and when jayne went into town to beg their friends for loans, money to secure his release, she watched their eyes glaze over. friends would say things to me like, oh, jayne, i m so sorry about eduardo, we liked him so much and speak about him in the past tense as if he were dead. even on the playground, classmates told jayne s children to give up hope. little kids would go up to my children and say things like, oh, i heard your daddy is dead, they found him in a plastic bag in the park juarez. and jayne would turn on her computer to find messages from a man barely hanging on. i need you like never before. help me, be compassionate toward me. i can t take it anymore. but now, more than half a year in, suddenly something new. the kidnappers demands dropped into the mid-six figures. that was money she might be able to borrow from some well heeled friend. so i started asking people and some people would tell me, yeah, sure, call me on such and such a date but then i wouldn t get a
he had a machete but no cell phone to call police. frantically jayne tried to flag down passing cars. all hit the accelerator, not the brake. i m begging them to please stop and help me. but i imagine i looked pretty scary to see a woman bleeding, desperate, bound in duct tape next to a guy with a machete. then in sheer desperation, jayne stepped in front of an oncoming bus he was coming this way. i jumped in front. and i just put my hands up like this. and i hoped he stopped. but no cell phone on the bus either. now the bus driver flagged down a taxi and the taxi driver called the police. all of this information is going from me to the taxi driver, the taxi driver to the dispatcher, the dispatcher to the police and the police to the dispatcher and the whole way around. it was like playing telephone. was there still time for the police to seal off the town, save her husband? i thought because i had this description and the plates, i thought for sure that they would just
they wouldn t answer my calls or return my messages. lots of people, she discovered, didn t want to get involved. why? well, that they somehow, by helping me, they would expose themselves to this sort of a thing somehow. at the ranch, eduardo s grown children from an earlier marriage, desperate also, did everything they could to help but they didn t have that kind of money. and so they felt very alone in their little family circle as they tried to keep hope going at the ranch. i want you to look at the camera and give a message to your daddy because he s going to see this when he gets back. that i love him so much and he s the best dad in the whole wide world and i know he s coming back soon. and then quite literally in the depths of their despair, something completely unexpected. two individuals who jayne had not approached for loans went to her separately and wrote big checks.
forehead and tells me in spanish to get up. the first thing i said to him was, please don t kill me, i have three children. then they hustled jayne and eduardo into a waiting suv. unseen accomplices snapped pillow cases over their heads and tightly bound their hands and feet. eduardo was hysterical. i don t think he was completely hearing me. he probably had a concussion. the suv sped away. jayne tried to comfort eduardo. one of the abductors threatened more pain. he kept saying shut up you [ bleep ]. or i ll give you another one. you could tell he was trying to disguise his voice. within minutes, word of the attack got back to the school bp something was wrong. the teacher rushed to the now abandoned jeep. i went with my partner and the left window was all broken and blood was in the ground. and i had that feeling there was a kidnapping. in the suv under the gagging pillow case, jayne struggled to breathe. she reached out for eduardo. i felt blood all down his arm.
he never went back. now it was evening. i m hoping i ll get home, like they told me, i ll open the e-mail, there will be a message, and whatever i have access to they can have it all. just give him back. so i m at that point hoping this is going to be an open and shut deal in less than 24 hours. jayne got ready for the arrival of the federal afi agent. the federal police had promised he would move in right away and live on the ranch until he got eduardo back. she felt like she was waiting for the cavalry to arrive. she let hope grow. i expected him to roll in in some kind of bulletproof suburban, be big and burly and hopefully a little mature and having done this quite a while. and then finally at 3:00 a.m., the afi agent called. could someone come and pick him up in town, he asked. he had come from mexico city, by bus.