I smiled at Ginny, then looked down at Moose. “Why don’t we get our big boy, here, over to the hospital, and the rest of us take Ginny over to Miss Nina’s for some hot food. She’s hungry. What time is it?”
He glanced at his watch and smiled. “I believe we can just make it.”
Dally looked down at the kid. “How about that, hon? We’ll call and have your folks meet us there. It’ll be a big night out.”
She grinned. “Okay.”
Dally looked at Cedar. “Call the McDonners?” He nodded. “Sure.”
From my feet the weakening voice of the Moose rose up from where he lay in the moonlight. “Don’t forget my fried whatsits.”
Fedora looked over at Cedar. “Let me go with him to the hospital, okay?”
Cedar hesitated.
Fedora insisted. “You can have the rifle boys, there, stand guard on me if you want. I just got to go with him, you get me?”
I had to ask, looking over at the hunting party. “Are they really your deputies?”
He nodded, disgusted. “Uh-huh.”
I looked back at Cedar. “They fired first, you know.”
He avoided my look, glanced over at them instead. “I know. I was just over by the tree hut. I heard the rifles … first.”
The deputies all tried looking elsewhere.
Cedar took charge. “Okay, Jeff. You and Deacon go with our prisoners. They both stay at the hospital until I get there. And they both stay very healthy. Do you all understand me?”
One of them answered. “Yes, sir.”
Another one shifted his weight. “Urn, Cedar? Sorry ’bout the … I mean … they did draw on us.”
He looked at me. “And they are the kidnappers.”
I shrugged. “Why don’t you reserve judgment until you’ve heard it all.”
He nodded slowly. “Okay.” Then he leveled a very official countenance. “There’s something you’re not telling me, isn’t there?”
I agreed. “Plenty. I haven’t had a chance to completely put it all together, but I’m just now beginning to gather one strange theory. I’m certain you’ll find it amusing.”
He tilted his head at me. “Just now?”
“I get very philosophical when I get that close to dying. Your boys were shootin’ at me real good.”
Then Fedora looked up at me and whispered, “Pal? You got the wrong idea about who our boss is, you know.”
Before I could launch into further questioning concerning that particular subject, the little voice of Ginny McDonner interrupted.
She was holding up the wooden doll again. This time to her own ear. She was nodding and looking up at Dally. “Christy say’s she’s hungry too. And she wants to hear Flap’s story. Can we go now?”
I started adding up the past couple of days for the nipper. She’d been sleepwalking, kidnapped, chased, hidden in a tree hut and a storm cellar, cold, hungry, worried about her own life and the lives of her parents, and then, for dessert, witnessed a shoot-out. I figured it was enough to justify a talking doll.
Dally smiled down at the kid, obviously having done more or less the same figuring that I had. “She wants to hear the story, huh? Flap’s pretty good at telling this kind of story.”
Then Ginny McDonner looked over right into my eyes with a very adult, exceedingly serious gaze. “Oh, she already knows this story. She just wants to make sure he tells it right.”
Creepy.
Dally petted Ginny’s head. “You’re just tired, sweetheart.”
Ginny’s unearthly eyes were still locked onto me. “Uh-huh, but I’m not nearly as tired as Christy. She’s been out here a lot longer than I have.”
25. Christy
Most everybody had gone from Miss Nina’s by the time our little troupe arrived at the eatery. Miss Nina herself was asleep, or seemed to be, in the rocker by the heater. One or two tables were just finishing the last of the banana pudding.
Dally and the young Ms. McDonner headed right for the kitchen. Cedar had a word with the folks at the other tables, and there was a bluster of commotion as they angled out the door.
Then the policeman headed for Miss Nina.
I stopped him. “What are you doing?”
He seemed surprised. “I’m going to send her to bed. She needs her rest and we need a little privacy.”
I looked over at our comatose hostess. “Yeah. Well, the fact is — Miss Nina needs to stick around. She’s a player.”
That shook him up. “What in this world are you talking about?”
I nodded in her direction. “Miss Nina?”
Eyes still closed, and without a visible motion, she answered, “Mr. Tucker.”
“Got a minute?”
That opened her eyes. “What for?”
I raised my eyebrows. “It’s story time.”
She nodded slowly. “I see. And you figure you got a story worth my hearin’?”
I looked at her profile. “No, ma’am. All I’ve actually got is an idea. The story — that’ll kind of emerge as we all discuss it.”
She leaned forward a little. “That how it’s done?”
“How what’s done?”
She leveled what you’d have to call a spry look at me. “You found Ginny.”
I nodded. “Had some help.”
She tried, and failed, to stand. “You think you know what happened.”
“Like I said, I’ve just got some ideas.”
She sat back. “Well, would you mind havin’ your little meetin’ over this way? I seem to be a bit reduced.”
Ginny came back in, waving a plate piled with enough food for a lumberjack. “Fried chicken!”
I nodded. “No country-fried steak?”
She twitched her head in the direction of the kitchen. “She’s got it.”
On cue, Dally came in with another plate, just as packed, and sure enough starring country-fried steak.
I motioned them over to the table by the heater. When the five of us were seated comfortably, and the kid was chowing down to beat the band, I felt it was time to begin.
“I feel this is a story about commerce. Man comes to town. Man wants to buy land. Locals don’t want to sell. There’s a special plum, a whole mountain, just right for the man’s enterprise, but the family won’t even talk to him about selling it. It’s not a question of money. They have secrets and family and all manner of skeletons buried up there. Nothing in this world could make them part with it. So the man hires some out-of-town goons to kidnap the cute little daughter of the family. Family gets the kid back if they sell the land. It’s that simple. Only the goons lose the kid right away because she’s smarter than any other twenty kids, and way smarter than the two goons in question.”
Mouth full, staring at her food, Ginny still managed a commentary. “That didn’t take much.”
I went on. “Even though her folks didn’t see the kidnapping, the next-door neighbor did. He decided to come to the rescue. He hid out in the tree house he’d made for the kids, hoping, or almost knowing for certain, that Ginny will take them there because it was their getaway, their hideout.”
Ginny sipped her sweet tea. “Easy. They didn’t want me to freeze to death. They weren’t evil.”
I had to smile. “Right. Not evil, just stupid. So the neighbor in question, Wicher, swoops down like Tarzan, frightens our somewhat impressionable kidnappers. They scatter. Wicher and Ginny cook up a quick scheme, and poof, the whole abduction scenario is foiled but good.”
Cedar joined in the fun. “There. So why didn’t Ginny just come home then?”
I nodded, very sagelike. “Right. She didn’t because Wicher told her it wasn’t safe. He told her the goons would hurt her family.”
Ginny finally looked up from her food. “I’m always worried about Mama. She’s … a nervous person.”
Cedar looked down. Nothing to say.
I looked at Ginny. “Ginny McDonner is the queen of hide-and-seek. She excels. Nobody can find her. But she’s got help. She’s got
a magic doll.”
Cedar looked up again. “A what?”
“Wicher gets secret messages from the little Christy Rayburn doll he carved for Ginny.”
Dally couldn’t resist any longer. “Making him the king of the nuts.”
I saw a little something, couldn’t tell what, in the way Miss Nina shifted in her rocker.
I tapped on the table a little. “Yeah, Wicher was a little lose in the hat rack, but he had to be in on some kind of bad deal. What other reason would there be for telling Ginny not to go home?”
Cedar wasn’t convinced. “Unless the hired guns actually were threatening the McDonners.”
I looked at him. “Did they ever tell you that?”
He shrugged. “The McDonners? No.”
I looked back at the kid. “The fact is, Ginny got away so quick, the goons didn’t even have time to call the McDonners or write ’em or whatever they were going to do to make their demands. It all went south too fast.”
Cedar talked slow. “So you’re saying … somebody else had a deal or was in on the deal or had some reason to keep Ginny from going home.”
I nodded. “That’s what I’m saying.”
“For the land up there, the Rayburn place, Black Pine Mountain.”
“Right.”
He shook his head. “For a home-improvement factory?”
I squinted. “Worse. For an American winery. Much more evil.”
He just stared.
Dally came to the rescue. “Hainey told us he wants the mountain for a touristy chateau. Great for the local economy.”
He sat back. “Kidnap a little girl and terrify a family just for a tourist attraction?”
I shook my head. “No. For money. The kidnapping thing, it not only makes the owners of the property more liable to sell but it brings the price of the land way down, I’d imagine.”
He got sterner. “And this is all Hainey?”
I tapped again. “I thought so. But the boys insist that he’s not their boss after all.”
He stared at his hands. “The boys? You mean the kidnappers?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And why would you believe them?”
I tilted my head a little. “I don’t know. I just do.”
Ginny yawned so loud it made us all laugh.
She looked around the table, smiling herself. “I guess I might be a little sleepy.” She peeped at Cedar. “Where’s Mama an’ Daddy?”
He smiled at her. “On their way, darlin’.”
She stared over at a booth, then back at Miss Nina. “Can I go over there an’ lie down?”
Miss Nina was the only one avoiding looking at the kid. She just shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
Ginny dragged over to the booth, threw her little self down, and was breathing steadily before her head hit the seat.
I returned my attention to the adults. “So here’s where it gets really dark: I believe none other than our Miss Nina was the inside contact for the job.” Silence all around.
Finally Nina herself chuckled, or maybe cackled, a little. “You got no idea what’s goin’ on.”
I pressed. “Oh, really? How does a guy like Hainey figure the psychology of the McDonners? I mean he can find out who owns the land he wants by just researching the deeds or whatnot, but how does he know that hassling them will make the missus take her pills? How does he know the little girl’s a sleepwalker? Two essential bits of knowledge for the abduction scenario. And who sits in this very joint every day and listens to everything everybody says about everything? None other than the proprietress. And she’s got a system, to boot. She seems to be asleep, only she actually sees and hears everything.” I stabbed her with a look. “You were in on the deal with Hainey for a slice of the dough.”
She laughed again, and countered my stabbing gaze with an overdose of some hideous folk poison. “I said you got no idea what’s goin’ on. None.”
I turned to Cedar. “Any particular relationship between Wicher and Miss Nina that you know of?”
“No.” Then he sat up. “Not that I know of.”
I tried a stalling tactic, hoping that it might loosen Miss Nina’s resolve. I asked Cedar a key question. “And what’s the news you said you found out about Wicher? Something in his house you said was strange.”
Cedar sat forward. “Right. It was a newspaper headline.”
Dally caught that one. “Newspaper?”
He shrugged. “Tabloid. Supermarket deal.”
“What was the headline?”
He quoted. “FLORIDA MAN IN BIZARRE SUICIDE. All caps.”
She took in a breath. “How bizarre.”
Cedar took a quick glance at Ginny, to make sure she was asleep. “Drilled nineteen holes in his skull with a power drill.”
That altered the atmosphere in the place, as anyone might imagine. I had to ask. “Nineteen holes? Like, the first eighteen didn’t do the trick?”
He shook his head. “All they could figure is that the first one severed some nerve and he didn’t feel anything anymore.”
Dally sat back. “Yeah, but …”
Cedar moved on. “Anyway, that’s started some of us to thinking Wicher might be a suicide after all.”
And, brother, did that sentence get a reaction from our Miss Nina. She sat bolt upright and twisted with a lightning speed I wouldn’t have imagined her capable of. “Sydney?”
Cedar didn’t understand. “Sydney Wicher’s dead.”
“Dead?”
He nodded. “We think he might have killed himself, but the circumstances are so strange —”
I interrupted. “Is this what the so-called boys in the lab came up with?”
He looked at me. “No other fingerprints. No evidence that anybody was up there with him. And then … the newspaper … I don’t really know what to think.”
Miss Nina’s entire countenance had altered significantly. “Sydney’s dead.”
I could tell Dally had noticed something in her voice too.
She spoke very softly to Miss Nina. “You knew him well? You were friends?”
She just stared out the window, but there was a movie, a very long movie, playing out behind her eyes.
Before we could even get a gander at the credits, the front door of the restaurant burst open and Mrs. McDonner came flying in.
“Where is she?”
Ginny was startled and sat up. “Mama?”
Mrs. McDonner made it to the kid in a single jump, it seemed like. They were hugging each other so close, it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other started up.
Mr. McDonner was slower coming in, but no less enthusiastic about the situation. He was clutching the other two but good inside of three seconds, and I’m pretty sure everybody in the holy family trio was crying just a little.
The father looked at me with an expression of complete wonder. “We thought she was dead.”
Mrs. McDonner was rocking back and forth and muttering low like a prayer. “Baby, baby, baby …” over and over again.
I swear, there was actually light coming from the booth where they were. I glanced over at Dally, who was a little dewy in the peepers herself.
I smiled at her. “Well, this is something of a happy ending.”
She shook her head, avoiding eye contact. “Not quite the end.” Then she smiled a little. “But it surely is a lot happier than some might have imagined.”
Mrs. McDonner looked up. I guess Cedar had told her I’d found the kid. She locked eyes with mine. I’ve been paid thousands and thousands of dollars to find things all over the world, and I’m telling you I’d rather be paid with a look like that than all the tea in China. It made the world spin around. It did.
Then she looked over at the policeman. “Can I take her home now?”
He nodded, smiling. “I believe she could go home now if she wanted to.”
Ginny nodded. “I’d like to go home now.”
Mr. McDonner also had quite a look on him. “Mr. Tucker?
I’m sayin’ that I’m owin’ you.”
Ginny wiggled off the booth seat. She tossed a look our way. “Thank you.”
But it wasn’t aimed at me, or at Cedar, or even at Dally. She was looking right at Miss Nina.
Miss Nina was all kinds of avoiding eye contact. Mrs. McDonner looked down at her daughter, confused. “Are you thankin’ Miss Nina for the meal, baby?”
Ginny screwed up her face. “Who’s Miss Nina?”
Her mother looked over and nodded her head at the restaurateur. “Miss Nina.”
“No.” Ginny looked at the old woman, shaking her head. “Her name’s Christy.”
26. One, Two, Three
Rack focus. Low brass. Every eye in the joint slapped on the figure in the rocker.
Ginny lowered her voice, embarrassed by the obvious turmoil she’d created. “Well, that’s what Mr. Wicher said.”
Dally was the first one to get her voice box working. “Mr. Wicher told you that this person here … was Christy?”
The little girl nodded.
“Christy Rayburn?”
More nodding.
Dally was talking like a broken record. “The Little Lost Girl?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Miss Nina?”
The old lady’d finally had enough. “Stop it!”
Big silence.
No wonder Miss Nina had been there in my little vision quest. No wonder she was lumped in with all the other fictional characters — Miss Nina was just another storybook invention. It was very clear to me in that moment who this woman was. I just had to get her to let it out.
“You’re not Christy Rayburn.” My voice was taunting. “You couldn’t be.”
Silence.
“You’re not the one,” I kept on, “who thought all this up.”
Her eyes avoided mine.
“And the one who led poor old Sydney to his grave.”
Barely rocking, I could see her face flushing, her jaw grinding.
“You’re not the Little Lost Girl.”
She was humming, low, to herself.
“Or the kidnapper.”
Her humming grew more like a growl.
“Or the murderer.”
“Shut up! I never killed nobody.” She stopped dead. “Nobody I cared about.” She jabbed up a look at me like one of David’s poisonous vipers, quick and filled with venom, hissing — with a little lick of the lips.
Easy as One Two Three (A Flap Tucker Mystery) Page 18