Finances had been tight ever since Joan O’Donnell married Peter Hubbard. The first three years Peter worked as a shop sweeper at General Electric and went to school nights. It had been one hell of a long slog, but the hard work had paid off. When Peter graduated with his engineering degree – the same day Nicola turned five – he was promoted to GE’s jet-engine shop. The bump in pay wasn’t life changing by any means, but the extra money had given them some well-deserved breathing room. No more penny-pinching on the groceries. No more Ramen Noodles and Hamburger Helper or buying second-hand clothing and used toys at the Salvation Army. Joan felt as though she’d been liberated from prison.
Then the workers went on strike. To make ends meet, Peter took a job at a local auto-parts store and drove a cab three nights a week and every other weekend.
But that was all in the past. The strike was months behind them, and Peter was back at work with GE. They could afford to celebrate a little. Instead of a night out on the town, they decided to redo their bedroom.
Joan arrived just as Carter & Sullivan was opening its doors. She parked her Buick station wagon with its wood-panel trim near the mall’s south-east entrance. For the next three decades, whenever Joan was interviewed about what happened, she’d tell reporters she wished she’d parked near the store’s north entrance. That way they wouldn’t have passed the toy aisle.
Nicky stopped dead in her tracks when she spotted what would become that year’s popular Christmas toy: the Cabbage Patch doll. Nicky wanted to stop and look. Joan wanted to get the bedding and go home. Unlike her mother and sister, she didn’t care for shopping.
‘Please,’ Nicky begged, tugging her mother’s hand. ‘Please, Mommy, pleeeeease.’
‘You promise you’ll stay here? Right here, in this aisle?’
‘I promise.’
‘You promise what?’
‘To stay with the dolls.’ Nicky smiled her gap-toothed smile. ‘I won’t walk away.’
Joan left her daughter alone without giving it a second thought. Another girl was standing in the aisle, a cute tomboy with curly black hair. It was 1983; parents left their kids alone all the time.
Joan found the comforter she wanted easily enough, but the advertised sheets were another matter. When she failed to locate them, she hunted around for a store employee. The pleasant older man she spoke with didn’t know anything about the advertised linens but said they might be out back in the storeroom and went to investigate. It was 9.13 a.m.
During this time, recent high school graduate and newly minted Carter & Sullivan employee Brad Fisher was running late. He was supposed to arrive at work at 8.45, but he had somehow slept through his alarm – again. He headed for the toy department, which was next to the door for the stockroom. When he cut through the aisle displaying those creepy Cabbage Patch dolls, he saw a teenager or a boy of at least twelve kneeling next to a young girl matching Nicky Hubbard’s description. Brad would later tell the police he remembered the little girl clearly, because her long blonde hair was pulled back from her face and tied with a white marble elastic band. They were all the rage that summer; his younger sister wore the same sort of stupid things in her hair. The stores could barely keep them in stock.
Brad would also tell police about the teenager, who he had assumed was the girl’s brother. How when the boy got to his feet he was short, barely a few inches over five feet. How he wore dirty jeans, scuffed work boots and a stained black T-shirt.
The boy grabbed his sister’s wrist. When she tried to take her hand back, he yanked her arm, hard. When she let out a small yelp, he smiled.
A brother wouldn’t act that way, an inner voice whispered.
Then another voice countered: Remember when you got so pissed at Maggie for ratting on you when you sneaked out to meet George and Tony? What did you do?
Brad smiled at the memory. I cut the hair on all her Barbie dolls and flushed the evidence down the toilet. Maggie, with her big fat mouth, was a tattletale bitch. So he breezed right past the brother and sister and entered the storeroom. When he punched in, it was 9.19 a.m.
At 9.24 a.m. Joan Hubbard had her new sheets in hand. She went to collect Nicky, only to find that her daughter was no longer looking at the Cabbage Patch dolls.
She’s probably wandered off to look at some other toy, Joan thought. With a frustrated sigh, she went to find Nicky, who would be spending the rest of the day inside the house, grounded, for breaking her promise not to wander off.
The frustration turned to a slow but growing fear when she failed to find the child anywhere in the toy department.
The kids’ clothing section was nearby. But Joan couldn’t see her daughter anywhere among the racks.
Had Nicky gone to look for her? Had she hurt herself? Joan dropped her bedding items on a nearby display table and hurried off to the customer service department at the front of the store. She bypassed the people standing in line to return items and with her voice rising in panic told the young girl working the counter that she couldn’t find her daughter.
The counter girl called the manager over the loudspeaker. Joan, hysterical with nightmarish thoughts about her daughter, about her being lost or hurt or – Don’t say it, don’t say it or it will come true – darted behind the counter and pressed the microphone button.
‘Nicky. Nicky, it’s Mom. Come to the front of the store, Nicky. Mom is at the front of the store. My daughter’s name is Nicky Hubbard. She’s wearing a yellow sundress and sandals. She has blonde hair. Her name is Nicky Hubbard.’
The Carter & Sullivan store manager acted quickly and promptly. He announced Nicky’s name and physical description over the loudspeaker, and told his employees to stand by all the store exits and stop any little blonde girl from leaving. It was now 9.56 a.m.
Brad Fisher hadn’t heard any of the announcements. He was outside, standing in the unbearably hot Kansas sun, doing the same thing he did every morning: using a utility razor to break down the mountain of empty cardboard boxes stacked next to the dumpster. He returned to the storeroom a few minutes after ten, surprised to find it empty. Usually there were employees going in and out to stock the shelves or to take one of their allotted ten-minute breaks. He ducked into the staff bathroom and splashed cold water on his face.
The moment Brad stepped back into the store he knew something was wrong. Customers were huddled together and speaking in hushed tones. Others were moving swiftly through the aisles, searching the clothing racks and looking underneath the display tables, concern and dread etched in their faces. Carter & Sullivan employees were posted near the store exits.
When Brad found out what happened, his stomach turned to ice. He would never forget that feeling or the way the polished white linoleum floor seemed to dip and sway in his vision, or how he wanted to slip inside a black hole and disappear. Brad was eighteen years old and felt like crying.
What would always come back to him – what would continually haunt him – was that moment in the toy aisle when the boy had grabbed the little girl’s wrist. How the brother’s smile hadn’t been, in fact, brotherly at all but something more sinister, something more in line with the way Brad’s father smiled when he discovered a raccoon caught inside a steel trap.
I should’ve done something, Brad Fisher would later tell himself, as he took another slug of beer stolen from his father’s workshop refrigerator.
If only I had said or done something, he would later tell himself as he took another hit off the bong.
If I hadn’t been so spineless, so selfish, maybe she wouldn’t have been taken, he would later tell himself as he rode the needle; heroin was the only thing that banished the images from that day, the only thing that offered him comfort.