“Mm-mm-mm,” Linda said, frowning. “A parental kidnapping ? Nasty stuff. Very bad. My cousin’s twin boys disappeared a few years ago. Their father drove them from Little Rock to San Diego, where he was shacked up with his girlfriend, would you believe?”
“Yeah, I’d believe. What did your cousin do?”
“Well, first she tried the Little Rock cops, which got her exactly nowhere. The kids were gone and out of their jurisdiction, and at that point, she didn’t have a clue where they were. Then she hired a private eye from Dallas, but still no dice. Finally she got connected with an outfit called the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, and they located the kids in less than a month. Put their pictures on a Web site, and a day-care worker out there in San Diego spotted them and made a phone call.” She shook her head. “You know, I used to worry about privacy and computers and the web and all that stuff, but not anymore. You got people stealing kids, they’ve given up their right to privacy, far as I’m concerned.”
“This woman says she’s working with the Center,” I said. “That’s how she located her daughter.” I pulled out the card Rachel Lang had given me. It had the Center’s address on it, and the case worker’s name and phone number. “I intend to give them a call before I talk to her.”
“Well, if that part of the story checks out, you can believe the rest,” Linda said decidedly. “The case workers review everything to make sure it’s a legit claim. My cousin had to give them copies of her custody papers and the police reports and everything, before they’d even talk about working with her.” She shuffled the deck of registration cards once more, and dropped one on the counter in front of me. “Excuse me,” she said, turning away. “I’ve got to go to the dining room for a coupla minutes. We’ve got a new kid waiting tables, and I want to make sure he knows what he’s supposed to be doing.” She heaved an exasperated sigh. “The last one we hired, turned out she couldn’t read the menu. Took us a month to get her trained, and then she ran off to New Orleans with the dishwasher. Sometimes I think I could have found an easier career path.”
The card on the counter was Rachel Lang’s. I copied down the automobile license plate—a rental, most likely—and the Orlando home address and phone number, then stuck the card under the vase of flowers where Linda could find it when she got back from the dining room. I stopped at the pay phone in the outer lobby, where a long-distance conversation confirmed that Rachel Lang had first requested the Center’s services two years before to institute a search for her missing daughter, Elena, and that she was now in Texas, following a lead. The story Lang had told me was checking out—as if I had needed any additional verification, after seeing the age-progressed photo and comparing mother-daughter noses.
The Pack Saddle’s main building, brown-cedar-shingled and with a red tile roof, is contructed like a large ranch house, with a half-dozen wings angling off in various directions. Rachel Lang’s second-floor west-wing room was large and comfortable, with chairs on the small balcony overlooking the river and a sweep of lawn, khaki-colored from the summer’s heat. I accepted the offer of a soft drink over ice and we sat outside on the balcony.
The sun had slipped below the western horizon and a flock of mallards was settling down for the night in the ferns along the riverbank. Nighthawks zipped across the lawn in search of winged snacks, and the tree frogs practiced their metallic call. Ms. Lang—Rachel, as she asked me to call her—began to tell her story, and I spent the next half hour listening and learning and asking questions, not just about Rachel’s experience but about parental kidnapping, a painfully tragic crime that destroys lives as surely as murder but is rarely sensational enough to hit the headlines.
Rachel’s tale wasn’t sensational by tabloid standards, and she told it in a quiet, steady, reportorial voice that underplayed its human drama. But even so, her story was terrifyingly, horribly
real.
While she was getting her accounting degree, Rachel worked as a bookkeeper in a large Orlando furniture store owned by her uncle. Following a complicated series of events that she didn’t explain, Rachel and her uncle were charged with tax fraud. (Although she didn’t directly accuse her uncle, I got the idea that he had set her up, and I wondered if a smart defense attorney could have gotten her off.) Both went to federal prison, he for ten years, she for six. At the time of her trial, Rachel was pregnant—the child had been conceived during a brief sexual relationship with a longtime friend—and a few months after she went to jail, she gave birth to Elena.
The child’s father, whose name was Jim Carlson, tried numerous times to persuade Rachel to marry him. She kept refusing him, and he angrily demanded that she surrender Elena to him. He sued for custody, but the court considered his history of intermittent unemployment and awarded temporary custody to Rachel’s mother, who had been caring for Elena since the child’s birth. Carlson was granted regular visitation rights. Rachel intended to go back to court to seek permanent custody as soon as she was released. But shortly before Elena’s second birthday, Carlson took the little girl to Disneyworld on a regular weekend visit and failed to bring her back. Father and daughter disappeared without a trace.
The child’s grandmother was devastated by Elena’s loss and held herself responsible. For Rachel, still in federal prison and unable to do anything to help her frantic mother, the pain was excruciating. Even though she had rejected Carlson’s repeated offers of marriage, Rachel had considered him a friend, and she felt betrayal and a racking grief, as well as anger both at herself and at him. If she hadn’t let her uncle manipulate her, she would be at home with her daughter now. If she had agreed to marry Carlson, she might somehow have prevented the abduction. The only thing that kept her going was her mother’s support and her academic work: She had enrolled as a graduate student in a prison program in psychology and was hoping to be certified as a therapist upon her release.
But Rachel had plenty of trauma of her own to work on. Obsessed with recovering Elena, her mother searched endlessly and tirelessly, far beyond the limits of her failing strength. Within the year, she was dead of a massive heart attack. Now there were three victims of the kidnapper’s crime, and Rachel was left to mourn both her daughter and her mother.
When Rachel was released from prison, she began her own efforts to recover Elena. “I was absolutely driven that summer,” she said quietly. “I finally figured out that when somebody steals your child,
you’ve
got to take charge of the search. There are too many missing kids and the authorities just don’t have enough people to do what has to be done. But I let the search swallow up my life. It was all I lived for, and that wasn’t healthy.” She touched her scarred face ruefully. “Then the accident happened, and I was left facing several years of rehabilitation and plastic surgery, and lots of thinking about who I was and what I needed to do. I had to accept the fact that finding Elena was my second priority. Getting well, putting my life back together, finding my right livelihood—all that had to come first.” She had just begun to heal and find some balance, when she learned, quite by accident, that Jim Carlson had died in a house fire in Miami only a few months after he abducted Elena.
Rachel’s face clouded and she shuddered. “I went into another tailspin, thinking that Elena might have burned to death with him. The Miami police and fire officials said they had recovered only one body—but the house had been completely destroyed. She was so small, just a little over two years old. What if her body had been buried in the rubble and carted off by the heavy machinery they brought in to clear the burned-out site? What if they hadn’t found her because they hadn’t known to look for a little girl?”
“Dear God,” I whispered. I was awed by the pain this woman had suffered, by the terrifying weight of the tragedies that had been heaped on her.
“I prayed a lot, too,” Rachel said matter-of-factly. “Then I learned from a family friend that Jim Carlson’s father had been seen in Atlanta some time before. With him had been a little girl who might have been Elena. The friend tried to talk to him, but Dr. Carlson walked away.”
Rachel attempted to trace the senior Carlson, who had lived in Miami, and discovered that he had sold his house and left his work—a successful dental practice—just after his son died. Convinced now that her daughter was still alive and with her grandfather, Rachel contacted the Center for Missing and Exploited Children and began searching in earnest: not just for Elena, but for Dr. Jack Carlson.
“Jack Carlson?” I asked, and then, incredulously, put it all together. “Jack Carlson, Carl Jackson! Dr. Carl Jackson, my dentist!”
“You’d think it would be easy to find a professional man, wouldn’t you,” Rachel said with a wry twist to her mouth. “After all, doctors and dentists are only supposed to practice under their own names and after they’ve legally met the state’s requirements for licensure. But it turns out that it isn’t all that difficult for a dentist to establish a practice under an assumed name, especially in rural areas or in big-city dental clinics. Clinic directors don’t always check references or medical credentials, and if an out-of-state dentist doesn’t voluntarily register with the state board of dentistry when he goes into practice, he probably won’t be discovered unless he somehow calls attention to himself.”
This information wasn’t particularly new or startling. I’d been involved in a distasteful case ten years or so before in which the defendant—our firm’s client—was a self-styled doctor who had practiced for nearly a dozen years in a Houston clinic under his dead brother’s name and credentials. He wasn’t found out until he was charged with embezzling the clinic’s funds. But still, this was Dr. Jackson we were talking about—excuse me, Dr. Carlson—whose hands had been in my mouth as recently as Monday. And he owed me a permanent crown.
Rachel drained her drink and set down the glass. “As I found out, Jack Carlson had taken Elena to Atlanta, where he got a job in a dental clinic. He left when my friend recognized him and moved to Syracuse. They were there for only about six months; then he took Elena to Boise, Idaho, and finally to Seattle, working in dental clinics along the way.”
“Did you do your own detective work?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I hired a guy who traced Carlson to Syracuse, then to Boise. But private detectives are expensive, and I ran out of money. I got lucky, though. The Center got a tip that he was in Seattle, where he married one of his patients, a widow whose husband had recently committed suicide, leaving her very well fixed. Carlson apparently used her money to buy a practice from a retiring dentist here in Pecan Springs and relocated once again. He must have thought that the trail was so cold by now that it was safe to settle down. He and his wife—Jennie, her name is—have even purchased a large piece of land and are preparing to build a house.”
I frowned. “But I thought you said you caught up with him in Seattle.”
“I did.” She sighed. “I flew there, but missed him by a couple of days. When Carlson and his wife took Elena and left town, they didn’t tell anybody where they were going. I couldn’t find a single clue to where they were headed.”
“How did you trace them to Pecan Springs?”
“A woman from this area E-mailed a tip to the Center. She said she’d seen Elena’s age-progressed photo on the Center’s Web site and recognized her. She also sent the Carlsons’ address, so when I got to Pecan Springs, I drove by their house. Elena and your son were out in the yard. I watched them, and after a while they rode their bicycles to your shop to work in the garden. It wasn’t hard to follow them there. I strolled around, pretending to look at your plants, but I was really eavesdropping on the children.” Her smile was crooked. “I liked what I heard, very much. Whatever else he’s done, Jack Carlson has brought up a bright, healthy little girl with a great deal of self-confidence and a strong self-esteem. I would give anything to have had Elena during her growing-up years, but I don’t think she has been badly damaged.”
“She thinks her mother died when she was born,” I said. “She says she dreams about her.” I left out the part about Melissa’s dream mother being blond-haired and blue-eyed and as beautiful as Princess Di. Children can be unintentionally cruel, expecting their mothers to be like the moms they see on television. Uncomfortably, I wondered if there wasn’t a lesson for me in this. If I had accepted Leatha as she was, rather than wanting her to be another Donna Reed—
“I’m glad I’m still alive for her,” Rachel said, “if only in her dreams.” She tilted her head, watching a young couple drifting lazily down the river in a red canoe. “I want to meet her. I want to tell her who I am, and that I’ve been searching for her for almost ten years. I need to tell her that I love her, that I want her to come and live with me and grow up as my daughter.” She turned to face me, and her voice became more urgent. “But I need to do all of that without traumatizing her, China. That’s where you can help. Elena likes and respects you. She trusts you. I believe she’ll accept what you say about me, about this situation. Will you help?”
I turned answers over in my mind. I had plenty of reasons to stay out of this complicated affair. The wedding, of course, and after that, the honeymoon. And there was all that sad business about Edgar Coleman, and Letty. But the Colemans were McQuaid’s problem, not mine. Most of the work for the wedding was done—and what was there to a honeymoon, except throwing a few clothes in a suitcase and boarding a plane? Anyway, it didn’t sound like Rachel needed me to do much more than talk to Melissa and intercede with Dr. Jackson and his wife. If it looked as if there were serious legal questions or the negotiations threatened to blow up, I could always call the Whiz. In fact, I should call her anyway. Chances were that she’d been involved in this sort of thing before and would have some suggestions on how to proceed. But the most important thing was my feeling for Melissa, who was a very special young woman. I owed it to her to help her learn the truth about her past, in as gentle and supportive a way as possible.