Cheryl Tardif - Children of the Fog

He gave her a rueful look. “Figures you’d know about those books. You’re a woman.”

She shook her head. “I’m a writer.”

“What do you write?”

“Fiction. Mainly mysteries. Right now, though, I’m working on an illustrated children’s book for Sam…” Her smile faded.

“He’ll read it,” Matthew said softly.

Sadie’s gaze flickered to the window.

A woman in a teal jacket stood on the street corner. Her white-blond hair shone in the sunlight as she waited for the crosswalk light to flash. A young boy held her hand. He had his back to Sadie, but his hair reminded her of Sam’s.

She frowned. Even his build is like—

The boy turned abruptly, his familiar eyes latching onto hers. His mouth opened and he mouthed one word.

Mommy.

Her heart splintered into a million miniscule pieces.

“Sam?”

She lurched to her feet, oblivious to the spilled coffee pooling on the table and the strange looks from Matthew.

“Sadie, what’s wrong?” he asked, standing quickly.

Brushing past him, she flew out the door and veered around the corner. Across the street, the woman in the teal jacket meandered down the sidewalk, staring into shop windows every now and then. Alone.

Zigzagging between cars, Sadie ignored the blaring horns as she ran toward the woman, grabbed her arm and spun her around.

“Hey!” the blond yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Where is he?” Sadie demanded.

“Who?”

“Sam! The boy you were with.”

The woman eyed her as if Sadie were a street beggar. “Are you nuts? I wasn’t with any boy.”

Sadie gaped at her, speechless. Something was wrong—off. The woman’s hair didn’t seem quite as pale up close, and she seemed younger than the woman Sadie had spotted from inside Borealis Café.

But she’s wearing a teal jacket.

She twisted around, searching the sidewalk. But there was no other blond-haired woman in teal.

“Sadie, what’s going on?” Matthew said, rushing toward her.

Bitter tears trailed down her cheeks. “I saw him. Sam! He was walking with her .” She whipped her head around, but the woman was gone. “Where did she go?”

“Look, Sadie, why don’t I drive you home?”

“I’m not crazy, Matthew! I saw Sam. I swear it.”

He gently took her arm. “I believe you.”

“He looked at me and said… Mommy .”

“I imagine seeing Cortnie sometimes,” he murmured, steering her across the street. “At the park. At her school. But it’s never really her.”

“I didn’t imagine it,” she argued. “It was Sam.”

Matthew sighed. “Sadie, do you want to talk—?”

“No. I just want to go home.”

“Do you want me to drive you?”

“No, I’m fine.” She rolled her eyes. “Well, as fine as I can be under these circumstances.”

He took her car keys from her fumbling fingers, unlocked the car door and waited while she climbed in. Then he passed her the keys and a business card.

“My home, office and cell numbers.”

She thanked him, then sped away. As she watched him in the rearview mirror, Matthew Bornyk stood motionless, a miserable expression on his handsome face.

No father should ever look that way.

Unable to help herself, she drove around the block three times, looking for the blond-haired woman in the teal jacket. But there was no sign of her. Or Sam.

When Sadie arrived home, she sat on the cold cement steps of the front porch, mindlessly sipping a cup of coffee while scanning the cars that passed by. After an hour, she could have sworn she had seen Sam three times. But in her heart she knew it wasn’t him. Her baby was gone, taken by a madman, and with each passing moment she was more and more convinced that she needed to tell the police what she knew.

Maybe tomorrow.

The rest of the day dragged on. She paced around the house, the cordless phone attached to her belt.

“In case there’s any news of Sam,” she said to Leah, who had dropped by.

“You can’t just wait by the phone every day, Sadie. You should get out, get some fresh air.”

Sadie stared at her. “What do you expect me to do? Go tanning? Or out for coffee?”

“No, I didn’t mean it like that,” Leah said, throwing her hands up defensively. “I just don’t want to see you holed up in your house for days on end. It’s not… healthy.”

“I can’t act as if nothing’s wrong, Leah. Not when somewhere out there my son is waiting to be found.”

“They’ll find him.”

Leah hugged her, but Sadie felt smothered and pulled away.

Her friend didn’t understand. No one did.

That evening, she vacuumed Sam’s room.

“For when he comes home,” she told Philip firmly.

The following day, there was still no sign of Sam.

Jay called to say that the clown shoe was a dead end.

“And we got nothing off the sheet of paper,” he added.

There were no prints, no DNA, nothing to lead them to the kidnapper.

“We’re trying to trace the manufacturer of the shoe,” he said. “Maybe we’ll find the store he bought it from.”

Sadie’s heart sank. “But that won’t do any good if he paid with cash.”

“Yeah, but we might get lucky. The store may have a security camera. We just need a break, Sadie. One solid lead and we’ll find Sam.”

All day long she wracked her brain trying to think of ways to help the police locate Sam without having to describe the man she had seen, but nothing came to her, so she ventured outside and plastered more posters of Sam all over the neighborhood, until his eyes followed her everywhere. She knocked on doors, asked questions about a strange vehicle in the neighborhood and showed Sam’s photograph. But no one had seen a thing.

She even tried to rely on fate. It had become a habitual joke all these years, something to play with, like we’ll buy the house if the previous deal falls through. Or I’ll know the time is right to write something different when I’m given a sign. Fate had been her best friend back then, but now that she really needed divine intervention, it had abandoned her.

The next day, she waited by the phone. By suppertime, it hadn’t rung, so she called Jay’s number.

“Sadie, we don’t have any news yet. Sorry.”

“You told me the first three days were crucial,” she said, trying to keep the panic from her voice. “Why is it taking so long?”

“We’re doing everything we can,” he assured her. “We’re hoping someone in your neighborhood will call in. Someone had to have seen something.”

Yeah, I did.

Although the words were on the tip of her tongue, she just couldn’t spit them out. She feared for Sam. She had no doubt that The Fog would kill him, just like he promised. And there was no way she could live with Sam’s death on her hands.

A week went by. A week of pure hell.

Sadie wanted nothing more than to slip away into a cloud of drugged oblivion. But the stubborn part of her kept her heading out each morning to replace the ripped, blurred, rain-splattered posters of Sam.

On the tenth morning, she remained in bed, refusing to get up or eat anything. She’d even ignored the incessant ringing of the phone, although Leah had called twice and left frantic messages on the answering machine.

Sadie didn’t want to talk to anyone.

Except Sam.

She missed him fiercely, and not a moment passed when she didn’t think of him. Was he alive? Was he being abused?

The angry X’s scratched across the days on the calendar beside her bed glared back at her.

“Ten days…”

Sam’s picture was pressed up against her. She peeled it away, noticing the red imprint the frame had left on her arm. Placing the picture back on the nightstand, she reached into the drawer beside her bed and removed the binder—the one with the drawing of The Fog.