“FIND HER!”
Chapter 13
The phone goes dead. She'd suddenly realized she was losing control and had to immediately eliminate the reason, which was me. She also likely awakened Christi with her screaming, and is now being comforted by her. She and Christi are as much alike as are Becky and I.
I close my flip phone, hook it to my belt, and then immediately pull it back out and speed dial Becky’s number. As with the last dozen attempts, I get only her voice mail. She’s good to her word. I expect she’ll turn it on only to use it.
I head out.
I turn North on Highway 93 and follow through Kalispell morning traffic, half looking for a place to eat and half looking for a direction on my search for Becky. I see a sign for Perkins Family Restaurant and turn right onto Highway 2. We have no Perkins Restaurants in Texas, but we ate as a family at one in Oklahoma. It didn’t leave an unpleasant memory, and it’s the only thing I’ve seen so far that wasn’t fast food. It also occurs to me that Becky raved about how she liked it. Maybe there’s a chance she’d show up there. I take her photograph in with me.
The menu is too much, or my mind is too jumbled to focus on it. When the waitress returns with my glass of orange juice I ask about a simple stack of pancakes. She writes that down. “Anything else?” she asks. “Maybe a side of bacon or ham?”
Ham sounds good so I agree to that. I then pull out the picture and show it to her. “I’m searching for my daughter. This is a restaurant she might come to. You wouldn’t happen to have seen her?”
“She ran away, huh. She’s pretty.” She picks up my menu. “Where from?”
“Dallas, Texas.”
“You’ve got the accent.” She walks away.
Less than two minutes later a different waitress—she has a name tag that says Carol—comes by and slides into the booth across from me. “Gail says you’re looking for your little girl.”
I show her the picture.
“How old?”
“Seventeen.”
She reaches across for my napkin, pulls a pen from her pocket, and starts writing on it. “You should call this number. It’s the NCIC. That’s the National Crime Information Center for missing persons.” She shoves the napkin at me. 1-800-THE-LOST is written on it. “You need to get her listed with them.”
I start to say it isn’t that serious, but she yanks the napkin back.
“Oh, and go here.” She writes www.missingkids.com. “That’s the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.”
“She didn’t really run away,” I say. “She decided after her high school graduation that she wanted to explore this area of Montana, and she left without our permission.”
Carol straightens her spine. “You may be in denial. My little girl left when she was seventeen as well, with a vision of making it big in Seattle. I convinced myself that everything was cool and she was doing okay, even though I didn’t hear from her for two years. A month before they found her dead in an alley with a needle in her arm I had gotten a call from her. I found out things in that call that I had never known, the real reasons why she ran away. She didn’t go off on some adventure to see the sites and experience life like I had thought. She ran away because my boyfriend at the time was sexually abusing her, and her father was doing the same thing when she was forced to go visit him as decreed by the courts. After I got past the initial shock of her death, I started piecing together all the clues that were there before she took off. I was in denial. If I had faced it then I would have done something and she wouldn’t be dead now.” Her eyes glisten; despair oozes through her aura. “You’re doing the right thing coming here. Whatever you do, don’t give up. Where is her mother?”
“Home with our youngest daughter. I was the logical one to go.”
“You talk to your wife and figure out why she ran away.” She makes like she’s considering her next words. “I used to be quiet and non-confrontational. Not anymore, so I’m going to say something and I expect you’re not going to like it.” She pushes the napkin back at me. “If there is any chance that the reason your daughter ran away is because of sexual abuse, even if it’s not you, then maybe you’re the wrong person to be here. She may be scared of men. Go home and let her mother come. And if it is you . . .” She slides out of the booth and walks away.
I don’t know what to do now. I was just accused of sexually abusing my daughter and all I did was show a picture. If this Carol wants a confrontation, then I can give it to her. The more I stare at the chicken-scratch on the napkin, the angrier I get; the angrier I get, the more I want to go search her down and read her the riot act. Just then the first waitress, Gail, shows up with my breakfast and drops it hard in front of me.
“What did you say to Carol? She’s in the kitchen bawling her eyes out.”
I pick up Becky’s picture and slide out of the booth. “I didn’t say a damn thing to her. She did all the talking. I feel sorry for what happened to her daughter, but she doesn’t know a damn thing about me or my daughter. She owes me an apology.” I pull a ten out of my wallet, drop it on the table. Gail is simply staring, her mouth hanging open. “My daughter’s name is Becky. She may be going by Reba, or possibly Rebecca. If she comes in and you recognize her, tell her that her father is in Kalispell. Tell her to call me and that maybe, what she came for, we can accomplish together.”
I walk out the door without looking back. I’m angry but I’m trying to grow my compassion for Carol. What would I feel if Becky were to die during her quest? It would be my fault.
By the time I pull onto US Highway 2, my anger is at the situation. I’ve had my ass chewed by my wife and then by a woman who I don’t know, and I haven’t had breakfast yet, not even a cup of coffee. I stop at a drive-up espresso stand and get myself a double white-chocolate mocha. They also have fresh pastries so I grab two of them and pull to the side and park. The mocha and one pastry hit the spot. The second pastry is too much, but I eat it anyway.
“What now, Zechariah?”
I have absolutely no idea where to begin. I was going to go to the sheriff and police, but after the deal with the waitress, I’m not so sure. I don’t want to be accused of being the reason she ran away. The point is she didn’t run away. She decided to take a vacation without permission, to go exploring, to seek an adventure. She said in her note that she had made a friend here. Would this friend have the same desire as she . . . to find Smilodon? She said she was an adult woman.
I start to pull the phone from my belt, to call Tanya and ask if Becky took her computer with her, when it rings. The caller ID says, “Not listed.” I flip it open. “Zach.”
“Sabre-toothed Zach! How the hell are you?”
I recognize his voice only because I was expecting his call. “Things could be a little better, Sheriff. How have you been?”
“Don’t call me sheriff. I was glad to turn that God forsaken—thank you voters—job over to someone else. And if you call me Mister Shwartzberg, I’ll find you and shoot you in the heart.”
“You don’t mince words, do you, Brian.”
“That’s better and no I don’t. So, what brings you back into Montana? You researching another book?”
“It’s more personal than that. I may need your help, or at least some advice and direction.”
“Hmm! Have you had breakfast?”
“Not exactly.” My stomach growls for something more substantial than over-sugared baked dough.
“I don’t like giving advice before breakfast so why don’t you come on out. I’m not cooking so I can guarantee it’ll be good.”
I agree and he gives me directions.
I arrive at a three story colonial sitting on the edge of ninety acres. There’s a huge barn along with several paddocks. There is only one horse in sight. Across from the house is another house under construction. An expanse of two-by-fours defines walls and doorway. Several men are sitting on the half tiled roof drinking from mugs. To the south side of the house that is not under cons
truction is an expanse of lawn and trees, some apple, others I don’t know about. In the sunniest part of the lawn sits a picnic table with a red and white checker table cloth, set for breakfast. I approach it. Brian walks out of the house with a platter of pancakes.
“Zach!” He sets the platter down and grabs my hand. “Damn good to see you.” He pulls me into a hug. “Damn you’re looking good. Did you get a new eye or something?”
I laugh. “It’s acrylic.”
“You’re shit’n me. What kind of doctor can do that?”
“Not a doctor. An Ocular Prosthetist. She’s an artist of artificial eyes.”
“I’ll be hog tied and hung over a burning pit.” He looks past me. “Sharon! This is Zechariah Price. Sabre-toothed Zach. Zach, this is my beautiful wife, Sharon.”
I turn to a tall, busty, well-proportioned blond, who I wouldn’t want to get into a wrestling match with. How I know this last part, I’m not sure. Maybe it’s the ranch-like atmosphere combined with the way she carries herself. I picture a woman who could wrestle a steer to the ground so that someone could stick a red-hot branding iron on it, and then get dressed to compete for Miss Montana, or Mrs. Montana.
There is also a sharp edge to her aura.
“He’s such a clown and a liar.” She walks past with a huge bottle of syrup and a pitcher of orange juice. She places them on the table and extends her hand. “Nice to meet you, Zach. I’ve heard a lot about you. The man who faced down the sabre-toothed cat and saved Brian’s life. You’re a legend in his mind.”
Her handshake adds confirmation to my impression. I firm-up mine to keep from getting my hand crushed. Her voice is light and humorous, but the feelings flowing off of her tell me otherwise. She is not happy to meet me at all and wishes I would go away. She blames me for something I can’t quite get my mind wrapped around. I picture the sizzling branding iron, and her flipping me to the ground. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. . .” She gives me a look that would extinguish Tanya’s. “. . . Sharon.”
She grins. “Have a seat. We’re about ready. Matt will be out with the eggs in a second.”
The table is set for four. Brian is already pulling pancakes onto a plate. “Pick a place to squat and dig in.” I sit across from him and select two pancakes. He pours juice. A young man exits the house with a platter of eggs. Brian makes a place for the platter. “Zach, this is our youngest, Matt. Matt, this is Sabre-toothed Zach.”
Matt extends his hand. “Dad’s kidding, right? You’re not Sabre-toothed Zach. He only has one eye.”
“I’m not kidding, Matt,” Brian says. “He saved my life after I tried to arrest him.”
I point to my right eye. “This one is fake.”
With absolutely no shyness he steps up close and peers at both of my eyes. “This one’s a bit red. The other is too perfect. Amazing.” He sits down next to me, across from his mother who has been spreading jam on toast. “Wow!” He looks between his father and me. Questions are flowing off of him in little vignettes, but he says nothing.
“Since I know you’re going to ask, we have two other boys. Matt here was a surprise, following his brothers by ten years. Sharon wasn’t supposed to be able to have kids again after Kevin and Karl were born. They were big, scrapping twins who gave her a devil of a time on the way out. They’ll be thirty come December. Kevin is married and living in Missoula. He’s a firefighter, with a degree in forest management or some such thing. They’ve given us one granddaughter.”
“That’s wonderful,” I say. “We’re still a few years—quite a few I hope—from grandchildren. Becky just turned seventeen. Christi is fourteen.”
“I hear girls are easier until they turn teenagers.”
“You’ve heard it right.”
“I don’t have to budget in weddings,” Brian adds.
“I’m secretly hoping they elope,” I say. “It’s either a wedding or a year of college.”
“College! Let's not even get into that. We’ve got two down. Matt here is about to enter his second year at MSU in Bozeman.”
“Montana State?” I look at Matt. “What’re you majoring in?”
“I want to be a large animal veterinarian like Mom.”
“What does that mean? Like elephants and rhinos?”
Matt and Brian laugh. “Horses, cattle, swine,” Matt clarifies.
I lift my eyebrows. I’m impressed both with Matt and the fact that the woman sitting with us is a vet. I think that would have been my last guess, or maybe after the handshake my second guess, following trail boss on a 2000 mile cattle drive. “What about your other son, Karl?”
“He’s a software engineer working for Microsoft in Seattle. He’s threatened to get married three times to the same woman.” Brian looks at his wife. “Is he engaged right now?”
“I don’t think so,” she says from the newspaper she’s not really reading. Her mind has been continuously with our conversation. “I’ll worry about it when we get an actual invitation.”
She’s lying. I know this for two reasons. One, she’s a mother. It’s her job to worry about her sons whether she wants to or not. Two, her concerns are evident in my psychic mind. She is also trying to convince herself she’s not lying.
“Yeah, he is,” Matt says. “I talked to him last night on chat.”
“Okay, four times,” Brian corrects.
Sharon’s head comes out of her newspaper. This is certainly news to her, and she doesn’t like it. She wants him to move on and find a woman who he truly deserves, not this bimbo—her thoughts, not mine. She returns to her newspaper. She’s going to call him right after breakfast. Matt excuses himself, taking the empty platters with him.
Brian stands with his coffee mug. “Did you see our new construction?”
I stand and follow him to the driveway where we can look at the skeleton building and the crew on top shooting staples into the shingles. A fork lift is lifting a pallet of shingles.
“This will be Sharon and Matt’s new animal hospital. We’re hoping to have it open by the first snow.” We watch for a time, and then he says, “Advice and direction.”
“Pardon?” I don’t read him very well at all. Maybe it’s all those years in law enforcement, where he had to maintain a stone face. To maintain a stone face, one has to maintain a stone mind, and often a stone heart. I don’t know about a stone heart, but Brian is guarded.
“You said you called me for advice and direction,” Brian says. “That tells me you aren’t making just a social call.”
“My daughter, Becky, decided that she wanted to vacation in Montana.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” he says.
“By herself. She took off in the middle of the night, leaving only a note.”
“Running away?”
I shake my head. “No. Not quite that simple.” Brian does not know about my special talents. I share that information only on a need-to-know basis. To be truthful, the only people who know, outside of Tanya and Becky, are an FBI agent, and the late Aileen Bravelli. She was taken by the cats while I was busy ripping my eyeball out with a stick. She was also the only person I had ever met, before Becky, who shared some of my talents. “She has taken on a fascination for the sabre-toothed cat. She wanted to come here and prove to herself that they actually exist, that her father hasn’t been packing around a bag of lies.”
“Hmm! A quest of sorts.” He turns from the construction and we walk toward the paddock. The lone horse trots toward us as we approach. “A dangerous quest. Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“Only that she’d go to where my story last placed them.”
“The ruins of Sans Sanssabre.”
“The area around there. First, though, I think she was hooking up with a friend she made on the Internet.”
“From around here? Kalispell or there abouts?”
“Probably.”
“She’s not alone in her quest, then.”
“I don’t think so.
He leans on the fence and t
he horse nuzzles his hand. “What kind of advice and direction you looking for?”
Somewhere nearby a diesel truck starts up. “Don’t know, to be truthful. The friend she made is not her age, an adult, her note said. She’s always been athletic and has never hung out with the partying and drinking types. I expect she would do the same here if she made more friends, and I’d have to assume they’d have the same thoughts as she, to find the elusive big foot of the cat world. I guess one question would be are there any groups around here still searching for the sabre-toothed cat?”
Brian pokes his tongue around in his mouth as though trying to dislodge a piece of food. “Could be, I imagine.”
“Brian!”
We turn to Sharon walking toward us. She stops. “Got a call. Be back in a couple hours.”
“Okay. Matt and I are going up to that meeting at Sam’s in a bit,” Brian says.
She eyes me briefly and then looks at Brian. “Thought you weren’t getting involved in that anymore? Wish you wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, well . . . you know.”
One more look at me and then she turns and walks away.
“She’s on call today,” he says to me as she approaches a huge three-stall garage. “There are two doctors. She normally works Tuesday through Saturday. She’s off on Sunday except for emergencies. Mondays she’s on call if the other vet can’t get to something. He must be busy today.”
“Ah,” I nod. A Ford F-350 diesel with a dual cab and the longest bed I’ve ever seen pulls straight out of the garage. We walk through the barn and past a fifth-wheel horse trailer parked in the center. In a stall is a mare with her colt. The colt is nursing. The mare gives me an evil-like eye. “She doesn’t like me,” I say.
He looks at the horse. “You mean Sharon?” His voice is a question, but not a denial.
“She doesn’t approve of my being here, or of me at all.”
“Where do you get that idea?”
“Just a feeling. I’m rather sensitive to people’s moods.”
“You must be.”
“She also doesn’t like your son’s girl friend, now on their fourth engagement.”
Sabre-Toothed Cat Trilogy Page 45