Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “What about Tommy, Jack?” Frank kept his voice gentle, chatty. “You know, I’ve talked to him a few times and I just can’t get over this feeling that he knows something he’s not telling me. Maybe you could talk to him.”

  Jack rubbed his eyes and gazed up to the ceiling. “If he won’t tell you, he sure as hell won’t tell me. He hates me because he knows I despised his father. Dorothy says she can’t think of anything, either.”

  Frank crossed the room and rested his hand on Jack’s shoulder. “Don’t go blaming yourself. At least we have a solid lead now—we’ll find her.”

  Jack lifted his head. For a moment he was silent, as if he were about to speak in a foreign language and wanted to get the phrasing right before he uttered the words. “Do you think,” he asked finally, “that this guy took her away, and sent that ransom note? Or do you think she went off with him on her own?”

  Frank scratched at a nonexistent spot on his pants. “I’m not sure. I think the note was sent to distract us, not to get money for Janelle’s return. But we’ll follow through with the ransom drop, just to be certain.”

  “Rosemary ran off on me once, you know.” Jack’s eyes were fixed firmly on Frank’s bulletin board. “Janelle was a baby. No one knew about it.”

  Except Miss Noakes. “Why did she leave?”

  “I drove her off,” Jack answered, his gaze never leaving the clutter of posters and memos pinned to the cork. “I loved her so much. She was so beautiful. I didn’t want anything to happen to her. I wouldn’t let her drive the truck at night, or go to the lake without me, or take the baby into Placid with her girlfriends. Finally it got to be too much for her, and she just took off.” Jack stood up and finally looked Frank in the eye. “And now I’ve done the same thing to Janelle.”

  Guilt pricked at Frank as he watched Jack trudging back to his truck. No wonder the poor man had been so adamant that his daughter hadn’t run away. He’d lost sight of the real pain Janelle’s disappearance had caused. Finding her was more than a professional challenge. Now that he suspected she was with Pablo, and that he—or worse, both of them—had something to do with the killing of those animals, and with the death of Dell Lambert, he needed to find Janelle fast. Janelle was in danger. Either that, or she was dangerous.

  The sound of the outer door opening and slamming shut again shook him from his reverie. Quick, light footsteps crossed the floor, and after a brisk rap, the door opened and Ned Stevenson’s professionally cheerful face appeared in the doorway.

  “Frank,” he said as he strode across the room with his right hand extended, “I hope I’m not disturbing you. Do you have a minute?”

  Frank accepted the outstretched hand warily. The old smug Ned was back. “What can I do for you?”

  Ned produced the same smile Frank had seen him use when trying to sell a contractor the highest grade pine paneling that the lumberyard produced. “I just came in to share with you a little—well, advice is too strong a word.” Ned laughed. “I only wanted to mention that maybe you shouldn’t let all this stuff Penny’s been telling you influence you so much. I love her dearly, but,” Ned leaned forward confidingly, “she’s a little high-strung.”

  “Really,” Frank said. “She doesn’t strike me that way at all.”

  Ned sat back and crossed his legs casually. He wore khaki work pants like the other men at the lumberyard, but his were crisply creased. Unembarrassed by his slight paunch, he rested his hands on his belly. “Oh, don’t get me wrong. I didn’t mean to imply that she’s neurotic or anything. She just has quite an imagination—quite an imagination. And I find that very attractive.” Again, the salesman’s smile. “But you just have to understand where Penny is coming from.”

  Frank felt the same urge to throttle that he had experienced twenty years ago, when a man implied that Caroline had missed a fly ball because she was a girl. “And where, exactly, is she coming from?”

  “Naturally, Penny loves books. But I’ll let you in on a little secret that not many people know: she’s done a little acting. College plays and things, even been in a few TV commercials. And that tends to make her see ordinary, innocuous events in a more, well, dramatic light.”

  “Ordinary events like a teenage girl talking for hours to a strange man in a bar and then disappearing a couple of weeks later?” Frank asked.

  Ned kept his smile pasted in place, but his eyes narrowed. “Look, Frank, I know you’re under a lot of pressure to solve this case, especially from my father. Just leave my wife out of this. I don’t want her upset.”

  Before Frank could say anything that he’d regret, the phone rang and he snatched it up, turning his back on Ned. Recognizing that he’d been dismissed, Ned left, shutting the door rather more firmly than was necessary.

  19

  WATCHING THE STREAM OF COFFEE falling from the basket of his coffeemaker to the pot below, Frank waited until the coffee reached the two-cup mark, then pulled the pot out gleefully. Immediately, the stream of coffee stopped. He chuckled and poured himself a cup. This was just about the best birthday gift Caroline had ever given him, surpassing even the fish-shaped tie rack she had made the year she insisted on taking wood shop instead of home ec.

  Frank had a contentious history with coffeepots, blaming them for coffee that was either too strong, too weak, too bitter, too cool, but always too slow in coming. Much to the annoyance of everyone he had ever shared a pot with, his impatience for fresh coffee led him to interrupt the pot in midbrew while he attempted, with varying degrees of success, to catch the onrushing coffee with his cup. This new gadget obviated the need for that—the perfect gift for the man who has everything but patience.

  He took his cup and settled down in his recliner. Although it was after eight, Frank didn’t worry that the coffee would keep him up at night. He was inured to caffeine; it was the uncertainties of the Harvey case that kept him tossing and turning.

  Janelle’s term paper research—the stack of books and articles on utopian religious communities that Penny had assembled for him—stood on the end table. He had put it aside while he searched for Pablo, using state police databases, drawings, and descriptions. Now, with nowhere else to turn, he went back to it. This was what Janelle and Pablo had been discussing at the Trail’s End. If he set himself the task of knowing everything Janelle had known when she had walked into the bar, would he be able to deduce what she had learned when she left?

  Frank imagined the three friends coming in, nervous and excited at their illicit adventure. He saw Melanie immediately drawn to the laughing, beer-drinking college boys, with Kim trailing after her as chaperone. And Janelle, did she approach Pablo? No, he saw her only as heading away from what had attracted her friend.

  Then he pictured Pablo, with his unerring ability to strike up a controversial conversation. Why had he settled on Janelle? Probably he had recognized easy prey in a young girl out of her element.

  And then they had started to talk…

  Frank turned to the stack of books beside him and began to read. A heavy tome told him more than anyone could want to know about the Mennonites; a slimmer volume related the more interesting saga of a group in Iowa that allowed no interaction between the sexes and had, understandably, died out around the turn of the century. He read on, finding the parallels among the utopian communities: a charismatic leader; a profound faith in God; a vision of a better life achieved by shutting out the larger world; trials and persecutions; success in a few cases; in most of them, failure of the dream.

  Why was Janelle so fascinated by this? If Bob Rush could be believed, she was questioning her faith. According to Mrs. Carlstadt, she wanted to break out of Trout Run and see the big city, or at least Albany. Frank studied the pictures of stoic, placid-faced women in long dresses making quilts and tending gardens. It hardly seemed the life Janelle aspired to.

  Frank pictured Janelle digging through her bag for something to use to capture Pablo’s pearls of wisdom. Using her pen to jot down his thoughts on the back o
f a napkin or an envelope. How could he hope to ever find those notes?

  And then, reading the note cards, he suddenly saw the whole picture, where before he’d seen only disconnected dots. Getting up from his chair, Frank began systematically making piles on the hearth rug of books, articles, and index cards. Within minutes, his sorting paid off. He went to bed and slept dreamlessly till morning.

  “So what does that word mean, anyway?” Earl asked.

  “What word, utopia?”

  “Yeah, I mean, I’ve heard it before but I was never sure what it meant.”

  In a rare relinquishment of control, Frank had allowed Earl to drive the patrol car back from a call and was using his opportunity as passenger to speculate aloud on Janelle’s term paper notes.

  “Utopia means a place where everything is perfect and there are no problems,” Frank explained. After a pause, “What do you usually do if you don’t know what a word means?”

  “Ask you.”

  “What if I’m not around?”

  Earl shrugged.

  “Don’t you look it up in the dictionary?” Frank insisted.

  “I don’t have one,” Earl answered, in the same tone he might have used to explain his lack of a cell phone or a cappuccino maker. “Hey, that was a pheasant that just ran past,” he added, craning his neck to watch the movement in the tall grass on the shoulder.

  “Keep your eyes on the road,” Frank said reflexively. “Doesn’t it bug the hell out of you not to know something?”

  “No.” Earl was nothing if not candid.

  Frank studied his assistant in profile: the unquestioning gray eyes; the slight overbite that had gone uncorrected; the wispy mustache he was cultivating in the mistaken belief that it made him look older. For the hundredth time he reminded himself that Earl was not his son, and that it was not his job to prod the boy on to higher levels of achievement. He sighed. “Well, Earl, one thing’s for sure—you’re never going to get ulcers.”

  Earl shot his boss a quick sideways glance, trying to determine whether an insult lurked somewhere. Then his usual placid half-smile returned, dismissing the very possibility of snide intent. “So, go on, you were telling me about the utopian groups.”

  Frank didn’t require much prodding. Talking to Earl was like thinking aloud. “The one thing we know about Janelle’s meeting with Pablo is that they talked about her term paper. And Penny thought she saw Janelle taking notes on their conversation.”

  “But you looked for those notes and you couldn’t find them,” Earl interrupted.

  “I know, but I was sure that if I could figure out what Pablo told her that night, I’d know where to find him, and maybe Janelle, too. So last night, I went over in my mind everything that must have happened in the Trail’s End that night. And I think I found her notes.”

  The urgency in Frank’s voice was strong enough to pull Earl’s admiring gaze away from a new extended cab truck with monster wheels parked on the shoulder ahead of them. “Where? I thought you stayed home last night and went to bed early.”

  “I did. They were right there under my nose all the time, mixed in with the other index cards.”

  “You must’ve looked at those things a million times already,” Earl objected.

  “But I didn’t see the Pablo notes because I wasn’t looking specifically for them. Last night I sat there imagining how Janelle must’ve got interested in what he was saying, and probably started digging around in her backpack for something to write with. And I remembered that I’d found a dried-up black pen in her pack,” Frank said, leaning over from the passenger seat to honk the horn at the car ahead of them hesitating at an intersection where there was no stop sign.

  “So…”

  “Most of Janelle’s note cards are written in black ink; the rest are in blue. And all the note cards have citations at the bottom referencing the book or article that Janelle got the information from—that’s how Penny was able to find me all the material Janelle used. But when I went back over the cards again, I noticed that there was one that didn’t have any citations. And this is the clincher—the handwriting on that card is messy, like she was taking down the information in a hurry. And the card’s got all these little scribbles on it—”

  “—like you make when your pen’s running out of ink,” Earl finished Frank’s sentence, his head bobbing in agreement like a float on one of his fishing lines. “Sure. That makes sense. What does the card say?”

  “‘Secular spirituality,’ ‘contribution by ability,’ ‘segregation of the sexes,’” Frank read aloud. “And this is the clincher: ‘living in community.’”

  Earl glanced over at him, waiting for the punchline. When it didn’t come, he said, “That’s it? What does it mean?”

  Frank brought his gaze back from Howard Jenks’s roof, which he realized was finished in two different colored shingles. Amazing what you noticed when you weren’t driving. “I’m hoping they can tell me at the bruderhof.”

  “The bruderhof! But you already went down there. They didn’t know anything about Janelle.”

  “Right. But I didn’t ask them about Pablo.” Frank ground his heel in the floorboard, searching for a brake pedal as Earl careened around a corner. “This Michael, the leader, kept going on about how you had to make a commitment to live in community. He used that phrase ‘in community’ a couple of times, yet I didn’t find it in any of the books Janelle took out. And it shows up in the notes Janelle took that night when she talked to Pablo. So I think he must’ve got it from the Bruderhof. Maybe he visited there. Maybe they know him.”

  Earl frowned. “That’s a stretch.”

  The words, uttered so casually, hit Frank like a punch in the jaw. “Damn it, Earl! All police work’s a stretch. What d’ya think, the answers are going to be spelled out for you like skywriting? You have to be willing to—” He stopped in midtirade, suddenly realizing what had set him off. That phrase, “that’s a stretch” were the very words he’d used to blow off Perillo when he’d come up with his idea. The odd but brilliant idea to verify the day on which the old woman had claimed to have seen Ricky Balsam, by reviewing the plot lines of the soap opera she’d been watching when Ricky had called. And here he was, yelling at Earl for doing the very thing he’d done to Perillo.

  The words “I’m sorry” rose to his lips. But just then the car drifted left as Earl turned his head toward the brand-new fiberglass fishing boat parked in the Pickneys’ driveway. “Stay in your lane!” Frank said.

  Frank’s drive to the bruderhof that afternoon offered none of the pleasure of the first trip. He barely noticed the scenery flashing by. Anxiety sat in his stomach, along with a slice of pizza he’d grabbed before leaving. He had too much invested in this idea that the members of the bruderhof would know Pablo. But Earl had been right—it was a stretch. Worth checking out, but not worth counting on too much.

  When Frank arrived, he went straight to Michael Heine’s office. If the steward was displeased at seeing him again, he didn’t show it. He pushed aside the one paper that had been occupying his attention and waited for Frank to speak.

  His legs stiff from the drive, Frank paced around the small office. “I know I was totally off base thinking that Janelle could’ve come here to live. But you say that the curious do come to visit.” Frank pulled out the composite sketch of Pablo. “We think she learned about your community from a man named Pablo: midthirties, light brown hair, blue eyes. Has he ever been here?” Frank’s sentence ended on a note of hopeful inquiry.

  Michael studied the picture with the same careful deliberation that Frank had noticed him apply to every question, great and small. After a moment his work-roughened finger tapped the drawing. “This is not a very good likeness, but there was a man named Paul Connor who was once a novice here.”

  Frank stopped pacing and pulled out his notebook. Pablo’s real name—things were looking up! “That’s C-on-n—”

  “Unfortunately, we discovered after he left, when we were filing our t
axes, that he had given us a false name and Social Security number.”

  Frank closed his eyes for a moment. He might have known getting Pablo’s real name was too much to hope for. Still, the man had been here. “When was this? What happened to him?” he asked.

  Michael stretched back in his chair and half-closed his eyes. Apparently these questions required a good deal of reflection before they could be answered. Frank choked back his impatience with difficulty.

  “It has been almost four years, I think. He came to us in the summer. Said that he had been in seminary but had grown disillusioned with the worldliness of the other students. After careful consideration, we agreed to admit him into our community as a novice.” Michael shook his head slowly. “But it was a mistake. He was not suited to our way of life.”

  When Michael said no more, Frank prodded him. “He was a troublemaker—couldn’t follow the rules?”

  The steward chuckled softly. “Our life may seem restrictive to you, Mr. Bennett, but really we have very few rules. Paul took to our daily routines without a problem. He was a good and willing worker. But to truly live in community you must be prepared to surrender yourself completely. Your personal wishes and plans and ideas must die. You must give yourself up completely and find yourself again in Christ. This, Paul was not able to do.”

  Frank looked around. A quiet hum of industry pervaded the place. Outside the communal kitchen, three women sat peeling potatoes, making conversation only intermittently. In the shop, the only sounds were the noise of power tools. Even the children playing happily on the swings and slides outside the nursery school seemed surprisingly low-key. Frank had built his own mental image of Pablo, and however skewed it might be, he found it hard to imagine the man in this setting.

  “I’ll bet he had a hard time keeping quiet, huh?” Frank wagered.

  “We have no prohibitions against talking here, Mr. Bennett. But yes, Paul’s problems did center around his conversation. You see, the bruderhof is not a democracy—the majority does not rule. Instead, we debate important questions until a consensus is reached. If everyone is not in agreement, we postpone the decision, and then we keep working to bring everyone together. We never ‘agree to disagree.’ This is the fundamental underpinning that makes community life possible.