Sweet Lamb of Heaven (15 page)

So while Don's family lawyer made up the papers—I could file from Maine, as it turned out—I stalled, putting off Ned's voicemails and texts with short texts of my own. I'd tell him on Tuesday, not a minute before I'd said I would, and meanwhile Lena and I spent time with the others at the motel and with Will; we weren't alone much. We kept busy, went to a movie in the afternoon, to dinner in the motel café.

I envisioned a hard, bad conversation with Ned when the deadline came. Because of that I was constantly nervous, I almost trembled with a brimming anxiety. I picked at my food, I tried to keep busy so that I didn't have time to succumb to fear, and on Sunday night I could barely sleep.

I had dreams of small, furry dogs being mauled by something they couldn't see.

Don suggested Lena and I could switch rooms and stay right off the lobby. We could trade with Burke and Gabe, there was no difference between our room and theirs except for location, and that way we'd be near Don—near help, in other words, in the event that Ned started banging on our door Tuesday night. Lena was jubilant, when we told her about the change, at the thought of trying a new room—it might as well have been a trip to Disneyland. She fantasized about trying all the rooms, one at a time. “Then Don's room, then Kay's room, then the Lindas' . . .”

We would move Tuesday morning, before I called Ned and told him I was filing for divorce; by Monday night, on the momentum of Lena's excitement, we had our small bags neatly packed and waiting just inside the door.

But we didn't move to Gabe and Burke's room the next day, because I woke up Tuesday morning and Lena was gone.

IT WOULD BE
futile to try to evoke the desperation I felt when I saw she wasn't there.

My head was pounding—I'd been drugged—sharp pains like nails or tacks in my temples. Still that was nothing to what I felt, nothing, and I picked up the phone as soon as I saw her empty bed, the wrinkled sheets, as soon as I called her name and got silence, and then I sat up and saw her suitcase was gone too, Lucky Duck, her puffer coat. The chain on the door hung in two pieces.

All this took five seconds—less.

And then I was standing and running to the door, I was throwing it open and running up and down on the cement walkway in nothing but underwear and the long T-shirt I slept in, calling her name. Bare feet on ice, on the ridges in the pavement. I tore the pads on my toes, fell in a panic and scraped the skin off my knees, flailing.

I found Don in the lobby and I called Ned, hysterical, but of course he didn't pick up. Don sat me down on a brown-and-orange couch with coarse upholstery, whose pattern I still remember well, how I picked at the threads as I sobbed . . . I'll spare myself writing more about this. The point is she was gone, and the worst time in my life started.

I didn't keep a written record during the days after she was taken, but it's not those days anymore and it helps me to write now.

So Will came, Don was there, Kay and the Lindas, Burke and Gabe, even the well-dressed couple with two expensive cars. Everyone was around me after that, though I only half-noticed them. They were a blur of people who weren't my little girl, the blur of irrelevance.

They said things, they called the police and the police were coming, they said, hovering—we'd stay right here and wait for them. A blanket? A heating pad for my feet? I was in shock, said one of them.

I registered goodwill but I hadn't known what desolation was, before Ned took Lena, I'd never known what it felt like to be destroyed.

THERE CAME A TEXT
on my phone while I was still almost catatonic. It was a text from Ned, I understood when Will held the phone up for me, though it didn't have Ned's name beside it, only a string of unfamiliar digits. Don said it was probably a prepaid.

The text bubble read
Call off the lawyer.

“So he already knew she was filing,” I heard Don murmur to Will.

“Surveillance,” nodded Will.

“And sedation to make them both sleep through it,” said Don. “How? The bottled water in the room? Something
I
cooked?”

He was on edge: everyone was.

There were security cameras, of course, the motel had a camera aimed at the parking lot, one in the lobby, a couple more. But when Don tried to view the footage his software told him the files had been damaged and couldn't be retrieved.

Beside me was an egg-salad sandwich on a paper plate. I remember it distinctly: the pores and craters of the beige whole-wheat bread, the fact that it looked nothing like food. I realized, seeing it, that there
was
no food for me—no food existed, in this world, nothing would ever be eaten.

The sandwich sat beside me, aging. I didn't touch it, and though I did relent about food in general—evidently—to this day the sight of an egg-salad sandwich makes me queasy.

Someone got my laptop and at their request I managed to click through a number of frames, I clicked here and there, tears running down my face, until I was able to bring up a photograph of Ned. Don emailed it to himself, then went back into the motel office and printed it out, though everyone present remembered what Ned looked like.

A new text:
No police.

“He's got to be kidding,” said Will.

We were still in the lobby. I think guests must have been coming and going by then, no longer crowding near. Will and Don and I sat on the couches while Main Linda kept busy making tea in the café. The yellow-beige sandwich had gone away—good riddance to it, unappetizing forever. Instead a coffee cup sat next to me on an end table, the surface of its cold, weak coffee as still as stone.

“. . . are there people outside action movies who'd actually agree to that condition?” Will was asking.

“Where are the cops? I'm going to call them again,” said Don.

Another text came in.

If you call the cops again
[end of text bubble]
I'll call my FBI friends
[end of text bubble]
and make a counterclaim of kidnapping.

“He can hear us,” said Don, and stood up hastily. “Still listening, aren't you?”

Big ears to hear you with
.

We gazed at each other, Will and Don and I. They looked round-eyed. I don't think I did. I wasn't surprised. I was on a plateau, the final plane of hell, I thought, a flat, dry place.

“He does know someone in the FBI,” I said.

There'd been this asshole from the Anchorage field office. A couple of times he and Ned had driven to a rifle range called Rabbit Creek—I remembered because I thought of small rabbits running scared as the two men fired their weapons. They went for drinks afterward at some sports bar, where Ned stayed sober and the FBI guy got sloppy drunk. I hadn't understood what Ned wanted with him, some kind of “ASAC,” Ned had said, assistant special agent—a sullen man with pitted cheeks, a spare tire and a comb-over.

I'd expected him to look like Mulder from
The X-Files
, I realized when they stopped by the house once, Mulder had been my main teenage exposure to an FBI idea and it lingered.

But he didn't look like Mulder at all. Sadly unlike Mulder.

And surely they'd had precisely nothing in common, I thought now, nothing but the FBI guy's future utility. Ned was a bet hedger, a fortifier and consolidator, effective at building networks and circuits. They met at a boxing gym and the FBI guy had apparently been drawn to Ned, as so many people were—as I had been.

Considering this I started to feel a spur of practicality again, my ruined center cauterized for a time so that it stopped infecting the rest of me. I could keep it together as long as I didn't think of Lena being alone or afraid. It was her emotions I feared for when I let myself fear, her trust of the world being damaged, eroded bitterly as I sat there with my hands tied, unable to reach her.

I didn't even consider physical harm. I couldn't stand to: that possibility was walled off in me.

Quickly all of us stood up and started searching for the microphone. There sat the laptop and my cell phone, which seemed the most likely, so Don called in the angry young mogul to inspect my devices. Apparently Navid knew about electronics. He came in, scruffy in his mountain-man beard and plaid shirt, and took my computer apart piece by piece. He seemed attentive, not angry at all, and I felt grateful and guilty for not liking him before; I would like him from now on, I would like anyone who helped me get Lena back, more than that I would love them abjectly, I'd be abject, I thought.

At some point I noticed I was digging my fingernails too deep into the heel of one hand. They were too short to draw blood, but the bruises would be there for weeks.

Navid took apart my phone, making me agitated—it was my only link to Lena, and what if it got broken?—but he put it back together again without finding anything.

Was the mike on my person? I didn't wear jewelry and I had no buttons, even, except for the one on my jeans. Don and Navid inspected my shoes—by this time a pair had been brought to me, along with a pile of clothes, and I'd dragged myself to the bathroom beside the café and put them on, the jeans and woolen socks and a pair of worn sneakers—but they found nothing there either. I didn't have my purse in the lobby so the bug, we figured, had to be elsewhere. We switched to inspecting the furniture.

It was confusing, since Ned wasn't likely to have heard about my plan to file for divorce through a microphone in the lobby.

After a fruitless search we trailed out of there, Don and Will and I, and into Don's office, but I was still nervous, I couldn't know when Ned was listening since we hadn't found the bug. I felt conflicted about calling the police again, we couldn't figure out why they hadn't arrived yet, so I insisted we go analog for a while, talking to each other by writing things down on a pad of lined paper and passing it among us.

Don and Will thought Ned must have got to the local police somehow, they suggested he wouldn't be able to do more than delay them and we should call again, get someone different on the phone. If that failed we should try another jurisdiction—the feds, probably, since none of the Mainers believed Ned's threats about the FBI could possibly amount to much.

He was bluffing, Don said, it was highly unlikely his contacts in Anchorage could strong-arm agents in Boston.

But I still felt overheard. I couldn't even trust my clothes, despite the fact that we'd inspected them: everything was suspect. Back in my room I stripped them all off; I stepped into the bathroom and made another 911 call—they transferred me to the sheriff's office and I reported the kidnapping again—they said they were dispatching a car, they promised two officers would arrive within the half hour.

After I pressed the
END
button I stepped into the shower and let hot water beat down on my face.

What about those chips people implanted in pets, I thought—what about them? Could I have been implanted with a chip? Could I pick it out from under the skin, as I'd once seen in some otherwise forgettable movie?

Scratch, scratch, blood, and a loosened nub of metal dug out of the flesh.

IF I HAD
been guided to the motel by some sense beyond the usual five, some navigational instinct having to do with magnetism or light, I wanted to know what for.

THE STATE POLICE
finally got to us hours after we'd first called. It was two officers, polite and attentive in their note taking. We made them sit with us in the back office, where we felt Ned might not be able to hear, and I told them everything I could think of—about Beefy John, B.Q., Ned's driver, his rented SUV. Black and American, was all I could say, and of course he might easily have switched it out. A couple of times I had to stop, and the cops waited patiently, their faces presenting sympathy.

I wrote down the address of our house in Anchorage, where as far as I knew Ned still lived. I had no idea where he'd been staying locally—there weren't other motels nearby, said Don, you had to drive at least half an hour for the closest lodgings open this time of year.

“Or he could be staying with local contacts,” said Will. “That mechanic, maybe? John something . . . Pruell, maybe,” he told the police.

“Ned—my husband isn't the type to sleep in his car,” I mumbled. “He never stays in hotels under four stars.”

The policemen looked at each other.

“That narrows it down,” said one. “He ain't in Maine.”

I had a tin ear. My sense of humor had left with Lena.

We were surprised at how soon the cops went away again. I'd thought they would stay near, I thought there'd be a task force, something—in movies policemen walked around the house or apartment of the kidnapped child's family, tapping phones, watching at windows. But in fact the two policemen left after their brief interview of me and an even briefer search for the concealed microphone (they found nothing). Their expressions were mild.

“We'll do our best to find your daughter, ma'am,” said one. But I didn't like how he said it—casually, as though it wasn't life or death.

In the silence after the lobby doors swung shut Don said Ned had to have got to them, that their placid demeanor was unnatural. He said we should assume they weren't going to move quickly and I had to just call the FBI. But I wasn't so sure, I was more afraid of Ned's capabilities than they were, so instead I went online and then I borrowed Will's phone, distrusting my own. I hired a private investigation company based in Portland.

They'd assign a team right away, they said.

I called my parents next. My mother seemed shell-shocked, as though Lena's abduction was a sheer unreality, and offered to help with money. Her voice was so faint that I could barely hear her.

I COULDN'T SIT
in the motel, I found, waiting for someone else to look for my daughter. I couldn't stand it. I didn't want to talk to anyone who didn't already know what had happened.