“Mrs. Silver, my partner’s daughter is missing and the last person her daughter communicated with is your son Dylan. So you can understand her concern,” he informed her. He was stern but soft.
She looked at me, I thought I saw pity in her eyes, but it was probably just confusion.
“Dylan called. He was very upset about someone getting hurt. He said he just needed to be by himself. I gave him your number, he promised he would call you.”
“Well he didn’t!” I yelled at her. “If you hear from him, you tell him to have my daughter call me. You find out where he is and you call me. Do you understand?”
She nodded.
“Detective, I know my son and he would never, never hurt anyone. If your daughter is with my son, she’s fine, I know my son,” she insisted.
I didn’t say anything, I just wanted to slap her. No one knows his or her children, I thought now. I thought I knew my daughter, I now knew I didn’t. My partner Joe didn’t know that his daughter would try and take her life.
No
, I thought,
we may think we know our children, but we really don’t.
I couldn’t figure out where to go next, so we headed over to the rectory to Father Murphy. It was getting late, and I knew that Mass was over and he would probably be with Sunday’s youth group in the gymnasium, where on a normal day, my daughter should be. Now I was thinking that normal was an elusive thought.
Chapter Eleven
The Roman Catholic Church at St. Mary’s was a large, gothic-style building that had two towers on either side of the front of the building, which was constructed of Belleville stone in 1890. The building featured various sized stained-glass windows and large, exquisitely carved wooden doors.
Behind the main building stood a much larger and more modern redbrick structure, which contained the school and the business offices. Behind that building was a less-elaborate building, which housed the living quarters of several of the clerical staff.
To the north of that building was the new gymnasium donated by several philanthropists whose families had been members of the church for generations since the church’s inception. Although the majority of the population in this area of the Catskill Mountains was of Jewish descent, the church’s youth group was non-denominational and served the entire community.
The floor of the gymnasium was a bustle of noise, with teenagers hanging out, playing Ping-Pong and bumper pool. It looked like a scene from my youth with not an electronic game in sight. I scanned the room for Bethany, but whatever false hope I envisioned was dashed when I couldn’t find her face in the crowd. My hopes were dashed when I realized she wasn’t there.
“Jean?” Father Murphy came up behind me.
“Father, have you seen Bethany?” I blurted out.
His brows turned inward.
“No, I haven’t. I thought she would come to the group today.”
I looked around again; I recognized Katie Hepburn and her friend Lisa Padilla. I bee lined it straight over to them.
“Where is he?” I grabbed Katie’s arm.
Father followed Marty and me and made an attempt to quickly defuse the situation by gently taking a hold of my forearm.
“Where’s who?” Katie cried out as she pulled her arm away and rubbed it, as if I really had hurt her. Perhaps I did.
“Dylan! Where is Dylan Silver?” I spoke in almost a hiss as I became more and more agitated.
She threw back her hair as if she was a model posing for the camera.
One of the other girls who had started to crowd around us shouted out her resentment. “Hey!”
It took a moment to put the name to the face. It was Tiffany, the girl that had found Jamie’s body, the one with nervous tic. I hadn’t noticed before, but her face was covered in freckles. I felt like ripping each one off her face one by one.
“Jean, please!” It was Father Murphy interceding, as he tried to calm me down. “Please, tell me what’s wrong,” he urged, making an effort to defuse the situation.
Marty was the one that spoke to him, I was too incensed to speak.
“Bethany is missing, Father, we think she’s with Dylan Silver, and we can’t locate either of them.”
“Please, come into my office,” said Father Murphy. He looked at the girls. “You too, all of you.”
The girls paraded behind us, Marty taking up the rear. We walked into a small office that was sparsely furnished. A metal desk with a couple of beat-up vinyl covered chairs sat in the center of the room. Soccer balls and pool sticks were sitting in a cardboard carton in the corner. On the wall behind the desk stood a flimsy bookcase that looked like it was made of particle board.
“Girls, do you know where Dylan is?” The priest positioned himself on the corner of the desk as we all crowded into the small room.
It was Lisa who spoke first. “Honestly, Father Murphy, we don’t. We haven’t seen Dylan since that night.” She turned and looked at me. “Honestly, Mrs. Whitley, we haven’t seen him.”
I don’t know why, but I thought that I believed her.
“Do you know where he would go, Lisa? Do you have any idea where Dylan might go? To think? To get away?” I used the terminology that his mother had used to describe the disappearing act. I pleaded with her. She shook her head.
“Lisa, I need you to answer me honestly. I need to know, did Dylan kill Jamie?” I knew I sounded like I was begging her for an answer.
“No, ma’am, I don’t think he would, really. Dylan was just mad at Jamie because she was being mean to Tiff and me. Dylan didn’t like when she acted like that, but he wouldn’t hurt her. Or Kimberly,” she added.
I looked at the other girls. “Do either of you know where I could find him?” It came out more sharply than I intended. I knew I had to play them like they were playing me.
It was Katie that answered.
“Dylan likes to hang out at the lake. There is a kind of old shack down there that he used to go to.”
At that moment, my phone rang. I grabbed it. I could barely get out a “hello.”
“Mom?” It was my daughter. My heart skipped two beats.
“Damn it, Bethany, where are you?” I screamed into the phone.
“Mom, listen to me. Please!”
I looked up. Everyone was staring at me. I walked out of the room and found a quiet corner.
“Okay, I’m listening. Where are you?” I said, willing myself to calm down.
“I’m with Dylan. Mom, please don’t be mad. I can explain. Please… you have to listen.”
I swallowed the spit that I had been unconsciously holding in my throat. “Okay, Bethany,” I said exasperated. “Come home and we’ll talk.”
“Mom, promise me you won’t arrest Dylan. Promise me,” she pleaded.
“Bethany, I can’t promise that, he is a suspect in the murder of Jamie Camp and an attempted murder of another.”
“Mom, I swear, he didn’t do it, please—you have to promise me.”
Marty had come out of the room and was waiting for me. “Okay, Honey, I promise. Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
I heard her whisper to her accomplice. She came back to the phone. “We’re at the old ice cream shack by the lake. Mom, remember—you promised.”
“I’m on my way. Don’t you dare move.” I motioned to Marty that a crisis was averted. I turned to look at Father Murphy and the three girls. Only Lisa looked like she was even remotely concerned about what was going on. I wondered if the other two girls were void of emotion.
I was hurrying to the car to get my daughter when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. Father Murphy had stepped outside to smoke a cigarette. I could swear he had one of those old-fashioned lighters, the kind of lighter that uses lighter fluid… the same type of flammable liquid that caused the burns on Jamie Camp’s face, and maybe Kimberly’s, as well.
But, I thought, the hell with everything else. My main concern right now was getting my daughter back safely, and giving her a piece of my mind and then grounding her for the rest of her life.
***
There were four different directions from which to enter the lake area. The route that Marty chose to drive came from the east, which would bring them directly to the shack that Bethany had mentioned in her phone call to her mother.
He drove down a bumpy dirt road canopied with oak trees. It was once the site where teenagers and young families spent their days swimming and playing Frisbee on this area of the lakefront. But times had changed, and what was once an active and populated area of the lake in the 1950s through the 1970s was now desolate and unused.
Bungalow colonies had once dominated the area. Mothers and children would spend the summers in the small cottages while their husbands stayed home in one of the cities crowded boroughs during the week and worked. Weekends would mean long commutes for the fathers, who would drive upstate on Friday after work to spend the weekend with their families, and then head back home to the city on Sundays so they could be back to work Monday. Those days were long gone because it took two incomes to sustain a decent lifestyle and mothers were also in the work force. The Catskills and a summer vacation were no longer an option for young families of the twenty-first century.
Jean
was out of the vehicle before Marty came to a full stop. In one hand, she held her cell phone, relaying her position to her husband Glenn, telling him that she had the shack in her sights where Bethany evidently had spent the night.
The small, white, wooden building that once served as an ice cream and candy dispensary for the visitors to the lake was now dilapidated and barely still standing. The door was hanging off the hinge, and the sliding window that once brought pure delight to children’s faces was just shards of broken glass.
Where Marty carefully watched every step he made, Jean marched on like a woman on a mission. Disconnecting her phone call, she hollered out her daughter’s name.
Marty didn’t recognize Bethany at first. It seemed that she had changed dramatically in a matter of months.
It hadn’t been that long since he had seen her.
Wasn’t it just weeks ago that she was still in that awkward stage?
He thought to himself. The girl had been all spidery legs attached to a long, thin torso, with not much evidence of budding maturity.
Yet here she was, standing in front of him. Gone was the boyish-looking figure, and she was way past the cusp of blossoming into a woman. He suddenly understood Jean’s fear and anxiety.
Bethany
was standing in the doorway, against the shack, half facing the direction they were coming from and at the same time watching over someone in the shadows, consciously protecting her friend from their view.
It was obvious to Marty that Bethany was reluctant to move from her position, as if she didn’t trust her mother not to betray her.
Jean
’s pace became more vigorous and her facial expression more animated as she reached her daughter. Marty could see that as she got closer to her daughter, she was uncertain about how she should react or which way to proceed. She didn’t really have to make a decision, because Bethany raised her hand up in an attempt to stop her mother from getting any closer.
Jean
stopped in her tracks and Marty stayed a few feet back, still unable to see if it was definitely Dylan hiding in the small building.
“Mom,” Bethany said, with caution in her voice. She looked over in Marty’s direction, trying to calculate whether or not he presented a threat.
“You promised. You said you would listen, you said you weren’t going to arrest him,” she stammered.
Then, suddenly, she stood up straighter, making herself taller, as if she was standing in defiance. She was taking a stance in an effort to protect her friend, even if the approaching enemy was her own mother.
“Bethany, what the hell were you thinking?” was the only thing that Jean managed to vocalize, her anger now overcoming her fears. Her anxiety had vanished, now that she knew her daughter was not in any immediate danger.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Damn it, Bethany! Where is he?” Marty watched the transformation in amazement. Jean was now morphing back into cop mode, shedding her maternal persona like a snake sheds its skin. The minute that Jean had concluded that Bethany was safe and unharmed, she no longer was the child’s mother, but a cop on the job.