Undercurrents

by Mary Anna Evans

  Sylvia, a generation younger, hurdled the back of the chair in front of her, which was only empty because Kali had left it. Linton knocked Laneer’s empty seat out of his way and joined her in chasing the girl, but she had a head start that had already taken her out the sanctuary’s side door.

  The rest of the room sat still for a moment, shocked into silence and inaction. After an odd delay, the congregation erupted. People were yelling and jumping out of their seats, but most of them just got in each other’s way. Laneer kept hobbling forward, far behind Kali’s other pursuers, but determined.

  Some people rose to their feet but stayed put, muttering with their companions. Others hurried after Linton and Sylvia, close enough to see what was happening but far enough away to ensure that they didn’t get involved. Maybe they were trying to help but didn’t know how, or maybe they just didn’t want to miss any excitement. Faye couldn’t tell, but there was no doubt that they were adding to the turmoil.

  Still others moved the opposite direction, having decided that the funeral was essentially over and why should they wait while the misbehaving child’s elders rounded her up? They had other places to be. These people scattered like sports fans watching a lopsided football game, thinking that if they hurried, they could get their cars out of the parking lot before everybody else.

  Faye was caught in the press of people trying to move in both directions. Being shorter than most, she found herself pushed face-first into one person’s back and then another person’s sternum. Seeing her problem, McDaniel grabbed one of her forearms and yanked her free of the mob in the center aisle. Then he kept dragging her as he headed for the side aisle, then forward to the door where Kali had left the building. They were still dodging people, but there were fewer of them.

  He didn’t even turn around as he told her why he was dragging her along with him. “The child won’t speak to anybody else. If anybody can get her to come back, it’s you.”

  With McDaniel clearing their path, they made progress toward the open door. Faye was grateful for his help, but there would be a ring of bruises around that arm when the melee was past.

  As they emerged from the chapel, they found themselves in a parking lot surrounded by woodlands. Behind the church, a creek much like the one in Kali’s neighborhood ran along the back property line. There were lots of people in sight, but none of them was a little girl in a black sundress, a ponytail, and black patent-leather Mary Janes.

  Laneer was walking back and forth, calling Kali’s name. In the instant since she left his side, he had changed. He had been old before, with a tremor and wrinkles and a head of hair turning white. Now he looked elderly and infirm. And terrified.

  “Where is she?” Faye asked McDaniel. “People don’t just disappear.”

  Sylvia looked in no way elderly or infirm, but she, too, looked terrified. “Kali! Where’s my girl? You come here to Sylvia right this minute!”

  The searchers fanned out. Linton and Walt sprinted into and across the parking lot, then straight down into the creek, splitting up as they crossed it and disappeared into the woods. Mayfield skirted the creek, disappearing behind the church building.

  Jeremiah was calling his crew to him. As they gathered, Armand left his side and walked toward McDaniel, asking “What can I do to help?”

  Before McDaniel could answer, Jeremiah spoke a few words and Stephanie and Ayesha dropped to all fours. They started looking under cars while Jeremiah and Richard took to the woods. At a hand signal from Jeremiah, the two men split, heading east and west, then deeper into the trees.

  Faye’s first impulse was to head into the woods with them until, watching Stephanie and Ayesha check beneath one car after another, her heart stopped. Could Kali be hiding under a car? What if someone unknowingly started it up and drove away?

  She looked up at McDaniel. “Nobody can go anywhere until we’ve checked under every one of those cars.”

  Armand, now standing at McDaniel’s side, nodded. “You got that right.”

  McDaniel turned to Armand and said, “You want to help? Stay right here and keep an eye on these cars. Check their trunks and back seats. I have to go to the lot on the other side of the church and do the same thing.”

  He ran to the other parking lot and Faye hit the pavement. She started crawling from car to car, gravel digging into her bare knees until they bled.

  The asphalt was hot and sticky under her palms and it smelled like hot motor oil. She worried as she crawled, because nearly half of the lot was already empty. Plenty of people must have gotten to the cars and left while she and McDaniel were still trying to get outside.

  She told herself that it didn’t matter. The grisly truth was that she would have heard the screaming by now if someone had run over the little girl. Unfortunately, another truth was that she would have heard the crowd celebrating if anyone had found her, and she hadn’t heard that, either. Kali could have been in the trunk of any of the cars that had already left, and that trunk might also hold a shovel and a bouquet of flowers.

  She told herself to stop thinking. Thinking was doing Kali no good. Faye’s job was to crawl from car to car, looking for a grief-stricken little girl. So she did, but she didn’t find Kali in the parking lot, and neither did anybody else.

  All the while, Frida lay in her casket in the stained-glass light of an empty chapel, covered in flowers and waiting to be put to rest for eternity.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  They had looked for Kali until the sun began to fade, and he had helped them. At any number of times during those long hours, he had thought all was lost. They were going to find her before he did, and she would tell them everything.

  Finally, he knew what he had to do. Kali had seen what he did to her mother, so she had to be silenced, along with the woman who had kept him from finishing the task. Her outburst in the chapel had made that clear.

  He had seen her footprints. She had been running like someone who would keep moving without a single turn until she dropped from exhaustion, so he had to be running in the right direction. He had obliterated her trail as best as he could while running at full tilt. And as he ran, he asked his mind to chew on a problem for him. He was not, at the moment, armed.

  It had not seemed safe to load his trunk with a shovel. Instead, he had found a likely spot far away from here, where he had already dug a grave for the archaeologist. A shovel waited there for her. Now he needed it to silence the child, too, but it was there and she was here.

  Working without the shovel went against everything inside him. Kali was small. So, for that matter, was Faye Longchamp-Mantooth. It would be no big trick to strangle them or beat them with his bare hands. Emotionally, though, he needed the distance of the shovel and its handle. He also needed the protective clothing and gloves that waited with the shovel. They put him in another world. They isolated him from what the shovel was doing.

  Murder must leave no trace on his person. He knew no other way to do it.

  Flowers, too, were a necessity. They added grace to the moment. They reflected the woman and her beauty. They fed the earth with the fragrance of their rotting petals. He could do nothing without flowers, but they, at least, were not a problem. He was surrounded by delicate woodland wildflowers.

  Ripping a fistful of black-eyed Susans from their stems, he thrust them into his pants pocket, alongside the tiny baby’s breath blossom he had taken from the graveyard. The flowers’ nearness helped him focus. He could do this. He just needed to find her.

  With the flowers in his pocket, the insight came.

  The creek. He was looking in the wrong place. A child who waded up a creek every day would not be running through these woods when she had familiar flowing water handy. He would find her there. The creek was a gift, because it would give him a way to do murder at one remove, the way he liked to do it. It would also give him a way to bury her without a shovel.

&nbs
p; Drowning was the secret. If he drowned her, the water would wash him clean and the water itself would be a kind of grave. Scattering flower petals on its surface would fulfill his final compulsive need.

  He stared at his hands as he ran for the creek. Could he really hold a living being underwater with those hands? Could he bear to feel the passing of a soul as it left a body?

  He could do it.

  Oh, yes. He knew he could do it. He had no other choice.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  It was well past the time when Joe would have expected Faye to be at the motel, and maybe she was there, but she wasn’t answering her phone. She might even be in the room next door to the one where Amande waited, but he had no way to know. He only knew that he couldn’t stand lying on an uncomfortable and too-short bed, dialing her number repeatedly. So instead he was wandering around the motel, hoping to see her or to hear her voice.

  They’d driven all day, and now his wife was nowhere to be found. There were any number of places where she might legitimately be, safe and happy, but Joe couldn’t deny it any longer. He was terrified and he had been since Faye had first told him about the woman who had been buried alive.

  Not knowing what else to do, and unable to sit idle, he’d detoured from wandering around the lobby, wandering instead out to the parking lot to look for her car. No luck. So maybe she was working late.

  On his way in, he had another idea to distract him from his fear. Well, he had the same idea again. He’d only asked for her at the desk three times. Why not make it four? Maybe this time the clerk would tell him what he needed to know, if he just found the right words to ask him.

  When the bored clerk emerged from the office, Joe said, “I know you can’t tell me what room Faye Longchamp is in, and I don’t want you to, because I’m her husband and I don’t want any old stranger to be able to find out where she’s sleeping—”

  The clerk gave a slow nod. “So you understand why we have rules. That’s cool. And unusual.”

  “But is there anything you can to do help me find her? Do you have a number for anybody else with her group?”

  The clerk checked his computer. “I’m sorry. She made the reservations herself through an online vendor. I don’t have any information here that you don’t already have. I mean, I have her home address, which would be no help since I suppose you live there, too. Or I could call her cell for you, but she’s your wife. Surely you know her phone number.”

  Joe’s shoulders sagged. “She’s bound to be working late. I’m probably worried for no reason.”

  He turned to go, but the clerked stopped him with a “Wait. Sir?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I could leave a message on the phone in her room. Maybe her cell battery died, but if there’s a message on her room phone, she’ll see the light flashing as soon as she walks in.”

  “That’ll work. Thanks a lot.”

  “No problem.”

  The clerk dialed Faye’s room as Joe walked away, then called out again. “Wait. Sir?”

  Joe turned around again. The clerk said, “I’ve got her roommate on the line,” and handed him the phone.

  Joe tried not to snatch the phone, but he grabbed it pretty damn quick. “Hello? This is Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth’s husband. I drove up here from Florida to surprise her. Do you know where she is?”

  A young woman’s voice came out of the receiver. “A surprise? That’s so sweet! You’ll have to wait a little while for the surprise, though, ’cause she’s at the funeral. It’s been a while, so she shouldn’t be gone much longer.”

  Of course, she was at the funeral. That’s exactly where he should have expected Faye to be.

  A man who wasn’t on edge and nearly frantic would have had his anxieties eased by this information. He would have thought, “Great. I’ll take Amande for a nice dinner and we’ll see Faye soon.”

  But Joe, whose edginess was rising by the moment, thought, “I don’t like the sound of ‘It’s been a while.’ It’ll be dark soon and they don’t bury people in the dark. I’m going out there.”

  Once again, he quizzed the young woman, whose name he should probably have asked. “Do you know where they had the funeral?”

  “Some old church out in the country. I heard it was where Frida’s—that’s the dead woman—it’s where her great-grandparents used to go. I don’t know the name of it.”

  That was all Joe needed to know. This woman might not know where the old church was, but the Internet did. His daughter knew how to make the Internet sing, and, despite Amande’s insults, Joe thought he was pretty good, himself. The website for the Memphis newspaper would have run articles on the murder that would tell him the name of the poor dead woman. With the name, he could find her obituary and that would tell him the location of the funeral.

  “Would you do me a favor?” he asked. “If she comes in or if she calls, would you please, please, please tell her to call her husband?”

  Before he used his phone to track down his destination, he called Amande and told her that he was going out and that she needed to stay put. The last thing he needed was to lose both his daughter and her mother on the streets of Memphis.

  Faye had crawled around a rocky parking lot until McDaniel returned. Now he was telling her to have a seat so he could help her bandage her bloody knees, but she wasn’t where she wanted to be. She wanted to be too far away to hear, running headlong through briars and underbrush, looking for a little girl who couldn’t be found.

  McDaniel handed her a bottle of water, keeping another one for himself. “I know you won’t be sitting here long, but please rest here and drink this before you go running off. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  She didn’t want to sit still, because then her brain would be free to think. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, hoping someone had texted good news, but all she saw was a voice mail from Joe, and she was too antsy to take the time to listen to it. She needed to tend her wounds and go back to looking for Kali. Joe would understand if it took her a little time to call him back.

  This was the advantage of long-term relationships. Most conversations could wait.

  She surveyed their work. Four band-aids on each knee were doing a pretty good job of protecting her wounds, but they still stung. The scrapes on her shins were going to have to go uncovered, because she’d given all the other band-aids to her crew. The first-aid kit she kept in her glove compartment had fallen short and she didn’t have time to wait for McDaniel to raid his.

  “The search-and-rescue team will be here any minute,” the detective said as he settled onto the garden bench beside her, facing the woods where Kali must still be.

  The ornamental bench with its curves and molded scrolls looked just right in the shady garden behind the church. Its concrete was cool on the backs of her thighs. McDaniel looked like he needed something cool on his sunburned cheeks.

  “I hope they hurry,” she said, “and I hope they have lights. It’s going to be dark soon.”

  “They’re hurrying and they have lights.”

  “Tell me they have dogs,” Faye said, dabbing again at her bleeding shins with a ball of cotton dripping with antiseptic.

  “They have dogs.”

  “If my husband were here, he wouldn’t need a dog. He could track her.”

  “I find it hard to believe that he could do a better job than a dog. No human has that kind of nose.”

  “Joe doesn’t use his nose. At least, I don’t think so. He uses his eyes. And when he gets close, he uses his ears. I can’t tell you how he does it, but he does it. If we don’t find her soon, I’m calling him and telling him to get on a plane.”

  McDaniel looked doubtful. “Well, right now, we’re all we’ve got. You and your people have checked under all the cars?”

  “Yes. And in the trunks. You?”

  “I’ve looked in every
cranny of the other parking lot. Nothing under the cars. Nothing in the trunks. But don’t you worry. We’re going to find that girl, and I’m bringing in all the people we need to do that.”

  “Do you think Kali might have been in the trunk of one of those cars that left right away?” Faye scanned the parking lot and the people standing in it. “I’d say we lost half of them in the first few minutes after she ran.”

  “Yeah, half. At least,” McDaniel said, and he didn’t look happy about it. “They left before I had any clue that it was going to take more than five minutes for a hundred people to find a ten-year-old girl on the lam. Especially when every last one of us saw her leave under her own power, and hardly five seconds passed before people went after her. I want to say that there’s no way anybody had time to put her in their trunk before the rest of us came outside. Only I can’t say that, because nothing else here makes sense. Where could she have gone?”

  “I can tell you that Kali is pretty self-sufficient, especially when she’s outdoors. She spends hours in an environment like this every day. I’ve seen it.” She paused to look at the flowing creek and its overhanging trees. Some of them were even sweetgums, just like the ones on Kali’s creek. “Should she have been able to evade a dozen or more adults who were looking for her? No. But the fact that I know she can handle herself in a place like this,” she gestured vaguely at the trees, creek, and sky, “is helping me hold onto the hope that she’s okay. She’s just hiding because she’s upset and I can’t argue with that. She has every right to be upset.”

  “Everything changes when the sun goes down.”

  As if in response, the undersides of the clouds hanging west of them began to turn pink. Faye consciously shifted her mind away from her fear of the coming darkness and focused on practical things.

  “Do you have a handle on where everybody is? Jeremiah and Davion have come back,” she said. “Reverend Atkinson is in the church praying over Frida. Who’s still out there?”