A mother's love

Chapter 42

Everybody had their suspicions when Kyle went missing. He never admitted it, but the first thing Simon thought when Brenda called him in hysterics and told him that she couldn't find Kyle anywhere was that Brenda had schemed in some way to be rid of him. His suspicions were largely alleviated when he arrived home to find Brenda in a genuine state of utter distress.

"Simon, he's gone! He's gone!"

"Just calm down and tell me what happened."

"He was sleeping, it was his naptime and he was sleeping and I went to lie down and I fell asleep and when I woke up he was gone, he was just gone!"

She was crying, shaking and incoherent; after seeing her reaction Simon felt awful for having suspected her of something sinister. He got her calmed down as much as he could and called the police. The precinct captain, Dave Bennett, drove out to their house personally along with his deputy, Brian Whittaker. Ventura Falls was a quiet neighbourhood where families felt safe and secure. Things like children going missing didn't happen there and as such Captain Bennett felt that this was a case that required his personal attention. At present it was only a missing person's case but if it turned out to be a kidnapping he wanted to be in a position to lead a full scale investigation into the matter to protect the reputation of Ventura Falls as a safe place. To that end it was convenient for Capt. Bennett to have the same suspicions about Brenda that Simon had had but after meeting them at their house he saw nothing in her reaction to her son being missing that confirmed his suspicions. She was unable to speak she was so distraught; answering their questions was left to her husband, who she sat next to and whose arm she never let go of. He found their story about her waking up to find that her son was missing to be credible, especially after he was informed that the boy was severely autistic. The likeliest scenario, he informed them, was that Kyle had woken up while Brenda was still asleep, had left the house on his own and was wandering around somewhere.

"Is there any place you used to take your son to that he might go to?"

"When he was younger I used to take him for walks in the woods, along the trail; I stopped taking him when he got older and harder to manage."

"Okay, what we're going to do is perform a sweep of the neighbourhood; patrol cars will search all the streets, we're going to talk to your neighbours and get the word out amongst them that if they have any information they are to call and share it with us, and I'm going to send some men into the woods to conduct a search. I'm also going to need an article of your son's clothes, something that hasn't been washed, in case we need to use dogs to track him."

Brenda left the room and retrieved from the wash a T-shirt that Kyle had worn two days before that she hadn't washed yet. She handed it to Captain Bennett who sealed it in a plastic bag and handed it to his deputy.

"Are you going to be able to find him?" Brenda asked them despairingly.

"We're going to do our best to find him, that I can promise you. The first twenty four hours in cases like this are critical, that's why it's important for us to do everything that we can to find him as quickly as possible."

The initial phase of the Ventura Falls PD's investigation into Kyle's disappearance yielded nothing. Nobody contacted the precinct following the press conference that Bennett called to inform the public of the situation and ask them for their assistance, they didn't find him during their sweep of the neighbourhood and none of the neighbours they talked to had seen Kyle nor had they seen any suspicious individuals or vehicles around the neighbourhood. By midnight they were ten hours into the search and any hopes they had of finding Kyle were fading fast. Capt. Bennett monitored the progress of the search from his office and with every update he received informing him that nothing of any material usefulness had been unearthed the more he felt that something was off about the whole case. The child had been missing somewhere in the region of two hours when they had begun the search, they should have been able to find something, even if it was something small, in the ten hours that they'd been searching for him. At one a.m. the search was halted for the night; they would resume in the morning. Capt. Bennett didn't leave the precinct and spent all night sitting in his chair in his office, unable to shake the gnawing suspicion that Brenda had told them to look for Kyle in the woods because she knew that's where they would find him. He called the State Troopers at four a.m. and asked them to bring dogs with them. At 6 a.m. they arrived at the precinct and Bennett immediately went out with them to the woods taking with him the T-shirt that Brenda had given him. It took less than half an hour for one of the dogs to pick up a scent. They followed it to a perfectly innocuous looking spot not far off the trail where, after only a few scratches at the dirt, an article of clothing became visible. The dog was pulled back, and out of the shallow grave they pulled the body of a boy who, based on Brenda's description of what he was wearing before he'd gone missing, was definitely Kyle. Bennett left the crime scene to be secured and prepared himself for breaking the news to Simon and Brenda.

Brenda was wearing the same clothes that she had been wearing the previous day, she clearly hadn't slept and his guess was that she hadn't eaten either. He was finding it impossible to reconcile the obvious state of trauma that she was in with the fact that they had found her son exactly where she had said they would find him. Her devastation when she received receiving the news that her son was dead was absolute; Bennett saw nothing in her reaction that seemed to him remotely inauthentic. She broke down and collapsed into the arms of her husband, who was remaining as stoic as he could for his wife's sake. He gave them his condolences and promised that he and the rest of the Ventura Falls Police Department were going to do everything they could to find the person that had taken their son away from them.

His suspicions wouldn't go away and as the investigation into Kyle's death unfolded they continued to increase. No evidence was found at the crime scene, not even a footprint, there were no bruises or any other marks on his body, and the only DNA evidence they found on the body were a few hairs that belonged to Brenda, and being from his mother they were considered to be of no evidentiary value. All they were able to learn was that he had died from suffocation. The overwhelming absence of evidence pointed to a crime that was premeditated; there was no chance that this was a kidnapping gone wrong, the theory under which they had been operating.

The authenticity of Brenda's grief never wavered once in all of the time that Bennett spent in her presence when he visited them at their home to inform them of the progress of the investigation, of which there was none; she looked increasingly emaciated and sleep deprived. On what would be his final visit with them all he could offer them was his promise that they were going to keep working on the case and a caution not to be too hopeful, without any evidence or any witnesses their chances of finding him were exceedingly slim, next to nothing, in fact. He didn't share with them his true views on the case; if one of them had been involved in their son's death he had no way of knowing which of them it was or if it was both of them. His overwhelming suspicion remained, because of what she'd said about where Kyle might have gone to, that if one of them had been involved it was Brenda; she also had plenty of motive and opportunity. He was certain enough to take the opportunity when Simon walked him to his car to ask him a few final questions about Brenda.

"Did you notice anything strange about your wife in the days prior to your son's disappearance?"

"No, nothing; why?"

"It must've been hard for her, taking care of your son all by herself, as challenging as he must have been."

"I offered to get her help but she always refused, saying that she was his mother and it was her responsibility to take care of him."

"Did it ever look like that responsibility was too much for her?"

"Always, but, like I said, she wouldn't accept any help."

Simon thanked Bennett for all that he had done, bade him good-bye and turned and walked back up the driveway toward the house. Before getting in his car Bennett stood out in the gentle rain and took one last look at their house and saw Brenda staring out of the living room window. She wasn't looking at him; she was looking out into the distance at something in her mind that was a mystery to him. Looking at her staring out of the window, Bennett didn't know if he was looking at a woman who was looking out in search of forgiveness for what she had done or for an explanation for why they had been the victims of this horrible crime. He just didn't know.