Through the Darkness

CHAPTER 20

I certainly didn’t set out to wreck my daughter’s marriage, but the look of pure loathing she sent Dante’s way when the words “Joanna Barnhorst” passed over my lips will be tattooed on my brain forever.

Emily tossed the picture she was holding across the table at her husband. “So this is your former girlfriend,” she sneered. “I always wondered what she looked like.”

Dante turned the photograph face down without even looking at it. “She means nothing to me, Emily. After seven years of marriage and three beautiful children, surely you know that.”

“I once had three children,” Emily whispered in a long, long ago and faraway tone of voice, as if she were reading the first line of a Victorian novel.

Across the table from his wife, Dante paled.

“If she means so little to you, darling, honeylamb, sugarpie, how come you were so hot to give her a job at Paradiso?”

“Correction. FranÇois was lobbying to give her a job, not me. He said he felt sorry for her.”

“Oh, puh-leeze, give me credit for a little intelligence, will you?”

Dante massaged his temples with his fingers, as if trying to erase the pain. In my opinion, my son-in-law had a lot of explaining to do, but I feared that what Emily was about to say might poison the well forever.

“So, you turned her down,” she continued, relentless.

“Right.”

“You sent her away.”

“Yes.”

Dante closed his eyes and rested his head against the back of his chair as the significance of what he’d just said sunk in.

“And she came back that Monday?”

“I don’t know, Emily. You may recall that I was tied up with that reporter. If Joanna came back, I certainly didn’t see her.”

As much as I hated to fan the flames, I felt I had to jump in and set the record straight. “She did come back, Dante. She stuck her head into the office for a second while I was sitting there. She was looking for you.”

“My God.” Emily practically screamed the words.

“Em-” Dante began, but Emily interrupted him.

“What on earth would make Joanna kidnap Timmy? I have tons of ex-boyfriends,” she added maliciously, “but as far as I know, none of them ever tried to kidnap my children!”

Dante leaned forward and pressed his hands between his knees, as if trying to control their shaking. “I don’t know, Emily. I dated the woman. When I met you, I broke up with her. End of story.”

“Apparently not,” my daughter said.

Dante turned to me. “Did Joanna say what she wanted?”

“Just that she was looking for you.”

Dante exploded. “Jesus Christ! I’ll kill her. I swear to God I’m going to kill her. Where did you say she’s living?”

“She’s got an apartment out on Bestgate Road.”

Dante bolted from his chair, and considering the black mood he was in, took Emily surprisingly gently by the arm. “Let’s go.”

Emily shook his hand away. “You go. I’m going to call the FBI.”

“Stay put,” I told them. “The FBI is already on it. Agent Crisp told me that when she warned me against stalking Joanna.”

“The hell with that! Come on, Emily!”

Emily glanced from me to her husband. I suspected she would have gone off with him, too, but was saved from making any decision by the sound of my cell phone, chirping its buttons off to the tune of “Old McDonald Had a Farm” from my purse, which was sitting on the landing.

“Connie?” By the time I reached the phone and punched the Talk button, I must have sounded breathless.

Connie sounded breathless, too. “Joanna’s packed up Timmy and the suitcases, Hannah, and she’s on the move. I’m right behind her on Route 50, heading west. Unless I miss my guess, she’s heading for New Carrollton.”

New Carrollton station, at the intersection of Route 50 and I-495, better known as the Capital Beltway. From there, Joanna Barnhorst could take a train, or bus, or hop on the Metro. My bet was on the train.

Thinking about Amanda Crisp and her FBI team who were supposed to be on the case 24/7, I asked, “Have you seen any Ford Tauruses in the vicinity? Crown Vics?”

“You think I noticed that?”

“Right. Silly question. Best to hedge our bets, then. Stick with her,” I said, “We’re on our way.”

Except when the children were in the car, my son-in-law drove like Dale Earnhardt, Junior, and had four points on his license to prove it. In his present state of mind, I had doubts we’d arrive in one piece with Dante at the wheel, so I insisted on driving while my daughter yelled encouragement from the backseat. “Can’t you go any faster?”

I pulled into the HOV lane. “If I go any faster, I’ll get stopped for speeding, and where would that get us?”

From a spot in the console, my cell phone chirped again. “You get it,” I told Dante as I overtook and passed a truck on the right.

Dante clapped the phone to his ear. “Yeah?” He listened for a few seconds, then turned to me and said, “It’s Connie reporting in. Joanna’s in the parking garage at New Carrollton, so it’s either the Metro or the train.”

“Jeeze.” I slammed my foot down on the accelerator. The speedometer shot up to a terrifying eighty. In the backseat, Emily kept muttering faster-faster-faster under her breath, nearly driving me insane. Nevertheless, I made it from the Annapolis city limits to the Capital Beltway in a record fifteen minutes. I shot right off the highway and onto the exit ramp, crossed over the Beltway, ruined my shock absorbers by taking a series of diabolical speed bumps way too fast, pulled past the taxi rank and into the Kiss and Ride.

As we climbed out of the car, Dante still had Connie on the line. “Where’s she now?” he hissed into the phone. “There’s a train for Florida in ten minutes,” he reported while punching the End button with his thumb. “Connie thinks that Barnhorst will be on it. Let’s go!”

With Dante in the lead, we charged through the double glass doors and into the train station. Just inside, Dante stopped cold, so abruptly that we piled into him. We were all looking around for Connie.

I spotted her first, over by the automated ticket machines.

“Thank goodness you’re here. I thought I’d have to buy a ticket.”

Connie pointed to a row of seats near the women’s restroom where Joanna Barnhorst sat with Timmy in her arms. The very picture of motherhood, she was rocking him gently.

Dressing Timmy for their journey, she’d abandoned the pink theme. My grandson was dressed in yellow overalls and a white top with a picture of Nemo the clownfish embroidered on it. I recognized it as one of the outfits she’d bought for him at Sam’s Club earlier in what was turning out to be the longest day of my life.

While I was mindlessly admiring Tim’s new outfit, Emily streaked past me in a fury. She stopped dead in front of Joanna Barnhorst and stood there, solid as a tree and about as movable. “Give me back my child.”

Joanna looked up with what could only be described as a demented smile on her face. “She’s my child. I told you that before. Don’t you listen?”

“I’m telling you one more time. Give me back my baby, or I’m going to take him away from you.”

Joanna clasped the sleeping child to her chest, burying his chubby face in her bosom. “No. She’s mine.”

Dante surged forward. “Joanna, whatever I may have done to you, Timmy doesn’t deserve to be taken away from his mother.”

Still holding Timmy, Joanna stood up and tried to sidestep the pair of them. “You should have thought about that a long time ago,” she snapped.

“Give Timmy back now, Joanna.”

“No!”

I didn’t expect what happened next. Emily’s hand shot out and struck Joanna a stinging blow across the cheek.

“Help!” Joanna screamed. “They’re trying to steal my baby!”

In the confusion, Emily snatched Timmy from Joanna’s arms and bolted for the door, with Joanna close behind yelling, “Stop! Stop!”

At the door, Emily suddenly whirled. With one hand, she grabbed the bib of Timmy’s brand new overalls and ripped them off. Then she tore off his disposable diaper. Holding Timmy aloft, naked except for his t-shirt, waving her child back and forth before the astonished room of waiting passengers like an oscillating fan, she yelled, “What did you say your daughter’s name was, Joanna?” She lifted Timmy higher, like a trophy, and consulted the crowd. “Does this look like a little girl to you?”

“Not with that pecker on him,” muttered a drunk who had, until recently, been snoozing on one of the chairs.

Abruptly awakened from a sound sleep, and undoubtedly cold, Timmy began to howl.

“My baby, my baby,” Joanna crooned, clawing at her own clothing.

On the arrivals and departures board mounted high on the wall above the glassed-in ticket counters, the letters that spelled out the train schedule clattered into their new positions with a sound like playing cards slapping on bicycle spokes. The Florida train had arrived at the station, the letters announced, but no one made a move to get on board. As Emily crowed and Timmy screamed, the crowd continued to grow, forming a semicircle around them.

Suddenly, someone pushed me forcefully aside.

“What the heck’s going on here?” a security guard demanded to know.

Grabbing onto the security guard for support, Joanna sobbed, “They’re stealing my baby.”

“No we’re not,” Emily insisted in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. “Timmy is our child. Dante’s and mine.”

I pushed forward through the crowd to put in my two cents worth. “Have you heard about the Shemansky kidnapping?” I asked the guard.

“The what?”

“Jesus Christ!” Dante exclaimed. “It’s been on TV and in all the papers. After all the publicity, you’d think that a security guard,” he skewered the guard with his eyes and emphasized each word, “that a security guard at a municipal train station, for Christ’s sake, would be up to speed on it.”

Dante reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a square of paper, unfolded it, and shoved the paper-a missing poster for Timmy-under the guard’s bulbous and red-veined nose. “This child,” Dante snarled.

Safe in his mother’s arms at last, Timmy had stopped crying and buried his head in the crook of her neck. The guard examined the poster, then looked up, his eyes moving from child to the poster, child to the poster, and back again. “Could be,” he said after an eternity had passed.

Dante exploded. “Can’t you fucking read, man? Red hair, green eyes, thirty pounds. Get me a goddamn scale and I’ll prove it to you!”

Ignoring my son-in-law’s tendency toward profanity, the guard handed back the poster. “Look, I ain’t no expert at identifying babies. They all look like Elmer Fudd to me.”

“If you don’t believe my husband,” Emily said, “take a look at this.” Using the arm that wasn’t holding Timmy, she eased her hand into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a piece of paper that I recognized as a photocopy of Timmy’s footprints, the ones they’d taken at the hospital the day he was born.

The guard waved the evidence away. “I ain’t no fingerprint expert, either, lady.”

Dante had reached the end of his rope. He yanked out his cell phone, and as I watched, he dialed 911.

In the meantime, I was placing a call to Agent Crisp, mentally bracing myself for another stinging lecture. “We’ve found Timmy,” I told her. “We’re at New Carrollton station.”

“I know,” Crisp said. “We’re on our way. I’ve called for backup.”

While we were distracted with our respective calls, Joanna tried an end run, facing the guard directly and screaming into his face. “He’s mine, I tell you.”

The guard’s face grew red. “Sit down, lady! I ain’t no King Solomon, either. We’ll let the police sort this one out.” And he made a third call on his Nextel.

“You’re not fooling anyone now, Joanna,” Dante said gently as Joanna took the guard’s advice and sat. “It’s all over. You can keep up this charade for an hour, maybe two, but we both know that it’s over.”

Joanna began to sob.

“DNA tests will prove it, you know that. They’ll prove Timmy’s ours beyond a shadow of any doubt.”

Joanna laced her fingers together and stared at them, tears coursing down her cheeks. “He should have been mine. He should have been mine.”

“What the hell’s she talking about?” Connie whispered.

“She’s just sick and confused,” I suggested.

But when Agent Crisp arrived a few minutes later with Agent Brown in tow, Joanna collapsed like a punctured tire. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered as she wiped at her streaming nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t know why I did it. It’s just that when I walked by the nursery and saw that little boy lying there so peacefully, something came over me, and I took him.”

Amanda Crisp nodded, and Norm Brown took Joanna’s arm. “Joanna Barnhorst, you are under arrest for kidnapping.” As he read the unfortunate woman her Miranda rights, Joanna seemed barely to be listening. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Her cheeks still glistening with tears, Joanna nodded.

The crowd parted to let them pass, and everyone’s head turned in her direction as Agent Brown led Joanna away.

I was watching, too, and as the door swooshed shut behind them, I heard one last plaintive cry. “He should have been mine.”

“You know Joanna better than anyone else here,” I ventured, turning to my son-in-law. “What do you think she means?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

And the funny thing was, even after everything that had happened, I believed him.

“That’s it, everyone. Show’s over!” The guard waved his arms as if flagging down a semi. “Either get on the train or go home.”

Dante turned to Agent Crisp. “That’s it? We can take Timmy home?”

Crisp beamed. “Take your son home, Mr. Shemansky.”