by Alex Grecian
But it all depended on Skottie Foster handling things on her own.
So he was getting things ready for her, trying to anticipate whatever she might run into and squaring away any distractions. He had just decided there was nothing else he could do and his holiday was in the hands of fate and proper planning, had his keys out, ready to lock up, when his computer chimed. He shook his head and flicked out the lights in his tiny office, then sighed and flicked them back on, crossed to his desk, and clicked the Safari icon in the dock at the bottom of his screen. He had a new e-mail from Captain Clayton, and he leaned forward over the back of his chair to open it.
The captain had written a single sentence: Look into this, Keith. Below that was a forwarded message from Major Thomas. The New York address of a law firm was at the top, followed by six paragraphs. He had to read it all before he was able to process it.
Dear Major Thomas:
My name is Mary Loftus, and I am an attorney with Morrison, Ellis, and Moore. I am contacting you on behalf of one of our firm’s partners: Jason Bloom.
This CEASE AND DESIST ORDER is to inform you that the actions of State Trooper Scotty Foster, including the persistent harassment of Jason and Rachel Bloom, have become unbearable for them. As Officer Foster is a law enforcement officer representing the state of Kansas and you are her supervisor, you are ORDERED TO STOP and prevent her from engaging in such activities immediately, as they are being done in violation of the law.
Morrison, Ellis, and Moore will pursue any legal remedies available against you if these activities continue. These remedies include but are not limited to: suing Scotty Foster, you, and all of her commanding officers for damages in civil court, and seeking criminal sanctions against the Kansas Highway Patrol and all responsible parties within the hierarchy of the Highway Patrol.
Officer Foster must IMMEDIATELY cease all contact with Rachel Bloom, and you must send me written confirmation that you will order her to stop such activities. You risk severe legal consequences if you fail to comply with this demand.
This letter acts as your final warning before we pursue legal action. At this time, I have not contacted the authorities or filed a civil suit against you, as I hope we can resolve this matter without authoritative involvement. This order acts as YOUR FINAL CHANCE to cease illegal and unwanted activities before we exercise our legal rights against you.
To ensure compliance with this letter, and to halt any legal action we may take against you, I require you to fill out and sign the attached form and e-mail it back to me within two (2) days of your receipt of this letter. Failure to do so will act as evidence of your infringement upon Jason and Rachel Bloom’s legal rights, and we will immediately seek legal avenues to remedy the situation.
Sincerely,
Mary Loftus
Mary Loftus wrapped up the e-mail with a long boilerplate disclaimer about their exchange being private and confidential, and there was an attachment that Keith downloaded to his desktop.
He wondered why Jason Bloom, if he was actually a partner at a big New York law firm, hadn’t written his own threatening letter. And he wondered if the damn letter was legitimate at all, since they’d misspelled Skottie’s name.
Either way, it had rolled downhill through the chain of command and had landed on his desk. He rolled his chair back and slumped down into it. He swiveled back and forth a few times, staring into the shadows in the corner of the room. At last he reached for his phone.
2
Skottie ended the call and stared at her phone for a long minute. Her head was spinning, and she knew she needed to organize her thoughts, to figure out some plan of action.
But Maddy needed to get ready for bed, and Bear had complicated their nightly routine. The big dog was a constant distraction for Maddy, who couldn’t seem to keep on task for more than thirty seconds. Emmaline came home from church and brought a flurry of energy with her into the tiny house. She waved Skottie away and took over with Maddy, prodding the girl to turn off her music and brush her teeth.
Skottie went to the kitchen and filled another bowl of water for the dog and glanced out the window. It had started to sprinkle again, creating a frozen crust on top of the thin layer of snow in the backyard. She checked the overnight forecast and saw that a major storm system was rolling in. A huge digital cloud of green, ringed with yellow and red highlights, was moving fast from the northwest. She went outside with Bear, letting him run and slide around the tiny yard while she watched the sky and mulled over the conversation she had just endured with Lieutenant Johnson.
He had sounded tired. Whatever Skottie had done to make Rachel Bloom sic a lawyer on the KHP, he told her, she had better not do again. And if she was still doing something, she needed to stop immediately. She had tried to explain to him that she had no idea what was going on, but he hadn’t been interested.
“All I care about is that we don’t get sued, Skottie,” he had said. “That clear?”
It was clear. But what wasn’t clear was why there was talk of being sued in the first place. She had visited Rachel once, at her deceased mother’s house. Everyone had been cordial, the meeting had ended on a sad and troubling note, but Skottie couldn’t recall any hostility. She wondered if Travis had visited again and said something to trigger a lawsuit. She’d brought up that possibility with the lieutenant.
“Stay the hell away from that guy, Skottie.”
She didn’t mention to Keith that she was watching Travis Roan’s dog, that she had invited the Nazi hunter to Thanksgiving dinner.
“I’m gonna get him checked out,” Keith said. “See if he’s even who he says he is. But in the meantime, you steer clear. You do your job, help fix a flat tire, give out a ticket or two, and keep your head down. Hopefully this goes away on its own.”
And if it didn’t? Skottie hadn’t asked, but she could read between the lines. Her job was in jeopardy. She wasn’t sure she could follow the lieutenant’s advice. She was being bullied, and she didn’t like it. She was used to standing up for herself, and the thought of backing off and letting someone else take control left a bad taste in her mouth.
When Bear went back to the door, she took him in and locked up for the night. He followed her and watched as she checked the latches on all the windows. She grimaced at the fresh trail of muddy paw prints on the floor.
“I don’t even wanna think about trying to give you a bath,” she said. “But we should’ve got a brush for you, huh? When we were at the store. Spruce you up a little?”
She rummaged around in the linen closet and found a pile of old sheets and blankets from the queen-size bed that was still back in Brandon’s house in Chicago. They didn’t fit any bed in Emmaline’s home. She bunched them up in a corner of the living room and showed Bear that he should lie down on them. She pantomimed for him, lying down and pretending to sleep, and then stood and motioned him over. She felt foolish, but he finally padded over and curled up, watching her the whole time.
“We’re a little bit the same, you and me,” she said. “Suspicious of everybody, but holding out hope, huh?”
Bear snorted and stood, turned in a circle, and lay back down. She shook her head and silently scolded herself for talking to the dog as if he could understand her. Maybe if she spoke in Esperanto . . . She was beginning to understand why Travis Roan trusted the dog more than he did other people. But she still couldn’t understand why he had trusted her so easily.
She cleaned out the coffeepot for the following morning, poured herself a glass of wine, and sat in Emmaline’s old rocking chair by the window, staring out at the darkness while fat raindrops hit the glass every few seconds. She didn’t think she had many options.
Her first instinct was to drive out to Ruth Elder’s old house in Phillipsburg and confront Rachel in person. But she knew that would be the end of her career in Kansas. The more she thought about the situation, the angrier she got, so she deci
ded to sleep on it, come back to it fresh in the morning with a clearer, and possibly wiser, head.
But that still left the question of why. Why threaten her with a lawsuit in the first place? Skottie hadn’t even met Jason Bloom and had barely spoken with his wife. She was more convinced than ever that there was indeed a Nazi in the general area. But she felt certain there was something else going on, and she was too good at her job to leave it alone.
She sat down with a pen and a notepad and wrote down everything she had seen or heard about since arriving back in Kansas, everything that didn’t seem to sit right or that was currently unsolved. Then she put the list in order from major crimes to minor, big questions to small. The hidden Nazi wasn’t at the top of the list.
There were two dead bodies. Possibly both homicides, although one or both might also be suicides or accidents. Two bodies gave her something to work with. She grabbed her phone and dialed Keith Johnson back. He picked up after the first ring.
3
The street looked radically different in the dark, with rain pelting down on the slick pavement and the gritty shingles. He stood in the shadows near the community garden and watched the quiet houses, all connected by the wraparound privacy fence that extended for three city blocks around the church.
The moving van was gone, and there was a lamp in the window of number 437. Travis moved quickly. Despite the signs warning that the neighborhood was under video surveillance, he still didn’t see any cameras in use. But if they were hidden somewhere under the eaves or behind cracks in the fence, the rain would decrease their range and effectiveness. Unless the church had sprung for something state of the art and very expensive, right now the entire street would look like a grainy blur. The cameras, if there were cameras, were there to discourage vandals, not a trained huntsman.
He darted across the road and flattened himself against the fence, slid along until he came to the covered porch of 437. He vaulted the railing and stood for a moment in front of the door, scanning the street in both directions for any sign of movement. When he was confident that he hadn’t been observed, he knocked lightly on the door. He listened and heard nothing from inside. The quality of lamplight in the window didn’t change; no shadows moved across the glass. He knocked again and tried turning the knob, then pulled out his bump key and unlocked the door.
Inside it was dim and empty, the single lamp shedding more light on the street outside than it did inside the front room. Boxes had been stacked randomly along the walls, next to plastic-covered furniture. Travis locked the front door and moved quickly through to the kitchen, which was in a similar state of disarray. A box had been opened on the island counter and silverware was piled next to the sink, crumpled newspapers strewn carelessly on the floor. He flicked a light on in a tiny bathroom and checked the empty medicine cabinet, then went back through the kitchen and up the stairs to the second floor. There were three bedrooms along a hallway, two on Travis’s left and one on the right, and a small bathroom at the end with the door standing open. Travis looked in the first bedroom on the left and saw several sets of iron bunk beds, identical to the beds he had seen in the church’s outbuildings. They were shoved into the room with no space between them so that it would be virtually impossible to use them, or even to close the bedroom door. The bedrooms across from it looked the same.
When he was satisfied that he was alone in the house, he returned to the front room and uncovered an armchair. He folded the plastic sheeting and set it on a heap of boxes all labeled living room in Rachel Bloom’s distinctive handwriting, then dragged the chair so that it faced the dark kitchen. He sat and took his Kimber Eclipse from the holster under his arm.
Then he waited.
4
“Put that away,” Skottie said. “Time to wind down for the night.”
Maddy surrendered her phone with a minimum of fuss.
“I caught a Horsea today,” she said.
“Is that good?”
“It’s a Pokémon. You know?”
“Oh. Well, is it good?”
“It’s okay,” Maddy said. “It’s not good for fighting electric monsters.”
“Then maybe we should stay away from electric monsters.” Skottie glanced at the small bookcase next to the bed. Like the bed and the room, the books there had once belonged to her, and looking at them now she felt oddly wistful. She remembered reading them under her covers in this same room. The top shelf held books by Walker Percy, Harper Lee, Walter Mosley, and Ralph Ellison, but the shelf beneath that was filled with older books that had been passed down to her by her mother, from Emmaline’s own childhood. Skottie scanned the titles and smiled. There were Raggedy Ann and Andy and the Nice Fat Policeman and the first three Oz books sitting next to the Anna Apple series about a spunky British girl: The Wandering Wood, The Faery Fountain, A Balloon to the Moon, and her favorite, The City Under the Sea. Anna Apple had always fallen into strange adventures and emerged better off than before, thanks to the friends she made along the way. Skottie remembered them fondly: the kindly old nutcracker, the Babushka that contained endless smaller versions of herself, and the strange twins, Margaret Marigold and Peggy Petunia, who were never in the same place at the same time. Skottie had read about them so many times that the books were falling apart.
She reached out and touched their spines.
“You okay, Mom?”
Startled from her reverie, Skottie jumped. “Of course, baby. Why?”
“You have a funny look on your face.”
“I just remembered something, that’s all. Do you want me to read to you like I used to?”
“No,” Maddy said. “I want Bear to sleep in here with me.”
“Absolutely not.” Skottie sat down on the edge of Maddy’s bed and smoothed the blanket over her daughter’s thin body. The blanket was festooned with cartoon characters she didn’t recognize, elastic dogs and vampire girls, and she wondered where it had come from. Emmaline must have gone shopping. “Did you brush your teeth?”
“Of course I brushed my teeth,” Maddy said.
“Don’t tell me ‘of course.’ You didn’t brush ’em last night.”
“Can Bear sleep in here or not?” Maddy smacked her hands silently down on the blanket.
“I already said no,” Skottie said. “Did you wash your face?”
“Yes. But where will he sleep?”
“I put some old blankets on the floor in the living room for him. You can read for fifteen minutes, and then I want you to turn off your light. It’s been kind of a weird day, and you need your sleep.”
“Bear will get lonely out there. And scared. He’s never been here before.”
“He’s a dog. They usually sleep outside. He’ll be fine.” But Skottie already saw a chink forming in her armor. Travis had said something about Bear sleeping in hotel beds. He was no ordinary dog.
“I’ll stay in the living room with him,” Maddy said. This compromise seemed to make perfect sense to her.
“No, you will not.”
“Why don’t you like Bear?”
“I like Bear very much.” Skottie smiled as she realized that she really did like the dog. But she also realized she would have to lay all her cards on the table or Maddy would never accept her decision. “He’s a good dog, baby, but he’s also a stranger to us. I’m responsible for you, and I don’t know what Bear might do tonight. I need to keep you safe, and I don’t know him well enough to feel good about you two sleeping in the same room.”
As if on cue, Bear padded into the room, his claws ticking gently against the hardwood. He glanced at the bed and sniffed, as if acknowledging that it was too small to accommodate him, then turned in a circle and plopped down on the floor at the foot of Maddy’s bed. He smacked his lips and yawned wide, rested his head on his paws, and closed his eyes.
Maddy grinned at her mother, silently daring her to drag the dog back
out of her room. Skottie frowned and weighed her options. She was reasonably sure she could order Bear to leave and he would, but Maddy would be devastated and there would be a fight. The dog had brought her daughter out of her shell—only a little, but it was progress—and Skottie didn’t want to create yet another wedge between them.
“Fine,” she said.
Maddy wiggled happily and Skottie saw her involuntarily lean forward, about to give her mother a hug. But she caught herself and sat back, clapped her hands instead. Bear looked up at the sound, saw that he wasn’t needed, and laid his head back down. Skottie noticed that one of his eyes didn’t shut all the way, and she wondered if he slept like that all the time, always on partial alert.
“I give up,” she said. “He can sleep in here. But your door stays open all night, and if you get scared or you feel uncomfortable, I want you to holler. I’ll be right across the hall.”
“I know where your room is, Mom. For God’s sake.”
“I’m just reminding you. And watch the language.”
“Can I have my phone back? I won’t play with it.”
“If you won’t play with it, then what’s the point of having it?”
Maddy shrugged.
“I’ll plug it in in the kitchen,” Skottie said. “You can have it in the morning.”
“Okay. Thanks, I guess.”
“You sure you’ll be okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” Maddy said. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
Nothing could sound less true to Skottie, but she was glad for the moment, and grateful to the dog for helping to create it. She stood and kissed Maddy on the forehead and left the room, glancing back once to make sure Bear was staying put.
“Sleep tight, you two.”
5
Travis had just finished writing a text message when he heard muffled footsteps and the unmistakable sound of a door being opened at the back of the house. He hit send and put his phone away, then sat up straighter in his chair and picked up the Eclipse from his lap.