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Denise’s car that he’d just driven home from the tow place that day, and the trunk was open. It really was a disgusting smell, I’ll admit that. I can see why my mom and dad freaked out so bad about it. I mean, I’m not a either a cop or a nurse, like them, but it did smell like a dead animal. Again, though, as my mom herself later pointed out, it had been a meat pizza.
    So there I am in the garage , all alone with this stinking car, my dad having gone back inside to stare at the TV, or the abyss, or whatever it is he was doing, and I’m just out there not knowing what is going on but knowing I need to be there for my mom and my sister, whatever it is. Mom showed up about five minutes later with Denise in the car, and when they got there, Denise just jumped out of the car, not saying a word to Mom or even me, and stormed off back to her bedroom. Then everything got almost comical because, naturally, Mom follows her into the house and threw open her bedroom door and stood there shouting and crying, demanding that Denise tell her where Deeley was, and when Denise ignored her and acted like she was deaf, Mom would shout at me, “You ask your sister what’s going on. You ask her where my granddaughter is!”
    But before I could even get a word out , Mom would lean around me and ask Denise again herself, and this lunacy went on for like ten minutes or so, until Mom was so worked up that she stormed off down the hall, shouting for my dad to intervene, as though he could have helped.
    Nor was that anything to get Denise talking , but then my mom runs back, Dad in tow, and by then she was screaming and she said she was calling 911 to report Deeley was missing, and that because of the smell in the trunk, she was probably dead too.
    That made Denise jump and me , too. First I tried to calm Mom down but she pulled away from me and headed toward the kitchen, still dragging Dad by the wrist, and a minute later, me and Denise could hear her on the phone and we realized she was done threatening and this was getting serious.
    That’s when Denise turned to me for the first time since they’d come back to the house a nd started telling me her story.
    T hat’s when I got scared, finally.
    Denise told me that she didn’t know where Deeley was because Manny, the nanny, hadn’t returned Deeley since sometime in early June.
    I pleaded with Denise to give me details, but I could see she wasn’t going to say much, when we could hear Mom screaming for the police to come, from the kitchen phone, so all I got were a few mumbled sentences about Manny kidnapping Deeley and how Denise had been trying to find her on her own.
    I was starting to get worked up by then , too, and I guess Denise didn’t like that because she told me that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed because she’d talked to Deeley just the day before on the phone. Like I say, I was getting freaked out by then but even in that moment what she said didn’t make sense to me.
    I asked her for her cell phone and she said she had accidentally left it at Aaron ’s, but that getting the cell wouldn’t help us because the call had come in from a private number. She said that Deeley had sounded fine but when she had tried to get Deeley to tell her where she was at, the phone went dead. I don’t know why Denise had even bothered to do that, ask her I mean. After all, Deeley’s smart but she’s not even three years old, so I doubt she could give anyone an address..
    I felt desperate to find Deeley at this point, so I was glad that Mom was on the phone with 911. My dad came back down the hall at that poi nt and he seemed to be in shock. I think he had just realized for the first time that his grandchild was missing and not off on a weekend of fun at Disneyworld, or wherever Denise had been saying she was.
    My mom was still on the phone and seemed to be getting the run-around with the nine-one-one dispatcher , so she screamed out that Denise’s car smelled like something died in it.