Through the Darkness

CHAPTER 6

“Where are they? What’s keeping them?”

Paul squeezed my hand. “It’s been less than five minutes, Hannah. They’ll be here soon.”

Less than five minutes. It had seemed like hours since Paul punched 911 into his cell phone, then dragged me out onto the veranda of Paradiso by the arm, insisting that I get some fresh air.

“Emily needs me-” I began.

“Right now, I think she needs her husband more.”

Just moments before, while Paul changed back into his street clothes, I’d persuaded my daughter to lie down on the massage table in Garnelle’s studio, where Garnelle had placed a cool, aromatic compress on her forehead. We’d left Dante sitting on a chair next to the table, stroking Emily’s hand. Every time she struggled to sit up, he’d gently force her to stay put.

“I can’t believe this is happening, Paul. Emily knew I was working in the office! Puddle Ducks has a telephone. Why didn’t she call and ask me to watch Timmy for a few minutes?”

Paul wrapped his arms around me, drew me close and rested his chin on the top of my head. “Emily will probably never stop asking herself that question. But at this point, I can’t think of anything more counterproductive. She didn’t, so you couldn’t, so here we are.”

My cheek felt hot against the cool, clean-smelling fabric of his shirt, until I began to dampen it with a fresh waterfall of tears. I couldn’t help it. Images of Timmy kept flashing through my mind like a slide show: Timmy’s mischievous green eyes; the white stub of a tooth just breaking through the gum on his lower jaw; his gurgly laugh. “I’m crazy about that little boy!” I sobbed. “If anyone hurts Timmy, I’ll kill them. I swear to God I’ll rip them apart with my bare hands!”

Paul’s arms tightened around me. “And I’ll help you to it. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, Hannah. Let’s pray the police can find Tim and bring him safely home.”

I dabbed at my eyes with the sleeve of my shirt and stared out over the Chesapeake Bay, but the calm beauty of the sun-dappled water, the cloudless blue sky, and even the gulls reeling leisurely overhead failed to soothe me as they usually did.

Farther down the drive, I could see Norman Salterelli guarding the gates as I had asked him to, a formidable mountain of muscle and sinew barely contained by the black spandex workout clothes he wore. “Do you think they got past Norman?” I wondered aloud.

Paul grunted. “Nobody gets by Norman.”

In point of fact, nobody-not spa employees nor their clients-seemed anxious to challenge the body builder. Perhaps drawn by morbid curiosity, several dozen folks still lounged about the garden, milled around the patio or loitered on the beach, showing little inclination to go back inside and fetch their things. If anybody wondered why they couldn’t see flames or smell smoke, they didn’t mention it.

The parking lot remained full, too. I noticed several individuals hanging around their vehicles, as if waiting for the alarm to stop ringing and the all clear to sound so they could get on with their business.

A clean-cut military type, wearing his tools as proudly as a gun belt, paced next to a green and white van marked THOS. SOMERVILLE CO. François told me he’d been waiting for a repairman to fix a malfunctioning thermostat in the dishwasher, so I figured that had to be the guy. “H2O Tommy” waited, too, the five-gallon bottles of springwater he had been planning to deliver staying cool in his truck.

A twenty-something gal wearing a blue windbreaker and tennis togs, looking wholesome in a L.L. Bean sort of way, sat sideways in the driver’s seat of a Volkswagen Jetta with the door open, her feet resting on the ground on either side of her gym bag. I glared at her suspiciously. Wasn’t that bag big enough to hide an infant the size of Timmy? I had just made up my mind to ask Paul what he thought about her when the young woman shrugged out of her jacket, leaned over, unzipped the bag, and stuffed the windbreaker into it. Then she stood, stretched, and plopped the gym bag on top of the VW. I sighed. Not a kidnapper. Just a dingaling who was going to drive off and forget about that bag sitting on her roof. In my youth I’d lost a fancy new camera that way.

A Toyota Camry and a BMW wagon’s distance away from the Jetta, another man who looked vaguely familiar rested his backside against the hood of a late model, gold Chevy Malibu. I’d been wondering about him for a while, too, and just as I heard the wail of the first siren, the penny dropped. It was Eva’s husband, Roger Haberman, who had arrived for his interview. I hoped Roger would be happy with his job at the marina a little while longer because he sure as hell wouldn’t get hired at Spa Paradiso today. Maybe not any day, the way things were going now.

“Looks like the police beat the fire brigade,” Paul murmured into my hair as a two-toned blue Anne Arundel County police car sped up the drive. It was followed by a second patrol car, lights flashing and sirens screaming. Seconds later a ladder truck from Eastport wheeled up the drive and, hot on its tail, the three-thousand-gallon water supply tanker engine the county keeps at the city’s Forest Drive facility.

Paul kissed my hair, then released me to lope down the steps and speak to the officer. The officer, in turn, jogged down the drive to consult with the firemen, several of whom had already dismounted from their trucks dressed in full fire-fighting regalia. After a few moments the driver of the tanker engine removed his fire hat and set it on the seat of the vehicle, then accompanied Paul and the police officers up the drive, zeroing in on me as if they knew I was the guilty party who had called in the false alarm.

“I’m sorry,” I said before anyone could admonish me. “It’s my ten-month-old grandson who’s missing. Pulling the alarm was the only way I could think of to flush everyone out of the building so we could search for him.” I was already feeling a twinge of regret for all the man-hours I wasted when a white and yellow EMS vehicle pulled in next to the ladder truck, adding to the blockade, and my vague sense of remorse. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

One of the policemen stepped forward. “We’ve met before, Mrs. Ives. I’m Ron Powers, and this is Officer Will Dunham and Captain Tom May of the Annapolis Fire Department.”

“Of course, I remember you,” I said, extending my hand. The last time I’d seen Officer Powers, he’d rescued me from a wrecked van after some crooks had taken me and my friend, Naddie Bromley, on a high-speed chase up Interstate 97. I recognized the serious gray eyes, but Powers had shaved his mustache since we’d said good-bye to one another in the emergency room after the crash, and somewhere along the way his chin had acquired a half-inch scar that only emphasized the resolute squareness of his jaw.

“So, there’s no fire.” It was a statement, not a question.

“No fire.”

Powers turned to Captain May. “The ladder and the tanker can head back, Tom, but we may need an EMT, so ask them to stick around, will you? Is there someplace inside where we can talk?” he asked, addressing Paul rather than me.

“They have a conference room.”

“That would be fine.”

As I led the officers into Paradiso, Powers asked, “You said it’s your grandson who is missing. Are you his caretaker?”

“No, my daughter and her husband run this spa. Timmy disappeared from the day care center when my daughter stepped out of the room for a minute.”

Disappeared. I couldn’t bring myself to use the word taken. Even then, as irrational as it seemed, I must have harbored some small hope that Timmy had escaped from his playpen, crawled off on some private infant adventure, and would be found napping quietly behind a curtain, say, or nestled comfortably in a pile of towels. But it was going on an hour past his feeding time, in which case Timmy-never one to pass up a meal-would most certainly have been howling from whatever hidey hole he’d gotten himself into.

“Has anyone been in the day care center since your daughter found the child missing?”

“No, just me. Emily…” I started to explain about Emily being called away to the loading dock, but what would that have accomplished? Making lame excuses for my daughter wouldn’t bring Timmy back. I lowered my eyes to avoid Ron Powers’s unblinking, uncompromising gaze. Don’t these people read the newspaper? Watch television? His eyes were accusing. Never leave a child unattended. Never!

“Would you like to see it?” I asked.

Powers nodded, then turned to Paul. “Mr. Ives, while your wife takes me to the day care center, will you show Officer Dunham to the conference room, then locate the child’s parents and have them meet me there in, say, ten minutes?”

Reluctantly, or so it seemed to me, Paul released my hand. His lips brushed my cheek. “Are you going to be okay?”

“I think so, Paul. I’m doing something, at least. That helps a little.”

Two minutes later I wasn’t so sure. I escorted Officer Powers to Puddle Ducks, but once there, I found I couldn’t go in. Even though the lights were on and the afternoon sun streamed through the French doors, the nursery seemed dark, the cheerful murals making a mockery of the playpen, its vast emptiness burning like a hole in the center of the room.

Officer Powers produced latex gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. He circled Timmy’s playpen, bent at the waist and peered into it, but didn’t touch anything. “Is that Timmy’s toy?” he asked, pointing a latex finger at Lamby.

“Yes. He won’t go to sleep without…” I paused, too choked up to continue. I turned my head away, concentrated on the painting of Jemima Puddle Duck, and fought back my tears. Dear God, let us find Timmy. Let him sleep in his own crib tonight, with Lamby by his side.

Powers crossed over to the French doors. “Were these doors locked?”

“I don’t know. They were closed, though. I’m sure of that.”

Powers straightened. “They aren’t locked now.”

Did I imagine it, or was there disapproval in his tone, an unspoken but they should have been?

“Does Spa Paradiso have a Code Adam in place?” Powers asked as he gazed through the windows to the patio and the woods beyond.

“Code Adam?” It wasn’t until I said the words aloud that it occurred to me what they meant. Code Adam. Adam had to stand for Adam Walsh. “Is it named for that child who was abducted in Florida?”

“Right.”

Six-year-old Adam Walsh had been found murdered. Every parent’s nightmare, a horror too terrible to contemplate. “What exactly is a Code Adam?”

“Best thing ever to come out of Wal-Mart,” Powers explained as he opened the door to the supply closet and peered in. “Now more and more stores are following their example. When a customer reports a missing kid to a store employee, they get a description and broadcast a Code Adam over the P.A. Everything stops while they look for the kid, and employees monitor all the exits to keep the kid from leaving the store.” He shut the door firmly. “A Code Adam foiled a kidnapping out at the Barnes & Noble in Harbour Center last month,” he added.

“I think that’s what I had in mind when I reached for the handle on the fire alarm,” I said, not the least bit apologetically. “I know the contractor has installed the equipment and the wiring for a P.A. system in the spa, but I don’t think they’ve finished with it yet.”

Officer Powers’s index finger swung in an arc from one corner of the room to the other, pointing out a pair of surveillance cameras that I hadn’t noticed before. “Are those working?”

My heart, quite literally, skipped a beat. If someone had snatched Timmy from his playpen, what a godsend those cameras would be! But I didn’t hold out much hope of that. The same outfit that installed the public address system was supposed to be installing the monitoring station for the surveillance cameras, and as late as last week, Dante had told me they had been waiting for parts.

“I don’t know, Officer Powers. You’ll have to ask my son-in-law.”

Powers grunted, then circled the room once again, more slowly this time, checking out the furniture and the toys and the games while the second hand on the clock ticked relentlessly on. It was maddening how slowly the man was moving.

“We’ll need to seal off this room until the evidence technicians can get here,” he said at long last. “Can this door be locked?”

“Emily has a key.”

“Good. Why don’t you go get it, then. I’ll wait here until you get back.”

Grateful that something was going to be done that involved the active collection of evidence, I hustled off to the conference room, where I found only Garnelle and my daughter. Emily was sitting bolt upright in a chair, stiff as a poker and about as responsive. From her ramblings, I deduced that the key was in her purse, but she didn’t have the slightest idea where that purse might be.

“Where’s Dante?” I asked Garnelle, who was standing at the refreshment station, fixing a mug of coffee. “And my husband?”

“Outside with Officer Dunham.” Garnelle added a generous amount of milk and two packets of sugar to the coffee, stirred, and brought it over to Emily. “Here you go, honey. Drink some of this.”

Emily wrapped both hands around the mug but made no move to drink it.

“They’re taking down names, addresses, and telephone numbers,” Garnelle added. “Then Dunham says they’ll start letting people go home.”

As if they knew we were talking about them, Paul and Dante suddenly appeared, followed by Officer Dunham. “Reinforcements have arrived, thank God,” Paul announced, coming to stand by my side.

“Officer Powers needs to secure the nursery,” I informed my son-in-law. “Can you take him a key?”

Dante executed a rapid U-turn and left the room.

A few minutes later he was back, accompanied by Ron Powers. “Everyone take a seat,” Powers ordered, taking charge.

“Coffee?” asked Garnelle.

“Yes, thank you. That would be nice. Black, no sugar… Okay,” he continued, accepting the steaming mug from Garnelle. “So, who was the last person to see the child?”

Emily blew her nose noisily into a tissue. “The child’s name is Timmy.”

“Sorry. Timmy. Who was the last person to see Timmy?”

“I was,” Emily snuffled.

“And that was, what time?”

“Five minutes after one.”

I glanced at my watch. Two o’clock. Timmy had been missing for nearly an hour.

Powers looked up from the notes he was scribbling with a ballpoint pen into a slender, flip-top notebook. “Anybody else see the little, uh, Timmy, in the nursery?”

Emily shot out of her chair. “What difference does it make who else saw him? I saw him!”

I started to say that I had seen Timmy, but then I remembered that I hadn’t. I’d accompanied Paul to reception, then gone straight to Dante’s office. I’d not stopped by the nursery at all, knowing that I’d be going there later to play with Timmy.

Powers turned to my son-in-law and asked, “And where were you between one and one-thirty this afternoon, Mr. Shemansky?”

Dante bristled. “Surely you don’t think that I-”

“I’m just trying to establish where everyone was at the time Timmy disappeared,” Powers insisted. “I’ll be asking everyone the same question.”

Dante looked only slightly mollified. “I was right here, being interviewed by a reporter from Shape magazine. Hope Katz. Last time I saw her, she was heading for the garden with everyone else.”

François appeared at the conference room door carrying a fresh carafe of coffee and a plate of sandwiches. He paused on the threshold, as if waiting for permission to enter. “I thought you could use something to eat.”

When nobody said anything, François crossed the room and placed the plate of sandwiches on the credenza next to me. I recognized his turkey wraps with apples and cabbage; his sweet potato and portabella wrap; his famous crustless, almond-butter finger sandwiches. My stomach lurched, and I pushed the platter away. If I took a single bite, even of one of François’s delectable sandwiches, I knew I’d throw up.

“And you are?” Powers asked, his eyes following the platter.

François favored the officer with a withering glance. He flourished the carafe, the hot liquid slopping dangerously close to its lip. “Do you mind if I set it down first?”

Powers flapped his hand dismissively, waiting.

François exchanged the full carafe for the empty one, then pulled himself up to his full six-foot-two. “I am François Lesperance, executive chef at Spa Paradiso.”

“And where were you, Mr. Lesperance, between one and one-thirty today?”

“In the kitchen, supervising the lunch preparation. You may check with my staff.”

Powers scribbled something, then turned to Paul, one eyebrow raised.

Paul alibied for Garnelle and vice versa.

Dante, who had been growing increasingly red-faced as he sat in a corner, fidgeting with a pencil, suddenly erupted. “What the hell does any of this have to do with finding Timmy, you asshole! The longer you screw around with us here, the farther away the SOB who took Timmy can get with him.”

Emily chimed in. “Other than wasting time asking us damn fool questions, what the hell are you doing, anyway?”

I sighed. At least they were agreeing on something.

If Powers was upset by their insults, he didn’t show it. “Let me assure you that we’re doing everything within our powers to return your son to you,” he said calmly. “There’s only one road in and out of the Bay Ridge community. The minute we learned the nature of your 911 call, we set up a roadblock at the entrance. We’ve been stopping every car coming out of your community.”

“Aren’t you going to issue an Amber Alert? Whoever took Tim could be miles away by now!”

Powers shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another. “Once we determine that an abduction has occurred-”

“What?” I thought Dante would fly across the room and attack the man. “Of course an abduction has occurred, you moron!”

Paul laid a restraining hand on Dante’s arm. “It won’t help to insult the officer.”

Dante’s eyes blazed. “This is such bullshit!”

Emily glared. “They always suspect the parents.”

I waved both hands in the air. “Time out!” When I had everyone’s attention, I turned to the officer and said, “I know you’re just doing your job, Officer Powers, and that you have to eliminate us as suspects, but I think I speak for everyone in this room when I say that we’re all willing to take a lie detector test to prove we had absolutely nothing to do with Timmy’s disappearance. Once that’s out of the way, you can move on to other more promising suspects.”

“Test me right now,” Emily insisted. “Get the guy with the polygraph down here right now and let’s do it!”

“I’ll arrange it,” Powers said. “In the meantime, do you have a recent picture of the chi-Timmy?”

A worried glance passed between Emily and Dante. “We’ve just moved here, and most of our pictures are still packed.”

I reached into my purse and pulled out a wallet-sized photograph of my grandson. “I took that picture last week,” I said, handing it over, feeling a deep sense of loss as Timmy’s image slipped from my fingers to his. In the photograph, Timmy was dressed in a white and blue sailor suit, posed next to Coco, their chocolate Labradoodle. Coco wore Tim’s sailor cap lopsidedly between his floppy ears. “Can you crop out the dog?”

Powers nodded, and tucked the photograph carefully between the pages of his notebook. “If, as I suspect, Timmy was taken away in a vehicle, it would help if we had a description of that vehicle.” He turned to face Dante. “I notice you have security cameras both inside and out. Are they working?”

Tears pooled in Dante’s eyes, overflowed, and spilled down his cheeks. “They’re coming to install the monitors this weekend.”

“That would be no?”

“No.”

“He was trying to save money,” Emily snapped. “He hired some cut-rate outfit run by a friend of his just to save a few bucks. I told you we weren’t ready to open yet! Ooooohhhh…”

“Did anyone notice anything suspicious today?” Powers continued, interupting my daughter’s rant. “Any vehicles that didn’t belong, or ones that were parked too close to the building?”

Everyone simply stared.

“Did anyone show any unusual interest in the child? Give him gifts?”

Emily said, “Everyone loved Timmy, Officer Powers. But I don’t remember anyone paying more attention to him than they would to any other cute baby.”

Powers tucked the notebook into his pocket. “Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. Since we don’t have a suspect vehicle, we can’t post anything to the changeable message signs on the highway that allow us to communicate with motorists. But we’ll issue a ‘Be on the Lookout,’ and we can prepare a description of Timmy and the circumstances of his disappearance and fax it to the media. They’ll put the BOLO out on all area radio, TV, and cable systems, where it will be seen and heard by millions of listeners.”

I’d seen those messages before-other people’s children, never ours-sad details about their abduction crawling along the bottom of our television screen. A school picture, a candid photo of the child, slightly out of focus. I wondered how many of those stories had happy endings.

“And we’re bringing in a tracking dog from Baltimore County.”

“What kind of dog?” Paul wanted to know.

“We’ve requested a bloodhound. Bloodhounds will be able to pick up Timmy’s scent even if he was carried away in somebody’s arms.”

“What good will that do?” Emily was sobbing again. “If the kidnapper took Timmy away in a car, the trail will stop at the parking lot, right?”

“Bloodhound noses are many times more sensitive than German shepherds’,” Powers pointed out. “It was a bloodhound that tracked Laci Peterson’s scent down the center of a highway, if you remember, proving she left the house in a vehicle, not on foot, as her husband had claimed.”

Laci Peterson. Another victim who didn’t make it. This wasn’t encouraging.

Dante slouched in his chair, hands pressed tightly between his knees. “You know what really bothers me?” he told the officer. “I never asked Emily to sign for anything today. As far as I know, there was no delivery.”

Emily looked up, face blotched from crying. “Then who…?”

“You didn’t recognize the voice on the telephone?” I asked.

Emily bit her lower lip. “Just a woman’s voice. I assumed it was one of the staff.”

“Hey, everybody!” The head of a white stuffed tiger lunged into the room, followed immediately by the equally white head of my sister, Ruth. “What’s with all the police cars, anyway? I had to sneak in through the loading dock. Look what I brought for Puddle Ducks,” she chirped, not pausing long enough for anyone to answer her question. She galloped the super-sized toy along the chair rail. “This will solve the problem.”