“Amusement park?” she grumbled to herself, as she pushed in the last shelf. Carly was smiling at her, but Kate wasn’t sure if it was in response to the shelving unit or because Kate was getting worked up over Dean’s plan.
“Looks good,” she said, planting her fists on her hips. “What do I owe you?”
Kate took a moment to write out an invoice, and when she handed it to Carly, she said, “No rush on that.” The bill was negligible, and if Carly didn’t have the funds to build a unit from scratch, then there would be no sense pressuring her for pocket change on her labor costs.
“Thanks, if you’re at the town meeting tomorrow, I’ll have a check ready.”
“Sounds good,” she said, as she packed up her tool kit.
As she straightened up, with her tool kit in her hand, her cell phone started buzzing from the front pocket of her overalls and Cookie immediately sprang to mind.
Figuring it was Scott giving her a call to let her know why he hadn’t come home last night or to make sure she still slept well, she swiped the screen without even looking at it to see who was calling.
“Mom?” said Jason in a worried tone the second her voice came through the line. “It’s Jason.”
“Hey, honey, what’s going on?”
Panicked, Jason cut in with, “Can you come to the house?”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
Upon hearing her shrill response, Carly neared her, growing worried.
“It’s Becky. Please, just come.”
“I will. I’m on my way, but if this is an emergency, Jason, then you have to call the police.”
“Trust me, I have. But something tells me Scott’s not going to know how to handle this. Come quick.”
Before she could ask one more question, he hung up, leaving Kate in utter confusion.
“What’s going on?” asked Carly, concerned.
“I have no idea, but I have to get going.”
The drive across town was a blur. Jason and Becky had moved into a quaint, one-story house on the east side of town where a small village of similar houses had been built a number of years ago. Affordable, the homes were occupied by mostly young couples and the elderly who were healthy enough to live without hospice care.
Kate pulled up to the cul-de-sac where Jason and Becky’s blue house sat between two identical ones, which were white, and as she did, she immediately noticed two police cruisers and an ambulance.
Scanning for Scott’s truck, she nearly overlooked it, distracted by the twirl of emergency lights, but then spotted it parked in front of the second police cruiser.
What in God’s name happened?
She rushed to the front door, which was open and then barreled into the living room where Jason was seated between two medics who were taking his blood pressure and fastening butterfly bandages over the bridge of his nose and cheek.
“What happened?” she asked urgently, as she made her way deeper into the room.
Scott was standing off to the side with his gaze fixed on Jason, as if he were patiently waiting for his turn with the young man.
“Mom,” said Jason, urging the medics off of him. “The house got broken into.”
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, finally seeing the living room window that was completely shattered into oblivion. “Are you okay? Did they hurt you?”
“It was only one guy, and no he didn’t hurt me...” he trailed off and his eyes widened with terror. “But he took Becky.”
Chapter Four
The medics cleared out, and Scott took Jason behind the house outside so his police officers could comb the house for evidence. Kate followed, closing the door behind her and sensing Scott would prefer to speak to Jason alone. But this time Scott wouldn’t be able to push Kate out for any reason. This was her son, her family, a part of her life that had become so important; she might lose sense of who she was without it intact.
“We have plenty of time, Jason,” he said, indicating the young man could have a seat at the patio table. “Go slow, and tell me everything.”
Jason looked worried and exhausted, as he lowered into one of the patio chairs. He planted his elbows on the table and plowed his fingers through his hair, hanging his head for a moment. Scott sat in an adjacent chair, and Kate slid into one at the opposite side of the table from her son.
When Jason looked up, he locked eyes with Kate, asking, “Her parents. They don’t know. What am I going to tell them?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” said Scott, speaking for her. “Right now, let’s focus on the event as it occurred. The more I know, the more effective I can be at finding her and bringing her home.”
Kate knew if it were anyone else seated at the table, Scott would have mentioned that the first seventy-two hours of an abduction investigation were the most critical and that time was of the essence. But doing so would only rile Jason up into a panic that would work against his effort to explain what had happened. She appreciated Scott holding his tongue to that effect.
Prompting him, he said, “Start from the beginning. You woke up this morning to the sound of someone breaking in?”
“Yes, I heard glass shattering in the living room. We were in the bedroom. Becky’s a heavy sleeper, so after I heard the windowpane break, I listened and heard footsteps, and then shook her awake and told her to be quiet.”
“Do you have an idea of what time that was?”
“Before my alarm was set to go off,” he said, offering what he could without mentioning an exact time. “I didn’t look at the clock, but my alarm always goes off at a quarter to seven.”
Kate took note of Scott furrowing his brow. She knew him well enough to have a strong sense of what he was thinking. The house had been broken into just before seven, and it was now fast approaching noon. What had taken Jason so long to call the police?
“What happened next?” asked Scott, urging him to go on.
Jason had slipped into a dissociative state, his gaze softening as though he was looking at nothing in particular, perhaps reliving the event in his mind. He blinked and then trained his attention on Scott.
“I told Becky to stay in the bedroom. I got out of bed, quietly pulled on my jeans, and grabbed a baseball bat from my closet. I thought maybe we were getting robbed, so I took a long moment to debate whether or not I should go out and scare him off, or let him take what he wanted and go. I mean, I was hoping he wouldn’t come into the bedroom.”
“Okay,” said Scott, waiting for more.
“Becky wouldn’t stay put. She whispered that she needed to get dressed.”
Kate considered this detail and completely understood. If Kate had been in her place, there would be no way she’d stay under the covers, undressed, and not ready to defend herself.
“So Becky threw on some clothes. Then I noticed that whoever was in the living room wasn’t rummaging around as though they wanted to steal something. They were walking slowly towards the bedroom.”
“Was the bedroom door open or shut?” Scott asked.
“Shut. But I eased it open.”
“Did you see the man?”
Jason clammed up.
“You said he was approaching the bedroom, so if you opened the door, didn’t you see him?”
“Yeah, no, I don’t know. It all happened so fast. I charged at him with the bat, but he overpowered me.”
“Did you hit him?”
Kate hoped he had. If he did, then the culprit’s blood might be in the hallway, and Scott would have a chance at finding out who he was.
“Not really,” said Jason, vaguely. “If I made contact, it wasn’t a good enough hit. He got the bat away from me.”
Kate interjected immediately, “So you can get his fingerprints.”
Scott met her gaze, but he frowned.
“He took the bat with him,” said Jason. “I didn’t realize it until after he was gone.” He quickly added, “He had a gun.”
“You saw a gun, but you didn’t see his
face?”
“We were wrestling around. I didn’t see his face.”
“Did you get a sense of his ethnicity? His height? His weight?”
Jason thought about it, but he seemed unsure and didn’t answer right away. “White, I think. He was my height give or take a few inches. He was strong.”
“Why would he need to fight you if he had a gun?” Scott challenged in a way Kate didn’t like.
“I charged at him. I wouldn’t have done that if I saw the gun. It was like I had tunnel vision. In the struggle, he shot me with something.”
“Shot you?” Kate asked, surprised.
“I felt a needle in my neck. Then the next thing I knew I was collapsing and my vision turned black. When I woke up, I was tied to a chair. It took hours to get free. And when I did, I discovered Becky was gone.”
“Okay, slow down. So you think he drugged you?” Scott asked.
“Yes.”
“Can you show me where?”
Hesitantly, Jason offered Scott the side of his neck he thought the needle had plunged into, but his pointing finger seemed to guess vaguely at the precise location. Scott leaned in close, examining the area, but the frown on his face told Kate he couldn’t tell where the puncture was.
“Did you mention this to the medics?”
“Why would I?”
“Because we will need a blood sample to test for what you might have been drugged with. It’s fine,” he offered quickly so Jason wouldn’t feel like he’d done anything wrong. “Let’s get you to the hospital now before the drug leaves your system.”
“Do I have to go? I mean, Becky is out there somewhere. I want to help find her. I should do something.”
“Jason,” he said sternly. “The best thing for you to do is go to the hospital.”
Reluctant as he seemed, Jason rose from the table with Scott, and they made their way through the house and out the front. Kate followed behind them, eyeing the living room as she went and glancing up the hallway towards the bedroom when she could. There was absolutely no damage to the house that she could see other than the shattered window.
Outside, Scott opened the door on the passenger’s side of his truck for Jason to climb in since the medics and ambulance had left. After shutting the door, Scott gave orders to the police officers, as well as the two detectives who would be working the case—Garrison, who had been promoted a few months back, and Masey.
“Call me if you need to get picked up,” said Kate to Jason through the open window of the truck.
“Don’t you have a full day?” he asked.
“I can swing by the hospital and bring you home,” she explained.
When she rounded the hood of the truck, Scott was walking away from his officers towards the driver’s side.
“What do you think is going on?” she asked him.
He pressed his mouth into a hard line. “If the intruder took nothing of value in the house, then I’m thinking the guy believes Becky was the only thing of value. She’s the heiress to a mustard empire, isn’t she?”
“I really don’t know about that,” said Kate, folding her arms. “I’ve gotten to know Becky, and she wasn’t exactly getting a free ride from her parents. If anything, she and Jason have been struggling since she doesn’t work.”
“Is that right?” he asked, curiously. “I thought she didn’t work because she didn’t have to?’
“I think she doesn’t work because she is accustomed to not working, but I have to say, when Jason started dating her in college, her parents weren’t too pleased. When Lance and Amelia came over for dinner, I think they were being polite and keeping up appearances, but I was under the impression Becky didn’t exactly get along with them.”
“The kidnapper might not know that, however,” he countered, which she couldn’t argue with.
There had to be a reason the kidnapper took Becky, and so far, Scott’s hunch was the only logical theory.
“Let me know how it goes at the hospital?” she asked, as he opened the door to the driver’s side and climbed in.
“Of course.”
Kate stood on the curb and watched Scott’s truck pull onto the road and drive off.
Cookie Halpert had been murdered, and now Becky Langley had been abducted?
This was either an instance of “when it rains it pours”…or the two crimes were connected. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
Checking the clock on her truck’s dashboard after climbing in, she saw that she was already late to start painting Hazel Millhouse’s home. Kate dialed her number on her cell, and as soon as Hazel picked up, she told her she was on her way.
Kate realized she was holding the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip as she drove through town. She kept trying to relax, but it was proving impossible. It was nerve-racking to think Becky had been snatched from her home, and while Kate was grateful Jason had fought and hadn’t been taken, she wasn’t relieved by that fact. The kidnapper wanted Becky for a reason, and didn’t need to take Jason, but what if the kidnapper couldn’t get what he wanted as a result of taking Becky? Would they come back for Jason? Would they kill Becky? She feared to imagine.
Pulling into Hazel’s driveway, Kate pushed the disturbing thoughts from her mind, stepped out of her truck, and grabbed two cans of paint from her truck bed.
The front door was wide open, as well as the windows, and Hazel’s little toy dog—Mitsy—was flitting across the yard, yipping its head off and running circles.
“Hazel!” Kate called out, as she stepped into the open doorway, having set the paint cans on the walkway. “I’m here!”
Soon the older woman came into view, taking her time walking into the foyer. Hazel had broken her hip several times a few years back, but hadn’t had an incident since, so though her gait was slow, she looked strong and healthy.
“Glad to have you,” she said with a smile, as she passed through the doorway outside. “I hope you don’t mind Mitsy; she is getting a little fresh air.”
“I don’t mind at all,” she said, and then she noticed Mitsy lifting her leg to pee on Kate’s paint cans. “Oh hey!” she exclaimed, starting after the dog and scaring her off before she could.
“Eventually I’ll need all the sides painted, but for now, I’d like the front painted so the neighbors don’t have to look at this eyesore,” she explained.
Kate examined the peeling paint. The house could certainly use a fresh coat or two, but it wasn’t as bad as Hazel had made it out to be.
“Well, that’s no problem,” she said, kneeling and angling a wooden stick under one of the can’s metal lids to pop it off. “I remembered you have a ladder?”
“Oh, yes. Right this way.”
Kate followed Hazel around the side of the house, and when they reached the back, Kate noticed the ladder on its side, resting next to a wheelbarrow and some odds and ends that looked like old furniture pieces.
As Kate lifted the ladder and set it on her shoulder, Hazel remarked, “Shame about Cookie.” She shook her head and grimaced.
Kate wasn’t surprised the old woman had heard. Word traveled fast in Rock Ridge, and since Hazel had been working at the library, a virtual hub of gossip, it was no wonder she knew as many details as Kate, and then some.
“I won’t say I saw this coming,” Hazel went on. “But I had my suspicions.”
“Really? Why is that?”
They rounded the front of the house, and Kate set the ladder against the side of the house then leaned over, catching her breath and pouring blue paint into the tin.
“I didn’t know Cookie well, not beyond ordering her pastries online, which she always delivered to me herself. We had a few chats, but nothing too deep or involved, you know, polite chitchat and nothing too invasive. No prying.”
It sounded like Hazel was concerned Kate might assume she had pried.
“But she didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” she went on. “So when she checked out a library book on shooting guns, it caught my eye
.”
“A book on how to shoot a gun?”
“That’s right. It was all about handguns.”
“That doesn’t sound like something Cookie would be involved in.”
“That’s what I thought. Then when she returned the book five days later, I logged it back into the system, and then checked the pages for damage. The library is really cracking down on that kind of thing, or I should say, Mrs. Briar is.”
Hazel shook her head at the woman’s name. Mrs. Briar was the other librarian, and the two of them rarely saw eye-to-eye. In fact, they were as different as night and day. Hazel tended to be warm and welcoming to the library patrons, while Mrs. Briar acted as though anyone who stepped through the door was a huge inconvenience to her.
“Anyway,” she went on. “As I was flipping through, I found a receipt for Drake’s Firing Line. It was itemized and Cookie had rented a handgun and one of the range lanes for nearly three hours.”
“Really?”
“If you ask me, Cookie knew something bad was about to happen and wanted to protect herself.”
“So why not buy a gun?”
“Who’s to say she didn’t?”
“Drake’s Firing Line,” she said, turning the name over in her mind. She hadn’t heard of it.
“I kept the receipt,” said Hazel, as she lifted a finger as if to say, “Wait right here.”
Kate rolled blue paint onto her paint roller, and by the time she was straightening up and angling the long pole of her roller onto the top edge of the house, Hazel returned with the crumpled receipt in her hand.
“It has the address and telephone number,” she pointed out, handing it over.
Eyeing it, Kate noted that the address said Rock Ridge. But when she considered the street number on Holloway Avenue, she realized the firing line had to be located on the very outskirts of town, nearly in the next county, and barely still in Rock Ridge.
“The only person who would really know what was going on with Cookie would be Clara,” said Hazel in a tone that implied Kate ought to have a talk with her.
Mrs. Fix It Mysteries, Season 2 (5 Cozy Mystery Books Collection) Page 3