The Damp, Gray Gone Ch. 02

"And why were you angry?"

"None of your business."

He looked at the pretty sergeant, who gave a grim smile and took over the questioning.

"Did she say why she was dropping him off early?"

"Yes."

She waited for me to continue, but I was already a bit peeved by their attitudes and the tone of the interrogation. So fuck 'em: I'd answered the question; let them ask the next one.

"Okay, Professor," she said, her impatience showing, "why was she dropping him off early?"

"She said she was dropping him off early," I stressed, given that I didn't really know if she was telling the truth, "because there was nothing for Kyle to do at her apartment, he was bored, he missed his puppy, and she wanted to start prepping early for her big trial that started a couple of days ago."

"But you didn't believe her?" she asked, catching the qualifier I'd put on my answer.

I shrugged. "I didn't really think about it. If that's what she said, that's what she said."

"So you don't trust her?" Lieutenant Gavers asked, zeroing in for the kill shot I'd given him with my pedantic demand for precise answers.

"She's my ex-wife, Lieutenant. As of only about a month or so ago. So you'll excuse me if I don't exactly . . . if we're not really on the best of terms right now."

"So it was a bitter divorce?" he pressed.

"Is there a cheery one?"

"So it was bitter," Sergeant Adams said, writing in her notebook.

When I said nothing to her restatement, Lieutenant Gavers took over again.

"What did you say? When she said she was bringing him home."

"I told her to go ahead. Any plans I may have hoped for would be adjusted."

"Were you angry?"

"No."

"Not even a little?"

"No."

"You're telling me--"

"The proper way to ask the question, Lieutenant," I said, my voice going to pissed-off-professor-lectures-student mode, "is, 'How did her request to bring him home early make you feel?'"

He glared at my tone, and I glared right back at him.

"The answer to that question," I continued, "is frustrated. It was frustrating. We'd already rearranged the weekend schedule to give her time to get set up. Then she missed her first Wednesday night for the same reason. Now she was cutting short her first visitation for work. So I was frustrated. And sad, too. For Kyle. He doesn't deserve to play second fiddle in his mother's life."

I turned to Sergeant Adams, whose face softened and her gaze now avoided mine. "Write it down, Sergeant. 'Frustrated.' You didn't miss bitter, so don't miss this one."

She turned to Gavers, and he nodded. She wrote it down.

"Let's cut this short," I said. "She dropped him off at the curb--didn't even bother bringing him to the door or helping him with his duffle bag or anything--and that's the last I've heard from her."

"What about last night?" Sergeant Adams said. "It was a Wednesday. Did she show up?"

I shook my head. "Without even bothering to call. Just blew him off. And yes, that did piss me off. A lot."

"So what did you do about it?" Gavers asked.

"Left about seven messages between her cell phone and her office voicemail."

"When?"

"Between seven and about nine-thirty."

"And the tone of your messages?"

"Starting at pissed off and ending at extremely pissed off. You should've seen Kyle's face as the night wore on without her even bothering to take the time to at least make a fucking phone call."

I felt myself shaking with rage at the memory of my little boy's disappointment. Gavers's next words, though, popped my rage like a pin to a balloon.

"She's missing," he said. "She didn't show up at work this morning. No one's seen her since she left the courthouse at just after five last night, Professor."

My eyes went wide and darted between the two of them.

"So you were at home last night between, say, four-thirty and eight?" Adams asked.

I nodded.

"Anyone see you? Other than your son?"

I nodded. "My neighbors, the Romescus. They saw me at probably about five. We chatted for a few minutes while the kids played. Then again at about six-thirty and a couple of times after that when I went out onto the back deck to call Whitney."

"They were out in their yard all night?"

"Yeah," I said, my voice cracking, my throat dry. "Having a barbecue. Then Sally and Charlie just sat on the deck talking and watching their kids running around until about seven-thirty or so. They weren't out there after that."

I saw a movement at the door and looked over Gavers's shoulder.

"Professor Whitman," I said to the spry Dean of History.

"I . . . uh . . . Luke, I was . . . ."

I looked at the two detectives.

"We're finished here," Gavers said. Sergeant Adams snapped her notebook shut while Gavers fished around his jacket pocket.

"Here," he said, extending a wrinkled, worn business card. "You think of anything--and I mean anything--you call, okay?"

"Yeah."

I put the card in my pocket while I watched them leave. They both nodded to Professor Whitman as they walked past him.

"Luke, is now a bad time?"

I just stared at him, wondering what I was going to tell Kyle.

"What is it?"

"It's Whitney," I said. "She's disappeared."

His eyes went wide. "My God."

"Sorry," I said, snatching up my briefcase. "I gotta get home before Kyle gets there."

I strode past him without another look.

* * * * *

I checked the call history on my home phone and saw a number from Sunday I didn't recognize. I dialed the number, writing it down on a piece of paper while it rang.

"Hello?" she said.

Thank God, right on the first try.

"Kristin," I managed, my eyes locked on Kyle in the backyard.

"Luke?" she said. "Something wrong?"

"Can you come over here?"

"Luke, you're scaring me. What's wrong?"

"It's Whitney. She disappeared."

"Did-a-runner disappeared or kidnapped disappeared?"

"I think it's the second one," I said. "The cops interviewed me. An hour and a half ago. She didn't show up for work this morning, and no one's seen her since last night."

"Maybe she just wanted to get away from everything for awhile," Kristin said.

"Not a chance. She's right in the middle of a huge trial. If she just took off, she'd get fired and then some. Hell, she'd never work again. Maybe even lose her license or something."

Kristin didn't even pause. "We'll be right over."

Ten minutes later, Ben charged through the house and out the sliding glass door to the backyard. Kristin was close behind him, her face anxious as she looked me over.

"You holding up?"

"What do I tell him?" I asked.

"Nothing. Not a damned thing."

"But what if . . .?"

She set her face in grim determination. "If it's the worst case scenario, you tell him when you know for sure. Otherwise . . . well . . . otherwise just tell him she's busy and she'll spend a lot of time with him when the trial's over."

"Lie to him?"

"Yes, Luke. Jesus Christ, you can't tell him she's missing. You wanna tell him the truth? Tell him she's maybe in a ditch somewhere dead? Or worse, being raped and beaten and tortured?"

I shuddered. These images had raced through my mind--all of the worst case scenarios--but Kristin was the first one to put them in words. And ex-wife or no ex-wife, Whitney was still Kyle's mother. Also, I realized for the millionth time, there was still some love in my heart for the woman who'd cast me aside like yesterday's bathwater.

"Listen," Kristin said, her voice getting low and steady, "if he thinks she's blowing him off, he'll be hurt and angry and resentful. But sadly enough, there are others in his class--hell, one in the backyard with him right now, for that matter--who've all gone through the same thing. Kyle's been dealing with it for the past five or six months, and this'll just seem like an extension of that. But if you tell him she may have disappeared or worse? Jesus, Luke, he'll be a total basket case. He'll have nightmares and . . . and it won't be good. So don't tell him what's going on unless you have to."

She was right. Fuck absolute morality. Nothing is black and white; the world's comprised of varying shades of gray. And if ever there was a time to lie to your child, this was damned sure one of them.

"So what else do I do?" I asked.

"You let the police handle it," she said. Seeing the look on my face, she rushed to continue. "I know it's not going to be easy. I know you'll feel helpless and useless and all that, but there's nothing else you can do. You're a history professor, Luke, not a trained policeman, right?"

"Still," I said. "There's gotta be something I can do."

She pulled me in and hugged me tightly. I hung my face into her shoulder and caught a whiff of her shampoo. Peaches. Same as Whitney's shampoo sometimes.

"You hold together, Luke," she whispered into my ear. "That's what you can do. You hold it together and be strong in front of Kyle. You be there for him. That's the most important thing you can do right now, understand?"

I just squeezed her tighter in response, feeling better at the close contact with another human being who cared.

"Now let's get some dinner going, okay?" she said, and loosened her grip on me. "We'll stay for awhile so Kyle's got Ben to play with."

"Thanks," was all I could think of saying.

"What're friends for?" she said, then busied herself in the refrigerator looking for something to make for dinner.

* * * * *

I slept on and off all night. The dreams came back, along with the ache in my hip, and I was being surrounded and shot at. All around me, the Iraqi soldiers were overrunning the trench, and new trenches were popping up everywhere I turned. Looking around, my platoon was either dying or dead, and still I kept shooting as the bullets tore into me.

I awoke with a gasp, sitting straight up and panting for breath. My mind was still frozen on the last image in my dream: Whitney, being dragged away by a band of Iraqis, them ripping her clothes off as they dragged her and me trying to pick them off with a massive machine gun firing fully automatic bursts that kept missing them.

My head swiveled automatically, looking outside to check the bad weather I knew was coming. It was already beginning to drizzle outside, not much more than a light mist, and the skies bordering dusk and dawn were slate gray with angry thunderclouds moving across the heavens.

A damp, gray dawn, like so many hundreds of others since that day in southern Iraq. And, just as with the others, my hip and upper thigh ached to the bone, like the bullets and shrapnel were still clawing their way into my depths.

The only difference between this and all the others before it was that Whitney had disappeared without a trace. On this damp, gray dawn, my boy's mother was gone.

The urge to do something more, to get off my ass and go looking for her, was still squirming around my brain, still telling me I needed to act.

Then Kristin's words came back, and I couldn't fault her logic. What the hell did I know about finding a kidnapping victim?

But there was something there, something I couldn't put my fingers on. The more I thought, the more my brain refused to cooperate in bringing it to the forefront.

Two hours later, though, Kyle noticed something and commented on it. That's when it hit me. All of it. Not just the answers to my endless questions, but the whole picture just came out of nowhere and punched me right between the eyes.

When it hit me like a freight train, I decided--was compelled to--ignore Kristin's advice. And Gavers's demands.

And, to a large degree, common sense.