Marcia Talley - Through the Darkness

“My baby, my baby,” Joanna crooned, clawing at her own clothing.

On the arrivals and departures board mounted high on the wall above the glassed-in ticket counters, the letters that spelled out the train schedule clattered into their new positions with a sound like playing cards slapping on bicycle spokes. The Florida train had arrived at the station, the letters announced, but no one made a move to get on board. As Emily crowed and Timmy screamed, the crowd continued to grow, forming a semicircle around them.

Suddenly, someone pushed me forcefully aside.

“What the heck’s going on here?” a security guard demanded to know.

Grabbing onto the security guard for support, Joanna sobbed, “They’re stealing my baby.”

“No we’re not,” Emily insisted in a perfectly reasonable tone of voice. “Timmy is our child. Dante’s and mine.”

I pushed forward through the crowd to put in my two cents worth. “Have you heard about the Shemansky kidnapping?” I asked the guard.

“The what?”

“Jesus Christ!” Dante exclaimed. “It’s been on TV and in all the papers. After all the publicity, you’d think that a security guard ,” he skewered the guard with his eyes and emphasized each word, “that a security guard at a municipal train station, for Christ’s sake, would be up to speed on it.”

Dante reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a square of paper, unfolded it, and shoved the paper-a missing poster for Timmy-under the guard’s bulbous and red-veined nose. “ This child,” Dante snarled.

Safe in his mother’s arms at last, Timmy had stopped crying and buried his head in the crook of her neck. The guard examined the poster, then looked up, his eyes moving from child to the poster, child to the poster, and back again. “Could be,” he said after an eternity had passed.

Dante exploded. “Can’t you fucking read, man? Red hair, green eyes, thirty pounds. Get me a goddamn scale and I’ll prove it to you!”

Ignoring my son-in-law’s tendency toward profanity, the guard handed back the poster. “Look, I ain’t no expert at identifying babies. They all look like Elmer Fudd to me.”

“If you don’t believe my husband,” Emily said, “take a look at this.” Using the arm that wasn’t holding Timmy, she eased her hand into the pocket of her sweater and pulled out a piece of paper that I recognized as a photocopy of Timmy’s footprints, the ones they’d taken at the hospital the day he was born.

The guard waved the evidence away. “I ain’t no fingerprint expert, either, lady.”

Dante had reached the end of his rope. He yanked out his cell phone, and as I watched, he dialed 911.

In the meantime, I was placing a call to Agent Crisp, mentally bracing myself for another stinging lecture. “We’ve found Timmy,” I told her. “We’re at New Carrollton station.”

“I know,” Crisp said. “We’re on our way. I’ve called for backup.”

While we were distracted with our respective calls, Joanna tried an end run, facing the guard directly and screaming into his face. “He’s mine, I tell you.”

The guard’s face grew red. “Sit down, lady! I ain’t no King Solomon, either. We’ll let the police sort this one out.” And he made a third call on his Nextel.

“You’re not fooling anyone now, Joanna,” Dante said gently as Joanna took the guard’s advice and sat. “It’s all over. You can keep up this charade for an hour, maybe two, but we both know that it’s over.”

Joanna began to sob.

“DNA tests will prove it, you know that. They’ll prove Timmy’s ours beyond a shadow of any doubt.”

Joanna laced her fingers together and stared at them, tears coursing down her cheeks. “He should have been mine. He should have been mine.”

“What the hell’s she talking about?” Connie whispered.

“She’s just sick and confused,” I suggested.

But when Agent Crisp arrived a few minutes later with Agent Brown in tow, Joanna collapsed like a punctured tire. “I’m sorry,” she whimpered as she wiped at her streaming nose with the back of her hand. “I don’t know why I did it. It’s just that when I walked by the nursery and saw that little boy lying there so peacefully, something came over me, and I took him.”

Amanda Crisp nodded, and Norm Brown took Joanna’s arm. “Joanna Barnhorst, you are under arrest for kidnapping.” As he read the unfortunate woman her Miranda rights, Joanna seemed barely to be listening. “Do you understand these rights as I have explained them to you?”

Her cheeks still glistening with tears, Joanna nodded.

The crowd parted to let them pass, and everyone’s head turned in her direction as Agent Brown led Joanna away.

I was watching, too, and as the door swooshed shut behind them, I heard one last plaintive cry. “He should have been mine.”

“You know Joanna better than anyone else here,” I ventured, turning to my son-in-law. “What do you think she means?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

And the funny thing was, even after everything that had happened, I believed him.

“That’s it, everyone. Show’s over!” The guard waved his arms as if flagging down a semi. “Either get on the train or go home.”

Dante turned to Agent Crisp. “That’s it? We can take Timmy home?”

Crisp beamed. “Take your son home, Mr. Shemansky.”

When I peer through the plastic sleeve that containsmy Baltimore Sun as it makes the short trip from my front stoop-or the nearby bushes-to my kitchen table each morning, I rarely see good news above the fold, but Saturday’s paper was the happy exception.

Madonna and Child . That’s what ran through my mind as I smiled at the picture of Emily and Tim with a heart so full of joy that it was in real danger of bursting. Emily wore a beatific smile, and her son? The photographer had captured him just at the moment he’d thrown back his head and laughed.

When I got to the kitchen, Paul already sat at the table, shoveling a bowl of cold cereal a spoonful at a time into his mouth. With Chloe and Jake back home with their parents, their family once again complete, it was our first morning without a trace of Froot Loops littering the floor.

“Look at this,” I said, laying the newspaper on the table in front of my husband. Paul swept his empty bowl aside, picked up the paper, and read the article aloud.

The Sun had most of the facts straight-that Timmy had been spotted by his own mother at the train station, that the kidnapper had been about to flee on a southbound Amtrak train. But they made Emily’s presence at New Carrollton seem like a happy coincidence-better copy-and the FBI, to their credit, didn’t set them straight on the matter.

That afternoon, The Capital carried a similar spread-front page pictures of Emily and Tim’s joyful reunion. A photo of Joanna Barnhorst in police custody, her head bowed, also accompanied the article.

I spread the paper out flat on the table and went to fetch the scissors to cut the article out.

When I returned with the scissors, a headline below the fold made me gasp: PASTOR’S HUSBAND ALLEGED PEDOPHILE FOUND DEAD.

The scissors fell from my fingers and clattered to the floor. I dropped into a kitchen chair and pulled the paper toward me, almost afraid to read any further, because if I did, the fact that Roger Haberman was dead could only be confirmed.

The body of Roger Haberman, 51, was found by a fisherman early this morning, floating in the water under the Spa Creek Bridge. Haberman, a convicted pedophile, and the husband of the Reverend Evangeline Haberman, pastor of St. Catherine’s Church in West Annapolis, had recently been featured on an NBC television special, where he and a dozen other men were caught in a sting operation…