Gone The Next

by Ben Rehder

  So that’s what I did. Had no choice, really, considering where Brian Pierce lived, way back in the woods. I couldn’t trespass, so I had to stake him out and hope he left the property.

  Friday morning passed slowly. I was tempted to park along the shoulder of the road, where I could see Pierce’s house through the small gap in the trees, but I couldn’t run the risk that he’d notice me. So I parked in the church parking lot again. Sat. Waited. Got bored, so I checked Pierce’s Facebook page, but didn’t see any activity. It’s times like this when your confidence begins to drop. You start to doubt that your subject is even in the house. Last thing you want is for him or her to suddenly come home, after having been out and about for hours without you knowing it. But it happens sometimes, because you can’t conduct surveillance 24 hours a day, by yourself, for a prolonged stretch.

  So. You sit and wait. If you’re like me, there are times when you desperately want to take a nap, but you can’t do that. But you can surf the web. You can listen to the radio. You can read. You can also talk on the phone, so by mid-afternoon I decided to call the number Jessica had given me. It went straight to voicemail, so I said, “Hi, Jessica, this is Roy Ballard, your customer from yesterday. Well, just one of many customers, I assume, unless you had a really bad shift. Anyway, I forgot to mention that I represent the Texas Restaurant and Innkeepers Association and you have won a major award for your superior hospitality and luminescent smile. It is my responsibility to bestow the award upon you, so it only seems fitting that we conduct the ceremony over dinner, where we can critique the performance of our waiter and/or waitress. At your convenience, but without any undue delay, why don’t you give me a call? I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but I will say that this award is in the form of a trophy, not some cheesy plaque. Plaques are passé, and the association is well aware of that fact. Hope to hear from you soon.”

  You can also simply sit and think, but that’s not always a good idea. I did that for awhile, later in the afternoon, and unpleasant memories began to fight for my attention. This Tracy Turner thing had brought them to the forefront. I didn’t need the assistance of a therapist to arrive at that conclusion.

  Painful.

  The dog park. Walking back to my Nissan and discovering that Hannah was missing...

  Panic set in quickly, of course. I looked in every direction. Shouted her name. Screamed her name. Tried to remain calm, but that was impossible. My heart was thundering. Breathing as hard as a sprinter after a race. I started babbling at passersby, pleading for their help, seeing in their faces that they thought I had lost it. Then seeing that they finally understood. My daughter is missing! Please help me!

  I called Laura first. Don’t know why. Should’ve called the cops, but I called Laura. She couldn’t believe what I was saying. Hannah couldn’t be missing. She must have just wandered off. Now I was wandering with the cell phone in my hand, searching in a wooded area not far from the parking lot. Finally Laura began to understand the seriousness of the situation.

  “Please come right now,” I said.

  “I will. But you find her, Roy!”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Don’t you lose our daughter!”

  That’s when it really sank in. If I didn’t find Hannah...I didn’t want to even think about it, but if I didn’t find Hannah, not only would she be gone, which was the worst nightmare I could imagine, but I’d be to blame. It would’ve been horrible enough if Hannah had gone missing under someone else’s watch, but it had happened under mine. I couldn’t imagine shouldering that guilt.

  Laura and the first cop car arrived at the same time. We gathered in a tight circle and I immediately began telling them both what had happened. A small crowd clustered around us — people who had been looking for Hannah but had now given up. There was nowhere else to look, really.

  “I left her — I left her for just a minute,” I said.

  “You left Hannah?” Laura asked. I’ve never seen a more grotesque look on her face. “Left her where?”

  “In the car. It wasn’t more than a minute.”

  “Where did you go? Why did you leave her?”

  “There was a woman. I had to talk to her.” I told them about Susan Tate, and the conversation about dogs, and about the pit bull puppies that her brother had. It came out in a disjointed jumble and I didn’t know if any of it was making sense.

  The cop said, “So you had had an earlier conversation with this woman and you went back to speak to her again?”

  “That’s what I’m saying!” I looked around for Susan Tate in the crowd, hoping she might appear, but I didn’t see her. Not that it would have mattered.

  “What did you need to talk to her about?” the cop asked.

  “I wanted to get her phone number.”

  Laura looked like I had slapped her. “You wanted to get her phone number? Are you fucking kidding me?”

  I knew what she was thinking. She had complained about my flirting in the past. Never quite trusted me.

  “It wasn’t like that, Laura.”

  She turned and walked rapidly toward the wooded area, which I had already searched, calling Hannah’s name.

  The cop told me that a detective who specialized in missing children would be here shortly.

  Obviously, it was far and away the worst day I’d ever experienced, and I was pretty sure it would remain crystal clear and sharp as glass in my head for the rest of my life.

  But now, years later, I was given a temporary reprieve. A distraction. Something important was happening. A car on Thomas Springs Road had slowed and was pulling into Brian Pierce’s driveway.

  15

  The car, a white Volkswagen Jetta, stopped at the locked gate. I already had the video camera zoomed in and recording, so I would get a decent shot of whoever emerged from the car. Unfortunately, from this angle, one hundreds yards down the road from the driveway, I wouldn’t get video of the license plate. The windows of the Jetta were tinted too dark to see how many people were inside.

  The driver’s door opened and a person stepped out. A female. The view through the binoculars revealed that it was a middle-aged woman. Pierce’s mom? No, probably not, unless she’d had him when she was a teenager. A sister? Maybe. The woman was fairly attractive. Brown hair. Slim. Dressed casually in jeans and a sleeveless top. She went straight to the gate and began to unlock the combination lock on the chain that kept the gate closed. She seemed to open it very quickly, which meant she had likely unlocked it before. That might be helpful information later, or it might not. She swung the gate open wide, drove through, hopped out, closed the gate, locked it, got back in the car, and drove onto the property, until the car was obscured by the cedar trees.

  Interesting that she locked the gate. Planning to stay awhile? Or just wanting to ensure that nobody could wander onto the property? Either way, I was glad something was happening. It had always been a possibility that I might have sat out here for several days with no activity at all.

  Thirty minutes passed. The Jetta did not come back down the driveway. It was nearly five o’clock, so I was wondering if the woman was here for the evening.

  I transferred the video from my camera to my laptop. I reviewed the video frame by frame and saved a decent still shot of the woman’s face. Then I began to scroll through Brian Pierce’s friends on Facebook, to see if I could find her. Didn’t know what I hoped to learn, but learning anything would be better than learning nothing.

  Here’s something I discovered early on in this business: Guys don’t change their appearance much, even over a period of years. Easy to recognize ol’ Joe, time after time, unless he puts on or drops an amazing amount of weight. Women, on the other hand, might look very different from one day to the next. A woman is much more likely to change the color or the length of her hair, for instance. Brown one day, blond the next. Long, flowing hair becomes an updo, or maybe even a bob. New make-up, new eyeglasses, new clothes, and suddenly the girl from yesterday has a dramatic
ally different appearance. So it didn’t surprise me that I couldn’t positively identify the Jetta driver on Pierce’s friends list. There were about four women she might have been, but I couldn’t say for sure. Or maybe none of them were her.

  I was studying each profile closely, completely focused on what I was doing, when there was a loud rapping on my passenger-side window and I almost had a stroke.

  A woman was standing beside the van. Maybe seventy years old. And she was scowling. I regained my composure long enough to use the button in the driver’s door to lower the power window on her side. I gave her a broad smile. She elected to continue scowling. Her short gray hair was covered by a visor to keep the late-afternoon sun out of her eyes. Her cheeks were rosy from the exertion of a brisk walk.

  “Boy, you sure startled me,” I said.

  “May I ask what you are doing here?”

  I avoided the question. “Well, not much. Is there a problem?” Trying my best to sound friendly.

  “I live right down the street. I drove by this morning and noticed you parked here. And now I see that you’re still here.”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am.”

  “Is your van broken down?”

  She came across as a retired high school principal, or the stereotype of one, anyway. Stern. Had heard every excuse in the book. Won’t be fooled.

  “No, ma’am, fortunately, it isn’t.”

  “We had a break-in earlier this spring, you know. One of my neighbors. That’s why we’re all keeping our eyes peeled.”

  “I understand, but I can assure you that — ”

  “Anybody parked here all day like this is going to get noticed. You have business at the church?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You’re on church property, you know. I came very close to writing down your license plate number and calling the sheriff.”

  “I don’t blame you at all. It’s wise of you to be cautious. Feel free to ask for Detective Ruelas. Tell him Roy Ballard says hello.”

  Her attitude changed by precisely one nanometer. “What exactly are you doing here?”

  I knew better than to lie to a sharp old woman like her. “I’m conducting an investigation.”

  “You’re a police officer?”

  “No, I’m working for an insurance company.”

  Her nose wrinkled at those words. Insurance company. Now I noticed her eyes scanning over everything inside my van. Well, everything that was in plain sight. Some of my most valuable items were kept in a concealed compartment underneath the rear passenger bench. That includes a Glock nine-millimeter handgun, which I am not licensed to carry, because a guy with my criminal history can’t get a license.

  “You normally conduct an investigation this way? Park in the same spot all day?”

  This woman wasn’t bashful, I’ll give her that. Downright pushy, really. She turned and looked one way down the road, then the other, as if attempting to puzzle out who or what I was investigating. Her gaze came to rest on Pierce’s gate. Damn, she was good. Then again, my van was facing in that direction, and there was nothing else down that way that I would be watching. Process of elimination. Simple logic.

  She pointed. “I know the young man who lives there. I knew his grandparents well.”

  She was feeling me out. Wanting to see if her deduction was correct.

  “Is that right?” I said. “You know, my own grandparents used to live along this road.”

  She looked at me. “What were their names?”

  “Jim and Beulah.”

  Her eyes lit up. “Oh, you’re kidding me. Jim and Beulah Ballard. They had the rock house on the hill, way back near the conservancy.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Lovely people. Salt of the earth.” Just that quickly, she was a different woman. Friendly. Not suspicious.

  “Yes, they were.”

  “Had dinner with them many times. What a smart, engaging couple.”

  “Unfortunately, I didn’t inherit that gene.”

  “Oh, go on. I remember them bragging about all their grandchildren. Which one are you?”

  “Roy.”

  “Roy Ballard! That’s what you said a minute ago but I didn’t make the connection. Roy, I’m Emma Webster.”

  I was worried that she might have recognized my name when it appeared in the newspapers way back when, and that she would remember that now, but I didn’t see any indication of it.

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Webster.”

  “Please, it’s Emma.”

  “I remember my grandparents mentioning your name, but you seem way too young to have been one of their friends.”

  She ate that up. “Well, they were several years ahead of Tom and me, but that didn’t stop us from forming a friendship. I only wish we’d known them longer. By the time we moved here, well, we only had the pleasure of knowing them for a handful of years.”

  In other words, they died. Why did people avoid stating that simple fact? Everybody dies eventually. Some people die sooner than others. No need to use euphemisms or sugarcoat it.

  “They had a lot of good friends out here,” I said, just to say something, because I was starting to feel a little awkward about having a conversation through my van window. What was the proper etiquette? Was I a host of sorts? Should I offer her a Coke and some potato chips? Also, I was a little worried that the woman in the Jetta might choose this particular moment to leave Pierce’s place, and I’d have to say a quick and possibly rude goodbye to ol’ Emma.

  “This area just isn’t the same anymore,” Emma Webster said. “This used to be out in the country — you know that — but there’s been so much growth, all these new subdivisions, and nobody knows their neighbors like they used to. Like this Pierce boy. Brian Pierce. As I said, I knew his grandparents, Larry and Faye, but they’re gone now. Things change, I guess. I’ve run into Brian a couple of times when I was out on one of my walks — sometimes I catch him when he’s out checking his mail — but he doesn’t have any interest in talking to an old woman. Or maybe talking to anyone. I think he’s a bit of a loner.”

  I nodded toward Pierce’s driveway. “That guy is? Pierce?”

  “He’s young and single, so when he first inherited the place, we were worried there’d be some late-night parties. Lot of distance between our houses, but you’d be surprised how sound carries. Not to mention drunk drivers. Young people don’t always use common sense. But we rarely hear a peep from his direction. Hardly ever see any strange cars coming and going from his driveway. Just his truck, a big white thing.”

  I realized now that Emma Webster didn’t fit the role of a retired principal after all; she was, instead, an enthusiastic neighborhood gossip. Mrs. Kravitz from Bewitched. I was starting to wonder how long she’d go on.

  “Sounds like a recluse to me,” I said.

  “Yes, that’s exactly right. He does have a very nice home, with a large back patio that would be perfect for entertaining, but, well, I guess it’s really none of my business. I just know that when I was his age I was a lot more sociable. My friends and I were always doing something. Always getting together for this or that.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But I’ve never even seen Brian with another person. Always by himself. I’d get lonely living like that. Although there was the one time I saw Brian with a little girl in his truck.”

  16

  A couple of years ago, I was having trouble catching one particular fraudster, so I wore a wire into a bar and struck up a conversation with the guy. I posed as a house painter — same profession as him — and we hit it off well. I was drinking ginger ale, pretending it was something stronger, and pretty soon we got around to bitching about our jobs. Damn hard work, wasn’t it? Long hours. Crappy benefits. Dangerous. Fumes that could slowly damage your brain. Sure didn’t want to be doing this when we were sixty years old. Then, after about his eighth beer, the guy grins and tells me he’s on workers’ comp at the moment because of a back injury. Fel
l off a scaffold — but not really. He was faking it. Taking some paid time off. He deserved it, didn’t he? Perfect. That’s all I needed. I was literally seconds from sliding off my bar stool and walking out the door when he said, “Something else I haven’t told anybody...” Hard to resist a line like that. So I said, “Yeah?” and he leaned in closer and said, “I’m not proud of this, but one night last fall, I was a little bit buzzed, but driving anyway, and I hit a guy on a bike.”

  Whoa.

  That moment was similar to this one with Emma Webster, in that both of them had blurted out something big and unexpected. Hell, this wasn’t just big, this was enormous. I wanted to say, “Wait a sec, Emma, what did you just say?” But I played it cool, even though my heart rate immediately jumped up a notch.

  “That’s weird,” I said. “A little girl?”

  Emma Webster said, “I was walking by just as he was pulling into his driveway. I could see her on the passenger side. Probably five or six years old. Little blond girl. No car seat, and that’s what bothered me.”

  “This was recently?”

  “Oh, let’s see. Probably February or March. A few weeks later, I saw him again out by his mailbox. So I stopped and casually mentioned the little girl. I said something about a child that young needing a car seat. You know what he did?”

  “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “He denied having that little girl in his truck. Said I must have been mistaken. I mean, I can understand him being embarrassed or feeling guilty for not having a car seat, but there’s no reason to lie about the situation. Just own up to the mistake and have a car seat the next time. If there is a next time. I never did figure out who that little girl was. Brian has never been married, and he doesn’t have any brothers or sisters, so it wouldn’t have been a niece.”

  By now, I could hardly control my expression or even sit still. The growing doubts I’d had about seeing Tracy Turner at Pierce’s house were quickly receding. “Maybe he was babysitting for someone,” I said. Did my voice sound odd? It did to me, but she didn’t seem to notice.