Take the Bait

by S. W. Hubbard

  “Yes. I found her to be a fascinating young woman.”

  Frank suspected that what fascinated Pablo the most about Janelle was her fascination with him. “And I believe after that first meeting, you agreed to meet her again?”

  “You seem to know all about it,” Pablo said.

  “So she slipped out of her house one night to meet you, and then what? You arranged to pick her up on April eighteenth on Stony Brook Road?”

  Pablo cradled his tea mug in his hands and sipped at it contemplatively. “I don’t know where you got the idea I met her at night. We agreed to meet one afternoon—a few days later, I can’t remember the day—at the picnic area that overlooks the brook there in Trout Run. We talked for several hours. Then, about two weeks later I happened to be driving along Stony Brook Road, on my way back from the used book store in Lake Placid, when I saw her walking. I stopped to offer her a lift.”

  “That was some lift you gave her—all the way out here,” Meyerson interjected.

  Pablo looked at the lieutenant as if he were nothing more than a blackfly—irritating but inconsequential—and turned his attention back to Frank.

  “She wanted to talk some more. We went back to the picnic area. After about an hour, she asked if she could come and live here at the compound.”

  “Were you aware that an elderly man named Dell Lambert who lived on Stony Brook Road apparently saw Janelle leave with you?” Frank asked.

  Pablo shrugged. “What if he did? I wasn’t trying to be secretive.”

  “That man is now dead. He had an unfortunate accident,” Frank continued. “What can you tell me about that?”

  Pablo cocked his head to one side. “What could I possibly tell you? I don’t even know of whom you are speaking.”

  “Were you back in Trout Run two days after Janelle left?” Meyerson asked.

  “No, I didn’t leave the compound at all for several days after Janelle arrived. I wanted to give her time to feel comfortable with the others before I left her.”

  Frank scowled. More like he wanted to keep constant watch over her so she didn’t get away. He still couldn’t figure out the Lambert angle, and he could see Meyerson was ready to move on.

  “So, you encouraged Janelle to walk off and leave her family without saying a word?” Meyerson was having an increasingly difficult time containing himself in the face of Pablo’s blasé recitation of the facts.

  “I did not encourage her to do anything.” Pablo made a steeple of his long fingers and balanced his prominent chin on it as he continued in a deliberate voice. “Janelle is a highly intelligent woman. She came to accept the impossibility of living the life of the mind surrounded by petty, venal distractions. She made the logical choice in coming to live at the compound—”

  “We’ll come back to why she came in a minute,” Frank interrupted. “How long was she here? When did she leave?”

  “When?” Pablo repeated, as if surprised that this should interest them. “She left Saturday night.”

  Frank squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lip. His expression was that of a man who has been hit so hard and so suddenly that mere profanity cannot begin to express his pain. While he had been wasting his time interrogating that poor hiker, Janelle had been on her way to another hiding place. If he could have immediately applied himself to locating the compound, instead of being sidetracked by that stupid stakeout, he might have found the girl.

  “I wonder why Janelle felt she had to leave in the middle of the night, Mr. Esterhazy,” Meyerson speculated. “You weren’t holding her against her will, were you?”

  Pablo refused to be antagonized. “I imagine,” he said, slowly twisting a large silver ring on his right hand, “that she did not want to have to explain her actions to me and the others. It was easier for her just to sneak off.”

  “Oh yes, much easier to walk four or five miles through the pitch-black woods in the middle of the night, than to ask you to drive her back home.”

  Pablo turned to face Meyerson and began speaking in a slow, patient tone that he might have used to explain long division to a slow-witted child. “Janelle was here because she wanted to be. But living in a community such as ours is difficult. One must be prepared to make sacrifices. I thought she was mature enough to commit to our way of life. Apparently, I was wrong. Naturally, if she had asked me to take her somewhere, I would have complied. But she did not ask.”

  Frank listened to Pablo with only half an ear as his mind churned through other possibilities. The timing of her departure was just a little too convenient. Who could have tipped Janelle off? Was there someone in town who had known all along where she was? Or was it Pablo who had been alerted?

  “Could Janelle possibly have known that we were on to her being here? Is that why she ran?” Frank asked. “Did she get some sort of message on Saturday?”

  “How could she?” Pablo spread his sinewy arms in a dismissive gesture. “We have no phone, no radio, no newspapers, no mail.”

  “Yes, but you come and go. Maybe one of your friends on the outside let you know we were closing in on you.”

  “I have no ‘friends on the outside,’ as you put it. My whole universe is here, where we all live in complete isolation from worldly distractions.”

  “Just what are these ‘distractions’ you’re all hell-bent on getting away from…Pablo?” Frank hesitated over the name, hating to give this charlatan even the most insignificant recognition. Still, there was no point in antagonizing him when there was so much yet to learn.

  “Money, fame, status, possessions, sex—”

  “Whoa, there. What do you mean, ‘sex’?” Frank interrupted.

  Pablo’s full lips separated in a slight smile and his eyelids drooped to half-mast. “Yes, we are entirely celibate here at the compound. The intellect cannot develop fully when one is preoccupied with primal physical gratification and all its concomitant emotional entanglements.”

  “So which of these deadly distractions was Janelle trying to get away from?” Meyerson asked. “Money, fame, and status obviously aren’t problems, and I wouldn’t say she was overloaded with possessions, either.”

  “Janelle’s reasons for coming to the compound are not mine to divulge,” Pablo said in a disturbing echo of Pastor Bob. He could not have known how this would set Frank off.

  “Don’t give me that crap! I want to know, once and for all, what this kid is running from. And if I have to haul you into court to find out, I will. Now why don’t you just make it easy for both of us, and tell me everything you know about Janelle.”

  Pablo was obviously torn between his pledge to defy the state and all its emissaries, and his equally powerful desire to be rid of Frank and Meyerson. He decided on the latter. “There was apparently some personal entanglement that she wanted to be free of,” he admitted.

  “Who with?” Meyerson asked.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Do the names Craig Gadschaltz or Bob Rush sound familiar?”

  “I can’t say they do.”

  Frank jumped up from his seat in exasperation. “Well, what the hell did you spend all this time talking about?”

  “What I always spend my time talking about. Books, philosophy, society, ethics. Janelle’s petty personal problems were of no interest to me. I tried to help her understand that they should not concern her, either.”

  “She wasn’t pregnant, was she?” Frank asked.

  For the first time, Pablo looked disturbed. “I must admit, that never occurred to me. Rosalie would know.”

  The woman had apparently been unashamedly eavesdropping, for she entered the room the moment her name was mentioned and proceeded to answer the question.

  “Janelle wasn’t pregnant. I had to help her when her period came.” Seeing the puzzlement on Frank’s face, she elaborated. “She was used to relying on unnatural and unsafe products created by the drug industry to exploit women.”

  It took Frank a moment to realize she was talking about tampons, which E
stelle had regarded as the most significant scientific breakthrough of the mid-twentieth century. Not caring to dwell on what the alternatives could be, Frank moved the questioning along. “Did Janelle confide in you why she left home?”

  Rosalie hesitated, glancing over at Pablo. “Tell him anything you know, Rosalie. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some reading to do.”

  “Just a minute.” Meyerson placed a restraining hand on Pablo’s shoulder. “We’re going to want a complete tour of this place, and we’ll need to talk to everyone. After all, we have nothing but your word that Janelle really left here.”

  Pablo jerked away from the lieutenant’s grasp. His eyes narrowed in anger as he considered this outrageous invasion by the state. “Do you think you’re going to find Janelle tied to a bed or buried outside the kitchen door?”

  “It won’t take us long to get a search warrant,” Frank reminded him.

  Pablo spun away from them and stalked out the door, calling back over his shoulder, “Fine. Rosalie will escort you.”

  Despite her initial deference to Pablo, Rosalie proved quite chatty. “This is the kitchen,” she said, displaying with pride a room more primitive than the kitchen in Frank’s grandmother’s house, which hadn’t been electrified until after World War II. “I do most of the cooking because Pablo feels we should each contribute to community life according to our talents.”

  “And how did Janelle contribute?” Frank asked.

  “She helped me in the kitchen and Charles in the garden.”

  “So you spent some time alone with her. Did she tell you why she left home?”

  Rosalie lifted her mop of hair, damp with sweat, from the back of her neck. “She wasn’t specific. I just remember she said she was relieved to be free of…she used an odd word…coercion…that was it.”

  “Who was coercing her to do what?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Didn’t you ask?”

  “Oh, no. When you come to the compound, you start a new life. You leave your old life behind entirely.” Rosalie removed some rolls from the oven of the woodstove. “We never question each other about our pasts.”

  “Could her father have been the person coercing her?” Meyerson interjected.

  Rosalie cocked her head to one side in consideration. “I don’t think so. When she first arrived, she was very anxious about contacting him to let him know she was okay. Of course, that was impossible.”

  “Why?” Frank and Meyerson asked simultaneously.

  “We have no way of reaching anyone on the outside,” Rosalie said with the same incredulity she would have shown if they had asked her why she didn’t visit Mars.

  “Pablo goes out into society. Surely Janelle could have written her father, and Pablo could have mailed the letter for her.”

  Rosalie shook her head so adamantly that, for a moment, her hair completely obscured her face. “Pablo refuses to accept any services of the U.S. government.”

  “Convenient,” Frank muttered. He opened the back door. “Come on, Rosalie, continue the grand tour.”

  “We raise much of our own food,” Rosalie said as she led them past a weedy-looking garden to the next building. “This is the women’s house. It’s where Janelle, Lark, Catherine, and I sleep.”

  The room was set up as a large dormitory with four twin beds, all of which were unmade. Pegs on the wall held a collection of ratty dresses, T-shirts, and jeans. A cloudy mirror propped up on a small chest was the only concession to feminine vanity. The woman they had seen earlier sat at a table by the window, a mass of tiny beads spread out before her. She looked up at Rosalie, but said nothing.

  “Lark is making porcupine quill jewelry, which we use to barter for goods we can’t grow or make ourselves. This was Janelle’s bed,” Rosalie continued, anticipating Frank’s next question.

  Frank lifted the covers and looked under the mattress, but Janelle had left nothing behind. “Where did she keep her things?”

  Rosalie pointed to the pegs. “We each have just two sets of clothes. This is her dress, so she must have been wearing her pink shirt and her jeans when she left.” Frank checked the pockets of the dress while Meyerson opened the trunk, the only other place in the room where anything could be hidden. But it contained only sweaters and blankets.

  Frank continued the tour with Rosalie, leaving Meyerson behind to question Lark on her knowledge of Janelle’s whereabouts. The men’s dormitory was almost identical to the women’s, except it was slightly smaller. After poking distastefully through the gray bed linens in the main room, a flash of movement outside the window caught his eye. “That must be Charles out in the garden, huh? Why don’t you introduce me, Rosalie.”

  But Charles, although friendly and cooperative, had no insights on what had brought Janelle to the compound and what had made her leave. Their conversations, he reported, had been largely confined to horticultural matters. Meyerson had had even less luck with the inaptly named Lark, Ben, and the herbalist, Catherine. But he had made one find.

  “Look at this,” he said, leading Frank behind the men’s dormitory. Before them sat a vintage Japanese compact car, so tiny it seemed toylike. “According to Ben, Pablo makes some money as a trader of used books, and this is what he drives when he’s making his rounds.”

  Frank peered through the window. Every inch of space in the car, except the driver’s seat itself, was filled with books. “Well, that certainly explains why Janelle left the gas can behind. It’s a wonder Pablo managed to squeeze her in here.”

  Frank stood back and surveyed the compound from this angle. “What the hell…?” He suddenly started trotting around to the front of the building, calling back to Meyerson over his shoulder. “There’s another room in this building! Rosalie showed me the men’s quarters and I noticed it was slightly smaller than the women’s. But from the outside the buildings are the same size.”

  He charged back into the men’s dorm. Maybe he had given up too easily—maybe Janelle was being held here! He spotted a small door, concealed by the men’s clothes that hung from pegs above it. He reached out to yank the door open, and practically fell on his face.

  Pablo made an exaggerated gesture of ushering Frank in. A neatly made double bed entirely consumed the floor space. The windowless walls, covered with bookshelves and art, seemed to offer no possibility of concealment.

  “So, you don’t sleep with the hoi polloi, eh?” Frank said, slightly out of breath. Nothing and no one was hidden here.

  “This is my inner sanctum. I need a place where I can read and meditate.”

  “I imagine you do,” Frank said. Turning to leave, a thought occurred to him and he reversed direction. “Say, Pablo, how do you feel about animals?”

  “Animals are our kindred spirits on earth. They must be allowed to live their lives without interference from humans. That is why we consume no animal products here.”

  “You lived at the Silas bruderhof for a time. They’re not vegetarians, are they?”

  “No, they exploit animals for their own purposes. I tried to get them to see the error of their ways, but I failed.”

  “How do you feel about zoos?” Frank continued.

  Pablo shuddered. “An abomination! Imprisoning animals for human entertainment—it’s barbaric!”

  “And keeping pets—I imagine you frown on that?”

  Pablo grew quite animated, warming to his subject. “Did you know that cats will revert to their feral state in just one generation? They can easily live outdoors as hunters, instead of being confined to houses and beholden to humans for mass-produced, unhealthy food full of chemicals and dyes. There’s no reason that all animals should not be living free.”

  “What if a few animals had to die in order to achieve this freedom? “Frank probed.

  “You mean, some that were weakened by domestication might not survive the transition? That’s true, but—”

  “No,” Frank interrupted. “I meant what if a few animals had to be sacrificed to make y
our point about living free. That would be justifiable under the circumstances—a sort of holy war, right?”

  Pablo’s caution snapped back into place. “What are you getting at? All war is immoral.”

  “You wouldn’t consider killing a pet or an animal in a zoo? You know, to release it from bondage and sort of make a statement at the same time?”

  “I’ve never killed anything in my life. What are you going on about?”

  “Someone’s been killing animals in Trout Run: a dog, a rabbit, a cat, an emu. Do you happen to know anything about that?” Frank sat on the edge of the bed, casually blocking the door with his outstretched legs.

  “Don’t be absurd! Of course I don’t!”

  “Is there anyone else around Trout Run you’ve been spouting your theories to? Maybe someone…misinterpreted…them.”

  “This is a typical tactic of the police state. When you can’t entrap me on one charge, you trump up another and try again!”

  “Don’t blow that left-wing hot air in my face, Mr. Esterhazy. I suggest you think long and hard about why Janelle came here, why she left, and where she went. And when something comes to you, just step out of your front door and let us know—the state police will be camped on your doorstep until we find that girl.”

  On the teeth-rattling ride down the dirt road, Meyerson speculated on their plan of action. “It doesn’t seem possible that Janelle could have contacted anyone to pick her up. If she really walked out of here, she must have hitchhiked once she got to the main road. We get that out on the news, and set up a roadblock—maybe we’ll find the person who gave her a lift.”

  Frank nodded absently. It now appeared Janelle could not have been the one to have sent the ransom note. And Pablo claimed he wasn’t the person she sneaked out to meet at night. Of course he could be lying, but to what purpose? He had admitted taking her to the compound, why deny that he was the man she sneaked out to see at night?