Dark Specter

some result. It didn’t seem likely that we would receive a ransom demand. If that had been the object of the kidnapping, there were several children attending the party whose parents were in a much better position to pay than Rachael and I.

Besides, all the evidence suggested that the victim had been chosen at random. Only one of the lengths of crepe paper led out into the kitchen. The woman had presumably waited until the child following this trail passed through the connecting door, then locked it and decamped. But since the process of selection was done by the children themselves, and done blind, there was no way of determining in advance who that would be. All the woman knew was that one of the children would fall into her trap. It just happened to be David.

This sense of arbitrariness was almost the hardest thing for Rachael and me to face. Our son had been taken from us by someone whose identity was unknown and whose motives did not bear thinking about, and all by chance. Our suffering and appalling sense of helplessness, to say nothing of whatever David might be going through, were all mocked by the knowledge that they were the product of nothing more than a mere lottery, a casino sideshow whose odds were precisely calculable: fourteen to one.

It was three weeks to the day after David’s abduction that a maintenance worker at Elm Creek Park, a nature preserve northwest of Minneapolis, came upon a pile of bloodsoaked clothing and alerted the police. The description of the clothes David had been wearing when he disappeared had been widely circulated, and the garments were quickly identified as his. They were all there, every last one. I had to go to police headquarters to make the formal identification, and I wept when I saw his tiny shorts and socks. The denim shirt had been slashed in several places, and was heavily stained with blood. There were other stains on the jeans.

About a year earlier, David had exhibited symptoms which led our doctor to believe that he might be suffering from anemia, and a series of blood tests had been done. The results of these were still on file, and a comparison with the stains on his clothing produced a virtual certainty that the blood was his.

I was the one to tell Rachael. Maybe I did so badly; maybe there is no good way to break such news. I felt absurdly resentful at having been miscast as a character in some trashy made-for-TV weepy. My revenge was to read my lines as flatly as possible. The police had found David’s clothing in a state which suggested that he had been the victim of a violent attack. They were now searching the scene for his body, but Elm Creek Park was very large and the remains might not be discovered for some time, if at all.

“That’s impossible,” Rachael replied, shaking her head.

I was stunned at her calm, confident tone. For two weeks now, Rachael had been in a state of continuous agitation which even the powerful barbiturates the doctor had prescribed seemed unable to reach. Terrible panic attacks ripped her brutally out of her brief spells of broken sleep, and her mood swung from frantic bursts of pointless activity, in which she would go around the house moving furniture and other objects until each was positioned just so, to periods of almost catatonic inertia when she would not respond to the simplest remark. Yet now she had just heard the worst news of all, and it had seemingly been powerless to touch her. The reason soon became obvious: she hadn’t heard it.

“I’ve seen him several times,” she went on casually. “He’s alive.”

I sat staring at her across our walnut-grain coffee table. In one of her manic phases, Rachael had arranged copies of the New York Review of Books and Atlantic Monthly and other detritus of our former life into neatly aligned quadrilaterals, like the base layers of a pyramid.

“You never told me,” I said weakly.

“You wouldn’t have believed me,” she shot back.

Well, that was true enough.

“I saw him just today,” she continued in the same creepily conversational tone, “on my way back from seeing Mom. He was with that woman. They were driving the other way. I saw him clearly. But there was a central divider, so I couldn’t do a U-turn. I turned around the first chance I got, but I never caught up with them. But it was definitely David.”

She went on to describe the other sightings, always brief glimpses in some situation which, conveniently enough, made it impossible for her to make contact. My response to this was no doubt unhelpful. I should have passed the whole thing over to the professionals we were consulting and let them handle it. But I was under considerable strain myself that day, having seen what I’d seen and heard what I’d heard. I needed sympathy and support in facing what had to be faced, not a course of self-serving delusional fantasies.

“Rachael, he’s dead. He must be. It’s just a matter of time before they find the body. I’m sorry, but there’s no point in either of us trying to pretend otherwise. It merely delays the process of healing.”

I suppose I sounded sanctimonious and insincere. She gave me a withering look.

“He’s always been dead to you,” she said. “You never wanted a child in the first place.”

There was some truth in this, although the moment David was born and I held him in my arms, what I had or had not wanted became irrelevant. But Rachael had never forgiven me for not responding the way she had hoped when she announced that she was pregnant. Now she was taking her revenge.

“It doesn’t matter what you or the police think,” she went on with an icy calm. “I know David is alive. That woman is just trying to throw me off the trail. She knows I’ve seen her, and that sooner or later I’ll catch up with her. She’s trying to make me despair and give up. Well, it won’t work. She may have fooled everyone else, but she can’t fool me. I’ll never abandon David whatever happens. Never.”

Nor did she. When her fanatical faith finally deserted her, she joined him.

Two days later Rachael went to visit with her mother. When she didn’t return, I called and discovered that she had left the house at six. It was now almost nine. When another hour passed with no sign of her, I alerted the police, but there was little they could do at that time of night. Even when a full search began, it was two days before they found her body in the car, parked in a clearing off a back road in a state forest thirty miles out of town.

Maybe it was that final conversation with her mother that finally broke the self-induced spell which had been protecting Rachael. By now the story of David’s bloodstained garments had appeared in the papers and on TV, and Rachael’s mom-a matter-of-fact midwesterner from a German farming family-must have drawn the same conclusions as everyone else, and would not have hesitated to tell her so. Rachael’s comforting illusions could survive my skepticism, but she was defenseless against her own mother. Having postponed the reckoning with the truth for so long, she was swept away when it finally occurred. On the way back from her mother’s she stopped at a pharmacy and filled the repeat prescription for sedatives which the doctor had given her a few days earlier. Then she went to a liquor store and bought a bottle of vodka, and drove to the lonely glade in those woods and consumed them both.

I had already been through so much chat Rachael’s death merely confirmed me in my state of total numbness. I seemed to have been exiled to a zone beyond feeling, and I never expected to return. In the end I did, but gradually, and with frequent relapses. It was two months before I started to feel even fitfully normal, or rather to realize how abnormal I had been feeling for so long. It was another month after that-much of which time I spent with my parents back East-before I could even think about picking up the threads of my life. As soon as I did, I realized that they were like the threads of David’s shirt: slashed and drenched in blood.

Take the Chevy Nova, for instance. It was no longer a car but Rachael’s death chamber. How could I use it to drive to work or to stock up and save at Safeway? I soon realized that the house would have to go too. Every square inch was mined with memories, any one of which was enough to blow my fragile sanity to shreds. I put it on the market and moved into a rented apartment downtown. The idea was to put what had happened behind me and start again in a new place, with new friends and a new life. The college had given me the rest of the semester off, as much to avoid unwelcome publicity as anything else, I suspected. With the summer vacation coming up, I had several months in which to pull myself together and-the phrase seemed appropriate for some reason-“get my head together.”

Instead I fell apart more completely than ever before. For days at a time I didn’t even get out of bed. I unplugged the phone, which brought a succession of calls from oversolicitous people wanting to know how I was “getting along.” I didn’t open my mail or read the papers. I turned the television to face the wall and left the drapes drawn all day long. Dishes and clothes went unwashed. I hardly ate.

At the time I thought I was just having another relapse into the shock and grief which had overwhelmed me for so long. I realize now that it was more than that. What had happened was hard enough to deal with in itself, but