The First Ladies Club Box Set

by J B Hawker

  “Maybe we could sing songs like we did around the campfire,” Dawn, huddled at Hope’s side, whispered.

  “Good idea!” Hope said, immediately beginning to sing the first song that popped into her head, “This Little Light of Mine.”

  The others gradually joined in and, finding that the singing did make them feel better, they began to vie with each other to suggest the next song to sing. They went through traditional camping songs, Sunday School tunes, songs from Broadway musicals, and even pop tunes in the next hour. No matter the desperation of their situation, Hope vetoed rap. She didn’t trust any song where she couldn’t understand the lyrics.

  Gradually, the singing dwindled as the children dropped off to sleep, bunched together like a litter of puppies for comfort and warmth.

  Determined to get her charges home in one piece, Hope forced herself to stay awake to keep watch.

  She opened the old rucksack, just for something to do, and her fingers brushed across small wrapped parcels of paper and several bundles like those she’d encountered on the floor.

  She spent the rest of the night puzzling over what these things might be and who had left them there. She was tempted to use the flashlight to check it out but decided not to take a chance of waking the tired children.

  She dozed off and on but was immediately alert as the first faint traces of sunlight began to dilute the absolute blackness within the vault and she was able to discern her surroundings.

  On the floor, in the middle of the room, a broken coffin was on its side leaning against the plinth.

  She thought this may have been the source of the crash they’d heard when squeezing into the vault the night before.

  Sprawling out of the open casket were two corpses, one mostly skeletonized with its arm extending across the floor, the finger bones crushed.

  Hope shuddered as she realized this was probably the bundle of twigs she had stepped on.

  She was sickened to see a more recent decedent lying beneath the older remains.

  A man with a bullet hole in his forehead sprawled amid a scattering of what she recognized from her military training as bricks of drugs.

  What had she dragged her campers into? She needed to get them out of there. Fast.

  Hope snatched up the chip bags, candy wrappers, and other evidence of their presence and stuffed them into the old rucksack, throwing it over her shoulder.

  She roused the kids from sleep, military style, rushing them out the door without giving them a chance to see their grisly temporary roommates.

  Ignoring the sleepy children’s protests, she hustled them across the soggy weeds of the cemetery and urged them into the trees.

  “Sun’s up. Time to get our bearings and hike out of here, gang!” she ordered. “Climb up this hill. There should be a good lookout point up there where we can reconnoiter. Come on! Hup! Hup!”

  “What’s got into her?” Aleeshia whispered to Ty’Nisha, who merely shrugged as they trudged up the rugged hill and into the woods.

  …

  Gideon was having trouble keeping focused on his presentation for the audience at his clergy conference. He was worried about Hope. When he’d tried to call her before breakfast, the call went straight to voice mail. He tried to tell himself she was simply busy and not checking her messages, but it worried him that she hadn’t called back all morning.

  He wrapped up his talk and left the podium, indifferent to the round of applause.

  He squeezed through the crowd, only briefly acknowledging the words of congratulations from those he passed.

  Once in his room, he called Hope again, got no response, and then threw his things into his suitcase and checked-out.

  The stop-and-go traffic out of Portland only added to his frustration.

  Fortunately, the storm from the night before had passed over and a watery sun was forcing itself through the parting clouds.

  Once out of the city, he was able to push his car up to the speed limit, wishing he could ignore the laws of the land, just for once, but knowing if he did, that would be the time he’d be caught. He shuddered to think of the example that would set for his congregation, especially as his recently delivered talk had centered on pastoral integrity and accountability.

  Using the hands-free feature on his phone, he called the church office. When the answering machine picked up, he remembered it was Saturday and Cookie wouldn’t be coming to work. She probably wouldn’t have been able to help him, anyway, he reasoned. If Hope wasn’t answering the phone, she certainly wasn’t calling the church to check in.

  Frustrated and feeling helpless, Gideon filled the remaining miles with fervent prayers.

  Chapter FOURTEEN

  Marjorie Merriweather looked up from her desk when Brian Morris walked into her office.

  “How did things go yesterday?” she asked.

  Brian sat down in the chair beside the desk before replying.

  “About as well as could be expected, I suppose,” he said. “Those little ones had bonded during their stay with the Jones woman. Probably out of some sort of primitive survival instinct. Anyway, they didn’t want to be separated from the baby. It almost broke my heart to hear them pleading to stay in the hospital with her while the doctors check her over.”

  Marjorie nodded with a grim smile. She’d had her heart broken more times than she could count in this job. Retirement looked better to her all the time.

  “What did the doctors think about the baby’s condition?” she asked.

  There was no point in commiserating with Brian. They both knew they had no recourse to separating this makeshift family. Toby’s birth mother had earned a chance for his return and Becky was going to a new foster home... one Marjorie had vetted personally. The children would be much better off, and they would soon forget this tragic episode in their lives.

  She hoped.

  “There were signs of neglect, naturally. Diaper rash, underweight, the usual. But it seems the older girl had kept the baby from more serious problems. From what the toddlers said, when she wasn’t at school, Dawn was the primary caregiver,” Brian said.

  “I’ve reported the neglect and abuse to the District Attorney. They should be picking up the Jones woman today,” Marjorie said. “I’ve already revoked her foster license.”

  “Good. That woman is a menace,” Brian said, getting up just as the phone on Marjorie’s desk rang.

  Marjorie answered the call, listened, and gestured for Brian to wait.

  Hanging up the phone, she shook her head.

  “That was the DA,” she said. “When they went to pick up Yvonne Jones she’d already run off. The house was empty, and her car was gone. He said it was hard to be sure in all the squalor, but the house didn’t look like she planned to return.”

  “Have they put out an alert for her?” Brian asked, frowning.

  “Yes. Let’s hope they find her soon. I’d hate for that woman to get away, now that we know what she’s been doing,” Marjorie said.

  “I’ll never be able to understand people who hurt kids,” Brian remarked as he left the office. “They should be locked up and never let out again.”

  Brian had a soft heart, Marjorie knew, but she had to admit that she agreed with him.

  …

  Sun shining through a gap in the motel room’s flimsy drapes hit Yvonne’s face and she woke up with a moan. Rolling over in the tangled sheets, she saw that she was alone.

  Her handsome cowboy, not nearly so handsome up close and not really a cowboy, had slipped away sometime in the night.

  She squinted against the light and turned her face back into the pillow, breathing in the sour odors.

  It took a few moments for her brain to clear enough to remember where she was... and more importantly, why she was here.

  Looking at the time on her cell phone, she gasped and slid off the bed onto the nasty green industrial carpet.

  It was already mid-morning and she’d planned to be across the California border by now.<
br />
  She gathered up her scattered clothing and shuffled into the tiny bathroom where she rinsed her mouth and splashed water onto her face.

  Yvonne returned her key to the motel office, poured herself a cup of complimentary coffee in the lobby, emptying half a dozen sugar packets into the weak brew, and hurried to her car. There was no time for breakfast.

  Despite her conviction that she was probably not being sought by the authorities, she wouldn’t feel safe until she was miles away in California’s Central Valley.

  …

  A black van bumped along a winding one-lane mountain road, the two men inside bouncing and swaying with the twists and turns of the vehicle on the poorly maintained road.

  “Man, this road is a piece of garbage,” Dwayne complained when they hit another deep pothole. “Can’t you drive around the holes?”

  Beto turned to glare at his companion, veering dangerously close to a steep drop-off.

  “Watch it! Are you trying to get us killed?” Dwayne shouted.

  Beto swerved back onto the road with an unintelligible snarl.

  “You don’t like it, you should have picked a better rendezvous spot,” he said after a few more miles of rough road.

  “I would have, if it was up to me. You know it was the big guys who chose the drop-off spot. I just hope that stupid punk, Biggie, took the stuff to the right place,” Dwayne replied. “He never said anything about this bad road.”

  “He didn’t say much, at all,” Beto agreed. “I’m thinkin’ maybe he took the stash and ran.”

  “He wouldn’t have the balls. He almost wet his pants when we scared him the other night.”

  “If the stuff’s not where it should be, he will have more than wet pants to worry about,” Beto growled. “How come he’s not answering his phone, anyway?”

  “He’s such an idiot, he probably lost it, or let his battery run down. We never should have used him,” Dwayne said.

  “I coulda told you that,” Beto nodded.

  The van passed through what had once been a thriving small town. Only the gray, windswept remains of a wooden storefront and a scattering of foundations and crumbling chimneys among the brambles and weeds showed the community ever existed.

  The road climbed past this ghost town, winding into the pines and evergreens of the higher elevation.

  A clearing appeared on one side of the road with a rough track leading off through a pair of sagging rusted metal gates.

  Beto took the turning into a derelict cemetery, bouncing over the uneven ground between clumps of thick vines and toppled headstones toward the mausoleum situated on a knoll at the far side of the clearing.

  At the foot of the hill, he stopped the van, hopped out and stood looking up at the crypt.

  “What a stupid place to stash the stuff,” he muttered.

  Dwayne stood beside Beto, gazing up at the tomb.

  “Who do you suppose was buried there? Must’ve been the local rich guy. It’s the only little house here,” Dwayne said.

  “Little house? Don’t be a fool. It’s a burial vault... hmm, maybe that’s why the bosses picked this spot. What’s a better place to keep something than a vault, eh? Like a safe or a bank vault, get it?” Beto replied.

  “Whatever. Let’s pick up the stuff and get out of here. This place gives me the creeps,” Dwayne said, trudging up towards the tomb.

  “Hey!” he said when he reached the top. “The lock’s busted!”

  Beto hurried up the hill and pulled the door open.

  “I see the bags,” he said, peering into the dimly lit space. “Go get the flashlight outta the van. We’d better check to be sure it’s all here.”

  Dwayne ran down to get the light, climbed back up to the crypt, and stepped inside, switching on the flashlight.

  “Oh, man!” he said when the light played across the broken casket with the two dead bodies spilling out. “That’s messed up,” he added, stumbling outside and retching into the weeds.

  Beto grabbed the flashlight and entered the crypt. He only glanced at the skeleton as he bent down to see if he could identify the more recently deceased.

  “Well, it isn’t Fat Boy, anyway,” he said.

  Moving the light around, he located the bags and dragged them out into the sunlight.

  “You ever seen that guy before?” he asked Dwayne, who shook his head and swallowed.

  “You got so upset, I figured he must be your long-lost lover or something,” Beto sneered.

  “I was just surprised, that’s all. Let’s get these bags back to the van,” Dwayne said, embarrassed.

  “We gotta do an inventory first if your delicate stomach can handle that.”

  The two drug dealers bent to the task and soon found that some of the product and money was not in the bags. Beto took the light back inside where he found some packets of drugs and a few bundles of cash. He brought them out and counted them, discovering that both money and drugs were still missing.

  The two men returned to the crypt, Dwayne averting his eyes from the bodies, as they made a careful search. When they stepped back into the sunshine, Dwayne held an orange shirt in his hand.

  “This is all that’s left in there,” he said, handing it to Beto.

  “This doesn’t look like it’s been in there very long,” he commented.

  “What are we gonna do?” Dwayne asked. “The bosses will think we’re holding out on them.”

  “I don’t know what happened in there, but this shirt has to mean something,” Beto said. “Maybe whoever has been dipping into our stuff left something else.”

  He began to pace among the weeds, scanning the ground and gazing into the surrounding woods.

  Dwayne stumbled as he searched the rough ground. Bending down, he discovered he’d tripped on Biggie’s discarded gun.

  “Look what I found!” he crowed.

  “That tells us how the dead guy copped it, but it doesn’t help us find our stolen stock and money,” Beto replied.

  Looking up toward the hilltop in frustration, he caught a glimpse of bright orange, exactly the color of the shirt in his hand.

  “Up there!” he cried.

  “Where?” Dwayne asked, looking in the direction of his friend’s pointing finger. “Oh, I see it. You think that’s whoever has our stuff?”

  “Who else?” Beto growled. “Come on, we’ve got to catch them. There’s got to be a road around the other side of this hill. Let’s go!”

  …

  The teenagers waited restlessly in a clearing on the mountainside while Hope searched for the best way out of the wilderness. From a rocky outcropping, she peered down at the derelict cemetery, thinking of the dead man with a shudder. She was grateful none of the children had seen him.

  Looking down, she was startled to see a black van parked near the tomb and two men coming out of the crypt.

  They seemed to be arguing and one of them had Jennifer’s shirt in his hand.

  Hope remembered the girl finding a dry shirt in her pack and saying she was changing clothes in the dark, warning everyone not to look her way. Apparently, she hadn’t bothered to return her wet shirt to her backpack.

  Hope watched the men talking and seeming to search for something. Then one of them looked up and pointed right at her!

  She looked down at her own shirt and guessed that the man must have seen the flash of orange through the trees.

  She couldn’t hear what these men were saying, but their gestures indicated that they were upset. A thrill of fear shot through Hope when she saw that one of the men held a gun.

  “Okay, troops, let’s get a move on!” she said, hurrying back to the group and leading them over the top of the ridge to begin the climb down.

  The way was rocky and muddy from the rains, so the going was slow as the youngsters slipped and slid down the hillside.

  “Are you sure this is the right way?” Aleeshia asked, looking at her muddy shoes.

  “We’re headed southwest, so we are sure to come out at
the highway, eventually. With any luck, we’ll find a road or some signs before we get that far. Keep on the lookout for an occupied house on the way. We might be able to call for someone to come and get us, so we don’t need to hike so far,” Hope replied.

  TyVon and Colton were ahead of the pack, as usual, hurtling down the hillside, hopping across rocks to avoid the swampy patches. Colton missed his footing, tumbled into the mud and rolled into TyVon before he could stop his momentum. The two boys continued to fall, all tangled together, until thumping into a stand of pine trees.

  Hope trotted down to them.

  “Are you guys okay?” she asked.

  Colton, lying atop his friend, looked up with a sheepish expression, saying, “I guess we were going a little too fast.”

  TyVon pushed Colton off and stood up, wiping at the mud on his knees.

  “I’m not hurt, no thanks to Klutzy here,” he said.

  “Good. We can’t afford to have any injuries, so you guys better stick with the group from here on out, okay?” Hope asked.

  The boys nodded and brushed each other off.

  Hope walked to a nearby promontory to plot the best route from their current point.

  She was elated to see a paved road not too many miles down the hillside. A paved road could mean traffic and a ride back to their van. Even as she watched, a car came into view and Hope started to jump and wave. When she recognized the black van from the cemetery, she stopped waving and crouched down low.

  She had no idea if those men were dangerous, but she remembered the money and drugs in the rucksack she’d found and suspected they might be connected.

  As soon as she’d seen what was in that bag, she’d gotten rid of it.

  She didn’t want anything to do with the drugs or tainted cash in the bag, so when she’d spied a burned-out tree stump, she’d used her knife to dig it out and shoved the bag into it, covering it with dirt and leaves.

  Could the men in the van be looking for their missing drugs and cash? The way they’d pointed at her after finding Jennifer’s shirt made her uneasy.

  If the van she’d just seen was theirs, they must be either leaving the area with the rest of their loot or else... and she shuddered to think it... they thought she had taken what was in the rucksack and they were searching for her... and the kids.