Chapter Five
Early Saturday Afternoon
At the campground, the Ferraros and Terells had unloaded their bikes and Mickey and Ben were ensconced in their reclining lounges with a radio between them. Nancy and Jane Ann sat at the picnic table, browsing through cooking magazines and occasionally calling attention to good recipe possibilities.
“Got the Iowa game on?” Larry asked the other two men.
Ben nodded. “No score yet.”
Sabet and Joe placed their new treasures on the ground and clambered up the steps of the trailer after ammunition. How 80-pound children could manage to shake a 6,000-pound vehicle was beyond Frannie’s scientific expertise. Probably why she had taught social studies.
Larry picked up the guns and placed them behind the pickup, grinning. The kids returned, Sabet clutching the bag of marshmallows while Joe tried to grab it from his sister. They stopped and looked around frantically for their weapons.
“Grandpa!” they both said in unison.
Larry feigned innocence. “Why me? Uncle Mickey’s the trickster in this group.”
“We know it was you,” Sabet insisted, arms folded, and Larry meekly retrieved the guns from their hiding place.
“Let me see how they work,” Larry said, holding his hand out for the gooey bullets. “I want to make sure you kids don’t get hurt with these things.” Soon Larry and Ben were trying the guns out on Mickey, who had dozed off and slept through the attack.
“I can see now we bought them for the wrong kids,” Frannie commented to Nancy. Larry and Ben finally surrendered the guns to the kids and Larry cautioned them against using any targets other than trees and Uncle Mickey. The men returned to their chairs by the radio. From the hysteria of the announcer, someone must be doing something big in the game.
“Yes! Touchdown!” Larry pumped his fist in the air. Apparently the someone was the Iowa Hawkeyes. The outburst brought Mickey to a sitting position and Larry leaned closer to the radio for the extra point. But the announcer was drowned out by the clamorous drone of training wheels.
Larry sank back in his chair. “This is too much.” He hoisted himself out of his chair and ambled toward the road.
Frannie quickly followed him. “Larry...?”
When she got to the road, he was standing in the middle, arms folded, facing the direction the little girl had gone. The offender had just reached the end of the road and as she turned around, saw Larry standing there. She left her bike in the road and looking around, spotted a woman just walking up from the tent loop. Larry could see her talking to the woman while pointing back at him. Larry gave a little wave and turned back to the campsite.
They looked expectantly at him. He gave a shrug and said, “She’s ratting me out to a lady on the road. I suppose I’m in trouble now. I think I’ll go to the can before the gendarmes come for me.” And he headed to the path through the woods to the restrooms.
Frannie sighed and didn’t know what to say. She shrugged at the rest and they sat uneasily, shifting and searching for the comfort they had a few minutes before. Fifteen minutes passed, Larry returned, but no sign of the girl or the ranger. The men went back to the radio and the game. Joe, who had been busy using Cuba for marshmallow practice, came to Frannie’s side.
“Grannie Fran?”
“Yes, Joe?”
“I thought we were going on a hike.”
“Right. Get me that map on the table and let’s pick out a trail.” She showed Joe where they were on the map of the park and together they picked out a trail that led from the tent loop along the bluffs to the river.
“We’d better take along water bottles,” Sabet said seriously, “in case we get lost.”
“If we stay on the trail, we won’t get lost,” Frannie assured her. “But water is a good idea anyway.”
They went into the camper, found water bottles, and filled them. Frannie picked up her camera and her cell phone. Phone reception wasn’t good in many areas of the park, but it wouldn’t hurt to have it along.
“Anyone else joining us?” she asked the group.
“Ummm...” “Nap, maybe...” “Sore ankle...”
“Okay, okay—quit your muttering. What a bunch of wet blankets! Sabet and Joe, ready?”
They chorused “Yes!” Frannie laid down the law about not taking the marshmallow guns, and they set off.
With just a hint of crispness in the air, the warm sun felt good as they ambled down the campground road. Frannie especially appreciated it caressing a little sore spot in her shoulder—one of those unexplained ailments that come with age. She watched the kids scampering ahead of her and tried to remember feeling that limber and pain-free, but to no avail. At the end of their loop, they turned left into the tent loop.
The variety of abodes in this area ran the gamut from small one-person domes to large tents with attached screened rooms. And where white and tan predominated the RV area, here the riot of color added an air of whimsy. Campsites were peopled by a few apparent loners, couples, and several families. Frannie noticed a woman whom she believed was the one the training wheel girl had approached for help only a short time before. The woman sat reading in an aluminum lawn chair in front of an old green and tan canvas tent and looked up from her book, nodding pleasantly, as they passed. Frannie itched to ask her what the girl had said and how it was resolved, but resisted the temptation. Let sleeping dogs lie, right? She and the kids continued to the middle of the loop where a sign between two bright colored nylon tents announced the trailhead.
Sabet and Joe raced down the trail ahead of her so that she frequently had to yell to have them slow down or wait for her to catch up. The trail here was wide and grassy—maybe also used as a maintenance road. It was easy walking; a fact much appreciated by Frannie. Tall ash and walnuts curved over the track, forming a canopy—and occasionally depositing just enough black walnuts in their green seamless skins on the trail to prevent her from becoming overconfident.
Ahead, the kids reached a fork and hesitated. They had both picked up long branches to use as walking sticks. A sign with a silhouette of a hiker indicated a narrower trail leading down and to the left, while the wider track curved to the right. Joe tapped the top of the sign with his stick, earnestly arguing some point with Sabet. They looked back at Frannie; Sabet called “Gran?”
“Wait up! We’re going to go down that trail,” she called back, pointing at the sign. They entertained themselves by poking each other while waiting for her. When she caught up, she put her finger on the junction on the map and showed them how the trail headed down toward the river.
“Hold on, just a minute. Let me take your picture by the sign.” They hammed it up, brandishing their sticks while she snapped a couple of shots.
“Now, don’t get so far ahead,” she cautioned. “You guys aren’t even looking at anything. There’s no hurry and there’s some neat little caves in the ledges.”
“Wow. Indian caves?” asked Joe.
“No, not big enough for people. Maybe the animals use them.”
“Mountain lions, I bet,” Joe said and Sabet gave her grandmother a “Kids!” look.
The path led downhill until it reached the edge of the Bluffs River, where it split and went both directions along the bank. The three held a short conference and decided to follow the river downstream. A few golden leaves danced along in the current as they wandered along, examining fallen logs and odd-shaped rocks. The kids used their sticks to whack the trees and shrubs as they passed and, thankfully, not each other. Sabet led the way up a steep incline, using her stick for its original purpose, to the mouth of a small cave high above the path. Frannie waited below and caught her breath once as Joe lost his footing. But he regained it quickly and after they had peered inside, they slid and skidded back down the hill, which Frannie captured with her camera.
“No mountain lions,” Joe reported, and they continued down the path.
Joe, in the lead, found a sand bar protruding into the river. At the
point, the river rushed around the bar, and narrowed into a small rapids. Frannie’s heart gave a little lurch as she saw him drop his stick, race to the point and balance with one foot on a slippery rock in the water.
“Joe! Get back!”
He turned to look at her with his Grinch grin.
“There’s like stepping stones here,” he yelled pointing.
“But we’re not going to use them. C’mon back to the path,” Frannie said.
Joe’s face fell. “But—,” then he checked Frannie’s expression. “Okay.” But when he tried to turn back to the path, his foot slipped, his arms pinwheeled, and down he went. Sabet reached him first and hauled him up. The water wasn’t deep or fast enough to pull him into the current but he got a good soaking.
Frannie reached them as Sabet was saying, “You should have kept your stick, Joe—then you wouldn’t have lost your balance.” Frannie resisted the urge to scold when she saw him starting to shake in the cool fall air.
“Get his sweatshirt off,” she told Sabet and pulled off her own hooded sweatshirt. As she pulled it over Joe’s head, she saw a bruise beginning on his cheek and scrapes on both hands. She rolled up the sleeves, hugged him, and headed him firmly back to the trail. As they retraced their steps back to the campground, Frannie thought she could hear Joe’s teeth chattering. In just a t-shirt, she was a little chilly herself. Hurrying through the tent loop, she caught a few stares. She smiled weakly and nodded in response. When they made the turn onto their own road, a dark green pickup sat in the road by their campsite, surrounded by several people. Frannie spotted the top of the ranger’s hat but didn’t recognize anyone else.
When she got to the group, she guided Joe around the outside of the people toward the trailer but was puzzled by some angry looks on several of the strangers’ faces. Now she recognized the parents of the training wheels girl in the middle of the group, the mother looking rather frightened. Ranger Sommers was talking quietly with Larry, who was gesturing cautiously, backed up by the rest of their friends.
“Sabet, take Joe in the camper and help him find some dry clothes, okay?” Frannie said, and turned to her husband and the ranger. “Larry, what’s going on?”
“The little girl who was riding her bike past here—they can’t find her,” Larry said quietly.
“Oh, no,” Frannie said. “We saw her talking to that woman down by the tent loop. Did anyone see her after that?”
Mickey jumped in. “Her parents think Larry has something to do with it!”
Ranger Sommers shook her head. “No one’s accusing anyone—we’re just trying to track where she...”
“I am!” the mother interrupted. “He’s a Blue Coyote! Taylor told me so last night!”
The ranger turned slowly. “A Blue Coyote?” Even the eyebrows went up a little bit.
“Stranger Danger—it’s our code word, and she told me he’s a Blue Coyote,” the mother insisted. “He wouldn’t leave my daughter alone!”
“I just commented on the training wheels—that she needed to get rid of them. The noise was very annoying,” Larry said helplessly.
“You better check on that little boy with them, too,” one of the mother’s companions almost yelled in the ranger’s ear. “Did you see the bruise on his face?”
Frannie stood by, stunned. What were these people accusing them of? Larry, a life dedicated to law enforcement, a loving father and grandfather...of course, they didn’t know that, but still the charges burned. She started to protest to the ranger but Sommers waved her away.
“Whoa—let’s calm down here,” Ranger Sommers turned to face the parents and their friends. “Mrs. Trats, the important thing is to find your daughter and wild accusations aren’t going to help. I’m going to ask you to return to your campsite while I talk to these people a little longer. The county sheriff will be arriving soon and will want to talk to you. We need to get search parties organized—it’s very likely your daughter wandered off and got disoriented.”
“But, you can’t just let—“
“I need your cooperation, Mrs. Trats. We are accomplishing nothing standing here arguing. Please go back to your campsite and I will be there in a few minutes.”
“Fine!” Mrs. Trats spat out the word and turned on her heel. The others reluctantly followed.
Ranger Sommers moved closer to Larry and Frannie’s trailer and motioned Larry to follow.
“I remember you now from Bat Cave State Park last summer. You are the retired cop, right? Sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” the ranger said.
“Larry Shoemaker,” he held out his hand.
She ignored, or didn’t notice, his hand. “So you’ve had no contact with this child other than talking to her when she rode past here?”
“No, I only talked to her once, about the training wheels.”
“And what happened the last time she rode by? She was headed to the main campground road, correct?”
“Yes, although she always turned around before she got to the main road. I went out in the road to intercept her on the way back and ask her to give it a break, but when she saw me, she got off her bike and talked to a woman passing by. I assumed she was complaining about me so I came back here.”
“Did you know the woman?”
Larry shook his head, but Frannie jumped in. “I think she’s camped over in the tent area. We just saw her again when we left on our hike.”
“What about your little boy? What happened to him?”
Frannie sighed. Sam would never let Joe go camping with them again. “He’s our grandson. We were hiking along the river and he ran out on a sand bar, stepped on a slippery rock, and fell in. He bruised his cheek and scraped his hands when he fell. His sister got there first and grabbed him.”
Ranger Sommers seemed to accept the explanation but didn’t comment either way. “I’m going to go talk to Mrs. Trats a little more and then I would like you to go with me to show me the woman Taylor Trats was talking to.”
“Glad to,” Frannie answered. “We can help search, too.”
The ranger gave her a steady look. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She turned and walked away.
Larry rubbed his hand over his crewcut and put his other arm around Frannie.
“What are we going to do?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Nothing we can do right now except help out when they let us.”
“Do you think someone really took her?”
Before he could answer, Sabet and Joe burst out of the camper. Joe had dry jeans and a sweatshirt on. Frannie was pretty sure the wet ones were in the middle of the living room floor.
“Gran! What were all those people doing here?” Sabet demanded.
Frannie drew in a deep breath. How much to tell them? “They can’t find that little girl who has been riding by here. She might be lost.”
“Did they want Grandpa to help—cuz he was a cop?”
“Sort of. Joe, where are your wet clothes?”
“Oh—I forgot!” Surprise. He climbed back into the trailer and soon reemerged carrying a sodden pile. Frannie helped him hang the clothes on the portable clothesline off the back of the trailer.
Meanwhile, the Ferraros and Terells had gathered around Larry. Even Mickey was subdued as they kept an eye on the road to the Trats’ campsite and speculated on how the child could have gotten lost so quickly in broad daylight. Larry squelched most of the talk in Sabet’s hearing and moved to add wood to the fire.
Frannie looked around at her friends and tried to ignore the hole in her stomach. The accusations and suspicions brought back a hammer of memories of the previous Fourth of July weekend when the campground hostess was murdered at Bat Cave State Park. Surely the Trats girl would be found soon having just wandered off. But...she thought about her uneasiness around the single men in the road crew and the conversation she overheard while waiting in the truck. They had seemed awfully interested in the kids at the campground and the flea market, but then lots of people liked kids. It
was the times that made everyone suspicious.
Mickey had picked up his guitar and was strumming it softly. Jane Ann was on her phone—probably to one of her daughters. Nancy was getting an explanation from Joe about his marshmallow gun. A peaceful scene but a disturbing current underneath.
Ranger Sommers returned from the Trats’ campsite, looking grim. Frannie could imagine the demands being made of her.
“Mrs. Shoemaker, would you ride over to the tent loop with me and point out the woman you saw talking to the Trats girl?”
Frannie nodded, noticing that Sommers was deliberately excluding Larry. She climbed into the passenger seat of the DNR pickup while the ranger took the wheel and expertly backed the truck into an empty campsite across the road, completing a neat three point turn, and slowly headed to the tent loop. Frannie pointed out the small tent and the woman sitting, still reading, by the fire.
The ranger got out of the truck, and since she hadn’t been instructed not to, Frannie followed. The ranger introduced herself.
“Ma’am, a little while ago, a young girl on a bike talked to you in the road?”
The woman, middle-aged with too-black helmet hair, closed her book and stood up, tugging her pink embroidered sweatshirt over ample hips clad in matching pink sweat pants.
“Why, yes. She was afraid of a man in one of the campsites. She wanted me to go with her to report it.”
“Who were you going to report to?” Sommers tilted her head slightly and crossed her arms.
“Well, we were going to find you, but when we passed the host site, the woman was outside so we talked to her. She said she would take care of it.”
The Blue Coyote (The Frannie Shoemaker Campground Mysteries Book 2) Page 5