Beside Still Waters (Psalm 23 Mysteries)

by Debbie Viguié

  The restaurant had been her second stop of the day. Kapono had told him that she had walked there from Pearl Harbor, a fact that surprised the detective. It would have made more sense for her to have taken a taxi off base. Cindy walking through a military base when it wouldn’t have been normal for a person to do so was definitely something he should investigate, the first abnormal thing she had seemingly done since arriving in town.

  He pieced it all together through the conversation with Kapono and the receipts that he rifled through. He should be able to recreate her Saturday and Sunday from Pearl Harbor up to the moment she was kidnapped.

  Ideally he would have started in the morning after the sun was up and people were awake. He wanted to wait until the exact time of day that Cindy had done each thing, just to detect if there were any patterns or things that were time occurrences that she might have witnessed. He didn’t want to wait that long, though, to get started.

  He looked at the time stamp for the gift store at Pearl Harbor. He hoped someone there remembered her. It would help if he could get an idea of her moods and actions during the course of those days. Had Cindy found trouble other than the murdered restaurateur?

  He picked up her camera and began to look at the photos. There were shockingly few on there and he started to think she might have taken pictures with her phone instead. He finally found the phone behind the curtains. Someone had smashed it and it wouldn’t turn on. He debated about putting it back. It looked like the police had missed it in their search, but he was loathe to risk removing something they might notice.

  He shook his head. If they had found it, they would have taken it with them as evidence and tried to find a way to get the data off of it. He slipped the phone in his pocket and returned to the search.

  ~

  Cindy was exhausted and hungry. She had no idea how long she had been awake or even what day it was. She was sitting, tied to a chair, and had been for so long that she’d long ago lost the feeling in her bottom and her feet. She tried to shift but nothing seemed to work.

  Every time she felt like she was going to finally drift off and get some sleep a commercial would come on, loud and blaring, and jolt her awake. The muscles in her eyelids spasmed and she gritted her teeth, hating the sensation. She was so tired she could feel her own pulse pounding through her body. It wasn’t fast necessarily but she was hyper aware of it.

  Her terror had given away to a dull, mind-numbing feeling of fear mixed with misery. She had given up trying to figure out what her captor was going to do to her. She was actually starting to think he might let her starve to death or go out of her mind with exhaustion.

  A news show came on. Apparently it was six in the morning. She swung her head toward one of the windows, but it was still dark outside. She turned back, staring blankly at the television screen, processing very little of what was crossing it.

  A picture of a woman flashed up and with a start she realized it was her. Fully alert she listened to the rest of the announcement. The police knew that she was missing. They were searching for her.

  Despair filled her. She wasn’t missing, she was kidnapped. Until they got that straight they’d be looking in all the wrong places, like the ocean and hiking trails and places where a tourist could get lost or injured. Tears stung her eyes. Had they gone through her room? Why hadn’t they figured out she had been kidnapped?

  She wondered if Kapono was worried and in the next breath she realized that the police had probably called her home. Geanie would have answered the phone, been told that she was missing. Geanie would have called Jeremiah to tell him.

  Jeremiah.

  She had to get free. She had to see him again. If he could survive assassins trying to kill him and a bunch of teenagers in the woods then she could survive this. She looked around. If only she could find a way to signal to someone, to let them know that she was here and alive and kidnapped.

  A sudden sound in the hallway caused every muscle in her body to tense so suddenly that half of them cramped. She bit her lip and struggled not to cry out with the pain of it all.

  I’m dehydrated, she realized as the muscles in her left hand continued to spasm before the fingers curled into the palm like claws and stayed there. The pain was excruciating and even worse was the desperate sensation of wrongness.

  An image darkened the doorway and then the overhead light flicked on. Mr. Black was standing, arms crossed, staring at her. She tried to read his expression but his face was neutral. He stared at her for what seemed like an impossibly long time, as though he was trying to make his mind up about something. Finally, he gestured to the television.

  “Someone finally realized you were missing,” he said.

  She heard the emphasis he put on the word finally. He wanted her to think that it was unusual that it had taken so long, that no one cared, that she was unimportant. But she wouldn’t let him do that to her.

  “They’ll come for me,” she said. She tried to put as much conviction into her voice as she could. Maybe if he thought people were searching for her, he’d let her go. She knew it was a long shot, but she had to try.

  He smiled that slow, creepy smile that made her skin crawl. “I very much doubt that. Oh, I’m sure they’ll look for you. But they’ll never find you. They’ll spend a few days combing Honolulu and then the rest of the island before they give up.”

  “They might find me,” she said, hoping she sounded defiant.

  “No, they won’t. You’re not on Oahu.”

  He might as well have slapped her. She could feel herself reeling from the impact of the revelation. Her worst fears had been realized. She had left the island completely and they wouldn’t know to look for her on a different island.

  “Where, where am I?” she asked at last.

  “One of the other islands,” he said with a shrug.

  “I kind of figured that out on my own,” she said, struggling to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. She reminded herself that she didn’t know how he would respond if provoked.

  “Good. Then I’ll leave it for you to figure out which island,” he said with a smug smile.

  Her knowledge of the other islands in the Hawaiian chain was limited to their names. And she was pretty sure she didn’t even know all of those.

  “So, are you ready to tell me what I want to know?” he asked.

  “I’d tell you if I knew anything. Please, you have to believe me.”

  “I don’t have to believe you, actually. I just have to wait you out.”

  “What, what are you going to do to me?” she asked, hating herself for asking when she knew she wasn’t going to want to hear the answer.

  He smiled at her. “Nothing. I don’t have to, after all. We are in no danger of discovery.”

  “But, you can’t keep me here indefinitely,” she said.

  “Trust me, my dear, I don’t plan to keep you here very long at all. As I’m sure you’ve realized by now, you’re dehydrated. The human body can only go so long without water before organs begin to fail. After that comes death. So, I figure in a day or two you’ll be willing to tell me anything I want to know.”

  “I’d tell you now. Please. I have no idea why you think that I was a courier.”

  He just shook his head. “I’m sure you’ll see things my way, in time.”

  He turned and left the room. She shouted after him. “I don’t know anything!”

  It was no use.

  Once again she went back to testing the strength of her bonds. There was still no give, nothing. She wanted to cry, but she remembered his words about dehydration. She didn’t dare.

  She had been thirsty before but now knowing his plan it seemed to somehow make the thirst worse.

  It’s because I know I won’t be able to drink anything soon, she realized.

  A soda commercial came on television and she screamed in rage and frustration. He had left the light on and she probed the room once more with her eyes, looking for something, anything she could use to try
and free herself.

  There was nothing in the room except her, the chair, and the television mounted on the wall where it met the ceiling. She stared at the closed closet door and wondered if she could make it over there and if there was anything inside that would make the effort worthwhile.

  The chair she was tied to wasn’t large or heavy but it was metal. There was no breaking it. The thinnest of seat cushions was on it, not enough to make for real comfort.

  The floor of the room was wood, some sort of bamboo she thought. Her feet were lashed too tightly to the chair and at an awkward angle so she couldn’t use them to push against the floor and slide herself across.

  “God, help me do this, help them find me,” she prayed. She took a deep breath, tensed all her muscles and tried to jump upwards, getting the chair to hop about half an inch in the direction she wanted to go. It jarred every bone in her body and she winced in pain.

  She did it three more times in rapid succession and then had to stop. She was panting with the exertion and she realized she was even more dehydrated than she had thought she was. She had gained a total of two inches in her journey across the floor.

  ~

  Jeremiah went back to his room. It was before six in the morning. There wasn’t much he could do for another couple of hours. He needed to go to Pearl Harbor and retrace her footsteps from there. The police would be questioning everyone at the hotel to find out if they had seen or heard anything around the time Cindy had been kidnapped. There was nothing he could do there without ending up with Kapono shadowing his every move. It was a better use of his time to start at the beginning and work forward as the police worked backward. He turned on a morning news program and laid down to get a quick nap in.

  He was just drifting off to sleep when he heard the newscaster say “In local news, a tourist is missing. Police are asking for any help locating this woman.”

  Jeremiah opened his eyes. There on the television was a picture of Cindy. He sat up and stared intently at the television while the newscaster finished the story. When it was done he turned the television off and tried to resist punching the wall behind it.

  Now the kidnappers would know that people were looking for them. By plastering Cindy’s picture all over the news the police knew they could have thousands of pairs of eyes looking for her. Which was all the more reason for the kidnappers to bury her. Maybe literally.

  He stood up. He had less time than he’d thought. He was going to have to go to Pearl Harbor now. He grimaced. He would have to stop off at a store and buy some different clothes if he expected to be breaking onto a military base.

  11

  Mark woke in the morning with worry for Cindy and Jeremiah still gnawing at him. There was little he could do for them, though. He got up and a few minutes later was at his computer again searching the database of The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children hoping to find someone who looked like the Paul that he had known. He had already done an exhaustive search of kids kidnapped in California that would be the right age and he was expanding it to the rest of the country. Of course this was all assuming that whoever the real Paul was he had been reported missing and a body had never been found.

  It was exhausting, depressing work and did nothing to help his mood. He had found an old newspaper article about the real Paul who had been kidnapped and then returned to his family a couple of years later. It at least gave him an age range to play around with. He still had no way of knowing whether his Paul had known he was a changeling although it seemed likely that he did.

  The database did a great job trying to age photos so you could see what the missing kids would look like as adults. Try as he could, though, he couldn’t find anyone who looked like his partner. When he finally closed down the website in frustration he realized that he wasn’t going to find Paul that way. Either police had thought they recovered the correct body and taken him off the missing list or he had never been reported missing in the first place. The latter seemed outrageous, but it was possible he could have been a son of one of the cult members who had been drawn to the area.

  Mark opened up a browser window and started a new search on the cult that had lived up in the mountains around the Green Pastures area where the bodies had been found.

  The cult had been named the Jewels of Heaven. Rumor had it that they had converted much of their wealth into gold and jewels which they kept buried. He didn’t know if they took their name from the buried jewels or if the name of the cult itself incited the rumors about buried treasure. It seemed that every decade or so someone went looking for it in a serious way only to come up empty-handed.

  The leader of the cult had been a man named Matthew, from all accounts your typical charismatic psychopath. He had been a suspect in the kidnappings of some children from wealthy families, but nothing could ever be pinned on him and despite hefty ransoms being paid the children were never seen from again. The real Paul was one of those. Mark couldn’t help but wonder if the bodies of the other kids would turn up in that same pit.

  After three years the cult seemed to vanish without a trace. None of its members were seen or heard from again, including Matthew. With the ransom money he had gotten from the kids’ families he could have easily fled south of the border and been living the high life somewhere in South America.

  It was fascinating reading, but none of it explained where Not Paul could have come from or who he might have been before. He wrote down the names of the other kids who had been kidnapped. Rose Ayers, Danny Monroe, Sandra Colbert, and Jesse Armstrong. A quick search online revealed nothing about them in the years since their kidnappings were newsworthy. The one exception was a memorial service held seven years later for Danny Monroe on what would have been his twelfth birthday. At the age of five, Danny had been the youngest of the kidnapped kids.

  Mark stared at the list and then reluctantly picked up the phone and dialed Harry, the coroner who had been the one to tell him that his partner had not been the real Paul Dryer. When the man picked up Mark felt himself gripping the phone tighter. He was still on suspension and it wouldn’t look good for him if he was caught investigating anything more than the channel line-up on his television.

  “Hi, Harry, it’s Mark.”

  “Mark! Good to hear from you. Have they let you back in yet?”

  “No, not yet. I’m working on it, though. Doing my therapy hours.”

  “I feel your pain.”

  “Yeah. Listen, Harry, I’ve got a favor to ask.”

  “Is it one that’s going to get us both in trouble?”

  “Probably,” Mark admitted.

  “Then let’s hear it.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me about Paul, doing some digging of my own. There were a bunch of other kids that the cult was rumored to have kidnapped back in the day. I was wondering if they are among the bodies you found in that mass grave.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line and Mark began to worry that Harry wasn’t going to help him. Finally the coroner broke the silence. “What are the names?”

  “Rose Ayers, Danny Monroe, Sandra Colbert, and Jesse Armstrong.”

  “Okay, give me a minute.”

  Mark waited, listening to the sound of papers being shuffled. Finally Harry picked the phone back up. “I can confirm that the bodies of Rose Ayers and Jesse Armstrong were among those discovered.”

  “But not the others?”

  “No. We finished identifying the last body a week ago and they were definitely not there.”

  Mark nodded. “Have Rose and Jesse’s families been notified yet?”

  “It was my understanding that they were. We haven’t released any of the remains yet. We were planning to start doing that next week.”

  “Thanks, Harry. I owe you.”

  “Yeah you do. Never fear, though, I’m sure I’ll figure out a way for you to pay me back.”

  Mark hung up and crossed out Rose and Jesse’s names on his list. That left Sand
ra and Danny, still missing. They were presumed dead, but why hadn’t their bodies been recovered with the others? Had they been killed at a different time, dumped someplace else?

  “Mark, under no circumstances should you go and talk to their families. It’s a dumb idea which will reopen old wounds and bring them pain and land you in hot water,” he told himself sternly.

  A minute later he shook his head as he stood up from his desk. It looked like he was about to go and do something stupid.

  ~

  Under cover of darkness Jeremiah had managed to slip onto the naval base. He was dressed in all black, flat and dull with nothing shiny, not even a button, visible. It would make it harder for human eyes to see him and impossible to tell crucial details like his height if he was caught on surveillance cameras. That was why so many with dark purposes chose the color of night, but few knew how to really utilize it to its fullest potential, understand the principles of physics that were in play and the way that light truly functioned. These things had long ago become second nature to him.

  He moved swiftly from shadow to shadow, his rubber soled shoes silent as they touched the ground. Most personnel were asleep still and he took his time avoiding the sentries. He made his way to the public areas, circling the closed gift shop and standing for a moment staring at the shuttle that took tourists to the Arizona memorial.

  He saw nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing that Cindy would see that dozens of others wouldn’t. Satisfied that nothing in the immediate vicinity had something to do with her kidnapping he began walking, as he was told she had, off base toward Uncle’s restaurant. He walked slowly. Kapono had said that it was highly unusual that the taxi driver would have directed her this way. He also knew that the driver was under suspicion and that the police were still trying to track him down.

  He kept his head swiveling left and right, wondering what Cindy could have possibly seen that day. He was walking close to the water and he turned and glanced at it. Something made him stop and the hair on the back of his neck raised slightly. There was something not right about what he was seeing and he struggled to put his finger on it even as he strained his eyes.