Taken Read Free

warehouse. Much appreciated, that quiet act of kindness. Sometimes looking the other way is just what the doctor ordered. Better than casseroles left on the step or offers to babysit. Give her time, they must have urged each other, and now the garage was just a garage again and Tommy is eleven years old and giving his mother fits.
    Leaving the van in the driveway, I bound up the breezeway steps, kick the screen door open and approach the inner door with key in hand. Because we always lock up and activate the alarm. Nice neighborhood, but still. Bridgeport is a mere three miles down the road, and in Bridgeport they have gangs and drugs and crime that sometimes manages to seep into suburban Fairfax. So we lock.
    But the door is unlocked and the alarm isn’t sounding. And that can mean only one thing. I’m already heaving a sigh of relief as I enter the kitchen area.
    “Tommy?” I call out. “Tommy! I was worried sick! What were you thinking?”
    No response. Pretending he can’t hear me. Pretending he didn’t do anything wrong. Ready with a facile fib about how he did so tell me he was getting a ride home and it must have slipped my mind. Early-’zeimers, Mom. You’re losing it.
    “Tommy?”
    The TV is on in the family room. Low but audible. A Sony PlayStation game. It will be Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven, his current favorite, or maybe the new Tomb Raider . But game or not, the little scamp can hear me fine. And now he’s starting to piss me off. He should be here in the kitchen, ready with an apology, however lame.
    “Tommy! Turn off the TV!”
    I march into the family room, expecting to see my son perched in front of the big-screen TV, manipulating the controls of his precious PlayStation.
    But Tommy isn’t there.
    “Hello, Mrs. Bickford. Take a seat, would you, please?”
    There’s a man in my brown leather chair. He has Tommy’s video-game control box on his knee, working the joystick with his left hand. His face is obscured by a black ski mask.
    In his right hand is a pistol, and he’s aiming it at me.

3
olly-olly-entry
    T here are only five rooms in the house, not counting the basement, and Lyla searches all of them. Each room, and the basement, too, looking for Jesse. The boy must be playing hide-and-seek. A game he loved when he was five, only a little less so now that he’s reached the advanced age of eleven, when boys are usually past wanting to play with their mothers.
    Her Jesse is an exception. He’s an athletic kid, fit and lean and tall for his age, but in some respects he’s still Momma’s little boy. Any moment now he’ll leap out of a closet, or out from under the stairwell, with a gleeful boo! and her hands will fly to her heart.
    You scared me, dear!
    He’ll kill himself laughing, holding his tummy, bent over from the sheer joy of it.
    Oh, Mom, you’re such a wuss!
    That she is; from the first day that she held his tiny body, all she’s ever done is worry. Worry, worry, worry, morning, noon and night, until it makes her dizzy with anxiety. Worry that he’ll wander into the swimming pool and drown—not that they have a pool, thank God. Worry that he’ll tumble down the stairs where he likes to play mountain climber. Worry that he’ll fall from his bicycle, or worse, that he’ll be stolen by a child snatcher who looks, in her waking nightmares, like Freddy Krueger.
    She reminds herself that there are no Freddy Kruegers in the real world, certainly not in boring old New London, Connecticut. And that Jesse has fallen on the stairs more than once and received nothing more dangerous than a bruise or two. Took a wild spill from his bike, for that matter, and wore the scabs on his knees like badges of honor, no tears and no complaints. He’s a sturdy boy, her Jesse, heals quickly. Healthy as a horse, unlike his doting mom, who suffers from a variety of infirmities, not the least of which is a background hum of fear that never leaves her, not even when she’s sleeping.
    Fear of the world,