Between Lost and Found

by Shelly Stratton

  “Shit!” Sam shouted, looking like a surfer who was trying to regain his balance on his surfboard in a massive wave. He quickly turned to Janelle. “Take the stairs. Get out of here! Get the hell out of here!” he barked at her before reaching for the radio on his shoulder and shouting for more police assistance.

  “Connie!” Janelle shouted, gathering her skirts and grabbing Connie’s hand. “Connie, we’d better go!”

  The older woman nodded vaguely, looking dazed. The two women made it down the stairs, which seemed on the verge of collapse. Most of the other models had already fled, leaving behind hairpieces and rhinestone earrings in their wake.

  Connie teetered on the last step. Just as Janelle reached for her hand to help her regain her balance, Connie was knocked onto the pavement. She landed on her rear and clutched her face like someone had hit her. Connie dropped her hand and revealed a trickle of blood coming from her left nostril.

  “Oh, my God! Connie! Are you okay?” Janelle reached for her but was shoved aside again, almost falling herself as she tripped over her hem. Her cowboy hat was knocked off her head and kicked into the crowd.

  “You bitch! You fuckin’ bitch!” Yvette yelled. “How could you?”

  Janelle turned to find Yvette holding up her bloodied fist. Janelle realized in horror that she had been the one who had hit Connie.

  “You told everyone it was Tyler who did it, you lying bitch! You want to act like the grieving widow? You really want to do that when I know what a fuckin’ whore you are!” Yvette shouted, lunging for her mother again. Janelle jumped between them, holding up her hands.

  “Evie, stop!”

  Yvette lowered her fists. She shook her head in disgust.

  “Bill isn’t dead, Janelle. He just ran to get away from this cheating bitch!” she shouted, jabbing her finger at Connie, who was still huddled on the ground. “He wanted to get away from you, you slut! You whore!”

  Janelle turned to Connie. The older woman’s flush of rage had disappeared. She now looked extremely pale, like all the blood had been drained out of her.

  They heard the police sirens then. The assistance Sam had called for had finally arrived.

  Yvette glanced in the direction of the approaching cruisers, looked back at Connie and Janelle, shook her head again, and then ran off in some unseen direction, getting lost in the melee. Janelle turned back to Connie who was still sitting on the pavement, getting knocked to and fro by random knees and feet.

  She was on the verge of getting trampled.

  “Connie, honey,” Janelle said, reaching for her yet again. “Please! We can’t stay here!”

  Connie hesitantly reached up and took the hand Janelle held out to her. She shakily rose to her feet.

  “Hold onto me,” Janelle ordered, feeling her panic rise with each passing second. She flinched when she heard glass shatter. Was that a store window? Someone else was screaming now. It sounded awful. In the corner of her eye, it looked like something—one of the vendor stalls—was ablaze. She didn’t know how she was going to run in this dress, in these uncomfortable shoes. How was she going to lead Connie out of this? She didn’t know the answer for sure, but she would damn well try.

  “Don’t let go. We can—”

  Janelle was stopped midsentence when she felt herself being yanked. It felt like someone had gotten tangled in her dress and was pulling at the fabric. She heard the side seam rip. She tugged at her skirt to free herself but then she felt someone wrap an arm around her waist. She was lifted off of her feet.

  “What are you doing?” she yelled. “Stop! Put me down!”

  She was being dragged—physically dragged—by some unseen person away from Connie. The two women lost their tenuous grip. Hollow-eyed Connie was shoved in one direction and Janelle was carried in another.

  The Titanic was sinking and they were lost at sea, being ripped away from each other by the vicious tide.

  Janelle started to yell and kick. She clawed at the arm around her waist. The unseen person dragged her for several more feet before dumping her unceremoniously on the sidewalk in front of Mason’s Grocery. She landed on her hands and stomach on the cold cement. Janelle quickly scrambled to her knees and looked over her shoulder to find Sam standing over her.

  She stared at him in shock.

  “I told you to get the hell out of here,” he said sternly, before turning on his heel and marching back into the fray.

  Here she was thinking that she was being kidnapped and instead, she had been carted to safety.

  Sam saved me.

  Janelle wanted to shout for him to come back, to stay with her—but she didn’t. He had work to do, and she needed a place to hide while the mob had its fill. She reluctantly took Sam’s advice. She looked around her and saw people scrambling in all directions. Several were running toward her. She was in danger of getting trampled again. Janelle yanked open the door to Mason’s Grocery. She found nearly a half dozen people standing around with shell-shocked looks on their faces, including the shopkeeper, Agnes.

  “Let’s all go to the back,” Agnes whispered, shuffling across the linoleum tile. “Come on!”

  They followed Agnes and took refuge behind metal shelves and freezers, crouching low or kneeling on all fours, waiting for the riot to end. Thankfully, they didn’t have to wait for long. Just as quickly as the chaos had erupted with all the spectacle of an exploding Mount Vesuvius, it fizzled out like the last sparkler at a Fourth of July parade.

  After two hours, the crowd dispersed, leaving Main Street quite different from the way they had found it. Several car and shop windows were broken, including Hot Threads & Things, and shards of glass glittered in the light from the overhead streetlamps. Tents and stands were either tilting at odd angles or toppled into the street. It looked like the first annual Black Hills Wild West Festival had come to a climatic end several days early.

  Janelle emerged from Mason’s Grocery along with the others and limped down Main Street, gazing around her. She dragged her tattered, dirty gown behind her and ripped off the one false eyelash that had managed to survive the riot. She wrinkled her nose at the burnt smell of the charred remains of a stand selling cowboy hats and boots that someone had either purposely or accidentally set on fire. She watched as the firemen trudged back to their truck, carrying a limp water hose on their shoulders.

  A few people sat on the sidewalk and metal benches, either in handcuffs or being bandaged by EMTs. Janelle had heard that one person had to be carted off to Lead-Deadwood Regional Hospital in an ambulance, though she wasn’t sure if she trusted that rumor.

  After all, unsubstantiated rumors are what had gotten them into this trouble in the first place.

  Janelle walked back to her rental car, which was parked a few blocks away in the lot behind Christ Church. She searched for either Connie or Sam among the dazed faces of those she passed. She wasn’t sure how they had fared in the confusion, and it gnawed at her that either Sam or Connie may have been the person strapped to a gurney and rushed to the hospital.

  She found Connie standing in the parking lot, leaning against the truck bed of her Silverado, trembling like a leaf in a strong wind. Her nose was still bleeding. A scratch was on her right cheek. The wind had picked up again so her long, dark hair whipped wildly around her face and shoulders. She looked shell-shocked.

  “Connie?” Janelle called out to her.

  The older woman slowly turned and stared at her as if she didn’t recognize her.

  “Do you want me to drive you home?”

  Connie squinted like she was trying to understand what she was saying.

  “Do you want a ride?” Janelle repeated, enunciating the words.

  Connie wrapped her arms around herself and nodded.

  They drove to Connie’s house in silence. Janelle didn’t know the directions and Connie didn’t bother to give them, so instead Janelle punched in her address and let the automated, robotic voice of the car’s navigational system tell her where to go.r />
  She glanced at the back of Connie’s head as she drove. It was an opaque shield of all black.

  “Connie,” she asked, “how did you know Tyler was the one who abducted Pops?”

  Connie slowly turned from the passenger-side window and fixed Janelle with that startled gaze again, as if she had forgotten that Janelle was sitting beside her and she was being driven in the young woman’s car. “Huh?”

  “How did you know it was Tyler? How’d you know he did it? I mean . . . Did he say something to you? Did he mention anything about Pops’s disappearance?”

  “No . . . but he didn’t have to. I just . . . knew.”

  “What do you mean you just knew?”

  “I just knew, Janelle,” she said with more vehemence. “I . . . I felt it in . . . in my heart.”

  Janelle frowned. “So you accused a man of murder . . . based on a feeling?”

  “Sometimes that’s all you have,” Connie mumbled before returning her attention to the passenger-side window. She didn’t say anything else for the rest of the car ride.

  When Janelle arrived at Connie’s house, she pulled up to the end of the driveway and peered at the two-story home with its shoddy wooden steps and porch, parched front yard, peaked roof, and pale gray siding. It looked badly in need of some tender love and care. It looked lonely.

  “Do you want me to come in with you?” Janelle asked, leaning over the leather armrest as Connie opened her car door. “I can stay for a bit if—”

  “No, that’s all right,” Connie said, lowering her bloody tissue from her nose. “Look, I’m sorry, Janelle. I’m . . . I’m sorry for everything. Please forgive me.”

  “Of course I forgive you.”

  Though Janelle suspected she wasn’t the one who could grant Connie the absolution she was seeking.

  Connie nodded and slammed the door shut. Janelle watched the older woman climb the porch steps, open the screen door, and close it behind her.

  Janelle arrived back at her grandfather’s silent cabin less than thirty minutes later. She shut the door behind her, not bothering to turn on the lights. Instead, she lowered the zipper of her gown, which was now covered in dirt, sweat, and ripped to shreds along the hem. She took it off and let it pool at her feet then stepped out of it. She climbed onto the couch in her bra and panties, bringing her knees to her chest and letting her face rest against the plaid sofa cushion. She inhaled her grandfather’s scent, seeking reassurance from it, but it was starting to fade—the smell of his cologne was starting to lose the battle to the generic mothball smell of old sofa fabric.

  She wrapped her arms around her legs and closed her eyes.

  Connie may have been wrong about Tyler, but perhaps she was right about one thing: Pops was dead. The realization made an ache spread through Janelle’s chest.

  Her father had died when she was nineteen years old and she had accepted it with a stoic resignation that seemed well beyond her years. By then, he was all but a ghost to her anyway, one that drifted in and out her life. He’d missed all the important milestones, skipping her sixteenth birthday and not bothering to call or send a card. He hadn’t been standing with her mother and neighbors, taking pictures, as she climbed into the limo to go to prom. He hadn’t sat in the audience at her high school graduation.

  “There’s nothing you or I could’ve done to help him, honey. But it’s okay to cry,” her mother had encouraged when they got the call that he’d died. “It’s okay to be hurt.”

  But Janelle hadn’t cried—even at his funeral. She had shut the door on those emotions long ago, putting them in a lockbox of “Things to be Dismissed and Forgotten,” and had thrown away the key. But she couldn’t put this in a box. She longed for her grandfather, and that longing would never be quenched. But she would have to let him go.

  It’s okay to cry. It’s okay to be hurt, honey, her mother would say.

  So she finally did it. She cried for the father who had walked away and for the loss of the father who had stayed and taken his place.

  CHAPTER 26

  Janelle heard a knock at the cabin door. Before she pulled back the gingham curtains, even before she rose from her bed, she knew who would be standing on the welcome mat. She ran across the living room and flung the front door open. Sam stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the glow of the dark night underneath the full moon and the outline of pine trees in the distance. His face looked weary.

  She didn’t hesitate before leaping at him and throwing her arms around his neck, like he was a sailor who had come home from a long, arduous deployment.

  “Ooof,” Sam replied as she slammed into his chest.

  He stumbled back slightly, grabbing the edge of one of the porch posts, barely stopping them both from taking a tumble down the wooden stairs to the gravel driveway.

  “Oh, thank God! You’re all right,” she gushed against his chest, pressing her face into the fabric of his navy blue uniform. She released him a few seconds later.

  He gave a bemused half smile. “Yeah, I’m . . . I’m fine.”

  I’m fine. After what they had just witnessed and endured, all he had to say was, Yeah, I’m fine. That is so Sam.

  “How are you doing?” he asked, looking her up and down. “Got all your limbs? Still have two eyes?”

  She took a step back and gestured at herself. She was wearing an oversize t-shirt and silk pajama pants. Her curly hair was in a loose ponytail at the nape of her neck. Purple polka-dot, rubber-toed socks were on her feet.

  “Gaze upon Janelle Marshall in all her glory! All in one piece,” she said, then paused. “Well, all in one piece physically, anyway.” She shook her head. “What the hell happened back there? How did it turn into that?”

  His smile disappeared. The weariness came back to his face. “It didn’t take much. Just a lot of hurt and confused people looking for someone to blame, anyone to blame.”

  “And for some reason Connie selected Tyler. I thought they were going to erect a pyre, tie him to a post, and set him on fire in front of City Hall.”

  “I’m sure plenty of them wanted to, but they didn’t. Tyler got pretty roughed up, but he made it out alive. We don’t have another body we’ve got to send to the medical examiner. At least there’s that.”

  “I don’t think Connie wanted it to happen like that, Sam. She got . . . caught up in the moment, I guess. She apologized to me . . . for everything. I’m sure she’d apologize to you, too, for what she said.”

  His face darkened. He didn’t look equally convinced. “Like I said, they had to blame somebody. I guess Connie decided to cast a wider net.” He took a deep breath. “Look, I wasn’t trying to keep you up or rehash everything that happened today. I know you’re probably tired. I just wanted to make sure you were okay and apologize for being so rough with you.”

  “You don’t have to apologize. I know why you did it. And I told you, I’m fine!” She took a step toward him. “Thank you for coming out here. You didn’t have to.”

  He shook his head again. “Like I said, I wanted to see if—”

  “But you could have called or texted to ask that.”

  He paused.

  “That’s what I mean, Sam. You came in person, and I’ll admit I . . . I wanted you to come.”

  She forced the words to pass her lips before she had the chance to second-guess herself. It’s now or never, she thought as she took another step toward him and hesitantly raised her hand. She placed it on his chest, over his heart.

  “I had hoped you would come tonight. I missed you, Sam.”

  His reaction to her confession wasn’t quite what she had expected. Instead of looking shocked or impressed, he looked sick, like he had come down with an extreme bout of nausea.

  Oh, dear, she thought, also now starting to feel a little nauseated. Had she read this all wrong? Had she really dismissed Connie’s warning and risked her engagement over mixed signals?

  She quickly dropped her hand and retreated back to the cabin doorway.

&n
bsp; “I-I’m s-so sorry,” she sputtered. “I—”

  “No, I’m sorry.” He yanked off his cap and roughly raked his fingers through his hair. Matted with sweat and grime from the day’s ordeals, his hair stood up stiffly. He turned away from her like he couldn’t meet her eyes.

  “Look, I’ve already given this speech once today. But it looks like I’m going to have to give it again.” He cleared his throat. “Janelle, I . . . I’m not good at relationships. I’ve accepted that. I’m not the right guy to depend on for . . . for anything.”

  “How could you say that?” she cried.

  Being humble was one thing, but this admission was ridiculous.

  “You’re the town’s police chief, for Chrissake! You picked me up out of a crowd during a riot and carried me across a—”

  “But I’m not good for the long haul, is what I’m saying! I want to be . . . but that’s just not me. I failed someone already who needed me, who needed my help. I don’t want to do it again. I’m sorry.”

  She inclined her head and stared up at him. “Are you talking about your wife? Is that who you think you ‘failed’? You mean Gabby?”

  From the look in his eyes, she knew she had hit the mark. Her shoulders slumped.

  “Sam, you damn near reek of guilt. Do you know that? You used to cringe every time you looked at me. You did it like it was painful to even see me. You did it because I look like your wife. I look like her, right?”

  He lowered his gaze to his shoes that were now caked in soot and mud.

  “I bet there are death row inmates who feel they have less to apologize for than you do. But there’s no reason to apologize! You didn’t do anything wrong! You couldn’t cure bipolar disorder. You wanted to help, but it was beyond your control. It would’ve been for anybody!”

  “You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” he said tightly through clenched teeth.

  She angrily dropped her hands to her hips. “Yes, I do! I do, Sam!”

  She of all people knew what it was like to be disappointed, to feel what you believed mattered most to you slip through your fingers: your vision of your future and the person you thought you’d spend your life with. You couldn’t keep grabbing for the tether once it had already broken. Why keep punishing yourself?