Excerpts from Chapter 1
Chapter 1
I unlocked the dead bolted door, not robbed then obviously but a quick look through the empty house revealed that anything valuable, but not nailed down, was long gone: furniture, antiques, pets, child, and whatever we accumulated in over eleven years of marriage.
Okay, I thought. The stuff is gone. Fine. But Kaitrin?
Fighting back my panic, I spotted the tip of a note on the floor where the dining room table used to be. The note was tucked in a book on the Jon Bonet Ramsay child murder.
“Dear Paul, I’m going away for a while. I’ll call you later. Anne,” my wife’s note stated. Odd, a friendly toned note, seems more likely Anne left me and took our daughter.
“Oh my God! Kaitrin’s gone. She took our little girl away from me.”
Don't Leave Home Without It
“Paul, one last thing,” Sally said, “bad news, nothing to do directly with Kaitrin but Anne put Barney to sleep.”
Barney is Kaitrin’s anchor; the floppy, dachshund pup is her first view of the backyard when waking and is her morning signal that all’s right with the world.
“What the hell?”
“She said that she didn’t want to take care of him; no word on the other pets or where they are or anything.”
Kaitrin’s eyes danced to the fluttering fire engine red of the cardinals, the swift blue jays, and the full-breasted subdued red robins that chirped outside her bedroom window. During the twilight we hearkened to and spotted these winged visitors but as night crept to her cozy room the walls revealed decorative stars, moons, and the Big Dipper. Kaitrin tranquilly fell to sleep despite her squeaky rocking chair that no amount of oil would salve but no matter. I commissioned an artist to portray the Pennsylvania state bird, and a sign that read “Kaitrin” on one street intersecting with “Theus” as the cross street.
Anne saw little of Kaitrin as a baby but when Kaitrin was five Anne increasingly left Kaitrin alone and with other people to watch. Typically, I would come home from work and have to find where Kaitrin was and get her fed to put her to bed for the night.
House stripped.
Then one day the house was stripped, that was obvious from the driveway. With the curtains gone no furniture was visible in the empty house. The house looked even worse now, it was bad enough before, the deferred maintenance rancher was drab but now it looked disheveled too. The stone faux front was typical Post-War Levittown, Pennsylvania architecture. I had tried to liven up the interior a bit though and spruced up the front too by showing off the matching wood and green flower pattern throughout. Then I tore out the carpets to show the wooden floors and matching exposed wooden beams on the ceilings. Now the house looked abandoned.
No hero today.
Kaitrin and I hadn’t been apart more than three days on my longest academic trip, in fact, we were bosom buddies because my wife wanted to go right back to work after our baby’s birth. We have been in Pennsylvania since Kaitrin was ten weeks old. Anne worked her double shifts at the hospital until Kaitrin was eight months old so I provided primary care six days a week. Even after my professorship began at the University I arranged a teaching schedule to accommodate Kaitrin’s needs.
Me? Paul M. Theus, PhD, mid-40s, slender, short beard, looks like Russell Crowe in “The Gladiator,” but no hero today: scared and totally unprepared.
The policeman seemed genuinely sympathetic now, but there was little he could do. No evidence that Kaitrin was in imminent danger. The little girl was with her mother after all, and although this cross-country trip was unannounced, kidnapping seemed a bit hasty to conclude. He advised me what I could do. He suggested I could contact the local police department in California to check on Kaitrin’s welfare.
The most likely destination that my wife would show up would be at my mother-in-law’s house, Harriet P. Dough, so I placed a call, left a message, and waited.
