U Is For Undertow

Henry seemed to take it all in, though I have no idea how he managed to keep the players straight. Once in a while he’d stop me with a question, but in the main, he seemed to follow the narrative. When I finished he thought about it briefly and then said, “Let’s go back to the conversation you had with Stacey Oliphant. What makes him so sure the kidnappers were amateurs?”

“Because they asked for chump change, to use Dolan’s words. Both thought it was odd to ask for fifteen grand when they could have asked for more. Stacey figured if they’d been professionals, they’d have ramped up the demand.”

“Must not have been chump change to them. If they were rookies, fifteen thousand might have seemed like a fortune.”

“Not that the money did them any good. Patrick photocopied the bills and then marked them…”

Henry frowned. “How?”

“Some kind of fluorescent pen he used in the export side of his clothing business. Deborah says the marks would have popped out under a black light, which a lot of kids had back then. She also says none of the money ever surfaced, at least as far as she’s heard.”

“They must have figured it out.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Which is probably why they tried again,” he said. “If they discovered the bills were marked, they couldn’t risk putting the cash in circulation so they got rid of what they had and tried again. Only this time they snatched Mary Claire instead of Rain.”

“Oh, shit. I hope that’s not true. That would mean Patrick set the second kidnap in motion. If the money had been clean, they might have been satisfied with what they netted the first time and let it go at that.”

Henry said, “I’ll tell you something else that just occurred to me. Suppose when Sutton stumbled into the clearing, the two weren’t digging the hole to bury a child. What if their intent was to bury the tainted money?”

I stared at him. “And they buried the dog instead? How’d they manage that?”

“Simple. One stays in the woods to keep an eye on the site. The other goes off, steals the dog’s corpse, and brings it back. They drop the mutt in that hole and hide the money somewhere else.”

“How’d they know about the dead dog?”

“Beats me,” he said. “You told me yourself that a couple of hundred people could have known about the shed and the pickup routine.”

“All this because they were worried the little kid would blab?”

“Why not? I’m just brainstorming here, but it makes sense to me.

Didn’t you tell me Patrick packed the money in a gym bag he tossed on the side of the road?”

“Right.”

“So picture this. They leave Rain asleep in the park. They’ve counted the money so they know it’s all there. Once they get home they discover the bills are lighting up like neon. Either they meant to dump the cash or their intention was to get it out of sight until they felt it was safe to spend. Once the little kid appeared, they decided it was too dangerous to leave the money in that spot.”

“The dead dog’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think? Why not just fill in the hole?”

“They were setting up a cover story to explain what they were doing in the first place. Sure enough, the police exhume the dog and that’s the end of it. No big mystery. Someone’s buried a pet. Might have taken twenty-one years, but it shows you how wily these guys were.”

“ ‘Were’? Nice idea. Like maybe they’re dead or in prison.”

“One can only hope,” he said.

When I got home I decided to let Henry’s suggestions percolate overnight. I’d been overthinking the whole subject and it had only served to confuse instead of enlighten me. Meanwhile, something else had occurred to me. I realized I might have a way to find out if Hale Brandenberg was being honest about Aunt Gin’s sexual orientation. It didn’t matter one way or the other, but I’m a stickler for the truth (unless I’m busy lying to someone at any given moment). There might be evidence at hand.

I went up the spiral stairs to the loft. I have an old trunk at the foot of the bed that I use for storage. I cleared the top and opened the lid, removing neatly folded piles of winter clothing I’d packed away in mothballs. From the bottom I hauled out a shoe box of old photographs that I dumped on the bed. If Aunt Gin had a “special friend” whose existence Hale was trying to conceal, I might find glimpses of her in pictures taken at the time. Aunt Gin had socialized with a number of married couples, but she also had gal pals.

Snapshots tell a story, not always in obvious ways but taken as a whole. Faces appear and disappear. Relationships form and fall apart. Our social history is recorded in photographic images. Maybe someone had captured a moment that would speak to the issue. I sat on the bed and picked through the pictures, smiling at the photos of people I recognized. Some I could still name. Stanley, Edgar, and Mildred. I blanked on Stanley ’s wife’s name, but I knew the five of them played card games-canasta and pinochle. The kitchen table would be littered with ashtrays and highball glasses, and they’d all be laughing raucously.

I found shots of two single women I remembered-Delpha Prager and one named Pri

I did marvel at how young she looked. While I was growing up, she was passing through her thirties and forties. Now I could see she was pretty in a way I hadn’t seen before. She was slender. She favored glasses with wire frames and she wore her hair pulled up in a bun that should have looked old-fashioned, but was stylish instead. She had high cheekbones, good teeth, and warmth in her eyes. I’d thought of her as schoolmarmish, but there was no evidence of it here.

I came to an envelope sealed with tape so old and yellow it had lost its sticking power. On the outside she’d written MISCELLANEOUS 1955 in the bold cursive I recognized. My interest picked up. I withdrew an assortment of snapshots. I appeared in the first few photographs, age five, my expression bleak. I was small for my age, all bony arms and legs. My hair was long, bunched up on the sides where bobby pins held the strands back. I wore droopy skirts and brown shoes with white socks that sagged. By that Christmas I’d been living with her for six months or so, and apparently I’d found nothing to smile about.

The next photograph I came to generated an exclamation that expressed my surprise and disbelief. There was Aunt Gin enclosed in the arms of a man I recognized on sight, though he was thirty years younger. Hale Brandenberg. She had her back up against his body, her face turned slightly as she smiled. His face was tilted toward hers. The next five pictures were of the two of them, mostly horsing around. In one they played miniature golf, clowning for a photographer who might have been me since the tops of their heads were missing and I could see the blur of a finger inadvertently covering a portion of the aperture. Another photograph had been taken in the gazebo in the hilltop park so popular with my high school classmates. There were two snapshots of the three of us, me sitting on Hale’s knee with a snaggletoothed grin. I was probably six by then, in first grade, losing my baby teeth. My hair had been chopped short, probably because Aunt Gin got a