With (14 page)

Somebody was tearing at the back of his jacket and he turned around and there was Karen. “LEO! WHAT HAPPENED?” she hollered. Leo explained to the officer that this lady was the girl’s mother, and the officer helpfully explained the situation to her so Leo didn’t have to do it. But Karen looked like she was fixing to murder the officer. “BUT WHAT WAS SHE DOING HERE AT THIS ROLLER RINK?!?!” Karen screeched, and the officer looked at Leo and waited for Leo to explain because the officer sure didn’t know what she had been doing here at the roller rink. And because he didn’t know, both of them were staring at Leo waiting for him to explain.

“Skating,” Leo said, and that was all he could say for the moment.

“DID
YOU
BRING HER HERE?!” she yells into his face.

There was a crowd of people gathered around them, girls and parents and cops and sheriff’s deputies and state troopers, and somebody in that crowd must’ve been a friend of Karen’s or maybe a mother of one of the other girls, because the woman said, “Karen, we were having the party here. Didn’t Robin tell you?”

“NO SHE DID NOT!” Karen screamed. “DO YOU THINK I WOULD HAVE LET HER GO TO THE GODDAMN PARTY IF I’D KNOWN YOU WERE TAKING HER TO
THIS
PLACE?” Karen broke down and commenced bawling. Leo tried to hold her and for a moment she looked as if she was going to let him hug her but then she backed off from him and cried, “I want my mother! Where’s my mother?”

“She didn’t come with me,” Leo admitted, and, thinking of Louisa, said to himself,
Boy, am I going to be up ole Shit Creek without nothing to steer with.

“She didn’t come with you,” Karen said. “She didn’t come with you, huh? So she didn’t come with you.” And then she says, still calm but very loud, “LEO, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH HER?”

“I reckon she’s just a-settin at the
TV
up at the house,” he says.

Karen bursts out laughing. “So you’ve just got her at your house? And Mother’s with her?”

It got through Leo’s sawdust that they were talking about different hers. “Aw, I thought you meant your mother. I haven’t done nothing with Robin. She’s been kidnapped.”

A policeman spoke to Karen. “Ma’am, let me ask you: are you married?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” she wanted to know.

“Yes or no, ma’am, please.”

“No, I’m divorced.”

“Then maybe the girl’s father came and got her. That often happens, you know, especially if there’s any kind of custody dispute.”

“Then Billy has got her!” Karen said. “That asshole! Oh, it’s just like him!” And Karen commenced bawling again.

The cop said, “Let’s get off the rink and go sit down and you can tell us how to find him.”

Everybody got off the rink, and a table was set up with chairs around it, and other people sat in those bleachers, and each of the girls at the birthday had to answer a few questions before she was allowed to go, and one by one the parents took the kids away. Leo figured the best thing for him to do was just slip on out and get on home and maybe even pretend to Louisa that he didn’t know nothing about nothing. But as he was stepping slowly and softly toward the door, a cop came and took his arm and said, “I hope you’re not going anywhere.”

“My wife,” he said, “she’s the girl’s grandma, and I reckon I ought to go get her.”

“We’ll send a trooper to pick her up,” the cop said. “We need you here. Have a seat.”

The place was really filling up with all kinds of officers and the
FBI
besides. Somebody was even taking flash photos of that balcony and running a tape measure across it like you did when somebody has a wreck.

Leo was mighty glad to have all those law enforcement people surrounding him for protection when Louisa arrived, or else she might’ve killed him on the spot. It took a couple of ’em to hold her back from attacking him. Her behavior was really inexcusable and was probably the reason they decided to keep him for questioning. He didn’t relish spending a night in jail but it was sure a lot better than spending the night at home with her. Either way he wouldn’t have been able to sleep a wink. It wasn’t the disgrace of being arrested that preyed on his mind as much as the fact of Robin’s disappearance. She meant the world to him and now she was gone. They could suspect him all they wanted to and it wouldn’t bring her back.

They fed him a good breakfast at the jail and there was a
TV
with the morning news having a big story on Robin, and her picture broadcast for all the world to see. It wasn’t one of her best pictures and didn’t do justice to her beauty. Right soon after breakfast a feller from the state police, name of Jack Samples, who was in charge of child molesters, and two of Lieutenant Samples’ men, sat Leo down at a table and commenced asking him a bunch of questions. They had even checked him out and found his Navy rap sheet, which mentioned that he’d spent some time in the brig after being caught during shore leave with a eleven-year-old whore. That had been twenty years ago, goddammit, but they acted like he’d just been picked up last night.

They grilled him. What was his exact relationship to the victim? What was the nature and extent of that exact relationship? Had the victim ever said or done anything inappropriate or of a sexual character during that relationship? Had he ever said or done anything inappropriate or of a sexual character during that relationship? Had he ever fondled her? Where had he touched her? Had he sat her upon his lap? When and how often and with what conclusion? What sort of kisses had he given her and received from her? Was it true that he had given her a large stuffed bear, named Paddington, whom she regularly slept with?

Leo did a lot of sweating during this interview, but the worst had only just begun. Maybe he had given the wrong answers to the questions because by and by they started in to trying to get him to confess where he had taken her and where he was keeping her. In the trunk of his car maybe? Tied up in the woods somewhere? In an abandoned house somewhere? They promised him they would try to get him off lightly if only he would confess and lead them to the girl. Did he want to spend the rest of his life in prison? No? Then why didn’t he come clean and help them find the girl?

Trying desperately to divert attention away from his own innocent self, Leo suddenly remembered the man from the other day, the man who Robin said had pretended to be him, the man they’d later encountered out on the road after Robin’s bike wreck who at first claimed to be her grandfather because, as he’d said later, he had suspected that Leo was a child molester and wanted to protect her against him. The sawdust began to sift away as Leo realized that man was probably the number one suspect. Maybe that man was some kind of stalker who wanted Robin specifically and had taken the trouble to follow her to the roller rink and abduct her.

Leo told the officers all that he could remember about the man and what he had done and said. He concluded, “Maybe he was just looking for his lost dog, like he said, but that could’ve just been a excuse.”

The officers looked at each other, and mumbled some stuff to one another, and then Jack Samples said, “Or maybe he was your partner in this deal. Maybe he was the one who actually grabbed her at the rink but you put him up to it. Huh?” All Leo could do was shake his head vigorously and keep on a-shaking it. They led him off to another room and hooked him up to a bunch of wires and stuff that was some kind of lie-detector machine. Then they asked him all kinds of questions, including all of the questions they’d already asked him, and he did his best to tell the honest-to-God truth. He told the truth when they point-blank asked him if he knew where she was. When they were all done, and he was plumb wore out, he said, “Well, did I pass?” but they didn’t say yes or no.

Finally one of them asked him, “Do you think you can describe this man you were talking about?”

And later that morning they brought in a police sketch artist who wanted to do something called a “composite,” and the feller started off with simple questions to Leo like age, height, weight, hair color, eye color, etc., and then got to more complicated ones like how close together the eyes was, and how long the nose was and how much the ears stuck out. Leo had a pretty hard time trying to remember just what the guy had looked like day before yesterday, and finally when the artist had come up with a sketch and showed it to him Leo had to offer his humble opinion that it didn’t look too awful much like the feller. “His eyebrows was bushier than that, and his mouth was some wider,” Leo criticized the artwork.

By mid-afternoon they had a sketch that was a fair likeness of the guy. Jack Samples studied it and laughed and said, “Aw shit, that sort of looks like old Sog!” But nobody took the trouble to tell him who this Old Sog was. They made copies of the picture and sent ’em out to the press, and it appeared on the evening news and Leo was even a little proud, as if he’d drawed the picture himself.

Jack Samples said to him, “Well, I guess you’re free to go, for now. Probably the girl wasn’t even abducted, she was just a runaway.”

“On roller skates?” Leo said, and somehow they all thought that was funny, and laughed. But Leo wasn’t laughing. One of the cops, not Samples, had told him that in most sexual kidnappings the child is never found alive, and Leo was starting to get powerfully haunted by the notion that poor Robin could be dead and raped somewhere at this very moment. His heart poured out for her, and for his loss of her. She had been the light of his life. Such as his shitty life had been. Now some real son of a bitch who had made careful plans and carried them out had removed Leo’s darling little girl from this earth. Leo did not intend to take it laying down.

He drove on home, prepared to face the worst yet. It’s twenty miles from Harrison to Pindall and that gave him plenty of time to think about what he would say to Louisa. But by the time he got there he realized there was only one thing he was going to say to her: “Screw you.” Honest.

So he was even disappointed when he got there and discovered she wasn’t there for him to say that to. The car was gone. He suddenly remembered that this was Sunday and if she wasn’t at one of her constant church services or meetings or whatever, she was most likely keeping Karen company during this time of grief and anxiety and waiting.

Leo went up to the bedroom and got his revolver out of the closet and took hold of a fistful of bullets. Then he turned right around and drove those twenty miles back to Harrison. He didn’t go to Karen’s. He went to the roller rink.

It’s funny how things come to you. Maybe because of not having any sleep the night before and being in a kind of daze still, or maybe because without even thinking it out loud he had already determined that if need be he would spend the rest of his life searching for the girl, he suddenly experienced a flash of a minor little detail that he hadn’t even known he had noticed: that feller’s pickup didn’t hardly have no tread to speak of on the tires. They was bald.

Leo searched the parking lot behind the roller rink until he found some bald tracks in the mud, and they went out onto the highway turning south, but he lost the tracks on the asphalt. He started driving slow down that asphalt road, watching every little side road that he came to for any sign of the bald tracks again.

It was the slow but steady beginning of Leo Spurlock’s long, long quest.

Chapter twelve

H
ow in hell was he supposed to answer a question like that? He was struck all of a heap that she would use that word, which didn’t belong on the sweet lips of such an innocent child. And yet. And yet, he couldn’t help but be kind of excited by it, because the way she used it seemed to mean that she at least knew what it was and therefore he might not have to learn her as much as he thought he’d have to learn her.

Even so, he choked on his coffee and needed a minute to gentle down. And then he asked, “Where’d you pick up that word?”

“Everybody knows it,” she said, staring him straight in the eye, feisty and brash as all get out.

“Sweet little girls don’t know it,” he said.

“You should hear all the words Gretchen Scott knows,” she declared. “She knows all of them.”

“Who’s Gretchen Scott?”

“One of my best friends at school.”

“Did Gretchen tell you what that word means? Did she explain what happens when you go to bed with somebody?”

“Sort of,” she said. “But you’re not answering my question. Is that what you’re going to do to me?”

“Not today,” he said, and that was all he could think to say, which was true. He didn’t intend to rush things. He wasn’t one of these here goddamn
rapists
. Aw, of course he knew what statutory rape was, but this wasn’t the same thing. He really hoped that whatever they did would be consensual on her part. He wasn’t never going to force her to do nothing. And besides for some strange reason he wasn’t feeling an awful lot of lust, not at the moment, anyhow. He’d thought for a while that he wouldn’t be able to hold himself back, once he got ahold of her, but now that he had her he didn’t seem to have the itch in his britches that he’d expected.

“But tomorrow maybe?” she said. “Or sometime?”

“Not if you don’t feel like it,” he declared, and then, because the subject was something that ought not be discussed too much but just acted upon whenever the occasion called for it, he decided to change the subject. “It’s warming up out there,” he observed. “You want to take a look at the place?”

“I want to brush my teeth,” she said.

“Fine and dandy. What color toothbrush do you want?”

“Blue.”

He got her a nice blue toothbrush out of the box of new toothbrushes, and then, because she’d never brushed her teeth without running water, which they didn’t have, he showed her the new system of using the wash basin and a gourd dipper filled with water from the water bucket. He had to hold the dipper for her at first, but she got the hang of it, and brushed her teeth and then he wanted to show her how to draw water herself. He took her out to the well, and showed her how to let the well bucket run down on its chain down and down deep into the well and then you let the bucket submerge itself and you pull it up on the pulley with the chain. She had a struggle, at first, pulling that chain with the bucket full on the other end of it, but she finally got it up and then he showed her how to pour the well bucket into the kitchen bucket and take it to the house and set it on the bucket shelf and put the gourd dipper in it.