The Hiding Place

by Karen Harper

  “So Clay might have some money stashed somewhere, but if I had Beamer’s nose, I’ll just bet I could follow the stench of big bucks to Jordan Lohan. He probably wanted me watched to be sure I didn’t…” Her voice wavered and trailed off.

  “Didn’t what? Put a big banner up outside saying the Lohans lied about your child? What could Jordan get out of having someone watch the house?”

  “I—I don’t know. Maybe to see how you and I were getting along?”

  “What the hell does he care, as long as you leave his little Laird alone—Oh, now I see where you’re going.”

  “You said some big shot with power and money, some local person, has upped the ante again for you to take the Fort Bragg job. Maybe someone besides Claire was hoping you’d take me with you—get me out of this area, out of the Lohans’ hair, so to speak. You took a good look at those power photos of Jordan with local and national politicos in their house. He could have pulled some strings to get your army contacts to push you to go and take me, too. I mean,” she said, her voice dripping sarcasm now, “it wouldn’t be the first time someone in political office did something illegal and immoral.”

  Now he sat down on the edge of her desk, looking suddenly shell-shocked. “Both of my contacts urged me to take you east. They even offered some help setting that up.”

  “See? Think the worst of the Lohans, and you’re probably only scratching the surface of what they’re capable of. If they can make a dead baby just disappear in this day and age, they can probably abracadabra anything.”

  “But what possible tie could someone like Jordan Lohan have to the likes of Rick Whetstone and Marcie Goulder?”

  “I don’t know. But if we can just put these pieces together somehow…I admit that the Lohans usually deal with lawyers and power brokers, not small-time, off-the-wall people like them. And why watch the house from outside,” she said, sinking in her desk chair, “when what counts is what’s going on inside the house, though we did hug each other outside? On the one hand, I could see Rick hiding above the house, thinking he could snatch Claire, but surely Marcie wouldn’t want her now, and Clay’s in jail…Sorry if I sounded jealous about Marcie.”

  “That part, I liked.”

  “I suppose the one she’s been watching has to be me.”

  She stood and looked out the window, up toward the scent pool. Remembering she had the two sequins in her shirt pocket, she took them out and attached them to a sticky note on her desk. Nick came up behind her and put his arms around her shoulders; with a sigh, she leaned back into his strength before turning to face him again.

  “Nick, Beamer’s another part of the puzzle, at least his behavior the night Marcie was here. Remember how he freaked out around her, and she tried to pass it off as the fact some cat at the L Branch had rubbed against her?”

  “You’re a genius. I should have thought of that right then.”

  “Maybe you were blinded by the glitter of sequins or big boobs.”

  “I’ve been a boob. Maybe it was always her up there and never Rick. That time I thought I saw a flash of blue—it could have been her denim jacket. And you’ve said that big truths are always in little details. Right away, I noted that old hunter’s cabin had been swept out, and, when I was at their apartment, I noticed it was really clean. But the key thing is that the candy bar wrapper was hers, so Beamer had tracked her before, and he remembered her scent.”

  “She didn’t want me to fix her tea, but asked for cocoa. She loves chocolate. Maybe we’ve been on a dead-end trail with Whacker Getz, and that’s why he looked so shocked when we confronted him. I mean, the guy hates me, but those bike tracks could have been from anyone mountain biking around here.”

  He pulled her to him and held her hard; she clamped her arms around his waist. His mouth close to her ear, he whispered, “You’re good at what you do, sweetheart. As you said, Marcie’s a captive audience at the funeral tomorrow, so let’s take her out afterward and carefully, cleverly interrogate her.”

  When Jordan went into the kitchenette of the clinic cabin to speak quietly with the nurse, Veronica quickly jumped up and felt in his raincoat pockets. Yes, his cell phone. Praying he wouldn’t miss it before he left, she took it and pushed it down between the cushions on the couch.

  Breathing hard, she sat on top of it and strained to hear what they might be saying. Something about doses of her medicine.

  Veronica recalled a classic scene from the old movie, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, where Jack Nichol son was stuck in an insane asylum. Yes, she thought, though it was hardly a luxe environment, it was rather like this place, with the Lohan version of that control ling Nurse Ratchet from the film. When the woman had insisted Nicholson take his pill that doped him up to stay cooperative, no doubt, he managed to keep it under his tongue. Yes, some version of that would do.

  “Darling, I’ve got to run,” Jordan told her as he came back out into the living room and scooped up his raincoat. She prayed he wouldn’t look for his cell, but he just came over and kissed her cheek. She had an urge to turn and bite him, but then he might have her restrained again. And she couldn’t have that, because she’d soon be going for a nice, long walk—in this case, a freedom march.

  Tara and Nick entered the Corbett Funeral Home in Evergreen just before ten the next morning. The cloying smell of flowers and of some sweet chemical—cleaning fluid or worse—hit Tara in the pit of her stomach. Like Beamer, she was sensitive to scents. Suddenly, she was certain she had smelled sharp scents at the same time she’d heard the words vaginal delivery, the same night she’d heard someone crying and then later, the organ music. Smells from a makeshift delivery room in her clinic cabin?

  “Isn’t Ms. Goulder here yet?” Nick inquired of the hovering funeral director, Ralph Corbett, who had just introduced himself.

  “Not yet, though she said she’d be here a half hour ago,” Corbett, a rotund, dapper man told them, glancing at his watch. It looked strange to see someone nattily attired in a suit and tie around here, where most people dressed Western casual. “And we’ve had no other calls inquiring about the time of the service, since that wasn’t in the newspaper obituary,” he added.

  “No one from his workplace—a caterer here in Evergreen?” Nick asked.

  “No one on his or on Ms. Goulder’s side. It’s almost as if the poor man didn’t exist.”

  Hair on the nape of Tara’s neck prickled. That was the way she’d described what the Lohans had done to her little Sarah: it was as if she had never existed. Here she was attending a funeral for a man she barely knew and yet she had not been able to formally mourn her own daughter.

  In the pearly lighting from two torchère lamps, Corbett escorted them up to the closed casket. On it lay a single spray of white carnations, dyed red around the edges. The white ribbon tied around it bore no words. Recorded organ music played in the background. It made Tara miss Veronica again. Despite her growing loathing of the Lohans, Veronica had cared for her, and somehow they had been kindred souls.

  Nick paced while Tara sank into a wooden chair in the front row of a neatly arranged semicircle of them. “What if Marcie doesn’t show?” she asked Mr. Corbett.

  “I’m not sure. It’s most unusual. No minister is coming. She was going to do a reading or two, as I understand it. I do have permission and payment to inter the body. My, I hope nothing has happened to her. She seemed such a nice, sincere young lady.”

  “Yes, didn’t she?” Tara said with a pointed look at Nick.

  “This whole thing is so sad,” Mr. Corbett went on. “I understand the deceased’s only living adult relative is in prison, and here his significant other seems to have deserted him.”

  “I believe,” Nick said, “we will go look for her, rather than phoning. Perhaps, when it came to really saying goodbye, she became despondent and needs help. Mr. Corbett, if we don’t call you by noon, go ahead with the plans to inter Rick Whetstone. He was once my brother-in-law, so perhaps I’m the closest one to him
right now—if Ms. Goulder has left, for some reason.”

  As soon as they were outside in their car, Tara said, “But if the reason she’s missing is that we’re onto her, how could she know?”

  In the bathroom of her cabin, with the shower running to cover her voice, Veronica sat on the closed toilet seat and whispered into the phone. Even if Anne, her own Nurse Ratchet, was listening at the door, Veronica was quite certain she could not hear. She’d managed to avoid swallowing her medicine and, later, to dump her coffee into the orchid plant Thane and Susanne had sent her, just in case it was laced with something.

  “Rita, this is Mrs. Lohan. I don’t want you to indicate in any way that you are talking to me, at the price of your job—or even more, considering my source for the Vicodin. Do you understand?”

  “Oh, yes, ma’am,” her maid said. “What is it I can do?”

  “Listen carefully to me. You realize that I did not tell Mr. Lohan the source of my drugs before and how devastating his knowledge of that could be.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Here’s what I want you to do. Do not write this down, do not repeat it except to your brother, if you need help. And, Rita, don’t think you can tell Mr. Lohan what I’m asking, because I have left a way for you to be arrested if you do, even if I am still locked up at the clinic. You managed to keep things quiet before, and I want my requests now kept the same way.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  The woman’s voice kept getting weaker and shakier. Ordinarily, Veronica would have pitied her, but this had to be done decisively and quickly.

  “Tomorrow night at ten o’clock, I want you to park your vehicle where it cannot be seen outside the west service entry gates of the clinic grounds. I want you and your brother to bring two extension ladders about fifty yards south of that gate where there is heavy vegetation, placing one ladder inside the fence and one out. You are to wait there. Are you with me so far?”

  “We can do that for you.”

  “Excellent. And I’ll need money from under my everyday jewelry box in my second drawer. I believe there are several hundred dollars there. Bring all of it and two casual changes of clothes for me. The other thing I need you or your brother to get me is a rental car in another name—not mine, not yours. After I climb the fence, you will drive me to where you have left that car. Do you understand all that, Rita?”

  “Yes, tomorrow night.”

  “I am relying on you, just as you rely on me to keep the secret of your and your brother’s drug dealing. And bring no one else in on this. As I said, there is someone who knows your secret, and it’s not Mr. Lohan—yet. If anything goes wrong in any way, you and your brother will be arrested.”

  Breathing hard, Veronica cut off the call and hid the phone under the extra towels until she could place it by the door behind the chair where he’d put his raincoat. She’d love to phone Tara right now, but she couldn’t push her luck. If Jordan found his phone and checked the log of who had been called when, he might be tipped off anyway, but she had to risk that. If he did check the log, she hoped to be long gone by then, until she had all the answers she needed—and a way to make sure Jordan never locked her up again.

  Marcie was not at her and Rick’s apartment, nor was her car parked anywhere in the immediate vicinity. Tara and Nick talked the landlord into letting them in to look around. Like the rest of the place, the bathroom where Marcie had said Rick had killed himself was immaculate. Her clothes were still there, as if she were coming back.

  “That laptop of hers that meant so much is nowhere in sight,” Nick told Tara as they walked back out onto the street. “Let’s go down to inquire about her at the L Branch where she was hostessing.”

  The place was called a tavern, but it was more restaurant than bar. Western music—Kenny Rogers crooning an old hit—and Western ambience seeped from the place. Nick asked to see the manager, who turned out to be a burly, bearded guy in a plaid flannel shirt with his graying hair tied back in a ponytail.

  “Marcie Goulder?” he said when Nick asked if he’d seen her. “Not for a couple months. She worked here for a while, then split, I think, when she met some guy with dough.”

  He knew nothing else about her. As they started out, Tara turned back to ask, “Do you have a cat that hangs around here?”

  “No way,” he told them. “Dogs, I like, but I’m allergic to cats. I just set rat traps, if it comes to that.”

  “Good advice,” Nick told Tara as they went out on the street again. “I think we’d better find a way to set some traps for our own kind of rats.”

  18

  After calling Ralph Corbett to tell him they couldn’t locate Marcie, Nick and Tara hurried home. They were hoping Tara could find some sort of information about Marcie online, some hint about where she might have gone. Since Marcie’s new laptop had seemed so important to her, perhaps she had some sort of online presence, though they didn’t trust her to be using her own name. If they got any leads, they were going to look for some link between her and the Lohans.

  As Nick drove Tara’s truck into the garage and killed the engine, he realized something was wrong. “Beamer’s not barking,” he told her.

  When the Lab was left alone, he’d always given them a loud welcome home, though not the big display he had the day Nick had returned. That was only one week ago, though it seemed like a year. Now Nick felt the same ripple of fear as he had in the desert before everything exploded.

  “Wait here a sec,” he told Tara, taking the house key from her as she got out to unlock the garage door to the house. With all that had happened, could someone have hurt or taken Beamer? Thank God, he thought, Claire was at school.

  He fought down his instinct to prepare for a frontal assault and pulled Tara from the garage and around the corner of the house where they huddled under the deck. “Get out your phone and be ready to call nine-one-one,” he said. “I’m going up into the trees in back to see if I can spot anything. Beamer would not keep quiet on his own. You stay put here.”

  “No!” she whispered, grabbing for his wrist but missing. “The trees are where someone would hide.”

  He ignored her protest. Keeping low, he darted up into the trees. It took him only a second to see the back window over the kitchen sink had been completely broken and that a wooden ladder lay on the ground under it.

  “Call the cops!” he yelled to Tara. “Tell them someone broke into the house. I’m going in.”

  “No, Nick, wait!” she cried, but then he could hear her on the phone. The fact that the ladder lay on the ground made him believe their invader had come and gone. Whatever had been taken from inside, it was Beamer he was most worried about. The dog couldn’t be lost, too, not like Clark and Tony in Afghanistan and Tara’s daughter here.

  He jammed his key so hard in the back door he almost broke it off. “Beamer? Beamer boy?” he cried as he slammed the door open and thudded up the stairs. No sounds whatsoever. The dog evidently wasn’t locked up somewhere. If someone had tried to take him, Beamer was used to obeying commands. The doors had been locked, but that didn’t mean someone hadn’t just gone in the window then out a door, dragging the dog.

  Nick tore through the great room, scanning the floor, then into the kitchen where glass, glittering in a shaft of afternoon sun, lay shattered over the countertop and floor. Below the sink, in a smear of blood, Beamer lay unmoving.

  Tara’s panicked call to the police surprised her, and not just because they answered immediately and were on their way. With adrenaline pounding through her, and with the house and trees nearby, she suddenly recalled phoning the police for help when Clay had held Claire and killed Alex. The sight of her friend tied to a chair in the kitchen leaped at her. Others had told her about that day, but she saw it now, even as she tore around the house to follow Nick inside.

  She rushed in, expecting to see the place vandalized or torn up. But the main room looked normal, untouched. Was this just a warning to them to lay off their search for a
nswers about her baby? But once again, how would anyone know for sure she had been driven to avenge her baby’s death?

  She gasped when she came into the kitchen. Nick knelt in shards of glass on the floor with Beamer in his arms, trying to hold him up so his dangling feet hit the floor. The Lab looked limp and lifeless.

  Her feet crunched glass; she almost slipped as she ran to them, and then saw blood. “Has he been shot?”

  “Cut by glass, drugged. I thought he was gone. Can you help me? He’s got to move.”

  “Thank God, he’s alive!”

  But Beamer was dead weight at first. Tara moved his legs while Nick held him up. The dog’s tongue lolled from his mouth, and his eyes were dilated. He breathed in shallow rasps.

  “Nick, we’ve got to get him to a vet.”

  “I know one who makes house calls, but I’ll need the phone book. Maybe I can get him to drop everything and come up here.”

  “I’ll get the number,” she said and stood. “Oh—there’s a gnawed bone with icky-looking meat on it over here. Not ours.”

  “That must be how they—Marcie, whoever—took Beamer out of commission. I swear, I’m gonna kill somebody.”

  “She may be unaccounted for, but she did know we’d be in Evergreen this morning—at her request.”

  “Don’t touch stuff. Maybe the police can take fingerprints.”

  As Nick dialed the number she read him, Tara could hear the distant wail of a siren. For the first time, she feared for her work in her office and went down the hall to check, peeking first in Claire’s room. Nothing amiss there. But in the bathroom, the medicine cabinet door gaped open and the shelves had been shoved clear. Boxes of bandages and plastic bottles cluttered the floor, as if someone had been madly looking for drugs. Drugs, when they’d drugged poor Beamer?

  In her office, things looked intact, her file drawers not jimmied, her PCs in place. She’d have to check her bedroom for the extra cash she kept there. Surely, someone hadn’t broken in just to hurt Beamer.