Long lost

1

Loganville was better than I expected: a picture-postcard town with a prosperous-looking main street and a welcoming park in front of its courthouse. I asked directions to the Unitarian church, whose minister I'd phoned to make an appointment. The portly, gray-haired man was stacking hymnals in the vestibule.

"Reverend Hanley?" I'd explained on the phone why I needed to talk with him. I showed him Lester Dant's photograph and asked about the teenager's arrival at the church nineteen years earlier. "I realize that's a long time ago, but Reverend Benedict seemed to think that you'd remember what happened back then."

"I certainly do. It's difficult to forget what happened that summer. That boy meant a great deal to Harold and Gladys. They wanted so much to become his guardians."

"Harold?"

"Reverend Benedict. Their greatest regret was not having children. How is Harold, by the way? I haven't seen him in at least a year."

"He's well enough to get down on his knees and trim roses."

Reverend Hanley chuckled. "No doubt saying a few prayers while he's at it." He studied Lester Dant's photograph and sobered. "It's hard to… Add time and a scar-he could be the same person. The intensity of his eyes is certainly the same. He might be able to help you find your wife and son, you said?"

"He's the one who kidnapped them."

The minister took a moment to recover from what I'd said. "I wish I could help you. But I didn't get to know him well. The person you need to talk to is Agnes Garner. She's the member of the congregation who took the most interest in him. And she's the one he most betrayed."

2

Climbing the porch steps at the address I'd been given, I found a woman in a wheelchair. From her pain-tightened face, I might have guessed that she was almost seventy, if Reverend Hanley hadn't already told me that she'd been thirty-eight when Lester Dant had come into her life nineteen years earlier. "Ms. Garner?"

"Mrs."

"Sorry. Reverend Hanley didn't tell me you were married."

"Widowed."

"He didn't tell me that, either."

"No reason he should have."

Her abrupt manner made me uncomfortable. "Thanks for agreeing to see me."

Her hair was gray. Her dress had a blue flower pattern. She had a cordless telephone on her lap. "You want to know about Lester Dant?"

"I'd appreciate any information you can give me."

"Reverend Hanley called and explained about your wife and son. Do you have a photograph of them?"

"Always." With longing, I pulled out my wallet.

She stared at the picture. Kate's father had taken it when we were visiting Kate's parents in Durango. The magnificent cliff ruins of Mesa Verde aren't far from there. We'd made a day trip of it. The photo showed Kate, Jason, and me standing in front of one of the half-collapsed dwellings. We wore jeans and T-shirts and were smiling toward the camera. In the photo's background, next to an old stone wall, a stooped shadow looked like a human being, but there wasn't anything to account for the shadow. Jason had insisted it was the ghost of a Native American who'd lived there hundreds of years earlier.

Ghosts. I didn't want to think I was looking at ghosts.

"A wonderful family."

"Thank you" was all I could say.

"There's so much sorrow in the world."

"Yes." Emotion tightened my throat. "Mrs. Garner, do you recognize this man?" I showed her the photo.

It pained her to look at him. She nodded and turned away. "It's Lester. I haven't thought about him in years. I try my hardest not to."

She's going to send me away, I thought.

"Do you honestly believe that what I tell you can help?" she asked.

"I don't know any other way."

"Hurt him."

"Excuse me?"

"We're supposed to forgive those who trespass against us, but I want you to hurt him."

"If I get the chance, Mrs. Garner, believe me, I will."

She gripped the sides of her wheelchair. "There was a time when I could walk. I was always the earliest to arrive for Sunday services."

The change in topic confused me.

"I made a point of getting to the church before everyone. Now I wonder if I wasn't too proud and that's why God punished me."

"Whatever happened, Mrs. Garner, it wasn't God's fault. It was Lester Dant's."

3

He'd sat at the top of the church steps with his back against the door.

"A teenager," Mrs. Garner said. "His head was drooped, but even without seeing his face, I could tell that I didn't know him. His clothes were torn, so the first thing I thought was that he'd been in some kind of accident. The next thing I thought was, the way his head hung down, he might be on drugs. But before I could make a decision whether to hurry to help him or run away, he raised his head and looked at me. His eyes were so direct, there was no way he could have been on drugs. They were filled with torment. I asked him if he was hurt. 'No, ma'am,' he said, 'but I'm awful tired and hungry.'

"By then, other members of the congregation had arrived. The reverend came. But neither he nor anybody else recognized the boy. We asked him his name, but he said that he couldn't remember. We asked where he came from, but he couldn't remember that, either. From the rips in his clothes and the freshly healed burn marks on his arms, we figured that he must have had something terrible happen to him, that he was in shock.

"The reverend offered to take him home and get him something to eat, but the boy said, 'No. These people are waiting for the service to begin.' That sounds too good to be true, I know. But you weren't there. Everybody who came to church that morning felt so concerned about the boy and so touched by his unselfish attitude that we had a sense of God's hand among us. We took him inside. I sat next to him and handed him a Bible, but he didn't open it. I wondered if he was too dazed to be able to read. Imagine my surprise when the congregation read out loud from the Scriptures and the boy recited every passage from memory. I remember that the reverend said something in his sermon about keeping compassion in our hearts and helping the unfortunate. He paused to look directly at the boy. Afterward, everybody said that it was one of the most moving services that we'd had in a long time. The reverend took the boy home. He asked me and a couple of other church members to help. We made a big meal. We got the boy fresh clothes. He did everything slowly, as if in a daze.

"Who was he? we wondered. What had happened to him? Where had he come from? A doctor examined him but couldn't get him to remember anything. The chief of police got the same results and asked the state police if they knew about anybody who matched the boy's description and had been reported missing. The state police didn't learn anything, either."

That made sense, I thought. Loganville was in Ohio, but the fire had happened in Indiana. The Ohio police had probably decided that the boy's arrival in Loganville wasn't important enough for out-of-state inquiries. Even if they had gone out of state, inquiries to the Indiana state police might have been pointless, the fire having been basically a local matter that the state police wouldn't have monitored.

"Various members of the congregation offered to take the boy in," Mrs. Garner said. "But the reverend decided that since I'd found him, I had the right to take care of him if I wanted. My husband was the most generous soul imaginable. Five years earlier, we'd lost a son to cancer." She paused, caught in her memories.

"Our only child. If Joshua had lived, he'd have been the same age as the teenager I'd found on the church steps seemed to be. I couldn't help thinking that God had sent him into our lives for a reason. As a…"

Mrs. Garner had trouble saying the next word.

"Substitute?" I asked.

She nodded, her pain lines deepening. "That's another reason I believe I was punished. For vain thoughts like that. For presuming that God would single me out and give me favorable treatment. But back then, I couldn't resist the idea that something miraculous was happening, that I was being given a second son. I told my husband what I hoped for, and he didn't take a moment to agree. If I wanted the boy to live with us while his problems got sorted out, it was fine. My husband loved me so much and…"

Her voice dropped. She turned her wheelchair slightly so that she looked even straighter at me. "The boy came to live with us while the authorities tried to figure out who he was. He was awfully skinny. It took me days of solid home cooking, of fried chicken and apple pies, to put some weight on him. His burns had healed, but the scratches on his arms and legs, where his clothes had been torn, got infected and needed their dressings and bandages changed a lot. I didn't mind. It reminded me of taking care of the son we'd lost. I was pleased to do it. But I couldn't help wondering what on earth had happened to him.

"I left books and magazines on his bedside table so he'd have something to amuse him while he was resting. After a while, I realized that none of them had been opened. When I asked him if they didn't suit him, if he'd like to read something else, he avoided the question, and it suddenly occurred to me that the boy couldn't read."

I'd taken a seat on a porch swing. Now I frowned. "But you said that he could recite passages from the Bible."

"Any passage I asked him."

"Then I don't understand."

"I asked him to read the back of a cereal box. I asked him to read the headline of a newspaper. He couldn't do it. I put a pencil and paper in front of him. He couldn't write the simplest words. He was illiterate. As for the Bible passages, there was only one explanation. Someone had taught him the Bible orally, had made him memorize passages that were read to him. It chilled me when I realized that. What on earth had happened to him?"

"That's one of the few questions I have an answer for."

Her gaze was intense. "You know?"

Wishing that I hadn't interrupted, I nodded. "His parents held him prisoner in an underground room."

"What?"

"As much as I've been able to figure out, they believed that the Devil was in him, that the only way to drive Satan out was by filling his head with the Bible."

Mrs. Garner looked horrified. "But why wouldn't they have let him learn how to read and write?"

"I'm still trying to piece it together. Maybe they believed that reading and writing were the Devil's tools. The wrong kind of books would lead to the wrong kind of ideas, and the next thing, sin would be all over the place. The Bible was the only safe book, and the surest way to guarantee that the Bible was the only book Lester knew was to teach it to him orally."

Mrs. Garner's eyes wavered as if she'd become dizzy. She lowered her head and massaged her temples.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

"The things people do to one another."

"I've told you what Lester did to my family. What did he do to your Seconds passed. Gradually, she looked up at me, the pain in her eyes worse. "He was the politest boy I ever met. He was always asking to help around the house. At the same time, I'd never met anyone so troubled. Some afternoons, he'd lie in bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, reliving God knew what. In the nights, he couldn't go to sleep unless his closet light was on. He often woke screaming from nightmares. They seemed to have something to do with the fire that had burned his arms. I'd go into his room and try to calm him. I'd sit holding him, stroking his head, whispering that he was safe, that nothing could hurt him where he was, that he didn't have to worry anymore."

She paused, rubbing her temples again.

"Are you sure you're okay?" I asked.

"So long ago. Why does the memory still hurt so much?"

"I don't mean to upset you. If you need to rest for a while, I can come back when-"

"I never spoke about this to anyone. Ever. Maybe I should have. Maybe it wouldn't keep torturing me if I'd told someone, if I'd tried to explain."

"Do you want to explain it to me?"

She looked at me in anguish for the longest while, searching my eyes. "To a stranger. Yes. Someone whose judgments I'll never have to face again."

"I don't make judgments, Mrs. Garner. All I want is to get my wife and son back. Do you know anything that can help me do that?"

She struggled with her thoughts. "One night, he kissed me on the cheek. Another night, after one of his nightmares, after I held him and calmed him, he pecked my cheek again. Or tried to. He grazed my lips, as if he'd aimed for my cheek and missed. It was an awkward moment. I stood as soon as I got him settled in bed. I felt uncomfortable, but I kept telling myself that I was imagining things, that the boy hadn't meant anything."

"Mrs. Garner, you don't need to-"

"I have to. Somehow I have to get it out of me. I wanted to take care of the boy so much that I was in denial. Each intimacy seemed innocent. Like when I tried to teach him to read and write. That's what I used to be: a teacher at the high school. This happened at the end of summer. School hadn't started yet. I had time to try to teach him. I used the Bible, since he already knew the words. We sat together at the kitchen table. Our chairs were close. There was nothing wrong. We were just a teacher and a student sitting at a table working on a school problem, arid yet, in retrospect, I realize that he sat closer than he needed to. When he helped me make dinner, our hands would touch briefly. I didn't think anything of it. One of the reasons I haven't told anybody about this is that I'm afraid it'll seem as if I took some kind of"- she had trouble saying the word-"enjoyment… That's the furthest thing from the truth. I know that there are a lot of twisted people in this world, Mr. Denning. But I'm a churchgoing, Godfearing woman, and I assure you that I am not capable of enjoying the touch of a teenager whom I considered to be like a son."

An uncomfortable silence gathered. I made myself nod, encouraging her to continue.

"But it's because I wanted so desperately to take care of him that everything happened. One night, after another of his nightmares, when I held him, he grazed my…" Self-conscious, she looked down at the front of her dress. "It seemed accidental, yet I finally admitted that too many accidental gestures like that had happened, and I told him that certain kinds of touching weren't appropriate. I told him that I wanted the two of us to be close but that there were different kinds of closeness. He said that he didn't know what I meant but that if I wanted him to keep a distance, he would."

"The next night…" She couldn't get the words out. Her eyes glistened, close to weeping. "May I see the photograph of your wife and son again, please?"

Puzzled, I took out my wallet.

She studied it even longer than the first time. "Such a wonderful-looking family. What are their names?"

"Kate and Jason."

"Are you happily married?"

"Very." Now I was the one who had trouble speaking.

"Is your son a good boy?"

"The best." My voice became hoarse.

"How will this help you find them?" Moisture filled her eyes.

If Kate and Jason are still alive, I thought. What I'd learned from Reverend Benedict filled me with despair.

"I'm betting that he has habits." I struggled to hide my discouragement. "If I can understand him, I might be able to follow his trail."

"A trail that started nineteen years ago?"

"I don't know where else to go."

"He raped me."

The porch became deathly silent, except for her sobs as tears trickled down her cheeks.

I felt paralyzed, trying to get over my shock. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have asked you to talk about it."

"Don't talk about it?" Her tears made scald marks on her cheeks. "God help me, I've been holding it inside all these years. That's the torture. My husband was the principal of the school where I taught. Around dark, the janitor called about a water pipe that had burst. My husband hurried down to learn how serious the damage was. I got ready for bed. The boy… The rotten son of a bitch bastard-"

The torrent of what for Mrs. Garner were the crudest of obscenities shocked me.

"He came into my bedroom while I was undressing, threw me on the floor, and… I couldn't believe how strong he was. He was so frail-looking, and yet he overpowered me as if he had the force of the Devil. He kept calling me Eunice, but he knew very well that my first name is Agnes. I tried to fight him off. I scratched. I kicked. Then I saw his fist coming at me. Twice. Three times. I almost choked on my blood, lying there half-unconscious while he…"

Her voice faltered. She pulled a handkerchief from her dress, raising it to her cheeks.

"Afterward…" Some of her tears dripped from her chin. "After I vomited… After I found the strength to stand, I saw drawers open and realized that he'd stolen anything of value that he could stuff into his pockets. But that was the last thing on my mind. I staggered to the phone to call the police and get an ambulance, and all at once, I realized that I couldn't do that. I thought of the congregation and the town and the high school where my husband and I worked, and I imagined everybody staring at me. Oh, sure, they'd be sympathetic. But that wouldn't stop them from telling everybody they knew about what had happened to Agnes Garner. Being sympathetic wouldn't stop them from staring, and it wouldn't stop word from getting around to the students, who would stare even more than their parents. Rape. Rape. "I wavered in front of the phone. I remember telling myself that I had to call for help, that I was close to passing out. Instead, I forced myself into the bathroom. I used all my strength to get in the tub and wash myself where he'd…" She wiped more tears from her face. "Then I got dressed. Then I called the police. And no doctor ever had a chance to examine any part of me except my smashed lips and my bruised cheeks. I told everybody that I'd come into the bedroom and found him stealing money and jewelry. Not that I had much jewelry. I'm not that kind of a woman. All told, he took about three hundred dollars, which could be replaced, but a simple necklace that my grandmother had given me could never be replaced.

"My husband got home just after the police car arrived. The police searched for the boy but never found him. Maybe he slept in the woods. Maybe he hitchhiked and got a ride out of the area. The next day, Reverend Benedict arrived from Brockton. I learned that the boy's name was Lester Dant. I learned about the fire that had killed his parents. But I never told Reverend Benedict or Reverend Hanley what had really happened in my bedroom. I never told my husband. I never told anyone. When word got around, people stared, yes, but it was a kind of staring that I could tolerate. We'd taken a boy into our home. He'd repaid us by beating me and stealing from us. I was the kind of victim that the town could deal with."

"I can't tell you how sorry I am," I said.

"Eunice." She sounded anguished. "Why on earth did he call me Eunice?"

I didn't answer.

"You know about the underground room where his parents kept him prisoner. What else do you know? Have you any idea why he called me Eunice?"

Her tone was so beseeching that I found myself saying, "Yes."

"Tell me."

"Are you sure you want the answer?"

"The same as you need answers."

I hesitated. "Eunice was his mother's name."

Mrs. Garner moaned.

"It sounds as if he was punishing…"

"His mother. Punishing his mother. God help me." Her voice cracked with despair. "Hurt him. Remember your promise. When you find him, hurt him."

"You have my word."

4

All the way to my car, I tried not to let Mrs. Garner see my discouragement. "When you find him," she'd said. But I no longer believed that I would. With no information about where Lester Dant had gone that night, I hadn't the faintest idea what to do next. Worse, I didn't see the point of trying. Lester was far more disturbed than the FBI's information about him had revealed. I couldn't imagine him keeping Kate and Jason alive.

Grieving for them, I slumped behind the steering wheel. Hate fought with grief. "Hurt him," Mrs. Garner had pleaded. Yes, hurt him, I thought. Furious, I drove past well-maintained lawns and neatly trimmed hedges. I reached a four-way stop and turned to the right. At the next four-way stop, I turned to the left. No reason. No direction.

I went on that way, at random, for quite a while, driving through the prosperous farm town until I realized that I was passing certain homes and stores for what might have been the fifth or sixth time. Fatigue finally caught up to me, making me stop at a motel called the Traveler's Oasis on the edge of town.

It was almost five, but for me it felt like midnight as I carried my suitcase and backpack into a room that faced the parking lot. Too exhausted to survey the Spartan accommodations, I returned to the car for my printer and laptop computer. I wondered why I'd bothered to bring them. They took up space. I hadn't used them.

Maybe it's time to go home, I thought.

In Denver, it was two hours earlier. I picked up the phone.

"Payne Detective Agency," a man's familiar voice said.

"Answering the phone yourself?"

Payne didn't reply for a moment. "Ann had a doctor's appointment." Ann, his receptionist, was also his wife. "How are you, Brad?"

"Is my voice that recognizable?" I imagined the portly man next to his goldfish tank.

"You've been on my mind. When you called the last time, you were in South Dakota. You said you'd get back to me, but you didn't. I've been worried. What are you doing in…" I heard Payne's fingers tapping on a computer keyboard. "The Traveler's Oasis in Loganville, Ohio."

"Sounds like you've got a new computer program."

"It keeps me distracted. What are you doing there?"

"Giving up."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I figured that as long as you were in motion, you wouldn't do anything foolish to yourself. You didn't learn anything, I gather."

I sat wearily on the bed. "The opposite. I learned too much. But it hasn't taken me anywhere."

"Except to the Traveler's Oasis in Loganville, Ohio."

Payne tried to make it sound like a joke, but it didn't work. "I was hoping to find a pattern," I said into the phone.

"Sometimes a pattern's there. We just don't recognize it."

"Yeah, well, my pattern's been aimless." Something Payne had said caught up to me-the somber way he'd said it. "Ann had a doctor's appointment? Is everything okay?"

"We'll see."

"… Oh."

He hesitated. "A lump on her breast, but it might just be a cyst. The doctor's doing a biopsy."

I took a tired breath. "I'll say a prayer."

"Thanks."

"Before all this began, that isn't something I'd have said."

"That you'd pray for somebody?" he asked.

"The last few days, I spoke to a couple of ministers and a very religious, very decent lady. I guess some of their attitudes wore off on me. The trouble is, I also learned about a man whose parents turned him into a monster. Lester Dant."

"You believe in him now."

"Oh, I believe in him all right. God help me."

"Another prayer," Payne said.

"I'll be starting home tomorrow. I'll phone as soon as I get back. Maybe you'll have the results of the biopsy by then."

"Maybe." Payne's voice sank. "Have a safe trip."

I murmured, "Thanks," and hung up.

Please, God, keep his wife healthy, I thought.

I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. The draperies shut out the late-afternoon light. I wanted to sleep forever.

Please, God, I hope you didn't let Kate and Jason suffer. I couldn't help thinking about the good and bad things that religion could do to people. I couldn't help thinking about Lester Dant running from one church and showing up at another and…

5

The shock of the idea made me sit up. I found myself standing excitedly, thinking about what Lester Dant, posing as my brother, had told me more than a year earlier.

"As I wandered from town to town, I learned that an easy way to get a free meal was to show up at church socials after Sunday-morning services."

Jesus, I thought, he would have continued doing what worked. He'd have gone to another church in another small town. Payne had been right. The pattern was there. I just hadn't recognized it.

In a rush, I arranged my computer and printer on a table next to the bed. I unplugged the room's phone from the wall and attached my own phone line, connecting it to my computer. Then I turned on the computer and made adjustments to my Internet-access program so I could shift from AOLs Denver phone number to one that it used in the Loganville area.

The next thing, I logged on to an Internet geography site and printed a map for Ohio, along with ones for the surrounding states of Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. What I wanted was a list of towns. Dant would have avoided cities. I was sure of it. After the smothering closeness of having been imprisoned underground, I imagined him recoiling from the congestion of cities.

The maps gave me hundreds of names. Too many to be of use, but a start. I made the list more practical by eliminating the names of towns that were on the extreme reaches of the other states. I further reduced the list by eliminating Indiana, convinced that Dant would have avoided going back to where he'd been imprisoned. That left Ohio, Michigan to the north of it, Kentucky and West Virginia to the south, and Pennsylvania to the east.

But the towns in them weren't what I cared about. What I wanted were the names of churches in those towns. I typed "Churches in Ohio" into the Internet's "Search For" box. A list appeared, complete with their locations and their Web site addresses. I matched them with the towns on my list. I did the same with churches in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. I eliminated any church with a saint's name in it, certain that Dant would have avoided Catholic, Anglican, and Greek Orthodox churches. Their theology and ritual would have been alien to him. I need to identify Protestant congregations, I thought, and then I can-

A loud knock on the door distracted me.

I jerked my head in that direction.

Sunlight had long since faded from behind the draperies. I looked at my watch. Almost seven hours had passed. The hands were close to midnight.

The loud knock was repeated. "Mr. Denning?" a man's voice asked.

When I stood, my legs ached from having sat so long. I went to the door, squinted through the tiny lens, and saw an elderly man in a jacket and tie. I kept the security chain on the door when I opened it and peered through the five-inch gap. "What is it?" The stark floodlights in the parking lot made me blink.

"I just wanted to make sure that everything was all right. Our computer shows that you've been on the phone since around five o'clock, but when I tried to access the line to make sure you hadn't fallen asleep and left the phone off the hook, all I got was static."

"I've been catching up on office work."

The man looked puzzled.

"On the Internet," I said, pointing toward my computer on the corner table, which I later realized he couldn't see.

The man looked more puzzled.

"You have my credit-card number," I said. "I'll gladly pay all the phone charges."

"As long as everything's okay."

"Couldn't be better."

"Have a nice night."

He left, and I became aware of throbbing in my head, of cramps in my stomach. Through the crack in the door, I saw a harsh red-and-blue neon sign across the street. The words it flashed were steaks 'n' suds. Two eighteen-wheeler trucks were at the edge of the crowded parking lot. Begrudging the time I'd be wasting but telling myself that I couldn't be any use to Kate and Jason if I didn't maintain my strength, I disconnected from the Internet, locked the room behind me, and walked toward country _musi_c-_a jukebox playing something about a one-man woman and a two-timing man-coming from the restaurant's open windows.

6

Forty minutes later, the steak sandwich I'd eaten felt heavy in my stomach. I recalled the strict healthy diet that I'd put myself on in preparation for my search. Tomorrow, I'll rededicate myself, I vowed. Tomorrow.

"Here's your coffee to go," the waitress said.

"Thanks."

As I left the restaurant, about to cross the parking lot, a noise made me pause. The jukebox had stopped, but the conversations of the crowd inside were loud enough that I had to strain to listen harder. On my right. Around the side of the restaurant. I heard it again. A groan.

A woman's groan.

"Think you can leave me?" A man's muffled voice came from around the corner. "You're dumber than I always said you were."

I heard a metallic thump, as if someone had fallen against a car. Another groan.

Inside, the jukebox started playing again: something about lonely rooms and empty hearts. The careful Brad I'd once been would have gone back into the restaurant and told the manager to call the police. But how long would it take the police to arrive, and what would happen in the meantime?

Imagining Kate being punched, I unzipped the fanny pack I always wore. Knowing that I could draw the pistol if I needed it, I walked to the restaurant's corner. There were only a few windows on that side. Away from the glare of the neon lights, my eyes needed a moment to adjust before I saw moving shadows between two parked cars: a man striking a woman.

"Stop," I said.

The man spun toward my voice. The minimal light showed a beefy face. A chain on his belt was attached to a big wallet in his back pocket. "This is a private conversation. Stay out of it." He shoved the woman to the asphalt. "You don't want to live with me anymore? Well, either you live with me or you don't live at all."

"I told you to stop."

"Get lost, pal, or when I finish my family business, I'll start on you."

"Get lost? You just said the two words I hate the most."

"You heard me, buddy." The man jerked the woman to her feet and pushed her into a car. When she tried to struggle out, he struck her again.

"But you're not hearing me." Conscious of the pistol in my fanny pack, I stepped closer.

"All right, I gave you a chance to butt out!" The man spun toward me again. "Now it's your turn."

"Must be my lucky night."

He lunged.

The take-out coffee was in my left hand, the liquid so hot that it stung my fingers through the Styrofoam cup. I yanked the lid from the cup and threw the steaming contents at the man's face, aiming for his eyes.

The man shrieked and jerked his hands toward his scalded face.

I drove stiff fingers into his stomach, just below the V of the rib cage, the way I'd been taught.

Sounding as if he might vomit, the man doubled over. I kicked sideways toward a nerve that ran down the outside of his left thigh.

Paralyzed, his leg gave out, toppling him to the pavement, where he shrieked harder from the pain in his leg.

I yanked his hands from his face and drove the heel of my right palm against his nose, once, twice, three times. Cartilage cracked. I stepped back as blood spurted.

He dropped to the pavement and lay motionless. Ready to hit him again, I shoved him onto his side so the blood would drain from his nose. I felt for a pulse, found one, smelled his sour alcohol-saturated breath, and turned to the woman slumped in the car. "Are you all right?"

She moaned. I was appalled by the bruises on her face. "Are you strong enough to drive?" I asked. "I don't…" The woman was off-balance when I helped her from the car. Her lips were swollen. "Yes." She took a deep breath. "I think I can drive. But…" "Do it."

Behind me, the man groaned. "Hurry," I said. "Before he wakes up."

Through blackened eyes, the woman looked around in confusion. Bruises that deep couldn't develop in just a few minutes, I knew. They were the consequence of numerous other beatings.

"Drive?" she asked plaintively. "How? I ran here. I hoped I could borrow money from a girlfriend who works in this place. It turns out she called in sick. He was waiting instead."

Stooping beside the man on the pavement, I satisfied myself that he was still too dazed to realize what was going on. I pulled his car keys from his pants. Then I took his big wallet from his back pocket and removed all the money he had-what looked like a hundred dollars.

"Here," I told the woman. I pulled out my own wallet and gave her most of the cash I had-around two hundred. "I can't accept this," she said.

"My wife would have wanted me to give it to you."

"What are you talking about?"

"Take this. Please. Because of my wife."

The woman looked at me strangely, as if trying to decipher a riddle. "I have a sister in Baltimore," she said as I gave her the man's car keys.

"No, it's the first place he'll look," I said. "If you'd robbed a bank, would you hide at your sister's? Too obvious. You have to pretend that you're running from the police."

"But I haven't done anything wrong!"

"Keep telling yourself that. You haven't done anything wrong. But that son of a bitch over there certainly has. You have to keep reminding yourself that your only goal in life is to stay away from him." In Denver, when life had been normal, I'd been proud of the volunteer work Kate had done as a stress counselor at a shelter for battered women. I knew the drill. "Pick a city where you've never been. Pittsburgh." I chose it at random. "Have you ever been to-"

"No."

"Then go to Pittsburgh. It's only a couple of hundred miles from here. Leave the car at a bus station, and go to Pittsburgh. Look in the phone book under 'Community Services.' Look for the number of the women's shelter."

7

I trembled in my motel room, amazed by the rage that had overtaken me. For a moment, as the bastard had come at me, I'd almost shot him. The only thing that had stopped me was the realization that the shot would have sent people scurrying from the restaurant. Someone might have seen me. The police would have come after me. How could I have looked for Kate and Jason if I were in jail?

8

For reasons important to my family and me, my E-mail said, I'm looking for information about a young man who might have come to your church in the late summer or in the fall nineteen years ago. I realize that it's hard to remember that far bach, but I think that the circumstances would have been unusual enough that someone in your congregation would recall him. The boy would have been in his mid-teens. He would have collapsed against the front door of your church early before Sunday services, so that the first person to arrive would have found him there. He would have been wearing torn clothes and would have had scrapes and scratches, suggesting that he'd been in an accident of some sort. He wouldn't have been able to recall his name or what had happened to him or how he had come to be at your church. Members of the congregation would have taken care of him- in particular, women-because something about his eyes invites mothering. He would have been able to quote the Bible from memory but otherwise would have been unable to read or write. Someone, probably a woman, would have tried to teach him. Ultimately, he would have stolen from the people who helped him, perhaps have beaten them also, and have fled town. It may be that near the end he "remembered" that his name was Lester Dant. If you have any knowledge of someone like this, please send me an E-mail at the above address. I very much need to learn everything I can about this person. A year ago, he kidnapped my wife and son.

9

The next morning, after a torturous sleep, I sent that message to the E-mail address of every church on my list. Staring at my computer screen, I silently asked God to help me. All I could do now was wait.

The need to urinate finally made me move. But once in motion, I remembered Payne's remark that as long as I stayed in motion, I was less likely to do something foolish to myself. I went for a five-mile run. I returned and checked to see if I had any E-mail. Nothing. I did an hour of exercises, then checked my E-mail again. Still nothing.

What did I expect? That someone at each church would faithfully read the church's E-mail every morning, that word of my message would spread instantly throughout each congregation, that people who remembered something like the events I'd described would immediately send an E-mail back to me? I have to be patient, I warned myself. Even in small towns, news doesn't get around as fast as I want it to. If there's a reply to be had, I probably won't receive it until evening.

So I showered, dressed, and tried to read. I went out and got a sandwich. I took a walk. I watched CNN. But mostly I kept checking to see if any E-mail had arrived. None did. By midnight, I gave up, shut off the lights, and tried to sleep.

But unconsciousness wouldn't come, and finally, betraying my resolve of the previous night, I went down the road to a bar and grill, where I wasn't likely to be recognized. If the man I'd beaten was looking for me, the logical place he'd do it was the restaurant across from the motel. This time, it took four beers and a shot of bourbon before I felt stupefied enough to go back to my room and try to sleep. I'm going to hell, I told myself.

I am in hell.

Around dawn, I woke, but there still wasn't any message. I faced another day of waiting. Time dragged on, until I admitted that I'd been a fool to have hoped. I hadn't been brave enough to identify with Lester Dant as closely as I'd needed to. I'd been wrong in my prediction of where he'd gone nineteen years previously and of what he'd done when he'd arrived there. Vowing that I couldn't persist in leading my life the way I was, wondering if I wanted to lead my life at all, I checked my E-mail and tensed at the discovery of four messages.

10

I was certain that they didn't exist, that I'd tricked myself into seeing things. With a sense of unreality, I stared at them. Unsteady, I printed them out. Each was from a different state: Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. Initially, their sequence was alphabetic, based on the sender's name, but after I reread them several times, I arranged them so that they formed a geographical and chronological narrative.

Mr: Denning, the first began. Your message so disturbed me that it took me a long time to face up to answering it. My husband told me not to pain myself, but I can't bear the thought that other people have suffered. The writer identified herself as Mrs. Donald Cavendish, and the details of her message paralleled what Mrs. Garner had told me. If a rape had occurred, Mrs. Cavendish didn't mention it, but I had a disturbing sense of a deeper hurt than even the strong facts of her message accounted for. He hadn't called himself Lester, though. He hadn't used any name at all. The night that he'd disappeared, he'd burned down their house.

This had happened in November, a month after he'd brutalized Mrs. Garner. What had occurred in the interval? I checked my maps and found that the town in Kentucky was two hundred miles from Loganville, Ohio. After Lester spent the money that he'd stolen from Mrs. Garner, had he wandered, subsisting on the proceeds from house break-ins and liquor-store robberies until his aimless path took him to Kentucky?

The next message (as I arranged them) was from the neighboring state of West Virginia and described events one year later, when Lester (he used only his first name) had been welcomed by a churchgoing family whose teenage daughter he eventually victimized. It was the daughter who sent me the E-mail, revealing what she'd hidden from her parents until she was an adult. Lester had warned her that if she told anyone what he'd done, he'd come back one night and kill her. To prove his point, he'd strangled her cat in front of her. The next night, he'd robbed the house, stolen the family car, and disappeared. The police had found the fire-gutted car two hundred miles away, but although Lester was gone, it had taken the daughter a long time before she'd stopped having nightmares about him.

The third message (from Pennsylvania) described events a surprising eight years later. He'd shortened his first name to Les. His methods had changed. In his mid-twenties now, he no longer had the air of vulnerability that had made it so easy to portray himself a victim and win the compassion of a small-town congregation. Instead, he'd showed up at the church and offered to do odd jobs in exchange for meals. His amazing ability to quote any Bible passage from memory had endeared him to the congregation. This time, it was the church that he'd burned.

But it was the fourth message that disturbed me most. It was from a man who described events thirteen years after the fire in which Lester Dant's parents had been killed. It came from a town in central Ohio. This time when Lester had disappeared, he'd taken the man's wife. She'd never been found. But Lester hadn't used his first name or its abbreviation, Les. He'd used an entirely different first name. It turned me cold. Peter.

Shivering to the core of my soul, I stared at the maps and the placement of the towns. From Brockton southeast to Loganville in Ohio, then farther southeast to the town in Kentucky, then east to West Virginia, then northeast to Pennsylvania, then northwest to the town in Ohio, a hundred miles from where I was raised in the middle of that state. One month. One year. Eight years. Thirteen years.

He'd been to far-off places in the country during the intervals (his FBI crime report made that clear), but something kept making him return to this general area, and I couldn't help feeling that the placement of towns on the maps wasn't random, that it had a center, that he'd been skirting his ultimate destination, each time getting closer, drawn relentlessly back to where everything had begun.