for Beth Kerry’s little boy,” Ellen said. “He’s three, his name is Ben, and he was here a minute ago. He’s got to be in the room. So divide up. Look all around where you are. And if you find him, pick him up and stand still.”
And they all did that. They set down their bags where they were, and the whole room burst forth like a choir: “Ben? Ben?” in a shower of different timbres of voice, Beth’s the loudest. Jimmy Daugherty cut the room into halves by walking through, and assigned people quadrants. Nick took off at a lope down the first-floor corridor. Twenty minutes later, a few small groups of newcomers were greeting one another again, but most of the faces nearest Beth watched her for direction, in their eyes a kind of embarrassed pity.
Ben was gone.
CHAPTER 2
It was Jimmy who said they might as well call the police—not that the kiddo wasn’t somewhere right nearby, anyhow, but it could move things along quicker, you know? Jimmy knew everybody at Parkside; in fact, if not for the reunion, he’d be working today. “It’d be my shift, Bethie, and these are good guys. We’ll get the troops over here.” The station house was less than a mile away.
“Bethie, you’ll feel better,” he said. “He’s probably asleep in a linen closet.”
The manager, a chubby, fancy man, was back from lunch now. Waving his hands, with large gestures intended to play across the room, he had berated the counter slut and brought Ellen coffee—believing she was the child’s mother—and checked the doors to the swimming pool to make sure they were locked, and summoned security, which turned out to be two hefty older men in ill-fitting purple livery.
Beth sat on the luggage trolley skinning her hair back from her face with her hands. In her mind’s athletic eye, she was trotting the length of the corridors, shoving open every door that was ajar, calling Ben in a clear, Doris Day voice, welcoming him. In fact, her legs were gelatinous, she could not stand. Vincent was curled behind her, holding Ben’s blanket, asleep. Jill had taken Kerry upstairs and put her down on a bed.
It was five minutes to two. Beth had been in the hotel less than one hour.
After the first, fruitless search, the lobby had drained of alums. Beth watched people slink away, talking low, not quite sure what they dared do. Were they to continue greeting each other as if nothing had happened? Join in the search? Go out to lunch? Go home? Two guys were in the bar, drinking, watching a football game on the high, slant-mounted TV; but they hadn’t been here when Ben went missing. Beth didn’t blame them, though she would have had she recognized them. Husbands, she thought. Not my friends.
When Jimmy came back from the desk phone, he said, “It was just what I thought. They’ll send a bunch of guys over here, no problem, and they’ll floor-by-floor it, and they’ll find him in no time.”
Ellen asked him, “What if Ben went outside?”
Jimmy looked pained. “I…uh…some guys will be looking outside, too. But Bethie, there have been no…accidents reported.” Accidents? Beth shoved a deck of her brain over to accommodate new alarm. He could have been run down by a car, picked up by a felon, knocked into a ditch, flattened by a train…. Beth seized herself, forcibly. She tended to embrace panic as a matter of course; Kerrys did that—no hangnail was too small for a short fulmination.
; But Ben had been missing now for one full hour. Ben had never, unless Beth was on a job or out for dinner twice a year with Pat or giving birth, been out of Beth’s sight for one full hour, in the three years of his life.
So this was serious. Too serious for panic. Beth needed to call upon the self that, in her newspaper days, calmly started printing photos of a fire at midnight and finished by one a.m., in time for the first press run. The self that once found a way to pull and snap Vincent’s dislocated arm back into place, while his limb dangled like a plunger on a rubber band. Who stanched bleeding foreheads, who made children who ate muscle relaxants throw them up. That self struggled in her grasp and broke free. She smoothed her face. It welled with oil, as if she hadn’t washed for days.
The clock, meanwhile, lurched ahead. In the moment that she spent on her face, another eight minutes passed.
Ben had been missing for one hour and eight minutes.
“Bethie,” Jimmy was saying, deliberately casual. “This is Calvin Taylor. He’s my partner. Everybody’s coming. Slow day at the old station house. Cal, this is Beth Cappadora. It’s her boy.”
Beth looked up; she felt small, like a pond resident. It felt good to look up, good to be down where she could do nothing, ruin nothing, take charge of nothing. She wondered if Taylor could see her at all. Calvin Taylor was slender and spectacled, spoke with a Jamaican lilt. “Don’t worry, mother,” he said genially. “We haven’t lost a child yet.”
He squatted down next to Beth and asked her a series of soft questions about Ben—his size, his age, his clothing, where he was standing when she last saw him. Beth murmured in reply. When Wayne came over, Calvin Taylor shook his hand and asked about the results of the first-floor search. And then he said, again genially, “Well, Mr. Thunder, sounds like nothing left for us to do but open a few doors.” Wayne all but beamed with pride; the police had commended him! Beth almost laughed aloud.
Jimmy and Taylor told the manager, who was lurking, to get a passkey; they would have to open two hundred rooms.
“Ah, there are guests, though…” the manager said nervously.
“We’ll knock,” said Taylor.
The lobby filled with handsome young men—almost all short, Irish, Italian, a couple of black guys, one tall Germanic blond. A woman with long brown hair in a bun, looking awkward in a uniform clearly not styled to fit the contours of her body. She came over and sat down beside Beth on the trolley. “Scared, huh?” she said. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him. I mean, I’ve been a cop for five years, and I’ve looked for a dozen kids, and we always find them.” She stopped and looked at Beth, who was pulling her own hair now, rhythmically. “We find them, and they’re okay. Not hurt.”
Beth did not know what to do with Vincent; she supposed she should comfort him. She looked at him, as he twitched in his sleep.
“Would you like something to eat?” the manager asked Ellen. He was florid now, and smelled thickly of cigarette smoke.
“I’m not his mother,” Ellen told him. The manager, now sighing audibly, turned to Beth.
“Would you like something to eat?”
Beth considered. She did not see how it would be possible to eat.
“I’d like a vodka and tonic,” she said. The manager’s mouth made an O in surprise, but he bustled off, literally snapping his fingers to the bartender.
“Paperwork,” said the brown-haired police officer with the artful bun. “I have to ask you a couple of things, Mrs. Cappadora. I mean, even if we find him in five minutes, there has to be a report, of course. And we need the most detailed description we can get to send out to other departments—if we need to do that, which we probably won’t.”
Beth knew she was supposed to find this soothing, this routine-ness, this scoffing at the absurdity of it all. It was meant to assure her that any minute a tousled Ben, with a fistful of baseball cards given him by a friendly policeman, would be carried out the elevator doors like a silver cup. Everyone would be smiling, everyone would be chiding Ben, “You gave your mama a scare, partner….”
“…three?” asked the police officer.
“Yes,” said Beth. “What?”
“He’s three, your son?”
“Just turned.”
“Date of birth?”
“April first.”
“April Fool’s Day.”
“Yep.”
“And he has, what…brown hair?”
“He has red hair. He has dark red hair. Auburn. And a red baseball cap. He’s wearing an orange shirt with red fish on it. And purple shorts. And red high-top gym shoes. Those are new. Parrots.” Beth bit her lip; she knew how that sounded—as though she didn’t care enough to match colors in her kids’ outfits. But who noticed what a kid wore to ride in a car? She slid her eyes over to the brown-haired officer. She would. The officer was probably a caring mother.
And why, she asked herself suddenly, don’t they tell one another what Ben looks like? Is there a therapy or a strategy in the repetition?
“And Mrs. Cappadora, where did you say you lived?”
Beth hunkered down and talked. She concentrated on precision and detail. She pretended she was Pat. She told the officer about Ben’s language skills and his fears (windstorms, all bodies of water, blood) and his habit of hiding in small places (once, horrifyingly, but just for a moment, the dryer). In detail, she described Ben’s birthmark, the mark in the shape of a nearly perfect carat—an ashy-colored inverted V that sat just above his left hip. The birthmark had been something Beth considered having removed, she told the officer, but the dermatologist said it was nothing, just an excess of pigment, and so she left it alone. Sensing the officer’s restlessness, Beth next talked about Vincent—who had awakened and gone off with Ellen to get a sandwich. He was a difficult kid, but he loved Ben and was protective of him.
“Kerry’s named after me,” said Beth. “I mean, not Beth, but that’s my last name, Kerry. Before I got married. We were going to name Ben that, Kerry…at least I wanted to, but Pat—that’s my husband—he said, ‘Why not just name him Fairy?’ So we named the girl that instead. Ben’s named after my brother….” She babbled; the lobby was filling up again, with police officers Beth hadn’t seen before.
As Beth watched, two of them set up a folding table in a small room off the lobby that probably was used to hold coats with a number of cellular phones and a compact radio that squawked and crackled.
“What are they doing?” Beth asked.
“They’re setting up a command center,” a young female officer whose name tag read G. Clemons told her.
“What for?”
“Well, to stay in touch with the station, and to take any calls that might come in from the state police or other departments.”
“Other departments?”
“Yes. Or tips from people. Or any kind of calls. I mean, if we knew for sure that anybody else had been involved in this, it’d probably be a larger operation already. But the kind of tips we’re going to be getting might—”
“Tips? But how would anyone know where to call?” Beth asked, and then what G. Clemons had alluded to jabbed her. One person might.
“Just a minute, Mrs. Cappadora.” Tucking stray ends into the careful roll at the back of her head, Officer Clemons spoke briefly with Detective Taylor. He took the sheet of paper she’d been using, made a few jottings on it himself, and took off for the phone.
“We’re putting out an ISPEN, Mrs. Cappadora. That’s ‘Illinois State Police Emergency Network.’ Alphabet soup, huh?” The bun bobbed in concern. Beth thought, she’s still trying not to scare me. “That frequency is monitored by all departments statewide. For example, this is District Three, near Chicago, but we pick up way into the western and northern suburbs….”
“You have a lot of police officers for such a little city.”
“Oh, these aren’t all Parkside police, Mrs. Cappadora,” said Officer Clemons. “They’re from Chester and Barkley and Rosewell, too.”
Beth stared
at her. “So you’re worried.”
“We have to take the disappearance of a child this small, after this length of time, very, very seriously, Mrs. Cappadora.”
It was three p.m. Ben had been missing for two hours.
There were two cops at each of the exits Beth could see, and the slice of the circle drive that lay inside her vision was filling with blue-and-white cars, like a puzzle with pieces sliding into place. Jimmy Daugherty crossed in front of the revolving door. Beth excused herself and wobbled, thickly, to his side. She asked Jimmy for a Marlboro. He lit it.
“Bethie,” he said. “Pat will be here soon, right?”
Beth was startled. “I didn’t call him.”
Jimmy ground out his own cigarette with a vicious twist of thumb and forefinger. “You didn’t call Pat?”
“I thought we’d find him right away, and Pat had to work.” She sounded like the kind of light-witted ninny who would soon begin to complain that she was missing her favorite soap. She tried again: “No one told me to call Pat!” That was worse. In the valley of the gathering shadow, who doesn’t call your nearest? The child’s father?
“Let’s call now,” Jimmy told her gently.
Beth thought, well, I’m not going to.
“And your folks? They’re all still here, huh?”
Not them, either, thought Beth. No chance.
Pat would not have left a three-year-old to wander off alone. He would have made quick, fail-safe preparations—waved Ellen over, or waited to leave Vincent and Ben with Jill. He would have given the three minutes that safety demanded, not waded off blunderingly the way Beth did, trying to cut corners, shave time, consolidate motions. He would not do what Beth did when she set a hot glass dish on a corner of the counter at home and tried to make one phone call and then let the dish fall. He was full of foresight.
All their parents knew that.
Beth said no, she would not bother their parents now.
“I guess that’s probably best, actually,” said Jimmy. “Because you could have a family situation here, where the grandparents wanted the child—I mean, Bethie, I’m probably not exercising the kind of judgment I usually do because I know you and Pat and the Cappadoras. But who knows? Actually, my supervisor said the first thing I talked to her that we have to get somebody over to their house and talk to them.”