Shira shrugged, shook her head, and turned back to her friend.
Danny checked his phone for a text message, maybe a voice mail that might have come in without the phone making a sound. That happened sometimes when the reception was spotty. Nothing there.
He didn’t remember what her last class was or where it took place. He didn’t remember where her locker was. But the school secretary-receptionist in the front office would know where she was supposed to be. It occurred to him that she might be sick, might have gone to the school infirmary. But the school was supposed to call him and say so. Maybe it had just happened.
All that speculation was pointless, he then decided. She was probably loitering at the lockers-wherever they were-with Jenna.
Though, come to think of it, he hadn’t seen Galvin’s Maybach limo in the pickup line, and there was no way the new driver was going to be late picking her up.
He looked around, fully expecting Abby to appear, sheepish or defensive or some combination of both.
But she wasn’t there.
The school secretary, Mrs. Gifford, a grandmotherly white-haired woman with apple cheeks who was probably ten years younger than she looked, smiled at him as she finished a conversation and then hung up the phone.
“Looking for Abby?” Mrs. Gifford said. She knew the names of all the school’s students and could identify all the upper classmen by face.
“She didn’t sign out early, did she?”
She donned a pair of reading glasses on a chain around her neck and consulted her computer screen. “She was here today, but you knew that. And, no, she didn’t sign out early. Unless she left early and forgot to sign out as they’re supposed to.”
“Where was her last class?”
“Well… human sexuality, in Burke 203.”
“How do you get there?”
It was a long trek through the main building and into the adjoining one, Burke Hall, a maze of jags and blind alleys and staircases up and down and up and down again. He saw a pretty black girl named Carla who was a friend of Abby’s, or at least used to be.
Carla had seen Abby at lunch but had no idea where she was now.
Abby wasn’t in or near the classroom where her last class had been held. Danny checked his iPhone, obsessively now, for a text or a voice message or an e-mail. He called her mobile phone and it went straight to voice mail.
She was nowhere in school to be found.
So maybe she had disobeyed his order and gone home with Jenna, before dismissal. Somewhere in his call log he had the Galvins’ home number, he was sure. He’d called the house once or twice. Celina Galvin had called his cell once, he recalled. But when he located her incoming call in the call history, it was marked BLOCKED. He searched for the outgoing calls he’d made to their house but didn’t find any. Maybe, in fact, he’d never called their landline. Celina had called him once, and he’d called Abby’s cell when she was over there. No use in trying directory assistance to find their home number. It would be unlisted for sure.
Well, Galvin was never without his BlackBerry. He called that number, and it went right to voice mail. Damn. Using his phone’s browser, he found the phone number for Galvin Advisers in Boston and called it. He got one of those infernal voice-mail prompt menus that tell you to enter the four-digit extension of the person you want to speak with, or press 9 for a company directory. He pressed 0, then pressed it again, until an operator came on the line, and he asked for Tom Galvin’s office. A woman answered Galvin’s line and said he was out of the office and she had no information on when he was returning, and she had no way of reaching him, and would he like to leave a message? He did. He said it was urgent.
He called Lucy, on the off chance that she might know something.
“I haven’t talked to her,” Lucy said. “Was she upset about something?” Traffic noise was loud in the background wherever she was. On Danny’s end, in the school hallways, it was getting quieter.
“No. Well, yes, maybe. I told her to come home after school and not go over to the Galvins’.”
“Oh, really?”
“She naturally wasn’t happy about that.”
“Did she refuse?”
“Refuse? No.”
“Did she sound upset?”
“Annoyed, maybe.”
“Angry at you?”
“Probably, but what else is new?”
“So maybe she took the T home.”
“She knew I was picking her up, like always.”
“Sure, but maybe she felt insulted. Belittled, as if you were questioning her judgment.”
“Of course I was questioning her judgment. She’s sixteen.”
“Maybe she felt infantilized.”
Infantilized. Shrink talk. But he knew better than to point it out.
“So she rebelled by taking the train home, to remind you she’s not a kid anymore. Or to punish you, show you she didn’t want to get a ride with you.”
“Infantilized.” It just slipped out.
“Danny. If she was on the T when you called and the train was underground, she wouldn’t have cell phone reception and you’d get voice mail. Just try her again.”
“Yeah, well…” He’d called her five or six times by now. Unless her train was stuck underground, she couldn’t still be on the subway. “If you hear from her…”
“Of course. You’re not scared something might have happened to her, are you?”
“Gotta go,” Danny said.
But he couldn’t keep that image from violating his thoughts, that grotesque photo of Galvin’s chauffeur Esteban, horribly butchered. Abby was the most precious thing in his life, and what’s most precious to us is our greatest vulnerability. If someone had taken her, kidnapped her…
But he couldn’t allow his thoughts to veer off that way.
He felt oddly remote from the halls around him, covered with drawings and projects. Bulletin boards about club activities and games, and cubbyholes for the younger girls. Unsettling self-portraits on the wall, executed with creepily disproportionate features, a gallery of present and future body-image issues. It was like he was floating in midair, seeing everything through the wrong end of a telescope.
He returned to his car and got in and tried to clear his head, to think of what to do. He checked and rechecked his phone for voice mails, for texts that might have popped up, might have slipped by unnoticed, but there were none.
He flashed back to an incident he didn’t like to think about, years ago when Abby was three, maybe four. He wondered whether all parents had something similar happen to them. Sarah had some function after work, so he’d taken Abby to the Prudential mall.
Her favorite store was an overpriced candy shop with a display case of chocolate truffles and chocolate-covered pretzels and white chocolate peppermint bark and dried pineapple crescents enrobed in milk chocolate. A revolving rack of huge multicolored lollipops. But Abby was always drawn to the Plexiglas bins of radioactively hued jelly beans.
He had said no, no candy today, and they went to the food court to get her a slice or two of pizza. Standing in a long line, he turned, and she was gone.
He looked around, gripped with panic. She wasn’t there; she was nowhere in sight. Heart racing, he walked through the hordes of tourists, didn’t see her, knew she’d been abducted. I looked away for a second, he’d say later.
He found her two minutes later at the candy shop, shoveling red jelly beans into a clear plastic bag. The longest two minutes of his life.
Maybe that was all that had happened. Red jelly beans. Because if what had happened to her was anything like what he feared, he didn’t know what he’d do. He couldn’t go on living.
Leon Chisholm approached, stiff-legged, and Danny rolled down the window.
“Abby in trouble?”
In trouble? he thought. What’s he implying, what does he know? And then, the realization: “Oh, no, she’s not being kept after school, no.”