Gone, Baby, Gone (Kenzie & Gennaro 4)

“I’ll call the P.D. down there,” Broussard said. “Can we skip-trace him?”

Poole shook his head. “He hasn’t taken a fall in five years. No outstandings. No parole officer. He’s clean.” Poole tapped the table with his index. “He’ll surface eventually. Disease always does.”

“We done?” Broussard asked, as the waitress approached.

Poole paid the check, and the four of us walked out into the darkening afternoon.

“If you were betting men,” Angie said, “what would you bet happened to Amanda McCready?”

Broussard took out another stick of gum, popped it in his mouth, and chewed slowly. Poole straightened his tie and studied his reflection in the passenger window of his car.

“I’d say,” Poole said, “that nothing good can come when a four-year-old has been missing for eighty-plus hours.”

“Detective Broussard?” Angie said.

“I’d say she’s dead, Ms. Gennaro.” He walked around the car to the driver’s door and opened it. “It’s a nasty world out there, and it’s never been nice to children.”

6

The Astros were playing the Orioles in a sunset game at Savin Hill Park, and both teams seemed to be having some problems with their mechanics. When a slugger for the Astros hit one down the third-base line, the Orioles’ third baseman failed to field it because he was more interested in tugging at a weed by his feet. So the Astros’ base runner picked up the ball and ran toward home with it. Just before he reached the plate, he threw the ball in the general direction of the pitcher, who picked it up and threw it toward first. The first baseman caught the ball, but instead of tagging a runner, he turned and threw it into the outfield. The centerfielder and the right fielder met at the ball and tackled each other. The left fielder waved to his mom.

The North Dorchester T-ball league for ages four through six met once a week down at Savin Hill Park and played on the smaller of two fields, which was separated from the Southeast Expressway by about fifty yards and a chain-link fence. Savin Hill overlooks the expressway and a small bay known as Malibu Beach, and it’s here that the Dorchester Yacht Club moors its boats. I’ve lived in this neighborhood my entire life and have never seen an actual yacht drop anchor anywhere near here, but maybe I’m always looking on the wrong days.

When I was between four and six, we played baseball because they didn’t have T-ball back then. We had coaches, and parents who screamed and demanded concentration, kids who’d already been taught how to lay down bunts and dive under the second baseman’s tag, fathers who tested us from the mound with fast balls and curves. We had seven-inning games and bitter rivalries with other parishes, and by the time we entered Little League at seven or eight, the teams from St. Bart’s, St. William’s, and St. Anthony’s in North Dorchester were justifiably feared.

As I stood by the bleachers with Angie and watched about thirty small boys and girls run around like spastics and miss balls because they’d pulled their hats over their eyes or were busy staring up at the setting sun, I was pretty certain that the method used when I was their age better prepared a child for the rigors of the actual sport of baseball, but the T-ball kids seemed to be having a lot more fun.

In the first place, there were no outs that I could see. The entire lineup of each team hit through a rotation. Once all fifteen or so kids had hit (and they all hit; there was no such thing as a strikeout), they switched bats for gloves with the other team. Nobody kept score. If one child was actually alert enough to both catch the ball and tag out the runner, both kids were congratulated profusely by the base coach and then the runner stayed on base. A few parents yelled, “Pick up the ball for God’s sake, Andrea,” or “Run, Eddie, run! No, no—that way. That way!” But for the most part, the parents and coaches clapped for every hit that dribbled more than four feet, for every ball fielded and thrown back somewhere in the same zip code as the park, for every successful run from first base to third, even if the kid ran over the pitcher’s mound to get there.

Amanda McCready had played in this league. Signed up and brought to the games by Lionel and Beatrice, she’d been an Oriole, and her coach told us she usually played second base and could catch the ball pretty well when she wasn’t transfixed by the bird on her shirt.

“She missed a few that way.” Sonya Garabedian smiled and shook her head. “She’d be right out there where Aaron is now, and she’d be tugging at her shirt, staring at the bird, talking to it every now and then. And if a ball came her way—well, it would just have to wait until she was done looking at the pretty bird.”

The boy standing at the tee, a round and rather large kid for his age, smashed the ball into deep left, and all the outfielders and most of the infielders ran after it. As he rounded second base, the big boy decided, What the heck, he was going to try and field it too, and he ran into the outfield to join the party as the kids tackled and rolled and bounced off one another like bumper cars.

“That’s something you’d never see Amanda do,” Sonya Garabedian said.

“Hit a home run?” Angie said.

Sonya shook her head. “Well, that too. But, no, you see that pig pile out there? If we don’t get somebody to stop it, they’ll start playing King of the Mountain and forget why they came in the first place.”

As two parents walked out on the field toward the melee and kids somersaulted off the pile like circus performers, Sonya pointed to a small girl with red hair who was playing third base. She was probably five and smaller than almost anyone on either team. Her team shirt hung to her shins. She looked at the party going onto the outfield as more kids ran toward it, and then she bent to her knees and began digging in the dirt with a rock.

“That’s Kerry,” Sonya said. “No matter what happens—if an elephant walks out onto the field and starts letting all the kids play with its trunk—Kerry won’t join in. It simply wouldn’t occur to her.”

“She’s that shy?” I said.

“That’s part of it.” She nodded. “But more than that, she simply doesn’t respond to what other children predictably respond to. She’s never really sad, but she’s never really happy either. You understand?”

Kerry looked up from the dirt for a moment, her freckled face squinting as the dying sun bounced off the pitcher’s stop, and then she went back to digging.