The Wrong Family(39)

She ripped it open, and a flurry of paper drifted out, landing across the kitchen floor. Swearing, Winnie knelt to pick up the pieces. They were cut in different-sized rectangles. She held one up to her face and saw that they were printouts of online news stories. The first one read: Baby abducted in supermarket!

The story was of Rosie Jhou, taken from her stroller in the late nineties from a chain grocery store. Winnie remembered the story. As far as she knew, Rosie Jhou had never been found. That would make her over twenty today. But why would someone send Winnie this? She reached for another clipping, this one asking, Where is Karlie Karhoff? in bold across the top. Eight-month-old Karlie Karhoff had last been seen in the nursery of her family’s home in Montana. Her distraught parents said they’d put her to bed the night before, like usual. “She had a cold and was sleepy,” her mother, Hillary Karhoff, told authorities. But to their horror, they found her crib empty the next morning, baby Karlie gone.

Winnie reached for another, this time her stomach in her throat; it was about a missing Detroit girl named Hellie Armstrong. Hellie hadn’t made it to her second birthday party; she was taken from her yard a week shy of it while wearing her yellow Princess Belle dress. Her mother said it was going to be a Disney Princess party. By the time Winnie was finished picking up the pieces of paper, she held over a dozen clippings in her hands, which were shaking so hard she dropped them all over again. She stuffed everything back into the envelope, every child who had never been found, and quickly dropped it into the trash. The lid closed and Winnie placed a hand over her racing heart.

Rosie Jhou’s little face was in her mind as she took deep, gulping breaths. But she paused, the toe of her shoe pressing hard on the pedal of the trash can so that the lid sprang back. She stared down into the peels and rubbish, at her name and address handwritten on the envelope, and a chill swept across her body. That was a woman’s handwriting, she was sure of it. She shoved the envelope farther down, pushing the rest of the trash over it. Someone knew.



* * *



She spent the rest of the week and the weekend in a kind of shocked stupor. Everything made her jump, and the sound of Samuel’s loud TV shows set her on edge, their laugh tracks making her want to scream. Why did kids have to watch things that were so obnoxiously loud? On Friday night she put her hair into a ponytail, got into her sweats, and hid in the bathroom, citing cramps. Nigel and Samuel retreated to the den to play video games, leaving her to her own devices, which included obsessively Googling the stories of the kids in those articles. None of them had been found. None. She paced the bathroom floor in her socks, one arm wrapped around her waist, the other over her mouth. It was Josalyn she was thinking of, the petite blonde with the thin, ratty hair. The girl had one of those faces; she’d looked insolent and angry even when she hadn’t meant to. She’d looked no more than fourteen, though she’d been a woman of eighteen when she came to the program at Illuminations. Winnie remembered the bitten down fingernails, and the sleepy way her eyes looked when she’d first sat in Winnie’s car on the way to a doctor’s appointment. She had two STIs and half of her teeth were rotting in her mouth; other than that, Josalyn had been healthy of body. Her mind, on the other hand, was a stewpot of issues and she was often suicidal—the evidence of that on her wrists, scars slashed the wrong way, the way a fourteen-year-old girl might attempt. Sitting at a little table in Starbucks, Josalyn told Winnie that she’d almost overdosed on sleeping pills the year before in California. Winnie distinctly remembered the flat way she’d told her about her suicide attempts—very matter-of-factly. Her therapist said she was suffering from PTSD and handed her a diagnosis for Bipolar-1. She’d just been a kid to Winnie, some kid who needed help. Winnie had come home each night thinking—no, obsessing over Josalyn’s fate. Her coworkers told her that it was normal to have those feelings when you started out. But she’d gotten under Winnie’s skin, for whatever reason. Did it matter? She wanted to help her. She’d done the opposite.





      19


WINNIE

When Winnie’s phone lit up on Tuesday morning with a text from Amber, she was crossing Pike Street with her arms full of dried flower arrangements. She’d volunteered to pick up the flowers for the winter banquet at Samuel’s school.

The flowers, which you could buy from the market in huge, inexpensive bouquets, were sold dried through the winter. Winnie found that depressing. They crunched slightly in her arms as she waited for the light to change. She was freezing, her nose still raw from the cold she’d had last week. She wondered who on the school board thought bouquets of dead flowers were Christmassy, and why hadn’t someone invented a heated coat?

She had to hike uphill back to the parking garage where she’d left her car, so she didn’t read the text until the flowers were loaded neatly into the trunk, and even then, she was distracted as she glanced at her phone while she walked around to the driver’s side door. She had to read the text again, sure it was a mistake, clearing her throat incessantly as she did when she was anxious. Surely Amber, who routinely drank two glasses of wine with lunch, had it wrong. But Winnie also knew that Amber, who’d grown up in Brooklyn and had once shoved a man down a flight of stairs for touching her rear, was not the type of person to raise false alarms.

So Winnie typed a reply: Send the photo.