Set Free (22 page)

My life had become a schlocky detective novel. By day I was an intrepid investigator, ferreting out pieces of the puzzle that was Katie Edwards. By night I sat in surveillance—at her office if she was working late, or outside her home.

Since first undertaking the scheme to expose Katie, I’d discovered an important distinction: as an author, people generally like your attention; as a detective, people do their best to hide from it. Which makes finding stuff a lot harder. Turns out, I’m a rotten detective. So far, I’d turned up nothing useful. Tonight was no different.

Most of the people who’d worked alongside Katie on her rise to TV stardom had pretty much the same thing to say: she was driven, worked hard, was single-mindedly career focused, rarely socialized. There were neither warm fuzzies nor cold denunciations. They didn’t outright like her or hate her. They simply didn’t know her very well.

One thing kept me digging: Katie’s friends. Other than my wife, I couldn’t find a single one. When people would tell me she didn’t socialize, I thought to myself: she doesn’t socialize with
you
. A lot of people keep their personal and professional lives separate. But that was the problem. If Katie had a personal life, I couldn’t find it. No pals she’d hang out with on weekends. No boyfriends. No bars or restaurants she frequented. From what I could tell, Katie got up every morning, went to work, worked hard—I had to give her that—then, except for regular errand type stuff, she returned home and stayed there until it was time to do it all over again the next day.

On nights when Jenn was working late, and some when she wasn’t, I’d taken to grabbing a sandwich or takeout sushi and having dinner in my car outside of Katie’s apartment. Once again, I found myself having no clear idea of what it was I was looking for, other than some sign that she had a life outside of work.

Katie was nothing if not consistent. If the people of Boston knew her history, they’d be wise to be concerned about her spending all her time alone doing nothing but concentrating on work. The last time she’d done that, she’d gutted me on national television, and the time before she’d destroyed an entire town. A frightening resume. The big question: was she preparing to do it again?

By nine o’clock, food gone, iPhone and iPad batteries dying, and absolutely nothing happening, I was fighting the temptation to nod off. It was time to go home. And maybe, I was beginning to seriously consider, it was time to stop this altogether.

I was about to reach for the key and start the engine when the passenger side door opened.

She got in.

“H-hi,” I stuttered, stunned.

“Hi, daddy.”

“Hi, who’s this?”

“Mikki, it’s Gail Dolan. I’m Melissa’s mom.”

“Oh…hi.” Mikki frowned, surprised. How had Melissa’s mom gotten her number? She and Melissa Dolan hadn’t hung out since grade three.

“Listen, Mikki, this is so last minute, but I know you girls are always looking for extra money to buy make-up and stuff and I’m in a real bind. I’ve got a slight emergency and I need someone to look after Gavin, Melissa’s little brother. It’s just for a couple of hours, right after school today. You get off at three, right?”

Mikki checked her watch. It was nearing two o’clock and she was walking to her last class of the day. “Yeah. But I usually go right home after school.”

“Of course. I know where you live. I could pick you up in front of your house at four. If you give me your mom or dad’s number, I’ll call and ask them if it’s okay. I can have you back no later than six-thirty. That sound alright?”

“Can’t Melissa do it?”

“She’s got some kind of student meeting thing after school. I’m really desperate, Mikki. I’ll pay you double because it’s so last minute. It would really help me out.”

“Uh, sure.” Mrs. Dolan was right. The extra cash would come in handy to supplement her unfairly austere allowance. Mikki knew both her parents would be home late that evening, so she could probably get away with the babysitting gig without either of them knowing about it. But, they’d just had the “trust talk.” Her parents had agreed to loosen the reigns a bit on things like allowing her to stay in the house alone. She didn’t want to screw that up. So she gave the woman her dad’s cell phone number—he was more likely to pick up—and agreed to the job.

At four o’clock on the nose, a small brown car pulled up on the street outside the Wills’ house. Mikki waved from where she’d been waiting on the front steps. She’d had to rush after last period. The walk home from school was only a few minutes, but she needed extra time to drop off homework for her best friend who’d been sick and missed school that day. Grabbing her things, she dashed down the path and into the back seat of the waiting vehicle.

“Hi Mikki,” Mrs. Dolan said, turning in her seat to fix her young passenger with a wide, sunny smile.

Mikki noticed the ridiculously big, way-out-of-fashion sunglasses and oversized, floppy hat. She wondered why one of the woman’s friends didn’t suggest a make-over.

“I got you this. I hope you like
Reece’s Pieces
.”

Mikki accepted the
DQ Blizzard
with a nod. It was her favorite. She’d never actually met Melissa’s mother before, but she was pretty sure her mom had, at some parent-teacher thing ages ago. “Thanks, Mrs. Dolan. Did you talk to my dad?”

“Yes I did,” she said with a musical lilt, turning to face the road and slip the car into drive. “Don’t forget to put on your seatbelt, sweetie.”

By the time the car pulled into the carport attached to a small house in an older, rundown, East Boston neighborhood, Mikki was fast asleep. The drugs in the ice cream treat had done their job.

Gail took a minute to observe the activity level on the street. It was typically quiet during the day, and thankfully today was no different. She knew her landlord, old Mrs. Wazlowski, would be out, attending her weekly bridge game at the community center. Not that any of that mattered. The distance between the car and the private entrance to Gail’s basement suite apartment was less than five feet, and at this time of day, all in shadow. No one would see her helping the droopy girl inside.

Gail had Craigslist to thank for her new home. She’d been renting a perfectly respectable apartment closer to downtown. It was small but cute and she was sorry to have to give it up. But the tenancy agreement precluded having a pet, never mind a thirteen-year-old girl held hostage for a few weeks. And Gail needed extra space for that second person. A person who needed to be kept quiet, or more accurately, couldn’t be heard. She’d searched the online classifieds website and found exactly what she needed.

The house wasn’t in her favorite part of town, and now her commute to work was longer, but in all other ways she couldn’t have asked for a better set up. Mrs. Wazlowski was an elderly widow. Her son, long moved on and disgracefully neglectful of his mother, had been one of those kids who was always in a band or practicing to be in one. She and her husband, being the type of parents who did whatever they could to encourage their child’s developing talent, had refitted a room in their basement to make it soundproof. It was a place where little Wazlowski junior could drum, or strum, or screech his head off, without disturbing the rest of the family or eliciting complaints from the neighbors. Once the son moved on and her husband died, Mrs. Wazlowski wisely decided to convert the basement into a rental property, from which she could make a few extra dollars.

Mikki Wills was pretty, popular, and purposeless. Exactly the kind of girl Gail Dolan detested. Even so, she’d sacrificed her own lifestyle and committed a significant chunk of her savings to setting the girl up in teenybopper heaven. Except for the part about being kept under lock and key.

The room in the Wazlowski basement had been repainted bubblegum pink, the single bed outfitted with matching sheets and covered with stuffed animals. There was a flat screen TV, Blue Ray player, and large stack of movies Gail believed any thirteen-year-old girl would enjoy. There was even a small selection of makeup, lotions, perfumes, and hair care products. If that wasn’t enough to keep her busy, Gail stocked the room with books, and a selection of magazines she planned to refresh every week. Most young girls like Mikki were happy as clams, so long as they could keep up to date on every piece of breaking news in the world of celebrity gossip and fashion.

Gail was quite certain the one thing Mikki would not be happy about was having to give up her phone. Before destroying it, Gail would check the roster of calls registered the day of the abduction. Most would be to and from her school chums. There would be at least one call from an unknown number. Not so unusual. But even if investigators did follow it up, all they’d learn is that the call originated from a disposable phone, now swimming with the fishes at the bottom of the Charles. Yes, Mikki Wills would be upset at being completely cut off from the cyber world. But there was no reason the child shouldn’t have to make a few sacrifices of her own. It’s not like she was staying in the apartment as a paying guest. Well, not exactly. If all went to plan, Gail certainly expected to benefit greatly from the girl’s presence.

The room had its own bathroom. And Gail had hired a handyman to build a swinging flap at the bottom of the door—like a pet door—through which meals, magazines, and whatever else the girl might need could be delivered. Although she’d made some effort to disguise her look and voice, Gail did not want her new “roommate” having any more opportunity to look at her face than was absolutely necessary.

Even before the teen arrived, Gail had prepared the first note. It had been strangely enjoyable. Planning for and creating the ransom letter, cutting out letters and phrases from newspapers and magazines, fashioning the message: it was kidnapping-arts-and-crafts. 

By the time Mikki Wills woke up that first day, dazed, confused, and scared out of her mind, she was fully ensconced in Junior Wazlowski’s former music room. Neither she nor her captor knew it at the time, but it would become her home for considerably longer than either ever imagined.

After Katie Edwards revealed the lie,
my
lie—about being held prisoner in the Atlas Mountains—everything I’d written in
Set Free
was tainted, soundly derided, discounted, then promptly forgotten.

Yes, I’d lied. Eventually, I came to understand I’d done it to protect myself, to make myself feel better, to heal. I know none of those are good reasons or apt excuses. I should have damn well kept whatever I needed to say, in whatever way I needed to say it, to myself. At the end of the day, I lied and it was wrong. But along with the lies, truth had also been tossed away.

The truth is that I was never in a Moroccan prison shaped like a rectangle. I never slept atop a pedestal to be closer to the sky and fresh air. I was never cared for and loved by a woman named Asmae. But the descriptions of my daughter coming to me at night, our conversations, our comforting one another…nothing was closer to the truth than those moments. They didn’t happen in a rectangular cell atop a pedestal. But they did happen. In a miniscule back room of a red clay house, in a village inconspicuously built into the side of a mountain. I can still feel the wisp of my daughter’s warm breath against my neck as we hugged, the softness of her face as it pressed against mine, her golden curls tickling my nose. I remember the fresh, clean scent of her that reminded me so much of home I thought my heart might break in two.

People will think it was a dream, a hallucination, or the desperation of an emotionally wrecked man, that brought Mikki to me during my self-imposed exile in Morocco. And they’ll think it again, to hear of her sitting next to me in my car, outside of Katie Edwards’ Boston apartment.

But they’re wrong. It wasn’t any of those things. It was the unbreakable bond between parent and child. One born of relation, bred of time spent together, cemented by steadfast, unwavering love. A father’s most important job is to look after his child: to protect her, teach her, ensure she knows every second of every day that she is valued, and loved, and special to him. But I’ve learned this connection is not a one-way street. A child can do all those same things for a parent. It’s a role that grows and develops as the child does, the tables slowly turning until one day, the parent is old and feeble and unable to care for themselves and the child takes over.

But when the natural progression of life is interrupted—by circumstance, by the retarded development of one of the players or, as in our case, by unimaginable tragedy—an imbalance develops. The one left behind—parent or child—is left reeling, incomplete, searching for something to fill the unfillable gap. But here’s where the unthinkable comes into play. Something which, had I ever considered it before all of this happened, I would have never believed. Sometimes, the impossible
can
become possible. The unfillable
can
be filled. I know Mikki didn’t miraculously appear to me in Morocco like some kind of divine apparition. But she
was
there. She
did
comfort me. She
did
allow me to comfort her. She
did
guide me back to sanity. She saved me. She set me free and sent me home.

We’d always been connected, Mikki and I. So why is it so impossible to believe, in the absolute worst moments of our lives, each of us experiencing similar hells simultaneously yet separately, that we’d need each other’s help? Desperately so. Who’s to say that we didn’t, somehow, do exactly that? Who’s to say it wasn’t I who helped my daughter survive, and she who helped me?

In the darkened interior of the car, parked next to Katie Edwards’ apartment, although I was not entirely surprised to see my daughter because of our past history of visitations, something was notably different. In Morocco, Mikki had always appeared to me as a child. Sometimes she was a helpless infant, sometimes a little girl of three or four, sometimes a teen. But never was she older than when I’d last seen her, when we’d lost her at the age of thirteen. Tonight, Mikki was a young woman, maybe twenty-one or twenty-two. I’d never seen her at that age, of course. But there was no mistaking who she was. She had the same warm, friendly eyes, glowing face, and a pink barrette holding back her hair.

For a full moment I simply stared, saying nothing. She too was silent, endlessly patient, as if knowing this is what I needed. Like the times before in Morocco, I was inexplicably calm, not at all shocked to see her. But I was taken aback by her mature appearance. As I took in this older version of my child, a bloom of pride began to swell inside of me.

Suddenly I knew what she was there to tell me.

I’d done it. I’d protected my child. I’d somehow kept her safe into adulthood. Not only that, but I could tell by the set of her kind face, the gentleness of her smile, that she’d grown into a good, compassionate, generous human being.

Silly thoughts began to race through my mind. Like how, even though I’d owned this same car for most of her life prior to the kidnapping, this new, adult Mikki had never been in it. I hoped she wasn’t upset by the mess in the backseat—her usual spot. I glanced down at her hands, looking for a wedding ring, but saw none. I assessed her clothing, the healthy color of her cheeks, the light in her eyes. I was relieved to see laugh lines, the same ones her mother had.

“How are you, sweetheart?” I finally found my voice.

“Daddy, I’m fine.”

“You’re fine?” My heart fluttered with the hope that it was true. In all the time we’d spent together in Morocco, she’d never said those words.

“I am now.”

I felt myself welling up, but resisted the impulse to cry. I didn’t want to waste one second on tears. “You don’t know how happy that makes me.”

She laughed, a marvelous sound. “Oh, I think I do.”

I released a colossal sigh and grinned at her. Inside I was feeling something I was certain I’d abandoned long ago: contentment.

“I need something from you, Daddy,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Go inside.”

“What?”

“
Dad, I need you to go inside
.”