Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “The state police should just butt out if that’s all the more help they’re going to be,” Martha Feeson, passing by en route to the dairy case, interjected. “What do we need them here for?” She shot Frank a significant look before beginning her struggle with the perpetually jammed sliding door of the refrigerator.

  “First of all, I’m the one who asked the state police to join in the investigation. Earl and I can’t handle this by ourselves. And Lieutenant Meyerson doesn’t believe Janelle’s run away. We just have to talk to everyone Janelle knows. It’s all part of the investigation.”

  “You should be talking to—”

  The jangling of the string of bells hung on the front door interrupted Augie’s advice. Clyde Stevenson stood on the threshold of the Store and surveyed the scene before him.

  “If you’re all just sitting around here drinking coffee, you might just as well come across to the old flower shop and help us.” Although the florist business had been defunct for several years, the empty building was still known by its previous name. Normally unused, today a steady stream of human traffic flowed up and down the sloping wooden steps.

  “I noticed people going in and out over there. What are you up to, Clyde?” Bart asked.

  Frank knew full well what Clyde was doing and was sure everyone else in the Store did too, but they all waited to hear Clyde’s self-promotion.

  “Elinor has taken it upon herself to organize the concerned citizens of Trout Run to assist in the search for Janelle.” Clyde fixed Frank with a ferocious glare. “Ned will be back from Plattsburgh with the fliers shortly, and we’ll need volunteers”—his glare shifted to the members of the Coffee Club—“to hang them up. I just came in here to get some snacks for our workers.”

  “Well, that’s a real good project for your family, Clyde,” Frank said as he drained his coffee cup. “I think I’ll head back over there with you and check out your operation.” Although the little man irritated him mightily, Frank had learned that by maintaining an air of cheerful obtuseness to Clyde’s barbs, he could return the irritation in kind. He waited patiently while Clyde pored over the selection of boxed coffee cakes, then longer as he painstakingly counted out exact change for his purchase.

  Finally, Frank headed across the green with Clyde, remembering to shorten his customary stride so that the lumberyard owner wouldn’t have to trot to keep up. His courtesy did not extend to making small talk. It was no secret that in the search for a new police chief, Clyde had preferred a local man that he could control, as he had controlled Frank’s predecessor for the past twenty-five years. But in a rare show of independence, the other six members of the town council had resisted Clyde, arguing that they would never find anyone else with Frank’s experience. Besides, his pension from the Kansas City police made him available at an unbeatable price, a rationale that Frank suspected ultimately swayed the frugal little entrepreneur.

  There was no love lost between the men. Frank found Clyde absurd, and in his early days on the job had made some wisecracks that soon came back to haunt him. He had failed to appreciate how deeply Clyde Stevenson’s economic power pervaded the town. As owner of the lumberyard, he controlled three hundred jobs, and the income from those jobs in turn helped local businesses like the Store and Al’s Sunoco and Malone’s diner stay afloat. So while he sensed that no one else in town genuinely liked Clyde any better than he did, Frank had learned that he’d best keep his smart remarks to himself if he wanted to gain the respect and cooperation of the citizens of Trout Run.

  Silently, the two men entered the old flower shop, and the buzz from twenty workers’ voices immediately ceased. They all stared at one another for a moment until Ned spoke up. “Dad, Frank, is there some news?”

  “My only news is that the Store is out of donuts already so I had to get coffee cake.” Clyde turned to his companion. “Perhaps Chief Bennett here has something more relevant to tell us.”

  Forty eyes switched their focus from Clyde to Frank. Filled with fear and worry, they pleaded with him to tell them that this was all some horrible mistake, that Janelle was on her way home.

  Frank took a deep breath and started talking. “As many of you know, I called in the state police today, after Janelle had been missing overnight.” He rattled on about missing persons bulletins, roadblocks, and background checks. He could see that none of it brought the slightest reassurance to the volunteers, mostly mothers and grandmothers who no doubt believed their efforts at the old flower shop would somehow protect their own offspring from mortal danger.

  He wound up with an exhortation to keep up the good work, which sounded lame even to him. Ned Stevenson listened, then set his jaw in a disapproving clench and returned to pounding the keyboard of his laptop computer. He had recently returned to Trout Run from finishing his MBA at Wharton and never missed an opportunity to show his contempt for the provincialism that surrounded him.

  “Couldn’t one of the ladies do all that typing?” Clyde asked his son.

  “I’m setting up a database of appropriate places to send these fliers,” Ned replied without raising his head from his work. “I’ve downloaded a list of highway travelers’ information desks across the country and I’ve written a cover letter asking them to post our flier. By the time I teach anyone here how to do the mail merge, I can have it done myself.”

  Clearly flummoxed by his son’s jargon, Clyde retreated to the door but preserved his dignity with a parting shot, “Well, don’t spend all morning here. Remember, I want to review all the orders you’re placing with Calverton before you send them off.”

  A twitch of annoyance passed over Ned’s even-featured face. Neither Clyde nor his wife, Elinor, was particularly attractive, but their genes had combined to produce a son whose pleasant looks fell just a little short of handsome. His brown hair, styled carefully at a unisex salon in Lake Placid or maybe even Albany, concealed some incipient thinning at the crown. Sporty clothes chosen from catalogs made him look a little more rugged than he really was.

  “I’ll be up by eleven,” Ned replied without looking at his father.

  Frank supposed he should be grateful for the involvement of people like Clyde and the group he had rallied around him, but he could not shake the feeling that their efforts, and perhaps even his own, would be fruitless. Augie Enright had been surprisingly perceptive—this was one of the best spots on earth to hide a body.

  A burning pain gnawed below Frank’s rib cage as he crossed the green to his office. He hadn’t felt it since he had left Kansas City, and he took it as an ominous sign that this case was not going to resolve itself easily or soon. The doctor had called the pain irritable bowel syndrome, which was his way of justifying a $150 fee for telling Frank he had a bellyache that wouldn’t kill him and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone could do about it. Well, he was irritable all right. This wasn’t the kind of work he’d expected when he’d agreed to take the chief’s job in Trout Run. He didn’t need challenges anymore; just a little routine, a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

  Frank trudged past Meyerson’s state police car, parked beside the Trout Run patrol car. Maybe Lew would have some new information.

  “Didn’t they have any?” Doris, the town secretary, demanded as soon as Frank walked through the door.

  “Have any what?”

  “Coffee filters! When you went out for coffee I told you to pick some up!”

  Frank looked down at his hands, surprised to see that they were indeed empty, but Doris had already stormed off. “I’ll just have to use a paper towel. Don’t complain to me if there’s grounds in the pot,” she called back over her shoulder.

  Doris’s coffee was consistently dreadful, and he didn’t think a few loose grounds would affect her results one way or the other. Crossing the hall, he opened the heavy wooden door that separated the police department from the other town offices. Two heads snapped up to greet him.

  Earl, with his general air of a dog recently rescued from the pound, and Lieut
enant Meyerson, an ex-Marine of almost painful cleanliness, were not destined to be boon companions. They looked equally relieved to see Frank.

  “Bennett. Glad you’re here. Reports are in on every car stopped by troopers on the Northway Saturday and yesterday. Nothing suspicious. Ditto with the report on recently released sex offenders. No one in this area.”

  Frank nodded. “Thanks, Lew. I wasn’t really expecting much, but you can’t be too careful. What about you, Earl, did you talk to Dell Lambert’s niece?”

  Celia Lambert checked in on her blind uncle every day, so they had hoped she might have seen Janelle.

  “Yeah, I caught up with her this morning. She says she left old man Lambert’s by eleven-thirty yesterday. Didn’t notice anything. Now what do we do?”

  “It’s time to start reinterviewing Janelle’s friends and the neighbors, plus her teachers, coaches, everyone that knows her at all well.”

  “What’s the point of that?” Earl asked. “The friends and neighbors already told us everything they know. And what could her teachers possibly know about where Janelle was on Saturday?”

  Frank and Lew exchanged a glance.

  “What?” Earl asked. “What don’t I understand?”

  “We think Janelle must have known whoever she got in the car with,” Meyerson explained.

  “How can that be?”

  “Think, Earl,” Frank said. “Why was the gas can set behind that bush? It seems as if Janelle herself put it there—hers is the only footprint leading up to it. A kidnapper wouldn’t have ordered her to do that.”

  “But why does that mean she went off with someone she knew? She couldn’t have been planning on meeting someone and running away. She didn’t have any money with her. She didn’t even know she would have to go up to Al’s for gas.”

  Frank nodded. “That’s right. I struggled with that all yesterday. But what if she ran into someone she knew there on Stony Brook Road, and she didn’t want that person to drive her home, so she set the can back off the road, intending to come back for it later?”

  “Why wouldn’t she want the person to drive her home? Her dad was waiting for the gas,” Earl objected. “She could’ve dropped it off and gone back out again.”

  “Not if the person was someone her father didn’t approve of—someone she wasn’t supposed to be with,” Frank answered.

  Understanding spread across Earl’s face. “Oh, so you think she went off with him, thinking it would be for just a few minutes, and then she never came back!” Earl sat back, pleased with himself. Then distress replaced satisfaction on his pliable face. “Wait a minute! Then what happened? If she’s with someone she knows, why hasn’t she come back? She’s gotta know by now how worried everyone is.”

  Frank sat silent.

  Earl shoved his hair out of his eyes, as if seeing Frank more clearly would help him understand. “You mean you think this guy tied her up, or, or hurt her or something? Someone she knew? Someone from Trout Run? No way. No way!”

  Frank turned away from his assistant’s incredulous face. Unfortunately, there was a way. There were many ways. Making neat piles of the papers on his desk, he began speaking again, as if Earl had never mentioned a thing.

  “Yesterday, we asked people the basics. Now, we have to find out about her friends, her relationships. See if we can figure out who she knows who could be a suspect. Or see if there’s anything in her life that could possibly provide a motive. Before we get started, though, I want to stop by to see Jack Harvey.”

  “But if there’s someone Mr. Harvey doesn’t like Janelle hanging around with, wouldn’t he have told us that right away?” Earl protested.

  “Maybe, maybe not. Never be afraid to ask about the obvious—you may look foolish, but you look even more foolish if you don’t ask. Besides, there’s some rumbling over there at the Store that we’re not handling this thing right. I want to keep Jack posted on what we’re doing. Word will spread soon that we’re asking questions over at the school.”

  Meyerson compressed his thin lips until they virtually disappeared from his angular face. “We’re operating totally by the book, Frank. We don’t need his permission to investigate.”

  Frank’s voice took on an edge. “I’m not looking for permission. We just need to hold his hand a little.”

  Meyerson’s frown grew more pronounced.

  “Look, Lew, hand-holding is what the people of this town pay me for. If they wanted the state police code read to them for every incident, they could turn this office over to you boys, just like in Johnsonburg and Verona.”

  Lew gave a curt nod. “I’m going out to check on the K-9 teams. Talk to you later.”

  “What are you smirking at?” Frank asked as they listened to the front door of the Town Office slam. Earl quickly rearranged his expression as Frank continued. “Meyerson’s a good cop. He’s just a little too caught up with procedures—probably all that time he spent in the Marines. Estelle always said it was a good thing I pulled a high lottery number in the draft and never had to go to Vietnam. I probably would have been court-martialed for insubordination.”

  “What’s that?”

  Frank smiled. “Thinking you know more than your bosses.”

  “You don’t have a boss here.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Earl. I have to answer to the whole damn town.”

  As Frank walked up the Harveys’ back porch steps, through the screen door he could see Jack sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee and an untouched donut before him. Unshaven and gray-faced, he had the look of a man who’d been kept awake by torturous pain. The only relief morning had brought was that he was no longer obliged to lie in bed.

  Ardyth Munger and her sister-in-law, Grace, stood at the sink washing and drying dishes. Ceramic casseroles and foil-wrapped plates of all sizes covered the counter—the ladies of Trout Run responded to every crisis with an outpouring of lasagna, chicken divan, and oatmeal cookies.

  Frank knocked on the door and walked in without waiting for an invitation. Jack brightened.

  “Frank! What brings you out here? Have you heard something from the state police?

  Frank shook his head.

  “You’ve discovered a new clue?”

  “No, sorry. I just wanted to fill you in on what we’re doing.” Frank pulled a chair up to the heavy old oak kitchen table and glanced up at Ardyth and Grace. “Would you ladies mind giving us a few minutes?”

  “Of course, we were just finishing up. Grace, put that tuna noodle in the freezer. Jack, tell Dorothy to pop this lasagna in the oven for tonight—it just needs reheating. Or do you want me to tell her?” Ardyth asked.

  “No, no. I’ll remember. Thanks for coming.” Jack rose shakily to accept an awkward hug from Grace. “Tell everyone I appreciate all the food.”

  “It’s nothing. You let us know if there’s anything you need, anything at all, you hear?”

  The ladies left and Jack sat back down across from Frank. “Well?”

  “The state police have checked the status of recently released sex offenders—there’s no one in our area. Clyde’s organizing volunteers to post fliers with Janelle’s picture. And her description has been circulated nationwide. Now we’ll start interviewing Janelle’s teachers, friends—that sort of thing.”

  Jack’s calloused hands tightened around his mug. “But you already talked to her friends; what more do you need to ask them?”

  “We need to see if anything was going on in Janelle’s life. You know, figure out how she was thinking, who she was involved with…”

  “What’s that supposed to mean? She wasn’t ‘involved’ with anyone.”

  “Many times, in cases like this, someone the victim knows is mixed up in the disappearance. That’s why I have to take the time to really get to know your daughter.”

  Jack sat back in his chair and squinted at Frank through red-rimmed eyes. “What in God’s name are you talking about, man? You think someone from Trout Run kidnapped Janelle?” />
  Frank shook his head. “I just want you to understand that we’d be falling down on the job if we didn’t look into the possibility that this could be a local thing.”

  Jack leaped up from the table, sending his chipped coffee mug into a slow roll. “The people in this town have known Janelle since she was a baby—why, they’ve known me since I was baby! Maybe where you come from, people do terrible things to their neighbors, but not in Trout Run!”

  Frank watched Jack continue in a restless loop around the sunny, old-fashioned kitchen. He felt as if he were about to kick away a lame man’s crutch, but he took a deep breath and went on. “Jack, there’s something bothering me about the way Janelle seems to have walked over and put the gas can behind that bush—almost like she was setting it out of the way until she could come back and get it.”

  “She must’ve got tired. The can got too heavy for her, so she decided to walk home without it,” Jack said.

  “We found it only fifty yards beyond where Joan Haddon says she stopped to offer Janelle a ride. If she was energetic enough to turn down Joan’s offer, she wouldn’t have got so tired that she’d abandon the can in just fifty yards.”

  Jack opened his mouth as if to protest, but Frank didn’t give him the chance. “She might have gone for a ride with someone she knew,” he continued, “then intended to come back for the can and walk home. Now the question is, why wouldn’t she just let that friend drive her home? I’m thinking it’s because she knew it was someone you didn’t approve of.”

  “Didn’t approve of?” Jack sputtered. “There’s no one she knew that I don’t approve of! Janelle’s friends are all the nicest kids. They play sports, they’re in the church youth group. They have good clean fun together. Not like this crap you see on TV—drugs and guns and hanging around on street corners. You know there’s nothing like that here in Trout Run.”

  “I didn’t say it had to be someone from Trout Run—I said it might be someone she knew. Maybe someone she met in Lake Placid or Plattsburgh.”