Stolen

by Daniel Palmer

  “Beautiful,” Ruby said.

  “Anyway, when March came around and I hadn’t seen Tanya outside once, I just got the feeling that something was wrong.”

  “What did the police say?” Ruby asked.

  “Well, that’s the crazy thing,” Ruth said. “Did you know that it’s not that simple to report an adult as missing? They could just be gone.”

  “Is their car still here?”

  “No. It’s gone. The police checked the garage.”

  “Did the police go inside the house?”

  “They did but didn’t see anything suspicious. They think they just up and left.”

  “You must think that, too, because you’re collecting their mail.”

  “I’m collecting their mail, but I don’t agree with the police,” Ruth said.

  “What do you think happened to them?” I asked.

  Ruth turned around and pointed toward a yellow clapboard house fronted by green shutters set slightly askew and a lawn that stuck out because it rivaled the Uretskys’ for its lack of landscaping.

  “I told the police to look at Carl Swain,” Ruth said.

  Bucky seemed to slink away at the mere mention.

  “What’s wrong with Carl?” Ruby asked.

  “I’ve seen him lurking around the Uretskys’ house. Peeking into their windows.”

  “That is creepy,” Ruby said.

  “Carl would drive by slowly if Tanya were out gardening. I’ve seen it happen several times. I told this all to the police, of course, but they never got back to me.”

  “So you think Carl Swain has something to do with the Uretskys’ disappearance?” I asked.

  Ruth nodded. “And so does Bucky.”

  “Your dog?” I said.

  Bucky perked up, and his tongue dropped out of his mouth. Ruth said, “I believe animals have a sixth sense.”

  “I’ve read somewhere that dogs can detect cancer and other diseases,” Ruby said, looking at me.

  I looked back. It could explain Bucky’s powerful reaction to Ruby and not to me.

  Ruth nodded. “That’s true,” she said. “Some dogs have fifty times the scent receptors as humans.”

  “So does Bucky bark at this Carl fellow?”

  “He won’t let me walk him on that side of the street,” Ruth said, the pitch of her voice dropping to signify the ominous connection.

  “Has Bucky met Carl?”

  “On a number of occasions,” Ruth said. “And if you thought he barked at Ruby, you should have seen his reaction to Carl.”

  I admit that Ruth got me curious. I didn’t really believe in doggie detectives, but I was desperate to find Elliot Uretsky, and willing to believe that Bucky’s barking at Carl Swain was some kind of lead.

  “Maybe Carl has cancer,” Ruby suggested.

  Ruth’s eyes narrowed. She made several furtive glances at Swain’s house, as though afraid of being overhead.

  “I believe I have a sixth sense, too,” Ruth said. “And if Carl Swain has cancer, then it’s a cancer of the soul.”

  CHAPTER 27

  We returned to Uretsky’s neighborhood the very next day, arriving exactly one hour later than the time we saw Ruth out walking Bucky, the psycho-sniffing dog. We didn’t want her to think we were stalkers—which, of course, we were. We sat in Ziggy, just like a couple of private dicks on a stakeout. We were parked directly across from the little yellow house with the crooked green shutters. Unlike the Uretskys’ house, the garage here was attached, and a structure was built on top of it, too, an addition of some sort.

  “What are you going to do if you see him?” Ruby asked.

  Ruby rested her hand on my leg. I loved the feel of her touch, though it made me miss our more playful and more naked touching sessions. One look and I could tell that Ruby was missing them, too.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You don’t know! That’s your plan?”

  “I just want to see him.”

  “And then what?”

  “Then I think I’ll know if he’s involved in some way.”

  “Now you, Ruth, and Bucky all have the sixth sense?”

  “Wasn’t that about seeing dead people?”

  Ruby punched me in the arm. “This isn’t funny, John. Ruth thinks Carl had something to do with Uretsky’s disappearance. He could be dangerous.”

  “Tell me this, then. If the Uretskys have disappeared, how is it we’re being terrorized by Elliot Uretsky?”

  “So why are we even here?”

  “Because what else do we have to go on? Maybe Swain saw something during his Peeping Tom sessions. Something that could help lead us to Uretsky.”

  Ruby couldn’t argue that point, or she could but didn’t feel like arguing, so we went back to waiting.

  I broke a minute of silence by asking, “Do you want to play twenty questions?”

  Ruby shot me an annoyed look. “No, I don’t want to play twenty questions,” she said. “I want to go home, and by home, I mean to the apartment you rented to a couple of Spanish-speaking professors.”

  “I just want to wait a little longer,” I said, kissing Ruby on the cheek. “I love you.”

  “You better,” Ruby said before giving me a quick kiss on the lips.

  We returned to silence. Twenty or thirty minutes later my cell phone rang. It was Clegg calling—or returning my call, to be more precise.

  “Hey, David,” I said. “Thanks for getting back to me.”

  Ruby looked at me, shaking her head in dismay. “I have a sixth sense, too, you know,” she said.

  “Sorry I wasn’t around yesterday,” Clegg said. “What’s up?”

  I could tell that his “Sorry I wasn’t around yesterday” was code for “I was preparing for a climbing expedition.” Sensitive guy he was, he knew better than to tell me.

  “Remember that LEAPS thing, or whatever you used to look up information on Uretsky?” I said.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “Can you look up somebody else for me?” I asked.

  “A buddy of Uretsky’s?” Clegg asked, not missing a beat.

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Sure thing. Give me the name and address.”

  I gave him Carl Swain’s name and Carl’s address.

  “I’ll check the Triple I, too,” Clegg said.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Interstate Identification Index. It’s basically Google for criminal history.”

  “Sounds good,” I said.

  “It’ll take a bit, so I’ll call you back,” Clegg said.

  “Good again.”

  “Kiss your lovely bride for me,” he said.

  “With pleasure,” I said. I got out of the car.

  “Stretching?” Ruby asked.

  “I’m going to take a look around.”

  “I’m coming with you,” Ruby said, reaching for the door handle.

  “No. Stay in the car. I’ll be less conspicuous alone.”

  “No, you’ll be just as conspicuous,” Ruby said. “But maybe it’s better if I stay and keep a lookout. Make sure your cell is on. I’ll text you if I see anything to be worried about.”

  I nodded, leaned forward, and kissed Ruby, as Clegg suggested, and away I went.

  Twice, I walked past the front of the house feeling, just as Ruby had predicted, completely and ridiculously conspicuous. It looked like one of those homes without any lights on during Halloween—the kind you’d scurry right past because on the night when bogeymen were most real, this was the exact sort of place they’d like to congregate. The windows were dark and dirty; sprigs of weeds came shooting up through cracks in the front step bricks. The lawn, more brown than green, looked mostly dead, and while some lovely pots filled with dirt were set out front, the plants within them were nothing but thin sticks with black leaves. In another bit of creepy construction, there were no windows on the extension built on top of the single-car garage that was connected to the side of the house.
>
  It looked like nobody was home, but I knocked on the front door, anyway, just to check. No answer. I tried the doorbell. It didn’t work. So I cut across the forgotten lawn and stood close enough to Ziggy to get Ruby’s attention. “I’m going to check out back,” I said in a half whisper.

  Ruby rolled down her window. “What?” she asked loudly.

  Now it was my turn to shoot her an annoyed look. “I’m going to check out back,” I said, speaking in my normal voice. I gave up trying to not appear conspicuous. It was obvious that we were both lacking in the detecting department.

  “Be careful and keep your phone on,” she said.

  The back of the house, like the Uretskys’, proved to be as ugly as the front. A dilapidated trampoline with one leg missing took up a good portion of the postage-stamp lawn. Rusty toolboxes were strewn about with no tools inside—none that I could see, anyway. The trees were cut down to stumps, and the stone birdbath next to one of them, cracked and ugly, held brown, dirty rainwater. The lawn was a dead patch of dirt where nothing, not even weeds, would grow. The basement door had a window covered by a curtain, and the other windows out back were too high for me to see inside without a stepladder.

  I did a three-sixty and got the same feeling Ruth Shane had expressed the day before. The place felt poisoned.

  I’d decided it was time for me to head back to Ziggy when my phone buzzed. I looked and saw a text message from Ruby. Some of the words were misspelled, but the content of her message told me that she had sent her text in great haste.

  Woman wiith gunn run!

  CHAPTER 28

  Left or right—which way should I go? Wrong way, and chances were I’d run into an armed woman. Instead of bolting, I hesitated, overthinking and not reacting. For a few seconds my feet stayed rooted to the ground, with half my brain screaming to run and the other half debating which way.

  Five seconds at most. That’s what it took to decide. Five quick ticks of the clock, but as it turned out, it was three ticks too many. When I broke left—which happened to be the right way to go—I almost made it to the side of the house when I heard a scratchy, hoarse-sounding female voice shout from behind me.

  “You stop or I shoot!”

  I stopped, all right. The world around me turned gray, as if all its color had gone swirling down a fast-draining tub. My eyes closed tightly, while my hands went unprompted above my head.

  I heard footsteps approaching, slow moving. Either she was being cautious or she couldn’t move quickly. I kept my hands up and turned around . . . nice . . . and . . . slow. I can’t say which I saw first, the woman or the double-barreled shotgun pointed at my chest. We’ll call it a tie.

  The woman, rollers in her hair, wore a faded white nightgown in mid-afternoon and had no shoes on her feet. Her cheeks were sunken, as though the bones beneath had dissolved over time. As for her face, she radiated toughness, a look enhanced by her leathery skin, which had crinkled the way a potato dries in the sun. Her lips creased back into a snarl, while her eyes, milky and blue, could not conceal the hatred that probably accompanied her every waking second.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  I could tell by the rasp that she inhaled at least three packs a day. She stood about twenty feet from me, but that gun shortened the distance between us considerably. This was probably how poor Giovanni felt, scared and cornered, though he had an aluminum bat stashed at his disposal, whereas I was unarmed.

  The woman took a threatening step forward. “Who are you?” she asked again. “And what do you want?”

  I kept my hands in the air and didn’t take a single step. I went rigid like the Tin Man, but I had a heart, and that organ was pounding away mightily.

  “I’m looking for Carl Swain,” I said. My dry throat put a little crack in my voice.

  “What for?” she asked. The word for came out sounding like “foah.” She took another step forward, keeping the gun pointed at my chest. Her toes curled in the dirt to show me that she was digging in. Hopefully, that meant she wouldn’t be coming any closer. Then again, she could blow me away just fine from this distance.

  “I’d like to ask him about Elliot and Tanya Uretsky,” I said.

  “Carl’s not here, and you shouldn’t be here, either,” she said. “So get off my property, or I’m going to shoot, and then I’ll call the cops.”

  She raised the gun, taking aim with her eye. The skin of her arms where it had loosened from the underlying muscles flapped like two white, sun-spotted wings. Her toes curled deeper into the dirt. I was taking a cautious backward step when I caught movement behind her. It took me a couple blinks of the eye to realize that it was Ruby.

  “Stop!” I heard Ruby shout. “You stop it right now!”

  The woman whirled around and trained the gun at Ruby’s head. My breath caught in my throat, and I lunged forward, ready to tackle the woman to the ground and wrestle the gun away, but Ruby held up a hand that told me to stay put. So I stayed put.

  Wearing her sun hat and glasses, Ruby looked about as threatening as Annie Hall, but she did not back down. Rather, she took a couple steps forward, her finger wagging at the weathered woman like a scolding schoolmarm’s. Ruby, who was a card-carrying member of the ASPCA, who checked food labels for genetically modified organisms, who loved to do yoga before she got sick, who contemplated veganism, and who read Mahatma Gandhi’s biography twice, did not appear ready or even able to preach the power of nonviolence. Instead, she strode right up to the woman and stopped maybe a foot away.

  “You put that gun away right now!” Ruby said. My wife ripped off her sunglasses so the seriousness of her expression could not be misunderstood. “Right now!” Ruby said.

  The woman hesitated, the standoff in full effect. Ruby didn’t back down, but the woman eventually did. She set the butt of the gun on the ground, the barrel aiming skyward, with one of her knotty hands still positioned near the trigger mechanism, ready to make a quick move if necessary.

  “How dare you point a gun at my husband?” Ruby said. “How dare you? You could have killed him!”

  “What’s he doing sneaking around my property?” the woman said.

  “We weren’t sneaking,” Ruby said. “We knocked on your door.”

  “And I rang the bell,” I added.

  The woman twisted her neck around to glare at me through those milky, dying eyes. Guess she didn’t need to know that part.

  “You get off my property, and don’t ever come here,” she said.

  “We have enough trouble just living as it is. Why don’t you leave us alone? My boy hasn’t done nothing to no one. You just leave and leave him be.”

  Now, I may not be a professional detective, but even I could deduce that this angry old woman was Carl’s mother. I walked past Mama Meanie, taking quick and purposeful steps. Carl’s mom eyed me with contempt, holding on to the shotgun in a way that reminded me of the American Gothic painting. I only wished that she brandished a pitchfork.

  Ruby took hold of my hand, and we slinked away backward, instinct telling us that vigilance was still necessary.

  The woman followed us to the front of the house. Once again we were back inside Ziggy; once again we were driving away from this neighborhood. I kept looking in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see Carl’s mom standing in the middle of the road, leveling her shotgun and readying it to take a lucky shot. But I saw nothing more than a sunny street and rows of pleasant-looking houses—pleasant except for two of them, Carl Swain’s and Elliot Uretsky’s.

  CHAPTER 29

  Leaving never felt so good. Ruby and I were in recovery mode, still breathing hard, still trying to regain our equilibrium. I was driving through neighborhoods I didn’t know very well, using my GPS to guide us back to the apartment on Harvard Avenue—a place I couldn’t really call our home—when my phone rang.

  Ruby saw it was Clegg calling, which did nothing to improve her battered spirits.

  “Maybe you need to screen your users better, John
,” Clegg said before I even got out the word hello.

  “Explain,” I said.

  “The Triple I query I ran on this guy Swain came back jackpot. Not only is he a neighbor of this Uretsky guy, but he’s a level three sex offender. We’ve got one count of assault with intent to commit rape, indecent assault and battery on a person aged fourteen or older, and two counts of rape.”

  “Crap,” I said. Ruby looked at me. I mouthed the word rapist and watched her pale skin turn even paler. “Shouldn’t he be in jail?” I asked.

  “He served seven years, then got out,” Clegg said. “Average time behind bars is eleven for rapists, in case you wanted to know.”

  I didn’t want to know. Seemed like infinity would be a more fitting sentence for a scumbag like Swain, but what do I know about the law.

  “Got any physical stats on him?” I asked.

  “White male, forty-six, six feet, two-ten. Hair brown. Eyes brown.”

  “Can you send me a picture?”

  “Sure. Or you can look him up yourself on the SORB Web site.”

  “SORB?” I asked.

  “Sex Offender Registry Board.”

  “One more question,” I said, signaling to make a left turn. “The address I gave you, is that Mom’s place or his?”

  Clegg looked it up. “By Mom I’m assuming you mean Lucille Swain, and yes, she’s the registered owner of the property on that address,” he said. “So, is this guy giving you grief? I’ve got plenty of contacts in the Medford PD who would love to pay this piece-o-crap a visit.”

  “No. Not really. I’ll just deactivate his account. Thanks for the help.”

  “Okay, hombre,” Clegg said. “Call anytime.”

  I ended the call, wondering if the next time I tried to reach Clegg, he would be someplace far away, feet high above the earth, smelling the purity of the sky and feeling his soul come alive. I wished I could join him.

  “What do you make of that?” Ruby asked after I put my phone away. I shouldn’t have been talking and driving, anyway. At least it wasn’t another crime.