Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  Frank paced around his desk, his vow to be more patient slipping away. He had carefully constructed a strategy that would allow him to follow up on Tommy’s assertion that Janelle was meeting someone at night, while still appearing to believe in the ransom note. But things weren’t playing out as he’d expected.

  “Why are you fighting me on this?” he asked Jack Harvey, keeping his voice level while crushing a blameless soda can.

  Jack’s face, already red from a morning spent loading trucks at the lumberyard, was now flushed deep maroon in rage. “Why? Why? Because I can’t get you to believe she was kidnapped, even when we’ve got a goddamn ransom note that says she was!”

  “I explained it to you—the person she was secretly meeting might be the guy who wrote the ransom note. That’s why we’ve got to figure it out before Saturday.”

  Jack leaped up so suddenly that his hard wooden chair rocked back on two legs and came down again with a resounding thump. “We don’t agree on shit!” he roared. “My daughter’s friends are all welcome in our home. Janelle didn’t have to sneak around to meet anybody.”

  “Your own nephew is the one who said he saw her slipping out at night!” Despite his best intentions, Frank’s voice took on its angry edge again.

  Jack snorted. “Tommy’s a liar. He gets more like his old man every day.”

  “But Jack, think. What reason would he have to make this up out of the clear blue?” Frank sat down behind his desk and stacked loose papers into neat piles without looking at them. “Did he and Janelle fight? Was there some animosity between them?”

  “Tommy’s just jealous of her because she does so well in school.”

  “Oh, come on. Tommy doesn’t strike me as the type who cares much about school one way or the other. There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  Jack stared out the window blankly. Finally, he spoke. “When Tommy and Janelle were little kids, they were inseparable. Living out where we do, there weren’t many other kids around, so they played with each other all day. Tommy was Janelle’s hero—he called all the shots and Janelle did whatever he said. But he was real protective—saw that she never did anything dangerous. We used to say that Tommy and Janelle were like brother and sister. That they’d look out for each other, just like Dorothy and me always did.”

  He paused, lost in his memories. “Things changed when the teachers decided Janelle should skip a grade. She got put into Tommy’s same class at school then, and it wasn’t long before she went straight to the top of the class. Tommy always had trouble in school. Janelle said the other kids made fun of him sometimes. I think he was embarrassed to have his little cousin see him struggle.

  “At home, she still tagged around after him like a puppy, but he pushed her away often enough that she finally left him alone. At the time, we just figured he was going through a stage where he wanted to spend more time with other boys, but the truth is, he never did have many friends. By the time they got to high school, it was like they hardly knew each other anymore.”

  Jack looked Frank straight in the eye. “So that’s why I say Tommy wouldn’t know what Janelle was doing or who she was seeing.”

  Eager for a change of scenery after his latest run-in with Jack, Frank headed out to answer a call at Harlan Mabely’s place just off Route 53. Just when he began to worry that he must have missed the turnoff, a hand-painted wooden sign warned, WHOA, SLOW DOWN! A second command soon appeared: HEY KIDS, DON’T MISS THIS! The third and final sign rewarded passing motorists’ anticipation: GENUINE ADIRONDACK PETTING ZOO. MEET BART THE FRIENDLY BEAR.

  Harlan Mabely’s petting zoo was the kind of roadside attraction that used to break up long hours of car-bound tedium, before the Interstate system turned family vacations into a hopscotch game from one fast-food outlet to another. Frank pulled up in front of a little green-painted log cabin peppered with signs in contrasting yellow: OFFICE, GIFT SHOP, ALL VISITORS CHECK IN HERE, LAST TOUR: 4:30, NO UNACCOMPANIED CHILDREN.

  Before Frank had even opened the car door, Harlan emerged to greet him. A wiry little man with very few teeth, he always sported a two-day growth of beard. Frank marveled at the man’s consistency, since stubble implied at least occasional shaving, yet Harlan never appeared fresh-faced.

  “Someone cut a hole in Martha’s fence!” Harlan shouted, trotting down the two steps from the office porch with his gray work pants flapping around his spindly legs. “Come right this way.” He waved for Frank to follow him down a gravel path that led into some sparse woods where the animals were kept in pens.

  The Adirondack Petting Zoo was a flea-bitten menagerie of abandoned, displaced, and wounded animals, who, with the exception of Bart the Bear and a couple of de-scented skunks, were not native to the Adirondacks at all. As they passed the cages, Harlan kept up a non-stop patter filling Frank in on each animal’s provenance. Finally, they arrived in front of a fenced-in patch of dirt with a shed in the corner. A five-foot-tall bird with droopy gray feathers regarded them balefully through the chainlinks.

  “There’s my sweet girl,” Harlan crooned in a high-pitched singsong. “A lot of people think she’s an ostrich, but she’s an Australian emu. I got her when a zoo in Florida closed. She was real sickly when she first came, but I take good care of her, don’t I, sweetheart?”

  The bird emitted a throaty cackle that Frank was hard-pressed to interpret as agreement. Still, a flightless bird stuck on the wrong continent didn’t have many options open to her. Directly in front of the emu’s food dish, the fence had been cut with wire cutters and bent back, leaving an opening about three feet high and two feet wide.

  “See what they done!” Harlan pointed dramatically at the hole. “Lucky for me, the thief don’t know much about emus. You can’t get ’em to squeeze through a little hole. They just won’t go. Stubborn, aren’t you Martha?” The bird moved toward Harlan and he stroked her scrawny neck.

  “So there was never any danger of her getting loose because of this?” Frank asked, examining the cuts in the fence.

  “No, but who’s to say they won’t come back and cut all the way through? I can’t afford to lose one of my star attractions.” Harlan wagged a grimy finger at Frank. “You know what I think? I think there’s someone out there tryin’ to build a herd of emu. There’s money in raising them for their meat and their hides. Yessir, there surely is.”

  Emu rustlers in Trout Run seemed highly unlikely. “Look, Harlan, it’s getting close to graduation and the kids are up to all kinds of pranks, but they don’t mean any harm. I tell you what—Earl will sit here from nine to eleven for the rest of the week. Once they know we’re taking this seriously, they’ll give up on trying to steal Martha.”

  “All right,” Harlan agreed. “But don’t fall asleep on the job. Remember, that bird’s worth a pretty penny and I don’t have insurance on her.”

  As Frank returned to town along Stony Brook Road, unconsciously, irresistibly, his eyes were drawn to the spot where Janelle’s gas can had been found. Surveying the meadow, he noticed three large black birds wheeling in the sky over the farthest part of the field. Occasionally one swooped down to the ground, then rose again, wings flapping languorously.

  Turkey vultures, feeding on some carrion. His heart raced. But it couldn’t be Janelle; this field had been searched, and her body would have been spotted. Besides, this was the first time he’d noticed the birds—they were obviously after a fresh kill. He was about to drive on when some niggling seed of doubt pulled him back. What if Janelle had been abducted and her killer had returned to dump her body here, as some sick flourish?

  Frank got out of the patrol car and waded through the meadow grass, swatting at the bugs that dived into his head and cursing himself for getting all bitten up for the sake of what was likely to be some half-eaten rabbit corpse. Still, he hesitated when, as he came within a couple of feet of the birds, one of them flew up in front of him, dangling a piece of gory flesh from its beak. Frank steeled himself to look; his stomach still churned a
t crime scenes.

  In the flattened grass lay a small bloody mass. It was clearly not human, and Frank turned away in relief. Then, something black peeking out from a clump of flowers caught his eye. Frank found a stick and pulled it forward. A long black cat’s tail lay before him, and now he noticed tufts of white fur amid the bloody pulp of the corpse. Against all odds, he had solved another case.

  14

  AFTER LUNCH Frank decided to stop into the store outside of Lake Placid where Edwin had run into Dell Lambert. The Feast and Fancy was far enough out of the way that Lambert might have felt comfortable letting down the charade of blindness. A long shot, but if he didn’t get any useful information, he could at least get some of the coffee Edwin raved about.

  Located in a small strip mall, the Feast and Fancy shared unpretentious space with a dry cleaners, a drugstore, a hair salon, and a gift shop. As he opened the door to the gourmet/health food shop, the scent of fresh-ground coffee energized him. Showing the clerk a picture of Lambert that had run in the Mountain Herald obituary, he asked, “I think this man was a customer of yours. Do you recognize him?”

  “Sure, that’s Mr. Lambert,” the woman answered. Then, realizing the picture was part of an obituary, she gasped. “Oh, my goodness … he’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Frank answered, not bothering to elaborate. “Did he shop here often?”

  The clerk shrugged. “A couple of times a month. He came in with a woman—I think it was his niece.”

  “Never alone?”

  “Oh no—he was blind, you know. He needed her help.”

  “This is important, uh, Nancy,” Frank said, glancing at her name tag. “Did Mr. Lambert ever do anything that would make you think that maybe he really could see? Like push the shopping cart, say, or read a label or count his change?”

  Nancy cocked her head to one side. “That’s a weird question. No, no—he always walked with his hand on his niece’s arm, like you see blind people do on TV. And she put everything in the cart, and she paid.”

  Frank nodded. “Thanks for your help.” He turned as he reached the door. “Say, how much do you charge for that coffee?”

  “Nine dollars a pound.”

  Frank’s eyes widened. No wonder Edwin couldn’t turn a profit at the Inn. He let the door swing shut behind him. It looked like Lambert’s death really might be a coincidence. He turned to head back to the patrol car when a sign in the Nature’s Way gift shop caught his eye. SQUIRREL-PROOF BIRD FEEDERS!

  Every square inch of Nature’s Way, including the ceiling, displayed something nature-related. If Lambert had shopped in here he would have had trouble holding Celia’s arm—two people couldn’t walk side by side in the jam-packed maze of merchandise. But when Frank showed Lambert’s picture, the genial, gray-haired man at the counter immediately recognized him. He volunteered a wealth of information before Frank could even ask a question.

  “Poor old Dell—I heard he passed away. He really knew his birds. Loved to come in here and pass the time while his niece was getting her hair done.”

  “So he walked around in here alone?” Frank kept the excitement he felt out of his voice. No way a blind man could navigate through this tangle of stuff.

  “No, he’d hang around the counter here with me. He was blind, you know. If I got busy, I’d put him back there in Books and Music to listen to the CDs of nature sounds.”

  Again, the logical explanation. But Frank persisted. “You never saw him do anything that would lead you to believe he really could see?”

  “Of course not! Why—” A gasp and a crash from the back of the store sent the man running. Frank sighed and wove his way along crooked trails toward the door. As he rounded a pyramid of insect collection boxes, he nearly tripped over a young man unpacking a box of butterfly nets.

  “Whoa, sorry! I didn’t see you there.”

  The kid stared up at Frank for a moment before he spoke. “It never really struck me until I heard what you asked Charlie, but once, when Mr. Lambert was sitting over there”—with a nod he indicated an easy chair next to a stereo with headphones—“I saw him get up and change the CD. He pressed all the right buttons and everything.”

  Bingo! I knew it. I knew I was right. But as Frank returned to the patrol car and sat thinking, the thrill of vindication faded. This made it more likely that he could have witnessed what happened to Janelle. And more likely that he had been killed to silence him.

  But if Janelle had staged her own disappearance, did that mean she was complicit in Lambert’s death? Frank massaged his temples. The alternative wasn’t much better. If whomever Janelle had left with had come back and killed Lambert, that meant Janelle herself was in great danger. The stakes were suddenly a hell of a lot higher.

  When Frank got back to the office, Doris waggled the phone receiver at him. “Just in time. Your daughter’s on line two.”

  He listened as Caroline’s animated voice provided him with new information. Then he hung up and stared unseeingly at his phone. A few hours ago, he would have thought this message had solved all his problems. Now, he didn’t know what to make of it.

  Frank braced himself for his next task and headed across the green to Etta Noakes’s house. Before he left, he told Doris to call the Presbyterian church and make an appointment for him with Bob Rush. He’d do everything by the book so Clyde couldn’t accuse him of harassment.

  The sagging porch and drooping shutters that faced him as he approached Etta’s house should have been an affront to Frank’s passion for square corners. But the porch swing and the wisteria vine that shaded it reminded him of old farmhouses from his youth. Miss Noakes, unaware of his coming, pulled weeds as best she could without getting down on her knees, framed by an arbor overrun with honeysuckle.

  Afraid of startling her, Frank scuffed his feet on the sidewalk and rattled the garden gate. Miss Noakes turned with a smile of welcome, but it faded quickly from her face as she saw Frank’s expression.

  “You’ve found Petey, and he’s dead, isn’t he?” she said unflinchingly.

  She’s a tough old bird, Frank thought. She’s making it easy on me. “Yes, ma’am, I’m afraid so. I found him over in that big meadow along Stony Brook Road.”

  “The same place the Harvey girl disappeared from?” Etta tossed down the weeds clutched in her hand. “What made you look there?”

  “Well, I was driving along and I noticed some birds circling overhead” Frank trailed off uncomfortably.

  “Vultures,” Miss Noakes said. “How do you know it was Petey, then?”

  “I found his black tail. They hadn’t, uh, touched that. And there were some clumps of white fur … around. I buried him out there, Miss Noakes. I thought you would’ve wanted that.”

  “That was nice of you. You can’t blame the vultures for doing what they do. It’s just nature’s way of cleaning up,” Miss Noakes said philosophically. “Well, you found him, just like Agnes said you would. Now, do you know who stole him and killed him?”

  Her question took him by surprise. “I assumed a fox had got him.”

  “A fox doesn’t kill what she’s not going to eat.” Miss Noakes folded her hands on the knob of her walking stick and fixed her eyes, which were still a clear blue, on Frank. “No, someone killed my Petey and left him there for the birds, and I want to know why.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He might have known it wouldn’t be that easy to write off Miss Noakes. The old gal had a point, though—a fox would’ve eaten its kill. And why had he found the cat on Stony Brook Road, of all places? Just another supposed coincidence, like Dell Lambert’s death? “I’ll keep working on it.”

  Something about the droop of his shoulders as he left must have prompted Miss Noakes to take pity on him. “Don’t worry so much about that Harvey girl,” she called out. “She’ll come back, just like her mother did.”

  With his hand frozen on the garden gate, Frank turned to face the old woman. “What do you mean by that?”

  Miss Noakes hob
bled toward him so she wouldn’t have to shout. “Rosemary Harvey took off for a while when that child was just a baby. No one knew about it—they covered up by saying she went to take care of her sick aunt in Saranac Lake. Of course, Rosemary’s mother’s sister was as healthy as a horse—I knew her quite well. Rosemary wasn’t gone long—couple of weeks. I suppose the baby brought her back. Picked up her life here like nothing ever happened.”

  “But why did she leave?” Frank asked.

  Miss Noakes shrugged. “None of my affair. I’m just telling you; she left, she came back. It’s in the blood.”

  The next hour passed with the speed of sap dripping from a maple tree. Frank sent Earl to look into a complaint that garbage cans had been overturned at the Stop’N’Buy convenience store, while he feigned interest in Reid Burlingame’s strategy for traffic management during the Annual Volunteer Fire Department Parade and Carnival. By 3:30 Frank was looking anxiously at his watch, and by 3:40 he was nudging Reid out of the office. Then he set off across the green to the Presbyterian church.

  This time Frank allowed Melba, the church secretary, to formally announce him, so Bob Rush was sitting authoritatively behind his desk when Frank entered. The minister’s earnest blue eyes met Frank’s shrewd brown ones directly. Frank ignored his host’s offer of a chair and instead began to prowl around the office.

  “This is a nice little table,” Frank remarked. “I bet it’s an antique. Did you get it over at Martin Deurr’s barn?” Deurr’s barn, an astounding tangle of broken-down furniture and worthless gimcracks with a GARAGE SALE sign perpetually posted out front, was what passed for an antique shop in Trout Run. Bob Rush’s delicate mahogany table was as unlikely to have turned up there as a Renoir among the paint-by-number landscapes at the church bazaar.

  A flicker of condescension passed over Bob’s face so quickly that it might almost have gone unnoticed. “It’s a piece that’s been in my family,” he said.