The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard Read Free Book Online

good to be down where she could do nothing, ruin nothing, take charge of nothing. She wondered if Taylor could see her at all. Calvin Taylor was slender and spectacled, spoke with a Jamaican lilt. “Don’t worry, mother,” he said genially. “We haven’t lost a child yet.”
    He squatted down next to Beth and asked her a series of soft questions about Ben—his size, his age, his clothing, where he was standing when she last saw him. Beth murmured in reply. When Wayne came over, Calvin Taylor shook his hand and asked about the results of the first-floor search. And then he said, again genially, “Well, Mr. Thunder, sounds like nothing left for us to do but open a few doors.” Wayne all but beamed with pride; the police had commended him! Beth almost laughed aloud.
    Jimmy and Taylor told the manager, who was lurking, to get a passkey; they would have to open two hundred rooms.
    “Ah, there are guests, though…” the manager said nervously.
    “We’ll knock,” said Taylor.
    The lobby filled with handsome young men—almost all short, Irish, Italian, a couple of black guys, one tall Germanic blond. A woman with long brown hair in a bun, looking awkward in a uniform clearly not styled to fit the contours of her body. She came over and sat down beside Beth on the trolley. “Scared, huh?” she said. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him. I mean, I’ve been a cop for five years, and I’ve looked for a dozen kids, and we always find them.” She stopped and looked at Beth, who was pulling her own hair now, rhythmically. “We find them, and they’re okay. Not hurt.”
    Beth did not know what to do with Vincent; she supposed she should comfort him. She looked at him, as he twitched in his sleep.
    “Would you like something to eat?” the manager asked Ellen. He was florid now, and smelled thickly of cigarette smoke.
    “I’m not his mother,” Ellen told him. The manager, now sighing audibly, turned to Beth.
    “Would you like something to eat?”
    Beth considered. She did not see how it would be possible to eat.
    “I’d like a vodka and tonic,” she said. The manager’s mouth made an O in surprise, but he bustled off, literally snapping his fingers to the bartender.
    “Paperwork,” said the brown-haired police officer with the artful bun. “I have to ask you a couple of things, Mrs. Cappadora. I mean, even if we find him in five minutes, there has to be a report, of course. And we need the most detailed description we can get to send out to other departments—if we need to do that, which we probably won’t.”
    Beth knew she was supposed to find this soothing, this routine-ness, this scoffing at the absurdity of it all. It was meant to assure her that any minute a tousled Ben, with a fistful of baseball cards given him by a friendly policeman, would be carried out the elevator doors like a silver cup. Everyone would be smiling, everyone would be chiding Ben, “You gave your mama a scare, partner….”
    “…three?” asked the police officer.
    “Yes,” said Beth. “What?”
    “He’s three, your son?”
    “Just turned.”
    “Date of birth?”
    “April first.”
    “April Fool’s Day.”
    “Yep.”
    “And he has, what…brown hair?”
    “He has red hair. He has dark red hair. Auburn. And a red baseball cap. He’s wearing an orange shirt with red fish on it. And purple shorts. And red high-top gym shoes. Those are new. Parrots.” Beth bit her lip; she knew how that sounded—as though she didn’t care enough to match colors in her kids’ outfits. But who noticed what a kid wore to ride in a car? She slid her eyes over to the brown-haired officer. She would. The officer was probably a caring mother.
    And why, she asked herself suddenly, don’t they tell one another what Ben looks like? Is there a therapy or a strategy in the repetition?
    “And Mrs. Cappadora, where did you say you lived?”
    Beth hunkered down and talked. She concentrated on precision and detail. She pretended she was Pat. She