Kidnapped ik-10

by Jan Burke

  “He doesn’t have anything to do with the Fletchers!”

  “Not even his mom?”

  “Not even his—” He broke off and made a sound of frustration. “Goddammit, Irene…”

  But before he could say more, Caleb was calling to him, clearly excited about something he had found.

  That wasn’t lost on Vince, either, and he followed Ben up the slope. I would have done the same, but the uniformed officer had finished his coffee break and was now dedicated to preventing me from getting any closer to the crime scene.

  I pulled out a camera and took a few shots. Nothing very artistic, but the Express hadn’t spared a staff photographer for this, so they’d have to make do. The uniform called up to Vince before I managed to take more than five or six. The whole group was scowling at me now.

  They came down the hill in a pack. Caleb reached me first and surprised me by saying, “You’re Ben’s friend who’s taking care of Ethan Shire, right?”

  “Yes, he’s living with my husband and me until he gets back on his feet.” I extended a hand and introduced myself. “How do you know Ethan?”

  “Before he was shot, he used to come out and talk to us while we worked on the municipal cemetery case. How’s he doing?”

  Ethan had uncovered a scandal involving the reselling of graves, grave robbing, and the mixing of remains at a municipal cemetery. I now recalled that several of Ben’s graduate students had worked on the project of restoring the graves.

  Ben was bearing down on us now. “Look,” I said, just as he reached us, “why don’t you and Ben come over for dinner tomorrow? Ethan is recovering, but he’s kind of down. I think he’s bored, just having Frank and me around.”

  “That would be great! I mean… I can make it. Ben, how about you?”

  I managed not to smile. I think Ben would have come just to see how Ethan was doing, but I also knew there was no way on Earth that he would let his graduate student spend time with two reporters without being there to oversee matters.

  Ben gave me a hard stare but then sighed and said, “Yes, I’d like to see how Ethan’s doing, too.”

  Vince said, “Caleb found a wallet. As you know, that is not even close to a positive ID. May not even belong to the deceased. But make sure Mark gives me that call, all right?”

  “For a guy who just got a big break on a case, you’re looking mighty grim,” I said.

  “Let’s just say life is full of surprises.”

  I tried to get more information out of him, but he said that until he cleared things with his department, he wasn’t going to say more. I made sure he meant it, then left.

  As I drove off, I glanced in the rearview mirror and caught Caleb Fletcher staring at my car. That was okay. I was curious about him, too.

  CHAPTER 12

  Monday, April 24

  3:30 P.M.

  A HOME IN HUNTINGTON BEACH

  CARRIE smiled to herself as she washed the lunch dishes, thinking of being able to spend more time with Grandfather Fletcher as soon as she finished. The visit from her uncle and her grandfather had been a surprise. Uncle Giles was always nice to Carrie, but it was Grandfather she was most happy to see. Everyone loved Grandfather.

  Her sister, Genie, and their brothers were upstairs with him now, while Carrie washed the lunch dishes. Mom and Dad were in Dad’s office, here at home, talking with her uncle. Family business. Uncle Giles was in charge of Grandfather’s private school — Fletcher Academy. Carrie wondered if she would be allowed to go there one day. Home schooling was okay, but she wished sometimes that they got out of the house more, could meet children who weren’t her cousins. She always tried to be extra nice to Uncle Giles, thinking he might let her in.

  Today her parents and Uncle Giles had gone off to talk almost right away. Grandfather had said the children could all take a little break before they went back to their studies.

  Carrie dried her hands and went upstairs to their big playroom. Grandfather turned and winked at her as she slipped in, but went on playing the piano, singing to her little brothers, Aaron and Troy. The boys stood as close to him as they could, eyes bright, joining in on the chorus. It was a song for young children, one Grandfather had written. Her nine-year-old sister, Genie, was quietly drawing. She smiled at Carrie, flashed a quick greeting in sign language, then bent her head over the big pad of drawing paper Grandfather had brought her.

  Grandfather had taught all of his grandchildren some sign language so that they could communicate with their two deaf cousins. “And when my hearing goes, you can use it to talk to me,” he’d say.

  As usual, he had brought a little gift for each of them. The drawing pad for Genie. For Carrie, a disposable camera, which made Mom roll her eyes but delighted Carrie — Grandfather had smiled at her excitement. The boys had been given storybooks, carefully chosen for their reading levels and interests — Troy’s was a book about dinosaurs, Aaron’s about astronomy. The boys loved books.

  Carrie went to sit on the cushions on the window seat of the big bay window. She listened to the lyrics of Grandfather’s song, which was about the planets in the solar system. Carrie was old enough now to know that most of the songs Grandfather wrote were teaching songs, because Grandfather loved teaching almost as much as he loved children. The song was just the right thing for the boys. Aaron was five and Troy was six. Both of them could name the planets, because they knew this song so well.

  Carrie had been able to name them at the age of four. She had learned them without the song.

  Grandfather began to play a different song, a song about raindrops. He said that it came from a movie. Carrie, who was sitting away from the others, listened to Grandfather sing it as she watched raindrops on the windowpane.

  Suddenly a strange feeling came over her. Inside her head, she could hear another voice singing the song. A man’s voice, soft and gentle. She was remembering that voice.

  Someone else has sung this song to me. Another man. He sang it to me so that I wouldn’t be afraid of the rainstorm, the thunder.

  She could almost see the man. In her memory, she could find the scent of him — it was a good and comforting scent, maybe from his soap or shampoo. Then, in snippets of memory that were nevertheless quite clear, she could see the man. His eyes were blue, like hers, and his hair was the same dark gold. As quickly as the images and memories had come to her, they were gone.

  She watched the raindrops more intently. She had come up with a term for these experiences: a remembering. She knew Mom would scold her if she knew Carrie had tried to make a noun out of a verb, but Mom didn’t need to know all of Carrie’s thoughts. Mom would say they were memories, period. They weren’t exactly memories, to Carrie’s way of thinking. They were something on the way to being a memory. One day, she would remember more, and then they’d really be memories, not these vague impressions.

  When the rememberings first came to her, she had been frightened and upset, and — for reasons she couldn’t immediately explain — sad. She knew she was adopted — they all were — but Mom and Dad said she had been adopted as a baby, not at three years old, as Genie and the boys had been. So how could a baby remember a song?

  She was a sensible girl, as Dad was always saying, so she didn’t stay upset for long. She worked out several possibilities. She decided her parents had probably lied to her. She must not have been a baby when they adopted her. She must have been older. She looked something like Mom — and was probably chosen on that basis. After her, they gave up on that — Genie and the boys didn’t look anything like their adoptive parents. They just didn’t want her to be hurt by the knowledge that her real parents had a chance to get to know her before they decided they didn’t want her any longer.

  She had seen how the boys cried when they first came to live here, each in turn. She had watched how wonderfully patient and kind Mom and Dad had been. Now, two years after the youngest, Aaron, had come here, he seemed not to remember being part of any other family. He didn’t cry out for h
is dead parents, or try to make up another name for himself.

  Mom and Dad said Carrie’s parents had died not long after she was born. But she was sure that was a lie.

  It made her feel sad that her adoptive parents had lied, even if it was a white lie. She was old enough now to realize that everyone lied, but still, you didn’t have to like it. She knew she was kind of a liar, too, because she kept secrets, and if her mother asked, “What’s on your mind, Carrie?” she didn’t always answer truthfully.

  She wished she could ask questions about her birth parents, but she was afraid, she admitted to herself. What if she hurt Mom and Dad by asking? What if they decided she was too much trouble to keep? She was happy here, and loved her family. What good would it do to ask questions, especially if she might not like the answers?

  She leaned her forehead against the cold glass and closed her eyes. The voice of the man of her remembering came back to her, and she found that she liked thinking about him. She had a series of private daydreams about this father who had not wanted to give her up, but a mean mother who insisted. The mean mother variously kept her locked in a closet, put her in a trunk, or sold her to strangers.

  She never came up with a mental image or even a remembering of her birth mother. Only her father. She had another daydream in which her mother died just after Carrie was born, and then her father was in a terrible accident and hit his head and couldn’t remember anything and didn’t come home, and Carrie was put up for adoption.

  That part of the story was inspired by a paperback book she had found in a box in the attic, called Emily and the Stranger, in which an earl falls off his horse and hits his head and loses his memory and is found by a woman who lives alone in the woods and who cares for him and marries him, and then she gets kidnapped and he hits his head again and remembers everything, then they learn that Emily was really not a poor girl after all. It was a book that Mom didn’t know she had hidden in her room, a book that had taught her many other surprising things. (She and Genie had been told about sex as an element of biological reproduction, but that was nothing like what the book described.)

  Emily and the Stranger was now in a mailing envelope she had taken from the recycling pile and taped to the back of one of the sliding doors on her closet, one of several places where she kept small treasures. She never hid things under her mattress, though — Genie had told her that Mom hid things under her own mattress, so Carrie was sure Mom searched the kids’ beds every now and then.

  In Carrie’s daydream, her father would be hit on his golden-haired head a second time, but not enough to hurt, just enough to make him remember his past and look for her.

  He was her secret, just like the book. No one needed to know. Not even Grandfather. Especially not Grandfather or Uncle Giles, she decided, then wondered why such a thought should even cross her mind.

  CHAPTER 13

  Monday, April 24

  4:30 P.M.

  NEWSROOM OF THE

  LAS PIERNAS NEWS EXPRESS

  ALTHOUGH the City Desk had put a few more people on the story of the drowning victims out on the oil island, Mark Baker still had his hands full with that one. Mark and I have worked together for a lot of years, though, and he knows just by looking at me when I’m on to something.

  “They won’t tell me anything,” I said. “Probably because of Frank. His friends know that he’ll be suspected of being my source if any cop gives me anything for the paper. There are still a couple of those guys who will never forgive him for marrying a reporter.”

  “Can you blame them?” Mark asked, laughing. “Besides, you know that attitude runs both ways.”

  “True.”

  “So what’s with the body in the woods?”

  I told him what I knew about it, which wasn’t much. “But I have a feeling, Mark — something tells me it’s going to be big. Maybe not as big as the one you’re working on, but… I don’t know. Maybe it’s just the location — the Sheffield place has been abandoned so long. What was this guy doing out there?”

  “Hmm… I’ll give Vince a call.”

  “I’ll download the photos I took,” I said. “Let me know what’s up, okay?”

  He agreed to keep me posted.

  FRANK called, and after some discussion of what we each had left to do at work, we figured out that he’d be home first. “Looks like it’s going to start raining again,” he said, “but if it doesn’t, I’ll walk the dogs.” We talked about Ethan and the roster of our friends who took turns staying with him during the day while he was in this phase of his recovery. Ethan was due to see his doctor soon and would probably insist to him that he was now well enough to be left at home alone.

  “He’ll say that,” Frank agreed, “but he likes the company.”

  We spoke briefly about the parts of Frank’s current case that were already public knowledge. I could tell he was trying not to let on that he was feeling a little down — notification of families is one of his least favorite parts of the job.

  “I hope you won’t mind,” I said, as much by way of distraction as confession, “I invited Ben and his grad student, Caleb Fletcher, to dinner tomorrow night. I would have talked this over with you first, but—”

  “No, don’t worry about it. That will be great,” he said. “I’ve been concerned about Ben since he broke up with Anna. And I know Caleb — it will be good to see him again, too.”

  AFTER I talked to Frank, I spent some time on my computer looking up archived stories on the Fletcher family.

  Caleb’s name brought up a lot of matches to stories from the trial.

  I spent a few minutes reviewing those. The paper had ferreted out family trouble then — his mother’s parents and the Fletchers had lined up against Caleb and his mother, Elisa Delacroix Fletcher. Nelson Fletcher’s testimony against Mason had helped the prosecution. He said Richard had confided to him that he was having difficulties with Mason, that Mason argued with Richard and often lost his temper.

  Although the prosecutor had asked for the death penalty, Caleb and Elisa had apparently been persuasive at that point. Caleb had said, “I don’t believe for a moment that Mason killed my father or my sister. But if the jury believes it, I’ll ask you to keep him alive, or we’ll never find out what really became of her.” Mason was given a life sentence.

  So now, five years after the trial, Caleb’s sister was still missing, his half brother still in prison.

  I kept reading.

  I got a lot of hits from the business section on the name Fletcher. I narrowed it down to Nelson and still came up with quite a few.

  Nelson Fletcher was generally accounted to be a man who loved his privacy. He was the respected owner of several manufacturing firms. I learned that he was actually Nelson Fletcher, M.D. — he had a medical degree from UC Irvine but had practiced medicine for only three years after his residency, during which time he also took up a study of engineering. He held a number of patents on medical devices used in a wide variety of surgical procedures, a line of work that apparently paid very well.

  I tried a search for Elisa Delacroix Fletcher and found only one other hit, but a relatively recent one. It was dated about two years ago.

  To my surprise, the story was a small wedding announcement: Elisa had married her late husband’s brother Nelson Fletcher. First marriage for Nelson. Elisa had a son, Caleb Fletcher, by a previous marriage.

  No mention of Mason. No mention of the drama of just three years earlier. Man, oh man, someone in Features had been asleep at the wheel to let that one go in without a shout. Didn’t they even notice that she wasn’t going to have to change the last name on her checks and return-address labels?

  It seemed likely to me that this marriage had led to Caleb’s estrangement from his mom. What the hell had persuaded the woman to marry a man who had testified against her son?

  I started to wonder if she knew more about her son’s guilt than had been said during the time of the trial, and looked more closely at those stories. The
reporting was clumsy, not some of the best to come out of the Express. From all I could gather, the defense hadn’t put up much of a fight. I was trying to piece events together and thinking about looking up the trial transcripts, when Mark walked over.

  “Kelly, you haven’t lost your touch. Damn if your instincts weren’t right about this one.”

  “What one?” I said absently, still absorbed in my reading.

  “The dead dude out at the Sheffield place. You were right — could go big.”

  “Who is it?”

  “If that’s his wallet, it’s one Gerald Serre.”

  My jaw dropped. “Gerald Serre?” I spelled the last name out.

  Mark frowned, as if I had spoiled a surprise. “Yes, he—”

  “Supposedly kidnapped his own child…”

  Mark gave me a suspicious look. “You talk to Frank or something?”

  “No, no — I mean, I did, but not about this. Serre’s ex-wife called me today.”

  Now the look was really suspicious, but I was worried about something that was far more important than dirty looks.

  “Mark, if he’s dead, what happened to his little boy?”

  He didn’t get a chance to answer, because Lydia Ames called out to us from the City Desk.

  “Mark — Irene — either of you know a Sheila Dolson? Irene, she says you can vouch for her. She claims she and her dog are out at the Sheffield place. The dog just found more remains.”

  “Shit,” Mark and I said in unison. He turned to me and said, “Kelly, you know her. You’ve got to come with me.”

  I caught the urgency in his voice and remembered that Mark, who had been viciously attacked by a dog when he was ten, has a fear of them. He’s embarrassed by that fear — no one else in the newsroom knew about it — and he’s tried to overcome it. But the look on his face said he didn’t want to deal with this situation alone.