Mariah Stewart - Acts of Mercy

“Can I just get a burger and fries?” he asked.

“Sure. Be right back with that.” She took the folded menu from his hands and walked into the kitchen through double swinging doors.

Sam stared out the window at the traffic, just beginning to pick up as the end of the work day drew closer. Two police cruisers passed with lights flashing but their sirens silent. A group of five or six young girls, laughing and pushing each other playfully, their hair wet, walked by in short summer cover-ups, each carrying a large tote bag.

“Is there a public pool nearby?” Sam asked when the waitress returned with flatware and a napkin.

After placing them before him, she leaned one knee on the bench opposite his seat and asked, “You’re new in Conroy?”

Sam nodded. “My first time here, yes.”

“You just passing through?”

“I haven’t decided yet,” he told her.

“The pool is about four blocks up. Nothing fancy, but it’s wet and the young families enjoy it. Used to be more for the folks who had a little money, but these days, people with any serious money have their own pools, someplace other than Conroy, so the city pool has had to open its membership to anyone who can afford the fee. Anything you want to know about Conroy, you can ask me. I’ve lived here all my life. Isn’t anything that happened around here that I haven’t heard about.”

Sam suspected as much. “You’ve heard about the Mercy Street Foundation?”

“Oh, yeah.” She gestured with one hand as if to say, Of course, who hasn’t . “Robert-that’s Robert Magellan, the one who started it up-he comes in every once in a while with his cousin, Father Burch. He’s the Catholic priest over there at Our Lady of Angels. Nice guys, both of ’em. Both good tippers, too. Shame about Robert’s wife.” The waitress shook her head slowly from side to side.

Sam had read everything he could find on Robert Magellan. It occurred to him that though he’d spent several hours with Mallory Russo that morning, the tragic disappearance of Robert Magellan’s wife and child had never come up.

“She disappeared a few years ago, right?” Sam knew, but wanted a local’s take on it.

“You been on Mars or something?” She crossed her arms over her chest and frowned.

“Close enough.”

“The wife and their baby had been missing since right before Valentine’s Day, 2007. They just found her car not long ago. Just buried her last week. Beth was still strapped in her seat behind the wheel, but the baby was gone.” She lowered her voice as she delivered this last part.

“Gone?”

“Gone, as in someone must have found the car down in that ravine and took that baby and left poor Beth there all this time.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “You ever heard such a thing? Take a woman’s baby and leave her lying there dead?”

The tinny ring of a bell from the kitchen called the waitress to the pick-up window. She returned with Sam’s meal and placed it before him.

“No leads on what happened to the baby?” Sam asked. That had been left open in every article he’d read.

“None. He was just gone.”

“Any chance he could have gotten himself out of his car seat and got the door open and wandered off?”

“Not unless he was Baby Superman.” The door opened and she turned to see who was coming in. A party of four, obviously regulars, waved to Nancy as they seated themselves. She stood and walked to the counter for their menus. “Ian Magellan was only three months old when he went missing.”

He should have remembered that much, Sam thought as he took a bite from his burger and digested the information. Clearly Magellan’s own tragedy had been the motivating factor in establishing the Foundation, and Sam wondered if he’d hired an investigator to work only on finding his missing son. He took another bite without tasting and chewed slowly. He knew what it was like to lose the person you most loved in the world. He and Magellan had that much in common.

How had Magellan survived losing both his wife and his son? That he had, and now spent a considerable chunk of change helping other people find their missing loved ones told Sam something about the man’s character.

“You need another water?” the waitress asked as she approached the table.

“Just the check.”

“You finished with that?” She pointed to his half-eaten burger.

Sam nodded. “I wasn’t as hungry as I thought I was.”

“Coffee? We have some nice Boston cream pie. Just came in from the baker this morning.”

“No, thanks. Just the check.”

“You staying in Conroy for a while?” She placed his check on the table.

“Maybe for a few days.”

“You stop in tomorrow morning and have breakfast with us”-she smiled as she turned to walk away-“your coffee’s on me.”

“I’ll do that. Thanks.” He picked up his sunglasses and stood. He counted out enough bills to cover his lunch and a tip, and left it next to his plate. The diner was beginning to fill up, with most of the booths by the windows already occupied.

Sam stepped out into the heat of the late summer afternoon and immediately wished he hadn’t. By the time he got to his car and turned on the air conditioning, he was sweating. He wondered what was wrong with him, even considering a move to a place where the temperature in August rose to one hundred degrees with nearly one hundred percent humidity. Why would he, who hated the heat so, choose to live in such a place, when for the first time in his life, he had total control over where he would live, had no one to answer to but himself?

And why would he want to put himself in a position where he’d be dealing with the same demons he’d just spent seven months trying to exorcise? He’d used up a good portion of his savings in his attempts to put his past behind him. What in the name of God was he doing contemplating the possibility of walking back into that same fire again? He couldn’t even claim fatigue; he’d just returned from the longest vacation he’d ever had. So what had possessed him to apply to the Mercy Street Foundation in the first place?

Well, he did need a job, he rationalized, now that he was back in the States.

And, he reminded himself, he hadn’t expected his profiling skills-which were considerable, even he had to admit that-to be an issue. Mallory Russo had been correct in suspecting that Sam had thought the job would be easier, less stressful, than what he’d been used to in the Bureau. She’d disabused him of that quickly enough, even went so far as to wave a particularly tantalizing case under his nose to tempt him.

The air came on with a hot blast. He leaned back against the seat and waited for it to cool him. He left the parking lot and drove aimlessly past a row of boarded-up storefronts in a neighborhood where young and not-so-young hookers stood on the sidewalk and eyed every car that passed, including his. Jumpy young men in sleeveless T-shirts gathered on the corner, gesturing and posturing, maybe for the hookers, maybe for each other. Sam had watched the same scenes play out in a dozen other cities on hot summer afternoons. The seamy side of Conroy was nothing new.

On his way back to the motel where he’d spent the night, he stopped at a drugstore and picked up two newspapers-one local, one national-and a news magazine. He’d been out of touch for months, and it was time for him to catch up. On his way to the cashier, he grabbed a copy of a sports magazine with a picture of the quarterback of his favorite NFL team on the cover.

It was still early, so he took the long way to the motel, choosing streets that wound through the town, past brick row houses close to the factories and larger, more stately homes overlooking the river, away from what must have been some serious emissions from those smokestacks back in the day. A side street brought him past Our Lady of Angels, and he recalled that Nancy had mentioned that Robert Magellan’s cousin was a priest there. Several blocks away he passed another church, this one smaller, older, in need of some paint and some general maintenance. Beyond the church, white stones of varying sizes rose up from the ground. Without thinking, Sam parked the car and got out. He walked around the building, noticing that the front door was padlocked, and walked through the quiet churchyard.