Only Ever You (17 page)

Chirpy announcers were talking about the prospect of snow so soon after Halloween, about local trick-or-treating, about whether the Penguins would do well in that weekend’s game. “C’mon,” Bea muttered. She leaned against the washer, careful not to touch the nightgown. The blood was tacky to touch now, drying in patterns. An ad for incontinence played, then one for Viagra, then one for some nasal allergy spray. Sweet Jesus, was everyone in this country drug dependent?

“And now, some breaking news.” The announcement alerted Bea. She stood upright. “State police have issued an Amber Alert for missing Fox Chapel toddler Sophia Lassiter. I repeat, an Amber Alert has been issued for three-year-old Sophia Lassiter of Fox Chapel, reported missing from her home sometime this morning. Sophia Lassiter is white, with short blonde hair and blue eyes, approximately thirty-three inches tall and weighs approximately thirty pounds. Anyone who sees a child matching Sophia Lassiter’s description is asked to contact the police.”

“Mommy!” The child’s cry was piercing; Bea jumped, banging into the washer. She ran up the stairs as the child wailed, “I want my mommy!”

The little girl struggled up to a sitting position as Bea reached her. “It’s okay,” she said, reaching out to help the child get her balance. “You’re okay.”

The child shrank from her touch. “Mommy!” she wailed again.

“Sssh,” Bea crooned. “It’s okay. Are you hungry?” She pointed over her shoulder at the peanut butter and jelly sandwich on the dining room table that she’d prepared before she left. Her daughter had loved pb&j; it was her favorite. Didn’t all kids like it? She’d stocked up on bread and peanut butter and on mac and cheese and apple juice. “I know you must be hungry, Avery. Come and eat some food for me.” It felt odd but good to finally say the name out loud. Her daughter’s favorite name for all her dolls when she’d been little; convenient that it worked equally well for boys and girls.

“My name’s not Avery,” the little girl said.

“That’s your real name.”

“My name is Sophia.”

Bea shook her head. “That was just a pretend name. Your real name is Avery. It’s a pretty name. Try it. Say Avery for me.”

“Sophia!” A shout.

Bea rubbed a sweaty palm against her pants leg, glad that the house was remote. No one was likely to hear them; they were alone in the woods.

As if she could understand, Avery screamed louder. “Sophia! Sophia! Sophia!” The last cry ended on a wail and she began to weep again, eyes creasing into tiny slits and face turning red. Bea walked to the table, peeled back the plastic wrap from her own sandwich, and took a bite. What she really wanted to do was sleep. Her head kept throbbing in equal time with her chest, but it wasn’t safe to give the child another sedative, not so soon after the last one.

“Doesn’t your dog want some food?” she said loud enough to be heard over the little girl’s wails.

The crying stopped and Avery, who’d been clutching her stuffed dog tightly in her arms, suddenly lifted one of its floppy ears and whispered into it. Then she looked at Bea and nodded.

“Does he like peanut butter and jelly?”

“Just jelly, no peanut butter,” Avery said, but with a glower.

“I’ll make him a jelly sandwich,” Bea said, getting up from the table and walking into the kitchen. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Avery wiggle off the couch and move slowly to the dining room. Bea didn’t say a word as the child climbed up onto a chair and picked up the sandwich.

With the crying ended, another noise became noticeable.
Scratch,
scratch,
scratch
against the kitchen door. Bea had left Cosmo in the backyard last night. There was food and water for him outside, but he still wanted to come in. He knew that someone else was in the house; the question was how would he react? How would Avery? Cosmo was a friendly little dog, and Bea wasn’t worried as much about him as she was about the child.

Cosmo barked, just a single sound to attract attention, but it was loud enough that Avery heard. She swiveled around on her chair to stare wide-eyed at Bea. “Do you has a dog?”

Bea nodded. “Do you want to meet him?”

“Yes! Yes!” Avery scrambled off her chair, still holding on to her stuffed dog. Bea opened the back door and Cosmo shot into the kitchen, little nose down and up sniffing wildly. He stopped in front of Avery and barked once, small tail wagging like crazy.

“Hello, doggie! Hello!” She bent to pet his head and then his side. “What’s his name?”

“Cosmo.”

“Hello, Cosmo! Good doggie!” All of a sudden she paused and looked at the dog more closely and then up at Bea. “I sees him at the park and at my house.”

The hairs rose on Bea’s body. It hadn’t occurred to her that the child would remember the dog. She said to distract her, “Do you want to eat your sandwich with Cosmo?”

It was important that the child ate. Hungry children were cranky children, and Bea didn’t want any more tantrums. The little girl ate with Cosmo at her feet, offering bites of the jelly-only sandwich to her stuffed dog. Bea refilled the small mug of milk and sat across from Avery. “What’s
your
dog’s name?” she asked.

Avery gave her another mulish look. After a moment she mumbled, “Blinky.” Her chair wobbled and Bea reached out to catch it, only to feel a sudden numbness in her left arm.

She clutched it, walking into the kitchen in search of the nitroglycerin tablets. She paused with the pill bottle in her hand. When had she taken the last one? Was it three hours ago or four? She needed to keep better track; she swallowed one anyway, looking out the kitchen window at the woods rising behind the house. Gray light, the sun rising somewhere behind the clouds. Wind blew roughly through the trees, trunks groaning like boats tossed in a stormy sea. Leaves poured onto the cracked patio. Soon the trees would be completely bare. Would anybody up the hill be able to see them? Bea tried peering through the foliage, but it was still too dense.

“I see you went ahead and took her.”

She whipped around. Frank stood in a dark corner of the kitchen, arms crossed. She put a hand to her chest. “Stop sneaking up on me!”

“You’re a stubborn woman, Bea.”

“She belongs with us. Can’t you see that?”

Even with his face half in shadow, making his expression hard to read, she could feel his disapproval.

“I only took what was mine to take,” she added, looking away from that hard face and walking back to the child. She waited until Avery was done eating to say, “I have a surprise for you.” The little girl simply stared at her with that same sullen expression. “It’s downstairs.” Bea pointed toward the hall and the door to the basement steps. Avery swiveled in her chair to stare at the door, and then looked up at Bea for a long moment in a very adult, almost suspicious way. It made Bea uncomfortable. “Don’t just sit there,” she said. “Go downstairs and see what it is.”

The child hesitated, then slid off the chair and walked slowly through the kitchen and into the shadowed hallway, Bea following behind her. Avery reached a hand toward the doorknob and stopped. “What is it?”

“I can’t tell you, it’s a surprise,” Bea said, hovering behind her. “Go on, head downstairs.”

Bea hit the light switch at the top of the stairs, a single bare bulb illuminating the shadowed stairs and a bit of the concrete floor at the bottom. The little girl shook her head, took a step back. “No.”

“You won’t get the surprise if you don’t go down.” Bea tried to hide her impatience with a light tone.

“No!” The child took another step back, bumping into Bea’s legs.

“Just hold on to the handrail.” Bea pushed the child forward, her hand on one small shoulder. “C’mon, you can do it.”

“No! No, no, no!” Avery pulled out of Bea’s grip and took off running down the gloomy hallway.

“Get back here!” Bea chased after her.

The little girl rounded the corner, but then she tripped and fell. “Gotcha.” Bea hauled her up and dragged her back down the hall.

“I wanna go home!” Avery wailed.

“Let’s see what’s down here first,” Bea said, grasping the child’s small hand and forcing it on to the handrail. She half-walked, half-carried Avery down the wooden steps into the basement, reaching for another switch at the bottom. Two long fluorescent bars flickered on, humming. Bea led her down the hall to the door partially hidden by the steel support pillar.

“It’s behind that door,” Bea said. “Go on, open it.”

“No, no, no!” Avery’s shrieks increased in volume.

“Here, I’ll help you.” Bea walked the child over and forced Avery’s hand to cup and turn the knob. She pushed the door open for her, shoving the child into the room.

Bea watched, waiting for the explosion of happiness. She’d painted the walls a cheerful pink and found a wooden bed at a garage sale. It looked a lot like the one in the child’s old room. Cheaper probably, but still a good match. She’d found a toy shelf at a Goodwill and filled it with toys that she bought and some that had been her daughter’s. She’d bought a striped rug at Target to cover the cold concrete floor and even remembered to get a night-light. It was a nice room, but when she looked down to see Avery’s reaction, the girl’s face was slack; she wasn’t smiling at all. She seemed indifferent.

“Whose room is this?” she said.

Of course! Bea had forgotten how kids think. “It’s yours. This is all for you.” She spread her arms wide. When Avery didn’t move she gave her a little push in the back to get her over the threshold.

“This is not my doll,” Avery said, fingering a little baby doll that Bea had bought.

“Yes it is. She’s yours. All of this is yours. Here’s a tea set. You can have tea parties.”

“Mine’s purple.” Avery ran one little finger over the new, pink teapot. She didn’t sound enthusiastic. Bea felt a little annoyed. Didn’t the child appreciate anything?

“Don’t you have something to say? What’s the magic word?”

The girl’s lower lip slipped out. She pulled her stuffed dog into her arms and shook her head.

This child had been spoiled, that was plain to see. Bea shook her own head. “Thank you. The magic word is thank you.”

The child still didn’t say it. Bea sighed. She didn’t have the energy to deal with this now; they’d have plenty of time. “You and Blinky have fun with your new toys,” she said.

Avery stared after her as Bea walked backward toward the door. She felt uncomfortable with how the child kept looking at her. It wasn’t polite to stare like that.

She left Cosmo in the room with Avery and closed the door. She slid shut the bolt lock she’d installed and, predictably, the child started to wail. The door shook slightly and Bea knew that Avery had banged on it. But there was hardly any noise coming out—the door and the walls were solid.

chapter twenty

DAYS ONE, TWO, AND THREE

Before Jill could ask to see the death certificate, Elaine Lassiter snatched it from Andrew’s hands. “Are you sure you’ve got the right person?” she demanded, scanning the document with a stunned expression. “Maybe this is the wrong woman?”

“I’m sure, Mrs. Lassiter.” Andrew sounded unusually somber. He took the certificate back from Elaine and offered it to David, who glanced at it, his expression unreadable.

“Could we concentrate now on who
has
taken our child?” he said, passing it to the detectives. “Why aren’t there any leads?”

Jill recoiled at his disdainful tone. David was looking at Detective Ottilo, but she had been the one who thought Sophia’s disappearance was tied to her adoption. Strange to think that if she’d found out just two days ago that Sophia’s birth mother was dead, she would have felt relieved.

“It’ll be okay,” Andrew murmured. “They’ll find Sophia.”

*   *   *

He stayed on until well into the evening, until Jill urged him to go. “Paige will be putting the boys to bed—you need to be there to say good-night.” Just saying the words felt surreal—Andrew’s sons waiting safely at home in their beds. All over the country children were going to sleep in their own beds, but her child’s bed was empty. Andrew hugged her again and clapped David on the shoulder, promising to return the next day.

She and David went upstairs sometime after eleven when her in-laws finally went home and the police had cleared out, leaving behind crime-scene tape, used coffee cups, and crumpled takeout bags. Two different police vehicles remained parked out front, one from Fox Chapel, the other from neighboring O’Hara, with officers whose jobs seemed to be both to keep watch and to keep the media at bay. Two news vans had parked along the street, clearly camping out. Jill moved through her nightly routine on autopilot, pausing only when she changed out of her jeans and started to cry as she stared at the dirt-caked knees from that morning’s frantic search. She gulped sobs back, brushing the wetness from her cheeks, refusing to break down. Nothing good would come of her tears; if she started to cry she might never stop.

But the tears came again later, after she slipped into bed next to David, fear pressing down on her like the weight of too many covers. David was awake, too; she could tell by his breathing, but neither of them spoke. She thought of what it had been like after Ethan, those first days when she’d felt his absence like a constant ache, and now that wound had torn wide open and she longed to stroke Sophia’s soft cheeks, kiss the small spot at the nape of her neck, feel a dimpled little hand slip into hers. Tears spilled over, hot and silent, running down Jill’s cheeks and dampening her pillow. Exhaustion eventually carried her into sleep, where she dreamed of Sophia calling to her from far out at sea, where she bobbed in an inflatable ring that the waves kept pulling farther and farther from shore. Jill struggled to get to her, swimming through waves that rose higher and higher around her. She woke up with her throat hoarse from crying Sophia’s name.

*   *   *

The police showed up at 6:30
A.M
., more news trucks following them into the cul-de-sac. Sophia’s disappearance had been on every evening broadcast. Now reporters were jockeying for position at the front of a growing crowd.