Lost Richard
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“Every night I used to do the same thing. I would make sure the lights were off, the curtains drawn, the house locked. And I would check to make sure he was all right before I went to bed. Sometimes he would wake up and tell me not to worry. I didn’t want to worry I just…and then, he…”
She pulled a cotton handkerchief out of her purse and dabbed her eyes for a moment before giving up and sobbing into it. Her muffled wet sniffs and sobs filled the room, sobs like a small child and quite loud too, reminding Michael of a baby squirrel calling out into the early morning for its mother.
“And then?” Michael patiently said when her sobs had quieted down. He picked up her teacup from the rim and handed it to her. She looked at him with large, wet, green eyes, but didn’t take the cup.
“He was gone,” she chocked going back into her sobbing convulsions into the handkerchief. Charlotte Winston was an aspiring young actress who lived in the southern reaches of London in a small townhouse with her son, Richard. She was a delicate woman with large red lips and frizzy blond hair. Her body was long and slender and moved gracefully, even as her shoulders bobbed up and down to her sobs.
“Do you know what happened to him?” Michael asked putting the cup down on the table between them.
“If I knew do you think I would be coming to you?” she yelled, hysterically.
Michael took a deep breath and clenched and unclenched his fists. He stood up and looked out the window at the carriages driving by. He heard her loudly slurp down some tea from her cup and place it back down with a loud clank of china.
“No I don’t know where he went.” She sniffed. “I just went to his room to wake him up for school and he wasn’t there.”
“Anybody who would want to kidnap your son for any reason at all?”
She placed her head delicately on her hand and looked up at the ceiling. “No I don’t think so. All the teachers at his school have loved to have Richard in their classes, but I don’t think they would kidnap him. My family…well if they even recognize him as part of the family at all, they wouldn’t dare take him from my home. Most of them don’t even look at him. No, there’s no one who would dare do that.” She poured another great deal of milk into her tea and gulped it down.
“What about the father?”
She paused and stared at the tea in her cup. “I don’t know his father. I was too drunk to tell a bed from a chair.”
She looked up at him, her lip pouted out and her eyes large, as if expecting him to pass some sort of unwanted judgment. Michael just walked behind the chair and placed both teacups on a tray by the door.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
This entry was posted on Friday, July 28th, 2006 at 10:43 pm and is filed under Mystery, Realistic Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.