Marcia Talley - Through the Darkness

Erika showed me how to find the chat rooms, and suggested that I join one of the regional chats. There were chat rooms for every major metropolitan area. Washington, D.C., had five. I clicked my mouse and, simple as that, I was in.

“What now?”

“Now you wait.”

I watched, alternately amazed and disgusted, by the amount of traffic scrolling by me in the room. People joined the chat, stayed for a while, and left. One strange, misspelled message repeated itself so many times that I was certain it was being generated by a robot. Hands off the keyboard, folded in my lap, I ignored them all.

“Some of these guys are just goofing off,” Erika commented. “Others are probably kids pretending to be horny, thirty-five-year-old guys, but way too many are exactly who they say they are, and they’ll end up arranging to meet the child.”

After only two minutes a box popped up on my screen titled PM. DonnieWants2Screw had dropped in to say “Hi.”

“It says PM. What does that mean, Erika?”

“Private message. That’s where they’ll try to lure you in.”

“Do I want to talk to someone named DonnieWants2Screw? I don’t think so.”

“That’s okay. Just wait.”

After a few Hello U Theres , DonnieWants2Screw gave up and Randy_in_Rockville29 stopped by, desperate to talk to Candy, too. “What should I say?”

Erika shrugged, so I typed Hi .

A/s/l , Randy replied.

From reading the previous chats, I knew what that meant. Age, sex, location. I typed in 13/F/Rockville , lying to Randy about everything except my sex.

Randy was twenty-nine, male, and lived in Rockville, if he weren’t lying, too. Got breasts? He wanted to know.

A/s/l were the last keystrokes I ever sent in Randy’s direction, but my dance card was far from empty. In just five minutes more than ten guys had PM’d Candy. I played along with one guy for a while, abbreviating willy-nilly and using words I had learned such as kewl and lol . When he started to get personal, though, asking whether I shaved “down there,” I groaned and turned to Erika. “What do I say now?”

“Type POS,” she said. “Parent Over Shoulder.”

“Jeeze,” I said, typing. I remembered that I’d first heard the term POS from Chloe, and she’d gotten it from her friend Sammy. I hoped it was innocent Internet slang passed down to an unsuspecting Sammy by an older sibling, but at least Chloe wouldn’t be visiting with Sammy and playing on any questionable websites while she stayed with us.

“I wouldn’t recommend pursuing that chat,” Erika said, “but I guarantee you that if one of our volunteers got a hold of that guy, he would be arranging to meet Candy in a few days’ time.”

I logged out of Yahoo feeling dirty, like I needed to run the keyboard through the dishwasher set on scald.

“I don’t imagine I’ll be able to face Roger, but I will talk to Eva about him.”

“Mother! How can you even go back to that church?” Emily’s breath was hot against my cheek.

“Eva’s my friend. I can’t tell you how helpful she’s been to me since Timmy disappeared.”

Emily ignored me. “Erika, tell me how I can help with PredatorBeware. Do you think I could learn to be a decoy?”

“Emily!” I couldn’t believe my daughter had volunteered for stressful work like that.

The look Emily sent me was pleading. “But what else can I do? Nothing is happening, and now the FBI thinks that the person who took Timmy did it because they wanted to keep him! There’s no ransom demand. The tip calls are going to 1-800-TheMissing, and our phone just sits there, mocking me! I have to do something, and helping to get a pedophile off the street is a very good start.”

I found myself agreeing. Eva was my friend, but I owed Roger nothing. I thought about watching Cross Current , and about what I’d just seen, and felt I needed to do a bit of outing myself. “I don’t think there’s any connection, but Roger was in the parking lot at Paradiso on the day Timmy disappeared. He’d come to apply for a job.”

“Mother! Roger could have taken Timmy!”

“He didn’t have Timmy when I saw him, Emily, and that was after we sounded the alarm.”

“Timmy could have been drugged, and hidden in Haberman’s trunk!”

“Emily, think! He’d have to get by the police roadblock.”

“Maybe he had an accomplice, then,” Emily continued. Lord, my daughter was hard to turn.

“Let me weigh in here,” said Erika. “We know Roger is involved with children for sex. It doesn’t take much stretching of the imagination to…” She paused, as if weighing what to tell me and what not. “Oh, hell. For all we know, Roger’s been flying back and forth to Bangkok for years, paying to have sex with children. Maybe he can no longer afford the airfare.”

I nearly gagged. “I really don’t think so. Roger seems to like his victims young, but he also likes them female, and hovering on the cusp of puberty.”

“Some people think you can cure a pedophile. I don’t. They almost always reoffend, we know that, so whether Roger took Timmy or not, he needs to be off the streets, cooling his heels behind bars.”

Emily set her lips in a firm line. “We’ll organize pickets, won’t we, Erika.”

Erika nodded. “Damn straight.”

Whatever Roger had done, I thought, Eva didn’t deserve to be punished. She’d taken St. Cat’s from a tiny congregation of one hundred communicants to upward of five hundred. We had a strong young program, a single parents’ group, and one for swinging-well, maybe not so swinging-seniors. We supported a missionary couple in Guatemala.

I dug Eva’s card out of my purse and punched her private number into my cell. I had to warn her that the pickets were coming.

Why I felt like I had to ride off like Paul Revere, carrying the warning to Pastor Eva that the pickets were coming, the pickets were coming, I couldn’t say. Perhaps it was the calm warmth of her voice when she picked up after the first ring, recognizing my number from caller ID. “Hello, Hannah. Please tell me you’re calling with good news about Timmy.” Typical Eva. When her own world must be falling apart, her first thought was for others. Either that or she hadn’t a clue about Roger, which I found almost impossible to believe.

“No word about Timmy, I’m afraid. But I’d like to talk to you, if it’s convenient.”

“Of course. When would be good for you?”

“Are you busy right now?”

“I’ll always have time for you, Hannah. You’ve caught me at the grocery store, but I’m heading for the checkout counter as we speak. Can you meet me at my office in about thirty minutes? I’ll need to go home and put my groceries away first, so if I’m a bit late, just wait.”

I thought about what I’d overheard of Erika’s elaborate plans to plaster the West Annapolis neighborhood with flyers warning the residents about Roger, the pedophile in their midst, and about her decision to target St. Catherine’s with her picket lines because of the church’s “symbolic value.” So, just in case she had already been able to muster her troops, I said, “Do you think we could meet at the parsonage instead?”

If Eva thought this was a strange request, she didn’t say so. “Of course. I’ll put the kettle on.”

I left my daughter’s home and drove straight out of Hillsmere, across Forest Drive and down Bay Ridge, feeling that my luck must be changing for the better because for once in my life I made all the lights. But my winning streak ran out at the foot of Sixth and Severn when the keeper of the drawbridge that joins the suburb of Eastport to Annapolis proper raised the span to allow a procession of sailboats to pass through to the bay from the inner reaches of Spa Creek. Stuck in traffic near Eastport Elementary, drumming my fingers on the steering wheel, grumbling to myself, I knew there was no good way to open up the subject of Roger with Eva, so I’d just have to wing it.