Fortune's Deadly Descent (3 page)

I read, for a second time, the transcript from the hypnotist, and once more I’m frustrated not to find anything I hadn’t already told Inspector Moreau in the
Post de Police
in Saint-Corbenay. “Madame Hagen, please say again why you shut the water off?” he asked me, repeatedly, and by then it was nearly three hours since Benny had vanished. Moreau’s slack shoulders and thick knuckles were at odds with his nearly unmarked face, making his age hard to figure. Late thirties, forty at the outside. One after another, he let his cigarettes burn unattended across the cramped room. What could I say about shutting off the running faucet? A mother’s instinct, the need for order? Only one thing is certain—Benny had been in that washroom shortly before me. By turning off the faucet, I’d smeared his fingerprints beneath my own, making it seem like I’d taken him there to wash his hands. Moreau paced, his black boots clumping. “But you said you were in the café looking for napkins?” He produced a flat smile. “I’m just trying to understand. For the sake of your Benjamin.”

Two days later he sent us home without Benny.

I hug my arms around myself, catch the stale sweaty smell of unwashed skin, and recoil. I’m thinking again of the too-sweet scent hovering above the sink on the train.
Gardenias
?

I gaze up toward our lofty, seventeenth-century ceiling, as if the baroque sconces and curly leafed adornments have something to tell me about my son’s whereabouts. The snow-white walls, the sculpted panels like cake frosting—this house has brought us so much happiness. I love being here more than any destination I can dream up. Before last week, its rooms were infused with
Liebe und Glück
. Love and Luck. You could feel it the instant you stepped through the door. Everyone said so. And now, it’s as if everything good has been sucked, abruptly, out through the French doors, vanished forever. All I can think is that I cannot bear being here
without Benny. At this hour, his birthday cake should be the centerpiece of this table. Swiss meringue drizzled with semisweet chocolate, layer upon layer of berries and Chantilly cream. The room should be full of clamoring voices; we should all be singing, clapping hands as Benny rips open gifts.
Why
, I think,
why did I indulge him with a trip to France?
I shake my head. Of all the questions we’re left with, this is the only one with an easy answer.

The table’s strewn with paper scraps, timelines, maps, scribbled notes on pages torn from a legal tablet. If only I could lay it all out in the proper order I might be able to spot what I’m otherwise blind to. But my mind won’t settle down; I see Benny everywhere in this big house, dashing past with the dog, stopping for hugs, rattling around in the kitchen…

The phone rings for what must be the twentieth time that day, jerking me back to the here and now. It’s already three in the afternoon. I lean forward to see Benicio in the front room picking up on the third ring as Isak has instructed. “Hallo, Gabi,” he says. “
Ja. Ein bisschen
.” A girl from school, no doubt asking if Benny’s feeling better. I wonder if the parents see through Benicio’s cover story that Benny’s down with chicken pox. Most don’t vaccinate for it here, and Benicio’s had entire conversations about Benny’s condition, patiently listened to advice on itching and fever, and quoted Benny’s supposed comments from his sickbed. Only one sharp mother had said she thought Benny already had the chicken pox in Kindergarten. Not missing a beat, Benicio told her that although rare, a person could get it more than once. Amazing, how easily these fabrications come to him.

We do what we’re told, yet I’m filling with the wild urge to scream:
No, you’re wrong, we need to call a press conference and get Benny’s photo on every TV screen in Europe
. I haven’t even told Klarissa, my cousin Emil’s wife, who’s become, in recent years,
my closest friend in Zurich. She and Emil lived in New York City, he a software engineer, she an environmental lawyer. She’s smart, quick, acerbic, funny. I want so badly to hear her voice, to laugh with her over coffee. Having money now, and a certain fame as a writer, has made me cautious about who I spend time with, but Klarissa’s like a sister to me, and she thinks we’re in Paris. Not being able to tell her the truth adds another layer to the suffering…plus, Emil’s daughter Sophie is like a sister to Oliver, and he’s under the same gag order. It seems absurd to think we can’t trust them, but the risk is too great, so we’ve been told. All of this secrecy has set me to pacing, kneading my arms, gulping down tears in the bathroom. I have a vision of Benny tied up in front of a television while one of his abductors flips through news channels and finds no mention of him. How easy it would be to convince a child his age, no matter how mature, that his parents never loved him. Especially when they aren’t his “real” parents.
See? No one is looking for you. Don’t you know how much trouble you were? They only pretended to love you. They never wanted you to begin with. Why do you think your mother abandoned you on the train? It was so I could take you off her hands
. This is the bitter pill Interpol has made us swallow. If Benny
is
being held for ransom, publicizing his disappearance will only complicate matters. The kidnappers might simply “rid themselves” of Benny and find another target. But what if he
wasn’t
taken for ransom? And what if it wasn’t Isabel or Jonathon? I have to reel my mind back from the darker possibilities. The steamy taste of vomit rises to my throat. I stiffen, and wait for it to pass.

Benicio hangs up the phone and I wander into the front room and sit across from him and Isak. No one speaks. We hear the murmured conversation and momentary laughs of the other investigators, eating takeout at the kitchen counter. The smell of
warm soy sauce drifts toward us. Time feels heavy, resistant to moving. Oliver is due on the four o’clock flight from JFK. Isak wouldn’t even allow us to tell
him
until yesterday, and only then because I threatened to do it anyway.

And so we wait.

I study the room, trying to see it as Oliver will for the first time in five months. Something seems
off
. Maybe it’s just having strangers come in and out with their paraphernalia, moving chairs around, and so on. But I notice that several of the family photos on the long south wall of the room are askew. Most are of the four of us—Benicio, Oliver, Benny, and me—the rest are my Swiss relatives whom, before seven years ago, I didn’t even know I had. One of the Interpols could’ve brushed against them, or it could’ve been Benny, heavy in thought, running a finger along the wall. There’s something haphazard-looking about them, as if they were taken down then put back carelessly, out of order perhaps. But when I get up and straighten them, I can’t decide
what
the order was, and I sit down again, more frustrated than before.

When I think of all the years leading up to last week, how I led an utterly different life, it seems strange beyond words. I always woke charged with energy, closed myself in my office with its walls of books and big leafy plants at the windows, and wrote. If I gazed out, there was the Limmat River, the cobbled, winding streets of Old Town, and farther off, the snowcapped Alps. I sometimes lay on the woolly rug in front of the fire, reading with a child’s dreamy absorption. That heavenly space has been a place to make love too—Benicio surprising me with kisses behind my ear, trailing down my throat. It’s there I wrote every word of
Illume
, which, amazingly, lingered for years on best-seller lists, convincing me the next novel would be even better. Yet weeks before Benny’s disappearance, the novel I’ve been working on
had come to feel a little doomed. Why was that? And now, I can’t imagine writing another sentence.

Isak steadily flips through his folder. Benicio scrolls through his cell phone. I’m empty-handed and draw my feet beneath my thighs on the sofa. I watch the two of them and know instinctively that they’re up to something. Either trying to protect me from an awful truth, or quietly assembling a case against me. I can hardly blame them for thinking,
How do you lose a child on a train?
After Lyon, when the air-conditioning failed, the heat had made everyone bad tempered and self-absorbed. A few remembered me looking for Benny, but no one really remembered Benny. Of course, he’d been there. No doubt about that. Fingerprints on the faucet. His, then mine. But when were they put there?

Pinto springs up, barking, and there, suddenly, is Oliver.

A five-month absence seems to have sharpened his features, or perhaps his face has made its final shift into manhood. Either way, he resembles my mother and me more than ever. The gray-blue eyes and dark wavy hair he’s let coil past his ears. The one-sided dimple. The pensive, anxious lines crimping the corners of his eyes—my mother’s exactly.

Oliver drops his bags near the door and crosses the room to embrace Benicio and me. Then he holds me long and hard as Pinto paws her way up his thigh. He loosens his grasp, and then clutches me again. The familiar scent of his skin calls to mind his boy body, once so small I could attach him to my hip and gallop about a room. I close my eyes and breathe him in.

“Anything?” he whispers into my hair.

I gently shake my head no.

When I finally let go, we sink onto the sofa. I can’t repress the morbid, guilty feeling of gratitude that he’s made it this far.
Look
at him
, I catch myself thinking, a grown man, a music journalist living in New York City.
Look at my twenty-four-year-old
—and for an instant, the world fills with order and affection.

This wasn’t always the case. We’ve come so far since our miserable existence with Jonathon in Portland, Oregon. Oliver was a snarky, angry teenager then—my mere existence sent him up the wall. There were times I honestly believed he was lost to me, that I’d never again know Ollie, the boy whose face lit up at the sight of mine. But Oliver’s difficult teenage years abruptly ended when Jonathon and Isabel turned dangerously greedy, and our lives, especially mine, were nearly lost. Getting through that time bonded us in a way nothing else could.

I squeeze his hand, take him in—the leather shoes, hair cut to give the illusion of accidentally falling into place, vintage-looking turquoise and gray plaid work shirt with white snaps, dark jeans. Under normal circumstances he’d seem handsome, happy, relaxed.

Benicio introduces him to Isak. After that, Oliver appears to study me. “You need to eat,” he finally says.

I nod at the floor.

The room falls silent. Benicio rubs his eyes. Beside him, Isak buries his face in another folder. The only sound is Pinto nervously licking her paws.

“My mother told me you were looking into the several cases brought against her a few years back by people who claimed her money was somehow theirs,” Oliver says to Isak. “I’m pretty sure they were all crazy. But has it turned up anything?”

Isak glares at me, clearly unhappy that I’ve shared this information with Oliver. “No. Nothing,” he says. “Everyone appears to have gone on with their unremarkable lives. One of them is now deceased.”

The silence washes back around us as we retreat into our separate thoughts. A little later, Oliver rattles around the kitchen and returns with a platter of bread, cheese, and olives for the coffee table, along with an opened bottle of red wine and four glasses. The platter is Italian, white ceramic…the same one Benny used for his soft pretzels stuffed with peach marmalade and cream cheese. His two front teeth were loose and the pretzels were easy to chew. At the sight of it, I nearly smell the beer batter, the salt and yeast, hear Benny saying
Check it!—
an expression picked up from Oliver—as he held one out to me.

Oliver passes me a chunk of Brie-smeared schwarzbrot. His hand trembles. He pours me wine. Our eyes meet and his mouth curls into a mournful smile.

“Thank you,” I whisper. My mouth fills with the buttery-mushroom taste of the cheese, then the bite of the zinfandel. I realize how thirsty I’ve been. The wine goes down like water.

There’s been no call for ransom, and—equally disturbing—no morning call from Isabel.

“Have you talked to Willow?” Oliver asks me.

I shake my head. “I’m not allowed.” I glance at Isak. “Besides, she has enough to worry about. Running the hotel, taking care of the kids.”

Willow and I have been close for years—she owns the small hotel in Mismaloya, Mexico, where I hid from Jonathon and Isabel, and later she helped me escape to Switzerland. She’s come to Zurich often, but since she married a widower two years ago, adopting his three children, I’ve barely seen her.

“What’s new since we talked?” Oliver asks.

“They dredged a lake outside Saint-Corbenay,” I blurt, but instantly regret it. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to sound so…I don’t know.”

Isak carefully places his elbows on his knees, one then the other, letting the folder dangle. “We’re now certain the wiring in the train’s air-conditioning unit was cut,” he says.

“At the stop in Lyon?” Oliver asks.

“It would appear so.”

“Wouldn’t it have to be someone who worked on the train?” I ask.

“Not necessarily,” Isak says. “You have to keep in mind there were hundreds of passengers, many foreign. It takes time to investigate such a list, getting their governments to cooperate. But of course, yes, we’ve been questioning the train personnel, conducting background checks. So far, nothing unusual.”

“Why aren’t there cameras on these trains?” Oliver asks.

Isak gives us a look tinged with chagrin. “It would cost millions,” he says.

I turn to Oliver and say, “I want to go back and look for Benny myself, but Isak keeps…advising against it.”

“What mother
wouldn’t
want to do this?” Isak says. I notice for the first time how greasy his hair is, how the skin around his nose is shiny, unwashed. “But, as I’ve explained, you’d only be a distraction. Too much can go wrong.”

“It’s been
five days
,” I say. “You’re no closer to finding him, as far as I can see. Unless you’re not telling me something.”