“Yes, indeed. His last name will be the same as ours, of course, but do pick something pleasing for the child.”
“Michael, I think,” she offered. “Michael Andrew.”
“I like it,” Morgan smirked, struck by the irony of the child’s new first name being nearly the same as the child’s real last name.
“So. Have you ever been to New Orleans? No? Well, I understand that it’s a grand town—particularly since I haven’t lived there before. I think we will feel right at home there.”
He was still whistling as they cleared the county line.
~~**~~
Chapter 22
“Sir, what shall I do with the, er, contraption?” It had been quite an eventful day, and Mason was glad to finally be home. Banks had opened the door to Mason’s automobile for him to step out.
“What? Oh! Is it still strapped to the back?”
“Yessir.”
Mason thought for a moment. “After you have put the car away, please call the hospital and see if we can get an address for Mrs. Thoresen. Tomorrow we’ll deliver the buggy to them.”
“Very good, sir.”
When O’Dell received the urgent summons to telephone Parsons, he was interviewing a family in a missing persons case in Kansas City.
“Give me Parsons. It’s O’Dell, calling him back.” He hung up and waited for Parsons to call him at the number he’d left. Five minutes later the telephone rang. He grabbed it off the wall.
“O’Dell.”
He listened to Parson’s garbled account with growing horror. “Call Gresham back for me, will you? Tell him I’m on my way.”
O’Dell listened. “Tamberline is here. He can take over.”
He listened a moment more and cut off his boss in mid-sentence. “I’m sorry, Parsons, but I’m done here. I’m heading to Denver. Fire me if you need to.”
He left the receiver dangling and raced for his hotel, praying that he had not missed the late afternoon train. Long hours later he arrived in Denver and grabbed a cab from the station to Palmer House. It was after eleven o’clock at night, going on twelve hours since the kidnapping.
One of Gresham’s stone-faced guards recognized him and nodded as he mounted the front porch. Inside, weary faces stared at him as he let himself in the front door: Tabitha, Billy, Mr. Wheatley, Grant.
“Mr. O’Dell.” Grant Michaels spoke to him from an overstuffed chair in the great room. O’Dell had seen Grant only weeks earlier. The oxygen gauges hummed from the tank nearby, but Grant had shriveled. His skin was grey, his eyes sunken.
“Grant.” O’Dell was fearful for his friend. He pulled up an ottoman and sat in front of him. “You don’t look at all well.”
“Know. Struggling. Please help. Help us. Again. Find Edmund!” The effort to speak exhausted Grant; between words he clamped the rubber cup over his face and strained to breathe.
O’Dell placed a calming hand on Grant’s knee. “I will do all I can, but I must have your word, Grant. Listen to me; I’m serious.”
Grant nodded, too worn to look up.
“You know that I will do my very best, but you must promise to trust in God. You must promise to rest in his peace and not tax your body further. Your wife and son need you, Grant. You must care for yourself so that you may care for them. Now, will you give me your word?”
Grant, still breathing heavily, nodded.
O’Dell got up and turned. Joy stood in the doorway to the dining room, watching him, watching Grant. Her eyes were swollen from weeping and her body drooped with exhaustion; O’Dell knew she had to have heard what he said to her husband.
“Joy. I’m so sorry. I came as fast as I could. How is your mother?” He asked about Rose to distract Joy’s attention from Grant, if only for a moment.
“Mama’s arm is broken and she has lost a lot of blood. It will take time for her to recover from it. They insist she stay in the hospital for a few days. Breona is with her.” Her eyes were still on Grant even as she sobbed, once. “We are both glad you are here, Mr. O’Dell. Please . . . please bring Edmund home!”
O’Dell roughened his voice. “You heard what I told Grant. I will do my best, but first off, we must pray and ask the Lord for his help and guidance. Trust in the Lord with all your heart; lean not on your own understanding.”
“Yes,” Joy whispered. “We have set our hearts to lean on him. No matter what.”
O’Dell reached for Joy’s hand and led her to Grant. “Then let’s pray right now.”
O’Dell spent a restless night in one of the overstuffed chairs in the great room of Palmer House. Early in the morning he called ahead and left to meet with Chief Groves in his office. He was surprised but glad to see Marshal Pounder and Samuel Gresham also waiting for him, even though the expressions that greeted him were grim.
“I’m sorry about Hicks and Rawley, Sam.” O’Dell had known both of Gresham’s men personally; Gresham looked as though he had not slept.
“Thank you. They were good men. They had to have been ambushed, taken completely by surprise, for this to happen,” was all Gresham could manage.
At Gresham’s signal, Groves began to brief O’Dell on the few facts they had gathered. “Mrs. Thoresen provided a good description of the man who shot her,” Groves reported, “and told us she saw two other men with him, although her descriptions of them are only superficial. A fourth man was likely driving, but she did not see him. That is the extent of what we have learned.”
“The thing is,” Pounder interrupted, “the outing to the park was not planned in advance. Miss Li and Mrs. Michaels only decided to leave their children in Mrs. Thoresen’s care that morning. Because the almanac predicted sunny weather midday, Mrs. Thoresen decided that morning to walk the babies in the park.”
“You are saying that the outing was not planned in advance but the attack was.” O’Dell grasped the implications quickly. “If that is so, someone had to have been watching the house at the exact moment Mrs. Thoresen left. Whoever that was had the attack planned with men ready and waiting.”
“Yes.” The other men nodded their agreement.
“But why take Grant and Joy Michaels’ baby?” O’Dell fretted. “All along, we’ve been concerned for Mei-Xing’s child, not theirs! The Michaels have no real assets—if it were kidnapping for money, the kidnappers would most certainly have picked a richer target.”
“We haven’t figured out a motive either, Ed,” Gresham cut in. “It doesn’t make sense. The only thing we know is that Palmer House had to have been under surveillance to pull this off, so Groves’ men have already been through the neighborhood, searching for lookout posts and questioning residents to see if they have seen anything unusual.”
“We haven’t uncovered anything so far,” Groves admitted. “This morning we requested the newspapers to ask for anyone who has noticed anything to come forward, but . . .”
O’Dell frowned. “Well, someone knows something. I will head over to the Pinkerton office to wrangle some extra sets of eyes. The office has someone in temporary command—I figure I can bully him into doing whatever I want.”
He turned to Gresham. “Sam, you want to come along?” O’Dell and Gresham left the chief’s office and hailed a cab to take them to the Pinkerton office.
As it turned out, the temporary chief of the Denver Pinkerton office, Ettisie, suffered from a mild case of awe regarding O’Dell and his reputation; he was willing to bend over backwards to accommodate him. O’Dell asked him immediately for as many men as he could spare to re-canvass the neighborhoods around Palmer House.
“Say, Mr. O’Dell, we’ve got a letter for you, came this morning.” Ettisie offered an envelope to him. O’Dell had little attention to spare for distractions and waved it away, but Ettisie insisted, “Well, it says ‘Urgent’ on the back of it.”
O’Dell took it from the man’s hand and slid it into his breast pocket, determined not to be sidetracked by anything trivial. But as he opened his mouth to say something, a sharp
caution pressed on his spirit. He paused and felt for the letter again.
The envelope bore no return address. Odd. Tearing it open, he scanned the three lines penned in a fine hand and frowned. The note contained only the address, no salutation, no signature, and the odd phrase, You really should visit! He turned the sheet over. Nothing. He looked again at the single word, “Urgent,” scrawled almost like an afterthought on the back flap of the envelope.
Then he studied the postmark. Late yesterday, here in Denver.
Late yesterday.
“Gresham! We need to go.” Grabbing up his hat and cane and not waiting to see if Gresham was following, O’Dell hobbled for the curb to hail a cab. Gresham caught up with him just as O’Dell was opening the door of the cab.
“What is it?”
“I’m not sure.” O’Dell shouted the address to the cab. Then he showed Gresham the note.
He and Gresham stared at the neglected bungalow just down from where O’Dell had asked the cab to stop. The fact that the address had led them to within blocks of Palmer House was not lost on either O’Dell or Gresham.
“Drive around the block,” O’Dell ordered. “Go slow past that green house there.” As they rolled by the house, he and Gresham studied it: The yard was uncared for; the house unremarkable. Then the driver, following O’Dell’s instructions, turned the corner. When O’Dell spotted the alley he called out, “Stop here and wait for us.”
He handed the cabbie a large note before he and Gresham slipped out of the cab and started down the alley. No one seemed to pay them any mind. A dog barked from one of the yards along the alley but left off of its own accord after O’Dell and Gresham had passed by.
When they reached the house with the peeling green paint, they stayed out of sight behind its falling-down garage, watching, looking for signs of activity within the house.
“Awfully quiet,” Gresham observed.
O’Dell nodded and pointed to tire tracks in front of the garage. “Still pretty fresh.”
They waited longer.
“I’m going to have a look,” O’Dell said after watching for ten minutes. He made no attempt to be stealthy; he just hobbled to the back of the house and up the short steps to a door. He listened, turned to Gresham, and shook his head. Then he tried the door handle. The door swung wide and O’Dell stood there, listening.
As he stepped into a small washroom, he could sense the emptiness of the place. Aware of a presence behind him, he turned. Gresham nodded from the doorway. O’Dell removed his revolver from his coat pocket and gestured with his chin. The two of them gingerly went forward.
They did not have to go far. Four bodies sprawled on the kitchen floor. The blood pooled on the kitchen’s cracked linoleum had dried, leaving no doubt that all four men were dead.
Gresham and O’Dell exchanged worried looks but said nothing. Gresham gestured that he would search through the remaining rooms and O’Dell nodded. He squatted awkwardly and studied each man’s face. One of the men matched Rose Thoresen’s description.
When he stood up, he noticed the paper on the table. He picked it up and began to read, his stunned alarm growing with each line.
To the police:
The men whose bodies you find here were recently in the employ of one Fang-Hua Chen of Seattle, Washington.
Madam Chen ordered that her men perform the following crimes: a) Abduct the infant child of one Mei-Xing Li from the address below, b) Dispatch (kill) Miss Li and her bodyguards, and c) Bring the child to her.
The father of Miss Li’s child is Su-Chong Chen, the late son of Fang-Hua Chen, making Madam Chen the child’s paternal grandmother.
O’Dell scanned through a few unknown names and details, racing to the end of the letter.
Sorry about taking the wrong child, O’Dell.
R.S.
With rising horror, O’Dell reread the last line. The wrong child? Whoever had taken Grant and Joy’s son had taken the wrong child? But what did that mean for little Edmund?
Cora DeWitt twisted her hanky around her wet fingers, and her stomach twisted along with the damp fabric. Her eyes darted around the room again. Quite apparently, her tenant had packed and vacated the premises, hastily throwing only a few things into a bag, leaving the room in a state of chaos.
The breakfast and lunch trays Cora had left for the nice-looking man who called himself Roger Thomas had sat untouched outside his door. Since she had not seen or heard her renter move about since she left for her club meeting yesterday morning, she had used her key to enter.
Her first concern when she entered had been the rent that was nearly due. Then she had grimaced in smug satisfaction.
Fortunately, I required a month’s rent as deposit! Her hard mouth had turned up on one side. If I acquire a new tenant quickly, I will actually be ahead by forty-five dollars!
Her concern over the rent had quickly dissipated, however, as Miss DeWitt had observed, not what was missing, but what her tenant had left behind: A chair had been placed before the window, and between the chair and the window sat a mechanism on a tripod she readily recognized—a telescope.
That was when Miss DeWitt’s hands had begun to sweat and her stomach clench.
The morning papers were trumpeting the news of a heinous crime—two men shot and killed yesterday only blocks from her house, right down the street in this decent neighborhood, on the very sidewalks she herself walked! Not only had the two men been shot, but also a grandmother walking her two infant grandchildren!
Miss DeWitt recognized the woman’s name: Rose Thoresen. The papers proclaimed that Mrs. Thoresen would survive, but the shootings were not the worst of the news. No, the worst of it was that whoever had shot Mrs. Thoresen and the two men had also kidnapped the infant son of Grant and Joy Michaels.
Cora scowled. She bore a grievous offense against Mrs. Thoresen and her daughter, Joy Michaels. They had brought soiled women into the house across the street—directly across the street—from her home! They had brought those soiled women to live in Cora’s own neighborhood!
Palmer House they call it, she sneered to herself, after old Martha Palmer! Cora bore an even deeper grudge toward Martha Palmer. The old woman had set Cora down, thoroughly mortifying her, in front of a score of her friends!
For more than a year Cora DeWitt had nursed her grudges against Mrs. Thoresen, Mr. and Mrs. Michaels, and Martha Palmer. How she had looked for an opportunity to pay them back for their affronts!
But . . . to take a child? The distress and revulsion she felt at such a crime overshadowed every other feeling.
She swallowed and slumped into the chair sitting before the window. She sighted along the barrel of the telescope. From where she sat she had a perfect view of Palmer House, its front entrance, and its walkway to the street. With a telescope one could monitor every coming and going in great detail.
Without question, the man who called himself Roger Thomas had spied upon Palmer House and upon the people who lived there. He had sat in this same chair yesterday and watched Mrs. Thoresen, guarded by two men, wheel a pram down the sidewalk and toward the park . . . just before someone murdered them and took one of the babies that had been in Mrs. Thoresen’s care.
Well, why on earth would Mrs. Thoresen require guards? Cora fretted. That is just an example of the sort of sordid activity I have been against since she and the others set foot in that house!
Cora DeWitt shuddered. But if I hide this information and the police find out I did so, will I not be guilty of aiding in murder and kidnapping? The idea that she might be swept up in such disreputable actions alarmed her even more than the distressing alternative!
She swallowed again. Against her preferred inclinations, Cora knew she must come forward with what she knew. Scowling, she stood and trod reluctantly down the stairs to her front door.
Banks stopped the automobile near the front gate and Mason studied the imposing house with interest. He hadn’t been able to figure out the relationships among those of the
concerned horde that had descended upon the hospital yesterday, so he was more than a little intrigued.
As Banks unstrapped the buggy from the back of the automobile, Mason stepped out. “I will take it, Banks,” he directed.
“Very good, sir.”
Mason wheeled the “contraption” down the long walk to the house’s front porch—only to be confronted by two powerful-looking, no-nonsense men.
“Please state your business,” one growled.
Mason looked from one to the other, realizing that they were cut from the same cloth as the man who had identified himself as Gresham. “My name is Mason Carpenter. I am, uh, returning this baby buggy.”
“You’re the man what found Miss Rose yesterday and called the cops?”
“Yes, that’s me.”
“We’ll take the buggy for you.”
Mason’s curiosity had only increased. “Um, is it possible for me to see one of the young ladies I met yesterday? I believe her name is Tabitha.”
The two guards glanced at each other. One of them pointed to the walk where Carpenter was standing. “You stand right there—and don’t move. I’ll ask.”
The other man folded his arms across his chest and stared at Carpenter. Mason put his hands into his pockets and rocked back on his heels—a sure sign that he was nervous.
What in the world am I doing? he quizzed himself, half turning toward the front gate.
You want to see if that red-haired woman sets your heart on fire as much as she did yesterday, a voice whispered back to him.
Mason had all but decided to trot back down the walk to his waiting automobile when the front door to the house opened and she was standing there. Glaring at him.
Mason grinned and her frown faltered a little.
“You wanted to see me?”
He was mesmerized! “Yes. How is Mrs. Thoresen faring? And the little one? Shan-Rose?”
She hadn’t asked him up onto the porch or into the house; Mason was still standing on the walkway and Tabitha was still standing in the doorway. The two guards looked from one to the other and Tabitha sighed.
Stolen (A Prairie Heritage, Book 5) Page 21