Chapter Twenty-four

He blinked, taking in the scene.

It was quite a scene. Three nurses and two doctors, all swarming around my son, who appeared to doze in and out of sleep. Or in and out of consciousness.

In our separation, Danny had proven to be particularly vindictive and mean-spirited. Unless, of course, you saw things from his point of view. Admittedly, very few people on the face of this earth would ever find themselves in his peculiar position. His once mostly happy household had been turned upside down. His wife of five years (which was how long we had been married prior to my attack) was suddenly not the person he had wed...and for the next six years Danny didn't handle things very well.

Yes, eleven years of marriage down the drain.

Would it have taken a special man to be strong and stay by my side? Certainly. It also would have taken true love, too. That was, perhaps, the hardest realization of all. That my husband didn't love me enough to be there for me.

So, yes, if you saw things from his point of view then perhaps some of his actions began to make sense.

Some.

The cheating part was unforgivable. Call me what you want, but I didn't deserve that. Next, he had fought for sole custody of the children. He believed I could hurt them. That if I was desperate enough, or hungry enough, I might feed on my own children. Insanity, of course. If I was desperate enough or hungry enough, my neighbor's yipping chihuahua would suddenly go missing.

Fighting for the well-being of our children was admirable enough on Danny's part, although there was no basis for it. I had never once exhibited any lack of control. My children received nothing but love from me. I suspected he was doing it out of spite. To purposefully hurt me.

Danny wasn't a bad father. Sure, he worked too much and often missed out on anything that had to do with school and sports, but he made up for it the best way he could. Often he read to them at night. As I worked in my office, I would listen to him patiently explain the meanings of words and help his son and daughter pronounce them. Often I would hear little Anthony giggle at Curious George or Tammy beg him to read one more page of Twilight. (Ironic, I know.) He spoke gently to each of them, sometimes so quietly that I never knew what he told them. I always wondered what they talked about, but I never wanted to ask. It seemed so personal. Just a son and a father, or a daughter and her father, exchanging sweet moments meant only for each other.

We'd gotten along like this for many years, living in quiet desperation, our kids content enough, but our marriage collapsing. I would have continued living like this forever. I was a monster and Danny seemed to at least accept me.

But it all came to a crashing end months ago when I had caught him cheating.

Danny still stood in the doorway, unsure what to do. His tie was still pushed up against his Adam's apple, and he looked pale and worried. He was still wearing his nice Italian suit. Danny rarely wore his nice suits, so he must have been in court today. An injury attorney, Danny hated going to court. Injury attorneys prefer to settle over the phone. They like easy, cut-and-dried cases. Anyway, if he had been in court, that might explain why he had been so short over the phone.

He finally spotted me in the far corner of the room, where I had sat while the doctors and nurses swarmed over my son. A few long strides later and he was sitting in the spare seat next to me, where he surprised the hell out of me by leaning over and giving me a small hug. I didn't hug him back.

"How is he, Sam?"

I started to tell him what I knew, but only about six coherent words came out. I broke down completely, sobbing hard into my hands, and I was slightly less surprised when Danny reached over again and pulled me into his shoulder.

Chapter Twenty-five

We were sitting side by side at the foot of my son's hospital bed. It was after hours, although "after hours" didn't mean much in a children's hospital intensive-care unit, since parents or guardians are usually permitted to stay with their children overnight.

We had been sitting there quietly for some time before I realized Danny had been holding my hand. I gently pulled it away, shocked and surprised all over again. Danny hadn't held my hand in six years. And if he did happen to touch me, it was always immediately followed by a visible shudder.

He wasn't shuddering now. Why, I don't know, and I certainly didn't care. Danny was the least of my concerns.

Anthony was breathing lightly on his own. Occasionally his aura would flash yellow, but mostly it was a deep black. Interestingly, bigger flashes of light seemed to hover over his body, and then scuttle away again like frightened fish. I sensed these could be other entities. But I wasn't sure. How could I be sure? I didn't know what the hell was going on with myself half the time.

Another curious glob of light come over him, hovering briefly over his head, and then seemed to dart around my son almost hectically.

No, not hectically.

Playfully.

It was the spirit of a child, I realized. And I was suddenly certain this child had died in this hospital. A ghost child. Trying to play with my son.

I took in a lot of air but the sound was strangled and Danny glanced sharply over at me. He didn't seem to know what to do with his hand now that I had removed it from his.

"What?" he asked.

"Nothing," I said. I had long ago learned not to share my supernatural experiences with Danny. Such experiences served only to freak him out and distance him even further. Now, I just didn't care to share anything with him.

As I watched the amorphous light zigzag over my son's inert body, I thought of another child. A girl who was being held prisoner by God knows who. A girl who was alone and scared and probably hurt.

I looked at Danny. "Will you stay with Anthony?"

My ex-husband blinked, and then his eyes narrowed. "Of course. Are you going somewhere?"

"Yes."

"I want to talk to you about something, Sam," he said, and I heard, amazingly, desperation and a hint of something else in his voice. What that hint was, I refused to believe.

"Can it wait?"

He almost reached out for my hand again, but stopped. I noticed a subtle ripple of revulsion pass through him, but he fought through it. "Yes, it can. When will you be back?"

I stood and grabbed my purse. I looked at my sleeping son. I looked at the impenetrable black halo that surrounded him. I decided against sharing any information with Danny, especially about the black halo. I also didn't want to talk about the phone call with little Maddie. Danny had lost his intimacy privilege long ago, and was nowhere near my inner circle.

I said, "I might be out all night."

He nodded. "It's okay. I'll be here. You have work to do. Anthony isn't going anywhere. Are you working a case?"

"Yes."

"An important case?"

"Very."

He nodded again. "I'll be here all night. I took half the day off tomorrow, too." He motioned to the nearby, partially open window which showed a sliver of silver-tipped clouds in the night sky. "Probably wouldn't be a good idea to have you sleeping here in the morning, right? Might raise a few suspicions."

I fought through my own shock and surprise of Danny showing an ounce of consideration. I said, "I'll try to make it back as soon as I can. Call me if anything comes up."

He nodded, and almost reached for me. I shrank back.

"Where are you going?" he asked.

"Out," I said, and left.

Chapter Twenty-six

McDonald's was hopping.

The smell of French fries hung heavy in the air. I hadn't eaten a French fry in over a half a decade. I wondered if they still tasted perfect. A creepy, life-sized, cardboard clown grinned at me from a far corner. Outside, shoeless children swarmed over the mother of all jungle gyms. A half-masticated chicken nugget sat under a nearby plastic booth.

And hanging from the ceiling above the counter was a video surveillance camera.

Bingo.

According to my Google map search, this was the closest McDonald's to Maddie's last known address - the same address where I had found the working meth lab and the not-so-working dead man.

I headed over to the counter, where a teenage Hispanic girl smiled at me blankly from behind a cash register. Instead of ordering, I asked to see the McManager.

* * *

Now I was sitting in the McDonald manager's office. It wasn't much of an office. It was just a desk at one end of a narrow room. At the other end was the employee's time clock and the drive-thru window.

"We have to make this quick," he said. He was a very short, oddly shaped man with a bad limp. So bad, in fact, that I think his right leg might have been a prosthetic.

"Or the clown gets pissed," I said.

He grinned. "Something like that."

He didn't bother introducing himself. I guess when you're wearing name tags, introducing yourself is redundant. Anyway, according to his shiny black and silver tag, his name was Bill, and he was the general manager.

He listened to my story attentively. As he listened, he leaned a little to the right. He seemed to be mildly in pain. I would be, too, if I was sitting on half an ass. I concluded my story with my request to view the surveillance video.

"And you're working with the police?"

I gave him Detective Hanner's card. "Call her if you'd like."

He took it from me, studied it. "I'll do that. But I'll have to get approval from my district manager before I release the surveillance video."

"Of course."

"It's not that I don't want to help you."

"I understand."

"We just have procedure."

"Of course you do."

"Awe, fuck it. There's a missing girl. Hang on, and I'll get you set up in here. I'm not exactly sure how to run some of these electronic gizmos, though."

"I'm pretty handy with electronic gizmos."

"Of course you are. A regular James Bond."

"Minus the babes and the goofy English accent."

He grinned again. "Hang on."

He got up and limped out of the office. As I waited for him to return, I thought of my son and the black aura, and a crushing despair unlike anything I had ever felt took hold of me right there. All thought escaped me. Rational thought, that is. I had an image of myself grabbing him and jumping through the hospital window. Of me running off into the night with my son in my arms. Where I would go, I didn't know, but I had an image of us together, somewhere, alone, while I willed him to perfect health. The image was strong. The image was real, and I wondered if it was perhaps precognitive.

Could I now see into the future?

I didn't know, but more than likely it was just an image of a helpless mother doing something, anything, to help her sick son.

Bill came back with a remote control and a small three-ring binder. He sat back at his desk, easing himself down slowly. As he did so, gasping and wincing, a wrecked motorcycle briefly flashed before me. I saw it steaming and twisted on the asphalt.

"You were in a motorcycle accident," I said suddenly and without thinking.

Bill snapped his head up. He had been flipping through the binder. Now his hand paused in mid-flip. His eyes narrowed. "How did you know?"

I could have pointed to the Harley-Davidson picture frame or the Harley-Davidson coffee mug, both of which were sitting on his desk. I could have told him that it had been a lucky conjecture. But I didn't. I was too mentally exhausted for lies and half-truths.

"I had a vision of you crashing. I saw the twisted wreck of your bike. I saw the twisted wreck of your leg."

He continued looking at me, and then finally nodded. "Yeah, I crashed it. Took a right turn too wide. Head on into a minivan. How I'm alive to this day, I have no clue."

"You still ride, though," I said.

He nodded. "It's the only thing that keeps me sane. How did you know?"

"Lucky guess."

"You're a freaky lady."

"You have no idea."

"And this little girl," he said.

"She was here." I said. "I know it."

"There's a lot of tape here. I was just looking through the instructions on how to - "

"Video surveillance 101," I said. "I can manage."

He pushed the folder over to me. "Here's the passwords to access the program. It's all stored on remote hard drives, but we can access it from here, and elsewhere, too. We have a lot of shit that goes down in our parking lots. Cops are always here checking out our video feeds."

"Thank you," I said. "I'll be fine."

"Do you know what day she was here?"

"No clue."

"Do you know what the girl looks like?"

"No clue."

"Do you know what the bad guys look like?"

"I have an idea," I said, thinking of the big black man in Maddie's memory. "I do have a picture of the mother."

"It's a start," he said.

The strong smell of French fries seemed to eddy in his back office. I said, "You ever get sick of the smell of French fries?"

"Honestly?" he said. "It turns my stomach."