Blue Tears

by Ninie Hammon

  She placed a smile snug on her lips, waved at Fletch in his cruiser, punched the button on her car key that popped the trunk, dropped the plastic bag into it and slammed it shut. Opening the driver’s side door, she leaned in and took the garage door opener off the visor, then crossed the lawn to the cruiser, parked so the driver’s side was nearest the house.

  Fletch. By the book.

  “Could I ask a favor?”

  “Anything at all you need.”

  He smiled. He was such a dear man, good and kind and dedicated. She wondered to this day if it was her fault he’d gotten shot at the lake that day when she and the others were trying so desperately to locate and save Macy Cosgrove, who, it turned out, was nowhere near the lake. She also wondered briefly why some local girl hadn’t snatched him up, with that square, Dudley Do-Right jaw and perfect-teeth smile.

  Wondered those things with the disengaged part of her mind that was attending now to the plan while the rest of her wrestled with devastating, gut-wrenching grief.

  “I need a box that’s on the top shelf in the storage room. I could ask Dobbs to get it down for me, but with his back …”

  “Glad to help.”

  Fletch was out of the cruiser in a heartbeat and walked along beside her as she aimed the garage door opener and pushed the button. The door slid grudgingly upward. He didn’t ask why they weren’t going in through the house. Once inside the garage, she punched the button again and the door went down. She offered an explanation this time, but probably didn’t need to.

  “It’s cold in here with that door open.”

  On the top shelf in the back corner of the storage room — even Fletch would have to use the step stool — was a wide, flat cardboard box. It was filled with the leftover tiles from the bathroom renovation probably twenty-five years ago. She knew the contents because it had been in the attic and she’d convinced Brice to move it out of the way when she’d been getting ready for the yard sale that never happened. She’d been determined to dig all the way to the back of the flotsam and jetsam stored up there to find whatever’d been left by the original owners, the mysterious Sophia Watford.

  Now, she had no real memory of being curious about Sophia Watford. Had no idea what it felt like to want … anything. She was alive for one purpose — to kill Sergei Mikhailov. That single-minded objective was a flamethrower that burned away all her desires, memories, thoughts and plans, everything that was not directly related to accomplishing her goal — saving the life of her little girl.

  When Brice had lifted the box up onto the shelf, he had sworn he’d compressed his spine and made himself two inches shorter. He’d had to jam it in, wedge it between the wall and a pipe coming out of the ceiling. It would likely take two men Brice’s size to get it out of there now.

  She flipped on the light, walked to the back of the room and stood beneath the shelf.

  “That’s it. You’ll need the step stool.”

  She’d left it leaning against the wall when she’d swapped out the lightbulbs. As soon as Fletch had it positioned beneath the shelf and had climbed it to the top, she said, “You need more light to see what you’re doing. I’ll get a new bulb, if you wouldn’t mind putting it in for me.”

  She left him standing on the step stool. He’d have to climb down off the stool and cross the length of the storage room to the door to see into the garage, and she was counting on him just waiting where he was.

  Stepping into the garage, she grabbed the bottle of superglue from the bottom shelf of the workbench, hurried to the garage door and engaged the manual lock — a handle in the middle of the door that shoved bars into tracks on both sides. She turned the bottle up and emptied almost all the contents into the mechanism of the lock, kept just enough to squirt into the side panels where the bars engaged.

  Then she returned to the workbench, chucked the empty glue bottle into the trash can and picked up the lightbulb off the bottom workbench shelf. When she returned to the storage room, Fletch wasn’t standing on the top shelf of the stool where she’d left him and her heart stuttered through a series of irregular beats. He’d moved the stool to beneath the burned-out bulb and stood waiting there for her. He climbed the steps, unscrewed the bulb and screwed in the new one.

  “I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble. If you’d rather not—”

  “Oh, no ma’am, no trouble at all. I’m glad to help.”

  This bulb produced light and Fletch climbed down off the stool, moved it to a spot beneath the shelf with the box of tiles. He climbed up again and tried to lift the box. It wouldn’t budge.

  “This is mighty heavy,” he said, grunting. Anyone else would have asked her what was in it and why she wanted it down off that shelf. Fletch didn’t.

  “When Brice put it up there for me, he had to wiggle it around to get it to fit.”

  She stood beside him, watching him wrestle the box, making chit-chat as he pushed and shoved. She had to keep him occupied and engaged until the superglue dried. It wouldn’t take long. The box moved back and forth on the shelf, but there was no way to get an angle to grip it to lift it. She suspected Fletch would stand there on that stool for hours trying to get that box down before he’d give up. But eventually it would occur to him — surely it would! — to go out into the back yard and ask for help from one or both of the deputies there.

  She waited as long as she dared before she picked up the rose clippers off the nearby shelf and stepped up behind Fletch.

  “I think you’re getting it,” she said, encouragement dripping off the words like syrup off pancakes. As he shoved and grunted, she carefully lifted the cord that ran from the microphone on his shoulder, beneath the epaulet on his shirt, down his back and connected to a sending unit on his belt.

  Snip!

  “It’s moving. I can see it!” she said and backed out of the storage closet, put the snips on the workbench and stepped into the house. She quietly closed the door behind her, locked the knob and engaged the deadbolt.

  Stepping out of the mudroom into the laundry room, she closed that door behind her, too. The washer had filled and was making a grumbling slush-slush sound. She turned to the clumpety-clumpety dryer and opened the door. The drum slowed and the clumps ceased and Dobbs turned to look at her in surprise.

  “Where’d you come from?”

  She acted like she’d just come quietly into the kitchen behind him and he hadn’t noticed. “The Marine Corps band could have marched through the kitchen and you couldn’t have heard it.” She took one of the shoes out of the dryer and examined it.

  “Needs a couple more minutes.” She tossed it back in, closed the door and switched on the deafening clumpety-clump again.

  When she stepped from the laundry room into the kitchen, she closed that door behind her, too, muting the banging racket. “That’ll help.”

  “Bailey … are you okay? You’re acting—”

  “I absolutely am not okay.” She kept moving, couldn’t let him pin her down. “I smell like the sweat-sock bin in the Steeler’s locker room after a game, and this time I’m not going to think of ‘one more thing to do’ before I take a shower.” She made it across the room so her back was to him and he couldn’t see her face. “Listen for …” The word hung in her throat. If she said the child’s name …

  “I will. Sparky’s in there with her. He’ll set up a racket if I don’t hear her.”

  She said nothing else, couldn’t speak. If she were required to say a single syllable more she would dissolve in tears on the floor.

  Dobbs turned back to his chili and she pretended to start up the stairs. She gave him a few seconds to re-engage, then slipped through the living room and out the front door. It took two tries to fit her key into the ignition of her car. She pulled out slowly, drove down the street with shaking hands on the steering wheel.

  I’m sorry, Fletch …

  Maybe she said the words out loud. Maybe just thought them. She was crying too hard to tell.

  The Evinrud
e outboard motor was humming through the water, making a sound like a sewing machine, ran better than it had the day T.J.’d bought it. He’d paid $25 for it to a fisherman at the marina who’d got disgusted and started selling off his gear when his jon boat started to sink. The guy’s friend had tossed a cooler off the dock into the boat and knocked a hole in the bottom.

  Takes a real special kind of stupid to do a thing like that.

  T.J.’s jon boat was made of metal, couldn’t knock a hole in the bottom with an ax. The boat was likely almost as old as T.J. He’d gone out fishing in it almost every summer day since he’d come back home to Shadow Rock.

  It was almost dark, and T.J. turned the boat back toward the boat ramp when his phone rang. It was Dobbs.

  No preamble. “Bailey’s missing.”

  “How can she—?”

  “Not missing, she ran away, tricked Fletch, locked him in the garage and—”

  “Slow down, slow down, tell me what—”

  “Fletch’d still be in that garage — I never heard him knocking and yelling — but he finally took an axe to the door.”

  “You realize you ain’t making no sense whatsoever.”

  “All the sense you need to hear is that Bailey left. She got a call, told me it was a telemarketer, but I heard her talking. Half an hour later, she was gone, and I’m thinking that call is why she left.”

  T.J. was so floored at the news he didn’t know what to think.

  “There’s more. Brice isn’t picking up.”

  The sheriff always picked up.

  “The dispatcher can’t reach him either. He’d called in some number, I think ten-seven—”

  “Means officer out of service.”

  “Whatever. Fletch got her to try to reach him anyway to tell him about Bailey, but he’s not answering radio calls — because he’s not in his cruiser.”

  “And you know that how?”

  “He called me about forty-five minutes ago and said he might be late for his shift with Bailey tonight because he was going to the Nautilus to have a little talk with Maxwell Crenshaw.”

  “Why would—”

  “Total long shot. Grasping at straws. Crenshaw obviously knew Mikhailov well enough to grant him a seat in one of his private games the night of Bailey’s birthday party, so he thought maybe …”

  “You saying both Brice and Bailey’s in the wind?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  What could possibly be important enough to Bailey to get her to leave that little girl of hers and go running off somewhere?

  It wasn’t like Brice couldn’t get cellphone coverage at the casino.

  T.J. needed to find Brice, tell him Bailey was missing, put their heads together and maybe figure out why in the Sam Hill she’d run off like that and where she went.

  Looking out over the glassy surface of the lake, night shadows reaching out to claim the water, the decision made itself. Oh, he could go back to the boat ramp, tie up the jon boat, get in his truck, drive to the Joe’s Hole Marina and take a launch to the Nautilus, or …

  “I’m going to find Brice,” he told Dobbs, stuffed his phone back in his pocket, turned the bow of his jon boat toward the Nautilus Casino and Hotel complex on the other side of Whispering Mountain Lake and headed out through the gathering night.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Bailey looked out through the plastic window on the launch at a lone jon boat making its way across the lake in the darkening sunset shadows. Why would somebody want to be out on the lake on a winter night like tonight?

  She had not been surprised by the small crowd waiting for the launch at Joe’s Hole Marina. Wintertime pretty much shut down the big lake’s recreational activities and she assumed the casino, too.

  The rest of the crowd was as dressed up as she was. That was the kind of place the Nautilus was. She remembered how good-looking Brice, T.J. and Dobbs had been on her birthday, a month-long lifetime ago. That night, she had been distracted by her concern for the girl whose portrait she had painted, a girl being strangled.

  Tonight, she was again distracted by the image of a girl whose portrait she had painted, a girl burning to death. Except maybe that was all in her head.

  Bailey had not had a sufficient number of firing synapses to think about that particular piece of the puzzle after Mikhailov had called. She’d been concerned with escaping from the guards around her house … and with telling Bethany goodbye.

  BAM.

  It was almost an audible sound, the banging shut of the door on all thoughts having to do with the little girl who should be waking up from her nap soon. If she slept too late, she wouldn’t want to go to bed tonight and in a strange new place, she was going to have trouble going to sleep and …

  And maybe her … mommy would be home by then to sing her the pumpkin pie song.

  Maybe.

  Stop it.

  Let it go.

  She pulled her mind back to consideration of the conversation she’d had with the monster murderer who held her precious sister captive.

  His reference to drugs. PCP, angel dust. Was that what Bailey had painted — María’s mind frying on the inside rather than her body frying on the outside? Had she been hallucinating the flames all around her? Maybe what Bailey had heard was the final scream of a mind melting, eating itself alive.

  She shook her head so violently the woman standing next to her, dressed in the gaudiest flowered dress Bailey had ever seen, looked at her sharply and took a step away. Bailey stilled her body, and concentrated on the activity in her head.

  She had “talked” to Jeni and the other girls after she painted them. Not long conversations, but she had put words into their heads. She’d told Jeni to “delay” the men who meant to kill them, and Jeni had swallowed the key that unlocked the electrical box with the switch to turn on the lights.

  She had communicated to the other girls whose shadowy images she’d seen in the closet, told them to fight back. To use rocks. On her signal.

  And they’d heard.

  On the way to the train station in Boston, Bailey had called out to María with her mind, pleaded with her not to leave.

  Had María heard her?

  Bailey didn’t know. She’d never had a chance to ask. But María had stayed. She hadn’t run away. Maybe hearing Bailey in her head was part of what brought her to her senses.

  If María’d heard Bailey then, maybe she could hear her now — even if the connection was a static confusion of sparkling images. Bailey had to try.

  And say what? What could she say that would help María?

  She looked up at the bright shining ball of the casino as the launch powered down in its approach to the docking slip, looked at the lighted windows of the upper floors that were exclusive hotel rooms.

  María was there. In one of those.

  She closed her eyes, cleared her mind and concentrated.

  María, I’m coming.

  Bailey formed the words in her mind without speaking them aloud.

  Coming soon.

  To set you free.

  She felt nothing after she spoke the words in her mind. As she had felt nothing when she had tried to communicate with Jeni.

  But feeling nothing didn’t mean she’d been unsuccessful. Apparently, being aware of a message connection wasn’t part of the process.

  She turned and looked up at the bright lights of the hotel above the casino.

  Had María heard?

  T.J. refused to shrink from the blast of freezin’ wind off the water, told himself he wasn’t cold and that he wasn’t sorry he’d left his denim jacket in his truck. Told himself he wasn’t grittin’ his teeth to keep them from chatterin’. Of course, he didn’t believe a word he said.

  As he got to the west side of the lake, he spotted one of the Nautilus launches, making its round-trip route from Joe’s Hole, the largest marina on the east side of the lake. No launches were running from Westbrook, Tucker’s Landing or Blackfoot tonight.

&n
bsp; It was getting dark. Sunset was about five o’clock out there on the flatland beyond the mountains, where the twilight of a slowly darkening sky would grant light for another fifteen minutes after the sun went down. Here, the mountain hid the sun on the western horizon and the pinkish-gold “sunset” sky above it. Real dark was quick and abrupt.

  He wouldn’t make it to the Nautilus before dark and his little jon boat had no running lights, meaning he was already breakin’ the law using it. He could pull in behind the launch and follow it to the boat slips out front, but he wasn’t making for the front door. The launch and houseboat slips there had no spaces for the likes of a plebeian jon boat. He figured to go around to the back of the facility, if a round building could be said to have a back side, to the space reserved for deliveries, and the ever-pleasant garbage pickup. He’d find a spot among the dumpsters to dock, slip in the back door.

  Wasn’t like there was a stated dress code at the Nautilus like he’d seen in places in Florida: No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service. Nothing like that. It was one of those understood things. Nobody spelled it out but everybody knew about it. Show up in this swanky joint dressed like T.J. — black corduroy pants and a checkerboard plaid wool shirt — and you’d stand out like a dog in a duck parade. T.J. did not want to stand out. He’d “borrow” proper attire once he got inside so he could make his way to the executive offices unnoticed. Not that he expected to find Brice there. The sheriff had told Dobbs he intended to go have a come-to-Jesus meeting with Crenshaw an hour ago. He’d long since left.

  So where had he gone that he wouldn’t/couldn’t answer his phone? T.J. would start the search at Crenshaw’s office. This wouldn’t be the first time he had tried to find one person, one needle in the Nautilus Casino haystack. He, Dobbs and Brice had spent an evening looking for the girl Jeni, whose face peeking out of the shadows Bailey had painted. They’d found her, but it had taken hours and there’d been three of them. T.J. had considerably more going for him now than they’d had when they were searching for the girl. The casino/restaurant complex had been jammed with Saturday night partiers on that exceptionally warm Halloween night. Today was a cold Wednesday in early December. The establishment would be lucky to host thirty percent of the crowd they’d had that night. The girl had been small, elegantly decked out like every other woman. Brice McGreggor was six feet, six inches tall with red hair, wearing a sheriff’s uniform. He stood out in a crowd.