by Dale Mayer
Mugs shot her a look.
“The good news is, I don’t see anything.” She stared in the direction of Penny’s house. It wasn’t far from the creek either.
With a sinking feeling, Doreen wondered if Johnny had been knocked unconscious and put in the creek. “No, no, no,” she said. “That’s silly. No way that could have happened without finding a body in all this time.”
Then again, the high floodwaters from decades past had sent a full-size truck down this very creek and even poor little Betty Miles’s arm and hand, so who knew what else might have come past Doreen’s house? But still, she wasn’t going there. Not yet.
She reached out a hand to dip into the creek, and Mugs growled. She froze. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked. “Have all the animals gone nuts right now?”
But his gaze was still on the spot in the creek in front of her. She dug around but didn’t see or feel anything. Nothing reflected the sunlight. Nothing appeared to not belong here.
She removed a few rocks in the creek, and water rushed in to fill those holes, lifting up some of the sand beneath and pulling it back. Unable to help herself, she kicked off her flip-flops and gingerly stepped into the creek. Warm enough. She proceeded to pull away some of the muddy creek bank, opening up a much larger area in the creek bed, allowing a bit of a run for the water to flow in and to flow out, taking a lot of the sand with it. Within minutes the area was down to just the rock layer. She loved how water worked that way.
She still couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. She worked her way farther up the creek in Penny’s direction, with Mugs getting ever closer and closer. Finally she looked at him and asked, “You want to take over?”
He barked and then barked again.
She sighed and kept digging. “This better be worth it,” she muttered and reached in again.
As she moved rocks around in the water, something small popped to the surface and started to float away. She snagged the small piece of wood. She was about to toss it aside when she saw Johnny scratched on one side. Upon closer inspection, it wasn’t a single piece of wood but two pieces of wood nailed into a cross with his name filling the crosspiece. She sat down on the bank beside Mugs as he sniffed her new find.
“Okay, this is a little creepy,” she said. She laid it on the path and took a picture with her phone, immediately sending it to Mack. Thaddeus waddled up and tilted his head to stare at it. For once he was quiet. Making the cross was something she could see the kids of their gang doing, as some kind of a memorial. But why here? Particularly if Johnny’s body had never been found. Meaning, his death had yet to be confirmed.
Her phone rang.
“What is that?” Mack asked.
“It looks like a little cross with Johnny’s name on it,” she said. “This thing is only like six inches long and maybe four inches across. Mugs found it in the creek. Actually maybe Goliath found it.”
He groaned. “Seriously?”
“What do you want me to say?” she said. “I was working in the backyard, and Goliath came out here. Mugs started chuffing away …”
“Chuffing?” Mack asked.
“Hey, Mugs. Could you chuff a little more again so Mack can hear you?”
But Mugs just yawned.
“Okay, so he’s not doing it right now,” she said. At Mack’s barely smothered laugh, she snapped, “But he was doing it. … And Mugs wouldn’t leave this area alone either—at least once the scaredy-cat took off for home—so I dug up a section along the bank to widen the creek a bit, plus removed some rocks in the stream itself to get the water moving along better. Mugs barked the closer I got to where this was buried. Then he became completely unconcerned the minute this thing surfaced.”
“Why is it you think it’s a memorial thing?”
“You know how when someone dies on a trail, people put a cross there as a memorial? That’s what this looks like. It’s obviously old. It looks like it’s been in the creek since who-knows-when, and it’s got Johnny’s name on it.”
“So you think somebody threw it in the creek or had it standing up nearby as a memorial for him?”
“That’s what this feels like,” she said. “But you know what? Don’t trust me. When you come by, I’ll show you.”
“You’ve already pulled it out and sent me a picture of it. How will I know where it was?”
“I’ll grab a stick,” she said, reaching for a broken branch, “and mark where I found it. How’s that?”
“Good enough,” he said. “It’ll still be a few hours before I’m done at Mom’s.”
“Okay, I have lots to keep busy until then,” she said. “Of course now …”
“Of course now nothing,” he said. “Finding somebody’s way of saying goodbye to an old friend doesn’t mean anything more sinister than that.”
“Nope,” she said. “But I’d love to know who threw it in here. … And why they picked the creek as the memorial site.” With that she hung up.
She sent the picture to Penny and then called her. “Hey, I just sent you a picture. I found something in the creek bed. I was thinking about how your place isn’t far off the creek itself. Anyway, I found a little tiny cross with Johnny’s name on it.”
“I just looked at the picture,” Penny told Doreen. “I have no idea what that is or who would have made it.”
“There’s not a ton of craftsmanship in it. It’s pretty crude,” Doreen said hesitantly, sitting nearby it and the creek. “It reminded me of how people will hang wreaths and crosses on the side of the road when there’s been a fatality.”
“Exactly,” Penny said. “But to put that on the creek implies maybe he drowned?”
“The year he went missing was the year of the heavy flooding. Did Johnny swim?”
“Oh, absolutely he did but not well,” Penny said. “That was also the year Paul Shore went missing.”
Doreen sat down with a hard thump. “Right. Didn’t other children go missing back then?” she asked, her voice sounding a little bit the way she felt on the inside, dreading to hear her answer. “There were other missing boys, right? As I recall, two.”
“There were,” Penny said. “I can’t remember how many. Or their names. Again you’ll have to talk to Mack because that was a long time ago. But I think you’re right. Two little boys went missing. It’s one of the reasons I think the town turned on the handyman Henry Huberts so quickly because they suspected him in all three children’s disappearances.”
Doreen remained silent, considering these other unsolved cold cases, her cell phone at her ear.
Penny eventually said in a cautious tone, “But I don’t know what that has to do with Johnny’s disappearance.”
“You said in your letter that he went missing in August of that year, right?”
“Correct.”
“And now we’re reminded of the horrible flooding that happened earlier that same year, and today I find a cross with Johnny’s name on it in the creek bank. Maybe somebody accidentally killed him. Maybe they had a fight, and Johnny drowned, or maybe he got lost in the water, and they were afraid they would get blamed,” Doreen said.
Penny was quiet, thoughtful, before she said anything. “We were always warning him about the dangers of the floods when he was younger. He wasn’t big on being around water. He would never go to the lake, even though we live in one of the most gorgeous locations in the world.”
“And people kayak down this creek a lot, don’t they? Not yet, obviously, as there’s only a little water, although,” she looked around the area, “I guess it’s been rising steadily.”
“Oh, yes. Canoe, kayak, float on tubes all summer while there’s enough water. It’s quite the place.” Penny smiled. “It’s always low in the spring but with every month it rises until the snow melts up in the ski mountains and then …”
“Right,” Doreen said, nodding, yet of course, Penny couldn’t see this over the phone. “But, in high-water times of the year, it would have been dangerous.”
“Yes. I think Paul Shore went missing in May that same year, when we had the really big runoff. Johnny went missing later in the summer,” Penny said. “The water would have dropped back to normal levels by then.”
“Okay. That’s good to know,” Doreen said, relaxing a bit with relief. “I guess by August we are into much lower water levels, aren’t we?”
“Yes, even though the floodwaters got superhigh that year and had caused chaos earlier. But, once that heavy rush of water passed, what with the melting snow coming from the tributaries into the main creek, the water levels kept dropping. … I know Johnny did spend a fair bit of time with his buddies at the creek, but mostly drinking and hanging with his friends, not swimming or anything like that. I don’t think we ever thought he might have drowned.”
“That’s because, if the water level was low, and he had drowned, his body would have been found already,” Doreen said calmly, staring at the calm creek before her. “Which puts us back to somebody hiding the fact that Johnny had died. Any chance that one of the kids involved with him would have had something to do with those two missing little boys?”
“I have no clue,” Penny said in surprise. “I don’t remember any rumors to that effect. I just know the two little boys went missing that year, and I think it was early in the year, even before Paul went missing. But you found Paul. We never found the other two.”
“Once Johnny went missing, that’s where your focus went,” Doreen said.
“Of course. George was a good boater. He was a really strong swimmer, and he was forever trying to get Johnny to practice swimming, but Johnny was very resistant to the idea.”
“He could have been resisting just because his big brother was telling him that he should do it,” Doreen said with a chuckle, picking up a small rock and tossing it into the creek.
“Quite possibly. But George was very insistent, because, to him, it was a safety issue. One of those life skills everybody should learn,” Penny said in all seriousness. “Like learning to drive.”
“I agree totally,” Doreen said, nodding her head again. “Anyway I just wanted to let you know what I found.” She stood, brushing off the seat of her pants.
“I can’t believe everything you are finding,” Penny said. “I mean, that’s major progress. I found the dagger, but we just now found his medallion, and now you found that creepy cross.”
Doreen had to agree with Penny on the description. After she hung up, Doreen picked up the cross and carried it past the deck to the veranda, where she laid it on the small table there. She studied it for a long moment. The small piece of wood had a fairly uniform shape, like the edges were shorter on the top of the crosspiece and wider on the bottom, as if maybe a deliberate design attempt. And the name had been carved in it with a knife, Doreen thought. Not very deep, but it wasn’t burned in or etched in with some wood-burning tool. All in all, it wasn’t as crudely made as she had first thought, but it was effective, especially when she considered the fact it had survived all those years in the water. Unless another Johnny had gone missing. She groaned at that idea.
“It is a common name,” she muttered. “And it’s all too possible that somebody else with that name might have died, and this referred to somebody else’s Johnny.”
On that note, she decided to take a look at deaths and other missing Johnnys in the area from around the same time that Johnny Jordan went missing.
Back inside, she made herself a sandwich for lunch, then sat in front of her laptop to research drownings of anybody with the name of Johnny. She found two in the last thirty years, one closer to Fintry, which was almost an hour up the lake on the opposite side. The lake currents operated in weird and wonderful ways, and bodies floated so they could have ended up all over the place.
The second Johnny was from Kelowna but had gone missing from a boat in the middle of the lake while out drinking. She winced at that thought. Apparently a large group of young men and women, nineteen in all, were on a big party boat. One of the guys had gone overboard. Nobody had noticed until he was almost underwater. Two men had jumped into the lake to rescue him but lost him in the murky depths below. His body was never found.
That sent chills down her back because of the similarities. But this particular Johnny had disappeared nineteen years ago, so it wasn’t the Johnny that Doreen was looking for. But if large groups of young people were partying on the lake nineteen years ago, they definitely were twenty-nine years ago.
Then she searched for missing kids named Johnny. The only one who came up was Johnny Jordan. Then she searched for John, Johnny names with different spellings, Johan even, etc. The cross was very definitely for a Johnny with a Y. After that, she looked for car accident victims because, if someone had had a child who had been killed in a car accident, but his favorite place was the creek, his mother might very well have left a memorial at the creek closest to where he’d died.
Doreen was grasping at straws but didn’t have a lot of other options right now.
She picked up her sandwich. Hearing a weird sound, she turned to see Thaddeus sitting on the kitchen table, watching her. His head tilted to the side and bobbed, as if willing her to understand. She pulled off a slice of cucumber from her sandwich and put it in front of him. Immediately he pecked at it.
Meow.
She glanced at Goliath, staring at a piece of ham hanging off the corner of her sandwich. She groaned but tore off that piece and put it in front of him. Mugs jumped up with his front paws on her chair, his most woebegone look on his face. She sighed and gave him a piece of cheese. “That’s it, you guys. No more.”
Of course they didn’t listen. She shifted so she couldn’t see them and quickly finished her sandwich, then put her plate in the sink. “What do you think? Back out to the garden?” But the animals had already raced ahead of her to the back door. She chuckled, grabbed a dry pair of gloves, and headed outside.
She stopped working at four. She was hot and sweaty, and what had started out as perfect working conditions had ended up getting really warm. She had maybe a six- by ten-foot stretch weeded and dug out nicely. The daisy patch looked absolutely wonderful. They needed water now that she’d disturbed their roots so much. She struggled to bring the hose all the way to the back of her property, ended up connecting several hoses to reach this bed, but finally she stood in the heat and soaked them down.
As she glanced at the next bed, the echinacea were overcrowded and heavily leafed, crying out for attention. “You guys are next.” Then she sprayed Mugs with the hose. He ran around, jumping at the drops. Goliath was nowhere to be seen, likely off snooping in the bushes along the pathway. Thaddeus sat atop a rock, drinking the fresh water that had pooled on the ground. She laughed, turned the spray on above her to cool off a bit and then walked back up to the house to shut off the water.
With Mack coming over soon, it was time for a shower. She felt she had done enough work for the day. At this rate, it would take months to get her own garden back under control. And that was without planting, transplanting, or incorporating any new design elements. But it was her place, and it was her time and energy, so she would do what she wanted to do, when she wanted to do it. Depending on her finances of course.
Chapter 20
Saturday Dinnertime …
By the time Mack arrived, she was in the kitchen, fresh coffee dripping, counters and table all cleaned up and ready for whatever magic he was prepared to show her.
He walked in, placed more groceries on the counter, and smiled at her. “Are you ready?”
She motioned toward the bag. “I thought we had everything already. Isn’t that what’s in my fridge?”
“We had most of it, but I didn’t buy any pasta. Remember?”
She frowned, then shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t.”
He withdrew a bottle of red wine from his bag and placed it on the table.
She studied the label. “I’ve never seen this before,” she said, eyeing it. “I’m not a huge fan of
reds, but I do love whites and rose. Especially the sparkly stuff.” She grinned.
“Welcome to how real people eat,” he said. “That’s a cheap bottle of wine. It’s good, and it’s local. Plus it’s absolutely perfect to have a glass while you’re making pasta sauce with some of it too.”
“Interesting.” She watched as he unpacked a few more mysterious items she didn’t recognize.
He shooed her away and said, “You work on the pasta. I’ll work on the sauce.”
“If that meant anything to me,” she said with a tilt of her lips, “then I would hop to it and get started.”
“Get your largest pot.” He stopped, frowning at her. “I hadn’t thought about that. … Do you have pots?”
She lifted her finger in the air. “I don’t, but Nan does.” She went to one of the pantry cupboards and opened it. “What size pot do you want?”
He joined her, rubbing his hands. “Now this is what I’m looking for.” He reached inside and pulled out a decent-size pot with two small handles on opposite sides. “This Dutch oven will do.”
She looked at it curiously. She’d never heard the term before and didn’t know how it could possibly apply. It wasn’t an oven, and what on earth made it Dutch? Or was that what the Dutch called a pot? Not wanting to ask and to appear even more foolish, she closed the cupboard door and watched as he took it to the sink.
“Give it a quick wash and a rinse and then fill it with water up to here,” he said, drawing an imaginary line on the inside of the pot.
Obediently she stood at the sink and did as he asked. Cleaned and rinsed, she waited until the pan filled up. She shut off the water and looked back at him. “And?”
“Put it on the large burner at the back of the stove,” he instructed.
He busily chopped onions and garlic, and she saw he had snagged another pot while she’d been filling hers. It was on the front burner. She sniffed the aroma coming from his pot as she lifted her pot to place on the back burner. With that done, she leaned in closer to sniff the pot in front of her. Mugs stretched up his front paws to the oven door and sniffed. Then, he’d missed out on a lot of good smells now too.