THE LAST BOY (52 page)

It never let up. In fact, it rained steadily, day after day after day. Yet, despite the weather, the search for the boy went on, even more extensively than when Daniel had first disappeared the previous fall. Tripoli, returning to active service, was given immediate charge of the operation and requisitioned as much manpower as the department could muster. He organized search parties of volunteers and had them slog their way through the surrounding woods, bogs, and fields. He called in professional trackers with bloodhounds. All that remained of old Matthew's hut was rubble, but still they combed every inch of the surrounding Danby Forest, now all but a waterlogged marsh. Commandeering private boats, Tripoli had them scour the flooded lowlands in the event that Daniel had been stranded by the rising waters. They found survivors huddled on rooftops and clinging to trees, dead pets and bloated cattle floating in the muddy waters, but not a single sign of the missing boy.

The airwaves were filled with stories of Daniel's disappearance. The
Ithaca Journal
carried front-page stories requesting information; the local and national networks carried tales of the boy's second
vanishing, but not a soul in the town or the country at large had seen the boy since he had left his mother on Green Street.

Four days later, when the worst of the storm was lifting, Tripoli ordered up a helicopter and kept it circling over the city and neighboring towns, its engines often roaring right through the drizzling nights. But still they found no trace, no trail, no sign of the boy.

Molly waited in the trailer, listening to the rain drumming dismally on the roof, listening and waiting as hope faded and the water level in the swamp behind her home continued to rise. The newer trailers near the park entrance became flooded and had to be abandoned. The deluge spared only the older units, like hers, that sat on the high ground in the rear.

Tripoli did his best to comfort Molly, but as the prospects for finding Daniel diminished, she became progressively more withdrawn, preoccupied. She started keeping a journal. In it she wrote about Daniel, describing in minute detail the child she had known from birth, and then went on to chronicle his return and the astounding transformation he had undergone while living with the Hermit. And she wrote about herself, confessing how, sitting encapsulated in her office, she had become detached not only from the outside world, but her own child. That in her quest for what she deemed indispensable to live she had become blinded to all that was good and beautiful, deaf to the quiet voice of common sense that was her little boy. For Molly, her journal was a way of sorting out her feelings and coming to grips with what she had done and what she would do, might do, could do.

Whenever Tripoli phoned, their conversations were abrupt.“I’m sorry. I can’t talk right now,” she would say and slip off the line. When he came to the trailer to see her, she kept him at the door. Most of the time she just sat slumped at the kitchen table staring out the window, lost in thought.

“I’m just not up to seeing anybody these days,” she told Rosie,
who kept banging on her trailer door until she finally opened up.

“Molly, darling,” she said, managing to barrel her way in. “We need to talk.”

“Sure,” she said, “but just not right now.”

“You’ve got to stop whipping yourself. Nobody's blaming you.”

“Maybe, but I am.”

Larry called a few times. To apologize, to commiserate, to plead with Molly to come back while she waited for Daniel to turn up again.

“You got to keep busy in the meanwhile. Keep yourself occupied until they find him,” he said.“Just like you did before.”

“Thanks,” she muttered, “but no thanks.” Nothing could have been further from Molly's mind than the magazine.

Tripoli kept coming by every day, hoping to pull Molly back into life, but she scarcely seemed to hear what he was saying.

“I’m getting really worried about her,” Rosie confided in Tripoli when Molly locked her out of the trailer, speaking to her only with the chain on the door—and then but briefly.“She says she can’t face anybody, but this…this is scary.”

“I didn’t listen to you. I didn’t listen to Rosie, I didn’t even listen to my own boy,” said Molly as Tripoli stood outside in the drizzle insisting that she accept a soggy bag of groceries.

Each time Tripoli went shopping, he discovered that food prices had leaped upward, some items nearly doubling in a week. And it was not only the breads and cereals directly impacted by the failure of the grain crop, but meat and fish, dependent on feeds, were rising dramatically. Fruit and fresh vegetables were now essentially out of reach for working families. Tripoli couldn’t even find a bag of sugar in Wegman's, and he suspected that people were beginning to hoard basic supplies—which would only magnify the problem. And, as he stood in the rain hoping that Molly would accept the package, he kept hearing in his mind the voices of the books. It was as if the
spirit of Anterra was addressing him across the ages, urging him to action. Do something. But do what? Was it too late?

In town there was a swirl of speculation about Daniel. He was out there alone in the woods with no one to turn to and nothing to eat. It was only a matter of time until he was dead—if he hadn’t already succumbed to the drenching rains and hypothermia.

“And that boy knew something really important,” said Howie Schultz, the postal carrier, as he stood under his umbrella sorting mail into the boxes that served the trailer park. “Something that could have stopped all this. Just look at how it's been raining. The wife's really scared. First that heat. Then these rains. I mean, what's the world coming to?”

“She drove him away!” said Mrs. Dolph bitterly, as she waited in the downpour for Howie to get to her social security check.“Some mother!”

“First she has the old man killed,” remarked Mrs. Lifsey to her bridge circle, “then she chases away her poor little boy. For the second time!”

One morning, Molly looked out the window to see heaps of garbage dumped in her front yard. Often, when she answered the phone, she was greeted by the click of someone hanging up. Other times, anonymous voices cursed and threatened her. “You’re not fit to be a mother!” hissed one female voice.“When he comes back, if he
ever
comes back,” shouted an angry man, “I hope to hell the authorities take him away from you.”

Molly knew that they were right, that she was to blame, and so she kept those messages of anger and hate, dutifully recording them in her journal.

After the rains finally tapered off, there was an early hard frost in October and Molly finally ventured outside. Standing in front of her trailer, she stared down at the remains of Daniel's neglected garden.
Oozing tomatoes hung on withered vines, desiccated bean plants shivered in the wind. When she poked her hands into the soil, she pulled up sodden potatoes, half-rotten. This is all that remains of Danny, she thought, kneeling in the mud. This and memories.

Molly spent her time wandering the nearby hills, following familiar paths, every step reminding her of Danny. Day slid into meaningless day, time losing all definition as the trees turned barren, the fields and meadows took on mournful shades of gray and brown, and the sky, grim and low, cloaked the sun. Gone were the summer wild flowers; and Danny, too. How little it might have taken to keep Danny, she kept telling herself. Now he was out in the wilderness, alone, this time with no one to care for him or shield him from the brutality of this unforgiving climate.

“Since the day that Danny was born and Chuck deserted us,” she wrote in her journal,“I’ve been so caught up in paying bills and going back to school, that I’ve never had—or allowed myself—the chance to stop and look up at a cloud, stand at night and stare up at the stars. Being productive does not always require running around in busy circles. Sometimes a person just needs to take a deep breath, stand still, and contemplate. Here was a little boy living with me, trying to teach his mother a little common sense. Was I always such a slow learner?”

One evening the phone rang, and Molly let it ring. When the answering machine picked up and she recognized Sandy's voice on the other end, she took the call.

“How are you doing, Molly?” Sandy inquired.

“Not so great, as you can imagine,” she answered. “How are things at Larry's?”

It turned out that Sandy was no longer with the magazine. Molly was surprised.

“Apparently you haven’t heard. After you left, things just fell apart.”

There were cost overruns in printing the October edition, egregious editorial mistakes that never got caught, pages that were bound out of order. And creditors were suddenly demanding payment up front. Larry had apparently been living on the edge, and hiring the new people had pushed him into insolvency.

“It was as if the magazine were cursed,” Sandy said. “First he fired the new people he had hired to replace you. Then he laid off Tasha. Then me. Finally Ben. I still can’t believe how fast everything unraveled.”

Larry Pierce had closed the doors to the magazine and filed for bankruptcy. The attorney handling the case was Alex Greenhut, by chance the same lawyer who had helped Molly obtain food stamps and welfare when she had been at the low point in her own life. From what Sandy had heard, Greenhut had tried his best to protect Larry, but there was no way to appease the creditors who were crying for blood. Not only was the magazine out of business, but Larry, as a result of his personal guarantees, was utterly ruined. Broke. In the end, he couldn’t even pay his lawyer's bill.

Molly had some savings but she refused to touch them. She was keeping them for when Danny came back. It was getting colder and the propane company was now refusing to deliver gas until her bills were paid. She failed to pay the rent, and let the car insurance lapse. Whatever it took, Molly was determined to hang on, wait for Danny, ignore the angry stares and denunciations of her neighbors, hold out as long as she could.

Tripoli was persistent. Every evening, without fail, he appeared at Molly's place. Sometimes during the day, when he was near the east end of the city, he’d think of her and drive over to the trailer park. When Molly finally relented and let him in, he sat with her, sometimes for hours, asking nothing, just quietly holding her hand.

“I don’t deserve your love,” she murmured, head bowed and
unable to look him in the eye.“I never did. You’re wasting it on me. Find someone else. Someone who’ll make you happy.”

He collected the garbage scattered across her lawn, straightened up the kitchen, and cooked her dinner.

“How can you ever forgive me, Trip?” she asked, “For not believing you, not trusting you.”

“There's nothing to forgive,” he said, holding her fragile frame tight. Through her thick sweater he could feel her ribs and verte-brae.“I only hope and pray that you can stop punishing yourself.”

Some days were better, some decidedly worse. On the nights that threatened to be bad, Tripoli slept over, holding her close and kissing away her tears.

“What would I do without you?” she asked.

“Why don’t you come to my place? Live with me,” he gently urged.

“I can’t. I can’t leave here. Not until the day they evict me—and then they’re going to have to drag me out bodily.”

Tripoli offered to pay her rent and was secretly relieved when she refused. The sooner she was out of that place of misery, he believed, the better.

The arrival of November was greeted by bitter cold and snow, promising another harsh winter.

“Sometimes I dream about living in a warm climate,” she said, shivering on a particularly frigid night. She was rationing heat, and by evening she was so chilled that even in bed with piles of blankets and Tripoli holding her she couldn’t warm up.“It's so dreadful here. So hostile.”

Tripoli thought about the tropics. He recalled his flight down to Sarasota to meet Matthew's old teacher, remembered the myriad of aquamarine pools, the endless miles of paved highways, the shopping malls and the fast-food joints. “It's really beautiful here, if you just open your eyes and look around. The summer and winter, it's all part
of a greater whole. Daniel saw what it was and loved it. He wanted us to love it, too.”

She stared at him in the darkness. How different he sounded these days, how different from that down-to-earth detective she had first met in her trailer the night Danny disappeared from daycare. Then she thought about Kute Kids. Mrs. Oltz, long dead. Cheryl, who had locked poor little Danny in the basement. The magazine. It now all seemed like a couple of lifetimes ago. How could she have been so insensitive? So stubborn? So utterly deaf and blind?

In her journal, Molly revisited each and every error she had made since the moment she had spotted Danny wandering up the road back toward her trailer. If only it were possible to move back in time, she thought going back through the densely covered pages of her notebook. If only retracing her steps were as simple as this, how differently she would have handled everything. Might have. But then some fools never learn from their mistakes.

Secretly, Molly harbored the dream that one day she would look out the window and there would be Danny, just as before, bouncing happily up the road, a coarse wool sweater tossed over his shoulder. But it was just that, she knew, a dream. People didn’t get second chances.

That same day in September when Daniel disappeared, the books had vanished, too. Tripoli had come home late that night, exhausted and soaked to the bone, and noticed immediately that the books were missing from the kitchen table. All that remained were scattered dishes and crumbs, his pile of notes encircling the spot where the volumes had rested for weeks. Until now, he had never had anything of value in the house and hadn’t even bothered locking the door. He kept kicking himself for being so lax. Why would anybody want to steal them? he wondered. Ultimately, when Matlin finally caught on that he had taken the books from the evidence room, there would be hell to pay. An independent investigator appointed by the governor was questioning everybody in town about the disappearance of the Hermit's body, and the books would be the next point of investigation. The noose was tightening. To hell with them, he thought. What could they do to him? In the grander scheme of things, measured against the wider flow of human events, their inquiry and his life were of minute significance.