Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “I said, someone must have followed her and grabbed her,” Jack repeated.

  “Don’t go jumping to conclusions.” Frank walked back through the meadow to where Jack and Earl stood. “Stranger abductions are actually very rare. And there’s no sign of a struggle. That’s a good thing.” He didn’t add that an abductor would hardly be likely to order Janelle to walk fifteen feet away from him to put her can behind a bush.

  “But if it’s not that—” Jack began to protest, but Frank held up his hand for silence.

  “Let’s just take one step at a time. Someone’s bound to have seen something.” And Janelle’s friends might know something they weren’t telling her father. If she was up to something, the friends might be covering for her. He’d check it out, but there was no point in getting Jack riled up again.

  Frank got some yellow tape from the patrol car and roped off the area around the gas can. He marked exactly where the can sat, then put a stick under the handle to carry it. “Who lives over there?” Frank pointed to a small house on the other side of the street as he put the gas can in the patrol car trunk. Perched on the side of a hill and painted dark green, the small house was barely visible through the trees.

  “Old man Lambert,” Jack answered, with a certain disgust in his voice.

  Frank glanced at Earl.

  “He’s blind,” came the clarification.

  “All right then, let’s go talk to Al,” Frank said.

  Al Jewinski was a man of very little imagination, except for when it came to diagnosing the source of strange rattlings under car hoods. He emerged from his garage as soon as the patrol car pulled in and seemed surprised to hear they had not come to buy gas.

  Al began to repeat what he had told Jack. “Janelle got here at eleven forty-five. I know that for a fact, because I made a note of the time so I’d know how much to charge for the labor on that transmission job.” He nodded toward a car up on the lift in the garage. “I got her gas and a candy bar—she was a nickel short but I told her she could owe it to me—and she left.”

  So Janelle had been penniless at the time of her disappearance. That made running away seem less likely, but Frank asked the next question anyway. “Did she seem like her usual self? Was she nervous or excited?”

  Al’s dim gray eyes grew dimmer, and he hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his dirty green work pants. “No, she was friendly, just like always.”

  “You said you saw her walk away until she turned onto Stony Brook,” Frank prompted him.

  “Yeah. I watched her walking while I was filling a car.”

  “You had another customer right after Janelle? You didn’t tell me that!” Jack said.

  “You didn’t ask,” Al replied, straightening his angular frame from its perpetual hunch.

  “Who was it? Anyone you recognized?” Frank asked.

  “I’m thinking, I’m thinking. I get a lot of customers in a day.”

  This seemed unlikely, given the remote location of the Sunoco station, but Frank supposed that when you moved as slowly and thought as slowly as Al, four or five customers filled up your day quite smartly.

  “What kind of car was it?” Earl asked, thinking rightly, for once, that Al had a better memory for makes and models than for names and faces.

  “A green Ford Taurus—that’s right, it was Joan Haddon’s car,” Al proclaimed.

  “And which way did she pull out?” Frank asked.

  Al looked puzzled again.

  “Did she go off in the same direction as Janelle?”

  “Oh. Oh, yes she did. She turned right.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere,” Frank said as he put the car into gear, leaving the dazed Al to ponder their departure. “Where would we find Joan Haddon this time of day?”

  “She works over at Mr. Foley’s real estate agency,” Earl said. “It’s not five yet. She’s probably still there.”

  When Frank pulled up to the small frame bungalow that Mr. Foley had converted into an office, the green Taurus was parked out front. Working for Mr. Foley for twenty years had given Joan an unflappable disposition, so she seemed unsurprised to see Frank, Jack, and Earl troop into her office at the end of a working day. “What can I do for you gentlemen?” she asked.

  “Did you see my daughter this afternoon walking on Stony Brook Road?”

  “Why, yes I did. I offered her a ride.”

  Relief passed through Jack’s body like a liberating army. His eyes lit up, his shoulders unknotted, and his posture straightened now that he knew that Janelle had merely been driven somewhere by kind, familiar Joan Haddon.

  “Where did you take her?”

  “No place.”

  “What do you mean?” Jack shouted, leaning over Joan’s keyboard, his anger returning as fast as it had dissipated.

  Joan used her desk chair to roll away from him. “I mean she turned me down. What’s going on here?”

  Frank pushed Jack gently into a chair. “No one’s seen Janelle since around noontime, and Jack’s getting worried. Can you just tell me exactly what you and Janelle said to each other?”

  “Sure. I had filled up at Al’s, and then as I turned onto Stony Brook Road I saw Janelle walking along, carrying a can of gas. So I stopped and asked her if she wanted a ride home. She said it was a nice day and she needed the exercise. She thanked me and I drove off.”

  “Did she seem insistent that you not take her, like she had someplace else to go?” Frank asked.

  “No. She just seemed like she was enjoying being outside now that the weather’s finally nice.”

  “Where were you going?” Frank asked.

  “Out to the Eggerts’ cottage on Long Lake. They’re coming up this weekend, and I had to make sure everything was ready for them.”

  “Did you see anyone behind you as you drove away?”

  “No one that I noticed. I came back the same way about an hour later,” Joan continued. “I didn’t see her anywhere along the road then.”

  Looking at their worried faces, Joan, too, knit her brow. The she gave herself a little shake, as if to physically dispel the anxiety creeping over them all. “Kids lose track of time. She probably went over to a friend’s house.” The men turned to file out and Joan followed them to the door.

  “My Heather did that to me once. Two hours late from school. I was worried sick. Turned out it was cheerleader tryouts and she never mentioned it.” Her voice trailed off as she stood in the door and watched them get into the patrol car. “Try looking at the baseball diamond,” she called as they pulled away. “They all hang out at the baseball diamond.”

  But Janelle was not at the baseball diamond. Nor was she at the library, Malone’s diner, or the Teen Center of the Presbyterian Church. As each place was checked without success, Frank felt a dread rising in his throat. The frenetic activity brought to mind the case of little Ricky Balsam. The case he couldn’t close; the case that had precipitated his “retirement” from the Kansas City force and led him here to lie in wait for speeders on Route 9, investigate a few break-ins at vacation homes, and calm the occasional domestic dispute.

  It was nearly two years now, but not a day went by when thoughts of what he should have done, what he should have known, didn’t plague him. Eleven-year-old Ricky Balsam had left his home in a quiet neighborhood in Kansas City one afternoon, selling candy bars to raise money for his soccer league. When dinner came and went with no word from Ricky, his parents had called the police. Intensive searches and house-to-house questioning had turned up only one clue: an elderly woman reported buying a candy bar from Ricky at two-thirty, just as her favorite soap opera came on the air. Then the trail went cold.

  Frank still remembered the faces of Ricky’s parents when, about six weeks after the disappearance, he went to their home to tell them that hunters had found Ricky’s candy order form. The mother’s face had lit up, certain that this was good news. But the father had looked deep into Frank’s eyes and let out a low moan that built into a keening wail
. The next day, searchers found Ricky’s decomposed body buried under some leaves in the same area. Frank had investigated the case for what it so obviously was: an abduction and murder. And he had been wrong, so wrong….

  Frank tried to push from his mind any thoughts that the Janelle Harvey case would turn out the same way. It couldn’t.

  He wouldn’t let it.

  Not again.

  2

  BY DINNERTIME word of Janelle’s disappearance had spread throughout town, and friends and neighbors turned out in scores on the green in front of the Town Office, waiting for their orders.

  “It’s one of them pedal-files that snatched her,” Augie Enright opined to anyone who would listen. “They look normal, but they get these uncontrollable urges.”

  “Shut up, Augie,” hissed Lydia Barton. “We’ll find that girl safe and sound.” Lydia’s opinion carried some weight, but still, a current of fear coursed through the crowd, and Augie found plenty of sympathetic ears for his theories until Frank’s emergence from his office stilled all the murmuring.

  Frank walked up the steps of the gazebo in the center of the green and gazed out at the anxious, upturned faces before him. He could almost feel their fear and worry transfer itself to his shoulders. Here, take this. Fix it and make everything all right again. He didn’t want to let them down. They had done a lot for him, without even realizing it. Given him a place to go every morning, things to do, words to say at a time when he’d felt that the very core of himself had crumbled away. When suddenly he had found he was no longer a husband, no longer a detective commander.

  He wanted to show Trout Run he could do what they’d hired him to do—keep them safe. But he wasn’t sure it was within his power. All afternoon he’d played out best-case and worst-case scenarios in his mind. The best case was that Janelle had run away, but that was beginning to look less and less likely. It wasn’t that easy to run away from Trout Run—not without a lot of planning. The nearest train station was forty miles east in Essex, and the Trailways bus stopped just once each day in Keene Valley, twenty miles to the south. He’d checked both—no Janelle. That she could have hitchhiked off with a stranger without a penny in her pocket seemed extremely improbable. But teenagers were impulsive, and if she had been angry or distraught she might have set off without thinking what her next step would be.

  Was Janelle the impetuous type? It was too early for him to know. In these frantic hours since her disappearance, no one had anything but kind words to say. Janelle was a wonderful girl. Jack was a wonderful father. Everything about their life was wonderful, wonderful. With time he might turn up a different story, but right now it didn’t seem that Janelle had any reason to run away.

  So, the worst-case scenarios won out. First, the theory everyone here probably believed: that Janelle had been abducted by a stranger—a sexual predator or serial killer. If that were true, she might well be dead already. And searching for her killer—a person with no link to his victim or logical motive—would be like searching for the proverbial needle in the haystack. He might never make an arrest, might never even find her body. He saw nothing but grief and failure for everyone if Janelle had been abducted by a stranger.

  The alternative was both better, and much worse: Janelle had gone off with someone she knew, and for whatever reason, could not—or would not—come back. That scenario offered the possibility that Janelle was still alive and could be rescued if they found her fast enough. Even if she were dead, Frank was confident he could uncover any killer who knew his victim. So that kind of case could be solved—but at what cost?

  Frank looked out at the crowd before him, supposedly his allies, here to offer him every assistance. What would happen if they realized he suspected one of their own? Would they fight him every step of the way? Would they turn on him, then turn him out? He’d lost his last job by failing; he might lose this one by succeeding.

  But right now, Trout Run had turned out to search for Janelle, and Frank had to let them do it. So with no preamble, he began barking out orders.

  “Joe, Augie, Dave—I want you to take your pickups and drive all the back roads between here and Verona. Look for any vehicles pulled off the road. It’s possible that Janelle could be trying to make it back home.

  “Ned, Vinnie, George,” Frank called on some of the younger men in the group. “Take these flashlights—it’ll be getting dark soon—and walk the whole length of Stony Brook from where Janelle disappeared to the bridge. Look for any signs of her clothes or other belongings.” What he didn’t say was, “Look for signs of a shallow grave.” He wouldn’t shout that out in front of the crowd, not with Jack pacing anxiously beside him. Tomorrow, if Janelle still hadn’t been found, he would search the meadow and brook again.

  “Ladies, I want you to divide the phone book between you and call every family in Trout Run, Verona, and Johnsonburg,” Frank told a group of women that included Janelle’s Aunt Dorothy and Joan Haddon. “Ask if they’ve seen Janelle, of course, but also ask if they were anywhere in the vicinity of Stony Brook Road around noon. Write down the name of anyone who says they were, and I’ll go talk to them. They may have seen something important without realizing it.”

  A group of teenagers milled on the fringe of the crowd, not certain whether they were considered part of the problem or part of the solution. Frank recognized most of them—he’d spent the latter half of the afternoon talking to all the kids Jack had identified as Janelle’s closest friends as well as her boyfriend, Craig Gadshaltz. He’d interviewed them separately, and they had been remarkably consistent in their answers. No one had seen or spoken to Janelle since the night before, when most of them had gone out for pizza following the baseball game. Janelle had been her usual self—not moody or nervous. She had not mentioned any special plans for today. He didn’t get the sense that any of them were covering for her. They’d all seemed so ingenuous, so awed that they were being questioned in a disappearance.

  The boyfriend, Craig, had seemed bewildered and worried. Frank hadn’t been able to tell if the boy was holding something back, or if it was just typical teenage inarticulateness that made him so quiet.

  Now Frank could see that some of the girls had been crying. They clung to one another, clutching twisted tissues in their hands. Occasionally one of the boys offered a clumsy hug in consolation.

  “Hey, guys!” Frank shouted, waving them closer. “I want you all to drive over to Lake Placid and show Janelle’s picture around in all the pizza joints and ice cream parlors and other places kids hang out. Show her picture to kids you don’t know—someone may have seen her there.”

  “But Janelle never—” One of the girls, he thought her name was Kim, started to protest, but the others overruled her.

  “C’mon—divide up. Craig and me can drive,” a tall boy named Jerry took charge, and the others followed.

  Frank noticed that Janelle’s cousin Tommy was not among the teenagers, nor was the boy with Dorothy and Jack. The absence might not have registered, if not for the fact that his interview with Tommy that afternoon had been so odd. He’d found Janelle’s cousin hammering away in the barn behind Jack’s house, and the kid would’ve kept pounding through their conversation if Frank hadn’t asked him to stop. He soon understood why Jack had told him not to waste his time talking to Tommy. All Frank’s questions about Janelle’s possible whereabouts were met with a resolute blankness and a slow shake of the head.

  Finally, Tommy had spoken. “Uncle Jack’s always up Janelle’s ass. She probably just wants a little time to herself.” And then he added, “When I go off, no one calls the cops to look for me.”

  By now Tommy must realize that Janelle hadn’t just slipped off for a little private time, but he hadn’t joined the search. Was he simply jealous of all the attention being shown his cousin, or was there something more there? Frank didn’t have time to worry about it now.

  “Earl, I want you and…” He scanned the crowd, looking for someone who could handle authority. Relucta
ntly, he settled on a man he didn’t personally like, but whom he knew could be trusted. “…Clyde Stevenson to run a roadblock on the main road to Lake Placid. Stop every car and show them Janelle’s picture.”

  Jack Harvey turned to go off with Clyde and Earl, but Frank laid a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Jack, you come back to the office with me.”

  “But I’d rather help Clyde with the roadblock. That seems like the best bet.”

  “No, I need you with me,” Frank insisted. He nodded to Clyde and Earl to get them moving, then led Jack, still protesting, back to the Town Office.

  “We’ve been together all day—you know everything I know,” Jack said. “I want to be doing something to find Janelle.”

  “I understand,” Frank answered as they walked into his office. “But if some news comes in, it’ll be best to have you right here.”

  Jack tensed. “You mean if they find her body, you want to keep me from doing anything crazy.” It was not what Frank had meant, but he was glad Jack had leaped to that conclusion. The truth—that Jack must still be considered a suspect—would have upset the distraught father even more.

  “You’ve seen a lot of this stuff where you come from, haven’t you?” Jack continued. “You know she’s dead.” His voice cracked, and he didn’t bother to hide his tears.

  “I don’t think that at all,” Frank lied. “It’s only been a few hours. We’ll find her.” But you might not like how we do it.

  Jack sprawled in the hard wooden chair across from Frank’s desk, staring up at the water-stained ceiling, but his eyes were focused on something only he could see. “Janelle is more than a daughter to me. She’s my life. We did everything together. Since I lost Rosemary, Janelle is all I have.” He slumped forward, cradling his head in his hands. “This can’t be happening. Not to us. Not here.”