I'll Walk Alone - Mary Higgins Clark [20]
Ted could not conceal a tremor in his voice. “My son, Matthew, is five years old today. Neither his mother nor I believe that he is dead. Someone, perhaps a lonely woman who desperately wanted a child and seized the opportunity to steal him, is with him at this moment. If that person is watching us, please tell Matthew how much Mommy and Daddy love him and long to see him again.”
The reporters kept a respectful silence as Ted walked to the curb where Larry Post, his high school friend and long-time driver, was holding the car door of the backseat open for him.
14
After Josh left her, Zan went upstairs, double-locked the door of the apartment, and stripped off her clothes, wrapping herself in her warm old bathrobe as she had done when she woke up in the morning. The message light was blinking on the telephone. She walked over and turned off the ringer. For the rest of the night, she sat in the bedroom chair with one single light shining on Matthew’s picture. Her eyes searched each feature of his face longingly.
The spike of hair that by now had probably developed into a cowlick. The hint of red in that mop of sandy hair. Was he now an outand-out redhead?
He had always been a friendly child, sunny and welcoming to strangers, not like some children who are naturally shy at age three. Dad was an extrovert, Zan thought. So was Mother. What happened to me?
So many of those months after they died are a blur. Now they are saying that I took Matthew out of his stroller that day.
“Did I?” she whispered aloud.
The shock of the question, the enormity that she could actually voice it, stunned her. She forced herself to ask the logical next question. “But if I took him, what did I do with him?”
She had no answer.
I would never have hurt him, she told herself. I never laid a finger on him. Even when I had given him a “time out” if he was behaving badly, my heart would melt for him, sitting in his little chair, looking so miserable.
Is Ted right? Do I wallow in self-pity and want other people to pity me? Does he mean that I’m one of those crazy mothers who harm their children because they need to be pitied and comforted?
She had thought she was beyond it, that sense of numbness, the feeling that she was withdrawing into herself from the pain. In the airport in Rome that day, when she had called Ted only minutes after she learned of her parents’ death, she had felt her legs crumble under her. But even though she could not reach out to the people who had gathered around her, who had lifted her onto a stretcher, who had rushed her to the hospital in an ambulance, she had been aware of every word they said. It was just that she couldn’t open her eyes, or make her lips form words, or lift her hand. It was as if she had been in a sealed room and could not find her way back to tell them that she was still with them.
Zan knew that was happening to her again. She leaned back in the soft armchair and closed her eyes.
A merciful emptiness engulfed her as she whispered his name: “Matthew … Matthew … Matthew …”
15
How much had Gloria told that old priest? It was the question that haunted him day and night. She was beginning to crack, and now at this crucial time, when it all was coming to a head, when everything he had planned during these two years was about to happen, she had rushed into that room.
He had been born a Catholic, and knew that if what Gloria said was under the seal of the confessional, the priest would have to keep his mouth shut. But he wasn’t sure if Gloria was a Catholic, and if she wasn’t, and just had gone in for a little heart-to-heart chat, maybe the old priest would consider it okay to say that Zan had a lookalike, someone who was impersonating her.
If that happened the cops would keep digging, and it would soon be all over… .
The old priest. That neighborhood around West Thirty-first Street wasn’t any great shakes, he thought. And stray bullets were hitting people all over the city these days. Why not one more?
He would have to take care of it himself. He couldn’t take the chance of