Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “I didn’t allow her to hang out there. She would just go to Placid or Plattsburgh to go shopping. She was always with her aunt or me—she was just learning to drive.”

  “Did she ever get any calls from someone you didn’t recognize, or act cagey about where she was going?” Frank persisted.

  “Are you suggesting that my daughter lied to me?” Color crept up Jack’s neck and suffused his cheeks.

  “Of course not. It’s just that you can’t expect a teenage girl to confide everything to her dad. My daughter certainly didn’t,” Frank answered.

  Jack leaned across the table until his face was inches from Frank’s. “I don’t know how you brought up your girl,” he growled. “But I brought up my daughter to tell the truth. Janelle is an angel. She never gave me one moment of trouble.”

  “We have to look at every angle, Jack.” Frank found a sponge on the counter and began mopping the puddle of spilled coffee on the table as he talked. “If Janelle was really abducted by some maniac, then I gotta tell you, there’s not much we can do.” Frank hesitated, but pushed on. “Maybe weeks or months or years from now, some hiker or park ranger will find her body. To be honest, there’s not much hope for Janelle if that’s what you think happened.”

  “What the hell does that mean—you’re just going to give up!”

  Frank continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “Crimes like that have no motive. Usually, the way we end up catching these serial killers is through some fluke. They get picked up for a traffic violation or something, and start boasting about what they’ve done.” Frank’s eyes hardened. “It’s not a pleasant thought, but if someone from around here was involved in her disappearance, our chances of catching the person are a lot better than if this was just some random act.”

  Jack sat and stared ahead impassively.

  Frank spoke quietly. “No one’s blaming you, Jack. No one’s saying you’re a bad father, that you weren’t watching out for her. I have to investigate it this way, whether you like it or not. It would just be easier with your support.”

  Jack let out a slight snort at this last remark. He remained silent for a long time, then finally said, almost inaudibly, “Go ahead and see what you can do.”

  “I’d like to start by looking at her bedroom again.”

  “You already did that on Saturday,” Jack protested. “Nothing’s missing. All her clothes are there and the ten dollars her aunt gave her for her birthday is still in the card.”

  “I know that. I’m looking for something else.”

  “What?”

  Frank shrugged. “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “All right.” Jack led him down the hall to Janelle’s room. “I haven’t touched anything.”

  The room looked as if Janelle had just stepped out of it. Three stuffed animals stood guard on the twin bed. A poster of four surly young men dressed in black—some rock group, Frank presumed—adorned one wall. The bulletin board was a jumble of cartoons and funny buttons, award ribbons for cheerleading and 4-H, and photos. One showed a laughing group of teenagers on the ski slopes at Whiteface Mountain. Another showed Janelle in a long pink dress with a ruffle at the bottom, holding the arm of a tall, thin boy who looked distinctly uncomfortable in his suit: Craig Gadschaltz, her boyfriend.

  Frank turned his attention to Janelle’s desk. Posted on the wall where she would stare directly at it if she were sitting at the desk was a square of heavy white paper covered in elaborate black script.

  “Isn’t that beautiful?” Jack asked proudly. “Janelle was teaching herself calligraphy. She did that all herself.”

  Frank nodded and bent to read the text:

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

  The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame! Despair! Solitude! These had been her teachers—stern and wild ones—and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.

  Frank raised his eyebrows. It seemed like a somber sentiment for a happy seventeen-year-old. On the desk he found a stack of index cards covered in Janelle’s round, even handwriting.

  “Those are for a paper she’s been writing for school. She spent a lot of time on it.” Jack still referred to his daughter in a disconcerting mix of the present and past tense.

  Next Frank examined the bookshelves. There he found a couple of current fashion magazines. He remembered their names from when Caroline was a teenager, but the stories advertised on the cover certainly seemed to have changed in ten years. “What’s sexy now!” one headline proclaimed. “The Shattered Love Life of Gwyneth Paltrow.” “Is Your Relationship Too Hot to Handle?” Frank picked the magazines up. Perhaps he should browse through them just to catch up on what young women were concerned about these days.

  In contrast, Janelle’s bookshelves were filled with reading material of a loftier nature. Janelle apparently had a compulsive streak, for the novels were arranged alphabetically by author. On the top of the waist-high bookcase, five books were set apart between brass bookends: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, The Portrait of a Lady, Anna Karenina, The Scarlet Letter, and Middlemarch. They meant nothing to him, and he wondered why Janelle had given them a place of honor.

  Finally Frank took a perfunctory look through the drawers and closet. His earlier search had revealed no diaries or letters, and none of Janelle’s clothes were missing. He turned to Jack. “I’d like to take the magazines, the note cards for the school report, and those five books there.”

  Jack shrugged, but didn’t object. Following Frank out of the house, he stood on the front porch. As Frank started up the car, Jack shouted something. “What was that?” Frank asked, sticking his head out the window.

  “I said thanks.”

  Frank drove slowly up the rutted drive. He didn’t know what to make of Jack’s abrupt mood swings. The man seemed genuinely distraught by Janelle’s disappearance, but then, Ricky Balsam’s father had been genuinely distraught, too. Distraught because he’d known all along that his son was dead. Was Jack responsible in some way for whatever had happened to Janelle? Or did he just blame himself, as all parents do, for everything from cavities to car crashes? Frank’s gut told him Jack was all right but his gut could no longer be trusted.

  The bark of the radio interrupted his train of thought. “Trout Run One, give your location.” The voice certainly did not belong to Doris. Despite repeated instructions on radio procedure, she always quavered, “Frank, Frank, can you hear me? Where are you?” It must be the state police dispatcher.

  “Trout Run One. I’m on Baxter Road headed north, over.”

  “Meet Lieutenant Meyerson on Stony Brook Road. The K-9 team has found a body.”

  Frank’s hands tightened on the wheel. So, it was to be a murder investigation after all.

  4

  FRANK ARRIVED MINUTES LATER to find Stony Brook Road mobbed with state police cars, dogs, and dog handlers. The center of activity seemed to be a stand of birches and low bushes directly down the hill from old man Lambert’s house. To Frank’s great annoyance, Earl had taken it upon himself to leave his post at the office and now stood making a great show of holding back a small group of local onlookers.

  “What are you doing here?” Frank snapped. Pushing through the crowd with Earl trailing after him, he located Lew Meyerson standing next to a blue tarp. Frank watched Earl’s eyes grow saucerlike as he registered what must be beneath the heavy plastic. Thank God the body was covered—he hadn’t even given a thought to the fact that Earl had never been present at the discovery of a corpse before.

  The trooper finished barking orders into a radio, then hung up as Frank and Earl approached. “Dogs were searching both sides of the road when they picked up a scent,” Meyerson said. “Bit of a surprise that this was what they found.”

  Frank lifted the corner of the tarp and heard Earl gasp as Dell Lambert’s eyes, sightless in death as they had been in life, looked up at them. Lambert’s frail, pajama-clad body lay curled on the
sloping ground, his head cocked at an angle that would have been natural only for an owl.

  “When did he die?” Frank asked.

  “I’d guess early this morning,” said Meyerson. “Rigor’s just beginning to set in. M.E. can’t get here for another forty-five minutes, but I’d say he broke his neck. There’s no blood.”

  “So he must’ve tumbled all the way down the hillside from the edge of his yard. I wonder what he was doing outside?” Frank said.

  Only a small square of lawn surrounded the house; trees, shrubs, and ivy covered the rest of the steep property as it ran down to the road. Years ago, some large stones had been set into the hillside to make steps through this woodsy area. The body lay at the foot of them. Frank began to climb, nodding his head to Meyerson to follow. “You stay here, Earl,” he said, and for once, Earl obeyed.

  The slope was steep enough to make Frank’s breath ragged by the time he reached the top, although he noticed with some irritation that Meyerson seemed unaffected. The last step, higher than the others, was part of a little retaining wall that had been built to extend and support the level lawn area.

  “The old man must’ve stepped off this edge and just kept rolling down,” Meyerson said.

  “I don’t like it, Lew,” Frank replied. “What would he be doing out here alone, early in the morning, still in his pajamas?”

  Meyerson shrugged. “He heard something. He wanted some fresh air. Old people all wake up early.”

  “But he knew the yard dropped off—that it would be dangerous for him,” Frank objected.

  “What are you getting at, Frank?” Meyerson sounded impatient. “Whatever the reason, he was out here and he tripped.”

  “Or…” Frank made a pushing motion with his hands.

  “Oh, come on. Why would you think that?”

  Both men turned to look down at Stony Brook Road. Even through the trees Frank could clearly see the meadow and the bush where Janelle had left her gas can. “A disappearance and a death in the same location less than twenty-four hours apart. I don’t believe in coincidences like that.”

  “But you interviewed him yourself. He was blind and hard of hearing. He wasn’t a witness to whatever happened to Janelle. Why look for trouble—you’ve got your hands full with this missing girl.”

  Frank turned and started walking toward Lambert’s house. Meyerson might be right, but it couldn’t hurt to stay open to all the possibilities. “What if whoever took Janelle noticed Lambert up here looking down at them, and came back and killed him?”

  “I thought we were working on the assumption that Janelle went off with someone she knew, in which case, she’d have said that Lambert was blind and no threat.”

  Frank nodded, conceding the point.

  “And why wait until the next morning to come back and kill him? You’d have to figure by now, he’s already told the police anything he might know.”

  “Not necessarily. Whoever took Janelle wouldn’t know when we first considered her disappearance suspicious, or who we talked to first.” Frank reached out to open Lambert’s front door. “Let’s go in and look around.”

  The door opened into a hall that led straight back to the kitchen, bathroom, and two bedrooms. To the left was a sunny living/dining room, dominated by a huge picture window with a spectacular view of Stony Brook Road and the Verona Range beyond.

  All the furniture hugged the walls, leaving a wide, clear path to the kitchen. No books, magazines, or newspapers filled the shelves. Instead, Lambert had a large boom box and a stack of books-on-tape. A small TV sat on one shelf—Frank had commented on it yesterday, and Mr. Lambert had cheerfully confessed to being a news junkie. “I got one of them dishes just so I can listen to CNN and those Sunday morning news shows,” he had said. Well, he’d missed them today.

  He caught a movement from the corner of his eye and spun around to face the window. A bevy of goldfinches had settled on a large bird feeder that hung outside. Had that been there yesterday? He couldn’t recall, although he’d certainly looked out the window, checking the view of the road and meadow. Why would a blind man keep a bird feeder outside his window? A rectangular table with two deep drawers stood under the window. He opened the top drawer and pulled out a large pair of binoculars. Holding them to his eyes, he focused on the crowd of people still milling on the road. The ambulance was here now, loading the body. He could actually read the name tag on one trooper’s uniform. Crouching down, he reached into the back of the drawer and pulled out a book—Peterson’s Guide to Eastern Birds.

  “Hey, Lew—what if our witness could see?”

  Returning to the beehive of activity at the bottom of hill, Frank saw a slender woman struggling with a state trooper trying to keep her off the path leading up to the house. “It’s all right, Pierson,” Frank shouted, and Celia Lambert broke free and ran up to him.

  “What happened? The neighbors called me. Where’s my uncle?”

  She looked at Frank through her stylishly shaggy bangs. Celia struck him as a little sharper than the average local girl, as if she’d been out in the world and chosen to come back.

  “Your uncle had an accident,” Frank said. “He seems to have stepped off that ledge at the edge of his yard and rolled down the hill.”

  Celia breathed in sharply. “Is he all right? He’s not—”

  She knew the answer to this. Frank knew she knew—they always did. But they always made you say it.

  “I’m afraid he didn’t make it. He may have, uh, broken his neck. I’m sorry.”

  Her large dark eyes stared at him, unblinking. Then the tears spilled over and she buried her head in her hands. “Oh, I should have come to see him this morning. If only I had, this wouldn’t have happened.”

  Frank hated this. You never got used to doing it, no matter how many times you had to. At least it hadn’t been a child or a husband, although Celia seemed pretty cut up about the old man. “Don’t blame yourself. He probably went out right after he talked to you—he was still wearing his pajamas.”

  Still weeping softly she said, “He must’ve gone out to—” She stopped.

  “Gone out to do what?” Frank asked.

  Celia found some tissues in her purse and blew her nose. “To get some fresh air. He hated to stay in the house all day.”

  “Wouldn’t he have gotten dressed first?” He was sure Celia had been about to say something quite different.

  Celia smiled weakly. “My uncle is—was—a little eccentric. Sometimes he stayed in his pajamas all day.”

  Frank hesitated. He wasn’t ready for everyone to know he suspected a link between Lambert’s death and Janelle’s disappearance. “Celia, was your uncle totally blind?”

  “He could see light and dark, shadowy outlines. He was supposed to count his steps when he went outside. Never go more than twenty steps from the house.” She began to weep again.

  “Celia, I found a pair of very powerful binoculars in your uncle’s house. Why would he have had them?”

  Celia began to twist her tissue. “Where?” Was that fear he heard in her voice?

  “In the drawer of the table under the window,” Frank replied.

  Celia’s shoulders relaxed and she went back to mopping her eyes. “My uncle had always been a great bird-watcher, before he lost his sight. He still liked to know the birds were being fed. He liked to hear them out there—recognized all sorts of bird calls.”

  That still didn’t explain the binoculars, but Frank let her ramble on.

  “Whenever we’d go over there we’d tell him what birds were on his feeder. It gave us something to talk about. My brothers and I used the binoculars to scan the woods for big birds—hawks, flickers, owls. You could even see a blue heron down at Stony Creek with those things.”

  She sniffled. “I liked our visits. I’ll miss him.”

  “I’m very sorry for your loss. Would you like me to drive you home? Earl’s here—he could drive your car back.”

  Celia shook her head. “I’ll be o
kay. Where did they take my uncle?”

  “The medical examiner,” Frank explained. “There will be an autopsy, then they’ll release the body to you.”

  “Autopsy!” Again the flash of fear, or was he imagining it? “Why? I thought you said he broke his neck?”

  “Just my guess. I’m not a doctor. The M.E. will be in touch.”

  Frank watched as Celia stumbled back to her car, turning twice to look back at her uncle’s house.

  Her explanation of the bird feeder made sense, and even the binoculars, but still, she had seemed jumpy. Why had she asked where he’d found the binoculars? If she was the one who used them, surely she knew where they were kept. And when he’d said the drawer, she had seemed relieved.

  And the autopsy, why had she objected to that? Frank sighed. He was reaching too hard. Lots of people didn’t like the idea of their loved ones’ bodies being cut up. Perhaps the simplest explanation held true here. Perhaps Dell Lambert really was a blind old man who hadn’t seen anything happen on Stony Brook Road, and who died when he lost count of the steps he’d taken from his door. Still, he intended to find out more about the nature of Lambert’s blindness.

  The crowd around Lambert’s house had finally dispersed, and Frank and Earl prepared to leave. As Frank got in the patrol car he said, “Lew, have the forensic team go over this whole area, especially up at the top.”

  “Looking for…?”

  Frank didn’t care for the tone of Meyerson’s voice. A little snide, he thought. “Any sign that someone other than Lambert was up there this morning. And get someone to talk to the neighbors—see if they noticed anything.”

  “You want me to pull men off the search for the girl for that? Forget it!”

  “It’s related,” Frank backpedaled. He had to remember he didn’t have a staff anymore. Meyerson didn’t work for him, he was helping him out. “Please.”

  “Frank, the neighbors didn’t notice the girl disappear from the middle of the road in the middle of the day. What could they see up here at dawn?”

  “All, right, all right. I’ll get Earl to do it. But the forensics guys, please?”