Russ laughed. “Told you. Feel like some sausage and eggs?”
“If you’re cooking, sure.” She yelped when her feet hit the floor and hustled over to the sofa to dig through her suitcase for her slippers.
“That’s one of the things I’d like to do if we buy the place,” Russ said. “Put in hot water pipes under the flooring. It’s basically always-on heat.”
“I could go for that.” She followed him to the kitchen and hoisted herself none too gracefully onto one of the tall stools beneath the counter. The kitchen was a simple U shape, with the cheap laminate counter forming the outer half. It ended in a dry sink and some ramshackle drawers. Russ had stacked a wall of water jugs next to the faucetless sink. The bottom of the U was taken up by an old-fashioned wood-fired cooking stove, currently sending off delicious smells and waves of heat. The door Oscar had just gone through was kitty-corner to the stove, its window letting in the only natural light in the kitchen. Next to it were open shelving and a propane-fueled refrigerator that they hadn’t bothered to start up last night.
Russ slid a couple of orange and avocado melamine plates in front of her and handed over a mismatched jumble of flatware. “Looks like the owners furnished the place with Mother’s hand-me-downs,” she said, laying out two places.
“Or Grandma’s.” Russ tapped the stove with a spatula before shoveling up a huge bowl of scrambled eggs. “I hope you’re hungry.”
“Are you kidding? When am I not hungry these days?” The eggs were followed onto the counter by a plate full of sausages. Clare didn’t even wait for her husband to take a stool before she started chowing down. “Angkhhs,” she said around a mouthful. “Ih gugh.”
Russ sat beside her and helped himself to eggs and sausage. “Here’s what I’m thinking about for this area,” he said. “We can’t change the footprint of the house, because of the conservation easement. But we can do anything we want within those limits. I’d like to move the bathroom from there”—he thumbed at the curtain-covered doorway that stood between the counter and the bedroom—“to where the fridge is now. Move the kitchen into this space, open it up, and convert where it is now to a mudroom-slash-utilities-room.”
Clare swiped a napkin over her mouth. “Are you planning to upgrade that drafty drop toilet? I thought my ladybits were going to freeze off last night when I went to the bathroom.”
Russ grinned. “Don’t worry, darlin’. I have a vested interest in keeping your ladybits nice and warm. I’ll put in a very up-to-date chemical composting john.” He pointed through a wide rectangular archway to the central room and enclosed porch that formed the longest part of the L-shaped cabin. “Over there will be a family room/dining room/library combination.” It looked like the owners had had a similar multi-usage idea, as the room currently held an armoire, a rectangular table shoved against one wall, and two squishy chairs in front of a small woodstove.
“I’m thinking I could install bookshelves under those pretty clerestory windows and add matching windows to the other side. I could fit another set of French doors in that archway real easy, to match the ones leading to the bedroom on this side.”
“Sounds beautiful.” Clare swallowed a last bite of egg, wiped her mouth, and slid off her stool. She crossed into the center room. “But where do our guests sleep?” She looked up. There was an unadorned loft space above her, dark and inaccessible.
Russ followed her. “No guests.”
She gave him a look.
“All right, all right. The loft runs to the end of the kitchen. If we finish it off, it’ll be big enough for two bedrooms. Two very small bedrooms. I don’t want any visitors getting too comfortable.”
“If one of them is going to be the baby’s room, you’re going to have to put in stairs. There’s no way I’m climbing up and down that thing”—she thumbed toward a wooden ladder wedged into the corner—“while holding an infant. Or worse, a squirming toddler.”
Russ grunted. She thought, Please let’s talk about this, but all he said was “I can build stairs. Don’t worry.”
He turned around. The top of the cabin’s L had once been its main entrance; it still sported a door and a pair of wide widows. At some point, someone had added on a finished porch. In the summer, it would be perfect—cool breezes and a to-die-for view of the lake. Now, it stood cold and bare of furniture.
“I’d like to winterize the porch,” Russ said. Evidently, the discussion of the baby’s room was over. “Insulation, hypocaust heating—that’s the pipes under the floor—and double-paned glass. There’s this cool thing I’ve been wanting to try. Mesh screen that rolls up into the top of the frame. You slide up the winter windows, roll down the screen, and bam, you’re ready for summer.”
Clare put her frustration and disappointment away. They would have plenty of time to talk. The thought of time caught at her. “How long do you think it will take to do all these improvements?”
“Depends on how many weekends we can get away. If we try to get up here regularly, and if we take our vacation time … I’d estimate five or six years.”
“Five or six years? That’s not a weekend getaway. That’s a construction project!”
“It’s been on the market for years because nobody’s wanted to deal with the challenges. I do.”
“You mean challenges like no electricity, plumbing, or running water?”
“This place could be a showpiece with a little elbow grease and thought.” Russ took the poker off its hanger and opened the woodstove door. “Solar panels on the cabin and boathouse roofs. Rainwater collection into cisterns. Maybe even a wind-powered pumping system.” He shoved a half-burned log toward the back and tossed in another split. “Better add on another year or two to my estimate.”
“Seven or eight years.” Clare sat in one of the squishy chairs, tucking her feet up under her flannel nightgown to get them off the cold floor. “I had no idea you were so green and eco-minded.”
“It’s not that.” He dropped into the chair opposite her and stretched out his legs to rest his booted feet on the woodstove’s raised brick hearth. “Taking this on means we can get a lake house we can afford, with great water frontage and lots of privacy. I know it seems like a long time to share the space with sawdust and power tools, but we’ll be building something we can enjoy for the rest of our lives.”
She smiled. “I like the sound of that.”
“Me, too. Maybe it was all those years of army housing, where I couldn’t even paint the walls. It left me with the need to leave my mark on my surroundings. ‘Russ Van Alstyne was here.’”
She couldn’t resist. She drew her nightgown taut across her rounded belly. “Russ Van Alstyne was here,” she said.
“Jesus! Not like that.” His cheeks went pink.
“Will we be able to do all this work with a baby underfoot?”
“Underfoot? It’s not even born yet!”
“Russ.” They had known about the baby for almost three months now, but he was still refusing to accept the timeline. “The baby’s due by the end of April. By this time next year, we’ll have an eight-and-a-half-month-old. When you start working on the house that summer, she’ll be over a year, toddling around and getting into things.”
Russ pushed himself out of his chair. “I don’t want to get into it now. Can’t we just have a relaxing vacation without rehashing all that stuff? Please?”
“It’s getting a little hard to pretend I’m not pregnant, don’t you think? I’m starting to blow up like the Pillsbury Doughboy.”
“Don’t say that. You look beautiful.” He touched the side of her cheek, feather-light, then stood. “I’ll clean the dishes. You get dressed, and I’ll show you what ice fishing is all about.”
“Okay.” She tried not to feel defeated.
He paused in the archway, his back still toward her. “You said ‘she.’ At the last exam, did you—”
“I was just picking a pronoun. I want it to be a surprise.”
His voice was dry. “You
already managed that part, Clare.”
2.
“This is it,” Hadley said, peering through the squad car’s windshield at the mailbox. She double-checked her notebook. “Fifty-five Canal Street, Fort Henry.”
It was a quiet street, full of small, neat houses that had probably been built after World War II. The sort of neighborhood that had seen several generations of kids grow up and move away. Probably not too many had come back—Hadley saw a lot of meticulously cleared walkways and drives, but no snowmen or sleds left in the yards.
Kevin pulled up to the curb. “Huh. Just a few blocks away from my place. I wonder if I’ve seen them before.”
It was the first thing he’d said during the morning ride from Millers Kill that might be considered personal. Of course, seeing as how Hadley had once spent the night at his place just a few blocks away, it might be very personal indeed. She had been stiff and quiet through the morning briefing and hadn’t relaxed in the squad car. He hoped it was just nerves about their responsibility for the investigation and not discomfort about working with him.
She flipped over her notebook to an earlier page. “You want to try the bail bondsman or her lawyer one more time? Before we talk to the grandparents?”
“No. They’re just as likely to know where Annie might be and who her associates are. People will confide things to their parents they wouldn’t tell anyone else.”
Hadley snorted. “Not me. I never told anything to my parents if I could avoid it.”
They got out of the cruiser. The sun off the snow was almost blinding, and the air felt softer and warmer than it usually did in early January. Might be due for what his mother called a strawberry spring—a few days’ thaw in the midst of the long, cold upstate New York winter. Kevin put his cover on. “What did the CFS caseworker know about them?”
“They’re the mom’s parents. They’d applied for custody of Mikayla but got passed over in favor of the MacAllens.”
He gestured for her to precede him up the walk. “Because of the transplant issue?”
Hadley shrugged. “Maybe. You know how Children and Family Services are.” Getting info out of CFS was like prying one of Genny’s stuffed animals away from her. You could do it, but it was going to cost you no end of grief.
“Oh, yeah.” There was still a cheery Christmas wreath hanging on the front door. Flynn knocked. “We’ll need to get a warrant going ASAP. I can—”
The door swung open before he could say anything else. Kevin got an impression of dark eyes and a deeply creased face before the man holding the door open said, “Thank God. Come in, please. Come in.” He stepped back so they could enter the living room. “I’m Lewis Johnson.”
Hadley and Flynn both wiped their feet on the large mat in front of the door. Mr. Johnson closed it behind them. Kevin took off his lid and stowed it beneath his arm. “Mr. Johnson. I’m Officer Flynn, and this is Officer Knox.”
Kevin took in Johnson’s mahogany skin and the crucifix hanging in the foyer while Hadley shook the older man’s hand. Latino? Then he spotted the bead and quill work decorating the walls and revised his opinion to Iroquois. Probably Mohawk, in this part of the state.
A sixty-something woman emerged from the kitchen, still wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “This is my wife, June,” Johnson said.
“Have you found her? Do you know where she is?”
Hadley glanced at Kevin. “No, ma’am,” he said. “We don’t know where your daughter or Mikayla are yet.”
“The sergeant who was here last night said they might be together.”
“Sit down, June.” Johnson gestured for them to take two chairs in the tiny living room. “Let’s let these officers ask their questions and see if we can help sort things out.”
Kevin perched awkwardly on the chair, which was a little too short for his legs. “We went to your daughter’s apartment on Causeway Street last night. She fled when I tried to speak with her. She was alone at the time, but there were girl’s things in one of the bedrooms.”
“Mikayla’s room,” Mrs. Johnson said. “She was hoping to get unsupervised overnight visits, but the court won’t allow it.”
“When we searched the apartment, we also found a large amount of over-the-counter pseudoephedrine, which is used in making—”
“Crystal meth,” Mr. Johnson said. His voice was deep and heavy. “We know much too much about what goes into making crystal meth.”
“She used to steal it from us,” his wife said. “We had to put a combination lock on our medicine cabinet. Then she started stealing money to buy it with. When she started stealing our belongings to sell…” Her sigh was the sound of an unhappy nostalgia, looking back to the bad old days that had reared their head again.
“Right now,” Kevin said, “we’re working on the theory that Annie was in some way involved with your granddaughter’s kidnapping.” He hoped to God this wasn’t going to be one of those cases where an addict mother exchanges her child for her next fix. “However, since your granddaughter wasn’t with Annie last night, we think there must be a person or persons helping her.”
“Not necessarily,” Johnson said. “She’s quite capable of leaving Mikayla alone in a parked car all night. Or in a grocery store. Or at a rest stop.”
“We’ve already put an AMBER Alert out on Mikayla,” Hadley said. “If she’s in a public place, chances are good someone will find her. In the meantime, we’ll be doing everything we can to get her back. Does Annie have any friends who might be involved? Maybe a boyfriend?”
“We don’t know any of her friends anymore,” Mrs. Johnson said.
“She doesn’t have friends,” Mr. Johnson said. “Just fellow users. Any one of them would sell another for the price of a fix.”
Mrs. Johnson touched her husband’s arm. “She does have a boyfriend. Travis Roy. They’ve been together about a year, year and a half.”
“What do you know about him?” Hadley said, writing in her notebook.
“He’s bad news,” Mr. Johnson said. “Just like all of her boyfriends. A jailbird with tattoos up one side and down the other and a mean streak.”
Mrs. Johnson gave him a look. “He’s a white man, about, I don’t know, five-nine? He has dark hair that he keeps very short.”
Mr. Johnson stood up. “I think we have a picture of the two of them somewhere you can have.” He went to a flip-down writing desk and opened a drawer.
“You said he was a jailbird? Do you know what he was in for?”
Mrs. Johnson frowned. “Annie said he’d been in Fishkill for possession. And he was arrested for some sort of firearms violation. Carrying an unregistered weapon?”
Mr. Johnson returned to his seat and handed a photograph to Kevin. It showed an attractive if too thin woman with a midnight fall of hair standing next to a rope-muscled guy who looked like he could be a redneck gang enforcer. A little girl in shorts and a Hannah Montana T-shirt stood in front of them, grinning to reveal a missing tooth. “That’s Mikayla,” Johnson said.
Her grandmother smiled a little tearfully. “She’s such a wonderful girl. Despite the chaos in her life and some of the horrible things she’s seen. She’s smart and creative and funny.”
“We have her with us as much as possible,” Mr. Johnson said. “I mean, before the accident. Sometimes she’d stay with us for weeks at a time while Annie was off doing God-knows-what. Whenever Annie called, wherever she was, we’d drop what we were doing and come get Mikayla.”
“But you didn’t get custody of her after the accident.” Kevin handed the photo to Hadley, who tucked it into her pocket.
“We didn’t even know where she was. She’d show up for her visits with a caseworker. She’d talk to us about how well Mikayla was doing after her transplant, and all the time looking at us like we might be cooking meth in the kitchen. But you know what? It’s not the first time an Indian child’s been taken away from her family by white folks. I thought it was bullshit—”
“Lewis!”
&nb
sp; “—and we’re not going to take it,” he continued. “June and I are taking classes at the Washington County Hospital for caretakers of transplant recipients. And we’re getting qualified as licensed foster parents. As soon as we’re done, we’re reapplying for custody. I suspect—I hope—that when Annie goes to trial, she’ll be locked away for a few years.”
Mrs. Johnson took his hand and squeezed it hard. Kevin thought of his own family. He could imagine how his parents would suffer if one of his brothers went down that broken road.
Mr. Johnson shook his head. “And now this.” He let out a sigh that seemed to rumble up from the basement of his soul.
“Why would she take Mikayla? Why?” Mrs. Johnson dropped her husband’s hand and stood abruptly.
“Is there anyone else you can think of who might have reason to take Mikayla?” Kevin looked from one Johnson to the other. “Her father, maybe? CFS didn’t have a name for him.”
“Hector DeJean.” Mr. Johnson looked even more grim than before. “He was another mean son of a bitch.”
“Lewis…”
“Let’s call a spade a spade, June. Annie wouldn’t put him on the birth certificate because she was afraid what would happen if the state went after him for support money. He used to hit her all the time. She finally left him after she fell pregnant, and he tracked her down and beat the shit out of her. It’s a miracle she didn’t lose Mikayla. And then she still turned around and started in with one of his friends.” He shook his head. “She doesn’t care. So long as he can give her drugs, she doesn’t care.”
“What happened to DeJean?” Hadley asked.
Johnson grunted. “He did four years in Plattsburgh for assault.”
“Has he had any contact with Mikayla since?”
“Oh, yeah. He came back around when he got out three years ago, all changed and reformed.” Johnson’s tone left no doubt what he thought about DeJean’s alleged reformation.
Through the Evil Days: A Clare Fergusson/Russ Van Alstyne Mystery Page 8