Jan Burke - Kidnapped

“The lawyer’s cautiously optimistic,” Mason said. “He’s coming up here next week. I’ll let you know what he says.” He nodded toward the photos. “What did you bring?”

“You wanted to see the new apartment?”

The next hours passed with Caleb telling tales of moving, describing the new place and his adventures in graduate school. Mason talked about a painting he was working on and some of his fellow inmates-people Caleb had come to know through Mason’s stories about them. They played a game of gin. Mason won.

“You’re being careful?” Mason asked, but not about his card play. He always asked this question at some point in a visit, especially if Caleb was pursuing some lead that might help them figure out who set Mason up. None of the leads ever panned out.

“Yes, but I’m not in any danger. I can’t understand that, either.”

“What do you mean?”

“They killed Dad. They took Jenny. They sent you to prison. Why did I escape any punishment or harm?”

Mason raised a brow. “I don’t think you did.”

Caleb fell silent. “No, I guess I didn’t, but still…”

“You didn’t. I know you think you’re failing me, failing Jenny. But you aren’t, you’re fighting for us. And lately-you must feel as if you’re fighting alone. And there’s nothing I can do about that, much as I wish I could.”

“When we talk-when I see you-it helps.”

Mason seemed surprised.

“It does,” Caleb reassured him.

“Well-that’s good.” He dealt another game of gin. Caleb won.

At 2:15 P.M., it was time to clear out, to start the checkout process. All visitors were told it was time to leave. The brothers stood and exchanged another brief embrace-the earlier greeting and this quick hug good-bye were all the physical contact allowed between them.

“Thanks for coming all the way up here,” Mason said.

“See you next week.”

“You don’t have to-”

“I know. But I’ll see you next week.”

That exchange was always the same, every week, as were their next words.

“Keep looking for her, Caleb.”

“I will.”

It was their good-bye, and one of the few mentions either made of Jenny, having long ago found it too hard to say much more.

CALEB began the drive home, wondering how she might have changed in five years. Hoping she had lived to change.

Monday, April 24

2:05 P.M.

NEWSROOM OF THE

LAS PIERNAS NEWS EXPRESS

THE phone had been ringing all day. I’d inadvertently created a hotline for despair.

On that rainy Monday morning, I got more calls than Circulation-and they had to talk to everyone whose copy of the Las Piernas News Express had landed in a puddle.

As the day wore on, the rain let up, but the calls didn’t. One of the busiest news days we’d had in weeks, and I was answering the phone.

Most callers were people who were divorced and afraid of what their ex-spouses might do. Although the end of yesterday’s column had carried a teaser that said, “Next Sunday: What You Can Do to Prevent Custodial Abduction,” fearful divorced parents were not going to wait a week for those tips.

The other calls, though fewer in number, were harder to take: parents who hadn’t seen their children in years.

Most were people worn out by their hope. What would they have done with their energy, I wondered, if they hadn’t spent it looking for a missing child? The slight chance that I might be able to help them had led them to take time out of whatever else they had planned that day to contact me. They would patiently tell me the details of their misery, and I didn’t have the heart to cut them off.

They weren’t all pleasant personalities, either. Jane Serre was clearly drunk when she called at ten in the morning. The booze didn’t make her story any less awful. On a Friday afternoon two years ago, her ex-husband, Gerry Serre, had stopped by a local day-care center and picked up their three-year-old son, Luke, as planned. They shared custody, and he was going to take the boy to San Diego for a week-to see the zoo, Legoland, and Sea World. They never returned. When she checked the hotel he said he would be staying at, they said no reservations had been made under his name. He had left everything-his house, his car, his job-even his band, apparently the one interest he seemed to have outside of work. Hadn’t touched his credit cards or bank accounts. Just disappeared. With Luke.

“He always was a secretive bastard, you know?” she said, although it came out closer to “scheecretive.” I had been saying “Hmm” to the constant “you knows?,” which was enough to keep her going. I considered cutting the call short, but I knew that if I hung up, the phone would ring again, a call from someone else with another version of the same story.

The picture she gave me of Gerry was that of an uncommunicative loner, estranged from his family. Jane claimed that she got most of the friends in the divorce, friends who had been hers to begin with, but a guy who worked with Gerry said her ex mentioned that he had been dating someone recently. No one in his office had the name of his new girlfriend, nor had any of them seen her, but Jane figured this gal had money and had helped Gerry to steal Luke.

The guys in the band, she said, claimed they didn’t know the new girlfriend, either, but they had always hated Jane. The feeling was mutual, and the topic of the band was extensively explored. The name of the band was Snaggletooth, which she claimed he had cruelly named after her, but she had shown him by getting reconstructive dental surgery.

Up to that point, I managed to jot down the details despite Jane Serre’s slurred delivery. With the dental surgery, I was at the too-much-information stage and ended the call. I wondered if her marriage had made an alcoholic out of her, or if her alcoholism had led, at least in part, to the end of the marriage.

A FEW more worriers called, and then I got Blake Ives.

Mr. Ives was a yeller. He wanted to let me know how unhappy he was that we had “glorified kidnappers,” meaning the couple in Mexico. Pointing out that I wasn’t the one who wrote that story seemed cowardly, so I just listened to him rant. I didn’t enjoy that much, but I suppose I half-admired him for still having the ability to yell about his missing daughter, Carla, eight years after his ex-wife and her new boyfriend had taken her. After eight years, no one with a missing child has forgotten that child for a moment, but most people are beaten down.

So I asked for details. As it turned out, I had known his ex-wife-she had briefly worked at the Express. The yelling suddenly became even more understandable. I had never liked Bonnie Creci, as she was known before she married the unfortunate Mr. Ives.

I remembered Bonnie as being both smart and sly, one of those women whose supposed concern is carried like a small poisoned dagger. She would take your colleagues aside, and if your name followed the phrase “I worry about…,” what followed your name was not genuine solicitude but something meant to undermine your reputation. Some people thought she was smug, but I didn’t believe she had the underlying self-confidence to carry that off.

The main reason I had disliked her, though, was that she went out of her way to make trouble for Lydia Ames, who was then assistant city editor. Most of us figured Bonnie was after Lydia’s job. Lydia and I have been friends since grade school, so anyone who tries to mess with her makes two enemies. I wasn’t the only one who came to Lydia’s defense, though. Bonnie found out just how fast the temperature could drop in the newsroom, and she eventually decided it was a little too chilly at the Express.

“She hasn’t worked here in a decade,” I said to Ives.