Dead Silence Read online

  “The boy is stable and alert,” Dr. Handler is saying. “His vitals are good.”

  “How old do you think he is?”

  “About three, give or take.”

  “That’s what I thought.” He writes it on his report beneath the physical description he’d jotted earlier. Fair skin, slender build, blond hair, and the bluest eyes he’s ever seen—same shade as his favorite pair of jeans. The ones his twenty-year-old daughter had recently informed him are too bright.

  “Dark denim is in style now, Dad,” she’d said the last time she’d visited. “And those are cut way too wide in the legs.”

  “That’s because I’m cut way too wide in the legs. And everywhere else.”

  “Next time I come home, I’ll go shopping with you. We’ll get you some fashionable stuff.”

  He’d looked at his wife, who’d laughed. “Come on, don’t you want to be fashionable?”

  “You, too, Mom. Time to lose the cargo pants.”

  “But . . . they’re comfortable. And they have lots of pockets.”

  “Ugh. They’re so 2012.”

  “I got them in 1996,” she’d said after their fashionista had sailed out of the room. “Same year we got her.”

  “I think my jeans are older than that. Kids. One minute, we’re changing their diapers and the next—”

  “Don’t you dare say they’re changing ours!”

  He’d laughed and put his arm around her. “I was going to say, the next, they’re telling us we don’t know anything about anything.”

  “Maybe they’re right.”

  “They are. But we can never let on.”

  He sees Dr. Handler check her cell phone, bristling like she’s about to dash away.

  “Is the boy talking yet?” he asks her.

  “No.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t speak English.”

  “He seemed to understand me when I asked him to stick out his tongue and sit up.”

  “So is it that he can’t talk, or do you think he’s . . . you know, dumb? Sorry—that can’t be the politically correct phrase, but . . . what is?”

  “I refer to patients with this particular disability as nonverbal.”

  “Do you see a lot of them?”

  “Very few. In this case, I’m inclined to suspect PTSD with selective mutism, depending on what happened to the child leading up to being discovered.”

  He jots that on his incident report. “PTSD—so he went through some kind of trauma?”

  “At this age, just being separated from a caregiver can be traumatic. The sooner we can find his parents, the better.” Dr. Handler looks at her phone again. “I’m sorry, Sergeant, I have a patient waiting to be discharged.”

  “Can you just give me another minute? The more you can tell me about this little boy, the better chance I have of finding out where he belongs.”

  “Is this part of the investigation? Or out of the goodness of your heart?”

  “Both,” he admits, and jumps back as paramedics rush past, pushing a bloody man on a gurney. A sobbing woman trails behind, grasping for him and wailing.

  “Let’s step into that office,” Dr. Handler suggests, and leads the way into a closet-sized room. She flips on a light and closes the door. “I’d ask you to have a seat, but . . .” Both chairs are stacked with cardboard cartons, as is the desk and a good portion of the floor. “Medical equipment. It was delivered yesterday, but it’s been too chaotic for anyone to unpack it and put it away. Happens a lot around here. Short staff, budget cuts.”

  “Happens everywhere. Especially CPS. You probably know how that goes.”

  “Oh, yes.” She shakes her head.

  Child Protective Services had promised to send someone over to the hospital for further assessment, but they, too, are overwhelmed tonight. The administrator who’d fielded the phone call had been pleased to hear that the Hansons are available to serve as emergency fosters if need be.

  “That will help expedite things. We’ve worked with you and your wife enough times to know that he’ll be in good hands. Are you sure, though? Because you’d said you were going to take a break for a couple of years.”

  “We were, but . . . this case is special. There’s just something about this kid . . .”

  “Enough said. We’ll have someone there as soon as possible. Probably an hour or so.”

  More than two have passed since then.

  He sets the clipboard on a waist-high stack of boxes, pen poised to write, and looks up at Dr. Handler. “Anything you can tell me about the child’s condition that might help identify him?”

  She flips through her file. “He’s extremely pale, with poor muscle tone, but he doesn’t appear to be malnourished. No head trauma. He has a few bruises and an open cut on his foot. Nothing that screams deliberate mistreatment, though. Kids that age—they fall, learning to ride a bike or climbing where they shouldn’t, you know?”

  “Oh, I know. I’ve got three of them. Not that age anymore, but . . . believe me, I know.”

  She nods, flipping a page. “Another thing—the child is filthy. His pajamas are caked in dirt. He’s not wearing shoes. You said he was found on a farm?”

  “Yes. I was in the area on speed patrol when the call came in. Levi Stoltzfus—do you know him?”

  “No.”

  “He lives out on Cortland Hollow Road, has a big farm with an orchard. His wife, Anna, makes the best apple butter you’ll ever taste, by the way. They’ll have a table at the Apple Harvest Festival this weekend if you want to sample it yourself.” His stomach rumbles in appreciation. “Anyway, that’s where the boy turned up, by the old fruit stand. Levi was there to do some repairs—guess he had quite a bit of damage from that storm last week. He found the boy unconscious on the property, scooped him up, and went to the gas station to call for help.”

  “No cell phone?”

  “Levi’s Amish. A lot of people who live out in that area are. He was driving a buggy, so it took some time for him to reach a phone, even though his horse is a standardbred.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it used to be a racehorse. A lot of the Amish use them, according to my teenaged son—he’s obsessed with them.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “Obsessed with racehorses, not with the Amish,” he explains, not adding that his kid has more than his share of unusual obsessions. “By the time I got on the scene, the boy was waking up. Groggy, not talking, seemed dazed. We’re canvassing the area, but there aren’t a lot of houses in walking distance of where he was found. No one recognizes him and no one has reported a missing child. There’s a campground about two miles away, and we thought he might have wandered over from there, but the place isn’t even open yet. Too early in the season.”

  “Two miles is a long way for a child that age to wander. And if he did walk that far, not wearing shoes, he’d probably have more than just one fairly superficial cut on one foot.”

  “I know. It’s like he dropped out of the sky like a baby bird. We’ve put out an APB, and we’re checking the missing child databases. Nothing yet, but if—”

  He breaks off as Dr. Handler’s cell phone buzzes.

  “Sorry, I have to get this.”

  She answers her call. He checks his own phone and finds a text that reads only, ETA?

  Soon, I hope, he types back. Still waiting for—

  He curtails the text as the doctor’s terse conversation ends. “Okay, I’ll be right there,” she says, and hangs up. “I’m sorry, Sergeant Hanson, but I really have to dash.”

  “I appreciate your time. Do you think he’ll be released tonight? Or do you need to admit him?”

  “Ideally, he’ll be released. We’re waiting on CPS and a pediatric psych consult, but as you know, it’s probably going to be a while.”

  “Can I see him?”

  “Sure, go on in.” She gives a little wave and disappears.

  He deletes the second half of his text, hits Send, and heads back out into the c
orridor.

  Crises are playing out in every direction. For many, the night will end in healing; for some, uncertainty; for a few, tragedy.

  Which will it be for the lost little boy?

  Poking past the curtain, he sees that the child’s eyes are closed, his face pale as the pillow beneath his shaggy blond hair. His right thumb is in his mouth. A plump redheaded nurse in pink scrubs adjusts a tube in his scrawny left arm.

  “IV fluids for nourishment and hydration,” she says, seeing him without needing to look up, as women have a way of doing.

  “Is he asleep?”

  “He was awake just a second ago.” She leans over the bed. “Sweetie? You okay?”

  His heart stops the way it had when his own kids were toddlers, sleeping so soundly that he wasn’t sure they were breathing. How many times had he poked them in their cribs to make sure, risking the wrath of a terrible two-year-old?

  The nurse gives the blond hair a little pat and shrugs. “I think he’s just resting.”

  Her tone makes it clear she doesn’t think that at all.

  “Um . . .” He tries to make out the nurse’s name tag.

  “Chess,” she says with a smile. “Like the game. My full name is Francesca, but nobody calls me that.”

  “Mine is Willard. Like the . . . uh, guy in the horror movie about the man-eating rats—that’s what my wife said when we met. She hasn’t called me by my name since.”

  “What does she call you?”

  “For the most part, you don’t want to know,” he says with a wry grin, and she laughs. “So how is this little guy doing?”

  “Oh, he’s terrific. We were having a nice little chat right before you came in.”

  “He was talking?”

  “Not quite.” She goes back to the IV tubes. “But I was telling him about my little boy, and how much he loves nursery rhymes. I sang a few and I thought he might join in. He didn’t, but he smiled, like he knows them. Right, sweetie? Like this one—‘Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow . . .’”

  Ah, a ripple of awareness under the pale eyelids as she sings.

  Someone shouts for help down the hall. Running footsteps, commotion.

  This is no place for a frightened little boy.

  Chess does her best to drown out the chaos as she works on him, singing “Jack and Jill,” “Hickory, Dickory Dock,” and “Baa Baa Black Sheep.”

  “There we go. All set for now,” she says, finished with the IV. “I’ve got to move on to another patient. Did Dr. Handler tell you we’re waiting on a psych consult?”

  “She did. And a caseworker, too.”

  “That’s going to be a while. Are you sticking around?”

  “I am. My wife and I have volunteered to be emergency fosters if he’s released before we find out where he belongs.”

  “That’s a nice thought, but there’s a lot of red tape to get approved for something like that.”

  “We’re already certified. We’ve worked with CPS quite a bit.”

  “Fostering?”

  He nods. “We’ve had quite a few kids over the years, and we adopted our youngest son through the system.”

  “That’s a beautiful thing. The world needs more people like you.”

  “Really, more like my wife. She’s the one who got us involved in this, years ago.”

  “I admire that. So many people are only interested in helping themselves these days. All right, make yourself comfy and I’ll check back soon, but holler if you need me.”

  Chess disappears around the curtain.

  “So, kiddo . . . you like nursery rhymes, huh?”

  The boy is still. Asleep?

  He keeps talking anyway, just in case he’s in there somewhere, alone and frightened and needing reassurance.

  “I happen to know a few nursery rhymes, too. I can’t carry a tune, but they’re not all set to music, are they?”

  He reels off “Little Miss Muffet” and a few others he remembers from a Mother Goose book he used to read the kids—“Little Jack Horner,” “Little Bo Peep,” “Three Little Kittens.” He’s not sure, but the boy’s eyelids might have fluttered a few times.

  “Little. Why are so many nursery rhymes about little? That’s what I want to know.”

  He reaches out to touch his shoulder. The child flinches and jerks his thumb from his mouth. His eyes open, and then close again.

  “Where’d you get those beautiful blue eyes, kiddo? Oh, that reminds me of another good one for you. How about ‘Little Boy Blue’?”

  He recites it, sensing that the child is paying close attention.

  “. . . where is the boy who looks after the sheep? Under the . . .” He trails off as if he’s forgotten the rest. “Under the . . . um . . . under the . . .”

  The child’s lips move. No sound comes out, but he mouths haystack.

  So you are in there, aware. And someone read you a nursery rhyme somewhere in your past. Maybe someone who loved you.

  The thumb is back in his mouth, and he’s sucking it feverishly.

  “How do you know that story, little guy? Who told it to you? Your mom, maybe?”

  But it could have been the nurse. Just now, before he’d returned to the room. The recognition doesn’t necessarily mean he has a mother who loves him.

  Maybe you just want to believe that, for the child’s sake.

  A tear slips past the fringe of blond lashes and slides down the boy’s pale cheek.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he whispers, touching that fragile little shoulder. This time, the child doesn’t flinch. “I’m here for however long you need me.”

  Jessie has never encountered a child who won’t eat egg noodles, white bread, or chocolate pudding, but she’d recently rid her pantry of all three so that Billy wouldn’t be tempted to indulge.

  She’d dashed out for what was supposed to have been a quick supermarket stop, but it’s impossible to leave Wegmans without a cartful of groceries and running into everyone you’ve ever known. Not fun when you’re wearing ancient jeans that keep sagging down your hips because you didn’t have time to find a belt, and you haven’t picked up a brush since this morning.

  Catching a glimpse of herself in the rearview mirror, she sees that her short, dark hair is slicked and spiky from the rain, and her eyeliner has smudged around her lashes. Precisely the look she’d been going for as a teenager in the ’80s, but as a middle-aged mom? Not so much.

  Thunder rumbles as she turns up North Cayuga Street and into her driveway. Home.

  As a little girl growing up in the quaint gingerbread house next door, she’d thought this place, three stories with turrets and a mansard roof, looked like a cartoon mansion from which bats and ghosts would swoop as the clock gonged midnight. That was before the owner, Professor Silas Moss, covered the gloomy peeling paint with a fresh coat that had dismayed the neighborhood, especially her parents—which had in turn delighted Jessie.

  “When he said yellow, I thought he meant a muted shade of ochre or vintage mustard, something like that,” her mother had said, gaping out the window.

  Her father had lowered the shade. “I don’t think Big Bird Yellow is in the historically accurate palette.”

  Thereafter, Jessie had seen Si not as an aging neighbor, but as a kindred spirit. The garish yellow house had been her second home—and then simply home, after he’d moved out fifteen years ago.

  She’d thought Billy might be back by now, but his car isn’t here and the first-floor windows are dark. At least now she has time to pull herself together, get supper started, and warn Theodore. She sees lamplight in his bedroom window at the back of the house and a silhouette at the desk.

  She grabs as many shopping bags as she can carry, along with the library book she’d picked up on the way home. It’s about the Titanic, to help her better relate to an anxiety-ridden young therapy patient who’s obsessed with the century-old disaster.

  “It’s common for kids to fixate on something when they’re dealing
with anxiety,” she’d told his worried mother.

  “Yes, like video games, or basketball . . . But a ship that sank a hundred years ago? Isn’t that strange?”

  “Not by a long shot,” she’d said, and shared her own son’s latest random passion for horse racing.

  Inside the house, she flips the light switch with her elbow. No space for the bags on the cluttered countertops, so she dumps them on the floor, shouting, “Theodore? Can you come help me? It’s about to pour again!”

  Silence above. No surprise there. Chip and Petty, too, had often had selective hearing when it came to helping.

  And you don’t spring disruption on Theodore when he’s doing his homework. Or ever, really.

  I have to warn him before—

  The lights flicker. Uh-oh. Jessie scurries back out for another load, glancing at the black storm clouds descending like a funeral veil. How much more rain, she wonders, can the leaky mansard roof take? Last night, she’d counted far more drips than there were strategically arranged third-floor buckets, and far too few emergency savings account dollars to repair the roof, let alone replace it. Another Ithaca winter is bearing down, with so much snow that it will be a miracle if the roof doesn’t give way under the weight.

  How many people had warned her and Billy against buying this place? Not just for the proximity to her parents’ house, but because it was—is—five thousand square feet of fixer-upper.

  I just couldn’t let it go, though. I couldn’t let strangers live here.

  She’d had no problem when her parents sold her childhood home next door and moved away. She never had been able to shake the memory of what had happened there back in 1987.

  Leaving the groceries on the floor, she hurries up the enclosed back stairway that had been used for servants in another century—not the one prior to this. The treads are steep and worn, the bulb long burnt out on a ceiling so high that replacing it is a death-defying feat. The house dates back to the 1870s, with original woodwork, tile, windows, doors, and fixtures—and the endless repairs that accompany them.

  Theodore’s room at the top of the flight had been built as a library. Overlooking the backyard and running the width of the house, it’s spacious and inviting, with a marble fireplace, deep window seats, and two walls of built-in bookshelves.