I went back downstairs. When Jill came, she didn’t try to offer any mitigating explanations for Matt’s whereabouts. We were cleaning up the mess from the broken canisters in the kitchen when the Pinkerton man arrived. He and Jill and I sat in the living room. I gave him several photographs of Matt from last summer and a studio portrait of Sarah and Nathan I’d had taken on a whim at Sears a few months before. I told the detective about Matt’s not calling and what the hotel manager in Orlando had said about the room being empty.
“Can you find them?” I said.
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Mrs. Drobyshev. It’s Wednesday; your husband isn’t due back in Boston until Friday. With a little luck, he’ll call today with some lame excuse and all this will be a welcome waste of time.”
“In other words, you think I’m overreacting.”
“No, not at all. You were wise to get us involved so quickly. If he
has
abducted the children, the sooner we start looking, the better chance we have of finding him. Meanwhile, I’m going to have to ask you some questions to see if we can come up with anything else that could help our investigators.”
The interview was exhaustive. I tried to be brutally honest. If the detective or Jill—who knew most of it but was undoubtedly hearing some of my starker admissions for the first time—thought I was a lousy wife and mother, I didn’t care. I was past the point of lying about any of it; I just wanted to see my kids again. The detective took copious notes. He said it was important to know that Sarah had a cast on her arm because it made her stand out and people would remember her. Before he left the house, he got paged on his beeper. He asked if he could call his office in private, and I showed him to the study.
When he came out, he said, “Well, I wouldn’t call it good news exactly, Mrs. Drobyshev, but it’s a start. Airline records show that your husband and children took a flight to Memphis, Tennessee, Monday morning.”
“Memphis?”
“We’ll get our people down there on this immediately.” He stuffed his notes in his briefcase. “Memphis. Smart move. Middle of the country. Means we’ll have to cover a lot more ground.” He was thinking aloud; then he looked at my face and realized his mistake. “But don’t worry, we’ll find them.”
“
Will
you?”
He forced a reassuring smile. “We’re good at what we do.”
I called Thorny and told him what I had learned. He said Amanda was on her way to the city to meet him and they’d catch the next shuttle out of LaGuardia for Boston. I didn’t try to act tough and tell them not to bother. Jill stayed with me until they arrived and promised to come back the next day. I was supposed to go to the movies with my friend Anita that evening, but I called her to cancel, saying I’d come down with a summer cold. I couldn’t bring myself to broadcast what I so desperately didn’t want to be true.
Griffin called at some point. He wasn’t due back until Saturday. He offered to fly home, but I said he should stay and finish his business, everything would probably be resolved in the next day or two. Maybe I was testing him, hoping he’d insist on coming home. He said okay, he’d wait to hear from me. As I hung up the phone, some part of me realized I didn’t want him here right now. In my mind I was already blaming him, thinking how none of this would have happened if he hadn’t come crashing back into my life. Which was both irrational and true. As the day wore on, when I wasn’t blaming him—or hating Matt—I was blaming myself. Hating myself, certain that everyone would be whispering about what a horrible mother I had been, saying I
deserved
to have the children taken away. Chances are most people already believed that anyway.
Every minute felt like an hour. I was chain smoking and chewing my thumbs raw, my mood swinging between catatonic silence and screaming rage. I couldn’t eat, didn’t want to sleep. Each time the phone rang, I was filled with a sudden hope, believing it was Matt come back to his senses. I wouldn’t let anyone stay on the line for more than a minute, afraid Matt would call and get a busy signal and change his mind. Thorny spoke with the phone company Thursday morning and arranged to have a second line for outgoing calls installed that afternoon. Amanda called Tillie for me and explained the situation but asked her to keep it quiet for now. Tillie said I could take all the time off from work that I needed.
Late Thursday afternoon a man from the Pinkertons called and talked to Thorny. One of their detectives had spoken with a clerk at the bus station in Memphis who said she had sold tickets on Tuesday to a man she was certain was Matt. She remembered the little girl with a cast on her arm. Matt paid in cash. She wasn’t positive, but she was pretty sure he bought tickets to Little Rock. The Pinkerton man said it was a huge break; his detectives were only two days behind and were going to start posting fliers with photographs of Matt and the kids. Thorny authorized them to offer a twenty-five-thousand-dollar reward to anyone with information that led directly to “the recovery of the children.” That was how the Pinkerton man wanted it worded; he wanted to make sure we didn’t call it a kidnapping. Matt and I had agreed he could take the children on vacation to Disney World. Flying off to Tennessee wasn’t something we’d talked about, but as long as he brought the children home on Friday when he was supposed to, it would be hard to claim that he had broken any laws.
“Oh my god, Daddy,” I said. “Twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“Don’t worry about the money, sweetheart.” He put his arm around me. “We want to catch the son-of-a-bitch. That’s all that matters.”
I was awed by the way he had taken charge of the situation and touched by his concern. It was so much more than I had expected, and I think he may have even surprised himself. He was not a doting father or grandfather, but this violation had struck a nerve. This wasn’t the usual Thornhill fiasco, someone screwing up with their foibles and bad habits; this was an assault on the whole family. As I watched Thorny’s steely resolve, I understood for the first time why he’d fared so well on Wall Street.
***
On Saturday, after the deadline had passed, Thorny and I went to see the Boston police. We were careful not to mention that Matt had been a cop, fearing they would automatically close ranks around him and put us at a disadvantage. If the sergeant who listened to our story recognized Matt’s name, he didn’t let on. He laced his fingers over his broad chest and pretended to be interested.
When we were finished, he said, “Listen, folks, I sympathize with you. I really do. I can see how hard it must be for you with all this waiting. But you have to understand, he hasn’t been gone that long. Cases like this usually resolve themselves in a couple weeks. The parent gets tired and runs out of money; the kids are whining to go home. So he calls some friend or family member who talks him into doing the right thing. Bottom line is, your ex-husband was supposed to come back yesterday. I know it seems like a long time to you, but we have to let this thing run its course.”
Thorny said, “Couldn’t your department get in touch with your colleagues in Orlando, where the children were staying last? Or Memphis? We know their father took them there.”
“I’m gonna be honest with you, sir. Police departments don’t have the manpower to run around dealing with stuff like this. Do you have any idea how often some parent gets ticked off and takes off with the kids? We’re talking about beaucoup cases. There are hundreds of them here in Boston every year. We file a missing persons report and hope for the best. If our officers ran around trying to chase those people down, we wouldn’t have any time left to go catch the bad guys.”
I wanted to spit on him. Since when were kidnappers not the bad guys?
Thorny said, “Do you think we should contact the FBI?”
The sergeant shrugged. “Good luck with that.”
That afternoon the man from Pinkertons called. He said they’d gotten hundreds of leads, most of which proved to be dead ends. But one had come in from a motel clerk in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, who recognized Matt and the kids from the flier. She said Matt was growing a beard. He registered for the room under the name of Gerard Betz and stayed Tuesday night. He was driving a blue 1977 Chevy Malibu. The woman from the motel said there was no reason for her to take down the license number—the motel didn’t require that from their guests—but she remembered the car because her brother had one just like it. Using this information, the investigators were able to trace the car to a dealership in Little Rock. The used-car salesman remembered Matt well and said he’d paid cash for the car. He was also able to give the detectives the license number.
Thorny thanked the Pinkerton man and reminded him that Matt spoke Spanish so he might be headed for Mexico. Not to worry, the detective said. They had people south of the border where Matt and the kids would stand out more than they did in the U.S. With all the information they’d gathered, the Pinkerton man didn’t think it would take long to track him down.
I tried to feel confident. Looking at the Rand-McNally atlas, I traced the road from Little Rock to Arkadelphia with my fingertip and followed it down into Mexico. There were still moments when the entire situation didn’t seem real, as if Matt were engaged in a grotesque practical joke.
Jill arrived with her kids, all three of them bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked. She had been coming to see me every day. Amanda paraded the kids out into the backyard while Jill and I talked in the kitchen. I poured some iced tea for her and told her what the Pinkertons said.
“They’ll find them,” Jill said. “I know they will.”
“Do you really think so, Jilly?”
“Absolutely. I really do.”
I began to cry for the seven hundredth time. Jill reached across the table and held my hand. “I know it’s hard, but you have to stay positive, Luce. You
have
to.”
“I know.” But in my head I was screaming, Can’t you see this is killing me? You have it all, you mindless sow—devoted husband, perfect kids, vice-president of the La-fucking-Leche League. My life is a total wreck. Half the time when you look at me I know you’re thinking it’s all my fault. And it
is
. It really is.
“Jill,” I said softly, “did Matt ever…? I mean, you two have always been so close. He never said anything to you about…you know, doing anything like this?”
“Oh, Lucy.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I love you. You’re my best friend. How could you even think such a thing?”
“I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.” I rocked in my chair and covered my face with my hands. “They’re
gone
, Jilly. Really gone!”
Matt
“Can we go to IHOP for breakfast?” Sarah said. “Mommy likes to take us there.”
I looked at my watch. It was quarter to seven Monday morning, our bags packed and ready to go. “Sure. We have time before we go to the airport. I saw one just down the road.”
“We’re going on another airplane?”
“Yep, we’re going to a zoo. A big zoo.”
Nathan said, “I wanna see monkeys.”
“Sure, we’ll see lots of monkeys and lions and tigers and polar bears. You guys’ll love it.”
Sarah said, “Are we coming back to Disney World?”
“No, honey. We’ve been on all the rides and stuff. Let’s go have some new adventures.”
“Okay.”
I was relieved. I was afraid she was going to balk or start asking questions about why we were leaving here and going on an airplane that wasn’t taking us home. “Did your arm itch last night, hon?”
“Just a little.”
“Well, let’s sprinkle some more baby powder under your cast this morning just in case.”
I looked around the room to make sure I had everything. Then we walked down the hall to the elevator. I was carrying my bag and Nathan’s over my shoulder and pushing him in the umbrella stroller. I had gotten a small suitcase with wheels for Sarah that she could pull herself, Sundae strapped on top of the suitcase with a bungee cord.
There was a teenage bellhop at the concierge’s stand by the door. “Need some help with the bags, sir?”
“No, we’re fine, thank you.” It was a stupid mistake. I should have gone out one of the back doors to the parking lot. Chances were the boy wouldn’t remember us. He probably saw hundreds of guests a day. Still, I had to be more careful. I hadn’t checked out of the room so it would seem like we were still staying at the hotel.
The kids asked for pancakes with strawberries and whipped cream at the IHOP. I said fine. Anything to keep them happy. This wasn’t the time to take a hard line on what they ate. There was a jar of crayons on the table and paper place mats for them to color. As we waited for our order, I kept chiding myself for that brief exchange with the bellhop. That was actually my second stupid mistake. I had told Lucy we would be going to a water park today. I was trying to sound casual, in no rush to get off the phone. From the hotel window, I happened to be looking down on the blue neon sign for Cleo’s Splashatarium, and the lie came slipping out. How could Sarah go to a water park with a cast on her arm? Fortunately—or, rather, true to form—Lucy didn’t pick up on it.
I parked the rental car in the regular lot at the airport and locked it. The agency would discover it eventually. I had made the decision to go to Memphis before I left Boston. I heard they had a good zoo, which would be nice for the kids and make them feel like they were still on vacation. My next stop was still unplanned. From Memphis, I could go in any direction. I had no specific route or destination in mind. I figured I’d make it up as I went along, as if the randomness of our journey would make us harder to find. When I booked the airline reservations on the phone last night, I had been worried about using our real names for the tickets. I had a fake Massachusetts driver’s license, but it didn’t match the name on my credit card if the agent at the airport asked for my ID. A single man with two small children paying cash for one-way tickets could raise a red flag with the airline. It wouldn’t matter if the authorities began their search in Orlando or Memphis. I’d just be spending a few more hours as Matthew Drobyshev.
It was strange watching myself turn into a criminal. All the stealth and paranoia. The last two and a half weeks in Boston had been incredibly stressful. I slept no more than two or three hours a night, wrote down almost nothing on paper. I had never been a good liar, and sometimes when I talked to Lucy, I was afraid she could see inside my head. The things that concerned me most were money and how I would go about changing our identities.
I actually had plenty of money. With some wise investment advice from Thorny, I’d managed to more than double my mother’s life insurance payout in five and a half years. I had nearly a quarter of a million dollars, and the divorce settlement let me keep it all. My investments were mostly in stocks and mutual funds. Once I made up my mind to run, I sold everything and transferred the money to my bank account. The trick was making sure I had access to it in my new life. I couldn’t convert the money into cashier’s checks or stock certificates because they had to be made out to a specific individual, and I didn’t know what name I’d be using. I considered asking Uncle Joe to hold the money, or my old friend Sandor, whom I didn’t see much anymore but still felt close to. I knew I could trust them, but doing so would put them in a compromising position if the police came around and started asking questions. Javi had become my best friend, but I couldn’t tell him I was abandoning DSC. I made sure the books were immaculate and left him with a schedule of upcoming trips and detailed client records.
In the end, I felt that it was best to have all my money in cash, but I didn’t want to risk carrying it all with me and having it get lost or stolen. On the Sunday before I left for Disney World, I drove up to Monadnock State Park in New Hampshire and buried four plastic watertight containers, each holding fifty thousand dollars, in separate locations, and made a carefully drawn map. The rest I took with me, almost thirty thousand dollars in hundred dollar bills.
I wasn’t quite sure how I’d go about creating new identities for the kids and me. I’d seen TV shows about people using some dead person’s name and birth date, but I didn’t have time to explore that angle. Besides, I needed to do it for all three of us. I tracked down a small-time criminal from my days as a cop. For a thousand dollars I bought a fake driver’s license and three blank Massachusetts birth certificates, complete with the state seal, knowing I could fill them in with any names I wanted.
The kids loved the Memphis zoo. We had dinner and stayed in a motel room nearby. Lucy wouldn’t know we’d gone missing yet, but I was already starting to look over my shoulder. Tuesday morning I bought bus tickets for Little Rock. I paid cash and didn’t have to give the clerk my name. Nathan and Sarah fell asleep sitting side by side on the bus, while I was across the aisle from them with an empty seat next to me. I looked out the window at the green fields of Arkansas, a state I had never been to. The man in the row in front of me was snoring loudly. I glanced down at my feet and noticed a brown leather wallet. I assumed it belonged to the snoring man and had slipped under his seat. I picked up the wallet and found it was stuffed with cash. The man went on snoring. Tucked among the business cards and credit cards was a Tennessee driver’s license. Unlike the licenses in most states, it had no photograph. The man’s name was Gerard Betz. I slipped the license into my pocket. Betz awoke and stretched his arms over his head.
I stood up and looked over the seat. “Excuse me, but I think you dropped this.” I handed him the wallet.
He gave it a quick glance to make sure the money was there. “Jesus, thanks, my friend. I woulda been up the shit’s creek without a paddle.” He pulled a fifty-dollar bill from the wallet. “Can I offer you a token for your honesty?”
“No, no. Please. You would’ve done the same for me.”
He didn’t ask twice. “’Course I would. That’s what makes this country great, right? People bein’ good neighbors. Doin’ the little things.” He offered his hand to shake. “Thanks again. What’s the name, friend?”
“Dan. Dan Roble.” My old pal from high school, the first name that popped into my head.
“I’m Gerry Betz.” He was forty-three according to his license but looked much older. Sun-tortured skin and huge veiny nose. “Where you headed, Dan?”
“Little Rock.”
“Business or pleasure?”
“Family.” I shook my head. “Definitely not pleasure. I have my two little ones with me.”
“Say no more, my friend. I got three ex-wives and doin’ my best to make it four. My problem is I’m a
romantic
. I just can’t do like these young people nowadays, takin’ all the good stuff without makin’ any promises.”
“Those promises can get expensive.”
“You’re tellin’ me.” He laughed. “I guess that’s why they sound like prayers. You feel so damn good when you’re sayin’ them. Then you just go back and do what you always done.”
“Daddy?” Sarah said. “My cast is itchy.”
I asked a man in the Little Rock bus station if he knew of any good used car dealers. He directed me to a Chevy dealer a short cab ride away. I had already decided to use Betz’s license for identification instead of my fake Massachusetts ID. It would probably be days before Betz missed it, and he wouldn’t think to ask if someone had used it to buy a car. It took me less than twenty minutes to pick out a blue 1977 Chevy Malibu, which cost six hundred fifty dollars. For an extra twenty the salesman said he could have all the paperwork back from the registry in two hours.
“How’d you break your arm, sweet pea?” the salesman asked Sarah.
“I flew off the trampoline,” she said proudly.
“Awright! Does it hurt?”
“No, just itches.”
I took the kids to a small amusement park, and we spent the night at a motel in Arkadelphia. I doubted if Lucy would do anything more than shrug when I didn’t call that evening as I promised I would. She’d assume I forgot or was being spiteful. It wasn’t like she really wanted to talk to the kids. Asking me to call was just a way for her to act like she was being a good mother. She was too busy fucking Griffin to think about anything but herself.
The air conditioner in the motel didn’t work very well. It must have been over ninety even after the sun went down. I kept scratching my neck. I hadn’t shaved since Friday. My whiskers were flecked with gray. Legally, I still wasn’t a fugitive, but I looked like a bandito on the run. In the morning I shaved a distinct line under my chin to make it clear I was growing a beard.
Sarah picked up a brochure for the Arkadelphia Aquatic Park from the rack in the motel lobby. “This looks like fun, Daddy. Can we go there today?”
“We’ll see.”
The woman behind the desk said, “Whatcha do to your arm, punkin?”
I didn’t like the way the cast kept calling attention to Sarah.
We had a great time at the water park. Nathan was timid about most things, but he loved the water. I let Sarah get her cast wet so it would be easier for me to remove later that evening. The doctor said she’d have it on for a month. It had been three and a half weeks, but taking it off a few days early wouldn’t do her any harm.
When we got back on the road, I felt a strong pull south toward Mexico. But I figured that’s what Lucy would expect, so I headed west instead. I stopped at a motel outside of Norman, Oklahoma. The sun and water had tired the kids out, and they both fell asleep shortly after dinner. I cut off Sarah’s soggy cast with a pair of surgical scissors I’d bought at a pharmacy. I kissed her and rubbed some lotion on her dry, flaky skin. I could still hear Lucy dismissing the broken arm as the kind of thing that happens to kids every day. As if Griffin bouncing on the trampoline at the same time as Sarah wasn’t the cause. I watched television with the sound down low and reminded myself of all the reasons why she couldn’t be trusted with the children.
We spent one night in Wichita, another in Kansas City, where we went to see the Royals play the Twins. Sarah kept asking to talk to Lucy. I pretended to call and leave messages on the answering machine. I held the phone out and told the kids to say I love you, Mommy. Saturday morning I was keenly aware that I’d passed the deadline for returning. Lucy would have figured out there was a problem by now. I had no idea what she would do. Or
could
do. I doubted if she’d be able to convince the police to start looking for me immediately. They had bigger fish to fry, but my paranoia kicked in to high alert. I had purposely stayed off the interstates and stuck to the back roads, careful never to go over the speed limit. I didn’t want to get stopped for some routine traffic violation and have some local cop get suspicious.
After three days the car had taken on a lived-in quality—road maps on the dashboard, toys and trash scattered about, one of Nathan’s T-shirts, wet with drool from a recent nap, air-drying on the seat. My beard had begun to fill in. It definitely made me look older, maybe a bit more mysterious. In the late afternoon both kids were cranky and kept asking when we were going home. I stopped at a Dairy Queen in Bloomfield, Iowa. We got ice cream cones and went to the weedy picnic area around back. Three teenage girls were sitting at the next table feeding peanuts to a squirrel. The animal would scamper up close, hesitate, then quickly take the nut from their hands. When Nathan tried to say
squirrel
, it sounded like
curly
, and that became the animal’s name. One of the girls let Nathan take a turn feeding him. As Curly was about to snatch the peanut, Nathan got so excited he lunged forward and the squirrel scratched him on the finger. Nathan howled. The scratch was tiny, barely enough to draw blood. One of the girls ran into the Dairy Queen and came out with a first-aid kit. She put some antiseptic on the scratch and covered it with a Band-Aid. Another girl picked him up and started swinging him around to get him laughing again.
When the girls left, I said, “We’re lucky you only got a little scratch, Natey. Does it hurt?” He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve let you feed him.”
Sarah said, “It was an accident. Curly didn’t mean it.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Do you know what an accident is, Natey?”
“Bad.”
“Yes, accidents are bad. And they happen so fast, when you’re having fun and least expect it.”
“Like flying off the trampoline,” Sarah said.
“Exactly.” I’d been obsessing for the past three days, trying to come up with a context in which to frame my story for the kids. Now it began to unfold like it was telling itself. “That accident didn’t turn out so bad. Just a cracked wrist. But if you had fallen a different way, it could have been much worse. You could have hit your head on the swing set or broken your neck like that boy from Katydids who crashed into a tree with his sled. Now he’s paralyzed and can’t walk.”