Stranded at Romson's Lodge

by J. L. Callison

  Almost reluctantly, Sue withdrew her hand. “I must see to my other patients. I’ll check on you in a little bit. Use your call button if you need me.” She left the room, but glanced back at Charles before she walked out the door. She felt the same stirring.

  CHAPTER 23

  Jed woke up early again Sunday morning and lit a fire in the cookstove. When the fire was hot, he put the coffeepot on to brew and then started mixing pancakes. He fried bacon and eggs to go along with the flapjacks, debating whether to stretch them out or to go ahead and use them up. But he reasoned they would not last long without refrigeration, even though the bacon was salt cured. He flipped the pancakes on the griddle and called out to Lizzie.

  “Hey there, sleepyhead. We’re burning daylight! Coffee’s on and the jacks will be done in just a jiffy.” He heard a groan come from Lizzie’s room and knew she was moving. She stumbled out of her room a few minutes later, running her fingers through her hair. She looked unhappy.

  Lizzie rubbed her eyes a time or two and said, “This hotel is really lacking on the shower facilities. I need to wash my hair. How in the world did people do it in the old days?”

  “Actually, as late as 1900, women washed their hair only about once a month. That’s one reason they wore it up in buns or braided it, so it didn’t look so bad.”

  “Ugh! That’s terrible!” Lizzie made a face.

  “I guess you could go down and take a bath in the lake if you want. Wake you up, at least!”

  “Very funny.”

  “Sit down and have a pancake—or five. We’ll figure something out after breakfast.” Jed poured her a cup of coffee and slid it in front of her. “I hope you like salt bacon. It’s all the meat we have.”

  “It’s fine. Smells good. What’s with you in the mornings anyway?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve always been an early riser. Just like getting up and getting going, I guess.”

  “Ugh. Daddy and I have an agreement. I take care of dinner, and on the weekends I do lunch, too, but he is on his own for breakfast. I usually just get up in time to get out the door to school and eat something on the way. He always leaves me a cup of coffee in the pot when he leaves for work.”

  “Well, today is Sunday. We obviously aren’t going to church, so I thought we would just have a little quiet time of our own and then take it easy today. We’ll try to keep things as normal as we can. I think doing so will help us keep things together. What do you think?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  CHAPTER 24

  James Romson opened his eyes to the smell of coffee and bacon. He shook the sleep from his eyes and sat up. His muscles seemed to creak as he stretched. He glanced at the clock on his bedside table and then, startled, looked again. It read one-thirty-eight in the afternoon! He had been sleeping since he arrived home from the police department at five-twenty the previous afternoon! Slowly, he rose to his feet and wandered down to the kitchen where he found his disheveled wife frying bacon and holding a large coffee cup in her hand.

  “Hi, honey,” he said. “You look like I feel!”

  “Thanks, a lot! Remind me to compliment you sometime, too,” she said as she reached her lips up for a kiss. “Good morning, darling. I think we were more tired than we thought.” She started forking bacon out of the frying pan and broke eggs into the hot grease. “I know the doctor won’t like the grease and cholesterol, but after a day like the last two, I’m not too worried at the moment. I thought breakfast sounded good, even if it is afternoon.” James hugged her and then put bread into the toaster.

  “You know, I think we might have goofed turning the phone off. What if Pete tried to reach us with a ransom demand?” James asked, as he scratched his head absentmindedly, his forehead furrowed.

  “I think he will call back. I don’t think that will be a problem. I looked at the answering machine, and it’s full. I didn’t think I could take listening to it before I had some coffee in me, though.”

  “Mary, I just thought of something. We didn’t call either of our parents last night to tell them! I hope they didn’t watch the news, but I know they were most likely swamped by people at church this morning. We’d better call them right away and apologize.” He turned the telephone ringer back on and picked up the handset. After dialing his parents’ home, he waited just a few moments for an answer. Mary could only hear half of the conversation, which was very full of apologies.

  “Hi, Mom. James here. . . . Yes, I’m sorry we didn’t call you yesterday. . . . I know, we should have thought of you. . . . No, we didn’t do it on purpose. We . . . No, Mom, we were at the police department until . . . No, Mom, they didn’t arrest us. . . . No, Mom, the TV people didn’t talk to us. . . . No, Mom, the news people don’t know what they are talking about. They . . . No, we are not suspects, and Jed was not killed. . . . We don’t know. We just woke up. . . . Of course, we slept! We hadn’t been to bed in . . . I know, Mom. We are worried, but . . . Is Dad there?”

  Mary put the eggs and bacon on the table and buttered the now cooling toast. She handed James a cup of coffee. He waved to her to go ahead and eat, miming talking in his ear.

  “Hi, Dad. Sorry we didn’t call you last night, but by the time we got home from the police department, a little after five, we were totally exhausted and both fell asleep with our clothes on. I woke up not ten minutes ago. . . . No, I don’t know what is going on today. I just woke up. . . . No, I don’t know what the news is saying, and we have not talked with them at all. . . . No, I know they don’t know anything about what happened. We are still trying to work that out. All we know is Jed picked up Pete, our pilot, when they got back from Europe and for some reason went to the hangar. His Bronco is there, but the plane is not. He had Charles’s daughter, Elizabeth, with him. The lock on the hangar door had been blocked with Super Glue or something, and we had to cut the lock off the door. When we left the police had sealed the site. . . . No, Dad, the news people don’t know what is going on either. The police would not have told them, and we certainly haven’t talked with them. Charles was taken to the hospital with chest pains and shortness of breath. . . . No, I haven’t talked with him yet either. I just now realized we hadn’t called you and wanted to apologize. We didn’t mean to leave you out of things; we just had too much going on to think of. . . . Yes, Dad, we’ll call you right away when we hear anything. . . . Okay, Dad. Love you. We’ll let you know everything we find out. Goodbye.” He sat down at the table shaking his head at Mary’s grin. His mother tended to be a little excitable.

  Mary picked up the telephone as James started eating. She dialed her parents’ number and waited for an answer. It came quickly.

  “Hi, Daddy. . . . Yes, I’m sorry we didn’t call you last night, and you had to hear on the news. . . . No, we really don’t know what is going on. James and I had been up for almost two days, and we basically collapsed when we got home from the police department last night. . . . No, I really don’t know what the news is saying happened. We just woke up about twenty-five minutes ago and realized we had not told you. . . . No, they don’t have any real information. All they know is Jed and Elizabeth are missing . . . . No, we haven’t talked with the police yet today. We’ll be calling them just as soon as I’m through talking with you. . . . Yes, we love you too, and I’ll call you just as soon as I hear anything at all. . . . Tell Mommy I love her, and I hope her migraine goes away soon. . . . Yes, I know the stress is not good for her. . . . Okay, goodbye.”

  Mary hung up the phone and sat down at the table with a sigh.

  “Well, at least mine went a little easier than did yours.” She smiled at her husband. She loved her mother-in-law dearly, but she was so glad her husband had been the one to call her.

  James picked up the phone. “I suppose we’d better call the PD and see if anything new has come up, but I want to call Pastor Shepherd first before he goes to church for the evening service. I know he’ll want to be able to say something about what is going on.” He called the pastor
’s home and left a brief message telling what he knew and apologizing for not letting him know sooner. He added that he would be in touch soon and asked him to please ask folks not to call. They had more than they could handle as it was.

  CHAPTER 25

  Detective Summers reached Teddy Baldwin Sunday afternoon just before two o’clock. She had hoped to catch him earlier, but, after church his family had all gone out to eat. They were in no hurry to get home, it seemed. She dropped by his house at three o’clock and interviewed him for over an hour, repeating questions periodically in a different manner just to be sure she was getting the right answers. He was her most important witness because he was the only one who noticed Jed stop and talk to the man with the supposedly broken-down car by the street. Though quite a number of others had noticed the car and remembered seeing it when asked, no one had recognized the car, nor had anyone else noticed a person with it. She had to be certain Teddy was telling the truth and that he was telling all of it.

  “Teddy, I know we’ve gone over this a couple of times already, but I need to go over it one more time. I know you’ve told me what you saw, but I’ve learned in my years of police work that often, in retelling the story, a witness will mention a detail he left out earlier. It isn’t intentional most of the time, especially when it is someone like you, who is trying to help me find a friend, but little items get missed in the telling. Now, can you please walk me through it one more time?”

  Teddy was a little exasperated, especially since he was missing the NASCAR race at Talladega that he particularly wanted to watch on TV, but he also wanted to help find Jed and Elizabeth. “All right, we’ll go through it again.” Teddy sighed. “When we got back to the school, while we unloaded the bus, I heard the secretary call Jed and ask him to give Lizzie a ride home. I know Lizzie was unhappy about it because she was homesick the whole time we were in Europe. You see, she and her dad are really close since her mom died a couple of years ago. She hardly goes anywhere without him. I think it’s sweet.

  “Anyway, I think they were the first to leave the school. Since we got back to the school a little early, my mom was late getting there to pick me up, so I was watching the drive for her to pull in. That’s the reason I saw the guy out there by his car. He pulled up just a couple of minutes after the bus pulled in and raised his hood like he had problems with the engine. I noticed he was on the no parking side of the street, but when you breakdown, you breakdown, you know?”

  Detective Summers nodded her head. So far, so good. Same story.

  “So, when Jed was pulling out of the lot, this guy waved at him, and Jed just stopped at the edge of the road. I saw the guy walk over to Jed’s door, and it looked like they were talking. Nothing seemed wrong about it to me. They were just talking like they knew each other or something.”

  “Could you tell who it was?”

  “Nah. It was just some dude.”

  “What did he look like? Can you describe him?”

  “I dunno. I didn’t really pay all that much attention to him. He was just a little taller than the top of the Bronco, so maybe about six feet? Kind of skinny. Looked like he was wearing some kind of jumpsuit or something. You know, one of those one-piece deals with a lot of pockets?”

  “What color?”

  “I don’t really remember. Like I said, I wasn’t paying much attention. Dark, maybe a blue or a gray.”

  “Okay, what happened then?”

  “Well, the guy walked back to his car and closed the hood, got a bag out, and got in the back seat of Jed’s truck.”

  “Did it look like he was forcing his way in, or was Jed okay with him getting in?”

  “Looked like it was okay with Jed. Everything looked friendly to me.”

  “Did you notice what kind of car it was?”

  “Yeah, it was an old Ford Thunderbird, but I’m not sure what year. I only noticed because we had one like it until last year. It was dark blue, I think.”

  “Did you notice the license plate, or would you recognize it if you saw it again?”

  “Nah, I didn’t see the plate, but I might recognize it. I’m not sure. One T-bird looks like another, you know.”

  “Thanks, Teddy. I appreciate you taking the time for me. I may be back in touch with you if anything comes up. Here’s my card. Please, if you think of anything else, would you give me a call? I don’t care what time it is, day or night. Leave me a message if I don’t answer, and I’ll call you back. Just tell me a good time to call, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. I hope you find them quickly. We graduate in three weeks, you know.”

  “I hope so, too. We are going to do our best, I promise.” Detective Summers offered her hand to Teddy and left to write up her notes for her report. Everything Teddy said corroborated what she already knew but didn’t leave her any closer to knowing it all. Sometimes she thought it was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on it, and pieces were missing that had to be created to fit in. The problem was in creating the correct missing pieces so they fit together. Often, one didn’t know if the pieces really fit until it was all over, and sometimes they didn’t fit at all.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sue Jenson walked into Charles’s hospital room again at three-thirty. She had been in and out several times during the day, and each time there seemed to be just a little spark of something between the two of them. After her divorce, she had decided she wanted nothing to do with men. She didn’t trust them.

  Oh, Doctor Lambert was okay, but theirs was a professional relationship. Sure, they had a friendship there, but it was based on work. Sue was careful to surround her son with good role models, but they were all married men, and she kept a proper distance. She didn’t want to get tangled up in another abusive relationship like the one she had gotten out of. “Once burned, twice shy” is the way she described it whenever one of her friends tried to introduce her to someone.

  Charles, on the other hand, had a vulnerability about him that went beyond the loss of his daughter. There just appeared to be a hole in his life. Sue knew it had to do with the loss of his wife three years earlier. Collette Sitton died just a year after Sue’s divorce, and she remembered it well. One doesn’t work in a hospital in a small city without knowing what goes on. Mrs. Sitton had not been her patient, but they still crossed paths frequently, and Sue observed how close Charles and his wife were. At the time, she felt jealous, almost cheated.

  Charles sat on the chair next to the bed. He was fully dressed and ready to leave.

  Sue grinned at him. “What’s the matter, Charles? You don’t like our hospitality?”

  “The ‘ity’ part is quite fine. It’s the hospital part I don’t care for.” He chuckled at his little joke. “I’m ready to get out of here, just as soon as the warden comes around and grants me my pardon.”

  Sue always tried not to get attached to her patients, keeping a professional attitude at all times, but somehow she wasn’t able to do so with Charles. She reached out and laid a hand on his. “I’ll be praying you find your daughter soon, Charles. I know what you’re feeling. Please, if you ever need someone to talk to, give me a call.”

  Charles turned over his hand, catching hers in his. “Thank you, Sue. I don’t remember the last time you took care of me, but I appreciate what you’ve done for me today. I may just take you up on your offer. My house was awfully empty with Elizabeth gone and doubly so when she didn’t come home.” Tears welled up in his eyes, and he dashed them away angrily with his other hand, not letting Sue’s hand go.

  “Don’t fight the tears, Charles. You have to let it out or you will hurt yourself. I know you Marines don’t cry, but forget being a Marine for a little bit and allow yourself to be a daddy. I know you love your girl, and you’re a great dad. Release the pain. You can’t bottle it all up.”

  Charles sat there with his head down and his eyes averted from Sue’s. He gripped her hand almost fiercely, sharing his grief through the small but very personal contact. Sue knelt on t
he floor next to his chair and laid her other hand on his shoulder. Tears flowed down his cheeks, but he made no sound as he agonized over his missing daughter.

  Doctor Lambert paused at the doorway, unnoticed. He quietly backed away, pulling the door nearly closed, and moved down the hallway. He recognized Charles’s need for privacy to deal with his grief. He whispered a little prayer for him as he entered the next room. He could check Charles out after he saw this patient.

  Sue said nothing but remained kneeling on the floor for several minutes, just allowing Charles to hold her hand while she gently stroked his shoulder. She recognized that the anguish extended well beyond just the loss of his daughter. Missing Elizabeth had opened other, long scabbed-over but unhealed wounds from years before: loss of friends and comrades and the horrors of war he had witnessed and experienced.

  He was not the first combat veteran to break down and cry in front of Sue, but this time was different. She felt she participated in his grief, but not just as a medical professional. She was taking his grief on herself, and without realizing it she wept along with him.

  CHAPTER 27

  James Romson placed a quick call to Anh Nguyen, his secretary.

  “Mr. Romson, how are you doing? And Mary. Is she okay? I am so sorry to hear about Jed and Elizabeth!”

  “Hi, Anh. We are doing as well as can be expected, I suppose. I don’t really know what’s going on. Charles is in the hospital, but I don’t think it’s serious. Look, I really hate to bother you on Sunday, but would you please call all of the management team? I need them, you too, for a breakfast meeting at six o’clock tomorrow morning. Will it be a problem for you, with getting the kids off to school?”