She grabbed the vanity top for support, as the room and memory whirled around her.
The little boy pedaled past her on a red tricycle. He was wearing a blue-and-white-striped sweater. He rode the tricycle around and around on the cracked sidewalk in front of the old brick brownstone, stopping to smile and wave at her. She hurried past him to the weathered oak door and banged hard with the brass knocker. She needed to talk to them.
“Let me in.” She pounded on the door.
A little boy on a red tricycle. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
The note. The card.
If anyone saw them . . .
If anyone put it together . . .
She hurried to the bedroom, the walls closing in around her. Hide it. Hide it quickly. But where? In a drawer, the closet, a book?
Her heart was pounding. Aubrey or the detective—they might walk in at any moment.
She reached for her hobo bag beneath the nightstand and shoved the card inside.
Her cell phone was on the bed, on top of the pile of mail. She stared at it.
What choice did she have?
She picked up the phone and lay down, crumpling into a fetal position. Then she hit the speed-dial button that connected her to the first man she had loved in a long, long time.
He answered on the first ring. “Are you okay, darling?”
She closed her eyes, but the spinning wouldn’t stop.
“Please come, Jonathan,” she said, praying she was doing the right thing. “I need you.”
CHAPTER 8
Aubrey hated that he’d gotten to her. That he’d made her so defensive. She had fled her mother’s office after Smolleck had finished questioning her, given her his business card, and assured her the FBI and police were doing everything possible to get Ethan back safely.
She was surprised he hadn’t asked her to take a polygraph, but maybe he was saving that for their next conversation.
She didn’t know what to make of Special Agent Tom Smolleck. His line of questioning and confrontational approach made no sense. Her parents’ college years and Mama’s illness couldn’t possibly be connected to Ethan’s disappearance. And Smolleck’s harping on the family dynamics and relationships disturbed her. Even the Simmers—as disagreeable as she found them—loved their grandson.
She couldn’t imagine them or anyone else in the family staging a kidnapping.
She checked the time. A little after four thirty. Kevin and Kim were making a statement to the press at five at their hotel. It infuriated her that the Simmers didn’t want her mother to be there. Through the dining-room casement window, she could see a couple of black sedans, a police car, and her mother’s old red BMW in the driveway. All the news vans were gone and had left behind deep, black ruts in the grass. She wondered where her father was—whether he had been invited to the press event or had returned to his girlfriend, wherever they were staying.
And how was Kevin doing with all this?
Did he know about the Simmers’ directive, or was he expecting Mama to be at the press conference?
She checked her phone for messages. No response from Kevin to her earlier text. She speed-dialed his number. The call went to voice mail. “Call me, please,” she said, then sent another text. Mama and I want to be at press conference. Simmers say no. What do you want?
Kevin probably wouldn’t get her messages if the man who had answered his phone earlier still had it, but she had to keep trying.
She went to the kitchen to get her mother something to eat and was momentarily calmed by the familiar sight of the round, white kitchen table, sunset-colored chintz curtains, and glass-fronted wood cabinets that had been painted white long before Aubrey’s family had moved here. On a small shelf was a photo of Aubrey’s grandmother as a young woman. Nana had lived nearby and had always been here when Aubrey came home from school.
With Mama and Dad preoccupied by their careers, Nana was the one who provided most of the hugs, reassurances, and Mallomars cookies—always with a glass of milk.
Aubrey often missed her grandmother, but she especially could have used a hug and a Mallomars cookie now.
She opened the refrigerator, surprised to find it fully stocked. Whole milk, orange juice, containers of fruit salad, string-cheese sticks, hot dogs, and snack-size bags of baby carrots. Her mother rarely kept much food in the house.
This was all here for Ethan.
She picked up the bag of carrots. The last time she’d been with Ethan, he had taken two small carrots and stuck one in each nostril, pretending to be a dragon.
“Do dragons eat carrots?” she’d asked.
He’d taken them out of his nose, then said with a big grin, “Only carrots with boogers.”
It was one of his favorite words. Boogers.
She transferred fruit salad to a plate with a few cheese sticks and a bag of carrots, then went upstairs.
A vague smell like vomit hit her when she opened the door to her mother’s room.
Mama was in a fetal position on top of the patchwork quilt, eyes closed. She was surrounded by mail and magazines, her phone close to her open hand. Her shoulder-length dark hair was uncombed, and her white button-down blouse was badly wrinkled and damp, as though she had spilled water on herself. The blouse looked like the one her mother had been wearing the previous day in the photo at the carnival. It was Mama’s typical uniform—white shirt and jeans—but Aubrey wondered whether her mother had bothered changing her clothes since yesterday.
The scene before her reminded her of those times when she was a child, and then again when Dad left eight years ago—her mother curled up in bed, eyes squeezed shut against some terrible pain.
Aubrey would darken the room and put cool washcloths on her head, whispering over and over, Mama, please be okay.
“Mama?” she said softly. “Are you sick?”
Her mother blinked. She seemed to be trying to focus on one point, as though the room were spinning.
“Is it the vertigo?”
“I was a little dizzy, but it stopped.”
“I brought you some food.”
“No, thank you.”