Gone, Baby, Gone - Dennis Lehane [9]
She looked at me, her mouth half open, as if afraid to put it into words, hear them hit the air, and know that it made her someone who refused to help a child in need.
“I don’t want to tell them yes quite yet,” she managed, as we reached our car.
I nodded. I knew the feeling.
“Everything about this disappearance smells bad,” Angie said, as we drove down Dorchester Avenue toward Helene and Amanda’s apartment.
“I know.”
“Four-year-olds don’t vanish without help.”
“Definitely not.”
Along the avenue, people were beginning to come out of their homes now that dinner was over. Some placed lawn chairs on their small front porches; others walked up the avenue toward bars or twilight ball games. I could smell sulfur in the air from a recently discharged bottle rocket, and the moist evening hung like an untaken breath in that bruised hue between deep blue and sudden black.
Angie pulled her legs up to her chest and rested her chin on her knees. “Maybe I’ve become a coward, but I don’t mind chasing iguanas across golf courses.”
I looked through the windshield as we turned off Dorchester Avenue onto Savin Hill Avenue.
“Neither do I,” I said.
When a child disappears, the space she’d occupied is immediately filled with dozens of people. And these people—relatives, friends, police officers, reporters from both TV and print—create a lot of energy and noise, a sense of communal intensity, of fierce and shared dedication to a task.
But amid all that noise, nothing is louder than the silence of the missing child. It’s a silence that’s two and a half to three feet tall, and you feel it at your hip and hear it rising up from the floorboards, shouting to you from corners and crevices and the emotionless face of a doll left on the floor by the bed. It’s a silence that’s different from the one left at funerals and wakes. The silence of the dead carries with it a sense of finality; it’s a silence you know you must get used to. But the silence of a missing child is not something you want to get used to; you refuse to accept it, and so it screams at you.
The silence of the dead says, Goodbye.
The silence of the missing says, Find me.
It seemed like half the neighborhood and a quarter of the Boston Police Department were inside Helene McCready’s two-bedroom apartment. The living room stretched through an open portico into the dining room, and these two rooms were the center of most of the activity. The police had set up banks of phones on the floor of the dining room, and all were in use; several people used their personal cell phones as well. A burly man in a PROUD TO BE A DOT RAT T-shirt looked up from a stack of flyers on the coffee table in front of him and said, “Beatrice, Channel Four wants Helene at six tomorrow night.”
A woman put her hand over the receiver of her cell phone. “The producers of Annie in the AM called. They want Helene to go on the show in the morning.”
“Mrs. McCready,” a cop called from the dining room, “we need you in here a sec.”
Beatrice nodded at the burly man and the woman with the cell phone and said to us, “Amanda’s bedroom is the first on the right.”
I nodded, and she cut off into the crowd and headed for the dining room.
Amanda’s bedroom door was open, and the room itself was still and dark, as if the sounds from the street below couldn’t penetrate up here. A toilet flushed, and a patrolman came out of the bathroom and looked at us as his right hand finished zipping up his fly.
“Friends of the family?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Don’t touch anything, please.”
“We won’t,” Angie said.
He nodded and went up the hall into the kitchen.
I used my car key to turn on the light switch in Amanda’s room. I knew that every item in the room had been dusted and analyzed for fingerprints by now, but I also knew how perturbed cops get when you touch anything with bare hands at a crime scene.
A bare lightbulb hung from a cord above Amanda’s bed, the copper housing plate gone and the exposed wires dusty. The ceiling was badly in need of a paint job, and