Most callers were people who were divorced and afraid of what their ex-spouses might do. Although the end of yesterday’s column had carried a teaser that said, “Next Sunday: What You Can Do to Prevent Custodial Abduction,” fearful divorced parents were not going to wait a week for those tips.
The other calls, though fewer in number, were harder to take: parents who hadn’t seen their children in years.
Most were people worn out by their hope. What would they have done with their energy, I wondered, if they hadn’t spent it looking for a missing child? The slight chance that I might be able to help them had led them to take time out of whatever else they had planned that day to contact me. They would patiently tell me the details of their misery, and I didn’t have the heart to cut them off.
They weren’t all pleasant personalities, either. Jane Serre was clearly drunk when she called at ten in the morning. The booze didn’t make her story any less awful. On a Friday afternoon two years ago, her ex-husband, Gerry Serre, had stopped by a local day-care center and picked up their three-year-old son, Luke, as planned. They shared custody, and he was going to take the boy to San Diego for a week-to see the zoo, Legoland, and Sea World. They never returned. When she checked the hotel he said he would be staying at, they said no reservations had been made under his name. He had left everything-his house, his car, his job-even his band, apparently the one interest he seemed to have outside of work. Hadn’t touched his credit cards or bank accounts. Just disappeared. With Luke.
“He always was a secretive bastard, you know?” she said, although it came out closer to “scheecretive.” I had been saying “Hmm” to the constant “you knows?,” which was enough to keep her going. I considered cutting the call short, but I knew that if I hung up, the phone would ring again, a call from someone else with another version of the same story.
The picture she gave me of Gerry was that of an uncommunicative loner, estranged from his family. Jane claimed that she got most of the friends in the divorce, friends who had been hers to begin with, but a guy who worked with Gerry said her ex mentioned that he had been dating someone recently. No one in his office had the name of his new girlfriend, nor had any of them seen her, but Jane figured this gal had money and had helped Gerry to steal Luke.
The guys in the band, she said, claimed they didn’t know the new girlfriend, either, but they had always hated Jane. The feeling was mutual, and the topic of the band was extensively explored. The name of the band was Snaggletooth, which she claimed he had cruelly named after her, but she had shown him by getting reconstructive dental surgery.
Up to that point, I managed to jot down the details despite Jane Serre’s slurred delivery. With the dental surgery, I was at the too-much-information stage and ended the call. I wondered if her marriage had made an alcoholic out of her, or if her alcoholism had led, at least in part, to the end of the marriage.
A FEW more worriers called, and then I got Blake Ives.
Mr. Ives was a yeller. He wanted to let me know how unhappy he was that we had “glorified kidnappers,” meaning the couple in Mexico. Pointing out that I wasn’t the one who wrote that story seemed cowardly, so I just listened to him rant. I didn’t enjoy that much, but I suppose I half-admired him for still having the ability to yell about his missing daughter, Carla, eight years after his ex-wife and her new boyfriend had taken her. After eight years, no one with a missing child has forgotten that child for a moment, but most people are beaten down.
So I asked for details. As it turned out, I had known his ex-wife-she had briefly worked at the Express. The yelling suddenly became even more understandable. I had never liked Bonnie Creci, as she was known before she married the unfortunate Mr. Ives.
I remembered Bonnie as being both smart and sly, one of those women whose supposed concern is carried like a small poisoned dagger. She would take your colleagues aside, and if your name followed the phrase “I worry about…,” what followed your name was not genuine solicitude but something meant to undermine your reputation. Some people thought she was smug, but I didn’t believe she had the underlying self-confidence to carry that off.
The main reason I had disliked her, though, was that she went out of her way to make trouble for Lydia Ames, who was then assistant city editor. Most of us figured Bonnie was after Lydia’s job. Lydia and I have been friends since grade school, so anyone who tries to mess with her makes two enemies. I wasn’t the only one who came to Lydia’s defense, though. Bonnie found out just how fast the temperature could drop in the newsroom, and she eventually decided it was a little too chilly at the Express.
“She hasn’t worked here in a decade,” I said to Ives.
“She stopped being a reporter after she left the Express,” he said.
“Oh, no,” I said, “she stopped long before then.”
He laughed, and after that, he stopped yelling.
By the end of the conversation, his volume had come down to a whisper, harder to take than the shouts-but I still couldn’t help him.
I couldn’t really help any of them. I pointed them to resources they’d already used and ended up telling them the same thing they had heard from everyone else they had turned to for help. I took down names and numbers, but I don’t think any of them thought I’d ever be in touch with them again.
At around two o’clock, in an extraordinary gesture of mercy, John Walters ambled up to my desk and said, “I might need to send you out on a story.”
I tried not to look too eager to escape the building, but I knew he saw through it because he laughed.
“Mark Baker is tied up with the oil island story,” he went on. “You know about that one?”
“Yes, some of it.” The oil islands were oil-drilling operations set up to look like islands, just off the shore of Las Piernas. Five bodies had washed up on one of them that morning, so Mark, our crime reporter, was out there trying to discover what was going on.
“Kids who were rafting in the storm,” John said, “but they’re local, so I’ve already got other people helping out on that, and everyone else has his hands full, too. Lydia just got a hot tip at the City Desk. We need someone to go out to the old Sheffield place. You think you can take down some information for Mark without getting yourself in too deep?”
“It’s a crime scene?” Since I’m married to an LPPD homicide detective, the paper doesn’t allow me to cover stories that involve the police.
“Looks like it. Unless whoever left a severed hand in the woods up there has some reasonable explanation for it. I’m leaning toward crime scene, myself.”
“Not one of Frank’s cases?”
“No, I checked. Harriman is out on the oil island case, I’m told. But the hand in the woods is a possible homicide story, which is why it won’t be yours. Still, I need someone to get some basics for Mark to work with. I’ll need photos, too. A waste of your talents, but imagine what’s happening to my own while I work here. You want it?”
“Just get me off the damned phone.”
He smiled conspiratorially.
Guilt kicked in. I talked to him about the calls that were bothering me. “Do you think we could run photos of these kids as a kind of follow-up?”
“Those kids are nowhere near here, and you know it. The spouse who took them is not going to hang out in the town he or she took them from.”
“I guess not,” I said glumly.
He called the switchboard from my phone and told them to take messages for me. “Go on, Kelly,” he said. “You need some fresh air.”
CHAPTER 11
Monday, April 24
2:40 P.M.
THE SHEFFIELD ESTATE
