Never Look Away

FORTY-SEVEN

For the better part of half an hour, Jan drove randomly. Go a few miles, turn left. Go a few more, turn right. Get on the interstate, go two exits, get off. She hoped the more randomly she drove, the harder she’d be to follow.

And she hadn’t noticed any black Audis in the pickup truck’s rearview mirror. When she got on the interstate, and was able to see a good mile or so behind her, and when there was no sign of the Audi, she started to feel more confident that Oscar Fine was not on her tail.

But that was not a great comfort.

If he could find her once, it seemed likely he could find her again.

She must have looked like a madwoman to other motorists who happened to glance her way. Wide-eyed, her hair a mass of tangles from the wind blowing through the open side windows and the new crack in the windshield. She was holding on to the steering wheel as hard as she could not just to maintain control, but to keep from shaking.

She was a disaster.

Dwayne had to be dead. No way Oscar Fine was letting him walk out of that basement alive.

The question was, how much had Dwayne said before he died?

Did Oscar know who she was?

Did Oscar know who she’d been?

Had he already known before Dwayne walked in to trade his fake diamonds for six million?

Think, she told herself, heading west on the Mass Pike. Think.

One thing was a no-brainer. Banura had turned them in. Once they’d been to see him, and he’d examined what they had to sell, he must have tipped off Oscar Fine. But why was Oscar on alert now, after all this time? Had he been checking in with everyone in the diamond trade regularly for the last six years, reminding them to be on the lookout for those worthless stones as a way of tracking Dwayne and her down?

Maybe. But it was also possible something had triggered Oscar Fine to start looking now, perhaps more vigorously than he had been lately.

Had he seen a news report about her disappearance? Even if he had, those stories carried pictures of her looking like Jan Harwood, and Jan Harwood didn’t look anything like that girl who got the drop on him in the back of the limo. But maybe, when you’ve had someone cut off your hand, you remember a little more than hair color and eye shadow…

Jan let go of the steering wheel long enough to bang it several times with her fist. Was there any part of this that she hadn’t fucked up?

Where to start?

Pulling the stupid job in the first place. Hooking up with Dwayne Osterhaus. Being so incredibly dumb as to not know the value of the goods they’d stolen. Coming back to Banura’s when she knew the deal was too good to be true.

Walking away from what she had.

She glanced down at the dash, saw that the truck was nearly out of gas. Now she had a practical matter to contend with. She took the next exit, which was littered with gas stations and fast-food joints. She put thirty dollars’ worth into the tank, then crossed the street and parked in a McDonald’s lot.

She bypassed the ordering counter, went straight to the ladies’ rest-room, rushed into a stall, and vomited before she could get the seat up. She had her hands on the stall walls, steadying herself. She was sweating and dizzy.

And then she was sick again.

She flushed the toilet and stood in there, blotting her face with toilet tissue. Once she was sure she was ready, she opened the door, went to the sink, and splashed water on her face, trying to cool herself down. A woman helping her daughter wash up at the sink next to hers gave Jan a cautious look.

Jan knew what she was thinking. You’re some sort of crazy lady.

There were no paper towels, just those confounding hot-air blowers, and the last thing Jan wanted blowing on her face was hot air. So she walked out of the restroom, and out of the restaurant, droplets of water running down her face.

She leaned up against the brick wall of the restaurant, keeping an eye on the pickup and the traffic, always on the lookout for a black Audi. She stood there for a good half hour, as though paralyzed, not knowing what she should do next.

A restaurant employee emptying trash cans asked if he could help her. Not really wanting to help, but wanting Jan to move on. She got back behind the wheel of the truck, sat there a moment.

A cell phone rang, making Jan jump. She didn’t even have a cell phone. Then she remembered the one she’d stolen from the woman’s purse at the gas station. She reached into her own purse, found the phone, looked at the number.

There was no way anyone knew how to get in touch with her, was there?

But Dwayne had used the phone to call Banura. He probably had it on his phone’s log.

She flipped it open. “Hello?”

“Who is this?” a woman asked. “Have you got my cell phone? I’ve spent all morning looking for it and-”

Jan broke the flip phone, like she was snapping its spine, got out of the truck and threw the two pieces into a garbage can.

When she got back into the truck, she was shaking.

And thinking. Thinking all the way back to the very beginning. Back to when she pushed the Richlers’ daughter into the path of that car.

Wasn’t that when it all started, really? If she hadn’t done that-and God knows she never meant for that to happen-then her parents would never have had to move away. And then her father’s work might not have gone down the toilet, and he might not have hated her quite so much, and she might not have been so desperate to leave home so young, taken up with someone like Dwayne Osterhaus and-

No, she never meant to kill the Richler girl. She was just angry, that was all. Angry about something she’d said. Constance Tattinger was jealous of Jan Richler. Jealous of the things she had. Jealous of how much her parents adored her. Gretchen and Horace Richler bought her Barbies, and pretty shoes, and on her birthday let her order in Kentucky Fried Chicken. They’d even bought their girl a necklace that looked like a cupcake. It was the most beautiful necklace Constance had ever seen, and she had coveted it from the moment she first laid eyes on it.

One day, when Jan Richler wore it to school, and took it off briefly when it was itching her neck, Constance Tattinger reached into her jacket pocket and took it. Jan Richler cried and cried when she couldn’t find it, and became convinced Constance had taken it. Two days later, on Jan Richler’s front lawn, she told Constance what she believed she’d done, and Constance, angry and defensive, shoved the girl out of her way.

Right into the path of the car.

All these years, the woman who would steal Jan Richler’s identity hung on to that necklace. She’d been tempted many times to throw it away, but could never bring herself to do it. It wasn’t that she loved the piece of jewelry. Far from it. The necklace was a reminder of a terrible thing she’d done. It signified not only the moment Jan Richler’s life ended, but the moment Constance Tattinger’s own life changed forever.

She was pulled out of school.

Her parents moved away.

Her father began his never-ending resentment of her.

The day she took that necklace was the day it was determined she would leave home at seventeen and never get in touch with her parents again. She wondered, sometimes, whatever had happened to them. And then she realized she didn’t much care.

She hung on to the necklace for what it represented. A defining moment in her life. Even though it was a bad one.

One day, Ethan would see it in her jewelry box and ask if he could have it-cupcakes were his favorite snack in the whole wide world-and his mother would say no, it really wasn’t something a boy would wear, so he begged her to wear it when they went on a trip to Chicago.

She agreed to wear it for a day, and then never wore it again.

She thought about all these things, about her life, about Ethan, about David, as she sat in that truck. She thought about the life she’d had with them and-

Focus.

The woman known as Jan gave her head a small shake. There’d be plenty of time later to wallow in self-pity, immerse herself in it like a hot bath.

Something more urgent was nagging at her.

There was every reason to believe Oscar Fine knew that she had been living the last few years as Jan Harwood. He could have learned this from Dwayne, or he could have figured it out from the news reports of her disappearance.

If he knew about Jan Harwood, it wasn’t going to take him any time at all to figure out where she was from.

If she were Oscar Fine, she told herself, wouldn’t Promise Falls be her next stop?

She reached down next to her, looking for the photograph of Ethan she had taken from her purse only an hour or so earlier.

It wasn’t there.

Jan put the key into the ignition and started the engine. Without even realizing it, she’d already been driving in the direction of the place she’d called home the last five years.

She had to go back.

And she had to get there before Oscar Fine did.

She made no further pit stops on the way to Promise Falls, even when she was rounding Albany and saw that she had less than a quarter of a tank left. She felt she could make it.

She wondered where Ethan would be. It made sense that, considering the predicament she’d left David in, their son would not be at their house. David, if he hadn’t already been arrested, would probably be at the police station, or meeting with a lawyer, or driving all over hell’s half acre trying to figure out what had happened to her.

Jan almost laughed when it hit her: I wish I could talk to David about this.

She knew that wasn’t possible. There would be no room for forgiveness there, even though all she had to do was walk into a police station to put him in the clear. The things she’d done-you didn’t put that kind of stuff behind you and start over. Maybe, someday, some evidence might come along that would clear him. So be it.

By then she and Ethan would be long gone.

Ethan was her son. She was going to come out of all this with something that was hers.

It was most likely he was with Nana and Poppa. She’d take a drive by there first.

FORTY-EIGHT

Barry Duckworth was driving back from Albany in the late afternoon, approaching the Promise Falls city limits, when his cell rang.

His last stop had been north of the city at the Exxon station where whoever had been using Lyall Kowalski’s Ford Explorer-and Duckworth couldn’t begin to guess whether it had been his wife, Leanne, or someone else-had bought gas. The receipt that had been found in the SUV indicated that the purchase had been a cash sale, which made sense, since Lyall Kowalski had told Duckworth that their cards had been canceled.

When he got to the station, he showed a picture of Leanne to staff who’d been on duty at the time, but no one had any recollection of seeing Leanne Kowalski, or the Explorer, even though she would have had to come inside to pay. That didn’t surprise Duckworth. With the hundreds of customers coming in here in a single day, the odds that anyone would remember Leanne were slim. Even though Duckworth knew, from the receipt, the time of the purchase, there was no surveillance tape to check. The equipment was broken.

For good measure, he showed them pictures of Jan Harwood and David Harwood. No joy there, either.

So he got back into his cruiser and began the trek back home. It gave him some time to think.

Just about from the beginning, he’d liked David Harwood for this. You always look to the husband first, anyway. And there were so many parts of his story that didn’t hold together. His wife’s so-called depression certainly didn’t. The ticket that was never purchased. The evidence from Ted, the store owner in Lake George. And if you were looking for motive, there was that $300,000 life insurance policy. Just the sort of safety net a guy working in newspapers-or anywhere else these days, for that matter-might be glad to have.

It looked very much like Harwood took his wife to Lake George and killed her. After all, no one had seen her since, so long as you didn’t count the boy, Ethan. But Duckworth had been having doubts about his initial theory ever since the discovery of Leanne Kowalski’s body. From the moment David Harwood had looked into that shallow grave and seen her there. Duckworth had been watching closely for the man’s reaction.

Duckworth had not anticipated what he saw.

Genuine surprise.

If David Harwood had killed that woman and put her into the ground, he might have been able to feign shock. He could have put on an act and looked shattered. And faking tears, lots of people could pull that off. All of those things the seasoned detective would have expected.

But why had Harwood looked so surprised?

It had flashed across the man’s face for a good second. The eyes went wide. There was a kind of double take. There was no mistaking it. Leanne Kowalski’s body was not the one he had been steeling himself to see.

That told Barry Duckworth a couple of things. Harwood was not Kowalski’s killer. And it wasn’t very likely that he’d killed his wife, either.

If Harwood had killed Jan Harwood, and disposed of her elsewhere, he wouldn’t have looked so taken aback. He’d have known he was going to be looking down at someone other than his spouse. Even if he had killed Kowalski, and knew she was going to be there, he might have acted surprised, but that’s what it would have been: an act. What Duckworth saw was the real deal.

And then there was the business of the Explorer.

Harwood might have had time to kill Leanne Kowalski between taking his wife up to Lake George and going to Five Mountains the next day, but Duckworth couldn’t for the life of him figure out how the Explorer got all the way down to Albany and ended up at the bottom of an embankment. When did Harwood have time to do that? How did he manage it alone? Wouldn’t you need one person to drive the Explorer, and another for the car that you’d need to get back to Promise Falls?

Duckworth wasn’t liking Harwood for this nearly as much as he once had. Maybe there was something to the reporter’s claims that his wife had taken on a new name, changed her identity, after all. It had seemed pretty outrageous to him at first, but now he was feeling obliged to give it a look-see. He could find out again the names of those people Harwood had been to see in Rochester. See what they had to say.

He was starting to get a new feeling in that gut of his that Natalie Bondurant had so maligned.

And that was when his cell rang.

“Duckworth.”

“Yeah, Barry, it’s Glen.”

Glen Dougherty. Barry’s boss. The Promise Falls police chief.

“Chief,” he said.

“It wouldn’t normally be me calling you with this, but some lab results just got copied to me and I wondered if you had them yet.”

“I’m on the road.”

“This Jan Harwood disappearance. You’re handling that.”

“As we speak,” he said.

“You asked for tests on some hair and blood samples in the trunk of the husband’s car.”

“That’s right.”

“They’re back. They both match the missing woman, based on the hair samples you took from the house when you had it searched.”

“I hear ya.”

“I think you need to move on this,” the chief said. “Looks like this clown moved her body in the trunk.”

“Maybe,” Duckworth said.

“Maybe?”

“There’s parts of this I don’t like,” the detective said.

“Looks to me like you’ve got this son of a bitch dead to rights now. Time to bring him in again, sweat him out. Once you lay this out for him, he’s gonna fold.”

“I can bring him in again, but I’m not sure.”

“Look, Barry, I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I am going to tell you this. I’m getting a lot of pressure on this one. From those fucking amusement park people, from the tourism office, and the mayor’s office. As well as that weasel Reeves. God, I hate that guy. The bottom line is, Five Mountains makes a lot of money not just for Five Mountains, but for the area. People start thinking there’s someone snatching kids there, they’re going to stay away. And from the sounds of it, this guy may have made up all that shit about his kid getting abducted there. You hearing me?”

“Absolutely,” Duckworth said.

“If I were you, I’d bring him in again.”

“He’s hired Natalie Bondurant.”

“Well, by all means, bring her in, too. Once she sees what you’ve got on her client, she may just tell him to take some kind of deal.”

“Got it,” Duckworth said. “I-”

But the chief had ended the call.

Duckworth was getting another feeling in his gut. He didn’t like this one at all.

FORTY-NINE

Dad and I drove over in two cars as fast as we could. Mom was standing on the porch, waiting for us, and ran over to the driveway as we each pulled in.

She was at my door as I was getting out.

“There’s still no sign-”

“Start from the beginning,” I said as Dad got out of the other car and came over.

Mom took a moment to catch her breath. “He’d been out in the backyard off and on all day. Playing with the croquet set, just whacking the ball around.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I was doing some things in the kitchen and around the house, checking outside for him every few minutes, but the thing was, I was always hearing whack, whack, whack, so I knew what he was up to. And then I realized it had been a while since I heard it, and I was pretty sure I hadn’t heard him come in, so I went out to make sure he wasn’t getting into anything he shouldn’t, like your father’s tools in the garage. And I couldn’t find him.”

“Dad,” I said, “call the police.”

He nodded and headed for the house.

Mom reached out and held my shoulders. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, David, I’m just so-”

“Mom, it’s okay. Let’s-”

“I swear, I was watching him. I only let him out of my sight for a few minutes. He was-”

“Mom, right now we have to keep looking. Have you tried the neighbors?”

“No, no, I’ve just been looking everywhere. I thought maybe he was hiding in the house, under a bed, something like that, maybe playing a trick on me. But I can’t find him anyplace.”

I pointed to the houses next door and across the street. “You start knocking on doors. I’ll make one last check of the house. Go. Go.”

Mom turned and ran to the house on the left as I ran up the porch stairs and into the house.

“His name is Ethan Harwood,” Dad was saying into the phone. “He’s four years old.”

I shouted, “Ethan! Ethan, are you here?”

I ran downstairs first, checking behind the furnace, moving back the door to the storage compartment under the stairs. A four-year-old boy, he could hide in a lot of places. I could remember, when I was Ethan’s age, getting out my parents’ suitcases and curling myself up inside them. One time, one of them latched shut on me, and Mom heard my screams before I ran out of air.

The flashback made me dig out the larger cases-a different set, all these years later-from under the stairs and give them a shake.

Satisfied that Ethan was not in those cases, or anywhere else in the basement, I scaled the stairs and faced Dad as I came into the kitchen. He was off the phone.

“They said they’re going to have a car swing by in a while,” he said.

“A while?” I said. “A while?”

Dad looked shaken. “That’s what they said. They asked how long he’d been gone and when I said under an hour, they didn’t seem all that excited.”

I moved Dad aside and grabbed the phone, the receiver still warm to the touch, and punched in 911.

“Listen,” I said once I had hold of the dispatcher who’d spoken to my father. “We don’t need some car coming by in a while to help us find my son. We need someone right fucking now.” And I slammed the receiver down.

To Dad I said, “Go help Mom knock on doors.”

For the second time in almost as many minutes, Dad turned and did what I told him.

I ran upstairs and opened closet doors, looked under beds. There was an access to the attic, but even with a chair, there was no way Ethan could hope to reach it.

“Ethan!” I shouted. “If you’re hiding, you better come out right now or there’s going to be trouble!”

Nothing.

By the time I got out front of the house, about a dozen neighbors were on the street, milling about. My parents’ door-knocking had brought people out, wondering what was going on and whether they could do anything to help.

“Everyone!” I shouted. “Everyone, please, can you listen up for a second?”

They stopped gossiping among themselves and looked at me.

“My boy, Ethan, you’ve probably seen him around here a lot the last couple of years. We can’t find him. He was in my parents’ backyard, and now he’s gone. Could you please all check your properties, your backyards, your garages? Any of you with pools, God forbid, please check them first.”

My mother looked as though she might faint.

Some of them started nodding, like Sure, that’s a great idea, but they weren’t moving with any speed.

“Now!” I shouted.

They started to disperse, save for one man in his twenties, a tall but doughy, unshaven lout with a tractor hat on. He said, “So what’d you do, Harwood? Getting rid of the wife wasn’t enough? You got rid of the kid, too?”

Something snapped.

I ran at him, got him around the waist, and brought him down on a front yard. All the others who’d been heading off to hunt for Ethan stopped in their tracks to watch the show. Straddling the man, I took a swing and caught the corner of his mouth, drawing blood instantly.

“You motherfucker,” I said. “You goddamn son of a bitch.”

Before I could take another swing, Dad had his arms around me from behind. “Son!” he shouted. “Stop it.”

“You fucker!” the man with the hat said, rolling onto his side, feeling his mouth for blood.

Dad shouted at everyone, “Please, just look for Ethan.” Once he had me off the man, Dad leaned over him and said, “And you get your sorry ass home before I take a kick at it myself.”

The man got up, dusted himself off, and started to walk away, but not before looking at me and saying, “You watch it, Harwood. They’re going to get you.”

I turned away, my face hot and flushed. Dad came up alongside me. “You okay?”

I nodded. “We have to keep looking.”

Even though Mom had said she’d already done it, Dad and I searched the backyard and his garage. The croquet set wires were shoved into the lawn randomly, striped wooden balls scattered about. There was one mallet lying on the grass. I went over, picked it up, as though it could tell me something, then dropped it back to the ground.

“Ethan!” I shouted as dusk began to fall. “Ethan!”

Down at the end of my parents’ street, and then a block to the left, was a 7-Eleven. Could Ethan have wandered down there on his own, looking to buy a package of his favorite cupcakes? Would he have attempted something like that? Did he even have any money on him?

I started running. Dad shouted, “Where you going?”

“I’ll be right back!”

Running flat out, it only took a minute to reach the store. I burst through the front door so quickly the guy behind the counter must have thought I’d come to rob the place.

Breathlessly, I asked if a small boy had been in within the last hour, all by himself, to get a package of cupcakes. The man shook his head, but said, “There was a lady here, she bought some, but no kid.”

I ran back to my parents’ house, both of them standing out front.

“Anything?” I asked.

They both shook their heads no.

“Where would he go?” Dad asked. “Where do you think he would go?”

“Would he try to go to your house?” Mom asked.

I looked at her. “Shit,” I said. “That’s brilliant. He kept asking me if he could come home. Maybe he just decided to start walking.” I recalled when he had stormed out the door, threatening to do just that.

Although only four, Ethan had already demonstrated a keen sense of direction, correcting me from his backseat perch anytime I took us on a route to my parents’ that wasn’t the most direct. He’d probably be able to find his way to our house, even though it was a couple of miles away. And the thought of him crossing all those streets on his own…

“We need to trace our way back,” I said.

“I didn’t see him on the way over,” Dad said.

“But we weren’t looking,” I said. “We were in such a rush to get here, we might not have noticed.”

I had the keys to Dad’s car in my hand and was heading over to it when an unmarked police car came tearing up the street.

“Good,” I said. “Cops.”

The car pulled over to the curb, blocking the end of my parents’ driveway, and Barry Duckworth got out, his eyes fixed on me.

“They sent you?” I said to him. “I thought they’d send a regular car, and uniformed officers. But, whatever.”

“What?” he said.

“Aren’t you here about Ethan?”

“What’s happened to Ethan?” Duckworth asked.

My heart sank. The cavalry hadn’t arrived after all. “He’s missing,” I said.

“Since when?”

“The last hour or so.”

“You’ve called it in?”

“My dad did. Look, you need to get your car out of the way. He might have gone back to our house.”

Duckworth didn’t make any move to get back in his car. “We need to talk,” he said.

“What?” I thought maybe he had news about Jan, or maybe even about Ethan. “What is it? What’s happened?”

“Nothing. But I need you to come downtown. I want to go over a few things again.” He paused. “You might want to have your lawyer meet us there.”

My jaw dropped. “Are you listening? My son is missing. I’m going to look for Ethan.”

“No,” said Duckworth. “You’re not.”

FIFTY

My first impulse was to start shouting, but I knew if I overreacted, Barry Duckworth might very well have me on the ground and in handcuffs in a matter of seconds. So I tried to keep my voice even and controlled.

“Detective Duckworth, I don’t think you understand,” I said. “Ethan may be wandering around all by himself, trying to get from one side of town to the other, crossing streets he’s not old enough to cross. He’s four years old, for Christ’s sake.”

Duckworth nodded, giving me hope maybe he actually did understand. “Have you searched the house, and out behind-”

“We’ve searched everywhere. We’ve got neighbors checking their properties. But he could be trying to get back to our house and I need to check.”

“When other officers get here, they’ll be able to mount a systematic search,” Duckworth said. “They can get the word out, every officer out there in a car will be looking for your son. They’re good at this sort of thing.”

“I’m sure they are, but he’s my son, and if you’ll move your goddamn car out of the way, I’m going to try to find him myself.”

Duckworth’s jaw tightened. “I have to bring you in, Mr. Harwood.”

The air around us was charged, like an electrical storm was imminent. “This is not a good time,” I said.

“I appreciate that,” the detective said. “But those are my instructions.”

“Are you arresting me?” I asked.

“My instructions are to bring you in for more questioning. I suggest you get in touch with Natalie Bondurant. She could meet us as the station.”

“I’m not going,” I said.

“I’m not asking,” Duckworth said firmly.

“Come on,” Dad said. He and Mom were standing just behind me. “What the hell are you doing? You have to let him find Ethan.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but this does not involve you,” Duckworth said.

“Doesn’t concern me?” Dad said, outrage growing in his voice. “We’re talking about my grandson. You got the nerve to tell me it doesn’t concern me?”

Duckworth blinked, the first hint that maybe he could see this wasn’t going well.

“As I just said, sir, when the other officers get here, they’ll be able to conduct a thorough search.”

Dad raised his arms in frustration. “You see any here now? Huh? How long are we supposed to wait? What if Ethan’s in some kind of trouble right this very second? Is my son supposed to sit around answering your damn fool questions while his boy’s in trouble? What the hell’s so important that you have to talk to him now?”

Duckworth swallowed. Instead of looking at Dad, he spoke to me. “Mr. Harwood, there are developments in your wife’s disappearance that we need to go over.”

“What developments?”

“We can talk about that at the station.”

There was no way I was going to that station. I had a feeling if Duckworth managed to get me there, I wouldn’t be leaving. Not any time soon.

“Hey!” someone across the street shouted.

We all looked. It was the guy with the tractor hat, the one I’d punched in the mouth. There was still blood on his chin.

“Hey!” he shouted a second time, looking at Duckworth. “You a cop?”

“Yes,” the detective said.

“That asshole assaulted me,” he said, pointing a finger my way.

Duckworth tilted his head at me.

“It’s true,” I said. “We were asking all the neighbors to help us look for Ethan, and he… he accused me of killing my son. And my wife. I lost it.”

Duckworth turned back and said to the man, “I’m sure an officer will be along shortly and he can take your statement.”

“Fuck that,” the man said, walking across the street toward us. “You need to put the cuffs on him right now. I got witnesses!”

Even with Duckworth standing there, the guy was ready to get into it with me all over again, striding right up, pointing that finger. He got close enough to poke me in the shoulder. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d tackled him, but this time I was getting a strong whiff of booze off him.

Duckworth quickly pulled the man’s arm down and off me and said, forcefully, “Sir, if you’ll just go stand over there and wait for the officers to arrive, they’ll be more than happy to take your statement.”

“I seen this guy on the news,” he said. “He’s the one killed his wife. Why isn’t he in jail already? Huh? If you guys were doing your fucking job, he wouldn’t be out walking around attacking people like me.”

Duckworth had no choice now but to turn away from me and deal with the guy. “What’s your name?”

“Axel. Axel Smight.”

“How much have you had to drink tonight, Mr. Smight?”

“Huh?” He looked offended.

“How much have you had to drink?”

“Not very much. What the fuck is that supposed to mean anyway? If I’ve had a bit to drink, I’m not entitled to police protection?”

“Mr. Smight, I’m only going to tell you this one more time. Go stand over there and wait for the officers to arrive.”

“You’re not going to arrest him? What else do you need? I’m telling you, the guy attacked me.” He touched his hand to his bloody chin. “What the fuck do you think this is?” He was shouting now. “Strawberry milk shake? The fucker hit me right in the mouth!”

Duckworth pulled back his jacket, revealing a set of handcuffs clipped to his belt.

“There you go!” Axel Smight said. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Cuff the fucker!”

Duckworth, with more skill and speed than his bulk might have suggested, took hold of Smight, spun him around, and forced him down onto the hood of his unmarked cruiser. He twisted Smight’s left arm behind him, slapped one cuff on the wrist, and then grabbed the right arm to do the same.

I didn’t stay to watch the whole procedure. I ran for Dad’s car, slipped the key into the ignition and turned over the engine. There looked to be just enough room to squeeze past Duckworth’s car if I ran over onto the grass.

“Mr. Harwood!” Duckworth shouted, trying to hold a squirming Axel Smight onto the hood. “Stop!”

I put it in reverse and hit the gas, clipping the corner of the front bumper of Duckworth’s car on the way out. I heard it scrape along the entire side of Dad’s car.

“You dumb bastard!” Duckworth shouted.

I didn’t know what the hell he meant by that, but I wasn’t hanging around to find out. I got the car onto the street, stopped with a screech, threw it into drive and sped off.

A person might normally be inclined to keep speeding away from a scene like that, but the moment I turned the corner I slowed down, scanning both sides of the street, looking for any signs of Ethan.

“Come on,” I said under my breath. “Where the hell are you?”

It was tricky, watching both sidewalks and the traffic in front of me all at the same time, and I had to hit the brakes hard and fast a couple of times to keep from rear-ending someone. I was turning in to my street when my cell went off. I was nosing the car in to the curb and getting out as I put the phone to my ear.

“Yeah?”

“Dave, it’s Sam.”

“Hey,” I said.

“Where are you? You sound kind of out of breath.”

“I’m kind of busy, Sam,” I said.

“I need you to come by the paper,” she said.

“I can’t,” I said. I was walking down the side of the house. Ethan didn’t have a key to the house, at least not that I knew of. I supposed it was possible he’d taken the one my parents keep on a nail at their place.

“It’s really important,” Samantha Henry pleaded.

I stood in the backyard and shouted, “Ethan!”

“Shit,” Sam said. “You just blew out my eardrum.”

I used my key to open the back door, and while I didn’t expect my son to be in the house, I called out his name anyway.

There was no answer.

“Dave?” Sam asked. “Dave, are you listening?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I need you to come by the paper.”

“This is not a good time, Sam. What’s this about?”

“Elmont Sebastian,” she said. “He’s here. He wants a word with you.”

I felt a chill run the length of my spine. I remembered the story about the Aryan Brotherhood prisoner whose genitals he’d Tasered. The one nicknamed Buddy. The one Sebastian had made cry when it was suggested to him something might happen to his six-year-old son on the outside if he didn’t play by Sebastian’s rules.

FIFTY-ONE

It was getting dark when I wheeled into the Promise Falls Standard parking lot. I spotted Elmont Sebastian’s limo parked at the far end, near the doors to the production end of the newspaper building, where the presses were housed. There was no one standing around.

I parked a couple of car lengths away from the limo and got out. As I did, Welland appeared from behind the driver’s seat and motioned for me to get in the back.

“No thanks,” I said. He opened the door anyway. I was expecting to see Sebastian, and he was there, but sitting next to him was Samantha Henry. She appeared to have been crying.

She shifted over to get out of the car and said to me, “I’m really sorry.”

“Sorry?”

“I just, I was doing it for my kid.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Do I have to tell you times are tough? I’ve got bills. I’m raising a child. I know it was wrong, David, but what the fuck am I supposed to do? Tell me that? End up on the street? And newspapers are screwed, anyway. There’s no future here. It’s only a matter of time before we all lose our jobs. I’m looking out for myself and my kid while I can. Mr. Elmont’s offered me a job with Star Spangled Corrections.”

“Writing press releases or midnight guard duty?” I asked. From what I’d gathered from my source, women didn’t fare too well in Sebastian’s empire.

“Deputy assistant media relations officer,” she said, trying to hold her head high without success.

“It was you,” I said. “You saw the email before I deleted it.” She’d have had time. When the anonymous email landed, I went for a coffee before making the decision to delete it. “You went on my computer and told Sebastian about it.”

“I said I was sorry,” she said. “And I told him you’re trying to find someone named Constance Tattinger, that she’s probably the one who just sent you that list. That’s what he wants to talk to you about.” She turned and walked away, got into her car and drove out of the lot.

My face felt hot.

“Come on in,” Sebastian said, patting the leather seat. “Help me out here and I might still be able to find a spot for you, too. It might not be media relations. I’ve promised that to Ms. Henry, and I’m a man of my word. But you’d be perfect for writing up our proposals. You have a nice turn of phrase.”

“Do you have my son?” I asked.

Sebastian’s eye twitched. “I’m sorry?”

“If you have him, just tell me. If there’s something you want in exchange, name it. You hold the cards. I’ll tell you anything I know.” I allowed myself to get into the car, the door still open, one foot still on the pavement.

“All right, then,” he said. “Tell me about Constance Tattinger. You asked Ms. Henry to check into that name. That’s your source? I’m puzzled, because I’ve never heard of her. There’s no one working for me or Promise Falls with that name.”

“She’s not the source,” I said. “Constance Tattinger is, as far as I know, my wife.”

Sebastian’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t follow. Why would your wife have a list of names of people-”

“She didn’t. I called Sam about two different things. I guess she thought they were related when she called you.”

Sebastian leaned back into the leather seat and sighed. “I have to admit, I’m a bit confused. I thought your wife’s name was Jan.”

“Jan Richler’s the name she was using when we met, but I think she was born Constance Tattinger. I’ve been trying to find out everything I can about her, hoping it will lead me to her. I’m pretty sure she’s the one who set up the meeting at Lake George. It was a trick.”

Elmont Sebastian looked like he was getting a headache. “So your wife’s not the source, but you think she’s the one who emailed you to say she had all this information to give you about my company?”

“Yeah.”

“Why the hell would she do that?” Sebastian asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Not as far as you’re concerned. She wouldn’t know the first thing about your company, or what you’re doing to buy votes on council. Now what about my son?”

“I don’t know a damn thing about your kid,” Sebastian said. “And I don’t care.”

I felt deflated. As frightening as it would be for Ethan to have been picked up by this pair, I was hoping they had him to trade.

“You really don’t have Ethan,” I said.

Sebastian shook his head in mock condolence. “All my years running prisons, I don’t think I ever had an inmate in more shit than you.”

I took a moment. “If you don’t know anything about my son, then we’re done here,” I said, swinging my other leg back out of the car.

“I don’t think so,” Sebastian said. “Regardless of whoever your wife is, something was mailed to you. Something you have no business possessing.”

The list in my pocket. The one I’d foolishly told Sam about.

“I think you’re mistaken,” I said, now fully out of the car.

It would have been easy to give him the envelope. God knows I had enough to worry about right now. I could have handed Sebastian what he wanted and walked away. But I also knew there was a chance I might-just might, somehow-come out the other side of this hell I was currently living through, and actually return to work as a reporter. If not at the Standard, then someplace else. And if I did, I wanted to bring down Elmont Sebastian.

There wasn’t any chance of that happening if I handed over what was in my jacket.

“Really, David, you need to consider your position,” Sebastian said.

Welland was coming around the car. When he reached the open door, he and Sebastian exchanged a look. Sebastian said, “If you’re not going to hand it over, I’ll have to ask Welland to get it for me.”

I bolted.

Welland’s right arm shot out, got hold of me by the wrist, but I was moving quickly enough that my hand slipped out of his grasp. As I ran I reached into my pocket for my keys, thinking, naïvely, that maybe I could get behind the wheel of my car before Welland was on me.

As I felt him closing in on me, I abandoned the idea of my car and instead hightailed it across the lot for the Standard building. Welland was snorting like an angry bull in pursuit. While he had me beat in the muscle and bulk department, he wasn’t all that fast, and I felt myself pulling ahead of him.

I mounted the five steps up to the back door and had it open before Welland could get hold of me, but there was no time to pull it shut. I was overwhelmed by the sound of running presses, a heavy, loud, humming that went straight to the center of my brain. This time of night, only one of the three presses was running, producing some of the weekend sections. The other two presses wouldn’t be set into motion for a couple more hours, when the newsroom finished putting together the first edition.

I was running wildly at this point, heading down any path that presented itself to me. Ahead and to the right was a set of steep metal stairs leading up and onto the boards that ran down along the sides and through the presses.

I grabbed hold of the tubular handrails and scurried up them. Even over the din, I heard some pressmen shouting, telling me to get off. This was their domain, and they didn’t care for trespassers. They could tolerate Madeline in here to check on press repairs, but I was just some dumbass reporter.

Once up on the boards, I had a good fifty feet of catwalk ahead of me. I looked back, expecting to see either a pressman or Welland appear at the top of the stairway, but no one materialized.

But there was still a lot of indistinct shouting going on.

I stopped for a moment, wondering if it was possible I’d lost Welland. I debated doubling back, then concluded it was safer to keep going in the same direction, to the set of stairs at the far end of the presses.

To my left, the press was going at full bore, endless ribbons of newsprint going past at blinding speed, trekking up and down and through the massive apparatus. Every few feet there was an opening where the boards cut through to the other side.

I started moving again, my hands running along the top of the railing, and then there he was. At the far end of the walkway, Welland loomed into view at the top of the other set of stairs.

“Shit,” I said, although I barely heard the word myself for the humming of the press.

I whirled around, planning to double back, but standing where I’d been seconds earlier was Elmont Sebastian. He wasn’t the youngest guy in the world, but he’d scaled those steps in no time. He looked down at his hand, smeared with ink residue from the railing. He gave his suit a worried look, probably wondering how soiled it had already become.

I thought I had a better chance of bulldozing my way past him than heading the other way toward Welland.

I started running at Sebastian. He broadened his stance, but I didn’t slow down. I slammed into him, but instead of just him going down, he grabbed me around the neck and we went down together.

“You son of a bitch!” he shouted. “Give it to me!”

We rolled on the boards. I brought up a knee and tried to get him in the groin or stomach. I must have hit something, because he loosened his hold on my neck long enough for me to start scrambling back onto my feet.

But Sebastian was up almost as quickly, and leapt on my back. The tackle threw me to one side, into one of the walkways that went through the presses. Newsprint flew past us on both sides, the words and images an indistinct blur.

As I stumbled to one side, Sebastian was pitched up against the railing. He was facing it, and his upper body leaned over with the impact. He threw his hands out in front of himself, but there was nothing there to catch on to.

But there was something to catch on to him.

It happened so blindingly fast that if you’d caught it on video, and had the chance to play it back in slow motion, you still probably wouldn’t be able to see how it went down.

But what happened, basically, is Sebastian’s right hand bumped up against the speeding newsprint, which flung his arm upward and into the spinning press. It was moving so quickly there was no opportunity for Sebastian to react.

His arm was torn off in a second. And it just disappeared.

Elmont Sebastian screamed and collapsed onto the boards, reaching over with his left arm, hunting for his right.

I looked down, horrified and aghast, and God help me, thought of Ethan’s joke.

Black and white and red all over.

Welland came up behind me, saw his boss, and said, “Jesus.”

Sebastian thrashed about for a second or two, then stopped. His eyes were open and unblinking, but I wasn’t sure that he was dead. Not yet.

I said to Welland, “We’ve got to call an ambulance.”

I started to move, knowing no one would be able to hear me on my cell with the roar of the press-which had not stopped-in the background.

Welland grabbed hold of my arm. Not quite the way he had before. Not in a menacing way. He was just holding me.

“No,” he said.

“He hasn’t got long,” I shouted.

“Let’s wait a bit,” he said.

“What the hell are you doing?”

Down below, pressmen were pointing, shouting. From their viewpoint, I wasn’t sure they could see what had happened to Sebastian.

“We’re gonna let him go,” Welland said.

“What?”

“The fucker never should have zapped me in the balls, or threatened my son.”

I stared at him, speechless.

Welland added, “We didn’t take your boy. I’d never have let him do that.”

FIFTY-TWO

Someone had killed the press. It was slowing, the noise receding.

Welland-or Buddy, as I now knew him to be-squeezed past me on the catwalk.

“I’m outta here,” he said.

An alarm was ringing now, and pressmen were coming up on the boards from all directions.

“Where are you going?” I asked Welland. I was, in the midst of everything, thinking about how I was going to explain Elmont Sebastian, the CEO of Star Spangled Corrections, getting torn apart in the Promise Falls Standard pressroom.

“I got people who can help me disappear,” he said. “You tell whatever story you want.” He glanced up, pointed. “Those look like cameras. Whole thing’s probably on closed-circuit. You’re in the clear. By the time they start looking for me, I’ll be gone.”

He didn’t waste another word on me. He was a big, intimidating presence, and none of the pressmen stood in his way as he made for the stairs and slid down them navy-style, feet braced on the outside of the railings. I watched him run for the door, and then he was gone.

One of the pressmen, who recognized me from around the building, said, “What happened?” Then he spotted Sebastian, and looked away almost as quickly. “Oh, man.”

“Call an ambulance,” I said. “I don’t think it’s going to matter, but…”

“I’ve seen guys lose fingers, but God almighty, never anything like that.” He shouted down to someone to call 911.

I didn’t want to hang around and explain. I made my way to the stairs and down and was about to head for the door to the parking lot when I saw Madeline Plimpton striding in my direction. She looked past me and barked at the pressman, “Talk to me.”

“Ask him,” he said.

Madeline fixed her gaze on me. “I thought you were using up vacation time.”

“Elmost Sebastian’s up there,” I said, pointing at the rollers. “If he’s not dead yet, he will be before anyone gets here. I hope selling him land for a prison wasn’t your only plan for keeping the paper afloat.”

“Dear God,” she said. “Why-”

“It may be on the monitors,” I said. “I hope to God it is.” I moved around her, heading for the door. “And I guess I owe you an apology. Sam Henry was reading my emails. She’s sold out you and me and everyone else at the paper. However much time it’s got left, she shouldn’t be here for it.”

“David, start from the beginning.”

I shook my head. “Ethan’s missing. I have to go.”

“Ethan-for Christ’s sake, David, what’s going on?” Madeline said. “You come back here now and-”

I didn’t hear the rest as the door closed behind me. Sebastian’s limo was already long gone. Welland, knowing the authorities would soon be after him, would have to ditch it at the earliest opportunity. After I got into my car and turned the key, I had to think a moment about where I was going to go next. I’d been left shaken by what had just happened and felt disoriented.

Samantha Henry’s phone call luring me to the Standard had prevented me from doing a search of my own house for Ethan. I’d gotten the door open, and I’d called out his name, but I hadn’t been through the house room by room.

I hadn’t actually expected him to be there. The house was locked, and Ethan certainly didn’t have his own key, unless, as I’d considered earlier, he’d taken a spare from my parents’ house.

But I had no memory of locking the house after getting Sam’s call. It was possible that even if Ethan had no key, and hadn’t been in the house when I was last there, he could be there now.

It made sense to check in with my parents to see whether anything had happened since I’d fled in such a hurry. I took out my phone and saw there was one message. I wouldn’t have heard it ring with the press rolling.

I checked it.

“Mr. Harwood, this is Detective Duckworth. Look, I’m willing to overlook what happened, but I’m not kidding around here. You have to come in. I’m going to call your lawyer and tell her to bring you in. I’m not out to screw you over, Mr. Harwood. There are things about this case that don’t make sense, things that are in your favor. But we need to sort them out, and we need to sort them out now if-”

I no sooner had deleted the message than the phone rang in my hand.

“Yeah?”

“Tell me you didn’t do what the police say you did,” Natalie Bondurant said.

“Unless you have news about my son,” I said, “I don’t have time to talk to you.”

“Listen to me,” she said. “You’re making things worse for yourself by-”

I ended the call, then speed-dialed my parents’ house. Mom answered on the first ring.

“Has Ethan turned up?” I asked.

“No,” Mom whispered. She sounded as though she’d been crying when the phone rang, and was trying to pull herself together. “Where are you? That detective, he was gone and now he’s back. I think he went by your house and couldn’t find you and now he’s back here. I think he’s going to arrest you if you show up.”

“I just have to keep looking,” I said. “If you hear anything-anything-let me know.”

“I will,” she said.

I slipped the phone back into my coat and sped out of the lot, heading for home.

• • •

I was worried Duckworth or other members of the Promise Falls police might be watching my place, so I parked around the corner and walked up. I saw no suspicious cars on the street. After a while, you get to know the cars of your neighbors and their friends. Nothing out of the ordinary jumped out at me.

I came down the side of the house and entered through the back door. As I’d suspected, I’d left it unlocked.

I came in through the kitchen. The house was in darkness, and I was reluctant to flip on a light just in case someone was out there that I’d missed. But I needed to let my eyes adjust to be able to see where I was going. I knew my way around in the dark, but there were still several boards out of place. The house was full of booby traps, and I was suddenly worried that if Ethan had come home, he might have caught his foot in one of the holes where boards were missing.

“Ethan!” I said. “It’s Dad! It’s okay! You can come out!”

Then I listened. I stood there, just inside the door, and held my breath, hoping to catch some faint sound of movement in the house.

“Ethan?” I called again.

I let out a long, discouraged sigh. And then thought I heard a board creak, overhead, in the area of Ethan’s room.

I went through the kitchen, stepping carefully. Dad had put all the boards I’d ripped up to one side, and pried the nails from them, but he hadn’t covered over the long, narrow holes I’d left behind.

I went through the living room to the stairs and mounted them slowly in the dark. “Ethan?” I said.

Surely Ethan wouldn’t be moving through the house in total darkness. After all, he was still a little boy, and, like most kids, had a fear of the dark, even in his own home.

Are you up here?” I asked.

The door to Ethan’s room was ajar. Sidestepping the few openings in the floor of the upstairs hall, I got to the door and pushed it open.

A glow from a streetlamp fell through Ethan’s window.

There was a dark shadow on the far side of his bed. Someone was standing there, someone far too tall to be Ethan.

I reached over to the wall switch and flipped it up.

It was Jan.

The shock of seeing her, standing there, was overtaken by the shock of seeing the gun in her hand, which she was pointing directly at me.

“Where’s Ethan?” she asked. “I’ve come for Ethan.”

FIFTY-THREE

Ethan’s dresser drawers were open and his clothes had been tossed onto the bed, next to a soft-sided flight bag, the one we kept in his closet for trips.

I couldn’t recall Jan ever looking worse. Her hair was scraggly, her eyes bloodshot. It had only been two days since I’d seen her, but she looked as though she’d lost ten pounds, aged ten years. The gun was shaking in her hand.

“Put that down, Jan,” I said. “Maybe you’d rather I called you Constance, but it’s hard for me to think of you as anyone but Jan.”

She blinked. The gun didn’t move.

“Or maybe I’ve got it wrong, and Constance isn’t your real name, either.”

“No,” she whispered. “That’s my real name.”

“I guess I can understand why you never wanted to introduce me to your parents,” I said. “One set was fake, and the other was dead.”

Her eyes widened. “What?”

“Martin and Thelma? Your real parents?” Something in her eyes said yes. “You don’t know? Someone killed them a few years ago. Slit their throats.”

If she was troubled by this news, she didn’t show it. “Where’s Ethan?” she asked.

I said, “He’s not here.”

“Is he with Don and Arlene?”

“No,” I said.

“Oh no…,” she said. “No, no…”

I took a step closer to her. “Put that gun down, Jan.”

She shook her head. “No, he has to be here,” she said dreamily. “I’ve come for him. We’re going away.”

“Even if he was here,” I said, “I would never, ever let you take him. Give me the gun.” I inched closer.

“We have to find him,” Jan said.

“I know,” I said. “But you’re not going to be looking for him with a gun.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “I need it. I need this gun.”

“You don’t need it with me,” I said, taking another step toward her. “What do you think I’m going to do to you? I’m your husband.”

Jan stifled a laugh. “I think you’d probably like to do plenty to me. But you’re not the one I’m worried about.”

“Who are you talking about?”

“So my parents are dead,” she said, ignoring my question, her mind drifting, a slightly crazed look in her eye. “He must have thought they knew something. He must have thought they’d know where I was. He must have killed them when they couldn’t tell him anything.”

“Are you talking about who killed your parents? Is that who you’re worried about?”

“I did a bad thing,” Jan told me. “I did something…”

“What did you do? What’s all of this about?” I was less than two feet away from her now.

“Everything’s been for nothing,” she said. “The diamonds weren’t real.”

“Diamonds?” I said. “What diamonds?”

“They were worthless. Fucking worthless.” Another stifled laugh. “It’s like some huge cosmic joke.”

I grabbed her wrist.

I’d thought maybe she’d let me wrest the gun away from her, but as soon as I tried to twist it out of her hand she reacted, trying to pull her arm away. I wouldn’t let go. She swung at me with her left hand, hitting me in the side of the face. I swung my right arm up, knocked her hand away as I held on to her right. Then her free hand was clawing at me, her nails digging into my cheeks, but instead of trying to block that hand I turned in to her and got both hands on her wrist, doubling the pressure on it to make her drop the weapon.

As I turned I threw my body into it and forced Jan up against the wall, hard, knocking the wind out of her. While the move may have had the effect of weakening her, it also prompted her to pull the trigger.

The shot, which sounded like a sonic boom in Ethan’s small bedroom, went into the floor. I jumped, but I didn’t loosen my grip. I slammed her wrist against the wall. Once, twice. The third time, the gun fell from her hand and clattered to the floor. I was terrified it might go off again, but it bounced harmlessly up against the baseboard.

I let go of Jan’s hand and dived down to get it, but the moment I let go and turned, she jumped onto my back.

“No!” she screamed.

I rolled, forcing her up against the metal frame of Ethan’s bed. The beam jammed into her back and she yelped in pain. I scrambled ahead, crablike, to get my hands on the gun, got it, then rolled and pointed it straight at her.

“Just shoot me, David,” she said, winded and getting up onto her hands and knees. “Just put a fucking bullet in my head. It’d be easier.”

“Who are you?” I shouted, both hands wrapped around the gun. “Who the hell are you?”

She rose up, sat on the side of the bed, and put her head in her hands. After a moment, she looked up, tears running down her cheeks. “I’m Connie Tattinger,” she said. “But… I’m also Jan Harwood. No matter who I am, I’m Ethan’s mother.” She paused. “And I was your wife. For a time.”

“What’s all of this been?” I asked her. “These last five years? Some kind of goddamn joke?”

She shook her head. “Not a joke… not a joke. I was, I’ve been… waiting. And hiding.”

“Waiting for what? Hiding from whom?”

Jan took a few breaths, ran a finger under her wet nose, and said, “We hijacked a diamond shipment.”

“What? We?”

Jan dismissed the questions with a wave. “Six years ago. Then, my partner, he got sent away for something else. The diamonds were in a safe place but it was going to be a few years before we could get at them. The man we took them from… he’s been looking for us, for me, all that time.”

I was trying to take it all in. Those few short sentences, summing up years of deception. I grabbed on to something Jan had already said. “But you said they were worthless. Why would this man, why would he want them back?”

She summoned some more strength to continue. “Because of what I did to him.”

I waited.

“I cut off his hand,” she said. “To get the briefcase he was attached to.” She sniffed. “He lived.”

I was so stunned that I lowered the gun, letting it rest on the floor next to me, but still within reach. “I don’t know who you are,” I said.

She nodded. “No, you really don’t. You never have.”

“Where did this all happen?” I asked.

“Boston,” she said.

“So after it happened, you had to hide out,” I said. “You came to Promise Falls.”

She nodded, her eyes glistening.

“And married me. Why? Why do that?”

She couldn’t find the words. I took a shot at helping her out. “It was like camouflage. You figured I could help you blend in. Who’d guess the nice little wife down the street had anything to do with a diamond heist?”

She nodded again.

“Did you really need to have a child to complete the picture?” I asked. “Is that what Ethan’s been for you? Part of a cover story?”

“No,” she whispered.

I shook my head. I had more questions. “So let me figure this out. When your partner got out of jail, you’d recover the diamonds?”

“Yeah,” she said. “We expected to get a lot of money for them.”

“Enough to go away and live happily ever after,” I said.

She closed her eyes and nodded again.

“And I was dumb enough to think you already were. God, I’m such an idiot.”

Jan swallowed, wiped away a tear, and said, “But they weren’t worth anything. The man whose hand I cut off-his name’s Oscar Fine-he’d been putting the word out. When we showed up at this guy’s place, this guy Dwayne-”

“Dwayne?”

“He was the one I stole them with,” she said. “Dwayne knew a man who’d give us cash for the diamonds. But he must have called Fine. When we went back for the money, Fine was there. He must have killed Dwayne. And he tried to kill me before I got away.”

I rested my head up against Ethan’s closet door.

Jan said to me, “What the hell happened to the floors? All the boards ripped up?”

“I found the birth certificate, the one for Jan Richler,” I said. “Behind the baseboard in the linen closet.”

“You couldn’t have,” she said. “I took it with me.”

“I found it a long time ago, but put it back. After you disappeared, I wondered what else you might have hid. I found the other one, the real one. Why didn’t you take it, too?”

“I needed the other envelope for the key that was in it,” she said. “It didn’t occur to me to get the other one. So… you knew about the Richlers?”

“I knew of them, but I only went to see them after you disappeared. I found out about their daughter.”

Jan looked away.

“I guess that was handy in getting a new ID,” I said, not able to keep the sarcasm out of my voice. “Knowing someone personally who died as a child. So you applied for a copy of the birth certificate and-”

“No,” she said.

“What? But I found-”

“It was the original. I tried applying for a copy but didn’t have enough substantiating information. So I watched the Richlers’ routine for a few days, figured out when they did their groceries, got in when they went out. People generally keep those kinds of documents in one spot. A drawer in the kitchen, the bedroom. Only took me an hour to find it. Once I had it, everything else-driver’s license, Social Security-was a breeze.”

I was actually impressed, but only for a moment. “You have any idea what you’ve done to those people? Bad enough what happened when you were a little girl.”

Jan shot me a look, evidently figuring out I knew she’d pushed the other girl into the path of the car.

“But to use their daughter’s name now, all these years later, that-”

“Okay, so I’m a shit,” she said. “I’m poison. Anyone who comes in contact with me, their life eventually goes into the toilet. Jan Richler, her parents, my parents, Dwayne.”

“Me,” I said. “Ethan.”

Jan met my eye and looked away again.

“The whole depression thing, it was masterful,” I said.

“My mother,” Jan whispered. “She spent most of her life down in the dumps. Can hardly blame her, considering what she was married to, the bastard. I just modeled myself on her, without the booze.”

“Well, you set me up beautifully. I was the perfect patsy, wasn’t I? Your sole audience. So when you disappeared, it looked like I was lying. Like I was trying to make them think you killed yourself, and the cops would figure I’d killed you. The trip to Lake George, the horseshit you told that guy in the store. Everything pointed to me. And it was you who sent the email.”

Half a nod. “You’d already heard from that woman. I knew you’d fall for the email.”

“And the tickets you ordered online. How’d you get into the park?”

“I paid cash,” she whispered.

“Was Dwayne the one who ran off with Ethan? So I’d have this crazy story to tell the cops, and give you time to slip away?”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“Please,” I said. “How’d you pull it off?”

“I had a change of clothes, a wig, in the backpack. When you ran after Ethan, I went into the restroom and changed, then walked out of Five Mountains.”

My fingers touched the gun resting on the floor.

“There’s more,” she said quietly. “Sites you supposedly visited on the laptop, blood in the trunk, a receipt for duct-”

“Yeah,” I said. “I know. And talking me into the life insurance policy. About the blood. Did you really cut your wrist?”

“No. I nicked my ankle so I could leave a sample in the trunk.”

“You’re really something,” I said. “The thing I don’t get-the thing I will probably never get-is why?”

Jan wiped a finger under her nose again. “They wouldn’t be looking for me if they thought I was already dead,” she said. “Even if they never found a body, if they figured you’d killed me…”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I’m asking why.”

She didn’t seem to follow.

“Why would you do this to me?” I asked her. “How could you do this? How could you do this to me? How could you do this to Ethan?”

Her eyes moved about for a second, as though searching for the answer. Then they stopped abruptly, as though the answer had been right in front of her.

She said, “I wanted the money.”

FIFTY-FOUR

“What did you think was going to happen?” I asked. “After I ended up going to jail for killing you?”

“I figured, maybe, because there was no body, you’d end up getting off,” she said. “But they’d still think you did it, and they wouldn’t come looking for me.”

“And if they convicted me?”

“Your parents would look after Ethan,” she said. “They love him. He’d be safe with them.”

“But you had to know,” I said, “that if I did get off, I wouldn’t rest until I found you.”

“I’d already had someone looking for me,” Jan said. “And he hadn’t, until now, found me. I figured I could deal with that, once we had the money from the diamonds.”

The word “we” had triggered something in me. “This Dwayne,” I said. “Were you in love with him?”

She didn’t need time to think. “No,” she said. “But he was useful.”

I nodded. “Like me.” I couldn’t stop myself from asking, “And what about me? Did you ever love me?”

“If I said yes, would you even believe it?” she said.

“No,” I said. “What about Leanne? How’d she end up dead?”

Jan shook her head tiredly. “That wasn’t supposed to happen. But Dwayne and I, we ran into her, outside Albany. She saw me in the truck, came over, wondered what I was doing there, who Dwayne was. Dwayne did what he had to do. We got rid of her car, and took her up to Lake George, in the pickup, under the cover.”

“That meant a lot of backtracking.”

“I had this idea,” she said, looking down into her lap, “that if we left her body up there, it would… it would build the case against you.”

I ran my fingers across the gun again, slowly took it into my hand.

“I never knew you for a minute,” I said.

She looked at me. “No, you never did.”

“Why did you have him?” I asked.

“What?”

“Why did you have Ethan? When you got pregnant, why did you go ahead with it? Why didn’t you get an abortion?”

She bit her lip. “I was going to,” she said. “I thought about it. Having a child, it was never part of the plan. I couldn’t believe it when it happened. I thought I’d taken precautions, but… I lay awake at nights, convinced I was going to do something about it. I made some calls, went to a clinic in Albany. I had an appointment.” She wiped tears from her eyes. “I couldn’t do it. I wanted to have him. I wanted to have a baby.”

Now I was shaking my head. “You’re something else. You know what you are?”

She waited.

“A monster. A psychopath. The goddamn devil in a dress. I loved you. I really loved you. But it was all an act. None of it real. Not for one fucking minute.”

Jan struggled to find the words she wanted to say. “I came back because of love,” she said.

“No, you didn’t.”

“I came back for Ethan,” she said. “You, I figured you could find a way to fend for yourself. But with Oscar Fine out there, looking for me, looking for ways to get to me, I knew I had to come back for Ethan, to protect him. He’s my son. He belongs to me. I’m his mother, for Christ’s-”

I’d had enough.

I picked up the gun, pointed it, and pulled the trigger, felt the gun kick back in my hand.

Jan screamed as the shot filled the room.

The bullet went into the wall over Ethan’s headboard, a good two feet to the left of Jan. She looked around, saw the hole in the wall.

“That’s what kind of mother I think you are,” I said.

Shaking, Jan said, “It’s true. I came here for him. I drove by your parents’ house first, didn’t see any sign of him, then I came here. It was dark, so I let myself in, decided to pack his things, then when you came home, I was going to leave with him.”

“Jesus, Jan, what were you going to do? Kidnap him at gunpoint? Wave this in my face and drag him off? Is that really what you were going to do?”

She was shaking her head. “I don’t know.”

“Jan, it’s over. Everything’s over. You have to turn yourself in. You have to tell the police what you did, how you set me up. If you love Ethan, the only way to prove it, at this point, is to make it possible for me to raise him. You’re going to go to jail. There’s no way around it. Probably for a very, very long time. But if you mean what you say, if you love your son, you have to make things right so that he has his father there for him.”

A calm seemed to come over her. “Okay,” she said quietly. “Okay.”

“But the first thing we have to do,” I said, “is find him.”

It was as though I’d thrown cold water on her. She became, suddenly, focused. “Find him? You don’t know where he is? He’s missing?”

“This afternoon. He was playing with the croquet set in the backyard and Mom stopped hearing-”

“When?” Jan asked urgently. “When did she notice he was gone?”

“Late. Like, five or six o’clock.”

Jan seemed to be computing something in her head. “He could have gotten there by then,” she said.

“Tell me,” I said. “Are you talking about this Oscar person?”

She nodded. “I think he knows where I’ve been living, who I’ve been these last six years. Either from the news, or from Dwayne, before he killed him. Fine would have had time to get here. He’s driving a black Audi, something he could make good time in. He might have gotten to Promise Falls before I did. I pulled off the highway for a while, trying to gather myself together.”

“Jesus Christ, Jan, how would he even know where to find Ethan?”

“You think he’s stupid? All he has to do is look up your name. He’ll find this address, your parents’ address, plus…”

“Plus what?”

Jan’s face crumpled like paper. “He may even have a picture of Ethan.”

It was all dizzying. Finally encountering Jan, learning about her past, coming to grips with the realization that Ethan might not just be missing, but in real danger. As I went to get up off the floor, my hand caught on the rough edge of a long piece of hardwood flooring shaped like a jagged icicle.

“Fuck,” I said. Still not trusting Jan, I tucked the gun under the edge of my butt while I pried out a splinter with my thumb and forefinger. Blood bubbled out of the wound.

Jan made no move for the weapon, and I took hold of it again as I got to my feet.

“This guy,” I said, “whose hand you cut off, what would he do with Ethan if he had him?”

Jan shuddered. “I think he’d do anything,” she said. “I think he’d do anything he had to, to get back at me.”

The words “eye for an eye” came to me. But I wasn’t thinking about eyes. I thought of the feel of Ethan’s hand in mine.

“Do you have a way to reach this man?” I asked, feeling frantic. “Some way to find him? So we could try to work something out? Make some sort of deal?”

Jan said, “He might be willing to trade Ethan for me.”

There was nothing in that plan that troubled me. Not at this moment. But I didn’t think it was our only option.

“I’ll call Duckworth,” I said.

“Who?”

“The detective who’s been trying to find you, to nail me for your murder. He can put the word out. Get everyone looking for Oscar Fine. You can give them a description, tell them about the car he’s driving. If the police find him, they find Ethan. I don’t think he’s going to do anything to him before he’s found you. He probably figures as long as he has Ethan, alive, he’ll have some leverage with you.”

Jan, resigned, nodded. “You’re right. You’re right. You’re right. Call him. Call the detective. I’ll tell him anything he needs to know to find Ethan. I’ll tell him anything he needs if it’ll help find Oscar Fine, if it’ll lead us to Ethan.”

I took out my phone.

Jan reached out, touched my arm. “I don’t expect you to forgive me.”

I moved my arm away. “Gee, you think?” I said.

I flipped open the phone, started searching the list of incoming calls so I could find Detective Duckworth’s number, and was hitting the button to connect when a voice said, “Stop.”

I looked up. There was someone standing in the doorway to Ethan’s room.

A man with one hand.

FIFTY-FIVE

“Drop the gun, and the phone,” Oscar Fine said to me. He had a weapon of his own pointed at me. It had a long barrel, slightly wider at the end. I was guessing that was a silencer. There’d already been two unsilenced shots fired off in this room. With any luck, maybe the neighbors had heard them and dialed 911.

My gun was aimed at the floor, and I was pretty sure I’d be dead before I could raise my arm to use it. So I let the gun fall down along the side of my leg to the floor and tossed the phone, still open, onto the bed.

“Kick it over here,” Oscar Fine said. “Carefully.”

I lined up the edge of my shoe with the gun and slid it toward him. It narrowly missed one of the holes in the floor. Never taking his eyes off either of us, he knelt down, and using his stump and the weapon in his one hand like a set of chopsticks, picked up the gun, and slipped it into his pocket.

The color had drained from Jan’s face. I’d never seen her look more frightened, or more vulnerable. Maybe, if there’d been a mirror around, I would have felt the same about myself. This is it, her expression said. It’s over.

“Where’s my son?” I asked.

Oscar Fine didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on Jan. “It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Please,” Jan said. “You have the wrong person.”

He smiled wryly. “Really. Show a little more dignity than your boyfriend did at the end. You know what he did? He pissed himself. The poor bastard pissed himself. I’m guessing you’re made of stronger stuff than that. After all, you were the one had it in you to cut off my hand. He just sat up front. Did he piss himself then, too?”

Jan licked her lips. I was guessing her mouth was as dry as mine. She said, “You should have had a key on you. If you’d had a key, we could have taken the briefcase without hurting you.”

Oscar Fine momentarily looked solemn. “I can’t argue with you there. But you know what they say about hindsight.” He smiled and then said, with no hint of irony in his voice, “You have to play the hand you’re dealt.”

Jan said to him, nodding in my direction, “Please let him go. Tell him where our son is so he can go get him. He’s just a boy. Please don’t make him pay for anything I’ve done to you. I’m begging you. Is Ethan outside? Is he in your car?”

Oscar Fine’s tongue moved around inside his mouth, like he was thinking something over.

And then, in an instant, his arm went up and the gun in his hand went pfft.

I shouted, “No! God, no! Jan!”

Jan was tossed back against the wall. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t make a sound. She looked down at the blossom of red above her right breast, put her right hand up and touched it.

I ran to Jan, tried to hold her as she started her slide down the wall. I eased her down, tried not to look at the blood trail she’d left behind her. Her eyes were already glassy.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said.

The front of her blouse was already soaked with blood. Her breathing was short and raspy.

“Ethan,” she whispered to me.

“I know,” I said. “I know.”

I looked at Oscar Fine, who hadn’t moved since firing the shot. It struck me that he looked at peace.

“I have to call an ambulance,” I said. “My wife… she’s losing a lot of blood.”

“No,” he said.

“She’s dying,” I said.

“That’s the idea,” Oscar Fine said.

Jan struggled to raise her head, looked at him and, with considerable effort, said, “Ethan. Where is Ethan?”

Oscar Fine shook his head. “I have no idea,” he said. “But if you’d like, I’d be happy to look for your son. Once I find him, who would you like his hands sent to?” He smiled sadly at me. “It won’t be you.”

“You don’t have him,” I said.

“I wish,” Oscar Fine said.

Jan’s eyelids fell shut. I slipped my arm around her, pulled her to me. I couldn’t tell whether she was still breathing.

In the distance, we heard a siren.

“Shit,” said Oscar Fine. He glanced at the open phone on the bed, shook his head in disgust, reached over and snapped it shut. He sighed as the siren-it sounded like only one-grew louder. In another few seconds, I could hear steps pounding on the front porch.

“Change of plan,” Oscar Fine said. He waved the barrel at me. “Come.”

I took my arm from around Jan and walked across the room, past Oscar Fine and through the door. He stayed close behind me. I could feel the barrel of the gun touching my back.

“Stay very close,” he said.

From downstairs, I heard Barry Duckworth yell, “Mr. Harwood?”

“Up here,” I said, not shouting, but in a voice loud enough to be heard.

“Are you okay?” Lights started coming on downstairs.

“No. And my wife’s been shot.”

“I’ve already called an ambulance.” Duckworth had reached the bottom of the stairs. Oscar Fine and I were standing behind the short upstairs hall railing, about to turn and come down the stairs.

Duckworth, who had his weapon drawn, looked up. I could see the puzzlement in his face, wondering who the man behind me could be.

Oscar Fine said, “I’m going to shoot Mr. Harwood if you don’t let us leave together.”

Duckworth, his gun angled upward, took a moment to assess things. “There’s going to be a dozen officers out front in about two minutes,” he said.

“Then we have to move quickly,” Oscar said, moving me down a step at a time. “Lower your weapon or I’ll shoot Mr. Harwood right now.”

Duckworth, seeing the gun at my back, lowered his gun, but held on to it. “You need to give yourself up,” he said.

“No,” he said. We were halfway down the stairs now. “Please back away.”

Duckworth took a couple of steps back toward the front door.

We reached the first floor. Keeping me in front of him as a shield, Oscar Fine started easing me toward the kitchen. He was going to take me out the back door. Maybe his car was parked a block over, and we’d be heading through the backyard and between the houses to get there.

Duckworth watched in frustration. His eyes met mine.

We were under the railing when I noticed Duckworth glancing up.

Oscar Fine and I both craned our necks upward at the same time, too.

It was Jan. She was standing at the railing, leaning over it at the waist. A drop of blood touched my forehead like warm rain.

She said, “You will never hurt my son.”

And then her body pivoted forward. She wasn’t leaning on the railing, she was pitching herself right over it.

As she started to come down, I saw that she was clutching firmly, in both hands, the two-foot daggerlike plank of hardwood flooring I’d caught my hand on.

She plunged over the side, the plank pointing straight down ahead of her.

Oscar Fine had no time to react before its sharp, ragged end caught him where neck meets shoulder. The force of Jan’s fall rammed the plank deep into his torso, and that, combined with the weight of Jan’s body, put him down on the floor in an instant.

Neither of them moved after that.

FIFTY-SIX

Jan and Oscar Fine were both declared dead at the scene. Once the initial panic was over, I couldn’t bring myself to go back into the front hall and look at the tangled wreckage that was my wife and her killer.

I spent the better part of an hour with Barry Duckworth, explaining everything to him as best I could. Broad strokes, mostly. Many of the details I didn’t know, and didn’t expect I ever would.

I had the sense he believed me.

But even before we got into that, I had something more urgent to discuss with him.

“Ethan’s still missing,” I said. “Jan was certain Oscar Fine had taken him, but upstairs there, just before everything happened, he said he didn’t know anything about him.”

“Was he lying, you think?” Duckworth asked. “Messing with you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “If he’d had Ethan, I think he would have enjoyed taunting us with the fact.”

But to be certain, we found a black Audi-registered to Oscar Fine-one street over. We checked the back seat and trunk for any signs of Ethan.

We came up empty.

“We have everyone working on this,” Duckworth assured me as the two of us sat together at the kitchen table. “Every single available member of the department is looking for your boy. We’ve brought people in on their days off. We’re doing a block-by-block search.”

“What if Ethan’s disappearance… what if it has nothing to do with any of this?” I asked. “What if he just wandered off? Or some sick son a bitch just happened to be driving through the neighborhood and-”

“Regardless,” Duckworth said, “we’re doing everything, exploring all those angles. We’re interviewing everyone on your parents’ street and your street, doing a door-to-door right now.”

None of this made me feel any better.

“She did it for Ethan,” I said. “And for me.”

“She did what?” Duckworth said.

“She pulled it together long enough to kill that man so I’d be there for Ethan.”

“I guess she did,” Duckworth said.

“She said she didn’t expect my forgiveness,” I said.

“Maybe, if she could ask you now…”

I said nothing and looked down at the table.

Mom and Dad arrived shortly after that. There was hugging and crying, and as I had done with Duckworth, I tried to tell them what I knew about the events of the last three days.

And the last six years. And even before that.

“Where could Ethan be?” Mom asked. “Where would he go?”

While Duckworth went off to help oversee the crime scene, the three of us sat at the table, not knowing what to do.

We were tired, depressed, traumatized.

Part of me was grieving.

Sometime around midnight, the phone rang. I picked up.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Harwood?”

“Yes?”

“I’ve done a terrible thing.”

I was there by 3 a.m.

Detective Duckworth put up some objections at first. First, he didn’t want me leaving the crime scene. Second, if I knew who had taken my son, if he’d been kidnapped, Duckworth had to send in the police.

“I don’t know that it’s exactly a kidnapping,” I said. “At least not now. It’s kind of complicated. Just let me go and get my boy. I know where he is. Let me bring him home.”

He mulled it over a moment, then finally said, “Go.” He said he’d try to pave the way for me with the New York Thruway authorities, maybe save me the trouble of getting pulled over for speeding.

When I pulled up in front of the Richlers’ house on Lincoln Avenue in Rochester, the living room lights were on. I didn’t have to knock. Gretchen Richler was standing at the door waiting for me, and had it open as I came up the porch steps.

“Let me see him,” I said.

She nodded. She led me upstairs and pushed open the door to what I presumed to be the bedroom she shared with her husband, who was not around. Ethan was under the covers, his head on the pillow, sound asleep.

“I’ll let him sleep for a bit more,” I said.

“I’ve put on some coffee,” Gretchen said. “Would you like some?”

“Yes,” I said, following her back downstairs. “Is your husband…”

“Still in the hospital,” she said. “They have him in the psychiatric ward, I guess they call it. They’ve got him under observation.”

“How do they think he’s going to be?”

“It’s a kind of wait-and-see situation,” she said. “With any luck, he could be home in a few days, although I… I don’t know how he’ll fend on his own.”

She filled two mugs with coffee and set them on the kitchen table. “Would you like some cookies?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Coffee’s fine.”

Gretchen Richler took a seat across from me. “I know what I did was wrong,” she said.

I blew on the coffee, took a sip. “Tell me what happened.”

“Well, first of all, we were looking at that picture you left with us, the one of your wife. It was the necklace she was wearing. The cupcake.”

“Yes?”

“It had been our daughter’s. She’d lost it just before she died. She’d accused Constance of stealing it. When I saw it on your wife, it all came together. I knew.”

“It was the only time I remember seeing her wear it,” I said. “She had it in her jewelry box but never put it on. But just before that trip, Ethan found it. He loves cupcakes and begged her to wear it.”

“That last time you called, just after Horace tried to take his own life, when you said you thought your wife was still alive, that you thought maybe you were going to find her, I went… I went a little crazy.”

“Go on,” I said.

“I was so angry. Here’s this woman, she’d taken my daughter’s life not once but twice. I couldn’t get it out of my mind, what she’d done to us. I wanted her to know how it felt.”

I nodded, had another sip of the hot coffee.

“I just, I just thought that she deserved it. That if she could take a child from us, if she could take her from us, and then take her identity, something bad had to happen so she’d understand. So, with Horace in the hospital, I drove to Promise Falls. I found your parents’ house and I saw your son playing in the backyard. I told him I was his aunt Gretchen, and that it was finally time for him to come home.”

“And he went with you.”

“That’s right. He was so excited about going home, he never questioned me for a minute.”

“He didn’t think it was odd that he had an aunt he’d never heard of before?”

Gretchen shook her head. “He never questioned it.”

“So he got in the car with you,” I said.

She nodded. “I’d stopped around the corner, before I got to your place, and bought some treats to keep him happy. Then I started driving back here, and he was telling me I was going the wrong way. I had to explain to him that before I could take him home, he was going to stay with me for a little while.”

“How’d he take that?”

Gretchen choked up and a tear formed at the corner of her eye. “He started to cry. I told him not to, that everything was going to be okay. That he wouldn’t have to stay with me all that long.”

“What were you planning to do?” I asked.

Gretchen looked into my eyes. “I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea.”

“On the way to Promise Falls, I’d made up my mind. I was going to… I was going to…”

“You wouldn’t have hurt him.”

She couldn’t look at me. “I hope not. It’s like, for a while there, I was possessed or something. I wasn’t myself. I was going to get even, make things right. But when I saw him, once I had him in the car…”

“You couldn’t do it,” I said.

“He’s a lovely boy,” she said, looking at me again. “He really is. You must be so proud of him.”

“I am,” I said.

“But once I’d taken him, I didn’t know what to do.”

“So you just came back to Rochester.”

She nodded sadly. “I’m very ashamed of myself. I am.”

“You have no idea what you’ve put us through,” I said.

“I know.”

“My mother, I don’t know that she can ever forgive herself for letting Ethan out of her sight.”

“I’ll tell her I’m sorry. I will. Don’t you get a chance to make some sort of statement when they sentence you? Don’t you get to say something to the family?”

I felt so tired.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” I said.

Gretchen was confused. “I don’t understand. I kidnapped your son. I have to be punished for that.”

I reached across the table and put a hand on hers. “I think you’ve been punished enough. You and your husband.” I paused. “By my wife.”

“Even if you don’t want me arrested, she might,” Gretchen said.

“No,” I said. “She won’t. She’s dead.”

Gretchen gasped. “What? When?”

“About four hours ago,” I said. “Her past-one of them-caught up with her. So there’s no one to get even with anymore. She’s gone. And the truth is, you may have saved Ethan by taking him away when you did.”

“That doesn’t excuse me,” she said.

All that matters to me, at this moment, is that my son is okay, and that he’s not in any danger. I’ll do what I can to persuade the police not to charge you. I won’t cooperate if they want me to testify.”

“I made him a late dinner,” Gretchen said, not hearing me. “He settled down after a while, and I made him some macaroni and cheese.”

“He likes that.”

“I knew I was going to have to call you. I was going to do it in the morning. But I knew you wouldn’t be able to sleep, not knowing where he was, so I decided to call when I did.”

“I’m glad.” I took my hand off hers. “I’d like to get my son now.”

“You’d be welcome to sleep on the couch again, go in the morning.”

“Thank you for the offer,” I said, “but no.”

Gretchen led me upstairs. I sat on the edge of the bed. Ethan stirred, rolled over.

“Ethan,” I whispered, touching his shoulder gently. “Ethan.”

He opened his eyes slowly, blinked a couple of times to adjust for the light spilling in from the hall.

“Hi, Dad,” he said.

“Time to go,” I said.

“Back to our house?” he said hopefully.

“Not for a while yet,” I said. Maybe never. “Probably Nana and Poppa’s. But I’m going to be with you.”

I pulled back the covers. He was still dressed, his shoes on the floor next to the bed.

“I didn’t have any pajamas for him,” Gretchen said apologetically.

I nodded. As I helped Ethan sit up, Gretchen handed me his shoes. While I was slipping them on his feet and securing them with the Velcro straps, he said, “That’s Aunt Gretchen.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“She picked me up at Nana’s.”

“I hear she made you macaroni and cheese.”

“Yup.”

Once I had his shoes on, I picked him up, let him rest his head on my shoulder, and went back downstairs.

“I hope Horace will be okay,” I said as Gretchen opened the door for me.

“Thank you,” she said. “But you just worry about your boy.” She patted Ethan on the head. “Bye-bye.”

“Bye, Aunt Gretchen,” he said, rubbing his eyes.

I carried him to Dad’s car and belted him into the safety seat in the back. I was about to turn the key when Ethan asked, “Did you find Mommy?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Is she home?” he asked.

I took my hand away from the key, got out of the front seat and into the back. I closed the door behind me and snuggled in close to Ethan, taking his hands into mine.

“No,” I said. “She’s gone away. She won’t be coming back to us. But you have to know she loves you more than life itself.”

“Is she mad at me?” he asked.

“No, of course not,” I said. “She could never be mad at you.” I paused, then found the words I wanted. “The last thing she did, she did for you.”

Ethan nodded tiredly, cried a little, then yawned and fell back asleep. I kept holding him. We were still there like that when the sun came up.