Through the Darkness by Marcia Talley

Daddy made me take it back and say sorry.”
    â€œAnd the police are going to make the person who took Timmy bring him back and say sorry, too.”
    Chloe’s worried frown vanished. “I’m gonna tell about Timmy at Show and Tell!”
    I tugged lightly on the end of one of her ponytails. “Maybe we can keep it a secret for just a little while, Chloe. When Timmy comes home, then you can tell. Okay?”
    â€œIs Timmy coming home today?” she asked as I helped her shoulder her backpack.
    â€œI don’t know, pumpkin, but I hope so.”
    â€œIs he coming home tomorrow?”
    Conversations with Chloe had a way of spiraling out of control. She was perfectly capable of trotting out every day of the week between now and the Fourth of July, so I quickly changed the subject to a trip we’d taken to Disney World the previous year, and we chattered about Pirates of the Caribbean and Thunder Mountain as we walked hand in hand down the sidewalk to the parking lot.
    At Hillsmere Elementary five minutes later, Chloe’s teacher was waiting for us in the school office. Again, no explanations were necessary. While Mrs. Rogers escorted Chloe to her classroom, the school principal urged me to allow my granddaughter to chat with the school psychologist, a plan I vaguely agreed to, thinking I should have asked Emily about it first.
    By the time I got to St. Catherine’s on the corner of Ridgley and Monterey, the caffeine had kicked in. I felt wired, every nerve in my body bristling with electricity. I hadn’t been so juiced since Oberlin, when I pulled two all-nighters in a row writing a term paper on Stendahl. If I had run into Timmy’s kidnapper at that moment, all the police would ever find of him would be bones and occasional pieces of skin.
    I parked near the parish hall, cut the motor, and looked around. I was the only car in the lot.
    I fiddled with the radio. I organized the glove compartment. I cleaned old Exxon receipts out of the console. Finally, I went looking for Eva, thinking that perhaps Roger had dropped her off on his way to work at the marina in Eastport.
    Pastor Eva’s office was in the parish hall, through a door and to the left, just off a Plantation-style breeze-way that joined the parish hall to the church proper. I jiggled the doorknob, but the parish hall was locked. A note taped to the window told me Eva’d been called to Anne Arundel Medical Center to pray with a patient about to undergo emergency surgery and I should wait for her in the garden.
    Taking my time, I wandered back along the breeze-way and stepped into the garden, the soles of my boat shoes scrunching comfortably on the graveled path. This is a real garden , I thought. It was filled with lilac, sweet william, mint, and such an abundance of flowers that it invited butterflies and hummingbirds that wouldn’t have been caught dead flitting about one of Ruth’s sterile, sculptured creations. Later in the summer zinnias and milkweed would be in full bloom at St. Catherine’s, and after that, sunflowers. In the fall, asters, phlox, purple cornflower, and goldenrod would turn the garden into a riot of Technicolor, a sight so beautiful that even parish asthma sufferers had not dared to complain.
    I sat down heavily between two deep pink azaleas on a bench dedicated to a parishioner who had been killed in the explosion of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. With my back to the plaque, I tried to put all thoughts of death out of my mind.
    The sun was just inching over the trees, touching the garden here and there, awakening the butterflies that clustered on fence posts and flat rocks, sluggishly stretching their wings, preparing for a busy day gathering nectar. On my right, a hedgerow of forsythia was a blaze of yellow, separating me from the traffic whizzing by on Ridgley Avenue.
    Bathed in sunlight, I closed my eyes, wincing as the inside of my eyelids scraped over my eyeballs