THE LAST BOY (17 page)

“Block everything out. Concentrate. Think about Danny.”

Molly tried. Into her mind came images of a child's decomposed body lying in the woods. She kept pushing it out of her thoughts until, finally, she could actually see Danny. He looked as he did that last day, that last moment when she had hurriedly left him at Kute Kids. She could see that eager look in his eyes as he contemplated the visit to the farm owned by Billy's Uncle.

“You had a dream…” said Evelyn with her eyes still closed. “A very clear and vivid dream.”

Molly's eyes popped open. She stared at the woman who sat with her head bowed, rocking in her chair.

“Danny was trying to talk to you.”

Molly forced her eyes closed.

“Your boy is safe. He is warm. Cared for. Content. Peaceful. He is being prepared for something very important.”

“You can see him?” Despite herself, Molly was swept up.

“Yes. Yes!” exclaimed Evelyn, gripping Molly's hands tighter. “I see him now.”

“Where is he?”

“That I can’t see yet. But it feels like he is in a very tranquil place. In the country somewhere. In nature.”

“What's he doing?”

“Yes. Now I see him. He's in the woods. He's picking up sticks.”

“Why's he doing that?” Molly asked excitedly.

“Gathering wood,” said Evelyn. “You are not to worry. Wait! I hear—”

“What?”

“He is talking to me.”

“What's he saying?
What?
”

“Quiet! Wait! He's saying, ‘Don’t worry…Mother…Don’t worry.”

“Mother?” Molly opened her eyes. “Danny calls me Mommy. Not
Mother!
”

“He has changed,” intoned Evelyn, her eyes still sealed.“He has matured. When he returns to you he will be different. Changed.” She opened her eyes and looked straight at Molly who had been watching her.

“Well…uh…” Molly stammered.

Evelyn just waited.

“This is all very…interesting,” said Molly finally. For a moment there, she realized, the woman had her almost believing. “But that dream,” she said.“You heard it from Rosie, didn’t you?”

Evelyn shook her head and tried to speak, but Molly pushed on. “And the business about the woods…”

“Whatever you want to believe,” Evelyn said calmly.

“Look, I really appreciate your effort. And I don’t want to seem rude. But…I’ve got to run,” Molly said, rising and pushing back her chair. “Thanks a lot. Maybe you’ve helped. I don’t know.” She sounded confused.

“So?” whispered Rosie eagerly as they walked arm in arm in the
cold night back to the car. “What did she say? What did she tell you?”

When he got back to Ithaca that evening, Tripoli picked up Molly at her home and drove her to the hospital.

“We just need a sample of your blood.”

“But when will I know?” she asked, turning her face up to him as the nurse slid the needle into her vein.

He didn’t immediately answer and she looked down to see her blood, red and dark, spurting into the vacuum tube.

“It’ll take a little time,” he said finally. “I’ll rush it. But in the meantime you’ve got to go on with your life.”

“Fat chance.”

He took her home and helped her into bed.

“Can you stay?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I need you to sleep here. I don’t want to be alone. Not tonight.”

“No problem.”

He got into her bed and held her. He could feel her shivering.

“Do you love me, Trip?” she asked.

“Naw,” he tried to joke.“You’re just another case. I do this with all my suspects.” He kissed her on the nose.

She didn’t say anything.

“Of course I love you. I love you like crazy. I only wish there were something that I could do to take away the pain.”

“Hold me tight,” she said, and he held her tightly and stayed awake long after she had finally lapsed into sleep.

They moved into the new offices on State Street. The premises were clean and new, but the walls were paper thin. Everything seemed chintzy, made out of plastic rather than real wood. The move itself
took a lot more effort than anybody had anticipated; and when all the excitement was over there was Thanksgiving staring Molly in the face. It was a painful time for many reasons. Rosie always made a large turkey, and Molly and Danny went over to the Greens’ for the feast. Everybody in the Green and Lopez families were invited— cousins and uncles and aunts and grandparents. Although Molly had few living relatives, Danny had inherited a sprawling family through Rosie, one representing every shade in the human spectrum. Without Danny, Molly couldn’t imagine taking part in the festivities.

The passing of Thanksgiving also heralded the Christmas season. All over town the stores were filling with decorations and gifts. The city itself had strung lights in the trees on the Commons, and families were starting to trim their homes with lines of colored lights. Danny had been gone now for over a month and the pain was acute as ever. There was no way to ignore the approach of the holidays, though Molly did her best to avoid the toy sections in the stores.

Danny's birthday fell on the fourteenth of December, so close to Christmas that Molly always went to great efforts to make sure that that day was not slighted because of the big holiday. For his fourth birthday she had thrown a large party for him, inviting as many little kids as could fit into the trailer. The place had been a mess, but Danny, swamped with attention and gifts, had been euphoric. After all the children had left, it had taken hours for him to settle down.

“What kind of party am I going to have this year?” he kept asking right up until the day he had disappeared from Kute Kids.

“Well, we’ve got to plan something, don’t we,” Molly had said.

But they had never had the chance.

Molly kept wondering about that little body, chopped up into pieces and abandoned to rot in the woods somewhere off the highway near Batavia. Despite herself, she couldn’t resist following the story in the newspapers. The body remained unidentified and Tripoli tried to avoid talking about it. When pressed, all he would say was
that the DNA results hadn’t come back yet. It took time. He tried to be supportive. What else, he wondered, could he do?

Life seemed suspended as she waited for the inevitable call. It came a week later, Tripoli reaching Molly at work to inform her that the DNA didn’t match.

“Aha!” she said, exhaling a loud sigh of relief. “I knew it. I was sure, Trip, just sure. Now didn’t I tell you?”

“Yeah. I suppose so.” There was a flatness to his tone of voice, but Molly refused to be infected by his lack of optimism.

The body was not Danny's, and that meant hope. Hope for her. She tried not to think about the other mother…Hope…Even if it was just a shred she clung to that fragment for all she was worth, and two days before Danny's birthday Molly took off during her lunch break and drove straight to the mall. She hadn’t been there since the day Danny vanished and the shopping center seemed bigger, busier, more crowded than she remembered it. Danny's biggest dream was to own a remote-controlled car like the ones he had seen the older boys playing with in the park. She found them in the toy store next to J. C. Penney's and picked out the biggest, most expensive one she could find: a pickup truck souped up with flames and decals. It weighed nearly ten pounds and cost more than a week's worth of groceries.

When Molly arrived at work the next morning, Larry called her into his office to tell her that Doreen was leaving and that she was being promoted to editor. The job entailed a lot more responsibilities but he was sure she could manage them.

Two days later, Molly moved into Doreen's office. It was small, but had a door she could close and a window. Though it was sealed, it looked out on the garden courtyard and on days when the sun was out, it flooded the room and lifted her spirits. Part of Molly's responsibility was to train the new secretary Larry had just hired. Tasha was
fresh out of school with no real experience and needed to be coached. Suddenly, here she was in a position of authority, student transformed into teacher.

Life went on. Not only at the magazine, but in the rest of the world. That was the odd thing about tragedy, thought Molly. It was like a rock dropped in the ocean—the ripples were evident only close to where it had pierced the surface.

Tripoli was working long, irregular hours. A lot was happening in town. There were a flurry of break-ins, an attempted rape up near the campus.

“Your people are not working on Danny's case like they used to,” said Molly one night, sitting at the kitchen table as Tripoli washed up the dinner plates.

“Well, I’d be lying to you if I said we were going full-steam. It's not that I’ve given up looking. It's just that we’ve got an overload of cases right now. You’ve gotta understand, Molly, the department works by a system of priorities.”

“And Danny is now low, is that it?”

“A day doesn’t go by—no, not an hour—that I don’t think about Danny. Nothing in the world would make me happier than to get him back to you.”

That same week, Rosie lost her job at the P&C. They fired her because she had come up short on two occasions. It was just before Christmas, a particularly bad time. Ed was still laid off, she had lost her health insurance with her job, and…

“And on top of everything,” said Rosie, biting her lip, “I think I’m pregnant.”

“Think?” asked Molly, putting down her pastrami sandwich. In an attempt to cheer Rosie up, she had taken her out for lunch at Hal's Deli on Aurora Street.

“Know!” she said heaving a sigh.

“But that's wonderful. Aren’t you and Ed…?”

“I’d say right now we’re more scared than happy. I know why I lost my baby last time. You can’t imagine what that body shop was like.”

Molly could. She remembered how the building was sealed in winter and the exhaust fans were ineffective. Every time she stepped in she got nauseated from the fumes.

“There were days I had these throbbing headaches. Sometimes I couldn’t even breathe. I knew I should have quit right away, but…”

“But now you’re out,” said Molly, trying to sound upbeat.

“Two years there. All I can do is think about what they did to my body. Did permanently. And now there's some other poor sucker trapped in my place.”

Molly opened her pocketbook and took out her checkbook.

“What's this?” asked Rosie, her face flushing as Molly slid a check for five hundred dollars across the Formica.

“This is for medical expenses. I want you to see a doctor.”

“I can’t take this.”

“Oh yes you can!” said Molly fiercely.“And you will.”

With the command post closed, Lou Tripoli was back in his old office on the second floor of the city police building on Clinton Street. He spent hours reviewing the videotapes they had taken from the AM/PM Minimart on Green Street, the Short Stop Deli on Seneca, even the cameras posted outside the banks and merchants out at the malls.

The surveillance cameras had been running continuously on the afternoon that Danny disappeared, and Tripoli began again the laborious task of watching the tapes. He was still hoping that the police had overlooked something, some fleeting detail that might generate a fruitful lead.

Tripoli actually found Edna Poyer on the Minimart tape. She had cut across a corner of the station lot, and was indeed heading towards Woolworth's around three o’clock—just as she had claimed.
Tripoli pushed a button on the machine and printed out a couple of the frames.

The more Tripoli searched, the more determined he became. He was sure that if he kept at it, sooner or later he’d turn up something substantive.

It was late December. The January issue of the magazine had been put to bed, and the office was closed for an extended Christmas break. Two solid weeks. Losing Danny had been bad enough. But now, missing him at the time of year they both loved so much—that was almost too much to bear. Molly was afraid she might go to pieces. Tripoli made it his business to check up on Molly at odd hours. Once in a while they made love. At other times Molly wasn’t quite up to it and he didn’t push. They just slept, content to lie in each other's arms.

Molly made it through the Christmas holidays by simply staying outside and walking. It snowed incessantly that winter, the low gray clouds dumping layer upon layer onto the frigid landscape. But the snow didn’t stop Molly. She kept pushing on through drifts of thigh-deep snow, across the campus, up and down the hills. Each time she spotted a small figure her heart would start racing.

“I tried to call you yesterday,” said Tripoli when he finally reached her on the phone one morning.

“I must have been out,” said Molly, her voice dull and flat.

“Everything okay?”

“I’m making it.”

Tripoli was going to fly down to North Carolina to bring back a guy on a warrant.“You going to be all right while I’m gone?”

“Sure. Don’t worry about me.”

“But I do.”

That winter, Ithaca barely saw the blue of sky. At first people were merely inconvenienced, but soon farm animals had to be
locked inside their barns, and the deer began dying by the hundreds. Day and night the plows kept noisily scouring the roads, and soon the trailers in Molly's park lost their form and came to resemble huge white burial mounds. The snowfall, which in one twenty-four-hour period exceeded thirty inches, had already broken all accumulation records for an entire winter. Temperatures, too, continued to plummet to all-time lows. On a Wednesday, while Molly was at work, the propane heater in her old trailer gave out, and she returned to find the pipes frozen. Although she was able to get her heat restored, she was without water for nearly a week. Yet Molly refused to move. How else could Danny find her?

As the days wore on, Molly continued putting in long hours at the magazine. No matter how hard she worked, however, there was still time left over, time to fill, time to think, and time to miss her boy.

Despite her growing doubts about ever seeing Danny again, her nights of despair and moments of panic, her career was taking off, reaching a level she could only have dreamed of a year earlier. She was earning a good salary, meeting critical deadlines, and having other people seeking out her counsel. She realized she was perfectly capable of holding a good job, here or maybe anywhere. By any external measure she had made it; she had strengths and resources greater than she ever realized. Yet without Danny, this victory felt hollow.