Her lover? Her kidnapper?
Helen wasn’t sure how to fill in the blank.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Exactly.” Sarah sighed. “I can’t help wondering if she’s in a pickle she can’t get out of, and I think I’m the only one in town who cares.”
Helen couldn’t fault the skeptics, since she herself was among them. It would have been impossible not to be skeptical with so many unanswered questions, namely, why would anyone forcibly take Luann Dupree? She was the director of a small-town historical society, not a blue blood. If someone had snatched her looking for ransom, why send texts to her best friend reassuring her that all was fine? Why wasn’t the kidnapper demanding money?
Helen voiced her thoughts aloud. “Why would someone abduct Luann and pretend she’s run away? Why keep up the charade?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” Sarah said, “and there’s only one thing I can figure out.”
“What?”
“He wants whatever it is she stumbled upon when she starting unpacking all those old boxes after the renovation. I think she must have told him about it, and maybe he knew what it was worth and decided to shake her down.”
“But you don’t know what it is?”
“Not yet,” Sarah said, and her gaze darted about. “I haven’t found anything up here that looks valuable, but it may very well be in this building, right?”
“Still, how will you know when you find it?”
Sarah shrugged. “I’m not sure. But he must have known about it. Could be she was asking questions about it on some historical-nerds site and he latched on to her. That’s how lots of these creeps work. They target women, pretend to want a relationship, and then they bleed them dry. Frank was just telling me the other day that romance scams make up the highest percentage of online fraud.”
“So you’re convinced her Internet beau is a fake and he just wanted something she had,” Helen said, putting it simply. “What happens to her if he found it?”
“Then Luann’s probably toast, and her body’s going to turn up in the dumpster at a random truck stop along the highway.”
“Sarah!” Helen chided. “Let’s think more positively, shall we? If this mystery man wanted to pilfer a long-lost antiquity, you’d think he would have ransacked the place before he took Luann, right?” she said, recalling that the sheriff had taken stock of the place the morning after Luann disappeared, and nothing had seemed awry except for the puddle that had seeped beneath a back door.
“But why bother ransacking the place if he had Lu?” Sarah countered. “Wouldn’t it be easier to find the artifact if he kidnapped her and got her to cough up the location? We know he’s got her phone, and he must have taken her laptop, too. All her notes are probably on there.”
Helen couldn’t argue with that.
“If he’s got her keys, he can pop back in and retrieve it in the middle of the night, and no one would even realize it was gone.” She suddenly stopped talking, and her expression turned stricken. “It’s my fault, isn’t it? I told her not to go alone on that date. I should have followed them, shouldn’t I? It’s like a horror flick after all.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“This is terrible.” Sarah groaned and went back to biting her lip.
It was terrible, all right.
Helen wasn’t sure if the sheriff’s wife was truly onto something, or if she was so upset about her best girlfriend’s abrupt departure that she’d gone and lost her mind.
Chapter 8
Helen was almost relieved when Sarah Biddle took off in search of more packing boxes. At least the sheriff’s wife wasn’t just spouting off wild theories about Luann anymore. Instead she was a woman on a mission. She swore she’d track down the mysterious artifact, which she was sure would provide clues to whatever had happened to Luann.
For Sarah’s sake, Helen hoped that Luann would call soon or send a smiling selfie from the Grand Canyon or Yosemite, wherever she’d wandered off to with her paramour, anything to reassure her frantic BFF that everything was fine.
But she had to admit Sarah’s doubts didn’t seem entirely unfounded, and she couldn’t fault her for wanting to play detective. She’d done it herself a time or two, mostly with the intention of helping loved ones out of trouble. But this time, she decided to leave the meddling to Sarah. After all, the woman was married to the sheriff, who should rightly get involved if Sarah’s instincts proved on target. Helen had enough to worry about with the flood and Clara’s family troubles.
And besides, she had another task at hand, and she decided to get to it, even though Clara hadn’t shown up yet. With Sarah gone and silence her only company, she went down to the second floor and settled herself at the table where she and Clara had been working in the days prior. She reached for the nearest pile of photos, finding a pack that was rubber-banded together.
She unbound them and shuffled through a few, trying to pin down the subject matter. Soon she came upon a series of black-and-white shots depicting balloons released to the sky. Postcards dangled from the strings. Faces tipped heavenward, as though to watch their progress.
“It’s Children’s Day,” she said aloud, recognizing the Balloon Ascension specifically.
River Bend still celebrated similarly to this day, and Helen herself had filled out numerous cards through the years for her own kids as well as for herself. When the balloons were let go, they traveled near and far. When someone in a distant town found the self-addressed postcard caught on their fence or snagged on a stalk of corn in their field, they returned it. The mayor kept track of all the postmarks on a map to ascertain where the farthest balloon had landed. The winner received an assortment of items from local businesses, anything from suitcases to haircuts or meals at the diner.
Helen continued skimming through a half-dozen similar photos, finding a few marked on the back with an August date from sixty-odd years prior.
Since it was more than a decade before she and Joe had moved to town, the pictures belonged in Clara’s pile. She started to push the photos over to the opposite side of the table but stopped.
A face caught her eye—two faces, actually—and she drew the stack back in front of her. There were two girls in the photograph, one in her teens and the other in her twenties, standing on a porch festooned with bunting. They seemed poised to watch the Children’s Day parade.
She adjusted her glasses on the edge of her nose and smiled.
Could it be . . . ?
Helen chuckled. Yes, it was, just as she’d thought.
Clara couldn’t have been more than sixteen, Helen surmised. The girl frowned at the camera, her brow creased beneath her dark bobbed and pinned hair. An oversized plaid shirt hung down over her pedal pushers, as if to hide her ample body. Beside her stood her blond sister, Betty, older by a decade, tall and thin in short sleeves and rolled-up jeans belted snugly at the waist. She was a sharp contrast to Clara’s petite height and stocky build. A twentysomething Bernie stood in Betty’s shadow, smiling shyly, his dark hair pomaded and brushed off his brow.
On the other side of the porch, a gruff-looking man leaned a hand on the railing. He had his other arm slung around a middle-aged woman, whose frown seemed to mirror Clara’s. Helen had never known Clara’s parents but assumed that was them.
Hmm.
It wasn’t the happiest family portrait Helen had ever seen. But she was sure Clara would get a kick out of finding it there with all the photographs from that long-ago Children’s Day. Helen hoped she herself would stumble upon some candid family shots of her own brood when they were younger.
“What are you staring at so intently?”
Hearing her friend’s voice over her shoulder gave Helen a start.
“Clara!” She laughed. “You won’t believe whose photo I just found. There’s a girl I know who’s far too young to look so unhappy. Or maybe that’s just what teenagers have always done.”
“What teenaged girl?” Clara dropped her tote bag to
the floor and settled into the chair.
Helen picked up the photo and pushed it across the table.
Her friend made sure her glasses were on her nose before she took the picture and gave it a thorough once-over.
Instead of seeing delight on her face, Helen saw something else. It wasn’t horror exactly, but it was close. A flicker of fear or maybe anger that lit up Clara’s blue eyes; the settling of her lips into a hard line; and the intake of breath that seemed held for an eternity before Clara released it.
“It’s your family, isn’t it?” Helen said, feeling as if she’d done something wrong. So she started to babble when her friend remained silent. “That’s you and Betty, yes? And Bernie’s standing there behind her. I never knew your parents, but I can see you in your mother’s face. As for your father . . .”
“That’s not my father.” Clara’s chin snapped up. “He was my stepfather.”
“I didn’t know.”
“My father died when I was six and Betty was sixteen. My mother remarried a year after. She didn’t know how to manage on her own and pretty much fell apart.” Clara’s full cheeks flushed. “Betty kind of took over with me after that.”
Helen watched her friend as she spoke. Clara’s face went through a mess of contortions, as though she was fighting hard to remain stoic and losing the battle.
“When he moved into the house, it was . . . difficult,” Clara explained quietly. “Betty couldn’t stand him. She married Bernie as soon as she was out of high school. She moved away, and I was devastated. It was a hard time those years without her, a really hard time.”
There was little Helen could do but reach over and give Clara’s hand a squeeze. But Clara slipped her fingers away to touch the photograph.
“I went to live with Betty and Bernie in Coal City when I was sixteen, not long after that summer. Bernie was gone a lot, traveling for the coal company. Betty took me in when I didn’t know where else to turn. She kept me from screwing up my life. I’d do anything for her, Helen.” Her glasses fogged up, and Clara removed them, wiping them on her floral-print dress. “I owe her so much.”
“I’m sorry for what you went through, hon. I really am,” Helen said.
How could she have known Clara for so long and never heard this sad tale? But it was a private matter, the sort of thing you didn’t ask about. One of those locked-up secrets that stayed tucked away until something shook it loose.
Clara made a noise, like a strangled breath. “It was so long ago. I try hard not to dwell on it. It’s easier that way.”
“It’s wonderful that you had Betty when you needed her most,” she remarked. “And that Betty has you now.”
“You’re right about that,” Clara said, looking uncomfortable, like she was ready to change the subject. “Hey, have you heard any news about Luann Dupree? Is she really not coming back?”
And change the subject she did.
Helen thought about sharing her run-in with Sarah Biddle not twenty minutes before. She could easily repeat what she’d learned about Luann, but she reined herself in. She wasn’t in the mood to gossip. She was thinking of a sixteen-year-old girl living in a house with a difficult man who wasn’t her father and a mother who’d fallen apart, and her heart ached too much to talk nonsense.
When Helen hesitated, Clara remarked, “You do know something.”
“All I know for sure is that she’s still gone.”
“Oh. That’s bad news for the Historical Society, but I guess it’s good if she’s happy.” Clara shrugged. “I wonder if they’ll replace her.”
“I imagine they will, if she’s not coming back.”
“It’s so odd, isn’t it?” Clara murmured and shook her gray pin curls.
“Yes, it’s odd, indeed,” Helen agreed.
“Well, I figure whoever’s in charge is still going to want to archive all these photos, right? So how about we schlep through a hundred more in the next hour or two then hit the diner for lunch? I’m craving the cheesy tomato soup and a piece of apple pie.”
Helen smiled. “I’m in.”
She turned to reach for another pile of photographs from the white carton near her chair, and from the corner of her eye saw Clara slipping the photograph of her family into her tote bag beneath the table.
That isn’t yours, she nearly said. It belongs to the Historical Society.
But Helen stopped herself. If Clara wanted to keep a painful moment in her past from being part of the archives, she understood.
So she said nothing.
After the Flood
Chapter 9
Monday, Three Weeks Later
Tweeeet.
Helen’s phone trilled from her bedside table, awakening her on the first ring. The second twitter roused—and frightened—a slumbering Amber. He flipped from his back to his paws in no time flat. An involuntary “oomph” escaped Helen’s lips as the twenty-pound tom used her belly as a springboard before diving off the bed.
Tweeeet.
She caught the phone before the third ring, scooping up the receiver from its charging cradle and hitting the Talk button.
“Um-hmm?” she mumbled, still not fully alert.
“Oh, Helen!” It was Clara, and she was beside herself. “Something dreadful has happened! I’m taking Betty to see the sheriff right now! Can you meet us there?”
“What’s going on?” Helen sat up in bed, blinking the sleep from her eyes and trying to clear the cobwebs from her head. She glanced at the alarm clock. It was eight fifteen. She’d slept later than usual after staying up half the night racing to the finish of a mystery. “You said the sheriff’s office? Are you in trouble?”
“No, it’s not me! It’s Bernie.”
“Bernie’s been arrested?”
“No, it’s worse than that! Please, hurry!” Clara got out in a strangled tone before hanging up.
Helen stared at the phone in her hand for a minute before finally setting the handset back on the charging cradle.
Something had happened to Bernie.
Bernie Winston, Helen reminded her soggy brain, Betty Winston’s husband. He was Clara’s brother-in-law who used to work in the coal industry, the one with Alzheimer’s who’d been a mainstay in River Bend gossip these past weeks. If talk wasn’t about the flood or Luann Dupree running off with her lover, folks were gabbing about glimpsing Bernie standing in the window of his house in his underpants or slipping out and turning up in a neighbor’s backyard, sitting on a patio chair.
Helen found herself wondering if Bernie had managed to find the car keys that Betty had reportedly hidden away and had driven into someone or something. That had always been one of Clara’s worst fears.
Oh, dear.
Her adrenaline kicked in.
She threw off the covers and raced to her bureau then pulled open drawers to retrieve socks, bra, and T-shirt. She shrugged out of her nightgown, dressed quickly, and grabbed yesterday’s warm-up suit from the bench at the end of her bed. She raced to the bathroom to brush teeth and splash water on her face.
All the while Amber sat in the hallway, silently watching and waiting, his tail doing an anxious tic.
“I’ll open a can when I get back!” she assured him, knowing he’d hardly starve in her absence since she always left a bowl of dry food on the kitchen floor.
She had to leave by the back door, as the creek had spilled over onto Jersey Avenue the week before. Though the water wasn’t more than ankle-high, Helen had to don her rubber boots every time she left the house. Still, she cut through the side yard and marched upward until she reached Granite Avenue. The asphalt and gravel on that street was still dry.
Helen hurried along the sidewalk, her head down, not glancing at the Victorian cottages on either side of her, simply focused on moving her legs forward and getting to Main Street as fast as she could.
By the time she reached the heart of River Bend—a mere two blocks that composed the tiny downtown—she was breathing hard. Beneath the morning sun, she c
ould see the slick sheen of water that covered the road’s surface. It rippled every time a car drove slowly through it.
Helen looked both ways before crossing the road, wincing at the feel of river mud beneath her boots.
When she flung open the door to Frank Biddle’s office, she spied the sheriff at his desk, hands pumping the air in front of him as if trying to stop traffic.
Standing before him were Clara Foley and her older sister, Betty Winston. Both seemed to be talking at the same time, arms flailing.
They clearly hadn’t heard Helen enter, though she’d come just in time to catch Clara howling, “You must get help and be quick before something bad happens,” while Betty pleaded, “Please, Sheriff, he doesn’t know left from right these days. You have to find him before he gets hurt!”
Be quick before something happens? Find him before he gets hurt?
“What’s going on?” she asked, though she had a feeling she knew what it was, and it wasn’t the car accident she’d imagined.
The sheriff rose from his chair, tenting his fingers on his desk. “Morning, Mrs. Evans,” he said, seeming grateful for the interruption.
Clara and Betty stopped talking at once and turned as Helen approached.
“Oh, Helen,” Clara moaned and hustled toward her, catching her elbow and drawing her near. Clara’s blue eyes were red rimmed and tired. Her broad face frowned, dimpled chin trembling. “Bernie’s wandered off again, and this time we can’t find him,” she blurted out, and Betty let out a whimper. “We’re afraid he’s gotten himself lost in the woods, and with the river rising so fast, who knows what could happen! If he can’t recall how to tie his shoes, how could he remember how to swim if he fell into the harbor or a swollen creek?”
At which point Betty’s mewls became a gut-wrenching sob, and she turned the palest shade of white Helen had ever seen.
“Mrs. Winston, are you all right?” the sheriff said, taking a step nearer. “Should I call Doc Melville?”
“I could fetch him myself,” Helen volunteered because the Melvilles’ place was only a few blocks away.
Come Helen High Water Page 7