A Measure of Blood (23 page)

“This kind of trip is what my father took me on. And so I'm taking you.”

Saturday, yes, the day his mother is to be cremated, but he's not there. Think, notice. There's a town outside the car windows, street lights, the sounds of other cars. He lifts up a little. Big empty parking lots. Walmart.

“What do you usually do on Saturdays?”

TV. All morning on Saturdays. But he doesn't say. He is trying to think of what he needs to do.

“You have to answer me when I ask a question. That's a rule. Do you hear me?”

He can tell the man is upset, even scared, by the sound of his voice. He can usually pretend to be asleep, but since he's fighting to keep his eyes open to notice things, since the man keeps turning and tilting the rearview mirror to see him, he can't pretend. “TV,” he manages to squeak out.

“Ah. Well, today you'll have an adventure with your father. Two times my father took me to the woods. Three times. Once when I was little, then when I was grown up. We didn't hunt. It wasn't for that. It was for looking. And learning. He was a zoologist. You know what that is? Answer me.”

“The zoo?”

“Animals. He studied animals. The first woods, forest, was in another country, a beautiful country, and the woods were … you can smell them, very rich soil there, and … and plants that are different from here and …the animals are different, too. Lizards. You like lizards?”

Matt shrugs.

“Couldn't hear that.”

“No.”

“Well, they're important there. Where I come from, there are almost five hundred different kinds of animals and birds and almost three thousand kinds of plants. In one little country. Lots of places have beauty if you know how to look. The plants here and the animals … I'll be honest—I don't know the numbers.” He turns slightly. “You have to talk. Ask me a question.”

Matt can't make his voice work. “Will we camp out?” he manages.

“No, there's a place. We won't get rained on. Ask me how I know about this place. Ask me questions.”

How can he think, notice, when he is falling asleep. How can he ask questions when his voice won't come up. “Your father,” he murmurs.

“Answering. That's right. Questions and answers. The other guy who has this place—he won't be there… . If he is, we won't bother him. He owns it. I mean, his grandfather owns it. They get some kind of deal, gas and mineral rights, and so they just keep being allowed to own it. Never have to sell. My father was a good friend, so he was allowed to go any time he wanted. He went because of the animals. Not to kill them, right? He studied them. He used to put up cameras to scan the woods—yeah? Can you imagine? Slow action, huh. Just so he could watch what went on when he wasn't there. The cameras might still be up, I don't know. When my father died, my mother told the owners they could keep the cameras, like, as a gift. Infrared. For nighttime pictures. Are you listening?”

“Yes.” He doesn't care.

“Good. I want to teach you things. What he would say, my father, is, ‘I want to watch the woods coming to life.' That's early morning. That's almost now. We won't get there in time this morning to get those first noises. We'll have to watch the woods going to bed tonight. And coming to life tomorrow. And all that while, time to talk, time to just … have a chance to be quiet and think and eat and talk.”

The man is still talking, talking, still very nervous, what Matt's mom would call
hyper
and Matt knows enough to know that's not good, but he can't stay awake. It's still dark out, just getting light, the motor humming, nothing much to see out the windows, so his eyes keep closing. “McKean County,” he hears and, “thickest woods you ever saw.”

McKean County, he thinks, remember that.

ARTHUR AND JAN
haven't slept—it's six in the morning. The coffee hits Arthur as a dry taste, or the aftertaste at any rate leaves him dry mouthed. Not even two small weeks ago this started. Their lives have rollercoastered since. He wonders about fate, wanting things too much. The stars, Shakespeare would have said, the explanation for everything, just everything.

He can't bear to think about what his son must be going through, but the DVD image haunts him. The boy walked willingly it seemed. Was he not afraid of the man? Did he know the man? His head was tilted up. He was
listening
.

Christie and the whole police force have no idea who this man is. How can it be—that a man could kill Maggie Brown, take her son, and leave no trace?

The circles under Jan's eyes are dark smudges. She looks like tragedy, like madness, Judith Anderson playing Medea, Helen Mirren playing a drunk. “Maybe if you try to lie down.”

“Can't. What about the babysitter, Meg? We should talk to her. He liked her. Maybe he said something.”

He tilts his arm to look at his watch. It's six now. They'll be waking Meg's family up on a Saturday morning, but they have to go. In case he said something. Arthur nods. “Let's wash up and go.”

“If only he's okay,” she says. “I'd give up everything.”

And he? Trade a healthy Matt for a healthy heart? Yes. Done.

He picks up his car keys, puts them down again, and goes to the kitchen sink and washes his face with a bar of hand soap, finally dunking his head under the water where he gets a brief refreshing memory of a waterfall, and life, and happiness.

MARINA CAN'T SLEEP
either. Tomorrow if there's no news, she has to run the rehearsal. Oh, who can watch a boy every minute? Even a rebellious, grieving boy. It's nobody's fault.

She walks up to the small desk she uses in the room they keep for the kids. They're going to need a new house—the kids are getting bigger, need separate rooms. And there is no place for her and her papers.

On the desktop is the newspaper she carried around for a week in her bag—the one that contained the article about her and Jan. She kept planning to show it to Richard, but what with one thing and another, it never got from her hands to his. Well, it was just a student paper. Just an article.

Then she does the thing that is her signature mix of logic and inspiration and spookiness—the way she wins Jotto games by simply intuiting the word her opponent is thinking of. Maybe the guy who took Matt read
this
paper, maybe he knew about Jan Gabriel somehow and knew where the boy was going to be. If he read the paper, he was local. Okay. Student, faculty, staff possibly. Of course, her husband and his colleagues are already considering that. She turns pages, as if an answer will come to her, thinks about members of the student newspaper staff—the girl who came to interview her and Jan, a nice kid, not a likely suspect. Keeps turning pages.

Want ads.

She reads them beginning to middle. She doesn't have to go past the middle because she sees the ad for a maroon Pontiac for sale. She knows in her gut she has it.

She dials the number in the ad. No answer.

She calls Richard to tell him what she found.

“Wow. Wow. That sounds— How did you do it?”

“Can you and Artie … ?”

“You bet.” But even while he is on the phone with her, he is alerting Artie. Then she dictates the number and hears him dictate it to Artie in turn. All the while she is near tears. She listens carefully to be sure Richard and Artie have the number right.

DOLAN GETS THE
CALL
at six thirty. He listens carefully, says, “Got it, got it,” and looks at his boss. “This is a weird one. Guy named Nate Brown owns the phone. Bought it a year ago. Address on Dawson Street.
Brown
. Like Maggie Brown? There's something we don't know about going on.”

“A relative after all?”

“It sounds like, doesn't it? Why did nobody know?”

By six forty in the morning, Christie and Dolan are knocking on doors on Dawson Street.

The name Nate Brown does not appear anywhere on the door of the rundown building that Dolan has been told was the address for Nate Brown when he purchased the cell phone. The detectives rouse the occupants of apartment 4 anyway. The students who live there trip over computers and pizza boxes and remote controls and beer cans as they let the detectives in. One of them was up early, three have been asleep.

They are nervous, probably looking around for roach butts left about.

Christie makes a lightning-quick speech about the earliness of the hour and the importance of an Amber Alert investigation. “Which one of you is Nate Brown?”

They look at each other confused. “Never heard of him,” one says and the others ditto him.

“Anybody know him?”

They all say no.

“He once lived here. How long have you been here?”

“Just moved in like a week ago,” the spokesman answers. “Like maybe two.”

A fairly good mess has been made in two weeks. “Need to see your IDs,” Christie insists.

Finally he shows them the rough photo printed from the clip of video.

“Can't see anything in this,” the mouthy one snaps, as if the police are totally inept. “I mean, like, that could be anybody.”

Three of them yawn in unison.

“Get some sleep.”

Dolan and Christie then check all the students in the building. Mostly it is the same routine—waking people up, getting curious stares from windows and doorways, drivers on the street stopping to see what the flashing lights are all about.

They go to neighboring buildings.

“This is not—” Dolan begins.

“
Pitt News
,” Christie says. “The ad.”

“Anybody there at this hour?”

“If we yell loud enough.”

By then it is seven. They call ahead to get a security guard to open the
Pitt News
offices. “And get me somebody in student records.”

As soon as they get there, the door to the
Pitt News
office is open. They ask the officer to get them the number of the faculty adviser so they can call him.

“Meanwhile, look the other way,” Dolan tells the security guard. The guard nods and turns to the hallway to make his inquiries. Dolan starts looking through file cabinets and loose file folders. “Can't find it, can't find it. Shit.”

Meanwhile Christie has another security officer on the phone going through student records. “Nate Brown,” he tells her. “Nathaniel­ or Nate. Used to be on Dawson Street.”

“Pitt has hundreds of Browns. Nathaniel?”

“We think so. Or another possibility is something like
Danilo
or
Dal
in the name.”

“I'll keep looking. Can I call you back?”

“Yeah.”

Christie takes a call from Ziad Zacour. He tells him he has no information yet and will call him when he does.

“Watch it,” the security guard in front of him says. “Somebody's here.”

The student who walks in to the office looks about suspiciously. He takes in their clothes. His expression suggests they do not look like thieves.

Christie shows his ID. “Police investigation. A seven-year-old boy is missing. We think the man who took him placed an ad here. To sell a car. A Pontiac.”

Miraculously—it felt like a miracle—the student said, “Pontiac. Yeah. I'm Josh Hansen. I remember the guy and the ad. He placed it online. Then he came over and paid cash, wanted to get the ad in right away. And we did.”

“Did he fill anything out, give an address?”

“He skipped the address and we didn't press it. But he did say he could run right over, that he was working in the computer lab and got a ten-minute break.”

“Working? A job?”

“Sounded like.”

“Where's the lab?”

“There are several. There's a main office, though.” Hansen looks up the phone number for them.

“You don't write about this, you understand?” Christie warns. “Or talk. There's a boy's life at stake.”

“I saw nothing going on here,” Hansen says, hands up. “I am dumb as a doorpost.”

By seven twenty they are in another office, waiting for a secretary to arrive to look up employee information. She gets there at seven thirty and when she has consulted a few pieces of paper, says, “Looks like you're looking for Nadal Brown.” She pronounces his name just as the call comes to Christie from the security officer studying student records. She says, “I found a part-timer in student records. A Nadal Brown.”

“Bingo.”

Both women give the same address on South Neville.

Things happen this way, all at once, and when they start rolling—well, Christie hopes it will be this way from now on.

Without intending it, he's in the field with his old partner Dolan, though Greer is his current partner. To finesse what amounts to a kind of infidelity, he calls her and is pleased to find she's awake.

“Slept?” he asks.

“Two hours. It helped. You?”

“Not yet.” He tells her what to do next and that she can keep working with Potocki this morning. He feels like a man having an affair.

WHEN JAN AND
ARTHUR
arrive at the Philips house at seven twenty, they do awaken everybody, but the girl Meg is polite and invites them in. She pulls a robe around her. “Let me put some clothes on. I saw the news,” she says. At seven thirty they are seated at the kitchen table with Meg, who is making coffee. She says she doesn't know anything, but she advances the theory that Matt has been doing his best to adapt to his new parents. She doesn't think he was acting out.

Jan looks about at the sparsely furnished little house and the two chipped cups on the drainboard. Somehow Meg has found two cups with saucers for their coffee.

“Can I make you toast?” she asks. “And we have some hot cereal, too. I could make oatmeal.”

Jan hastens to say, “No thanks,” but Arthur says, “Yes, I'm ravenous from staying up. Oatmeal would be … ”