“Mama,” she says weakly.
“I’m right here, baby. I’m not going anywhere. The doctors are going to take care of you,” Bianca whispers through tears.
The doctor and a nurse rush her into a nearby room with Bianca close behind them.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“We need to talk to her. Until we figure out what this clue is supposed to mean, we don’t really have anything to go on. We have to just wait,” Sam says.
There’s a small waiting room off the side, and he and I go into it. He pulls up the picture of the shoe again and stares at it.
“Click on the image and make it bigger. Maybe there’s something in it that we’re not noticing,” I suggest.
He fills the screen with the image, and we continue to stare at it. I start in one of the top corners of the image and inch my eyes across it, taking in every tiny piece of it individually rather than the entire image. By the time I get to the bottom corner, I haven’t found anything new. It’s just the shoe with the words written across it.
“It’s on a track. Like a running track,” Sam says. “But I can’t tell where.”
“It’s outside,” I say. “The way the light is hitting it looks like sunlight.”
“That means it wasn’t taken this morning. It was too cloudy.”
“Where are there outdoor running tracks in Sherwood? The middle and high school have them, right?”
“Yes. And the gym. I’ll call the station and have people out to those locations to look.”
He walks out of the waiting room to make the call, and I stay, sitting in the blue upholstered chair waiting. Waiting for Eric to call and say he found out who the email address is attached to. Waiting for one of the doctors to come in and tell us something. Just waiting.
A few minutes after Sam leaves, Bianca comes into the waiting room. There’s a slight awkward tension as she looks at the empty chairs around me.
“Sam had to call up to the station,” I tell her. “He should be back any second.”
She nods and looks down at her fingers folding and unfolding, twisting her rings in front of her.
“I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you yesterday,” she says.
I shake my head and stand up to take a step closer to her. She looks fragile; like any second she might just topple over.
“No,” I say. “You don’t have to apologize. I...”
“Yes, I do. You’re only trying to do your job coming to help us. I shouldn’t have reacted like that. I’m still really sensitive talking about my problems. That’s something I need to work on. It’s just when Sam brought up Holly and her talking about me, it brought up a lot of really bad memories. It frankly scared the hell out of me. I thought back to that day, and I wondered if it was possible that I did go and pick her up somehow and didn’t remember. It made me question myself and everything I’ve been going through to try to be a better person and a better mother. I was so scared that something happened, and I slept or went back to my old habits and somehow that whole section of the day I was blacked out, and I just didn’t remember. It was horrible enough to realize my daughter was gone, and I didn’t know where she was. But it was even worse to think that maybe somehow, I was the one responsible for it, that I had done something to her or left her somewhere, and whatever she was going through was my fault. I got defensive and angry, and I shouldn’t have taken it out on you. I’m sorry.”
“Bianca, I have to ask you something,” I say gingerly.
This woman is in a delicate situation, and I don’t want to make it worse by upsetting her, but I can’t just pretend I don’t know what Sam told me earlier.
“Alright,” she says.
“Sam called the hospital and talked to your supervisor.” Her eyes drop to the floor again, and she shifts back and forth on her feet. She knows what I’m about to ask, but she doesn’t stop me. “He says she told him you got off two hours before you went to pick up Gloria. You said it was only fifteen minutes. That you just stopped for gas before you went to the community center for her. If that’s true, it creates a really big gap. If you did get off when you originally said you did, the sign-out sheet would have Gloria being picked up when you were still at work. But now it has her being picked up while you were off and unaccounted for. Where were you?”
“I didn’t do anything to Gloria,” she insists. “It scared me, and I started questioning myself, but I didn’t do anything to her. I know everything I did that day.”
“Then you need to tell us. We need to know the truth.”
“Bianca?”
Sam walks into the room behind her, and Bianca turns to look at him.
“She’s awake and talking,” she tells him. “The doctors have a few exams they want to do, but so far, it seems like she’s fine. A few scratches and bruises, but nothing serious.”
“I’m so glad to hear that,” he tells her.
“Bianca, you need to tell us where you were during those two hours,” I say.
She continues to stare at Sam.
“Please,” she says, but he shakes his head.
“You do,” he tells her. “There’s time unaccounted for, and what you were doing during that time could point to who might have had reason to do this.”
She lets out a long, defeated breath and sits down heavily in the chair across from me. She pulls her large cross-body bag into her lap and rests her arms on it for a second before digging through it and coming up with a black leather folder.
“I’ve been struggling with wanting to drink for a couple of months. Things have gotten worse with Gloria’s father, and the stress has really been getting to me. I don’t ever want to get back to that place again. I don’t recognize myself when I’m there. I hate myself. But I know there’s always the risk of it happening, and I’m going to have to be the one to stop it. I have to do the work to make sure that I stay in control. So, that’s what I’ve been doing.”
My mind goes to the thimble back in its bag, tucked into my carry on.
“What do you mean?” Sam asks.
Bianca unties the leather strips securing the folder closed and pulls out several sheets of thick white cardstock. She holds them out toward us, and I take them.
“What are these?”
“I was at the church fifteen minutes after I left my shift at the hospital. I just wasn’t at the community center.”
Sam and I look at the papers, and realization settles in.
“You were with the pastor. For counseling.”
She nods. “Did you know he’s licensed? He says he just does spiritual counseling, but he’s just being humble. He became a licensed counselor before he went to seminary. I trust him so much. I’ve never even considered going to therapy of any kind before, but working with him has really helped. He writes down affirmations for me every time I go in to see him. I bring them around with me everywhere I go, so if I’m starting to feel tempted or overwhelmed, I can look at them, and it makes me feel better. That day I went to my session with him right after I got out of work. He was with someone at the time, an emergency, so I had to wait for a little while before he could see me.”
“About how long?” Sam asks.
“Twenty minutes, maybe?”
“Did you see who he was with?”
“Only briefly and not even all of him. I was sitting around the corner waiting, and when I heard Pastor’s voice, I went toward the office. The other person was going down the hallway in the other direction, so I only caught part of them going around the corner. It was a man. That’s all I know,” she says.
“And how long did you meet with Pastor Robins?” I ask.
“Almost an hour.”