“But your mother went back for you. You weren’t actually abandoned.”
“Right. And when I learned about the other children who went missing in that area, I found that they were never abandoned, so it kind of blew my theory.”
“But they’d all been patients at the Little Angels clinic.”
“That’s what they had in common.”
“And the Little Angels clinic is a Project Rescue facility.”
“That’s right.”
“So? What does that mean?”
“The other thing they had in common was the number of visits to the clinic. When a child has too many visits to the doctor for certain kinds of injuries or excessive illness, they’re flagged by attending physicians as possible victims of abuse. Jessie’s arm was broken. Charlie was abandoned. Brian was brought in for a broken leg, a blow to the head. Pamela had her arm pulled out of the socket. These are not normal injuries for toddlers.”
“How do you know that? Dr. Hauser said he didn’t give you the files.”
“Well, you wouldn’t expect him to tell you that he’d violated clinic policy because of his friendship with Arnie.”
I smiled inside. I had been right about Dr. Hauser and his Dancing Bear tie. The inner hippie had won out in the interest of doing the right thing, even if it meant breaking the rules.
“So you’re saying that someone believed these children were the victims of abuse.”
“Not someone, Ridley. Your father.”
Jake seemed to be looking past me, his brow knitting, and I turned to see what he was looking at. There I saw what he saw, the Firebird, as stealthy and menacing as a shark.
He reached over and grabbed my head and pushed it down on the table. He lay his head next to mine and yelled to the waitress, who was the only other person in the diner, “Get down!” She responded as if she’d been trained to do so, immediately dropping into a crouch behind the counter.
It was then that the windows of the diner exploded in a crystalline blizzard of glass. The sound of automatic gunfire and shattering glass was deafening, easily the most terrifying sound I’d ever heard. The whole world was a kaleidoscope of deadly shards and blinding light. Jake dropped under the table and tugged on my legs for me to do the same, and together we crawled behind the counter, where the frightened waitress was weeping on the floor. I was too stunned to even be afraid.
“Is there a back door?” Jake yelled above the sound.
She nodded and crawled into the kitchen. A back door stood open through which the cook must have fled. We exited on all fours.
By the time we were in the back lot, the sound of gunfire had ceased and we heard the burning of rubber on asphalt. The Firebird engine revved and rumbled off into the distance. Jake pulled me to my feet.
“Call the police!” he yelled at the frightened woman, who huddled against a concrete wall, weeping. “Ask for a Detective Gus Salvo.”
In the cold, bright morning, Jake took my hand and we started to run.
We ducked into a church on Hicks Street. My ears were ringing from the violence of the sound and my heart had burrowed itself into my esophagus, where it stayed, making it difficult for me to breathe. I gripped Jake’s hand like a vice, only noticing how hard once I let go and felt my fingers cramp.
The church hummed with silence. An old lady in a black kerchief prayed in the front pew. The morning light washed in through the stained-glass windows, those bright colors dancing on the floor like butterflies. Votive candles flickered in the alcoves. It felt very safe. Who would try to kill you in a church?
Jake dragged me into a confessional. A small sign announced that confession would begin at four P.M. I was glad. I wouldn’t even know where to begin. I sunk onto the red velvet cushion that was so worn, its stuffing had started to show through. I touched the leather Bible and took away a fingertip black with dust. Jake stood peering through the curtain.
“Who is trying to kill us?” I whispered fiercely.
“Ridley, we’re deep into something. Someone doesn’t want us getting any deeper. But at this point, you know as much as I do,” he answered softly.
“But I don’t know anything.”
He gave me a look that I couldn’t read and then turned back to keep his watch outside the confessional. I noticed a gun, a semiautomatic, cold and menacing in his hand. I realized I’d never seen an actual handgun before. It made me sick.
“What are you going to do with that?” I asked stupidly.
“Protect us…if it comes to that.”
Do you think you go straight to hell for shooting someone in a church, or does God understand that sometimes there are extenuating circumstances? I leaned my head against the wood wall and felt the most powerful wash of fatigue. “I don’t know anything,” I whispered again.
I thought about those foundation dinners, those glamorous events filled with New York City’s elite in business, broadcasting, medicine, society. I thought about all that money being funneled into Max’s charitable fund. I thought about all the people that money had helped. I thought about Max’s driving passion to save abused children and battered women in a way he and his mother had never been saved, how it had become a kind of salve for his own pain. I thought of how frustrated he and my father were sometimes over a system that failed so often, a system that bound the hands of physicians from helping children in danger. So many nights over dinner they had discussed these issues. So many times I overheard their impassioned debates in the study. So many times as a child I wondered why they became so angry and sad.
What would have happened if Max and my father had decided to take certain cases into their own hands? What if providing safe haven for abandoned babies was just one arm of Project Rescue? What if there was another Project Rescue? One with which the social elite of New York City wouldn’t be so eager to have their stellar names associated. These thoughts ran like liquid nitrogen in my veins.
“So you don’t have any idea
“I didn’t say that.”
He moved away from the curtain and sat beside me on the small bench so that we were squished in next to each other. He stuck the gun in his waistband and wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow, then dropped his arm around me.
“We’ll stay here for a while, okay?”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far ahead.”
I noticed for the first time just how dog tired he looked.
“What are you going to do, Jake?” I said softly, my lips so close to his ear that I could taste him.
“What do you mean?”
“When you figure it out? When you know all the answers about what Project Rescue is and what happened to us, what are you going to do?”
He looked at me blankly with a slight shake of his head, as if the thought had never occurred to him, as if he’d been questing for an object he couldn’t identify. We’re all so lost, aren’t we? Always looking for something elusive, something we think is crucial, never knowing exactly what it is.
“I just need to know who I am,” he said.
“You know, don’t you?”
“I need to know what happened to me. These other kids wound up in homes, I think, like you did. What happened to me? How did I wind up in the system? Don’t you want to know for sure, Ridley, what happened to you? Don’t you want to know the truth?”
We were still whispering. It was a good question. The truth is always held up as this Holy Grail, the thing for which all must be sacrificed. Everyone’s always talking about how it will
