~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“She was screaming like a banshee when she found the leech on her leg,” Alex told Detective Bentley. He followed the comment with a hearty laugh.
I think the leech creeped Alex out as much as it did me, and he was secretly glad it hadn’t happened to him when he swam in the river at the lodge.
I sat back in my chair and smiled. Even though Alex had started school a few days late, he had settled in nicely and told Mick over the phone that he was doing well and having a good time. I was pleased to see his car in the driveway when I came home from the deli. I wasn’t sure if he would make the drive home from Columbus to have dinner with us and spend the night, but I was glad he did.
None of us had talked much about what happened in Canada, but with Detective Bentley here, we were finally ready to have a conversation. I think Alex wanted to be here to give his perspective, too.
When I came home limping and sporting a fresh red bump, Mick insisted I lie down on the sofa with ice on both my ankle and my forehead. I told him it was an accident and both mishaps occurred when I lost my balance getting into my car. He wanted to cancel dinner plans, but I insisted we go forward with the evening. In the end, my argument won out, and Darby and Nate took over the cooking duties to make the Reuben sandwiches in our kitchen.
“Susan,” Detective Bentley said. “I think these sandwiches of yours get better and better all the time.”
I only smiled.
“Hey, wait a minute,” Nate piped up. “Darby and I made the sandwiches this time. Are you saying they’re better than Susan’s?” He puffed out his chest with pride.
The detective looked flustered at possibly offending me, but he said, “I think these are the best I’ve had so far.”
Nate clapped Darby on the back with joy. Darby laughed and said, “Yeah, but Susan taught us how to make them, and the Thousand Island dressing is her recipe.” Nate was forced to good-naturedly agree.
Everyone was nearly finished eating. I tore a few pieces of crust from the edge of the last of my sandwich and held them under the table for Joe. He took them gently from my hand and gobbled them down. He hadn’t left my side since coming home this afternoon. I rubbed behind his ears and whispered to him, “You’re a good dog, Joe.”
“If everyone’s done,” Mick said, “let’s move into the living room. We can have coffee and dessert in there.”
“I’m too full for dessert,” the detective said. “Maybe later. But a cup of coffee sounds great.”
Nate made like a waiter and took everyone’s drink order before heading for the kitchen.
My ankle was sore, but I could walk on it. The twist in the back seat of the car hadn’t been severe, and the ankle appeared to be more aggravated than damaged. Still, Mick helped me to one of the two sofas in the room and propped my foot up on a footstool.
Dinner conversation had consisted mostly of light chatter about work and school. The one bright note was when Detective Bentley told us they found the guys who threw the dead cow onto Mrs. Moore’s yard. It seemed other kids in town were also having problems with the Moore Landscaping drivers. A freshman on the Carbide High swim team enlisted his twenty-six-year-old brother and a few of his friends to get the dead cow from a field on the outskirts of town where a local farmer had dumped it. They loaded it into the back of a pickup, and took it to the Moore house during the night. There were no charges filed against anyone except the farmer who had illegally dumped the cow. Detective Bentley finished his story with a heartfelt apology to all of us, but especially to Alex.
The only comments over dinner about our vacation had been to discuss my sprained ankle, my appendicitis surgery, and the leech. The silence in the living room now was awkward.
I took a sip of my raspberry tea before saying, “I want to thank Chuck for joining us.” It always made me a little uncomfortable to call Detective Bentley by his first name, but we had all been friends long enough now, it came more easily to me than it used to. I turned to the detective to give him a warm smile, “I also want to thank you for taking my collect call and helping me when I was in Martha’s house. I would have never thought to look for a crutch, or even to leave the house, so thank you for your guidance.”
Everyone mumbled agreement. He only appeared slightly embarrassed when he said, “I was happy to help, and I’m glad everything worked out. I’m sorry your call was refused at the station when you first called. I’ve already taken care of that, so it won’t happen again.”
Mick was upset when he asked, “You called for help, and they wouldn’t give it to you?”
“She called collect,” the detective said.
Speaking at the same time, I said, “I called collect, and-” I stopped to let him finish.
“Ever since the 911 system went into effect, we haven’t accepted collect calls from anyone,” he said. “There really hasn’t been any reason to.”
Silence surrounded us again. I looked to Alex to help get the ball rolling. There was a lot I wanted to know, and for some reason, everyone had been following Mick’s lead and hesitant to talk about it.
“Alex, I still want to know what happened after Ramsey ran off with me,” I said with a smile. “Did you really see that happen?”
“Wow, Susan,” he said uncomfortably. “Way to jump right in.” He paused for a moment before saying, “I think I’m the reason no one has wanted to talk about this.” No one objected, and he sat quiet for a moment. “I thought the Sasquatch was real at the time, and I figured he would take you somewhere and tear you apart and maybe even eat you.”
I almost smiled, but he was so grave, I held all of my emotions in check.
He continued, “I knew Dad would never forgive me for leaving you there, and I kind of went crazy and wanted to kill myself. I went to the rock quarry, and I was just going to slide off into the water. I figured they would never find you, and I didn’t want anybody to find me either.”
His words shocked me to my core. Tears burned my eyes. I had been trying to convince everyone that I was ok, and I had even been making light of the ordeal. I had been oblivious to how deeply everyone else might have been impacted by the chain of events.
A sorrowful sigh escaped, and I whispered, “Oh, Alex.”
He saw my distress and tried to smile. “I’m ok now,” he said. “But at the time, I went to the edge of the quarry and sat down on a rock. Have you ever heard that if your hair stands up during a storm, lightning is going to strike where you’re standing?”
I nodded my head yes.
“I felt that,” he said. “It had to be survival mode, because I jumped off the rock and just missed getting hit. I thought for sure I’d be deaf from the sound it made.”
Mick chimed in to say, “That’s when he decided to leave the quarry.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I realized if there weren’t any instances of a Sasquatch or Bigfoot ever hurting a human, then maybe you wouldn’t be the first. Maybe you would be ok, so I ran back to the lodge to tell Dad.”
I knew better than to ask Mick or the guys how they felt when they heard the news. Instead, I asked, “When did you figure out it wasn’t a real Sasquatch?”
Nate laughed. “That was all Darby,” he said. “He was the sane one when we were all going crazy.”
Darby smiled and said, “It was so shocking the first time Alex told us what he saw, we made him tell us again. When he said the Sasquatch picked up the gun before he picked you up, I knew it had to be a thinking man, not some animal. So, we did have that part figured out right away.”
“It wasn’t a real gun,” I told Alex. “Ralph said it was a prop gun like they use in theaters. He said he had no intention of hurting us.”
“You could have fooled me,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “It scared me when I saw he was the one to pick me up along the road, but something had changed in him. He was defeated, and he wasn’t angry anymore. I think the blow to his head shook him up quite a bit.”
“Good,”
Mick said. “He needed a blow to his head.”
“Too bad he got away with the gold,” Alex said. He looked at Detective Bentley and asked, “Am I in trouble for digging it up and giving it to him?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Chuck said. “There’s still a lot to untangle yet.”
“He didn’t get away with it,” I said. “He was picked up in Montreal this morning with all four gold bars.”
The detective was quick to ask, “How do you know that?”
Guilt over not telling them about Ralph’s son this afternoon surely showed on my face, and I instinctively opened my eyes wide when I realized my mistake in speaking out. I attempted to regain my composure.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I must have heard it on the news when I went to the store today.”
He frowned. I was certain he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t say anything. I changed the subject.
“Were you able to trace the call to Martha’s house?” I asked.
He shook his head. “By the time I got down to the station, the call had dropped. It was pretty frustrating trying to talk to people in Canada who didn’t want to talk to me. By the time I started making calls, they already had an all-out manhunt going on for you, and no one wanted to take the time to talk to some detective in Ohio. That’s when a woman answering the phone at the local police station put me in touch with that idiot, Richard Rice.” Everyone in the room rolled their eyes at the same time. “I told him where to find you, and he promised to have someone call me back, but, of course he never did. I paced for over an hour before calling the police station again and yelling at the woman. I kept telling her I knew where you were until she finally shut up long enough to listen.”
He rubbed his hands together and ran them up and down on the top of his slacks. It seemed just thinking about the frustration again broke him out into a sweat.
“Did she listen?” Nate asked.
“She eventually put an officer on with me,” he acknowledged. “He knew the exact location when I described the barn with the tobacco advertisement and the surrounding countryside. I found out later it only took thirty minutes before they searched the barn, but you weren’t there. It wasn’t too long after that, and they had a warrant to search Martha’s house. I think you know the rest from there. She’ll definitely be doing jail time for writing the fake prescriptions and for attempted murder.”
Alex frowned and asked, “Why was she shooting at Susan? I never heard the answer for that.”
“She panicked,” Chuck said. “She knew people would think she had kidnapped Susan, and if the fake prescriptions came to light, she’d definitely go back to jail. Ramsey left her holding the bag, and she snapped when she saw Susan was gone. She was going to keep her from talking.”
A shiver coursed through my body, and I felt Mick tighten his grip on my hand.
“Is there any word on Ramsey?” Mick asked.
“They caught him attempting to cross the border into Washington last Tuesday,” he said.
Alex asked, “What’s going to happen to him?”
The detective contemplated the question and said, “I’m not sure anything is going to happen to him,” he said. “Not as far as law enforcement is concerned. He was taken into custody for questioning, but as far as I know, they haven’t charged him with anything. Dan and Emily have a civil case against Richard Rice for their loss of income, and Ramsey will likely testify against Richard, but when you think about it, he didn’t break any laws. Ralph didn’t die from the blow to his head, and Ramsey thought he was saving Susan by running off with her, so the police don’t have anything to charge him with other than trespassing, and only if Dan and Emily want to press charges.”
Darby hadn’t said much all evening. I think his emotions were similar to Mick’s, and my disappearance had taken a big toll on him, too. At that moment, I was overwhelmed with feelings of love for my family and friends.
“Hey,” I said, sitting up taller. “How did Ramsey make those horrible screaming noises?”
The guys looked at each other and shook their heads. No one knew.
“I’ve got the answer to that one,” Chuck said. “When Ramsey was in college, he went on a basketball scholarship, but he was a whiz when it came to electronics. Have you ever seen those old, hand-held air raid sirens from the forties?”
Darby and Mick nodded their heads.
“He reworked one of those to emit the screaming sound,” he said. “He could make the scream as short or as long as he wanted. He kept it in the abandoned cabin on Dan and Emily’s property, so it would be close by when he frightened their guests.”
That explained the clean table and chairs. He was probably in the cabin often.
Everyone lapsed into silence again. I glanced at my watch. It was shortly after nine. My stomach jumped. I would have to think of a way to get out of the house before too long. Ralph’s son wouldn’t be happy if I was late.
Darby stood and asked, “Is everyone ready for dessert now? I made a tiramisu.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “If Ralph didn’t turn himself in at Silver Run, how did you all know I was at the lodge?”
Even Mick laughed at the question.
Nate answered. “Between family, friends, guests, and business associates, Dan and Emily have over a thousand email addresses in their computer. An email blast went out, and every one of the contacts received the same two-word message. Susan here.”
“Who sent it?” I asked.
Mick gave me a hug and a quick kiss before saying, “Beau.”
I couldn’t help laughing. Bless his heart. What a shock he must have had to wake and find me sleeping on the sofa. For him to manage to use the computer, let alone send an email, was nothing short of a miracle.
Darby and Nate went to the kitchen to cut the tiramisu. I looked to Alex and said, “Go get your coins from the Pirata exhibit and show Chuck. He can see what started all this.”
“You don’t have the real coins, do you?” the detective asked with a grin. “You know there are ten missing from the exhibit, right? No one knows who took them or where they went.”
This was news to me. Because the gold bars had been the focus of everything in Canada, I had no idea the authorities here were looking for the coins.
I suddenly felt hot and flushed. “Of course Alex’s coins aren’t real,” I said. “They look and feel real, but they’re souvenir coins Mick bought for him when we went to the exhibit.” Alex left the room, and I asked, “Why don’t you have camera footage of the theft of the coins or the gold bars?” I raised my voice, “Or the food court, so you could see when Ralph ran into me?”
He shrugged his shoulders, “Security at the mall said all of their cameras were down for almost two hours that day. It had been happening off and on for over a week, but only for a minute or two at a time. Unfortunately, they didn’t place a service call until it was too late.”
I knew that would be Ralph’s handiwork.
Alex came into the room and set a handful of coins on the coffee table in front of the detective. There were exactly ten, so I assumed he grabbed the coins I had put on his dresser. I watched the detective carefully, and he seemed to be eyeing me in return. I couldn’t help the guilty flush that rushed into my face, and I averted my eyes.
Darby and Nate returned with dessert. Detective Bentley placed the coins back on the table without comment.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
I cut the lights before coming to a complete stop in front of the construction office. My guilt over the coins and ducking out of the house registered off the charts, but I was determined to see this through.
Before everyone finished dessert, I excused myself to use the bathroom. When Mick tried to accompany me, I assured him I was fine and could walk on my own. I picked up the coins without looking at the detective and told Alex I would put them back in his room. I wouldn’t normally go to this end of the house to use a bathroom, but no eyebrows were raised, and I continued on my way.
I knew they would eventually figure out I was gone, but I hoped to be back soon. I would tell them something lame, like I had to run out for personal hygiene items.
Five minutes went by, but there was still no sign of Ralph’s son. At ten minutes after, I was starting to get nervous and scared. Was I in the right place? I double-checked the address, but there was no mistake. Ralph’s Construction was plastered on everything.
Maybe he had parked out back and was waiting inside the office. I slipped out of my car and pushed the door softly until it latched and distinguished the interior light.
A lone security light hung from the end of the building and was expected to be sufficient for the entire property. My eyes adjusted to the darkness around the front door. I reached out and turned the handle. It was unlocked, and I tiptoed inside.
There was no adjusting to this darkness. There wasn’t even a glimmer of light coming in through a window. I felt the walls on either side of the door, but there was no light switch. I scooted my feet forward in small increments, hoping to eventually come to a desk. The big toe of my good foot hit the leg of a chair, and I let out a soft, “ouch,” under my breath. My injured right foot brushed what felt like a bag of powder. It was softer than cement, but cement was the image conjured up in my mind.
My thigh finally bumped into a desk. I felt around until my hands found a lamp. I pulled the chain. The light illuminated the desk while throwing a greenish glow around the room. It took a second for my eyes to adjust, and I looked to see what the bag was on the floor.
It wasn’t a bag. It was Ralph’s son. He had fallen clutching his midsection. Blood pooled around his torso. There was blood on my foot and sandal from having shoved it into him. My shoe then left a blood smear across the floor from the man to the desk.
6 Maple Leaf Hunter Page 14