Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

“I got nothing to do with that old man’s bird,” Tommy responded immediately. “My mother told you—I was home with her the night it happened.”

  “Right, studying. I bet you aced that test,” Frank said. “Forget Harlan’s emu for the time being. There was something else I wanted to ask you.

  “Remember Elinor Stevenson’s little dog, Leo? In all those years of coming to work with Elinor, he never left the store. Then one day he takes it into his head to go out into the lumberyard and gets crushed to death under some boards.” Frank paused. Did he see a flicker of concern in Tommy’s eyes? He pressed on.

  “Now, that was way back in January, long before Janelle disappeared. In fact it was…” Suddenly, the little connection that had been eluding him clicked into place. In his mind, he heard the volunteers in the old flower shop memorializing the date Leo had died. He saw the cheerleading coach checking her calendar for the date when she’d noticed Janelle’s distraction.

  “It was January twenty-first that Leo died,” Frank continued. “The day before the Lake George game. The day before Janelle’s teachers and friends noticed a change come over her. What do you know about that, Tommy?”

  He had the satisfaction of seeing a bead of sweat break out on Tommy’s upper lip.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re going on about,” Tommy muttered.

  “Oh, I think you do. Janelle knew you’d killed Leo. She was upset about it. She wanted to confide in someone, but didn’t know who to turn to.”

  Tommy pulled himself up straight in the recliner, as if to be better prepared to fight or flee. His normally sallow face flushed to a dull red.

  “Why did she run away, Tom?” Frank asked softly. “It’s because of these animal killings, isn’t it?”

  Tommy examined his large, rough hands with great interest. “It’s not my fault she’s gone.” His words were nearly inaudible.

  “Tell me everything now, Tommy. Tell me about the man she sneaked out at night to see. Tell me why you kill the animals. If you make it easier for me, I’ll make it easier for you. There’s a chance you could get off with just probation.”

  But Tommy said nothing. Frank waited. The silence grew oppressive.

  Frank finally spoke. “You’re doing it to taunt this character Pablo, aren’t you? You didn’t like Janelle sneaking out to meet him. I have a lead on where he lives, Tommy. I know he has something to do with these killings, and I’ll find it out today. I’ll probably be there by this afternoon. I’ll find Janelle. Then it’ll be too late for you.”

  Frank watched in amazement as relief seemed to course through Tommy’s body. His familiar cocky contempt returned.

  “You don’t know nothing and I ain’t telling you nothing. You can’t arrest me ’cause you got no evidence I did anything wrong. Now get out of our house or I’ll get my mother to complain to Clyde that you’re screwing up again.”

  The One Earth Organic Farm was easy to find, lying on the main road between Verona and Wolverton. He must have passed it many times before, although he had never paid much attention to the modest, weather-beaten buildings and the struggling plots of vegetables.

  Frank pulled in the driveway and followed the gravel path to a door marked with a sign that read SHOP. Opening the door, he was engulfed in the pungent scent of herbs and spices. Large bins filled with dried beans and peas, rice, grains, and flours lined the one narrow aisle. Above them were smaller bins filled with what were presumably herbs, although Frank’s knowledge of this subject began and ended with parsley. At the back of the shop, the building widened out enough to accommodate a large wooden table topped by an old-fashioned scale and some plain brown bags.

  A woman in her early thirties, hugely pregnant, emerged from a darkened doorway behind the table, just as the front door opened to admit a man about a decade older. “Can I help you?” they both asked.

  Frank turned from one to the other and settled on the man, simply because the woman looked so exhausted. “Hi, I’m Frank Bennett, chief of police over in Trout Run.” He extended his hand, but the man seemed not to notice as he turned to straighten the lids on some bins.

  “I’m working on the disappearance of Janelle Harvey—I’m sure you’ve heard about it—and we have reason to believe she might be with a man named Pablo. I understand he’s one of your customers?”

  The rising inflection of Frank’s voice indicated that this was a question, but the other man simply gazed at Frank poker-faced, without saying a word.

  Frank took a more direct approach. “Do you know where Pablo lives?”

  “Can’t help you,” the man said, and turned to go back outside.

  Frank reached out and grabbed his arm. “What do you mean, ‘can’t help me?’ Do you know this guy or don’t you?”

  The man shrugged off Frank’s hand angrily. “He’s a customer. He comes in, he buys, he leaves. That’s all I know.” Before Frank could speak again, the man was out the door.

  Reconsidering his strategy, Frank turned to the woman and gave her an “oh well, what can you do” sort of smile. Perhaps it was just as well to have the husband out of the way; he tended to have better luck with women anyway. “You have quite a selection here,” Frank began, walking over to the counter.

  Just then a little girl appeared from the back room, tears streaming down her face. “I can’t get Amy’s hat to stay on her head,” she wailed.

  Her mother took the doll and tied on the offending headgear. “There you go, sweetie. No need to cry.” The child scurried away.

  “That’s the nice thing about the little ones. You can solve all their problems so easily. Now, when they get to be this age”—Frank pulled one of the Missing Girl fliers from his notebook to display Janelle’s smiling face—“then you never know what they might do when they get in trouble.”

  He noticed a furrow of concern in the woman’s brow as she gazed at Janelle’s picture. “Her family’s worried that she might have been influenced to do something foolish. Well, you’re a mother—I don’t have to tell you what it’s like to love a child and want to keep her safe.”

  The woman swallowed hard and began twisting the fabric of her dress. “I hope my husband didn’t offend you. He just has a thing about authority figures.” Her timid voice indicated that the only trouble she had with authority figures was with the one she had married.

  Frank pressed on. “Janelle was seen talking with this fellow Pablo shortly before she disappeared. Chances are, he’s done nothing wrong. But we just need to talk to him. It’s the only lead we have right now.” He summoned up a smile that he hoped conveyed benign paternal concern.

  The woman nodded, her eyes flicking nervously to the door. “Sometimes we make deliveries to Pablo’s compound. I’ll draw you a map.”

  22

  FRANK WAS SORELY TEMPTED to head straight for the compound by himself, but common sense prevailed. Pablo’s followers could be armed, and if he encountered trouble, no one would even know where he was.

  He radioed Meyerson to meet him in Wolverton. Briefly, they discussed the merits of waiting until they could obtain a search warrant.

  “Look, Lou, I don’t feel like screwing around all day when we’re this close,” Frank said. “Have Pauline or someone get the process started while you and I head over to the compound. I bet we can talk our way in, but if we can’t, we’ll just wait there ’til the warrant comes through.”

  Reluctantly Meyerson agreed, and by noon they were lurching along a dirt track that grew progressively narrower. Meyerson winced as pine and birch trees scraped at the well-maintained finish of the state’s four-wheel-drive vehicle. Frank peered into the thick undergrowth that made the woods virtually impenetrable on foot. “It’s hard to believe anyone lives back here year-round. How do they store their food? They can’t possibly have electricity.”

  The road seemed about to dead-end into a stand of pines when it suddenly dipped and curved hard to the right. As Meyerson swerved, the truck bottomed out with a sickening crunch of metal
against stone. Frank tried not to picture the truck’s muffler, concentrating instead on what lay in front of him.

  The prospect called to mind a village on the Russian steppes he had seen on a National Geographic special—a forlorn outpost of humanity amid the wilderness. The four buildings, made of unpainted wood, had been erected by someone with very limited carpentry skills, and even less architectural ability. Each was oblong, about twenty by forty, punctuated at irregular intervals by windows of different sizes. One building, slightly smaller than the others, appeared dangerously close to collapse, but it presumably wasn’t occupied by humans, since a squirrel dashed in and out at will. Smoke wafted out of the cinder block chimney of the building on the right. It was too hot to need a fire for warmth, so someone must be cooking, though no people were in sight.

  Frank and Meyerson got out of the truck cautiously. A sudden stab of anxiety wrenched Frank’s gut as he thought of those crazed survivalists the Feds were always raiding out west. Nothing he’d heard about Pablo indicated that he was armed, but Frank was not about to walk heedlessly into these dilapidated buildings. “Hello!” he shouted, hoping to get the inhabitants to come to him. “Anybody around?”

  His voice sounded pathetically small to his own ears out here in the woods. Still, the compound was so silent, and the buildings so insubstantial, that surely anyone inside would have heard him. Frank and Meyerson waited a moment longer, but when no one came out to greet them, the lieutenant started toward the building on the right, his hand lightly resting on his holstered weapon. The door, made from a large sheet of warping plywood, shuddered under his insistent knocking. “Police!” he barked. “Anyone home?”

  This produced a response, although from a different quarter. A sleepy-eyed woman appeared on the stoop of the building across the bare dirt yard. She said nothing but cocked her head at them inquiringly. Frank appraised her with distaste as he and Meyerson approached. Her brown hair, none too clean, was pulled into a lank braid that hung almost to her waist. Long, bony, bare feet, thoroughly coated with dirt, protruded from the hem of her sacky sundress. She raised her hand to scratch her head, and Frank averted his eyes from the dark hair that curled out of her armpits.

  “Good morning, miss,” he said with forced politeness. “We’re looking for a fellow named Pablo. Is he around?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  Meyerson took the authoritarian approach. “I’m Lieutenant Meyerson of the New York state police and this is Police Chief Bennett from Trout Run. We’d like to ask Pablo a few questions regarding the disappearance of Janelle Harvey. Can you ask him to step out here, please.”

  The woman looked genuinely puzzled. “Who told you about that?” she asked.

  “Her family’s been searching for her for weeks!” Meyerson snapped.

  Her face cleared. “Oh, really. Well, you’ll have to talk to Pablo, but he went out for supplies.”

  “When will he be back?” the lieutenant asked.

  She shrugged.

  “What time did he leave?” he continued with elaborate patience.

  The woman raised both arms and rotated them to indicate her lack of a watch, then turned to go back into the house.

  “Wait!” Frank shouted. “What did you mean by asking who told us about Janelle’s disappearance? You know her, don’t you?”

  The woman merely shook her head and slipped through the door. Frank used his foot to block her from shutting it. “Send Janelle out here. We just want to talk to her, see that she’s all right.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “She’s here!” Elation quickly replaced Frank’s determination to stay calm. He began to press against the door with his shoulder as the woman threw the full weight of her body against it from the other side.

  Meyerson pulled Frank back, and the door slammed shut. “We can’t enter the buildings unless they let us in, Frank. Not without a search warrant. We’ll radio in and tell them to put a rush on it. If she’s in there now, there’s no way for her to get away without us seeing her.”

  Frank answered with an edgy chuckle. “C’mon, Lou, there are ways around that. We can say we had reason to believe she was being held against her will and was in danger.”

  Meyerson shook his head. “I know how you feel about this case, Frank. I don’t want to see you screw it up now. What if she’s dead? Have you thought of that? If we go in without a warrant, nothing we find will hold up in court. You don’t want this guy to walk, do you?”

  Frank jammed his hands in his pockets. “All right, all right. But I’m not leaving this spot until I meet up with Pablo,” he said as they headed back to the truck to begin their wait. “We better hope he’s not out eating brown rice and spreading his gospel.”

  Meyerson, not a man to allow time to pass idly, pulled a notepad from his pocket and began printing neat notes. Frank was so wound up that sitting still in the truck was an act of sheer physical discipline. He knew if he allowed himself to get out of the vehicle to pace, his paces would soon lead him up to one of the many uncurtained windows, and from there, the temptation to infringe civil liberties would be irrepressible.

  He satisfied himself with studying the buildings of the compound. The community Pablo had created was a far cry from the shipshape bruderhof’s air of domestic prosperity and harmony. If Frank had found Janelle there he could have at least reassured her father that she had been living a decent life with good people in her absence from home.

  But this place! What could Janelle possibly see in this forest ghetto to make her want to leave her home in Trout Run? What could be so bad that she felt compelled to seek shelter among these outcasts eking out a subsistence living? He could accept that Janelle felt alienated from Kim and Melanie and their shallow concerns. But could she possibly feel more connected to the slovenly hippie they had spoken to this morning?

  He sat contemplating the woman, trying to imagine what her good points might be, when Meyerson dropped his pen, instantly alert. Frank was about to ask him what was wrong when he heard it too—a sputtering, backfiring engine laboring up the dirt road. An instant later, a dilapidated Chevy truck pulled into the clearing beside Frank’s. Two men got out: one, barrel-chested with a bushy red beard; the other, blue-eyed, ponytailed, and even to Frank’s grudging eyes, far more attractive than the police artist’s sketch.

  Frank and Meyerson quickly got out of their truck, and the four men faced one another in the still woods. The burly man glowered at his visitors, but Pablo was the soul of well-bred courtesy.

  “Good morning! Welcome to our compound. How can I help you?” Pablo passed his clear blue gaze quickly over Meyerson and rested it on Frank.

  “Frank Bennett, Trout Run police; Lou Meyerson, state police. We’re here about Janelle Harvey,” Frank said curtly.

  Pablo’s only response was a slight elevation of his straight, dark eyebrows. “We will be more comfortable inside. Ben, will you please unload the truck?”

  Frank marveled that words that were in themselves polite could sound so offensive. Nevertheless, he followed his host to the building whose chimney still emitted smoke, eager to see the inner sanctum of the compound.

  He was amazed to see that the inside of the building was actually quite comfortable-looking. They stood in a large room lined with chest-high bookshelves, above which hung a variety of paintings, some abstract, some representational. Woven wool rugs in Native American designs covered the unpolished wood floor, and several overstuffed armchairs and wooden rockers surrounded the central wood-burning stove. A large trestle table, with benches on either side and straight-backed chairs at the head and foot, stood at the far end of the room. Beyond it lay a doorway, which presumably led to the kitchen. A strong but not unpleasant smell of cooking vegetables permeated the room.

  Pablo gestured them toward the chairs, then turned toward the kitchen and said, “Rosalie,” in a voice no louder than he would use in normal conversation. Instantly, a plump woman with a mass of
wildly curly graying hair came to the doorway.

  “Bring our guests some tea, please.” Pablo leaned back languidly in the worn but genuine leather armchair, crossing one long leg over the other and dangling his sandalled foot. “You had a question about Janelle?”

  “For starters, where is she?” Frank asked.

  Again, the raised eyebrows. “I’ve no idea.”

  Meyerson, who had been perched tensely on the arm of a chair, leaped up. “Don’t play games with us, man! We have witnesses who saw you with the girl. You’re looking at charges of abduction, statutory rape, contributing to the delinquency of a minor…”

  Pablo’s long, finely shaped nose twitched in distaste. “Don’t be preposterous. You can’t intimidate me the way you routinely oppress the underclass.”

  “You don’t deny that you know Janelle Harvey?” Frank asked.

  “I don’t deny it.” Pablo echoed him with a mocking smile.

  “And you brought her here?”

  “She came here,” Pablo corrected.

  “But she’s not here now?”

  He shook his head. At that moment, Rosalie arrived with the tea, and Pablo took elaborate pains pouring, straining, and stirring.

  Frank stared into the clear, rosy liquid in his cup. Unlike Meyerson, he felt surprisingly calm. He could see where this was headed: Janelle had eluded him once again. It was almost what he had come to expect.

  “Let’s start at the beginning, Mr.…” Frank paused to allow Pablo to fill in the blank.

  “My name is Pablo.”

  “That’s your full, legal name?” Meyerson interrupted.

  Pablo gazed up at an impressionistic painting of a woman with one huge breast and one tiny bump. “The state knows me as Paul Esterhazy,” he said contemptuously.

  The name sounded vaguely familiar to Frank. “Any relation to the Esterhazy fertilizer people?”

  Pablo looked deeply pained. “That some of my relatives engage in unethical pursuits is beyond my control.”

  Frank, certain that fertilizer money had paid for the land, books, paintings, and whatever other creature comforts the compound offered, restrained his impulse to sarcasm. “Let’s start at the beginning,” he said levelly. “You talked to Janelle at the Trail’s End bar in Trout Run in March. Was that the first time you met her?”