Undeliverable (12 page)

“Absolutely. Honey, come sit down, please.” She shook her head and kept washing the dishes from all of the volunteers the night before.

Ben watched the detective watch Jeannie. “It’s alright. I understand the urge to keep doing normal things. All I ask is if you think of something while I’m asking the questions that you speak up.” He got a shrug in return. “We already have all of the basics of what happened. Let’s go over his favorite places to go, in case we forgot any yesterday.”

Ben waited for his wife to speak, but when she didn’t, he responded, “He loves the zoo and that corner park. He always wants to go to McDonald’s, you know the one with the great big play area on Montgomery?” The detective nodded and made a brief note in his ragged notepad. Ben noticed that most of the book was already full. How many of those notes were about children? How many were still missing? “We did his last birthday there.”

“Anywhere else in particular?”

Again, Ben waited to see if Jeannie would say anything before answering. “Not really, he likes being in the store and at school, I guess.”

Another small notation in the account ledger of the missing. “Did he ever have any conflicts with the kids at school?”

Ben couldn’t remember, but he thought he would know if anyone had been picking on his son. He was as transparent as a window when something was bothering him. “No, he’s a great kid, got along with just about everybody.”

Detective O’Connor didn’t write anything down about school. “Just about?”

“All kids get into scrapes on the playground, tussles over balls or the like. Nothing major though, no problem cases.” Ben vividly remembered convincing Benny to sit still while he applied hydrogen peroxide to his elbow from a particularly rough spill. Ben had to tell him that even stormtroopers in Star Wars were man enough to endure the sting of the foaming liquid. After that he had behaved: stormtroopers were the pinnacle of manliness that month.

“Alright. Anybody ever show an undue interest in your son?”

Ben wrenched his mind back to the conversation. “Undue interest?”

The detective gestured vaguely with one hand. “Men in the park coming up repeatedly, customers who paid too much attention to the boy.”

Ben tried to think back. All he could remember was a faceless mass and the occasional encounter with a friend. “I never saw anything. Honey? Did you?”

Again, all the men got was a head shake. Ben opened his mouth to say something about her taking an active interest in the conversation but thought better of it. On any other day that would have brought her full attention to bear, mainly on berating him, but he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t chase her off now.

“Ben, how was your son at home? Any trouble?” The little notebook was nearly full at that point. How many pages did each child get?

“What? No. He is a good kid.” Except for his constant pestering for a puppy. When he came back, they would have to remedy that. A small one that wouldn’t break things in the store. Or chew on things. He thought he knew where the county shelter was.

“How was discipline in the house? Strict?”

“Well, yes, I guess. He doesn’t get away with things if that’s what you’re asking. He knows the rules.” First rule, listen to your parents. Second rule, don’t talk to strangers. Had Benny listened to those two?

The detective had filled a page of notes and turned to the back of the sheet. “How did you enforce them?”

Ben shrugged. “Oh, time-outs, no dessert, the like.”

“You never hit him?”

A bowl shattered and Jeannie leaned hard against the sink. A cut on her wrist formed a slender line of blood, which began to drip onto the floor, but she didn’t raise her voice. “Never.” Ben started from his chair and grabbed a towel to press to his wife’s wound, though the detective didn’t move.

“I have to ask these questions, ma’am. You’d be surprised by the number of young kids that run away from home because they feel they have been treated unfairly.” Detective O’Connor didn’t meet her gaze, instead he focused on his full coffee cup, which he turned in circles on the table. “Forgive me if what I ask seems harsh. It’s necessary.”

Jeannie didn’t seem to notice Ben’s attentions. “This is a good house. We’re good people, Detective O’Connor.”

“By all accounts, you are. But your husband was the last one to see your son, Mrs. Grant, and we have to rule out all possibilities.”

Ben rooted through the junk drawer for the box of Band-Aids and antibacterial ointment while the detective and his wife stared each other down. Finally Jeannie looked down at her arm as Ben adhered the bandage. She ran her fingers over the spot, as if noticing the pain for the first time.

“We’re a good family,” she whispered. She wandered back toward the bedrooms, and Ben had the unsettling feeling that he would find her curled back up in Benny’s bed when he went to look for her later.

“Do you have any more questions, Detective?”

“No, not for now, thank you. You should look after your wife; she’s taking this hard.”

Ben stared down the hallway. “I’ve never seen her like this before.”

“Difficult times bring out odd faces in everyone, Mr. Grant.”

The days after that seemed a blur for Ben. There was a string of no-progress reports from the police, Detective O’Connor always hopeful, but never too much so. Jeannie spent the majority of her time sitting in Benny’s room, making and remaking his bed with the Transformers sheets and reading the picture books on his shelves:
Tikki Tikki Tembo; Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel; Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
. After a couple days of sitting around the house and waiting for word, Ben insisted on opening up the shop again. He needed to be doing anything other than waiting.

He straightened up the shop, unlocked the door, and drummed his fingers on the counter. A few customers came in, but it was mainly friends stopping by to ask how they were holding up. He didn’t want to turn on the radio because at every news broadcast they were still asking for information on little Benny Grant, now missing three days. If you know anything, anything at all, please call the tip line.

All day, every time the door opened, Ben was sure he saw Benny walk into the shop before he noticed the customer or a friend bringing another casserole. Shop business seemed more brisk than usual, or maybe he was just so used to not doing anything that it just seemed noisier and more crowded than before. It was only after the third person he didn’t recognize expressed condolences and pity for his missing son that he realized what was happening. They were gawkers. Vultures. They came because they heard on the news about his store and his son and they had come to feed on his suffering. Ben threw everyone out of the store and locked up early. He decided instead to work on the pieces on the store floor that needed a bit of touching up and brought a banjo to the backroom to clean up. Its metal needed shining and a rust preventative.

He stopped as soon as he realized his workbench was still taken up by the disassembled box and hinges. The design on the cover was slightly raised under his fingertips. Benny was right, it did look a bit like the symbol for the Republic.

Benny was out there somewhere and Ben was in here, unable to do anything but wait. That wasn’t in his nature; he wasn’t a patient man, content to let others do the work that he, as Benny’s father, ought to be doing. He clenched his hand tight around the box and hurled it at the reinforced concrete of the back wall. The delicate inlay fractured on impact.

Ben stalked upstairs and sat down at the computer. Ten minutes later he was printing out a flyer that read, “Have you seen this boy?” above a picture of Benny. The tip line was printed underneath. Jeannie was still in Benny’s room and didn’t even acknowledge Ben when he informed her he was going out for a while.

He caught the copy center right before it closed its doors, and he made one hundred copies of the flyer. With a roll of duct tape around his wrist, he prowled up and down the streets around his house until he had run out of flyers, posting them at eye height on light poles, postboxes, fences, whatever came to hand. When he was done, he realized he was hungry for the first time since Benny had disappeared.

Back in the apartment, Ben pulled out a frozen dinner and popped it in the microwave. Jeannie drifted out of the back hallway, clutching Benny’s charcoal-colored teddy bear as the timer chimed. There were fresh tear tracks on her face and Ben wondered, not for the first time, why she would cry in Benny’s room alone, but she refused to cry in front of him.

“Where were you?”

“I was out putting up flyers. I couldn’t sit around here and do nothing. I decided I could help this way.” He sat down and dug into the steaming meatloaf and mashed potatoes.

“Do you really think it’ll help?”

There was a tentative hope in her eyes, a quiet, desperate need for him to promise that everything was going to be all right. This wasn’t his wife, the fiery, argumentative woman he’d fallen in love with and continued to argue with for years. This was a woman broken and scared, and he couldn’t think of anything to do but try and reassure her. “I’ll find our son, I promise. I won’t stop until I do.”

She attempted a smile but then pulled away and drifted back down the hall to Benny’s room. Ben watched her go, frowning. He couldn’t remember whether she had eaten that day or not.

There was still no new information. Weeks had gone by and there was never any new information. It was almost as if Benny had disappeared from the face of the earth. The news agencies had lost interest and the search was now a footnote buried in the middle of the broadcast. Then he wasn’t mentioned at all.

“Can’t you do something? Find a new lead?”

Detective O’Connor sat at the kitchen table, spinning his cup of coffee around and around. “We’ve tried just about everything at this point. If there was a lead, we would have miles more than we do now, but we don’t have anything. We’ll just have to wait and see if time turns something up. I know that’s hard to hear, but—”

“Hard to hear?” Ben shot a look down the hallway to where his wife was still hiding and struggled to modulate his voice. Any raised voices right now made Jeannie scurry for cover. “It’s fucking impossible. A five year old isn’t smoke. He can’t just disappear. What about the tip line?”

“There’s a lot of chatter, but none of it is useful. Dammit, I’m as frustrated as you are right now.”

“Could I get a copy of it, maybe try and go over it myself? I know you guys are busy, have other cases…”

The detective was shaking his head. “I’m sorry, Ben, it’s against regulations. I can’t let you have that record.”

“Why? You guys aren’t getting anywhere; I should get a crack at it!”

“I’m sorry, no. And, Ben? You two should be settling in for the long haul on this. It’s not going to be quick and easy. In fact, the odds now are just not good for you. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

The coffee tasted foul in his mouth and Ben scowled. “You’re saying you’re giving up hope.” It was their job to be looking; they couldn’t give up, not on his son.

“No, I’m…trying to be realistic. You should, too.” The detective stood. “If anything comes up, I’ll let you know.”

Ben didn’t even show the detective out; he knew the way by now. After rinsing the coffee cups at the sink, Ben grabbed a fresh stack of flyers from the counter and headed out to the streets of Savannah. Each night he roamed farther and farther from home to paper the city with his son’s face. It was better than nothing.

He got home a little after midnight and went into Benny’s room to try and coax his wife out of it once again. He shook her shoulder and when she didn’t respond, he rolled her over onto her back. A pill bottle fell to the floor, empty. It was the tranquilizers the doctor had prescribed for her a couple days after the disappearance.

He didn’t remember getting the phone or calling 911. All he remembered was the paramedics coming up the back steps and bundling both of them into the back of a wailing ambulance.

Ben spent the evening pacing in the emergency room. When the doctors came out, they said they had pumped her stomach and given her something to counteract the drugs; she was still unconscious, but they were hopeful. She would need to be watched closely for the next couple weeks and they suggested she stay at the hospital, at least for a few days after she woke up. They told him to go home, to take a shower and get some sleep. Ben nodded, too tired to argue, too tired to even think anymore, and took a cab back to their apartment to curl up alone in bed.

When she was declared to no longer be a threat to herself or others, Ben helped Jeannie back into their apartment, carrying her bags from the clinic.

“It’s so good to be home.” Her smile seemed real enough, though it trembled with the effort to sustain it for anything more than a brief flash. It was more life than he’d seen in her in weeks, and it made him happy to see it. As happy as he could be, considering.

Ben kissed her on the forehead. “It’s good to have you home.” He took the duffel bag back to their bedroom and came out to find her flipping through the mound of papers he’d left on the kitchen table.

“What’s this, Ben?” She paused to read a passage aloud. “It sounds like bad movie dialogue—I seen him, the other day, at the 7-Eleven on Main Street. Saying he’d been raised by wolves and right sure they wanted him back.”

“It’s the tip line. I got a copy of it, thought I could help look through it a bit, see if I catch anything the police missed.” He started straightening the mess of papers, gently taking the one out of her hand to put it back in its place in the pile. He had developed an order and process while she was still in the hospital and he wanted to make sure the paper was properly sequenced.

“I’m a little hazy about some things on…that day, but don’t I remember overhearing that you couldn’t have this?”

“Well, that’s what Detective O’Connor said, but you remember John, in my fraternity at school? The one who became a district attorney. Well, he was kind enough to get me a copy of the tip-line transcripts. I had to lean a little heavy on the whole brotherhood thing, but he finally caved.” Ben moved all of the papers off the table to a single stack on the counter and put his notepad full of notes on top of it. “You wouldn’t believe how many people called in.”