The Rescue - Nicholas Sparks [12]
And Kyle was out there without even a jacket.
Oh, Kyle.
She lifted Kyle’s blanket to her cheek and closed her eyes.
Where are you, honey? Why did you leave the car? Why didn’t you stay with Mom?
Taylor and the trooper stepped up into the ambulance and exchanged glances before Taylor gently put his hand on Denise’s shoulder.
“I know this is hard, but we have to ask you a few questions before we get started. It won’t take long.”
She bit her lip before nodding slightly, then took a deep breath. She opened her eyes.
The trooper looked younger up close than he had from a distance, but his eyes were kind. He squatted before her.
“I’m Sergeant Carl Huddle with the state troopers office,” he said, his voice rolling with the lullaby of the South. “I know you’re worried, and we are, too. Most of us out here are parents, with little ones of our own. We all want to find him as badly as you do, but we need to know some general information—enough to know who we’re looking for.”
For Denise, the words barely registered.
“Will you be able to find him in this storm . . . I mean, before . . . ?”
Denise’s eyes traveled from one man to the other, having trouble focusing on either. When Sergeant Huddle didn’t answer right away, Taylor McAden nodded, his determination clear.
“We’ll find him—I promise.”
Huddle glanced uncertainly at Taylor, before finally nodding as well. He shifted onto one knee, obviously uncomfortable.
Exhaling sharply, Denise sat up a little, trying her best to stay composed. Her face, wiped clean by the attendant in the ambulance, was the color of table linen. The bandage wrapped around her head had a large red spot just over her right eye. Her cheek was swollen and bruised.
When she was ready, they went over the basics for the report: names, address, phone number, and employment, her previous residence, when she’d moved to Edenton, the reason she was driving, how she stopped for gas but stayed ahead of the storm, the deer in the road, how she lost control of the car, the accident itself. Sergeant Huddle noted it all on a flip pad. When it was all on paper, he looked up at her almost expectantly.
“Are you kin to J. B. Anderson?”
John Brian Anderson had been her maternal grandfather, and she nodded.
Sergeant Huddle cleared his throat—like everyone in Edenton, he’d known the Andersons. He glanced at the flip pad again.
“Taylor said that Kyle is four years old?”
Denise nodded. “He’ll be five in October.”
“Could you give me a general description—something I could put out on the radio?”
“The radio?”
Sergeant Huddle answered patiently. “Yeah, we’ll put it on the police emergency network so that other departments can have the information. In case someone finds him, picks him up, and calls the police. Or if, by some chance, he wanders up to someone’s house and they call the police. Things like that.”
He didn’t tell her that area hospitals were also routinely informed—there was no need for that just yet.
Denise turned away, trying to order her thoughts.
“Um . . .” It took a few seconds for her to speak. Who can describe their kids exactly, in terms of numbers and figures? “I don’t know . . . three and a half feet tall, forty pounds or so. Brown hair, green eyes . . . just a normal little boy of his age. Not too big or too small.”
“Any distinguishing features? A birthmark, things like that?”
She repeated his question to herself, but everything seemed so disjointed, so unreal, so completely unfathomable. Why did they need this? A little boy lost in the swamp . . . how many could there be on a night like this?
They should be searching now, instead of talking to me.
The question . . . what was it? Oh, yes, distinguishing features. . . . She focused as best she could, hoping to get this over with as quickly as possible.
“He’s got two moles on his left cheek, one larger than the other,” she finally offered. “No other birthmarks.”
Sergeant Huddle noted