by Lisa Preston
“There’s a car, a white car. You’ve got to stop it.”
He indicated the passenger’s side of his car. “Get in.” As he got back behind the wheel, he leaned across the seat to open the door for her.
Daphne threw herself around the front bumper and into the police car, drawing her knees up, wanting to put her feet against the dashboard to brace herself.
“Seatbelt,” he said.
She buckled herself in, ready for hot pursuit, but he drove not much faster than the determined side of normal, no screaming tires, no lights and siren.
He spoke rapid-fire and cryptically into his dashboard radio, a number of other voices and squelch returned, and then he said, “Ten-four.”
“It went up and turned off to the right down here somewhere,” Daphne said as they arrived within a few blocks of where the car had turned off.
“Describe the car. Make? Model? And start talking about why we want this car.”
“It’s white,” she said. “Just white.” Shit! The car color, that’s all she had. Daphne took a breath. “It’s a four-door. A sedan. And it’s a late-model, like, new. Clean. I bet it’s a rental.”
“Foreign? American?”
“I don’t know.”
“And which road did it turn down?”
“I don’t know. One of these. I was way back there. One block from Rainier Court. I was on foot.”
“Okay,” he said, braking his patrol car to the curb. “What’s going on between you and the occupants of the white sedan?”
“They took a lady. An older lady named Minerva Watts. They’re holding her and I think they’re stealing from her.”
“Who are they?” He spoke into his radio again, but Daphne couldn’t make out the quick code.
“A man and a woman. I don’t know their names. Guff. The woman called the man Guff. I don’t know if it’s a nickname or what.” She looked around as he turned his car around with a smooth one-eighty in an intersection. He was driving them back toward Rainier Court. She sat up stiff and straight, rising with her voice. “Wait, what are you doing? Go after that car.”
“What’s your name?” he asked. And as soon as she told him, he said, “Miss Mayfield, other officers are closer than I am to that car. If they see it, this white late-model four-door with three occupants, two women, older one named Minerva Watts, and a man named Guff, they’ll stop it for me and I can work from there. Right now, you and I will begin at the beginning.”
As he passed Rainier Court, Daphne pointed. “There. That’s where it started. I mean, today it did. This goes back to Wednesday. It’s kind of complicated.”
He pulled up to the end of the last cul-de-sac, to her ill-parked truck, and they both got out, walking the few feet to her truck.
Giving her a pointed glance of appraisal, he said, “So, neighbors call about a young white woman in jeans and a black T-shirt. They say she drove up at a high rate of speed in a Toyota pickup with a camper shell on it, and she went running between these houses into the woods. And the neighbor calls back, says the woman is now running and screaming on the next road—”
“Rainier Court,” she supplied.
He nodded, gave a quick smile, and said, “Right before I arrive, this woman is screaming, running down the main road, down Everson, and she’s shouting for people to call 911.”
“That was me.”
“So I gathered. We got another call from a Rainier Court resident.” He walked around her truck, peered in the windows. “Why do you have all these tools in the back?”
“I’m a roofer.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“You said begin at the beginning,” she told him. “I’ll try to make it brief.”
She described driving to Rainier Court, feeling intimidated about going straight to the front door, then parking on the main road and hiking through the woods until she arrived at the back of the vacation house. She skipped how she got into the house, concentrating instead on Minerva Watts’s credit cards arranged on the dining table, the man and the woman, their comments, the add-on lock that kept Minnie confined to the bedroom, and the few details Minnie had related.
The officer turned in place, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and answered a squawk on his radio with a mumble as he listened to her story. He asked how far into the woods she’d gone after moving her truck to this cul-de-sac, and everything she could tell about the couple leaving with “the Watts woman.”
“Oh, God. I never should have left her. I never should have left Minnie in the woods alone. I left her! I left her by herself.” Sobs made Daphne tremble even as she told herself to pull it together.
He spoke into his radio some more and this time Daphne caught a bit of a woman’s voice. “… registered to a Daphne Mayfield on Mapleview Drive.”
My truck, she decided. He ran some kind of check on my truck.
“Let’s go take a peek at the end of Rainier,” he said.
“Yes, good. Rainier Court. Can I drive myself instead of going in your car?”
“Sure.”
Another patrol car was there, parked right across the driveway of the Rainier Court Vacation House. A blond man in uniform stepped away from the neighboring house as a woman in sweatpants hurried back inside.
The blond officer shrugged at the officer following Daphne. The two men conferred by one patrol car, with the blond officer shooting skeptical glances at Daphne.
“There’s more,” she called out. Closing the distance between them, Daphne told them in a rush, “They’re holding her, stealing her money, kidnapping her. You have to believe me. You have to do something.” She could not lose ground with the police. This new guy and the blond man had to believe her.
The first officer continued to regard her with a set, grim face. And the blond guy said, “Calm down, ma’am.”
She wiped tears from her face. “I don’t want to calm down,” she said. “Please, please, believe me. No one believes me. Look, I have this card, this officer’s card.” She pulled it from her pocket. “Officer Taminsky. He knows what’s going on, I mean until today. He doesn’t know about today. He knows about before.”
“Before,” the first officer said, taking the card and then stepping away to spurt words and numbers into his radio. When he gave her his attention, she told him the rest, the before. Wednesday in the park, Thursday at Minnie Watts’s house.
“And she asked them not to take her brooch. And the woman called her lady but when she saw me, she called Minnie Mother, and poor Minnie, she was so glad to see me, just like today.” Daphne took a breath and told them about Guff grabbing her, about the car accident and getting arrested for reckless driving, then again how one thing led to another today.
“And the guy said ‘this one isn’t as Alzheimer’s-y as the others,’” Daphne reminded them, wondering how many others there were.
“How ’bout a security sweep around back,” the blond officer said to the first. “Make sure the place is secure.”
The first officer nodded and told Daphne, “Wait right here.”
Waiting in front of the vacation house, Daphne thought about how she’d told Minnie Watts to wait.
Bits of motion in neighboring windows caught her attention. She was being watched by people who hadn’t so much as stepped outside when she’d screamed for help.
Turning her back on those unhelpful neighbors, she squinted up at the officers’ silhouettes moving upstairs in the vacation house.
As soon as they came outside, she asked, “Did you find anything?”
“We weren’t searching the house, per se,” the first officer said.
“No,” said the blond, “just making sure it’s secure. And there’s nothing remarkable in there.”
Daphne clenched her jaw. The couple would have taken their papers and Minnie’s credit cards. She pictured the details, the roses on the table. What happened to the little add-on lock she’d pulled off the bedroom doorknob? She had a vague memory of dropping it when sh
e knelt on the floor to help Minnie don shoes. She swallowed and faced the first cop.
“That woman put her coat over Minnie and—”
The blond cop looked at Daphne for one second, then told the first officer, “Sounds like she was taking care of her. After all, you say she addressed the Watts woman as her mother and—”
“Suppose she put the coat on her to disguise Minnie?” Daphne fired back. “To make her harder to see, harder for me to find her?”
The blond made little calming motions with his hands. “Suppose they ran because you chased them?”
“No, listen to me. That woman, Minerva Watts, she’s in trouble. These people are holding her, keeping her against her will. And I think they’re stealing from her.” Daphne snapped her fingers, remembering another piece. “She just sold her car wholesale to Fremont Ford. You can check that out.” As soon as she said this, she remembered the dealership telling her they couldn’t check on the sale until Monday.
The first officer squinted, as though he were trying to believe or trying to pretend while he listened to her talk again about the first car, the impound lot men’s comments, and what Officer Taminsky had learned when he checked out Minnie’s house on Eastpark and talked to the neighbors.
“Quite the circle-jerk,” the second officer said to the first.
Daphne looked at him. “What?”
“Maybe they’re running from you because you’re chasing them and you’re chasing them because they’re running from you.”
Circular reasoning wasn’t going to get her out of this mess, wasn’t going to help Minnie Watts. Daphne felt her tension grow, credibility slipping as the blond cop headed for his patrol car. Desperate to be believed, she repeated, “The guy said ‘this one isn’t as Alzheimer’s-y as the others’ and he was kind of in a tiff with the woman—”
The first cop pointed a finger at the house. “With Minerva Watts?”
“No, with the other woman.” Daphne eyed him. When he’d told her to get in his police car right away and pursued the white car, he’d given up because they were too late to catch them. He’d chased without needing more of a reason from her, right from the start. She studied him for hope.
“Miss Mayfield,” he said, “people just say ‘this one’ sometimes. It does not mean there were others. It’s just an expression.”
“Not this time.” Her jaw thrust forward. “Not in this instance. Look, I think there were others. Saying she wasn’t as Alzheimer’s-y as the others means there are other victims. See, this stolen car from California ended up here in Seattle.” She explained more about the impound, the abandoned car on the same block as the car rental agency and how the clerk had mentioned this house had just been rented. She talked about what the impound lot boss had said regarding the survivor coming to collect the car and the car being all that could be collected out of an estate because the owner—an old person—had recently signed things away to a charity that went defunct. And maybe the same thing was happening now, here.
“A lot of ifs,” said the first cop.
“But he said ‘this one’ like there were others.” Daphne felt angry tears on her lower eyelids.
“This one,” said the blond. “The others. Could be just an expression.”
Daphne shook her head. “Those people are holding that old woman. She was locked in a bedroom!”
“Sometimes people have to do that with their older relatives,” the blond cop said as he turned to go.
She watched him drive away but couldn’t stand the sight and closed her eyes. When she opened them to the sound of another vehicle, Officer Taminsky was pulling up. The first officer stepped to Taminsky’s driver’s door and they conferred for some minutes.
Daphne walked over. After all, they hadn’t told her to stand where she was.
“Yeah, I checked that on the way over,” Taminsky was saying. “A day-shifter impounded the car. Dispatch says they got calls associated with that impound from an out-of-state owner. Sounds kind of complicated.”
“Quite a few ifs,” the first cop said again.
Daphne nodded, then shook her head. “Not too many ifs. I wish they’d stopped and you could have talked to them. I tried to stop them. Why didn’t they stop? Why didn’t someone come out and help me stop them? Why didn’t someone else call for help sooner?”
“Why didn’t you call us instead of going into that house?”
“I don’t have a phone, remember? Guff got it when he grabbed my jacket Thursday. He grabbed me.” Then she pointed to the neighboring houses. “Lots of people must have seen. Someone should have called 911.”
“Someone did. We had two calls on you.”
“They should have called sooner.”
The first cop eyed the houses around them. A few faces were visible at windows, watching the spectacle. “People don’t always call the police when they see something suspicious. They’re reluctant to intervene, can’t decide what to do. They relieve themselves of the job. Officer Taminsky is going to finish up here, Miss Mayfield. Bye now.”
Because he was willing to see, Daphne showed Taminsky where she’d parked her truck on the main road, where she’d run into the woods. They went behind the house, too, and she showed him where she and Minnie had hidden.
“You made an unlawful entry into the house.”
Daphne closed her eyes. “What is the worst-case scenario?” she asked. She imagined being arrested again.
“I think we’re both imagining the same worst-case,” he said. “That there’s a couple victimizing this Minerva Watts. That impounded Lincoln, well, it’s odd, the history there, what we’re hearing from the man claiming the California Lincoln, the other person on the registration and title.”
She nodded and let the tears fall. He believes me. This will get fixed.
He raised an appraising eyebrow. “That Lincoln was abandoned not long after you followed it from Minerva Watts’s home, not far from where you got in a traffic accident while pursuing it.”
They dumped it because I pursued them, she realized. And that’s why it ended up in an impound yard with Vic’s car. “So what will you do? What happens now?”
He tapped his radio. “I’ve had another drive-by done at the place on Eastpark Avenue. There’s no answer, doesn’t seem like anyone’s been there.”
“No,” she said. “It looked vacant when I drove by today, before I came to Rainier Court. I bet they haven’t been back since Thursday, when he grabbed me and I ran.” She cleared her throat. “They have her. They have Minnie Watts. I had her and I let her go.” Daphne’s voice dropped hollow and softer with each word.
“Ma’am,” Taminsky said, “we’ll find her. This will not go on and on. It will end. We will figure it out.”
“But wait. Right now, what happens? You’ve got to do something.”
He explained that they’d done what they could. He promised to let her know of any new developments, promised he’d verify everything he could, not let it go. He said again he’d do what he could to figure it out.
“You guys don’t always figure things out,” she said, desperate and sure.
“Ma’am?”
“There are things that never get figured out. Things that never get solved. Ever.” And she knew it was true, knew she was right. “This is the third time since Wednesday that some cop has taken information from me and done what you guys call issuing a locate. And nothing’s happened. You don’t find her. You don’t stop whatever’s going on. There’s lots of times you guys don’t figure it out.”
He nodded.
She stopped there, not wanting the fact that police had never figured out who killed Suzanne to derail the search for Minerva Watts. She knew Minnie Watts wasn’t safe, even with the niggling doubts the police presented, making it sound so reasonable that it could all be a misunderstanding. She knew in her bones that Minnie wasn’t safe, wherever she was in the city, with those strangers.
But Minnie had been safe, for a few moments, when she was in the wo
ods with Daphne, kneeling amongst the Fairy Slippers in the rocks.
“Where’s your dad?” Daphne asked Jed, two seconds after she came through the front door and followed the sound of the TV into the living room. The boy—tonight looking like a boy-man in one of Vic’s old shirts—was on the couch, his glasses shoved to the end of his nose as he tried to read without them.
He pushed his glasses back and studied her. She wiped sweat from her face and flapped her shirt, feeling a trickle of perspiration course down her ribs. She’d never stopped sweating from her sprint through the woods, down Rainier Court after the car, dealing with the police in her fury and desperate hope. Pushing stray hair back from her face, Daphne’s fingers found moisture. She knew she must look greasy, like she’d been on a roof all day, shingling. Dirt smudged her jeans, clung to her shoes.
“He took Josie to a sleepover.” He stretched his legs and crossed his ankles. “How ’bout you make me a nice five-course dinner?”
“What?” Daphne’s chin dropped as she stared at him.
He grinned. “He said I should try not to bug you when you came home, so I thought I’d start with that.”
A strangled snort erupted from Daphne’s nose. Then she coughed and a fit of giggles burst forth.
“I’m not that funny,” Jed told her.
“Stress,” she explained. “Do you need some dinner?”
He inclined his head toward the table. Daphne swung around and saw the milk jug, and a paper towel smeared with mustard and bread crumbs. “Dad told me to make myself some sandwiches.”
He’ll clean it up, she thought. He doesn’t need to be told. “I’ll be upstairs.”
Jed nodded and returned to his book.
Grazie wouldn’t get up and come with her, even with plenty of pleading and encouragement. The dog flumped to lie on her side.
Cross-legged and alone on the bed, Daphne waited. For an idea, for hope, for Vic.
The phone did not ring.
She decided the police had forgotten to call, they’d been too busy, but they’d found Minnie. They had to find her, make her safe.