Undeliverable (13 page)

“Looks like hundreds.”

“More like thousands. From all over the state and even around the country. I don’t put much stock in those, but there are some interesting patterns in the other stuff. I go out and post flyers every day and spend my time down in the store looking through the tip line. I feel like I’m getting close to something. At least I’m still doing something, unlike the police. They’ve basically given up at this point.”

“But not you.”

“No, not me.”

Over the next few months, Jeannie saw a therapist three times a week, then twice, and finally down to once a week. She seemed more optimistic, though she still slept in Benny’s room every night. She would come home from her sessions talking about carrying on for Benny, making sure he had a life to come back to, making sure she was healthy and whole for him. She was coming back to life a little bit at a time, color returning to her cheeks, and she even laughed at a joke on one of the late night shows.

But she refused to have anything to do with Ben’s tip-line project or the papering. She needed to focus, her shrink said, on organizing herself instead. She meditated every morning and wrote letters to Benny that she religiously saved in a shoebox under her nightstand.

Ben wasn’t sure how any of that could help. He was certain that finding Benny was the only real way to make things go back to normal so he continued to go and hand out flyers, posting them wherever he could. He scoured the tip line for any reference to their son, begging for more recent transcripts from his friend.

One Saturday afternoon, Jeannie came into the shop while he sat at the counter working on the transcripts and declared she was ready to go back to work.

Ben carefully marked his place before turning to his wife. “Are you sure?” She was still prone to breaking down at every commercial featuring a young blonde boy, and she still wouldn’t let him touch her. What if a customer walked into their store with a young boy? How would she react?

She took a ragged breath and nodded. “Absolutely. Doc said it was okay if I wanted to, and I want to do this. It’s all part of keeping my life together for Benny. For when he comes home.”

Ben considered this a moment more, then decided that if her shrink said it was okay, she could probably handle it. “Alright then. Want the till?”

“Sure.” She settled on the stool behind the cash register and ran her fingers over the buttons. “Been a while.”

“We’ve been doing okay.” Ben hadn’t told her about the constant stream of sightseers, but the the vultures had been careful to buy things as well so they didn’t feel guilty for gawking. He wasn’t going to complain about the extra money.

“Sure, we always do well enough. Ben, why don’t you go take a break, go get a coffee, or just go for a walk, something. I got this.” She crossed her arms, hugging her sweater to herself.

“Ok, if you’re sure. I’ll be right back.” Ben started to head to the front door, happy to get a chance to go paper the city in the daylight, but Jeannie called him back.

“Ben, wait, can you take these someplace else first? I can’t —it’s hard, looking at it. Thinking about it.”

“Yeah, of course.” He gathered the papers and took them into the backroom. “Better?”

“Thanks.”

Eight months had gone by since Benny had vanished. No leads came in, and nothing Ben offered to Detective O’Connor seemed to be of any use. Jeannie was getting calmer, more put-together, insisting that she was focused on making sure the home for Benny to come back to was whole and healthy—always that phrase, whole and healthy. She ran the front of the store while Ben retreated more and more often into the backroom under the pretext of fixing pieces of furniture.

In reality, he spent most of his time at a wall that was usually covered by a rolling cabinet. He had taped up a map of Savannah and had started mapping the tip-line calls and their content. He had gathered newspaper articles, radio transcripts, anything at all that he could find that referenced his son. When Jeannie came back, he was quick to cover everything. He was sure that if she didn’t even like looking at the transcript of the tip line, she would really hate what he was doing now. But it was necessary. He was going to find their son; he had promised he would.

Detective O’Connor was due for his monthly no-progress report. He wanted to have something new to show the detective when he came. He thought that one of the tips sounded good; it had come from two blocks away and the caller had actually given her name and contact information.

“Detective O’Connor, hello.” His wife’s voice echoed from the front of the store.

Ben shifted the cabinet back into place and went out to join them. “Detective.”

“Ben. Jeannie. I’m afraid it’s the same as every other time. There just isn’t anything.” The man had his hands clasped behind his back and his feet planted solidly on the floor in front of the counter.

“I understand.” Jeannie was staring down at her clasped hands, fighting tears.

Ben swallowed the tightness out of his throat before asking, “What about that molester you guys found last month?”

The detective frowned. “The priest?”

“Yeah, could he have…?”

“No, I really don’t think so. Those allegations are incredibly weak and they’re coming from one family within the parish who has had an ongoing feud with the man over his sermon material.”

“Oh. Well.” Everyone was silent a moment.

Jeannie excused herself and went up to the apartment, probably to brew another of her numerous cups of chamomile tea. It was supposed to be calming. All he knew is he had come to hate the smell of chamomile.

Ben took advantage of her absence to broach the subject of a new possibility in the tip line. The two men went back to the workshop and Ben shifted the cabinet out of the way.

“This one, here, from Marjorie Leek. It seems legit. Did you guys check it out? Should I stop by and talk to her?”

The detective sighed and rubbed a hand over his mouth before replying. “Ben, Marjorie has Alzheimer’s. She calls any tip line that comes up on her television screen and insists she has seen the person they’re looking for. She never has.”

“Maybe this time she did,” Ben insisted.

The detective sighed. “She’s called us over a hundred times.”

Ben tried to control his mounting frustration. “But you didn’t—”

“Ben, what is this?” Jeannie’s voice cut through their argument and Ben winced.

He turned to face his wife, knowing that the wall of information was scattered and disorganized. Not ready for her yet. Once he found something concrete he was going to show her, prove...well, he wasn’t sure what he was going to prove, but he knew this wasn’t going to sit well with her. “I’ve been thinking, working with the tips and the information…”

“But, what is all this doing on the wall?”

Ben started over to her. “I needed to organize the information, see it all laid out.”

“Get rid of it.” Her hands were wrapped hard around the steaming mug and they trembled hard enough to slosh tea over the edge.

She couldn’t ask that of him, it would be like him asking her to stop believing Benny was coming back in just a few days. This is how he was going to find their son and she wanted him to just stop? “Jeannie, I’m trying to find our son!” He gestured wildly at the wall, dislodging a pin. Cursing, he stuck it back in its proper place.

“Get rid of it.” Her voice cracked. “Right now.” She left the workroom and returned to the front portion of the store.

Ben moved to put the cabinet back in place and started to follow his wife.

Detective O’Connor stopped him. “Are you going to do as she says?”

“Why? She’ll get over it. I’m doing the best I can to find our son while she sits there and pretends that nothing is wrong.” Ben’s throat burned again. He cleared it, coughing a few times.

The other man paused before speaking. “I think she’s right; this isn’t healthy for either of you.”

“Not healthy for your job you mean, if I find my son before you, with all your special detective training.” Ben regretted it as soon as he said it. But he couldn’t take it back, so he instead glared defiantly at the police officer.

The other man was silent a moment, his eyes calm. “You need to take a break from this, Ben. It’s wearing you down. Do as your wife says and take that mess down.”

“Fine. Later.” But he knew he wouldn’t. Both of them did and the detective only let out a slip of a sigh before taking his leave.

Ben continued to work on his project mainly at night, after Jeannie had taken her sleeping pill and would be guaranteed not to stumble in and yell at him once again. It had grown to the point that it now hid behind two rolling cabinets in the storeroom and encompassed over two hundred separate pieces of paper with scribbled notes, photographs, and bits of news reports.

His eyes were blurred from fatigue, but he couldn’t sleep. Not until he’d spent some time on this spider web of a chart, making whatever connections he could find, organizing and reorganizing the tip line on different hunches to see if a pattern emerged. To give his eyes a break, he picked up the beer bottles that littered his workbench and took them out the back door to the recycling bin. There almost wasn’t room in it due to the stack of bottles already there, though he could have sworn that the recycling truck had come by two days ago.

Once back inside, he pulled over a stack of notecards that held the most believable tips and shuffled it. He found this method of randomization often formed interesting patterns that seemed worth pursuing. After five shuffles, he spread the cards out on the table and started moving them around, blindly pushing them back and forth, already knowing most of the content by heart. His eye started twitching and he rested his head on the desk for a moment to wait for the twitch to subside.

“I can’t believe you.”

Ben’s head jerked off the table and he nearly fell off his stool. Light was streaming in the workshop windows and he had an index card adhered to his face with spit. Brushing it off, he turned to confront his wife.

“What?”

“This!” She gestured at the wall covered in paper, the note cards piled on his workbench. “I thought you were going to get rid of it. I thought you were supporting me, us.”

Ben scrambled to wake up enough to defend his project, cursing himself for falling asleep at the desk before covering up his work. “I am. This is the only way to find our son. No one else is doing any work. I have to!”

“No, you’re obsessing. And I can’t be healthy here if you keep this up. The last time I asked if you had thrown this all out, you told me you had, and I believed you. If you’re lying to me about this…”

Ben approached her with his arms out. “Jeannie.”

“No, Ben.” She backed away until she was in the doorway again. “Not—I can’t.”

“You haven’t let me even hold you for months! All you do is sleep in Benny’s room, and I can’t even put a hand on your shoulder. You call that being healthy?”

“I’m healing, and you’re not helping, not with this—this idiocy!”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Ben’s hands clenched and unclenched in frustration. He didn’t know how to make his wife see that what he was doing was for them, for their family. How could she not see that? He was so caught up in trying to figure out a way to get her to understand that he missed the next thing she said.

“What?”

Jeannie repeated herself, stronger this time. “I want you to leave.”

“But, Jeannie, please.” He moved toward her but stopped when she took another step away and shook her head.

“No. This is bad. It’s bad for you, and it’s bad for me. Hopefully this will make you see that.” She sounded like she was trying to convince herself more than anyone else.

“Where am I supposed to go?” Ben couldn’t think, couldn’t process this.

“I don’t know. But I want you to find someplace else.” She paused. “I don’t want to see you around the store, either. It’ll be too difficult.”

He slammed his hand onto the metal desk and she jumped. “Dammit, Jeannie! Not only do I need to find someplace to live, I need to find work, too!”

She flinched but stood firm. “You can have some of our savings to hold you over.”

“Fat lot of help that is.” All he was trying to do was find their son. She couldn’t see that. She didn’t understand. She didn’t want to understand. He knew it was because she blamed him, even if she wouldn’t admit it.

“Ben, I’m sorry, but it’s the only way—”

“It’s the only way for you to put your head so far in the sand it hits bedrock. I get it. I’ll be gone by this afternoon.” He turned to his web of information and started carefully dismantling it, making sure each piece of paper and pin was carefully stowed.

Sylvia swirled a shot of bourbon and downed it. She added it to the stack of glasses already on their table. “And then you came to Atlanta.”

“Eventually, yes. Took me a month to land here. Staying at crappy subsistence motels, trying to find work while still having time for Benny. And then this job opened up.” Ben was feeling a bit worse for wear. It was thirsty work, wrenching your heart out all over again.

“Why did you take it?”

“Hmm?” Ben had been admiring the balanced stack of glasses they had created. His brain was fuzzy, soft, and it was hard to concentrate on the here and now instead of reliving the arguments over and over again. “Oh. The databases. I wanted access to those databases. Since the police aren’t doing shit anymore, and I didn’t have any way to look things up before, this seemed perfect. I can finally start doing something with all that information I’ve been collecting.”

“Is it working? Have you found anything?”

Ben shrugged. “I’m not sure yet. I haven’t had much time to actually work with the computer much. Spending too much time getting acclimatized to the warehouse. Soon though. I spend most weekends out canvassing still. There’s a chance he could have ended up here; there were enough tips from this city at any rate.” He lowered his head to the table for a moment in an attempt to keep the world from spinning hard enough to drop him out of his chair. It had been a long time since he’d managed to get quite this drunk and he was surprised at the amount of alcohol it had taken. A lot more than in college, that’s for sure.