Gone, Baby, Gone

EPILOGUE

The Mother and Child Reunion

The Mother and Child Reunion, as the headline of the News called it the next morning, was transmitted live at 8:05 P.M. EST, on all local channels on the evening of April 7.

Bathed in hot white light, Helene bounded off her front porch, through a stream of reporters, and took Amanda from the arms of the social worker. She let out a yelp and, with tears streaming down her face, she kissed Amanda’s cheeks and forehead, eyes and nose.

Amanda wrapped her arms around her mother’s neck and buried her face in her shoulder, and several neighbors broke out in raucous applause. Helene looked up at the sound, confused. Then she smiled with a demure shyness, blinked into the lights, rubbed her daughter’s back, and the smile grew broader.

Bubba stood in the living room in front of my TV and looked over at me.

“Everything’s all right, then,” he said. “Right?”

I nodded at the TV. “Sure seems like it.”

He turned his head as Angie hopped down the hallway with another box, placed it on the stack just outside the front door, and hopped back into the bedroom.

“So why’s she leaving?”

I shrugged. “Ask her.”

“I did. She won’t tell me.”

I gave him another shrug. I didn’t trust myself to speak.

“Hey, man,” he said, “I don’t feel good helping the woman move. You know? But she asked me.”

“It’s okay, Bubba. It’s okay.”

On TV, Helene told a reporter she considered herself the luckiest woman in the world.

Bubba shook his head and left the room, picked up the stack of boxes in the doorway, and trudged down the stairs with them.

I leaned in the bedroom doorway, watched Angie pull shirts from the closet, toss them on the bed.

“You going to be okay?” I said.

She reached up, grabbed a stack of hangers by the necks. “Be fine.”

“I think we should talk about this.”

She smoothed wrinkles from the top shirt in the stack. “We did talk about it. In the woods. I’m talked out.”

“I’m not.”

She unzipped a garment bag, lifted the pile of shirts and slid them inside, zipped the bag.

“I’m not,” I repeated.

She said, “Some of these hangers are yours. I’ll get them back to you.”

She reached for her crutches and swung toward me.

I stayed where I was, blocking the doorway.

She lowered her head, looked at the floor. “You going to stand there forever?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

“I’m just wondering whether I should put the crutches down or not. After a while, my arms get numb if I’m not moving.”

I stepped aside and she moved through the doorway, met Bubba as he came back up the stairs.

“There’s a bag on the bed,” she said. “That’s the last of it.”

She swung out to the stairs and I heard her clack the crutches together, hold them in one hand, while she held the banister in the other and hopped down the stairs.

Bubba picked the garment bag up off the bed.

“Man,” he said, “what did you do to her?”

I thought of Amanda lying on the porch bench in Tricia Doyle’s arms, the Afghan pulled around them against the chill, the two of them talking quietly, intimately.

“Broke her heart,” I said.

Over the weeks that followed, Jack Doyle, his wife, Tricia, and Lionel McCready were all indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of kidnapping, forced incarceration of a minor, child endangerment, and gross child negligence. Jack Doyle was also indicted in the murders of Christopher Mullen and Pharaoh Gutierriez and in the attempted murders of Lionel McCready and Federal Agent Neal Ryerson.

Ryerson was released from the hospital. Doctors had saved his arm, but it was withered and useless, at least temporarily and maybe forever. He returned to Washington, where he was assigned desk duty in the Witness Protection Program.

I was summoned before the grand jury and asked to testify to my knowledge of all aspects of what the press had dubbed the Copnapping Scandal. No one seemed to grasp that the term itself suggested cops being abducted as opposed to doing the abducting, and the label was soon as synonymous with the case as Watergate had been to Nixon’s multitude of treasons and petty corruptions.

Before the grand jury, my comments regarding Remy Broussard’s last few minutes with me were disallowed because they could not be corroborated. I was restricted to testifying as to exactly what I’d observed on the case and what I’d noted in my case file.

No one was ever indicted for the murders of Wee David Martin, Kimmie Niehaus, Sven “Cheese” Olamon, or Raymond Likanski, whose body was never found.

The federal prosecutor told me he doubted Jack Doyle would be convicted in the deaths of Mullen and Gutierrez, but because it was patently obvious he’d been involved, he’d take a hard fall on the kidnapping charges, never see the outside of a prison again.

Rachel and Nicholas Broussard disappeared the night Remy died, taking off for parts unknown with, most on the prosecution side assumed, two hundred thousand dollars of Cheese’s money.

The skeletons found in Leon and Roberta Trett’s basement were determined to be those of a five-year-old-boy who’d disappeared from western Vermont two years ago and a seven-year-old girl who has yet to be identified or claimed.

In June, I dropped by Helene’s.

She gave me a tight hug with bony wrists that bruised muscles in my neck. She smelled of perfume and wore bright red lipstick.

Amanda sat on the couch in the living room, watching a sitcom about a single father of two precocious six-year-old twins. The father was a governor or senator or something similar and he always seemed to be at the office yet, as far as I could tell, had no baby-sitter. A Hispanic handyman dropped in all the time and complained a lot about his wife, Rosa, who always had a headache. His jokes were nonstop sexual entendres, and the twins laughed knowingly while the governor tried to look stern and hide a smile at the same time. The audience loved it. They went wild for every joke.

Amanda just sat there. She wore a pink nightdress that needed a wash or at least some Woolite, and she didn’t recognize me.

“Sweetie, this is Patrick, my friend.”

Amanda looked at me and raised a hand.

I returned the wave, but she was already looking back at the TV.

“She loves this show. Don’t you, honey?”

Amanda said nothing.

Helene walked through the living room, her head tilted as she fastened an earring to her lobe. “Man, Bea really hates you for what you did to Lionel, Patrick.”

I followed her into the dining room as she scooped things off the table into her purse.

“Probably why she hasn’t paid my bill.”

“You could sue her,” Helene said. “Right? You could. Couldn’t you?”

I let it go. “How about you? You hate me?”

She shook her head, patted the hair on the sides of her head. “You kidding? Lionel took my kid. Brother or not, fuck him. She could have been hurt. You know?”

Something small twitched in Amanda’s face when her mother said “fuck.”

Helene ran her hand through three bright pastel plastic bracelets, shook her arm so they’d drop to her wrist.

“Going out?” I said.

She smiled. “You know it. This guy? He saw me on TV, thinks I’m-like, a big star.” She laughed. “Ain’t that a riot? Anyway, he asked me out. He’s cute.”

I looked at the child on the couch.

“What about Amanda?”

Helene gave me a big smile. “Dottie’s gonna watch her.”

“Dottie know that?” I asked.

Helene giggled. “She will in about five minutes.”

I looked at Amanda as the image of an electric can opener was reflected from the TV and played across her face. I could see the can opening like a mouth on her forehead, her square chin bathed in blue and white, her eyes open and watching without interest as the jingle played. An Irish setter replaced the can opener, leapt across Amanda’s forehead, rolled in a field of green.

“The caviar of dog food,” the announcer said. “Because doesn’t your dog deserve to be treated like a member of the family?”

Depends on the dog, I thought. Depends on the family.

A savage pang of weariness stabbed me just under my rib cage, sucked the breath out of me, and left as quickly as it had come, trailed by a throbbing ache that settled into my joints.

I mustered up the strength to cross the living room. “Goodbye, Helene.”

“Oh, you leaving? ’Bye!”

I stopped at the door. “’Bye, Amanda.”

Amanda’s eyes remained on the TV, her face bathed in its pewter glow. “’Bye,” she said, and for all I knew she was talking to the Hispanic handyman as he went home to Rosa.

Outside, I walked for a while, finally came to a stop in the Ryan playground, sat on the swing where I’d sat with Broussard, looked out at the basin of the unfinished frog pond where Oscar and I had saved a child’s life from the madness of Gerry Glynn.

And now? Now what had we done? What crime had we committed in the woods of West Beckett, in the kitchen where we’d taken a child from parents who had no legal right to her?

We’d returned Amanda McCready to her home. That’s all we’d done, I told myself. No crime. We’d returned her to her rightful owner. Nothing more. Nothing less.

That’s what we’d done.

We’d taken her home.

Port Mesa, Texas

October 1998

In Crockett’s Last Stand one night, Rachel Smith joins in a drunken conversation about what’s worth dying for.

Country, a guy fresh from the service says. And the others toast.

Love, another guy says, and catches a round of jeers.

The Dallas Mavericks, someone yells. We been dying for them ever since they entered the NBA.

Laughter.

A lot of things are worth dying for, Rachel Smith says, as she comes over to the table, her shift over, scotch glass in her hand. People die every day, she says. Over five dollars. Over locking eyes with the wrong person at the wrong time. Over shrimp.

Dying is no measure of a person, Rachel says.

What is? someone calls out.

Killing, Rachel says.

There’s a moment’s silence as the men in the bar consider Rachel, and that hard, calm thing in her voice matches the thing that’s in her eyes sometimes, the thing that can make you nervous if you look too close.

Elgin Bern, captain of Blue’s Eden, the best shrimper in Port Mesa, eventually says, What would you kill for, Rachel?

Rachel smiles. She raises her scotch glass so that the fluorescent light over the pool table is reflected and trapped in the ice cubes.

My family, Rachel says. And only my family.

A couple of guys laugh nervously.

Without a second thought, Rachel says. Without a look back.

Without a moment’s pity.