For Whom the Minivan Rolls (12 page)

“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “You care about your wife,
and you’re worried. Why shouldn’t you cry?”

“I’m not being strong,” he said. “Madlyn would want
me to be strong.” He sniffed, once, and regained his composure.
Gary looked me in the eye, his bearing once more that of a
long-suffering employer.

“What you did in there was unconscionable,” he
said.

“I need Joel to trust me, and I needed you not to be
in the room, so he could be completely honest with me. If you had
agreed to let me talk to him alone when I asked the first time,
that scene wouldn’t have been necessary.”

“You undermined my authority with the boy,” said
Gary.

“Are you his father or his headmaster?”

He twisted his lip into something halfway between a
sneer and an attack of gastroenteritis, and ignored my question.
“What did he say to you?” he asked.

“I can’t tell you that.”

Beckwirth looked like he was going to swallow his
lips. His eyes narrowed, his neck appeared to widen to twice its
original size, and his veins stuck out. “Oh,
really?”
he
said.

“Yes, really. Joel is a source for an article I’m
writing, and I will not reveal to you what he said to me.”

“He’s my son!”

“I’m aware of that,” I said in my most soothing
“we’re-both-dads-here” voice. “But you have to understand, Gary,
that Joel is also a confidential source, and he needs to know that
what he tells me in confidence is going to stay that way. If he
doesn’t trust me, I won’t get any more information from him.”

“I don’t see where your information is making my
Madlyn reappear,” he said coldly.

“Neither do I,” I admitted, “but then, I didn’t
apply for this job. I was drafted. By the way, the night Madlyn
disappeared, did you hear anything?”

“I’ve already told you, no!” said Beckwirth, almost
as if he were vibrating. “I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t see
anything. Now, are you going to find Madlyn or not?”

“I have no idea if I’m going to find her,” I said.
“But I
will
keep looking. At least until Thursday.”

He started scooping up the pictures and placing them
back into the box, but not before sorting them for size and
shape—ever the Distraught Anal-Retentive Husband. “What’s
Thursday?”

“My deadline,” I told him. “I have to submit copy to
the paper on Thursday, and so far, on this story, I don’t have
anything to write.”

“They’ll extend your deadline,” Beckwirth said.
“I’ll make a phone call. . .”

“Gary, if I don’t find anything by
Thursday. . .” I didn’t know how to say the rest.

“What?”

“If I can’t find her after she’s been gone ten days,
Gary, well. . . I think maybe you’d better get used to
the idea that she might not want to come back.”

Beckwirth looked like I’d slapped him in the face.
With a sledgehammer. He clamped his teeth together and spoke
through them in a voice more reptile than human.

“Don’t ever walk through my door again unless you
have something cheerful to say to me about my wife,” he said.
“Cheerful”—that’s really the word he used. “The next time you say
something like that in my presence, Mr. Tucker, I will most
certainly kill you.”

I pursed my lips and nodded a bit, digesting the
soliloquy. I turned toward the door, then back to Beckwirth. “By
the way, Gary, does Joel like barbecued ribs?”

Gary Beckwirth tried as hard as he could not to
speak to me, but his pride at having raised his son correctly won
out over his determination. “Joel,” he said with a triumphant shake
of his head, “is a vegetarian. Why?”

I walked out the door, mumbling. “Figures,” I said.
“It figures.”

When I got home from Beckwirth’s house, I checked
the sidewalk carefully for further messages—there were none. The
other good news of the moment was that, even though it hadn’t quite
shown up on my sidewalk, I finally might have a lead to work with
in this Beckwirth story.

The possibility of a car driving by, loud enough to
wake Joel Beckwirth, at some time after midnight, raised a number
of possibilities. It could mean somebody had driven off with Madlyn
against her will—the squealing tires and screeching brakes would
certainly support that theory. At the very least, someone had been
in a great big hurry.

But I wasn’t ready to accept Beckwirth’s sinister
theories yet. It was equally possible that Madlyn had planned her
own disappearance. Suppose she’d decided to leave in the middle of
the night, knowing that Gary couldn’t be roused easily. True,
Beckwirth had pointed out that neither her car nor his had been
moved, but that didn’t mean Madlyn hadn’t driven away. She could
have rented a car, or reserved a taxi, and arranged to have it
waiting outside for her, or—more likely—have a friend pick her up.
The driver might still be in a hurry, giddy with Madlyn’s new-found
freedom.

It was also entirely possible that Madlyn had gone
out to investigate the noise, and been eaten by a passing bear. But
I wasn’t going to mention that cheerful theory to Dutton, nor
especially to Beckwirth. I had no bear tracks to back me up. You
write something in the newspaper, you need evidence.

I opened my front door wearily and walked into the
living room. Abigail hadn’t been able to leave the house for her
nightly run because I was out, so she was exercising on the
cardio-glide contraption we have in front of the television, which
I’ve unaffectionately nicknamed “The Thing.” The look on her
face—tired, pinched, beaten-down—was enough to tell me what kind of
night it had been.

“Which one?” I asked.

“The boy.” She rolled her eyes. “You’ll hear him
banging around up there in a minute.”

I glanced involuntarily up the stairs, sagged onto
the couch, and exhaled, rubbing my eyes. “He’s been a joy since his
banishment from Nintendo,” I said.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I wasn’t expecting that, and sat up, my eyes
widening. It wasn’t enough that other people’s families were
beating me up. Now mine had to get in on the act? “Well, what did
you want me to do? He grabbed another kid by the throat.”

“It would have been nice to have been consulted
before you laid down the law. That’s all.” Abby got off “The Thing”
and wiped the sweat off her face and neck with a towel she’d
brought in from the bathroom. She picked up a bottle of spring
water from the coffee table— pardon me, the spring water table—and
opened it.

“That’s the advantage of my being here, Abby, and
the disadvantage. I’m the one who’s here, so I have to react to
stuff as it happens. We didn’t have time to discuss this one.”

She put down the water after a long swallow and
nodded. “I know. But then you go out and leave me to handle the
consequences. You haven’t been home many evenings lately.”

“It’ll all be over by Thursday. Then I can go back
to being a writer again.” She sat next to me on the couch, and I
couldn’t resist putting my hand on her slightly moist thigh. She
wears shorts when she exercises in the house and sweatpants when
she goes out. There are advantages to having her stay home.

Abby nestled her head onto my chest and sighed a
little. “So what’s with Joel?” she asked.

I caressed the skin on her leg a little more. “He
heard something. Says there was a car spinning its wheels outside
the house on the night Madlyn left.”

She looked up at me, interested. “So, where does
that lead?”

“Well, first, I’ll call Westbrook in the morning and
ask if he checked the outside of the house for tire marks or
anything like that.”

Abigail curled her lip, and her voice took on a
sarcastic tone. “And after he tells you he didn’t?”

“I canvass the neighborhood. Ask the people who live
around there if anybody else heard anything. See if some busybody
happened to look out the window at the right time. There’s a yenta
on every street. Somebody’s bound to have seen something.”

“That’s not much.”

“It’s a hundred percent more than I had before I
talked to him.”

“You’ve got a point there,” Abby said. Her
expression changed, and now she was looking at me in an altogether
more agreeable manner. She snuggled closer. “Maybe you’re cut out
for this gumshoe stuff, after all.” She gave me a kiss that was
more than agreeable, and I responded with one of my own. We sank
down into the couch.

And that, of course, is when my son decided to come
stomping down the stairs from his room, unannounced, a look on his
face that would unnerve General Patton. Luckily, Ethan is an
Asperger’s kid, and didn’t take any notice of what his parents had
almost been doing.

The kid has a great sense of timing, though—I’ll
give him that.

“Dad?”

I removed my hands from where they wanted to be and
sat up straight on the couch, groaning just the way my father used
to when he sat up. When I was 22, I never groaned when maneuvering
on, onto, or off chairs and couches.

“Whatever it is, Ethan, the answer is ‘go to
bed.’”

“I can’t sleep.”

“Read.”

“There’s nothing to read.”

Abigail sat up now, grinding her teeth just a
little. It was clear this was the same argument they’d been having
before I got home.

“You have a million books up there, Ethan,” she
said. “Pick one out and read it.”

Ethan stopped, truly thinking about what she’d said.
“I don’t have a million books up there. They wouldn’t all fit.”

Abby took a deep breath and let it out, the only
technique she had retained from Lamaze class when she was pregnant
with, well, Ethan. “That’s right. I was exaggerating. But you have
a lot of. . .”

“I don’t FEEL like reading!” Ah, so it was going to
be one of
those
arguments. I stood up and pointed a finger
at my son.

“You’re
not
playing video games tonight.
You’re not playing video games
tomorrow
night. And you’re
not playing video games the night after
that.
You choked
somebody at school, and you have to pay the price for it. Now, go
to your room and
shut up!”
Abby was frowning at me. She
thought this was her argument and didn’t want to see it degenerate
into what she calls “a scene.”

Ethan, despite having heard this speech before, had
the nerve to look surprised. “It’s not FAIR!” he bellowed, and ran
back up to his room. Abby folded her arms and looked at me, a
43-year-old man pointing a menacing finger at a pre-teen no longer
in the room, his eyes wide, his teeth tightly clenched. I couldn’t
see them, but I would have bet that the veins in my neck were
sticking out about four inches. I was moments away from
hyperventilating.

“Nice work, Dad,” she said.

Diane Woolworth was a fifty-ish woman who clearly
wished she had been born in a Jane Austin novel. Her home was awash
in dark maroons, royal purples, doilies, and tea sets, and her
manner was that of a woman who should have been living in England,
but by accident had been set down in suburban New Jersey. If she
had been able to pull it off, she would have spoken with a British
accent, like Madonna.

I had spent the bulk of Wednesday morning ringing
doorbells on Beckwirth’s street, and being told politely by local
residents that they hadn’t heard a damn thing on the night in
question.

Once in a while, I’d hit a house where the doorbell
was not answered. These were generally the ones with no vehicle in
the driveway, indicating either that some rich people in Midland
Heights actually work for a living, or need two incomes to be
rich.

Occasionally, the residents who answered the door
were not quite so polite, like the guy who told me to “get lost”
because he was “sick and tired of snooping assholes asking
questions about the bitch across the street.” Not Noel Coward, I’ll
grant you, but certainly to the point.

Diane Woolworth’s doorbell was the third-from-the
last one on the block, but the first whose owner had invited me in
for a cup of tea (which I declined—if anything, tea actually tastes
worse to me than coffee). And—I swear on all that is pure and
decent—she also offered me a “crumpet.” I don’t mean the Tastykake
kind with the butterscotch frosting on the top, either.

“You’re looking into poor Mrs. Beckwirth, then, are
you, Mr. Tucker?” Diane asked, stirring the fat-free milk (you
can’t call it “skim” anymore) into her tea. “The poor woman. I
can’t imagine what might have happened to her.”

It occurred to me to ask why she’d invited me in if
she had no information, but one thing a reporter learns is to let
people talk. They’ll eventually say something you can use, even if
they don’t intend to. Especially if they don’t intend to. So I sat
back and took a bite of my crumpet, which is the dirtiest sentence
I’ve ever committed to paper. (A crumpet, by the way, is nothing
more than an English muffin that has a publicist.)

“You know, I used to see her out in her garden with
her gardener, telling him where to put the shrubbery,” Diane
continued. “You get used to seeing someone, and then just out of
nowhere, they’re gone. Unsettling, it is.”

The lamentations went on for a few more minutes
while Diane drank two cups of “very nice tea” and offered me
another crumpet, which I declined. I began to wonder if my
reporter’s tricks would come up short this time, and I’d just walk
away with a crumpet-enhanced waistline and no additional
information.

Just when I was about to stand and thank Diane for
her hospitality, her daughter Jane, about 22 and one tattoo short
of a biker chick, stormed down the main hall stairs and into the
dining room, where Diane and I were having our very nice tea and
crumpets. It was as if Freddy Krueger had wandered onto the set of
The Remains of the Day
.

She was short—around five-foot-one—not slim, dressed
in old, unwashed jeans, an Aerosmith T-shirt, and no bra. Her feet
were bare, and had last been washed when I was still a real
investigative reporter. I was willing to bet that beside her ears
and her nose, there were other parts of Jane that were pierced, but
I was better off not speculating about what they might be. She was
vigorously chewing a piece of gum. At least I hoped it was gum.
Tobacco stains the teeth, and no spittoon was visible in the
room.