Page 33 of Wicked Games

Her drafts folder has several blog posts in it that for some reason or other she never finished or never published. A lot of what she wrote about was time-sensitive and maybe something bigger and better came along. If she waited too long, no one would care.

Her trash folder catches my eye, and I click on it. The website platform keeps trash for six months, but it doesn’t have much in it. I click on the most recent one. It’s untitled and she trashed it the day after President’s Day.

I start to read, and the rich taste of coffee turns bitter in my mouth.

It’s a day like any other, chilly February temperatures, a cool breeze. But the sun is shining, and the warmth feels good on your skin. You need the fresh air and walk to a neighborhood park, picking up a cup of coffee from a busy café along the way. You can hear the children screaming, the wind scattering their shrieks, and the scrape of skates and sticks on the ice rink near the playground. The parking lot’s full, parents taking advantage of the day off work and school. You walk carefully over the icy sidewalk, high-heeled boots not the best choice, but a playground isn’t where you normally spend your time, and you didn’t realize your mistake until it was too late.

You stand and watch the activity. Kids playing on the brightly colored equipment, some a couple hundred feet away building a snowman. There’s a hockey game in progress on the rink, skaters wearing black and red jerseys pushing each other around, the coach blowing his whistle in an attempt to rein them in. The metal bleachers are full of parents talking amongst themselves or scrolling on their phones. A couple is jogging around the pond, and a woman pushes a stroller behind them, a dog tugging on its leash.

It's a beautiful, calm day, and no one would predict the horror that would occur.

A woman wearing flat boots, a black puffer jacket, and gloves, her dark blonde hair fastened in a bun at the back of her head, is sitting on a bench alone, a backpack at her feet and the parking lot behind her. She’s intently watching the children, her eyes never leaving a little boy wearing navy snowpants and a matching winter jacket, a hat on his head and mittens on his hands. He’s running around and laughing with a couple of other children who look to be the same age.

“It’s a nice day to be out,” you say, sitting at the opposite end of the bench. You sip your coffee.

“Yes, it is. The children needed a chance to blow off some steam,” she says, glancing at you out of the corners of her eyes. “It perks them up after being inside for days at a time.”

“I can imagine,” you say, but you can’t because you don’t have children and don’t think much about it, though your sister is caught up in a bad marriage where that’s all he wants and it’s all he wants because he can’t have it.

“That’s a beautiful coat,” she says, nodding in your direction.

“Thank you. It was a lucky find on a Bloomingdale’s clearance rack.”

The little boy she’s been watching runs up to her and says, “Marcy, I don’t want to go home yet.”

“That’s fine, Theo. A little longer then. Do you want a snack?”

“Okay,” he says, but he runs off, joining his friends in what looks like a game of tag. He resembles his mother.

Time goes by, but it seems to slow, like molasses in the cold. The children’s screams echo in your ears, and the slap of hockey sticks stings your skin.

An old black van turns into the parking lot, the sides rusted and the paint faded. It looks out of place in the lot filled with luxury vehicles, and you twist on the bench to watch the playground and the parking lot without appearing too interested in either.

A young man jumps out of the side, dressed in black and a ball cap low over his eyes. He searches the playground and spots a child near a play structure that looks like a fishing net and starts to walk across the snow.

The woman beside you unzips the backpack at her feet and begins to search for the mentioned snack.

You sip your coffee, watching the man heft the little boy who doesn’t want to go home into his arms, cover his mouth, and walk swiftly toward the van. No one is paying attention, too caught up in their own lives to question a man who might only be picking up his son after a morning of playing with his friends.

The woman sitting on the bench straightens, holding a box of what looks to be crackers. As if she knows something has gone wrong, she desperately looks around the playground, and not finding what she’s looking for, turns toward the parking lot just as the man shoves the little boy into the van.

She starts screaming.

With the tires skidding on the icy snow, the van shoots out of the parking lot, the driver cutting off a car in the street in his hurry to get away. You watch them turn sharply around a corner and disappear from view.

Your heart stops and your life is never the same.

I read the piece again, the second person point-of-view eerie and unpleasant. She describes the park as if she was there—the noises, the colors, the woman she sat next to, who seemed to be Theo’s nanny—but was it really an account of her morning or was she imagining what Theo’s abduction would have been like if she had been there to watch it?

It’s easy to understand why she trashed the post. It doesn’t fit in with anything she’s written in all her years blogging, and it’s puzzling why she wrote it in the first place. Maybe she was going to publish it for the traffic, but that would have meant admitting she’d known something was wrong and hadn’t done anything about it. She noticed the van stop in the lot. She watched the guy zero in on Theo and carry him to the van. If what she wrote is true, she knew who Theo was because Marcy said his name. She knew that little boy was Seth and Brooke’s son.

I read it for a third time, the yogurt in my stomach churning, but it’s not any clearer. Was she there or not?

Was she there, and if she was, why?

No, not why. How? If she was there, how did she know to be there? How did she know that was going to happen?

There’s no way she could have. No one could have known. In fact, if someone were to ask me, I’d say Theo’s abduction was purely by chance. Unless, of course, the kidnappers researched the Lockwoods and chose Theo specifically, but they aren’t the only rich family in Ashfield. Any of those parents at the park that day could have afforded the ransom. Elmwood Park is in the middle of the richest neighborhood in Ashfield, and Hattie, even with all her subscribers and what Bill makes as a plastic surgeon, had no business being in that part of the city.