An Educated Death (52 page)

She turned around in the schoolyard and drove slowly home again, peering down side streets and into driveways, until she came back to the spot where the bike lay. Her hands were shaking and she couldn't quite remember how to breathe. She stopped the car and sat there, hands gripping the wheel. He had to be somewhere. There had to be some reasonable explanation for this; she just hadn't thought of it yet. He wouldn't go off somewhere without telling her, not unless someone had made him go. Unless he'd gone with another friend?

She picked up the car phone and called Carole again. "Carole? There's no sign of him. Can you ask Tommy if he might have been riding with someone else? Someone he might have gone home with?"

"Hold on." She heard Carole calling Tommy, heard the snap in Carole's voice that was her own fear being transmitted.

Carole's answer hit her like a gut punch. "He says David was hurrying home because you were going to make cookies. He wants to know what's going on. Should I tell him?"

"Yes. No. I don't know. I don't think so. Ask him if he saw David from the bus."

She waited, straining to hear the mumbled voices, and then Carole was back. "He says they didn't pass David along the way. But they wouldn't, if he set out ahead. The bus has to go all around that loop. He didn't come home?"

"No. There's a bike... I'm sure it's his... lying by the road near that big pine they like to climb... but there's no sign of David."

"You'd better not waste any time, Rach. If he's been taken, the sooner the police get on it, the better."

"Taken?"

"Well, you said he wasn't in the tree or in the woods. And anyway, Mister Know-It-All is standing right here behind me and he says no way would David leave his bike just lying anywhere."

Rachel thought she might be sick. "Carole, I've got to go."

"Wait, is there anything—"

"Gotta go," Rachel repeated, and broke the connection. Sat shaking in her car with her awful thoughts closing around her like a gray blanket. "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God." She whispered it over and over like a mantra. "Oh please, dear God, don't let him be..." Her mind skipped over the words she couldn't say, couldn't even bring herself to think. "Oh please God! No!" David was her life.

She picked up the phone again and called Stephen, the red bicycle on the gravel in front of her car gleaming in the gray afternoon light. He grabbed the phone, didn't let her get past an anguished "Stephen" before he interrupted.

"Can't it wait, Rach? I'm right in the middle of—"

"David's missing. He didn't come home from school."

Instantly, she had his attention. "How long?"

"Not long. I thought he was on the bus... He was on his bike... I got home and the bus went by and then I remembered I'd seen a bike down the road." She was dithering and Stephen hated dithering. She gulped some air, drowning in her panic, and tried to be coherent. "Maybe twenty or thirty minutes."

"Call Carole. He's probably over there." She could sense him turning away, imagined him picking up his pencil and turning to his papers.

"I did, Stephen. I already called her. He's not there and he's not at school and he's nowhere along the route."

"Did you look in his room? Maybe he got past you and you didn't notice."

"I didn't. How stupid of me. I'll go check right now. I'll bet he's there. He probably came in while I was out looking for him." Relief flowed through her. "I'll call you back."

"I'll hold on while you go check."

"I'm not at home."

"Then where the hell are you?"

"Down the road... by his bike... where he left it lying by the road."

"Lying? Like in the dirt lying? Not on the kickstand?"

"Yes. Lying, like it was dumped there in a hurry."

There was a silence on Stephen's end, disturbed only by the pounding of her heart. "He'd never do that," Stephen said. "Call the police. I'm coming home."

A tidal wave of panic, unleashed by Stephen's confirmation of her worst fears, rolled over her. It took four tries to start the car and then she was so shaky she drove like a drunk the short distance to their driveway. She left the car with the doors open, sprinted for the inside phone, and dialed 911.

"My child... my son... he's missing," she told the man who answered. Behind her, the microwave beeped to remind her of the forgotten butter.

He asked her name and address, David's name and age, and a few brisk questions. "I wouldn't worry too much, ma'am. He's probably just off exploring. He'll turn up any minute. You'll see."

"But I am worried. You don't know him. He's not the kind of boy who—"

"All boys go wandering," the man said cheerfully. "They just forget about the time and..."

Through the fog of her panic, she realized he was brushing her off, that he wasn't going to help her. "Not my son," she interrupted. "He'd never go off and leave his brand-new bike lying in the dirt like that. Someone has taken him and we need your help right now!"

"Now, ma'am, please, calm down," the man said. "If it will make you feel better, I'll send an officer over to talk to you."

"It
would make me feel better," Rachel said, imagining David's frightened face peering at her from some stranger's car, imagining her only child in the grip of some unknown man, "if
you
would take this seriously. If you would sound a little bit concerned."

"I'll send someone, ma'am," he said in his police dispatcher's dispassionate voice. "If you'll give me your address." She gave it and he disconnected.

She stood a while, holding the bleeping receiver while the microwave cried at her like an unmilked cow, the mechanical world crying out for attention. The best way to forestall panic was to do something, anything to occupy her mind and keep out the awful thoughts. Call the neighbors. She tried them all. No one had seen anything. Everyone was sorry they couldn't help. And still no Stephen and no police. She'd finish the cookies. She turned on the oven and got out some baking sheets. Wait. She hadn't looked up stairs. Stumbling in her hurry, she rushed up the stairs and into his room, hoping, praying to find him there bent over a book. It was dark and empty, the only sound the bubbling from the fish tank.

She shut the door quickly on the emptiness and hurried downstairs to silence the microwave. She measured out a cup of sugar. Went to dump it into the bowl. Couldn't find the bowl. But she must have gotten out a bowl. Maybe she was losing her mind. Better her mind than her child. She couldn't bear that. Not again. Then she remembered. She'd left the bowl out in the yard. As she rushed to the door, something rustled by her ear, something in her hair. She snatched at it, dashed it to the floor, hoping it wasn't a bug. A leaf. She put a cautious hand up to her head, felt the leaves and sticks, and looked in the mirror.

She looked like a lunatic. Her face and shirt were streaked with mud and stained green from rushing through the bushes, from crawling around the culvert. Looking down, she saw that her shoes were green and muddy. Stephen would be upset, she thought, and then, who the hell cares. She opened the door and would have raced down the driveway to the mailbox, but there was a big man standing there, a cold-faced, red-haired stranger, holding her missing bowl.

"Lost something?" he asked.

Numbly, she took the bowl and tucked it under her arm. "Yes. My child. I've lost my child." It hurt to say the words.

"Detective Gallagher. May I come in?" His voice was gravelly and cautious. She knew instantly that there would be no comfort coming from this man. Over his shoulder she watched the Lexus coming up the drive, watched Stephen get out, his face set and terrible. She knew he was holding back the same fears she was feeling, holding them back and determined to master them. Stephen had little patience with weakness, with fear. Except when it was David's. There, through some resource that Rachel had never understood, he always found the patience and gentleness he needed.

She ran toward him, her arms out, seeking some reassurance that things would be all right. He stopped and stared at her. "Rachel, for heaven's sake, have you looked in a mirror? Have you seen yourself?" He sidestepped and headed toward Gallagher and the house.

"I wasn't thinking about me. I was thinking about him," she said, but Stephen wasn't listening. He'd shaken Gallagher's hand and was leading him inside. Rachel turned to follow and ran into an impenetrable truth, standing like a barrier between herself and the door. This was really happening. This wasn't her vivid imagination or an excess of worry. Not a dream or an irrational fear. While she was at the store buying sugar and peanut butter and listening to an old lady's complaints, someone had come along and snatched her child. Taken her son. Her David.

She collapsed on the step like a puppet whose strings are cut, arms folded tightly around her body to keep the pain from blowing her apart. Tears poured down her face, but she couldn't cry out or even sob. The horror of it stunned her into silence. She could only crouch there like some helpless animal while the realization pierced her like a thousand swords. This was really happening. David was gone.

"Rachel. Hurry up! We're waiting," Stephen called.

Heavily, gravid with grief, with fear, with the burden of a thousand maternal imaginings filling her mind, she pushed herself up and headed not inside, but down the driveway, down the road toward David's bike, toward her last tangible link to her son. She approached it carefully, as though an inanimate conglomeration of metal parts could be sensitive, and stood staring, her hand outstretched, reaching to touch it, to put her hand where David's had so recently been. It shimmered before her blurry eyes, proud and red.

"Don't touch that, please, ma'am." Gallagher stepped between her and the bike so abruptly she stumbled backward. She hadn't heard them coming.

Stephen caught her arm roughly and set her on her feet. "What do you think you're doing, Rachel? Come inside. The detective needs to talk to both of us," he said.

Rachel looked up into his tight, fierce face. "He must be so scared," she said.

Stephen's face softened and she saw the fear that matched her own. He put a supporting arm around her. "He must be. But don't worry, Rachel. We'll find him. We've got to find him." Together they went inside to talk to Gallagher.

 

 

Kate Flora, who also writes as Katherine Clark, was an assistant attorney general in Augusta, Maine, before moving to Massachusetts to marry, later working in public interest law and general private practice. She retired to raise her children and to write. Flora is the author of seven Thea Kozak mysteries and two Joe Burgess police procedurals, as well as co-author of the true crime work,
Finding Amy: A True Story of Murder in Maine
. As Katharine Clark, she is the author of
Steal Away,
a suspense/thriller. She is a former editor and publisher of Level Best Books, and former international president of Sisters in Crime. She divides her time between Maine and Massachusetts. Flora teaches writing for Grub Street in Boston.