Scary Stuff

by Sharon Fiffer

  “That’s not like your mother,” said Don, watching his wife retreat. “Jane, before I leave you and your brother here, tell me who the hell this guy is and whether he’s the guy who hit Swanette, because I . . .”

  Jane was no longer sure. As positive as she had been when she first saw Joe that he was the one who must be running the Internet scam, the one whom Swanette surprised in the shed, she had just watched him pop up from the steps when she said he could look around the farm. He was as eager as . . . Jane realized it as the thought formed . . . he was as eager as someone who had never been inside the house or the sheds. At least not on his own. Maybe he knew about it, the stuff stored on the farm, but he wasn’t a person who had unlimited access. He might be the face of Honest Joe’s Internet sales, but if he was, he might not even know it.

  And if Joe wasn’t old Brother James’s partner in crime, who was he? James must have handed his ring of keys over to someone. It was unlikely that he shared his business with his sister Ada. He didn’t have other family around. According to Don and Nellie, his wife left him or rather he drove her away when she got pregnant . . .

  Unlike the cartoon incandescent bulb that instantly switched on over a character’s head when an idea crystalized, Jane felt she was standing under the more ecologically sound compact fluores-cent bulb. Awareness dawned with, first, a slight humming in her brain, then a pause while pieces fell into place, until, with an implied ta da, the light flashed.

  Brother James had a son. Despite the gossip Don had heard from the Bonfield saloonkeeper, James and Martha had a son.

  “Joe?” said Jane, watching the man as he reluctantly turned away from the window to look back at her. “Joe Speller?”

  Joe turned from the window to look at Jane, who, with the others, stood at the bottom of the porch steps.

  He opened his mouth, but whether he was going to agree or protest, Jane could not have predicted. His disconcerting unmatched eyes were wide and he lifted his right hand slightly, but before he made a sound, they all heard the shot.

  Lying in bed at night in her Evanston home, Jane often heard noises that could be gunshots. Pops and bangs that turned out to be car noises and firecrackers were common enough, especially in the summer. It amazed her that, now, when she heard this true gunshot, fired from somewhere just beyond Dave’s trailer, it sounded like nothing else. There was no confusion, no momentary “what could that be?” No wonder the sound of gunfire was so often described as unmistakable.

  Oh shouted for everyone to get down and everyone—Jane, Don, Tim, Claire and Dave and Michael—dropped to the ground. Everyone except Joe, who, a second before, stood framed in the farmhouse window, was already down, crumpled on the porch floor, bleeding through his thin white shirt.

  The silence was so profound after the initial noise that they all heard the car engine on the main road.

  Oh was immediately on his phone, helping Claire to her feet, scanning the perimeter of the yard beyond the driveway and out-buildings, doing everything, it seemed, simultaneously.

  Jane was the first to reach Joe. She removed her borrowed scarf and pressed it to Joe’s shoulder. She had no experience with this and could only remember old Mrs. Tabor, her seventh-grade substitute teacher, who had decided that, in what Jane now realized was a period of undiagnosed dementia, instead of history, the class should learn basic first aid, repeating “pressure, pressure, pressure” as she pressed on the wound, using a giant teddy bear as a demonstration model.

  “Joe,” Jane whispered, “I think you’ll be fine. Don’t be scared.”

  It was the best she could do. His blue eye and brown eye remained open, but he was either wide-eyed unconscious or completely in shock. Jane didn’t think the wound, which she placed around his right shoulder, was life threatening, but what did she know besides television and movies?

  “That’s right, Mrs. Wheel. Pressure,” said Oh.

  The ambulance arrived just after Cord, who had barely started up the road. An EMT relieved Jane and she realized how immediately she went from being necessary to just another outsider getting in the way of professionals. Michael and Tim were talking to police officers, Claire was out of view, and Jane saw Oh nodding as Cord ranted and raved about his own stupidity in allowing such amateurish goings-on. Jane thought it was probably not the right moment to remind him that it was she, not he, who believed this area was a crime scene in the first place.

  “Who’s missing?” said Jane aloud and immediately knew the answer.

  Don was at his car, gesticulating to a police officer, and Jane knew, without being able to hear his voice or read his lips, what he was saying.

  “Where’s Nellie?”

  She had gone off without a fight when Jane suggested they take Claire and go back to Kankakee. She should have been safely out of harm’s way, sitting in the front seat, complaining to Rita about all the ridiculous human beings in her life. But Rita and Nellie were absent from the car and Jane could see Don was getting more and more frantic.

  Jane turned to where she thought the shot had come from. Dave’s trailer was parked at the very beginning of the driveway, just as one turned into it off the main road. He had turned the trailer and stationed it on the lawn, parallel to the road, which meant a car could have pulled up next to it and remained unseen from the house, which was set back several hundred feet from the road. If Nellie was sitting in the car, though, closer to the road and without the distraction of the group’s conversation, she might have heard the car drive up. She might have heard the car, seen the person who had fired the shot hitting Joe.

  And if that were the case, Jane had to ask herself, shuddering, WWND?

  What would Nellie do?

  19

  Nellie, hearing a car slowly pull up and stop without turning into the driveway, closed the photo album she had been studying ever since she found it earlier in the day.

  “What the hell is going on now?” she asked Rita.

  A small woman to begin with, and shrinking steadily every year, Nellie was able to turn around in the front seat and, crouching on her knees, catch a glimpse of the front of the car behind the lighting trailer-van. She saw the car’s headlights, dimmed to begin with, go out altogether, but could hear the vehicle still idling.

  “I’ll go find out who wants a piece of all this now,” said Nellie. She hesitated for just a moment and reopened the album. Some of the photographs had been missing, but enough were there and enough were captioned that she had pieced together the family history. “Okay, Rita, just in case, let’s mark the page.”

  Nellie fished out a package of Don and Nellie’s EZ Way Inn matches from the emergency kit Don kept in the glove compartment, leaving the door hanging open so she didn’t make any unnecessary noise. She opened the book, and bent up one match so it stayed outside the matchbook, dividing the cover into two halves. Unsatisfied, she folded the single match back in and pulled more matches forward, then tucked the cover in. Now all the print on the cover was blocked except for Nellie’s and, below her name, Inn. “Let’s see if the fancypants detectives can read this clue.”

  She put the matchbook in the album where the most interesting finds were, and laid the leather-bound volume carefully on the front seat. She squeezed open the door handle, put her fingers to her lips, and crept out. Rita began to follow, but Nellie turned and put her hand on the dog’s head. “I’ll be back.”

  Despite the lights provided by the huge floods directed at the house and outbuildings, the road itself was not lit and offered enough night, enough shadows, for Nellie to make her way to the other side of the idling car and crouch behind a few scrubby wind-break trees. She didn’t know car makes or models, and noted this only as a nondescript four-door boxy little car. The driver was absent, but the driver’s side door was open. Someone robbing the trailer? The car was parked close to the trailer door, close enough for someone to open the driver’s side door and touch the trailer.

  Nellie saw a figure do just that, open the back door
and use the car as a step up to the ladder on the side of the trailer. This nut was climbing onto the top of Len’s Mobile Lighting Van carrying what looked like a baseball-equipment bag.

  Nellie needed to get closer to see if she recognized whoever this was, probably the partner of that crazy-eyed Joe, who Nellie was sure . . .

  She couldn’t see from behind the trees, not now that the climber was on top of the van. The best place to see what was going on was the base of the trailer, so Nellie crept between the car and van and slipped into the backseat of the idling sedan. Crouching down on the floor, she could look up and out the back door. The view was perfect. She watched as the figure, dressed in black and with a scarf wrapped around head and face, leaned over the trailer roof toward the house.

  When she heard the shot, Nellie momentarily froze. Her husband, her daughter, and her son were in that group on the porch. Her family and that damn irritating Tim and that Detective Oh and his snooty wife, Claire, and some bozo from the lighting company. All of them were in the line of fire. And Joe. Then Nellie remembered that Joe was on that porch. Now everything she had only thought might be true became clear. Poor Joe.

  Nellie stayed put, covering her head with a raincoat that was tossed on the backseat floor. If what she thought just happened, happened, someone was going to have to catch the killer. Might as well be her since she was already here.

  20

  Jane wasn’t sure which—or whose—hysteria she should attend to first.

  Don had threatened to hit the police officer who speculated aloud that Nellie was the only one of them who had had the opportunity, and therefore could have been the shooter.

  Michael, seeing his look-alike shot, lying on the porch, reacted with a kind of twin-syndrome shock, and passed out cold.

  Tim and Claire, assisted by Dave, who remained cool even though Jane was quite certain no commercial shoot had ever turned into this kind of literal shoot on his watch, were trying to stay out of the way of the police, while continuing to inventory what was in the immediate vicinity. This, and reviving Michael, put them into a kind of list-making, brow-mopping frenzy.

  Detective Oh remained with Cord, nodding and listening to Cord give frantic orders to his people and making his own list at the same time.

  And then, of course, there was Jane’s own rising panic.

  As unprofessional as it might have been to lie under the circumstances, Jane identified herself to the EMT as Joe’s first cousin, his closest relative, and asked about his condition. Although he remained vague, it was a reassuring vague, and he did tell Jane he felt fairly certain that Joe’s injury was not life threatening.

  All of this activity, unfolding under the commercial lights, made the scene resemble a movie set all the more. Jane knew that the chaos would sort itself out, the police going their way, the ambulance and attendants going theirs . . . and all of the rest of them now banned from the farm, which would finally get its proper yellow wrapping to identify it as a crime scene.

  Jane’s panic was of the domestic variety.

  Nellie.

  Jane always tried to take a breath and solve the case of Nellie one non sequitur at a time. It was how she dealt with her mother’s daily erratic behavior, harsh judgments, bizarre pronouncements, and general homespun voodoo.

  And now, not for the first time, Nellie was missing. She had been kidnapped before, when thugs mistook her for Jane, and she was able to capture every one of the three while also cooking them a meal and diagnosing the leader’s peptic ulcer. Jane wanted to soothe her dad by reminding him of this episode, but somehow, watching him near apoplexy, she knew this would not be the right thing to ease his mind under the circumstances.

  “Dad, you have to take Michael home. Seeing Joe like that threw him,” Jane said. “I think he realized that all of this mistaken-identity stuff was more serious than he thought.”

  Don shook his head.

  “I’m going to go find Mom and bring her home,” said Jane. “I promise.”

  Don took Jane’s hand.

  “She’s a pain sometimes,” he said, and she nodded. “But she’s my pain and I can’t live without her.”

  Jane had never heard her father say anything this simple, this dramatic, this true. He was the sentimental one and Nellie was the cold fish . . . that much she knew. But somehow, this direct declaration caught Jane by surprise.

  Don finally agreed, after a struggle, to drive Claire and Michael back to Kankakee. Michael had wanted to stay with Jane, but she persuaded him that he needed to be with Don while she located their mother. Jane put her hand on her brother’s arm.

  “Take care of Dad for now and I’ll bring Mom home later. She’s following that car, I know it. She’s impulsive, Michael, but she’s too smart to get too close. We’ll catch up.”

  Neither Jane nor Michael stated the obvious. The police had swept the grounds. If Nellie was “following” the shooter, was she trotting down the road? She didn’t know how to drive. The car and Rita were both still here.

  The likely scenario was that Nellie had been snatched because she witnessed the shooting. The riddle there was why wouldn’t the shooter just do the convenient thing and shoot Nellie? Jane had wanted to comfort her father by explaining that if Nellie were going to be hurt, it would have happened then and there. She settled for telling him that if the bad guy had Nellie, he was going to keep her safe as insurance.

  Don didn’t answer back “until he doesn’t need her anymore,” but Jane saw it in his eyes.

  “You two have to go home. If there is any kind of ransom demand or any kind of contact made, it will be through you and Michael at home. Mom herself might end up calling there—she could even show up there. Cord is sending a police officer to the house to stay until we hear something. And we will hear from her,” said Jane. “Now go.”

  Jane and Oh had both spoken to Cord, who was sending people to cover all the roads into town, the service roads through fields, and also sending out Nellie’s description as a missing person. At both Oh’s and Jane’s urging, he promised that all caution would be used in pursuing the shooter since . . .

  No one finished the sentence . . . Nellie could be a hostage, but each of them said it silently. Cord patted Jane on the back and reassured her much the same way she had reassured her father.

  Amazing how everyone pretended to believe everyone in times of crisis.

  Dave was told he could leave the grounds, but the trailer needed to remain. He roared off on his motorcycle, presumably back to the bar where he had begun his evening. Jane couldn’t decide if he was the coolest, most detached character she had ever met or if he had met a girl at the bar, but he couldn’t get off the property fast enough. The police had been given a full description of Nellie, but Jane knew it was up to her. She had told Michael and Don that she would bring Nellie home.

  And now to keep her promise.

  “If Joe was the son of James Speller, that makes him Ada’s nephew,” said Jane, sitting in Oh’s car, notebook in hand. “James’s wife, Martha, left him when she got pregnant. She could have returned here with him as a boy and raised him, not telling him who his father was . . . or she could have told him he was entitled to something from his father’s family and he could have come back to Herscher to sort things out . . .”

  “His picture was on the Honest Joe Internet site, yes?” asked Oh.

  “I don’t think he had anything to do with that. Did you see his face when we told him he could look around here?” asked Jane.

  “He was like a kid on Christmas morning looking in that window,” said Tim, from the backseat.

  “Either because he couldn’t wait to see it all for the first time . . . or because he couldn’t wait to get back and finish taking what he’d already started to steal,” said Jane.

  Jane reminded them how little they knew about Joe. He might look familiar, but neither the Internet image nor the resemblance to Michael told them anything about the man himself. Joe mentioned he lived over Edna�
�s Diner. Could that be true? No one had reacted to Michael earlier in the diner.

  “Mrs. Wheel, I believe that coincidences are a part of life, a regular part of life. In fact, I believe they happen quite frequently, yet few recognize their patterns. That is why, when they do, people are so surprised. In this case, however, I do not think it is merely a coincidence that Joe and your brother resemble each other,” said Oh, starting the engine.

  When Jane had walked her father to his car earlier, they found Rita, still waiting and whimpering. Jane opened the door and invited the bereaved dog to join her. “Let’s go find Nellie,” said Jane.

  Rita hesitated, placing her paw on the photo album.

  “It’s okay, girl. You can come with me and we’ll get Nellie.”

  Once again, the dog pawed the cover of the book. Jane picked it up, remembering that her mother had been studying it off and on all day. “Okay, we’ll take Nellie’s book, too.”

  Tim, now sharing the backseat with Rita, picked up the photo album.

  “Nellie snagged this from the house, didn’t she?” asked Tim. “I remember seeing it, wondering if it were one of the random collected volumes or actually a family book.”

  “The leather binding is familiar,” said Jane. “I hadn’t noticed until now. It’s the same as all those leather-bound books in Ada’s study. It’s one more object taken from her house.”

  It was now after ten o’clock on a Sunday night. Oh drove toward Herscher via the main road since that’s where the shooter’s car had been parked. Jane found herself scanning the sides of the road, half believing that she would find her mother jogging along, pursuing whoever had shot Joe.

  The other half-belief Jane was holding was, she knew, the more likely. Nellie was being held by someone who was willing to commit murder to keep them from hearing whatever Joe might have been able to tell them. And if Joe wasn’t part of this Internet operation, what could he have said that made him a target? Was he sent to pick up that wooden slat in the shed and was it just a perk of his assignment that he’d be able to get a glimpse of the presale? It would be a day or two before they got any answers from Joe. And they needed to find Nellie tonight.