The New York State Police began their search of the mountains where Jonathan and Michael and Conner Braddick had taken their last hunting trip. They found no trace of Conner and only found Michael’s backpack and gear high on a mountaintop – a place where few people would tread on their own – but no other trace of either man. They had disappeared as well.
Jonathan would ramble nonstop when she was allowed to visit him, his eyes wide, desperate and insistent as he tried to convince her of something incomprehensible. It was all gibberish. Something had happened, of that she was sure, and his already fragile mind had snapped. Mary still had that horrible sense of alienation from him – of seeing him completely lost and yet standing right in front of her. He looked like a madman, his hair matted to his scalp, his pale face gaunt and soured with desperation, sweat and grime. His eyes, once blue, now looked nearly white. She had needed him so badly in that moment, needed him to hold her so they could find a moment of strength together and gird themselves against the horror of what had happened to their son. But he was untouchable. It was like watching a dead and broken branch finally fall to the ground.
The police questioned him extensively. They suspected him of murdering his two friends. They tried to connect him with Jacob’s disappearance. It was all too strange – too coincidental to just be coincidence, and the detectives looked for any connection between Jacob’s disappearance and the disappearance of Michael and Conner.
The newspapers and television had a field day. It was on the evening news; even some national publications picked it up. The multiple disappearances fueled all sorts of insane theories spread over the internet, television and newspapers, which twisted in her head and caused her to feel dizzy. Everyone had ‘facts’, and yet there were zero facts at all. Those ‘facts’ were woven into a tapestry – multiple tapestries – and hung like a veil before the stage of the world. She was so desperate sometimes she almost felt herself succumb to Jonathan’s story; it made as much sense as anything else at this point. He kept telling police to search the forests surrounding their town, to find a place with markings on trees and a ritualistic design in the ground. A place where trapped and possessed men offered gifts of children to a demon-god. They laughed and shook their heads. Mary kept her arms across her stomach, trying to keep her insides from spilling out.
Then they found it. Three miles up Route 4 – a long scenic road that rose and fell with the hills – and deep in the woods off old hiking trails no one used anymore, police dogs picked up Jacob’s scent and followed it to a strange clearing in the woods with a ring of stones laid in the ground and a pattern of intersecting lines. Symbols were carved in the surrounding trees, just as Jonathan had said there would be. The cops came down on him ten times harder. Now he wasn’t just some unlucky sap with bad timing – now he was an honest-to-god suspect.
So far they hadn’t been able to fit the pieces together, though. The timelines didn’t work. They triangulated his cell phone to a remote meadow in the Adirondacks that bordered Coombs’ Gulch – exactly where Jonathan said he had been the entire time. The detectives had to drop it after a while, but still, she could see it in their eyes – they were constantly thinking about it – how he did it and managed to baffle them all. They would never let it go.
“What do you think happened to your son?” Sonya Martinez said with a built-in sympathetic voice Mary recognized from every other female reporter who interviewed the family of a missing child, a voice sweet enough to convince you she cared, easily digestible for the masses, but with a slight edge of skepticism to let the viewer know she was on the case, determined to solve the mystery.
The camera lights left a halo over everything and everyone in her range of vision, as if angels had descended from heaven to question her and dredge the pain. Maybe if she told them the right things, the angels would find her son.
“He was only a boy. A little boy,” Mary said. The tears were coming now. She couldn’t help it. She cried automatically these days. Anything set her off. The lights and the questions were overwhelming; the loss and the fear ran rampant inside her. “I don’t know. I just don’t know, and that’s the worst part.”
She lied to the angels. She had heard it said that not knowing what happened to a missing child was the worst part. Maybe that was true after years of searching and heartache. Right now what she feared more than anything was the phone call that a body had been discovered, that detectives and forensic technicians were descending on some lonesome wooded area to piece together some horrid and lurid story of what a monster had done to her only child. Waiting to hear confirmation of what she, deep down, knew was the worst part. She felt the dead emptiness of true loss, like she had been killed and gutted like one of Jonathan’s dead deer.
Maybe that was all she was now – a doe strung up, hollowed out, with everyone taking their pound of flesh. The media questioned her parenting: Where was she when Jacob got off the bus? What was Jonathan doing in the mountains? How was their marriage? Remember JonBenét Ramsey? They painted the portrait that fit their notions, stripped the meat from her bones and dined on the six o’clock news.
And yet here she was offering herself up as further sacrifice. It was what the detectives and the experts told her to do, so she did it. Her life was not
