by K. J. Emrick
Her eyes studied me as I felt the seconds ticking past. “You’re wrong,” she finally said.
“Er… no. I’m serious, Stevie. This is serious, I mean.”
“Not what I meant.” She stepped back from the door and into the cabin where I saw her pick up a set of keys from the top of the bureau. “You said I don’t know you. Truth is, I do. I’ve watched you, Dell. I’ve talked to your friends. Even talked to the woman you run that Inn of yours with. Rosie. And yes, I know that’s all sort of Yolanda Saldivar of me, but I needed to know who my father was. I found out he’s a good guy. I found out lots of people trust and respect you, too. So, I do know you, Dell Powers.”
She stepped back over to the door where I was waiting and held the keys out towards me. “And,” she said, “I know that you’re someone to be trusted. Just like me.”
“Thank you, Stevie. Really, I’ll treat it like it’s my own—”
Just as I reached for the keys, she pulled them back. They dangled in the air between us as Stevie held my gaze.
“You won’t haveta worry about how you treat my car,” she told me, “because I’m going with you.”
I immediately shook my head. Those seconds were flying away even faster now and I needed to get to James. “This isn’t a joyride I’m going on. There’s real trouble here in Port Arthur, Stevie. I need to—”
“You need to get to my father because he’s in trouble,” she guessed. Snapping her hand closed around the car keys she gave a curt sort of nod, taking the blank expression on my face as confirmation. “I saw him drive off, same as you, and now here you are at me door wanting to borrow a car to go after him. Didn’t have to be a member of Mensa to figure that one.”
“Stevie…”
“Oh! Is it that Alistair bloke? Is that who did all this?”
“I don’t know but I need to get to him right now!”
“So let’s go.”
She shut the door to her cabin and started down the walkway that would lead behind the cabins and along that row of trees to the car park. I didn’t have any choice but to follow.
When I caught up to her again I tried once more to explain the real seriousness of what I was going to do. I was already worried sick over what might be happening to James. I didn’t want to have to save him, and Stevie too. Or myself either, for that matter. Getting James away from whatever kind of psychopath Alistair Grotton turned out to be would be hard enough.
“Stevie, please. Let me do this. I don’t know exactly what’s going on or what we’ll find. I’m not even really sure where to find him…”
My voice failed me. As I laid out all the ifs and doovalackies I realized how very serious this was and how I really didn’t know what I was up against or how I was going to do anything at all to help James.
We stopped at her car, a small older model Nissan Micra. It was some shade of green that I couldn’t quite put a name to. Stevie went right to the driver’s side, leaving me standing at the passenger door. “It sounds as if you could use a friend,” she said to me over the roof of the Micra. “Don’t it?”
Yes, it did. I really wish Kevin were here. This is about the time where I’d turn to him for help, if we were back in Lakeshore. But we weren’t, and Kevin wasn’t here, and if I was going to get to James in time to make sure Alistair didn’t do anything… bad to James, then I was going to need whatever help was being offered.
Right now, that was Stevie.
She nodded, correctly interpreting my silence. “Good. We’ll do this together, then.”
“Stevie…”
“No more words, Dell. This is my dad we’re talking about. Maybe I just met him today. Maybe he’ll never want to talk to me ever again after how I went about it, but he’s still the only father I’ll ever have. I need to do this.”
With that she got in behind the steering wheel, leaving me no choice but to get in with her.
She aimed the car down along the Arthur Highway north along the coast. I’d explained the details of the place as Alistair had given them to me and James, and how that was still going to be our best bet to find him. I thought about calling the police and trying to get them to look for Alistair’s car but it was such a common type, and I didn’t have his license plate. Some amateur sleuth I make. Feeling the unicorn pendant between my thumb and finger, all I could really do was pray that we weren’t going to be too late.
“How did you and James meet?” Stevie asked me after we had turned off the main road to a narrow dirt path not far from the Stewart’s Bay State Reserve. This section of road was marked with a single, rusting sign. No public access. “I mean, if you don’t mind telling me.”
I was keeping my eyes peeled for any vehicles on the road. There weren’t any. It was like all of Port Arthur had shut down. “How we met? I don’t mind telling you about that. It’s just not a very exciting story. Your father is a crackerjack reporter, and he came into my Inn one day to ask for some details on the business that he needed for a story. We talked, had some coffee, and then fast forward a few years and he’s asking me out on a date.”
Stevie smiled wistfully. “Sounds like a hometown Cinderella story to me. You accepted right away, of course.”
“Er, no. It took me some time.” I don’t know why I was opening all this up to Stevie, other than figuring that she deserved to know a bit about her dad and me. “I’d had some bad luck with my husband, and been divorced, and it was going to be forever before I trusted a man again. It was your dad made that bit of fortune possible.”
“You sound like you’re in love.”
It took me by surprise to hear her say that. It was something that should have been obvious to me, that I was in love with James. We’d said it to each other plenty enough. I still remember the first time he’d worked up the nerve to tell me. So, sure we were in love. “I guess you could say that.”
“What about now?”
I blinked at her. “Now?”
“Sure. Now. So you and my dad started out all lovey and dovey. That part’s easy, right? I’ve had more’n a few men turn me upside down in my own life. It’s the rest comes hard. What ya do next makes the difference.”
“Well, sure.” The conversation had taken a turn, but I wasn’t following.
“I only mention it,” she said, “because with the way you were sniping at each other I was beginning to think maybe you were on the outs. I really did come over yesterday because I heard the shouting. I didn’t haveta fake that part.”
Ah. Now I got it. “It’s… complicated.”
Stevie raised one delicate brown eyebrow. I know how lame that sounded, to say we’re complicated, but in the spur of the moment like this it was the best I could come up with. Whatever was going on with me and James, all the fighting and the insecurity and the doubt, it wasn’t something I was ready to talk about. Any conversation that led into our current feelings for each other also started with my dead husband’s murder, after all, and that was about as private as it got.
We came around a bend in the road that Stevie had to slow down for. Trees pressed close on both sides, mostly pines but with a few leafy varieties that were starting to change their colors and drop their foliage here at the end of Autumn. Two lanes became barely more than one and I had a feeling that hardly anyone ever came out this way. “Are you sure this is the road?” I asked.
“I figure it leads down to the water, and that’s where we want to start looking, right? Some private place down by the water?”
“Sure, but we aren’t exactly following a map here.”
She snorted. “Pretty sure this part of the world doesn’t exist as far as Google Maps is concerned.”
“Should we turn around?”
“There’s no place for it. Let me get ‘round this curve first—”
“Look out!”
In front of us, on the other side of the curve, the late afternoon sunlight revealed Alistair’s car was turned over on its side, with the front end buried in the trees. There was oil and
petrol all over the road. There’d been an accident, obviously, and a violent one at that.
At my warning cry Stevie slammed on the brakes and skidded to a stop on the dirt road, with rocks flying out from under the tires. A flashing red light came to life on her dash. My seatbelt locked and held me in place with a painful jerk across my chest.
When the dust cleared, a hand slammed down on the hood of Stevie’s Micra.
We both jumped, startled by the sudden appearance of Alistair as he stumbled and fell over to his knees, his upper body sliding slowly across the car’s fender. I reached for the mobile in my pocket and tried to dial emergency with shaky fingers.
“Dear God,” Stevie whispered. “What happened to him?”
Good question. For a moment I’d been too afraid to take a very close look at Alistair Grotton. This was the man that Kevin had warned me about. The man I had let myself get close to, only to find out my initial instincts about him were right and he was dangerous.
He certainly didn’t look dangerous now.
As the phone rang in my ear, I noticed the gash across his forehead that was pouring blood down his cheeks. His shirt was torn at the shoulder on one side, and that arm hung limply as he dragged himself around to my door. He was streaked with dirt. His eyes kept losing their focus. He’d been beaten up pretty badly. Had the car wreck done this?
James. Where was James?
“Triple Zero emergency,” a voice in my ear said. The phone call had connected. “Do you require Police, Fire or Ambulance.”
“There’s… there’s been an accident,” I said, reaching out to lock my door. Alistair was getting closer. My eyes drifted to his car… was James still inside?
I gave the information about where we were to the dispatcher, and told her as much as I could tell her about the accident even though that was hardly anything more than what road we’d turned down. One man was badly injured. The car was still near the road. There might be a second man who was hurt, and needed help…
“James,” I breathed. The dispatcher had said help was on the way before hanging up with me so she could contact police and fire services. They were coming.
Would it be in time?
Stevie reached across and put her hand on my arm. “Look,” she said.
Alistair was slumped against my window, pawing at it feebly with one hand. I didn’t know what to do. I could see he was really injured but should I trust him, even so? With everything Kevin had said, and with my own suspicions, I had been ready to bash Alistair in the head over and over until he confessed to every wicked crime he had ever committed.
Looking at him now I felt like it should be obvious that the man was no threat. He was just in pain, and scared. I still hesitated. After another short minute, I found the window button, and rolled it down. What finally decided it for me was the simple fact that I needed to know what had happened to James. I’d face down the Devil himself if need be. Not that I thought Alistair was the Devil. Maybe just a close runner-up.
I undid my seatbelt and pushed away from him as I stopped the window at half open, resting my backside on the center console. I glared into his brown eyes. “Where’s James, Alistair? What did you do to him?”
He took a moment to digest the question, blinking in thought, his hand white-knuckled as it gripped the edge of the window glass. “Took him,” he said very slowly, and very deliberately.
“You took him?” Heat rose in my voice. This man had my boyfriend. “You took him where? What did you do with James!”
He scrunched up his brow, wincing in pain, although the hurt seemed to help him focus. “No. Not me. Someone else took him. They… took him. Out of my car. They took him.”
I didn’t understand. The words were all there and I knew they were all put together in the proper order but I could not make them make sense. Someone else had taken James. They took him. “Who?” Alistair didn’t answer me right off. “Who, Alistair? You answer me! If it wasn’t you, then who? Who!”
“Dell,” Stevie said in a level voice. She put her hand on my shoulder but I shrugged it away. “Maybe we should wait for the authorities.”
“No! I will not wait when James’s life might be in danger.”
“I know. I mean, I understand.” I could hear how she was trying to find the best way to explain herself. “He’s my father, remember? I only just found him and I don’t want to lose him again but what good is this going to do? The police can—”
“No!” This time I launched myself at the door and threw it open, knocking Alistair to the ground on his backside. “You tell me… right… now!”
He looked up at me in a mixture of pain and shock. I didn’t care. He was going to be in a lot more pain if he didn’t start answering my questions. I was just contemplating how a good swift kick to his ribs might motivate him to remember where James was when he levered himself up to a sitting position, that one arm still dangling, and shook his head to clear it. Drops of blood scattered from his torn skin. I didn’t care.
“James was… with me,” he said. “In the car.”
“I know that!” My voice broke in a screech and I fisted both of my hands. “Where is he now, Alistair?”
“He took him. Yes. That’s right. He took him.”
My patience evaporated. At my foot in the dusty road was a heavy, basketball-sized rock that I hadn’t planned on picking up, or holding over my head like a weapon, or threatening Alistair with. Planned or not that’s where I found myself, standing there in a blind fury, demanding an answer one final time.
“Tell me where James is!”
“The American,” Alistair told me, wiping blood from his eyes. “The one we saw in the… restaurant. Hudson Snow.”
At the mention of that name I seized up like a human version of the Tin Man, hands till raised with my weapon tight in my grip, eyes wide, able to see and hear but not move, or think.
“Hudson Snow,” Alistair repeated the name. “He’s the one who took James.”
I don’t know if I’ve ever been so wrong about so much, in my entire life, ever, as I have been in the last two days.
The whole point to my staying in Port Arthur instead of going home was to keep a promise to a ghost that I would find the person who had kidnapped Rory Hunter and keep anyone else from getting hurt. Don’t let it happen again. Not only have I gone through a handful of suspects and been wrong each time, but now my own boyfriend was among the kidnap victims.
He wasn’t in the car. After I restrained myself from beating the ever loving daylights out of Alistair I went and checked for myself. He wasn’t there. He was gone, and I stood there dumbly staring at a broken, empty car until the first white with blue checkered stripe patrol cars arrived with their emergency lights flashing.
It took me some time to pour out my statement to a young police officer who kept asking me the same questions over and over before I could focus enough to give him the answers he was looking for. Truthfully, they seemed more interested in Alistair than in whatever information I could give them on James. Maybe that had to do with Alistair being this whole “person of interest” in some of their cases like Kevin had told me about. When I finally signed at the bottom of his handwritten page and looked up again, the ambulance had taken Alistair away. The tow service was loading up his Commodore. Soon there would be no way to know that anything at all had happened here.
The officer was closing his notebook and shoving his pen back into his blue uniform shirt. His part was done, too, as far as he was concerned.
“Wait,” I blurted out before he could leave. “Constable… Flanders, right? Please, tell me what you’re doing to find James. He was with that Alistair man before the accident and now he’s not here—”
“We know,” he said in that calming sort of voice that police officers use when they aren’t worried enough about something that you want them to be worried about. “We know, Miss Powers. We’re searching the area. We’ve put out alert messages to every officer on-shift and to all the surro
unding agencies. We’ve got his description from you. We’ve got everything we need. We’ll find him.”
“How? How are you going to find him? I don’t see anyone trying very hard!”
“We’re doing all we can,” he promised me. “The fire department is going to pull in a few boys and search the woods starting from here. From what I understand one of the blokes has a top notch Rottweiler. Belongs to the Hobart Dog Training Club or some such. If James is out here somewhere—” he motioned to all the trees around us when he said it, “—then we’ll find him. Stay by your mobile, too. There’s a chance that he’ll call, right?”
“Alistair said James was kidnapped,” I reminded him. Was he listening to me at all?
“We know, Miss Powers,” he said in that same annoying tone. “We’re doing everything we can to find him. We’re tracking down this Hudson Snow. Doesn’t seem to be in town but we’re searching. We’ll find him. For now, just go back to your cabin and wait for our call. All right?”
“No, it is not all right.” My volume was rising, and I knew I was drawing the eye of every officer still here on scene as well as the tow truck driver, but I didn’t care. “It will not be all right until we find him.”
“We’re doing everything we—”
“What about the caves?” I insisted. “Why aren’t you looking there?”
Suddenly uncomfortable, Constable Flanders scratched at the back of his neck. “Er, maybe you should speak to the sergeant. He might be able to explain that better’n I can.”
“What d’ya mean? I don’t need to talk to anyone else, I just want to know when you’ll be going to check out the caves.”
“Miss Powers, please, I need you to calm down and hear me. We are doing everything we can.”
“No, you’re not, because you’re not checking the caves!”