Read Online Gone by Mallory Kane - Free Book Online Page B

because she had no choice. She was hyperventilating. She knew that. But she couldn’t stop it without Joe’s help. How many times had it happened since Joshua had disappeared? Five? Ten?
    “Breathe evenly,” he kept repeating. “Slowly.”
    Finally she could take a full breath without it hitching. “Okay,” she said, a little breathlessly. “It’s okay now.”
    “Come on, let’s go outside.” He took the block from her and bent to set it back down on the little table.
    “No!” she cried, reaching for it. “I want to keep it.”
    “I don’t see why—”
    “Give it to me.”
    Joe gave her the block.
    She held it in both hands, pressed against her chest. “She was teaching him, Joe. She was teaching my little boy. Look at the block. It has a J on it. Did you see the kitchen?”
    He didn’t speak. He just waited for her to finish.
    “She took care of him. She gave him juice. Bought him little cups to drink out of.” She tried to blink away the tears, but they kept filling her eyes and flowing down her cheeks. “She’s had our son—known him—longer than we have.”
    Joe looked out the door, toward the sunlight. He clenched his jaw and tried to pretend that Marcie was someone else, one of the women he saw at the satellite office of NCMEC. But he knew that was a futile effort, for two reasons. First, she was his wife and she was talking about his son. But second, every time he met a mother or a father whose child had been taken from them, he felt the same way. The tarnished armor he tried to keep in place to protect himself from the pain of loss was barely more effective against strangers than it was against his and Marcie’s personal anguish. He supposed his empathy for the heartbroken parents made him good at his job, but he was worried that his roiling emotions were going to cripple him in his search for his own child.
    As he started to push the screen door open, Marcie shouted, “Joe!”
    “What?” he asked distractedly.
    “Your phone.”
    Then he heard it: his phone making a peculiar dinging sound. He froze.
    “Is that—?”
    He managed to nod. “A message.”
    “That’s the picture,” Marcie said breathlessly. “Oh, Joe, I’m afraid to look.”
    So was he. Reluctantly, he took the phone out of his pocket and pressed the button to activate the screen. There, on top of a little icon that looked like a mailing envelope, was the number one, indicating that he had one new text message.
    With Marcie hanging on to his arm with both hands, he tapped the envelope on the screen with a finger. For a second nothing happened, then a photo appeared.
    It was a picture of a little boy, a toddler who could have been two or three years old. His hair was brown and had been dampened and combed back so that the slight widow’s peak on his forehead was visible. His blue eyes, so much like his mother’s, sparkled in the light from the camera’s flash.
    Marcie burst into tears and her nails dug into Joe’s arm. “It’s Joshua. Oh, my baby. My Joshua. Look at him. He’s grown so big—” Her voice gave out and her entire body shook with her sobs. “Look at him, Joe. Look at him.”
    Joe was having trouble believing his eyes. He saw what Marcie saw, and his first reaction was that it was Joshua. But could he be 100 percent sure? Joshua at nine months had had chubby cheeks and a cute upturned nose that didn’t look like either his or Marcie’s. This child’s nose was straight and had a rounded tip. It still didn’t look like his or Marcie’s nose, but if he let himself, he could believe the boy’s eyes were just like Marcie’s. “Marcie, take it easy. We’ve got to be sure.”
    “You’re not sure?” she exclaimed. “Well, I am. I carried him inside me for nine months. I watched him and held him and fed him and took care of him for another nine months.” She jabbed her finger at the phone’s screen. “That is my baby!”
    At that instant, the phone dinged again and a second message