A Son's Tale

Was she that messed up?

Maybe there just hadn’t been time for her heart to assimilate the news that Cal wasn’t a good man.

At the moment, the whys didn’t seem to matter. Sammie was missing. She’d just given up custody of her son. And she needed Cal.

* * *

TENSE AND EXPECTING an interminable wait, Cal was shocked when less than five minutes later, his father and Martin, along with the officers who had driven them and those from a couple of squad cars who’d blocked off the area, came walking back out of the school, en masse.

He reached for the door handle. Sanchez stopped him. Not unkindly, but not gently, either. “Wait,” he said as his arm shot out across Cal’s body.

Straining to see what was going on, to see more than one of his father’s shoulders, he wanted to take down the man beside him. Martin, who was in front of his father now, made a motion.

“Let’s go.” Sanchez opened the door, slid out and held the door open for Cal.

“What’s going on?”

No one was saying much; the officers’ focus was trained on the middle of their entourage. Once he was standing, Cal could see what they saw.

A little boy with tearstained cheeks—Sammie— was being held by his father, his small arms wrapped around Frank’s neck. Frank’s head was bent toward the boy, as though he was speaking to him. As Cal approached, the crowd parted and allowed him to walk right up to the pair.

And that was when it dawned on him that Frank was no longer in handcuffs.

* * *

“SOMETHING’S GOING ON.” Grace, seated on the couch opposite from Morgan, straightened, staring through the window that led out into the hallway of the third floor of the police station.

Morgan didn’t care about bustle in the hallway.

She’d cared even less about the dinner that had been delivered ten minutes before. Or the tea her mother had offered her.

She just needed Sammie safe. That was all. She asked nothing else of fate or God or any powers that be. Just that Sammie be safe.

The door behind her opened. Just as it had when Michael had come in. When the tea arrived. And dinner. And an officer asking them if they needed anything. And Detective Warner.

“Morgan?”

Detective Martin. She swung around.

And there was Sammie. In the arms of the man who’d abducted him?

“What…?”

“Hold on, Mr. Lowen.” Detective Martin held her hand up in front of her and put it against George’s chest as he approached with a menacing look on his face. Holding George back, she motioned Frank into the room.

“I think all of you need to listen to what this young man has to say,” she said, pointing at Sammie. “And then, I hope, this will be the last time we see any of you. At least in this capacity.”

“Sammie?”

Morgan didn’t care what anyone had to say. She needed to feel her son, to know he was real.

Frank put the boy down and Sammie ran to her, his arms wrapping so tightly around her it hurt. Pain had never felt so good. “Oh, my God, Sammie,” she said, and started to sob. She hadn’t shed a tear in hours and now they were flowing as if a dam had broken.

Sammie was crying, too, and his tears put a stop to hers. Sammie hadn’t cried the last time he’d come home to her.

Something was different. Something was wrong.

Avoiding the two men who’d entered the room with the detective and her son, Morgan looked at Elaine Martin. “Where was he? What happened?”