The Best American Mystery Stories 2015 (31 page)

They both laugh.

Melanie buys a baguette, half-a-dozen croissants, four palmiers, and two little strawberry tarts. She pays. Someone is coming in as she leaves, there’s a delivery van pulling out from the curb, and Jenny is already halfway down the block. “Hey, Josh!” Melanie calls as she stuffs her purchases into the shopping-bag pocket behind Joshua’s back, “I’m all done. Aren’t those puppies cute?”

“Josh, are you asleep . . . ?

“Joshua . . . ?

“Josh . . . ?”

Very suddenly, the earth lurches out of orbit, the sidewalk tilts, and Melanie is sliding at a sickening heart-stopping speed toward a free-fall into the void.

5. Darien

I was the one who had to break the news to Simon. It wasn’t planned. I happened to drive by the bakery very shortly after the event (in my car, not in the delivery van), when the police were everywhere, sending out radio alerts. I couldn’t see Melanie.

“What happened?” I asked a policeman.

“A child has been stolen,” he said. “A two-year-old.”

“
Stolen?
That’s a strong word. Not just gone missing, the way kids do?”

“A two-year-old can’t unbuckle himself from a safety harness. It’s been cut.”

“Oh my God! And the baby girl?”

I knew instantly that that was a mistake but not a fatal one. The policeman narrowed his eyes and paid the kind of attention that has the effect of making me unnaturally calm and alert. I guess the challenge of getting out of dead ends (so to speak) turns me on.

“What baby girl?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought I heard someone say something about a double stroller and a baby girl.”

“She wasn’t taken,” the policeman said.

Later, I don’t doubt he was the one who had me declared “a person of interest” after the abandoned van was found, but before that I drove back to the house to tell Simon. I was as gentle and compassionate and consoling as only a kind neighbor can be. “I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news,” I said when he opened the door.

6. Simon

The second Simon opens the door he knows. All his life he has been bracing himself for this, looking back over his shoulder, waiting for when the moment would arrive.

And he has always known it would. He grew up with grandparents who turned pale and held still whenever they heard a knock on the door, with parents who passed the anxiety on.

“What?” he asks, or tries to ask, though his breath makes no sound at all. “What? Tell me.” He grabs a handful of Darien’s shirt as though grasping the nettle. He is spooked by Darien’s eyes.

Nothing, Simon thinks, will ever be more terrible than this moment.

As things turns out, he is wrong.

He does not yet know how wrong he is.

7. Ryan the Baker

The police want to know what Ryan saw, but Ryan saw nothing that could help. His morning passed, as all mornings pass, inside the cozy cocoon of ovens and bread and pastries and the pleasing
ding
of the till.

“You didn’t pay attention to the strollers?” the police want to know.

“There are always strollers,” Ryan says. “They are always parked outside. The store is too small for them, and the mothers can’t push them over—”

“So you were not aware of how many strollers were parked outside at the time? You didn’t see—?”

“I see them, I suppose. I don’t pay attention. They come and go, but in the season there are always strollers. One, two, three. I can’t recall.”

“You didn’t see anyone remove a child?”

“I’m too busy. The only time I see outside my window is when no customers come.”

“What time of day would that be?”

“In the season, almost never. In winter, most of the day.”

“And why exactly did you call 911?”

“Because Mrs. Goldberg, who’d just bought a baguette and croissants and four palmiers and two strawberry tarts, came running back into my store holding her baby girl so close that my first thought was, That baby will suffocate. She’s killing it.”

“What did she say?”

“She was sobbing and incoherent and then she fainted. My floors are heart pine and clean, but she fell on the baby.”

“Was anyone else in the store?”

“Yes, another client had just come in. Mrs. Goldberg’s baby was wailing, high-decibel, the way babies do, and the woman—the new customer—reached for the baby but changed her mind. So I put a loaf of whole-grain under Mrs. Goldberg’s head—it was the only pillow I had to hand—and I got the baby out from under and cuddled it—I’m a grandfather, you know—and then I called 911.”

“Why do you think your other customer changed her mind?”

“What?”

“Why do you think one of your customers changed her mind about taking the baby?”

“Oh. That’s not something . . . You know, reasoning was not at the forefront of my mind. It’s just something I happened to notice, the way she reached and then pulled away; or maybe it was something I didn’t notice till afterward, playing it back. Felt out of her depth, that customer, I would say. And so did I, to tell you the truth. But the reason could have been—if anyone was acting on reason, which isn’t something I’d swear to—it could have been Mrs. Goldberg’s face.”

“Meaning?”

“She looked deranged.”

“Yet when the ambulance came,” the police say, “you were still holding the baby. Why?”

Ryan puckers his brow, pondering this. “The baby was crying. What else could I do? And Mrs. Goldberg was . . . I think she was in a state of shock.”

“She was unconscious?”

“She seemed to be. I think she was.”

“For how long?”

“I really don’t know. Probably minutes, just minutes. I was pretty strung out myself. I really wasn’t conscious of time. And then the ambulance came and took them both.”

“Do you have any other information that might help us?”

“She always called the children her ‘punkins.’ She doted on them. She was a lovely gracious lady, one of my regulars. She came in every day in the season and always bought fresh-baked, which tells you a lot.”

“Any further comments?”

“I can’t get my mind around how fast . . . I mean, ten minutes at most, she wasn’t in the store more than that. She came in with that kind of glow she has—you couldn’t help noticing it, she was so
alive
, such a happy and courteous . . .”

“And then?”

“And then deranged. It gives me bad dreams, the way she looked. I haven’t slept well since it happened.”

“We have to ask you this,” the police say. “Is there any chance Mrs. Goldberg might have planned this? Faked this?”

Ryan stares at them. Perhaps a whole minute passes before he can speak. “I think,” he says, “that if you weren’t cops, I’d land a punch on your jaws that you wouldn’t forget in a hurry. But I know you’re just doing your job. And I suppose you must see a lot of slime.”

“We understand how you feel,” one cop says. “But can you answer the question for the record?”

“There is no way in a million years,” Ryan tells them, “that Mrs. Goldberg could have or would have faked this.”

8. Melanie

This is like the worst hangover ever. This is like wishing you were dead. This is like having your lungs full of nettles or prickles or barbed wire. No. Worse than that. It is as though your lungs are crammed with broken glass. Breathing hurts.

Then again, it is like being smashed in the surf by a humongous wave, a rogue wave, knowing you are going under but desperately fighting the rip, the tearing, the gaping hole where your babies have been swept from your arms.

Please, please, please, you beseech the ocean, I will willingly drown if that will save them.

Where is she . . . ? And where is . . . ?

What is this bleeding gaping hole?

Melanie’s heart is yammering in vibrato, her eyes flicker from the ceiling to the tube taped to her forearm to the nurse.

Then she remembers but hopes she is just waking, that she is recalling fragments of a horrible dream.

She is afraid to ask anything at all.

“Your baby is here,” the nurse says gently. She lays Jessica on Melanie’s chest, but this agitates Melanie.

“Take her, you take her, she’s not safe with me. Where’s Simon?”

The nurse places Jessica in a crib and attends to the drip, professional, calm, increasing the amount of sedation. “Your husband is on his way,” she says.

“And my son?” She makes herself say it. “My son, Joshua?”

“Everyone is looking for Joshua. They will find him.”

9. I, Joshua

Sometimes I configure the script this way, sometimes another, but I am ever more certain that I have the right cast, the right play. I call my script “Afterlife of a Stolen Child” and I am the expert on this case, though I have no interest whatsoever in publication, in HBO, in Oprah, or in anything but a missing segment of myself. All my research was done online via websites for missing children. I combed thousands of search engines and these were my constant keywords: male child, blond, blue eyes, same birth month and birth year as mine, case never resolved.

This is the one.

I’ve read everything. I know everything that has ever been put on the record (in police files, in interviews, in print) about the father, the mother, the baby sister, the baker, the baker’s regulars, the creepy neighbor who was “a person of interest.”

I have photographs. I’ve had them blown up and framed and hung on the walls of my room. This is Simon, this is Melanie, this is Jessica. The resemblance, I think you will agree, is striking. I’ve tracked the players through cyber detective and paid by credit card online.

Now I know in advance what you are thinking. What’s the payoff here? Who is the con man? What exactly does he get out of this? And I’ll be the first to confess that I myself have aliases, several in fact, and yes, there’s a certain kind of payoff for me.

I cover my tracks.

And so you suspect I’m impervious, without empathy or pain, but it isn’t so. Believe me, it isn’t so. I ask you this, and I ask you to think seriously before you formulate your answer: Why do con men do what they do?

And I leave you this clue: I have been this certain before but have been wrong, and yet I desperately need to be right.

This time, I believe I am right.

This time, no stone has been left unturned. I know who has died and who’s still living, I know their addresses, their phone numbers, where they work, and where they have ever worked. I know that Simon and Melanie split up within a year of the event, that both have remarried, that Simon has had other children and Melanie has not, that both drink more than is wise, and both are on antidepressants.

I know that Jessica, the little sister, is married and has young children and that she is rostered for duty at a child-care center one day a week. The other mothers find her neurotically anxious about the little ones in her care.
She hovers too much
, they whisper.
She almost smothers.

What I don’t know—what no one knows, what even Google and Yahoo and Wikipedia don’t seem to know and can’t make up—is what happened to Joshua and how Joshua came to be me.

I have a need—a compulsion, perhaps—to write all the possible scripts, but the three protagonists are constant and essential, though ever-changing within their chameleon selves:

Simon, Melanie, Darien.

I move them around like chess pieces on a board, especially Darien, because somebody did this, but how was it done so quickly? And what did he do with the child?

Joshua cannot remember.

Hard as I try to insert him, Joshua is always absent from the text.

You think, therefore, that the claimants—all of them, and I know I am not the first—are opportunists or sociopaths. You will point to the recent breakdown of Simon, to his interview with the
New York Times
following my phone call, an interview first desperately hopeful, then angry, then incoherent.

And you think I was not similarly distraught?

Consider this: I, Joshua (aka Joshua X), can recall nothing before my sixth birthday, in spite of another set of parents (good parents in a standard middle-class way; I hold nothing against them), in spite of siblings, in spite of family albums that record third birthday, fourth birthday, fifth birthday, and so on, but nothing earlier.
We didn’t have a camera before that
, the older siblings say, and it does indeed seem to be true, because there are no photographs of the earliest years of the brothers and sisters of my other family, the family of record.

You weren’t expected
, they say.
You came late. You were something of an accident but everyone adored you, you were such a beautiful child.

Perhaps everyone adored me, probably they did, but I always knew I was the cuckoo in the nest. I wasn’t expected and I didn’t belong.

It is essential, therefore, that I create Simon and Melanie as doting parents, because that is what was stolen from me. I was the center of the world of that beautiful mythical pair. Neither could recover from my loss, I insist on that. My absence destroyed them.

And here is Melanie, enlarged and framed on my wall, glowing mother of toddler and baby, both in her arms. Night after night, I dream myself into that cradle of her arm.

I admit it: I’m in love with my mother. I press my lips, every night, against hers.

In other circumstances, that might be disturbing, but not—given my history—in mine.

When I was an innocent infant, two years old, a wrong so massive was done to me that only Greek tragedy can contain it. I point to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides: they alone are equal to my tale.

And Darien?

Perhaps I need him even more than I need my mother. I need to know what he did and I need to understand why. He is the one player I have not been able to trace. This much I have established: that there was a summer neighbor who was briefly—as far as the local police were concerned—“a person of interest.” He was brought in for questioning, but there was not enough evidence to hold him. He vanished. He has left no aliases, no cyber tracks, though there has been speculation, over time, that he could be a serial killer and pedophile.