“Smart Daddy,” I said as another warning bell tolled. Had Daddy lied about the car not being ready today because he wanted a child-free night to spend with someone else?
Melissa’s tugging on my arm steered me away from dark places.
“You said we were going to build a fire,” she pouted.
“Well, what are we waiting for? Let’s go outside and gather some twigs for kindling.”
After filling a basket with twigs, we tossed some onto the large logs already positioned in the fireplace. When the firestarter worked on the first try, we settled onto the sofa and watched the tiny flames mature into a blazing fire. Melissa clapped her hands at the sight and beamed at my suggestion that we eat our macaroni-and-cheese dinners in front of it.
After eating, Melissa snuggled close to me. I could love this child, I thought. Before she could fall fully asleep, I walked her upstairs, brushed her teeth, and put on her pajamas. After tucking her in, I started reading Emma’s adventure with the playful platypus. By page five, she had fallen asleep.
I went downstairs and added more logs to the fire. The night had grown very cold. Sleet scratching against the windowpanes reminded me that winter comes early to the mountains. Since it was slightly after eight, I retrieved Greg’s phone number from Melissa’s backpack and tapped it into my cell phone.
He picked up on the first ring. Before I could say hello, he panted, “Who is this?”
“It’s Anne.” I laughed. “You sound, Mr. Lawyer, as if you’ve been chasing an ambulance.”
“Anne who?” he choked.
“Anne who,” I echoed calmly, preferring his playfulness to his initial panic and then answered, “Anne, the Mountain Maiden.”
“How is Melissa?” he shouted.
I paused and tried to make sense of his mood. Acute separation anxiety, I concluded as he repeated, “How is Melissa?”
“Greg, calm down. She’s fine. She’s sleeping.”
“She’s not hurt?”
“Of course not. Oh, you must be worrying about the drive up here. We did fine and managed the hilly terrain quite well.”
“Is she crying for me?”
“No, Greg. I’m sorry to disappoint you. I gave her dinner and read to her and she’s sound asleep.”
“So what do you want from me?”
“Just her clothes.”
“You’ll have to tell me where you are.”
“In the living room of the cabin.”
He dropped the phone. I heard rustling in the background. Rummaging noises? Looking for a pen? Why the need to write down the word clothes? But maybe he wanted to know more about the weather to include boots and rain gear. I heard a door close. Was Jeff there? Was Greg shooing him out?
Then I heard nothing.
Silence. A broken connection. I tried again and heard a busy signal. I paced the living room, waiting for a callback. Surely he had Caller ID. Minutes ticked by. Exasperated, I lay down on the sofa and pulled an afghan over me. Too tired to worry if his acute anxiety was a harbinger of our life to come, I fell asleep. And had a weird dream. Max, the wooden bear on the porch, had invited other wooden bears to a party. Their heavy paws thumped against the floor and one of them bumped against the switch next to the door, sending beams of light boring through the windows.
I tried to cover my eyes but a non-bear advised me to put my hands behind my back and told me I had the right to remain silent. As I tried to make sense out of this nightmare, someone ran past me and bounded up the stairs.
By the time I blinked my vision back I saw Greg rush past me, carrying the sleeping Melissa in his arms.
During the times when I’m not longing for the day before my arrest as a kidnapper, when I was attending to mundane chores, unaware that I was experiencing the best day of my life, I replay the story of my role in the perfect non-crime devised by Greg and his college roommate, Jeff — the oppo who had called me Machiavellian Mama. I marvel how I cooperated in my own victimization. Sure, Greg was clever and I was vulnerable. In the words of the tabloid — Caught! — I was a “lonely single longing for love and a child of her own.”
Not included in Caught! was Greg’s intense ambition to break into the political scene. He had the charm and the looks, but he also had a past, a past that would have been discovered by a skilled oppo like me. Jeff knew I would have tagged Greg out before he reached first base. To defuse me, Greg and Jeff, whom I totally underrated, systematically played me to perfection by throwing out the McKenna name to the party and betting that once I met Greg and learned his real name I’d be smitten and would not research him. The other part of their plan — establishing a relationship between Melissa and me so that she would be unaware of her “kidnapping” — evolved successfully in all the children’s places we visited.
Blinded by my eagerness for time away with Greg, I walked blissfully into the trap — never doubting that his car had broken down; never suspecting that, contrary to what he said, Melissa would cry if he stole away without her seeing him; never turning off the children’s CDs in my car to listen to the radio; never leaving the alternate route to go on the highway that flashed the Amber Alert; and never realizing that his strange “separation anxiety” was make-believe anguished parent-talk to a kidnapper for the ears of the FBI agents who simply needed to read Caller ID for my number and subsequent identification.
To ensure that Melissa was asleep when the raid occurred, Greg had to buy time at least until eight P.M. He rushed back into the library as soon as we pulled away and slipped into the role of distraught father. The librarian described me to him. As a delaying tactic, Greg offered up to the FBI the name of a freelance court reporter who had been friendly to Melissa. She also resembled me. After being shown a driver’s-license photo of her, the librarian identified her as the kidnapper. Unable to contact her at the courthouse or home, the authorities immediately issued an alert. Not until six-thirty did a friend of hers inform the FBI that the woman was vacationing in Nassau, a fact known to Greg. That subterfuge gained Greg the time needed to wait until I called and told him Melissa was asleep. I also learned that an anonymous caller had dialed the Amber Alert number, saying that she had seen a car driven by a woman with a young girl who resembled Melissa go down Tamarac Road in the Mountain Top Development. The FBI learned my identity from my cell phone number and my location from the caller, most likely Jeff’s new girlfriend.
No longer lacking face time and name recognition, Greg captured the hearts and votes of viewers as the scene of the father/child reunion played over and over on local TV. If Melissa had asked about me, no one could have heard her. Greg held her tightly and smothered her with kisses. Anything she said went into his shoulder. A teary-eyed interviewer cooed about “happy endings” before asking Greg about me.
He sighed. “The poor woman. I met her once at a cocktail reception and Melissa spilled juice on her skirt and apologized adorably. She must have fixated on her then and stalked us.”
Melissa. I love that child and I wonder what Greg told her about me. That I went away like her mother did?
Eve visited me in jail and brought me a printout on Greg McKenzie.
“You should have let me check him out,” she chided.
Aside from minor college hijinks like stealing the mascot of his alma mater along with Jeff, the incident that might have sunk his career had I found it occurred on a winding road in Colorado. Greg’s car skidded and careened into a ditch, killing Melissa’s mother. Suspecting drunkenness, the police on the scene advised the Midlothian Hospital medical personnel to test him for alcohol.