Terrified by Kevin O'Brien Page B

his head as they embraced. They were both crying.
    After a few minutes, Megan’s elation waned at the moldy smell of the strange, ill-fitting clothes he wore. The notion that someone had undressed her son repulsed her. The jeans rode low on him, and she was grateful to see he still had on the same underwear from this morning.
    Her hands shaking, she started to unbutton the checkered shirt. She stripped him down to his underwear, and then dug into the Bon-Macy’s bag the police had held on to for her. Megan quickly dressed him in the clothes she’d just bought on sale. Josh fidgeted a bit, but he was so in awe of the policemen that he was cooperative and docile.
    More than anything, she just wanted to take him home and give him a good bath—wash away whatever had happened to him, wash away this whole afternoon.
    At the same time, she wanted the police to find the monster who had tried to steal her little boy. The police questioned Josh while he sat in her lap, and from what they could tell, a man had come to him just moments after Megan had left their table in the food court. All they had to go on regarding his appearance was dark hair, glasses, and “a beard—here and here, ” Josh said, pointing above his lip and on his chin. This man with glasses and a goatee—perhaps a disguise—had told Josh that his mother had fallen and hit her head, and they were taking her to the hospital. He’d led Josh into the men’s restroom, just down the hall from where they were now. He’d given him the other clothes to wear for their “trip to the hospital.”
    The cops tried to ask Josh in a roundabout way if he’d been molested at this point. But their questions just confused him.
    “Josh, honey, they want to know if he took off your underpants or touched your penis or anything like that,” she finally said.
    He considered the question for a moment, and then shook his head.
    As far as she could tell from Josh’s sketchy account, the culprit had led him across the street to the Bon-Macy’s, where they’d taken the sky bridge to the parking garage. But before they’d gotten into the man’s car, someone else had shown up in the garage. That was where it got confusing. Megan wasn’t sure if this other person was the child-snatcher’s partner—or if he was someone who had followed them to this point. Apparently, he knew Josh’s name. But he could have heard it from one of the many lost-boy announcements in the Westlake Center.
    The police asked Josh to describe the stranger who had shown up—seemingly from nowhere. “He was like the other man, only taller,” Josh said. “But he didn’t have a funny beard or glasses… .” His description didn’t give the cops much to go on.
    The new man had told Josh to wait by the stairwell while he and the goateed man had climbed inside the car together. Josh couldn’t identify the car type, but remembered it had been “gween-colored . ” Apparently, after a while, the second man had emerged from the vehicle alone. Taking Josh’s hand, he’d walked him down “lots of stairs,” to the street level. He’d told Josh that it had all been a game, his mother was okay and she was looking for him. “We looked both ways and crossed the street to this building here,” Josh said, “and he told me to go inside and ride up the excavators and wait for Mommy… .”
    Officer Williams filled in the rest. One of the jugglers had made another announcement that they were looking for a missing boy—and this time Josh had been there to raise his hand and come forward. Then they’d flagged down Officer Williams.
    Megan figured the second man must have been at least partially culpable for what had happened—otherwise, he would have come back with Josh. Whatever, the two men were probably long gone already, having driven off in their “gween-colored” car. Megan wanted to track them down even more than the police did. But after an hour of them asking Josh the same questions over and over,