Blood Orange (12 page)

Early in life she had learned tears made her mother angry, which
meant a face slap. And because she knew her grandmother wanted
to see her whining and pitiful, Dana had refused to give her the satisfaction of showing any weakness. Now, when she wanted to cry,
she could not. She understood that the Bailey Committee had to
move. And she knew Lexy loved her and felt frustrated by her inability to comfort her. There was nothing anyone could do. The loss
of a child to death might become, with time, bearable. But a disappearance was a mystery and fed the imagination with grisly pictures
and suppositions. And guilt: the conviction that if she had kept
Bailey glued to her hip this would never have happened.

She reached into the backseat for her purse, opened the outside
flap and took out her cell phone. Three months ago she had programmed in the number of Lieutenant Walt Gary, the officer in
charge of the Bailey investigation. Though an improvement over
kid-phobic Patrolman Ellis, neither was Gary a rock of empathy.

An electronic female voice told Dana to listen to everything because the police department had made changes in its menu. She
stabbed the zero key; after a moment the voice of a live human
being came on the line.

“This is Dana Cabot,” she said, trying to sound like the kind of
woman who got what she wanted. “Connect me to Lieutenant Gary,
please.”

“I’ll check if he’s in.”

As Dana waited, three different customers came out of the nursery pulling American Flyer wagons loaded with seedlings that
would bloom at Christmas. Dana had already decided she would
not celebrate Christmas without Bailey. Lexy told her not to look
ahead. She should live one day at a time.

She felt a quick impulse to go back into the office and tell Lexy
she was sorry for being mean. It made no sense to be angry with her
best friend, but when Dana looked at Lexy she thought about God,
and she was mad at God. She had been tricked by religion, beguiled
into believing God loved his creation. Which he didn’t. If he did
there would be no murdered Lolly Calhouns, no kidnapped Bailey
Cabots.

The woman on the phone was apologetic. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cabot.
The roster says Lieutenant Gary’s on a call.”

Dana had seen the room where Gary worked. She knew that his
phone sat on the right side of his gunmetal gray desk beside a picture of his mother and father and a pit bull named Louie. She knew
he sat at his desk right now avoiding her call because he had run out
of positive things to say to her. He was too honest to pretend hope
when he felt none.

In the beginning, however, he had encouraged her to be optimistic and talked about how efficiently a search could be mobilized
since the passing of the Amber Act. He spoke of something called
NCMEC, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Dana did not ask what exploited meant.

The media and police had moved into action so quickly it was
impossible not to feel hopeful at the beginning. Twenty minutes
after Dana reported Bailey missing a description of her had been
broadcast on multiple radio stations throughout San Diego County.
On all the news shows that night and every night for a month
afterward Bailey’s picture was on the screen, and throughout the newscast a scroll ran along the bottom of the screen with a number
viewers could call with information. Almost immediately the phones
had begun to ring. A brown-haired child had been sighted crying in
a restaurant in Yuma; a little girl was seen struggling with a man in a
truck in Barstow. Strong leads, weak and crazy leads, plenty of dead
ends, and even a couple of calls saying David Cabot was just getting
what he deserved. Walt Gary was convinced that David’s defense of
Frank Filmore, the rock through the window, and Bailey’s abduction were all related.

Dana sensed Gary did not approve of David defending Frank
Filmore. Well, neither did she. Some days she was so angry with him
she had to leave the room to keep from blurting what she thought,
that it was his fault Bailey was gone.

Police, sheriffs, and the highway patrol were on the lookout for a
white van like the one that had run over Moby Doby. One had been
seen in the neighborhood right after Bailey disappeared, but there
were tens of thousands of white vans in San Diego County. The rock
and the note attached to it had been examined and yielded information Gary called valuable. The rock was of a sort most commonly
found in the Sweetwater River bed; the note had been written on
the kind of cheap paper used by schools and churches and for bulk
mailings.

From a friend, an attorney with a brother in the sheriff’s department, Dana and David learned that for several months officers in
the area of the Sweetwater School District had been watching an elementary school teacher about whom a parent had made a complaint. The accusation of abuse had proved to be a malicious response
to a child’s poor grade, but the authorities weren’t quite convinced.
Probably another dead end, but don’t give up hope, Mrs. Cabot.

Dana thought hope wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Sometimes it was harder to fight against it than for it.

The operator asked, “Do you want to leave a message?”

Tell him and the other police officers not to abandon Bailey just because her father is defending Frank Filmore. They should not hold the
father’s job against the little girl. “No. Thank you.” She had no more
to say to him than he to her.

She keyed in David’s number and waited for someone in the office to answer, drumming her bitten-down nails on the steering
wheel.

Barbara, the firm’s receptionist, said, “Cabot and Klinger, Attorneys
for the Defense.”

That was new. Probably Marcus’s idea. She asked for David.

“He’s in court, Dana. Can I take a message?”

He was always in court; he was only happy in court these days.

The unstoppable memories rolled over Dana as if something in
her wanted to be more miserable than she already was.

When she met David Cabot he was only nineteen but already a
star in the world of college sports. A hustling quarterback tall
enough to see over the line to his receivers, a basketball player, and
a better than average third baseman. She never got tired of watching
him throw a ball or catch one. She saw that more than anything else
games were fun for him; the joy he got from competition lifted him
and gave him wings. And the miracle was, he loved her and lifted
her with him. He had seen not a quiet, studious girl with a crummy
wardrobe and only two pairs of shoes, not Margaret Bowen’s abandoned daughter or Imogene’s unwanted grandchild. He had seen
straight through to the heart of who she really was, the laughter in
her, the courage, the dogged determination to succeed that perfectly matched his own.

Sitting in the parking lot with time on her hands and resting on
her shoulders like a bag of cement, she tried to remember what that
love had felt like. She thought of a story she had read to Bailey about a train making it over a steep mountain, thinking it could, it
could, it could, and then it did. If only she could apply her will and
think herself back to the way it had been just a few months ago. But
love and trust and loyalty were not cars behind a locomotive. No
matter how much she wanted to make things better, there was nothing she could do.

Just as well David was not in his office because a part of her
mind knew the sound of his voice would only irritate her. It was so
clearly no longer the voice of the boy who loved games for the sake
of the play. The boy had vanished beneath layers of ambition and
professional pride. Bailey’s disappearance had smothered the last of
him entirely.

No message, she told Barb, and put her cell phone away.

She envied David being overworked and stressed for time. All
her days were empty. There were things she should do but nothing
she wanted to do, and so she did nothing. She sat and stared out the
front window; she lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. She sat
through terrible movies she forgot the instant she stepped out of the
dark and into the sunlight. Since May she had lost fourteen pounds.
Levi’s that had been snug and sexy hung on her hips like a punk’s.
Once she had loved food, loved cooking and serving; and even
cleaning up had never been the grind for her that it was for some.
But the kitchen had become no more than a room she walked
through on the way in or out of the house. She had stopped making
coffee and instead drank hot water from the tap or drove twelve
blocks to Bella Luna, where the barista comped her cappuccinos
and avoided her eyes.

She turned the key in the ignition and backed the big SUV
around the tail end of the church sextant’s rusty old Beetle and out
onto the street.

She would take a nap; a nap was always a worthy option, since at night she rarely slept more than three or four hours. David was just
as bad. Closed within their individual cells of fear and guilt, they
were awake at four A.M. in their own silent corners of the house.
Dana had begun to knit during the dark hours. She knit stockingstitch rectangles in shades of lime and pink. The rectangles were all
sizes and done on several different pairs of needles. Whatever
suited her from night to night, and of no practical use at all except
to occupy her hands. She did not know what David did in his wakefulness. Played solitaire perhaps or went on-line.

Despite his sleeplessness he bounded out of bed at five-thirty,
ran four times around the park with Moby at his heels, and left for
the office before seven. Sometimes he slept in the living room and
she did not hear him leave, showered, shaved, and dressed in one of
his beautiful suits. She knew he was eager to escape the house. Lexy
said he filled up his life with work so there would be no room to
think about Bailey. Dana believed he loved Bailey less than she did.
It would take more than a job to make Dana forget their daughter.

At a stop sign she let the car idle longer than necessary as she
watched a pair of girls in Arcadia School uniforms. They crossed
the street, ignoring the 4Runner, and ambled up the sidewalk with
their heads together, laughing.

She wished they had been taken instead of Bailey.

She turned onto Miranda Street, looking ahead to her house,
fourth from the corner. There was someone sitting on the front
steps.

n hour later Dana barged into Dr. Wren’s office with Bailey in
_ ….her arms.

The receptionist stood up, looking alarmed. “You can’t come in
without an appointment. If you have an emergency you need to see
the doctor on call.”

“It’s not an emergency. It’s a miracle!” Dana cried as she pushed
through the door to the inner office.

Before the receptionist could do anything, Dr. Wren’s nurse appeared around the corner, saw Bailey, and screamed. Dana began to
laugh and then to cry as the office staff converged at the front desk,
all of them either laughing or crying, all of them wanting to hug
Dana and Bailey. Dr. Wren invited Bailey into an examining room
immediately, where he checked her for external signs of abuse or injury, weighed her, and found that she had actually gained a pound
during her absence.

“As far as I can tell,” he said in his quiet, gentle voice, “Bailey is
in fine condition.” He grinned at her. “Roses in her cheeks.”

“Thank God,” Dana said and hugged Bailey tighter.

“There is one thing, of course. It’s difficult …” The thoughtful
lines between his eyebrows deepened. “Would you like me to do an
internal exam?”

“No,” Dana said quickly. She would be able to tell if her daughter had been sexually abused.

“If you change your mind-“

“I won’t.”

“Well, let me know if I can be of help.” Dr. Wren walked them
out to the waiting room. At the door, he kissed Bailey’s forehead.
“Welcome home, little angel.”

She had seemed perfectly healthy, but she had changed. She was
subdued and watchful.

Little silent angel.

When the media learned of Bailey’s return the public outpouring
of love overwhelmed Dana and David. Cards and flowers from
friends and strangers, toys for Bailey, gifts of potted plants, and
from someone they didn’t know a dreadful pink plaster statue of a
cherub that Dana put out in the garden hoping it would only last a
season. Occasionally strangers knocked at the front door. Dana
thought there was something ghoulish in their eagerness to see
Bailey, and she learned to ignore the doorbell unless she recognized
the car at the curb. Once or twice a white van drove by slowly.
Behind the smoked windows she thought she saw two heads but
could not be sure. Nor could she tell if there was a bumper sticker
on the back driver’s side. She told Lieutenant Gary anyway.