Chapter Twenty
RANEESHA GOT HERSELF BACK UNDER control, but only barely. “I thought Frederik was fine. But as soon as he came in the door, he was different. Scary. He hit me and started saying all sorts of things I didn’t understand. I was so afraid.”
She began to cough then, clearly overwrought. Quint limped into the attached bathroom, poured her a cup of water and returned with it and a damp washcloth that he gently pressed against the side of Raneesha’s head.
With a start, Amara realized there was blood on her mother’s head. It had to be from where Frederik had hit her. All blame for her mother fled with the realization.
She jumped up and took the washcloth from Quint to dab at her mother’s wound.
Quint half-staggered away and collapsed into the other chair in the room.
Raneesha managed to take a few sips of the liquid, enough to calm her coughs, and shakily went on. “He was crazy, Amara. He was erratic, jerky. I didn’t know what happened to him. He wasn’t making any sense at first, but he started ranting about how you’d ruined his career, ruined his life. He said everyone thinks he lied about your work.”
Raneesha shook her head, her hair, always so immaculately coiffed, stood up on her head in clumps, and some of those clumps were bloody. “He started referring to himself in the third person, screaming about how humiliated he was, how you had no right to do what you did and come away with everything. He said the dean fired him. And he said it was because you took what was his.”
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Amara’s brow came down, her hand falling to her lap. “The dean fired him? When?”
“I’m not sure. Yesterday or today, maybe. He didn’t always make sense. What does he think you took from him?”
“I can’t say for sure. He’s been angry at me about so many things,” Amara said. “If Frederik was fired, it was because he was unhinged and had been nothing but trouble for months.” And there was the run-in with him at her office a week ago. Someone may well have reported it to the dean.
Her voice hollow and weak, Raneesha said, “He said you didn’t get to have everything and him nothing, so he was taking your son. He said he’s going to make you pay for what you’d done if you didn’t start playing by his rules.”
Amara went cold all over. Was that a threat against Hampton? He couldn’t be that unhinged, to harm a child. She had to believe that he wouldn’t, or she’d go crazy.
“He dragged me upstairs,” Raneesha said, “and tied me to the chair. I tried to fight him, but he was too strong. He kept ranting at me. He went on for so long, and he was horribly angry. I was so scared. I didn’t know what he intended to do. It seemed like he was going to kill me to get back at you. By the time he grabbed Hampton out of his crib, Frederik was talking about everything like it was a game. He’d gone calm, and that was scarier than the ranting.”
Raneesha began crying again. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have opened that door. I’ll never forgive myself. I don’t expect you to, either. I didn’t mean for any of this — my God, Amara, you have to call the police! We should have done that right away.”
“No one blames you, Momma,” Amara said. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”
Amara looked over at Quint. “Can you call?”
Quint answered, “Yes.”
“Ask for an ambulance, too, for Momma.”
Quint nodded, looking paler than before, even his lips having lost most of their color. He appeared utterly devastated.
In other words, he looked how Amara felt.
All the same, there was a fire behind his blue eyes, and a strength that he was channeling toward her. It was as if she could hear him in her mind.
He didn’t say it out loud, but she heard it anyway: I will find our son.
Could he, she wondered? Was it that simple?
Quint stood, slipped his cell phone from his pocket and left the room without a word.
Raneesha watched him walk out of sight before she asked, “Amara … is that …?”
“Yes, that’s Quint Forbes, Momma.”
“He’s been all over the news.”
Amara’s system had gone into overload and shut down in shock. She felt detached, as if she were an observer of her own tragedy. She suspected the same was true for her mother.