Between Lost and Found

by Shelly Stratton

  Weight: 140

  Missing From: Mammoth Falls, S.D.

  County: Lawrence County

  Narrative: A South Dakota Silver Alert has been issued for William Clancy Marshall. He was last seen wearing a red, white, and blue Pabst cap, blue flannel shirt, denim jeans, and brown leather cowboy boots. He also responds to the nickname “Little Bill.” He may be showing early signs of dementia.

  He was last seen April 20, 2016. His vehicle was later found at 8:30 p.m. April 22 in the area of Cedar Lane in Mammoth Falls, S.D. The vehicle appeared to have been in an accident and was abandoned. Marshall has not been seen or heard from since this accident.

  If you have any information regarding his whereabouts, please contact the Mammoth Falls Police Department at 605-555-5973 or 911.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” the plump woman behind the counter asked.

  Janelle turned away from the corkboard where her grandfather’s image stared back at her. Beside his Silver Alert notice was a flyer for a used cobalt blue Acura and a note handwritten in black marker, advertising a room available for rent in nearby Spearfish. Two stubs below the advertisement had already been pulled.

  “I’m sorry . . . what? What did she say?” Janelle asked absently, blinking in confusion.

  The woman gave her an indulgent smile. “I asked if I could help you.”

  “Oh, yes! Yes! Thank you.” She placed her tote bag on the linoleum countertop and began to dig through it. She raised her gaze from her the bag’s depths and grinned apologetically. “I’m sorry. It’s . . . It’s in here.”

  The woman nodded. Benevolent understanding painted her round, dimpled face. But Janelle wondered if the other people in the post office were quite as patient. An older guy with a graying buzz cut who stood behind Janelle loudly cleared his throat as he shifted a large stack of USPS priority mail boxes in his arms. A woman standing in line behind him handed her bored toddler a roll of shipping tape to play with. The little boy was now taping his arm to one of the metal bars of his stroller.

  Truthfully, she was growing just as impatient with herself. It was like she was digging through someone else’s tote bag. When had she accumulated so many receipts, tubes of lipstick, and so much loose change? How had her bag become littered with so much junk? Usually, she was much more organized, but that had fallen to the wayside the past couple of days.

  “Here it is!” Janelle cried triumphantly, almost with relief. She tugged out a pink sheet of paper. “I saw this on the door yesterday. It said one of your carriers tried to deliver a certified letter to my grandfather’s cabin but no one was there to sign for it. I was wondering if I could pick it up for him. Umm . . .” Janelle began to search through her tote bag again. She pulled out her wallet and flipped it open. “I can give you my ID if that—”

  “That won’t be necessary, honey,” the woman behind the counter said.

  Janelle looked up at her.

  “You keep your ID. You don’t need it to get a certified letter.” The woman extended her hand across the counter and gently petted Janelle’s arm, catching her by surprise. “Besides, we know who you are.”

  We?

  Janelle slowly turned and found the older man behind her and the woman behind him staring at her. Unconcealed pity was in their eyes.

  Janelle supposed she should be used to it by now. When she had arrived in Mammoth Falls four days ago, almost everyone she had met had stared at her warily, suspicious of the outsider. But now that news had spread about her grandfather’s disappearance, she couldn’t go anywhere around town without words of sympathy from random strangers or someone gazing at her sadly, like she was one of those poor, starving, doe-eyed kids on the Save the Children commercials.

  Instead of making her feel accepted, it made her feel even more alone. Mark couldn’t get here soon enough. She needed his presence for reassurance. Thank God his flight was supposed to arrive in Rapid City by 4:45 p.m. tomorrow.

  “We’re all praying for Little Bill,” the woman behind the counter said. “We hope they find him out there.”

  “Thank you.”

  “My grandmother wandered off about two years ago,” the woman with the toddler suddenly piped.

  Her little boy had now shifted his attention from taping his arm to his stroller to wrapping his head like a bandaged mummy.

  “She’s got Alzheimer’s, kind of like Little Bill,” the woman continued, pushing her dark sunglasses to the crown of her head and adjusting her zebra-print diaper bag on her shoulder. “When the cops found her, she told them she thought it was 1968. She had hopped in the car and was headed to Montgomery Ward to pick up a new vacuum cleaner and a duster. I had to tell her that store had shut down almost fifteen years ago.”

  “It’s a shame when old folks go soft in the head,” the man with the buzz cut murmured behind his goatee.

  The plump woman nodded and then made a sorrowful tsk, tsk sound.

  Janelle’s lips tightened.

  Besides Pops’s absence, the second hardest part of this whole ordeal was that everyone in town was now under the mistaken belief that Pops had Alzheimer’s or had gone “soft in the head.” And the mistaken belief was all because of one line in the Silver Alert that Janelle wished they would have never included: “He may be showing early signs of dementia.”

  “We’ll keep it in there just as a precaution,” Sam had assured her after she accidentally let it slip that Pops still talked to Nana, who was long dead, and sometimes he forgot things like where he put his keys and whether it was Wednesday or Thursday. “We’ll say that Little Bill may be showing signs of dementia. That doesn’t mean he has it. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t have it, either. We’re just telling the people who are looking for him to be prepared.”

  But now Pops was transformed in the eyes of Mammoth Falls residents from the outgoing little guy with the big personality to a doddering old man who was wandering around in the forest, confused about where he was and who he was. It was something that would mortify her grandfather, who boasted about not wearing adult diapers or walking with a cane.

  “I ain’t as old as I look, baby girl,” he would say with a grin.

  “I’d . . . like that letter now,” Janelle said as she pulled her arm from under the woman’s hand. She then slid the notice toward her, ignoring the well-intentioned though thoughtless words of those around her.

  The woman behind the counter nodded. “Of course, honey. I’ll get it for you right away.”

  Five minutes later, Janelle was still trembling with indignation as she walked down the sidewalk, passing several festival tents on her way back to her car. Her cell phone began to chime, and she yanked it out her purse. She read the name on the screen and rolled her eyes.

  “Hello, Lydia,” she answered flatly.

  “Hi, Janelle! Glad I caught you!” the assistant HR director said on the other end of the line. She sounded tense, but frankly the woman always seemed mildly high strung. “Uh, I was wondering if you got my email about those really important forms that need your signature. They were due today and—”

  “Yes, I got your email. I had meant to turn in the forms early, but I didn’t get a chance to do it before I left. I’d planned to download them here and sign them again, but I—”

  Pop, pop, pop!

  The sound of gunfire echoed around her. Janelle screamed and dropped her tote bag to the ground.

  “Oh, my God, Janelle, is everything okay?” Lydia cried. Janelle whipped around, clutching her chest in alarm, only to find three men aiming black plastic pistols at a red-and-white bulls-eyes twelve feet away. A woman was laughing and screaming gaily beside them, clapping her hands. A painted scene of the Great Plains was behind the targets, showing the rolling hills, bison, and wagon trains.

  “Goddamnit!” Janelle yelled, reaching down and grabbing her tote bag from the sidewalk. Some of the festival goers looked at her uneasily, like she was the one toting a pistol. She took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m fine. Sorry. It’s jus
t . . . stuff going on here.” She shook her head in exasperation. “I’m sorry. What was I saying?”

  “You . . . umm . . . you said you had planned to sign the forms,” Lydia repeated back to her.

  “Yes! Yes, I had planned to sign them, but I didn’t get to do it before I left. Do you think maybe you could send me a digital copy and I can sign it here and email it back?”

  “Umm, well, I . . . I guess I can. I’m not really that familiar with that document system though. The last time I did it, the system crashed. Remember? Do you think you could just . . . I don’t know . . . print the documents out and overnight them to me instead?”

  “Lydia, the only printer and scanner around here that I can use is at the nearest Kinko’s and that’s almost thirty miles away. . . I think. I haven’t had the chance to hunt it down yet.” She shoved her hand into her frizzy curls. “I haven’t had the chance to hunt down anything. I can’t find any decent hair care products. I can’t even find a Laundromat around here. I’m running out of clean underwear!”

  Lydia paused. “I’m sorry, Janelle. I’m not following. What about clean underwear?”

  “Who’s the fastest gun in the West?” the man standing behind the counter ten feet away shouted. “Take your mark, gentlemen! Now . . . fire!”

  Pop, pop, pop!

  Janelle jumped again at the sound. “Goddamnit!”

  Her trembling was getting worse. She could feel herself fraying at the edges. “Look, Lydia, let me call you back. This is a . . . bad time.”

  “Umm, okay,” Lydia said in a squeaky voice, sounding panicked herself. “B-but can you tell me when you’ll send the—”

  Janelle hung up. She spotted her Jetta and fled toward it like it was the last helicopter leaving Saigon. She climbed inside her car and shut the door behind her.

  “Breathe in, breathe out,” she whispered. But the deep breathing exercises weren’t working anymore. Maybe it was the altitude; the air was too thin up here.

  She had to find her grandfather. She had to find him and get out of this godforsaken small town or she would go nuts.

  I can do this, she told herself as she tugged the certified envelope out of her tote bag. He’s not lost and he’s not “soft in the head.” And I’ll prove it.

  The instant she had seen the certified mail notice on Pops’s cabin door yesterday afternoon, she had felt of rush of adrenaline.

  It could be a clue, her hysterical mind had screamed. Maybe it could tell us where Pops is or what happened to him!

  Maybe her grandfather had managed to get an encoded letter past his kidnappers that had directions to the secret location where he was hidden. Or maybe he had pre-mailed her a note before his disappearance.

  “Dear baby girl,” it would say, “if this letter reaches you, then you are now in Mammoth Falls and the police think that I am missing. Just know that I am alive and well and I will be returning home very soon.”

  Janelle realized how ridiculous those scenarios sounded. She knew she was grasping at straws that were so flimsy they would break in two in her strong grip, but helplessness made her willing to grasp at anything that gave her a vague sense of hope. And this letter felt like a reason to hope and her first opportunity to truly do something besides waiting and praying.

  Though she had been prepared to stagger through snow and brush, she had been “strongly discouraged” (those were the exact words the cops had used) from participating in the search. Almost a dozen trackers with dogs, snowmobiles, and ATVs were now in mountains surrounding the town, sniffing every burrow and tree trunk searching for some sign of her grandfather.

  “If we get too many people—too many feet on the ground—it’s going to hinder more than help,” Sam had explained when she pleaded with him to let her look, too. “It’s tracking 101, Janelle. If we’ve got one hundred kindhearted but clueless folks stomping around out there, trampling evidence, it’s going to mess up the trail.”

  So she watched from afar as a myriad of SUVs and trucks from the Lawrence County Search and Rescue to the Deadwood Police Department paraded into Mammoth Falls, drawing more thunderstruck onlookers than if the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus had come to town. And during the day, Janelle could swear she could hear their engines revving and the dogs barking in the woods just an acre or so away from her grandfather’s cabin. She could hear the sound of the helicopters hovering overhead. She yearned to be out there rather than sitting by the phone, hoping that Pops would finally call her back or that he would step through the cabin door at any second.

  Janelle set the certified envelope on the car horn and tugged off her leather gloves.

  She suspected now that the real reason why Sam didn’t want her out there wasn’t because it would compromise the search but because the cops were no longer looking for Pops, but for his body. She had seen enough episodes of Disappeared to know that if a missing person wasn’t found in the first forty-eight hours, the likelihood of their survival was almost zero. Pops could already be dead, and there would be nothing worse than his own granddaughter stumbling upon his decaying remains.

  Still, it felt wrong, almost disrespectful, to sit around waiting. She owed Pops more than that.

  Her eyes scanned the certified envelope’s address label, making her frown. The letter was from MetLife Insurance. No encoded message. No dispatch sent from her grandfather’s Caribbean hideaway. Her mind spun off in yet another wild direction, her thoughts scampering after another enticing trail of bread crumbs as she began to rip open the envelope.

  Insurance . . . insurance money! That would enough motivation to make someone disappear, wouldn’t it?

  Maybe her grandfather had changed beneficiaries or added a new name. Maybe Pops had been coerced into doing it—plied with glasses of whiskey and a tale of woe. Then within days of signing on the dotted line his battered truck appeared on the side of a ravine . . . his empty battered truck. He’d be declared missing and then declared legally dead and someone in town would be six figures richer.

  But who would he add as his beneficiary? Pops wouldn’t do that with any random person, would he? No, he was impetuous but not stupid. Would he add his new wife?

  Connie, you sneaky bitch, Janelle thought as her heart rate picked up its pace and she flipped the letter open with a one-two shake. It makes perfect sense!

  She had suspected Connie might be behind this all along, hadn’t she? From the moment she had walked into Toby’s Bar & Grill and saw Connie sitting at the table with her low-cut top and “Buddy” tattoo, she had known Connie was nothing but trouble or, at least, not a woman to be trusted.

  What could someone like Connie possibly see in an almost-eighty-year-old man anyway?

  Nothing but dollar signs, Janelle thought with a contemptuous snort.

  Connie had suckered Pops into thinking they had a real relationship, enticing him with a web of deceit and seduction, and then finally she had trapped him like a black widow spider in hip huggers. Maybe she had one of her trucker ex-boyfriends do her dirty work.

  “Take care of the old man for me and I’ll split the money with you fifty-fifty,” Janelle could imagine the scene playing out like something straight out of a 1950s film noir.

  Janelle paused.

  But then again, Connie did seem distraught about Pops’s absence. Janelle had watched the normally outspoken woman grow quieter and more pensive with each passing day. She’d listlessly stare out of windows and would lunge for her cell phone, shouting “Bill?” only to slam down her phone when the person on the other end proved not to be him.

  Connie wasn’t that good of an actress, was she?

  And when Sam had gone to Connie’s shop with Janelle in tow to ask her more questions about the disappearance and the details of what had happened that night, making Connie retell her part of the story, it had been painful to watch Connie stutter and stumble her way through her answers.

  “So Bill made you call Janelle?” Sam had asked her, inclining his head and writing on a no
tepad as he spoke.

  “Well . . . umm, yeah . . . I mean, no,” Connie had said. Her eyes had gone unfocused again. She had gazed over Sam’s shoulder at the Main Street sidewalk, peering at the faces of passersby.

  He had squinted at her, seeming a lot less like a good ol’ country boy and more like a hard-nosed cop at that moment. “Is that a yes or no, Connie?”

  Connie had returned her focus back to Sam, ripping her gaze away from the store window. “I mean yes, he asked me to call her, but he dialed the number. I had never called her before.”

  “And then he gave you his phone?”

  Connie had tiredly raised her hand to her brow and closed her dark eyes. The lids had been pink and threaded with blue capillaries. Her eyes had seemed to jitter beneath the lids. “Yes, Sam.”

  “And he told you exactly what to say before he did it?”

  She had loudly groused and gripped the glass counter. “Yes,” she had replied tightly, making Sam lower his notepad and stare at her.

  “What’s wrong, Connie?”

  “There’s nothing wrong. I just told you five hundred times what happened. He told me to lie to her to get her to come here! I don’t understand why I have to tell you again!”

  “You have to tell me because a man has gone missing. This is serious, Connie. We can’t—”

  “Don’t you think I know that?” Connie had shouted. “Goddamnit, I know Bill is missing! I know it! I feel it!” She pressed a hand to her chest. “I feel it every time I take a . . . I take a breath!”

  Sam had pursed his lips and lowered his notepad.

  “You wanna know what he told me?”

  She had abruptly walked behind the sales counter, bent down, opened a door, and pulled out her fringed leather purse. She had plopped it on the glass top and a tube of lip balm fell out before rolling across the counter and landing on the floor.

  “You wanna know what he told me to say?” She had pulled out a cocktail napkin and slapped it down on the counter like it was a hand in a game of poker. “Right there. That’s what he told me to say.”

  Janelle had leaned forward and saw on the tattered cocktail napkin her grandfather’s handwriting—the long skinny t’s and the lopsided e’s. She had read the words that Connie had said to her the night he disappeared.