“Sarah Booth?”
I didn’t like the winsome tone in her voice. “What?”
“They’re performing The Nutcracker in Memphis. Want to go? We could double date, like back when we were in high school.”
I thought of Jitty. “Sure. I’d like that a lot, if Coleman is game.”
She whipped out her phone. “I’ll get the tickets. It’ll be a wonderful new Christmas tradition, just the four of us.”
I liked that thought.
17
We were prepared for an unwelcome reception when we pulled up at the Bromley’s river cabin. It was so well hidden from the road that had I not been there before, I might have missed it. Tinkie and I parked on the road and walked down the rutted driveway. As we drew closer, we could hear arguing. A young woman’s raised voice came to us.
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re going to jail. All of you will. And it isn’t going to help. Don’t you know that the bastard can go back on his word and refuse at any time?”
We crept up the stairs but before we could hear more, the front door was jerked open and a young woman stepped out on the landing, her face streaked with tears.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked, unwittingly stepping back to let Tinkie and the critters into the cabin. Before we could get into the house I heard the back door slam. Someone had made a quick exit. I waited a moment to see if I could catch a glimpse of who it was coming around the house, but the person never appeared. He or she could have cut around the house in the other direction or through the woods.
“Friends of the family,” I said as I followed behind my crew and stepped into a room I was already familiar with. Someone had gotten the holiday spirit. Now there was a Christmas tree, decorated to the hilt. The young woman closed the door, and I noticed she wore a warm flannel shirt and leggings. She held a plastic container of cereal in her hand. Two toddlers, one a boy about two and the other a younger child of indeterminate gender, played on the floor.
“I’m Tinkie Richmond, and this is Sarah Booth Delaney. We’re looking for Dara Peterson.” I didn’t say it, but I thought I’d found her.
The woman rattled the a plastic container of Cherrios, calling the children over to her. “Why are you looking for Dara?”
“We’ve been concerned for her.”
She eyed us, summing us up. I wondered what she saw when she looked at Tinkie in her beautiful red and black outfit and me in my jeans and a warm jacket. “No one has been concerned about her up to now. Her fairy godmothers have been few and far between. Why the sudden wave of alarm from two women who aren’t her friends?”
“How do you know we aren’t her friends?” Tinkie asked.
“Dara doesn’t have friends like you. People with money. Besides, Mom and Dad would have mentioned you were dropping by. I’m Mariam Bromley Akins.”
I was disappointed that I wasn’t already talking to Dara, but I pressed on. “Where is Dara?” I asked, ignoring her reference to us as unfriends.
“Bite me.” She pointed at the door. “Get out. Now. I don’t know who you are or what you’re up to, but you can leave on your own or I’ll call my husband back in here to throw you out. He hasn’t gone far and he’s already aggravated.”
Tinkie looked at me and shrugged. “Let’s go, Sarah Booth.”
I wasn’t ready to give up so easily, and I was legitimately worried about the young woman. I couldn’t get that bloody kitchen out of my mind. “Is Dara okay? At least tell us that much. We know she was having medical problems, and we’re concerned.” That statement caught the young woman off-guard.
“Dara is fine. What makes you think otherwise?”
“We’re private investigators. There was a lot of blood in the kitchen at her house.”
“We know she just had a baby and there were health problems,” Tinkie said. “I promise you, we only want to help.”
The girl’s eyes filled with tears but she was too angry to cry. “How do you know all of this about my sister? Are you spying on her?”
“We’re actually trying to help her. For real,” Tinkie said, and she stepped closer and put a hand on the young woman’s shoulder. “I don’t know what’s going on, but I know someone is desperate. We can help, if you’ll let us.”
Tinkie’s gesture was sincerely meant in kindness, but I wasn’t certain the young mother would recognize it as such. Somehow, I didn’t think a lot of kindness had fallen to her lot in life. But we did have a firm connection now between the Bromleys and Dara Peterson. That much we’d gained.
The woman sniffled and then turned away to give the Cheerios to the older little boy. “Here, Jeremy, give your sister a snack.” She sobbed quietly before she gathered herself. “No one understands the miracle of a healthy child until they have a sick one.”
As if the child sensed her mother’s distress, the baby toddled toward the young woman, who I could see was near exhaustion. The little girl dragged a very ugly little doll by one leg, its head beating a rhythm on the floor with each step she took. One eye was sightless, but the other was blue glass. Exceedingly creepy. And familiar. Probably from some horror movie.
“First, is Dara okay? There was a lot of blood in her kitchen.” Tinkie spoke softly.
“I know. The sheriff talked to me. Dara is fine. She cut herself on a broken glass. It was her blood. She had to have stitches, but she’s okay.”
I wasn’t certain I was buying her story, but I didn’t interrupt. She seemed more willing to talk than anyone we’d encountered along the river. “Mariam, we’re looking for a missing person. A young pregnant woman about your age. Her name is Eve Falcon.”
She went very still, but only for a second. “I can’t help you.”
“Are you sure?” I tried to be as gentle as Tinkie, but I didn’t have her touch—or her patience.
“Please leave. Now.”
“Mariam, I promise you, we want to help. I don’t know what you know about Eve and her disappearance, but she’s due to give birth any day now. Her cousin Cece is sick with worry. We just want to get her home safely.” Tinkie glanced at me, her brow furrowed. “I heard something outside. Like someone calling out?”
I hadn’t heard anything out of the ordinary. “No.”
“Are you sure?”
The kitchen opened off the living room and Tinkie hurried to the sink, where a window looked out over the woods that grew right up to the back steps. We both scanned the dense greenery below us.
“I don’t see anything,” I said. A back door offered an exit with a small porch and a steep flight of stairs to the ground.
“No one is here except me and my kids. My husband took off out the back door when you arrived,” Mariam said. “You have to leave. Now.”
I joined Tinkie at the window, aware that the height of the cabin gave us a better view into the woods than we’d ever have from ground level. What looked to be a deer trail ran from the back stairs into a dense growth of cypress and scrub oaks.
“Is that a building back in the woods?” Tinkie asked. She was standing on tiptoe.
“Yes, it’s an old woodshed,” Mariam said. “It’s rotting into the ground. Go check it out if you want. It’s filled with spiders, snakes, and cobwebs, not to mention old mattresses and things I wouldn’t touch on a dare. Go right out there and look. Just go.” She pushed us toward the back door. “Please just get out of here.” She opened the back door and Sweetie Pie, Chablis, and Pluto took off down the stairs at breakneck speed.
Tinkie balked. “Look, Mariam, no one cares about the ransom money. Cece is completely willing to pay the ransom, as long as Eve is okay. No one is going to press charges or try to involve the police, if Eve is returned unhurt. I swear that to you. If you know where she is, just tell us. We’ll take her and Cece will still pay the money. She has all of it. The whole hundred and fifty thousand. She won’t bat an eye.”
The color drained from Mariam’s face. “Stupid idjits,” she said under her breath. “Now you
have to leave. Right now. My folks will be back any minute and I don’t want them upset. They let me and my kids come here, and we don’t have anywhere else to go, so you have to leave.” She all but pushed us out the back door.
“If you know who has Eve, tell them the money is irrelevant. We just want her returned safely.” Tinkie pressed her point before the door closed in our faces. “Dammit,” Tinkie said, “that Mariam knows where Eve is. I know it.”
“We can’t force her to tell anything. What we know is that she’s Dara Peterson’s sister, and that Dara has a newborn. This is all connected, and when we figure it out, we’ll be able to find Eve.”
My partner looked at me. “What do Eve and her sibling have to do with Mariam and Dara?” The pieces were there—we just couldn’t put them together.
“We didn’t get anything out of the Bromleys because they weren’t here,” Tinkie said. “And I don’t have a clue how to run them down.”
“We’re here. We need to check out that woodshed. I doubt there’s anything there, but it won’t hurt to look.” I was headed in that direction when my cell phone rang. It was Cece.
“You have to get back here,” Cece said. “Coleman is here at the paper, and he’s asking questions. I know he only wants to help, but if someone sees him here, it won’t matter what I did and didn’t tell him. Please, can you do something?”
She was right. If someone was watching Cece, all they had to see was that Coleman was at her workplace. I checked my watch. Time was running out on us. “Okay, I’ll think of something.” I turned to Tinkie. “Aren’t you helping with the wise men’s costumes? Can you call Coleman right now and tell him to meet you at the church for a fitting or something?”
“Sure.”
“Let me check out that woodshed. Then I’ll take you to the church.” I ran around back and plowed through the underbrush until I came to a clearing. The woodshed was as Mariam had described it. Part of the roof was caving in. There was no sign of life, and no electric lines ran to the shed. Without power to heat the interior, it was uninhabitable. The only thing that gave me pause was Sweetie Pie sniffing around and giving that strange yodeling bark-howl that meant she’d caught a scent—likely of a nest of rats or some raccoons. Chablis ran back and forth barking. I shoved my way through heavy growth up to a window and looked inside. Cobwebs, spiders, and possibly snakes for sure. No sign of a prisoner. Wherever Eve or Dara might be, it wasn’t the shed. There wasn’t time for further investigation—I hurried back to where Tinkie waited, forcing the dogs to come with me.
“Oh, crap. I’m late to help with the costumes anyway,” Tinkie said, picking up a hissing Pluto in her arms. “The men will be at the church waiting. I called Coleman and he was suspicious, but he said he’d be there.”
“Will it take you long to fix the costumes?” I was wondering if she could keep tabs on Cece for the rest of the day.
“It’s just a matter of tacking those robes together here and there. The hard things are the headpieces. They’re a bit awkward. If I glued them to their heads, do you think they’d forgive me?”
“Sure, you try that glue thing. That will keep the men busy while we make the drop. And then they’ll kill us both.”
“You are tragically overdramatic, Sarah Booth.” Tinkie winked at me.
“I’ll take Chablis to Dahlia House with my crew. I want to do some research on the Peterson family and the Bromleys. They have to be connected.” Nothing else made sense. And somehow, Eve had been pulled into their sphere. I’d considered that Eve and Dara might have been childhood friends, but nothing I’d found confirmed that. Eve had gone to a small high school near the farm she grew up on, and when she was sixteen she disappeared from the area completely. “I know there’s a link, I just don’t know how it’s all connected. If I find anything, I’ll call, and I’ll be sure and get with Cece.”
We loaded up in the car and headed back to Zinnia. Something niggled at the back of my mind. Some connection I was missing. Some question I should have asked.
It didn’t take long to get back to town, and I let Tinkie off at the church, where cars were beginning to fill the parking lot. A lot of people were involved in preparing for the pageant, and the annual Christmas eating frenzy that was a big part of it. The social before the pageant brought out Zinnia’s best cooks. Everyone who had a claim-to-fame dish would bring it to share with the congregation. Ella Prine would have her sweet potato salad, and Velma Brown’s coconut cake would take center stage. That cake never lasted longer than ten minutes. Although I wasn’t hungry at all, my mouth was watering.
“See you in a bit,” Tinkie said as she got out of the car.
“If you can put a slice of Mrs. Velma’s cake back for me, I’d really appreciate it.” I watched her walk inside the church and then I started toward Dahlia House. I drove on automatic pilot. The critters in the backseat were snuggled up and comfy. Sweetie Pie let out a soft doggy sigh and eased into the passenger seat. She loved to ride with her head out the window, and though it was cold, I rolled the window halfway down for her. The cold air would liven me up, maybe kick my sluggish brain cells into gear.
I was halfway home when a deer leaped out of a pile of brush on the verge. I hit the brakes and swerved, sending Sweetie Pie off balance. She clawed at the dash to regain her footing and popped the glove box open. My gun and some paperwork scattered onto the floorboard. Rattled, I pulled over to check the animals and to put the gun away. Also to compose myself. I was a fast but careful driver, but that deer had caught me unaware.
With the car stopped, I checked Chablis and Pluto in the backseat. Pluto yawned wide, telling me he was bored with my fit of anxiety. Chablis jumped into my lap and licked my face. Like Tinkie, she doled out the comfort. I leaned down and grabbed the gun, returning it to the glove compartment. The papers were old receipts, car maintenance records, and the photo I’d taken from Eve’s cottage. I’d kept it in the car in case I found someone to ask about it.
I took a moment to examine it again, letting the small details stand out. The headless woman holding the babies wore red nail polish. Bright red. It was the nail polish of a young woman with hopes and dreams. She’d painted her nails before going into labor, an observation that hit me right in the heart.
Her hands were lean and young, the fingers slender and tapered. Ringless. What had her expectations been when she carried those children? That Will Falcon would divorce Carla and make a family with her? I couldn’t help but believe Will’s life would have been much happier. It was just a supposition, because I couldn’t know. But Carla Falcon was a dried-up prune with a plum pit for a heart.
I looked at the babies. They looked alike, but then all babies looked alike to me. They all bore a marked resemblance to Winston Churchill. On a bad day. These two were wrapped in white blankets, which didn’t indicate gender, and both were asleep. There wasn’t much to discern from studying them except they looked healthy.
I took a deep breath. I had to get moving. I was tucking the photo away when I caught sight of the ugly doll mixed in with the other baby paraphernalia. I froze. I’d seen that very same doll. There couldn’t be two dolls that ugly. And then I remembered where I’d seen that toy. Mariam’s child had been dragging it behind her on the floor.
If the babies in the photo were Eve and her brother, then somehow Eve was connected to Mariam, and now I had physical evidence to prove my theory. Mariam and Dara had to be the key.
Nearly twenty years had passed from the time the photo of the woman’s torso and the babies was taken and Mariam’s child was dragging a sad doll around the floor. It wasn’t evidence I could take to the law to have Mariam apprehended—not that I would do such a thing anyway. But it linked Eve, the Bromleys, Mariam, and Dara Peterson. The children were what tied it all together. They connected the families to the past and that gave me hope that I had found the leverage I needed to make the Bromleys tell me what they knew. And the place to start was that photograph. If I had a solid ID on the babies,
the other dominoes would line up.
I blew through an empty intersection. I really didn’t want to take the pets with me. With the coming of night, the temperature had turned bitter, and I didn’t think the Bromleys would invite two dogs and a cat into their home. Well, probably the pets would be more welcome than a private investigator. This was going to be confrontational.
I gunned it home, put the animals in the house and closed the doggy door so they couldn’t get out, and headed toward Fortis Landing. As I drove I called Cece. “Did you get the final details?” I asked.
“Not yet. I can’t take much more of this, Sarah Booth. Why don’t they call?”
She was fidgety and scared, and I didn’t blame her. “When will Jaytee get back?” I asked.
“Any minute. They flew into Atlanta earlier. They had to get their instruments through customs and load up the van. It’s what, about a six-hour drive?”
“Yeah. Remember, though, it’s Christmas Eve. Traffic may be really bad.”
“Right.” She sounded totally defeated.
“I have to drop Sweetie Pie and Pluto off at home, then I’m going back to Fortis Landing. I may have found something and I want to check again to be sure. Tinkie is helping sew the wise men into their costumes. Text me the minute you get the drop information. I’ll be fairly close to the location and I might be able to get there before anyone else. It’s always smart to have someone on the scene long before the drop.” I was torn between a desire to follow my lead or to force myself on Cece and stick to her like a second skin. The problem was that I didn’t totally believe she’d get a call to retrieve her cousin. I’d chewed and gnawed on the big why—why would the Bromleys or Mariam or Dara Peterson be involved in holding Eve for ransom? We’d told them to just ask for the money and they could have it. Using a pregnant woman as a bargaining chip was sheer madness. Besides, they just didn’t strike me as kidnappers. “Promise you’ll call me.”
A Gift of Bones--A Sarah Booth Delaney Mystery Page 17