Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [100]
I went downstairs for the paper, tucked it under my arm, and came back up. I made my cup of coffee and took it into the dining room with me as I opened the paper and discovered that another child had disappeared.
His name was Samuel Pietro, and he was eight.
He’d last been seen leaving his friends in a Weymouth playground and walking back toward home Saturday afternoon. It was now Monday morning. His mother hadn’t reported him missing until yesterday.
He was a handsome kid with large dark eyes that reminded me of Angie’s, and a friendly, crooked smile in the photo they’d cropped from his third-grade class picture. He looked hopeful. He looked young. He looked confident.
I considered hiding the paper from Angie. Ever since Allegheny, when we’d left that alley and all the steam had run out of us, all the determination, she’d become even more deeply obsessed with Amanda McCready. But it wasn’t an obsession that found an outlet in action, since there was very little action to take. Instead, Angie pored over all our case notes, drew Time Line and Major Figures charts on poster board, and talked for hours with Broussard or Poole, always rehashing, always circling the same ground.
No new theories or sudden answers came from these long nights or burst from the poster board, but she kept at it anyway. And every time a kid went missing and it was reported on the national news, she watched, rapt, as the minuscule details unfolded.
She wept when they turned up dead.
Always quietly, always behind closed doors, always at times when she thought I was on the other side of the apartment and couldn’t hear.
It was only recently that I’d realized how deeply her father’s death had affected Angie. It wasn’t the death itself, I don’t think. It was the never knowing for sure how he died. Without a body to point to, to lower into the ground for one last look, maybe he’d never been completely dead to her.
I was with her once when she asked Poole about him, and I could see the fear of his own inadequacy in Poole’s face as he explained that he’d barely known the man, just to see on the street occasionally, come across in a gambling raid, Jimmy Suave, always a perfect gentlemen, a man who understood that the cops were doing a job just as he was doing his.
“Eats at you still, huh?” Poole had said.
“Sometimes,” Angie said. “It’s having to accept someone’s gone in your head, but your heart never gets completely…settled about the whole thing.”
And so it was with Amanda McCready. So it was with all those kids who went missing nationally and weren’t found, dead or alive, over the long winter months. Maybe, I thought once, I’d become a private detective because I hated to know what happened next. Maybe Angie became one because she needed to know.
I looked down at Samuel Pietro’s smiling, confident face, those eyes that seemed to drink you up just like Angie’s did.
Hiding the paper, I knew, was stupid. There were always more papers, always TV and radio, always people talking in supermarkets and bars and while pumping gas at the self-serve.
Maybe forty years ago it was possible to escape the news, but not now. News was everywhere, informing us, bludgeoning us, maybe even enlightening us. But there. Always there. No room to duck from it, no place to hide.
I traced my finger around the outline of Samuel Pietro’s face and, for the first time in fifteen years, said a silent prayer.
PART THREE
THE CRUELEST MONTH
24
By early April, Angie was spending most nights with her poster boards, Amanda McCready notes, and the small shrine she’d built to the case in the tiny second bedroom in my apartment, the one I’d previously used to store luggage and boxes I kept meaning to drop off at Goodwill, where small appliances gathered dust while they waited for me to take them to a repair shop.
She’d moved the small TV and a VCR in there and watched the newscasts from October over and over again. In the two weeks since Samuel Pietro had disappeared, she logged at least five hours a night in that room, photographs of Amanda staring out with