Liberty or Death (46 page)

The woman shook her head.

"My aunt Miranda?"

She shook her head again.

"Why not?" David asked. "Why did they send you? I don't know you."

"Because they knew you'd be safe with me." She tried to smile again and he thought she meant to be reassuring. "The bad man will be watching for you. He'll be watching your grandmother and your aunt Miranda."

David didn't feel safe at all, even though the woman had known the password. He thought about jumping out the door but the van was going very fast and he'd heard awful stories about what happened to children who fell out of cars.

"Will my aunt Miranda come and get me, then?"

"Of course she will, when it's safe. Until then, we're going to pretend you're someone else and you mustn't let anyone know who you really are. The bad man will be looking for you. Are you hungry? I have some nice homemade cookies."

David thought he was too scared to eat anything, but when the woman handed him a big chocolate chip cookie and a cup of juice, he found he could get them past the lump in his throat. She seemed pleased to see him eat and smiled the way grown-ups do when children are being good. But David wanted his mother and he wanted to go home. He sat wondering what to do next, but before he could think of anything, his eyes closed and he fell asleep.

 

 

 

Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy!

-Ben Jonson, "On My First Son"

 

 

Chapter 1

 

She was going to be late again, Rachel thought, stepping on the gas. She couldn't make peanut butter cookies without peanut butter and brown sugar, and she couldn't be home baking if she was at the store buying supplies. There wasn't even enough time to get the cookies in the oven before David got home. He'd give her one of those looks, both irritated and understanding, that seemed so odd coming from a nine-year-old. Odd unless you knew how much he was like his father. Her husband, Stephen, was always giving her long-suffering looks. A woman who lived on sufferance, that's what she was. Always teetering on the verge of failure, clinging to the cusp of competence.

A shiny red bike lying at the side of the road caught her eye. Someone had a bike just like David's. Some kid biking home from school who'd stopped to explore the woods near the old pine tree. Maybe to climb the pine. It was the kind of tree that invited climbing with its well-spaced, sturdy branches. It took a kind of revenge, though, by daubing climbers generously with pitch. David had ruined more than one good pair of pants that way. Usually when he was with his best friend, Tommy. Tommy was the kind of kid the term "daredevil" was made for.

She snapped on the signal and whisked into the yard, grabbing the grocery bag and running for the door. In the distance, she could hear the muted roar of the bus. She hurried into the kitchen, vaguely aware of how silly she looked in her workout wear. She usually took it off the instant she finished class, but today she hadn't had time. They all dressed like this, the women in the suburbs. She didn't feel like one of them, but she knew she looked the same, a peculiarly gnome-shaped creature, body rounded and squared off by the bulky sweatshirt, perched on skinny little black Lycra legs.

She grabbed a bowl and stuck in the beaters. Threw a stick of margarine into the microwave to soften. Pushed the button and hurried to the window as the bus roared around the curve, passed the driveway without stopping, and disappeared into the trees. "Hey, wait a minute," she said aloud, rushing out the door and down the long driveway. Halfway down, feet churning, the arm that wasn't holding a mixing bowl waving, she remembered. David hadn't taken the bus. He'd gone on his bike. The bike she'd seen lying on the roadside.

Something felt wrong. David had just begun to be allowed to ride his bike to school. He wouldn't stop off without permission. He'd come straight home, then go out again after asking her. He was a cautious, methodical child, not a willful one like Tommy. But he and Tommy had planned to ride together. Maybe Tommy had persuaded him to stop. Only she hadn't seen Tommy's bike, just David's. Unbidden, Rachel's feet were moving faster, carrying her down the driveway. She left the mixing bowl by the mailbox and hurried along the road until she reached the bike.

She cupped her hands and called "David" several times, listening each time for an answer. Waiting without breathing. She walked to the base of the tree, cupped her hands again, and called up. She had a soft voice; she had to work at being loud. She circled the tree, staring up into the dark branches. There was no one there. She walked back into the woods, calling as she went, heedless of the damage she was doing to her pristine white shoes, shoes that normally never touched ground outside the gym itself. A knot of panic grew in her chest and her footsteps got faster as she plunged deeper into the brush.

This was silly. David didn't like the woods. He might go in with Tommy, just to show how brave he was, but the woods scared him. He didn't like small, enclosed spaces, didn't like the feeling of things closing in on him. She hurried back to the street, walked a few hundred feet in either direction, calling. Crawled down the bank and peered into the culvert, shouting his name. Her voice echoed back to her, hollow and metallic over the gurgling of the water, but no voice answered. Heart pounding, she climbed up the bank and looked up and down the empty road.

Maybe she was panicking over nothing. She didn't know that the bike was David's. His helmet wasn't there. Besides, David loved his new bike; it was the pride of his life. He wouldn't leave it lying in the gravel like that. He'd probably stopped off at Tommy's, so excited by being a big boy who could ride his bike that he'd forgotten to ask for permission. She ran home and called Carole.

"Carole," she gasped, cutting off the drawled hello. "It's Rachel. Did David stop off there on his way home?"

"Nope. I meant to call you and apologize. I forgot they were going to ride their bikes today, and I didn't wake Tommy in time. He took the bus. While I've got you on the phone, can I get your recipe for that cucumber salad? We're having some people from—"

"Can I call you back?" Rachel interrupted.

"Is something wrong?"

"David... he didn't come home. I've got to call the school. Talk to you later." Rachel disconnected and called the school. While she fretted on hold, pacing a loop as large as the phone cord would let her, the secretary found a teacher who remembered seeing David set out with all the other riders just before the buses left. "Was he wearing his helmet?" Rachel asked.

"I'll check," the woman said doubtfully, probably immediately consigning Rachel to the realms of the hyperanxious, one of those lunatic mothers who's always calling to keep track of her child's every move.

Rachel waited an eternity before the woman returned and confirmed that David had been wearing his helmet. An eternity during which she began to imagine awful things had happened to him. She thanked the woman, grabbed her keys, and began driving slowly down the street, retracing the route that David would have taken. There was no one. Not a power walker, not a jogger, no in-line skaters swooping gracefully as dragonflies. Where the hell were they? Why wasn't anyone out when she needed to ask if they'd seen David? They were always out when she wanted the road to herself.

She turned around in the schoolyard and drove slowly home again, peering down side streets and into driveways, until she came back to the spot where the bike lay. Her hands were shaking and she couldn't quite remember how to breathe. She stopped the car and sat there, hands gripping the wheel. He had to be somewhere. There had to be some reasonable explanation for this; she just hadn't thought of it yet. He wouldn't go off somewhere without telling her, not unless someone had made him go. Unless he'd gone with another friend?

She picked up the car phone and called Carole again. "Carole? There's no sign of him. Can you ask Tommy if he might have been riding with someone else? Someone he might have gone home with?"

"Hold on." She heard Carole calling Tommy, heard the snap in Carole's voice that was her own fear being transmitted.

Carole's answer hit her like a gut punch. "He says David was hurrying home because you were going to make cookies. He wants to know what's going on. Should I tell him?"

"Yes. No. I don't know. I don't think so. Ask him if he saw David from the bus."

She waited, straining to hear the mumbled voices, and then Carole was back. "He says they didn't pass David along the way. But they wouldn't, if he set out ahead. The bus has to go all around that loop. He didn't come home?"

"No. There's a bike... I'm sure it's his... lying by the road near that big pine they like to climb... but there's no sign of David."

"You'd better not waste any time, Rach. If he's been taken, the sooner the police get on it, the better."

"Taken?"

"Well, you said he wasn't in the tree or in the woods. And anyway, Mister Know-It-All is standing right here behind me and he says no way would David leave his bike just lying anywhere."

Rachel thought she might be sick. "Carole, I've got to go."

"Wait, is there anything—"

"Gotta go," Rachel repeated, and broke the connection. Sat shaking in her car with her awful thoughts closing around her like a gray blanket. "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God." She whispered it over and over like a mantra. "Oh please, dear God, don't let him be..." Her mind skipped over the words she couldn't say, couldn't even bring herself to think. "Oh please God! No!" David was her life.

She picked up the phone again and called Stephen, the red bicycle on the gravel in front of her car gleaming in the gray afternoon light. He grabbed the phone, didn't let her get past an anguished "Stephen" before he interrupted.

"Can't it wait, Rach? I'm right in the middle of—"

"David's missing. He didn't come home from school."

Instantly, she had his attention. "How long?"

"Not long. I thought he was on the bus... He was on his bike... I got home and the bus went by and then I remembered I'd seen a bike down the road." She was dithering and Stephen hated dithering. She gulped some air, drowning in her panic, and tried to be coherent. "Maybe twenty or thirty minutes."

"Call Carole. He's probably over there." She could sense him turning away, imagined him picking up his pencil and turning to his papers.

"I did, Stephen. I already called her. He's not there and he's not at school and he's nowhere along the route."

"Did you look in his room? Maybe he got past you and you didn't notice."

"I didn't. How stupid of me. I'll go check right now. I'll bet he's there. He probably came in while I was out looking for him." Relief flowed through her. "I'll call you back."

"I'll hold on while you go check."

"I'm not at home."

"Then where the hell are you?"

"Down the road... by his bike... where he left it lying by the road."

"Lying? Like in the dirt lying? Not on the kickstand?"

"Yes. Lying, like it was dumped there in a hurry."

There was a silence on Stephen's end, disturbed only by the pounding of her heart. "He'd never do that," Stephen said. "Call the police. I'm coming home."

A tidal wave of panic, unleashed by Stephen's confirmation of her worst fears, rolled over her. It took four tries to start the car and then she was so shaky she drove like a drunk the short distance to their driveway. She left the car with the doors open, sprinted for the inside phone, and dialed 911.

"My child... my son... he's missing," she told the man who answered. Behind her, the microwave beeped to remind her of the forgotten butter.

He asked her name and address, David's name and age, and a few brisk questions. "I wouldn't worry too much, ma'am. He's probably just off exploring. He'll turn up any minute. You'll see."

"But I am worried. You don't know him. He's not the kind of boy who—"

"All boys go wandering," the man said cheerfully. "They just forget about the time and..."

Through the fog of her panic, she realized he was brushing her off, that he wasn't going to help her. "Not my son," she interrupted. "He'd never go off and leave his brand-new bike lying in the dirt like that. Someone has taken him and we need your help right now!"

"Now, ma'am, please, calm down," the man said. "If it will make you feel better, I'll send an officer over to talk to you."

"It
would make me feel better," Rachel said, imagining David's frightened face peering at her from some stranger's car, imagining her only child in the grip of some unknown man, "if
you
would take this seriously. If you would sound a little bit concerned."

"I'll send someone, ma'am," he said in his police dispatcher's dispassionate voice. "If you'll give me your address." She gave it and he disconnected.

She stood a while, holding the bleeping receiver while the microwave cried at her like an unmilked cow, the mechanical world crying out for attention. The best way to forestall panic was to do something, anything to occupy her mind and keep out the awful thoughts. Call the neighbors. She tried them all. No one had seen anything. Everyone was sorry they couldn't help. And still no Stephen and no police. She'd finish the cookies. She turned on the oven and got out some baking sheets. Wait. She hadn't looked up stairs. Stumbling in her hurry, she rushed up the stairs and into his room, hoping, praying to find him there bent over a book. It was dark and empty, the only sound the bubbling from the fish tank.