crying (yes, again) until Jake reached over and gently wiped a big fat tear from my cheek.
“I’m sorry, Ridley. I’m so sorry for all of this,” he said, kissing me. His breath was hot in my ear as he whispered and goose bumps raised on my arms. “I could have squashed this for you but I didn’t. I fanned the flame. I led you to Christian Luna. It was so selfish. I just—”
“Didn’t want to be alone in this anymore?”
He nodded. I understood that. I remembered how alone I’d felt lying in that dark hotel room wondering who I was and where I came from, who was trying to hurt me. Jake had felt like that all his life. And in the last year, this searching for his family and for answers to what happened to him, his only friend gone. How lonely he must have been. The thought of having someone sharing his questions, sharing his quest, must have been irresistible. After all, beneath the surface of it, isn’t that what we’re all looking for? We may say we’re looking for love, following dreams, chasing the dollar, but aren’t we just looking for a place where we belong? A place where our thoughts, feelings, and fears are understood?
“I’m sorry,” he said again, pulling me into his arms and holding me. I wrapped my arms around him as best I could in the small space and held on tight. I couldn’t get close enough to him.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I understand it now.”
“What?”
“Quidam.”
He looked at me then, some combination of disbelief and gratitude in his eyes. I could taste the salt of my tears on his lips.
While we were hiding in the church, Detective Gus Salvo arrived at the scene of the shooting. I would find out later that, standing amid the glass confetti on the floor of the diner, he took from the shaken waitress the description of the two people who had fled the scene. He shook his head as she told him what she’d seen. It was another misshapen piece in a puzzle that made less and less sense the more he learned. What had started as a random shooting in a dangerous park was taking on dimensions he hadn’t intuited when the case first landed on his desk.
Gun laws in New York State were pretty strict. If you wanted to legally obtain a weapon, there’s a gauntlet of checks and balances, a long waiting period, etc. Harley Jacobsen had observed these laws in obtaining his Glock nine-millimeter and another smaller five-shot .38 Special Smith & Wesson, a gun cops often used as their off- duty piece. He was legally licensed to carry both. The rifle used to kill Christian Luna, however, had been purchased in Florida, where laws were much more lenient, employing only a three-day waiting period. In fact, in Florida, you could buy a weapon legally without registering it. Now, Detective Salvo could understand driving to Florida, buying an assault rifle, and driving back to New York City to use that weapon in the commission of a murder. What he couldn’t understand was why Jacobsen would have
He had been true to his word to me and was looking into the cases of the four missing children, following pretty much the same trail Jake, and then I, had taken. But Gus Salvo was a very single-minded man. He didn’t have all the distractions and personal agendas that Jake and I did. And he never lost sight of his goal, to discover who had killed Christian Luna and why.
Luna was believed by police to be Teresa Stone’s murderer. The fact that he hadn’t been caught meant that the case was still open. But according to the files Detective Salvo had been poring over, no one had looked into any other possibilities. Teresa Stone didn’t have any family to press the investigation, so after a year or so it had fallen into Cold Cases, more or less finished, gathering dust in a file deep in a basement somewhere in Jersey. Good news for whoever killed her. So the fact that Christian Luna had resurfaced and asserted his innocence to a woman he believed to be his kidnapped daughter, and who happened to have an entirely new identity now, must have seemed like pretty bad news and a very big problem to someone.
So Detective Salvo had come to the conclusion that Christian Luna had been someone’s loose end. The fact that Jake had been digging around in the same graveyard made him a loose end, too. And I, for that matter, looked to be doing a bit of dangling myself.
He looked around the diner, littered now with shattered glass. The sidewalk outside was riven with rounds from an automatic weapon. What the fuck, he wondered to himself, was going on? And I might have known this sooner if I hadn’t stubbornly turned my cell phone off when it started to vibrate in my pocket and I saw his number blinking on my caller ID.
twenty-nine
You’re driving on the highway and an eighteen-wheeler in front of you kicks up a little rock, which hits your windshield with a surprising, loud snap. That stone, probably no bigger than the nail on your little finger, leaves a tiny, almost invisible chip. And even though at first you can barely see it, eventually it’s going to spider. That minuscule rupture has created fissures that compromise the stability of the whole. Eventually everything you see through it will become fractured and broken, and another blow, however small, might cause the entire thing to collapse in a deadly, slicing rain.
Through the compromised windshield of my memory, I saw things that I hadn’t thought about since childhood, if I’d thought about them at all. They were rushing back to me, these moments that had been recorded but buried. How many things have we seen once and then never thought about again? I think, as a kid, when you see things you don’t understand, maybe you file them away in your subconscious, and only when you have the language and the knowledge to finally process them do they surface in your memory again. I’m not talking about repressed memories. I’m talking about nuances, subtleties, those delicate moments that can change meaning.
I remembered an afternoon in winter when my school closed early. I was eight maybe, in the third grade, and we all gathered at the jalousie windows to watch the snow fall, coating the playground impossibly fast. The sky was that blizzard color, a kind of blackish gray. Our school was dismissed in shifts generally, the kindergartners and pre-K’s all released at noon and the rest of us at three, so there weren’t enough buses for all of us to go home early on that day it snowed. Mothers were called and the drive leading past the entrance to the school was a parade of station wagons and minivans. I remembered this feeling of guilty excitement, happy to be going where it was warm and cozy to watch the cold, wet world grow ever whiter from a window near our fireplace, eating grilled cheese sandwiches and drinking hot chocolate.
We were all bundled and waiting by the aluminum-and-glass doors, and every time the doors opened, a flurry of snowflakes and cold wind blew in so that our noses and cheeks grew pink in the waiting. I was one of the last children to be picked up. I saw our familiar car approach, but at first the woman driving didn’t look like my mother. Her face was gray, her expression hard and drawn. Her hair looked tousled, and her eyes were narrowed in an angry squint. My mother was a beautiful woman, always impeccably maintained. I don’t recall ever seeing her “undone,” as she would say. The woman who had seen us off that morning, though still in her red silk pajamas, had been perfectly groomed, face washed, hair brushed, wearing a matching black velvet robe and slippers. She was in costume and playing her role as mother perfectly.
The woman at the wheel of the black Mercedes looked anxious, annoyed, and deeply, deeply sad. She stared ahead into the snow as if the weather were the most crushing disappointment to her. I remembered a flutter in my heart that I’m not sure I would have been able to explain. In that moment, I think I saw my mother without her mask.
My teacher, Miss Angelica, said, “There you go, Ridley. There’s your mom.”
I looked away from the woman at the wheel and shook my head. “That’s not my mother, Miss Angelica.”
My teacher looked again, peering through her glasses into the snow. “Why, sure it is, Ridley.” She gave me a confused, benevolent smile.
When I looked back my mother was there, smiling and waving. I felt a little jolt of surprise and then moved out into the snow. My mother leaned over and pushed the door open for me. I climbed in beside her and smelled her perfume, L’Air du Temps, the one that came in that frosted glass bottle with the little bird on the stopper. She brushed the snowflakes from my hat.
“Snow day!” she said cheerfully. “Let’s go pick up your brother from the middle school. Then we’ll go home
