It was a good thing, the distraught mother gathered, that cases of missing/abducted children were relatively rare in the affluent Hudson Valley suburbs north of New York City, as crimes of violence in these communities were rare. This meant dramatically focused police attention, cooperation with neighboring police departments in Tarrytown, Sleepy Hollow, Irvington. This meant dramatically focused media coverage, replication of Marissa Banty’s likeness, public concern and participation in the search. Outpouring of sympathy, it would be called. Community involvement. You would not find such a response in a high-crime area, Leah was told.
“Something to be grateful for. Thank you!”
She wasn’t speaking ironically. Tears shone in her bloodshot eyes, she wanted only to be believed.
It was in the distraught mother’s favor, too, that, if her daughter had been abducted and hadn’t simply run away of her own volition, hers would be the first such case in Skatskill’s history.
That was remarkable. That was truly a novelty.
“But she didn’t run away. Marissa did not run away. I’ve tried to explain...”
Another novelty in the affluent Hudson Valley suburbs was the mysterious/suspicious circumstance of the “considerable” time lapse between the child’s probable disappearance after school and the recorded time the mother reported her missing at 8:14 P.M. The most vigilant of the local TV stations was alert to the dramatic possibilities here. Skats kill police will neither confirm nor deny that the department is said to be considering charging Branty, who has no previous police record, with child endangerment.
And how it would be leaked to this same TV station, the distraught mother had evidenced signs of “inebriation” when police arrived at her home, no one at the station was in a position to say.
So ashamed! I want to die.
If I could exchange my life for Marissa’s
Hours, days. Though each hour was singular, raw as a stone forced down the throat. And what were days but unchartable and unfathomable durations of time too painful to be borne except as singular hours or even minutes. She was aware of a great wheel turning, and of herself caught in this wheel, helpless, in a state of suspended panic and yet eager to cooperate with the very turning of the wheel, if it might bring Marissa back to her. For she was coming to feel, possibly yes there was a God, a God of mercy and not just justice, and she might barter her life for Marissa’s.
Through most of it she remained calm. On the surface, calm. She believed she was calm, she had not become hysterical. She had called her parents in Spokane, Washington, for it could not be avoided. She had called her older sister in Washington, D.C. She had not seemed to hear in their shocked and incredulous voices any evidence of reproach, accusation, disgust; but she understood that that was to come, in time.
I am to blame. I know.
It doesn’t matter about me.
She believed she was being damned calm! Answering their impudent questions and reanswering them and again repeating as in a deranged tape loop the answers that were all she had in the face of their suspicion, their doubt. She answered the officers’ questions with the desperation of a drowning woman clutching a rope already fraying to haul herself into a lifeboat already leaking water. She had no idea, she had told them immediately she had no idea where Marissa’s father was, for the past seven years there had been no contact between them, she had last seen him in Berkeley, California, thousands of miles away and he had had no interest in Marissa, he had sought no interest in his own daughter, and so truly she did not believe she could not believe that there was any likelihood of that man having abducted Marissa, truly she did not want to involve him, did not wish to seem in the most elliptical way to be accusing him... Yet they continued to question her. It was an interrogation, they sensed that she had something to hide, had she? And what was that, and why? Until finally she heard herself say in a broken defeated voice all right, yes I will give you his name and his last-known address and telephone number that was surely inoperative after so long, all right I will tell you: we were never married, his name is not my child’s name, he’d pretended even to doubt that Marissa was his child, we had only lived together, he had no interest in marriage, are you satisfied now?
Her shame, she’d never told her parents. Never told her sister.
Now they would know Leah’s pathetic secret. It would be another shock, a small one set beside the other. It would cause them to think less of her, and to know that she was a liar. And now she must telephone to tell them before they discovered it in the media. I lied to you, I was never married to Andrew. There was no marriage, and there was no divorce.
Next, they needed to know exactly where she’d been after she had left the Nyack clinic at 6:30 P.M. of the day her daughter had disappeared. Now they knew she was a liar, and a desperate woman, now they had scented blood. They would track the wounded creature to its lair.
At first Leah had been vague about time. In the shock of her daughter missing, it had been natural for the mother to be vague, confused, uncertain about time.
She’d told them that she had been stuck in traffic returning home from Nyack. The Tappan Zee Bridge, route 9 and road repair and rain but yes, she had stopped at the 7-Eleven store near her apartment to buy a few things as she often did...
And was that all, had that been her only stop?
Yes. Her only stop. The 7-Eleven. The clerk at the cash register would recognize her.
This was a question, a probing, that had to do with Leah Bantry’s male friends. If she had any, who would have known Marissa. Who would have met Marissa. Who might simply have glimpsed Marissa.
Any male friend of the missing girl’s mother who might have been attracted to the girl. Might have “abducted” her.
For Marissa might have willingly climbed into a vehicle, if it was driven by someone she knew. Yes?
Calmly Leah insisted no, no one.
She had no male friends at the present time. No serious involvements.
No one she was “seeing”?
Leah flared up, angry. In the sense of — what? What did “seeing” mean?
She was being adamant, and she was speaking forcibly. Yet her interrogators seemed to know. Especially the female detective seemed to know. An evasiveness in Leah’s bloodshot eyes that were the eyes of a sick, guilty mother. A quavering in Leah’s voice even as she spoke impatiently, defiantly. I told you! God damn I have told you.
There was a pause. The air in the room was highly charged.
There was a pause. Her interrogators waited.
It was explained to Leah then that she must answer the officers’ questions fully and truthfully. This was a police investigation, she would be vulnerable to charges of obstruction of justice if she lied.
If she lied.
A known liar.
An exposed, humiliated liar.
And so, another time, Leah heard her voice break. She heard herself say all right, yes. She had not gone directly to the 7-Eleven store from Nyack, she had stopped first to see a friend and, yes he was a close male friend, separated from his wife and uncertain of his future and he was an intensely private man whose identity she could not reveal for he and Leah were not exactly lovers though, yes they had made love...