Wednesday's Child. Gayle Wilson
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folks just as soon roll ’em into the river or push ’em over a ravine as take ’em to the junkyard. You know how people are.”
Apparently realizing how far off the subject of her husband’s death that had taken him, the sheriff turned from his contemplation of the equipment to look at her.
“Sorry. That ain’t got nothing to do with why we’re here.”
“And that’s when they discovered his body?” she asked, ignoring his attempted apology.
“They called the office, and we notified the coroner.”
“And no one found any evidence Emma had been in the car?”
“Nothing but that infant seat. Like I told you, there was no second body, Ms. Chandler.”
Almost without her conscious volition Susan’s eyes returned to the slowly moving water below. There were questions she didn’t want to ask right now because she was afraid of the answers. Since Adams’s phone call, she had managed to regain control of the emotions that had momentarily escaped the long restraint she’d forced on them. She didn’t want to do anything that might put that fragile containment into jeopardy.
“Were the windows rolled up when the car was found?”
“All I can tell you is they were when I got here. The driver’s-side door was open, however.”
The men would have had to open it to find the body, she supposed, but the information made her wonder if Richard might have tried to get out. He was a good swimmer, and the current didn’t look strong enough to keep him from reaching shore. Unless he’d been too badly injured to try.
“But was it open when they pulled it out of the river?”
Adams’s mouth pursed slightly as if he were thinking about that. After a moment he shook his head.
“Don’t know. Have to confess I didn’t ask. We all knew what had happened. If you live around these parts, you know all about this place. More cars than I can count have missed that turn in the dark. No guardrail. Nothing to keep you from driving right off into the river if you misjudge the entrance. State ain’t gonna do nothing about it since they built the new bridge up on 84. Now this road don’t get enough traffic to make fixing this worth their while. It could even have been raining that night. Slick pavement. Poor visibility. Your husband a drinker?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“A lot of folks who miss that turn have had a few too many, if you know what I mean.”
“Richard didn’t drink. Not to excess.”
How confident she sounded. Almost smug. And how ironic that was coming from a woman who’d had no idea her husband was planning to disappear, taking everything they owned with him. Everything including their daughter.
“The current doesn’t look very powerful.” She was still thinking about the terrible possibilities of that opened door.
The sheriff’s lips pursed again as he looked over the water. “Can be. Depends on the rain upriver. And if you’re out in the middle of the channel, it runs a lot faster. Could have been what happened that night.”
“I’m sorry?” She turned, her eyes questioning as they focused on his weathered face.
“If the door was open, I mean. Maybe the current just took her out of his hands.”
Emma. He means Emma, she realized, sickness stirring the pit of her stomach.
But if Emma had been in the car when it had gone off the bridge, she knew Richard well enough to know Emma would have been strapped into her seat. Open door or not, there was no way the current could have washed her out of those restraints.
“She would have been strapped in.”
The sheriff shrugged. “Maybe when your husband realized what was happening, he tried to get her out. Maybe he had her free and the current just took her—”
“No,” Susan said.
The single syllable was loud in the afternoon stillness. The scenario he had just suggested wasn’t an idea she was willing to entertain. Not yet.
Adams had already admitted that he didn’t know if the door had been open when the car was pulled from the water. And if it had been, then why hadn’t Richard, an experienced swimmer, gotten out of the car and swum to safety.
Because he was trying to locate his baby in that dark, rushing water? Struggling to unfasten straps he couldn’t see? Trying desperately to get them both to safety?
“I didn’t mean to upset you, Ms. Chandler. I’ll be glad to find out about the doors and the windows. Did you ever think that maybe your husband left your daughter in the care of a relative or some friends? Maybe she wasn’t with him at all when he come down here.”
Did you ever think…
There was literally no one she hadn’t questioned about that possibility. No relative or mutual acquaintance that she had been aware of—and some she hadn’t been aware of until after Richard’s disappearance—that she hadn’t asked about Emma. And about Richard, of course.
None of them had professed any knowledge of their whereabouts. And despite her desperate need for information, there had not been one of them she’d doubted. Now she knew they’d been telling the truth. Richard had contacted no one in the weeks after his disappearance because he had been here, hidden by the waters of this narrow, marshy river.
“When will they be back?”
“Ma’am?”
“The people those belong to.” She tilted her chin toward the cranes on the bank below. “Will they be back out here on Monday?”
“I’m not sure what their schedule is. I can call the main office of Southern Georgia first thing Monday morning. See if I can talk to the men who were here that day. I’ll let you know what they say as soon as I find out. You do understand that nobody had any idea at the time that we ought to be looking for your daughter.”
There should have been a cross-reference to Emma in the national database of missing persons the sheriff had searched for Richard’s name. Apparently that had been another bureaucratic screwup. There had been plenty of those.
Emma had always been listed as an abducted child. Susan had been advised that was the best way to draw attention to her case. Not that she had ever been able to tell it had made any difference. After all, Emma was with her father. And Susan, unaware at that time of how the system worked, had admitted that Richard had no history of mistreating their daughter.
That was the truth, of course, as well as what had kept her sane through the years. But it had lowered the urgency with which the various agencies had responded to her pleas for help.
“I’d like to talk to those men myself, if you don’t mind,” she said, thinking of all the other “comforting” platitudes she’d listened to during those first few months.
There was too much at stake to trust that another set of law enforcement officials would do everything in their power to find her baby. She was no longer as naive as she had once been.
She had been given another chance to find Emma. A chance to right all the things she had done wrong seven years ago.
“In all honesty, ma’am, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Adams said. “First place, it’s bound to be upsetting. And those men might not tell you everything they’d be willing to say to somebody who’s not as…emotionally involved in this.”
“Is there a motel nearby?” she asked, ignoring his advice.
That was something else she had done the first time. Listened to all the people who were supposed to know the best thing to do. And look where it had gotten her.
“A motel?”
She couldn’t remember seeing any