The Deep End of the Ocean (8 page)

“You know what?” Ben told her then, buying time. “You can go to the deep end. You can go there. You just start walking, until it goes over your head and then you keep on walking on the bottom. But then if you want to go back, that’s too hard because the water just rubs all the, all the…”

“What, Ben?”

“All the feet marks away. You can’t ever turn around and go back. You can’t find it.” And Beth, chilled, sat with him, all that long afternoon, high on the brow of the beach, scooping sand.

Bracing herself on her hands, Beth climbed to the top deck of the bleachers. They were slippery with dew, tacky with chipped paint. She held her arms and shivered. Wind from the cloudy sky seemed to reach down for her. Hunt. Prod. Beth lay on the bleachers, stretching herself out to fullest length, and emptied herself of tears, until the shoulders of her sweater were soaked, and her forehead pulsed against the wood.

When she looked up, not at a sound, but at something else, a disturbance of the air, Candy Bliss was standing at the foot of the bleachers. She held a plastic zip bag, small enough for a sandwich. In it was Ben’s high-topped shoe, so clean and new the red parrot still glowed in the dark.

Finding the tennis shoe changed everything.

It was the shoe that made Ben kidnapped. It proved for Candy Bliss that Ben had not wandered away on his own.

The knowledge that her child was in a stranger’s hands should have accelerated her panic, but in fact it seemed to slow Beth down.

The shoe, Candy explained, had been found on a low shelf in the newsstand, low enough that Ben could have put it there himself. But it was tied neatly in a tight bow, in a way that most three-year-olds could never have done alone; and he could not have taken it off without untying it, either. “It’s not conclusive, Mrs. Cappadora,” said Candy Bliss. “But it’s enough to start on. And, of course, that’s how we felt anyway.”

“That someone abducted Ben?”

Candy nodded. “It just…that whole lobby full of people. You know, hiding in plain sight….” She shook her head. “Beth, now, you’re sure Ben couldn’t tie?”

“God no. He could barely cut pancakes with a fork. He was three.” She snagged her lip with her teeth. “He’s three.”

“Well, I’m never sure. I mean, I’m close to my nephew, but you have to live in the same house to really commit all those developmental stages to memory. And this is my first…”

“Your first?”

“My first case involving a child so young. Of this kind.”

“I see. Other kinds?” Beth asked.

“Well, in Tampa I used to work juvenile. Back when I started, that’s what a female officer in the South did. And later…”

“Later?”

“Well, homicide.”

“I see. You don’t have children of your own?” Beth asked, amazing herself at her even-measured voice, because she knew that if she looked behind her, she could see herself galloping back and forth across the verge of the parking lot, under the moon, keening and shuddering.

“I don’t,” said Candy. “I…kind of wish I did.”

“Maybe soon,” Beth said, thinking, For Christ’s sake, what are we talking about?

“Uh, well, I think not. I’m thirty-six. Maybe. Anyhow, he can’t tie, and you can see how this bow looks.” Beth stared at her son’s tiny shoe as if it were a chip of meteor, an extraterrestrial phenomenon.

The service door swung wide as they approached, a young officer anticipating them from a cue Beth couldn’t discern. She walked blinking into the sharp light reflecting off the stainless-steel expanses of sinks and stoves and straight into the muzzle of two huge and straining dogs.

“McGinty!” cried Candy, as if she’d just found her long-lost brother. But the barrel-chested, red-haired uniform cop was looking at Beth.

“Mrs. Cappadora,” he said softly. “This is Holmes and this is Watson.” The bloodhounds sat down, respectfully enough, at a silent gesture from McGinty’s right hand. “We call them the bionic noses. We scented them off your little boy’s shoe…and they got as far as the parking lot. We scented them again, and they went straight to the same place, to a spot in the parking lot a little west of the front entrance. We assume the car was there….”

“The car that belonged to whoever it was who took Ben,” said Candy.

“I know what he meant,” Beth snapped. “I’m not stupid. I was a newspaper photographer for years.” Candy nodded, tight-lipped. Pat showed up then, his face blurred with sleep, his hand still seeping under the bandage from Beth’s bite, and Candy sat down with both of them. After the state troopers assigned to the case arrived, they would expand their survey of mapped coverage areas for ground and air searches. There would be computer searches, with the help of the list provided by the reunion planners, and the first individuals they would concentrate on interviewing would be those with criminal histories.

“Criminal histories?” Pat asked. “Kids from Immaculata?”

“Not kids anymore,” said Candy. “And yeah, in any group that big there’s a fair chance we’re going to turn up some people, maybe spouses, with histories involving—” They both looked at Beth, and Candy continued, “Abuse. Or assault. Or something.”

“With children?” Beth asked.

“Maybe.”

“Like?”

“Like, for example, your friend Wayne. Beth, there was a statutory offense, involving a juvenile. In the seventies.”

“Wayne is as close to my children as their blood uncles. Wayne would never hurt Ben. This is because he’s gay….”

“Which is what I thought, Beth, and it turned out that the kid was sixteen and he was nineteen, and it was probably just a romance that got some parents all juiced…see? Most of these things turn out to be nothing, but we check them all….”

Ellen wandered into the kitchen, zeroed in on Beth, and enfolded her. In sweats and a ponytail, Ellen looked reduced, frail and young. She held Beth against her as Candy explained that it would be wise to get the parents’ lie detector tests out of the way. They could visit the technician today or wait until Monday.

“You think Beth arranged for Ben to be stolen?” Ellen asked.

“No, but most kidnappings are domestic in origin. They’re custody-related, or they turn out to be problems with relatives or former caregivers,” Candy Bliss explained.

There were lists and interviews and the first Crime-stopper poster of Ben’s face to approve; Beth—luckily, she thought—looked away at the last minute, so she never saw Ben’s trusting eyes look back at her from the black-and-white photocopy. Ellen helped Beth take a bath, drawing Beth’s jeans down over her hips, handing her into the tub as she would have helped a brittle-boned grandmother. While Beth lay in the water and Pat paced, smoking, in the bedroom, the phone rang almost incessantly. Ellen would answer, crisply, “She’s asleep,” or “No, they’ve lived in Madison more than ten years.” Dressed in Ellen’s clean clothes, so long on her she looked like Nellie Forbush in her sailor suit in
South Pacific,
Beth sat in front of the mirror and dried her own hair. Some time in the late afternoon, Officer Taylor asked her what she remembered about her classmate Sean Meehan. His second child had died four years before, a crib death that never felt quite right. When Beth began to dry-heave in the sink, the doctor, whose name Beth never knew, showed up again and gave her sample packets of tranquilizers. But when she couldn’t keep those down, either, he gave her another shot; and she slept, hearing everything, even her brother Bick’s voice—she tried to wake up to talk to Bick, but couldn’t fight her way through the slumberous layers. At one point, Pat sat her up and they watched a grainy, early-morning news video of teams of neighborhood volunteers and Immaculata classmates walking the forest preserve and the golf course shoulder to shoulder. When Ben’s baseball-cap picture flashed on the screen and a young woman said, “A community is mobilized to find little Ben,” Beth screamed and Pat turned the set off.

A bellman from the Tremont staff brought up a tray of cheese cubes and fruit, with a card tucked in it that reminded them they ate compliments of the Tremont, part of the nationwide chain of Hospitality Hotels. Ellen forced Beth to eat grapes and a single cube of cheese. Coffee materialized. Beth drank four cups.

It was still light when Candy came up into Beth’s room and asked her if she was ready to talk to the press.

Beth said, “Of course not.”

Candy winced. “Well, you don’t have to. But I want you to if you can. You don’t have to talk to a bunch of reporters, just one. I have one picked out. She’s okay. And you
could
talk to everybody. You could talk to Channel Five, Seven, Two, Nine…the
Tribune,
the local paper, the
Sun-Times.
They’re all here.”

“I don’t want to talk to anybody. Let Pat talk. He’s a good talker.”

“But Beth, you’re the mother. People respond to mothers. They see your emotion.”

“You want me to cry in front of these people.”

“No, I don’t want you to perform,” Candy said.

The sedative’s still-warm brandy in her blood made Beth bold. “I’m not the crying-in-front-of-other-people type,” she said.

“You are so,” Ellen put in.

“If I was,” said Beth, “I’m not anymore. This is my kid,
my
kid….” Beth felt the nausea crest and recede. “You don’t understand.”

“No,” said Candy. “I don’t. But I understand how far-reaching these reports can be, and how many people watch, and how we can get their eyes working for us.”

“Look,” Ellen told Beth. “You are going to do this. You are going to do this because it’s one thing you can do to help find Ben. Now, sit up and get ready.”

“I look like a sack of shit.”

“That’s okay,” said Candy, and Beth thought, remembering her newspaper days, yes, of course, this is a tableau: the grieving mother she had herself photographed five or ten times, eyes dreadful with sleep deprivation, cheekbones like rocky ridges. “But you don’t want to look frightening,” Candy went on, “or they’ll think…”

“They’ll think what?”

“That you’re nuts and you did it,” said Ellen as she went to get her makeup bag. Candy watched as she smoothed Beth’s hair back and secured it with a gold clip.

“Put on a little eye shadow, Beth,” Ellen said. Beth stared at the pot of greens and blues and beiges.

“Let me do that,” Candy suddenly said briskly. “I’m very good at makeup.” And, Beth would later reflect, more times than she could ever imagine why, Candy really
was
good at it: the discreet taupe orbs she sketched under Beth’s brows made her look wan but not wild; the minimal amount of cover-up she applied did not hide the pouches that flanked Beth’s nose, but muted them.

“Now, what I’m going to do,” Candy explained, brushing gently, “is bring Sarah Chan up here with her crew. And we’ll do her first, because she’s on deadline, and they troubled to send an anchor, and Channel Two is the top-watched news. And then if you want to do anybody else, you can—they’re all going to have reports anyhow. There will be a lot of lights, Beth.” Beth thought briefly of a gynecological exam, of her doctor telling her the patient litany, “Now, I’m going to insert the speculum….” She interrupted Candy.

“I know about lights, I’m a photographer.”

“Okay. And all you’ll have to do is answer her questions. They’re taping, so if you need to go back over something, if you’re nervous—”

“I’m not
nervous,
” Beth said, more violently than she meant; she didn’t need to compel Candy to despise her, too. “Can I see the press release?” she asked then, trying to sound helpful, even sane. Someone went to get a copy and Beth scanned it; it was not lyric prose: “No witnesses as yet to the disappearance…several promising leads…a full-scale investigation.”

“You don’t mention the shoe,” Beth said.

“And we’re not,” Candy told her. “That’s our hole card. Only one person, probably one, knows why that shoe was there. We’ll never get anything physical off the canvas, like—”

“Like fingerprints?”

“Right. But that’s what we’ll use for the confessors.”

“Confessors.”

“The people who say they took Ben, when they call.”

“People will call?”

“Oh, they have, Beth. They already have. There are chronics out there who just want the attention, and maybe some people who are genuinely guilty of something and so tormented they have to confess to something else. They all come out of the woodwork, Beth.”

And Beth locked on an image of a darkened room, a moon-pale face with a phone receiver clutched tight next to it, speaking quietly, whispering, perhaps afraid someone in the next room would hear…and then Sarah Chan, slim as a pleat and fragrant in her blue suit, knocked at the door and the room filled with a bristle of cables and light poles. Pat sat down next to Beth on the sofa.

“Touch her,” said Candy. And Pat placed his arm along the back of the sofa, resting it just shy of Beth’s shoulders.

“Mrs. Cappadora,” said Sarah Chan, “I want you to know that all of us want to do everything we can to help find your little boy. You know how these things are. They really draw people together. A whole city will be praying for Brian—”

“Ben.”

“For Ben. I’m very sorry about that. I just got here and I haven’t really brought myself entirely up to speed.”

Beth couldn’t say anything.

“Mrs. Cappadora?” Sarah Chan prodded.

“I understand,” Beth gulped, finally.

She suddenly recalled a moment from her newspaper days—shooting a family whose only son, a teenager, had died hours before in one of those hideous northern Wisconsin county-trunk car wrecks. All at once the boy’s old grandmother said loudly, “Oh, well, we used to do the same thing. My husband and his buddies would have a big tin bucket of beer on the floor in the back of the car, and they’d drive up and down raising hell. Oh, my yes, we did. They all do it.” Beth was dumbstruck, her fingers fumbling with her old Hasselblad (the editor wanted mournful portraits, not news shots). Was she supposed to agree: kids will be kids, kids will be incinerated in old Chevys?

Sarah Chan’s breezy reference to “how these things are” stunned Beth in exactly the same way, she realized, but now she was on the other end of the lens.

“Mrs. Cappadora, are you ready?” asked Sarah Chan.

“Let Pat talk,” Beth pleaded.

“We agreed,” Ellen told her firmly. “I’ll be right here.”