“I don’t want you walking by yourself.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“You don’t know what kind of people may target you. If people know that you’re looking into this… look what happened to Joshua. I don’t want you getting snatched or hurt.”
“Do you need the truck?”
Terry sighed and looked at the sheriff. “Can I hitch a ride with you?”
“Of course.”
“Okay.” Terry nodded at Erin. “I’ll leave it with you. But still don’t leave it too late, please. And maybe… let me know when you’re leaving here and have Vic and Willie watching for you to get home.”
“Are you really that worried?”
Terry’s brows drew down. “Of course I am.”
She again felt herself blushing. She stood up and kissed him goodbye. “I won’t stay too long. And you take care of yourself. You can’t pull an all-nighter like you used to. I don’t want your head getting worse again…”
He nodded. He was probably embarrassed at her saying so in front of the sheriff and Mary Lou. Men wanted to look strong and invulnerable. Especially a police officer like Terry. So much of his self-worth was tied up in being the protector. Not someone who could fall prey to illness or injury. She shrugged an apology and sat back down, letting him go without any more fuss.
She and Mary Lou watched the two men leave. Mary Lou turned back to Erin, eyes narrow. “Was there something else…?”
Erin pulled the folded newspaper out of her purse. “I have the article here. I don’t know if it will help, but…” She unfolded it, spreading it across her knees. “Okay. It has the names of the winners in both categories. I guess we start there.”
“Who were they?” Mary Lou leaned forward.
Even though Erin didn’t know all of them, Mary Lou had lived her whole life in Bald Eagle Falls. She would know not only the people, but their families and their histories. Sheriff Wilmot and Terry could conduct their background checks, but they wouldn’t know the mountain’s history like she did.
“Okay. Here we go. The first prize in beverages was Eugene Bath. He’s the one who made that carbonated mint tea. It was actually really good.”
Mary Lou just looked at her.
“Right. And then Bella Prost.”
Mary Lou closed her eyes, thinking about Bella.
“I really don’t think it could be her,” Erin said. “I work with her, and… she’s just not that kind of person. She liked Joshua. She wouldn’t have done anything to hurt him, even if it did mean losing her prize and people thinking that she participated in something underhanded. She just wouldn’t.”
“I make it a policy not to assume that children will follow the examples of their parents and make the same good choices—or bad ones—that their parents would make.” She met Erin’s eyes. “I think you’re right about Bella. I don’t think the girl has a mean bone in her body.”
Erin nodded, relieved. “She said that Campbell and Joshua never bullied her like some of the other kids at school. She thought they were both really nice boys. I’ve never heard her say anything against them, and I just don’t think she would do anything to hurt Joshua.”
“Who else?”
“Louisa David. She’s the one who got third place after Clayton was disqualified. She made this really good mango fizz. Like a mango lassi, but fizzy…”
Mary Lou nodded.
Erin wasn’t sure why she kept babbling. What did Mary Lou care about what kind of drink Louisa had won third prize for? Or even what Bella had said about Campbell and Joshua? Those things didn’t matter.
“Louisa is a young woman, like you,” Mary Lou said after some consideration. “Her voice would have the same timbre. Again, more of Tennessee in her accent. But that’s true of pretty much anyone around here.”
“Matt at the Quiki said that she probably did have more of a Tennessee accent than me. So that’s okay. Do you know anything else about her?”
“Her people have been around here for a long time. I’ve never heard much about Louisa. Graduated school, got married, had a few kids. But nothing… exceptional. Not someone who I think had a lot of ambition.”
Erin remembered Charley babbling about Beryl’s ambition while she had a concussion. Beryl had wanted to be something. She wanted to be famous for her recipe book, for her cooking, she wanted to start up her own restaurant. She had used all of her influence to get the opportunities that she wanted. Louisa sounded about as far from Beryl as she could be. Erin couldn’t picture a woman her age with young children making the trek from Whitewater to Bald Eagle Falls in the middle of the night to kidnap a young man. And then what? Where would she stash him? How would she look after him in between all of her other commitments? Or would she?
She could always have an accomplice. Her husband, probably. He could have been the one to kidnap Joshua, and was holding him in a cabin in the woods somewhere that no one knew about.
But it didn’t feel right.
“So that’s all of the soft drink winners. Then it’s the ice cream winners.”
Mary Lou fiddled with her teacup, empty or cold by now. She waited for Erin to continue. She must have heard who the winners were at the time, but a thing like having her son abducted could certainly have erased that knowledge from her memory.
“Doc Edmunds won first place.”
“I remember hearing that,” Mary Lou said, the corner of her mouth lifting in just a hint of a smile. “I imagine he’ll be using his money to rebuild the veterinary office. He’ll probably add on a full-service animal shelter.”
“Probably,” Erin agreed. “And if we’re only looking at women, we can probably skip over him.”
“He has a nurse-receptionist there. And he has a daughter, though she moved away a long time ago. I can’t imagine she would come back here to kidnap Joshua because she wants the prize money. She’d have to get rid of her father before she would inherit it.”
“Do you think we should look into Sarah, the receptionist?”
Mary Lou rubbed her eyes. How much sleep had she gotten over the past week? Probably not very much.
“No, not yet. She’s too many steps removed. Maybe she has a burning desire to work at a fancier vet office or to open an animal shelter, but I doubt it.”
Erin went on to the next name on the list. “The last two are both women. Deidre Robinson and Hannah Clark.”
Mary Lou sighed. “Does that mean it has to be one of those two, or that we’re on the wrong trail? Do we really think that one of the prizewinners took Joshua? Because she didn’t want to lose her money?”
“I don’t know. But if it was related to the contest, if they really were laundering money, then these are the names we have to work with. I don’t know all of the people who worked with Chef Kirschoff or for the sponsors. I met a few people in Whitewater…” Erin let her mind do a quick review of the people who had worked on the contest. “There was a woman who acted as a tour guide, telling us about Whitewater and its storied history… but I don’t think she was even from there, I think she was someone with Chef Kirschoff. She wouldn’t have known where to find Joshua. She would have had to come back here from… wherever they went to next.”
“I haven’t noticed anyone strange around town. Any outsiders, I mean,” Mary Lou said. “It’s all been very quiet since the contest ended. Like everyone was taking a breath.”
“I knew a few of the people at the hotel. And the other judge that they brought in, Lara Gross.”
“Lara Gross.”
Erin waited to see what Mary Lou thought of her. Mary Lou shook her head. She wasn’t going to magically come up with the answer.
“Deidre Robinson. Hannah Clark. Lara Gross. Is it one of them?”
Mary Lou covered her face with both hands. She rubbed her face briskly and palmed her eyes and sat there for a minute with them covered.
“Do you know them?” Erin asked.
“Deidre Robinson. Is that the mother or the daughter?”
<
br /> Erin looked down at the newspaper. They hadn’t included pictures of everyone. There had been too much else of interest. Beryl’s death, the explosion at the restaurant, Clayton’s arrest. Who wanted to see the faces of the prizewinners? But Erin had seen them at the hotel when she and Vic had gone back. There had been posters with pictures of all of the prizewinners. If Erin could just access them in her memory.
“I think… oh, it’s hard to be sure. I think that Deidre was an older woman. Grandma type. White hair.”
“The mother, then. She wouldn’t be able to sound like you on the phone.”
“No. Probably not. I should check, though…” Erin pulled out her phone and did a web search to find the pictures of the prizewinners. There had to be promotional pictures of them online. The first couple of searches that she tried didn’t bring up any results.
“What is it?” Mary Lou asked.
“I can’t get anything…”
“No service? It can be spotty out here.”
“No, I mean… my searches aren’t producing any results. I’m looking for the contest results, but searching the name of the contest doesn’t bring anything up.”
Mary Lou shrugged. “That’s not surprising, is it?”
“Well… yes, it is. All of the publicity that they did, and none of that got posted online? No summary of events or promotional flyers for the contest?”
“It was all done locally. Not on the internet. People in these parts, they’re a close community. Posters go up at the library and town hall. Or in people’s shop windows. In the weekly newspaper or the penny saver. We don’t go looking for that kind of thing online.” She gave a little laugh. “Not us old folks, anyway.”
“I knew the newspaper wasn’t online, but nothing? They didn’t put anything online? I didn’t even know that was possible.” Erin switched over to one of her social networks and did a search there. People must have posted pictures and tweeted and shared the results on social media. At least the young people, even if the older ones weren’t into social media.
But the results were sparse, and she didn’t find any pictures of Deidre Robinson. Erin switched over and searched for Hannah Clark. More results for her. Social media profiles. Some pictures of her with a bowl of the ice cream she had made, smiling sunnily at the camera. Erin searched for Lara Gross. She had professional headshots on her company website, her work history on LinkedIn, and all of the other things that Erin would have expected.
“I guess Deidre just doesn’t have any social media,” she said.
Mary Lou nodded, not surprised.
And Erin shouldn’t have been surprised either. There were plenty of white-haired grandma types who didn’t have social media accounts. They hadn’t grown up on computers. Many had never learned to do anything on the internet but read their mail, if that. Maybe just texts on their phones. If they had smartphones and not an old flip phone like the sheriff.
But no social media? No one else had posted pictures of her on their accounts either? No one in her family had written about granny winning a big cash prize in the cooking contest?
No one?
Chapter 40
“This doesn’t feel right,” Erin said. “You said that she has a daughter?”
“Yes… oh, you’re taxing my memory if you expect me to be able to remember that. She would have been my age. But we didn’t go to school together.”
“And she was in Whitewater, so she wouldn’t be in your school yearbook.”
“No.”
Then Mary Lou raised her hand in a ‘wait’ gesture. Her brows drew together.
“Yes.”
“Yes?”
Mary Lou got up. She spun in a slow circle. “Where did I put those? I don’t know if I ever even unpacked them after we moved here.”
She hadn’t always lived there. Erin had forgotten that the house was just a rental. Mary Lou and her family had lost everything in the financial disaster involving Angela Plaint. Including their house. It was really remarkable that Mary Lou hadn’t held a bigger grudge against Angela.
“I think… in the attic,” Mary Lou decided. She started toward the stairs.
“Do you need help?” Erin asked, standing, unsure what to do.
“No, no. There are actually stairs. No messing about with ladders.”
Erin sat back down. She watched Mary Lou go up the first flight of the stairs and then she disappeared down the hall.
Erin held her breath. Were they going in the right direction? It could be completely wrong. It could be someone who worked for one of the big sponsors. Some of them were huge corporations with thousands of employees. How would they ever find a needle in a haystack like that?
She waited. She had figured it would only take Mary Lou a minute to go up to the attic and find the books she was looking for. But they were packed away. And there were probably a number of other boxes that had never been unpacked either. And maybe none of them labeled clearly.
Erin shifted her position, anxious. She wanted to be there, digging through the boxes, finding the books. Like when Erin had been looking for Clementine’s journal, back when she had first come to Bald Eagle Falls.
But Clementine’s journal hadn’t been in any of the storage boxes. It had been in the hands of Davis and Joelle. They had stolen it from Erin and used it for their own purposes.
What if someone had stolen the yearbooks? Maybe that’s what it had all been about. Not about kidnapping Joshua, but about getting into the attic to find the yearbooks.
But who would know that they were there, other than Mary Lou? How would anyone know that she hadn’t just thrown them out? Not everyone kept their high school yearbooks. The teenage years were a horrible time. Plenty of people didn’t want to remember anything about that time. Erin had never had a yearbook, and she wasn’t sure she would have wanted one. What good would it have been for her?
She could hear boxes being moved around up in the attic. So Mary Lou was still at it. She hadn’t passed out in the hot, dusty attic.
Erin forced herself to look down at her phone and to work through a few more searches. The time would go faster if she kept herself busy. Before she knew it, Mary Lou would be back down with the yearbooks for the years that she and Deidre’s daughter had been in high school.
She almost succeeded in distracting herself from Mary Lou’s search.
But not quite.
It was eerie how nothing was showing up on her searches for the contest or for any mentions or pictures of Deidre Robinson.
“Here we go,” Mary Lou announced, appearing at the top of the stairs. She held a small stack of hardcover books in her hands. She rejoined Erin, and they sat side-by-side on the couch so that they could look at the books together.
“So I was thinking, we didn’t go to the same schools, so there wouldn’t be any pictures of her in my yearbook. But I forgot about sports. Our school teams played against each other more than once. And she was on the basketball team.”
“Great! Good thinking.”
Mary Lou picked up one of the books and started to flip through it. She started at the back, which appeared to be the standard place to put pictures of the various winning teams. Her eyes searched for the girl that she remembered. Or nearly remembered.
“Ah-hah. Here she is.” Mary Lou put her face close to the page, taking in the small black and white picture. “Rosalie. Deidre’s daughter is Rosalie.”
“Rosalie,” Erin repeated. “Rosalie Robinson?”
“She probably went by her married name. It was… Brandon.” Mary Lou pointed at one of the boys’ teams. “She married Marcus Brandon, her high school sweetheart. Of course, they didn’t stay together, but she kept his name. Probably the only thing she ever got from him.”
“Okay. Rosalie Brandon.” Erin tapped it quickly into her phone. There would be hits for Rosalie Brandon. She still wasn’t young enough to have a huge social media presence, but it would be more than her white-haired mother. “Let’s have a look…”
Erin trailed off. Again, the results were sparse. There were other Rosalie Brandons, of course, but no Rosalie Brandon in Whitewater Junction, or one of the other small towns nearby.
“Why aren’t they on here?”
“Not everyone is,” Mary Lou said. “The only reason I have an account on any social media is so that my sons can share things with me or message me. But I figure… by the time they have kids, at least I’ll know where to find the baby pictures.” She laughed weakly.
The laugh quickly turned to a sober expression. She was clearly reconsidering whether either of the boys would ever have children for her to spoil and coo over their baby pictures. Campbell wasn’t exactly pursuing the path toward being a responsible father. And Joshua…
Erin tapped in a couple more searches. She tapped one of the results. “There’s an obituary.” She skimmed through it quickly, checking the names of the mother and ex-husband. “Did you know she had died?”
Mary Lou shook her head. “It’s been so long. I didn’t remember that, but I’m not surprised. It isn’t like we were ever friends or kept in touch. It just would have been one of those cases where you say, ‘Oh, I remember her, she was on the Whitewater girls’ basketball team the year we won the championship.’”
Erin nodded. “So this is a dead end.” Clearly, their kidnapper was not Rosalie Brandon, returned from the grave. That would be a whole other genre of mystery.
“I suppose it is. I thought for a minute that we were on to something. Like maybe somebody had intentionally erased information from the internet. You always hear that once something is uploaded to the internet, it can never be deleted, but that always seemed a little far-fetched to me.”
Erin continued to look at the obituary, her eyes unfocused. She blinked a couple of times. She was getting tired, and she knew that Mary Lou was tired too. They both needed to sleep. Maybe she would have a dream that would tell her where to look next. Her subconscious brain could work on the problem while she was sleeping. And then in the morning… they could figure it out. They could find Joshua.
The words in the obituary cleared when she blinked. Erin looked at it again. “Rosalie had a daughter?”
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