Leighton Jones Mysteries Box Set

by N. M. Brown

  Chapter Two

  Tina was lying trembling in the cramped darkness of her small, dark prison. The rough material upon which she lay smelled of oil and gasoline. It reminded her of the smell of the place where her mom had taken her car to have new tyres fitted. The surface felt coarse and painful against the exposed skin of her arms and legs. She tried repeatedly to shift away from the fabric, but there wasn’t enough room and Tina end up scraping her knees. It was both dark and extremely hot in the confined space.

  Before the stranger had put her into the trunk of the car, he had led her from the creek to his car. At the time, Tina had been sick with fear. But she had no choice. Once Suzy had gone off in search of a doll, the stranger had leaned close to her. His breath smelled like cheap hot dogs.

  ‘Your momma’s name is Angela Blanchette and you’re Tina, right?’ he asked in a conspiratorial whisper.

  Tina had nodded but avoided the stranger’s intense gaze.

  ‘Good.’ The stranger nodded. ‘Well, Tina, there isn’t an easy way to say this so I guess I’ll just come right out with it – I’ve come here to help save you from some very bad people.’ He had frowned earnestly and watched Tina’s face closely ‘your mom sent me to help you.’

  Tina frowned and tried to make sense of what she heard. It didn’t work.

  ‘But she’s back at my house,’ Tina said. ‘I saw her before I left for Suzy’s yard.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the stranger had said with a smile. ‘She’s home but the bad people are watching your house from nearby. That’s why your mom asked me to lead you away from here. When I get you to safety, I have to call her. Then your mom will drive up to meet us.’

  ‘She said that?’ Tina asked with a hopeful tone. All she wanted was to be with her mom.

  ‘Yes she did,’ the stranger nodded, ‘on my boy scout’s honour. But we need to be quick.’

  ‘But, I haven’t seen any people.’

  ‘You wouldn’t have because these bad people are very clever. They’ve been watching you for a while now – hiding in the woods and driving slowly behind you as you skip home from school.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Tina asked.

  ‘I like to stop bad people. I got close to one of them in a bar. He was drunk and told me their plan – about how they would steal you. So, I called round to your home and I told your mom. I wanted to warn her, you see. Hell, she wasn’t sure at first but I explained that no locked door or window could keep these people out. I told her that they said you have a Toy Story poster in your bedroom and a fluffy crocodile on your pillow – that’s right, isn’t it?’

  Tina nodded in horror.

  ‘And he said that your mom has a painting of the moon on her bedroom wall. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  Tina nodded. The story seemed true, but as she realised how helpless she was Tina started to cry and shake. This didn’t seem to bother the stranger who said he would take Tina to a safe place where her mom would be waiting. The only problem was that these bad people were everywhere watching out for her – and that was why she had to hide in the trunk – where if she made any noise when the car slowed down, the bad people would find her and hurt her real bad.

  But now as she lay curled in the darkness of the rumbling car, Tina Blanchette wasn’t entirely sure that she actually believed the story the stranger had told her. Her mom had always told her that if they got separated in town, or if she ever needed help, she should find a police officer. It didn’t seem likely, even to a seven year old, that her mom would arrange to meet in some far-away place or ask somebody to lock her in the trunk of a smelly old car. This moment of realisation that the stranger might not be trusted was when the first wave of fear washed over her like some dark tide. If the stranger wasn’t really protecting her from bad people, and he had lied to her, that meant that he was a bad person – and he had trapped her in the trunk of his car.

  Chapter Three

  As she gripped the ivory coloured handset Angela Blanchette felt reality rapidly sliding away from her. Her heart was beating so powerfully she could actually hear it pounding. Whilst the phone began its ringing, Angela pressed her forehead on the wall, closed her eyes and mouthed a silent prayer.

  After calling on her daughter for five minutes without success, Angela had taken a leisurely walk down the hot street to see which garden she was currently playing in. Mostly, she like to hang out with Suzy Bucowiz – who she had been friends with since kindergarten – but if she wasn’t around, Tina would sometimes play with Tommy Carlson who lived next door to her. Tommy wasn’t much of a talker but he had a large trampoline and a modest swimming pool in his backyard. The latter was a source of excitement for Tina and anxiety for her mother. Although Tina was a strong little swimmer, her mother often worried that she would slip and fall on the tiled edge of the pool. In her cruel imagination, Angela could easily visualise her daughter running along the side of the pool edge then slipping, foot first as if on a banana peel, before slamming backwards onto the edge of the pool – head cracking like a ripe watermelon.

  On her way to the Bucowiz’s home, Angela saw Suzy scrambling up from the creek on the opposite side of the road. She was struggling to carry an assortment of dolls and toys. If Angela had been much closer she might have noticed that one of the Barbie dolls belonged to her own daughter.

  ‘Hi, Suzy,’ Angela called. ‘Is Tina over there with you?’

  ‘She was,’ Suzy said with a puzzled expression, ‘but she’s gone away somewhere.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Suzy shrugged, and one of the dolls clattered to the dusty ground.

  ‘Did you see her go?’ Angela asked with a feeling akin to something uncomfortable uncoiling in her guts. It took all of her strength not to grab the girl and shake the answer from her.

  Suzy shook her head, and then kicked absently at the hot ground.

  ‘So did you maybe have a fight?’

  ‘No, she was playing with the Barbie boat down in the creek,’ Suzy said in a matter-of-fact way. She mistakenly thought her words would offer Tina’s mom some comfort.

  Angela Blanchette felt as if she had been slapped.

  ‘In the creek?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Suzy said with a small shrug of her shoulders, ‘I left her there when I came up here to fetch a doll from my yard.’

  ‘Oh God!’ Angela pushed by Suzy and ran across the baked surface of the road to the path leading down into the creek.

  Having crossed the debris of the parking place, Angela half stumbled and half slid down the overgrown path to the place where a tiny stream had once ran.

  ‘Tina!’ she shrieked, but the there was no answer. She turned round and stared in all directions, hoping to see some flash of colour of her daughter moving playfully through the trees. There was nothing.

  Scrambling back up the slope towards the road, Angela repeatedly shouted her daughter’s name. The climb seemed endless as she negotiated the narrow dusty track. Eventually she emerged back at the roadside. Not far away, Jackie Bucowiz was coming out of her drive holding Suzy’s hand.

  ‘Hey, Angie, everything okay, honey?’ she yelled across the road.

  ‘I can’t find her,’ Angela said in a voice that was cracking. ‘I can’t find Tina!’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ Jackie seemed about to slide into panic, but somehow composed herself at the last minute. ‘Right, get over here!’ she called. ‘Don’t worry – we’ll find her.’

  Angela nodded and hurried across the road to where the woman and child were standing.

  ‘Right,’ Jackie crouched down to speak to her daughter face-to-face, ‘honey, when did you last see Tina?’

  ‘A little while ago,’ Suzy said.

  ‘Where was this?’

  ‘At the creek.’ Suzy shrugged her shoulders and began combing her fingers through her doll’s hair.

  ‘She’s not there, I checked.’ Angela glanced anxiously all around.

  ‘Did you guys have a fight?’
>
  ‘No.’

  ‘So why did you come back to the house?’

  ‘To get a doll, we needed an extra one.’ Suzy’s tone suggested it was an obvious situation and didn’t require further explanation.

  ‘Another doll? Why – you already had some?’ Jackie asked.

  ‘We needed one for the man, silly.’ Suzy shrugged.

  ‘What man?’ Angela’s head snapped around to stare at the girl.

  ‘The one with the glasses, who was with Tina. He wanted to join in our game but he didn’t have a doll. That’s why I had to come up here to get one.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Angela said, as the gravity of the situation engulfed her. She turned and ran, her cheap sandals slapping loudly on the hot ground, towards her own home. As the sound of her own frantic breathing filled her head, she was oblivious to Jackie calling her name.

  After clattering through the screen door of the house, Angela scrambled through the hallway to the telephone. It seemed almost too slippery to hold as she grabbed the glossy handset.

  Now as she held the plastic telephone in one trembling hand, waiting for the sheriff’s department to answer, Angela felt like the entire world was rapidly disintegrating around her.

  When David had slipped into the grip of his mid-life crisis, leaving her and Tina in the wake of his departure to start his new life in Alaska, Angela had felt like it was the end of her happy ever after.

  Now, two years later, Tina getting taken, felt like the end of everything.

  Chapter Four

  Dressed in a checked gown over a white vest and shorts, Len Wells shuffled out on to the small porch of his home in the Sunbeam Garden Retirement Village and eased himself into the red and white striped beach chair. The neat little porch was overhung by a small tiled roof beneath which small birds and the occasional rock lizard would regularly take shelter from the Californian sun. Some people might have resented these small intruders, but with no family, friends or pets, Len appreciated the fleeting company.

  Gripping the edge of the flimsy chair for support, Len adjusted his stained robe before attempting to sit. For him, sitting outside was a delicate process. Neither his own body nor the faded chair were as reliable as they had once been, and on at least one occasion he had found himself tumbling gracelessly to the ground. However, on this occasion the manoeuvre went smoothly.

  Having settled into the chair, Len reached down for an ivory coloured cool box he kept on the deck. With a trembling hand, he pulled out a small fat glass and a bottle of amber coloured bourbon. Len unscrewed the cap then poured himself a glass, deliberately leaving the top off the bottle. He then made a silent toast to a small girl called Maria; she had been small for her age and had a bright smile that seemed to radiate happiness. Even all these years later, Len could not forget that infectious smile.

  He raised the glass to his stubbled face, tipped it back and sipped the amber liquid. It tasted warm and sweet.

  From some nearby road, the sound of a police siren rose, whooping towards a crescendo then falling away again. To Len Wells it sounded like and echo from his past. He smiled bitterly. In response to the sound, the image of a second child rose in his mind, floating to the surface like a waxy balloon.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Len mumbled. If the old man was aware of the tears sliding down his strained face, it didn’t show. He simply picked up the glass again. This time he tipped it back and swallowed the entire contents.

  Having emptied the glass, he set it down and poured out another one. Then he turned his left wrist, stared at the face of his watch. Three forty-five pm. He let out a silent sigh, then tipped the drink into the back of his throat.

  Chapter Five

  The vehicle seemed to have been rumbling on forever. Every so often it would speed up for a while, then slow almost to a stop. The relentless rocking motion was making Tina feel increasingly sick. It reminded her of the time an accident on the highway meant her school bus needed to take a detour along some twisting back road. The twenty-minute experience had felt like it lasted for hours, and had left Tina feeling sick for most of that morning at school.

  Suddenly the car slowed and lurched to a complete stop. The momentum threw Tina against the far end of the trunk. The engine sound fell suddenly silent. It was then that she heard the stranger rolling down his window. Tina held her breath as she heard his voice call to someone. The sound was muffled but still discernible.

  ‘Get that goddamned thing out of the way,’ the stranger called. ‘You’re blocking the goddamned road!’

  In the absence of any visual, Tina’s hearing had suddenly become the most important of all her senses. As she listened, she noticed that the stranger’s voice sounded different from when he had spoken to her and Suzy back at the creek. Back then, he had sounded almost like a weird big kid, but now he just sounded like any other adult man.

  ‘I can’t. It’s too heavy. You’ll need to give me a hand – or we’ll both be stuck,’ a different voice replied. This was followed by some incoherent mumbling and then she heard the car door open and slam shut with a bang.

  Tina waited for a tense moment, half expecting the trunk to open and the stranger to look down on her, but the trunk remained shut. Listening intently, Tina became aware of voices coming from somewhere nearby.

  In the confusion of her confinement, Tina came to a clear realisation – she had to escape. This was not a normal rational thought, produced by a process of careful deliberation, but rather it came from some primitive self-preservation mechanism which had abruptly switched on like a shrieking alarm, telling her she was in real danger. Although she was only seven years old, Tina was an intelligent child who had come out of her parent’s separation with a quiet gift for observation. She was aware that the world was capable of changing, that a trapdoor could open and she could fall into instant chaos. Tina’s breathing quickened as adrenalin began to course through her tiny body. The only light in the airless space came in the form of a bright line where the lid of the trunk did not meet with the body of the car completely. Leaning on her side she pushed her face up to this gap. She squinted against the light, but was unable to see anything through the space. She tried pushing her fingertips into the gap but it was simply too small. Deciding to try a different approach, Tina rolled over on to her opposite side, and pushed her arms out in front of her. She was now facing the rear of the trunk. She remembered that in her mom’s car part of the trunk opened like a small hatch leading into the back seat. She had seen it in action one day when her mom had bought a new curtain pole from some shop in Barstow. That day she had sat in the back of the car – she only ever sat in the back because her mom said that was safer – and she had watched in fascination as the curtain pole pushed from the trunk into the seat next to her. She was entranced by the idea of a secret doorway leading to another part of the vehicle. It was like a secret escape hatch.

  Now, locked in the stranger’s car, Tina hoped that it had a similar hatch. She tried not to panic as her small fingers carefully traced the shape of the material on the surface closest to her. Breathing quickly, she ran her hands back and forth on the scratchy surface until they found an area that was suddenly smooth and hard. Pushing her hand into this small indentation she realised that it felt like the handle on her mom’s washing machine. Gripping the smooth plate was difficult with fingers that were slick with sweat. At first, they just slipped off, but she made a small fist and levered it against the handle. Closing her eyes, Tina ignored the pain, then heard an audible click. Suddenly the entire surface fell away from her. A blinding shaft of sunlight fell on Tina’s face and she had to hold up her hand to shield her eyes. She discovered that rather than a hatch, she had actually opened the entire backrest of the rear seat of the car she had been locked in. The backrest was now leaning forward at a sharp angle.

  Reaching into the bright interior of the car, Tina half crawled from the trunk on to the fuzzy material of the car seat. The brightness engulfing Tina was so strong that she had to keep
her eyes almost closed. With her balled fists pressed into the material, and her sweaty hair tangled around her face, she looked like an alert lion cub as she gazed around. From this position she could peek between the twin headrests and observe the stranger through the windshield. At first, she didn’t recognise him. His hair was short and cut close to his head with the exception of a dark lock falling across his forehead. Confused, Tina glanced down to the passenger seat where the discarded glasses lay beside the red baseball cap. She then looked back at the stranger and recognised the clothes. This was the same man. He was several yards ahead, helping an elderly man move a large metal trailer that seemed to have fallen off the other man’s car. It was sitting almost sideways, half in the tall grass which grew on either side of the road. This made the stranger seem momentarily kind, and Tina felt that perhaps she should trust him. This feeling changed, however, when she glanced down again and noticed that the baseball cap had hair attached with silver coloured taped to its inside rim. He had been disguising himself.

  In a moment of cool maturity, Tina glanced back up at the stranger and realised that this would probably be her only chance to return back home to her mom. Part of her wanted to cry, allowing hot tears to bubble down her face and wait for somebody to help – but the only adult who could help was her main threat. She had to be brave, like the time she fell the previous summer whilst learning to riding her bike. The syrupy blood had run down her leg and stained her white shoes, but she cycled home regardless and her mom had patched her up.

  Crawling carefully through the wedge-shaped opening, Tina panicked, thinking that she somehow would become stuck and the stranger would come back to find her trapped, caught in the act of trying to escape. Thankfully, her skinny body slipped through the space without much of a struggle.