“A toy?” Mrs. Sweeney asked.
“Lighter,” Joe said. “Barrister Griffiths has one just like it. Or he used to, if this is his.”
Klugg flipped up the dachshund head and struck a thumb on the flint, flicking his gaze at the secret underground tunnel. “Family secret?”
Joe nodded.
Whitey pursed his lips as he massaged Bess’s ears.
“Barrister?” Mrs. Sweeney glanced from Joe to the sheriff, the lighter, and back. “You think he took Maisie?”
“Only one way to find out.” Joe unhooked Bayou’s lead from his collar and looked at Klugg. “Coming, Sheriff?”
WHITEY HADN’T LIED about the dogs taking off like shots when they caught a scent. What he failed to mention was how bloody difficult it was to keep a grip on Bess’s lead as he and Klugg thundered through the tunnel like a pair of escaped convicts, getting slapped in the face with spider webs they couldn’t see because Joe kept the torch angled at the floor to light their path.
Three lung-burning minutes later, they burst into the Sweeney family crypt.
“Jesus.” Klugg swiped a meaty hand over his face, grimacing as he came away with a handful of clotted spider silk. “Jesus,” he blurted again, jumping back as he swatted at a large black spider climbing the front of his shirt.
Joe leaned back against Bess’s pull to shine the torch around. “See anything?”
Klugg left off wiping at his hair and shoulders to follow the torch beam around with his gaze.
“No.” He slapped at his ear. “Just coffins. And none looked tampered with. Except maybe George’s.”
George’s was the only coffin not deeply coated in a patina of dust. Its ebony sides gleamed in the torchlight as Joe travelled its length, but Bayou and Bess showed no interest. Bayou was at the far end of the crypt, clawing at the heavy wooden door that led into the cemetery. Bess had travelled only to the end of her lead, and her body quivered as she pointed her snout in the same direction as her son.
“Outside,” Joe murmured. “They want outside.”
Moonlight shimmered silver on the leaves of the vines growing over the ten-foot stone wall that enclosed the cemetery, and glimmered along the curved tops of grave markers as they raced out into the night.
Don’t go there, Joe. Don’t let your mind wander any path but the brightest one.
And fighting an ache of frustration and fear, he ran after Bayou, who’d galloped across the cemetery and out the open gate.
“DUCK,” HE CALLED OUT to Klugg, who grunted in reply. He was stalking Joe’s heels out of necessity: to catch branches before they whipped back and slashed his face as well as to ensure he didn’t end up lost in the darkness without torchlight or a dog to help guide his way.
“Dog’s getting louder,” Klugg muttered between gasps for breath.
“Yes.” Joe angled to slide between a pair of close-set trees and immediately swerved to avoid the next one. He frowned.
Either the brush was especially thick or the torch was failing. A minute later, he had his answer.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Grab hold of my belt,” he added as he drew Bess’s leash to stop her so he could shorten the length. With Klugg holding on to him, Joe tossed the torch aside and said, “Find her, Bess.”
The old dog lunged forward with a yelp, nearly jerking Joe’s arm from his socket.
Bayou’s song sounded less distant, and Joe’s arm throbbed with the strain of holding Bess back as she bounded into dense shrubbery. Joe cursed and closed his eyes, angling his head to blunt the worst of the sharp branches gouging his face and the backs of his hands.
Five yards later, he and Klugg crashed out of a snarled thicket into a clearing. It took both of them to halt Bess, who barked incessantly, lunging at the end of the lead, as they gulped for breath and assessed the wide, reed-choked ditch in front of them.
“I sure hope there’s no gators in there,” Klugg muttered. Then he tipped his chin. “That’s the old lumber mill.”
Sure enough, above the tall berm on the other side of the ditch, moonlight sketched the chalky outlines of a familiar structure.
They were five miles from Sugar Hill. Five miles by road, exactly. He knew because he’d ridden and walked the distance multiple times to collect George, who, when not seeking solitude at the pond or in his study, brought his sketch pads and pencils out here to sit the shade of the planer and draw.
Clinging to Bess’s harness with both hands, he dragged air into his raw lungs, fighting the urge to plunge into the slough, while Klugg took up a thick branch to probe the ditch and gauge its depth—and hopefully scare off any lurking snakes or gators.
The search grid was limited to a two-mile radius around the big house, because even that was further out than any of them had guessed Maisie might wander—if she hadn’t been kidnapped. It was a scenario he’d dismissed early in the day and had only begun to entertain when she’d not been found by the time he sent for Klugg—a scenario he couldn’t discount after racing through and around Norm and Else’s home and property only to return empty-handed to Sugar Hill and discover she still hadn’t been found, despite almost fifty people beating the bushes and looking under every log and into every hollow large enough to fit a small child and her dog.
That’s when he’d started sifting possibilities in his mind, from Andy Emerson to one of the previous evening’s party guests—which seemed only slightly more likely than the mayor’s ridiculous supposition that Mr. Lewis was guilty.
Lewis was the one person he’d easily scratched off the suspect list. Not only because Lewis never been to Sugar Hill before last night and didn’t know the manor’s layout, but because he was black. A coloured man bent on saving the necks of other coloured men and women wouldn’t willingly thrust his into a noose by stealing a white man’s child. Even in jest. And Mr. Lewis had not seemed the jesting type.
Which led him around to the only person he could think of who’d not only displayed an atrocious propensity for violence and murderous behaviour—to which kidnapping a child was a close cousin—but who also possessed the arrogance and sense of entitlement necessary to believe he could not only commit such an act but do so with impunity. Besides, who else might know about the secret passage?
Andy Emerson, maybe, if George had told Simmy and she had told him. But why would she?
Unless she was in on the kidnapping. His stomach sank.
Had it all been an act? A lie to distract him and send him on his way back home believing he’d never have to worry about losing Maisie to her mother again, so they could then have him followed and pluck Maisie out from under his nose? Was that what Emerson’s henchman had meant about him being followed? Had it been a taunt?
Bess barked, and strained at the end of the lead as Klugg tossed the branch away.
“About three feet, I think,” he said.
Bayou’s song was louder, and closer.
“All right,” Joe said. “Let’s go, Bess. Find Bayou!”
Bess lunged, but Joe was ready and let the leash roll out as he slid down the grassy bank, slogged through waist-deep sludge, and clawed up the other side, Klugg breathing harder than he was but keeping pace.
The ground down the other side of the berm was an uneven patchwork of weeds, grass, gravel, and random piles of rotting wood, but the moonlight and pure driving need to find Maisie seemed to enhance Joe’s sight and abilities, for he ran without stumbling, or fatigue, despite the weight and slosh of his soaked trousers and water-filled shoes.
Bess flew right past the abandoned mill’s main structure, and Bayou’s song blared to full volume when they shot past the dilapidated building neighbouring its far side on direct course for the tree line opposite.
Ten yards into the trees, Bess skidded to a halt next her son in front of a boarded-up wooden shack and, planting her hind end on the ground, raised her voice with his.
Chapter 36
Nowhere to Hide
“THEY’S HERE,” RUFUS shouted from
the front foyer. “Coming up the drive. It’s Mr. Banner and the sheriff. They got Miss Maisie, too!”
Tears pricked Margaret’s eyes as she rose unsteadily from where she and the Banners had been holding vigil on one sofa, with Miss Alma, Coral, and Winnie all on the opposite sofa.
She staggered, and leaned to brace herself on the sofa arm as the Banners, Miss Alma, and Winnie disappeared out into the hall.
“Come, missus.” Coral laid gentle hands on her waist. “Maybe you should set down for a—”
“No.” Margaret firmed her spine and knees. “No. I’m fine.”
The hours she’d wiled since learning of Maisie’s disappearance had been some of the hardest of her life. More grievous than standing graveside in the rain at her father’s and, later, her sister’s funeral. More terrifying than the frantic hours she’d lived with her heart in her mouth on the Titanic, and afterwards, knowing William and every penny and material possession they’d had was gone. More hurtful than losing George or learning that he had lied to her through omission, leaving her to decipher history, people, and place without benefit of a map or guidebook.
All those losses and heartaches and betrayals paled in comparison to the sheer blind terror she felt thinking something awful had happened to Maisie. That something awful would happen to Mr. Banner after he and the sheriff had disappeared into the tunnel in the ground. She’d feared for all three of them, but felt most ill when she thought of Mr. Banner and Maisie, and what it would mean to her if anything happened to either one of them.
She couldn’t—wouldn’t—remain at Sugar Hill. She knew that much. Not without them. Nothing mattered without them. Certainly not Sugar Hill.
It was George’s family legacy. George’s history. And without a history and family of her own, nothing else mattered. She understood that now.
She’d arrived in Georgia determined to make George proud. To make herself proud. To make Dianna and Jake proud by digging herself out of yet another lonely, dark place and making something of her future. She’d planned to do that by burying herself in work. Marrying herself to Sugar Hill. But she couldn’t marry herself to bricks and mortar and thirteen hundred acres of tobacco when her heart belonged to living, breathing people.
So as the clock had tocked the minutes away, and Miss Alma whispered prayers, and the Banners clung to each other, she’d begged God to bring Mr. Banner and Maisie back alive and well—for the Banners’ sake, not for hers. She’d already decided to leave Sugar Hill and to return to England and make a life for herself there.
The confusion between her and Mr. Banner must end so he would do as he should and needed to do: find a future with someone he could love and who’d be a good mother for Maisie. The kind of mother the poor child deserved and so desperately needed and wanted. Someone capable of adding extra joy to their family with another child—a sibling for Maisie.
Closing her eyes, she cupped a hand to her lower abdomen and breathed through a bolus of pain and nausea.
Please. Please let Maisie be all right. Let them all be all right. Her knees wobbled but held as she made her way out to the foyer.
Rufus had left the front door open, and he and Miss Alma and Winnie were on the porch. The Banners were trotting down the torchlit walk towards the drive, chasing their shadows cast by the torches’ amber light. Margaret made it to the end of the walk just as Mr. Banner and the sheriff crunched on to the gravel on the near side of the keyhole lawn, Bess and Bayou panting at the end of leashes held by the sheriff while Mr. Banner carried—
“Maisie,” Tonia cried out. “My God, child.” She crowded close to Mr. Banner, trying to touch her granddaughter, who was bundled in a quilt in his arms. “It is you. Where did you find her, Joe? Where was she?”
“Later,” he said as he marched up the walkway. “After Maisie’s been checked over, had a bath, and something to eat. Rufus,” he barked as he stomped up the porch stairs. “Send for Doc Hugh. I want him here straight away.”
DR. HUGH STRAIGHTENED, and patted Maisie’s hand she had resting on Reba’s neck. The dog was snuggled against her side, resting her snout on Maisie’s abdomen.
“That stitched bump on your head is the worst of your injuries,” Dr. Hugh said. “Miss Alma sew you up?”
When Maisie nodded, Doc Hugh smiled.
“Thought it looked her handiwork.” Standing, he gripped Joe’s shoulder. “You can rest easy, son. Maisie’s fine. No physical injuries that I can see but the one you say happened before she was taken.”
Joe exhaled. “Thank you, doc,” he said. “I didn’t see any serious wounds on her, and Miss Alma and Mrs. Sweeney, who helped her bathe, assured me she was physically fine, but I needed—”
“I told you I wasn’t hurt, Joe,” Maisie said. “I told you he didn’t hurt me. He didn’t want to hurt me. He said he was sorry. And he left me water in case I got thirsty.”
“Who, love?” his mother asked. “Who didn’t want to hurt you? The man who took you?”
Maisie nodded. “He smelled like horses.”
“Horses?”
Maisie smoothed a hand along Reba’s short coat. “Like Magnus. But it wasn’t him. It was someone bigger, a lot bigger, who smells like him.”
“A lot bigger?” his father demanded, casting a suspicious scowl out the window. “You mean like—”
“That’s enough for tonight,” Joe said, cutting off his father before he could paint a bull’s-eye on Big Ray’s back. “We’ll talk about this more in the morning. It’s time you got some sleep,” he added to Maisie.
“I agree,” Dr. Hugh said. “But before we go, does anyone know why doctors are like pie?”
“I do,” Maisie said. “If one slice of pie is good, two is better. If one doctor’s opinion is good, two doctors’ opinions are better!”
Dr. Hugh chuckled. “Smart as a whip.”
“You told me that one before,” Maisie said.
“Did I?” Hugh winked at Joe and then smiled at Miss Alma, who, with Mrs. Sweeney, his parents, and Coral, crowded around the foot of the bed. Rufus had turned in for the night at Joe’s insistence. He’d looked almost as old, tired, and worn out by worry as Joe felt.
“Speaking of pie,” Miss Alma said. “There’s one in my kitchen, dying for someone to slice it up and eat it.”
“Dying? Slicing? That sounds like a job for a doctor.” Hugh winked again at Joe as he sidled past him to take Miss Alma’s arm. “That is if Magnus’ll give me a minute to eat it.”
“Of course he will,” Miss Alma said. “I’ll slice his a little bigger so you can linger over yours. Coral, Winnie,” she added, prompting both girls to follow her and Dr. Hugh out.
Mrs. Sweeney eased a foot backwards. “I’d best go, too, and leave the rest of you—”
“No.” Maisie’s plea was sharp, fearful, something she hadn’t been when Joe and Klugg had shoved into the abandoned explosives hut to find her wrapped in her quilt on the floor, a jug of water by her hip and Reba between her and the strange dogs. “I want you to stay with me, Mrs. Sweeney. You, too, Joe. I don’t want to be alone.”
Mrs. Sweeney offered him and then at his parents and awkward smile. “I’ll go—”
“You stay. We’ll go,” Joe’s mother said to his utter surprise. “But first a kiss, Maisie Marie.”
He moved so his parents could take turns hugging Maisie and pressing a kiss to her brow and telling her how much they loved her. His mother paused to hold him for a long, long time before slowly pulling away to wipe her eyes and lead his father, silent, his eyes-red rimmed but dry, out by the hand.
When they were gone, Joe lifted his chin to stretch his tight larynx. When that didn’t ease the constriction, he coughed.
“It’s okay if you want to cry, Joe.” Maisie’s voice was soft. “I cried when I feared I might not get found.”
He sat heavily on the edge of her bed and stroked a hand over Reba’s warm body. Then, twisting, he bowed his head to Maisie’s shoulder. She curled an arm around his neck.
“Oh, Maisie,” he rasped, hugging her. “Thank God you’re all right. I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found you.”
The bed sagged and shifted as Mrs. Sweeney sat beside him to massage his back through his shirt.
He sat up, swiped at his eyes, and pushed to his feet. Moving to the window, he stared out, fighting for control.
He was the adult. He was supposed to look after Maisie, and Mrs. Sweeney and her estate, not cry like an infant in front of them.
“Do I have to talk to the sheriff?”
The forlornness of Maisie’s question tightened his throat, but before he could answer, Mrs. Sweeney said gently, “Not tonight, love. He and his deputy have gone and taken Mr. Coombs home. Magnus will have Miss Lisette back here just as soon as he drops Dr. Hugh at his home. For now, you need sleep. We all need sleep and, tomorrow, a good breakfast. The sheriff will be back in the morning. Then your father and you will sit down with him and tell him as much as you can.”
Before leaving, Klugg had promised to release Miss Lisette but had adamantly refused to question Barrister despite Joe’s assertion that there was no one else who would be so cruel and vindictive as to lock a blind child in a hut formerly used to store dynamite on derelict property where she might never have been found if not for Whitey’s dogs. He fisted his hands as Klugg’s parting words echoed in his mind.
“A lighter that looks like one Barrister owns isn’t evidence that he torched your cottage, Joe. And Miss Maisie’s admission that it wasn’t him that took her exonerates him of kidnapping. Even if I can verify that he’s no longer in possession of his lighter that looks like this one, I can’t prove this is his. And I’m not going busting into Barrister Griffiths’s house based on your hatred and suspicions of him. I will, however, investigate your daughter’s kidnapping. Can you think of anyone else who’d want to harm her, or you?”
My One True Love Page 34