“So he’s your nephew?” said the cop.
“No. He’s the son of a friend who died. His mother’s in the hospital.” The cop nodded, wrote in his blue scratch.
“And is everything okay with him here? Any fights or anything out of the ordinary this morning?” The bluntness of the question surprised James. He expected it to be gently bracketed: I’m sorry to ask you this, but …
“Yes. I mean, as okay as it can be. His father died. He’s living with strangers.…” The cop paused, began to write.
“Don’t write that down. We’re not strangers. You know what I mean. We’re not family. We’re not his real family. But we love him like he’s our real family. Please don’t write the word ‘strangers’—I—” James was exploding with the need to get out of the kitchen, on to the streets. He could find him, he was certain. Finn would want to be found by James. He would rise like a gas from the cracks in the sidewalks, pull himself up from the gutters where he was hiding, and make himself solid and seen for James. “Please let me go look for him.”
The woman cop grinned at Ana, like a girlfriend happy the husbands have left the kitchen.
Ana found the constant shifts in the woman’s demeanor ridiculous, something studied on television. She craned her neck and saw James facing the cop across the nook table far away. They could be two guys waiting for the coffee to drip, except for the cop’s bowed head as he wrote.
“When did you last see Finn?” asked the cop, still smiling.
“This morning. No, last night. I was gone before he got up.”
“So your husband got him up?”
“Yes.”
“He fed him, dressed him, took him to school?”
“He doesn’t go to school. He goes to daycare three days a week. James took him.”
“We’ll need to get the number of the daycare.” The cop clicked her pen, flipped open a rubbery notepad like a small medical chart. She wrote something, shielding the paper from Ana. “So Mr. Ridgemore took him to daycare. Does he do that most days?”
“I told you. Three days a week.”
“I mean, he’s the one who gets him up?”
“I have to be at work very early. James works from home.”
“What does he do again?” She asked this in a false voice, the “again” a silly little effort at intimacy.
“He’s a writer.”
“Lucky you. Husband does all the hard stuff, huh?” She smiled. Ana wanted to snap off her teeth, one by one.
“Did he call you today? Tell you anything about the boy?”
“Like what?”
“Did they have a fight? Anything unusual?”
“No. I don’t think I heard from him today.” The cop raised her eyebrow.
“Really? I got two kids, eight and ten, boy and a girl. If their dad’s with them, I’m calling every ten minutes: How are they? What’d you screw up? What’d I miss?” She was grinning. “They go to my mom’s after school. We never had to put them in daycare. We’re lucky like that.”
Ana said nothing, attempting to dissect this line of questioning, wondering if it was a strategy of some kind, or if the strain of contempt was how mothers were expected to talk to one another.
The cop held her gaze steady. After a moment of silence, she said: “Is there anything you want to say that you can’t tell me in front of your husband?”
Ana’s disdain for this cop and her simple view of the world rose up in her throat: The beautiful house must have the dungeon in the basement. The beautiful wife must barely survive the monstrous husband.
“There’s nothing I can’t say in front of him.”
The woman cop looked at Ana expectantly. Ana was meant to crucify him now, and she could have. She thought of the e-mail, and the secret visits to Sarah’s room. But she said: “James is a good father to this boy.”
The cop nodded. She didn’t write anything in her notebook.
“You should write that down: He’s a father to that boy. He would never neglect him. He would never hurt him. This is a freak occurrence, something that must happen every Halloween. Children try to get candy, they try to make their way without their parents, right? That’s what kids do.”
“Absolutely, Mrs. Laframboise. Is there someone we can call to corroborate your being at work today?”
Ana found Elspeth’s number on her cell phone and handed it to the cop.
“Now please,” said Ana. “Can you stop talking and find him?”
Voices echoed up and down the street: “Finn! Finn! Finn!” People whom James had never seen before were crouched next to cars, banging on doorways.
James saw Chuckles’s shadow looming, black on black night. He went to him.
“We’ve checked every house on that side of the street where people are home,” Chuckles said. “We need to finish this side, then cross over.”
They were in front of the brothel house. The windows were dark, almost invisible. An empty cat food tin, congealed, lay on the patchy grass by James’s foot.
“I think this house is a brothel,” said James. “I think there’s sex trafficking going on in there.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” said Chuckles.
James shook his head. He sounded insane. He always sounded insane around this guy. “Ah, fuck! I don’t know. I have no idea what I’m talking about.” He went to the door and banged hard. No answer. He banged again. Chuckles stood behind him, saying nothing.
“Come on!” James kicked at the door, and his swollen foot shot heat up his leg. “Fuck! Motherfucker!” He jumped up and down on his good foot, grabbing at his damaged toes.
Chuckles stepped in front of James and rang a doorbell.
“I didn’t see the bell,” said James.
The door flew open. A warm yellow light flooded the stoop, and churning music escaped, accordions and guitars and incomprehensible foreign moaning. A young woman with thin brown hair stood in front of them wearing sweatpants with the word “Juicy” crawling up one thigh.
“Yes?” she said.
Chuckles was forcefuclass="underline" “We’re looking for a kid. A kid’s missing. He’s almost three, blond. Have you seen him?”
She peered behind the men, at the police car down the street.
“You are missing a boy? Lots of kids come to the door tonight but I don’t have candy. I don’t know. My English not so good. I sorry. You are police?” she said.
“No. He’s my son,” said James, not tripping on the word. “We’re just trying to find him. You’re not going to get in trouble.”
“No trouble. I have papers. I am legal. You want to come in?”
James nodded. He moved inside and stood in the living room while Chuckles wandered through the rest of house. If the girl objected, she said nothing about Chuckles’s explorations.
The living room contained nothing but an old couch, pink and faded. Books and notebooks lay scattered across the floor, English language textbooks, books with titles in unidentifiable, swirling script. On the fireplace sat a row of empty wine bottles enclosed in candle wax. The thin curtains were nailed to the windows, above the molding.
“You live alone?” asked James, scanning for nooks and crannies and Finn inside them.
“No. We are three girls, all from Georgia. We come as nannies but it doesn’t work out for us. Now we are students. I am legal. My friends are not here.” She looked at him, squinted. “You live on street also, yes? I see you. You want one drink?”
“No, thank you,” said James. After months of speculating, this reality seemed worse somehow: There was no one to be liberated here, no Russian pimps, no gangsters. Just girls. Pretty girls. Students who didn’t mind a little squalor and couldn’t take their garbage out on the right days. Girls he would have tried to fuck two decades ago.