Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “The old man’s a pain in the ass, but the son’s not so bad,” Meyerson said.

  Frank was not so sure he agreed but was too tired to argue. “What the hell do you think is going on here? When Jason, Pablo, whatever his name is, walked into that clearing, I thought he was just some poor hiker who stumbled into our stakeout. Until this turned up.” Frank raised the plastic envelope that now contained the white parchment covered in calligraphy. “Tell me again exactly when you first noticed this?” he asked Earl.

  “It was after Lieutenant Meyerson handcuffed the guy and made him sit in the lean-to. I was just looking around and the white caught my eye.”

  “And it wasn’t on the trail before?”

  “It might have been. I wouldn’t have been able to see it from where I was.”

  “Will they be able to lift prints from this?” Frank asked.

  “Hard to say,” Meyerson answered. “It got pretty wet out there. And then Earl handled it.”

  Earl occupied himself with some papers, acting as if he hadn’t heard this.

  Frank sighed and read the writing again. Although smeared by the rain, it was still quite legible. There were no quotation marks or attribution, as there had been on Janelle’s extract from The Scarlet Letter, but still it sounded like a quotation from something. If Janelle were writing about herself, why would it be in the third person?

  Frank pulled the phone toward himself. “I’m going to call Edwin and see if he knows what this is from.”

  Edwin listened as Frank read the quotation over the phone. “Boy, there’s not a lot to work with there. I’ll have to study the style and syntax and see what I can come up with. I’ll call you back, okay?”

  “Sure, thanks.”

  They all sat in silence. The minutes dragged. Finally, Earl offered to go to Malone’s diner for sandwiches and coffee. Meyerson, probably not trusting Earl to keep quiet about the suspect in custody, went with him.

  They had been gone quite a while when the phone rang.

  Frank picked it up and listened to Edwin’s report. “You figured it out already? Great! Madame Bovary… what’s that about? A woman who commits adultery and kills herself! I don’t know. I don’t have time to think about it now.” Frank craned his neck to look out the window. A large navy blue Mercedes had just pulled up. “I think my suspect’s lawyer has arrived.”

  • • •

  The heat in the parish hall of the Presbyterian church on Monday night was enough to drop a moose. Having not expected more than the usual four or five supplicants at the monthly town council meeting, Augie Enright had failed to set up the large floor fans. Now, with over three hundred people crammed into a space meant to hold half as many, the atmosphere was suffocating.

  Reid Burlingame, the current president of the town council, stood at the lectern, tapping his gavel in a futile attempt to gain the attention of the crowd. After a minute or so of this, Clyde pushed him aside and, inserting his fingers in the corners of his dour little mouth, let out a whistle that sliced through the babble of conversation and drew everyone’s attention to the dais.

  “The town council originally intended to take up the matter of why our police chief has made such a shocking lack of progress in the Janelle Harvey kidnapping,” Clyde began. “But in light of what has happened in the past forty-eight hours—when the prime suspect in the kidnapping was allowed to walk free due to police incompetence—I believe we should move directly to a vote on terminating Frank Bennett’s contract immediately.”

  This speech ignited a buzz of debate among the crowd, which continued unchecked as Reid Burlingame succeeded in taking back the lectern from Clyde. The shriek of feedback produced when Reid adjusted the microphone silenced the group enough for the president to be heard.

  “Now just hold your horses, Clyde. Not everyone knows what’s been going on. We need to hear a report from Frank before there’s any vote taking.”

  Reid’s statement met with a general murmur of approval, not out of any loyalty to Frank, but because everyone was afraid that they might have missed some new details of the Harvey case.

  With a nod from Reid, Frank took his place behind the lectern and looked out at the sea of faces. In the past year, he had come to know and like most of them. Now the benign Presbyterian parish hall looked more like the Roman Coliseum. He half expected to see lions burst through the swing doors that led to the church kitchen.

  “The man we apprehended during our stakeout at the lean-to on the Mount Henry trail is named Jason Klein,” Frank began explaining. “He’s a twenty-five-year-old law student at SUNY Albany. On the morning that Janelle disappeared, Mr. Klein was studying in the library in Albany with a group of other students. At least seven people can verify his presence there.”

  Clyde made a great show of grimacing and rolling his eyes during this explanation, as if arranging for seven witnesses to back a story was the oldest game in the book.

  “Mr. Klein is an exemplary student, with no criminal record. As far as we can determine, he has no knowledge of, or link to, Janelle Harvey.”

  “Then why was he there picking up the ransom money?” someone shouted from the audience.

  “He says he wasn’t. He had been hiking in the area the day before and lost a small pack. He came back looking for it, saw something resembling his pack under the lean-to, and pulled it out. It was the ransom money, but he didn’t know that.”

  “Huh! Of course he would say that when he’s caught red-handed,” Clyde said.

  “Neither Nick Reilly nor Penny Stevenson picked Mr. Klein out of a lineup as the man, known as Pablo, who was seen talking to Janelle in the Trail’s End,” Frank continued in a monotone as if he’d never been interrupted.

  “The fact that’s he’s not Pablo doesn’t mean he’s not the kidnapper!” Clyde shouted from his seat on the dais. “Tell them about the paper. How do you explain that?”

  “A piece of paper containing a quote from a novel written out in calligraphy was found near the lean-to at the time Mr. Klein was apprehended. It was very similar to a paper found in Janelle’s bedroom. We’re not certain how it got there, but the paper does not tie Mr. Klein conclusively to Janelle.” Frank struggled to keep his voice sounding confident, even as a bead of sweat trickled from his hairline into his right eye. In truth, he was still puzzled by that paper. He hadn’t been able to reconcile Jason Klein’s innocence with the appearance of that damn quote from Madame Bovary.

  “Although it seems probable that she did write it, it could have been faked. Calligraphy isn’t unique; it can’t be matched like handwriting. And the paper could have been left there at another time.”

  “You are simply parroting the claims of that young punk’s high-priced lawyer.” Clyde pounded his knee. “This town deserves to know why you caved in to his outrageous demands!”

  It was true that Peter Stratton had proved a formidable opponent. Having just finished Stratton’s course on criminal law, Jason had decided not to attempt talking his way out of his predicament. Instead, he had sat back and let Stratton make short work of the police allegations. In addition to quickly producing an irrefutable alibi for the time of Janelle’s disappearance, the lawyer happened to be quite an expert on handwriting analysis, and it was he who had pointed out that the paper would never stand up in court as evidence linking Jason to Janelle.

  “In the absence of any evidence to connect Mr. Klein to Janelle, we had to let him go. The district attorney”—Frank glanced over at Clyde to emphasize this point—“felt that we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. However, we’ve asked him not to leave the state without letting us know.”

  Clyde’s snort of disgust was audible to all, but Reid and Frank chose to ignore it.

  “Well, that seems reasonable,” Reid said. “So if this fellow’s not the kidnapper, what’s your next step?”

  This was the question Frank had been dreading, although he knew it was inevitable. He certainly had no intention of standing here before the
whole town and confiding his suspicion that the animal murders and Janelle’s disappearance were somehow linked. He would have to tell them that he intended to keep looking for Pablo, but he had no ready answer for the next logical question—How?

  Frank drew a deep breath and his hands tightened on the lectern’s battered oak edges. “We’ll continue to search for this man Pablo. It’s our best lead to date.”

  Ned Stevenson rose from his seat in the first row. In contrast to Clyde’s shrill bombast, Ned sounded eminently calm and reasonable. “Isn’t it true, Frank, that you have no direct evidence that this man Pablo has anything to do with Janelle’s disappearance? As far as we know, he’s just a patron of the Trail’s End who Janelle spoke to briefly. Is it wise to spend so much time trying to track him down?”

  “As I think I may have mentioned, Ned,” Frank replied, trying his best to duplicate the younger Stevenson’s chatty tone, “Janelle was having more than just a casual conversation with this man—she was taking notes on what he told her for her term paper on utopian communities. We’ve learned that Pablo has set up some type of community of his own. Janelle could very well be there with him.”

  “There you go again!” Clyde was out of his seat and pacing across the dais. “You keep insisting that the child has run away. We wonder why our police chief can’t catch the kidnapper—it’s because he doesn’t believe Janelle’s been kidnapped. I say, get rid of him!”

  A murmur of discussion began to build again, growing into a crescendo of support for Clyde.

  Frank stared straight ahead, his face impassive. No matter what they said about him, how they criticized him, he’d be damned if he showed he cared. If they thought he was going to beg and plead to keep this two-bit job, they were sadly mistaken. He wouldn’t stoop to defend himself to these fools—he’d just resign.

  Then Jack Harvey stood up, looking from left to right until he was certain he had everyone’s attention. “I want Frank Bennett to continue to head the investigation into my daughter’s disappearance.” His voice rang out through the parish hall without need for amplification. “I’m sorry to disagree with you, Clyde, after all you’ve done, but, I think Frank’s the man who can bring Janelle home to me.” Then, suddenly flustered by his foray into public speaking, he jammed his hands in his pockets and muttered, “That’s all I wanted to say,” and sat down.

  “Well, unless anyone has something more to add, I think we can take our vote,” Reid proclaimed. “All in favor of keeping Frank Bennett on as police chief, raise your hand.”

  All the members on the town council raised their hands, except Clyde, who stoically kept his folded on his lap.

  “Motion carried,” Reid said, as cheerful as if they’d just voted on new Christmas decorations for the green. “I think we’ll take a ten-minute break, then move on to a discussion of the new rules for disposing of large objects at the town dump.”

  As he rose to go, Frank spotted Lucy and Edwin, Earl, and Jack all working their way toward him through the milling crowd. The expressions on their faces made him walk even faster to his truck. He made it there without speaking to anyone, and took off. Too wound up to endure the confines of his small house, he simply drove.

  He had no idea how long he’d been on the road when the Trail’s End sign, illuminated by a single spotlight, loomed up ahead of him. Realizing he had hardly eaten all day, he turned the wheel sharply and just cleared the entrance, spraying gravel.

  At nine, the parking lot was nearly empty. People tended to dine early, and with no entertainment scheduled, the Trail’s End was winding down for the night. Frank entered the nearly deserted bar and plopped down on a stool. “Hey, is it too late for a burger?”

  Nick looked up from his cleaning at the other end of the bar. “Not for you, Frank!” Now that Laurel had forgiven him and he knew his job was secure, Nick was quite enthusiastic about the role he had played in the Harvey investigation. “Say, I hope there’s no hard feelings about what went down at the lineup?”

  “Why should there be? Clyde and Ned Stevenson may be satisfied to pin Janelle’s disappearance on an innocent man, but that’s not the way I operate. I just have to keep on plugging ’til I find the real Pablo.”

  “Yeah, Ned didn’t seem too pleased with Penny after the lineup. I heard them going at it.” Nick shook his head. “I don’t know what she sees in him. Penny’s got everything: looks, brains, money. She could do better than Ned.”

  “Penny has money?”

  “Yeah, she’s not one to brag or anything. But at closing time we’d have a drink, get to talking. Her parents died when she was a kid. Their life insurance, the money from selling the house, it all went into a trust fund for Penny. Her guardian invested it, and when she turned twenty-five, she found herself sittin’ on a bundle.”

  “How much?” Frank asked.

  “Oh, she didn’t say, but I got the feeling it wasn’t chump change.” Nick regarded his lone customer. “You know, you don’t look so great—are you sure a burger is all you want? Why not have one of the dinner specials.”

  “Maybe you’re right.” Frank took the menu Nick offered. “I haven’t had a decent dinner all week.”

  “Get the lasagna primavera,” Nick recommended. “That’s what I had—it’s real good.”

  Frank looked a little dubious, then shrugged. “What the hell.” After Nick sent his order to the kitchen, Frank idly continued to read the menu, his attention caught by the Vegetarian Specialties heading. Under it the entrees began with Bulgur Pilaf, Stir-Fried Vegetables over Quinoa. Frank stopped reading when he reached Pinto Bean and Kasha Casserole; he felt like he was deciphering a menu in a foreign country. “What the hell is quinoa?” he asked Nick.

  “It’s a type of grain,” the bartender explained. “It’s not bad. A lot of people order it. In fact, now that I think of it, your man Pablo used to get that sometimes.”

  Frank looked up. “He’s a vegetarian, then?”

  “Oh, yeah. Big time. All I had to do was serve someone a steak or pork chops, and he’d be off on how wrong it was to raise animals for food. You know, they should be living free and all. Like a pig would know what to do with itself if you just set it loose somewhere.”

  Nick’s information hit Frank like a shot of caffeine. He’d been involved with an animal rights protest in Kansas City that had turned really nasty—people throwing blood on rich ladies wearing fur coats. He’d been frightened by the depth of hatred he’d seen on the protesters’ faces as the cops pulled them off the shoppers outside the fur salon.

  Did the animal murders in Trout Run fit into this? Did Pablo kill them, or have them killed, as some sort of bizarre symbol? Though why would he kill them if he was a vegetarian? There had to be a connection, he was certain.

  “Where do you buy this stuff—kasha, quinoa, bulgur?” Frank asked. “I’ve sure never seen any of that at the Grand Union in Verona.”

  Nick laughed. “Nah, we get it at a place called the One Earth Organic Farm. They grow vegetables and herbs, but they also have a small store where you can buy grains and stone-ground flour and dried beans—all that kind of stuff.”

  “You’ve been there?” Frank asked.

  “Yeah, to pick up orders. It’s north of here, on the way to Wolverton. Why? You thinking of turning veggie?”

  “No, but remember you said there weren’t many places in the North Country where a guy like Pablo would feel welcome?”

  “Of course! He must go there! And maybe they know where he lives.”

  “I sure hope so.” Frank poked around in his lasagna and held up a stringy green thing on the end of his fork. “What the hell is this?”

  “Swiss chard.”

  Frank grimaced. “Lucky you came up with the organic farm lead. Otherwise I’d have to hold this dinner recommendation against you.”

  21

  THE FAINT LIGHT OF DAWN crept cautiously into Frank’s bedroom. He awoke instantly, fully, and pervaded with an unusual sense of well-being. Had he been
dreaming of Estelle? Sometimes he visited with her vividly in his sleep, and these encounters always left him happy and at peace. But this morning he could not recall dreaming. Then it came to him; the lead on the organic farm he’d gotten from Nick Reilly. Today was the day he would find Pablo, he was sure of it. If he left right after breakfast, he would be in Verona by seven. All farmers, surely even organic ones, were early risers.

  A bowl of Cheerios and a cup of coffee served to temper Frank’s enthusiasm. He should really talk to Tommy Pettigrew before chasing off to the farm. He wanted to spring this animal rights angle on him and see what kind of reaction he got. Although he had a good feeling about this lead of Nick’s, Lord knows his hunches had been wrong often enough lately, and any information Tommy might provide could be useful.

  After restlessly dawdling away enough time to be certain that both Jack and Dorothy, who both worked seven to four, would have already left, Frank headed over to the Pettigrew house. Pounding on the door and leaning on the bell simultaneously, he made enough racket to wake both the dead and a teenage boy. Frank had already walked through the unlocked front door, ready to shake the kid awake, when a bleary-eyed Tommy appeared in the living room.

  For a moment, Tommy stared at Frank as if he didn’t even know who he was. Then, with his thought processes gradually clicking into place, Tommy coughed life into his voice and said, “What’re you doing here now? Uncle Jack and my mother are both at work.”

  “I know,” Frank answered. “It’s you I want to talk to.”

  Tommy glowered at him. “My mother told you to leave me alone.”

  “Tom, Tom, Tom. I never pegged you for being a mama’s boy. I just want to have a little talk, man to man.” Frank dropped onto the sofa. “Have a seat,” he added, as if Tommy were in his house and not the other way around.

  Tommy lowered himself to the edge of a chair, as if he expected the arms to reach out and grab him. He stared at Frank and waited.

  “We got interrupted the other day in the barn.”