Sticks and Stones

by Michael Hiebert

  Leah stared at the floor, slowly shaking her head. She opened her mouth, but no words came out. It was like she had lost the ability to speak. After a moment, when she finally managed to say anything, the words came out in a squeak. “She went to the store. Said she’d only be thirty minutes.” Her eyes rose up to meet Dan’s. “That was pretty near an hour ago.” No matter how much she fought against it, Leah couldn’t keep the image of Samantha Hughes from popping into her mind, except instead of seeing the woman’s face on that staked, twisted body, she saw Caroline’s. And instead of being stuck in the clay on the edge of the Anikawa, Caroline was staked to the damp trails running maze-like throughout Cherry Park Forest. Staked and twisted with a big 9 mm bullet hole in the back of her head. Leah trembled all over. Her fingers began to twitch. She couldn’t hold it together much longer. “I . . . I have to go find my daughter,” she said in a whisper.

  Dan moved closer, but she held up her palm, telling him to stay put. If he hugged her now, she would lose it for certain.

  “Dammit, I knew it was Tommy,” she whispered. “Why didn’t I bring him in earlier today?”

  She saw Dan swallow. “Don’t start with the shoulda, woulda, couldas. Not now. Now you need to focus,” he said.

  She stared into his eyes, looking at him washed out from her tears. “I knew it, Dan. I knew Tommy Stork was our killer. I think he was always the Stickman, even fifteen years ago. He’s . . . he’s got schizophrenia and . . . and from what I gathered from his pa, some sort of multiple personality disorder. I don’t know why he’s . . . and last night . . . we both knew he fit perfectly into the timeline. Why the hell didn’t we—”

  Dan shushed her and wrapped her in a hug. “No!” she said, pulling free. “I have to go pick up my baby. He won’t have gotten her yet. She’s still fine.”

  “We have to call Chris and Ethan in,” Dan said.

  “You call them. I’m goin’ to get my daughter.”

  “You can’t drive. You’re way too upset.”

  “Dan!” she said, firmly. “I’m goin’. You’re staying here and calling Chris and Ethan. I’m goin’ to look for my daughter!”

  Dan held up his palms in surrender.

  Leah exited the station, leaving the door open behind her. Jumping behind the wheel, she slammed the car door closed behind her. A second later, her tires spun, squealing on the still sun-warm asphalt as she pulled out onto Main Street and made a U-turn back toward Hunter Road beneath a velvet field of starlight.

  CHAPTER 56

  Leah drove down Hunter Road and up Main Street and then backtracked to Cottonwood Lane. For near on thirty minutes she searched the area around Mr. Harrison’s Five-and-Dime, going back and forth over the path Caroline would’ve taken to get there. She kept jumping at shadows in the night. Every time she turned a corner, her headlights would sweep across something like a tree or a telephone pole and Leah’s heart would leap, thinking for sure it was Caroline. But it wasn’t. Three times she did the circuit before Leah finally resigned herself to the fact that her daughter was missing.

  Chris had already radioed her twice. He and Ethan had made it in to the station ten or fifteen minutes ago. From what she knew, the three of them—Dan, Chris, and Ethan—were on their way to Tommy Stork’s.

  Leah had already told Dan her theory about the barn across the street from Stork’s house possibly being a good bet on the primary crime scene. That was, if it really was abandoned. From where she stood, she didn’t know how good of a look she’d gotten at it. She knew what it looked like in her memory, but she also knew how deceiving that could be.

  On so many levels.

  “Christ,” she said to herself. “We should’ve just gone and checked out that barn then.” They’d had two hours to wait for that six o’clock call to come in at eight-twenty or whatever the hell time it was.

  Goddammit, Chuck. If you’d have called when you were supposed to, we’d have Tommy at the station being interviewed right now and Caroline would be safe and sound in front of that television.

  Chris radioed again to tell her they had made it to Tommy’s shack on Rodman Road. Tommy didn’t answer his door, so they went in anyway. Leah guessed Ethan likely booted the door down, unless Chris had the battering ram in his squad car. Chris told her the house was empty and nothing seemed disturbed. That was when Leah reminded them of the barn across the street.

  “I’m heading up now,” Leah said. “I shouldn’t be more than ten or fifteen minutes.” She struggled with wanting to tell them to wait for her. This was her daughter. She should be the one to save her. But yet...

  “We can handle this, Leah.” Chris said.

  “I think . . . I don’t know, Chris. Do what you can. Just . . . be safe. And find Caroline.” She still wished they were all there. Who knew what that place looked like inside? It might be a death trap. Not only that, but—“Tommy might not be working alone,” she said, thinking of the two MOs for the Stickman and the Strangler that Dan had put at the end of his adjusted timeline. Two personalities. Two people? Or one very messed-up person?

  When she’d stumbled through this with Chris, he’d finally stopped her and told her they would start looking up and down Rodman Road. He told her not to worry. They would find the primary scene. They would make sure nothing happened to her daughter. And, he insisted, if she stopped talking and just started driving, she’d be there already.

  “Okay,” she said right before ending the call. “I’m turning on to Rodman now. Just have to come up and around. There’s no GD streetlights up here. Makes it hard to go over seventy.”

  Dan came on the radio. “Seventy? Are you nuts? Leah, slow down. We want everyone to live through this.”

  She shook her head. Doesn’t he get it? Sometimes he could make her so mad. “Tell Chris I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

  “Got it,” Dan said. “And Leah, listen. We’re goin’ to find her. She’s goin’ to be okay.”

  Leah hung the microphone back on the radio, thinking, Don’t make promises you can’t keep. Her mind began filling with memories of all the different times she’d told parents or spouses exactly what Dan had just said to her. Don’t worry. It’s all going to be fine. I’ll find her. I’ll bring her home safely. Of course, sometimes she did, but not always. And when she didn’t, when those loved ones either showed up dead or didn’t show up at all, Leah had to somehow face those same people she’d made those promises to and tell them she’d lied. She hadn’t been able to keep their babies safe.

  This time, it was her baby, and Dan had just said exactly what she’d said all those times when she’d been wrong. Those times when she’d lied.

  The tears came again, streaming down her face. Without Dan watching, she didn’t feel compelled to hold them back. She turned and started toward Tommy Stork’s house, feeling overwhelmed and empty. Lost.

  “You can do this,” she said to herself. “And you will.”

  The clock on her dash read 9:25 P.M.

  Rodman Road twisted abruptly to the left and began a slow arc past farmland and ranch land. Leah knew Tommy Stork lived about three-quarters of the way to the end of the road, where it joined up with Pineview Drive. She couldn’t be more than five minutes away at the speed she was going. One thing was for sure: She was happy all that rain had stopped so she didn’t have to worry about hydroplaning at seventy miles per hour.

  As she drove, Leah’s mind drifted through her interview weeks ago with Tommy Stork. She analyzed every word she could remember him saying, trying to remember if there was any hint of where he might be hiding Caroline if her guess about the barn turned out to be wrong. But the more she thought, the more she panicked, and the more everything just sort of galloped away from her like a wild horse heading over a hill.

  Always, it came back to that image of Caroline staked in the forest with a bullet hole in the back of her head.

  Leah pounded the steering wheel. “No! No! No!”

  Then she thought about the list of the thirty-nin
e suspects she’d gotten from Grell, and once again there was that feeling, as if she was missing something. She’d looked at that thing so much she had practically memorized every name, but still she hadn’t figured out what tugged at her about it. The folded list was still in her front pocket.

  She came up the gentle rise and, under the light of the half-moon and the twisted band of stars twinkling far above the road, she could pretty much see where Stork’s shotgun shack probably stood on the edge of the road another four or five miles away in this land of nothing but fields and farmhouses and tractors and hay bales and the edges of forests way off in the distance. One farmhouse had a single, solitary light on outside. No lights in the windows. It looked frightened, waiting for its people to come home.

  What she could make out perfectly was the ominous sight of the barn she’d snuck a look at that day she’d interviewed Tommy. It slowly rose on the horizon against a backdrop of constellations as she came up the gentle hill, growing more ominous as it grew taller. The yellow moon shone onto the structure’s wood, making it look far darker and far more gray than she remembered it being. Now it was almost black and possibly charred. Either it was the light of this weird night, or the barn may have been in a fire. From where she was, the wood around the entranceway looked crusted, and the doors stood at obvious angles to their hinges.

  They were, however, closed, and from what Leah thought she could see under the light of all the little stars, they were tied shut with either a rope or a chain. Or it could just be a shadow. Above them, the door of the hayloft hung open, and as Leah got closer, she could even make out a small heap of scattered hay in the moon’s white and bone-like light. It looked like it wanted to escape out the mouth of that door. That grass must be older and drier than a Kentucky sand weevil, Leah thought.

  Now that she was closer, there could be no mistake. Fire had wrought the damage to that barn. Destroyed the sheathing. It was no longer in use, as Leah had suspected. Probably had been abandoned for years. The scraped wooden doors looked like a mouth with a cyclopean loft for an eye. And, to Leah, that mouth shouted out in pain.

  Could her daughter really be tied up inside that building? Was she even still alive? Leah shivered and pulled her attention back to the road. She didn’t want to think about Caroline being anywhere near that barn. Especially not on a dead, dark night like tonight.

  She had moved to slow, and sickness filled Leah’s stomach. She felt like she might vomit. If it wasn’t for her, Caroline would have been safe. But the Stickman wanted things to be as personal as possible.

  Dammit. You knew it was Tommy. You knew.

  She unclipped the microphone from her car radio and called for Chris, hoping to God he and Ethan weren’t out of his car already searching on foot.

  “Chris, you there? Chris? Chris, it’s Leah?” She wanted to tell him she was there. Get them all ready to rush the farmhouse at once. There was a long duration of silence, and then ... nothing. No response.

  “Goddammit!” she screamed.

  Pulling the microphone up by its cord from where she had dropped it onto the car’s floorboard, Leah tried to call again. “Chris! Chris, goddammit. Chris, come in. Are you there? Chris!”

  Just then, the big car phone she had mounted beneath the dash sprang to life. She jumped at the sound of it ringing. Leah put her hand on her chest. “Holy shit,” she whispered, trying to catch her breath.

  She let the microphone to the radio go again and picked up the phone. “Leah Teal,” she said.

  “Hi, ma’am? It’s Jonathon. Sorry to call you on your car phone. I just wanted to—”

  She didn’t hear the rest of what Jonathon said on account of right then her radio started squawking. “Leah! It’s Chris. Sorry, we were out of the car. Just heard you as we were walking back up. Leah?”

  Quickly she scooped up the microphone and started talking. “I’m here.”

  “You’re where?” Chris asked.

  “I’m at Tommy Stork’s,” she said, trying to keep the panic out of her voice. “Well, I’m coming up now. What’s the plan? Any sign of Caroline?”

  “You told us to wait for you, didn’t you?”

  Her brain scrambled for an answer. “Yeah. I did. Okay, I’m right here. I see you.” She clipped the radio’s microphone back in place and picked up the car phone from where she’d laid it on the seat.

  “Hi, Jonathon. Listen, I ... Jonathon? You there?”

  She waited for his voice, but it never came. All she heard was dead air.

  CHAPTER 57

  I watched Jonathon begin to become unhinged as he talked to my mother on the phone. Something was wrong, and from what I could hear, it had something to do with Carry.

  They hadn’t talked long, and now Jonathon just sat there with the phone against his ear, not saying a thing. I didn’t know if my mother was talking or what. It seemed like he was just waiting.

  After about a minute, he put the phone receiver back on its cradle without so much as a good-bye. He turned to me, and I didn’t like what I saw in his eyes at all. They reminded me too much of some eyes I’d seen a couple of years ago. Those ones had belonged to a dead girl.

  “What is it?” I asked quietly. “Are you all right?” My whole body was tense. I felt my calf muscles cramp up like they did when me and Dewey went on long bike rides. “How come you never said good-bye?”

  He swallowed and looked slightly away from me. Like he couldn’t stand to look in my eyes. That scared me more than ever. “It’s . . . it’s . . .” He fumbled for the words.

  “It’s what?” I asked.

  “Your ma was on the radio, talkin’ to Chris.” Jonathon’s voice sounded hollow, like he was at one end of the cardboard tubes that come out of the insides of wrapping paper at Christmastime. Only this was a long tube, and even with my ear pushed right up against my end, I could barely hear him. “I . . . I heard enough,” he murmured.

  “What was she talkin’ to Officer Chris about? What do you mean, you heard enough?”

  “It’s . . . your sis—Carry . . . She’s gone missing.”

  My legs wobbled beneath me. I quickly backed to one of the kitchen chairs and sat down. I figured it was either that or the floor. Staring at Jonathon, I could tell my eyes were wide. All I wanted him to do next was tell me everything would be okay and Carry would be fine and I’d get over my sudden seasickness.

  And when that didn’t come, I felt something else well up inside me. It burned like fire, and I knew what it was on account of it happened just like this near on a year ago when I was out front playing sword fight with Dewey and old Preacher Eli dropped by. That afternoon I’d been so mad I broke my wooden sword over my knee.

  This time I just wanted Jonathon to tell me the truth. All of it. Exactly how he heard it.

  “Tell me what you heard,” I said, my voice sounding muffled on account of it coming out from behind my teeth.

  He was on the sofa with his head in his hands. “I don’t know . . .” he said, and I heard tears in his words and just then I felt bad about being so angry. I hoped he didn’t know I’d got like that. It wasn’t because of him, it was because of all them people in my mother’s files. All those dead people, and for what? It was such a waste. None of them deserved to die.

  And surely my sister didn’t.

  “Tell me what you heard?” I whispered. “Please?” I crawled off the chair and sort of walked over to the sofa on my hands and knees. I touched Jonathon’s shoulder. He still had his head in his hands.

  Jonathon took a big breath, raising his head from his hands. I saw his chest go all the way out and back in again. His eyes drifted to me. “I really don’t know, Abe. But I think Carry’s in trouble. I . . . I’ve gotta go help her.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  Something happened then that had never happened before. As I watched from my vantage point kneeling on the carpet, something sparked in Jonathon’s eyes that I never in a million years thought I’d ever see. I thought I had g
otten angry, but my anger only lasted a minute and it was little kid anger, I could see that now. Because Jonathon’s face—the way it changed—scared me more than I had been scared in an awful long time. And that was saying something. Jonathon had looked away right when the anger hit, but his eyes came back to mine now and that anger was still there, red and fierce, and yet, at the same time, something small and precious, maybe blue and sad, also gripped him.

  I reckon that was the first time in my life I ever fully understood the word tragic. At that moment, Jonathon terrified me.

  He took some deep breaths. When he talked to me again, his calmness was back. “I’m sorry, Abe. Look, I honestly don’t know any more than you do about what’s goin’ on. As soon as I do, you’ll be the first to know.” He put his hand on my shoulder. “Capiche?”

  I shrugged. “Sure,” I said sadly. I didn’t even bother to ask him what capiche meant.

  Jonathon ran through the house to Carry’s room, where he changed out of his pajama pants and into the shorts he’d been wearing earlier in record time. I never saw him act like this before. Ever.

  He sat on a dining room chair, putting on his shoes. I’d never understand people who did up their laces. Just seemed like a waste of time and energy.

  Jonathon looked up after putting on shoe number one. He clutched my upper arm. “Abe, listen. Do you have a phone book? The White Pages?”

  “What for?” I asked. I knew we had a phone book, but I had no idea where it might be.

  For a moment I thought he was going to get angry again. I even flinched, but he caught himself. “Hey, hey . . .” he said. “It’s okay. I’m okay now. Listen, I overheard your ma saying something to Chris about them having to get to some guy named Tommy Stork. I’m sure that’s what she said. My guess is that they think he’s got her. I really have to get there to help. So I’ll ask you again. Do you have a phone book?” He spoke that last sentence really slowly.

  I felt my eyes go wide as saucers at this news. “Tommy Stork’s the Stickman?” I asked, hearin’ my own excitement in my voice. I felt bad right away for gettin’ worked up over somethin’ when Carry was in such danger.