A King's Ransom Read Online Free PDF Page A

together at the kitchen table and made a list of people we should notify. Mom made the first few calls, but it was emotionally exhausting. I picked up where she left off, and soon the grapevine was in full swing. By midafternoon our phone was ringing off the hook. Dad's friends, Mom's friends, friends of friends, people we hadn't heard from in years - all were offering to help in any way they could. Other than to keep Dad in their prayers, we didn't know what to tell them. This was all foreign to us. The only thing we knew was that, by the end of the day, the one phone call we'd wanted had yet to come.
    There was still no word from the FBI or the State Department.
    I decided to stay with Mom that night, though my being there only seemed to highlight the fact that my sister wasn't. In a crisis like this, I suppose it was natural for Mom to want both of her children, even if she and her daughter weren't even technically on speaking terms.
    My parents had given me the right amount of freedom as a child, but Lindsey they'd strangled. Especially my mother. From preschool on, whatever Lindsey was doing, Mom was right there, as room mother, assistant soccer coach, teacher's aide, you name it. It was all out of love, surely, but Mom just couldn't seem to grasp that taking her eyes off her daughter for more than five consecutive minutes didn't constitute abandonment. A disastrous semester of home schooling in the eighth grade made it almost inevitable that Lindsey would run with the wrong crowd in high school, and by her junior year she was barely speaking to either parent. I became Lindsey's only lifeline to the family. Knowing that she was a bright kid, I talked her into going to college, though it was her own idea to enroll at the University of Puget Sound near Seattle, farther away from home than any other school in the contiguous United States. She earned a degree in journalism, and for the past two years she'd been traveling across the Americas in search of her first byline. Unlike my mother, I didn't see it as the end of the world that she wanted to go out and find herself. She never phoned our folks, and even her calls to me were pretty rare, maybe once every six weeks. I'd find out where she'd been, send her a little money, whatever she needed. For my parents' benefit, I'd subtly try to convince her that finding herself didn't necessarily mean losing her family. She didn't seem to be biting.
    Mom and I stayed up talking till after the eleven o'clock news, then said good night. My old room was virtually unchanged since the day I'd moved out to go to college, preserved like a time capsule. The dim light of the moon shone through the window, just bright enough to reveal an outline of my past. The Miami Dolphins team poster I'd worshipped as a teenager was still on the wall, hovering over the old dinosaur of a computer I'd used to explore everything from Super Mario Brothers to - well, dinosaurs. I half expected the door to open at any minute and my father to check on me the way he did when I was in high school. Spot checks were his way of keeping his teenage son from sneaking out at midnight to hang with the cool crowd in Coconut Grove. But as the minutes slowly passed, the house slipped deeper into an eerie silence. It seemed empty without Dad, and it made me ache inside. I wondered where he was sleeping tonight, if he was sleeping, if he was still alive.
    The phone rang at half past midnight. My immediate hope was that they'd found Dad. My fear was that they'd found his body. It was FBI Agent Nettles on the line, which put my heart directly into my throat.
    Don't be alarmed, he said.
    What is it?
    It's sort of an administrative issue.
    At this hour?
    I've just received confirmation that the Colombians are officially treating this case as an abduction. Which is good news. That means they have reason to believe your father is still alive.
    Have they heard from the kidnappers?
    No, but their divers have searched the area