Don’t go into the basement. The words drive me to my knees, reverberating inside my head, a kind of high, terrible keening basementbasementbasement. What has he done? What has that monster done to my son?
Bing, bong.
Front-door chimes. Who can it be? A wild rush of hope floods into me and I react by running full tilt through the hallway, banging my shoulder on the doorjamb as I head for the foyer.
Bing, bong.
Let it be Tomas. Let it be my son. Not dead in the basement, but alive on the front steps, ringing the chimes because he no longer has his key. I can see his big loopy grin, I can smell his hair, I can feel the bony softness of him pressed to my breast, struggling to get out of one of Mom’s dreaded super-hugs.
Hands shaking, I fumble with the lock and the chain—open, open!—and then the door swings wide and sunlight spills into the foyer.
Cops. Uniformed deputies. Lots of them.
“Tommy! Did you find him? Have you got my son?”
“Mrs. Bickford, may we enter your domicile?”
I gesture them inside, momentarily speechless. Dread descending because there’s no sign of my son out there, and the cops do not look happy. As if they resent being the bearers of bad news. It’s enough to make me flop onto the nearest sofa, burying my face in my hands as the uniforms flood into the foyer, into the living room, into my house.
“Mrs. Bickford, look at me, please.”
I look up and see a face I recognize. Terence Crebbin, one of the Fairfax officers. Sheriff Corso speaks well of Terry, refers to him as “my right arm,” and more than once Deputy Sheriff Crebbin has made an appearance at the ballpark when pressing police business intruded on Fred Corso’s sideline as a Little League coach. Always made an impression with the moms because he’s cute, a slightly harder but no less attractive version of Brad Pitt, except that his hair remains sturdily brown, no highlights.
Terry knows me well enough to use my first name, and so the “Mrs. Bickford” sounds more than ominous, it’s like a physical blow to the body. I’m cringing, waiting for the bad news. But what he says comes as a complete surprise.
“Have you seen Sheriff Corso?” he demands.
“What? No. My son. What about my son?”
“Never mind your son, Mrs. Bickford. That’s none of our concern right now.”
“None of your concern? But he’s been abducted! That’s what I’m trying to tell you!”
I’ve known Terry Crebbin on a casual basis for at least three years, and have always found him to be cordial and polite, if slightly distant, as I suppose any married guy is apt to be around a single mom. So there’s something wrong here, some terrible misunderstanding, something my poor addled mind has failed to grasp.
“Look,” I say, my voice shaky and uncertain, “what are you doing here? Who called you?”
I’m desperate to know, but Deputy Sheriff Crebbin is untouched by my anxiety, and betrays not a scintilla of sympathy. His cold, mysteriously stubborn expression makes me crazy—how dare they treat me like this, after what I’ve been through? What I’m still going through?
“I don’t know what you think is going on,” I begin somewhat heatedly. “But here’s what happened. My son, Tommy, was snatched at the baseball game. When I got home his abductor was waiting. Right here in the house. He had a gun. He made me go to the bank and wire money to an offshore account. He promised to let my son go, but I think he was lying.”
“Uh-huh. What makes you think this ‘abductor’ was lying?”
“The last thing he said was ‘don’t look in the basement.’”
Crebbin reacts as if he’s been slapped. “Basement?” He turns to the cops who have been, I now realize, handling my belongings. Picking things up, putting them down, which strikes me as rude. “Griffin! Pasco!” Sergeant Crebbin barks at his underlings. “Take a look around the basement.”
Griffin, who appears to be several years older than Crebbin, shoots him a look of concern. “Sarge, don’t you think, maybe we, um, need a warrant for that?”
Crebbin cuts him off with an impatient gesture, and turns to me, his expression intense, angry for some reason. As if something about me has deeply offended him. “Mrs. Bickford, do we have your permission to check out the basement? You’ve already given us permission to enter your domicile, and the law permits us to examine evidence found in plain view. The basement is assumed to be part of the domicile, so in essence you’ve already given us access to the basement.”
Why is he babbling in legalese? Nothing makes sense. Is my brain still numb with the drug that knocked me out? Why can’t I make them understand that my son has been kidnapped?
“The basement, Mrs. Bickford.”
“Yes, yes,” I tell him. “Tell your men to go ahead. I want you to look in the basement. I want to know.”
“What exactly do you want us to know?”
But I shake my head, wave him off. Can’t speak of it. Too awful to contemplate. But I’ve been thinking about nothing else since the man in the mask phoned.
“Stay on the sofa, Mrs. Bickford. Deputy Katz? See she doesn’t leave the room.”
Katz is Deputy Rita, a female officer I’ve never seen before. Small-boned and Hepburn-thin, she stands awkwardly beside the couch with her hand on her buttoned holster, as if fearing that I’ll make a run for it. And she avoids looking me in the eye. I try to tell her what happened to my son, babble something about the man in the mask, but she seems determined to avoid conversation with me. I’m not ordinarily such a motormouth, but nerves keep me yakking, as if the steady stream of words may act as barrier for whatever unthinkable thing waits in the basement.
“I thought he was here, you know? That he’d gotten a ride home with one of the other parents. From the game. Tommy won the game, he was excited. So was I. Yelling from the dugout, you know? We’re not supposed to. The parents, I mean. Supposed to maintain, be supportive, but not too noisy. Other parents might get offended. Then he went for an ice-cream sundae and then he wasn’t there and I was worried. Like you get when you can’t see your kid. Do you have kids? You’re so young, maybe not, but believe me, you never stop worrying. So I came home, looking for Tommy. Tomas, actually, that’s his real name. I thought he was here in the house, playing his video games, but it was the man in the mask, waiting for me. He had a pistol and, like I said, this ski-mask kind of thing.”
A door slams with the force of a gunshot. I just about jump out of my skin, as does Deputy Katz. Crebbin storms back into the room, glaring at me. I can tell he’s resisting the impulse to lay his hands upon me. But why? What does he think I’ve done to deserve his withering contempt.
“Come with me, Mrs. Bickford.”
There’s no fight in me, and no point in resisting. I accompany him into the hallway. A uniformed cop rushes by, grabbing for his walkie-talkie. Then Crebbin takes my arm and leads me through an open door, to the landing for the basement stairs. My knees get even weaker. Below are lights, more cops, the low hum of excited voices trying to keep it down. Crebbin expects me to refuse, but my mother’s body takes over, desperate to know what happened to my son, and I find myself descending the stairs, passing into the shadows of the partially illuminated basement.
At the bottom of the stairs, cops wait on either side, leaving an opening just large enough for me to pass through. Passively forcing me to the north wall of the basement, and to the large chest freezer that holds goods for my catering business. Cookie and bread dough, mostly.
My heart is racing and my jaw is quivering, but there’s just enough of me paying attention to get the impression that these men have already looked inside the freezer but are pretending not to have done so for some reason. Maybe because whatever waits in the freezer cannot be said to be in “plain sight,” and is therefore not subject to a warrantless search.