Vanished

help him. “I'm sorry about your husband,” she said carefully.

“So am I. It's not going to be pretty in the press tomorrow morning.”

“No, it won't be.” Bea had already seen some of the early tear sheets. “But it raises a little more sympathy for you. They really beat you to death the other day. It made me sick, that's why I wrote the piece I did.” She was kind of a Robin Hood, always defending the underdog, the beaten, the poor, the defeated. She and Charles seemed to have so much in common.

“Why Charles?” Marielle asked softly. “Why him? Why do you care so much?”

“I don't want to see him killed for nothing. I never believed entirely that Bruno Hauptmann was guilty either. I know some of the evidence was there, but so much of it was circumstantial. So much of it was hysteria created by the press. It was my first story, I was twenty-one, and I always felt that I could have made a difference, but I didn't. Maybe this time, I can. Or at least die trying.”

Marielle didn't dare ask her more than that, but there was something more in the girl's eyes, and after a long moment she decided to ask her. “Are you in love with him?” There was no jealousy there, nothing proprietary. It was only a question. And Bea Ritter looked at her for a long time before she answered.

“I'm not sure. I don't want to be. That isn't the issue.” But it was why she cared so much and Marielle knew it.

She smiled at her. “Does he know, or is he as stupid as he used to be?” Sometimes he could be dense when he wanted to be. And of course now he was involved with something much more important. But Bea laughed with her.

“I think maybe he is as stupid as he used to be, but maybe he's a little too busy.” The man was fighting for life. Then suddenly Bea looked worried. “Would you ever go back to him?” But Marielle shook her head without hesitation. Too much pain gone by, too much time, too much sorrow. She loved him, she knew she always would. But he was gone for her now. Marielle thought the little redhead would be perfect for him, if ever the time came, and he was acquitted. He owed a lot to her, but according to Bea, he didn't even know it.

“What are you going to do now, Bea?”

“I don't know…I'm going to call up some debts…talk to some old friends…hang out with some private investigators I know…” And maybe talk to Tom Armour, if she needed money. Maybe he would be willing to pay for some tips, or special favors. She was willing to do anything, call anyone, go anywhere, pay anyone she had to. “Maybe nothing will turn up, but at least we'll have tried…and maybe it'll lead us to Teddy.”

“You'll let me know if you hear anything, won't you?”

“The minute I do.” The two women stood up and Marielle walked her to the door. She knew they would never be friends. But she liked her. She was an unusual girl, and a smart one. Charles was luckier than he knew to have found her.

Bea Ritter slipped away into the night, and when Marielle went back upstairs, it was long after midnight. And as she turned the light off, she lay in her bed thinking of Malcolm, probably in an apartment on Park Avenue…and her little boy, she prayed, asleep in a bed somewhere, with strangers.

13

The trial went on for weeks after that, as Hitler seized Memel on the Baltic. The trial seemed to have pushed the world news off the front pages, in New York anyway. But Britain and France had announced that they stood ready to support Poland. And at the end of March, much to Charles's chagrin, the Spanish Civil War ended at last, when Madrid fell to General Franco. There were over a million dead by then, in three years an entire population had fallen. It was a tragedy to Charles, as he knew it would be to his friends in Europe. The fight was over. The war was lost. But Charles Delauney had his own war to fight now, the battle for his survival.

Marielle never heard from Bea Ritter again after her late-night visit. But she continued to read her articles in the paper, and was touched by her sympathetic viewpoint.

Predictably, there had been a huge hue and cry in the press about Malcolm and Brigitte for several weeks, but despite constant inquiries, Marielle stayed aloof about it, and made no comments. She and Malcolm had scarcely spoken to each other in weeks, and she had only seen Brigitte once since then. The girl had covered her guilt by looking haughtily at Marielle, and clinging to Malcolm, as though trying to prove that she was the winner. It seemed a poor defense to Marielle, and she didn't envy her awkward position. She felt betrayed by their lies, and Brigitte's false kindness, but she was hardly even angry anymore, or even jealous. He hadn't been hers in a long time, but she was deeply hurt by Malcolm's long-distance deception. Her only attempt to discuss the matter with him had been rebuffed, and Malcolm had pretended to be “outraged.” He told her that after her behavior with Charles he owed her no explanations, which told her absolutely nothing, except to confirm his guilt. But that fact had already been established.

She reminded him coolly that if he continued to stay at the apartment with the girl, the press would continue to hound them. After that, she noticed that he stayed at their house again, and not at Brigitte's apartment. But in spite of that, she still scarcely saw him.

The tension between them was unbearable, but so was the trial, as a trail of expert witnesses, detectives, and irrelevant people took the stand, endorsing Charles's guilt, and one by one being attacked by Tom Armour.

It was three full weeks before the defense had their chance. And Tom Armour called Marielle as his first witness. At first he led her across the same terrain carefully, rebuilding her where Bill Palmer had destroyed her. And the portrait that began to emerge at his hands was far different from the one colored by Malcolm and Bill Palmer. Instead of a mentally ill invalid, a woman not to be trusted with her own child, he showed more clearly what had really happened, how destroyed she had been at the death of her son, and the loss of her baby, and then her husband. Tom Armour admitted openly that Charles had been more than a little crazy, and had treated her badly. They were both racked with pain, he explained, and there was not a dry eye in the courtroom when he asked her to describe groping for Andre beneath the frozen ice of Lake Geneva. She explained how she had been able to save the two little girls, but not her own son, because he had slipped farther under the ice, and how he had lain lifeless and gray in her arms when she found him. She had had to stop several times as she described the scene to him, and then the hospital that night and losing the baby. In one fell swoop, they had lost their family, and Charles hadn't been equal to it, Charles even more than she. Then she had snapped, and all she wanted for months afterward was to die and be with her babies.

“Do you feel that way now?” Tom asked her quietly, as several jurors blew their noses.

“No,” she said sadly.

“Do you believe Teddy is still alive?”

Her eyes filled with tears again, but she went on, “I don't know… I hope he is… I hope it so much…” She looked at the press then and into the courtroom. “… If anyone knows where he is…please, please bring him home… we will do anything…just don't hurt him…”A photographer ran up, and a camera exploded in her face as she said it, and the judge ordered the bailiff to throw the photographer out of the courtroom.

“And if anyone does that again, you'll go to jail, is that clear?” Judge Morrison boomed as Marielle regained her composure. He apologized to her, and she waited for Tom's next question.

“Do you believe that Charles Delauney took your son?” It was a dangerous question, but he wanted the world to know what she thought because he didn't think she was convinced that he took him.

“I'm not sure.”

“Do you think he would do a thing like that? You know him better than anyone here. He has loved you, and hurt you, and cried with you…he's even hit you… he has probably done worse things to