Through the Darkness

CHAPTER 12

I arrived at Emily and Dante’s house at nine the following morning to find Georgina gone and Erika in charge of the kitchen, making a fresh pot of coffee.

I was relieved to see that Emily was up, dressed in a clean T-shirt and blue jeans. She’d even taken the time to wash her hair. While it dried, she wore it in a loose ponytail that hung down her back, leaking water in a damp semicircle around the collar of her shirt. She sat at a square table in the breakfast alcove and, with surprising energy, was tapping something into the family computer

Erika stood near the sink, grinding coffee beans.

“’Morning.” I called out, depositing a box of doughnuts from Carlson’s Bakery on the counter. “Any news?”

Special Agent Crisp appeared in the doorway from the dining room, yawning and stretching. “I’m afraid not.”

Emily lifted her hands from the keyboard and rested them in her lap, giving me her full attention for the first time in several days. “It’s been quiet so far, Mom, but everytime the phone rings, I practically have a heart attack.”

“Where is everyone?” I asked, looking around.

Erika twisted the tap and started to fill the coffeepot with water. “Connie sacked out in the guest room about five this morning. Dante’s gone to the spa to meet with somebody-or-other. I took the call.” She wrinkled her brow thoughtfully. “A Mrs. Strothers, I think.”

Hoo-boy. I wondered what was so important that Phyllis felt it necessary to pull Dante away from his family at such a critical time. It could have been good news, I supposed, like she was reaching into the commodious Strothers Family pockets to post a generous reward for Timmy’s safe return, but I wasn’t placing any bets on it.

“Dad and Ruth went out to Kinkos to get posters duplicated,” Emily told me. “Then they’ll start distributing them. Connie made up a list.”

“Posters?”

Emily pushed her chair back, rose, and stood behind it, optimism lighting her face. “Erika’s incredible. She put us in touch with BeyondMissing.com. They have online software that makes it easy to create a missing child poster and print it out. Come see what we’ve done.”

Erika smiled modestly. “BeyondMissing was founded by the father of Polly Klaas, and partially funded by DOJ. They’re only one of more than a dozen organizations that do an amazing job of getting the word out about lost children.”

I stayed anchored to my spot by the refrigerator, not the least bit interested in seeing the poster Emily had made. Just imagining Timmy’s cherubic face smiling out at me from a missing child poster in the post office or from the side of a milk carton made me hyperventilate. Get a grip, Hannah! If Paul and Ruth were out canvassing the town, I knew it wouldn’t be long before Timmy would be staring out at me from the bulletin boards of every fast food restaurant, gas station, and shopping mall in the state of Maryland.

Agent Crisp lifted the top of the Carlson’s box and considered the options before selecting a chocolate-covered doughnut for herself. “We put in a request to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, too. NCMEC faxed Timmy’s picture and vital statistics to their network of more than 26,000 law enforcement agencies, FBI field offices, state missing children’s clearinghouses, the Border Patrol, and med-” She stopped in mid-sentence and took a bite of her doughnut, then chewed thoughtfully.

I knew what she’d been about to say: medical examiners. I stole a glance at Emily to see if she’d noticed, but she’d resumed work on the computer, seemingly oblivious.

I wondered how long it would be before Crisp began asking Emily for DNA samples. Medical examiners.

Suddenly, I needed something stronger than coffee.

“NCMEC’s already contacted America’s Most Wanted,” Agent Crisp added. “Are you familiar with the program?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s hosted by John Walsh, Adam Walsh’s father.” I filled a glass with cold water from the tap in the refrigerator door and took a stabilizing sip. Adam Walsh. Polly Klaas. Murdered children with foundations named after them. I shivered.

Crisp licked the chocolate off her fingers. “They’ll be running a public service announcement about Timmy on their program this Saturday night. Fox network, at nine.”

“You’ve mentioned NCMEC several times, Agent Crisp. What’s NCMEC?” I asked.

“Timmy’s picture is already up on the NCMEC website,” Erika cut in.

“And we’ve got it up on FBI dot gov, too,” Agent Crisp was quick to add, with a sideways glance at me.

In the next few minutes I learned that the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had a network so extensive that less than forty-eight hours after his disappearance, Timmy’s picture was already appearing on the websites of Nation’s Missing Children Organization, Child Quest International, Laura Recovery Center, the Jimmy Ryce Center for Victims of Predatory Abduction, the Maryland Center for Missing Children, and similar organizations throughout the United States and abroad. His face and vital statistics would pop up on tens of thousands of computer screens, courtesy of websites that linked to BeyondMissing’s banner alerts, which rotated from missing child to missing child every ten seconds. It seemed to me that the FBI was on top of things, and I wondered how Crisp felt about Erika, who wasn’t even a family member, now that she’d entered the picture, seemingly intent on treading all over Crisp’s highly polished government shoes.

“Don’t you have to work today, Erika?” I asked.

“I requested the rest of the week off.” Using a paper towel, Erika scrubbed vigorously at the countertop surrounding the coffeepot. “Emily told me you could use an extra pair of hands.” She shrugged. “My firm is used to my going off pro bono like this.”

Connie chose that moment to stagger in, kneading her tired eyes with her fingers. “I smelled coffee,” she said. “Nature’s alarm clock.” She poured herself a mug, selected a cinnamon doughnut, then wandered over to the refrigerator, rummaged in it until she found the orange juice. “Anybody?”

“Sure,” said Emily.

Connie poured her niece a glass, and set it on the table next to the keyboard. I watched as Emily slipped her fingers into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a blister pack containing several pills. She popped a tablet out of the pack and into her mouth, chewed it, then washed it down with a gulp of orange juice.

“What’s that you’re taking, Em?” I asked.

“Can’t remember. Rema-something.”

Connie gave me a look. “One of her friends brought it over. Judy somebody-or-other.”

“Is it a prescription?”

Emily clicked the mouse, and pages began to spew out of the printer. “I guess so.”

Sometimes my daughter hadn’t the sense God gave a goose. This was the same good sense that inspired her to drop out of school to follow the rock band, Phish, for several months out of her young life. I wondered if Emily’s lackadaisical attitude toward prescription medications dated back to that troubled time when everything was relentlessly share-and-share-alike.

I played the mother card, although I hated myself for it. “Emily, do you think it’s wise to be taking drugs that are prescribed for somebody else?”

Emily rolled her eyes. “It didn’t kill Judy, so it’s certainly not going to kill me.”

Before I could counter with words I might be sorry for later, Connie stepped in to defuse the situation. “Amanda? Anything happen while I was sleeping?”

Amanda. Connie and Agent Crisp were on a first name basis. They must have bonded over the long night they had just spent together.

“I’m afraid not. We’ve been working on Timmy’s poster.” Agent Crisp snatched one of the pages out of the printer tray and passed it to Connie, who happened to be standing next to me. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t avoid looking at it.

MISSING CHILD ALERT

Timothy Gordon Shemanski

Last seen…

I blinked rapidly, fighting back tears, skimming to the bottom of the poster:

2.5 feet tall

30 pounds

Red hair, green eyes

They’d used the snapshot that I kept in my wallet, and added a second one of Timmy in three-quarter profile, cuddling Lamby under his dimpled chin.

“Excuse me.” Hand pressed to my mouth, I fled the room. I made it to the bathroom just in time.

When the tapping began, I ignored it. I was sitting on the chenille toilet lid cover, using both hands to press a cold, wet washcloth over my face.

“Hannah?” The tapping turned to knocking. “Are you all right in there?”

“I’ll be out in a minute, Connie.”

I hung the washcloth on the towel rack to dry, and examined my face in the mirror. I’d aged ten years in a few short days. I needed a haircut, badly. My tongue tasted like I’d been licking dirt off the sidewalk.

I slid the door to the medicine cabinet to one side, hoping to find some mouthwash to rinse the taste of bile out of my mouth. I rummaged unsuccessfully through the bottles-rubbing alcohol, nail polish remover, cough syrup (expired)-then turned my attention to the plastic bins Emily used to organize her odds and ends. Plastic razors, sample packets of shampoo, cotton balls, a comb with the American Airlines logo AA stamped on it, and-ah-ha!-a similarly marked cellophane packet containing a toothbrush and a miniature tube of toothpaste.

As I was sliding the door shut, I noticed another container on the top shelf filled with random packets of pills-pills in blister packs, pills in foil, pills and capsules sorted by color into mini-plastic Ziploc bags. Curious, I pulled the container down and dumped it out on the Formica counter. Among the cold tablets and remedies for diarrhea and acid indigestion, I counted four pink pills marked Paxil 20 and six yellow pills marked Amitrip 25.

Jeeze Lahweeze!

I pawed through the pile, sorting as I went. Valium, Percocet, Oxycodone, Efexor, Zoloft, Wellbutrin. Emily was stockpiling painkillers and antidepressants. That plus the “Rema-something” she’d just swallowed in the kitchen made six. I wondered if her doctor knew. I wondered if Dante knew.

Ten years ago I would have had a knockdown-drag-out confrontation with my daughter, then tossed the pills one by one down the garbage disposal.

Now? I wanted to bring it up with her, but Emily was no doubt too stressed for anything I could say to register. Knowing how she would feel about my snooping around in her medicine cabinet, I returned the pills to the container and put it back where I’d found it. Eventually I’d end up speaking to Dante about them, especially in light of Emily’s temper tantrums on Monday night. Overwrought and over-medicated, a volatile combination.

I ran the airline comb through my hair, brushed my teeth, and returned to the kitchen, where I found everyone except Emily talking into their cell phones. I poured myself a cup of coffee, trying to pick up the gist of the three one-sided conversations going on around me.

Amanda Crisp was giving directions to someone in Quantico who was going to speak at the press conference at two if he could navigate his way around the ongoing construction on I-95 North.

Connie was issuing instructions to an associate at Kinkos about making “Timmy” buttons. From the deliberate way she spoke, I gathered that English was a second language for the hapless associate. Either that or Kinkos was hiring six-year-olds these days.

Meanwhile, Erika stood at the window, staring into the backyard, cell phone pressed to her right ear, hand covering her left, going-um, ah, no way, my God, you’re shitting me, right?-until I was wild to know what the party on the other end of her cell phone was telling her. Erika had just exploded with a particularly vigorous Oh my God! when my own cell phone burst into the opening bars of Mozart’s Symphony No.40.

That would be Paul.

I took the call in the living room. “What’s up?”

“Just checking in, sweetheart. I’m with Ruth.”

“Where?”

“At Safeway, out near Best Buy. We’ve just finished postering the mall. Dennis is doing south county, and I was thinking if you’d meet us here and pick up some posters, maybe you and Ruth could take care of the grocery stores in Crofton so I can get back to the house in time for the press conference.”

The posters. I swallowed hard. How could I not agree to hang up posters, plaster the whole world with posters if it came to that, for Timmy’s sake?

I must have been quiet for a long time because I heard Paul say, “Hannah? You there?”

“Yes, I’m here.”

“Good. We’ll be waiting in Safeway at the Starbucks counter. I’ll order you a mocha frappaccino for the road,” Paul said, not doubting for a moment that my answer would be yes.

In the time it took me to finish my conversation with Paul, press the End button, and rejoin the other women in the kitchen, Agent Crisp had pulled up a chair and was sitting next to Emily at the computer. Connie stood just behind, sipping from a bottle of springwater. Erika still stood at the window, cell phone glued to her ear.

Agent Crisp glanced up as I entered the room. “Come, take a look at this.”

I’d made it halfway across the kitchen when whatever curiosity I might have had about what Amanda Crisp was looking at was driven straight out of my head by the shrieks of Ms. Erika Rose, Attorney-at-Law. “Why are you just now telling me this, Andrew?”

Four heads swiveled Erika’s way.

“What do you mean you had to keep it under wraps?”

Connie poked my arm and mouthed, What?

I shrugged.

“Ohmahgawd!” said Erika Rose. “Oh. My. God.”

Erika must have sensed four pairs of eyes staring at her, boring into her back, because she turned around about then, wide-eyed, and flapped her free hand in our direction. “That is so fanfuckingtastic!” she said into the phone. “I am so psyched.” And then, “Yeah, yeah. I got it.”

“What?” I said aloud.

“Yeah, what? What?” echoed Connie.

Erika held up her hand, palm out, signaling patience. I didn’t know about the others, but the suspense was killing me. There could have been a breakthrough in the search for Timmy, George Bush could have resigned his presidency, or maybe one of her girlfriends had just gotten engaged. It was impossible to tell.

“Okay,” Erika said, wrapping up the conversation at last. “I’ll be right over.”

With her thumb, Erika pressed down on the End button of her cell phone, a self-satisfied grin spreading across her face. She puffed air out through her mouth. “Sorry, girls, but I have to go.”

Emily leapt to her feet. “Is it Timmy?”

“No, sorry, Em. I would have told you if it were Timmy, you know that.”

“Then, what?” I repeated.

Erika scanned the room until she located her handbag in the corner where she’d tossed it, shouldered the bag, tucked her cell phone into an outside pocket and headed for the kitchen door. “Well, ladies. Something I’ve been working on for quite some time is about to hit the fan big-time, but in a very good way.” She disappeared into the hallway.

We stood there like statues, our mouths slack, staring at the empty space where Erika’s back had just been. “Does that mean we’ve just got one less volunteer?” I asked of no one in particular.

Suddenly, Erika’s face reappeared around the door frame. “You can’t get rid of me that easily, Hannah Ives.” Her teeth flashed white in the dim light. “Watch Cross Current tonight. NBC. Ten o’clock. You will not be sorry.”