Woozy on the kitchen floor, she asked, “But what’s happening?”
Standing over her, Schlo said, “It’s Jericho! Baby girl, Jericho is what’s happening.”
Foster showed her the video last. First they got loaded, a little loaded but for a long time, on the bottle of rum she brought back after fixing the street door so it wouldn’t attract attention. Rum because she liked the sweetness, like high school parties she’d never attended because she’d been too busy playing the role of a teenage slattern to actually slattern around. Playing a sexpot had kept her a virgin until her first marriage.
They were camped out in her panic room. Blush lifted her glass and made a grand sweep. “How do you think I could almost afford this wonderful house?”
Even to judge from what little he’d seen, the place was massive.
“Sure,” she said with chagrin, “it’s big for a house, but small for a world.” When she’d bought it at the height of her career, she’d been just as trapped in it as she was now. Photographers waited outside to follow her. Lunatic fans waited.
They’d poured more rum. More Coke. They toasted her crowdfunding when it broke twenty grand.
They’d fallen silent. Still sipping their drinks as the television showed a live on-location report of the first human remains being recovered from the Imperial Theater. Body bag after bag, each holding something too small to be a whole person. Not even a teenager.
She’d fallen asleep, and Gates Foster had told her sleeping self about the wreck of Lucinda’s fake funeral and how a fellow member of the support group, a doctor even, had botched the Bible reading. Instead of reading the section Foster had chosen, the man had read from the book of Joshua. The account of Joshua’s army shouting until their combined voices had collapsed the walls of a city.
He told her sleeping form how the funeral itself had evolved so quickly into a public humiliation. Almost as if it had been an organized conspiracy to goad him into rage.
On television the newscast broke to show Amber making an emotional plea for him to free his hostage and turn himself in to the police. Poor Amber.
Blinking awake from her nap, Blush said, “Don’t even think about it, buster.” She looked at the woman on-screen, Foster’s ex-wife, and said, “She’s pretty. Did your little girl take after her?”
Only then did Foster show her the gallery on his phone. First his favorite photos of Lucinda, then various age-progressed portraits that had appeared on milk cartons over the past seventeen years. With each one, yes, she did look more like her mother.
He showed her his rogue’s gallery of pedophiles and described his endless hunt. As if he were tracking down Nazi war criminals. The irony being that now he was the one hunted.
Only after all of that did Foster show her the video. The soundless few seconds. The grainy security video lasting no longer than a birthday candle, it showed Lucinda being led down a hallway and out a door of the Parker-Morris Building. She was holding hands with a slightly older girl. Most likely around twelve, the girl stood a head taller as she led the smaller girl through the door to the street and out of sight forever.
“Lucy had always wanted a sibling,” he said as Blush played and replayed the short video captured by a security camera so long ago. “She’d always ask us to have another baby so she could have an older sister,” he remembered, “but we tried to explain that the older one had to come before.”
Blush paused the video at the moment the older girl’s face seemed most visible. “I wonder what she looks like now.” Her eyes squinted to study the coarse image.
Foster took back the phone. He swiped through a gallery of images. “I asked the same people who did the age progression…” He handed the phone back, saying, “Of course, I had to pay for it myself.”
There on the screen was a woman in her late twenties, possibly thirty years old. Clearly the unknown girl from the video, but her blonde hair had grown a shade darker. Her round face had thinned, giving her wide cheekbones and accentuating her eyes. She was lovely, the kidnapper. It felt wrong to call a twelve-year-old a kidnapper. It felt wrong to think of himself as a kidnapper. If anything, this was a mutual kidnapping.
Blush looked at the photo of the grown girl. She looked a long time, long enough for Foster to finish his drink and reach for the bottle.
As he offered to fill her glass, she said, “I know her.”
The knife wouldn’t fit in Mitzi’s handbag. The blade was too long: a German Lauffer Carvingware knife. From where she couldn’t venture a guess, but she’d found it in the studio prop room still wrapped in FedEx packaging.
Her damaged wrist she’d wrapped in paper towels, where it was still glued. Stitches or staples or whatever doctors did these days, she still needed doing.
But who should Mitzi Ives meet at the doctor’s office but a moving van. A crew of men in blue uniforms, they were carting sealed boxes out the front door of the office.
Taped in the front window of the building was a sign that read “This Space for Lease.”
While down the block sat the doctor’s Daimler with the good leather seats, a Boston fern inside. This Boston fern that used to look so small on a plant stand in the only window of the waiting room, in the doctor’s car it filled the whole backseat.
Mitzi didn’t panic. She made polite, nodding eye contact with the movers. She edged past them through the street door and into the empty waiting room.
If the movers noticed or not, she held up the FedEx package as if she were just delivering it. The doctor stepped out of his examining room. Just pulling on his coat. Just this close to a clean getaway, he saw Mitzi and smirked. He snapped his fingers until
