Through the Darkness (21 page)

Damn. I'd been busted
.

“Mrs. Ives,” the reporter continued while my eyes shot shrapnel her way. “Doesn't it concern you that Roger Haberman, a convicted pedophile and repeat offender, was seen in the vicinity of Spa Paradiso on the day your grandson was abducted?”

I wanted to punch the woman out, but I took two deep breaths, dug my fingernails into my palms and asked, “And you are?”

“Michele Pickett, one
l
, from the
Sun.”

“Ms. Pickett…” I paused, as if committing her name to memory, with or without the extra
l
. “May I suggest that you ask the police about that.”

This time I managed to shove the door shut and lock it behind me.

I returned to the kitchen, where my tea had grown cold. “It's the press,” I reported to my friend. “I think we better start planning escape routes.”

“You're serious, aren't you, Hannah?”

“Very.”

As if to punctuate my remarks, the pounding began again, even louder, if that was possible. Fearing for the paint on Eva's front door, I headed back to the entrance hall, unlocked the door, threw it wide and opened my mouth to give the pesky reporters a sizable piece of my mind.

But it wasn't a reporter standing there. The reporters had retreated to a pair of noisy, raggedy lines on both sides of the sidewalk. What greeted me now were two men in suits who might as well have had “cop” written all over their chests in bright, flashing neon letters. Behind the cops stood another man dressed in slacks and a windbreaker, carrying a tool kit.

“Mrs. Haberman?” the tall cop asked.

“No.”

“Is she here?”

“Who shall I say is calling?”

“I'm Officer Peter Cook with the Anne Arundel County police.” He produced a badge and showed it to me. “We have a search warrant.”

I waited until the two other officers had shown me their badges, too, then said, “I guess you'd better come in, then. Please wait here in the living room while I get Reverend Haberman.”

I had more experiences with search warrants than I cared to admit, or remember. When the FBI came to arrest me for murder, they'd torn my house apart looking for evidence, going so far as to empty my flour canister and dump out my silverware drawer, although it's fair to say that they put everything back together afterward.

When I got back to the kitchen, Eva was standing next to the pantry door, using a kitchen knife to pry the top off a box of shortbread cookies.

“It's the police this time, and they've come with a search warrant,” I told my friend.

She laid the box of cookies down on a nearby counter and glanced about the kitchen, waving the knife, eyes wide. “What should I do?”

“There's really nothing you can do about it, Eva. It's like emergency dental work. You just sit back and let it happen.”

She drooped. “They'll be after his computer, I suppose.”

“Right.”

“And books, and magazines. Notebooks?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And weapons?” The furrow deepened between her eyes.

“What do you mean, weapons?”

“I've got to tell somebody. Roger kept a gun in his bedside table. Now it's gone.”

My daughter screwed up her eyes. “How can you
even
think
about going back to work?”

Dante captured both of Emily's hands in his and drew them to his chest. “I
have
to go back, Em, otherwise there won't be any money to pay the mortgage, or put food on the table. The ladies from St. Catherine's aren't going to cook for us in perpetuity, you know.”

Emily jerked her hands away. “You should be ashamed of yourself for deserting Timmy.”

“I'm not deserting our son, Emily. I'm doing what has to be done to maintain the health of my family including my other two children, and if that means returning to work, so be it. All of our money is tied up in Paradiso, you know that. If Paradiso fails, we're doomed.”

“He's going back to work,” Emily said to me, ignoring her husband, using the same petulant tone of voice she'd often used with me at the dinner table after an argument with her father: “Please ask your husband to pass the potatoes.”

Dante turned to me, a can't-live-with-her-can't-live-without-her look on his face. “Phyllis says some of our investors have threatened to pull out if we don't open by Monday.”

“I can't go back to that day care center,” Emily pouted.

“You don't have to, Em. For the time being I can move Alison over to Puddle Ducks—if you approve, of course. She's actually a certified teacher.”

“You don't understand what I'm saying, Dante. I can't
ever
go back to it.”

A slight twitch along the jaw, a barely detectable narrowing of the eyes, were the only clues that this news bothered Dante. “Emily. I've told you all along. It's okay for you to stay at home with the children. You don't have to work your tail off at the spa.”

Emily began to weep quietly. “But I
so
wanted Paradiso to be a success.” She turned her devastated face to me. “It's been our dream for so long. We're so, so close, and now it's all falling apart.”

I was worried, too. Now that Dante's grandiose plans for Paradiso seemed to be unraveling, so was his marriage.

I grabbed my daughter's hand and squeezed it tightly, surprising myself by saying, “Dante's right, Emily. He's the driving force behind the spa. You say you want it to succeed, right?”

Emily sucked in her lips and nodded.

“Then he's
got
to get back to it.”

Up until then Connie had been sitting quietly in the corner of Emily's living room. Suddenly she spoke up, putting into motion a carefully orchestrated plan to get Emily out of the house and off Erika's picket lines. “Anybody up for a movie?
Do or Die
is playing at the mall. It got good reviews.”

Emily rolled her eyes at her aunt, but at least she had stopped crying. “I don't feel like going to the movies.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “It's all set. Dennis and Connie are taking Chloe and Jake to Chuck E. Cheese's, and you, your father, and I are going to the mall. We're having dinner at the food court, we're going to sneak home-popped corn past the ticket taker, and we're going to enjoy ourselves for a couple of hours.”

I was enormously grateful that Connie had volunteered for the Chuck E. Cheese's expedition. Her stomach was far more galvanized than mine.

Reluctantly, Emily agreed to see the new thriller. She left the room to freshen up, and I was pleasantly surprised when she reappeared ten minutes later wearing a flowered sundress and sandals, her face glowing with the first touches of makeup I'd seen on her for days.

On the way to the mall, with Paul driving and Emily sitting in the backseat, it felt like old times, except back then we'd have been singing the traditional family round, “It's a Small World,” in combination with “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and laughing hysterically about it. There wasn't much to laugh about these days.

Paul parked the car near the Borders end of Annapolis Mall. We followed him in and loitered by the large ticket kiosk near Sears while he bought three tickets for the seven-fifteen showing. Tickets safely tucked into his breast pocket, Paul stood on the elevated deck that surrounded the food court, raised both arms as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea, and said, “Divide, and conquer.”

As usual, the food court was a happening sort of place, bustling with men, women, and children, with teens strutting their stuff, showing off for one another and for whoever was on the other end of their cell phones.

I stood in a paralysis of indecision. Salads to the left of me, yogurt to the right. Ichiban, Little Panda, Mickey D's, and a thousand-and-one varieties of fast food in between. Paul headed off with determination for his monthly cholesterol fix at Steak-Escape, while Emily and I trundled off to see what was being offered on the Chinese buffet. Balancing the food on our trays, we headed back to find a table, catching sight of Paul, who nodded at a vacancy near the escalators that carried movie-goers up to the theaters.

We'd taken only a half dozen steps toward our table when Emily's voice rasped in my ear. “Mother. Look!” She gestured with her tray. “See that woman over there?”

“Where?” My eyes ping-ponged over the crowd. There were several women in our immediate area, so it was impossible to tell which woman Emily was referring to.

“That one,” she croaked. “The one with the Kiddie Kruzer stroller!”

“Where?” I began, but then I saw what Emily saw. A dark-haired woman about Emily's age, wearing eyeglasses and a yellow beret, pushing a child in one of the bright red, car-shaped strollers that Westfield management loaned out to mall customers.

“My God, that's Timmy!” Emily shouted.

“What?” My head snapped around from the woman and her baby to Emily, who stood next to me clutching her tray so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. On the tray, her spicy tofu quivered on its plate, and the ice in her Coca-Cola actually chattered.

As I watched, Emily relaxed her death grip on the tray, and it tumbled end over end, splattering food and drink all over the floor and the Nikes of a teen unfortunate enough to have his legs sprawled in the aisle. Shaking off my restraining hand, she rushed forward.

“Paul!” I yelled, scanning the crowd for my husband. I set my tray down in front of a surprised senior and chased after my daughter.

“Timmy! Timmy!” Emily knocked over chairs, her arms flailing against the sea of humanity that seemed somehow to have closed in around us. “Mother, it's Timmy!”

When I caught up with her seconds later, Emily was kneeling in front of the stroller. “Timmy, it's Mommy! Mommy's here.”

“Ma'am, ma'am,” the child's mother was saying. “I think you've made a mistake.”

The baby in the stroller certainly looked like Timmy, could have been his twin, in fact, except that she was wearing pink overalls and a lace-trimmed shirt. Her mother had drawn the little bit of hair that sprouted from her head into a tiny topknot and secured it there with a beribboned barrette.

“This is Jennifer,” the little girl's mother said, her voice shaking. “Jenny, can you say hello to the nice lady?” She pulled the stroller toward her protectively.

Emily straightened, her face rigid. “You think a mother doesn't know her own child? This is Timmy. You took him, and he's mine.”

The mother, eyes wide and frightened by this nutcase standing in front of her, seemed to be appealing to me for help.

“Emily!” I grabbed my daughter's arm and held her back until Paul reached us.

“What the hell's going on here?”

Emily stood her ground. “This woman has kidnapped Timmy, Daddy. She thinks she can fool me just because she dressed him up in little girl's clothes, but she can't.”

In the stroller, Jenny said, “Buh buh buh,” waved a nubby rubber rattle in the air, and then began gnawing on it in a way that seemed so familiar that for a few seconds my heart stopped beating altogether.

Could Emily be right?

Paul's arm snaked around his daughter's shoulders, his head bent to touch hers. “Emily, you're upsetting this woman. You're upsetting her child.”

Jenny, in point of fact, seemed perfectly oblivious to the chaos going on around her, continuing to chew contentedly on her rattle.

“If you'll excuse me, then,” Jenny's mother said, giving the stroller a tentative tug in a backward direction. “I need to be going.”

“Not until you give me back Timmy!” Emily surged forward, reaching for the child, but Paul restrained her.

Jenny's mother backed away, dragging the stroller with her. “Don't make me call Security,” she snarled.

Paul led Emily to a nearby chair and forced her to sit down on it. She threw her arms across the table, rested her head on them and began to cry, deep wracking sobs that nearly ripped my heart out of my chest.

“Emily.” I knelt on the cool tiles next to my daughter's chair. “The woman is getting away. Do you want me to grab the baby?”

Paul's eyebrows shot skyward. “Hannah, are you out of your mind?”

My heart pounding, my breath coming in short gasps as the stroller and the woman in the yellow beret began beating a hasty retreat, I said, “What's the worst that could happen, Paul? The police come. The child is not Timmy. News at eleven: distraught mother of kidnapped child makes terrible mistake. Apologies all around. Everybody goes home.”

Emily turned her tearstained face to me, her eyes wide, pupils dilated. No telling what she was high on this time.

“Emily, are you
sure
that's Timmy?”

“I don't knooooooow,” Emily howled.