Читать книгу Every Move You Make - M. William Phelps - Страница 10

Throughout the day on Friday, October 3, Caroline Parker, perhaps overjoyed and anxiety-ridden over her sister’s wedding the following day, left Tim numerous messages on his pager. Finally, at about 3:30 P.M., after not talking to her all day, Tim called home.

“I’m still running errands,” he said. “I’ll be home soon.”

Caroline had spent the day sewing a comforter for her bed. It was a way, one would imagine, to burn off all that wedding stress. Tim had promised to bring home dinner.

At around 7:00 P.M., Caroline, wondering what she, Sean and Tim were going to have for dinner, paged Tim again and left another digital message.

What’s for dinner? We’re still waiting.

After thirty minutes went by, getting no response, Caroline ordered takeout from a deli up the road. She was getting upset because Tim wasn’t home. The wedding was fewer than twenty-four hours away. She wondered if he had finished all the errands.

When Caroline and Sean finished dinner at 7:30, she paged him again.

Where are you? Call me…[Caroline].

“Where are you?” was the first thing out of her mouth when Tim called a few minutes later. Her aggravation had now turned to anger.

“Listen—” Tim said before Caroline cut him off.

“Forget dinner. We already ate.”

“I have a few more errands to run,” he said. “I’ll be home soon.”

Before Caroline put Sean to bed at 9:30, she sent Tim another message.

I need to talk to you right now! Call me.

When Tim failed to call back, she dozed off while lying on the couch watching the nightly eleven o’clock news to see what kind of weather to expect for the wedding.

By 11:30, she woke up and, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, walked downstairs into the bedroom to see if Tim had come home yet.

Near midnight, she paged him.

Call me right away….

Tim called back immediately.

In what Caroline later described to police as a “broken call,” she said she thought Tim had said he was “surrounded by the police,” but the line had gone dead midway through the call. Later, when police asked her to describe the call a second time, she said she wasn’t sure if she had been dreaming, watching something on television, or if it was, indeed, Tim.

After he told his wife he was surrounded by the police, Caroline recalled later, she said, “Now you won’t be able to get a suit for the wedding.” Then she said they argued about Tim’s having to wear an old suit.

“That’s the least of my worries,” she thought Tim said before the line went dead again.

An hour later, at about 1:03 A.M. the following morning, as Caroline tossed and turned on the couch worrying not only about her sister’s wedding but where in the hell her husband was, the phone rang.

“It’s me, Caroline,” Tim said.

“Where are you?”

“I’m in Latham. I’ll be home in forty minutes.”

A few hours after the sun broke over Tim Rysedorph and Caroline Parker’s Regent Street apartment on October 4, 1997, Caroline woke up and immediately realized that Tim hadn’t come home. After paging him—Where are you? Call me right now!—she walked up the stairs to the kitchen, made a pot of coffee, threw some laundry in the washing machine and tried to sort out what was going on.

With no response to her first page, she sent another.

Tim, please call me now…. I need to speak to you now….

Fifteen minutes later: Tim, Sean has a soccer game soon, he can’t miss this one, too.

Sitting on the sofa, contemplating what to do next, the telephone startled her.

Tim!

When she answered, all she could hear were “Touch-Tone noises,” as if, she said later, “the call was being made from the outside. But I don’t know why I thought this. I assumed it was Tim, and he sounded like he was out of breath…that he was scared, or running.”

That’s when she said, “Tim? Tim? Is that you?”

Sean, who had been sleeping on the couch, got up when he heard his mother screaming and crying into the phone: “Tim? Tim? Speak to me?”

“Yes…,” the caller said quietly.

“Are you all right?”

“…call…not working…doesn’t work” was all Caroline remembered hearing before the line went dead.

When that happened, she sent him another digital page. Tim, I couldn’t make out anything you were saying…. Please call me.

For the next hour, Caroline paced in the living room…waiting, wondering. In her heart, she felt something was wrong—terribly wrong. Tim was not in the business of running off without telling her. They’d had problems in the past and Tim had slept at a friend’s apartment or his brother’s house for the night, but this was different. They hadn’t been fighting. Tim had promised to take care of several errands before the wedding.

Where the hell is he?

At some point before the wedding, after not hearing from Tim all morning, Caroline called her mother.

“Tim did not come home last night. He’s missing. I can’t find him.”

“What? Caroline, are you—”

“Don’t tell anyone in the family, Mom. I don’t want to ruin the day.”

“Okay.”

While Caroline was putting the finishing touches on her makeup after talking to her mother, the phone rang. Nearly jumping out of her dress to reach for it, she said in desperation, “Hello…hello?”

“Is Tim there?” a man’s voice asked.

“Who is this?”

“Lou.”

“Are you a good friend of Tim’s?” Caroline couldn’t recall anyone by the name of Lou that Tim had ever known.

“Yeah. I’m a friend. I work with Tim.”

“Have you seen him lately…Have you seen him”—Caroline was jumpy, frenzied, barely able to get the words out fast enough—“he’s missing.”

“I’m just returning his call; he left me a message.”

Caroline couldn’t handle it; she started to cry. “I’m sorry. I…I…We need to find him.”

“Don’t cry,” Lou said. “Everything is going to be all right. I’ll make some phone calls around town and see what I can find out.”

“You will? Yes. Do that. Please.”

“Maybe he’s in a place where he can’t call you?”

“What…where? What do you mean by that?”

“Maybe he got into trouble and got picked up and is in jail.”

“I would have heard something.”

“Not necessarily.”

Confused, Caroline asked, “What do you mean?”

“Listen, don’t worry. I will try to find out what’s going on and call you back later.”

“Thanks.”

Before Lou hung up, he had one last bit of advice.

“Maybe you should call the police.”