“There’s a black market in River Bend?” Helen asked, something Sarah said finally piquing her interest.
“There’s a black market everywhere, thanks to the Internet. I did a lot of research online about it,” Sarah told her. “Plundering is big business these days and lots of stolen artifacts are ending up on eBay.”
Helen thought of the old adage that cheaters never prosper and decided that it was a big fat lie.
“I just need to track down this fake boyfriend of hers. I know he’s responsible. It’s the only thing that makes sense,” Sarah went on, frowning as she drove. “I tried to locate her Facebook page so I could go through her friends list, but it’s really gone. If I could pin down her Mr. Maybe, get even a little information on who he is and where he’s from, there’s a chance I can find him.”
“She never told you anything about him?”
Sarah snorted. “I barely knew he existed before her date. Once in a while she’d drop me a crumb about someone she’d met online who was interested in her work. When she finally told me what was going on and that they were meeting up, I suggested he might be catfishing her. She laughed it off. I wish she hadn’t.”
“What’s catfishing?” Helen asked, because it conjured up images of throwing a line into the river, not dating.
“It’s when folks use social media to pretend to be someone they’re not in order to lure unsuspecting people into relationships.”
“It’s a con game,” Helen said simply.
“Yes.”
Sarah went silent, and Helen wondered if she should say something, remind Sarah that none of this was her fault—whatever this was—but she knew it wouldn’t do a bit of good. Instead she turned to look out the window again.
She took in the rise of the river, the tiny islands in its midst that looked to be drowning, the stalled barge traffic and chunks of debris visible above the ripple of the current. Then the thump of tires on the highway began to lull her, and she closed her eyes.
When next she opened them, an hour had passed, and they were rolling down an exit ramp in Belleville.
As Helen blinked the sleep from her eyes and got her bearings, Sarah guided the Jeep past a host of strips malls and gas stations before reaching an older residential area filled with generous lots, detached garages, and one-story ranches.
“We’re almost there,” Sarah told her.
Helen settled her hands over the purse in her lap, checking out the neighborhood: the plethora of pickup trucks, the roofs with pizza pie–sized satellite dishes, and the oversized dogs barking behind chain-link fences.
Sarah peered over the wheel, quietly counting the numbers painted on the mailboxes until she let out a soft “Aha. This must be it.”
The Jeep stopped at the curb in front of a house that looked tidy enough: neat red brick, black shutters, and a small fenced-in front yard without much in the way of landscaping. A lengthy and very cracked asphalt driveway ran back toward a one-car garage, and a small sign on the gate of the fence very clearly stated: no solicitors. no trespassing.
Sarah popped out of the driver’s side and came around to Helen’s door then waited until she’d gotten out of the car. “You’re coming with me, right?” the sheriff’s wife asked, suddenly timid. “You’re so good with people, talking to them and getting them to open up. I feel like I irritate people sometimes when I don’t mean to.”
You don’t say?
“So you want me to take the lead?”
“Oh, would you?” Sarah smiled nervously. “Frank claims you have a Miss Marple complex. I just think you pay attention more than most.”
Helen laughed. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
She followed the sheriff’s wife as she walked up the broken sidewalk and pushed open the gate, heading toward the covered front stoop. There was an iron railing and posts that had a trellis-like appearance, though the white paint had peeled and the concrete floor had split. Helen figured both were original to the 1950s-era house.
She wondered if Penny Tuttle was original to the house, as well.
Sarah cleared her throat as she rang the doorbell, stepping back to stand beside Helen as she waited for someone to answer.
When no one appeared within a minute or two, she gave Helen a look and pressed the bell again. “Maybe I should have called first,” she said. “Although that would have just warned her off if she had something to do with Luann going missing.”
Helen didn’t bother to remind her that the rest of the town didn’t think Luann was a missing woman so much as a besotted midlifer.
“Perhaps you could leave a note and ask her to call you,” Helen suggested just as she saw movement beyond the storm door.
Sarah scuttled behind Helen, like a scared little girl.
The inner door opened, and a woman stood behind the glass, staring out at them, a most puzzled expression on her face. She had short iron-gray hair and speckled skin. Her button-front dress looked a bit speckled, too. Even the floral pattern couldn’t mask the stains.
Helen thought she looked unwell.
“I’m guessing she’s not a museum curator or appraiser,” Sarah whispered over her shoulder. “She looks like my crazy aunt Thelma.”
Helen shushed her.
The woman leaned near enough to the glass to fog it with her breath as she squinted, like she’d lost her specs. She fumbled about reaching for the door handle but seemed unable to get it open.
When Sarah didn’t react, Helen went forward to help.
She drew the door wide quite easily, and the woman teetered then stumbled out onto the rubber welcome mat, still hanging on to the handle.
“Oh, dear,” Helen said, trying to balance the storm door against her hip and steady the woman at the same time. When she was finally able to get the woman safely out and onto the porch, she let the storm door drop. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to trip you up. You must be Penny Tuttle?”
“Who are you? Did Jackie send you?” the woman asked with the same bewildered look in her eyes. She rubbed her hands down over her hips.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know Jackie. I’m Helen Evans from River Bend, and I’ve come looking for a friend named Luann Dupree. We thought you might have been in touch with her. She had written down your phone number, and she’s been gone awhile, enough so that we’re worried about her—”
“I don’t know you,” the woman said again.
“No, you don’t,” Helen agreed and found herself slowing down her speech and raising her voice, wondering if the woman was hard of hearing. “Do you know a woman named Luann Dupree? We’re wondering if she’s been in touch with you.”
“Dupree . . . Dupree . . . I don’t know Dupree, and I don’t know you,” the woman said, sounding panicked. She quickly turned away, grabbing at the door, letting out a string of curses and batting away Helen’s hand when she offered assistance.
Finally, she made her way back inside. The glass in the storm door shuddered as it clunked closed, the heavier wood door shutting behind it.
Helen didn’t know what else to do. She turned to Sarah, ready to say, “That’s it! We’re done. Can we go now?”
Only Sarah wasn’t there.
For Pete’s sake!
She’d promised not to sneak off, but she wasn’t anywhere that Helen could see from the front stoop. The Jeep sat empty at the curb. Where the heck had she gone?
Helen hurried away from the door, looking this way and that. She spotted a neighbor across the chain-link fence: a heavyset woman with a hard look in her eye.
“Hey, what are you doing over there?” she called to Helen. “You’re not Penny’s regular nurse. What’s going on?”
“We’re just leaving,” she called back, hoping to reassure the woman.
But the neighbor put a phone up to her ear, like she was calling the cops, and Helen didn’t want to stick around to find out if that was what she was doing.
Dang it, Sarah, she thought. Where are you?
Helen crossed
the grass toward the driveway, hurrying around the corner so fast she nearly tripped over a downspout. She spotted Sarah lurking around the garage, peering through the dusty windows.
“Hey!” she called out, because Sarah had gone around toward the side door. “We’ve got to go,” she was saying, watching as Sarah picked up a rock from an overgrown plant bed and raised it, like she was going to break the glass panes. “Stop it!”
Her voice made the sheriff’s wife hesitate, and Helen approached her, breathing hard.
“Put that down!” she demanded.
Reluctantly, Sarah lowered her arm.
“Good God,” she muttered and straightened cockeyed glasses as she looked into Sarah’s flushed face. “What the heck are you doing? I told you, no poking around, and definitely no breaking and entering! Do you want the sheriff to have to bail us out of the St. Clair County lockup?”
Sarah sighed and dropped the rock. “Let’s go,” she said as she started walking toward the Jeep. Helen shook her head and followed.
The woman from across the fence came out of her yard, the phone in her hand. “I’m glad I keep an eye on things next door! Jackie says no one should be here. The nurse came already today. You’re trespassing!” she yelled as Sarah scrambled into the driver’s seat while Helen got into the passenger’s side.
Helen was shaking as she belted herself in, and Sarah turned the engine on and jerked the car away from the curb.
“Just what do you think you were doing?” Helen sputtered, bracing a hand on the dash as Sarah drove through the subdivision faster than the posted speed limit.
“I was looking for clues,” she said, her cheeks a bright red.
“You were about to break the glass on the door!”
“I saw something in the garage, but I couldn’t get in,” Sarah protested. “What else was I supposed to do?”
“Not that!” Helen said and thanked her lucky stars she’d stopped her in time. “Just what did you see that warranted burglary?”
“Evidence,” the sheriff’s wife said, and her eyes took on an odd sparkle.
“You found evidence that Luann was there,” Helen repeated, finding it impossible to hide her sarcasm.
“Yes, as a matter of fact, I did”—Sarah glanced at her sideways—“if you think finding Lu’s car counts.”
Chapter 19
“It’s her car, I know it,” Sarah insisted as they headed back to River Bend. “I’m sure it was a Fiat Spider, though it had a sheet draped across it.”
“If it had a sheet over it, how could you tell?” Helen asked point-blank.
“Well, it was a small car, and it was bright red, just like Lu’s Fiat.” After thinking for a minute, she added, “The rims on her tires were gunmetal, something Lu specially ordered, and there was that little circle of red in the center. They’re hard to miss.”
“Could you see the license plate?” That at least would give the sheriff something concrete to go on.
Sarah’s face fell. “No, the corner of the sheet covered the rear plate. But I caught part of a bumper sticker. Lu has a shovel-shaped one that says ‘I dig history,’ which is yellow. I could see the part that looks like a handle.”
Helen kind of doubted that a description of a small red car with gunmetal rims and a hint of a yellow bumper sticker was enough for the sheriff to get a warrant to search the garage or the house.
“Anything else?”
“Just a gut feeling.” Sarah was quiet for a minute. “Why would she have written down Penny Tuttle’s phone number and stuck it in her book? I was meant to find it. We were meant to come here.”
“Maybe Mrs. Tuttle has her own Fiat Spider. Luann isn’t the only person in Illinois who owns one. For all we know, they could have even been in a car club together, which would be why Luann had her phone number.”
Sarah let her gaze drift from the highway ahead long enough to give Helen a sideways glance. “Lu wasn’t in a car club, and I highly doubt that the confused old woman who came to the door drives a Spider.”
“Point taken,” Helen said before she offered another theory. “If that was Luann’s car—and I’m not saying it is—maybe she sold it before taking off so she’d have more money to travel.”
“Absolutely not! Lu wouldn’t have sold the Fiat for anything. It was her baby. She bought it for herself back when she turned fifty. She told me I’d have to pry her bony fingers from the steering wheel when she passed away.”
“Sometimes people say things they mean at the time, only times change. Perhaps getting into an online relationship made Luann rethink her life,” Helen replied, knowing nothing she could say would convince Sarah she was making a mistake.
Although it seemed Sarah had already moved on to another line of thought.
“If her car’s in Belleville, she’s still in the area. I’m sure of it. I just have to figure out where he’s got her. Do you think she’s a prisoner in Penny Tuttle’s basement chained to a plumbing stack?” Sarah asked and her foot got a little heavy on the gas as they sped back to River Bend.
“You think she’s chained in that old woman’s basement?”
Dear Lord.
Helen leaned back into the headrest, deciding it was futile to argue.
The “find” had only seemed to fuel Sarah’s belief that Luann had been taken and, now, that Penny Tuttle—or someone close to her—had something to do with it.
Helen couldn’t imagine that Mrs. Tuttle had kidnapped anyone.
The woman appeared too frail and out of sorts. Something about that fragile appearance had reminded Helen of Bernie Winston.
As Sarah rattled on, trying to piece together a scenario about Luann’s disappearance that suddenly involved Mrs. Tuttle in Belleville, Helen turned toward the window, staring out at the scenery and listening to the thump of the tires on the River Road.
The noise lulled her, and despite herself, she fell asleep again. She was shaken awake by the Jeep pulling off the highway into tiny Elsah.
Sarah kept silent as they wound through the quaint village and ended up on the back road that would take them to River Bend.
It wasn’t until they’d pulled in front of Helen’s house and Sarah put the car in Park that she resumed her wild deductions.
“The next-door neighbor mentioned someone named Jackie. Maybe it’s this Jackie who took Luann.”
Helen unbuckled her belt, though her stiff fingers slowed her progress. “We don’t even know if Jackie is male or female.”
“It sounds like a nickname.”
“You could try talking to Mrs. Tuttle or her neighbor, instead of picking up rocks to use as sledgehammers.”
“Right!” Sarah hit a hand on the steering wheel. “We have to figure out how the Tuttles are involved in all this.”
Helen hoped that “we” meant Sarah and the sheriff. She wanted nothing further to do with Sarah’s snooping. She had begun to agree with the townsfolk who thought Sarah was grasping at straws and trying to make excuses for the friend who’d dumped her instead of moving on with her life without Luann.
“If I tell Frank about the car, I’m sure he’ll want to help,” Sarah said as Helen reached for the door and let herself out. “Maybe he’ll finally file an official missing-person report on Luann and start investigating.”
“Good luck,” Helen said, uttering a terse good-bye before slamming the door.
She picked her way through the shallow floodwaters, sighing with relief when she reached the porch. As she leaned over to remove her boots, she heard the Jeep slosh through the muck as it pulled away. Once her boots were off, she locked the screen door to deter any more drop-in visitors.
“I’m home!” she trilled as she tugged wide the French doors to the interior.
Amber bounded out full throttle, voicing his displeasure at being cooped inside for so long. He sprang atop a table that had once been a crank washing machine. (Helen had bought it at Agnes’s shop long ago.) Though he couldn’t go beyond the porch, at least from there he co
uld watch the birds flit about and see the creek water spilling into the street, along with the occasional swimming snake that made Helen shudder.
While Amber surveyed the outdoors, Helen made a beeline for the kitchen. She turned the oven to 350 degrees and set about making a tuna casserole. Then she sat down at the dining room table with the crossword from the morning’s paper, which she still hadn’t finished. By the time the oven timer dinged, she had filled in the last squares.
“Nine-letter word for ‘dirty dog,’” she read and easily filled in the missing pieces to form scoundrel.
With that, she set down her purple pen and the folded newsprint, and she dashed into the kitchen to rescue the casserole from the oven. She made herself a pimento-cheese sandwich for dinner, not expecting to be invited to stay when she dropped off the tuna dish with Betty Winston.
She made sure Amber had dinner before she left. Considering it was sardines in shrimp jelly and smelled like the harbor when the water was low, Helen was eager to take off for a while. Cradling the warm casserole in its sleeve, she used her free hand to set the hook lock on the screen door so her fur-child couldn’t paw his way out in her absence. Then she sloshed across Jersey Avenue and crossed to Springfield, trying hard to ignore the moving current of floodwaters in the creek that gurgled onto the bridge beneath her green frog galoshes.
A few friendly souls called out hellos from front porches as she passed. Otherwise, things were their usual calm. There was no crowd gathered in front of Betty and Bernie’s as there had been earlier in the day. In fact, it was so quiet she could hear the rush of the floodwater beyond the homes on the right-hand side of the street.
Come Helen High Water Page 13