Boardwalk Cottage

by Barbara Cool Lee

  Hallie sat down on a stool and started flipping through the clippings again.

  "March 11, 1933," she read aloud. "Earthquake Destroys Local Band Organ. The famous Wurlitzer band organ whose melodies charmed local children has been silenced," she continued. "Today's earthquake sent the music machine crashing to the ground, and an echo of sadness was heard throughout the village. But never fear: Mayor Madrigal vows a new one will be installed before children arrive to ride the carousel this summer."

  She saw Kyle watching her. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm getting us sidetracked here." She put down the pile of clippings.

  "No," he said. "Go ahead."

  "There's no point. An earthquake in 1933 has nothing to do with Windy and Zac disappearing."

  Kyle smiled. "That sounds like my line."

  "Well, then, let's go."

  "Wait," he said. "Maybe you're right. Maybe there is a clue here."

  She brushed the dust off herself and started for the door. "You have a lot of better things to be doing right now."

  "No, I don't," he said. He hesitated, and she wondered what he was going to say. "I need you," he finally said. "I need someone who can think like Zac, someone with—"

  "—a vivid imagination?" She shook her head. "You said yourself this isn't some silly mystery."

  "We don't know what it is. Hallie, please."

  She looked at Kyle. His jaw was set in a stubborn line, but his eyes were sad and lost. She couldn't imagine what kind of misery he was going through. Raising these kids was his "mission in life," and now they were gone. Her best friend was gone. And she didn't know why.

  She picked up the clippings again. "Okay," she said. "What about this one...."

  Alec was just hanging up the phone when they went back out to the office a while later. "I just got off the phone with a friend of mine at PB-TV—they're the nearest television station," he explained for Hallie's benefit. "I'm going to write up a brief story outline and fax it over to them. Do you have photos of them?"

  Kyle looked on his phone. "There. I just emailed you a couple of pics of each of them."

  "Good. If we hurry, we might make the six o'clock news."

  Alec sat down at his desk. "One of my stringers is out of town, but I can get at least two people going on this right away. After I've talked to them, we'll make up a flyer. How about if I start with a thousand copies? That's one for every house in town."

  Kyle looked at his watch. "I've gotta pick up Chris and then get home. I want to be there if they call."

  Alec looked up, phone in hand. "I'll email you the flyer, so you can make some copies there. Then I'll get to distributing them around town." He turned to Hallie. "And I'm sure the TV news van will be here within a couple of hours. I'll send them your way for an interview—they'll want to hear about the accident."

  Hallie nodded, and swallowed hard. Whatever it took to help Windy and Zac.

  "Alec, I don't know how to thank—" Kyle started to say.

  "—Forget it," Alec said. "After we find Windy and Zac I'll send Karen around to hit you up for some major advertising for the boardwalk." He pushed them out the door. "I'll call you when I get some news."

  Outside the door, Kyle sighed. "Sometimes you forget how good your friends are until you need 'em."

  Hallie patted him on the back. "Let's go home."

  Kyle was out of the truck as soon as he'd set the emergency brake. He walked quickly to the ranch house, hoping against hope, Hallie knew, that the house wasn't as empty as it had been when he'd left. Chris followed after Kyle into the house.

  Standing alone in the driveway, Hallie looked at the old adobe ranch house more closely. Was there a secret hidden here? The veranda that ran along the front of the house had shaded generations of Madrigals, and the little carved saint over the front door had guarded their fates. The sense of place, of home, was so strong, she wondered if it was possible a boy—a bright, imaginative boy like Zac—would run away from here, knowing what awaited him out on the streets. But of course runaways never knew what was waiting for them, or they'd never leave home.

  She looked down the mountain to the coast. Pajaro Bay was carved out of the coastline in a shape like a sea gull with wings outstretched, a tiny lighthouse in the bay punctuating the shape like the gull's eye. Pajaro meant bird, Windy had told her, and Hallie could see how a creative conquistador had thought to name this place. Zac, the Spanish settler's descendent in imagination as well as blood, was as connected to this land as the adobe ranch house.

  Kyle came out of the house, his expression making the obvious question unnecessary. He clutched a cordless landline phone in one hand, and his iPhone in the other. "I'm gonna look around the barn," he said to her, and headed that way. She followed.

  The barn was just a barn—full of dusty hay and old tack and farm tools. They caught Halloween lurking behind a bale of straw in search of a stray rodent to pounce on. Kyle led Hallie up through the trap door into the hayloft to point out the bats huddled together in an upside-down cluster of leathery wings and sleepy mouse-like faces. She tried to suppress an instinctive shudder at the sight. "Let's go," Kyle whispered. "They need their beauty sleep."

  Down below, they searched through several of the stalls. Nothing seemed out of place. One of the stalls was open to the pasture outside, and a handsome bay gelding waited patiently for them there, ears perked up inquisitively as they rummaged around. Hallie heard hoof beats, and then a palomino mare trotted eagerly up to push past the bay and stick her head over the partition, looking for a treat.

  "Time for your dinner, eh, Poky?" Kyle said wearily. "Here you go." And he grabbed a couple of flakes of hay to give her what she wanted.

  After finding nothing in the barn, they went back inside, where Chris helped them search the house. Windy's room was mostly empty, with only a pile of stuff Hallie recognized from their shared dorm room. She had waded through all that stuff for a year, so she couldn't see how any of it could be a clue to the disappearance.

  Zac's room was the usual chaotic mess of clothes and schoolbooks and video games that Hallie guessed most parents of teenage boys were resigned to seeing. They looked gingerly through the room, the others apparently feeling as much like trespassers as she did.

  "He didn't run away," Chris said flatly. He held up a pair of athletic shoes for Hallie to see. "These are his good shoes," he explained. "He wears his old cruddy ones to work 'cause they get wrecked. But he always wears these whenever he's not working. The other ones are really gross."

  Kyle picked up something from Zac's paper-strewn desk. Hallie saw it was a few dollar bills paper-clipped together. "His allowance money," Kyle explained.

  Chris went to his room to start calling all his friends again, hoping for some news about Windy and Zac.

  Hallie and Kyle stopped on the landing of the house's main stairway.

  "So when I last saw Windy, she was on her way here. And when Zac left for work yesterday morning he had no idea he wasn't coming back," Hallie said.

  "No question. Zac wouldn't leave that stuff behind even if he was just spending the night somewhere. He would have taken his shoes and his money along. So something happened between the time you saw Windy, and Zac left work, and the time they both left false messages for me to throw me off track."

  Kyle leaned tiredly against the wall, framed in a ray of sunlight from a window high on the wall above them. Next to him hung a painting of a dashing young man dressed in the style of the prosperous nineteenth-century ranchero. Except for his deep Spanish coloring, the handsome, world-weary young man in the painting was a twin of the one who stood before her.

  "Who is that?"

  Kyle looked at the painting. "My great-grandfather on my father's side," he said after a moment.

  "Arturo. He built the amusement park."

  "Right. That was much later than the time of this painting, of course."

  She walked slowly down the stairs, stopping to examine each of the many paintings and photographs
along the way. She spotted a photo of a rosy-cheeked elderly lady with Windy's warm smile.

  "That's Rose Aidan Madrigal," Kyle said from over her shoulder.

  Hallie turned around. "She planted the cherry trees," she murmured.

  "Yeah," he said.

  She put her hand on his back, to comfort him, or herself, she wasn't sure which. "That's where you all get your green eyes."

  "I suppose. There's a lot of Irish in her family. I don't know the details—" He started to say something more, but bit it back.

  "The kids would know," she finished for him.

  "Yeah," he said wearily. "The kids would know." He sighed. "I guess we take it for granted. I suppose not everybody has roots that run as deep as ours."

  "Nope." She felt an aching emptiness, a sense of longing that went back as far as she could remember. "That's why Windy and Zac love it here."

  "Yup."

  They heard a car pull up on the gravel driveway and went outside.

  It was the news van, and a cute blonde reporter and a cameraman were getting out.

  "We can do it here," the woman said, pointing to the picturesque front porch.

  The interview went quickly. The reporter explained off-camera that they would cut in with pictures of Windy and Zac, and then started questioning them. She asked Hallie about the amnesia, and then Kyle gave descriptions of the missing kids. But the reporter kept coming back to Hallie, apparently finding it hard to believe she really couldn't remember anything about what had happened.

  Hallie just gripped Kyle's hand as hard as she could, and kept her cool, even when the reporter almost flat-out accused her of faking her memory lapse.

  This was for Windy. She could do this.

  At midnight, tendrils of fog hovered around the adobe house, shrouding the carved saints as they stared impassively down on the veranda, as they had stared for centuries. Now they watched with their unblinking eyes as the man below paced back and forth, back and forth.

  Please, Kyle prayed. He stopped there. What else could he say? He wasn't much for praying. He lived in the here and now, unlike his little dreamers, Windy and Zac. But they had been gone since Monday afternoon, and at Tuesday midnight he wasn't one step closer to finding them. If only Hallie could remember what had happened in that missing time, maybe they could figure it out.

  He thought of Hallie, lying asleep in the attic bedroom. Even if she couldn't remember, she still could help. Only she would jump to the conclusion that the phone message from Zac was some kind of James Bond secret code. She and Zac looked at things the same way. They were alike in spite of all her protestations to the contrary. They both saw wonder in every stray deer and old building. Kyle shuddered as thought of all the things that could happen to his kids out there in the world, unprotected.

  Please, he prayed. Keep them safe until I can find them. He paced some more.

  At two a.m. Hallie woke to the feel of a breeze blowing in through the open window. She rolled over in bed with a creak of old springs. Somewhere far below the window she heard an answering sound: the steady tread of boots pacing across the Saltillo tile on the veranda, back and forth, back and forth.

  She went back to sleep and dreamed again of her emerald-eyed prince. But this time he was the one alone in the darkness, hopelessly searching for something just beyond his reach.

  Chapter Five

  The next morning Kyle was still pacing: this time back and forth across the kitchen floor. At the kitchen table, Hallie and Chris made a half-hearted attempt at a breakfast of cold cereal.

  Chris got up and poured his cereal down the garbage disposal. He dropped the ceramic bowl in the sink and it broke in two. He started crying.

  Kyle went over to him and wrapped his arms around him. Chris sobbed into his shoulder. "Hey, kid, hold on," Kyle said. "We're going to get through this."

  They all jumped at a knock at the door. Kyle sprang to answer it. "Oh, it's just you," he said.

  Alec O'Keeffe came in. "Good morning to you, too." He plopped a box on the kitchen table.

  Kyle mumbled his thanks to Alec, who dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "Think nothing of it, man. So, what're you planning to do next?"

  Kyle leaned over and looked into the box of flyers. "Keep looking. But someone's got to stay here in case they call the home phone."

  "I can do that," Chris said firmly.

  Kyle smiled at him. "Okay. That's a good job for you."

  Alec handed Kyle a scrap of paper. "Some phone numbers," he explained. "Missing children's organizations."

  Kyle took the paper and stared at it for a minute, then he straightened up. "All right," he said crisply. "Let's get moving. We've got a lot to do."

  At the park, Kyle waited downstairs while Hallie clocked in. She taped a flyer up next to the time clock, then went down the hall to Tom's office.

  The office was empty—well, Tom wasn't there, but a junk-filled room with a one-armed seven-foot gorilla in the corner could hardly be called empty. After tripping over a stack of files in the middle of the floor, she managed to find her name on the assignment chart on the wall. "Looks like it's 'BC' for the rest of the week," she murmured.

  She added a flyer to the stack of papers on Tom's desk before leaving.

  At the fog-shrouded haunted cottage Charlie sat out front, as always, filing her nails. Kyle handed her a flyer.

  Charlie took the flyer while Hallie leaned up against the control panel by the stool and watched. "Yeah, the cops were already here this morning asking everybody about them," Charlie said. She looked at Zac's picture. "The poor kid." She shook her head sadly.

  "You said yesterday you haven't worked here that long," Kyle said. "But did you get a chance to meet Zac?"

  "Yeah. Julian—that's my husband—and I just moved up here from down south last month." She looked out at the promenade. "We thought we'd make a fresh start here. It seemed like such a nice little town, you know?"

  "Yeah. Not the kind of place where kids get kidnapped."

  Charlie looked startled. "Kidnapped?" Her hands stopped their incessant filing. "You don't think Zac ran away?"

  Kyle's attention sharpened. "Why?" he asked quickly. "Do you think he did? Did he say anything to you?"

  Charlie looked confused. "I dunno. I just thought, well, I guess the way the sheriff asked questions." She paused, as if reconsidering. "Well, I guess the cop never actually said he'd run away, but I just assumed when he asked about whether Zac was having trouble at home and that kind of thing." She looked at Kyle out of the corner of her eye.

  "Why?" Hallie interjected. "Was Zac having trouble at home?"

  "I dunno," she said. She seemed to think hard about it.

  "Don't worry about offending me," Kyle said. "Anything you can think of might be helpful. Even something small."

  Charlie laughed nervously. "I feel like I'm getting grilled."

  Kyle echoed her nervous laugh. "Just the facts, Ma'am." He paced around in front of the ride, as nervous as yesterday, Hallie noticed. "I'm sorry, Charlie. It's just that we're all going crazy looking for them, and it would be great if we could find some clue, you know?"

  "Sure," Charlie said, relaxing back onto her stool. She puckered up her brow again, thinking. "Let's see, we did get to talking sometimes. You know, you work for hours and hours here, and sometimes the fog doesn't burn off by midday, and the weather stays real gloomy, and the tourists go back to their bed-and-breakfasts and curl up by the fire and leave you sittin' out here with nothing to do. Like I told the sheriff, Zac would stop by and bring me gum and soda and stuff—always going out of his way to be nice to people like that. Even though his family's some high-class big shots he never acted like he was better than the rest of us. He'd just talk to you real natural, like equals. Oh." All of a sudden she seemed to realize who she was talking to. "Sorry, Mr. Madrigal. I didn't mean anything by that. I just mean he was a nice, helpful kind of kid."

  "Don't worry about it."

  "What did you talk abou
t?" Hallie prompted Charlie.

  "Kid stuff, mostly. His school, little projects he was into—he's a real creative kid, you know."

  "Yup. Any particular projects?"

  Charlie shrugged. "You know how kids are. It's video games one week and skateboards the next."

  "Did he ever seem upset about anything?"

  "Zac?" Charlie looked at her sideways. "Upset? He was always a cheerful kid, you know, one of those people with a big grin and a new joke to tell you every time he saw you."

  "Hmmm, I know somebody like that," Hallie said. Like someone who was right now pacing around the front of the ride like a caged lion.

  "What about Zac's projects?" Kyle asked again. "Can you think of anything about them?"

  "No. Um—" Charlie looked at something behind Kyle.

  Kyle and Hallie turned around to see a woman with a couple of little girls in tow.

  "I'd better let you get to work," Kyle said. "Listen," he added to Charlie. "Give us a call if you think of anything, okay?"

  Charlie nodded.

  Kyle half-smiled at Hallie and walked away.

  "How scary is the ride?" the woman customer asked Hallie.

  "Huh?" She tore her eyes away from Kyle's retreating back. The two little girls with the woman looked to be about kindergarten age, eyes huge in their little faces as they craned their necks back to stare at the haunted cottage.

  "Is the ride scary?" the woman repeated.

  Hallie looked doubtful. "Maybe the carousel would be a better idea."

  "Caree-what?" one of the girls asked.

  "A merry-go-round," the woman explained. "With pretty horses that go up and down." She glanced up at Hallie.

  "That way," Hallie pointed.

  "Ooh, horses!" the little girl exclaimed. "Can we feed the horses, Mommy? I have a carrot in my lunch." The girls scampered off.