Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  Frank ducked out of Tommy’s room and went into the bathroom, where he flushed the toilet, ran some water, and popped back out again. In a few moments he had parked himself at Dorothy’s kitchen table and was inquiring about the possibility of coffee.

  Dorothy clearly didn’t know what to make of Frank but she was not a woman accustomed to giving a man an argument, so she obediently set about filling the percolator. Frank watched her as she worked: she had the kind of even, delicate features that can make a woman either quite plain or quite beautiful. The Dorothy of today fell squarely into the former category, but Frank imagined that she could have been very pretty once. Just how long ago that would have been, was hard to judge.

  Dorothy was curiously ageless. Hair of no particular color—not blond, not brown, not gray—lay in aimless waves that stopped around her chin. She was thin, but more haggard than lithe. Still, Frank noticed, she was not flat-chested. There was a figure there somewhere, although she made no effort to display it. Frank watched her hands as she measured the coffee. The nails were bitten to the quick, but there were none of the knotty veins that gave away the age of even the most well-cared-for women.

  Frank guessed that she was perhaps thirty-eight—maybe twelve years older than his Caroline. But what a world of difference! Caroline seemed to him—even with a husband and kids—to be the perpetual teenager. Always bouncing around, full of ideas and laughter. Always sporting a new haircut and some outlandish new outfit. In a hundred years, Caroline would not look like Dorothy did today.

  “So, Dorothy, you’ve lived in Trout Run all your life, I bet,” Frank said to get the conversation going.

  “Oh yes. So did my parents and grandparents. Harveys have lived on this land for one hundred and twenty years,” Dorothy told him, her voice revealing a little animation for the first time.

  “Well, this sure is a pretty spot,” Frank said as he looked through Dorothy’s kitchen window at the meadows that ran away from the house until they hit the Verona Range. “You think Tommy and Janelle will want to keep the land in the family for another generation?”

  Dorothy looked at him curiously. “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, you know how hard it is to hold kids back today. They want to get away and see the wide world.”

  Dorothy shrugged. “Tommy likes it fine right here in Trout Run.”

  “What about Janelle?” Frank pressed. “Did she ever express an interest in going somewhere else to live someday?”

  Dorothy’s expressionless face seemed to close down even more, if that were possible. “No, she didn’t. She loved her home and her family. Why would she want to move away?”

  “Her teacher, Mrs. Carlstadt, mentioned that Janelle wanted to go to the State University at Albany, and that Jack didn’t want her to go. Did Janelle ever talk to you about that?”

  Dorothy looked genuinely surprised. “No, no she didn’t.”

  “What about this disagreement she was having with Craig Gadschaltz; do you know what was going on there?”

  Dorothy began rooting around in a drawer, her soft voice drowned out by clattering silverware.

  “What?”

  “I said, I don’t know anything about any disagreement.”

  “But wouldn’t she have come to you with a problem like that?” Frank persisted. “I mean with her mom being dead, she must have turned to you for advice. Clothes, boys, you know, girl talk.”

  Dorothy did not return the smile. Instead she gave a deep sigh. “I don’t think my brother encouraged her to talk to me about things like that. I’m not exactly the best—whaddayacallit—role model when it comes to romance.”

  Dorothy dropped into the battered chair across from Frank and spoke while biting a hangnail. “Janelle would come over and visit with me. She could talk up a blue streak when she wanted to. But I got the feeling that she was never telling me the important stuff. Lots of times she would want me to talk. She’d say, ‘Tell me about my mother.’ She was so young when Rosemary died. I think she was forgetting her. So I’d tell her stories about when her father and mother were going together. How they were the best-looking couple in school. That was a real love story—Jack and Rosemary.” Dorothy’s face relaxed, and for a moment Frank could see the shadow of a pretty young girl. Then the pain seemed to snap back into place and the beauty was extinguished. “There are so many miserable marriages. Why God had to step in and break up such a happy one, I’ll never know.”

  Talking to Dorothy, Frank understood why Janelle didn’t confide in her. To unburden yourself on a woman who carried so much sorrow inside her would be cruel indeed, and Janelle, from all accounts, was not an unkind girl.

  “Well, Dorothy, thanks very much for the coffee. I won’t hold you up any longer.”

  He stood up from the kitchen table. “If you could just mention to Jack that I came by—I’ll try to catch up with him later.”

  As he passed back through the living room, he saw Tommy still rooted in his chair. Frank paused and crouched down beside the TV, putting himself in Tommy’s line of vision. “You don’t mind if I turn this off for a minute so I can ask you a few questions?”

  Tommy’s glance implied that he minded very much that he would now not know whether Joel or Charlene would win the $10,000, but Frank snapped off the TV anyway. “Tommy, did Janelle ever mention to you where she wanted to go to college?”

  The young man shrugged, but said nothing, apparently thinking that this was an eloquent enough answer. It was hard to say if he was intentionally avoiding Frank’s eye, because his own were hidden beneath long dark bangs. Lean but strong-looking, he had incongruously big hands and feet, like a puppy that promised to grow into a very large dog.

  Frank did not like disrespect from young people and was not used to getting it. When he repeated his question, his voice had an edge that made Tommy straighten up a bit in his chair and find his voice.

  “No, we never talked about that,” he said.

  “What did you talk about?”

  Tommy shrugged again, then realized that this would not be an adequate response. “School, sometimes. But we didn’t really hang with the same people.”

  “Did she ever talk to you about Craig Gadschaltz?” Frank could not be sure if he imagined it, but Tommy’s eyes seemed to shift and his hands grew restless at the mention of the other boy.

  “No, I mean I know they went out, but she didn’t talk about him to me.”

  Clearly, Tommy didn’t intend to volunteer one iota of information. “You know, Tom,” Frank leaned closer to the boy, “a few people have mentioned that you don’t seem all that upset about what’s happened to your cousin.”

  Tommy sat up straight. Finally, some show of emotion. “People should mind their own business,” he said through clenched teeth. “You don’t have to be crying and carrying on to be upset. Everyone wantin’ to act like big heroes, going off in those search parties. They ain’t going to find her like that.”

  Frank happened to agree, but he wondered why Tommy thought so. “Why not?”

  “Because they’re far away from here by now. No point in sticking around.”

  The flat certainty in his voice disturbed Frank. “Tommy, do you know who has Janelle?”

  “How would I know? I’m just saying, you watch America’s Most Wanted and shows like that, you know these guys always take off. They don’t hang around close by.” Tommy slumped back, as if all this communication had exhausted him.

  “Okay. It’s been good talking to you, Tommy.” Before he was out the door, Frank heard the TV come on again.

  On his way to the flower shop, Frank reviewed his encounter with Dorothy and Tommy Pettigrew. If she was better off now than when her husband was alive, it was hard to imagine how bad she must have looked then. And Tommy seemed to have accepted the premise that Janelle had been kidnapped. Was it wrong to assume he didn’t care because he appeared so remote and sullen? Between the glue fumes and the TV, his mind was shot—maybe he’d lost the ability to express
emotion. But, as Estelle had often pointed out to him, he was a pessimist.

  8

  AS FRANK PUSHED open the door to the old flower shop, the buzz of conversation abruptly stopped and the six women gathered around a folding table turned their heads toward him in one motion, like a flock of birds following some imperceptible signal.

  “Good morning, ladies. I’m looking for Jack Harvey—his sister said he might be here.” As he spoke, Frank scanned the room for Clyde Stevenson, but mercifully, his nemesis seemed to have abdicated leadership of the volunteers to his wife.

  With her no-nonsense Dutch boy haircut and broad shoulders, Elinor Stevenson did not exactly project an air of feminine compliance, but she was still preferable to Clyde. “You just missed him. Why? Is there some news?” she asked.

  “No, no. I just wanted to ask him something.”

  “About what?” Elinor demanded, with no pretense of subtlety.

  Frank was spared having to refuse to answer her when Laureen Nicholls, sitting closest to the window, announced, “Here comes Ned with the rest of the flyers.”

  Frank opened the door and Ned staggered in, carrying a large box, which he dropped on the table in front of his mother. “The printer ran out of the yellow paper the other flyers were printed on, so these are different.” Ned held up a sheet of sickly green paper, from which poor Janelle stared out bravely.

  “Oh Ned! They’re dreadful! Why did you agree to this?” Elinor wailed.

  “Mom, he’s printing them for free. I can’t argue about what he gives us.”

  “I just can’t do everything myself. I can’t! But look what happens when I trust someone else.” Elinor leapt up from the table, tears streaming down her face, and ran to the little office at the back of the store, where she could be heard weeping.

  The volunteers exchanged looks of surprise, then everyone turned to Ned, expecting some explanation.

  “Sorry about that. It’s just that it’s the twenty-first.”

  “Ah,” some of the ladies said, and they all turned back to folding and stuffing flyers as if nothing had happened. Frank found this even more astonishing than Elinor’s outburst.

  “What’s the twenty-first?” he asked Ned.

  “Today.”

  “Yeah, and …?”

  “She’s always a little touchy on the twenty-first of every month.”

  For a horrified moment, Frank thought Ned was confiding the timetable of his mother’s menstrual cycle, but surely Elinor was past all that.

  Seeing his confusion, Laureen piped up, “The twenty-first is the anniversary of when her little dog Leo had his accident.”

  Frank was beginning to feel like he was in a surreal dream. Could it be that Elinor broke down because her dog had peed on the carpet on the twenty-first? “What accident?”

  “You surely must be the only person between Albany and Plattsburgh to not know about Leo’s accident.” Charlotte Venable said this quite neutrally, but Frank knew her to be a sensible woman and reassured himself that she intended some irony.

  Ned, however, was clearly racking up this gap in knowledge as an example of Frank’s gross incompetence. “You must have noticed my mother’s little dog, Leo, in the store of the lumberyard. He came to work with her every day for twelve years.”

  Frank recalled the creature now—an irritating, yipping little dog who was invariably underfoot when you were looking for something on the shelves. Now that he thought about it, he hadn’t encountered Leo lately. “What happened?” he asked.

  “For some reason Leo wandered out of the store, which he’d never done before, and he got into shed number four,” Ned explained. “One of the men found him out there. A stack of two-by-fours had fallen on him.”

  “Mmm, a lumberyard’s a dangerous place,” Frank murmured, in the closest approximation to sympathy he could muster. While Ned had been talking, Frank heard Sylvia Hansen answering the phone, and it sounded like Clyde was on his way. He had no desire to be caught here discussing Leo’s demise when the old man arrived. “Well, I’ll be in the office for a while,” Frank announced to the room at large. “If you see Jack, send him over.”

  Frank walked into the office to find Earl regaling Doris with his tales of glory in running the speed trap.

  “You should have seen the look on Millie Hartmann’s face when I gave her that ticket. Forty-seven in a twenty-five zone—that’s a sixty-dollar fine.”

  “You might have just written her up for thirty-nine in a twenty-five—that would have made the fine only thirty-five dollars,” Frank reminded him.

  Earl was shocked. “But she was going forty-seven—I had her on the radar!”

  “For Christ’s sake, Earl, she’s the principal’s sister. There’ll be hell to pay for this tomorrow.”

  “Well, he shouldn’t ask to run a speed trap in front of his school if there’s certain people he wants to let go as fast as they please,” Earl sniffed. It was not often that he occupied the moral high ground in a discussion with Frank, and he was enjoying the view.

  Earl’s lecture on justice for all was interrupted as Jack Harvey burst through the door.

  “I was picking up my mail and they told me you were looking for me. What’s up?” Jack asked with pathetic eagerness.

  “I haven’t come up with anything concrete yet, Jack,” Frank answered. “I just wanted to ask you about some things I’ve found out about Janelle.”

  The father’s face contorted as he slammed his body into the already wobbly wooden chair across from Frank’s desk. “Why are you wasting your time investigating my girl? Why aren’t you looking for who took her?” Jack’s voice was loud enough to bring Doris’s typing to a halt.

  Frank walked across the office and shut the door. “Jack, we’ve been over this,” he resumed. “There’s no concrete evidence to suggest this was a stranger abduction, but I seem to be turning up more and more indications that Janelle was worried about something recently.”

  “Like what?” Jack’s large hands clenched the bills and advertising flyers he’d carried over from the post office, as if these alone had the power to keep him afloat in heavy seas.

  Frank made a calming gesture with his hand. “Nothing terrible. It’s just that Mrs. Carlstadt mentioned that you and Janelle had been having a little disagreement about where she was to go to college, and she thought Janelle might be upset about it.”

  Frank wondered if Jack would scrape the entire mailing label off his JCPenney catalog before answering. Finally, without raising his eyes, he began to speak. “Janelle wanted to go to the State University in Albany. I thought it was too far away and too big a school for her. She doesn’t know anything about getting around in a big city like Albany. I wanted her to go to Mount Marcy Community College. Then if she wanted to finish up in Albany in two years, that would be okay.”

  “Did you argue about it?”

  Jack’s head snapped up and his voice took on a plaintive edge. “You know how kids are. She kept on after me about it. Begging, pleading, telling me she’d take out a loan to pay for it. Ha! She’s doesn’t know what it means to be in debt. Finally I told her to stop—she could go to Mount Marcy or no place at all. And that seemed to settle it. She didn’t mention it anymore. I didn’t know she told Mrs. Carlstadt about it.”

  He was quiet for a moment, then looked at Frank suspiciously. “What did she say?”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Carlstadt. I guess she thinks I’m some dumb hick who won’t send his daughter to college, huh?”

  “Not at all. She said she thought you wouldn’t let Janelle go to SUNY because you’d miss her too much.”

  Jack turned his head toward the wall, but Frank could see his left eye blinking rapidly. In a moment he resumed speaking, and his voice was steady, but wooden with pain. “I guess that was it. I was too selfish to let her go. I couldn’t imagine life without Janelle. It seems like just yesterday that I was carrying her around on my shoulders, and to think that she would be leaving home in t
he fall—I wasn’t ready for it.

  “If Rosemary were still alive this would never have happened. I was never one much for school, but Rosemary, she was the smartest. Janelle gets her brains from her mother. Rosemary would have let her go to Albany. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t bear to lose her. She’s more than a daughter to me; she was all I had left of Rosemary.

  “But what’s this got to do with anything?” Jack jerked himself back to the here and now. “Are you trying to say she ran off to Albany? What would be the point in that—she hasn’t even graduated high school yet.”

  Frank turned the conversation without answering Jack’s question. “Did you notice any change in Janelle’s behavior around the third week in January?”

  “What kind of change?”

  “Did she seem distracted or depressed?”

  “Why?”

  “It’s when High Peaks lost to Lake George in basketball, but that’s also when Miss Powell says she noticed a change in Janelle. Said she wasn’t as perky as usual. Seemed distracted, not focused on what she was doing.”

  “Let me think. January. Well, somewhere around there is when Janelle and her boyfriend Craig split up.”

  Frank raised his eyebrows. “You knew about that? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Jack shrugged. “I couldn’t figure out exactly what was happening. All I know is he would call a lot, and sometimes she would make me answer it and tell him she wasn’t there, and sometimes they would talk and she would seem happy, and other times she would talk to him and hang up in tears. I asked her what was going on, if he was hurting her, but she insisted that it was all her fault, that she didn’t know what she wanted. But that’s all I could get her to say. Then after a few weeks he didn’t call much anymore, and she seemed okay. I was just as glad, really.”