“What’s up, Jack?” I said. I couldn’t see anything different from earlier that day. Jack put his nose to the crack where the door met the frame and inhaled deeply, then pushed at the door with a paw.
I hesitated. “What if—” but before I could think of a what-if Kay had shouldered past me and pulled the door open. Jack was inside in a flash. Kay and I paused just inside the door for our eyes to adjust to the relative darkness. But Jack went straight for the pile of hay bales where we had hidden and nosed something sticking out from behind them.
A foot.
A foot in a canvas high top basketball shoe.
A black canvas high top basketball shoe.
Chapter Sixteen
I couldn’t have moved if I'd been poked with an electric cattle prod. My brain was seized with terror. I saw that foot and everything else faded into blackness.
Jack was not similarly afflicted. He let out one eerie, high pitched, strangled cry, his whole body thrashed into a wag, and he disappeared behind the hay bales where the body lay.
The shoe moved, rolling over from toe down to toe up. A groan. Major rustling of hay. Jack uttered a long howling moan.
“Help, I’m being attacked by a tongue,” came Bob’s voice.
Kay flew across the rough boards of the floor. I discovered I could breathe again, and even move. I hurried after her.
Bob looked up from his cocoon of hay bales and grinned. The navy sweater was gone; otherwise he wore last night’s clothes. His face, ears, and neck were being thoroughly scrubbed by Jack’s long pink tongue. I leaned over and grabbed Jack’s collar and pulled him backwards, then held on as he bucked and wiggled to get back to Bob.
Kay reached down and offered her hand to Bob, who took it and pulled himself upright.
“Ladies,” he said by way of greeting, nodding and brushing off wisps of hay. He looked very tired and rumpled and altogether wonderful. I let go of Jack’s collar and threw my arms around him. Immediately his long arms wrapped around me, and we clung to each other, my face buried against his flannel shirt.
We were blasted apart by Jack.
“Whoa, Jack,” Bob said. “Easy, boy.” He knelt and began to scratch Jack down the spine.
I opened my mouth to say something—I have no idea what—but Kay was faster. “Bob,” she exclaimed, “where the hell have you been? How did you get here? How long have you been here? What is going on? Lou has been worried sick about you!”
He looked up at me over the wiggling dog. “This is the damnedest mess,” he said, “and I don’t want to get you involved in it. You saw me get carted off from the store last night?”
I nodded. “In a gray Mercedes like the one sitting out on the road a few yards from your driveway.”
“What?” Bob stood up. Jack sat down on his foot.
“Yeah, we saw it just now,” Kay said, conveniently forgetting that she hadn’t seen it at all until I pointed it out. “That’s why we came through the woods, we’re sneaking up on your house to get Lou’s car back.”
He crossed to the door and peered out. “Your car, Louisa?” he said. He gave me a quick look over his shoulder before resuming his inspection of the woods.
“I went to your house early this morning to see if you were there, and while I was inside I looked out and a man was searching my car. Jack was scared so we took off through the woods and made our way to Kay’s store. Now we’re coming to get my car back.”
Bob turned back to look at us. “I need to find out what’s going on at my house.” His voice was crisp with command. “Kay, you take Louisa and Jack back to your car and I’ll—“
“No way, buster,” she broke in. “We’re not leaving you to disappear again. Louisa and I are coming with you.”
“You can’t—” He stopped. The identical stony expressions on our faces said clearly that we would not be left behind. “Okay, okay, we’ll all go,” he said, throwing his hands in the air. Then he grinned at us. “Come on, we’d better hurry.”
Chapter Seventeen
The three of us—and Jack—peered cautiously out of the barn door, scanning the surrounding woods for any lurking bad guys. Bob slipped out and held the door for Kay and me. He closed the door quietly and headed off at a quick pace with Kay and Jack right behind him. I brought up the rear. He must have spent some time in these woods, because he went straight to a path that let us proceed without being mauled by the surrounding vegetation. He moved swiftly and silently. No barbed wire got in the way.
Of course they both walked faster than me, getting further and further ahead. I felt my tension grow with each step. Why hadn't I insisted we call the police when we found the gray Mercedes? I should have just ignored being called ‘lady’ in a sarcastic tone. Captain Johnson’s annoying professional opinion shouldn’t have stopped me, nor Kay’s desire to outmaneuver an ex-boyfriend.
What if the woman who had kidnapped Bob was still there? Or the guy who’d searched my car—or both? And what if they were armed and saw us and started shooting? What if he hadn’t just been searching the car but had planted a bomb? Or they had filled the house with poison gas and when we went in we were all killed? What if they really were space aliens and all this was taking place on another planet where they had whisked us in our sleep so they could observe how humans react under pressure?
“What if you stop making up stupid scenarios and catch up with Kay and Bob,” I muttered out loud.
Kay was nearly out of sight. I picked up my pace until I was nearly trotting, which is no more comfortable on foot than on the back of a horse. I didn’t see the large stick in the path in front of me, and my foot came down squarely on it. It rolled, throwing me off balance. I lurched and walked into an enormous spider web stretched between two bushes. Fortunately it was untenanted, but its sticky tendrils clung to my face. I shuddered as I batted it off, making involuntary ugh noises.
By the time I caught up, the others were at the edge of the woods overlooking Bob’s house. Kay crouched behind some bushes, and Bob lurked behind a big tree a few feet away. I knelt beside Kay, hoping the shrubbery was big enough to provide cover for us both. “What’s going on?” I hissed.
“We’re waiting to see if the coast is clear,” Kay whispered back.
“Well, we can’t see that from down here,” I said, and pushed myself back to my feet. I hunched over so I could see through the screen of branches but not be seen from the house. I hoped. The underbrush rustled, and Jack came snuffling towards me. “Jack, down,” I hissed sternly. He looked surprised but dropped to his belly.
From here I could see the back and one side of Bob’s house. Beyond that my car still sat between the house and the garage. The only sounds were the breeze making its way through the underbrush, a couple of blue jays squabbling over something, and a rushing sound I thought was the nearby river, but might have been traffic on the road. Under other circumstances it would have been wonderfully peaceful, but I was so tense the scene seemed like a horror movie, just before something jumps out and devours some of the characters.
Kay scrambled to her feet and looked back and forth between Bob and the house. I decided the place was deserted and straightened up to ease the kink in my back. A single loud bang had Jack on his feet and surprised a loud squeak out of one of us. Me, I think. My first mental image was of large shotguns, before I remembered that Bob’s screen door made exactly that sound when it slammed shut. A hurrying form appeared from the front of the house, her back to us. The woman in red. Though she was now dressed in jeans and a red plaid shirt. She went straight to my car., She peered through the driver’s side window, shading her eyes with one hand. Then she opened the door and slid in behind the wheel. I heard the engine start. The blonde pulled the car door shut, backed around until she was headed for the road, gunned the engine, and drove away.
“My car! She’s stolen my car!” I yelped, heedless of being overheard.
“Louisa, did you leave your keys in the car?” Bob asked.
I gri
maced and gave a nod. “I thought I'd only be in your house for a few minutes.”
Beside me Kay scrabbled in her purse. She pulled out her tiny phone and dialed. “Police? Oh, Kerry Sue, it's you. This is Kay. Yeah, I'm okay, but…No, I didn’t call for Ed. No, I need to report a stolen car…Of course I'm not kidding… No, it's not my car, it belongs to my…Yes, but…Listen, this car is being stolen right now, I mean this very minute. I'm watching it being driven…If you put out a call right now someone could—”
She listened to the chirps that were Kerry Sue, sighed, folded the phone and looked at us. “Well, it’s business as usual down at the cop shop. That was Kerry Sue Maddock, undoubtedly the stupidest person in town, so naturally they gave her the job of dispatcher. She said they’re kind of busy right now and told me to call back in ten minutes.”
Chapter Eighteen
Bob straightened to his full height and gave Kay a puzzled look. His expression was that of a man trying to translate words into a language he understood. “The police told you to call back?”
“Not exactly,” she said. “Kerry Sue told me to call back. Well, okay, yes, she does work for the police, but she’s not of the police, if you know what I mean.”
His furrowed brow indicated that he did not.
“Bob,” I said, “have you lived in a small town before?”
“No. Not as small as Willow Falls, anyway. Just when I was in college.”
“College doesn’t count,” I told him. “A lot of things happen in small towns because of who you are. Kerry Sue being the police dispatcher is one of them. I can give you her genealogy later.”
“Okay, if you say so,” he replied. “Anyway, let’s go down to the house and—”
“No!” Kay and I barked the word in unison. We looked at each other. I let her continue.
“It’s not safe,” she said. “You’re mixed up in something, and the other side knows where you live.”
“True,” he agreed. “So what do you suggest?”
“Would they have any reason to connect you to me?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Unless they’ve been following me for a while. But merely following me is probably not their agenda.”
“The phone message,” I said. Kay and Bob looked at me. I hurried on. “I came here last night to get Jack, and someone had left a message on your phone—you’d been spotted and should be careful.”
“I think I know who was. Did they leave a name?”
I shook my head. “They started talking before the recording began.”
“Well, at least let me go listen to that,” Bob said.
“Um, you can’t,” I told him. “It—it got erased.”
Sudden amusement sprang to his eyes but he didn’t say anything.
“Anyway,” Kay jumped back in, “they know where you live, and they probably don’t know where I live, and I have fresh bagels and cream cheese and the last of the summer tomatoes in my fridge.”
“Food?” said Bob. He suddenly looked exhausted.
“Food,” Kay assured him. And with one more glance at Bob’s house, we turned to retrace our steps to Kay’s car.
Emily Ann flowed off the couch and over to Bob. She placed her front paws on his shoulders and touched his cheek delicately with her nose.
“Thank you, Emily Ann,” he said quietly. She gazed into his eyes before settling back onto the floor.
Kay walked straight into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and started hauling out the promised victuals. “I don’t know about you all,” she threw over her shoulder, “but having adventures always makes me ravenous. And Louisa ate my cookies in the car.”
“We both ate them. And I didn’t have any breakfast.”
“Let’s get some food and after that, Bob has major explaining to do.”
We had postponed his explanations until now. He’d set a quick pace back through the woods, and it was hard to carry on conversation between the front and back seats in the car. While she drove, Kay had continued trying to report my stolen vehicle. First the phone had rung and rung until she clicked it off, shaking her head. The next attempt was answered, but Kerry Sue must have stepped away from the phone. After an initial “Hello?” I heard Kay’s voice take on a frosty tone.
“Ah, Ed…yes, this is Kay…” She checked her mirrors, pulled the car over to the curb and killed the engine. “Well, in spite of what that idiot Kerry Sue Maddock might have said, I am most definitely not calling to see how you are. I know how you are, remember? Which I why you and I are no longer seeing each other…Yes, of course you do, I’d never argue with that…yes, my cousin has everything to do with the fact that I'm calling you—” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and hunched her shoulders. The atmosphere in the car began to feel close and I tried to roll down my window, but with the engine turned off the electric button wouldn’t work. I thought longingly of the simple hand cranks in my own car.
“Did Kerry Sue happen to mention that I have called three times because my cousin’s car was stolen? Yes, stolen…The first time I called we were watching the woman drive Louisa’s car away. You could have caught her by now, which I happen to know would have looked good in your monthly report to the city council…No, that is not a threat— I can't talk to you. Here, talk to Louisa.” With a face like thunder she thrust the phone in my direction. I took it gingerly and held it to my ear, but I must have hit one of its miniscule buttons and disconnected it, for all I heard was a dial tone.
“Um, I guess I cut him off.” I glanced at Kay for help but she was looking away from me out her side window. I was still trying to find the right button to make the thing work when the phone gave the annoying rendition of Fur Elise that Kay had selected for its ring. I fumbled with it. “Hello?”
“Hello? Mrs. McGuire? We seemed to have been disconnected.” It was Chief Johnson, sounding as frosty as Kay. “I understand that your car has been stolen? Can you give me the particulars?”
“It was the woman who drove away with Bob last night—”
“What?” His voice rose several notes. “The same woman has stolen your car? What about Mr. Richardson? Was he still with her?”
“No, we found him in the old barn, and we were going to his house to get my car, and we arrived just in time to see her drive off in it. She was wearing different clothes, but it was definitely the same woman.” Something about the man made me babble.
Silence stretched into several seconds. When he spoke his voice seemed carefully controlled. “And is Mr. Richardson all right?”
“Yes, thank you, he’s okay,” I replied. “Do you want to speak to—” Bob’s hand gripped my shoulder over the back of the seat, and when I looked at him he shook his head urgently. “—um, to Kay again?” I finished, making a puzzled face at Bob. Now Kay shook her head and scowled at me.
“No, that won’t be necessary. Just give me the information on your car and we’ll start looking for it.”
I described my little car’s make and color.
“That sounds like the car you were driving last night.”
“Yes, Bob and I have identical cars. Well, except for the license plates.”
“I see.” He managed to infuse his words with the suggestion that it was extremely peculiar for Bob and me to have the same kind of car. “All right, give me the plate number for yours.”
I did, thinking it was a miracle I was able to remember it.
“How was she able to just drive off in your car?”
I knew this was going to come up. “I left the keys in it.” At least I hadn't babbled this time.
“I see.” Several more seconds ticked by. “And the theft occurred at Mr. Richardson’s house? All right, we’ll get on it. I take it you no longer need to file a missing person report.”
“No, he’s not missing now, thank you.”
“Right. That’s the usual pattern in these cases.” He disconnected the call. I pulled the phone away from my ear to look at it. The usual pattern? How many
men disappeared out of grocery stores in this town? I knew that Willow Falls had changed in the years I'd been away, but still. I handed the phone back to Kay, who dropped it into the compartment between our seats and restarted the car.
“He said they’d look for my car.”
“Great,” she growled as she pulled back onto the street. Brakes screeched, a horn like the trumpet of doom blared, and an enormous SUV pulled around us. Several teenage faces glared from the windows. “Damn. I’m going to get us all killed, and you can lay that on Ed’s doorstep.”
Now, back in her apartment, Kay bustled about toasting bagels, spreading cream cheese, and slicing tomatoes, while I poured tea over ice into tall glasses. Bob excused himself to wash up. When he returned we each grabbed a plate and glass and settled at the trestle table. Bob took a huge bite.
“Thanks, Kay, I'm really hungry,” he said.
She too had taken a bite. She said thickly, “I thought you would be.” She swallowed. “Okay, you can have your bagel. After that I want to know what’s going on.”
He nodded, taking another bite. He seemed to have aged several years since yesterday. I looked down at the food on my plate. I wasn’t sure what would happen if I tried to eat. My stomach was as confused as my head. A few hours ago, all I had wanted was to know that Bob was safe. Now he was back, and I dreaded what I might hear in the next few minutes. What, after all, did I know about this man? He could be anyone. Or anything. He could be the reporter I'd been dreading, or a spy or in the witness protection program or a hit man or—
“Okay.” Bob put down his glass of tea. “This is hard to say, it sounds so insane. I mean, stuff like this doesn’t happen to people like me, only it has, and—“
“Just tell us,” Kay broke in sternly.
“Yes. Right. Well, the beginning of it was, I found out about a murder.”
I had just managed a sip of tea, which caught in my throat. I snorted and Kay whacked me on the back. “I'm okay,” I said, shaking her off. “I'm okay. Go on.”
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