Dark Specter

Having ditched out of the dean’s office at the earliest possible opportunity, I was the first parent to arrive at the house. I parked at the curb and walked up the path to the front door. Inside I could hear kids screaming and shouting. It sounded a little out of control, but we’d given similar parties ourselves and I knew that they always tended to come apart toward the end.

I rang the doorbell. There was no response. Close up, it was apparent that not all the screams inside were of excitement or over-tiredness. Some of the children sounded seriously panicked. I rapped on the door. I was expecting a rapid response, an adult face corroded with stress, relief and a sense of failure. “Hi, I’m David’s father,” I’d say with a big smile. “Looks like you’ve got your hands full here. Just remember, next time you get to go shopping.”

No one came. I rapped again, then tried the handle. I thought at first the door was locked, but it was just jammed against the frame, and gave when I pushed hard with my shoulder. Something nudged up against me, about the same height as David. Then I saw that it was a balloon, one of those shiny metallic pillow-shaped ones filled with helium. It moved past me on a current of air and drifted away, rising rapidly until it was just a dark shape against the eggshell-blue sky.

There were more balloons inside, taped in bunches to the walls, streamers and paper chains looping down from the ceiling and lengths of crepe paper winding all over the floor. But despite these festive touches, the scene which met my eyes was the stuff of every parent’s nightmare. Some children were fighting, others were crying. One boy was busily smearing chocolate cake on the wall, another was throwing everything he could get his hands on at a sofa where two others lay cowering in terror. In the corner, a girl with glasses and curly blond hair sat with a blank expression, clutching a teddy bear.

Hearing footsteps behind me, I turned. A woman I didn’t recognize was coming up the path, looking at me apprehensively. I immediately assumed that this was the party-giver, who had sneaked out to the corner store, leaving the children unsupervised.

“Are you supposed to be in charge here?” I demanded aggressively.

“I’m here to pick up Tara,” the woman said, coming up the steps and looking in. “Jesus! What the hell’s going on?”

With a cry of “Mommy!” the girl with the teddy bear scrambled to her feet and rushed across the room to embrace her mother.

“I was scared!” she sobbed.

I looked around for David. He didn’t seem to be there. I called his name. No one answered.

A door opened off the living room to the left. I opened it and looked inside. It was empty, the walls bare, the air musty. I rushed to the only other door, leading to the back of the house. It was locked.

I ran back to the front door. By now, the other parents had started arriving. I pushed through them and dashed around in back. A flight of steps led to a door lying open. Inside was the kitchen, a bedroom and a staircase down to the basement. I searched them all. There was no one there.

The key to the connecting door was in the lock. I turned it and went through to the living room. David had to be there. But he wasn’t.

I stood paralyzed, hyperventilating, unable to think or act. Eventually one of the mothers asked if I was all right. I told her I couldn’t seem to find my son, apologetically, as if it was my fault. It was she who called the police.

The process which followed was as long and thorough as the one which follows an airplane crash, and as futile. The investigators painstakingly collect all the scattered fragments of the wreckage and patch them together again, they draw detailed maps and plans showing exactly where and when the accident took place, they interview witnesses and analyze every scrap of evidence. It is a retrospective victory of order over disorder, a triumphant demonstration of human ingenuity and control, a reassuring ceremony around the open grave.

Above all, perhaps, it provides a pretext for speech in the face of the unspeakable. There are no words for the experience Rachael and I had to endure, moment by moment, over the following days and weeks. I should say experiences. She had hers and I had mine, and they were as impossible to share as two acid trips whose only point in common is that they started from the same external stimulus. I was locked into my grief and she into hers, but they were configured differently. Any attempt to discuss these differences invariably ended in mutual recrimination and pointless self-validating conflicts in which we worked off our urge to give and receive the punishment we both longed for.

For my part, I focused on just one aspect of the situation: David’s asthma. I told myself that everything would be bearable if only he had had his medicines with him, his various inhalers and the pink hydrocortisone pills to be used as a last resort. I imagined him coughing endlessly, with that patient, bewildered look he always had at such moments, struggling for breath in the middle of the night. All other possible horrors I excluded by dwelling on that one problem, as though the whole thing was just a question of bad management. If only he had his medicine. If only he had his medicine.

Rachael’s demons were less tractable. Her work with the Children’s Protective Service had exposed her to endless examples of the ways in which careless or ill-intentioned adults can abuse the children in their care, and she now replayed all these scenarios with David as the victim. Unlike me, she had met the woman who had sent the invitation to the party, known to her as Carol. It was a casual meeting, just a few words exchanged after they dropped the children off at school, but now Rachael recalled that she hadn’t liked the woman. “Affectless” was the word she had used to describe her. And so she had to live with the knowledge that she had let our son, her only child, go unescorted to the house of a person she hardly knew and didn’t care for. As a professional in the field, part of whose job was to assess the suitability of those responsible for children, this was almost unbearable.

Penned in these separate hells, we were visited from time to time by envois from the outside world: policemen, psychiatrists, media ghouls. The story of David’s disappearance gradually took shape. After interviewing several times the fourteen children who had attended the party, as well as the parents who had delivered them to the house, the police pieced together a picture of what had happened.

The party had apparently begun normally. As the children arrived, they were given paper hats and party favors. There was a table laid with snacks, drinks and a birthday cake. One mother had asked to stay, claiming that her daughter was too timid to enjoy the occasion otherwise, but “Carol” had refused on the grounds that it would be unfair to the other children. To start with, there was a round of games. They played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, musical chairs, statues, and then, as a grand finale before the food, treasure hunt. This involved each child following a length of crepe paper which wound all around the house before leading to a present of some kind. Each paper ribbon was a different color, and the children selected their color-and hence the present-by dipping their hand into a bag and picking out a short strand of the same paper.

After that it was a free-for-all as the children milled around, falling over each other, getting their paper trails confused, before finally finding and unwrapping the present. When they eventually calmed down, they discovered that the woman in charge was no longer there. But children are used to adults drifting in and out on mysterious errands, and for a while none of them thought much of it. They played with their toys, then, left to their own devices, some of the more aggressive ones started to attack the food. After that the situation gradually deteriorated. No one noticed that the woman’s daughter and David were also missing.

All attempts to trace “Carol” proved fruitless. She had rented the house six weeks earlier, paying the deposit and two months rent in advance with a check drawn on a local bank. The account had been opened with a cash deposit of three thousand dollars, the balance of which had been withdrawn the day before the party. The Social Security number and other details the woman had given all proved false, as was her name. She had of course been seen coming and going at the school and at her home, but no one seemed able to give a precise description of her. Even estimates of her height varied wildly.

The teachers at the school told police that her daughter had been withdrawn and uncommunicative, and the same seemed to apply to her mother, if she was her mother. The FBI was already working on the possibility that the girl was the victim of an earlier kidnap-there were some similarities with an unsolved case on their files-and that the woman had wanted to add a son to her “family.” I found this marginally comforting, just as I did the knowledge that the aggressor was a woman. What I most dreaded, of course, the unspoken horror that surfaced at four in the morning, was the idea that David had fallen into the hands of someone for whom evil, the deliberate infliction of pain, was an end in itself.

The police did their best to reassure us, and to make themselves look good, but it was obvious that there was little they could do except hope that the massive searches, roadblocks and appeals to the public produced