Here and Gone(50)

He leaned on the bed, his weight rolling Audra over to look straight up at him, no pretending now.

‘My point is,’ he said, ‘you’re an addict, an alcoholic, a pill-popper. Everyone knows. Who’s going to believe you didn’t kill yourself? Now, tomorrow, I’m going to ask Dr Steinberger for a new prescription for you. After that, I’m going to stop by the liquor store. Then we’re going to get things back to normal around here.’

Patrick stood and left the room.

The next morning, after he’d left for work, Audra asked Jacinta to change Sean out of his school clothes while she made a phone call. Sister Hannah answered, gave Audra the address of a shelter in Queens, said they’d be expecting her and the kids.

Jacinta helped them down the stairs with everything they could carry. She embraced the children on the sidewalk, tears in her eyes. As a cab driver loaded their bags into the trunk, Audra took Jacinta in her arms.

‘Be careful,’ Audra said. ‘He’ll be angry.’

‘I know,’ Jacinta said. ‘I will.’

Sean and Louise waved at her from the cab’s rear window. Louise cried, knowing she’d never see Jacinta again. She clung tight to Gogo, and Audra wiped the tears from her cheeks. As the three of them huddled together in the back of the cab, she felt a joyful terror at what lay ahead.

Eighteen months ago, two years since she’d quit the booze and the pills. Audra swore that she would never be separated from her children again. No matter that Patrick had come after her with everything he had, his mother goading him along. Audra would cling to them until she could cling no more.

And yet they had been taken from her anyway.

Audra took a long shower; the guesthouse water was hot and plentiful. She turned the temperature up as high as she could stand it and scrubbed her body pink. The grime seemed embedded in every crease and hollow, and even after thirty minutes there was no clearing it.

But her mind cleared. Fatigued though it was, Audra began to reassemble the previous forty-eight hours into some sort of order. For a few moments she questioned herself again. What if they were right? What if she had done something terrible and couldn’t admit it to herself? And then she remembered Sean’s face as he told Sheriff Whiteside not to hurt her. Sean, her little man, standing up for her. She almost smiled at the thought, before she remembered Louise’s terrified sobs from the back of her car.

The time since then had compressed so that two days seemed like two hours. But her children had been out there, somewhere, all the while. Terrified, wondering why she hadn’t come and gotten them yet.

No, Audra knew Special Agent Mitchell was wrong. She had not harmed her children. And Mitchell was wrong about something else: Sean and Louise were alive. Audra felt it in her bones. Not some mother’s intuition nonsense; all logic pointed that way. Whiteside and Collins wouldn’t have taken her children just to kill them. There was something in it for them; the children were worth something. And they were only worth something if they were alive.

Who would pay someone to take her children? Only one answer made any kind of sense. She imagined her husband handing over a wad of his mother’s money, slipping an envelope into Whiteside’s hand.

A terrifying idea, but it meant Sean and Louise were alive. If her children were alive, then she could get them back. It was simply a question of how.

Audra shut the water off, stepped out of the shower, pulled a towel from the rack. A few minutes later her body was dry, her hair damp. She pulled on the clothes, the same shabby jeans and top she’d been given the day before. They still smelled of her sweat, but at least her body was clean.

She sat down on the bed, next to the nightstand and the old telephone on it. I must do something, she thought. Anything. The smallest thing would be better than sitting here knowing her children were out in the desert somewhere.

A knock on the door startled her. Audra got to her feet, crossed the room, put the chain lock in place. She unlocked the door and opened it a crack, no more than two inches. The landlady, Mrs Gerber, waited there, her face flushed.

‘There’s a man here insists on talking to you,’ she said, breathless. ‘I told him no, but he wouldn’t accept it. Says he needs to talk to you right away. He damn near kicked his way—’

‘A man?’ Audra said. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Wouldn’t say. I told him, tell me who you are and what you want, but he just pushed right past me. I’ve a good mind to call one of those police officers over here to put him out.’

‘What does he look like?’

Mrs Gerber seemed to gather herself as she thought. Eventually she shrugged and said, ‘Like he doesn’t belong around here. He’s waiting down in the dining room.’

Audra closed her door and followed the landlady down the stairs to the entrance hall.

‘I don’t like this,’ Mrs Gerber said over her shoulder. ‘Strange men showing up and pushing their way in. I don’t need the trouble at my age. He’s in there.’

Audra followed the direction of Mrs Gerber’s finger to a set of double doors across from the foot of the stairs. One of them stood open, but she could see no one inside. She approached the door, wondering if she should knock. A stupid idea, she pushed the door open and stepped inside.

He stood up from the bare table, his face barely visible in the dimness of the room. But she knew him well enough.