Last to Know: A Novel(67)
He’d also caught the flicker of concern beneath Rose’s quiet words. “You really don’t know where Diz is?”
She lifted a shoulder in a helpless shrug. “Y’know, he just went out for a walk, I guess. He had his binoculars. He hasn’t taken the boat—I mean, he wouldn’t anyway without asking permission. Wally never lets any of our kids go out on the lake alone.” She half smiled, remembering something Diz had said. “Whenever Diz got fed up and threatened to leave, he’d say he’d go and live on the island with the badgers. I told him they didn’t have fries or chocolate there so he always reconsidered.”
“Where did he pick to run away to instead?”
“Nowhere, actually.” Rose frowned, trying to think. “Diz is not the kind of boy to run away. He kind of likes it here at home, even with Wally and … well, everything that went down. He was ‘supportive.’” Her eyes met Harry’s anxious ones. “In fact, just the other night he said to me, it’s you and me alone here, Mom, I’m gonna take care of you.”
“Obviously you’ve been calling him, he’d have heard the bell.”
“He always comes for that, he knows it means suppertime.”
“Then I think we’d better go look for him.”
Harry called Squeeze, who galloped from the bushes and skidded to a stop, then sat, head tilted, eyes fixed on Harry, awaiting instructions. Squeeze had no official training as a search dog; it was simply a natural instinct in him and he had worked many disaster scenes, sniffing out victims.
Rose went to salvage one of Diz’s as yet unwashed T-shirts from the laundry room, then gave it to the dog to sniff. Then she put on sneakers and she and Harry followed the dog as it took them on a narrow trail framed in brambles ripe with berries, dark with juice. Behind them the hill buzzed with cicadas; in front of them the lake gleamed gray as the dusk. The dog stopped here and there but Harry could tell it had no lead. It was getting dark and his concern was rising.
He said, “We’d better go back and get help.”
Rose closed her eyes and gave a horrified little gasp. “You don’t mean … you can’t think something might have happened to him?”
Harry put an arm around her shoulders and said as confidently as he could, “I’m not thinking anything yet, Rose, only that your boy should be home and he’s not. It’s getting dark and we need to get up a search party. He might have fallen, he could have broken a leg, lost his way.”
Back at the house Harry got on the phone to the local police station. A search party was hastily organized, firemen arrived in their truck, sheriffs in black-and-whites, surprised neighbors asked what was going on, offering immediate help; another search party was organized from the village. Within an hour the now-dark woods were being systematically combed for any sign of Diz.
Wally came home, and Roman and the twins. Rose was trying to keep the panic out of her voice when she told them what was going on. They immediately went out to help, calling for Diz, searching the sandy shore road, flashlights gleaming into the undergrowth.
Then local TV arrived with a sympathetic young man, and Rose, frantic, went on camera holding up a picture of Diz and asking anyone who might have seen him to contact the sheriff’s office.
Wally and the twins stood beside her. “He’s just a lost boy,” Wally said simply. “Please help us try to find him.”
The hearts of those watching went out to them. All except for one. Actually two, because at that moment Diz was unconscious and unaware he had been kidnapped. He was not even able yet to think about where he was. Or what might happen to him.
51
Mal was still jet-lagged, hungover, and exhausted but she was feeling good. When she’d kissed Harry goodbye at Boston’s Logan air terminal, she’d watched him climb into the unmarked police car that met him, driven by Detective Rossetti, of course, and in which she, a mere civilian, was not allowed to ride. She regretted leaving Harry but the endless-seeming flight from Paris in economy, because that was the way Harry traveled, had left her creased, cramped, and with freezing feet. Where did all that icy air that swept around one’s legs come from when the rest of the plane’s air felt like warm mush. They didn’t even have those small round buttons you used to be able to twist in your direction anymore; now “air” on a plane was universal: you got what they gave you.
She had not even envied Harry his police car; the limo that had met her felt pretty good. As did the shower later, clothes stripped en route to the bathroom, hair and skin soaking up water like a sponge, even the shampoo that got in her eyes was okay. Dried off, wrapped in her best robe—gray plush, old and baby-soft, wet hair flapping round her shoulders, a glass of Napa Sauvignon Blanc in hand, complete with two ice cubes just the way she liked it—not something she would ever do in front of wine purists but Mal liked her beverages with an edge of chill—she slumped on the sofa, opened her iMac, and Googled Bea Havnel.
Instantly, Bea was looking straight at her with those unafraid blue eyes: calm, composed, almost regal in her bearing. Harry was right, this was no shrinking violet; Mal could swear the woman was enjoying the media attention, the notoriety even, which obviously she was confident she would shake off. Her very stance seemed to invite the watcher to dare to accuse her, this lovely gentle young woman, of any crime, other than being present when her mother burned to death with a knife in her eye, and being there when Jemima Forester was found with her throat cut. “Unfortunate circumstances,” as Mike Leverage had no doubt said. Mal thought he was right.