He offered her a handkerchief.
He asked her why she was crying.
She told him she’d spent all day yesterday editing hundreds of feet of film, and marking the strips with Roman numerals to differentiate this go-round from the earlier strips marked with Arabic numerals, and one of the other girls on her team — “There are five of us altogether,” she said. “We have to do this fifteen-minute film as our final project…”
One of the other girls came in this morning, and reedited everything she’d already done, messing everything up, getting the sound all out of synch, and replacing the Roman numerals with Arabic numerals all over again because she didn’t know what Roman numerals were!
“Can you believe it?” Alice said. “She’s twenty-one years old, she’s from Chicago, that’s not a hick town, and she’s never heard of a Roman numeral in her life! She thought it was some kind of secret code! Can you believe it?”
“Amazing,” Eddie said.
“I know. How can anyone be so…?”
“You. I mean you. Amazing.”
He was still holding her hands, she noticed.
“You’re so very beautiful,” he said.
“Oh sure,” she said.
“Oh sure,” he said.
They were married six months later.
The two detectives who drive into the bus loading area at Pratt Elementary at 9:30 that Thursday morning are looking for a man named Luke Farraday. Like Sloate and Di Luca, they work for Cape October’s Criminal Investigations Division, and they have been sent here by Captain Roger Steele, who wants them to find out whatever they can about the blue car that supposedly picked up the Glendenning kids yesterday afternoon.
The two detectives are named Peter Wilson Andrews and Julius Aaron Saltzman. Saltzman is very large, standing at six-four in his bare feet, and weighing a good two hundred and twenty pounds when he’s watching his diet. He is wearing a little blue-and-gray crocheted yarmulke fastened to the back of his head with bobby pins, this because he is very proud of his Jewish heritage and will take the slightest opportunity to discuss the impending American holocaust if nothing is done to stop the tide of anti-Semitism in this nation. Saltzman is what Andrews would call a Professional Jew, more or less, in that his Jewishness seems to dictate every move he makes and every word he speaks.
Andrews is perhaps five feet eight inches tall, very short for any cop but especially for a detective, where promotions often depend on brawn rather than brain. He is what one might generously call a redneck. In fact, he drifted down here to Florida after working on a tobacco farm in Tennessee, where his neck and his arms did grow very red indeed and then brown from hours of laboring in the hot sun, until he decided there had to be a better life somewhere for a red-blooded (and red-necked) American boy like himself.
Andrews found that better life here on the Cape, where first he worked as a bouncer in a strip joint on the Trail south of the airport, and then joined the police force as a uniformed rookie earning $28,914 a year. He is now a full-fledged detective in the CID, working with Saltzman, and thanking his lucky stars for his partner’s size and raw power every time they go up against some redneck like Andrews used to be, carrying a sawed-off shotgun or a machete or even a pool cue.
They find Farraday in the school cafeteria. He tells them he came in half an hour ago after supervising the unloading of the buses, and he is just now lingering over a cup of coffee before heading home. What he does, he explains to them, is come in early in the morning to unload the buses, and then goes home until it’s time to come back in the afternoon, when the kids are boarding the buses again. There’s not much for Farraday at home. His wife died three years ago, he tells them. He’s alone in the world, he tells them.
Farraday is wearing bifocals and a hearing aid, a man in his mid-sixties, one of a breed who come down here to retire and then discover that they have all the time in the world to do nothing but play golf and push a shopping cart up and down the aisles of a supermarket. They finally take jobs as cashiers in souvenir shops, or bank guards, or — as is the case with Farraday here — guards at school crossings or bus-loading areas, anything to keep them busy, anything to make them feel useful again. There is nothing like early retirement to make a person feel dead.
The detectives have got to be very careful here.
They have been cautioned by Steele that they are not to indicate in any way, manner, or form that a kidnapping has taken place. The Glendenning woman was warned that if she notified the police, her kids would be killed. Apparently, she is none too happy that the police are already on the job, but that’s the way the little cookie crumbles, lady, and if you want your children back you don’t go to a lawyer or a private eye. You go to professionals who know how to do the job. Though, to tell the truth, this is the first kidnapping Saltzman or Andrews has ever caught.
The point is, a death threat was made.
So they have to tiptoe around old Farraday here — to both Saltzman and Andrews, sixty years old is ancient — find out whatever they can about the car that picked up the kids yesterday, without indicating in any way that any sort of crime has been committed here. They have an advantage in that Farraday seems kind of stupid to them. Then again, all old people seem stupid to Andrews and Saltzman.
“These’d be Jamie and Ashley Glendenning,” Andrews says. “Little boy and girl.”
“You fellas want some coffee?”
“No, thanks,” Saltzman says.
Andrews shakes his head no.
“Make a good cup of coffee here,” Farraday says.
Old farts talk about food a lot, Andrews notices.
“Not as good as Starbucks,” Farraday says, “but pretty damn good for a school cafeteria, am I right?”
“This would’ve been about two-thirty yesterday,” Saltzman prods.
“You know who else makes a nice cup of coffee?” Farraday asks.
“Who’s that?” Andrews says.
“Place called The Navigator? On Davidson? I stop there every morning on my way to work, they give you a good breakfast for a buck twenty-nine. Eggs and all. Nice cup of coffee, too.”
“Would you happen to remember these kids?” Saltzman asks. “The Glendenning kids?”
“He the one can’t talk?” Farraday asks.
This is the first they’re hearing about the kid being a mute. The two detectives look at each other.
“Father drowned out on the Gulf one night. Probably taking a piss over the side, lost his balance, fell in. Most of these small boat drownings are guys taking a piss over the side, did you know that? It’s a fact,” Farraday says, and nods. “The Glendenning boy can’t talk, it’s some kind of post-traumatic thing, the shock of it, you know. Won’t talk is more like it, I guess.”
“That’s a shame,” Saltzman says. “Did you happen to see the Glendenning kids yesterday afternoon?”
“Yes, I did,” Farraday says. “What’s this all about, anyway?”
“Apparently, they missed the bus, and some woman was kind enough—”
“No, they didn’t miss no bus,” Farraday says.
“Whatever,” Andrews says. “The thing is, some woman was nice enough to pick them up, and drive them home. But she left them with the housekeeper, and drove off without saying what her name was.”
“That’s funny, ain’t it?”
“Well, she was probably in a hurry, Thing is, Mrs. Glendenning would like to thank her, so if there’s—”