In Plain View (26 page)

I was imagining all sorts of bad things right now with Jenny missing.

“Aren’t you just the Philosopher King?” I tossed off after too long a silence. This conversation was not helping me worry less. Topic change. “Living alone didn’t protect Tom Jost.”

“Tom Jost didn’t want to be alone. His problem was reaching for the wrong companions. Classic mistake.” Curzon laid out his version of the facts without hesitation.

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. So says the King.” He gave me a cockeyed grin that took the edge off the certainty in his voice. “Did you bring a picture?”

“In my wallet.”

“Good.”

“Aren’t you gonna say we probably won’t need it?”

“You want me to?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope we don’t need it,” he answered carefully. “I want to know about the SUV.”

“Don’t start. It’s nothing, I’m sure.” It was my problem for now.

The SUV run-ins had to be connected to my job. Someone at the station or someone connected to the story on Tom Jost. If I dragged Curzon in at this point, he’d slap a gag on the story. I’d never make the satellite feed.

Twenty-four hours from now, I could come clean.

“It’s work related. Got nothing to do with Jenny.”

Curzon fixed me with the stare. He didn’t agree. He didn’t disagree. “So you got people from your office trying to run you down. Work is going pretty well then?”

“Work is great. Especially being here, which means I am getting jack-all done on a piece that will probably be seen by an eight share of Nielsen homes nationally, which is to say,
no one,
and completely submarine my career.” Saying it aloud actually made the urge to puke worse.
Jenny. Jenny, where the hell are you?
“Have I mentioned I’m going to kill that kid when we find her? You got any Tums?”

Curzon slid a drawer open and lobbed a bottle across the room. He didn’t prompt, didn’t offer any consolation. He waited, silent.

I knew the trick of silence, but couldn’t stop myself from saying, “It feels like I’ve stepped into a time machine.”

“Because of the Amish?”

“Of course.” The Tums dried the inside of my mouth like road salt. “And Jenny. And my sister. That house of hers.” I quit rubbing my forehead to glare at him. “You, too.”

“Me?” He sounded pleased. “Why me?”

“I don’t know.” More rubbing, less glaring. “This place, I guess.”

“Ahh. You’ve been in trouble with the law before.”

“Ha.”

He surrendered with both hands.

I tried to stay seated. Couldn’t.

“Two more minutes,” Curzon soothed. He ran Jenny’s picture through a machine at the back of his desk. No wasted motions. “Almost there.”

“I wasn’t meant for kids.” I paced the tiny rectangle of space in front of his desk. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s crazy.”

“You can,” he replied, totally calm.

To me, it sounded like,
you have to.
“I stink at this. I swear, when we find her—” I kicked my heel against the leg of one of the wooden chairs in frustration. “I did not ask for any of this.”

Curzon looked up from his computer, nodded pleasantly. “Done?”

“Fuck you.”

“Sure.”

I wasn’t ready to laugh, so that pissed me off, too.

He spread his hands and tilted his head exactly like a dashboard Jesus. Men rarely open their hands and show their palms. Curzon’s looked smooth and ruddy. Alive. I remembered how warm they felt and my skin prickled.

“You can’t turn your back on family,” Curzon said. “Not and keep your self-respect. There it is. Nobody said it would be easy.”

Pompous, asshole, know-it-all.

“No shit, Sheriff,” I said. “Tell me about it. Why don’t you start with your divorce from the She-bitch.”

He didn’t move an inch but suddenly the man I’d been talking to disappeared. Where does a man go when he hides behind his eyes? Curzon had retreated to that dark interior before. It came easily. His eyes narrowed. His face became impenetrable from the inside out and I watched myself change in his view.

The hurt it caused me was another surprise.

“My bad. I shouldn’t—You don’t—” I closed my eyes to escape his stare, to hide from myself. My own callused hands reached out, pleading for retraction. “Sorry, Jack. Nothing you’ve said is untrue.” I realized as I said it, how much that meant to me.

Long time ago, I gave up trying to figure out the mystery of what makes human beings connect. Friends. Neighbors. Lovers. I couldn’t say if it was dumb luck or fine timing or the science of body smells the conscious brain has no control over, somehow Curzon knew how to read me. He knew what I meant. Maybe he knew the words I didn’t say as well.

“I’m not talking about Sharon here,” he said slowly. His hands laced together and the knuckles whitened with the force of his grip. “But I know what it’s like. All that business on Sunday with Marcus and my father— it’s the same for me. What I want. What my family wants.” He pulled his hands apart. “Sometimes it’s hard to separate them.”

I don’t even know if he realized, but his right hand tightened into a fist and his left wrapped around it. I thought of that kids’ game—
paper covers rock.
I felt the force of his will in his eyes, hoping for my understanding. I remembered Jenny running, laughing, playing in his family’s backyard.

All I could think to say was, “Please, Curzon—Jack, please, I’ve got to find her.”

He nodded. No false promises.
We’ll find her, she’ll be fine.

I was right; nothing he said to me would be untrue.

“We’ll take my car.” He stood up and pointed me to the door.

Couple of serious-looking men in uniforms called “good luck,” as they punched the clock. Curzon raised a hand.

I was going to owe him big for this. The boss did not, as a rule, drop everything for a kid missing less than two hours. Something else to worry about. Later.

In less than ten minutes, we were on our way. Probably the fastest completion of police paperwork in history, but I was still crazed. I’d have sprinted to his car if I’d have known which one it was. Instead, I trailed at his elbow.

“There’s my car.” He pointed me toward an older Audi.

“What about those?” I pointed. Two rows over sat at least five matching silver SUVs. They had no visible police markings.

“Special transport. We got a grant,” he said. “Is that the kind of car that gave you trouble?”

The parking lot was suddenly colder. I met Curzon’s narrow gaze and thought about the darkness he closed himself into so easily.

“Maybe.”

“There are a lot of silver SUVs out there.” His voice had a bland edge that wasn’t there a minute ago.

“Yeah, sure. Let’s just go.”

We were in his car and on the road in a matter of moments but Curzon wouldn’t stop glancing over to check on me. “You cold?”

“I’m fine.”

He reached over and grabbed my fingers, then let go before I could make anything of it. “Those still bend?” he asked, while punching buttons on the dash to fire up the heat.

“How’s this?” I curled my hand into a fist and shook it lightly.

“Hey! Look, kids, it’s Feisty the Snowman. Where to first?”

I resisted the smile, but his silliness struck a spark that the car’s heat built into warmth. “Let’s go back to the school.”

We drove in silence. Curzon didn’t even need directions.

What is it about the inside of a car at night? He was watching the road and I was looking out the window, eyes burning for a glimpse of purple jacket. The car wrapped a cave of safety around us. I was too worried about Jenny to resist—the comfort or the intimacy.

We cruised the neighborhood, stopping anywhere I could think Jenny might have walked so I could get out and shout her name. I saw at least two other police cars slowly driving around, which pleased me at first but gradually sent the anxiety creeping up, up, up. A lot of people were looking.

Where the hell had she gone?

“So. Only you and your sister in the family?” Curzon’s tone was an injection of calm.

“Just the two of us.”

“What neighborhood you from?”

Neighborhood, parish, high school—I gave him all the standard Chicago-locator coordinates, answered every question and more. I don’t usually talk so much. Must have been the car.

“Can we follow the bus route?” I asked. “Maybe she tried to walk home that way.”

“Good idea,” he said. “I’ll go back to the school and we’ll start from there.”

I did a couple head rolls and shoulder drops. With every zap of the police radio, I twitched. Curzon was right of course; we needed to be systematic. Systematic was taking too damn long.

“Tell me about this story you’re working on. Why’d you ask me about Samaritan law?”

It was hard shifting my brain to thinking about work, shifting tectonic plates hard. I wasn’t sure whether to call the result a headache or a headquake.

“I think somebody may have seen Jost at the tree. Setting up. Doing the deed. The whole thing.”

“He did it by the side of the road,” Curzon pointed out matter-of-factly. He flicked a glance my way. “You feeling all right?”

“Great,” I said, with one eye closed. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”

“What, the tree? No. He picked a tree on his daddy’s front lawn.”

“Okay, classic protest suicide—look what you made me do. But the more I’ve talked to people, the weirder that part seems. Amish people don’t do protest, much less suicide. And wouldn’t he have gotten the same effect if he did it in his apartment and wrote a note? So why the tree? What was he thinking?”

Curzon slowed to a stop at a yellow light. “You’re asking, what did he get by doing it in
that
tree?”

“Exactly.”

Curzon’s cell phone rang. He answered, “Sheriff.”

Time stopped. The street light was red.

Still red.

My night vision dissolved. All the grays of the shadows around us went black. In the distance, car headlights flashed and turned away.

Red.

“Yeah, got it. Tell them five minutes.” He snapped the phone shut with a flick, dropped it into the space beside the gear box. “They found her.”

“She’s okay, right?”
Don’t bury the lead, you sadist.

The answer was hard to hear over the sudden blare of his siren.

“She’s alive.”

8:47:59 p.m.

I doubt it took us three whole minutes to get to her. Curzon drove like a bat out of hell. I was numb enough to admire the bright streak of lights we passed and the sensation of gentle compression into the Audi’s butt-warming leather seat.

As soon as he turned onto Orchard Road, I knew where we were going. Past the flashing yellow, where the edge of a golf course became a cemetery, lay the Prairie Path—an old railroad route that had been turned into a safe path for pedestrians, bikers, joggers. The Path crossed the busiest part of the road here. Cars against people.

I’d been to see the place myself several times this summer on my late-night jaunts. It was the spot where my sister died.

A squad car, wigwag lights flashing, and an ambulance were parked perpendicular to the road. Curzon pulled in next to the police cruiser. I had my door open before he’d even geared all the way down.

The night air near this narrow patch of woods had cooled faster; my breath fogged out ahead of me. I pushed between the cars, hands in my jacket pockets, cold and nervy to the core.

Trees and ancient bushes blocked most of the light around us from the houses. I could hardly see where I was walking. Dry leaves were heaped ankle high in the ditch. The crunch of my feet hustling toward the clump of emergency people was inappropriately silly.

“Jenny? Where is she? What happened?”

The cop got in my face. The paramedics were so busy they didn’t even look up.

“She’s alive.” He came toward me hands wide. “She’s unconscious. They need to know if she has a drug problem.”

“A
what?
” Someone moved, I could barely see her legs. “She’s eight years old!”

“Easy.” The cop body-blocked me.

I would have shoved him aside if Curzon hadn’t come up behind me and put a solid hand on my shoulder, calming, restraining. I’m too big for that move to work most of the time. It caught me off guard.

“I’m on it,” Curzon assured the guy. “Let her through.”

I shoved past the junior cop, took two steps and suddenly, I could see everything. The paramedic reaching for a hypodermic. Jenny’s face—so white it was hard to believe she was alive. Her closed eyes smudged with dirt or something darker. Leaves blanketing the edges of her body. She looked so tiny, something the wind could carry off, like the rest of autumn’s refuse.

“Oh Lord,”
slipped out.

Curzon was talking and the paramedic was saying something, and all I could hear was my one, single thought:
no.

She was dead. My sister was dead.

I see. I can see it now.

Memories began to flip on the screen in my head and I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes.

Stop. Stop it.
My sister’s in her crib, holding on to the rail, screaming. My parents may, or may not hear her. The TV is on and they are screaming over the sound of music and gunshots and other happy voices. I’m not allowed to get my sister out of her bed. I watch her face, wetter and redder by the moment. She isn’t looking at the door, she is looking at me.

My stomach curdles. I walk the long hall, one foot at a time…
um, baby’s crying?

Get back in your bed!

The pain is fast and sharp, but gone quick as a doctor’s needle. One fight ends. My father slams a door on his way out. My mother goes to the baby. I lie on the rug listening to commercials until my nausea is gone. I’m so calm, I’m invisible. I float back to my bed and…

My father laid out, dead this time, in his box. My mother is somewhere, speaking to strangers. My sister stands beside me. She is crying. This time her head is down. There is a line of white scalp where her hair parts. It is exactly the same color as the streaks her tears make on the front of her uniform blouse.

She fumbles for my hand—half my height, almost half my age—and in her face, I see all the sorrow I should feel but I am empty. Blank. I take her hand and…