Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro #4)(116)

“That’s bullshit,” Angie said.

“No, it’s true,” Ryerson said.

“How can…?” Angie dropped her hands from the table, stared off into space.

“This is America,” Ryerson said, “where every adult shall have the full and inalienable right to eat her young.”

Angie had the look of someone who’d been punched in the stomach, then slapped in the face as she’d doubled over.

Lionel rattled the ice cubes in his glass. “Agent Ryerson is right, Miss Gennaro. There’s nothing you can do if an awful parent wants to hold on to her child.”

“That doesn’t get you off the hook, Mr. McCready.” Ryerson pointed his cigar at him. “Where’s your niece?”

Lionel stared into Ryerson’s cigar ash, then eventually shook his head.

Ryerson nodded and jotted something in his notebook. Then he reached behind his back, produced a set of handcuffs, and tossed them on the table.

Lionel pushed his chair back.

“Stay seated, Mr. McCready, or the next thing I put on the table is my gun.”

Lionel gripped the arms of the chair but didn’t move.

I said, “So you were angry at Helene about Amanda’s burns. What happened next?”

I met Ryerson’s eyes and he blinked softly, gave me a small nod. Going straight at the question of Amanda’s whereabouts wasn’t working. Lionel could just clam up, take the whole fall, and she’d stay gone. But if we could get him talking again….

“My UPS route,” he said eventually, “covers Broussard’s precinct. That’s how we stayed in touch so easily over the years. Anyway…”



The week after Amanda’s sunburn, Lionel and Broussard had gone out for a drink. Broussard had listened to Lionel pour out his concern for his niece, his hatred of his sister, his conviction that Amanda’s chances to grow up to be anything but a mirror of her mother were slipping away day by day.

Broussard had bought all the drinks. He’d been generous with them, too, and near the end of the night, when Lionel was drunk, he’d put his arm around him and said, “What if there were a solution?”

“There’s no solution,” Lionel had said. “The courts, the—”

“Fuck the courts,” Broussard had said. “Fuck everything you’ve considered. What if there were a way to guarantee Amanda a loving home and loving parents?”

“What’s the catch?”

“The catch is: No one can ever know what happened to her. Not her mother, not your wife, not your son. No one. She vanishes.”

And Broussard had snapped his fingers.

“Poof. Like she never existed.”



It took a few months for Lionel to go for it. In that time, he’d twice visited his sister’s house to find the door unlocked and Helene gone over to Dottie’s, her daughter sleeping alone in the apartment. In August, Helene dropped by a barbecue in Lionel and Beatrice’s backyard. She’d been driving around with Amanda in a friend’s car and she was fucked up on schnapps, so fucked up that while pushing Amanda and Matt on the swings, she accidentally pushed her daughter off the seat and fell across it herself. She lay there, laughing, as her daughter got up off the ground, wiped the dirt from her knees, checked herself for cuts.

Over the course of the summer, Amanda’s skin had blistered and scarred permanently in places because Helene occasionally forgot to apply the medicine prescribed by the emergency room doctor.

And then, in September, Helene talked about leaving the state.



“What?” I said. “I never heard this.”

Lionel shrugged. “Looking back, it was probably just another of her stupid ideas. She had a friend who’d moved to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, got a job at a T-shirt shop, told Helene how it was sunny all the time, drinks were flowing, no more snow, no more cold. Just sit on the beach and occasionally sell T-shirts. For a week or so, it was all Helene talked about. Most times, I’d have brushed it off. She was always talking about living somewhere else, just like she was sure she’d hit for the lottery someday. But this time, I dunno, I panicked. All I could think was: She’ll take Amanda. She’ll leave her alone on beaches and in unlocked apartments and she won’t have me or Beatrice around to pick up the slack. I just…I lost it. I called Broussard. I met the people who wanted to take care of Amanda.”

“And their names were?” Ryerson’s pen hovered over the pad.

Lionel ignored him. “They were great. Perfect. Beautiful home. Loved kids. Had already raised one perfectly, and now she’d moved out, they felt empty. They’re great with her,” he said quietly.

“So you’ve seen her,” I said.

He nodded. “She’s happy. She really does smile now.” Something caught in his throat, and he swallowed against it. “She doesn’t know I see her. Broussard’s first rule was that her whole past life had to be wiped out. She’s four. She’ll forget, given time. Actually,” he said slowly, “She’s five now. Isn’t she?”

The realization that Amanda had celebrated a birthday he hadn’t witnessed slid softly across his face. He shook his head quickly. “Anyway, I’ve snuck up there, watched her with her new parents, and she looks great. She looks…” He cleared his throat, looked away from us. “She looks loved.”