The Deepest Secret (11 page)

“Tyler,” he calls through the closed door. “A police detective’s here to talk to us about Amy.”

“Okay. Hold on.”

No doubt his son’s lounging in his desk chair, feet up on the desk, or feeding photo paper through the printer and waiting impatiently for the results. The multicolored lamp will be throwing out its crazy colors. The overhead light will be shining, and the desk lamp, and the bathroom light. Even the nightlight on the floor will be switched on.
Why does he do that?
he’d once complained to Eve, and she’d answered,
Because he can
.

“He’s putting on sunscreen,” he tells the detective, and she nods. But it’s more than that. Tyler’s going through that strange ritual of
patting his face in a certain order. He won’t open a door until he does it.
He’s just checking to make sure his sunscreen’s on
, Eve said when David brought it up in therapy.
It’s more than that
, David argued, and Eve had snapped,
What are you trying to say, that our child’s not normal?

The snick of metal on metal. Watkins looks at him with surprise. “Your son locks himself in?”

“Yes,” he says shortly. Ever since that friend of Melissa’s had inadvertently opened Tyler’s door while he sat at his desk doing homework. Eve had heard the shrieking and come running. He thinks this is why Melissa has so few friends—she’s careful about who she brings into the house.

These are the rules: during the day, they go through the garage door and then through the kitchen door, which, positioned as it is behind the wall, doesn’t let in the light. Just after sunset to just before sunrise, when the air is completely drained of UV, they can go through the front door or the French doors that lead out onto the patio. At all other times, the drapes are to be kept drawn tightly, and every week, the UV-filtering films they’ve adhered to the windows are to be checked for peeling, cracking, or scratches. They track the passage of the sun closely. Its movement across the sky has made this house a prison.

“Okay,” Tyler calls, and David turns the knob.

“Move quickly, please,” he tells the detective.

Ahead is Tyler’s small bathroom, then a room on either side. David turns right. Tyler sits at his desk, in front of his two computer monitors and television, looking like an air traffic controller, with all those screens arrayed in front of him.

The walls are covered by scraps of paper that flutter as the door opens. David used to think there was no order to what’s essentially a massive collage, until Eve pointed out how Tyler had arranged his kindergarten drawings on one row, then his crayoned attempts at forming letters, his first story written on huge lined sheets of paper.
Tyler went through a self-portrait phase, the earliest ones at the bottom, in colored pencil and marker, graduating up to art pencil and charcoal, each tooth drawn with accuracy, each hair in his eyebrows waved more or less the way his eyebrows really grow. Weaved throughout are his brief foray into Cub Scouts, his early interest in dinosaurs, the map that Eve made of the neighborhood for one of his birthday parties, and Tyler’s later, and more comprehensive, focus in photography, evidenced in the plethora of photographs Tyler has taken, of his friends, Melissa, Amy. Receipts from the purchase of his laptop, binoculars, skateboard, and tennis shoes—everything has its place somewhere on Tyler’s walls.

“Hi, Tyler,” Detective Watkins says, looking around with curiosity. David wishes he could stop her. “I’m Detective Watkins. I’m trying to find Amy so that I can bring her back home. She’s not in any trouble, but if there’s something either of you know that could help us, that would be really great.” Is it his imagination or is she studying Tyler with particular curiosity? David moves toward his son, stepping into her line of vision.

“Okay,” Tyler says. “But I don’t know what.” He’s studying her in his usual focused way, with his eyebrows drawn and his chin lowered, and David realizes that maybe letting the detective get a good look at his son is worth it if his son is getting a good, long look at a police officer, a rare up-close-and-personal examination of something he’s heretofore witnessed only on a television screen.

“I hear Amy’s a friend of yours.” Watkins steps sideways, her angle now oblique.

“I guess.”

“When was the last time you talked to her?”

“At my birthday party.”

“When was that?”

“Thursday night.”

“What about last night?” Watkins asks. “I understand she texted you.”

“She wanted to come over. But I didn’t
talk
to her,” Tyler says, emphasizing this, letting the detective know that’s not the question she’d asked. Good for Tyler.

“Did she say anything to indicate that she wanted to run away?”

“No.” Tyler shrugs. “But she’s always running away.”

“Why is that?”

“Because of the divorce?” Tyler says this as though it had been a trick question.

“Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”

“No,” Tyler answers. “I mean, usually she came here.”

“But she didn’t this time?”

“No.”

“She didn’t knock on the door or ring the bell?”

“We don’t have a doorbell,” David interposes. He’d disconnected it when Tyler was little and sleeping through the days. Even now that Tyler’s on the same schedule as the rest of them, David hasn’t gotten around to reconnecting it. But this is a small detail and he has no idea why he’s volunteered it. Maybe it’s because of the intent way this woman’s looking at his son. David had wanted to jump in and disrupt the flow.

“Did she ever mention anyone she was afraid of?”

Tyler hesitates. “Not really.”

“Not really?”

“I mean, not anyone real. She didn’t like it when I played war games; she hated the vampire stuff on TV.”

“Did she ever talk about a special relationship with an adult?”

David’s dismayed at the angle her questions are taking, but of course this has to be the natural progression. Amy’s gone. The world’s an ugly place. You have to be suspicious.

Tyler makes a face. “Gross.”

“A teacher? A neighbor, maybe someone from church?”

Tyler shakes his head.

“Okay, well, do you think she’s the type of girl who might get into a stranger’s car?”

David leans forward. “Is that what they think happened?”

“We’re considering all possibilities. So, is Amy that kind of girl?”

“No way. Not Amy,” Tyler insists. “She wouldn’t get into anyone’s car, not even if they had a kitten or something like that.”

“A kitten?” David asks, and his son nods.

“Creepers use kittens and puppies to lure kids, stuff like that.”

David hadn’t known that. What kind of world is it that his children are growing up in? He looks at the detective. “Is that what you’re thinking now, that someone took Amy?”

She closes her notebook and nods at Tyler’s computer screens. “That’s a pretty cool setup. You like to play video games?”

“Yeah.”

She nods again. “What else do you do?”

What does she expect to hear, about Tyler’s soccer team and his plans for Homecoming?

“I don’t know. Ride my bike, maybe.”

“And photography, right?” Her voice is pleasant, her gaze serenely intent on Tyler. “You sure took a lot of pictures of Amy. Was there something particularly interesting about her?”

“They’re friends,” David says. Where the hell is she going with this? More than that. “She’s like a sister to Tyler.”

“She was always over here, wasn’t she?” She’s not answering him. She’s looking at Tyler. “Hanging out with you when she could have been playing with kids her own age.”

The inference hangs poisonous in the air. Is she crazy? “My son takes a lot of pictures of everyone.” He yanks open a desk drawer, pulls out a thick handful of photographs.

“Dad,” Tyler says, reaching for them. “Stop. They’re in order.”

David ignores him. “See?” He fans them out. His hands are shaking. “Nikki, Scott, Charlotte. Melissa, her friends. My wife.”

“Sir …”

“This interview is over,” David says. “Stay here,” he tells Tyler. “I’ll be right back.”

Outside, he draws the front door closed behind them. “Look,” he says. Watkins stands on the lower step, squinting up at David in the early afternoon sun. “My son just has a disease. That’s all. He’s not some kind of
freak
.”

“I understand that, but a little girl is missing.”

“There’s no way my son had anything to do with that.”

“We all think we know our kids.”

What the hell does that mean? “It’s not a matter of knowing what our kids are capable of. It’s a physical fact that my son was here when Amy went missing.”

“We’d do anything to protect them. I know I would.”

“Are you insinuating I’m hiding anything? I was flying home from DC last night. If you check …”

“We already have, sir.” She closes her notebook. “Keep an eye on your daughter.”

She turns and walks to her waiting car. The bright sun strikes the chrome of her car and makes him see spots.

Tyler’s sitting on his bed, his photographs scattered across his navy blue comforter. He looks up as David enters the room, and David can see the confusion and fear in his child’s eyes.

“I don’t get it, Dad. What’s wrong with taking pictures?”

“Nothing, Ty. Nothing at all. They’ll find her.” David sits beside his son and looks at the images of smiling faces arranged there, photographs of everyone in Tyler’s small world, everyone Tyler knows. The only one missing is David.

EVE

E
ve suggests taking Charlotte’s SUV.
I’ll drive
, she says. Charlotte doesn’t reply. She’s focused on the tasks at hand—printing and distributing flyers. They will paper this town with Amy’s smiling image. Everywhere, there will be reminders to the public to keep an eye out for this little girl. Everywhere Eve turns, she’ll be branded anew, her evil heart punished and punished and punished again.

Charlotte’s car is filled with reminders of Amy—the hardened drips of milk staining the cup holder, the silver CD sticking out from the CD player.
I could marry Harry Styles!
The rainbow sticker pressed to the dashboard, and the faint scent of chlorine that rises from the pink-and-purple beach towel lying on the floor behind their seats. Eve cracks a window, but it doesn’t help. Charlotte gazes out the window, leaning forward, as if she was willing Eve to go faster.

They reach the school parking lot, and Charlotte climbs out. Eve takes the box of flyers from the backseat. They will tape some here, on the front door that Amy had walked in and out of for six years. An American flag snaps in the hot wind. In the field beyond, children dash around kicking a soccer ball.

“She loves this place,” Charlotte says. “I don’t understand it. It’s so dumpy. The hallways reek of food.”

Minivans line the curb, parents waiting impatiently behind their steering wheels, focused on errands they have to run, chores they need to do. They don’t know how wonderful their lives are.

“She knows I’m looking for her, right?” Charlotte asks. “No matter what, she knows how much I love her.”

“Yes she does. She knows that.”

If Eve could, she’d climb into one of those minivans and drive away. She’d let the babble of children’s voices rise and fall around her. She’d drive past the park and the library and the grocery store, and pretend she was someone else, anyone else. For a while, surely that would work.

“Who would do something like this? Who would take a little girl away from her family?”

“I don’t know.”
I do. I do know
.

“Those sick women who cut babies out of pregnant women. What if someone like that has Amy? What if it’s a predator? Oh my God. She won’t understand.”

“Stop, Charlotte. You have to stop.” For Charlotte’s sake. And yes—a whisper—for her sake, too.

“I can’t. I can’t. How can I? What if I never know what happened to her? How can I live, not knowing? But I know they’ll find her. She’s okay. I know she is.”

Eve keeps a calendar, not the monthly ones of sunrises and sunsets that she tacks up by every door, but a secret one, in her heart. On it she tracks the time she has left with her son. It’s a rough guess,
one that gains days every time he has a good medical checkup and loses weeks when he has a bad one. The ending point floats in the air, and for the first dozen years, she couldn’t see it. But now that dark dot is coming into view, and if she squints, she can almost see it. And beyond it, there’s nothing, absolutely nothing.

Why haven’t they found Amy? A small voice inside Eve pipes up hopefully.
Maybe they never will
.

This isn’t her quiet cul-de-sac. It can’t be.

Vehicles are parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb. There are news vans from other cities—Cleveland, Chicago. People throng the street, reporters, neighbors, strangers, all of them taking up space as if they have every right to be there. They don’t. They have to leave, go and take their hateful curiosity somewhere else.

Charlotte and Owen stand outside their house, microphones bunched in front of them. Their children are off to one side. Nikki wears a bright yellow sundress, defiant. Scott has his hands in his pockets and his chin lowered. He is aware of every camera pointed his way. He’s terrified and angry, both.

“Amy’s allergic to peanuts,” Charlotte says. “Even touching one can cause her to break out in hives. If you have her … if she’s with you, you need to know.”

Remember to focus on your daughter
, Detective Watkins had told Charlotte and Owen.
Talk about what she’s like, what her special interests are. Use her name frequently. We want to humanize her. We don’t want to talk about repercussions or punishment
.

“Amy’s eleven years old, four feet ten inches tall. She has brown eyes and long blond hair. I wouldn’t let her get her ears pierced so she drew on her earlobes with a blue Sharpie. She … Amy … saw pictures on TV of the children without clean water and she decided to start saving her allowance to help build a well.”

A woman nods, taking notes.