Through the Darkness

CHAPTER 16

My daughter screwed up her eyes. “How can you even think about going back to work?”

Dante captured both of Emily’s hands in his and drew them to his chest. “I have to go back, Em, otherwise there won’t be any money to pay the mortgage, or put food on the table. The ladies from St. Catherine’s aren’t going to cook for us in perpetuity, you know.”

Emily jerked her hands away. “You should be ashamed of yourself for deserting Timmy.”

“I’m not deserting our son, Emily. I’m doing what has to be done to maintain the health of my family including my other two children, and if that means returning to work, so be it. All of our money is tied up in Paradiso, you know that. If Paradiso fails, we’re doomed.”

“He’s going back to work,” Emily said to me, ignoring her husband, using the same petulant tone of voice she’d often used with me at the dinner table after an argument with her father: “Please ask your husband to pass the potatoes.”

Dante turned to me, a can’t-live-with-her-can’t-live-without-her look on his face. “Phyllis says some of our investors have threatened to pull out if we don’t open by Monday.”

“I can’t go back to that day care center,” Emily pouted.

“You don’t have to, Em. For the time being I can move Alison over to Puddle Ducks-if you approve, of course. She’s actually a certified teacher.”

“You don’t understand what I’m saying, Dante. I can’t ever go back to it.”

A slight twitch along the jaw, a barely detectable narrowing of the eyes, were the only clues that this news bothered Dante. “Emily. I’ve told you all along. It’s okay for you to stay at home with the children. You don’t have to work your tail off at the spa.”

Emily began to weep quietly. “But I so wanted Paradiso to be a success.” She turned her devastated face to me. “It’s been our dream for so long. We’re so, so close, and now it’s all falling apart.”

I was worried, too. Now that Dante’s grandiose plans for Paradiso seemed to be unraveling, so was his marriage.

I grabbed my daughter’s hand and squeezed it tightly, surprising myself by saying, “Dante’s right, Emily. He’s the driving force behind the spa. You say you want it to succeed, right?”

Emily sucked in her lips and nodded.

“Then he’s got to get back to it.”

Up until then Connie had been sitting quietly in the corner of Emily’s living room. Suddenly she spoke up, putting into motion a carefully orchestrated plan to get Emily out of the house and off Erika’s picket lines. “Anybody up for a movie? Do or Die is playing at the mall. It got good reviews.”

Emily rolled her eyes at her aunt, but at least she had stopped crying. “I don’t feel like going to the movies.”

“Yes, you do,” I said. “It’s all set. Dennis and Connie are taking Chloe and Jake to Chuck E. Cheese’s, and you, your father, and I are going to the mall. We’re having dinner at the food court, we’re going to sneak home-popped corn past the ticket taker, and we’re going to enjoy ourselves for a couple of hours.”

I was enormously grateful that Connie had volunteered for the Chuck E. Cheese’s expedition. Her stomach was far more galvanized than mine.

Reluctantly, Emily agreed to see the new thriller. She left the room to freshen up, and I was pleasantly surprised when she reappeared ten minutes later wearing a flowered sundress and sandals, her face glowing with the first touches of makeup I’d seen on her for days.

On the way to the mall, with Paul driving and Emily sitting in the backseat, it felt like old times, except back then we’d have been singing the traditional family round, “It’s a Small World,” in combination with “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” and laughing hysterically about it. There wasn’t much to laugh about these days.

Paul parked the car near the Borders end of Annapolis Mall. We followed him in and loitered by the large ticket kiosk near Sears while he bought three tickets for the seven-fifteen showing. Tickets safely tucked into his breast pocket, Paul stood on the elevated deck that surrounded the food court, raised both arms as if he were Moses parting the Red Sea, and said, “Divide, and conquer.”

As usual, the food court was a happening sort of place, bustling with men, women, and children, with teens strutting their stuff, showing off for one another and for whoever was on the other end of their cell phones.

I stood in a paralysis of indecision. Salads to the left of me, yogurt to the right. Ichiban, Little Panda, Mickey D’s, and a thousand-and-one varieties of fast food in between. Paul headed off with determination for his monthly cholesterol fix at Steak-Escape, while Emily and I trundled off to see what was being offered on the Chinese buffet. Balancing the food on our trays, we headed back to find a table, catching sight of Paul, who nodded at a vacancy near the escalators that carried movie-goers up to the theaters.

We’d taken only a half dozen steps toward our table when Emily’s voice rasped in my ear. “Mother. Look!” She gestured with her tray. “See that woman over there?”

“Where?” My eyes ping-ponged over the crowd. There were several women in our immediate area, so it was impossible to tell which woman Emily was referring to.

“That one,” she croaked. “The one with the Kiddie Kruzer stroller!”

“Where?” I began, but then I saw what Emily saw. A dark-haired woman about Emily’s age, wearing eyeglasses and a yellow beret, pushing a child in one of the bright red, car-shaped strollers that Westfield management loaned out to mall customers.

“My God, that’s Timmy!” Emily shouted.

“What?” My head snapped around from the woman and her baby to Emily, who stood next to me clutching her tray so tightly that her knuckles had turned white. On the tray, her spicy tofu quivered on its plate, and the ice in her Coca-Cola actually chattered.

As I watched, Emily relaxed her death grip on the tray, and it tumbled end over end, splattering food and drink all over the floor and the Nikes of a teen unfortunate enough to have his legs sprawled in the aisle. Shaking off my restraining hand, she rushed forward.

“Paul!” I yelled, scanning the crowd for my husband. I set my tray down in front of a surprised senior and chased after my daughter.

“Timmy! Timmy!” Emily knocked over chairs, her arms flailing against the sea of humanity that seemed somehow to have closed in around us. “Mother, it’s Timmy!”

When I caught up with her seconds later, Emily was kneeling in front of the stroller. “Timmy, it’s Mommy! Mommy’s here.”

“Ma’am, ma’am,” the child’s mother was saying. “I think you’ve made a mistake.”

The baby in the stroller certainly looked like Timmy, could have been his twin, in fact, except that she was wearing pink overalls and a lace-trimmed shirt. Her mother had drawn the little bit of hair that sprouted from her head into a tiny topknot and secured it there with a beribboned barrette.

“This is Jennifer,” the little girl’s mother said, her voice shaking. “Jenny, can you say hello to the nice lady?” She pulled the stroller toward her protectively.

Emily straightened, her face rigid. “You think a mother doesn’t know her own child? This is Timmy. You took him, and he’s mine.”

The mother, eyes wide and frightened by this nutcase standing in front of her, seemed to be appealing to me for help.

“Emily!” I grabbed my daughter’s arm and held her back until Paul reached us.

“What the hell’s going on here?”

Emily stood her ground. “This woman has kidnapped Timmy, Daddy. She thinks she can fool me just because she dressed him up in little girl’s clothes, but she can’t.”

In the stroller, Jenny said, “Buh buh buh,” waved a nubby rubber rattle in the air, and then began gnawing on it in a way that seemed so familiar that for a few seconds my heart stopped beating altogether.

Could Emily be right?

Paul’s arm snaked around his daughter’s shoulders, his head bent to touch hers. “Emily, you’re upsetting this woman. You’re upsetting her child.”

Jenny, in point of fact, seemed perfectly oblivious to the chaos going on around her, continuing to chew contentedly on her rattle.

“If you’ll excuse me, then,” Jenny’s mother said, giving the stroller a tentative tug in a backward direction. “I need to be going.”

“Not until you give me back Timmy!” Emily surged forward, reaching for the child, but Paul restrained her.

Jenny’s mother backed away, dragging the stroller with her. “Don’t make me call Security,” she snarled.

Paul led Emily to a nearby chair and forced her to sit down on it. She threw her arms across the table, rested her head on them and began to cry, deep wracking sobs that nearly ripped my heart out of my chest.

“Emily.” I knelt on the cool tiles next to my daughter’s chair. “The woman is getting away. Do you want me to grab the baby?”

Paul’s eyebrows shot skyward. “Hannah, are you out of your mind?”

My heart pounding, my breath coming in short gasps as the stroller and the woman in the yellow beret began beating a hasty retreat, I said, “What’s the worst that could happen, Paul? The police come. The child is not Timmy. News at eleven: distraught mother of kidnapped child makes terrible mistake. Apologies all around. Everybody goes home.”

Emily turned her tearstained face to me, her eyes wide, pupils dilated. No telling what she was high on this time.

“Emily, are you sure that’s Timmy?”

“I don’t knooooooow,” Emily howled.

Behind her, her father looked at me pleadingly and mouthed the word pills.

I had been fully prepared to snatch the child and damn the consequences, but without Emily to back me up, I felt my resolve waver.

I glanced from my daughter to Jenny’s mother, who was negotiating a difficult three-point turn between the closely spaced tables and chairs of the food court. As she pushed off in the direction of Greenleaf Grille, the crowd separating us suddenly seemed to thicken. I looked to my left, where the escalator was disgorging a steady stream of moviegoers into the food court. One of the features, perhaps several of them, had just let out, and Jenny’s mother’s yellow beret was rapidly disappearing into the boisterous throng.

“Paul?” I whispered. When I had his full attention, I said, “When she calms down, take Emily into Borders or something. I’ll meet you there.”

Before Paul could reply, I took off, following the woman with the fire-engine-red Kiddie Kruzer that may or may not have contained my grandson as she pushed it up the ramp that led out of the food court. I trailed the yellow beret as it bobbed past CVS, stopped for a few seconds to look into the window of the Disney store, and hurried along to the Gap for Kids.

At Lord and Taylor, I nearly lost it. I stood at the cross aisles, gazing frantically in four directions, before spotting the beret again outside Build-a-Bear. Jenny’s mother was kneeling next to the stroller, pointing out to her daughter a stuffed Easter duck perched on a block in the window. She certainly didn’t look like a woman with something to hide, but I continued to follow her anyway, as she wandered through the linens department of JCPenney. She ditched the stroller at the door and carried Jenny in her arms into the vast wilderness of the parking lot.

I followed at a discreet distance, weaving and ducking between parked cars, keeping one eye on them all the while I was scrabbling blindly in my purse for a pen and a scrap of paper-any paper-to write on.

Jenny’s mother unlocked the door of a white Toyota Corolla, put Jenny into the backseat, fussed for a moment-presumably buckling the child in-then climbed into the car herself and backed out of the parking spot.

As the Toyota approached, I jotted down its license number on the back of a business card some guy named Ed had given me when I considered availing myself of his stump removal service. I stepped aside to let the Toyota pass, staring at the driver’s profile, trying to memorize it. But I didn’t need to memorize it. Just as she turned the corner, I realized with absolutely certainty that I had seen the woman before. But where?

We took Emily to see a doctor after that.

He talked with her for fifty minutes, and sent her home with a legitimate prescription for something she already had samples of in her medicine cabinet.

I held on to Ed’s business card with Jenny’s mother’s license number scrawled on the back of it and wondered what to do.

“Leave no tern unstoned,” would have been my husband’s advice.

My late mother would have said, “Follow your instincts.”

Emily, had she been saying anything, rather than sleeping soundly courtesy of the good doctor, would have said, “Go for it, Mom.”

So I did what anyone with a police lieutenant for a brother-in-law would have done. I called him, at home this time rather than on his cell, interrupting his dinner, or almost interrupting his dinner, since he mentioned that Connie was still fixing it.

“I have a big favor to ask, Dennis.”

“Should I hang up now, or wait to hear what the favor is before hanging up?”

I ignored the jab. “You heard about what happened at the mall last night?”

“My niece practically assaulted some poor woman with a child who looked like Timmy? Connie told me.”

“Exactly. But Dennis, here’s the thing. As I was looking at that little girl, all my bells and whistles were going off. I felt so strongly about it that I nearly snatched the kid. But I decided to follow the woman instead, although taking the time to look at stuffed animals through the window of Build-a-Bear isn’t exactly fleeing in panic, I suppose.

“Dennis, I’ve been thinking about it all night,” I rattled on, “and I’ve almost convinced myself that the child she calls Jenny is actually Timmy. But even if Jenny isn’t Timmy, even if I’m dead wrong, it wouldn’t hurt to check it out.”

“Check what out?” Dennis sounded wary.

“I followed the mother to the parking lot, and I have her license plate number.”

“Absolutely not.”

“But, Dennis, what harm could it do? Looking up a license plate number would hardly get you into trouble.”

“Hannah, what you’re really asking me for is the name of the owner of that vehicle. And if I give it to you, the next thing I know you’ll be knocking on her door, asking questions. Are you just itching to be charged with harassment? Or stalking?”

“I’d happily do hard time for assault and battery if it brought Timmy home.”

“Sorry. I just can’t do it.”

“How about I give you the number anyway?”

“No.”

“Please?”

“No.”

“It’s Maryland plate BBL6K4.”

“I’m hanging up now, Hannah.”

“Will you put Connie on?” But the line went dead.

I hung up in satisfaction. Knowing Dennis, he would be running that number through the DMV computers before five minutes had elapsed. He’d share what he found with the FBI, too. But just in case he didn’t, I telephoned Agent Crisp and left a message on her machine.

Sitting in my own kitchen with the muffled sounds of children’s laughter wafting up from the basement playroom where they were playing Chutes and Ladders with their grandfather, I brewed myself a cup of Lady Grey and sat down to think.

Staring into the amber liquid, I ran through my catalog of friends and acquaintances-Naval Academy wives, Go Navy/Beat Cancer team, St. John’s College friends, St. Catherine’s congregants, fellow survivors. I didn’t keep up much with my former colleagues at Whitworth and Sullivan, but I knew that one of them, a research librarian named Sallee Garner, might have some contacts.

Did I have any IOUs I could call in? I nibbled on a biscotti.

Duh! I’d once worked as a data consultant at Victory Mutual, a national insurance firm with its headquarters in Annapolis. Even after I left, its office manager, Donna Hudgins, and I had remained friends.

I located the phone book, looked up Donna’s home number, and made the call. “Hey Donna. Long time.”

“It sure has been,” she replied, her voice serious. “I’ve been following the story about your grandson’s disappearance in the paper. How’s everyone holding up?”

“Poorly,” I said, truthfully. “My daughter, Emily, was hovering on the brink anyway, but when the FBI said they were pulling out, she took it as a sign they were giving up, and I think that pushed her right on over.”

“What do you mean, the FBI is pulling out?”

“Not off the case. They’ve had a crisis management team at the house for four days, which is one more than is customary, but since there hasn’t been a ransom demand, they decided to pack it in. They’ve taken the team back to the office, where they have the resources to focus all their efforts on locating Timmy, rather than negotiating with his kidnapper.”

Then Donna said the magic words. “I wish there was something I could do to help.”

“Actually, that’s why I’m calling.” I told Donna about seeing the woman and the child who looked like Timmy in the mall, and how I was dying to know who the woman was. “My brother-in-law thinks I’m out of my mind,” I added.

“Hannah, you are the sanest person I know. Impulsive, maybe. But totally sane.”

So, I read Donna the license plate number.

“I don’t have direct access to the database myself,” she said as she jotted it down, “but I know someone who does. Can I call you right back?”

“Sure.”

So I waited. Puttering. Wiping down the kitchen counters with a damp cloth. Organizing the magnets on my refrigerator door by shape and by color.

When the phone rang about ten minutes later, I nearly jumped out of my slipper socks.

“Got a pen?” Donna asked.

“You bet,” I said, my heart hammering.

“Okay. Here it is, but you didn’t get it from me.”

“Get what from you?”

“Funny girl. Anyway, that plate is registered to a Joanna Barnhorst, 303-B Scott Circle. Do you know where that is?”

“Off Bestgate Road?”

“Right. She drives a Toyota Corolla, white in color. Right?”

“Bingo!” I said, enormously relieved that I’d gotten the number right. The car Donna described was a perfect match to the one I’d seen Joanna Barnhorst driving. “Donna, I can’t thank you enough.”

“Good luck, Hannah. And how about lunch soon?”

After I made a date for lunch in two weeks time and said good-bye to Donna, I sat back in my chair, staring at the name I’d written down: Joanna Barnhorst.

I’d never heard of her.

I tripped downstairs to the computer room and Googled “Joanna Barnhorst.” Except for some genealogical data going back to the 1830s, and a girl who was a star lacrosse player for her high school in New Jersey, there was nothing. I considered clicking on a link for one of those fee-based background check services, but what good would information about the woman’s credit history do me? It was probably a rip-off anyway.

While I was on the computer, I located the Barnhorst apartment on Mapquest. Joanna Barnhorst’s condo was just off Medical Drive, one of a series of condominium developments that had sprung up like weeds along the cut-through from Bestgate to Jennifer Road when the hospital moved from downtown Annapolis to a multi-acre campus that adjoined the mall in Parole. A good move for the hospital, I felt sure, but not for the patient suffering a heart attack if the ambulance got stuck in traffic during the holiday shopping season.

I flopped back in my desk chair. I wanted to run right out to Scott Circle, bang on Barnhorst’s door, and demand to see her child. Except it was nearly dark.

First thing in the morning I’d get Paul to run the carpool. Then I’d check this Barnhorst woman out.