Jumping Rise

by S. W. Hubbard

  “Mina is checking the rooms that are turning over today. She used to do all the cleaning herself, but recently we hired a woman from town to clean. We don’t want the children to help in the rooms. Sometimes they might discover something inappropriate.” Sanjiv mouthed “condoms” at Frank although there was no one within earshot.

  Mina Patel popped out of an open room again at the sound of their approaching voices. “Hello, Frank—how nice to see you.” With her glossy, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and her small feet enclosed in hot pink running shoes, Mina hardly looked old enough to be the mother of three. But Frank knew she kept a firm but affectionate rein on the kids, and her husband, too.

  “Sanjiv, the people who checked out of this room stole two bath towels.” Frowning, she tapped her clipboard with a pen. “I had a bad feeling about them when they checked in.”

  Sanjiv smiled indulgently. “Perhaps they had an emergency, a sick child. I have often received notes from customers...checks...packages. They try to make amends.”

  Mina pursed her lips. “My husband is too trusting,” she said to Frank before bustling off to inspect the next room.

  Sanjiv laughed off the criticism. “Mina has a hard time accepting that some loss is a cost of our business. She would send you off to track down those towel thieves if she had her way.”

  Frank smiled at the mental image of himself pulling over a tourist’s car to search for two scratchy white motel towels. His smile grew broader as they reached the end of the sidewalk and spied a little girl filling a green watering can from a hose. She sprayed water on her sandals and shorts, then staggered under the weight of the can as she headed toward a big urn of brightly blooming petunias.

  “Sarah, you are getting more water on yourself than on the plants,” Sanjiv laughed.

  “It’s okay, Daddy—they’re water sandals,” she explained while concentrating on directing the stream of water into the flowerpot. Once she was satisfied with her work, she looked up and caught sight of her father’s companion.

  “Uncle Frank!” Sarah squealed, and trotted toward him.

  Frank swung the damp child into his arms. “How’s my favorite girl? What have you been doing since school let out?”

  “I learned to ride my bike without training wheels. Emir helped me.” She pointed to a purple two-wheeler propped against the fence surrounding the pool. “And Mommy and I started a vegetable garden out back.”

  Unlike her brothers, Sarah had medium brown hair and her skin was pale enough to show a faint blush of sunburn. For a moment, Frank felt a twinge of sadness as he thought of how Sarah’s birth mother, Mary Pat Sheehan, would have enjoyed the daughter for whom she gave her life. But he shook off the morbid moment as Sarah continued listing her accomplishments.

  “I can swim all the way across the pool now,” she said as Frank set her back down. “But I’m not allowed to help Emir with the vacuuming.” She frowned at this injustice, but soon brightened. “I have to water the flowers around the pool now.”

  “Sarah does not know any limitations,” Sanjiv explained. “She thinks she is ready for the Olympics.” Frank and Sanjiv followed her into the pool enclosure, where Emir was winding up the pool vacuum. The family who’d been swimming earlier had departed, and now the only motel guest at the pool was a woman in her twenties. She sat on a chaise lounge, her golden hair streaming across her shoulders, her long legs displayed elegantly. Her toes were painted a blue that sparkled in the sunlight. Her hand made quick, sure movements across an artist’s sketch pad. Occasionally, she lifted her head and gazed out to the mountains on the horizon.

  Frank and Sanjiv approached her from behind, allowing Frank to see the drawing, an expertly shaded rendering of the peaks and the clouds moving in from the west. “Very nice,” Frank said to the woman, feeling more jovial toward a stranger than he normally would be.

  The woman turned her head to see who was paying her a compliment. “Tha—” she began. But her eyes widened at Frank’s uniform and badge. She slapped her sketch book closed, grabbed her backpack, and strode out of the pool area.

  “Geez, what did I say?” Frank asked.

  “Do not be concerned,” Sanjiv replied. “She is our mystery guest. She is here all alone.”

  “She never talks to anyone,” Emir added. “She just draws and goes for walks.”

  “I think she’s nice,” Sarah said as she picked a dead flower from the geranium pot. “Her name is Caitlin.”

  “Oh, she has told you her name?” Sanjiv’s face registered some surprise. “It seems like a lonely life for such a pretty young woman. But she has paid in advance to keep her room for the whole summer. And she is very neat. So, I count my blessings.”

  Chapter 3

  Days had passed since Doris had requested Frank’s help with her nephew. In that time, Frank had talked to Doris’s family about the advisability of keeping Blaine in the county lock-up until his trial. Over the objections of the women in the family, Frank had pointed out the absolute necessity of keeping Blaine out of further trouble if they wanted him to qualify for a pre-trial diversion program for first-offenders. The DA was willing to consider it, but if Blaine bought or sold drugs while he was awaiting his court appearance, all deals would be off the table.

  As there were no rehab slots available at the moment, jail was the safest place for him.

  The brothers—Blaine’s father and Doris’s husband—agreed with Frank, so Blaine remained incarcerated. When Frank visited the kid he could see that Blaine had come through the worst of his withdrawal but was still shaky and bleary-eyed. Their conversation consisted of Frank talking about pre-trial diversion and rehab, and Blaine responding with an aimless stream of, “yeah, man—right,” and, “I’m cool with that.”

  Then Frank brought up the desirability of Blaine’s revealing his supplier to clinch the deal with the DA.

  Instantly, the kid’s sleepy demeanor changed.

  “Oh, no—that’s not happening.” Blaine spoke with surprising firmness.

  “You’d score points with the DA and the judge,” Frank explained. “The DA might not make a deal without getting something in return. The state police can have the guy arrested before you go off to rehab.”

  Blaine shook his head and crossed his arms across his chest. “Snitches wind up dead.”

  As Frank continued cajoling, Blaine stood up and called for the guard.

  Their visit was over.

  NOW, IN THE COMFORT of his home, Frank pushed Blaine and his family’s troubles out of his mind for the evening. He and Penny worked together to make dinner and carried the food out to the table on the screened porch.

  Penny put her hands on her hips, surveying the chicken, string beans and roasted potatoes. “Doesn’t this look good! We’ve outdone ourselves.”

  “Soon we can take over meal prep at the Iron Eagle Inn if Edwin and Lucy want to take a night off,” Frank said.

  Penny laughed and sat across from him. “Let’s not get carried away. One successful meal plan from Food Network doesn’t make us chefs.”

  They dug into their dinner. As Penny cut her chicken, she said, “Desmond Hale invited us to spend next weekend at The Balsams, and I said we’d be delighted to go.”

  Slowly, Frank set his fork down. His gaze never left his wife’s face. “Desmond who? Some strange man invited us to spend the weekend at his house and you accepted?”

  “He’s not a strange man, Frank.” Penny tossed her hair. “I had already looked him up after the first time he visited the library. I told you—he’s the one who started a company to promote books and then sold it to Amazon for 750 million dollars.”

  “You never told me that,” Frank insisted even as the words rang a vague bell in his subconscious.

  “I did too! You never listen.” Penny scooped a second serving of string beans onto Frank’s plate with a thwap. “I told you last week that a man came into the library asking for help researching the history of logging in the High Peaks. He told me tha
t he’d just purchased a vacation home called The Balsams north of Verona. Of course, he didn’t come right out and announce he was a multi-millionaire, but when he told me the name of the house, I looked it up after he left. And when I saw how famous the house was, I looked him up.” Penny cocked her head. “I told you all about this when we went out to dinner at the Trail’s End last week.”

  Oh, the dinner at the Trail’s End! Now, Frank knew why he didn’t remember the saga of this rich entrepreneur guy. While Penny had been talking to him in the restaurant, Frank had been preoccupied by eavesdropping on a conversation going on in the booth behind him, where two guys were discussing the best place to buy cheap, aka stolen, auto parts. “Okay, yeah—I do remember. Just refresh my memory a little.”

  Penny took a deep breath before retelling the story. “Desmond Hale is in his early fifties. After working in mid-level Wall Street jobs in his twenties and thirties, he got this idea to create a book promotion site. He sank his whole life savings into launching the company, and the product took off. Last year, he sold it to Amazon for nearly a billion bucks. So now Desmond doesn’t work anymore and just looks for ways to give away his money. And he wants to give some to the Trout Run Library. A hundred thousand dollars!”

  Frank’s brow furrowed as he cut his chicken breast into precise cubes. “That’s an awful lot of money to thank you for helping him with some research.”

  “The donation isn’t to pay me for helping him,” Penny said. “We got to talking about the challenges faced by rural communities like ours. Unreliable internet service. Small, under-stocked public libraries. No literacy programs. I told him about all the things I’d like to do at the Trout Run Library, and at the end of our conversation, he said he’d like to help make it happen.” Penny beamed.

  “That’s great. Take his money.” Frank waved his fork at Penny. “Why do we have to go to his house?”

  “The Balsams is one of the grand Adirondack Great Camps. It’s been written up in the New York Times and Architectural Digest. I’m dying to see it.” Penny’s eyes shone with enthusiasm. “Besides, rich people like him want to feel some admiration in return for their donation. It’s the least I can do to get a hundred thousand dollars for the library. We can expand our book collection, get high-speed modems and buy more terminals to give access to people without WiFi or home computers. And most of all, finally start the literacy program to help people with reading challenges.”

  “It’s a very generous gift,” Frank agreed. “I just don’t understand why he’d want you—and your husband that he’s never met—to spend the weekend with him. People who barely know one another usually go out for drinks or dinner.”

  Penny salted her chicken and banged the shaker onto the table. “So you think it would make more sense for me to suggest to our billionaire benefactor that we meet at Malone’s diner for a plate of meatloaf and some backtalk from Marge instead of dinner prepared by his personal chef? Why are you being so ornery?”

  “I’m not being ornery.” Frank swatted at a fly that had squeezed through the porch screen. “If he’s got a personal chef why can’t we just go over there for dinner? You’d still get to see the house and nail the donation.”

  “Because you can only reach the house by boat,” Penny explained in an exasperated tone she’d never use on a library patron who asked a dumb question. “Desmond has to send a little motorboat to pick us up at the dock outside Verona. By the time we’d be done with dinner, it would be too dark to take the boat back. So we spend the night, and come back in the morning. What’s the big deal? It’s not like we’re busy.”

  There was no counterargument to that statement. The truth was, Frank hated being a houseguest. He liked to sleep in his own bed, pee in his own toilet, and most of all, wake up on his own schedule and make his coffee just the way he liked it: hot and strong. As much as Frank loved his daughter and grandkids, he didn’t even like being a houseguest in their home. He always felt on edge, like he was underfoot and disrupting everyone’s routine. Why would he want to duplicate that feeling with a total stranger?

  He stared at his plate in silence, the flavor gone out of his meal.

  Penny must have interpreted this as further resistance. “Fine. I’ll just go myself.”

  Frank’s head snapped up. “No! I don’t want you staying alone at some remote house that can only be reached by water. And there’s probably no cell service up there, either.” He didn’t add “alone with a billionaire.”

  Penny rose from her chair. “Frank Bennett, don’t you ever forbid me from doing something. I will accept invitations and go where I please.”

  “I wasn’t forbidding you,” Frank backpedaled madly. My God, how had this nice dinner run so far off the rails? “I was just worried...”

  Penny continued to shoot daggers at him. Frank wilted under her gaze. “Okay, fine. I’ll go along. What time do we have to be there?”

  “Thank you,” Penny cleared the dishes, the frost still not gone from her voice. “We have to be at the dock by four next Friday.”

  Frank followed his wife back to the kitchen repeating in his mind what he’d always told his daughter when she complained about visits to dull distant relations. It’s just one night of your life.

  Chapter 4

  “Look. There is Chief Bennett. We should ask him.”

  Frank raised his head from his contemplation of the Malone’s Diner Thursday lunch specials, which he had memorized as they never changed from week to week. While the menu items swam before his eyes, he had been thinking about Blaine, wondering if the DA and the judge would agree to the diversion to rehab.

  Mina and Sanjiv Patel stood beside his booth.

  “Have a seat,” he invited. “Ask me what?”

  “We should not disturb Frank’s lunch over this matter,” Sanjiv objected.

  “You’re not disturbing me. Actually, you’ll save me from Marge’s wrath if you join me in this booth. She gets mad when I sit at a table that’s too big for one, even if the diner is empty.”

  The Patels slid across the green vinyl banquette and faced Frank. “Mina and I are having a disagreement. Perhaps you can help us reach a decision,” Sanjiv said.

  “I don’t do marriage counseling,” Frank said. “I have a hard enough time staying out of trouble in my own home.”

  “Our marriage is not in trouble,” Mina said earnestly. “It is a legal matter that brings us to seek your advice.”

  Frank smiled. He should have known Mina took him too literally to risk a joke. “What’s the problem? I’ll help if I can.”

  “One of our guests has disappeared. And the ID we have on file seems to be useless.” Mina set her lips in a hard line.

  Frank arched his eyebrows. He would be more alarmed if this news had been delivered by anyone other than Mina Patel, whom he knew to be a stickler for following every rule.

  “Do you remember when you dropped by to visit us last week during your patrol?” Sanjiv began as he patted his wife’s hand. “And we saw a young woman sketching out by the pool?”

  Frank nodded. “Pretty girl...good artist. But I remember my arrival seemed to spook her.”

  Mina cocked her head. “Spook? Like ghosts on Halloween?”

  After fifteen years of living in the United States, Mina’s English was excellent, but occasionally colloquialisms confused her. “I meant she seemed startled, maybe even a little scared, to see a cop at the motel,” Frank explained. “She didn’t know I was there on a friendly visit.”

  Sanjiv nodded emphatically. “I too recall her strange reaction on that day. And now, this woman has disappeared.”

  “And we don’t know what to do about her room,” Mina continued. “Because she paid in advance for two months. But she has not been at the Mountain Vista for many days now. And she has left her possessions behind.”

  Marge Malone lumbered up to the table. “What’ll it be, Frank?”

  The beef stew special seemed too heavy for such a hot day, so Frank settled
on the tuna salad plate. Mina and Sanjiv ordered tea, and when Marge frowned, Sanjiv added a slice of blueberry pie to placate her.

  Sanjiv waited until Marge was out of earshot before continuing. “If she wants to use her room for storage while she lives somewhere else, that is no skin—” Sanjiv hesitated “—lost??”

  “No skin off my back,” Frank supplied the expression. “But you’re worried about her?”

  “Yes. She is young and skinny. She liked to take the hiking trails out back—one around the pond, the other up Little Cub Mountain,” Sanjiv said. “So I grew concerned she might have fallen and injured herself there.”

  “Sanjiv and the boys hiked both trails looking for her, but they found nothing,” Mina continued the tale. “The trails are easy and many hikers use them, so I did not think it likely she could be lost or hurt.”

  Frank knew that one of the perks of staying at the Mountain Vista was that two popular hiking trails could be accessed from directly behind the motel, although the official trailhead was further down Route 86. One trail led to pretty Painted Turtle Pond. The other led to the summit of Little Cub Mountain, a gradual climb that nevertheless offered a nice scenic payoff at the top. Since neither trail was arduous, they attracted lots of families with young kids, as well as seniors who didn’t want to over-exert themselves.

  “I even asked many of the hikers we passed if they had seen a young woman with a sketch pad. I knew she liked to draw when she hiked,” Sanjiv explained. “One older couple walking around the pond said they had seen her earlier in the week.”

  “Since then we have been trying to calculate exactly when is the last time we have seen her,” Mina said. “And we think we have not seen her since the day after your visit.”

  “Which was last Friday,” Frank said. “Today is Thursday.