background: “Tell Ridley her room is ready. Alex can handle everything and she can just stay here until it all blows over.”
“I’ll call you, Dad. Try not to worry.”
I heard his voice as I took the phone away from my ear and ended the call. It sounded small and tinny, farther away than it had ever been. There was officially no one I could trust in the world.
I found Linda McNaughton living in a double-wide trailer in a well-kept mobile-home park off of Route 206 in a town called Lost Valley. It was a pretty nice trailer, with casement windows and aluminum siding, across the street from the public library. She came to the door with a smile on her face, but only opened the door partway. I hadn’t called to announce my arrival, thinking that she might refuse to see me.
“Can I help you?”
“Hi, Ms. McNaughton,” I said brightly with a Girl Scout smile. “I’m Ridley…we talked on the phone last night.”
The smile dropped quickly. “What are you doing here?”
“I was in town doing research on my story and I was just hoping to talk to you a bit more. Actually, I was hoping that you had a picture of Charlie you might be willing to loan to me.”
She narrowed her eyes at me in some combination of suspicion and anger. “I don’t have a picture and I don’t have anything left to say to you. Please go.” She then closed the door on me. Hard.
“What if,” I said through the door, pretty sure she was still standing behind it, watching me through the peephole, “I told you that there’s a chance Charlie might be alive?”
I heard a gasp from behind the door and immediately felt bad. After all, I didn’t have any proof that Charlie might be alive. But while I was lying on that strange bed last night, all night, thinking about what had happened to me, about the things Christian Luna had told me, what I’d learned about the other missing children, my uncle Max, what Ace had said, the germ of something had taken hold and now, especially after the conversation with my father, was spreading like a virus.
The door opened again and Linda’s face had softened. She opened the door the rest of the way and stood to the side, offering me passage.
In her parlor, I sat on a stiff beige sofa covered in plastic and sipped the coffee she’d offered me. It managed to be weak and bitter at the same time. Linda wore a gray sweat suit that exactly matched the gray of her short- cropped hair. Her face was a landscape of lines and sagging skin, but she had sharp blue eyes that shone with attention and intelligence. She sat across from me and watched me now. We were surrounded by turtles—turtle figurines, turtles painted on pillows and platters, stuffed turtles, turtle mobiles.
“You know,” she told me when she saw me looking around, “I don’t really have any special fondness for turtles. Just this one year, my husband bought me a gold turtle pendant after we’d been to that turtle farm in the Caribbean. I made such a big deal about how much I loved it that from then on, everyone started buying me turtles. And it’s just gone on like that.”
She looked at me almost apologetically and laughed awkwardly. I smiled at her, placed the coffee cup down on the table. She got up and walked toward a bookshelf on the far side of the room. When she returned she held a small photograph in a pewter frame. She handed it to me. It was a couple with a small child. The little boy, about two, wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt and denim shorts, sat on top of a pony. The man, thin and bearded, stood to one side of him with a tentative smile and a protective hand on the child’s thigh. The woman, mousy, emaciated, looked on, her shoulders hunched in as she laughed, a bright smile on her face.
I don’t know what I expected of Michael and Adele Reynolds. All I knew of Michael was that he had been a heroin addict. Adele was a woman who’d sought to abandon her child. But in the photograph, I saw two people who looked a bit used, a bit worn maybe, but who were enjoying a day with their son. The image seemed incongruous to the judgment I’d unconsciously formed. It surprised me. I’d imagined them cold, selfish, abusive, neglectful. And maybe they’d been that in some moments. But in others maybe they’d been loving, happy, protective of their child. Maybe when Adele had tried to give up Charlie, she’d just been fearful that she was not up to the responsibility of raising a child, afraid that he would have been better off in someone else’s care. I had always been so angry at Zack for judging Ace by that one aspect, by his addiction, and I had unconsciously done the same thing to Adele and Michael.
“When there are so few good times, you remember them more clearly, I think,” said Linda. “I remember that day. We were all happy—Charlie’s second birthday. My daughter, Adele, was dead a month later. Then Charlie was gone. Then Michael. Within eighteen months, I lost them all.”
I felt my heart clench for her, imagining blow after blow like that and how it must have felt like the world had gone dark on her. I looked at her, expected to see her eyes filled with tears or her face to have changed with her grief. But she just gazed at the picture with a sad half-smile, as if all that remained was a sad resignation that things could not be changed.
Even Linda I’d judged. I’d imagined her as someone who didn’t love Adele enough, who
“Do you know for sure?” she said suddenly, looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read. “Do you have
I could see a slight shake in her hands, as though the hope was filling her with a kind of agitation. “No,” I admitted, returning her gaze. “Not yet.”
She sat down again with a sigh and looked away from me. I looked at the picture in my hand. The image was nebulous, the faces unclear and yellowed with age.
“I’ll try not to get my hopes up. Like I did last year.”
“Last year?”
“A young fellow came. About your age. Said he was a detective working on cold cases. That’s what he called them. He contacted me a couple of times with questions like who was Charlie’s pediatrician, did he ever go to the emergency room, how often. I told him what I could. But after a while he stopped calling. I called once and he said he was still working on it, promised he wouldn’t forget to call if anything came up, but I never heard from him again. Funny. Just the other day, I thought of calling him.”
“Why?”
“I came across Charlie’s birth certificate in a stack of old files. Thought it might be helpful to him.”
“Actually, Mrs. McNaughton, can I take a look at that?”
“Sure,” she said, getting up and walking over to a desk nestled in a corner of the room.
I leaned forward on my chair. “The man who came to see you—do you remember his name?”
“Well, I have his card right here with Charlie’s birth certificate. I can’t read without my glasses.”
She handed the card to me. I felt my stomach hollow out as I looked at the cream stock business card, embossed with black type.
Some of our moments together came back in flashes. I remembered his strange tone when I told him about the other missing kids, how he hadn’t seemed surprised at all. I thought about how he’d found so much information about the parents on the Internet. I also remembered how quickly he’d determined the origins of the clipping Christian Luna had sent. How he’d seemed alarmed when he learned I’d told Detective Salvo what I’d found. Tiny seeds of dread started blooming in my chest. He knew, I thought. He knew about the other missing kids already.
“Miss Jones, you all right?” I must have just been sitting there staring at the card as she held a piece of paper out to me, I don’t know how long.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking the paper from her hand.
“Charlie’s birth certificate. It’s a copy; keep it.”
I glanced at it and folded it, put it in the inside pocket of my jacket. I looked up to see Linda watching me still.
“You didn’t tell me why,” she said. “Why do you think Charlie might still be alive?”
I paused a second and then answered as honestly as I could at the moment. “Because
