by Karen Harper
They stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. Despite all those words—information—he’d put out between them like a barrier, she almost threw herself into his arms again. Instead she bent to gather the linens from the floor.
“Thanks for taking me in,” she said as she forced herself to head for the bedroom he’d given her. He had taken her in, heart and soul, as the old song said. But she had to fight that sweeping need for him with all her might.
* * *
As exhausted as Tess was and as good as she felt after a hot bath in Gabe’s big bathtub, she couldn’t sleep. She prayed she would not dream of that dog, nor of the monster in the cornfield. If she screamed out in the night, would Gabe come running? She tossed and turned, thinking of her father, her sisters, the missing girls, Gabe.
She heard a voice, a young girl’s voice, muted but close. Was she dreaming? No.
She sat straight up in bed. She heard a girl’s voice coming from out in the hall.
Tess got up and wrapped the extra blanket around her like a robe. She was wearing her nightgown, but she’d forgotten her slippers. Her feet were cold on the wooden floor. Tiptoeing to the door, she opened it a crack.
Light bled from under the door of the room Gabe had said was his home office. And that’s where the voice came from, definitely a young girl’s. Could he have a TV on in there? Maybe he couldn’t sleep either.
Tiptoeing closer, she put her ear to the door.
She could hear the words clearly now. “My name is Jill Stillwell. I love puppies and to camp out with my family. I love to read books. I can read now all by myself if the books are elentory, I mean easy enough, like in elentory school. I have an older brother, Jeff, who is nice to me mostly...”
The high, sweet, little voice went on. But...but Jill Stillwell was the name of the second girl who had been abducted, taken years after Tess’s family had moved to Michigan. She sounded so real, as if she was just on the other side of this door!
Carefully, quietly, Tess turned the doorknob. She only meant to open the door a crack, but it swung inward with a loud creak. She gasped and gave a little cry at what she saw, just as Gabe turned around to glare at her.
14
“Tess!” Gabe cried as he jumped to his feet. He killed the sound track—he’d been sitting at a laptop—and came at her as if to block her from seeing what was here. Or was he going to grab her?
“I heard—I heard a girl’s voice,” she said, retreating into the hall. “Jill Stillwell’s, one of the kidnapped—”
He grasped her shoulders in hard hands. “It’s a recording her family gave me from their Facebook page. It helps me to remember.”
It scared her how she recalled that some murderers kept relics of their victims. In the brief glance into the room, she wondered if it could be like a big memory box, a memorial to the lost girls. She’d glimpsed a large blown-up picture of a child who must be Amanda Bell, next to a map with all kinds of lines and other pictures. Were there things in there about her too?
Gabe gave a huge sigh that seemed to deflate his body. His broad shoulders slumped. “You’re not dressed,” he said as his eyes went over her. “And it’s cold tonight. Go get something on so you don’t distract me even more, and I’ll show you what I’ve never shared with anyone. I do have some stuff like this at the office, but I’ve got more here—maybe it will jog something loose for you.”
Hurrying, shaking, she did as he said and joined him in the big room that had been his parents’ master bedroom. Two walls seemed dedicated to the two earliest victims, Teresa Lockwood and Jill Stillwell. He’d posted photographs of the kidnap victims and their families, with lines drawn out to what he explained was “a circle of acquaintances.” On the next wall, narrower because of windows, he’d started to put up things about the Sandy Kenton kidnapping.
Each wall was a collage of evidence. He’d written in times, places, even things like height and weight of the victims. For each, he’d posted an age-advanced photo of what she might look like now. Tess was amazed at how close to reality the one of her came.
Amanda Bell’s area covered only the double-closet doors, but it included a big map of Brazil with cities and roads highlighted with a black pen. Sandy Kenton’s wall shared space with a four-by-four-foot bulletin board with a map of Iraq. It was marked where, as Gabe put it, “those sites had victims too. We worked hard to disrupt bombs.”
“Those red dots?” she asked, mesmerized by all that he was sharing, and still hesitant to look too closely at her own wall.
“No, the black ones. The red ones show where we didn’t get there in time. Where the bomb went off. This one,” he said, pointing at a dot nearly obscured by men’s first names, “was where I...I lost my friends—and I was in charge.”
She touched his arm, slid her hand down to hold his. He gripped her fingers so hard it hurt, but he didn’t look at her, only at the names.
Finally, she steadied herself to turn away and move closer to the wall dedicated to her. There were newspaper articles about her abduction, all laminated. From somewhere, probably her mom years ago, he’d gotten four photos of her, one alone, two with her sisters, one with the whole family. She stared at her parents, so young. What did her father look like now? And her mother was gone. Gabe had also posted a photo of his father in his sheriff’s uniform. And down by the floorboard a map of the area with Dane Thompson’s house and grounds diagrammed and labeled. She bent down to look at it closely. “So Dane really was your father’s number-one suspect?”
“But he couldn’t make it stick.”
“Dane had an alibi?”
“That he was out of town at the time of the abduction, heading for a meeting in Chillicothe.”
“A meeting?”
Gabe squatted beside her. “Yeah, with a woman, a colleague who still has a vet clinic there. She covered for him with a lie—at least Dad thought so. I have copies here of all the affidavits filed, the investigation files. I go over them, go over everything. It’s kind of like looking for the missing link.”
“But Sandy’s and Amanda’s disappearances are different from...from mine and Jill’s,” she said as they stood.
“Yep. No cornfield escape. But Jill was taken right out of a small tent she was sharing with her brother, near the cornfield that abutted their backyard. Why she didn’t wake up and scream, we never figured out.” He got up, walked across the room and pointed to a picture of a boy. “Mrs. Stillwell said both Jill and her brother were light sleepers.”
“Maybe the kidnapper gagged her right away.”
“Or used chloroform or some drug—jabbed her with a needle, since you’d been given shots of some sort. If we’d gotten you back in this day and age, they’d have run tests to pinpoint exactly what you had in your system instead of just having you treated by the small-town doctor your father insisted on.”
“So the answers are still out there. And that’s why this memory room.”
“My real war room. I just didn’t realize I had the recording with Jill’s voice up so loud.”
“You probably didn’t. I have excellent—sometimes too-good—hearing. Sounds seem to stick with me.”
“Like the harvesting machine sound you mentioned.”
“Do you have the others’—our voices recorded?”
“All but yours. But yours, I remember. I was there not only when you were taken, but also when they got you back. I rode my bike into town when I heard they’d taken you to Dr. Marvin’s office. I blamed myself for what happened to you. I had to see you, so I waited, but your father came out and told me to leave, to stay away from you. But then he saw my mother in the little crowd gathering, and he told her he was sorry for what he’d said to me, that he knew what happened wasn’t my fault. They...hugged each other—hard.”
Tess put her arm around his waist. He put one hard-m
uscled arm around her shoulders. “As I said a couple of days ago, Gabe, I don’t blame you. And I understand you’re partly so...so into this—”
“Say it. Obsessed.”
“—because you’re trying to finish what your dad started. You drive yourself hard for the victims, for his memory and for yourself too. But if you don’t get some rest, you won’t be any good to anyone.”
He hugged her to him, sideways, hip to hip. When he spoke, his deep voice vibrated through her. “My mother would love you. ‘Are you eating well, Gabe? Be sure you get your sleep and exercise even with all that’s going on.’”
“Then she’s still a good mother. She saw your father work so hard and tried to help him any way she could and now you.”
“Yeah,” he said, his voice hard again, but he sounded exhausted instead of intense. “She was a good mother, but he was gone a lot and that was hard—too hard for her sometimes as a wife, I guess. Let’s get some rack time before the sun comes up, okay? And I’d appreciate it if you don’t tell anyone about this room, including Vic Reingold or Deputy Miller.”
“Right. I understand.”
“You know,” Gabe said, turning her to face him, “you do understand.”
His blue eyes shimmered with unshed tears. Was he falling apart under the strain? She understood that too. He’d made a memorial here to all his tough times, his failures—including the bulletin board with his battle against bombs.
Maybe she should see if Miss Etta had a book that would help him—though she wouldn’t say who it was for. Something about pressure on the job, stress, handling hardship. She desperately wanted to do anything possible, not only to help him solve the abductions, but to help him stay stable and strong. Strange, but worrying about him actually made her feel a little better about herself.
* * *
The next morning, Tess and Gabe had breakfast together, then she offered to clean up as he rushed out the door to head for his meeting with Vic and Jace. He also intended to have Ann check the stuffed pit bull into evidence. Washing up their dishes by hand, she thought about the difficulties of being married to a sheriff or any law enforcement agent. He might always be rushing out the door. Did Vic Reingold have a wife? If so, he had been gone from her for days. Jace Miller was a newlywed, so how hard was his job on his marriage?
And standing in Gabe’s mom’s kitchen she wondered about those long days alone when Gabe’s father was working on her abduction case and then Jill’s. It was a lonely life, but Gabe had explained at breakfast that his mother had friends, including Marva Green, no less, and Wanda Kurtz too. They’d even worked together sewing those small scarecrows to earn extra cash. Did the wives of law enforcement men ever hear about their cases the way Gabe had shared with her last night?
She went up to make her bed and looked out the window across the cornfield toward her house. There was an AEP electrical truck in the driveway. She’d promised Gabe she wouldn’t leave until he called, but she couldn’t wait to tell him that.
She cleaned up the room, then walked through the downstairs. Despite how tidy things looked, except for the kitchen, things were really dusty. So Gabe kept things neat—or had cleaned up the place once—but didn’t manage the upkeep.
At seven-thirty, Tess got her cell phone out. She wanted to call Char in New Mexico and knew she’d have to phone her before she went out among the Navajos in their distant houses, some of them traditional hogans, which she visited as a social worker. But it was only five-thirty out there and she hesitated to punch in the numbers. Char would console her but question her too. She’d figure out how close she and Gabe were, then lecture her that she was crazy.
Holding her phone, Tess continued to pace in a big circle, through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, around again. Surely, if she could just find the spot she’d been held prisoner, she would recognize it somehow, the house, at least. But the numerous places she’d driven past already, slowing down, staring, had not rung a bell. Even if she’d been kept inside all that time, she’d surely have looked out the windows. She must be able to recognize things outside, a barn, a field, a road—something. Maybe if she drove more of the roads around here, something would strike her as familiar.
Tess jolted when her cell phone rang.
“Tess, it’s me.” Gabe’s familiar voice seemed to fill the house, to warm her, even though he sounded all business now. “I’m going to talk to Sam Jeffers, John Hillman and Dane Thompson, separately and on my own, so Vic won’t spook them. I want you to stay put until you get your power restored and—”
“I see the repair truck in my driveway.”
“Good. Jace is on his way to take paint scrapings from the telephone pole for Mike—he’s coming back here today—before the repairmen handle it or climb it if they put it back up.”
“Gabe, I think I should go with you to see those three men. If not, I’ll drive to their places on my own, just to see if anything jogs my memory.”
“What? No way you’re heading alone to their properties! Tess, I’m not going for a good-time chat. I’m checking to see if they have alibis, at least for the time you were harassed last night, not to mention when Sandy was taken.”
“Well, if I shouldn’t go alone, I should go with you. We’ll tell Sam Jeffers that I just learned he tried to track me with whatever dog he had twenty years ago and wanted to thank him. I assume you’re going to show John Hillman the stuffed dog that was on my property, so I’d have a natural stake in that.”
“Tess, I don’t—”
“Of course, you’re probably right that I shouldn’t go with you to see Dane, so we can compromise on that, and I’ll just go on the first two visits with you.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe and—”
“But last night shows I’m really not safe, not until we find whoever took me, Jill, Sandy—maybe Amanda. It’s hardly some high school kids, even if they are the ones who put graffiti on the rocks near the waterfall. And I don’t think my lights out and a dead dog are just someone’s sick idea of an early Halloween prank.”
She heard him muttering something. To himself? To Vic?
To Vic, she realized, as she heard his voice in the background. “Then let her go. Something’s got to unlock her memory. She’s still the best chance we’ve got.”
Gabe sounded really mad—but controlled—as he spoke again. “I’ll pick you up in about fifteen minutes. We’ll stop to talk to the electrical guys, then head for Jeffers’s place so you can ‘thank him,’ and we’ll see how that goes. Then maybe you’ll go with me to Hillman’s taxidermy shop, his little house of horrors. You won’t like it there, Tess.”
“I may not recall where I was held when I was kidnapped, but it was a house of horrors. I’m sure it was, but I’m desperate to remember it—and I will! I’ll be waiting for you here.”
He didn’t even say goodbye. He was angry with her, trapped into letting her help today, probably because of Vic rather than her arguments, but she thought she’d done okay standing up to him.
She got her things together in case he just dropped her at her house later, went to the bathroom, then paced in big circles again, waiting for him. Despite having her warm jacket on, Tess shivered. Had Gabe’s mother paced just like this, right here, waiting for her husband? This house, any one where the family had loneliness and conflict, could be a house of horrors.
* * *
“About Sam Jeffers’s place,” Gabe said. They were heading out of town toward the southeastern foothills after confirming that her power would be back on line soon. “Other than his cell phone, the guy lives like the early settlers. His Appalachian roots run deep. He’s here, he’s there, he’s everywhere around, has several small, old lean-to-type cabins in the woods, where he camps and hunts.”
“I’m pretty sure I was kept in a house, not at some campsite,” Tess said.
> “We’ll look at his main place, where he breeds and trains his hounds. He’ll be there, I think, because, according to Marva, he, Hillman and Dane just got back from the woods, where they were looking at a wounded stag Sam had cornered but not killed.”
“Cornered but not killed,” she repeated. “I...I hope Sandy Kenton’s being kept alive like I was. Jill too, of course—and Amanda, if she was kidnapped instead of snatched by her father. But why would someone take a third child if Jill was still...”
“Yeah. Assuming, of course, that whoever took Sandy out of the shop uptown in broad daylight is the same person who took you and Jill. But a copycat crime like this seems unlikely. I think we’re still after one person, maybe with an accomplice. So far, no real leads from Jace’s questioning folks who were in and out of that back alley when Sandy disappeared. Even our all-seeing, all-knowing veteran librarian didn’t see anything unusual. It’s almost like Sandy vanished into thin air.”
“And, in exchange, someone left that scarecrow.”
Gabe turned the cruiser into a narrow lane lined by buckeye trees. They always dropped their leaves early, so the bright autumn colors of the hills were muted to dry, brown foliage here. Some of the trees were even stripped of leaves, so it seemed their naked, crooked arms reached out. The narrow dirt lane twisted, climbed a bit.
“Oh, perfect,” Tess said. “Like a scene in a scary movie. A mailman comes up here every day?”
“No, there’s a box we passed down on the road. And, I’m surprised to see, a place for the Chillicothe newspaper. Can’t believe a loner and wanderer like Sam keeps up with the news.”
“Unless he likes to read about his handiwork.”