Джеффри Дивер - Transgressions

Sometimes Jude scared us. Like she’d maybe hurt us.

Wild! On Friday 7 P.M. news came BULLETIN — BREAKING NEWS — SKATSKILL SUSPECT IN CUSTODY. It was Mr. Zallman!

We shrieked with laughter. Had to press our hands over our mouths so old Mrs. Trahern would not hear.

Jude is flicking through the channels and there suddenly is Mr. Z. on TV! And some broadcaster saying in an excited voice that this man had been apprehended in Bear Mountain State Park and brought back to Skatskill to be questioned in the disappearance of Marissa Bantry and the shocker is: Mikal Zallman, thirty-one, is on the faculty of the Skatskill Day School.

Mr. Zallman’s jaws were scruffy like he had not shaved in a while. His eyes were scared and guilty-seeming. He was wearing a T-shirt and khaki shorts like we would never see him at school and this was funny, too. Between two plainclothes detectives being led up the steps into police headquarters and at the top they must’ve jerked him under the arms, he almost turned his ankle.

We were laughing like hyenas. Jude crouched in front of the TV rocking back and forth, staring.

“Zallman claims to know nothing of Marissa Bantry. Police and rescue workers are searching the Bear Mountain area and will search through the night if necessary.”

There was a cut to our school again, and 15th Street traffic at night. “...unidentified witness, believed to be a classmate of Marissa Bantry, has told authorities that she witnessed Marissa being pulled into a Honda CR-V at this corner, Thursday after school. This vehicle has been tentatively identified as...”

Unidentified witness. That’s me! Anita cried.

And a second “student witness” had come forward to tell the school principal that she had seen “the suspect Zallman” fondling Marissa Bantry, stroking her hair and whispering to her in the computer lab when he thought no one was around, only last week.

That’s me! Denise cried.

And police had found a mother-of-pearl butterfly barrette on the ground near Zallman’s parking space, behind his condominium residence. This barrette had been “absolutely identified” by Marissa Bantry’s mother as a barrette Marissa had been wearing on Thursday.

We turned to Jude who was grinning.

We had not known that Jude had planned this. On her bicycle she must’ve gone, to drop the barrette where it would be found.

We laughed so, we almost wet ourselves. Jude was just so cool.

But even Jude seemed surprised, kind of. That you could make the wildest truth your own and every asshole would rush to believe.

Now she knew his name: Mikal Zallman.

The man who’d taken Marissa. One of Marissa’s teachers at the Skatskill Day School.

It was a nightmare. All that Leah Bantry had done, what exertion of heart and soul, to enroll her daughter in a private school in which a pedophile was allowed to instruct elementary school children.

She had met Zallman, she believed. At one of the parents’ evenings. Something seemed wrong, though: Zallman was young. You don’t expect a young man to be a pedophile. An attractive man though with a hawkish profile, and not very warm. Not with Leah. Not that she could remember.

The detectives had shown her Zallman’s photograph. They had not allowed her to speak with Zallman. Vaguely yes she did remember. But not what he’d said to her, if he had said anything. Very likely Leah has asked him about Marissa but what he’d said she could not recall.

And then, hadn’t Zallman slipped away from the reception, early? By chance she’d seen him, the only male faculty member not to be wearing a necktie, hair straggling over his collar, disappearing from the noisy brightly lighted room.

He’d taken a polygraph, at his own request. The results were “inconclusive.”

If I could speak with him. Please.

They were telling her no, Mrs. Bantry. Not a good idea.

This man who took Marissa if I could speak with him please.

In her waking state she pleaded. She would beg the detectives, she would throw herself on their mercy. Her entire conscious life was now begging, pleading, and bartering. And waiting.

Zallman is the one, isn’t he? You have him, don’t you? An eyewitness said she saw him. Saw him pull Marissa into a van with him. In broad daylight! And you found Marissa’s barrette by his parking space isn’t that proof!

To her, the desperate mother, it was certainly proof. The man had taken Marissa, he knew where Marissa was. The truth had to be wrung from him before it was too late.

On her knees she would beg to see Zallman promising not to become emotional and they told her no, for she would only become emotional in the man’s presence. And Zallman, who had a lawyer now, would only become more adamant in his denial.

Denial! How could he... deny! He had taken Marissa, he knew where Marissa was.

She would beg him. She would show Zallman pictures of Marissa as a baby. She would plead with this man for her daughter’s life if only if only if only for God’s sake they would allow her.

Of course, it was impossible. The suspect was being questioned following a procedure, a strategy, to which Leah Bantry had no access. The detectives were professionals, Leah Bantry was an amateur. She was only the mother, an amateur.

The wheel, turning.

It was a very long Friday. The longest Friday of Leah’s life.

Then abruptly it was Friday night, and then it was Saturday morning. And Marissa was still gone.

Zallman had been captured, yet Marissa was still gone.

He might have been tortured, in another time. To make him confess. The vicious pedophile, whose “legal rights” had to be honored.

Leah’s heart beat in fury. Yet she was powerless, she could not intervene.

Saturday afternoon: approaching the time when Marissa would be missing for forty-eight hours.

Forty-eight hours! It did not seem possible.

She has drowned by now, Leah thought. She has suffocated for lack of oxygen.

She is starving. She has bled to death. Wild creatures on Bear Mountain have mutilated her small body.

She calculated: it would soon be fifty hours since Leah had last seen Marissa. Kissed her hurriedly good-bye in the car, in front of the school Thursday morning at eight. And (she forced herself to remember, she would not escape remembering) Leah hadn’t troubled to watch her daughter run up the walk, and into the school. Pale gold hair shimmering behind her and just possibly (possibly!) at the door, Marissa had turned to wave goodbye to Mommy but Leah was already driving away.

And so, she’d had her opportunity. She would confess to her sister Avril I let Marissa slip away.

The great wheel, turning. And the wheel was Time itself, without pity.

She saw that now. In her state of heightened awareness bred of terror she saw. She had ceased to give a damn about “Leah Bantry” in the public eye. The distraught/negligent mother. Working mom, single mom, mom-with-a-drinking-problem. She’d been exposed as a liar. She’d been exposed as a female avid to sleep with another woman’s husband and that husband her boss. She knew, the very police who were searching for Marissa’s abductor were investigating her, too. Crude tabloids, TV journalism. Under a guise of sympathy, pity for her “plight.”

None of this mattered, now. What the jackals said of her, and would say. She was bartering her life for Marissa’s. Appealing to God in whom she was trying in desperation to believe. If You would. Let Marissa be alive. Return Marissa to me. If You would hear my plea. So there was no room to give a damn about herself, she had no scruples now, no shame. Yes she would consent to be interviewed on the crudest and crudest of the New York City TV stations if that might help Marissa, somehow. Blinking into the blinding TV lights, baring her teeth in a ghastly nervous smile.