Through the Darkness (26 page)

With Dante in the lead, we charged through the double glass doors and into the train station. Just inside, Dante stopped cold, so abruptly that we piled into him. We were all looking around for Connie.

I spotted her first, over by the automated ticket machines.

“Thank goodness you're here. I thought I'd have to buy a ticket.”

Connie pointed to a row of seats near the women's restroom where Joanna Barnhorst sat with Timmy in her arms. The very picture of motherhood, she was rocking him gently.

Dressing Timmy for their journey, she'd abandoned the pink theme. My grandson was dressed in yellow overalls and a white top with a picture of Nemo the clownfish embroidered on it. I recognized it as one of the outfits she'd bought for him at Sam's Club earlier in what was turning out to be the longest day of my life.

While I was mindlessly admiring Tim's new outfit, Emily streaked past me in a fury. She stopped dead in front of Joanna Barnhorst and stood there, solid as a tree and about as movable. “Give me back my child.”

Joanna looked up with what could only be described as a demented smile on her face. “She's my child. I told you that before. Don't you listen?”

“I'm telling you one more time. Give me back my baby, or I'm going to take him away from you.”

Joanna clasped the sleeping child to her chest, burying his chubby face in her bosom. “No. She's mine.”

Dante surged forward. “Joanna, whatever I may have done to you, Timmy doesn't deserve to be taken away from his mother.”

Still holding Timmy, Joanna stood up and tried to sidestep the pair of them. “You should have thought about that a long time ago,” she snapped.

“Give Timmy back
now
, Joanna.”

“No!”

I didn't expect what happened next. Emily's hand shot out and struck Joanna a stinging blow across the cheek.

“Help!” Joanna screamed. “They're trying to steal my baby!”

In the confusion, Emily snatched Timmy from Joanna's arms and bolted for the door, with Joanna close behind yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

At the door, Emily suddenly whirled. With one hand, she grabbed the bib of Timmy's brand new overalls and ripped them off. Then she tore off his disposable diaper. Holding Timmy aloft, naked except for his t-shirt, waving her child back and forth before the astonished room of waiting passengers like an oscillating fan, she yelled, “What did you say your
daughter's
name was, Joanna?” She lifted Timmy higher, like a trophy, and consulted the crowd. “Does this look like a little girl to
you
?”

“Not with that pecker on him,” muttered a drunk who had, until recently, been snoozing on one of the chairs.

Abruptly awakened from a sound sleep, and undoubtedly cold, Timmy began to howl.

“My baby, my baby,” Joanna crooned, clawing at her own clothing.

On the arrivals and departures board mounted high on the wall above the glassed-in ticket counters, the letters that spelled out the train schedule clattered into their new positions with a sound like playing cards slapping on bicycle spokes. The Florida train had arrived at the station, the letters announced, but no one made a move to get on board. As Emily crowed and Timmy screamed, the crowd continued to grow, forming a semicircle around them.

Suddenly, someone pushed me forcefully aside.

“What the heck's going on here?” a security guard demanded to know.

Grabbing onto the security guard for support, Joanna sobbed, “They're stealing my baby.”

“No we're not,” Emily insisted in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. “Timmy is our child. Dante's and mine.”

I pushed forward through the crowd to put in my two cents worth. “Have you heard about the Shemansky kidnapping?” I asked the guard.

“The what?”

“Jesus Christ!” Dante exclaimed. “It's been on TV and in all the papers. After all the publicity, you'd think that a
security guard
,” he skewered the guard with his eyes and emphasized each word, “that a security guard at a municipal train station, for Christ's sake, would be up to speed on it.”

Dante reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a square of paper, unfolded it, and shoved the paper—a missing poster for Timmy—under the guard's bulbous and red-veined nose. “
This
child,” Dante snarled.

Safe in his mother's arms at last, Timmy had stopped crying and buried his head in the crook of her neck. The guard examined the poster, then looked up, his eyes moving from child to the poster, child to the poster, and back again. “Could be,” he said after an eternity had passed.

Dante exploded. “Can't you fucking read, man? Red hair, green eyes, thirty pounds. Get me a goddamn scale and I'll prove it to you!”

Ignoring my son-in-law's tendency toward profanity, the guard handed back the poster. “Look, I ain't no expert at identifying babies. They all look like Elmer Fudd to me.”

“If you don't believe my husband,” Emily said, “take a look at this.” Using the arm that wasn't holding Timmy, she eased her hand into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a piece of paper that I recognized as a photocopy of Timmy's footprints, the ones they'd taken at the hospital the day he was born.

The guard waved the evidence away. “I ain't no fingerprint expert, either, lady.”

Dante had reached the end of his rope. He yanked out his cell phone, and as I watched, he dialed 911.

In the meantime, I was placing a call to Agent Crisp, mentally bracing myself for another stinging lecture. “We've found Timmy,” I told her. “We're at New Carrollton station.”

“I know,” Crisp said. “We're on our way. I've called for backup.”

While we were distracted with our respective calls, Joanna tried an end run, facing the guard directly and screaming into his face. “He's mine, I tell you.”

The guard's face grew red. “Sit down, lady! I ain't no King Solomon, either. We'll let the police sort this one out.” And he made a third call on his Nextel.

“You're not fooling anyone now, Joanna,” Dante said gently as Joanna took the guard's advice and sat. “It's all over. You can keep up this charade for an hour, maybe two, but we both know that it's over.”

Joanna began to sob.

“DNA tests will prove it, you know that. They'll prove Timmy's ours beyond a shadow of any doubt.”

Joanna laced her fingers together and stared at them, tears coursing down her cheeks. “He should have been mine. He should have been mine.”

“What the hell's she talking about?” Connie whispered.

“She's just sick and confused,” I suggested.

But when Agent Crisp arrived a few minutes later with Agent Brown in tow, Joanna collapsed like a punctured tire. “I'm sorry,” she whimpered as she wiped at her streaming nose with the back of her hand. “I don't know why I did it. It's just that when I walked by the nursery and saw that little boy lying there so peacefully, something came over me, and I took him.”

Amanda Crisp nodded, and Norm Brown took Joanna's arm. “Joanna Barnhorst, you are under arrest for kidnapping.” As he read the unfortunate woman her Miranda rights, Joanna seemed barely to be listening. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Her cheeks still glistening with tears, Joanna nodded.

The crowd parted to let them pass, and everyone's head turned in her direction as Agent Brown led Joanna away.

I was watching, too, and as the door swooshed shut behind them, I heard one last plaintive cry. “He should have been mine.”

“You know Joanna better than anyone else here,” I ventured, turning to my son-in-law. “What do you think she means?”

“I honestly don't know.”

And the funny thing was, even after everything that had happened, I believed him.

“That's it, everyone. Show's over!” The guard waved his arms as if flagging down a semi. “Either get on the train or go home.”

Dante turned to Agent Crisp. “That's it? We can take Timmy home?”

Crisp beamed. “Take your son home, Mr. Shemansky.”

When I peer through the plastic sleeve that contains
my Baltimore
Sun
as it makes the short trip from my front stoop—or the nearby bushes—to my kitchen table each morning, I rarely see good news above the fold, but Saturday's paper was the happy exception.

Madonna and Child
. That's what ran through my mind as I smiled at the picture of Emily and Tim with a heart so full of joy that it was in real danger of bursting. Emily wore a beatific smile, and her son? The photographer had captured him just at the moment he'd thrown back his head and laughed.

When I got to the kitchen, Paul already sat at the table, shoveling a bowl of cold cereal a spoonful at a time into his mouth. With Chloe and Jake back home with their parents, their family once again complete, it was our first morning without a trace of Froot Loops littering the floor.

“Look at this,” I said, laying the newspaper on the table in front of my husband. Paul swept his empty bowl aside, picked up the paper, and read the article aloud.

The
Sun
had most of the facts straight—that Timmy had been spotted by his own mother at the train station, that the kidnapper had been about to flee on a southbound Amtrak train. But they made Emily's presence at New Carrollton seem like a happy coincidence—better copy—and the
FBI
, to their credit, didn't set them straight on the matter.

That afternoon,
The Capital
carried a similar spread—front page pictures of Emily and Tim's joyful reunion. A photo of Joanna Barnhorst in police custody, her head bowed, also accompanied the article.

I spread the paper out flat on the table and went to fetch the scissors to cut the article out.

When I returned with the scissors, a headline below the fold made me gasp:
PASTOR'S HUSBAND ALLEGED PEDOPHILE FOUND DEAD.

The scissors fell from my fingers and clattered to the floor. I dropped into a kitchen chair and pulled the paper toward me, almost afraid to read any further, because if I did, the fact that Roger Haberman was dead could only be confirmed.

The body of Roger Haberman, 51, was found by a fisherman early this morning, floating in the water under the Spa Creek Bridge. Haberman, a convicted pedophile, and the husband of the Reverend Evangeline Haberman, pastor of St. Catherine's Church in West Annapolis, had recently been featured on an NBC television special, where he and a dozen other men were caught in a sting operation…

The article went on and on and on, dredging up every detail from Roger's sordid and despicable past.

According to the reporter, suicide had not been ruled out.

Poor Roger
, I thought, and then,
poor Eva
.

Leaving the newspaper lying open on the table, I rushed into the hallway to fetch my car keys. I had to go see my friend.

The picket lines were gone. That was a plus.

I parked my car near the deli on the corner of Melvyn and Annapolis Street. I circled the block around St. Catherine of Sienna Episcopal Church on foot, tearing down posters about Roger from telephone poles and fences, crumpling them up and stowing them in a plastic grocery bag I'd retrieved from my trunk.

It didn't give me as much satisfaction as the first time I saw
FOUND
written across the top of one of Timmy's posters on the
America's Most Wanted
website, but at least I was doing something constructive.

When I telephoned her earlier, Eva said she'd be home that afternoon and she'd like to see me. We met at St. Catherine's, in the garden, as arranged, and hugged each other, hard.

Eva spoke first. “I'm so happy that our prayers about Timmy were answered.”

“Yes. I don't believe I'll complain about anything ever again.”

I stepped back from the embrace, held my pastor at arm's length and stared deep into her eyes. “But Eva, how about you?”

“Roger didn't kill himself, Hannah.”

I thought Eva was living in a dream world but couldn't admit it. I appealed to her logic. “But even after he was exposed on that television show?”

Eva clamped her lips together, her jaw set and determined. “Never. Not even for that.”

Thinking about Roger's missing gun, I gritted my teeth and asked, “Was Roger shot?”

“No.”

“What did the medical examiner say, then?”

“Roger's up in Baltimore now.” She glanced at her watch. “They should be calling me shortly with information.”

“Do you think it was an accident, Eva?”

“You saw the picket lines, Hannah. The hate in those people's eyes.”

I sucked air in through my teeth. “You think Roger was
murdered
?”