it next to our minivan. Look, there’s a receipt in it, two pretzels, my wife’s smell on the bag, and what to me looks like her blood. Look!’ He shoved the bag rudely into Officer Patterson’s face and then into Officer Charles’s. ‘What do you think it is?’
‘Listen, maybe her nose bled, and she decided to come. back in,’ said Officer Patterson, a little more sympathetically. ‘Then she met someone she knew, and decided to spend the afternoon with them. That’s likely, right?’
‘Then why hasn’t she called me?’ Rich screamed.
They looked frightened of him. Frightened and concerned. As if they didn’t understand what was driving him, what he was so upset about.
Am I crazy? Am I mad? Have I lost my sanity? Rich looked around him. There was the Disney Store, there was Dillard’s, there was FAO Schwarz. He could see, he could comprehend. He wasn’t insane yet. Rich concluded that police officers were trained to deal with robberies and homicides and rapes, but not trained to deal with fear.
‘Tell you what,’ Officer Patterson said. ‘If she’s in this mall, let’s alert mall security. They’ll call for her on the PA.’
Rich threw up his hands. He paced furiously near the fountain in the middle of the mall, peering into strange faces walking past him while the officers went to talk to security upstairs. Rich was still hoping that somehow Didi would miraculously appear before him with a new hairdo. Within five minutes there was an announcement over the public address system: ‘Will Didi Wood please come to the security office on the second floor as soon as possible?’ It was repeated twice.
Rich sat down, leaned his elbows on his knees, and held his head in his hands. Seconds later he was up and pacing again. Five minutes later – which seemed an eternity – there was another announcement: ‘Will anyone with any information about the whereabouts of a nine-month-pregnant woman with long brown hair and wearing a yellow dress notify the management or the security personnel as soon as possible.’ That message was also repeated twice.
The officers came back to Rich and flanked him as he walked back and forth. ‘Let’s wait and see. Okay? Let’s wait and see what happens,’ said Officer Charles.
They didn’t have to wait long.
Rich saw two women walking alongside a security officer, and he immediately moved toward them. Charles and Patterson followed.
The young security officer said, ‘These ladies here said they might have seen a pregnant woman in the parking lot earlier today.’
‘What time was that?’ Rich snapped.
Officer Charles put up his hand as if to stop Rich. ‘Wait a second,’ he said gently to Rich. He turned to the women. ‘What time was that?’
The ladies shrugged. They were short and chubby. The taller of the short women – bleached, heavy, and middleaged – said, ‘I don’t know. Maybe around one. We were just coming into the mall.’
‘And what happened?’
‘We parked our car and started walking to the entrance. Then all of a sudden a lady started screaming.’
An uncontrolled groan left Rich’s throat. For a few seconds no one spoke. Rich couldn’t even look up from the floor. He could barely stand.
‘Go on,’ Officer Charles said quietly.
There were tears in the woman’s eyes. ‘I feel so bad now, you know, because then we looked over at her, and she had a guy with her, and he smiled at us, wrapped an arm around her, and started kissing her –’
‘Started what?’ Rich said, horrified.
‘Started kissing her.’
He briefly felt relief. ‘Well, then, that couldn’t have been my wife.’
‘Maybe not,’ she said. ‘But this woman was very pregnant and she had long brown hair. She was screaming, “Help me, help me,” and then the guy kissed her and we just thought they were fooling around, you know? Didn’t we, Debbie?’
Trembling, Rich clenched and unclenched his fists.
‘This guy, what did he look like?’
Officer Charles extended his hand again. ‘Mr Wood, wait.’ He turned to the woman. ‘What did this guy look like?’
‘We didn’t see him so good,’ she said. ‘We just saw them from the side, you know. She was wearing a white dress –’
‘White?’ Rich exclaimed, his heart pounding.
‘Not white, Nancy,’ said Debbie. ‘It was yellow. Remember I said it was a cheerful color?’
‘Oh yeah,’ Nancy said. ‘Yellow. And the guy, he was, I don’t know – a little taller than her. Kind of thin, I think. Right, Deb?’
‘Yeah, he was taller than her. He was wearing jeans and a jacket, that’s all I remember. He was kind of nondescript, and we couldn’t see them well.’
Rich nodded in anxious agreement. ‘Nondescript – that’s exactly how Alex described the guy who was hanging around Didi when she bought the pretzels.’
Officer Patterson looked at Rich. He couldn’t place the peculiar expression and thought maybe it was guilt for her earlier reluctance to believe that Didi was in trouble, but then Patterson asked, ‘Does the man sound like anyone you know?’
Rich wished Patterson was a man and not a police officer, because he wanted to hit her. ‘What the hell are you saying to me?’ he said and didn’t care how he sounded. ‘What the hell do you think you’re saying? Does the guy sound like someone I might know? The guy who kisses my wife as she’s screaming for help? You know, no one like that springs to mind at the moment.’ Rich glared at her. ‘You’re saying, do I know if my pregnant wife has been fooling around behind my back?’
The officers looked ashamed, and the two women were downright embarrassed. ‘You just can’t help yourself, can you?’ Rich said to Patterson. ‘You just can’t help saying the wrong thing.’
‘I apologize,’ Patterson started to say, but Rich cut her off. ‘Obviously you have a problem dealing with people, and I see that as a real detriment in your line of work, considering you pretty much have to deal with people all day long.’
Disgusted with her, he turned away and spoke to Officer Charles. ‘Why are you looking for every possible explanation except the obvious? Her nose bled, she met a friend, the cell phone’s dead, she forgot about our lunch date, blah, blah, blah. Everything. God, can’t you see what must have happened?’ He was choking on his words. ‘My wife is missing. My pregnant wife – she’s probably been taken by force –’ The words were larger than his throat. ‘What can we do now?’ He looked around and walked back a few steps to sink into the wooden bench. ‘What do we do now?’ he said and buried his face in his hands.
The man kept a steady pace on the road. They had just passed Midlothian, twenty miles south of
