Gone (5 page)

“Hey,” Howard said. “Are you listening to me? I said—”

“I heard what you said,” Joe replied. “But I’m not interested.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marcie start, then put her hands over her mouth. He held up his hand, palm out, hoping she understood the message.
Don’t worry. I’m handling this. Stay calm.

Before the other man could speak, Joe went on. “I don’t even know if that’s my kid. Can you prove that the child is even mine?”

“Joe!” Marcie gasped, starting toward him.

He held up his hand again, then turned his back on her and walked across the room.

“Wha—?” Howard exclaimed, apparently not prepared for that answer. “Of course he’s yours, you stupid ass. The same day the newspaper said you lost your child, that’s the day my girlfriend showed up with him.”

“I’m going to need more than just your word on that,
Howard.
I need proof. Send me a picture of him and a picture of the clothes he was wearing when Rhoda took him.” Joe felt Marcie’s hand on his arm. He gave a quick shake of his head and touched his lips with his forefinger. “There was a label in his shirt. I want to see that before I talk to you any more.”

“Wait!” Howard yelled. “Wait! How do I send it? You want that from me, you gotta give me your cell or your email.”

Joe gave him his cell number. “Now you listen to me. If I don’t see the pictures in one hour, don’t even bother calling.” And with that, he hung up. His hand shook as he cradled the phone. He closed his eyes. When he took a deep breath, it caught in his throat and he had to cough.

“Joe, what are you doing? What if they don’t call back?” Tears were rolling down Marcie’s cheeks. She squeezed the sleeve of his T-shirt in her fist. “Oh, my God! He was so close and now he may be gone again.”

“Listen to me, Marcie,” Joe said, turning and catching her by the arms. “We’ve got to keep the upper hand. That’s the first thing they teach you at the center. If you show weakness, then they might hurt the child.”

“But you just— What if they didn’t save the shirt?”

“Then they’ll tell us that. Trust me, hon. I know what I’m doing.” He thought about his connection with the Delanceys. About how Rhoda and Howard had seen the newspaper article and were now angling for some of the Delancey money. He knew Howard would send the pictures.

What he didn’t know was whether he and Marcie would recognize Joshua, who was now twenty months older than they’d last seen.

* * *

L
OOKING
SHELL
-
SHOCKED
AND
bewildered, Marcie went upstairs to dress and Joe called his office and talked to his senior caseworker, Valerie. “I won’t be in today or Friday. I’ll be doing some work from home,” he told her.

“Good,” she said, before he even finished the sentence. “There are reporters hanging around outside the office like vultures. I’ll be thrilled to tell them that you aren’t coming in.”

“Reporters?” he said. “Are you kidding me?”

“I wish. They’re stopping everybody, wanting to know what we know about you and the Delanceys. Luckily, our staff and interns have enough sense not to answer. We’re behind you all the way.”

“Tell everybody I appreciate it,” he said.

“Joe? Are you all right? You sound terrible.”

“I’m fine, Val. Just trying to get everything sorted out. Don’t answer any questions, and let everybody know that when all this settles down, we’ll have a big celebration. We’ll all go out to dinner, on me.”

“I’ll tell them.”

“Thanks. I’m going to sign on from home and run some leads I’ve been working on for a couple of cold cases,” he said. “What’s the password for today?”

Valerie gave him the day’s password and they hung up. He headed into the small room off the dining room that they’d set up as his home office.

Marcie came downstairs about the time the computer was booting up. “What are you doing?” she asked.

“I’m going to see what I can find out about Howard without having to go into the office,” he said. “What about you?”

She shrugged. “Clean up the kitchen. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try to read.” She wrung her hands helplessly. “I don’t know if I can stand this. How long do you think it’s going to take for him to call back?”

“I don’t know, hon. I’m thinking he’ll call as soon as he can get the pictures. He’s going to have a problem with Rhoda. She’s not going to want to give the boy back. It’s obvious that the reason she took him in the first place was to have a child of her own. When he comes to her wanting to take a picture and she finds out his harebrained scheme, she’s liable to take—” He stopped, realizing where his thoughts were taking him, but he’d already said too much. Marcie’s sharp eyes met his and he knew that she knew exactly where his thoughts were heading.

“She’s going to take Joshua and run. Oh, my God, Joe, we’ve got to stop her.”

He did his best to calm her down, but his careless words had started him thinking, too. She was right. The woman just might take the child and leave. She could have relatives anywhere. “This is her home. She’s not likely to just pull up roots and head off to parts unknown.”

“I would,” Marcie said. “If it meant keeping my child safe. I’d do that—I’d travel to the ends of the earth.”

Joe nodded. She was right. He’d do the same thing to protect his child, or Marcie.

“We’ve got to go out there. We’ve got to talk to her, reason with her, before that man gets his hands on our child.” Marcie wrung her hands, then rubbed her temples. “We’ve got to go now.”

Chapter Five

They forwarded the home phone to Joe’s cell and headed northwest to Killian. They made it in just under an hour. As the car rounded a curve and the house came into sight, Joe muttered a curse under his breath.

“What is it?” Marcie asked. She’d held on to the grab bar the entire trip. When she let go, her fingers cramped. “What’s wrong?”

Joe pulled up near the sidewalk that led up to the wooden front stoop of the house and stopped. He put the car into Park, and left it running. “Wait here,” he said.

Marcie grabbed at his arm, latching on to his rolled-up shirtsleeve. “Tell me what’s wrong. I’m tired of you ignoring me and refusing to answer my questions.”

“When have I—?”

“Joe!”

He settled back down in the driver’s seat and looked at her sidelong. “The Nissan was parked out here in front of the house yesterday beside a beat-up green truck.”

“Oh,” she said, then,
“Oh.”
She squinted at the house and the yard, trying to see if there were any signs of the car being driven around to the back. But there were no tire tracks in the yard, or anywhere that she could see, except for the dirt road and the space where Joe had pulled in.

“So you think they’re gone?” Her voice tried to quit on her, so great was her fear that they’d fled with her child.

Joe nodded grimly. “It looks like it.” He shifted, preparing to climb out of the driver’s seat.

Disappointment settled like a stone in her stomach. “I’m going with you,” Marcie said, steeling herself for an argument, but to her surprise, Joe didn’t say anything. He just reached back inside the car, cut the engine and removed the key.

“Watch your step,” he said as they started up the sidewalk to the stoop.

“Did you go inside when you were here before?” she asked.

He shook his head with a wry smile. “Didn’t get the chance.”

“What did you do?”

“I parked there, just about exactly where the car is now, and I stood by the driver’s side door. Rhoda was on the porch there, with a rifle.”

Marcie gasped in surprise. “A rifle? Joe, she didn’t shoot at you, did she?”

“Three times, I think. Maybe four.”

Marcie felt like a bullet had just slammed into her own chest. She pressed a hand against her hammering heart. “Joe!”

“Once while I was standing there at the car door, and then at least twice more as I drove away.”

“You could have been killed!”

He made a dismissive gesture. “I got the definite feeling that if Rhoda had wanted to wound or kill me, she’d have done it. Nah. She was making a point with those shots,” he said as they reached the porch. He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Wait here,” he murmured.

“No—”

“Marcie, I don’t think there’s anybody here, but I want to make sure,” he muttered sharply. “Here are the keys. If I yell, run back to the car and get out of here.”

“I’m not going to leave you here alone,” she said, refusing to take the keys.

He grabbed her hand and pressed the key ring into it. “Neither one of us is going another step until you promise me you’ll do what I say. I can take care of myself, but Howard is a big man. If he grabs you, we’re sunk.”

She took the keys, glaring at him. “Fine. I’ll just leave you to your fate.”

He gave her a crooked smile and nodded. “Good. Now wait here.”

She listened, not breathing, but didn’t hear anything except his footsteps on hardwood. After about thirty seconds, he opened the screen door and came out onto the porch stoop.

“There’s nobody in there. Let’s go,” he said, looking at his feet as he stepped onto the porch and cupped her elbow in his hand. “Come on.”

“Wait a minute. I want to see inside. There might be a clue to where they went.”

“I already looked. I didn’t see anything.”

“Joe, wait. Did you check to see if their luggage is gone? If their toothbrushes are still in the bathroom? They could have just gone shopping or to a movie. We could wait for them.”

“What are you going to say?” he asked harshly. “‘Hi there. Enjoy the movie? Great. Now give me my son.’”

Marcie glared at him. “What were you going to say?” she blustered back at him.

He winced. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. Now come on. All the more reason to get out of here in case they do come back.”

“No,” she said. “I want to go inside.”

“I’m tired of arguing, Marcie. I told you there’s nothing to see.” He started down the two steps to the sidewalk, but she didn’t move. He pointed to the west. “Howard came from that direction. He had a fishing pole. I doubt there’s anything over there but docks and maybe a bait shop, but we could drive that way and see. Ask if anybody knows where they are.”

She ignored him and turned toward the door.

He caught her shoulder and when she looked back, his expression was grim. “Marcie, don’t.”

“Why not? You said there was nobody in there. Is there...blood or something?” Her gaze widened and fear sharpened their blue depths.

“No, hon, nothing like that.”

She shrugged, trying to remove his hand. “Then I don’t see why I can’t go in.”

He sniffed, then let her go. “Okay. Go ahead.”

Wondering at the defeated note in his voice, she opened the screen door and stepped into the cool, dim house. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust, after being in the bright sunlight. When they did, the first thing she saw was a small wooden table and two chairs. There were blocks and flash cards on the table and right beside it was a whiteboard with two words written on it in box letters.
JOSHY.
Underneath the name was the word
BOY.

Marcie stared, uncomprehending for a few seconds. Then slowly, as if she were drugged or sick or had just landed on an alien planet, she began to make sense of the things she saw. A groan erupted from her throat and she sank to her knees next to the little table. This was what Joe hadn’t wanted her to see. He’d known how much it would upset her. Tears welled in her eyes. She groped blindly on the table and her hand encountered a square, plastic building block. She held on to it as if it were a lifeline.

“He’s two years old, almost two and a half,” she murmured. “He’s learning his
ABC
s—” She gestured vaguely toward the board. “Even words,” she said, almost choking.

“I know, hon.” She couldn’t pinpoint where Joe’s voice came from but his words were as hoarse and strained as hers. She felt his hand on her arm and she let him help her to her feet.

She turned to him, proffering the block, her lower lip trembling with the effort not to cry. He ignored the plastic cube and just pulled her close. But she didn’t—she couldn’t—let him hold her right now. Hunching her shoulders, she stepped around him and went into the small kitchen. Beside the sink were several sippy cups turned upside down on a towel. An empty carton of juice was in the trash can.

Marcie felt as though she were choking and smothering. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get a full breath.

“Just breathe,” Joe said softly in her ear. She hadn’t heard him come up beside her. “Just breathe, slowly, evenly. You’ll be okay.”

She did what he told her to, because she had no choice. She was hyperventilating. She knew that. But she couldn’t stop it without Joe’s help. How many times had it happened since Joshua had disappeared? Five? Ten?

“Breathe evenly,” he kept repeating. “Slowly.”

Finally she could take a full breath without it hitching. “Okay,” she said, a little breathlessly. “It’s okay now.”

“Come on, let’s go outside.” He took the block from her and bent to set it back down on the little table.

“No!” she cried, reaching for it. “I want to keep it.”

“I don’t see why—”

“Give it to me.”

Joe gave her the block.

She held it in both hands, pressed against her chest. “She was teaching him, Joe. She was teaching my little boy. Look at the block. It has a
J
on it. Did you see the kitchen?”

He didn’t speak. He just waited for her to finish.

“She took care of him. She gave him juice. Bought him little cups to drink out of.” She tried to blink away the tears, but they kept filling her eyes and flowing down her cheeks. “She’s had our son—known him—longer than we have.”

Joe looked out the door, toward the sunlight. He clenched his jaw and tried to pretend that Marcie was someone else, one of the women he saw at the satellite office of NCMEC. But he knew that was a futile effort, for two reasons. First, she was his wife and she was talking about his son. But second, every time he met a mother or a father whose child had been taken from them, he felt the same way. The tarnished armor he tried to keep in place to protect himself from the pain of loss was barely more effective against strangers than it was against his and Marcie’s personal anguish. He supposed his empathy for the heartbroken parents made him good at his job, but he was worried that his roiling emotions were going to cripple him in his search for his own child.

As he started to push the screen door open, Marcie shouted, “Joe!”

“What?” he asked distractedly.

“Your phone.”

Then he heard it: his phone making a peculiar dinging sound. He froze.

“Is that—?”

He managed to nod. “A message.”

“That’s the picture,” Marcie said breathlessly. “Oh, Joe, I’m afraid to look.”

So was he. Reluctantly, he took the phone out of his pocket and pressed the button to activate the screen. There, on top of a little icon that looked like a mailing envelope, was the number one, indicating that he had one new text message.

With Marcie hanging on to his arm with both hands, he tapped the envelope on the screen with a finger. For a second nothing happened, then a photo appeared.

It was a picture of a little boy, a toddler who could have been two or three years old. His hair was brown and had been dampened and combed back so that the slight widow’s peak on his forehead was visible. His blue eyes, so much like his mother’s, sparkled in the light from the camera’s flash.

Marcie burst into tears and her nails dug into Joe’s arm. “It’s Joshua. Oh, my baby. My Joshua. Look at him. He’s grown so big—” Her voice gave out and her entire body shook with her sobs. “Look at him, Joe. Look at him.”

Joe was having trouble believing his eyes. He saw what Marcie saw, and his first reaction was that it was Joshua. But could he be 100 percent sure? Joshua at nine months had had chubby cheeks and a cute upturned nose that didn’t look like either his or Marcie’s. This child’s nose was straight and had a rounded tip. It still didn’t look like his or Marcie’s nose, but if he let himself, he could believe the boy’s eyes were just like Marcie’s. “Marcie, take it easy. We’ve got to be sure.”

“You’re not sure?” she exclaimed. “Well, I am. I carried him inside me for nine months. I watched him and held him and fed him and took care of him for another nine months.” She jabbed her finger at the phone’s screen. “That is my baby!”

At that instant, the phone dinged again and a second message appeared. When the picture came up, it was of the little T-shirt their baby had been wearing when he was stolen. The label said Joshua Joseph Powers. Below the name was his birth date.

Joe’s throat closed up. He could barely breathe, much less talk. Marcie had clapped a hand over her mouth and now sobbed loudly. The phone rang, startling Joe as it vibrated. Marcie stood close as he answered, so he held the phone slightly away from his ear so she could hear, too.

“So now do you believe me?” Howard’s slimy voice slithered through the receiver.

“Where are you?” Joe demanded. “Is Rhoda with you? Where is my son? Because I know you’re not at Rhoda’s house.”

“Now you listen to me. All you need to know is I’ve got your kid. And if you want him back it’s going to cost you half a million in cash.”

Marcie gasped at the man’s words.

“Half a million? You’re crazy,” Joe croaked. “I don’t have that kind of money. Not in my wildest dreams. I might be able to scrape together a hundred thousand. Be reasonable. You can do a lot with a hundred thousand dollars.”

“Now Mr. Joe Powers, even if you ain’t got that money yourself, you and I both know where you can get it easy enough.” Howard coughed harshly on his end of the line. “But I’m a reasonable man, Joey. I know it takes time. I’ll give you plenty of time—twenty-four hours. When I call you back you’d better be ready to do exactly what I say. And don’t forget. If you talk to the police, little Joshy’s fingers start coming off and your wife starts getting presents.”

The line went dead.

Marcie moaned. As Joe hung up, she stepped away from him. “What did he mean, he knows where you can get the money?”

Joe shrugged and shook his head, still looking at his cell phone.

“Why would he think we could get that kind of money? I wonder what he’s talking about?”

“I don’t know. We can’t worry about that. Come on. I want to get home and look at this photo on the computer screen. I want to study it—see if there’s anything in the background that might tell us where he’s holding Joshua.”

On the drive home, both of them were silent. Joe pulled up to the curb in front of the house and got out. Marcie followed him inside, not even commenting when he unlocked the door with the key he’d never given back to her.

While he headed to the study to transfer the picture to the desktop computer, she went upstairs to wash her face and hands, still carrying the plastic building block. She set it on the edge of the sink while she splashed water on her face. After patting her face dry with a towel, she glanced into the mirror, the towel still pressed against her nose and mouth. Her eyes were red and swollen from crying, but they sparkled with hope. A thrill fluttered through her chest like a butterfly. They’d found Joshua. Her baby. Now all they needed to do was pay the man and bring their little boy home.

She tossed the towel toward the drying rack, picked up the block and walked across the hall to the nursery. She turned on the light. Just like every time she went into Joshua’s room, her heart squeezed and her eyes and throat stung with tears. She did her best to not view the room through the eyes of a grieving mother. It was different this time. She had to make everything ready for Joshua’s homecoming.