down the law, Alexa bites her head off. Calls her the ‘stepmonster’ and all that—it’s not fair. She cares about Alexa like she was her own, she really does. She loves that girl.”
I nodded. Waited half a minute or so. Then I said, “Obviously you tried her cell.”
“A million times. I even called your mom—I figured maybe it got late and she didn’t want to drive and she didn’t want to call us, so maybe she decided to spend the night at Frankie’s. She loves Francine.” My mother’s condo was in Newton, which was a lot closer to downtown Boston than Manchester-by-the-Sea.
“Do you have reason to believe something happened to her?” I asked.
“Of course something happened to her. She wouldn’t just run off without telling anybody!”
“Marshall,” I said, “I can’t blame you for being scared. But don’t forget, she does have a track record for acting out.”
“That’s all behind her,” he said. “She’s a good kid now. That’s the past.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”
7.
Some years back, as a kid, Alexa had been abducted in the Chestnut Hill Mall parking lot, right in front of her mother, Annelise, Marcus’s third wife.
She hadn’t been harmed, though. She’d been taken for a ride, driven around, and a few hours later dropped off at another parking lot across town. She insisted she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and an examination by a doctor confirmed it. She hadn’t been threatened. They hadn’t even spoken to her, she said.
So the whole thing remained a mystery. Did her abductors get scared off? Did they change their minds? It happened. Marcus was known to be very rich; maybe it had been an aborted kidnapping-for-ransom attempt. That was my assumption, anyway. Then her mother left, telling Marcus she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore. Maybe it was precipitated by her daughter’s kidnapping.
Who knows what the real reason was. She’d died of breast cancer last year, so she wasn’t around to ask. But Alexa was never the same after that, and she wasn’t exactly an easygoing, well-adjusted kid before the incident took place. She got even more rebellious, smoking at school, breaking curfew, doing whatever she could to get into trouble.
So one day a few months after it happened, my mother called me—I was working in Washington at the time, at the Defense Department—and asked me to drive up to New Hampshire and have a talk with Alexa at Exeter.
I tracked her down on the stadium field and watched her play field hockey for a while. Even though she didn’t consider herself a jock, she moved with a sinewy grace. She played with immense concentration. She had the rare ability to completely lose herself in the flow of the game.
She wasn’t easy to talk to, but since I was Frankie Heller’s son, and she loved my mom unambivalently, and since I wasn’t her dad, eventually I broke through. She still hadn’t metabolized the terror of the abduction. I told her that was normal, and that I’d worry about her if she hadn’t been so deeply frightened by that day. I said it was great she was being so defiant.
She looked at me with disbelief, then suspicion. What kind of mind game was I playing?
I said I was serious. Defiance is great. That is how you learn to resist. I told her that fear is a tremendously useful instinct, since it’s a warning signal. Fear tells us we’re facing danger. We have to listen to it, use it. I even gave her a book about “the gift of fear,” though I doubt she ever read it.
I told her that she was not only a girl but a beautiful girl and a rich girl, and that those were three strikes against her. I taught her how to look for danger signals, and then I showed her some rudimentary self-defense techniques, a few basic martial-arts moves. Nothing fancy, but enough. I’d hate to be a drunken Exeter boy who tried to push her too far.
I took her to a dojo outside Boston and introduced her to Bujinkan self-defense techniques. I knew it would be great discipline for her, instill some self-confidence, be a healthy outlet for some of the aggression that had been building up inside her. Whenever I came to Boston and she was home from school, we’d make a point of getting together and practicing. And even, after a while, talking.
It wasn’t the solution I’d hoped it would be, though. She continued doing stuff she knew would get her in