Dennis Lehane - Gone, Baby, Gone

I shifted in my seat, pushed my cold coffee away. “Who had access to Helene’s apartment? Who could open the door with a key? Who would Amanda readily leave with, no fuss, no noise?”

“But he came to us.”

“No,” I said. “His wife did. He kept saying, ‘Thanks for listening to us, blah, blah, blah.’ Getting ready to brush us off. It was Beatrice who put the pressure on. What did she say when she was in our office? ‘No one wanted me to come here. Not Helene, not my husband.’ It was Beatrice who kept this thing alive. And Lionel-he loves his sister, okay. But is he blind? He’s not stupid. So how does he not know about Helene’s association with Cheese? How does he not know she has a drug problem? He acted surprised when he heard she did some coke, for Christ’s sake. I talk to my own sister once a week, see her only once a year, but I’d know if she had a drug problem. She’s my sister.”

“What you said about the criminal record,” Ryerson said. “How’s that play into it?”

“Let’s say it was Broussard who busted him, had him on a hook. Lionel owed him. Who knows?”

“But why would Lionel kidnap his own niece?”

I thought about it, closed my eyes until I could see Lionel standing in front of me. That hound-dog face and sad eyes, those shoulders that seemed to have the weight of a metropolis pushing down on them, the pained decency in his voice-the voice of a man who truly didn’t understand why people did all the shitty, neglectful things they did. I heard the volcanic rage in his voice when he’d blown up at Helene in the kitchen that morning we’d confronted her about knowing Cheese, the hint of hatred in that volume. He’d told us he believed that his sister loved her child, was good for her. But what if he’d lied? What if he believed the opposite? What if he thought less of his sister’s parenting skills than his own wife did? But he, the child of alcoholics and bad parents himself, had learned how to mask things, to cover his rage, would have had to in order to build himself into the kind of citizen, the kind of father, he’d become.

“What if,” I said aloud, “Amanda McCready wasn’t abducted by someone who wanted to exploit her or abuse her or ransom her?” I met Ryerson’s slightly skeptical eyes, then Angie’s curious, excited ones. “What if Amanda McCready was abducted for her own good?”

Ryerson spoke slowly, carefully. “You think the uncle stole the child…”

I nodded. “To save the child.”

“Lionel’s gone,” Beatrice said.

“Gone?” I said. “Where?”

“North Carolina,” she said. She stepped back from the door. “Please, come in.”

We followed her into the living room. Her son, Matt, looked up as we came in. He lay on his stomach in the middle of the floor, drawing on a pad of paper with a variety of pens, pencils, and crayons. He was a good-looking kid, with the smallest hint of his father’s hound-dog sag in his jaw but none of the weight on his shoulders. He’d inherited his eyes from his mother, and the sapphire blazed under his pitch-black eyebrows and the wavy hair atop his head.

“Hi, Patrick. Hi, Angie.” He looked up with benign curiosity at Neal Ryerson.

“Hey.” Ryerson squatted by him. “I’m Neal. What’s your name?”

Matt shook Ryerson’s hand without hesitation, looked in his eyes with the openness of a child who’s been taught to respect adults but not fear them.

“Matt,” he said. “Matt McCready.”

“Pleased to meet you, Matt. Whatcha drawing there?”

Matt turned the pad so we could all see it. Stick figures of various colors appeared to climb all over a car three times their height and as long as a commercial airliner.

“Pretty good.” Ryerson raised his eyebrows. “What is it?”

“Guys trying to ride in a car,” Matt said.

“Why can’t they get in?” I asked.

“It’s locked,” Matt said, as if the answer explained everything.

“But they want that car,” Ryerson said. “Huh?”

Matt nodded. “’Cause it-”

“Because, Matthew,” Beatrice said.

He looked up at her, confused at first, but then smiled. “Right. Because it has TVs inside and Game Boys and Whopper Jrs. and-uh, Cokes.”

Ryerson covered a smile with a wipe of his hand. “All the good stuff.”

Matt smiled up at him. “Yeah.”

“Well, you keep at it,” he said. “It’s coming along nice.”

Matt nodded and turned the pad back toward himself. “I’m putting buildings in next. It needs buildings.”

And as if we’d been part of a dream, he picked up a pencil and turned back to the pad with such complete concentration, I’m sure we and everything else vanished from the room.

“Mr. Ryerson,” Beatrice said. “I’m afraid we haven’t met.”

Her small hand disappeared in his long one. “Neal Ryerson, ma’am. I’m with the Justice Department.”

Beatrice glanced at Matt, lowered her voice. “So this is about Amanda?”

Ryerson shrugged. “We wanted to check a few things with your husband.”

“What things?”

Ryerson had been clear before we left the diner that the last thing we wanted to do was spook Lionel or Beatrice. If Beatrice notified her husband that he was under suspicion, he could disappear for good, and Amanda’s whereabouts might just go with him.

“Be honest with you, ma’am. The Justice Department has what’s called the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. We do a lot of follow-up work with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, Nation’s Missing Children Organization, and their databases. General stuff.”

“So this isn’t a break in the case?” Beatrice kneaded her shirttail between her fingers and the heel of her palm, looked up into Ryerson’s face.

“No, ma’am, I wish it were. As I said, it’s just some basic follow-up questions for the database. And because your husband was first on the scene the night your niece disappeared, I wanted to go over it with him again, see if there was anything he might have noticed-a small thing here or there, say-which might produce a fresh way of looking at this.”

She nodded, and I almost winced to see how easily she bought Ryerson’s lies.

“Lionel helps a friend of his who sells antiques. Ted Kenneally. He and Lionel have been friends since grade school. Ted owns Kenneally Antiques in Southie. Every month or so, they drive to North Carolina and drop some off in a town called Wilson.”

Ryerson nodded. “The antiques center of North America, yes, ma’am.” He smiled. “I’m from those parts.”

“Oh. Is there anything I could help you with? Lionel will be back tomorrow afternoon.”

“Well, sure, you could help. Mind if I ask you a bunch of boring questions I’m sure you’ve been asked a thousand times already?”

She shook her head quickly. “No. Not at all. If it can help, I’ll answer questions all night. Why don’t I make some tea?”

“That’d be great, Mrs. McCready.”

While Matt continued to color, we drank tea and Ryerson asked Beatrice a string of questions that had long ago been answered: about the night Amanda disappeared, about Helene’s mothering skills, about those early crazy days after Amanda had first disappeared, when Beatrice organized searches, established herself as media contact, plastered the streets with her niece’s picture.

Every now and then Matt would show us his progress on the picture, the skyscrapers with rows of misaligned window squares, the clouds and dogs he’d added to the paper.

I began to regret coming here. I was a spy in their home, a traitor, hoping to gather evidence that would send Beatrice’s husband and Matt’s father to prison. Just before we left, Matt asked Angie if he could sign her cast. When she said of course, his eyes lit up and he took an extra thirty seconds finding just the right pen. As he knelt by the cast and signed his full name very carefully, I felt an ache creep behind my eyes, a boulder of melancholia settle in my chest at the thought of what this kid’s life would be like if we were right about his father, and the law stepped in and blew this family apart.