My feet pawed the floor like a caged animal’s. I hung up the phone after calling every one of Caleigh’s friends. No one had heard from her since yesterday. The last contact had been a text from Caleigh to Brianna Kohl at 7:00 p.m. last night, which said, got the cutest stuff for school. The nearest neighbors hadn’t seen the children since yesterday when they drove by with their grandparents on their way to the Mall of America.
Police cruisers wailed in the distance and shortly afterwards pulled into our driveway. Sketcher’s deep resonant bark announced their arrival and I was at the door before they had a chance to ring the bell. Detectives Rose Donnelly and Bill Meyers, the last people I could have imagined meeting that morning, stood at the door. Sketcher stood by me, his fur bristling, and growled a low, throaty, ominous growl.
“Alex, for God’s sake! Can you lock him in the kitchen?” I said, immediately sorry for snapping.
The officers filed in one by one entering the living room. Detective Donnelly was a buxom, no-nonsense sort of woman with sharply defined features. She was dressed in a bilious green suit.
Detective Meyers was bland-faced with sparse jet-black hair, parted above his left ear. He was dressed in conservative gray slacks and a checkered blazer with a button-down shirt underneath. His shoulders were covered in a blanket of dandruff. “When did you first notice your children were missing, ma’am?” he asked.
I almost laughed at the absurdity of the question. My children are missing. It was a phrase from a nightmare. The conversational equivalent of a Salvatore Dali painting. The patterns in the living room rug began to crawl snake-like along the floor. The house was so still it seemed as though it were breathing on its own. I crumpled onto the sofa and looked up to see the detectives exchanging a look that frightened me.
“Are you the father?” Donnelly asked Alex.
“No. I’m Grace’s fiancé, Alex Sawyer,” he said. “We became engaged a month ago.”
My heart rolled over. I was tired and disoriented after two days of travel, unable to remember if it was 1:00 p.m. or 1:00 a.m. I struggled to remember what Meyers had just asked me. “About ten minutes ago,” I finally said. Was it jet lag or a bad dream I had walked into? “I just got home from a medical mission trip to Indonesia with Alex. I’m a psychiatrist. My former in-laws, Stan and Dahlia Rendeau, stayed here with the children while we were away. I talked to them yesterday and told them I would see them today. When I got home, they were gone.”
“Have you called your in-laws, ma’am? Have you checked to see if there is anything missing?” Meyers asked. “Do your children have cell phones?”
“Yes, I called. Dahlia and Stan are on their way over.” My vision blurred. I must have blacked out because moments later, Detective Donnelly was shaking me and holding a glass of water to my lips, jerking me back into consciousness.
“Dr. Rendeau, snap out of it,” she barked.
I looked at her wordlessly, feeling something between desperation and terror. Why hadn’t I been able to keep my children as safe as I had during that tornado warning? I looked to see Alex’s lips forming my name but I couldn’t piece together what he was saying.
“Grace, please. Try to pull yourself together.” I finally heard him say. “We’ll find them. We tried calling her daughter’s phone,” he said to Meyers, “but she didn’t pick up. Caleigh always picks up if her mother calls.”
“Dr. Rendeau, I understand you work with inmates. Is that correct? Has anyone made any threats against you lately? Has anyone been released who might have motive for harming you or your children? Have the children ever talked about running away from home?” Donnelly seemed impatient. The barrage of questions was as rapid as gunfire.
“Of course not! They’re very happy, well-adjusted children. We have a great relationship,” I insisted, summoning all my strength to think logically. “At the prison, we plan discharge very carefully. Most times the patients go back to their families or if the families are unwilling to take them, Josie Garrett, our social worker, finds halfway housing for them. It’s never been a problem. My number and address are unlisted.”
“Do you have Ms. Garrett’s number, ma’am?”
“It’s stored in my phone. Alex, where did I put it?”
“Here it is, Grace.” Alex handed it to me and I gave Detective Donnelly the number and then sank to the table. My breath came out in rapid, painful bursts. Sketcher nudged me and put his head in my lap. I walked to the window and placed my forehead against the cool, clear glass.
“Ma’am? Ma’am. Has everything been going all right at home?” Donnelly asked, dialing Josie’s number. “No answer.” Her voice registered somewhere in the back of my mind along with the screech of tires on the drive. I stumbled to the door and my in-laws burst into the house.
“Oh, Grace.” Dahlia took my face into her thin-skinned, speckled hands. Her carefully made-up eyes were veined with red. “I fixed breakfast when they got up. We went to church and then brunch with the Hendricksons. They wanted to stay so they’d be home to see you when you got back.”
“These are my in-laws, Dr. and Mrs. Rendeau,” I said to the detectives, the nightmare becoming more real by the minute.
Donnelly nodded. “What time was that, ma’am?” She had the manner of a crabby waiter.
“Around ten o’clock.” Dahlia looked at me helplessly. She looked like linens soaked in bleach.
“Dr. Rendeau, what time did you arrive home?” the detective asked.
“Around 12:30.”
“We’ve got an Amber Alert called in,” Detective Meyers said. “Get someone to talk to the neighbors to see if they saw anything,” he instructed Donnelly. “Whoever has them has a window of possibly two to two and a half hours. Don’t touch anything, anyone. We’ll call in the team to dust for prints. And I’ll bring the note in for analysis. Are you sure nothing is missing from the house, Dr. Rendeau?”
“What note?” Stan asked. He was a tall, thin man with a full head of silver hair and hooded blue eyes that reminded me of Matt every time I looked at him. He still had the steady hands and gaze that had stood him well during his long career as a cardiac surgeon at Mayo.
The detectives had already bagged the note as evidence. The words were indelibly imprinted on my heart. “It says, ‘Your children are gone. This is what you deserve. I’ll be in touch,’” I whispered.
Dahlia gasped. Stan turned to the window but not before he could erase the pained expression on his normally composed features. “Officer! The puppy is missing. But that happened several days ago,” he said.
Donnelly raised her eyebrows. “Your puppy is missing?”
“We have, I mean we had a new King Charles spaniel puppy and shortly after I left on my trip, the kids left her outside with Sketcher while they came in to eat dinner and the dog disappeared,” I said. “They were heartbroken. I don’t understand what happened since she had already been trained to avoid the invisible fence.”
“The dog never turned up?” Detective Donnelly jotted something down in her notebook. “Where was the children’s father during all of this?”
“The children’s father is dead,” Dahlia said icily.
“I promised once I got home I would put an ad in the paper and contact the local shelters, and maybe put up signs. What the hell is this? Go out and find them! While we’re standing here talking about the puppy, my kids are out there somewhere. Do something!” Terror hovered over the room like a bad odor. I had an almost irresistible impulse to throw something at Detective Donnelly.
“Calm down, ma’am. We’ve called in an Amber Alert. If it wasn’t important, we wouldn’t be asking you these questions. Do you have a picture of the children? Age, height, weight, hair and eye color, any identifying marks?” Detective Donnelly asked the questions as though she had them memorized. “How long has the father been dead?”
Dahlia still wore her heartache on her sleeve. “Please. My son died two years ago of cancer.” We all reached into our wallets for school pictures. “Give her the ones on the piano, Grace,” Dahlia suggested, blotting under her eyes with a wadded up tissue. “You can really tell what they look like from those. Just like Matt.”
“I have their fingerprints too,” I said numbly. “It’s the sort of thing no mother ever thinks she’ll need but last year there was a ‘Stay Safe’ program at the local elementary school. They provided finger printing to anyone who wanted it so I have Dane’s and Caleigh’s finger prints on a card upstairs.” My mouth quivered and my voice broke.
A framed photo of Caleigh looking directly into the camera, a half-smile on her face sat on the polished surface of the old upright piano. “Caleigh’s thirteen. One hundred pounds, and about this tall.” I held my hand up to my nose. “Blue eyes and white-blonde hair. She has a half-moon shaped scar over her left eyebrow.” I picked up Dane’s picture and could hardly speak. “Dane is six. He loves dinosaurs. He is about four feet tall, and weighs seventy pounds. He has reddish hair, the same color as mine and green eyes. Freckles. He’s missing his front tooth. Oh, God!”
Alex wrapped his arms around me, and I sobbed into his shoulder. Dahlia and Stan sat down on the other side of the sofa. “Don’t worry, honey, they’ll find them,” Stan said. My former father-in-law took my hand. I desperately needed to believe this to make my world feel orderly again.
“Any idea what they were wearing today, Mrs. Rendeau?” Detective Donnelly asked Dahlia abruptly.
Dahlia Rendeau, dressed for Sunday services, remembered exactly what they were wearing. “Caleigh had on dark jeans, a long-sleeved yellow top and orange flip-flops. Dane was wearing khaki shorts and his red shirt with a T-Rex on the front. Sneakers and socks. Right, Stan?”
“You got me,” Stan shook his head. All I remember is that they were hungry. We made ’em breakfast but it doesn’t look as though they ate much of it.” He gestured toward the plates of eggs and toast on the table.
“Did anything out of the ordinary happen in the week you were with the children?” Donnelly asked.
“Let’s see.” Stan filled his pipe. Light reflected off the gleaming dome of his skull. “There were quite a few annoying hang-up calls. Caleigh said it’d been happening a lot lately.”
“We’ll get phone records of all incoming and out-going phone calls from the phone company,” the detective replied. “Anything else you can think of?”
“Well, the puppy. We were only inside for a couple of minutes. I decided to go back out and get the puppy while Dahlia served the children their dinner. There wasn’t hide nor hair of her to be seen. But I thought maybe I saw a car drive away, way off in the distance.”
The air in the room seemed to still. Meyers asked, “Did you get the make or model of the car?”
“It was too far away. The only reason I even noticed it was because we’re so far out here you don’t see a lot of cars pass by, especially later on in the day. This was about six-thirty at night. All I saw was a cloud of dust as it drove away.”
“I don’t know if this has any relevance to what’s happened …” Dahlia hesitated.
“We need to know everything. Even something you may think has no relevance could be important, ma’am,” Meyers encouraged her. “Now why don’t you sit down and tell us what it is.”
“Well, I went into Caleigh’s room to say goodnight and she had these small scabbed-over cuts up and down her left arm. I had just seen a show on TV about teenage girls cutting themselves, and that was the first thing I thought of. Especially because she was so secretive about it. She pulled on her robe and refused to tell me what had happened. She said it was nothing.”
“We’ll keep that in mind. Dr. Rendeau. Has your daughter cut herself before? She have any psychological problems?”
“No! Absolutely not. Dahlia told me over the phone while I was in Indonesia and that was the first time I knew about it.” I felt myself deflating like a flat tire. A creeping sense of guilt shuddered through me as I wondered if I’d missed anything else over the past several months.
“Grace, I’m going to make some coffee. Would you like some, detectives?” Dahlia asked. Stan followed his wife into the kitchen.
“That’d be great, ma’am,” Meyers answered. “Cream and sugar for me. We’re going to need a list of all her friends, Dr. Rendeau.”
“I called the ones I know. The others should be in her phone. Oh, my god. Her phone is gone. She must have it with her.”
“We’ll see if we can track it,” Meyers said. “If you give me a list of her friends, we’ll be able to get their numbers. We’ll have someone interview them.”
Detective Donnelly got off the phone and said, “Ms. Garrett didn’t answer. I left a message to call the RPD. Dr. Rendeau, if you talk to her, have her call me ASAP. I’ll also call the warden at the prison to see if anything out of the ordinary has happened.”
“I’d like to get the Hendricksons’ number,” Detective Donnelly said as Dahlia and Stan came into the room with steaming mugs of coffee and handed them to the detectives.
Despite the dull thud behind my eyes that told me I should drink it, I shook my head and refused the coffee Dahlia placed in front of me.
“You can’t possibly think we have anything to do with this, young lady,” Dahlia said, giving the detective a dirty look.
“Just covering all the bases, ma’am,” Donnelly replied. “I’d like you come down to the station for finger printing, too, if you don’t mind. We’ll need a sample of everyone’s handwriting as well.”
“Detective, my in-laws love the children. They would never do anything to harm them,” I insisted.
“Again, ma’am, just doing my job. I’d like you both to provide handwriting samples, if you don’t mind,” the detective informed us.
“We were on a plane! How can you even suggest Alex or I had anything to do with this?” I had tried to keep myself together but a rising panic, as dark and ominous as a sea in winter, threatened to consume me.
Alex attempted to calm me. “Grace, she has to do this. Please.”
“In cases like this it’s usually family members, ex-care givers, ex-spouses, and so on who take the children. I’m not accusing you, ma’am, just trying to get to the bottom of this. We’ll contact the feds, and they’ll be in to set up a command center and distribute the children’s pictures nationally. The crime scene people will be in to dust for prints and luminol for blood. We’re bringing in the K-9 units now, and we’ve called in the state troopers who’ll expand the survey of our mapped coverage area with additional ground and air searches. The department’s helicopters do an air-land search to come up with any infra-red sightings in open fields and such.”
“Oh, God, do you mean … ?” A reeling sensation pulled me away from any semblance of rational thought.
“Not necessarily, ma’am. Just don’t want to miss anything,” Meyers interjected, as gently as if he were talking to a child. “Oh, and Dr. Rendeau, we’re gonna put a tap on your phone in case there are any ransom calls made. Try to keep ’em on the line as long as possible. I have to warn you there’ll probably be prank calls to the station made by people saying they want to confess. All of ’em nuts, in it for the attention.”
“Can you think of anyone else who would want to take your children?” Detective Donnelly asked bluntly. “Would they have gone to stay with a friend? Were they upset when you left them?”
I shook my head. “No! They were fine. Otherwise, I never would have gone.” The words blurred. It felt like I was seeing the world through a pair of cheap reading glasses.
“They were fine,” Dahlia repeated, wiping her eyes. “They were looking forward to seeing their mother. They would never have run away. We just went school shopping!”