Tuesday morning I staggered out of bed, let Coco out to do her business in the yard, stumbled through breakfast, and supervised the children’s face washing and tooth brushing while gulping down copious amounts of strong black coffee. I usually spiked my coffee with half and half, but I didn’t want to dilute the caffeine that I was counting on to jump-start me out of a semicoma so I could drive the kids to school without running the car off the road. Paul would have helped, of course, but earlier, after hugs all around, he’d hurried off to the Academy to make arrangements for someone to take his classes. He promised to meet me back at Spa Paradiso as soon as he could get away.
At St. Anne’s Day School, after Chloe and I escorted Jake to his classroom, we stopped by the office, where I intended to explain about Timmy. As it turned out, no explanation was necessary. The school secretary, normally a relentlessly cheerful sort, wore such a long face that I could tell she already knew.
“Is there any news this morning?” she asked.
Struggling for control of my emotions, I shook my head.
“Chloe? Do you want to sit down for a minute?” I directed my granddaughter to one of two chairs arranged at right angles to an end table in a nearby corner. “Do you have a library book in your backpack?”
Chloe nodded, her ponytails bobbing. I was never any good at French braids, a failing that had marked me as a Bad Mother when Emily was going through the Terrible Twelves.
“Why don’t you get out your book and read it while I go to that little room on the other side of the desk and talk to the principal. Okay?”
I left Chloe pawing through her backpack. When I returned five minutes later, though, she wasn’t reading a book. She was out of her chair, kneeling on the floor in front of the end table where a copy of the Baltimore Sun lay open. Timmy’s picture was on the front page.
“That’s Timmy, Grandmother!” Chloe said, looking up from the paper with excitement dancing in her eyes.
“I know.”
“Is Timmy famous?”
I sat down in the chair next to her, my heart pounding. “Yes he is, Chloe.”
Any doubts I had about whether Chloe had actually read the article vanished when she asked, “Grandma, what does ‘abducted’ mean?”
“Abducted means stolen.”
Chloe’s pale eyebrows disappeared into her bangs. “Somebody stole Timmy?”
“I’m afraid so, Chloe. But, your mommy and daddy, and your granddaddy and I, are trying very hard to find Timmy and bring him back home.”
“My mommy says that stealing is very bad.”
“Your mommy’s right. That’s why the police are helping us find the person who took your little brother away.”
Chloe hung her head, then studied me sideways through her eyelashes. “I stole a candy bar once at the grocery store. Daddy made me take it back and say sorry.”
“And the police are going to make the person who took Timmy bring him back and say sorry, too.”
Chloe’s worried frown vanished. “I’m gonna tell about Timmy at Show and Tell!”
I tugged lightly on the end of one of her ponytails. “Maybe we can keep it a secret for just a little while, Chloe. When Timmy comes home, then you can tell. Okay?”
“Is Timmy coming home today?” she asked as I helped her shoulder her backpack.
“I don’t know, pumpkin, but I hope so.”
“Is he coming home tomorrow?”
Conversations with Chloe had a way of spiraling out of control. She was perfectly capable of trotting out every day of the week between now and the Fourth of July, so I quickly changed the subject to a trip we’d taken to Disney World the previous year, and we chattered about Pirates of the Caribbean and Thunder Mountain as we walked hand in hand down the sidewalk to the parking lot.
At Hillsmere Elementary five minutes later, Chloe’s teacher was waiting for us in the school office. Again, no explanations were necessary. While Mrs. Rogers escorted Chloe to her classroom, the school principal urged me to allow my granddaughter to chat with the school psychologist, a plan I vaguely agreed to, thinking I should have asked Emily about it first.
By the time I got to St. Catherine’s on the corner of Ridgley and Monterey, the caffeine had kicked in. I felt wired, every nerve in my body bristling with electricity. I hadn’t been so juiced since Oberlin, when I pulled two all-nighters in a row writing a term paper on Stendahl. If I had run into Timmy’s kidnapper at that moment, all the police would ever find of him would be bones and occasional pieces of skin.
I parked near the parish hall, cut the motor, and looked around. I was the only car in the lot.
I fiddled with the radio. I organized the glove compartment. I cleaned old Exxon receipts out of the console. Finally, I went looking for Eva, thinking that perhaps Roger had dropped her off on his way to work at the marina in Eastport.
Pastor Eva’s office was in the parish hall, through a door and to the left, just off a Plantation-style breeze-way that joined the parish hall to the church proper. I jiggled the doorknob, but the parish hall was locked. A note taped to the window told me Eva’d been called to Anne Arundel Medical Center to pray with a patient about to undergo emergency surgery and I should wait for her in the garden.
Taking my time, I wandered back along the breeze-way and stepped into the garden, the soles of my boat shoes scrunching comfortably on the graveled path. This is a real garden, I thought. It was filled with lilac, sweet william, mint, and such an abundance of flowers that it invited butterflies and hummingbirds that wouldn’t have been caught dead flitting about one of Ruth’s sterile, sculptured creations. Later in the summer zinnias and milkweed would be in full bloom at St. Catherine’s, and after that, sunflowers. In the fall, asters, phlox, purple cornflower, and goldenrod would turn the garden into a riot of Technicolor, a sight so beautiful that even parish asthma sufferers had not dared to complain.
I sat down heavily between two deep pink azaleas on a bench dedicated to a parishioner who had been killed in the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. With my back to the plaque, I tried to put all thoughts of death out of my mind.
The sun was just inching over the trees, touching the garden here and there, awakening the butterflies that clustered on fence posts and flat rocks, sluggishly stretching their wings, preparing for a busy day gathering nectar. On my right, a hedgerow of forsythia was a blaze of yellow, separating me from the traffic whizzing by on Ridgley Avenue.
Bathed in sunlight, I closed my eyes, wincing as the inside of my eyelids scraped over my eyeballs like dry sandpaper. In spite of all the caffeine I’d consumed in the previous twenty-four hours, I felt I could fall asleep on this bench, uncushioned hardwood and all. I could sleep here for days and days and days. Yet I had to keep going, do whatever it took, for Timmy’s sake.
“Hannah?” Eva’s voice spiraled down, as if through a tunnel, to wherever it was I had gone. “Hannah, it’s Eva.”
I felt a hand on my shoulder and dragged myself into consciousness. “Eva, I’m sorry. I was somewhere in La-La Land.” I rubbed at a crick in the back of my neck.
“I hated to wake you.”
I managed a weak smile. “It’s so peaceful here in the garden. Sitting here, a gal could almost pretend she didn’t have a care in the world.”
“Would you like some coffee? I just put on a fresh pot.”
“Thank you, yes. Although I’m pretty wired.”
“Come.”
Although Eva wore black slacks and a rose-colored short-sleeved silk blouse with a clerical collar, something about the way she stood there with her arms extended, palms up, reminded me of a picture in a book of Bible stories I’d had as a child. Suffer the little children to come unto me. My head swimming, I rose from the bench, staggered, and grabbed her hands for support. “He’s just a little boy,” I sobbed. “He’s only ten months old. How could anybody…?” Eva folded me into her arms, and I began to weep, refusing to be comforted. I threw back my head and screamed to the sky, “Why, God, why?”