Daddy's Little Girl (12 page)

The library had been built nearly a hundred years ago, thanks to a grant from a wealthy railroader. A two-story red brick structure tucked between oaks and elms, it spoke of another time, especially the hitching post out front.

Adam Carnes and Beth Daye had been inside the library for nearly an hour, in the basement, where decades of newspapers had been stored. Not all of them had been committed to microfilm as yet.

Taking the June 8, 1953 date as a starting point, Carnes and Beth had looked many weeks in opposite directions of the June day.

With no luck.

Carnes, who admitted to himself now that there seemed to be no possible connection between the stories in the newspapers and the disappearance of his daughter, had begun to see the feverish flight to the library as just that—feverish and hopeless.

He slumped in his folding chair, letting his eyes close, knowing that soon he would have to call his ex-wife and tell her that their daughter was missing.

A grim reality began to replace his anxiety. A kind of deadness seeped through him.

He had gone past shock, finally. Now he was into ... what? Despair?

Watching Beth continue on through her own stack of papers, he tried his best to mouth the words to a silent prayer, but none came.

“Beth,” he said.

She looked up, her lovely face sober.

Gently as possible, he said, “I appreciate all your work, but it’s no use. There’s no connection between your husband’s journal and his ‘accident’ and my daughter’s disappearance. None.”

Now it was her turn to slump in her chair. She shook her head.

“I know,” she said.

“We both wanted there to be,” he said. “It would have made both our lives easier—a nice, neat package.”

She nodded. “Yes.”

Across the table, she put her head between her hands. The pose made her seem much younger.

A real feeling of admiration filled Carnes. He liked this woman. Very much. Under other circumstances ...

“I’ve also been thinking about one other possibility,” Carnes said after a time.

“What?”

“That maybe Sheriff Wayman was right. That maybe she did run away.”

“But she’s your own daughter. Surely you’d know if she—”

He shook his head. “No. That’s what I thought at first, too. That I know her so well, I’d know if something was bothering her enough to make her run away.” He shrugged hopelessly. “But I don’t know her, really. I’m a father in exile. I talk to her on the phone every few days and I see her several times a month, but I don’t have a truly ongoing sense of her life. Not at all.”

“You really think she ran away?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“From everything you’ve told me, she just doesn’t sound like a candidate. She’s got a good life with her mother and her new stepfather; she’s got a good life with you; she does well in school; there’s no evidence at all that she’s heartbroken or on drugs, two of the reasons teenagers usually run away.”

He just watched her as she spoke, the warm feeling for her increasing.

But now wasn’t the time....

He picked up a paper and looked at it. He enjoyed staring at the old ads, when things were absurdly inexpensive, a new car for a few thousand dollars, a good man’s suit for sixty or seventy, houses for ten, eleven, twelve thousand.

He was burying himself in the past again when he saw it.

As soon as his eyes encountered it, he wondered how he’d missed it the first time.

What he’d been looking for was a very obvious story, something terrible that immediately made some clear connection between Beth’s husband’s journal and Deirdre’s disappearance.

But here it was all the time, right in front of him.

“Beth!”

She glanced up from her own newspapers, startled. Almost instantly she was around the table, standing over his shoulder, reading.

The story appeared in the June 10, 1953 issue of the
Sentinel.
The 8th would have been that previous Tuesday.

The insatiable animal is born.

“A teenage girl,” Beth said.

“Exactly,” Carnes said.

She put a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t have any idea what it means,” she said.

“Neither do I,” Carnes said, standing up. “All I know right now is that it means
something.”

In a rush, they left the library.

“You feelin’ all right, Vince?” Donna said.

Vince glowered at her. “I ask you to call your cousin in Texas and ask her if she’d like some visitors, and you’re treating me like I’m a lunatic.”

Donna and Vince sat in the breakfast nook of their mobile home. It was near the end of his lunch hour. Donna didn’t know what to make of the last half hour. Usually Vince came home and wanted a little food and a little sex. Sometimes he relaxed to the point of kicking off his boots and sitting in the recliner and watching a soap opera with her. Today he had burst through the door telling her to call her cousin in Texas and see if it would be all right if they came down there for a few days.

Her cousin in Texas!

Why they barely had enough money in the bank to get them through till payday.

Texas!

But there’d been no reasoning with him. He’d even gone into the bedroom and started throwing things into a suitcase. She could never recall having seen him like this. He reminded her of a spooked horse she’d once seen. Nothing was able to calm that mare down. Nothing she did was able to calm Vince down.

“Hon,” she said.

He still glared at her. He scared her.

“What?”

“You want a Valium?”

“No, I don’t want a Valium.”

“Hon?”

“What?”

“You’re scarin’ me, you know that?”

He kept his eyes on her—bulging, mad eyes—but he did not say a word.

Just watched.

She collected the dishes. He watched. She washed them. He watched.

All unblinkingly.

Watching.

She wanted to go over and close his eyes, the way you did a dead person’s.

He was terrifying her.

Finally, she turned away from the sink and back to him.

He said, “You come over here and sit down.”

“You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

“Well,” she said.

“You come over here and sit down,” he said. It was still a command, but a softer one.

She went over and sat down.

He surprised her by putting his hand out.

She touched it with her own hand at once, thankful for the intimacy and love his gesture implied.

“I want to tell you something,” he said.

“What?”

“But I want you to promise me you won’t scream and you won’t tell anybody.”

“I promise.”

“Don’t promise too fast. Think about it. I want your promise to be serious.”

“All my promises are serious, hon.”

“Not all of them.”

She thought a moment. A long moment. “All right. I promise.”

He said, “I think they’re going to try to kill me. Probably tonight.”

She looked as if she was going to scream.

He pointed at her. “You promised.”

She slapped her hand over her mouth.

Then, taking her hand away, she said, “Who is going to kill you? Nobody’d want to kill you, Vince. You’re a popular man in Burton.”

“I know something, babe. Something I shouldn’t.”

“What do you know?”

He laughed. He sounded crazy. It was the fear, she knew. “That’s the funny thing. I don’t know what I know.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Right now, what I know doesn’t matter. Right now all that matters is that we’ve got to get our money out of the bank in cash and get out of here. You heard about Reverend Heath this morning?”

She clucked. “Why would a minister kill himself?”

“That’s the point, babe.”

“What?”

“He didn’t kill himself. He was murdered.”

“But everbody—”

“Everybody thinks he killed himself. That’s just what they want everybody to think.”

“But—”

He shusshed her.

Then he got up and walked down the narrow corridor of the trailer to the rear. He had heard gravel crunching on the lot outside.

He flicked back the curtain and peered outside.

Even from the living room she could hear the
click
of his service revolver as the safety was pushed off.

“Honey,” she said, getting up, running to him.

“They’re here,” he said, taking aim with his weapon. “They’re here.”

Richard could not stop picking his nose.

The retarded man knew that it was not polite to walk along the roadside, in full view of any oncoming traffic, with his finger scooping out the treasures to be found in his nose ... but he did it, anyway.

The stretch ahead of him was long. He was tired from not getting much sleep last night, and tired of the questions he’d had to answer today. First from Beth, then from Vince Reeves, and then from the man named Carnes.

The man named Carnes frightened Richard.

He sensed that Carnes was capable of hurting him, the same way the man had hurt him last night when Richard had found the blood.

Richard winced, trying to blank out his senses so that the thought of pain would go away.

The man in the butcher’s apron had been very good at inflicting pain. First he had gotten Richard on the ground and started to twist his ear until Richard had cried out ... and then he took to kicking Richard in the groin and the sides until Richard had almost blacked out.

Richard had escaped, his hands slick with the blood he’d found, his sides aching from the punishment the man in the apron had given him.

Richard paused on his journey, fascinated with the sudden appearance of a black crow against the skyline. The crow swooped and wheeled in the blue of the sky. Richard got tears in his eyes instantly. Something about birds moved him profoundly. Maybe it was their freedom. Maybe it was their beauty. He didn’t know and really didn’t give it much thought. All he knew was that he wished he knew how to fly.... The people of Burton thought he was completely stupid, which was not the case at all. Indeed, he used his slowness as a weapon ... a means of keeping them from knowing what was really going on in his shattered little world.

But then ... he was not smart, either.

He watched the crow, enviously.

No ... he was not smart. Ever since the accident years before ... he would phase in and out of reality. Sometimes reality was too terrible to contemplate, and so he retreated into a world of his own making ... populated by cute, friendly animals who spoke as animals did in stories for children ... animals who believed in, and cherished, and nurtured Richard ... animals who could be counted on to fill his long dark hours with the light of affection....

Not like the man last night.

Richard moved the sun out of his eyes by bringing a knuckly hand to his forehead.

Up yonder was the Foster estate where nice Ruth Foster and nice Minerva lived. He liked the long walk to the mansion—then he remembered Jake Darcy, the handyman who worked there. Jake, who gave Richard cookies. Jake was gentle with Richard and even spoke up for Richard when the townspeople started making fun of him. That’s where Richard would go now, not to the Foster estate, but to Jake’s.

So he turned around and headed back toward town, where Jake lived.

Yes, it was Jake he would tell about the man in the apron, because it had been near the Foster estate that Richard had found the blood and had seen the man.

Yes, then he would feel better, Richard would. Feel much better. Not have to listen to any more questions rain on him like fists.

Yes, he would feel much better when he had discussed the man with Jake.

Richard trudged onward, peaceful for the first time since he’d awakened this morning to find the man with the knife in his room.

So far he had done exactly what the man had told him to do—kept to himself what he’d seen last night.

The man had put the knife to Richard’s throat and pressed hard enough that Richard had started to cry.

He knew what the man could do ... send Richard to death.

Richard knew death was a bad place. A very bad place.

A couple of teenagers drove by in a VW and honked their horn, startling Richard. They laughed and smirked as they drove past.

Richard put his eyes to the ground.

He had learned long ago that in this world it was better to be meek and foolish if you wanted to survive evil.

Then he broke into a loping, almost comic run. He was going to see his good friend Jake ... the only good friend he had in the world.