Drawn Into Darkness(17)

His grandson.

Still missing.

There seemed to be no new developments, dammit. There hardly ever were anymore. So Ned lost himself in contemplation of the boy’s captured-in-time face, absorbing it visually and viscerally, memorizing it in his gut, warming his heart in the cappuccino glow of the boy’s eyes, more heartening to him than anyone else’s best smile. Justin looked like a kid with his soul intact. Those openhearted eyes and the firm curves of the kid’s chin reminded him of his son, Chad, when he had been that age, which was about the time that Ned had left for good.

Not that he had seen Chad much since, drunken ass that he, Ned, had been. But he did remember.

And he dearly remembered his few hours with Charles Stuart Bradley’s children. Ned had gone to see his dying wife mostly to apologize. His apologies were accepted by her but not by their son, all grown up and pissed at him proportionately. It was meeting Justin and Kyle and Kayla that had really pushed Ned to change. He had three grandchildren. He had wasted too much of his life.

So he had done the hard work to get himself clean and sober. And then, just when he was getting up the nerve to approach his son and his family again, he started to see their faces nightly on the TV. Chad all choked up, and Amy crying alongside her husband and begging an unknown abductor to please bring back her child.

Justin. Taken away.

Ned had thought he could only make things worse for them by intruding. Or maybe, face it, he was a coward. But ever since then, Ned had dedicated himself as if he were a candle lit for Justin. Visiting the Web site daily. Anonymously donating all the financial help he could afford. Alert day after day, at the office building where he worked and around town, in case he might, just might, be the one to sight the boy, even though he knew that his chances were ridiculously, outrageously, infinitesimally small.

Ned explored the Web site and found nothing new except a few more sympathetic comments. No fresh hope. And with every day that passed, hope was harder to hold on to. With a kind of glum, muted anger Ned booted down the computer. The damn thing took its time, finally darkening like a blinded Cyclops, leaving the apartment shadowy; it was getting dark outside. Nightfall.

“Oliver,” Ned said to the dog, “I want to get out of here.”

Go to a bar, get a drink, be with other people escaping their misery? It was an old, familiar urge and one that Ned had learned he must acknowledge but refuse. The silence of the apartment enveloped him. Always around this time of day he found it paradoxical that this comfortable place, with his big Tree of Life tapestry on the wall, his Bev Doolittle prints, his chunky sofa with a genuine Navajo blanket thrown over it, his books and glossy Sierra Club magazines piled on every surface, could feel so empty.

Ned got up from the computer chair, turned on some lights, then stood studying the intricacies of the Tree of Life—a gift from his AA sponsor, handmade by her—until the difficult moment had passed. He knew that the apartment’s smell of Budweiser and black bananas was in his imagination, an olfactory hallucination.

Sensing watchful eyes on him, he looked down at the dog, rendered almost shapeless by long white fur splotched with black patches.

“Oliver,” Ned gravely addressed the presence, “this is not a dive and I am not a drunk anymore. Let’s see what’s on TV.”

He would far rather have phoned his son. But he knew if Chad had felt too pissed to deal with his fuckup father after his mother’s death, he sure as hell wasn’t going to feel any better now, with his son missing. And maybe he never would.

• • •

Stoat arrived home from work in a mood as expansive as the aroma of the Popeyes fried chicken he carried in with him. At cheerful gunpoint he released me from my bondage, laughed as I ran to the bathroom, and invited me to join him and Justin at the supper table afterward.

Justin wasn’t looking at me, and I let him alone. I did not talk either with him or with my jovial gun-toting host, but focused all my attention on getting spicy, Louisiana-style food I wouldn’t normally eat into my very hungry stomach. Or I should say, almost all of my attention. I kept mental feelers reaching toward Justin, and sensed plenty of turmoil beneath his blank exterior.

“They didn’t pack enough napkins,” complained Stoat, snapping his fingers at Justin. “Go get some paper towels.”

“Who was your slave before you got me?” Justin retorted, at the same time getting up to bring the paper towels.

Stoat flipped like a lightbulb from bright to dark, scowling. “That’s exactly what you are, boy. My little sex slave.”

Face afire as he returned to the table, Justin protested, “It was a joke, Uncle Steve!”