Quinn’s mouth fell open, but I tossed him a warning. I pulled my checkbook out and wrote it out without commenting. “There you go. Thanks very much, Mr. Tiramisu.”
I picked up Ruby’s cage, and Tiramisu hurried us out the door. “My pleasure, dear people. Please stay in touch.”
We were in the hall before we could respond, and the door closed firmly behind us.
“What a rip off!” Quinn slammed the wall beside the door.
I grabbed his hand and led him away from room 504. “Come on. This place gives me the creeps. We’ll talk about it later.”
We walked back to our room with Ruby’s cage swinging between us.
“Help me!”
She shrieked louder than a toddler in a tantrum. I stopped dead and stared at her. Quinn brought her cage to eye level. “What the heck did that man do to you, sweetie? What’s wrong?”
She returned a steady gaze. Her gold eyes blinked once. “Help me!”
In a flash, the truth hit me. My hand flew to my mouth and my eyes widened in terror. I took Quinn’s arm and squeezed hard. “Oh my God. It’s Thelma.”
Chapter 15
I ran back to our room and dialed the hospital. Quinn hadn’t quite picked up on the urgency, so I tried to explain it to him while waiting on hold.
“Ruby’s repeating Thelma’s words! Remember yesterday? ‘Gadzooks?’ ‘Get my peepers’?” I shook his shoulders. “Quinn! My mother’s in trouble. I know it.”
He stared at me with a faraway look, but after a few seconds, the light dawned.
“Oh. Right! And your mom told the nurse ‘Gimme cookies,’ right?”
“Right.” A voice came on the line, and I shushed him with one finger. The voice didn’t belong to the same nurse who’d answered my call minutes earlier.
“Mrs. Hollister? This is Myrna Shapiro, Putnam Hospital’s head administrator. There’s been a bit of a mix-up, I’m afraid.”
My heart fell. “What kind of a mix-up?”
“Er… We can’t seem to locate your mother. The nurse on duty says she must have checked out, but our records don’t seem to agree. Her things are gone. We’re afraid she might have left of her own volition, without the doctor’s approval.”
“Oh no.” I sank to the chair.
“Matter of fact, we were hoping you were calling to tell us she’d shown up on your doorstep.”
“No. She’s not here. And she would never just get up and leave; that’s totally out of character. Plus, she has no car.”
Silence.
“I see. Perhaps we ought to alert security, then.”
I felt like saying, “Ya think?” but held it in. I thought for a minute and remembered entering the hospital, seeing red winking lights in the corners where cameras panned in the lobby and hallways. “Your hospital has security cameras, doesn’t it?”
She seemed relieved to be able to answer one question without hesitation. “Oh, yes. We do. I’m sure we can get to the bottom of this shortly.”
“We’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” I sent Quinn a questioning look. He grabbed the van keys. “Or sooner,” I said.
***
Quinn pushed the van hard. We made it to Putnam Hospital in less than ten minutes. The hospital administrator must have been watching for us, and by the way she cowered, I imagined the fear of a lawsuit loomed in her mind.
I shook her bony hand briefly and got right to business. “Where’s my mother?”
Quinn played the good cop. “Now, Marcella. Let’s give Miss Shapiro a minute to fill us in.”
Miss Shapiro smiled at him with thin lips, but her hands still shook on the clipboard she clutched close to her chest. She reminded me of a spinster schoolmarm, with her wispy hair in a bun, glasses with droopy chains, and a face that resembled a horse. Actually, I think a horse would have been prettier. But I wasn’t feeling exactly charitable.
“If you’ll both please come this way, our security officer has isolated the segment of video tape that explains what might have happened. We’ve called the police.”
My legs wobbled and Quinn helped me when I faltered. We wound our way through the corridors until we ducked into a small control center on the first floor. A well-muscled young man sat before a TV monitor with a nervous expression on his face. His badge said, Sam Cimino.
Miss Shapiro introduced us and instructed Cimino to play the tape.
He pushed a few buttons and the images whirred across the screen. “There,” he said, gesturing to a blur. He froze the frame. Two shaggy-haired blond men dressed in scrubs pushed a figure out the back door on a gurney. “We think they got her out this way. She must have been drugged, since we can’t make out any movement beneath the sheet.”
I collapsed against Quinn. “Oh my God! They killed her!”
Cimino shook his head. “I don’t think so. There’d be no need to take her with them if she were dead. They’d just leave the body behind.”
Quinn patted my hand and held me up. “Do you know these men?” he asked Shapiro.
She blanched. “Er. No. We’re going to ask around the floor, but I certainly don’t recognize them.”
Cimino spoke up. “The police are on their way.”
A sense of helplessness hit me hard. “Quinn?” I looked into his eyes, pleading for help.
“Could we get a glass of water for my wife?”
Miss Shapiro fluttered around me like an annoying moth. I wanted to shoo her away, but couldn’t summon the energy. They settled me in an empty waiting room with a cup of water and a box of Kleenex. After that, I felt like my mother really had died.
“They must have drugged her,” I said to no one in particular. “She would have put up a helluva fight, otherwise.”
Quinn ran his hands through his hair. “God. What a mess.”
I stood suddenly. “I want to see my mother’s roommate.”
Miss Shapiro wrinkled her nose. “Mrs. Eldridge? Oh, she won’t be any help. She’s got an advanced case of dementia.”
“We spoke to Hildegarde earlier. She was quite lucid. I’d like to see her,” I said firmly.
Quinn backed me up. “She’s right.”
“Really? How bizarre. I didn’t know…” She flipped through her chart as if looking for answers.
We ran into the hall, sprinted for the elevators, and skidded along the freshly waxed corridor into Thelma’s room. Hildegarde Eldridge lay in her bed, watching a soap opera with a frown.
“I wondered how long it would take you,” she said. She muted the television and raised the back of her bed.
I hurried to her side and barged ahead without ceremony. “Hildegarde, did you see what happened to my mother?”
She nodded and crossed her arms. “I did. I tried to use my call button, but they ignored me. Just like they have all week. They think I’m senile, just because I don’t choose to answer their ridiculous questions.”
Quinn sat on the edge of her bed. “We know you’re not senile. Will you please tell us what happened?”
“Two men came in last night. They kept calling your mother ‘Ramona.’ It made absolutely no sense to me. She yelled at them, but before she could get the nurse’s attention, they injected something strong into her IV. Knocked her out in seconds. I lay there and pretended to be out of it, and I must’ve pressed that call button a thousand times.”
I walked over to her call button and held up the severed cord. “Maybe this is why they didn’t answer.”
She covered her mouth with a hand and blanched. “Oh, dear. And I thought they were ignoring me. I can’t walk very well by myself, you know. By the time they finally came in this morning, I’d fallen asleep. I’m so sorry.”
I took one of her hands in mine. “Can you please tell us more about them? Anything at all you remember?”
“Of course, dearie. Could you raise my bed a little?”
I found the switch and cranked her up. “There you go. Better?”
“Yes, thank you. Now, let me see. They wore scrubs and
masks, so at first I thought they worked here. Both of them needed haircuts. Their hair was very long, hanging over their collars by several inches. They looked so much alike I thought maybe they were twins. But they could have been brothers, too. Both wore heavy leather boots and looked rather like lumberjacks. You know, brawny.”
I started to connect the dots. My heart hammered even faster. I turned to Quinn. “It was the cowboys in the white truck.”
Quinn dropped into a chair beside Hildegarde’s bed. “I’ll bet those creeps were the ones who broke into the hotel room and our house.” He leaned toward the woman. “Did they say where they were going?”
Her face screwed up in a memory. “No. But they kept mentioning somebody who’d given them instructions. I think they were afraid of him. No names, but ‘he’ kept coming up in their brief conversations. Like, ‘he said no noise, keep it quiet,’ or ‘he’ll kill us if we screw up.’ Things like that. They didn’t really seem too bright. Just numbskulls hired to do a dirty deed.”
I stood and looked at my mother’s empty bed. My heart crumpled. “Anything else? Anything at all that might help?”
“No. I don’t think so… Wait. One of them asked if the electricity was on in the cabin. I’m quite sure that’s what he said. The cabin.”
“My God,” I said, throwing my hands in the air. “There must be tens of thousands of cabins in the Adirondacks. He might as well have said, ‘the house’.”
Quinn got up and paced around the room. “The police will probably look up the license plate number from the tapes we just saw. Hopefully, they’ll put out an APB.”
“I sure hope so,” I said. I absentmindedly tidied my mother’s bed, wishing she was there. I put the pillow at the head and sat down beside it, smoothing the sheets as I spoke. “It has to be them. But what I don’t get is why?”
Something sharp pricked my finger. I yelped and pulled my hand back, afraid it was a dirty syringe.
“What’s wrong?” Quinn asked.
No blood coated my finger. I stood and examine the bed sheets, noticing a small lump halfway down the bed. Carefully, I turned the sheet back to reveal a silver earring.
Quinn got up to look and Hildegarde craned her head around to try to see. “What is it?”
I palmed it, at first thinking it might have been my mother’s. “An earring. A stud, actually, without the back. Somebody must’ve lost it.” I turned the stud in the light. “I think it’s a bear head.”
I slid it into my jeans pocket.
Quinn started to say something about “evidence” but I felt another wave of hysteria coming over me. I sank to the bed and cried into the pillow that had cradled my mother’s head so recently. It smelled like her, which drove me into more urgent waves of weeping. I wrung my hands, pulled my hair, and wailed like a child. It was humiliating, but I wasn’t together enough to know it. That came the next day.
As much as Thelma annoyed me, irritated me, drove me insane… she was my mother, and the thought of her being manhandled by those thugs drove me over the edge.
“It’ll be okay, honey.” Quinn rubbed my back in small circles and murmured in my ear. I hardly noticed.
“We’ll find her,” he said.
I turned to face him. Tears streamed down my cheeks and I moaned in hiccups and sobs that brought Myrna Shapiro running into the room with two uniformed policemen. I couldn’t control myself, shuddered and shook, and shouted the words, stuttering over them. “If these guys were the same thugs who br... br… broke into our home and hotel room, what in the world were they looking for, and why did they take my mother?”
Chapter 16
I took a sip of cold coffee and rubbed my gritty eyes. They still felt puffy from all the sobbing. I’d pressed cold wet paper towels beneath them for a few minutes to try to reduce the swelling, but it hadn’t done a lot of good.
Quinn sat beside me in Myrna Shapiro’s office, arranging pencils into parallel lines on her desk. He’d been wonderfully supportive, patting my hand and helping me answer the detective’s questions for the past hour and a half. I asked twice as many questions as the surly heavyset detective had posed, but received few answers.
Detective McCann sat across the desk, talking into his cell phone. When he finished, he clapped it shut and struggled to slide it into his pants pocket. I watched the red creases on his forehead deepen. The buttons on his shirt looked ready to pop each time he took a deep breath.
“We ran the plates.” He didn’t meet my eyes, smile, or indicate any sign of humanity.
I sat up straighter and squeezed Quinn’s hand.
McCann’s eyes watered and he screwed up his face, preparing for a window-shattering sneeze that shook his whole body and hurt my ears.
Quinn and I spoke the same words. “God bless you.”
He grabbed a handful of tissues from Myrna’s desk, then turned his head to blow. I shared an exasperated glance with Quinn, who rolled his eyes.
McCann turned back, tucking the tissues into his jacket pocket. “Nasty head cold.”
I felt Quinn squirm beside me and could picture the warning sign that flashed “germs!” in his head.
“The van your mother was taken in was stolen. A restaurant owner in Old Forge reported it sitting behind his back lot, with one of the doors open. His employee made a trip to the trash container and noticed the van abandoned behind it in the woods. Found a gurney inside, and a few sets of scrubs. I’ve got a crew on their way over there to gather physical evidence. They’ll speak to the restaurant crew and any regulars who might have been in the place when it happened.”
My shoulders slumped. “So we have no way to track them now?”
McCann shifted on the uncomfortable seat and coughed into his elbow. Quinn shifted his chair back a few inches.
“We might lift some prints from the van. And we’ve got videotape photos of them. We’ve already put those out on the wire.”
“Can you get us a few copies?” Quinn asked.
McCann looked wooden. “I can’t do that.”
I sat up, indignant. “Why the hell not? Wouldn’t it be up to the hospital, since the tapes are their property? And it’s MY mother who’s missing, God damn it!”
McCann pushed back from the desk and leveled a cool stare at me. “Why? Are you going to go door to door to try to find these guys?”
Heat rose in my cheeks, and I squirmed on the chair.
McCann stared at me. “These men are dangerous, Mrs. Hollister. They drugged and kidnapped your mother. They’re not the kind of men you should be searching for, or even approach without police protection.”
I sat silent, tapping one toe on the gray linoleum. He was really starting to tick me off. And in my state of mind, I didn’t trust my reactions.
McCann leaned forward. “You’d better not try anything stupid.”
Quinn patted my knee in warning. He knew I wouldn’t sit back and let strangers try to find my mother. I had to do something. Anything. And it didn’t matter what McCann thought. I smiled at Quinn to put him at ease, then uncrossed my legs and looked up at McCann with wide eyes. I think I even batted my lashes a few times. Cold anger spurred me on. “Of course we won’t.” With the lie delivered, I stood. “Thanks, Detective. Please call us at the hotel when you catch the bastards.”
Quinn rose and put his arm around my shoulders. He nodded to Cool Hand Luke and steered me toward the corridor. “Come on, baby. It’s time to get out of here.”
I nodded and sagged against him, my bravado withered. “Take me back to the hotel, honey.”
***
It was already dinnertime, almost six. We found a Wendy’s in the smattering of fast food joints appended to the hospital, including a closed Krispy Kreme store that almost made Quinn cry.
“I loved those donuts,” he said, looking longingly at the darkened windows.
“I know, baby. But right now we need some solid food.”
We parked our conversion van in the back, in what Quinn calls a “pull
y.” We could pull straight out when we were done, and not have to back up our monster vehicle in the tight quarters. We’d both had a few close calls in the Wegmans parking lot in Geneseo when we first bought the van, and decided it was just too risky. People coming from all directions, cars backing up at the same time. It seemed silly, but I considered a packed parking lot one of the most dangerous places in western New York.
We used the facilities, then stood in line behind a family of five. I watched the children like a hungry waif in a bakery store window, and after a few minutes, a deep ache settled in my heart. The kids looked like cherubs, with rosy cheeks, big blue eyes, and sweet smiles. From the little girl, probably around three, to the middle girl, maybe five, to the boy who looked about seven, they stood straight beside their parents with eyes glowing in anticipation.
I studied them, trying not to be too blatant, and realized the parents probably couldn’t afford this outing very often. The father—who looked like a hardworking farmer—had callused hands and a sun-worn face. His wife, in a plain faded dress, wore a kindly expression in her weary eyes. Each child’s clothes had been patched and mended many times. Their scruffy little sneakers looked like yard sale rejects.
I wanted to pick them up and make them a big spaghetti dinner, buy them all new sneakers at Wal-Mart, and hug them close.
We shuffled forward. When their turn to order came, the father paid in various bits of change and tattered one-dollar bills, and they migrated to the table in the corner. I watched with longing, the ache in my womb stronger than any sensation I’d felt in a long time. This blow, on top of my mother’s kidnapping, seemed unfair. I decided to have a talk with Him later, when I closed my eyes just before sleep. We had many of these talks, and usually it made me feel better, in a humble sort of way. I knew life wasn’t supposed to be fair, that there were no promises, but somehow I kept the ridiculous hope alive.
Quinn watched me, led me forward to the counter, and ordered a taco salad with two extra containers of chili and a Frosty for himself. He knew what I wanted: a big bacon cheeseburger, large fries, and a vanilla shake. When we arrived at the table, I sat facing the children and picked at my food.
Tall Pines Mysteries: A Mystery/Suspense Boxed Set Page 8