Rude Awakening (14 page)

He was still barefoot, still wearing pants that hit him mid-calf, but he was going home – come hell, high water or sore feet. He headed down the road, trying to keep to the smoother areas where car tires had paved the way and where there was less gravel to hurt his tender feet. It had been a long time since Dalton's feet had been barefoot outdoors, and they were regretting this omission.

It was slow going, but he kept his feet moving and his eyes trained on the horizon, looking for any sign of lights, either the skyline of Tulsa, or just a farmhouse yard light; he didn't care. Any light to show him the way home.

Holly had run away as fast as she could from the barn, considering the fact that she was carrying a four-year-old with breathing problems. But she told herself that this four-year-old was the whole reason to get the hell away from Mr Smith. Of course, he was the whole reason she was in this mess, too, she figured, but she didn't want to dwell on that. ‘Can't take this out on a kid,' she told herself. ‘It's not his fault. Mostly.'

There was a stand of trees not far from the barn and she'd headed there. She and Eli hunkered down behind a big oak, then watched the barn and waited. There was no sign of Mr Smith. She looked at Eli, who looked back at her, his eyes big.

‘Now what?' he whispered.

‘Damned if I know,' Holly whispered back.

‘You are! You
are
saying that!' Angela said, a gleam in her eye and a smile on her face.

‘Good God, no! Who would? She's an A-class bitch with a capital “B”. The only reason she even has that job is that her uncle owns the company. If she were any good, she'd be a VP or something by now, but she really stinks at what she does. Well, let's face it, Melinda stinks at everything. Except drinking,' Angela said, a smirk on her face. ‘She's very
, very
good at that.'

‘I came into this job ready to win friends and influence people, you know, like that old book says? My dad swears by that book. Made all us kids read it.' She shook her head. ‘But Melinda . . . How could I win
her
friendship when she wasn't even in the race?'

PART III

THE SEARCHERS

EIGHT

‘
W
hat do you mean?' Clovis Pettigrew asked me. She looked from me to her son-in-law to my wife. ‘Are you telling me my grandson's been kidnapped?'

‘Yes, Ma'am,' I said, feeling even worse about it now, standing in front of this Mighty Dog of a woman, than I had earlier, if that was at all possible.

‘All right, Sheriff. Let's see if I can get this straight,' she said, squaring her shoulders and bringing her body up to its full height of five foot nothing. ‘My son's been missing since Thursday night, and, let's let our hair down here, Sheriff: you've got no idea where my boy is. Now you're telling me my four-year-old grandson has been kidnapped. Is this correct?'

‘Yes, Ma'am,' I said.

She turned to look at her son-in-law. ‘Where's Mary Ellen?'

Hoisting up his two-year-old higher on his hip, Rodney Knight said, ‘I wish I knew.'

Clovis Pettigrew turned to me. ‘My son, my grandson
and
my daughter?'

I held up my hands in self-defense. ‘I got nothing to do with that!'

‘She asked me to watch Eli because she had a family emergency,' Jean told Miz Pettigrew. Jean was sitting on the couch, flanked on one side by her business partner, Anne Louise, and on the other by their secretary, DeSandra.

‘And you did such a fine job of helping out,' Dalton's mama said sarcastically.

Jean opened her mouth and looked at me, then closed it. Jean's a bit above getting defensive, although Clovis Pettigrew could bring out the worst in just about anybody. DeSandra, who must have somehow figured out that Miz Pettigrew's comment was less than flattering to Jean, jumped to her feet.

She got out, ‘Listen here, you little freak—' before Jean and Anne Louise managed to wrestle her back down to the couch. Anne Louise clamped her hand over DeSandra's mouth, so that all that came out was ‘ah ha arrg ah,' which was a little less offensive than what the girl had had in mind.

Shooting a glare at all three women sitting on the couch and crossing her arms over her chest, Miz Pettigrew turned back to me. ‘So tell me what you're doing so I can fix it.'

I sighed. To hell with it, I thought. If she can fix it, more power to her. ‘We did a search of the area before the ransom call,' I said. ‘Now we got Police Chief Smith here with equipment to record and trace any more calls that come in from the kidnapper. And I got an APB out on both Dalton's and Mary Ellen's cars.'

‘So basically, y'all are just standing around with your thumbs up your
be
-hinds.' Then Miz Pettigrew nodded her head. ‘OK,' she said. ‘Sounds adequate.' Turning to her son-in-law, she said, ‘Rodney, give me Junior and you go look for your wife.'

Rodney handed over his son and said, ‘Where do you suggest I look, Mama Clovis?'

‘Well, start back at your house. Then call Clary Swain, see if she's heard from her . . .'

‘
Clary Swain?
Mama Clovis, Mary Ellen hasn't talked to her since high school,' Rodney said.

‘Humph. Well, who's her best friend now?' she asked.

Rodney just stared at her, then said, ‘Well, I dunno. Me?'

Miz Pettigrew hiked the two-year-old up on one skinny hip and said, ‘Humph, I doubt it.'

Holly figured their best bet was to get to a road, but the only way this city girl knew how to do that was to get to the driveway leading to the barn and follow that back to the road. The only problem was that the big barn door was open wide and stared directly at the driveway. How could she get the boy to the driveway and down to the road without being seen by Mr Smith?

Looking at the sky, she noted that the moon was doing its crescent-shaped thing, which did light up the ground a little bit, but there were clouds rolling in the sky also, and they covered the moon every once in a while, darkening the world around her. But she guessed she couldn't count on cloud cover for the entire length of the driveway, especially while dragging a four-year-old with breathing problems along with her. She found herself grinning. God, she thought. I sound just like a commando! Under her breath, she said out loud, ‘Holly Humphries, Girl Commando! Coming to a theater near you!'

‘Huh?' Eli said, looking up at her, his mouth open in an attempt to get as much air into his little lungs as possible.

Holly shook her head. ‘Nothing, honey,' she said, tousling his hair.

‘We need to go,' Eli whined. ‘I want my mommy.'

Holly sighed. ‘I know you do, honey.' She scoped out the territory, just like Holly Humphries, Girl Commando would do. The tree line came up close to the driveway. There weren't a lot of trees in front of the barn, but if they darted from one to the other, they could still follow the driveway to the road and have some shelter from the moonlight.

‘OK, Eli, hold onto my hand. We're going to move fast from tree to tree but follow the driveway to the road, OK?'

He nodded his head and they began to move. They'd gone no more than five or six steps when bright light engulfed them.

‘There you are!' Mr Smith shouted, shining a large flashlight and catching them like deer in headlights, an unfamiliar expression to both city girl Holly and Chicago-bred ‘Smith'.

Holly grabbed Eli, looked behind her at the vast nothingness of the dense trees behind the barn and turned in that direction. Run! she thought to herself and took off.

I flipped to the next patient, LeeLee Novotny, who was legally blind. It took a moment for me to realize that I'd done the math wrong when I first pulled this patient's file. I had been looking for women twenty-five and under. LeeLee Novotny was
considerably
under. LeeLee was now eighteen years old, but she'd been less than that when she was seen by Dr Hawthorne. LeeLee Novotny saw him between the ages of fourteen and sixteen. Two years Emil Hawthorne could have been abusing her.

Mary Ellen Pettigrew Knight's depth perception wasn't particularly good in the daylight; at night, it was downright non-existent. Her flight off the cliff into nothingness was actually a little less than the distance from the roof of a one-story house. She did a belly flop onto a grassy knoll, knocking the breath out of her, breaking her nose, her right hand pinkie finger and rendering her unconscious.

Dalton's feet hurt. He found a large rock next to the gravel road he had been following and sat down, lifting one foot after the other to check them. His right foot was bleeding. The only item of clothing he had on besides his too-short pants and his undershorts was the new shirt he had bought specifically for his date with ‘Sarah'. Looking at it in the paltry moonlight, he noticed it was a little the worse for wear: the right shoulder was torn and there were all sorts of stains on the front of it. He grabbed the right sleeve and pulled. Using the good Oxford cloth sleeve, he gingerly dabbed at his bleeding foot. Knowing he had to keep moving, he tied the sleeve around his bleeding foot and tried standing on it. It felt good; so good, in fact, that he tore off the other sleeve and tied it around his left foot.

Then, just for heck of it, he lifted his voice to the heavens and yelled at the top of his lungs, ‘Mary Ellen!' He waited for about ten seconds, heard no response and continued on down the road.

‘What was that?' Holly said, pulling Eli down with her to hide behind a bush.

‘Huh?' Eli asked.

‘Did you hear something?' she whispered to the boy.

‘Somebody yelling,' Eli said, trying to whisper back.

They'd lost Smith and his flashlight a good five or ten minutes earlier and had been wandering ever since in what Holly hoped was a straight line.

‘That's my mommy,' Eli whispered.

Straining her ears for another sound from the woods, she irritably turned to the boy. ‘What?'

‘Mary Ellen,' Eli said. ‘That's my mommy's name.'

‘What's Mary Ellen?' Holly asked, her irritability starting to show.

‘The yelling,' Eli said, as patiently as a four-year-old could. ‘That man was yelling my mommy's name!'

Holly's eyes opened wide and she put her finger to her lips to quiet Eli. Then they both listened.

Emil picked up his cell phone and dialed. When the other end was answered, he said, ‘You said this was going to be easy. Well, it's not! They're gone and I can't find them and it's not even the right kid, for God's sake!'

He listened for a minute, starting to calm down. ‘OK, OK . . . Yes. I understand,' he said. He smiled. ‘I love you too.'