"I suggest you talk to his teachers." He manages to start
again. "See if everything was jake at school. Ask his friends . . ."
"Fine, we will, but . . ." Paul offers.
"Anything you do along those lines will save us legwork."
Pomeroy taps a silver pen against the edge of the desk.
"What are you going to do? What about issuing an alert?"
"We have. We've passed around the information. Okay, ma'am.
We'll open it up wide. We'll set up on your house. Your place of business, too.
I'll put officers out in the neighborhood canvassing door to door. And I want you
to call in the minute your son shows up"—Pomeroy leads them out of the
glass-walled office—"because he's going to." Pomeroy smiles reassuringly. "He's
going to." And he shuts the door behind them.
"That man is not going to help us." Carol's words come, grim.
Paul says nothing.
The seasonal switch has been made to Eastern Standard Time,
and darkness is coming early in Indiana. The Buick drives up. After long hours
of looking, of hanging flyers, Paul steps out of the car, the way he has so many
times after picking Jamie up from soccer practice. Paul stands on the driver's
side. Carol, after an afternoon of waiting by the phone, appears in the front
door. She shakes her head. In the setting sun, Paul is a handsome, still-young
father. He appraises his home of comfort, his still-young wife before it. A
police cruiser is parked at the curb. He walks toward the house and she crosses
toward him. They come together and cling to each other in the driveway, neither
sure what they're holding on to now. The sun drops below the trees.
Paul eats a bleak dinner of cold cereal. Rigged to the phone
is a trace/recording device monitored by the two patrolmen outside in their
cruiser. Carol sits in a trancelike state next to him. A scratching is heard at
the kitchen door. Carol gets up and lets Tater in. His mouth drips blood. She
gets a dish towel and wipes him clean. He is uninjured—the blood belongs to
something else—and he rumbles off into the living room, excited at the smell of
the police sniffer dogs that have been through the house all afternoon. Paul
shakes more Lucky Charms into his bowl and the prize falls out.
"He was waiting for this. I'll save it for him." He puts it
aside on the table and breaks down, his shoulders shaking with sobs.
Carol stands across the kitchen. She doesn't go to him. After
some time he stops.
"Let's just go up to bed." He stands.
Maybe we'll wake up tomorrow and find out this was all a bad
dream, he wants to say, but does not.
Paul crosses to the staircase. Carol goes to the wall and
turns on the living room and porch lights.
"Let's leave these on in case." She follows him up the
stairs.
The door swings open, throwing light onto the mattress, which
the boy has pulled off the bed and angled against the wall over himself like a
protective lean-to. Rooster offhandedly tosses a grease-soaked fast-food bag
into the room and sniffs to himself at the attempted defense. Never seen that
one before. As if it'd work. He slams the door behind him. Again the room is
awash in darkness.
Paul lies on his back in the darkened bedroom, unfeeling of
the mattress beneath him. He floats in space defined only by his misery. Grief
that he could never have imagined surrounds him and tears at him from every
direction. Circumstances pulverize him, sap him motionless in the dark. A dull
rumbling sound filters in from the bathroom. There, sitting in a filling tub,
Carol thinks of Jamie when he was a three-year-old playing the Down the Drain
game, an amusement of his own invention. Better get the plumber, Mommy, I'm
gone. I'm down the drain. . . . Carol's pale back shakes. The water pounds
and thunders. She realizes the sound isn't the water but her screams.
A bold, mesmerizing novel about the woman known as "Typhoid Mary," the first known healthy carrier of typhoid fever in the burgeoning metropolis of early twentieth century New York.
Z, the novel about the life of Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald is at points charming and; like another reviewer, I kept thinking of the movie, "Midnight...
read more
Although heavy on the scientific details, which slowed down the story for me (OK, I admit, I was one of those liberal arts majors who skipped out on...
read more
Loved this book. Magical, quirky, enchanting I could go on. All books do not have to be literary fiction, sometimes it is just so comforting to read...
read more
British Parliament asks Amazon to clarify why it pays $9 million in income tax on $23 billion of UK sales.(May 20 2013) Amazon will be called back to give further evidence to members of the British Parliament "to clarify how its activities in the U.K. justify its low corporate...
Full Story
