“Yes, ma’am, please be assured Officer Emry and Officer Remington are combing the neighborhood for your son.”
“Did you issue an Amber Alert?” Tim asked. “We are very close to the turnpike.”
In fact, Oiltop was one of the exits off of Interstate 35, the Kansas State toll road. We had truck stops near the exit. Any bad guys had easy access to a quick getaway unless an Amber Alert was issued. Then the toll gate operators were issued a warning and a picture of the missing child in hopes that they could stop an abduction at the gate.
“Oh my god! The turnpike!” Tasha nearly leapt out of her seat.
I put my hand on her shoulder and pressed her back into the chair. “I’m sure they issued an Amber Alert the moment you called 911.”
“Yes, ma’am, they did.” The officer’s brown gaze was warm with concern, and it seemed to calm Tasha. “Please, finish your story. You were texting a coworker around three P.M., and when you looked up your son was gone?”
“Yes.” Tears welled in her eyes again. “I looked up and he was gone. Just . . . gone.”
“Please try to remember exactly what you did.”
“I jumped up and called his name.” She took in a ragged breath and blew it back out as if to collect her thoughts. “I looked around. I thought he might have been distracted by a bug or a small creature. You know how big the park is, and there aren’t many trees.”
The Third Street Park was a full city block of meadow. There were soccer goals at one end of the field and a small playground set with swings, slide, and jungle gym at the other. My brothers and sisters and I had played in that park all the time when we were young. It was only half a mile away—far enough to create the illusion we were away from parental influence and yet close enough that when my brother Richard fell and broke his arm, Tim was able to run and tell Mom within five minutes.
A wide open field, it wasn’t likely a boy Kip’s size and age could hide from his mom. Not that Kip would hide. His Asperger’s meant he hated surprises and therefore hated to play hide-and-seek. I used to feel sad that Kip never played the classic childhood game. But right now I was thankful we could rule out that he was simply hiding from his mother.
“Have you had a fight lately?” Officer Bright asked.
“Only the usual mother-son things,” Tasha answered, her fingers cupping the bowl of the brandy, warming it and throwing the scent into the air.
“Such as?”
“We always struggle with his transition times.”
“Transition times?”
“When Kip focuses on something it is difficult to make him put it away when it’s bath time or dinnertime or time for church . . . transitions.” Tasha’s voice broke.
“I see. And did you fight before you went to the park?”
“Are you implying that Kip ran away?” Her voice rose two octaves. “Because he would not. He’s ten and he has an autism spectrum disorder. For crying out loud—I’ve had the same car for nine years because he throws a fit if anything changes. The last thing he’d do is run away.”
“Okay, all right, my job is to explore all possible avenues.” Officer Bright’s tone was deep and mellow and seemed to dampen Tasha’s anxiety whenever he spoke.
The man was good. I’d have to give him that.
“Did you check the house?” he asked. “Kip may have come home.”
“Oh my god, no!” Tasha jumped up, shoved the brandy glass in my hands, and rushed up the stairs calling Kip’s name. We all held our collective breath, as if the sound of our breathing would mask a response. We could hear her opening and closing doors.
“Kip? Kip!”
“I doubt he’s here, Bright,” Tim said, his jaw tight. “But I’ll get my shoes on and start looking.”
When Tim put on his shoes, I went into action, handing Grandma Ruth the brandy glass. “I’ll check the basement.”
“I’ll check the carriage house.” Phyllis jumped up to help.
“I’ll stay here near the phone,” Grandma Ruth said and tossed down the last of the brandy.
I rushed into the kitchen and yanked the basement door open. “Kip? Kip, are you down here?” I hurried down the stairs into the cold darkness. The fact that the basement light was not on was not a good sign. Kip was not a fan of the dark.
I reached for the dimmer switch and rotated it, illuminating the finished basement. Basements were rather rare in Kansas, as the bedrock was close to the surface, making cellars expensive. Some of the older homes were set on raised foundations, while the modern homes were simply built on slabs.
Slabs were fine as long as the weather behaved. The neighbors who had torn down old homes and replaced them with McMansions were dependent on the kindness of their neighbors when tornadoes came through. Trust me, you would rather be underground than in a closet—or worse, a mobile home—when those storms hit.
“Kip?” The only sounds I heard were the frantic footsteps on the floor above me. I did a quick turn around the paneled room to ensure that there were no ten-year-old boys playing hide-and-seek, then headed back up the wooden steps.
“Kip! This isn’t funny. If you are here, come out now.” Tasha’s voice held the edge of panic. I closed the basement door and stepped into the kitchen at the same time Tim and Kip came in the back door.
Relief washed through me. “Tim has him!” I shouted and went straight over to throw my arms around the little boy, who was quick to squirm away from me.
“I don’t like hugs!” he stated.
“Kip, thank goodness!!” Tasha rushed to him and got down on her knees, face-to-face with her son. I noted that her hands fluttered around him without touching him, and my heart ached. We all wanted to grab him and hold him close, but with Kip’s autism spectrum disorder, hugs were painful to him. “Where have you been? You frightened me so much.”
“I found Aubrey,” Kip said, and held up a squirming brown-and-white puppy. “Can I keep him?”
“Aubrey?” I tilted my head to the side.
“Aubrey is Kip’s imaginary friend,” Tasha said.
“Aubrey is not imaginary.” Kip lifted the puppy in the air. “He’s right here.”
“I’d say he certainly is right here,” Tim said from the doorway. “Young man, you need to apologize to your mother. You wandered off and scared her very badly.”
“I did not wander off,” Kip told him matter-of-factly. “I rescued Aubrey and came straight home.”
“I see that you did indeed rescue Aubrey,” said a male voice from behind me. “That was very nice of you, but your uncle Tim is right. You should apologize to your mother. You frightened her very badly.” Officer Bright was so calm and so sincere I wanted to hug him.
“Why?” Kip nuzzled the puppy that wiggled in his arms.
“Honey, I couldn’t find you. I have two police cars, Aunt Toni’s family, and Officer Bright all looking for you. I thought something bad had happened to you.” Tasha brushed the hair out of her son’s eyes. I don’t know how she had the discipline not to hug the stuffing out of Kip.
“But I was rescuing Aubrey. How could anything bad happen to me?” He raised one blond eyebrow.
“Remember that we have a rule where you have to tell Mommy before you can leave the park?” Tasha put her hands on her bent knees. It was then that I noticed how white her knuckles were. She wasn’t as calm or cool as she let on.
“I didn’t leave the park.”
“Kip,” I warned him. “This is very serious. You scared your mom and she called the police. Lying—even a white lie—is not acceptable here.”
“What’s a white lie?”
“A white lie is when you only tell part of the truth. For instance, you rescued Aubrey—but maybe you had to leave the play equipment to do that. Maybe Aubrey was in distress and you hurried to save him and in your haste you forgot to tell your mommy that
you were leaving.”
“I didn’t forget, ’cause I didn’t leave the park.”
For the first time I noticed the streaks of dirt on his shirt and knees.
“Okay, son, why don’t you tell us how you rescued Aubrey.” Officer Bright pulled out a kitchen chair, turned it around, and sat down. He draped his arms across the top in the most casual manner. His attention was fully on Kip. Right then my admiration for the young gun surged. I highly doubted anyone else would have been so patient.
“Are you going to put that in your notebook?” Kip asked and rubbed his dirty cheek across Aubrey’s back, revealing a white streak. Maybe the puppy wasn’t brown-and-white after all.
“Why, yes, in fact, I will.” The young officer pulled his notebook back out of his pocket. He flipped it open, withdrew a small pencil, licked the tip, and poised it over the paper. “Go on then.”
“Will you tell the news?” Kip asked, his blue eyes alight with expectation. “I read once that they give awards to heroes.”
“And you are clearly Aubrey’s hero,” the officer said. “Of course, I’ll tell the news. But first you have to tell your story.”
Kip sat cross-legged on the black-and-white tiled kitchen floor. “I was playing in the tunnel under the slide when I heard a noise.”
“What kind of noise?” Tasha got into the spirit of things, matching her son’s posture on the floor.
“It was like this—hmm, hmm.” He made a high-pitched whining noise. The puppy stopped squirming and licked his face. Kip giggled, and my heart warmed.
I sat down on a kitchen chair and put my chin in my hands. Tim had his arms crossed and was leaning against the doorjamb.
“Then what happened?” Officer Bright asked. He wrote in his notebook as if our very lives depended on it.
“I followed the noise.”
“Where did it lead?” Tim asked.
“It went through the tunnel and out across the sand pit. I crept up on it like this.” He let go of the dog long enough to do an army crawl of elbows and knees a few feet into the kitchen. The puppy barked at him and pounced on his head. “No, Aubrey!” Kip pushed the puppy off.
“Then what?” I asked, wondering when Kip’d left the park and where he’d found Aubrey.
“I went into the grass and I kept sneaking up on the noise.”
“Why did you sneak?” Tasha asked.
“’Cause I wasn’t sure if it was a bad noise or a good noise and I didn’t want to rush toward it if it was a bad noise.”
“Good thinking.” Officer Bright nodded and wrote a note.
“Mommy taught me,” Kip said proudly. “I sneaked up until I saw this hole in the ground.”
“How big of a hole?” Tim narrowed his eyes.
“About this big.” Kip made a circle with his arms the size of a pie pan.
Tasha and I made a noise at the same time. I glanced at Officer Bright, who leaned toward Kip, his expression rock-hard. “Was it very deep?”
Kip pursed his lips and sat up straight. “I had to put my arms and head in to reach Aubrey.” He lifted his arms over his head in a diving manner.
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. We always heard of little kids falling into old wells and getting stuck. This sounded like a well in a park in the middle of town. Why hadn’t anyone noticed it before?
I tried not to think about what would have happened had a small child fallen in that well, or worse, if Kip’d gotten stuck. I glanced at Tasha. She had turned two shades of pale. I patted her back. “Breathe,” I said under my breath, hoping Kip wouldn’t notice. Officer Bright was a step ahead of us.
“If I asked you to show me this hole, could you do that?” he asked. It wasn’t the first time I noted how careful he was not to react and upset or overexcite Kip.
“Oh, sure.” The boy stood. The puppy at his feet jumped on him and licked his hand. “Can we go now?”
“How about we ask your mom first?” Officer Bright stood and looked expectantly from Kip to Tasha and back.
“Mom, can I show Officer Bright where the hole is?” He turned to Tasha, who clearly wanted to hug her child against her chest and never let him go. “It’ll be okay, ’cause he’s a police officer that I know. Can I?”
“How about I go with you?” Tasha stood. She gave Officer Bright an expectant look.
“Of course, your mommy should come,” he said.
“And me,” Tim said.
“And Uncle Tim,” Kip said. “But who’s going to watch Aubrey?”
Everyone turned to me expectantly. I held out my hands. “Okay, you all go. I’ll give Aubrey a bath and see if we have something for him to eat.”
“You need dog food,” Kip said.
“That’s true.” I held the dirty, wiggly creature at arm’s length. “But since I don’t have a dog, I don’t have any dog food in the house.”
“Oh.” Kip glanced around. “Officer Bright, do you have a dog?”
“No, son, I don’t. I work too much to leave a dog home alone.”
“Oh.”
Tasha took Kip’s hand. “We’ll go to the store after you show Officer Bright where the hole is, okay?”
“Okay.” He skipped along beside his mom as they headed out the back door. “Can I get a new sticker book?”
“Don’t you think we ought to come straight home from the store? Aubrey might be very hungry from his time in the hole and all.”
Kip’s expression fell a little. “Oh. Okay.”
Tasha looked over his head at me and mouthed, “Thank you.”
I smiled. “You’re fine. Go.” I raised the puppy up and waved its paw. “We’ll be here waiting.”
“So, buddy,” Tim said as he held the door open for everyone. “When did you leave the park? Did you head straight home? Because, dude, you were gone a long time.”
The door closed behind them before I could hear Kip’s reply. Aubry and I stood at the back window and watched the police officer open the squad car door and let Kip into the backseat. Next he held the front passenger side door open and talked Tasha into taking the shotgun seat. I noticed the accidental hand touch and the look that passed between the two. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope for my best friend. I continued to wave the puppy’s paw until the car cleared the driveway.
“Huh.” I lifted Aubrey into the air. “So much for the old-fashioned ‘Mom, can I keep him?’” It seemed, at least for Kip, that rescuing Aubrey made having a puppy a done deal.
It was after I had that thought that Aubrey decided to piddle on me. “Oh, no, no, no!” I rushed out the back door and set the puppy down on the small patch of grass between the house and the carriage house. Aubrey sniffed around the peonies, then waddled through the grass a moment doing figure eights until he or she—I hadn’t looked yet—squatted and peed. Then the puppy bounded toward me on playful legs.
I knew then I was sunk. Its big brown eyes gave me this knowing look while it stretched its front paws up and stretched against my leg. I reached down and picked up the puppy. A big smear of brown colored my arm. “I don’t know if Kip rescued you or you rescued Kip.” The puppy licked my cheek.
It was hard not to giggle like a schoolgirl. I tucked the wagging tail under my arm and went back inside to give the dog a bath and mop the kitchen floor. It seemed everyone wanted to live at my house.
The phone rang as I walked inside. I let the door slam, put the puppy into a cardboard box I used for recycling, and grabbed the phone with one hand and the mop with the other. “Hello?”
“Toni?”
“Hi, Rosa, what’s up?” Rosa was my oldest younger sister. She lived in Wichita with her professional rodeo cowboy husband, Brand. Rosa, Eleanor, and Joan were closer to each other than I was to any of my sisters. You see, I was the oldest sister, born between the two boys—Richard, who was the oldest, and Tim, w
ho was only eighteen months younger than me. Mom and Dad took a few years off and then had Rosa, Joan, and Eleanor. Which meant that the boys were close and the sisters were close and I sort of hung out on my own.
“Did I hear correctly? Did the police arrest Grandma Ruth for breaking and entering?”
“Excuse me?” I ran the mop under the faucet, turned off the water, and squeezed the mop head to wring out the excess water.
“Is Grandma Ruth in jail for breaking and entering the courthouse?” Rosa’s voice sounded tight and full of blame.
“No,” I reassured her. “Grandma Ruth and Aunt Phyllis are here. They were helping calm down Tasha. She thought Kip had gotten lost and called the cops.”
“Don’t lie to me, Toni.” Rosa sounded breathless. “I saw Georgina Christenson at the club this afternoon. She kept going on and on about how sorry she was to hear that my poor Grandma Ruth was being held against her will . . . accused of breaking into the courthouse last night and of murdering Lois Striker. I wouldn’t put it past Grandma to break into the courthouse if she was looking for a story. But I told Georgina that surely my sister, who was right there in town, would tell me if such a thing happened.”
“She’s fine, Rosa, really. Chief Blaylock had her in for questioning yesterday, but I called Brad Ridgeway and he got her out.” I tilted my head and tucked the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I mopped up the piddle spots.
“Then you’d better call him again,” Rosa said. “Because I checked with Sarah Hogginboom and Grandma is in lockup as we speak.”
“What? No.” I rinsed the mop head again and squeezed it dry. “That’s not possible. She’s here in the house. Besides, I talked to Chief Blaylock less than two hours ago. I promised him I’d ask Grandma to lay low and let the professionals investigate Lois’s death.”
“If I were you, I’d be calling Brad, because I believe Grandma used up her one phone call on you yesterday. And Toni . . .”
“Yes?”
“Don’t make me have to come home to straighten this out. It’s embarrassing enough without having to explain why my older sister can’t keep my grandma in line.”
Murder Gone A-Rye (A Baker's Treat Mystery) Page 9