by Jan Burke
So she told him everything she knew. When she came to the part about figuring out about the pills in the Bloody Mary, she skipped over that, but thinking of it helped her find some defiance. “And I remember someone named Mason. Who is he?”
He looked away. “Your brother. He’s in prison.”
Brother, yes! Her mental picture of him came more sharply into focus. Then the next words registered. “In prison!”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He hesitated, then said, “He was wrongly accused of a crime.” He took a deep breath and added, “If anything happens to me, Genie, try to get Aaron and Troy away from here. If you find someone to help you, tell them to call the police. If they won’t call the police, don’t go near them. A good person will call the police if you ask them to, okay?”
She nodded.
“Ask the police to take you to Grandfather and tell him that he must take you to your aunt Elisa — to her, and only to her.”
“Who is she?”
“She’s — she’s someone who will love you. I promise you that. She will know who you are. She’ll… she’ll help you to get your brother out of prison.” He paused. “You have another brother, too. His name is Caleb.”
Caleb. A face came to mind with that name, a face not so unlike her own. A dark-haired, teasing teenaged boy, a boy who helped her to learn to read.
She felt confused, unable to take in all he was telling her, to fit these half-remembered people into her own idea of herself. Mason and Caleb were her brothers, but Dad had never mentioned them before. Dad let Mason stay in prison, when he knew it was wrong. Why? An aunt she had never met would love her and take care of her…. She knew Dad wasn’t telling her everything, but she couldn’t even manage to make sense of this much of it.
“Aunt Elisa will be good to you, I promise,” Dad said.
Genie decided she could straighten out the past later. She had bigger worries ahead of her. What was going to happen to her family? The boys…
“Will she love Aaron and Troy, too?” she asked.
“Absolutely.”
“And Carrie?”
“Yes.”
Something about the way he said that single word tipped her off. “You know what happened to her!” she accused.
“Yes.” He seemed upset, and she feared the worst, but he said, “Carrie is fine, I think. But Uncle Giles tried to hurt her, because she surprised him when she came to the house with Ms. Kelly.” He became even more upset as he talked about it. “There was no excuse for it! None! He should have just let her go.” He paused, tried to calm down again. “Cleo rescued them — Ms. Kelly and Carrie. Unfortunately, Uncle Giles fought with her, and she killed him.”
“Killed him!” Cleo is a liar.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, this is too much to be laying on you. I shouldn’t have told you—”
“No, I want to know the truth. If he was trying to hurt Carrie…”
“He was,” he said angrily. “And he wanted to hurt us. That’s why Cleo brought us here, to protect us.”
“But if he’s dead now…” she began to ask reasonably.
“It’s all confusing, I know. I wish I could explain everything to you. But even though Cleo killed Uncle Giles for a very good reason, she… she doesn’t want to go to the police. She’s afraid of them.”
“So she told you she saved Carrie and Ms. Kelly from Uncle Giles?” And you believed her?
“Yes.”
“Carrie is safe?”
“Yes.”
He seemed sure. She wanted to be sure, too. “Carrie will tell other people about us. They’ll look for us.”
“Yes. But… but that might not be good, Genie. Not if Cleo gets upset or worried, and right now she is upset and worried. So please forgive me, but…” He tore up the letter. “If Cleo thinks you’re trying to contact Ms. Kelly, she might kill us all.”
“We have to get out of here!” Genie said.
“Daddy!” Aaron called. “Look at what we made!”
“I like it,” Dad said, and he stashed the torn pieces of paper into a crevice between the rocks.
“We’ll talk more later,” Dad promised.
They had just walked over to the little snow figure the boys had made when Cleo burst out of the cabin.
“Everybody inside! Right now!”
CHAPTER 53
Wednesday, May 3
11:30 A.M.
LAS PIERNAS
I SPENT the morning with Ben, Ethan, and Caleb — Caleb asked us to come with him to talk to his mom. I had hesitated to be there during what probably should have been a private reunion, but Caleb persuaded me that she’d want my reassurance about how the children were being treated, based on my encounter with Carrie. “Besides, you’ve heard Jenny’s voice,” he said. “On your voice mail.”
Elisa Delacroix Fletcher proved to be as smart and resilient as Caleb, although she was understandably having difficulty coping with Nelson’s betrayal of her trust. She’d had less than a day to consider his apparent role in Richard’s death, Mason’s imprisonment, and Jenny’s disappearance. “You knew him for what he was!” she said to Caleb.
“No, Mom. If I had known, I probably would have killed him.”
By the time we had finished talking, I had a clearer picture of Giles, Nelson, Dexter, and her late husband, Richard. Police had told her that Dexter was being sought in France, and that Nelson appeared to have taken their trawler and headed to Mexico or places south.
“He’ll be back,” she predicted. “He travels, but Las Piernas is his comfort zone.”
If he had seen the look in her eye when she said this, I doubt he would have thought of Las Piernas in quite that way.
We left Caleb talking with his mom. I invited Ben back to the house for lunch. We had just started eating when Frank called. Ben’s pager went off at about the same moment, and he stepped outside to use his cell phone.
“I probably won’t be home for dinner,” Frank said. “I’m on my way to the San Bernardino Mountains to help out with the search for the Fletcher kids.”
“Where in the San Bernardino Mountains?”
“Half of us are going to Forest Falls — that’s where I’ll be. The others are going to Cedar Glen. The San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department is going to be supplying most of the personnel — we think we’ve got a couple of leads on where they might be. The GPS on the vehicle left outside of Graydon Fletcher’s place had an address in Cedar Glen entered on it, but there was a map and a set of keys to a place in Forest Falls. They’ve already checked both places and came up empty, but we’re going to be doing some door-to-door work in the neighborhood, and we want to see if the dogs can pick up on a trail. The Las Piernas SAR dogs group is on the way, too.”
“Does this mean Anna’s going up there?”
“Our department specifically asked that she be excluded from this one, but she’s got friends in the San Berdu department, so who knows what will happen. She was pretty hot under the collar about being left out.”
He told me that more bits and pieces of information had been coming in as more people became aware of the story of Roy Fletcher and the missing children. One of Roy Fletcher’s credit cards had been used to buy gas, and videotape had shown the boys entering the gas station’s convenience market with him. Genie did not appear on the videotape, but the camera trained on the gas pumps had shown Roy talking to someone in the SUV before he got back into the driver’s seat, and the attendant remembered that Roy had asked the boys to choose a bag of chips for their sister.
“Where was the gas station?”
“In Riverside, near the interchange for the San Bernardino and the Riverside freeways.”
I tried to picture it. “Before Waterman Avenue?”
“Yes.”
“So from there he could have gone up any of the mountain resort highways?”
“Yes — Highway 18 toward Lake Arrowhead, Highway 330 toward Running Springs, Arrowbear, or Big
Bear, or out to Highway 38 and Forest Falls. But he had directions to only two of them. So wish me luck.”
“Good luck. Any news about Troy Fletcher?”
“None of this goes to the paper, right?”
“Not my story now. And no, I won’t pass it along to anyone else — except — can I talk to Ethan, Caleb, and Ben?”
“Caleb and Ben won’t be a problem — they know the rules. Swear Ethan to secrecy. There will probably be a press conference later this afternoon, but I’ll be in deep shit if the Express gets it first.”
“I understand.”
“Okay. We believe his first name really is Troy, but his last name is Sherman. He was enrolled in a preschool run by a church. They have a program for children whose families wouldn’t be able to afford preschool otherwise. Smart kid, bad family situation.”
“How bad?”
“His parents each had more than a dozen arrests — mostly for theft, a few for possession. One day Troy didn’t show up for school. The school followed up, turned out nobody was home. The Shermans seem to have taken off — left without paying the rent. No one saw them leave, no one was surprised they were gone. Seems they had a habit of moving around.”
“So do you think they moved voluntarily?”
“I have a feeling that’s a question I’m going to be working on all next week, if not longer.”
“So how did the Fletchers learn about him? Is the minister of the church a Fletcher?”
“No. Catholic preschool, as it happens. Turns out Troy was tested by a woman named Jill Lowry, a school psychologist who volunteered to help assess the kids in the program. Guess who tested all three of the other kids?”
“Has she been questioned?”
“Reed and Vince are with her right now, which is why I’m the errand boy sent off to the mountains.”
His cell phone signal was breaking up, and we lost the connection at that point.
Ben was back inside, sitting at the table with Ethan. I noticed Ben’s sandwich was untouched. I came back to the table in time to hear Ethan say, “Poison. Pure poison.”
“Are you talking Ben out of eating the food I’ve prepared?” I asked. “Because I noticed yours is gone.”
“We weren’t talking about you. And yeah, my appetite is coming back — good sign, huh? In fact, if there’s any more…”
I got up to make him another sandwich.
“Trouble?” I asked Ben.
“That was Anna.”
“Oh?” I looked down and realized I had smashed the bread a little as I cut it.
“Wanted to know if I could talk Frank into letting her help with the search. Says she knows the kids and is worried about them.”
I’m afraid I took it out on the bread. “Really.”
“Told her I was sorry, but she knew as well as I did that I couldn’t help her out. Reminded her that I wasn’t going up with the local SAR team, since I’ve left it.”
“What did she say to that?”
“We argued. What did Frank have to say?”
I received the required oath of secrecy and quickly filled them in on our conversation, then handed Ethan’s second sandwich to him. He looked at its squashed edges and said, “Ten-yard penalty for unnecessary roughness.”
I ignored him and said, “Excuse me a minute — I need to get something out of Ethan’s room.”
As I went down the hall, I heard Ethan sigh and say, “My belongings, probably.”
I came back with the Thomas Brothers Guide for San Bernardino County and a set of USGS topographical maps. I went to the table that held the information Caleb had given me on Mason’s case.
“What are you doing?” Ben asked. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
I asked him to pass my plate over to me. “I’m going to see where a hunch leads me. I keep thinking about what Elisa said about comfort zones.” He exchanged a look with Ethan, and they both went to work on their meals. They watched as I checked my notes and opened the Thomas Guide.
“The problem, I think, is that we’ve forgotten Mason. Well, we haven’t, but I think the police have.”
“What do you mean?”
“First of all, he’s alive.”
For a second or two, they looked at me as if I’d gone simpleminded. Then Ben said, “And we know that Cleo isn’t reluctant to kill.”
“Exactly. I think she was supposed to keep him alive, frame him for Richard’s murder and for Jenny’s supposed murder. If he stood trial and the public believed he did it, then no one was going to expect their neighbor kid to be Jenny.”
“So what are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking that the last time anyone saw Mason Fletcher before he was found by Tadeo Garcia was the previous evening. Leaving a party — what a perfect time for a woman to ask for his help, or slip something into a drink.”
“He didn’t drink, remember?” Ethan said.
“Right — okay, his nonalcoholic drink or his food. Or maybe she gets him to help her out to her car and jabs him with a needle filled with Versed. Or any other drug that makes it impossible for the recipient to remember events.”
“I vote for something in his nonalcoholic drink,” Ben said. “She can’t take a chance that he’ll remember her too clearly.”
“Okay, she slips him some Rohypnol — no odor, no taste, and we’re off to the races. He had to be kept somewhere — and his car had to be kept somewhere — out of sight while the murder of Richard Fletcher was taking place.”
“Right, otherwise he might end up with an alibi,” Ben said.
“Let’s say she’s drugged and abducted Mason the night before. Gives him the first round of barbiturates to make sure he’s going to be knocked out for the duration. She stashes him and the car in a place where discovery is unlikely.”
“Okay,” Ethan said. “Then what?”
“Then Nelson Fletcher — or Roy, or Giles, or — who was the other one?”
“Dexter.”
“Right. Let’s say Nelson, because we know he coveted his brother’s wife. Besides, Jenny had spent time around him and would probably be more willing to walk away from the studio with him than with the others.”
“Makes sense.”
“So Nelson and his deadly cousin Cleo stop by Richard’s office. Jenny steps outside with Nelson. Cleo stays behind to kill Richard.”
“Then she takes the trophy with her,” Ethan said.
“Right. She had to have it to frame Mason. I think that was a mistake, though — if Mason had committed the crime, why on earth would he take the weapon with him? Especially such an awkward one. Why not just drop it on the floor? It’s not as if he could expect to defend himself from the police with it.”
“But she feels compelled to take it,” Ben said, “because if Mason’s found without it, there’s not much to connect him to Richard’s murder.”
“Exactly. So she kills Richard, takes the trophy. Also takes the bottle of scotch — because she doesn’t know that Mason doesn’t drink — and the sample of Jenny’s blood that Nelson has left for her, and heads up to the mountains — which is where she’s left Mason.”
“A lot of driving for her.”
“True. Worth it to her, because she feels safe up there. After murdering Richard, she can’t be seen driving Mason’s car any distance. She can’t risk being caught with Mason and the bloody trophy in the car. Way too much explaining to do if that happened. And she has to have a place where she can control him without a lot of neighbors watching her move a man who is knocked out cold.”
“Is she strong enough to do that?”
“She looked pretty damned strong to me, but I will admit to being scared shitless at the time.”
“Being shot at will do that to you,” Ben said.
“Anyway, the mountain resorts have another advantage for her. Many of the places up there are second homes, and intentionally isolated from one another to some degree. Half the population or less may be full-time residents.”
“So s
he could take Mason up there after dark,” Ben said, “and come back down to Las Piernas in a different vehicle, and perhaps not risk anyone observing her.”
“Some cabins are cheek and jowl with each other, but I suspect Cleo chose one off the beaten path, and with a way to see this spot, and within walking distance of it.”
I pointed to a road on one of the Big Bear Valley pages of the Thomas Guide.
“That’s where Mason was found.”
“I understand the walking distance part,” Ethan said, “but why would she have to see it?”
“That’s a guess. I think she likes to be in control, for one thing. If she had to make sure that he stayed alive, she might want to be able to see him.”
Ben nodded. “Even if she wanted him to die, she might have a vantage point. Some killers like to observe the activity that follows a kill.”
“Add it all up, I think it’s likely that Mason was left not far from her mountain hidey-hole.” I started studying the topo map. “There are several places along here that would work.”
Ben said, with emphasis on every word, “Call Frank. And call the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department. Tell them.”
He was a spoilsport, but I obeyed. I even turned on the speakerphone — “So that you won’t think I faked these calls,” I said. I got Frank’s voice mail. From the sheriff’s department, I got a polite kiss-off. Understandable. They wanted people with facts or sightings calling in, not theorists.
I hung up, and we sat in silence. Altair came up to Ben and started staring at him.
“Do you have Caleb’s cell phone number?” I asked.
He called it but didn’t hand his phone over to me. “Caleb,” he said, “does your mom have anything of your sister’s that I could use with Bool?”
There was a brief silence. At Ethan’s questioning look, I whispered, “His bloodhound tracks from a ‘prescented’ article. Altair and Bingle work in another way.”
“Great,” Ben said to Caleb. “Can you get her to take you over to my house? See you there.”
I saw the wistful look in Ethan’s eyes and braced for an argument. A moment later, he looked at me and smiled, then said, “I guess I’d better keep trying to reach Frank so he can be there in time to strangle you. I hope I can stay awake long enough to make that happen.”