“We’ve got to get to church,” Mila said, and Yashi handed Sameen over after one last snuggle. Yashi quickly turned away, going to the end of the conference table and looking out the window before finally taking a seat.
There was a moment’s bustle while Mila and Sameen left and everyone else got settled, then Sam grimly said, “Let’s look at what we’ve got.”
* * *
What they had was essentially nothing. The blood in Will’s living room was of three different types. The paint on the door was spray paint, sold at a half dozen places in Cedar Creek. They’d lifted dozens of fingerprints, belonging mostly to the family and to Yashi. They’d interviewed the neighbors and were expanding to everyone else in the family’s lives.
They had no clues. No leads. No answers.
As Yashi walked out of the police station after two depressing hours, her head throbbed in time with her steps. The breakfast from Creek Café had gone down easy but now sat like a rock in her stomach, and excessive caffeine jittered through her body with every heartbeat. She went to her car, stood there awhile, trying not to think about the long empty day ahead of her—a day she would normally be spending with her family—then turned and crossed the grass to First Street.
It was hot. Humid. Piercingly bright sun, achingly blue sky and not a breath of a breeze. A typical August day. The heat seeped into her skin, slowly chasing away the chill, forming tiny drops of sweat, pleasantly comfortable for the moment.
That moment wouldn’t last.
Cedar Creek’s downtown consisted of two-to five-story buildings, mostly brick or sandstone. Businesses occupied the ground floors, with an emphasis on antique shops, and most of the upper floors held offices, apartments or were waiting renovations to bring them new life. She turned west, alone on the sidewalk for as far as she could see, and walked mindlessly, her reflection in the windows distorting as she passed from one building to the next.
She loved this town. Had been charmed by it the very first time she’d visited. Hadn’t hesitated for one second when Will suggested she move here. It was funny that two Texans, born and bred and happy with their state, had ended up in a little Oklahoma city neither of them had ever heard of until college. His best friend had been from Cedar Creek, and when Will and Lolly had been looking for a small-town environment to raise the kids they intended to have, one trip to Cedar Creek had decided them. His friend had moved to Chicago a year after they settled there, three years before Yashi joined them. None of them had ever regretted their choices.
At the moment, though, Yashi felt as if the town had betrayed them. It was silly. The town hadn’t abducted her family. It hadn’t forced the kidnapper to do it. Every place had good people and bad. It wasn’t Cedar Creek’s fault this particular bad guy lived here, or that he’d chosen her family. The key word was chosen. All the guilt, all the blame, lay squarely with him.
The ring of her cell phone startled her into the moment. She’d walked to Main Street, the end of the downtown district, crossed to the other side of First and was halfway back to her starting point, and she couldn’t name a single thing she’d seen besides her wavering image.
Heart pounding, she pulled the phone from deep pocket of her dress, squeezed her eyes shut for a brief, fervent prayer, then looked at it. The number was blocked.
Though her hands trembled and her knees were suddenly unsteady, she answered the call, unable to make her voice as strong and sure as she wanted it to be. “This is Yashi.”
“Yashi!”
Brit’s voice broke halfway through the name, and Yashi’s heart broke, too. Glancing around, she spotted a couple of ’50s-era metal lawn chairs in front of a shop and sank gratefully into one. The green metal was shaded by the overhead awning but still made her grateful her legs weren’t bare.
“Brit, sweetie, how are you holding up?”
The question unleashed a flood of unhappy words. “I don’t like this, Yashi. I want to go home, and I want Mama and Daddy and Theo to be there, too, and I want this to have never happened! I want to water the garden and help Mom deliver her vegetables to Mrs. Lewis and Mr. Adams. They’ll go bad if they just sit there on the porch, and you know how she is about letting things go to waste. I want to practice soccer with Dad, and I want to lie by the creek and yell at Theo for splashing water on me and getting my hair wet, and I want to have goulash for dinner!”
Yashi’s throat tightened, as did her grip on the phone. The Douglas family had their naming tradition; through the Muellers, Yashi had a few traditions, too. More Sundays than not, she was at that dinner table eating goulash with them. She helped in the garden, too, and knew Lolly’s opinions on every aspect of recycling and reusing, and how many times had she listened to Brit yell at Theo? Too many to count.
“Honey, I’m so sorry. I should have come to see you. I should have asked Ben where you are and gotten permission.” Should have put Brit first, before absolutely anything, most certainly herself. She was an adult. She could handle trauma. But Brit was new to this kind of upset and fear, thank God. Of course she would have trouble coping.
A hiccup, then a loud sniff came from the phone, followed by a softer, calmer voice. “It’s okay, Yashi. Officer Lois said I could see you maybe tomorrow.”
The mix of formal title and informal first name tempted a small smile. Brit had been little when she met Ben and, through him, Lois Gideon. Lolly’s disapproval of children calling adults by their first names had led to a compromise that Brit had never outgrown. It had always tickled Ben when she tilted her head way back, gave him her best princess/tomboy smile and called him Officer Bear. Sentimental guy that he was—a label no one would slap on him at first or even twenty-first meeting—it still pleased him to know he had a special place in her heart.
“Do you have everything you need, honey? Clothes, books, makeup? A banana split from Braum’s? Some frozen pickle pops?”
“I just need my mama and daddy and brother.” Brit’s whisper was tiny and forlorn. “I can’t have my computer or phone, and the only real book I’m reading is the sixth Harry Potter. I can’t do that without Mom and Theo.”
Another Mueller tradition: group-reading Harry Potter in the summer. Even Will, who loathed it all, found the eye rolls and heavy sighs a fair trade for the sweet picture of the three people he loved best snuggled together with the books.
“We’ll get to finish it, won’t we, Yashi?”
Yashi’s heart hurt. Could she promise Brit that of course her family would return to her? It was the natural thing to say, but a lifetime ago, Yashi’s mother had promised she would be home in time to tuck her into bed, and she’d never come. Yashi had never seen her or her father again. There’d been no viewings before the funeral, no final kisses or hugs. Just a promise Mama hadn’t kept. It had taught her that promises were iffy things. You could do your best, but a pickup slamming into your vehicle at seventy miles an hour needed only an instant to obliterate your best.
“Who do you trust most in the world outside our family?”
“Officer Bear.”
“Well, he’s spending every bit of his time looking for them.” She didn’t go so far as to make promises on his behalf, but she didn’t need to. Brit’s faith in him was complete.
“Okay. And when we’re all home again, I’m never sneaking out of the house again as long as I live.”
“You bet you aren’t, because I’m going to help your dad put iron bars on your windows, and I was thinking of getting an ankle bracelet for your birthday, the kind that sets off an alarm if you go more than twenty feet from your room. You know, they’re a little bulky, and they only come in black, but I figure you can glam it up a bit.”
Her cousin almost giggled. “I have to go to school, Yashi.”
“One word—homeschooling. Better yet, you could be the first and only student at the Baker Law Firm and Online School. We’ll put your desk in my office. Six
hours a day, five days a week. No holidays, breaks or vacations.”
This time the giggle fully formed but faded too soon. “I love you.”
Yashi swiped her hand across her eyes. “I love you, too, sweetie.”
“Pray for us. Daddy and Mom and Theo and me and you.”
“I am.” As the call ended, she sighed heavily. Too often it seemed that praying was the only promise she could keep.
Chapter 5
On the walk back to her car, Yashi sweated out the jitters from too much caffeine. Unable to face the emptiness of home, she checked the police department parking lot for Sam’s vehicle, didn’t see it—or Ben’s, though she wasn’t looking—and sent Sam a text instead, asking permission to pick up the vegetables. Delivering them would ease Brit’s mind a degree or so and give Yashi something to fill an hour or two.
She was turning onto the two-lane that led to the house when his affirmative text came back. Don’t go in the house, he instructed, but he gave her free range over the outside. That was okay. She wasn’t sure she could bear going in that house ever again until her family was back where they belonged. A flash came from her childhood: Will’s aunt, taking responsibility for gathering funeral clothes, leading her inside their snug little house. Yashi had been too confused to understand, too scared to ask why this woman was taking her mama’s best clothes and too worn out to cry anymore. Instead, she’d plopped herself on Daddy’s chair, snuggled in the jacket he’d left lying there and pretended herself right out of the moment.
She’d pretended herself out of a lot of moments over the next few years.
Though the pavement had dried from yesterday’s rain, the leaves and bushes still glistened. The branches that met over the road were heavier, sagging lower, and the very air seemed too thick to breathe. She gripped the steering wheel tighter, concentrated on keeping to her side of the narrow road. A couple of big water drops plopped onto her windshield when she drove through the tunnel beneath the railroad tracks, but everything else was still.
The Mueller driveway was a muddy mess. She parked as far to the left as she could, where rocks showing through dirt offered a more solid trail, and climbed out. Sourness churned in her stomach, and even as her hair turned lank from the humidity, the fine hairs on her neck stood on end. Other than Ben’s house across the road and the highway sounds from the turnpike, there was no other sign of life. No dogs barking, birds flying, trains chugging past.
Damn it, she was scared. She was alone in a place where something awful and violent had happened, a place where no one could hear her scream if it happened again. But she had her phone and—reaching under the driver’s seat, she drew out a black nylon holster—her gun, and she’d never been one to give in without a fight.
Wishing for a waistband to clip the holster onto, she gripped the gun in one hand, the cell in the other, and walked to the house. Up the steps, also covered with mud, and around the porch to the back side. Nothing had changed in twenty-four hours. Everything was still saturated with water. The grass had grown another inch, the corn probably two inches. Tiny footprints tracked along the porch railing—from Ben’s Oliver?—and droplets of water remained on the garden baskets. They held heirloom tomatoes, sweet yellow onions, herbs and lettuce, cucumbers and eggplant and summer squash.
Sliding her pistol into her dress pocket, she picked up both baskets, walked back to the front of the house, then stopped. There had been three baskets yesterday morning, the third one tagged with more initials. SB. It had stuck in her mind because they were her mother Sonia’s initials.
She carried the baskets to her car, leaving them on the hood, then returned to the porch. The steps where she and Ben had sat yesterday afternoon appeared the same, lacking the mud of the front steps. She climbed to the bottom one, narrowed her gaze and tried to find a sign that someone had crossed the grass. As if she had any talent for finding such signs. The woods a few yards away were thick and wet. No one would come to the house that way when there was a perfectly good road out front, with plenty of muck on the ground to hide their movements.
It was probably no big deal. SB, whoever that was, had probably expected Lolly’s delivery and come to pick it up herself. Or maybe another neighbor—someone nosy like the old coot next door—had come over to get a glimpse of the crime scene and decided to help himself to the food.
But wouldn’t someone other than SB taking the food have taken all of it? People around there had a fine appreciation of homegrown tomatoes, onions and cucumbers. Why leave two baskets to spoil when he was already stealing one?
Wishing she’d worn sturdier shoes, she stepped into the grass. Within a few feet, her sandals were wet and moisture was seeping between her toes. She walked alongside the garden plot, wondering why no bees were buzzing in the nearby crape myrtles, why the occasional red wasp didn’t circle her, where the flies were. She didn’t like unnatural things, and unnatural stillness topped the list. It lent an ominous air to the scene and roused her fear once again.
The cornstalks rustled when she passed them, and her gaze darted that way, her mouth going dry. She stopped, her feet planted, not wanting to go forward or back. The woods began just ahead, a heavy growth of oaks, mimosas, maples and a profusion of red cedars, ranging in height from two feet to forty. The red cedars were pretty, always green and Christmassy, and they invaded everywhere they could get a tiny root. Over there was one that had completely surrounded a blackjack oak, leaving gnarly dead branches poking through. On the other side, eight or ten small red cedars were growing together, blocking light from the other plants around them.
Standing there, she could count at least a dozen of them big enough for a kidnapper or two to hide behind.
Nothing around her indicated that anyone had come this way, but her gaze settled on something discarded in the grass ahead: small, red, ragged edges. Before she recognized it, a voice from behind startled her out of her skin.
“What are you doing?”
In her panic, all she heard was a deep, male voice; all she realized was that she was utterly alone; all she felt was the pounding of her heart. It took only an instant to recognize the intruder as Ben, though, quickly enough that she hadn’t had time to yelp or spin around or maybe throw herself into his arms. She drew a breath before slowly turning.
He looked so good that, oh yeah, she would have loved to throw herself into his arms. Once she got there, she would never want to leave again, while he would be counting the seconds until he could push her away.
“Sam said I could come.”
“I know. But the baskets were on the porch, and you’re standing out here staring into the woods like you’ve seen a spirit.”
“Not a spirit. A tomato.”
His brows arched, giving her the impetus to walk forward to the red object resting in the grass. “There were three baskets on the porch yesterday, weren’t there?”
He nodded.
“When I got here, there were only two, and that tomato appears to have been eaten recently.” She pointed to the chunk, mostly stem and skin.
Ben came to stand beside her and crouched. The position allowed her to look down on his glossy black hair for one of the few times in their lives. The others had usually occurred in the bedroom, and he’d been kneeling, not crouching, and she hadn’t had the least interest in his hair or much of anything else besides pure pleasure.
Looking at him in any position was incredibly pleasurable.
After a moment, he stood again. “Could have been a deer, a squirrel or raccoon. Could have taken a tomato off the vine.” They both looked that way, at the less-than-vigorous vines that bore only green fruit at the moment—then his broad shoulders shrugged. “Could have helped itself to one from the baskets before SB came.”
She knew he was right. It wasn’t likely someone had come out of the woods, stolen the basket, then disappeared back into the overgrowth. She’d come to th
at conclusion before he arrived. Still...
“Do you know who SB is?”
“No idea.”
He walked to the edge of the grass, then pushed past tree branches to the faded path there. It led to another creek that ran through a narrow valley. It wasn’t deep enough to swim or fish in, and the hillside was steep and rocky. Too little reward for too much effort. Lolly and Will used the path only to get to the clearing a few yards ahead where she kept her compost pile. He studied the ground, parallel lines of dirt packed by the garden cart wheels, needles from the red cedars and weeds that Theo mowed when necessary. Standing next to him, Yashi didn’t see any signs of passage in the last day and a half.
“Will and I need to come out here with the chain saws and take out these cedars.”
Yashi’s nerves sharpened. Her family was missing, and he was talking about trash trees? Then she got the message: he was talking about the future. When Will was back. When things were normal. He was giving her reassurance.
Who do you trust most in the world outside of our family? she’d asked Brit. She didn’t need to ask herself the question. Her answer was the same as Brit’s—had been for years, would be for years.
Ben would find Will and Lolly and Theo. He hadn’t promised it. Didn’t need to.
She believed it anyway.
* * *
Ben stared at the ground long enough to recognize individual blades of grass before he finally looked up and ahead. There was no neighbor between where they stood and the Pickerings’ house, over on the new highway. Nothing but acres more of exactly what was in front of them: trees, rocks, shrubs, piles of dead leaves, with the added feature of narrow valleys that more closely resembled canyons. Lose your footing at the top of the hill above the creek, and you were likely to be in the water before you could catch yourself, with a fair share of aches and bruises.
Dangerous Reunion Page 9