Rude Awakening (11 page)

‘Sheriff's office,' she said.

‘Get any reports in?'

‘Don't you think I'd call you if I heard anything?' she said, all snippy like she gets.

‘Do I need to come down there?' I asked her, my dander up.

‘What? You gonna put me in time out or spank me?'

I grinned. ‘You know, I could put you up on charges for sexual harassment now?'

I could practically hear her blushing over the phone once she figured out the implications of what she'd just said. Finally, she said, ‘That's not what I meant!'

‘Where is everybody?' I asked, basically ignoring her.

‘Emmett's down in the south quadrant checking those old trailers down there, Anthony and some of Charlie Smith's people are dividing up the Bishop area and I got another civilian search party being led by Lonnie doing the north-east quadrant.'

Lonnie Sturgis was our weekend deputy who mainly just looked after the jail, but he was good at leading civilian search parties, as had been proven about a year ago when a couple from the old folks home disappeared. Lonnie and some of his volunteers found them after two days, still alive in their old car deep in a gully off a side road in the far east of the county. It had been a miracle, and Lonnie was a hero for a while after that. Every dog should have its day, I always say. Well, I think it sometimes, anyway.

‘OK,' I told Gladys, ‘let's call 'em back in. Seems we got a ransom demand. I think maybe the boy's been kidnapped instead of just being lost.'

‘How in the world did that happen?' Gladys demanded.

Stiffening, as the guilty often do, I said, ‘Let's just concentrate on getting the boy back, shall we?'

Holly felt scared watching Mr Smith cry. She wasn't used to seeing older men cry. Young ones, sure. She had a boyfriend once who used to cry watching TV commercials, but an old guy, no, she wasn't used to that. Holly wasn't much of a crier herself. She figured with the life she'd had up to now, if she ever started crying, she might never stop.

Holly had been five years old when her mother told her she wasn't going to be able to keep her any more. ‘It's just too hard,' she had said, always one to be absolutely truthful with her small child whenever it suited her purpose. ‘I can't save any money when I have to pay childcare. And it's hard to buy food, what with the childcare, and you keep growing out of your clothes. It's just a real expense, Holly, and I just don't make that kind of money.'

So Holly had gone with her mother to a big building in Tulsa, where she'd sat on a chair, her Hello Kitty bag next to her filled with socks and underwear and two outfits and four toys: all her mother said she could bring with her (‘I'll give the rest of it to the poor children who don't have anything,' Holly's mother had told her), and watched her mother sign her young life away.

She'd spent that night, plus the next six, at a halfway house, where she lost all but one toy to the other children who'd grabbed them the minute she walked in. She kept her stuffed dog in her panties so that no one could get it. She peed on it once when she went to the bathroom, but she was very good about cleaning it thoroughly in the sink. It was cold and wet after that for quite a while, and it began to stink not long after.

Her first actual placement was at a foster home with two ‘reals' and four ‘fosters'. She'd been the youngest. The ‘mother' was real nice, but the ‘father' never did anything but yell. Most of the kids ignored her, except for the youngest ‘real', who took an instant dislike to this usurper of the ‘baby' position. She did things like flush stuff down the toilet and tell her mother that Holly had done it, cut up Holly's only clothes and again blame it on Holly, saying Holly told her she was going to trick the ‘mother' into buying her a whole new wardrobe. Holly's punishment for that was wearing the same outfit every day for two weeks. It was her responsibility to wash it every night. Her preschool teacher called child welfare about that, and Holly was moved again.

By the time she ‘aged out' at eighteen, Holly had been in six foster homes and three halfway houses. She'd been molested by an older ‘brother' when she was twelve, beaten up by an older ‘sister' when she was fifteen, and ran away and ended up in juvie for two days when she was sixteen.

Throughout all of this, Holly had kept an active fantasy life, shutting out much of what was actually happening to her. It was inevitable that she would navigate toward the theater, since theater had been her entire life. You want a little girl who smiles and says ‘Thank you'? You got it. You want a little girl who tells jokes and acts sassy? Got it right here. You want a little girl who sits on your lap and ignores the hard thing poking her leg? No problem. Holly was not a born actress, but a bred one. She just wanted to start getting paid for it.

But in all those years, she'd never seen one of her foster fathers cry, nor one of the men at any of the halfway houses. She thought older men just didn't cry, until Mr Smith started bawling his eyes out.

But it was a lot scarier when Mr Smith
stopped
crying.

Awkwardly, he got to his feet, his eyes never leaving the boy's face. Holly didn't like the way Mr Smith was looking at him. Her arms instinctively tightened around the child in her lap.

‘Who are you?' he asked the boy, his voice soft and more frightening still.

The child clung to Holly. ‘Mr Smith,' she said, ‘you're scaring him.'

‘Where's John Kovak?' Mr Smith demanded.

Eli looked up at Holly, confusion clouding his face, and then looked back at Mr Smith. ‘At his house?' the boy answered.

‘I thought that's where I got you,' Mr Smith said. ‘At John Kovak's house.'

Eli nodded his head. ‘Yes, Sir,' he said. ‘Me and John was gonna play,' he said, then clouded up and began to cry again.

‘Stop that!' Mr Smith roared, which only made the child cry harder.

Holly picked up the boy in her arms and stood up, his head on her shoulder. ‘You leave him alone!' she said, indignantly. ‘You're not a very good director, Mr Smith!'

Holly wasn't sure whether it was before or after Mr Smith began to tie up her and the boy that she finally decided he wasn't a movie director after all. She decided there was something not quite kosher about this whole experience. It was also around this time that Holly decided she needed to get herself and the child out of the barn. If not, they were both going to be in very deep shit.

‘Mary Ellen!' Dalton said, relief pouring through him as he came out of the door that led from the cells to the real world. He saw his sister, all six feet of her, standing at the desk, hunched over as always, awaiting his release.

Mary Ellen gave her little brother a finger wave. ‘Hey, Dalton,' she said.

Dalton came up and threw his arms around her, hugging her tightly. Mary Ellen just stood there, arms at her sides, as the hug continued.

Backing away, Dalton grinned one of his huge grins. ‘Boy, am I glad to see you. And you can bet I'm ready to head home!' He put his arm around his sister's shoulders. ‘Let's get out of here!'

It was proof of Dalton's hard weekend that he didn't notice his sister said nothing about his strange pants or lack of shoes, something the Mary Ellen of old would have jumped on in a New York minute.

Mary Ellen led the way to her minivan and got behind the wheel. As she started up the van and headed out of the parking lot, Dalton reached for her cell phone, sitting on the bench seat between them. ‘I'm gonna call Mama—' Dalton started, but Mary Ellen grabbed the cell phone and threw it out the window. The sound of the phone smashing to bits was music to her ears.

‘Gee, Mary Ellen, why'd you do that?' Dalton asked, truly confused.

‘I'm not ready to go home yet,' Mary Ellen said, still staring straight ahead.

‘Ah, I think my car's parked back that way,' Dalton said, pointing in the opposite direction from where they were headed.

‘Oh?' Mary Ellen said. She shook her head. ‘Road trip!'

Charlie Smith, having an actual budget for his Longbranch Police Department, was able to come over to my house with telephones and tracing equipment. We weren't ready to call in the FBI, since we'd never actually gotten a ransom demand, per se. We were on our own, but Charlie and his department would be a big help.

We set up all the equipment in the living room and sat Jean in front of the main phone.

‘Why don't I answer the phone?' Rodney Knight demanded. ‘It's my son!'

‘But he thinks he has Johnny Mac,' I reminded him. ‘And he said he wanted Jean. She needs to answer the phone.'

Having been relieved of his two-year-old by one of the volunteers, he threw up his hands in exasperation and began pacing the living room.

Charlie and I moved off into a corner. ‘Who you think this guy is?' Charlie asked.

I shook my head. ‘I've got no earthly idea.'

‘Think Jean does?'

I resented the implication, but looked over at my wife anyway. Damn it to hell if she didn't look guilty of something. Of course, I was feeling all kinds of guilty letting the boy go out to the car by himself; maybe that's the kind of guilt Jean was feeling. But looking at her, I sort of doubted it.

‘I'll get back with you,' I told Charlie. I left him standing there while I went to sit on the couch as close to my wife as I could get.

‘How you doing?' I asked her.

Jean nodded her head, then said, ‘OK, I guess. Tense.'

‘Yeah,' I agreed, ‘tense situation. Why do you think that guy said he wanted you? You got any idea why someone would want to take our child, honey?'

Tears sprang to her eyes. ‘Yes,' she said quietly.

PART II

JEAN'S STORY

SIX

W
here do I start my story? When I first met him? Or why he wanted me in the first place?
That
goes back a ways – to when I was two years old. That's when the Salk vaccine came out. My father, a biologist, had known Dr Salk briefly and disliked him intensely, which is the reason he refused my mother's request to have her six children vaccinated. I was the youngest, and the only one to contract polio.