“Tinkie!” I called a bit louder. “Sweetie Pie! Pluto!” Calling the pets was a long shot because they often ignored me in the best of circumstances. To my shock, Pluto came out of the trees and joined me on the road. He curled around my ankles and bit at my knees.
“Where the hell is Tinkie?”
He started into the woods. Trusting his ability to navigate the darkness better than I could, I followed. As we wound our way through the trees, I grew more and more concerned. Tinkie wasn’t the kind of woman to take off through the underbrush in the dead of a winter night. She was wearing dress boots, not real boots. She didn’t have a weapon or a light. And why would she willingly fumble into a place where tree limbs poked at my eyes and tore at my clothes and hair? Tinkie was not a fan of the windswept or twig-swept look.
I stopped to get my bearings. The trees were so thick I lost sight of the dim lights that had marked a few of the houses down the road. Even the sound of the river water gently lapping the bank was gone. It was as if I’d stepped under a glass bowl where I was disconnected from everything except my immediate surroundings.
Using my flashlight as little as possible, I eased forward. Where in the world were Tinkie and the pets? Now even Pluto was AWOL.
Far in the distance I heard the sound of music. I recognized the Christmas ballet I’d always loved. What was going on? Where was my friend? I felt the pressure of panic pushing at me. I stepped forward in the darkness and came to an abrupt stop. Someone was in my path. I clicked on the flashlight to reveal an older man, who I knew instantly as Uncle Drosselmeyer. The man with the magic in The Nutcracker ballet.
All around me, the beautiful melody of the ballet came from the trees and limbs and branches, and Uncle Drosselmeyer began to dance. The leaves of the trees reflected a soft, diffused light that illuminated the woodland clearing in a mystical glowing orb of light. From behind the tree trunks, animated toys came into view. They joined in the dance with the great magician of the ballet. I thought back over my day to be sure I hadn’t ingested any hallucinogens. What I saw right in front of me wasn’t possible, yet I was seeing it. The toys and snowflakes danced to the lovely music, and Drosselmeyer, who was a fine figure of a muscular and lithe man, danced and leaped and whirled with such grace I was breathless just watching.
Drosselmeyer danced toward me and unveiled the nutcracker toy. He jetéed around a large oak tree and then rested the nutcracker in a nook of roots. I was transfixed with the agility of the dancer. At last I thought to pull out my phone and record what was happening. Just as I did so, Uncle Drosselmeyer began to change. Slowly, the dancer turned into someone I was far more familiar with, even if it was almost as impossible. Jitty, disguised as a beloved member of the ballet troupe, had followed me into the woods of Tallahatchie County.
With one magnificent grand jeté, Jitty twirled and faced me. Unsurprisingly, my phone camera had captured only blank darkness.
“What are you doing here in the woods?” I whispered because, in my heart of hearts, I hoped Tinkie was close by.
“You have to believe, Sarah Booth.” Jitty unbuttoned the top of her suit coat. “That’s your problem. You really don’t believe. Christmas is all about believing.”
“I have to believe in Santa Claus to find my friend and my pets?” Annoyance was clear in my tone.
“You have to believe in yourself, and in the power of the season.”
“Bull crap.” I had a missing pregnant woman and another missing mother and child. I was in the middle of the bitter-cold woods, unable to find my partner or critters. This wasn’t a time to lecture me on believing in magic or Christmas characters. Next she’d be after me to find Rudolph to light my way home with his red nose.
“Do you believe the nutcracker came to life?” Jitty asked. Her costume had begun to disappear and she was no longer the dancer, but Jitty, the haint of Dahlia House wearing my favorite jeans and green Christmas sweater.
“It’s a ballet. It’s fantastic and wonderful, but it is a stage production.”
“Am I real?” Jitty asked.
I had the good sense to stop the first answer that bubbled to my lips. “You’re very real to me.” I’d almost said she wasn’t, and a deep vein of fear opened up at what might have happened if I’d said that. Would she have disappeared? Would I be left at Dahlia House without Jitty, my friend, protector, and connection to the Great Beyond, where most of my family resided?
“And if you tried to tell someone about me, would they believe you?”
That was a tougher question. “They would want to believe me.” But I knew Tinkie would think I’d fabricated a means of communicating with my dead parents. And Cece would think that I’d opened the door to a subconscious desire made manifest. Madame Tomeeka is the only one who might believe me. She was hooked into the spirit world in a way that was much stronger than I was. But could she believe that I lived with the ghost of my great-great-great-grandmother’s dead nanny who’d been a slave and best friend? I couldn’t answer that.
“But would they believe?” Jitty pressed.
“They would try. And each one might come to believe in his or her own way.”
“The ability to believe in the unbelievable is what makes life magical,” Jitty said. “Without belief, your Granny Alice and I would have opted for a suicide pact. We had to believe that the sweet potatoes would make, and the okra, and that somehow, the two of us could scratch out enough food to feed the chil’ren and ourselves through the winter.”
“She couldn’t have made it without you, Jitty.” I’d thought many times that I didn’t have the grit of my Grandmother Alice or Jitty, or even of my parents, who’d stood up to injustice in a very public way.
“She couldn’t have made it without believing that the future would be kinder than the present. That we could somehow figure it out and manage to keep body and soul together. We believed, Sarah Booth. Else we would have given up.”
“You believed in your own abilities to do whatever was necessary. That’s different than believing in Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.”
“Is it?” Jitty did a quick and deft plié, letting me know that even in my jeans she could cut a fine figure on a stage.
I thought about her question. Really thought. Was it so different? Was self-sufficiency a more solid belief than in a mythical figure? “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Believing in magic is very powerful.”
“And you just made my point, girlfriend!” Jitty held up a hand to high-five. She was done with classical ballet and rational thought. She’d one-upped me in the logic department and she wasn’t interested in further debate.
“Make-believe won’t keep Eve and her baby safe or help me find Tinkie.”
Jitty sighed. “Call her.”
“What?”
“Whip out that cell phone you love so much and call Tinkie. And, just so you know, twenty years ago few folks on the planet would have believed you could carry a phone in your pocket and dial a friend from almost anywhere in the U.S. of A. Now I have work to do.”
Leaps and twirls took her to the edge of the woods, where she turned. “You’ll come around, Sarah Booth. I know it.” There was a burst of giggling from the animated mice and toys, a flash of the soft lights from the fluttering tree leaves, and then Jitty was gone.
The cell phone in my pocket rang.
“Where the hell are you?” Tinkie asked, more than a little annoyed.
“I could ask you the same. I’ve been trudging through the woods looking for you.”
“I’m standing in the road right where I’ve been for the last half hour, waiting for you. Not a single car has passed and the tall man hasn’t left his home. Good thing one of us is doing our jobs!”
I noted her sarcasm and chose to ignore it. The sequence of events didn’t make any sense at all. Tinkie hadn’t been on the road. She’d disappeared into the woods first, which was why Pluto had followed her in, and I’d followed Pluto. “I’ll be right there.” I backtracked and
found myself on the rutted road in front of the cabin where the tall man lived. The dim lights of houses scattered down the road were easily viewed. The woods were not as thick as the grove I’d just left. I walked fifty yards down the road and found Tinkie standing with the dogs and Pluto. “Did you ever leave the road?” I asked.
“Are you a fool? There could be alligators in those woods,” she said.
“Or worse. Ballet dancers.”
She looked at me like I’d lost my mind, which I likely had. “So are we going on down the road to interview people or have you decided to play Hansel and Gretel in the woods?”
Her question gave me pause. “I’m going to find Eve and her baby. I believe they’re okay.”
Tinkie put a hand on my forehead to check for a fever. “Are you okay?”
“I’m better than I’ve been in several days. We’re going to find her, Tinkie. I know we are. Christmas is the season of miracles, and we’re overdue.”
Tinkie knelt down by Sweetie Pie and Chablis. “I don’t know what’s going on with Sarah Booth, but let’s roll with it, okay? She’s so much pleasanter when she’s in a positive mood.”
Sweetie Pie barked twice, as if agreeing. My own hound dog was betraying me.
“Let’s head down the road.” I started walking fast, knowing the pace would prevent Tinkie from talking too much. “Here.” I handed her the gun. She was a better shot.
“You think I’ll need to plug someone?”
“You sound like you’d like that.” Sometimes Tinkie’s bloody streak surprised me.
“I would, if it’s the person who abducted Eve.”
“Just as long as we have a plan,” I said sarcastically.
“Tomorrow is Christmas Eve,” Tinkie said.
She was correct, but that was the date set for Eve’s delivery. “We need to find her.” I couldn’t help the feeling that time was running out for us. It was harder to believe in Christmas miracles when the stakes were so high.
We knocked on the doors of several more houses and ended up with no information to help us. Some of the homes were empty—the occupants out for the evening.
“Let’s head back to that roadhouse,” I said. “This is getting us nowhere fast.”
“I agree,” Tinkie said. “You need a drink.”
I pulled out the phone and called Cece to join us.
“I have news,” she said. “I’ll tell you when I see you.”
Before I could respond, she hung up. I relayed the information to Tinkie. “Is it good news or bad news?” Tinkie asked.
“We’ll know soon enough.”
11
Tinkie and I bellied up to the bar at the roadhouse and I ordered Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. Tinkie opted for the same. Best to keep the drink orders easy and simple. We’d left the pups and cat in the car, snuggled into a warm comforter. We wouldn’t be long in Odell’s, but we needed to meet with Cece.
Tinkie was what a lot of men considered “fun sized” because she was petite, so I kept a wary eye out for anyone who might give us trouble. Normally no one had an interest in us, but we were strangers in this bar, and it was a lively place with pool tables, loud music on the juke-box, and more single men than women. We sipped our drinks and huddled together, talking about the case.
“Where did you go, Sarah Booth?” Tinkie asked. “You acted like you were lost.”
How I wanted to tell her about Jitty and Uncle Drosselmeyer. But I couldn’t. Jitty’s lecture on believing in my own abilities had given me renewed hope that I desperately wanted to share with Tinkie, but how to explain that I was haunted by a woman dead for one hundred and fifty years who’d appeared as a fictional character from a Russian ballet. It was impossible to explain. So I told a half truth. “I thought I heard something in the woods and I got turned around.”
“That strip of woods is only about forty yards wide.” Tinkie didn’t believe a word of what I was saying.
I shrugged. “I don’t know how it happened. I’m just glad we’re back in civilization.”
“That’s a questionable assertion.” Tinkie tucked in closer to me as a big guy stopped at her elbow.
“Care to dance, ma’am?” he asked.
I nudged her. “Go on and dance. It’ll help pass the time.”
She cast a murderous glare at me and headed to the dance floor. It was a quick two-step and the man was a fine dancer. In a moment, Tinkie’s reservations had blown out the front door and she was having the time of her life. Any woman knows a strong lead makes dancing fun. This guy was good at leading and Tinkie was light on her feet. He had her spinning, whirling, and moving from the dancer’s frame to side-by-side and back. They were fun to watch.
“Ma’am, would you like to dance?” I looked up to find a green-eyed cowboy holding out his hand.
“Sure. I’m not as good a dancer as my friend, but I do like to dance.”
We hit the floor and in a moment the fast pace of the song had all of my concentration on not stomping his feet. At the end of the tune, our partners returned us to the bar with a gentlemanly “thank you.”
We danced three songs before the door of the bar swung open and a face I recognized entered the establishment. Two faces. Curtis and Matilda Bromley took one look at us and froze like ’possums in the headlights of a car. It wasn’t just that they hadn’t expected to see us—it was something else. They reeked of guilt.
I waved them over to the bar. “Let’s get a table,” I said, ignoring the obvious signs that they preferred not to talk to us.
Tinkie cleared up our bar tab as we found a table in a corner. “This is perfect. We can talk. My partner and I have some questions.” Suddenly the Bromleys were not the innocent good Samaritans that I’d first thought them to be. They’d found Eve’s purse and called Cece—what I’d assumed to be an act of compassion. Now I had a far darker motivation assigned to their actions.
“What are you doing at Odell’s?” Curtis asked, trying not to make it sound accusatory and failing completely.
“Oh, we’re looking for someone,” I said.
“Yeah, that Falcon girl,” Matilda said. “We haven’t seen her.”
“Have you seen Dara Peterson?” Tinkie asked, a quick thrust of her interrogation skills.
“Wh-who?” Matilda asked. The color left her face.
“We know all about it,” I said. “In fact, we were just about to call the law.”
“For what?” Curtis quickly grew belligerent. “We haven’t done anything wrong except try to keep Ms. Falcon from worrying about her relative.”
“Where is Eve?” I asked.
“If I knew that, I’d take you there.” Matilda kept her gaze leveled at mine. “I mean it. I don’t know where she is.”
“But you do know something.” It wasn’t a question.
“She was alive when we saw her,” Matilda said. “We should have just come out and said it instead of planting the purse and trying to pretend we didn’t know. She was perfectly fine. She got in the boat and went upriver.”
“Who was she with?” Tinkie almost jumped across the table.
“I didn’t know the people. Honestly.” Matilda was still holding my gaze.
“Did you speak to her?” I asked.
She nodded. “She was very pregnant and I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to be getting into a small boat. I asked her if she needed help and she said no, she was fine. There was nothing else I could do. She dropped that purse and it wasn’t an accident. I did what I thought she wanted—got in touch with her kin.”
“You can tell us who has her.” Tinkie cut to the chase. “If anything happens to her or that baby, you’re going to be charged as an accessory.”
For the first time, Matilda’s gaze faltered, and my heart sank. Did she know that something terrible had already happened to Eve? She’d never tell me, no matter how long I questioned her. “All we want is to find Eve and know she’s safe.”
“I don’t know where she is, but I do believe she’
s safe.” Matilda punched Curtis on the shoulder when he tried to stop her from speaking. “They know we know.” She turned back to me. “She’s okay. Pay the money and get this over with.”
“Has she had the baby? It’s due tomorrow.” Tinkie grasped Matilda’s hand. “Just tell us.”
“No. She hasn’t delivered and she isn’t in labor. But she wants to get back to her life. Just pay the ransom and put an end to it.”
“Cece has the money,” I said. “We’re waiting for instructions to make the drop. If you want to wait here, Cece is on the way. She can bring the money right now. We just want this to be over.” I wondered how deep they were in this.
“We aren’t touching any money,” Curtis said. “None. We don’t have anything to do with any of this. We only wanted to try to let you know Eve was safe. We wanted to do a good thing and now you’re threatening us.”
“A good thing would have been to send Eve home. You can’t hold a woman hostage for a ransom and call it a good thing.” I spoke as calmly as I could.
“You call it what you want to call it.” Matilda’s eyes narrowed. “I call it doing a good deed. Now we’re leaving, unless you want to call the police, and I don’t think you want to do that.”
There was a clear warning in her words. “No, we aren’t calling the law,” Tinkie said sharply. “We won’t jeopardize Eve or her baby. But if anything happens to either of them, understand that I’ll be looking for you. And I will find you.”
“When this is over, you can stop by and apologize,” Matilda said stiffly. “Let’s go, Curtis.” They both stood up and walked out the door and into the night.
“We should stop them,” I said, but I didn’t make a move.
“We could follow them. See if they lead us to Eve.”
But we both knew they were smarter than that. We’d made our decision when we let them leave the bar without calling Coleman. They would never lead us to Eve. This was a dead end—except that we now knew Eve was alive and well.
A Gift of Bones--A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery Page 11