Chapter Thirty-Five Edward
Edward didn’t care about the thorns or the branches or the cold. He was never letting go of her.
Voices rose, footsteps pounded toward them, muted shouts and directions. Ren was curled into a tight ball in his arms, hands over her ears, shaking violently. “Ren, shhh, I got you,” he told her. “I got you. I got you.”
“What’s happening?” she asked into his chest. “Where are they? Are they coming?”
“You’re safe,” Chris said, sending a careful hand over her back.
“They were shooting,” she sobbed into Edward’s chest. “Were they shooting at me? Were my parents shooting at me?”
Edward’s helpless gaze met Chris’s over the top of Ren’s head. Panicked, he shook his head, not knowing what to say.
“The police are here,” Chris said softly. “Lots and lots of them. It’s going to be okay.”
Edward knew Chris was probably right, but Edward wasn’t entirely convinced yet. There was a lot of yelling, and something somewhere was on fire. He was aware of a handful of SWAT officers moving past them down the driveway, the dark, ominous sound of gunfire, and then the piercing, high-pitched misery of Gloria’s scream.
Ren violently flinched in his arms. “What happened? Oh my God, what’s happening?”
He craned his neck, trying to see anything, but it was suddenly impossible, with another cluster of bodies in dark combat gear jogging past. All he could sense was that the energy had shifted, and everything quieted. And then two medics sprinted past with heavy bags.
“I think they’ve got the cabin surrounded,” he told her.
“Is Gloria okay?” she asked. “Is Steve okay?”
Edward looked over the top of her head to meet Chris’s eyes again—because honestly, he wasn’t sure that everyone in that cabin was going to make it out—but Chris was staring at his daughter in Edward’s arms, tears brimming.
“Hey,” Edward said gently, urging Chris to look at him. “Should we move back there?” He lifted his chin to where the police cars, ambulances, and SWAT vans were parked in the darkness.
Just as he said it, a low voice came from beside them in the bushes: “Guys, we gotta move you out.”
Movies always made the climax of a story seem so tidy, so compact. Police surrounded the suspects, apprehended them, carted them away in cop cars, sirens wailing victoriously. The victims were tucked safely in the back of an ambulance with a cup of tea and a blanket over their shoulders. Viewers caught up four months later with the characters, now smiling and healthy, walking in the park with a new puppy.
In reality, it wasn’t anything like that. In reality, the supposed climax was confusing, cold, dark, and time passed without any obvious plan or momentum. After the agents brought Ren, Edward, and Chris back to the protected line of cars, vans, and ambulances, she was quickly whisked off to the care of a pair of emergency medics; Chris was led to another ambulance a bit farther down the road, and Edward was asked to wait, out of the way, for further instruction.
Out of the way could mean a lot of things, he thought, and he moved so he was near the driver’s-side door of Ren’s ambulance. He eavesdropped while they spoke to her in low, calming voices. He could hear others nearby, too. Cops and medics and federal agents and all the various special-ops people they brought in to face any potential insanity on the homestead, all speaking too quietly for him to make out, but the movement around him gave him some clues about what had happened. Police tape was unrolled liberally, cordoning off large swaths of land. Dogs were brought in to search the premises for drugs, guns, maybe even people. He had no idea. With Ren shielded from view by a van, Gloria was escorted into an unmarked car and driven away—he caught only a glimpse of wild eyes and tousled hair before she was somewhat roughly guided into the backseat—but Steve’s whereabouts remained a bit of a mystery. That was, until a CSI van backed down the driveway and the coroner arrived.
The idea of this, that the only mother Ren had ever known had just been arrested, that the only father she’d known was leaving his property in a body bag, was too much. He couldn’t stay out of the way anymore.
Edward walked to where Ren sat in the back of the ambulance, partially hidden by the medic who was carefully dabbing at two large scrapes across her arm. She looked tiny and terrified, dwarfed by the big flannel blanket around her. She glanced up as his shoes crunched through the gravel, her eyes watery and bloodshot: a portrait of grief and confusion.
“Hi,” he said, and the single syllable felt heavy in his mouth.
“Hi.” She swallowed a sob. “How did you get here?”
“Airplane,” he said. “Then cop car.” In an effort to diffuse some of the tension, he whispered, “For once, I was not in handcuffs.”
Ren gave a watery laugh, and when the medic stepped away, Edward offered her his hand. She grabbed it between both of hers, wordlessly tugging him forward, needing a hug. Without hesitation, he wrapped his arms around her while she shook. “I’m here. I got you.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, but he knew that she did. She did, but it was too terrible to comprehend, and there was nothing he could say to make it any less horrific. Slowly, she pulled away and tilted her face up to his. “Who was that in the bushes? Was—”
“Yeah.”
“My dad?”
He ran this thumb over her cheek, wanting to protect her, wishing she got to hear this in a way she’d want to hold on to and remember. He nodded. “Yeah, Chris. He’s been looking for you for a very long time.”
“He’s not a terrible man?” she asked, chin wobbling.
Edward frowned, fury at Steve and Gloria rising in him anew. “No. He isn’t. He’s a good man who had something deeply precious stolen twenty years ago.”
Her tears spilled over, streaking down her cheeks. “Can I see him?”
Edward turned, searching in the darkness, and found Chris about ten feet away, standing unobtrusively next to a patrol car. It was all over his posture, the way he wanted to burst forward and hold this grown-up version of the little girl snatched from his side nearly two decades ago, but he approached slowly when Edward waved to him, correctly reading the shock all throughout Ren’s posture.
“Hi, Ren,” he said, calm and simple, just like the agents had suggested on the drive here from Lewiston. Use the name she knows, they’d told him. Don’t expect much right away. She may not want to talk, or she may need you to lay it all out immediately. There wasn’t one way this would go down, but this was what he needed to remember: This will be much more of a mixed bag for her than for you. You’ve just got your daughter back, but she’s losing the life she’s always known. Go slow. You do whatever she needs.
“I’m Chris.”
“Hi, Chris.” She tried to smile, and this glimpse of the Ren Edward adored, this earnest effort, sent a painful ache through his gut. “Thanks for coming.”
His laugh was carried on a sob. “Are you kidding? I’ve been looking for you for twenty years. I would have flown to Siberia a hundred times over.”
Ren stared at her father, and Edward knew what she was seeing, how it was undeniable who he was. In the flashing lights, he could see the tears streaming down both their faces, and as Chris stepped forward to give her a careful hug, Edward blended back into the mass of bodies all around them.
KIDNAPPING VICTIM GRACE KONING FOUND ALIVE TWENTY YEARS LATER, RESCUED IN DEADLY SHOOTOUT IN IDAHO
by Tustin Wilkes and Dawn Meyer, Associated Press
Updated 3:14 a.m. PDT
Grace Koning, the young girl who vanished nearly twenty years ago from a park near her home in Atlanta, was rescued last night in a shocking confrontation at her alleged kidnappers’ homestead in rural Idaho that left one man dead and a woman in police custody.
Deborah DeStefano (59) and Adam Zielinski (61), living under the assumed names Gloria and Steve Gylden, abducted Koning on the Fourth of July as she watched fireworks with her father, Christopher Koning. According to news articles from the time, Mr. Koning let go of his daughter’s hand to dig into his backpack for her sweater, and when he turned back to her, she was gone. An official search for the missing girl lasted nine months and spanned several states.
DeStefano and Zielinski reportedly brought Koning to Zielinski’s rural land in Latah County, Idaho, where they raised her as their own child, hidden from society.
As of just over a week ago, Koning, now twenty-three, was attending Corona College as a freshman under the assumed name Ren Gylden. “Ren said it took her a long time to convince her parents to let her go to college,” classmate Jeb Petrolli told the Associated Press. “Knowing what we know now, it’s wild they ever agreed. I guess they must’ve figured everyone forgot about Grace Koning and they’d get away with it.”
According to a campus student profile, Grace Koning had never been to school prior to her arrival in Spokane but was self-taught in subjects such as calculus, physics, Mandarin, and chemistry. And she made quite a positive impression on her peers. “She was absolutely a fish out of water,” a classmate told the Associated Press, asking to remain anonymous. “But once you get to know her, all the hype is real. She’s great. In hindsight this all makes sense, but at the time we just figured she’d had an alternative upbringing and was just sheltered.”
But after barely two months at school, Koning suddenly left campus a few days before spring break with another student, twenty-two-year-old Edward Fitzsimmons. The purpose of their trip remains unknown. Officials at Corona College have not replied to AP’s request for comment.
At some point in the trip, DeStefano and Zielinski intercepted Koning and brought her back to their homestead in Idaho, where authorities surrounded the area and rescued Koning in a shootout that left Zielinski dead. DeStefano remains in custody. A spokesperson for the FBI told AP she would be arraigned within forty-eight hours.
Although it was unclear why Koning left Spokane with Fitzsimmons, the Associated Press has learned that he is the one who alerted the authorities to Grace Koning’s probable location. Fitzsimmons and Koning’s biological father, Christopher (52), were apparently on-site for the rescue.
Neighbors of Christopher Koning report that DeStefano had once lived in the Atlanta neighborhood across the street from the Koning family. “She wasn’t really involved in neighborhood activities,” longtime local resident Annabelle Cleff told the Associated Press. “She mostly kept to herself.”
According to multiple sources, Christopher Koning and his ex-wife, Aria Miller, divorced just before Grace was two. Mr. Koning was awarded custody, but Miss Miller would make frequent attempts to see her child. “She was troubled,” Cleff said. “Addiction issues. Sometimes she would cause a scene. I remember standing at the curb one night when the police were called, and Deborah came out of her house, and all she said was ‘That poor little girl.’ She hadn’t spoken much to any of us up to that point. Didn’t even think about that again until all this happened.”
Multiple residents recall DeStefano’s relationship with Zielinski, who lived with DeStefano in the Atlanta neighborhood for some time. Jimmy Murphy, Mr. Koning’s next-door neighbor, remembers Zielinski as “a quiet man who had no love for city life or city folks.” When the couple moved away, residents figured they’d gone somewhere that suited them better than the suburbs.
“They moved before Gracie went missing,” Murphy said. “They must’ve come back for her. No one even thought about them, not once. And to think, all this time they had that little girl. I’m sure glad she’s alive, but Chris’ll never get those years back.”
Grace Koning is reported to be healthy, with no major injuries. She, Mr. Koning, and Mr. Fitzsimmons have been moved to an undisclosed location for protection.
This is a developing story.