Stranded

by Alice Sharpe

  “What?” Alex said, stunned.

  “Let Dylan and Kit handle this case. You’re off it.”

  “But—”

  “I think all that time in the mountains made you forget you’re part of a team. And I’m in charge of this team, not you. Stop going off like some lone wolf looking for glory. And if I hear you’re tampering with anything at all, there will be hell to pay. When I think what a reporter could lead with when it comes to this...well, it doesn’t bear considering.”

  Alex blinked a couple of times. His mind raced to make sense of what he was hearing. What in the world was going on?

  “I don’t want to have to give you a reprimand or time off, but I will if I have to, no matter what happens to me.”

  Alex met the chief’s gaze and did his best not to appear defiant or challenging since he figured that would just make things worse.

  “I’ll see you later,” Smyth said to Dylan, then stalked back to his car and took off.

  “What was that all about?” Dylan demanded.

  Alex shook his head, bewildered. “I really don’t know. Maybe he’s got trouble at home or something.”

  “He’s too pious to have trouble at home. Mr. Goody-two shoes is all about smoothing things over.”

  Alex had never heard Frank Smyth described that way. “You sound like you know him pretty well. Do you know his wife, too?”

  “Not really. They’re both involved in a lot of civic and church activities. Word gets around.”

  And Dylan always seemed to have his ear close to the ground. “Well something is bothering the guy,” Alex mused. “Maybe he feels bad Lynda died the way she did after he’d promised his mother he’d watch out for her. Is he handling her estate?”

  “What estate?”

  “You know, her house—”

  “The chief owns everything,” Dylan interrupted. “The land, the trailer, the whole nine yards. Lynda lived in it for twenty-some-odd years and there’s no record of her paying a dime in rent.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” Alex asked.

  “It’s a matter of record, buddy.” Not to be deterred, Dylan continued. “Did you notice the equipment out there?”

  “The tractor and Dumpster? Yeah. When did you see it?”

  “I drove by this morning before I got here. Our trusty chief is getting ready to level that dump. He’s had it declared a health hazard and rumor has it, he’s hurrying things along to get it demolished. Makes you wonder what’s he’s hiding, doesn’t it? And who is he meeting with that he won’t name? Why so secretive?”

  Alex wasn’t a big fan of idle speculation, although he couldn’t help but be interested. Was the chief involved in something dangerous? There was absolutely nothing to go on to suggest such a thing. So Smyth was acting surly—that didn’t make him a criminal.

  But why had he all of a sudden called Alex off this case?

  “All I’m saying,” Dylan said, “is that I’m keeping my eyes open. Be honest, what are you out here looking for?”

  Glad to get off the topic of the chief, Alex resumed his systematic search of the terrain. “I’m wondering if Billy was hit on his way home from my house last Saturday night. It was crummy weather and we know his bike didn’t get to the theater by itself. It’s a long way to go in the fog.”

  “I’m sorry, but this seems like a fool’s errand to me. If someone hit him out here, why move him to the theater and not the hospital?”

  “The only reason I can surmise is they wanted an out-of-the-way place to finish him off. I’m pretty sure someone really didn’t want him to talk to me.”

  “If you’re right about Billy being involved with your crash, why in the world would he want to talk to you the minute you got back to town?”

  “I’m not sure about that.” Alex caught the glint of sunlight off of a piece of metal down in the gulch off the steep roadbed. He scrambled down the slope, Dylan on his heels. He slid a couple of feet on some shale and knelt to examine his find, a small piece of red plastic encased in chrome.

  “This looks like part of a taillight housing off a bike,” Alex said, and then his shoulders stiffened. The dirt around them had been disturbed with parallel tracks as though something, or someone, had been dragged up the gully. It wasn’t visible from above. Rain had washed most of it away, but from down here, it was pretty obvious. A small, darker patch of earth off to the left under the cover of a bush made his stomach roll. A combination of intuition and experience kicked into gear.

  He’d be willing to bet that dark patch of dirt had been saturated with blood. Billy’s blood. Had the boy been hit, tumbled down the slope, laid here bleeding until someone dragged him back up the slope and drove him and his mangled bike away?

  Beside him, Dylan groaned as though Alex had spoken all of this aloud. “I’d better get the techs to go back over the Cummings twins’ car,” he said, his voice subdued. He glanced at Alex and added, “You better let me handle this now. You heard what the chief said.”

  “I don’t care what the chief said,” Alex stated boldly. “I’m in the middle of this, which means my family is in the middle. I’m not backing off for anyone.”

  “But—”

  Alex looked his partner in the eye. “Maybe it’s because I’m going to be a father, I don’t know. But this is about more than me. This is about our country and our freedom to make decisions. It’s about our future. I know that sounds kind of over-the-top, but it’s the way I feel. On a broad level, this is your fight as much as mine, I get that. But in my heart, this fight belongs to me.”

  Dylan nodded once, his gaze impenetrable. “Okay,” he finally said. “If that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is.”

  “That’s the way it is.”

  Chapter Twelve

  As it was the Friday before a holiday, school let out an hour earlier than usual. Jessica had seen an ad about a sale on garden plants over near Campton, and with the sun shining and an extra hour of free time, she asked Silvia Greenspan to accompany her on the ride to the nursery.

  “It’s supposed to be sunny tomorrow and I want to be prepared,” she explained.

  “I just can’t right now,” the older woman said, holding up a stack of papers. “It’s almost the end of the year and I have a ton of work.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Jessica said. “It’s only a half-hour drive and I’m restless again. It seems I can’t sit still lately.”

  “I was like that when I was pregnant with my youngest,” Silvia said.

  Jessica headed out of town with a light heart until she drove by Billy’s house and caught sight of the burned-out hulk in the backyard. The place looked depressing in the rain, the equipment waiting nearby like vultures hovering over a rotting corpse.

  She looked away at once. Being pregnant demanded optimism and hope, it demanded faith in the future and a positive attitude and she was tired of being afraid.

  Once at the garden center, she chose plants already established with set-on buds to hurry the bloom time. She mimicked the choices she’d chosen for her yard several weeks before when she gave Billy instructions. She started toward the checkout line, pushing a cart laden with pots of impending glory. It looked as though she and Alex would spend their Memorial Day vacation digging in the dirt.

  If he got a vacation. With one confirmed murder and another death hanging over their heads as a possible homicide, to say nothing of a potential Memorial Day bloodbath, nothing was for sure.

  As for why she still felt sentimental over the death of a young man who it appeared had gone out of his way to try to kill the man she loved—that was harder to pin down than the flowers. There was just some part of her brain that couldn’t combine the image of Billy, the kid out in the garden, and Billy, the guy sneaking around Alex’s airplane, doing his best to make sure Alex
didn’t have a chance of survival.

  Maybe it was Tad and Ted who had organized all this. Maybe they used Billy. Maybe they were into drugs. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  Her phone rang and she smiled when she saw the call was from Alex. It was four o’clock and she couldn’t wait to see him again. She answered it and the call immediately disconnected. She knew she had the mountains to thank for that, and she was glad she’d texted him her plans before taking off. At least he wouldn’t worry about her.

  Still, a gnawing pit opened up in her stomach and she debated returning the plants to their shelves and driving back into cell range. At that exact moment she felt the first fluttering kick of her baby and she touched her abdomen in awe.

  This was the moment she’d been waiting for, and a rush of pleasure bathed her in what felt like sunlight. She smiled and her resolve strengthened. Life had to go on. There were these issues now, there’d be others later. In a way, the destruction of her garden had been like a metaphor for life—just keep going. Fix what’s wrong, replace what’s lost.

  The clerk was an attractive blonde in her late forties. “You’re going to be busy,” she said as Jessica approached with a rolling cart covered with plants. “I hope you have a van or something.”

  “My car has a big trunk,” Jessica said.

  “You chose a nice variety,” the clerk added, and she began scanning the bar codes.

  “Someone destroyed our garden and we’re starting over,” Jessica explained. “Pity these won’t be blooming in time for Memorial Day.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I take flowers to the graves of veterans on Memorial Day, to honor my grandfather, you know?”

  “Oh, my gosh,” the woman said. “So do I. Red, white and blue?”

  “If possible.”

  “But I live over in Blunt Falls,” the clerk added.

  “I do, too,” Jessica laughed. “Hey, maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “That’d be great,” the clerk said.

  “I go midmorning,” Jessica added.

  “I do, too,” the clerk said, accepting Jessica’s credit card. “Do you have a big yard?” Jessica explained what had happened to her flower garden. As she spoke, the clerk’s eyes got wider and wider.

  “That’s terrible,” she said. “It’s so much work to create something beautiful and then to have it wantonly destroyed, makes you wonder what the world is coming to.”

  “Most people are good and decent,” Jessica said with conviction. “Some aren’t, but they’re in the minority.” At least I hope they are, she thought, embarrassed that she’d gotten so serious.

  “Yeah, you’re right, but I do have to say there are more than a few creeps lurking in the corners. Either that or I’m just a creep magnet. Well, is there anything else?”

  “Nope. That should keep us busy.”

  * * *

  ALEX WENT INTO the office the next morning to finish up paperwork he’d started earlier, before the chief got so adamant about him staying out of things. It was Saturday and with some shock he realized he’d been in this same office one week ago today making sure he still had a job. In a way, he was back in the same position.

  But what he really wanted to be doing was helping Jessica plant her new garden. He’d unloaded the car for her the night before and while his plan had been to discuss the chief’s confusing behavior with her, he’d backed away from the subject. She’d been in a great mood, happy and full of plans and chatter about a nice woman she met. She’d felt their baby kick for the first time and they spent an hour that night lying in bed with his hand on her abdomen waiting for him to experience it, as well. So far, no luck, but that would change.

  “I didn’t expect to find you sitting here smiling to yourself,” Dylan said as he perched on the edge of Alex’s desk.

  “Just thinking,” he said.

  “About Jessica, no doubt.”

  “No doubt,” Alex agreed. “Let me see your report.”

  “I don’t think so,” Dylan said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because you got warned off the case or have you forgotten?”

  “I haven’t forgotten.”

  Dylan stared at him a second, then shook his head. “Buddy, I’m going to be blunt. Before your crash you admitted to me you and Jessica were thinking of breaking up. Then you come back and discover she’s pregnant. You can’t walk away even if you want to.”

  “I don’t want to,” Alex said.

  “Well, man, see, that’s the thing. What about her? I mean, she was so sure you might have run out on her that she placed that remark on Facebook. You show up, what’s she supposed to do but give it another shot? I know she wants to stop working for at least a year or two, you told me that. She needs your paycheck to make that happen. If you keep pushing, you could lose your job. Have you thought about what that might mean?”

  “Are you implying she’d leave me?” Alex asked.

  “I don’t know,” Dylan said as he glanced up. His expression changed. Alex looked to see what had caught his attention and found Smyth approaching.

  “The bottom line is that it doesn’t matter,” Alex said softly. “I have to keep digging. There is no option. I told you that.”

  Smyth paused at Alex’s desk. “Digging for what?” he said, eyebrows furrowed, eyes glinting.

  “Nothing,” Alex said. “We’re planting a new garden and that takes digging.”

  “The newspapers will eat that up.”

  “The newspapers could care less.”

  “I heard about what you found out on the road,” Smyth continued. “What part of ‘back off’ didn’t you get? You better go home before you jeopardize this whole investigation.”

  “Listen,” Alex said, “I know I stretched the letter of the law the other night when I entered that shed...”

  The chief shook his head. “You broke into private property and took evidence.”

  “That would have been destroyed if I hadn’t taken it.” He met Dylan’s gaze because it was on the tip of his tongue to add that if the chief owned the place then what was the big deal? But Dylan seemed to know what Alex was thinking and his expression clearly said to tread softly.

  “So help me, if those Cummings boys walk because you messed things up, Montana won’t be big enough for the two of us,” Smyth barked. “And by the way, just so you don’t take me for a gullible fool, I know you weren’t sick a few days ago, I know you dove on your plane, I even know you took a bottle of water out of the cockpit. That’s probably another case you messed up, this one for the government. You’re on quite a roll. I’m not going to reveal my sources so don’t bother asking.”

  “Okay, I won’t,” Alex said.

  “For both of you,” the chief added, “the next two days are going to be busy with patrols at the parade and over at the fairgrounds where they’ve got some citywide rummage sale going. Lord almighty, why can’t people just stay home? We’re all pitching in for this. But for now, for today, Alex, you get out of here. I know how you like to dig in the dirt.”

  Dylan shook his head as the door closed behind Smyth. “I’m going to follow him.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. He’s acting strange. Did you tell him about the plane?”

  “Not me,” Dylan said. “Could it have been your friend?”

  “You mean Nate?”

  “No, the other guy. John Miter.”

  “I don’t see how. I don’t think he and the chief even know each other.”

  “I’ve seen them talking,” Dylan said.

  “When?”

  “I can’t remember. While you were missing. Just on the sidewalk or something.” He pushed himself away from Alex’s desk, which seemed to groan in relief and added, “I’ll call you when I discover what the chi
ef is up to.”

  Alex left soon after. He sat in his truck for a minute, unsure what to do. He kept thinking back to Billy.

  The kid must have been drugged after he was hit, perhaps to keep him quiet while the perpetrator found a way to transport him to the drive-in. What had Lynda Summers really heard that night, and, if she was murdered, why?

  His gut told him the Cummings boys didn’t have anything to do with Billy’s death. All sorts of people knew where their car was kept and that the key was left in the ignition.

  Had the piece of Billy’s jacket found on the car gotten there when his bike was hit out on the road, or later, at the drive-in?

  His phone rang and he saw by the number on the screen it was the lab. He was surprised the lab techs were working over the weekend, especially since it was a holiday weekend.

  “What are you guys doing in?” he asked.

  “I just came in because I knew you were anxious about this. We’ll finish testing on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the reflector you found came off Billy Summers’s bike. We’re going back over the Cummingses’ car. So far, no blood. In fact, dents and weeds notwithstanding, oh, and those pills, there’s nothing other than the fabric caught in the grill to tie it to Billy Summers.”

  “Judging from the roadside, he must have bled a lot,” Alex said.

  “It would seem so.”

  “How about the paint on Billy’s bike?”

  “Not a match. Same color, but different paint. There are a lot of red cars in the world, you know.”

  “Keep me posted,” Alex said, wondering how long it would be before Smyth spread the word for them to do otherwise.

  He drove around for a while, nervous about going home and letting Jessica see how uptight he was. He had to figure out a way to get a handle on things. It had started raining and the windshield wipers beat a monotonous thump-thump as they cleared the windshield. In some strange way, he was reminded of being in the Cessna, alone, high above the earth.

  What had he overlooked? There must be something.

  What did it mean that Frank Smyth owned Lynda Summers’s land and home, and did it mean anything special that he was apparently ready to plow it under as soon as possible? The place was a dump; who could blame him for wanting to get rid of such a health hazard? Tuesday morning, Alex needed to check the property deed for himself.