Lost Richard -Part 1
“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, reminding me of a baby squirrel calling out into the early morning for its mother. I never liked the sound of baby squirrels.
“And then?” I patiently said when her sobs had quieted down. I picked up her teacup from the rim and handed it to her in the hopes that she would pause to take a sip and calm down. Tea always seemed to have that effect for me: it cleared my mind. She looked at me with large, wet, green eyes, but didn’t take the cup.
“He was gone!”
It was a Saturday afternoon and after getting a phone call that a woman was at my office in utter hysterics hoping to speak with me, I got into my car and drove over to the office to meet Charlotte Winston, an aspiring young actress who lived 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 have any idea where he might have gone?” I asked.
“If I knew do you think I would be coming to you?”
I took a deep breath and stood up to look out the window at the cars driving by. I took a sip of tea and waited for her to continue. I’m not usually an impatient soul, but I was hoping not to get any work today and since I had come especially, I wanted a little more cooperation. But she was the customer and I had to be patient.
“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.”
“Are there any places he liked to visit?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“What does he look like?”
“He’s tall, has brown hair and brown eyes, fifteen years old, fairly muscular, you know, a regular kid.”
“May I have a recent picture of him?”
She fumbled with her purse and pulled out a glossy picture of a lanky youth posing next to a picnic table on a sunny day. It was hard to tell his eye color, but his hair was much darker than his mother’s. I thought it was interesting that he didn’t seem to have a speck of his mother’s physical traits in him. I made a mental note of that in case it was important later.
“Is there anybody who would want to kidnap your son for any reason at all?” I had to ask.
She placed her head delicately on her hand and looked up at the ceiling. “No, I don’t think so. 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.”
“What about the father?”
“I don’t know his father. I was too drunk to tell a bed from a chair.”
She looked up at me, her lip pouted out and her eyes widened, as if expecting me to pass some sort of unwanted judgment. I was in no state to bother with that.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 17th, 2007 at 5:34 pm and is filed under End of Childhood, Fiction Prose, Mystery, Realistic Fiction, Short Stories. 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.