“Where’s Joey?”
“He’s not with you?” I said.
Mom’s face drained of blood. “No. He’s supposed to be with you.”
I tried to assure her Joey was all right and briefly related events of the fight concluding with, “Arlie’s dad picked him up when he ran up to the street to get help. I thought he would have dropped him off here by now.” But my words didn’t have the desired effect. Mom looked like she had been slapped. Then she grabbed Arlie by the arm and dragged him toward the door.
“Cager, get my purse and meet us in the car. Aunt Cealie, make yourself at home. I’ll be back as soon as I find Joey.”
Mom drove directly to the Quintin house, though I had never told her exactly how to get there. But the old Packard wasn’t in its usual place. Mom turned to Arlie. “Do you know where your father is?”
“No, ma’am. He’s usually home this time ub day though,” he mumbled through swollen lips. “Maybe he’bs out back somewhere.”
“But his car is gone.”
“He drives out back sombtimes.” Arlie pointed to a two lane trail leading around the far side of the house. “Ober there, Mrs. Fenton.”
We bounced past the lathe house, flushing Tripod into a gimpy run for cover, but there was no car behind the house either. Engine roaring, Mom circled the car slinging Arlie and me around in the backseat as we shot past Tripod again just as he was picking his way back across the trail. She skidded to a stop in front of the house and ran up to the door pounding on it and pulling at the handle and calling, “Joey. Joey.” After getting no response, she peered through a front window then leaped off the porch and sprinted to the car.
Arlie said, “We hab a key under the doormat, Mrs. Fenton.”
“No time for that now, Arlie. I’m calling the sheriff.” Then she paused before turning back to us. “And I need to get you two patched up.”
Twenty minutes after Mom hung up the phone, the sheriff came racing up River Road, siren wailing. I guess he realized the only reason he held the office was the last sheriff hadn’t solved the cases of the missing kids. As he followed Mom back to the kitchen, he turned to the several deputies with him. “Check the rest of the house and garage.
“Sometimes kids come home and hide,” he explained as he and Mom entered the kitchen. “Just want to make sure he isn’t already here somewhere.” His voice was a deep boom, calm, full of authority. It matched his physique.
He was a giant of a man with pale blue eyes and blond, crew-cut hair on a bullet head. The floor flexed under his weight as he strode toward us. But his demeanor changed as soon as he saw Arlie and me sitting at the breakfast table. We were still in our bloody clothes and Arlie was holding an icepack to his face. It took only a few minutes to go over the day’s events.
He called to one of his deputies. “Get hold of the superintendent of public instruction.”
Mom pointed the deputy to the phone on the far wall.
It was pretty clear the sheriff had already linked Hartley and his buddies to this missing child event. As soon as the deputy had brought the superintendent up to speed, the sheriff took the phone. “I want those boys and their parents in my office before sundown. This bunch of delinquents is tied together with a kidnapping somehow and I intend to find out how.” Then he turned back to the rest of us. “What do you know about this man that picked Joey up?”
“He’s my daddy,” Arlie mumbled carefully.
“Then he’s a family friend?”
Arlie looked at me then at Mom. “No. He’s just my daddy. I’m the friend.”
“And you say you’ve already been to the Quintin house, Mrs. Fenton?”
“Yes. And there was no one home.”
“Well, let’s head back over there and see if we can get to the bottom of this.”
After a quarter hour of searching through the house and adjacent structures, the sheriff had to leave to meet with the school superintendent, but he told his deputies to get their patrol cars out of sight and wait in the tree line until Mr. Quintin returned. “As soon as he gets out of his car, arrest him.”
The rest of us went home. In the kitchen Arlie apologized. “It was me they wanted to beat up. Joey ran ub to the road after Cage came to helb me.”
“Arlie, if it’s anyone’s fault, it’s the boys who beat both of you up that led to Joey running for help. And whoever it was that picked him up. We don’t know for sure it was your father yet.”
Aunt Cealie glanced at me as if to say, “Don’t you think you ought to tell your mother what’s going on here.”
I nodded. “It’s Mr. Quintin all right, Mom. Aunt Cealie got his tag number.” It was the wrong thing to say.
Mom whirled around to Aunt Cealie. “What? You were there? And how did you end up in this anyway, Aunt Cealie? You never come into town this time of day.”
Aunt Cealie didn’t bat an eye. “I comes and goes as I pleases. Jus’ like a rabbit don’t take the same trail at the same time ever day, I don’t set no particular pattern for myself.”
I could tell that didn’t sound right to Mom, but what could she do. After a moment she straightened up and said. “Well, thank God you were there today or we wouldn’t know where Joey is.” Then she added, “And Cager and Arlie might have been far more seriously injured by that gang of hoodlums.” She fretted with her hair for a moment. “I ought to call your dad, but we don’t know the whole story yet and there’s nothing he can do but worry.”
Chapter 24
We all sat in the kitchen with our thoughts and fears for the next two hours. I watched the black and white Felix the Cat clock on the wall swing its pendulum tail back and forth in time with its eyes sweeping side to side as if looking everywhere for Joey. Even Fred the cat sat nervously with us clearly aware something wasn’t right.
Finally, Dad came home. By then the sheriff was back with more news. The four boys who had precipitated the events of the day were remanded to juvenile authorities for assault and battery. They wouldn’t be returning to school the rest of that year. But the sheriff said he could find no direct link to Joey’s being picked up on the road, though he was sure there was a connection. Dad wanted to go out looking for Mr. Quintin’s car but the sheriff told him to stay put. He already had the whole county on the lookout for the car. Or Joey. Or Mr. Quintin.
“I’ve pulled the night shift in early and have men waiting for Quintin at his house when he comes home. We’ll know more then, if we don’t find him sooner.”
And so we waited some more. The kitchen filled with the smell of fried eggs and Spam as Dad cooked some dinner. Arlie buttered the toast. Mom fretted. Aunt Cealie snored gently in her chair. We each ate a few bites then pushed our plates away and continued waiting. Midnight came and went, and still no word. I finally announced that Arlie and I would sit on the front porch to keep an eye out for the sheriff. Fred the cat followed us out. No sooner had we closed the door than, without a word between us, we set off for Arlie’s. The pavement was warm like the night we had dashed naked up the road to our campsite. Dogs again barked at our passing, causing porch lights to flash on and doors to swing open. But everything else about that night was different.
We hid in the canes at the edge of Arlie’s house and waited. After several minutes, Tripod wandered in and rubbed against us with loud purrs before settling down on Arlie’s feet. Crickets chirped. A little screech owl with a wavering chuckle kept us company for the next hour. Every now and then we heard the hidden deputies muttering on the other side of the house. Then headlights probed through the treetops as a car turned off the road. Yellow beams lit the drive.
The dark Packard rolled slowly by us and toward the trail Mom had taken to the back of the property. Where Arlie had told me he and his daddy had buried the man we came to know as Presley Poole, well respected cornerstone of society. My heart sank.
In the darkness, Arlie and I stumbled through the musty lathe house and out into the field behind. The Packard rolled to a stop about a hundre
d feet away under some pines. I grabbed Arlie as I noticed two deputies running toward the car. When Mr. Quintin opened the door, they hit him with a flashlight beam.
“Sheriff’s office. Freeze right there.” And he did. Arlie and I moved to within fifty feet of the car without being noticed. We stood quietly as they handcuffed Mr. Quintin and began shining lights into the backseat.
“Nothing here, Harlon. Grab his keys and get the trunk open.”
I walked up behind them as they lifted the lid. When their flashlights lit the trunk interior, Joey stared out of the shadows at me. Not eye-to-eye, but at some point above my right ear. Dirt covered one cheek and the one elbow that stuck up at such an odd angle. Trickles of dried blood stenciled his upper lip. And his gray eyes, they didn’t blink in the bright light. No one moved for several seconds. No one spoke. There was nothing to say. Then Arlie screamed, “Daddy, what did you do to Joey?”
Both deputies whirled, fumbling for their pistols. “Hold up, Harlon. It’s them kids. The ones got beat up.” It was about that same time they realized Mr. Quintin was gone.
And Arlie was chasing after him. “Daddy, Daddy, why’d you do it. Why’d you kill little Joey. He wub my friend.”
Holstering their weapons as they ran, both deputies charged out after the Quintins leaving me in the darkness with Joey.
But he wasn’t the same Joey I had walked to school with that morning. He wasn’t Joey at all. I wanted to go over and pull his little body out of the trunk and lay it out under the stars, and cover his face with my shirt, and hold him and cry, but I knew better than to contaminate a crime scene. I didn’t want any technicality brought on by my moving Joey to mess up a prosecution. It was a totally rational decision, and I puzzled at my lack of emotion, but there was no point in standing there crying and there was nothing else I could do. I thought I had solved that emotional shortcoming in myself, but now it was back. In the face of Joey’s death, I found myself not disconsolate; but merely numb. Nevertheless, I needed to be there when Mom and Dad arrived. So I joined the chase across the field.
The deputies caught up with Mr. Quinton in the front yard and wrestled him to the ground just as I came up. Arlie was crying, and his daddy was yelling at him to shut up.
“You were going to bury him weren’t you? Out there wib Mamma. Why, Daddy? Why?” As the deputies pulled Mr. Quintin into a standing position, Arlie ran to him, arms out in supplication. I stood amazed there was anything left between them, but as I watched, Mr. Quintin raised his foot and slammed it into Arlie’s chest hurtling him backwards into the night.
“You’re no son of mine you little pansy, so quit calling me Daddy. I should have killed you at the same time and been done with it.”
The deputies stood frozen in disbelief. Whether from the admission of another killing or from a father’s violent rejection of his son, I couldn’t tell. Finally one of them beamed his flashlight out into the darkness revealing Arlie lying crumpled in the dirt clutching his chest, gasping for breath. I finally gathered my own wits enough to go to him. Anesthetized though I was to the events swirling around me, I realized he needed comfort. Resolving to recover some of the humanity I had worked so hard to build over the past year, I sat down and pulled him to me.
But even as he shook violently in my arms, I found a revulsion to him rising in my throat as it finally registered that Arlie had known his daddy had killed his mother. His silence had enabled a monster to continue roaming the back roads and woods of our neighborhoods, and had now cost Joey his life.
Then something soft pressed against me.
Tripod had wandered in again, hobbling on his one remaining front leg. The other shot off by Arlie’s daddy. As Tripod rubbed along my side, I realized Arlie was no more to blame for Joey’s death than Tripod. Both had been viciously wounded by the same man. And both had stuck around. Out of necessity I supposed. Tripod because he had nowhere else to go. Arlie for the same reason. Then it struck me that I had taken away my own son’s chance of being born by coming back to save Joey. Or, perhaps more accurately, to save myself from my unbearable regret at not taking better care of him. Now both Jimmy and Joey were gone. For nothing. I recall still holding Arlie as my parents drove up. Dad getting out of the car. The deputies telling him it was all over. That they had Joey’s body. It was bedlam after that.
I sat in the dirt with Arlie and tried to remember how this had all started. It was a creature in a virtual world that had delivered me on this mission to set straight the most horrendous mistake of my life. From the vantage point of a floating mountain, it had seemed entirely possible. Easy even. But this wasn’t a virtual world here in Arlie’s front yard. This was real life and it had delivered a sorry end to my admirable beginnings to set it right again.
Chapter 25
The following months were pretty much as I remembered them the first time through. Arlie, and the fact that at least this time we had a body to bury, were the only major differences. Even the disappearance of Fred the cat was the same. We never saw him again after he followed us out that terrible night.
Arlie was remanded to Florida’s child welfare bureaucracy and eventually placed with a foster family, Edwina and Henry Goodwillough, an elderly couple who lived a few miles east of us. Arlie was their only charge. Mr. Quintin ended up on Florida’s death row waiting for Ol’ Sparky, the term of endearment used by the general population for the electric chair.
I was surprised Mom and Dad harbored no ill will toward Arlie. I even wondered whether they fully understood his involvement in the whole affair.
Then there came the matter of Presley Poole. I had asked Mom to drop me off at the Sheriff’s office so I could gather some info for a school report. After she left for the market, I asked to see the sheriff saying I had some additional information on the missing children. It wasn’t a minute before I was in his office enjoying his undivided attention.
When I had told the sheriff about Presley Poole trying to kidnap us and how Mr. Quintin had summarily executed him, the sheriff’s bucket jaw had dropped in disbelief.
“Who else have you told about this Mr. Poole?”
“No one.” And the sheriff dropped his pencil as well.
“And why not?” he asked as he swiveled his desk chair around toward me, his pale, blue eyes boring straight into mine.
“Mr. Quintin took care of the problem the FBI didn’t. He blew Mr. Poole’s head off then turned and told me to keep my mouth shut. Why would I tell anyone?”
“Indeed. Why would you?” The sheriff picked his pencil up and studied the point for a time before glancing at me. “Did you know those two men knew each other?” He caught the expression on my face. “I see you didn’t.”
He leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on the desk. “The FBI had Mr. Poole under surveillance for some time before concluding he had nothing to do with the disappearances of kids in this area. They observed Mr. Quintin meeting with him on several occasions for an hour or more at a time. I suspect the two were working together. Trading ideas. Then when Poole got careless and let you two get away, Quintin killed him knowing Poole would be caught within the day and would almost certainly give him up to get a deal.”
The sheriff swung his feet back down and leaned in toward me for a moment as if deciding whether to tell me more.
“And?” I prompted.
“Mr. Poole had a sister. A Mirabelle McDuff.”
“Hartley’s mother?”
The sheriff nodded, still studying me. “What do you know about Hartley McDuff?”
I shrugged. “The school bully. Never met him until the first day of sixth grade when he picked on Arlie.”
The sheriff sat up straight again. “Anything else?”
“That’s it.” But I had to know. “Did you find any bodies buried on Mr. Poole’s property?”
“Like the eight bodies Quintin had buried out back. No. But we’re still looking. We can’t account for all the missing kids over the past ten years with just the bodie
s at the Quintin place.”
“Why would he bury the evidence needed to convict him in his own back yard?”
“Most criminals are just stupid. Fortunately. Or we’d never catch half of them. He probably had a little fetish going, too. Probably liked to keep the bodies around so he could steal out to his little garden on occasion to reminisce a bit.”
“What about his wife? She was out there too wasn’t she?”
“Yeah. What about her?”
“Do you know why he killed her?”
“Argument probably. Her skull was bashed in. Possibly with a shovel according to the coroner—that’s the guy who does the autopsy,” he added for my benefit. “Maybe she caught him out back digging a grave. Or maybe Quintin killed her for some other reason. We just don’t know and Quintin isn’t talking.” He pushed up from his chair. “Anyway, that about wraps it up for us, kid. Really sorry about your brother. At least there won’t be any more damage done by those two.”
I joined Mom back in the austere waiting area and we walked together out into the late summer heat. I wanted to tell her about my coming back from the future but I dared not. She would probably believe it and would certainly tell Dad and he would almost certainly tell his loud-mouthed brother. And after that there would be no stopping the gossip.
But if word got out I had knowledge of the future, it would be my end. It wouldn’t take the world long to realize I was too dangerous to be walking around loose. In the wrong hands, such knowledge as I held could topple empires. So I kept my peace, as Aunt Cealie put it, and remained silent the whole trip home. At least events seemed to be settling into the usual humdrum of Stubbinville’s summer doldrums leaving me alone to nurse my regrets.
I had missed my chance to save Joey. And Ell and her time glider were gone as well. Back to her strange and alien world where she would be prohibited from ever piloting a glider again. I had blown my only chance. And my ineptness had harmed Arlie too. I remained a failure at sheltering and nurturing those around me. It was the same old problem from before I had ever met Ell.
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