The Laura Cardinal Novels

by J. Carson Black

  Between the trees on the right, Steve caught the glint of metal—a tin roof. Through the undergrowth he could see something dark and rectangular, solid enough to swallow the light. A cabin.

  He left the road and bushwhacked through the heavy underbrush, the trees growing thicker here. Suddenly, he was in a clearing. At one time it had been a lawn ringed with small boulders painted white. The boulders remained, but the lawn was overgrown, weedy saplings growing wild. Flagpole in the center, the flag itself long gone.

  Camp Aratauk.

  There were five bungalows, a smaller building marked OFFICE, and what looked like a mess hall, all facing onto the common area. Pine log construction, painted brown. Two steps up to a shallow porch for each of them. Rows of windows that had once been screened. Vandals and the weather had taken care of most of them; rusty mesh ballooned out of the rest.

  Steve glanced at the sky; it was pale lavender now. If he stayed much longer, he'd need a flashlight.

  A breeze sifted through the pines and dry oak leaves shuttled across the office porch. Dank coolness emanated from the empty window spaces, making him think of dark things—beetles and spiders and rotting wood.

  It reminded him of the derelict house he and his friends frequented as a kid. He experienced the delicious little tingle born of fear—a carnival-ride thrill—and had the sudden urge to explore the building. But there could be broken floor boards inside; it wouldn't do to break a leg out here.

  Tomorrow.

  Steve worked his way back down to the logging road, but couldn't find the place where the trail intersected. He thought about the road into the camp, which he knew would eventually connect to the highway. Maybe he should have taken it instead of trying to find his way back in the dark. But the road could have gone on for miles. God only knew where it came out.

  He couldn't be that far from home. He gave up looking for the trail and bushwhacked straight down the hill, heading in the direction of the cabin. Every now and then, he stopped to get his bearings, peering into the gloom. One of these times, he heard something rustling.

  His heart rate jumped into the red zone.

  It came from above, over the hill. More rustling and then a crashing sound.

  He stood still, his heart pounding. Waited, listening, but heard only silence.

  Finally he started back down the hill, trying not to picture what might be behind him—a garbage-seeking omnivore who walked upright and had no fear of human beings—and soon realized he was back at the stream bed. Steve was surprised at the relief he felt, pouring over him like warm water.

  The stream bed would lead him home. He squinted into the gloom, following the pale scatter of rocks that marked the shallow impression in the earth. Steve's Most Amazing Adventure nearly at an end.

  That was when he saw the black shape digging among the rocks ahead.

  “Jake!” His own voice sounded explosive in his ears.

  The animal raised its head. For a moment, Steve wondered if it was Jake . . . or another dog, a stray. He didn't like the way the animal canted its head toward him. Something menacing about it.

  The dog put its head back down and started digging again, and the impression vanished. Steve recognized the dog's tail, which had a slight curl to it from some unknown genetic donor. It was Jake.

  By the time he reached Jake, the dog's tail was wagging.

  “How'd you get out?” But he thought he knew. The porch screen door locked by a hook latch. Steve had made sure the door was closed, but apparently, Jake had managed to push it open.

  Jake didn't spare him a look; he was too busy pawing at whatever he'd uncovered in the stream bed. Pawing first, then digging frantically. Manic, the way he scrabbled at the earth, dirt, and pine duff, torn bits of fern flying out between his hind legs.

  Steve bent over the dog and saw something man-made just above the surface of the surrounding earth. Jake stopped and looked at him as if to say: “Gonna take over for me for a while, pal?” Steve got down and gently brushed the dirt from the object. Even in the near dark, he could see it was a book. Badly damaged from being encased in the earth, dampness seeping into its bones. Steve was still able to make out shapes, although the colors were faded and stained with earth. Red, yellow, blue. Primary colors.

  As he unearthed the book, the cover materialized in the dusk: A fat moon sitting on a porch swing, legs dangling down, talking to a boy in a striped T-shirt.

  The title of the book was The Man in the Moon.

  After dinner, Steve searched the Internet for references to the kidnapping. He tried several word combinations on Google, but came up with nothing. Probably the story was too old. Mark Galiardo had told him the girl had been kidnapped eleven years ago. The Internet in the mid-nineties wasn't the monster database it was now. There might have been an article, maybe a few articles, but after all this time, they had slipped through the cracks of history.

  He stared at the last search words he had typed in: Camp Aratauk. No references whatsoever. It was as if Camp Aratauk had never existed.

  The book sat next to him on his grandfather's cluttered desk, stained mud-brown, giving off the odor of overturned earth. The big, fat moon holding a glass of lemonade.

  He typed “The Man in the Moon” into the Amazon search box.

  And there it was. A slew of Man in the Moon books actually. The Man in the Moon goes to Paris. The Man in the Moon goes to the World Series. The Man in the Moon goes to Mars.

  “The Man in the Moon hits the Powerball, moves to Tahiti, and marries Paris Hilton.”

  Jake, lying at Steve's feet, looked up at the sound of his voice, eyebrows wrinkling. But he didn't remove his head from his paws.

  The first book, The Man in the Moon, had been published in 1987 and appeared to have gone into several printings.

  Steve called a bookstore in Tucson and asked the young man who answered if he had any copies of The Man in the Moon.

  “The computer shows we have three copies. Do you want me to save one for you?”

  “No, that's okay.”

  He hung up and stared at the book. No way for him to tell how long it had been in the earth. A month? A year? Ten years?

  With a groan, Jake rolled onto his side, stretching until his legs trembled. Steve saw no signs of the malevolence he'd felt for a brief moment up by the creek bed. Jake was just Jake, his companion—an animal Steve knew better than he knew most people.

  He must have imagined it, whatever he'd seen.

  He tapped the desk with his fingertips. Okay, what did he really have here? Some little girl, who maybe came from Camp Aratauk or possibly another camp—he remembered Mark telling him that there were so many new places up here he couldn't keep track—this little girl, looking for her book. How it ended up buried in the stream bed near his house, he didn't know. Maybe it got washed downstream after a rain.

  Except there hasn't been any rain since April. And the only camp up there is deserted and has been for a long time.

  He heard a car engine, gravel popping off tires. Headlights washing across the pine wall.

  Julie.

  He picked the book up and slid it into the bookshelf by the window—hidden in plain sight. Barely aware that his heart rate had gone up, that it was imperative to him that Julie not know about the book.

  Not that she would think he was crazy. No. Julie believed in everything: astrology, palm reading, the Ouija board. She loved that stuff so much she had recently opened up a New Age gift shop on Fourth Avenue, where she could surround herself with crystals and Tarot cards.

  He didn't know why he wanted to hide it from her. Didn't know why he suddenly felt secretive, almost ashamed. Perhaps because he was the scientist, the one who always kept his feet solidly rooted to the earth. The anchor for Julie's wildly tacking sailboat.

  He heard a car door slam.

  Wished he'd remembered to call her back, deflect her drive up here.

  Too late now.

  Chapter 2

  A vague s
ense of unease followed Steve out of sleep, quickly solidifying into a bad case of guilt.

  He untangled himself from the bed sheets, donned his wire-rimmed glasses, and pulled on his jeans, making sure not to wake Julie. At the doorway, he turned back to look at her. Julie was a beautiful woman—and even more beautiful in sleep. She was petite with shoulder-length, curly, black hair that was always a bit wild, as he imagined a gypsy's hair would be.

  The top half of her body was exposed. Her breasts were perfect globes in the soft light. For so many years, Steve had wanted her and no one else—sex had always been great between them. It still was.

  The rest of the time was the problem. Like a row of numbers that, no matter how hard you tried to make them fit, didn't add up.

  Looking at her, he felt sorrow.

  He would have to tell her.

  She dumped you, remember? The voice in his head, the one that kept the ledger. His own little crack at double-entry bookkeeping. Always seeking balance, always trying to make it turn out right, where he was ahead or at least even.

  She had dumped him, but that didn't change the way he felt about her now. He didn't want to hurt her, but he knew it would never work.

  Steve didn't know when exactly he had stopped loving her—some time before their divorce was official a year and a half ago. That was when he realized he couldn't go back to the way it was. It was Julie who had taken up with someone else, Julie who had filed for divorce. Steve's world was full of accepted theories and unalterable facts, so when she told him it was over, he'd had no choice but to believe her. His brain had figured it out, and now it seemed, the rest of him had followed.

  He walked into the little kitchen, which was as cluttered as everything else. His grandfather had been a historian, none too particular where he laid his books, papers, or artifacts. He'd lived alone for almost thirty years after Steve's grandmother died, and he didn't need to please anyone.

  Steve didn't need to please anyone either.

  He made a cup of instant coffee.

  Jake looked up at him, the plea in his eyes.

  “Don't go far,” Steve said, opening the back door, which in turn led onto a small screened porch. He propped open the screen door with a rock and watched as Jake trotted out into the clearing, sniffed at a few trees, and lifted his leg on the tire of Julie's SUV. Feeling frisky, bracing himself on his front legs and scraping the pine duff with his back feet.

  Steve flashed on the dog's frantic digging in the dark.

  The microwave dinged and he walked back into the kitchen, took out the mug of coffee, and sipped. He glanced at the porch, thinking about the falling-down screens at Camp Aratauk. This porch didn't look much better. Duct tape covered the rents in the screen from the time a black bear had tried to get in. Most of the porch was stacked with books and junk; he'd need a lot more boxes. He glanced up at the wood fascia that met the roof and noticed water damage. Yellowed newspaper was crumpled between the wood and the screen to keep the weather out.

  His grandfather was old school. He believed in “making do.” Stuffing newspaper up there was just like him.

  For some unfathomable reason, Steve had the sudden, overwhelming urge to pull the newspaper out of there.

  He reached up, grabbed a corner, and pulled. The paper tore in half. He dropped it to the floorboards and reached up for the rest of it.

  When he was through, there were eight little islands of crumpled newspaper all around his feet. Now he could see the damage to the roof, and it was extensive. He'd have to replace this whole porch probably.

  He stooped down to pick up the nearest sheet and found himself uncrumpling it: the front page of a July Arizona Daily Star from eleven years ago.

  At the top he saw the words, “Search for nine-year-old Jenn . . .”

  The rest of the headline was missing.

  His eye was drawn to a school photo portrait at the top of the page—a girl with forthright eyes, a sprinkle of freckles across her nose, and hair that would be the exact shade of wheat if the picture were in color.

  The world tilted sideways, and for a moment, he felt he was dangling in space, holding on hard to keep from falling off the edge. He stared at the picture, trying to assimilate what he was seeing, none of it making sense, but inevitable—as if he'd known all along. His mind saying: It's her, oh Jesus, it's real it's real it's real.

  There had to be an explanation. The answer would be in the article. He took a deep breath and tried to slow his heartbeat. Read it. Just read it.

  The article started out: “The county sheriff's office, friends, and family of Jenny Carmichael searched the area for a third straight day, fanning out over a one-square-mile area . . .”

  “Is Taster's Choice all you've got?”

  Julie stood in the doorway, looking sleepy, and a little lost. And a lot beautiful. How he could notice that when his world was falling apart, he didn't know. When everything he'd known to be true and right had suddenly changed like the twist of a Rubik's Cube.

  “What's that?” she asked, pointing at the paper in his hand.

  He looked down at it as if he were holding some foreign object, something with rough edges that cut into him. Aware he was just staring. He wadded the paper in his fist and let it drop to the floor. “Just Granddad doing his thing again.” He nodded toward the ceiling, aware that his legs were shaking, that Julie might see them. “See? He was trying to keep the rain out.”

  “With newspaper?” Julie yawned. “Is there anything for breakfast?”

  “Not here,” Steve said, his decision made. Turning his back on the porch, the newspaper at his feet—everything.

  “But we could go out,” he said.

  The Cold Case

  Chapter 3

  Tucson, Arizona

  July Fourth

  If not for the meth wars of 2002 and 2003, Laura Cardinal doubted she'd be sitting in the passenger seat of a Pima County sheriff's vehicle, trying to figure out how to unstick the air-conditioning vent, while breathing through her mouth to avoid smelling her new partner's Brylcreem.

  Her sergeant loved old commercials and was always singing jingles. One of his favorites was from the 1960s—“Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya!” Apparently, Jaime Molina had never heard that jingle. Jaime Molina went by the philosophy that more was better.

  Middle of the day on July Fourth, and the thunderstorms were threatening, but still holding off, the air like a sauna. Even the American flag hanging from the flagpole outside the Brashear house looked wrung out and dispirited. Beyond the house, Laura saw what looked like a bank of high clouds. It was the haze from the Diamondback fire in the mountains southwest of here. Arizona was a tinderbox before the monsoon rains came.

  “Some neighborhood, huh?” Molina said as they pulled up just short of the drive.

  Some neighborhood was right. Laura had always wanted a house in Colonia Solana Estates ever since she was a kid. Forget buying one of these places on a state police salary. Maybe if she solved a high profile case and they made a movie of her life. That wasn't likely, though.

  Molina had the car in park, the engine running as he took a clipboard down from the dash and made a show of looking at his notes. He did not look at her. So far today, he hadn't said much more than hello; most of his responses had been grunts. Laura wondered if he was concentrating on his notes for her benefit, perhaps wanting to keep her in this hotbox of a car a little longer.

  Laura had worked with passive-aggressive cops plenty of times. She buzzed her window down and more hot air billowed in. If he wanted to boil in this pressure cooker, fine with her. She was a native Tucsonan, and her first car didn't have air conditioning. She decided to gather her thoughts and figure out how she would approach this interview.

  She studied the house, seeing it both in real time and from six months ago when news crews jammed the one-lane blacktop and the front yard was a ganglia of cables, TV cameras, and satellite uplink trucks.

  The Brashear home looked like a movie-s
tar mansion on a smaller scale. Situated on two acres, the Mediterranean-style house had an old, red-tile roof and striped metal awnings. Eucalyptus and Aleppo pine rose above the white stuccoed walls, a stamp of wealth and power from a time when houses grew singly and were surrounded by desert. The royal palms lining the drive were a familiar sight to cable news junkies earlier this year.

  For a few days, Micaela Brashear's return six months ago dominated the cable news channels. Not as big as the Elizabeth Smart story. Smart had everything: She was blond, beautiful, and had been kidnapped by a renegade Mormon polygamist. Micaela Brashear, on the other hand, was now twenty years old, Hispanic, and adopted. But for a time, she'd held the spotlight.

  What intrigued Laura most about this case was that this girl had survived at all. Most girls kidnapped by strangers didn't make it. In fact, most girls kidnapped by strangers were killed within three to four hours of their abduction. But there had been instances of kidnappers who kept girls to adulthood. In one recent case, a school girl in Austria had been held for eight years. She’d been ten years old at the time of her kidnapping, and her abductor had kept her prisoner in a hidden room in his house. The neighbors had never guessed. Laura wondered what it was like to lead an existence like that, raped and threatened on a daily basis—and then one day, to escape and go back home.

  She also wondered why it had taken Micaela Brashear eleven years to escape her captor. These were questions that hadn't been asked before. No one thought to ask them when Micaela was reunited with her parents. Micaela Brashear was a cold case that had solved itself. The Brashears were the lucky recipients of the odd happily-ever-after fairy tale.

  The family of Kristy Groves, a working class family struggling to stay solvent in Tucson's tough economy—well, they got the unhappy ending.