“You need a reality check here, Marc.”
We pulled to a red light. I turned and looked at her—really looked at her—for the first time. The eyes still had that hazel with gold flakes. I know the years had been tough, but it didn’t show in the eyes.
“The odds that Tara is still alive are minuscule,” she said.
“But the DNA test,” I countered.
“I’ll handle that later.”
“Handle it?”
“Later,” she said again.
“What the hell does that mean? It’s a match. Edgar said the final confirmation is a formality.”
“Later,” she repeated with steel in her voice. “Right now we might as well assume that she’s alive. We should go through with the ransom drop-off as if there is a healthy child on the other end. But somewhere along the line, I need you to understand that this could be an elaborate con.”
“How do you figure?”
“That’s not relevant.”
“Like hell it isn’t. Are you saying, what, they faked a DNA test?”
“I doubt it.” Then she added, “But it’s a possibility.”
“How? There was a match between the two sets of hairs.”
“The hairs matched each other.”
“Yes.”
“But,” she said, “how do you know the first set of hairs—the ones you got a year and a half ago—belonged to Tara?”
It took a few moments for the meaning to reach me.
“Did you ever run a test on the first set, see if the DNA matched yours?” she asked.
“Why would we?”
“So for all you know, the original kidnappers sent you the hairs of another kid.”
I tried to shake my head clear. “But they had a snippet of her clothes,” I said. “The pink with black penguins. How do you explain that?”
“You don’t think the Gap sold more than one of those? Look, I don’t know what the story is yet, so let’s not get bogged down in hypotheticals. Let’s just concentrate on what we can do here and now.”
I sat back. We fell into silence. I wondered if I had made the right move by calling her. There was so much excess baggage here. But at the end of the day, I trusted her. We needed to maintain the professional, to keep compartmentalizing.
“I just want my daughter back,” I said.
Rachel nodded, opened her mouth as if to say something, and then grew silent again. And that was when the ransom call came in.
Chapter 16
Lydia liked tostare at old photographs.
She did not know why. They offered her little comfort. The nostalgia factor was, at best, limited. Heshy never looked back. For reasons that she could never properly articulate, Lydia did.
This particular photograph had been taken when Lydia was eight years old. It was a black-and-white still from the beloved classic TV sitcomFamily Laughs . The show ran for seven years—in Lydia’s case, from the age of six until just near her thirteenth birthday.Family Laughs starred ex–movie hunk Clive Wilkins as the widowed father of three adorable children: twin boys, Tod and Rod, who were eleven when the series began, and an adorable pixie of a little sister named, cutely enough, Trixie, played by the irrepressible Larissa Dane. Yes, the show was at least three steps beyond precious. Old repeats ofFamily Laughs still run on TV Land.
Every once in a while, theE! True Hollywood Story runs a piece on the old cast ofFamily Laughs . Clive Wilkins died from pancreatic cancer two years after the show ended. The narrator would note that Clive was “just like a father on the set,” which, Lydia knew, was a load of crap. The guy drank and smelled liked tobacco. When she hugged him for the cameras, it took all her considerable young acting skills not to gag from the stench.
Jarad and Stan Frank, the real-life identical twins who played Tod and Rod, had been trying to get a music career going since the show’s cancellation. OnFamily Laughs , they had a groovy garage band with a repertoire of songs written by others, instruments played by others, and voices so echoed and distorted by synthesizers that even Jarad and Stan, who could not hold a key if it was tattooed into their palms, started to believe that they were genuine musical artistes. The twins were both nearing forty now, both clearly clients of the Hair Club, both deluding themselves that, even though they claimed to be “tired of the fame,” they were one break away from the return to stardom.
But the true draw here, the gripping enigma of theFamily Laughs saga, involved the fate of the adorable “Pixie named Trixie,” Larissa Dane. Here is what is known about her: During the show’s final season, Larissa’s parents got divorced and fought bitterly over her earnings. Her dad ended up blowing his brains out. Her mother remarried a con artist who disappeared with the money. Like most child actors, Larissa Dane became an immediate has-been. Rumors of promiscuity and drug abuse swirled, though—this being before the nostalgia craze—no one really cared enough to be interested. She overdosed and nearly died when she was just fifteen. She was sent to a sanitarium of some sort and seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. No one really knows what became of her. Many believe that she died from a second drug overdose.
But of course, she had not.
Heshy said, “You ready to make the call, Lydia?”
She did not answer right away. Lydia moved to the next photograph. Another shot fromFamily Laughs , this time Season Five, Episode 112. Little Trixie wore a cast on her arm. Tod wanted to draw a guitar on it. Father didn’t really approve. Tod protested, “But, Dad, I promise only to draw it, not play it!” The laugh track howled. Young Larissa didn’t understand the joke. Grown-up Lydia didn’t either. What she did remember, however, was how she had broken her arm that day. Typical kid stuff really. She was horsing around and fell down the stairs. The pain was tremendous, but they needed to get this show in the can. With that in mind, the studio doctor shot her up with Lord-knows-what and two hack screenwriters incorporated the injury into the script. She was barely conscious when they filmed.
But please, do not start up the violins.
Lydia had read Danny Partridge’s book. She had listened to the whining of Willis onDiff’rent Strokes . She had heard all about the plight of the child star, the abuse, the stolen money, the long hours. She had seen all the talk shows, heard all the complaints, seen all the crocodile tears from her colleagues—and their dishonesty sickened her.
Here was the truth about the child star dilemma. No, it’s not the abuse, though when Lydia was young and foolish enough to believe a shrink could help, he kept telling her how she must be “blocking,” that she had in all likelihood been molested by one of the show’s producers. And no, don’t blame parental neglect for what child stars become. Or, in reverse, parental pushing. It’s not the lack of friends, the long hours, the poor socialization skills, the stream of studio tutors. No, it is none of that.