Only Ever You (18 page)

Jill looked out at the cars, but couldn’t spot Andrew’s among all the traffic. She hoped he’d be there in time for the press conference. She dreaded going out there. Jill had always been more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it. She peeked through the living room curtains at the swarm of news media that had been alerted that she and David would be giving a statement and swallowed hard, nervously smoothing her hair with her fingers.

“Remember, it’s important that you mention your daughter by name,” Detective Ottilo said. He’d been giving instructions to her and David for the last ten minutes. “An abductor might think of your child as an object of their fantasies instead of as a real person—by naming her you help destroy that illusion.”

Fantasies. Jill thought she might vomit. How many times had she watched parents of missing children give teary appeals on TV? Had any of them ever done any good? She rubbed her eyes, exhausted.

“Hey! Where do you think you’re going with those?”

Jill turned from the window to see David confronting an officer heading out the door carrying both of their laptops along with the desktop from David’s study. “You can’t take my laptop,” she said, hurrying toward them. “I need it for work.”

“It’s routine, Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter.” Detective Ottilo stepped between them and the officer. “We have to examine everything.”

“There’s nothing on those that will help you find Sophia,” Jill said.

“You’ll get them back ASAP,” Detective Ottilo said in his infuriatingly calm voice. “Don’t focus on that right now; you need to think about your media appeal.”

David threw up his hands and stalked away, grim-faced. Jill crossed her arms to hide the trembling. They were powerless to stop the police, powerless to control anything that was happening. More than thirty hours had passed since they’d last seen Sophia and a bunch of strangers crowded on their lawn wanted a piece of them, a close-up of emotional parents to lead every newscast. “I don’t think I can do this.”

“Yes you can, Mrs. Lassiter,” Ottilo said. “This is important. You’ll do anything you can to get your daughter back, right?”

“Of course,” she said, stung. She picked up the photo of Sophia that they’d been instructed to hold and stared at her daughter’s sweet little smile, steeling herself. Ten minutes later, Jill and David headed out the door followed by multiple police officers, who formed a phalanx around them.

Cold air stung Jill’s face, strands of hair pulling free from her loose bun to whip at her cheeks. She realized belatedly that she should have done something about her appearance. She must look terrible.

“Jesus,” David muttered, and she didn’t know if he meant the cold or the growing crowd at the end of the driveway. The reporters spotted them, turning en masse and rushing forward. “Mrs. Lassiter! Mr. Lassiter, who took your daughter?” Microphones thrust in their faces; someone bumped against Jill, knocking her off balance. David caught her by the arm before she fell.

“Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter, what happened to your child?”

Jill tried to keep her voice clear and steady as Detective Finley had instructed. “Yesterday morning we discovered our three-year-old daughter, Sophia Lassiter, missing from our home. She is our only child and we miss her terribly.” Her voice trembled and David picked up where she’d left off.

“Sophia is a loving, trusting little girl. Her mother and I need her back with us; we cannot go on without her.”

Jill held up the photo, trying to keep her hands steady. “Please look carefully at this picture of Sophia and call 911 if you’ve seen her.” She could hear the whir of cameras as they zoomed in on the photo. “I’m speaking now to the person who’s taken Sophia. I’m begging you to please return our daughter.”

David wiped roughly at his eyes, obviously crying, but she stood dry-eyed beside him. It had always been this way; she’d always shut down emotionally in public. Detective Ottilo stepped in front of them. “Allegheny County police, local officers, K-9 units, and trained search-and-rescue personnel will join volunteers from the community to conduct a broader search of the area beginning at ten tomorrow morning. That’s all for now. Please step back.”

“Do the police have any suspects?” someone in the crowd called.

“The investigation is just beginning.” Ottilo sounded completely calm, as if this was something he dealt with all the time.

“Do you have any eyewitnesses? Has anyone seen Sophia?”

Ottilo said, “That’s all we’re at liberty to discuss right now.” He signaled to Finley and she motioned to Jill and David to head back inside. Jill had David behind her, one hand on her lower back, as they headed up the walkway, leaving Ottilo to deal with the clamoring. She heard the last shouted question as Finley ushered them back in the front door. “Do the police consider Mr. and Mrs. Lassiter suspects in the disappearance of their child?”

Jill stopped short to hear his response. “We’re exploring all possibilities,” Ottilo said. “Everyone who has had contact with the child is considered a person of interest.”

David nudged Jill, raising his eyebrows. This is what Andrew had brought up yesterday, whispering to them in corners when the detectives were otherwise occupied. “Be careful not to say too much,” he’d warned. “Remember—they go with what seems easiest and obvious. The lowest common denominator is the two of you.” David nodded knowingly and Jill hadn’t been surprised. It made perfect sense, but it was different hearing the police actually admit that they were suspects.

“Let’s get out of the cold.” Detective Finley stood holding the door open for them, her face neutral. She waited for Jill and David to follow her, like school kids called in from recess, before closing their own door behind them. Jill slumped on the living room sofa, cold and trembling all over. She reached for a glass of water and gulped it down. Finley said, “That went well, good job.” It sounded so obviously pacifying that Jill snorted.

David moved to the window with his arms crossed over his chest. “Let’s hope it works.”

“I need to get more copies of that made.” Finley held out her hand for the photo of Sophia that Jill hadn’t realized she was still clutching.

Ottilo came back inside talking on his cell phone; Jill heard something about “search dogs” as he headed down the hall toward the kitchen. When she went to use the bathroom she felt as if she should be asking the police for permission.

She lingered in the powder room, splashing icy water on her face before running water over her wrists, trying to shock away the numbness. She had a surreal déjà-vu feeling and knew that she’d felt the same before, after Ethan. It was as if the woman she was inside, Jill’s real self, retreated until all that was left was this shell, this body, that was useless to do anything on its own. She stared into the mirror at the shell, noting distractedly the vacant expression in her sunken eyes, the sallowness of her cheeks, the limp hair. Disintegration took such little time.

When she came out of the bathroom, Tania was there, setting up her laptop at the dining room table, taking little notice of the police technicians who looked variously mystified or offended by this fast-talking woman with gypsylike clothes emanating a mixture of patchouli and lentils. “I got the website set up,” she said when she spotted Jill. “Come take a look.”

She’d suggested it last night, calling to tell Jill about all the missing-children websites, talking about them as if they were trendy and seemingly surprised that Jill had never seen one. She’d offered to set it up and Jill was surprised that she’d actually followed through with it. “I added the most recent shots I had of Sophia, but we can always add more,” Tania said, clicking rapidly through a couple of pages. Across the top of the home page it said
BRING SOPHIA HOME
, in a bright, bold font. “You should think about offering a reward,” she informed Jill and David. “People pay more attention when money is involved.”

She seemed to know so much about this kind of thing—why? Jill thought again of the studio being ransacked and how Tania had been so blasé about it. Suspicion must have looked like hesitation on Jill’s face because Tania said, “I know it’s crass, but some people won’t do the right thing unless they’re compensated, you know?”

“No,” Jill said. “I don’t know anyone anymore.”

*   *   *

The morning’s search had been mentioned on every nightly news broadcast, but Bea was still surprised to see a young police officer preventing cars from turning onto the street and directing them to park along the side of Fox Chapel Road instead.

Her chest constricted when he looked directly at her, but it wasn’t the same cop from that night. She’d taken the precaution of swapping the license plate on her sedan with one she’d stolen off a similar car in the vast wasteland of a Walmart parking lot. There were thousands of four-door sedans like this one, hundreds of thousands, probably; nondescript cars that no one would look at twice. The GPS had the route she’d taken from the house two nights before, but it had seemed bad luck, maybe even dangerous, to follow the same path. She’d gone a different way; it was easy enough to let the GPS reroute.

The bored expression on the patrolman’s face didn’t alter as he waved his hand, indicating that she should follow the car that had just passed, and she pulled onto the shoulder ahead behind a dark blue minivan. She checked the dashboard clock. Seven fifteen. She had two, maybe three hours to make it back before the child woke up. A plump man and even plumper woman got out of the minivan, followed by an equally roly-poly teenage boy. They passed Bea as she got out of the sedan, and she had to squeeze against the car so they could get by. “Here for the search?” the woman said to her with a somber expression, but avid, hunting eyes.

Bea said, “I just want to be of help.”

“Us, too.” The woman nodded at her husband and son. “Terrible what this world is coming to if you’ve got to worry about your children in your own home.”

She was the sort of person who relished the drama of other people’s tragedies, desperate to feel important, interested in attracting their own fifteen minutes of fame by claiming to be “best friends” with a victim they’d met once in passing.

She hated people like this woman and her passive husband and son, but she nodded at the woman’s babble as if she agreed, falling into step with them because there was safety in numbers. They turned onto the street, and she smiled when she saw just how many people were there. It was even colder today than the day before and she’d chosen her clothes with care, wearing a short, puffy jacket in dull blue with a gummy waistband. The color repelled attention and the extra padding and waistband concealed what she carried. She couldn’t resist checking, running her hand lightly against the small bundle resting against her ribs. She had to keep reminding herself not to reach in and touch it.

“I’d just die if I was the mother,” a young woman said, but she had that same strange excited look in her eyes that Bea recognized. People like that were there for the show, the media spectacle, all the while hiding behind the belief that they were really helping.

The crowd was so big that it was hard to see through all the people. Bea moved away from the fat family, pushing through the horde so she wouldn’t be standing on the fringes. It was easy to spot people on the margins and she could see several news trucks and camera crews panning the crowd. If she buried herself within it, no one would notice her. She’d worn a different wig today and pulled a dull oatmeal-colored knit cap over it for extra camouflage. Her head itched, but she didn’t dare scratch it. Fortunately it was sunny enough that her sunglasses didn’t seem out of place.

An elderly couple stood on one side of her; they looked like they were out for a day of bird-watching, both of them in hiking boots and heavy winter jackets, the man with binoculars slung around his neck. On the other side of Bea stood a skinny teenage girl with shiny, straightened hair and a fur-trimmed white coat and boots that screamed ski bunny, and next to her stood an older, heavier, wrinkled version of the girl. “I just can’t believe something like this happened out here,” the girl whispered to the woman. “It’s, like, so safe out here and they seem so, like, normal.”

“You can never tell,” the woman said, adding in an even lower voice. “It usually turns out to be the parents.”

*   *   *

The number of people who arrived to search surprised and moved Jill. Despite the cold, despite the short notice, a small cluster of volunteers had grown to a large crowd filling the cul-de-sac and lining most of the street. The media was still out in force, too, and there were cops galore. She wondered if every police officer in the county was there. The search dogs hadn’t arrived and Ottilo was upset about it. He’d had his cell phone glued to his ear for the last twenty minutes, but he waved at the special officer in charge of the search, mouthing, “Just go ahead.”

They were standing at the end of the driveway, Jill huddled in her coat, David next to her, trying not to notice the cameras recording their every move, listening to the special officer issuing instructions to the crowd with the help of a megaphone.

“We’ll move in groups of eight to ten. If you spot something, stop, and blow the whistle that you’ve been provided. An officer will come and assist you. If you find something, don’t touch it; wait for a trained officer or investigator to retrieve it. Obviously, we’re all looking for Sophia, but we’re also looking for any evidence that can lead us to the person or persons who might have taken her.” He dropped the megaphone and offered it to David.

“Thank you all for coming this morning,” David said, his voice wavering. “Jill and I are humbled by the community support. Let’s bring Sophia home.”

Bill and Elaine Lassiter stood with the crowd and Tania not too far from them. No sign of Leo with her. Jill wondered if the police had already talked to him. She saw other faces in the crowd that she recognized—a woman from the gym, the children’s librarian who knew Sophia from story hour, the old man from the dry cleaner’s. The neighbors were there, too; she recognized the couple with the rampaging golden retriever and the older woman who lived alone in the house closest to theirs. There were many more people that she’d never seen before and some of them stared at her and David with frank curiosity.