Beautiful Lies

twenty-four

Monday morning. After a sleepless night, I took a cab over to the lot where I’d left that rented Jeep and headed back out to New Jersey. On my way, I stopped at an Internet café on Third Avenue and, using MapQuest, got a map that led directly to Linda McNaughton’s doorstep. It’s kind of crazy, if you think about it, that any stranger can enter your address into a computer and get step-by-step directions to your house, but as it was working to my advantage at the moment, I wasn’t really in any position to complain. I used my credit card here. Didn’t have a choice. Anyway, the events of last night were starting to seem surreal and I had achieved a strange mental distance from everything. So much had happened since I’d called Linda McNaughton. My brain was taking a little break from the fact that my boyfriend (he was, wasn’t he?) had fled the police (so, for that matter, had I) and my brother hated me and obviously had for years.

Once I was on the highway, I called my father from my cell phone.

“Ridley,” he said, managing to fit anger, worry, relief, and love into the two syllables of my name. “You tell me what’s going on. Right now.”

“Nothing. Why?” I asked.

“Ridley.”

“Dad, everything’s fine,” I lied. “I just need you to tell me about Project Rescue.”

There was a pause on the line. “Ridley, you need to come home right now. We’ve talked to Alexander Harriman. The police were here this morning.”

It’s sad when your parents give you orders that you are too old to obey. It represents a disconnect between who they think you are and who you actually are. They hold on to this concept of you as a small being within their control and it takes a lot of time before they get the fact that it’s no longer the case.

“I can’t come home, Dad. I need to know what’s happening to me. Tell me about Project Rescue.”

“Project Rescue? Ridley, what are you talking about?”

“Dad, tell me!” I yelled this. I’d never really yelled at my father before and something about it felt good. He was quiet for long enough that I wondered if he’d hung up or if the line had gone dead. Then I heard him breathing.

“Dad.”

“It was the group responsible for getting the Safe Haven Law passed,” he said. His voice sounded strange and his words had a canned quality to them.

“No,” I said. “It’s more than that.” I realized then that I was driving really fast and couldn’t afford to get pulled over. I slowed down, pulled into the right lane.

He sighed. “Well, let’s see. Early on there were safe houses, Project Rescue safe houses. Usually at churches or clinics, sometimes at cooperating orphan facilities. It was before the law was passed, so while it wasn’t illegal, it wasn’t exactly state sanctioned and it was privately funded. We always thought of it as kind of an underground railroad.”

“Who funded it? Max?”

“Yes, and others.” He sounded tired and I thought his voice was shaking just slightly, but it could have been the cell phone reception.

“So what happened at these places?”

“The same thing that happens now. A parent could leave her child safely, the child would be held and cared for for seventy-two hours. If before that time the parent changed her mind, she could come back for her baby. She’d receive counseling and any other kind of assistance she needed.”

“And if she didn’t come back?”

“Then the baby was absorbed into the child welfare system.”

“And you were involved?”

“Not really. Though some of the clinics where I donated my time over the years were Project Rescue sites, and when there was a baby or child abandoned, I’d provide health care just like I would for any child.”

“But were you breaking the law?”

“Not in any real sense. There was no law to say that you couldn’t provide health care to a needy, abandoned child, as long as that abandonment was reported within seventy-two hours.”

“So you were just flying under the radar.”

He released another sigh. “In the best interests of the children, of course.”

It made sense that my father would work the angles of the system to help children. I could see that in him. But the logic seemed slightly faulty to me. I mean, why go to all this trouble to get children away from potentially abusive situations, just to put them into the child welfare system, which was rife with flaws and abuses of its own? I thought of Jake’s childhood experiences.

I was missing something and I knew it. The answers were right in front of me but I wasn’t seeing them. I was tired and the whole thing was too much. It’s like when you start out on a big project, like cleaning out your closet. You’ve got everything you own on the floor and on the bed, the closet is empty, and then lethargy sets in. You think, Why did I even start this? I don’t have the energy to finish. But you can’t just walk away, it’s too late for that. I knew there were a million questions I could be asking my father, but I couldn’t think of one.

“What do I have to say to get you to come home?”

I thought about it a second. “Tell me there’s nothing I need to know, that I’ve got myself wound up in something that has nothing to do with me and that I’ve lost my perspective.”

There was just the slightest hesitation. Then: “Ridley, there’s nothing you need to know.”

I don’t know how, but I knew with a cool certainty that my father was lying to me. I heard my mother in the background: “Tell Ridley her room is ready. Alex can handle everything and she can just stay here until it all blows over.”

“I’ll call you, Dad. Try not to worry.”

I heard his voice as I took the phone away from my ear and ended the call. It sounded small and tinny, farther away than it had ever been. There was officially no one I could trust in the world.

I found Linda McNaughton living in a double-wide trailer in a well-kept mobile-home park off of Route 206 in a town called Lost Valley. It was a pretty nice trailer, with casement windows and aluminum siding, across the street from the public library. She came to the door with a smile on her face, but only opened the door partway. I hadn’t called to announce my arrival, thinking that she might refuse to see me.

“Can I help you?”

“Hi, Ms. McNaughton,” I said brightly with a Girl Scout smile. “I’m Ridley…we talked on the phone last night.”

The smile dropped quickly. “What are you doing here?”

“I was in town doing research on my story and I was just hoping to talk to you a bit more. Actually, I was hoping that you had a picture of Charlie you might be willing to loan to me.”

She narrowed her eyes at me in some combination of suspicion and anger. “I don’t have a picture and I don’t have anything left to say to you. Please go.” She then closed the door on me. Hard.

“What if,” I said through the door, pretty sure she was still standing behind it, watching me through the peephole, “I told you that there’s a chance Charlie might be alive?”

I heard a gasp from behind the door and immediately felt bad. After all, I didn’t have any proof that Charlie might be alive. But while I was lying on that strange bed last night, all night, thinking about what had happened to me, about the things Christian Luna had told me, what I’d learned about the other missing children, my uncle Max, what Ace had said, the germ of something had taken hold and now, especially after the conversation with my father, was spreading like a virus.

The door opened again and Linda’s face had softened. She opened the door the rest of the way and stood to the side, offering me passage.

In her parlor, I sat on a stiff beige sofa covered in plastic and sipped the coffee she’d offered me. It managed to be weak and bitter at the same time. Linda wore a gray sweat suit that exactly matched the gray of her short-cropped hair. Her face was a landscape of lines and sagging skin, but she had sharp blue eyes that shone with attention and intelligence. She sat across from me and watched me now. We were surrounded by turtles—turtle figurines, turtles painted on pillows and platters, stuffed turtles, turtle mobiles.

“You know,” she told me when she saw me looking around, “I don’t really have any special fondness for turtles. Just this one year, my husband bought me a gold turtle pendant after we’d been to that turtle farm in the Caribbean. I made such a big deal about how much I loved it that from then on, everyone started buying me turtles. And it’s just gone on like that.”

She looked at me almost apologetically and laughed awkwardly. I smiled at her, placed the coffee cup down on the table. She got up and walked toward a bookshelf on the far side of the room. When she returned she held a small photograph in a pewter frame. She handed it to me. It was a couple with a small child. The little boy, about two, wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and denim shorts, sat on top of a pony. The man, thin and bearded, stood to one side of him with a tentative smile and a protective hand on the child’s thigh. The woman, mousy, emaciated, looked on, her shoulders hunched in as she laughed, a bright smile on her face.

I don’t know what I expected of Michael and Adele Reynolds. All I knew of Michael was that he had been a heroin addict. Adele was a woman who’d sought to abandon her child. But in the photograph, I saw two people who looked a bit used, a bit worn maybe, but who were enjoying a day with their son. The image seemed incongruous to the judgment I’d unconsciously formed. It surprised me. I’d imagined them cold, selfish, abusive, neglectful. And maybe they’d been that in some moments. But in others maybe they’d been loving, happy, protective of their child. Maybe when Adele had tried to give up Charlie, she’d just been fearful that she was not up to the responsibility of raising a child, afraid that he would have been better off in someone else’s care. I had always been so angry at Zack for judging Ace by that one aspect, by his addiction, and I had unconsciously done the same thing to Adele and Michael.

“When there are so few good times, you remember them more clearly, I think,” said Linda. “I remember that day. We were all happy—Charlie’s second birthday. My daughter, Adele, was dead a month later. Then Charlie was gone. Then Michael. Within eighteen months, I lost them all.”

I felt my heart clench for her, imagining blow after blow like that and how it must have felt like the world had gone dark on her. I looked at her, expected to see her eyes filled with tears or her face to have changed with her grief. But she just gazed at the picture with a sad half-smile, as if all that remained was a sad resignation that things could not be changed.

Even Linda I’d judged. I’d imagined her as someone who didn’t love Adele enough, who chose not to help her in the crisis of not being able to care for Charlie. Because of the way I was raised, in a house where there was more than enough money and enough love to go around, I always thought that everyone had access to the same unlimited resources. I hate to admit it, but it wasn’t until that moment, surrounded by Linda McNaughton’s turtles, that I realized poverty was not an abstract concept, that sometimes people just didn’t have enough love or money to care properly for a child. You can’t judge people for what they don’t have to give, can you?

“Do you know for sure?” she said suddenly, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “Do you have proof that he’s still alive?”

I could see a slight shake in her hands, as though the hope was filling her with a kind of agitation. “No,” I admitted, returning her gaze. “Not yet.”

She sat down again with a sigh and looked away from me. I looked at the picture in my hand. The image was nebulous, the faces unclear and yellowed with age.

“I’ll try not to get my hopes up. Like I did last year.”

“Last year?”

“A young fellow came. About your age. Said he was a detective working on cold cases. That’s what he called them. He contacted me a couple of times with questions like who was Charlie’s pediatrician, did he ever go to the emergency room, how often. I told him what I could. But after a while he stopped calling. I called once and he said he was still working on it, promised he wouldn’t forget to call if anything came up, but I never heard from him again. Funny. Just the other day, I thought of calling him.”

“Why?”

“I came across Charlie’s birth certificate in a stack of old files. Thought it might be helpful to him.”

“Actually, Mrs. McNaughton, can I take a look at that?”

“Sure,” she said, getting up and walking over to a desk nestled in a corner of the room.

I leaned forward on my chair. “The man who came to see you—do you remember his name?”

“Well, I have his card right here with Charlie’s birth certificate. I can’t read without my glasses.”

She handed the card to me. I felt my stomach hollow out as I looked at the cream stock business card, embossed with black type. Jake Jacobsen, Private Investigations.

Some of our moments together came back in flashes. I remembered his strange tone when I told him about the other missing kids, how he hadn’t seemed surprised at all. I thought about how he’d found so much information about the parents on the Internet. I also remembered how quickly he’d determined the origins of the clipping Christian Luna had sent. How he’d seemed alarmed when he learned I’d told Detective Salvo what I’d found. Tiny seeds of dread started blooming in my chest. He knew, I thought. He knew about the other missing kids already.

“Miss Jones, you all right?” I must have just been sitting there staring at the card as she held a piece of paper out to me, I don’t know how long.

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking the paper from her hand.

“Charlie’s birth certificate. It’s a copy; keep it.”

I glanced at it and folded it, put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I looked up to see Linda watching me still.

“You didn’t tell me why,” she said. “Why do you think Charlie might still be alive?”

I paused a second and then answered as honestly as I could at the moment. “Because I am.”

She shook her head, not understanding.

“Some other children went missing that year, Mrs. McNaughton, and at least one of them might be alive and well. My hope is that the same is true for Charlie.”

She looked at me and I saw a cautious happiness in her face. It made me feel guilty. “I hope so, too,” she said, and clasped her hands together as if in prayer.

I got up and took her hand, thanked her for her help. I promised to return her photograph and not to leave her only with questions. She stood at the door and held her hand up in a wave as I got into the Jeep and pulled up the gravel drive toward the highway. I was thinking that hope is not always a gift.

As I pulled onto Route 206, in the rearview mirror I saw a black 1969 Firebird with tinted windows approaching. My heart did a little dance and I pulled over to the side of the road, expecting to see the car pull up behind me. But it didn’t. It passed by, the engine revving as it did. Relief and disappointment duked it out in my chest. As I watched the car disappear around the next turn, I remembered then that Jake had said the police had impounded his car. I wasn’t ready to face him anyway, not with these new suspicions tugging at my pants leg. If he already knew about the other missing kids, then that meant he knew about Jessie Stone. He’d known before he even met me. I tried to think about what that might mean, and a thick curtain came down in my mind. I didn’t want to deal with it.

I pulled back onto the highway and drove toward Skully’s Mountain, on my way back to Hackettstown. In the absence of any better ideas, I thought I’d head to the clinic where Teresa Stone had taken Jessie. What was I going to do there? I didn’t really know. I was going to have to get creative. I was operating under a faith that the universe conspires to reveal the truth, that lies are unstable elements that tend toward breaking down.

The sky above me had gone a moody gray black, threatening snow. As I moved under a canopy of trees, it grew dark enough that I had to turn my headlights on. I drove through a small town center and turned off the main drag onto a smaller road that wound up Skully’s Mountain. It was a dark, narrow pass, and as I pulled over a small one-lane bridge at the base of a steep incline, I saw that it was edged only by a wooden guardrail protecting against a drop into a wide rushing river.

That was when I saw the Firebird again in my rearview mirror. How it had wound up behind me, I wasn’t sure. I couldn’t make out the form of the driver, but something went dark and cold inside me. I put my foot down hard on the gas and the Jeep burned a little rubber as I took off up the incline.

But the Jeep couldn’t compete with the muscle of a Firebird. In a second, it was on top of me, its high beams reflecting blindingly in my mirrors. I felt a heavy thud as the car rammed me from behind. In the movies, when people get hit from behind, it never seems to be especially jarring. It felt to me like the earth below my car had shifted, as my head knocked forward and then snapped back hard. I was jolted and involuntarily let go of the wheel for a second. The Jeep veered sickenly toward the edge before I could grab the wheel again. I overcorrected and wound up swerving to the other lane and just pulled back as another car came around the bend, its horn wailing in alarm as it flew past.

Mortal terror slows everything down and I felt like I was in a time warp as the Firebird rammed me again. All I could hear was the sound of my own ragged breathing as we came up on the next hairpin turn. I pushed my foot down on the gas but the Firebird was too fast; it came up on me again harder than before. Tears sprang to my eyes, casting the road in a wet blur.

“Stop it!” I screamed at no one.

Another jolt sent the Jeep swerving into the oncoming lane. I hit the mountainside guardrail and saw sparks fly as the Jeep bounced off it. The Firebird pulled up quickly beside me so that I couldn’t get back over. I looked over and saw nothing but the tinted black window. Suddenly anger cleared the fog of fear that was clouding my brain. I didn’t know who was driving that car and I didn’t care. I turned the wheel sharply, slamming the side of the Jeep hard into the Firebird. They don’t call them muscle cars for nothing; it felt like I’d hit a stone wall. The car swerved a bit but held its ground. I was really pissed then. I slammed it again, harder, not caring if I took us both over the side of the mountain. We drove like that, racing, the chassis of our vehicles joined in a horrible screech of metal on metal. Then I saw the glow of approaching headlights just past the curve.

The Firebird wouldn’t give ground. I leaned on my horn, hoping to alert the oncoming driver that I was in his path. I knew if I slammed on my brakes on a curve like this, I’d flip the Jeep or still wind up in a head-on collision with the approaching car because I wouldn’t have time to get back over to the right side. I leaned on my horn again, praying that the driver heard me and would slow, but just then the Firebird gunned its engine and took off. I jerked the wheel and moved back into the right-hand lane, I swear, two seconds before a red Dodge truck came fast around the corner. The truck flew past me, an angry horn reprimanding me for my careless driving. I watched as the Firebird disappeared around the next curve.

I slammed on the breaks and sat there, my hands gripping the wheel, my teeth gritted, every muscle in my body on fire with adrenaline. I was shaking uncontrollably. I wept into the steering wheel until I saw a car approaching from behind. Then I drove shakily up the rest of the mountain and when I got to the other side pulled into a Burger King drive-through and got myself a chocolate milkshake and fries. Having almost been murdered on a mountain road, very possibly by the man I’d been recently sleeping with, I figured I owed it to myself. I sat in the parking lot quaking, crying, and shoving greasy French fries into my mouth as fast as I could without choking myself.

The thoughts in my brain were spinning. I found that I couldn’t really process what had just happened to me, what I was supposed to do next. I wasn’t able to identify the driver of the car, but it had to be Jake’s car. Had it been him at the wheel? Why would he want to hurt me? If not him, then who? How did they get his car? And over and over the same question: Why was any of this happening? As I sat sipping the milkshake, still shaking, that horrible feeling of aloneness settled in the marrow of my bones. But I’d stopped crying. I was beyond that now. I was out of tears.

When you discover that the foundation of your life has been constructed over a sinkhole and every wall has begun to crumble, what do you do? Where do you go? My mind drifted as thoughts that had no relevance to the moment presented themselves for consideration, as if to give my frazzled brain a little recovery time. For some reason, I thought about my mother.

Back in the years after I graduated from college, I took the 4/5 train every Wednesday and Friday to attend a yoga class on the Upper East Side. It was at a hideous time, six to seven-thirty in the morning, but I found that, if I could make it, it significantly improved the quality and productivity of my day. On a particularly cold February morning, I walked to Fourteenth Street in the early darkness and descended into the Union Square subway station. Still half asleep when the train arrived, I got on and sat down. The train paused in the station and I looked out the window. Fluttering there was a monarch butterfly. It seemed to hover beside the window as I stared at it in wonder. I thought, How could it be here, in this dark, underground place in winter? How could it survive in the cold? But there it was. I looked around the train to see if any of the other passengers noticed, but they were all dozing or reading. They all missed it, this tiny miracle. And when I looked back, it was gone. The doors closed and the train pulled from the station.

It occurred to me, not then but now as I sat in the parking lot in the likely totaled Jeep, that that was how I loved my mother. Behind glass in a train that was always leaving the station. My mother was someone you admired for her beauty, for her charm, for the strength of her character. But like that monarch butterfly, she was ultimately distant and elusive. Something to be glimpsed but not held. It might have been different if she hadn’t lost Ace. Because I think we all knew on some level that he was her one true love and that when he abandoned her, she never quite recovered. That for all the fire and conflict in their relationship, she adored him. There was a light that shone from within her when she looked at my brother. When he’d gone, the stage went dark. And we were all left to fumble around, finding new roles in her production.

I guess I hated her a little for that, as much as I loved her. In my most secret heart I always believed that if she could have chosen to lose one of us, it would have been me, that she would have traded me to have Ace back in a heartbeat. Maybe it wasn’t true, but I believed that through most of my adolescence and into adulthood.

Anyway, life doesn’t work like that. You can’t make trades. Or so I thought.