Jumping Rise

by S. W. Hubbard

  “Yes, but several days passed before we realized we had not seen her in a while.” Mina defended their inaction. “On sunny days, she sits out by the pool and sketches, or goes for a hike. On rainy days, she stays in her room. On Sunday and Monday, it rained.”

  “Doesn’t she ever drive anywhere?” Frank asked.

  “She has no car,” Sanjiv answered.

  “No car?” Frank’s interest in the dilemma picked up. The Mountain Vista was situated halfway between Trout Run and Verona. A round-trip walk to either town would take hours and be rather unpleasant along the highway. “How did she arrive? Where does she eat? And what did you mean by fraudulent ID?” The motel had no restaurant—only a minimal breakfast bar of cold cereal, oatmeal, and coffee designed for early rising hikers and skiers. A couple of the rooms had kitchenettes. But most motel guests would drive to Trout Run or Verona for restaurant meals.

  Mina and Sanjiv exchanged a glance. “This is why we called her our mystery guest,” Sanjiv said. “A man showed up one day in June, before we got busy—”

  “The blackflies were still out. Only a few fisherman as guests,” Mina interrupted.

  “And he said he wanted to get a room with a kitchenette for all of July and August. And when I put in the reservation and asked for his credit card to hold it, he pulled out a roll of hundred dollar bills and said he would pay upfront in cash.”

  Frank’s eyebrows drew down. “Surely, that’s unusual?”

  “Yes, very unusual, but not illegal,” Sanjiv said defensively. “I asked his name and requested to see some ID, and he showed me his driver’s license. Mr. Anthony Kinsella.”

  “Do you have the license number?” Frank asked.

  “Yes, in my computer. But I must have recorded his phone number incorrectly because I get a recording saying that number is not in service.”

  “And his email bounces,” Mina interjected.

  “And when I tried to look him up, I cannot find any listing,” Sanjiv concluded.

  “This is why you should have demanded a credit card to hold the reservation,” Mina scolded. “Yes, we have the cash for the room, but there is no security. No damage deposit.”

  “But the room has not been damaged,” Sanjiv protested.

  Frank could see they’d been around and around on this point before.

  Mina blew a huff of air through her lips. “Anyway, on July 1, Mr. Kinsella checked in,” Mina continued. “He asked for two keys. I did not see him unload his car, but the boys said they saw him carry in a lot of boxes and bags. Then his car departed, and since then, only the girl has been in Room 12.”

  “So you haven’t seen Kinsella again,” Frank said. “Do you know the girl’s name?”

  “If people are sharing a room, we are not required to ask the name of all the occupants,” Sanjiv explained.

  “But Sarah has spoken to her about her artwork, and she says the girl’s name is Caitlin,” Mina sipped her tea. “But we tried to look up Caitlin Kinsella and found no one that could be her.”

  “When the man paid in cash, I thought perhaps he was planning...you know...a romantic rendezvous,” Sanjiv said.

  “An extra-marital affair,” Mina clarified, in case Frank didn’t catch on. “This sort of thing is very common.” She pursed her lips. “But it is none of our concern.”

  “But he left the girl stranded at the motel with no transportation and never came back to visit her?” Frank asked.

  “If he came, it would have to have been in the middle of the night because we have not seen him again since July 1.”

  Marge arrived with the food and banged down the plates.

  “There is one other matter we must tell you about,” Mina leaned across the table. “The girl did not want her room cleaned. She would take her own trash out to the Dumpster. She would ask me for fresh towels every third day, and once a week, she would ask for sheets.”

  “Less work for you,” Sanjiv pointed out.

  “But it made me very nervous.” Mina stirred her tea. “I said to Sanjiv, ‘what is she doing in there? Why so secretive?’”

  “Mina aspires to be a great detective like you, Frank.” Sanjiv smiled fondly at his wife, who looked unamused. “She waited until Caitlin went off for a hike and let herself into the room.”

  “As the proprietor of the motel, I have the right of access.” Mina threw back her shoulders. “I wanted to make sure there was no rotten food. We cannot have mice and bugs invading our motel.”

  “And what did you find?” Frank speared a tomato in his salad.

  “The room was very clean and orderly,” Mina admitted. “The freezer was full of microwavable dinners.” Mina wrinkled her nose. “She had cereal and shelf-stable almond milk, pasta and sauce, peanut butter and jelly, apple sauce and canned fruit.”

  Frank dug through the lettuce on his plate hoping to find some tuna he’d missed. “So she was cooking her own meals.”

  “Yes, but surely not very good meals,” Sanjiv said. “So I suggested to Mina that we invite her to our home for dinner.”

  The Patels lived in a suite of rooms connected to the motel, so the invitation wouldn’t have seemed overly familiar, but Frank suspected Mina wasn’t enthusiastic.

  “I thought such an invitation would make it obvious I had been looking around her room,” Mina said.

  “But at the beginning of the third week, an opportunity presented itself,” Sanjiv said. “Sarah came home with a beautiful drawing that Caitlin had made of her.”

  Mina beamed. “Very excellent! It captures Sarah perfectly. We are going to frame it and hang it on the living room wall.”

  “So when I saw Caitlin by the pool, I thanked her for this beautiful artwork and said we would like to offer her dinner in return,” Sanjiv said.

  “And she said ‘no.’” Mina’s smile disappeared.

  “But she hesitated. I thought she seemed tempted.” Sanjiv paused with a forkful of blueberry pie suspended in front of his mouth. “So we put some of Mina’s special chicken curry in a container, and Sarah took it over to her.”

  “That was the evening after the day when you saw her,” Mina explained.

  “And then we had two days of rainy, cloudy weather. And on the third day, Mina said it is very strange Caitlin has not asked for towels or sheets. So she knocked on the door and got no answer. And we waited one more day, then went inside the room. The plastic container that had held the curry was washed out and had a note inside that said, ‘thank you very much.’ The other food is still there. Her clothes are in the closet. Her suitcase is in the corner. Also, all her art supplies are there. The only thing we did not see was her backpack.”

  “Any signs of a struggle?” Frank asked.

  The Patels both shook their heads.

  “So what are we to do? Who should we contact?” Mina asked. “What if something bad has happened to her?”

  Despite Mina’s indignation about her guest’s behavior, Frank could see her essentially kind nature was concerned for the girl. “It’s probably nothing to worry about, but I’ll come out and look around,” Frank said. “I can run this fellow Kinsella’s license through the system. We’ll see what he has to say.”

  “We don’t want any trouble,” Mina said. “We run a respectable business.”

  Sanjiv’s normally placid expression darkened. “What if this Anthony Kinsella is not a good person? What if Caitlin does not want to be found?”

  Chapter 5

  Sanjiv had photocopied Kinsella’s driver’s license, so Frank told him to take a picture of it and send it to him. When it landed in his email box later that afternoon, Frank blew the picture up on his computer screen so the numbers and New Hampshire address were legible. He massaged his temples.

  This license was fake. Even in the blurry photo he could see the slightly crooked alignment and incorrect state code, which gave it away.

  Fake drivers licenses weren’t hard to procure—half the students in every college town had one so they could get i
nto bars. All an enterprising counterfeiter needed was Photoshop software, a good color printer, and a laminating machine. This fake was good enough to trick an unmotivated bouncer or an unsuspicious motel owner, but it certainly wasn’t designed to fool a cop. Getting a truly convincing fake ID required a trip to the dark web. But Caitlin’s companion could’ve gotten this piece of crap from the kid next door.

  Sanjiv had said the man who paid for Room 12 was in his forties, and the photo and birthdate on the fake license agreed with that. Presumably, he hadn’t used his real name, but Frank ran the name Anthony Kinsella through the system anyway.

  There was no 1947 Copeland Avenue in Rutherford, New Hampshire. Indeed, there was no Rutherford in New Hampshire. There were a few Anthony Kinsellas—one in North Carolina with bright red hair and a forehead tattoo who’d served time for assault, an elderly Kinsella in West Palm Beach who’d driven his car into the side of a strip mall, and one about the right age in Illinois who appeared to weigh upwards of four hundred pounds.

  So, Sanjiv’s mystery man remained a mystery.

  Frank exited the program and returned his attention to planning the parking for Edith Dunleavey’s funeral and repast on Saturday, which promised to clog the green from eleven to three. He didn’t want to leave Earl without a game plan—this dumb trip to Desmond Hale’s house was creating more work for both of them.

  Doris entered his office with a stack of reports to file, whistling tunelessly as she worked.

  “You’re in a good mood this afternoon,” Frank remarked, mostly to get the noise to stop.

  “Blaine’s parents just heard from Trudy Massiney that she found Blaine a spot in a rehab program in Plattsburgh. Now all we need is for the judge to approve everything. That’s supposed to happen next week.”

  “That is good news,” Frank agreed. He’d used his friendship with the county social worker to move Blaine to the top of her list of clients needing help. He hoped Blaine wouldn’t make him regret the favor. Frank had already told Blaine’s father to keep encouraging his son to give up his supplier as insurance that the diversion deal would go through. But he didn’t want to reiterate it with Doris. She had no influence over the kid.

  Doris closed the file drawer and faced her boss. “Thank you, Frank. I know this wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t spoken up for Blaine. We appreciate it.”

  Her heartfelt sincerity made Frank squirm because he knew the deal wasn’t a sure thing yet. “No problem,” he muttered gruffly. “I gotta run over to the Mountain Vista. Tell Earl I’ll be back soon.”

  Frank escaped before Doris could ask him the question he feared most: did he think Blaine would return home fully recovered?

  Frank hated to lie, but he couldn’t bear to tell Doris the truth.

  WHEN FRANK PULLED UP to the motel, Mina scurried out of the main office to meet him with Sarah tagging along behind her. But before she reached Frank’s side, Mina insisted the child stay behind with her brother. “Uncle Frank will come to visit you when he has finished his business.”

  Mina opened the door to Room 12 and Frank followed her in. It was orderly, as the Patels had described, but Frank searched the room with a trained eye, looking for small things the motel owners wouldn’t have noticed.

  He began in the bathroom. The shelf above the sink held toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and contact lens solution. Certainly these necessities could be easily replaced, but they could just as easily be tossed into a backpack, so their presence made it seem less likely that Caitlin had planned a permanent exit from the motel.

  There was no make-up other than a bottle of sparkly blue nail polish. Had Caitlin taken that with her, or did she simply not wear any? Certainly, she was pretty enough without it, but in Frank’s experience, pretty women were the most likely to want those little tubes and bottles of enhancements.

  He studied the beige tile and the white bathtub, going so far as to drop to his knees and examine the floor with his flashlight. Spotless. It was extraordinarily hard to remove blood from rough grout, so he felt fairly confident, even without a crime scene team, that no one had cleaned up from a violent attack in here.

  The main room, decorated in the Adirondack Rustic style, had a queen bed with a pine-cone patterned bedspread and forest green and cream checked curtains. The bedside lamp featured a birchbark shade over a carved owl base, and a small sofa sat under a framed poster of Whiteface Mountain. Although the room wasn’t fancy, it was cheerful and comfortable. Frank paced around checking all the outlets. No charging cords had been left behind.

  “Did you ever see her using a laptop or iPad?” Frank asked Mina.

  “No, not even a cellphone. And she never asked for the WiFi password.”

  Frank furrowed his brow. What young person would willingly cut herself off from the internet? She had to have had a reason.

  Next, he looked in the closet, where a Gore-Tex raincoat and a few shirts and pairs of jeans hung. The clothes showed no signs of excessive wear, and he recognized one of the labels as something he’d seen in Penny’s wardrobe. That made him think that Caitlin was not a poor girl who shopped at Walmart or thrift stores. On the floor of the closet were sport sandals and hiking boots. So she must’ve been wearing sneakers when she left. She hadn’t intended to hike, but she could have attempted to walk into town, or perhaps hitchhike.

  Next, he opened the dresser drawers: underwear, socks, t-shirts, shorts—all good quality. Since neither he nor Mina knew exactly what Caitlin had arrived with, he couldn’t say how much was missing. But given the small size of the roller suitcase in the corner, she didn’t arrive with a lot of clothes. So it was safe to guess that most of them were still here. He used the eraser end of a pencil to lift some of the garments: nothing hidden beneath the clothes.

  Now Frank moved over to the kitchenette, which occupied one corner of the main room. There were two kitchen cabinets over a counter with a two burner hot plate, coffee pot, and microwave. The fridge, although smaller than the one in his own kitchen, was still full-sized.

  “Only two rooms have these kitchenettes,” Mina said. “The others have only small fridges. Usually, the rooms with kitchenettes are taken by families.” She pointed to a small sofa on the other side of the room. “That converts to a bed, or we can bring in a cot for a child.”

  Frank opened the cabinets, which contained four each of plates, bowls, and mugs as well as one frying pan and one pot. Clearly not intended for long term preparation of hearty, balanced meals.

  “It is just enough to make breakfast or lunch, so you do not have to take the kids to a restaurant for every meal,” Mina explained. “Also, we have barbeque grills and picnic tables outside. But I never saw Caitlin use those.”

  Frank opened the fridge: bags of apples, oranges and mini carrots. A half-used loaf of whole wheat bread. Two dozen eggs, an open package of all-beef hotdogs, an open jar of Paul Newman pasta sauce, nondairy creamer, and a half-used box of almond milk.

  No alcohol.

  The freezer contained 2 more loaves of whole wheat bread and 15 Trader Joe’s frozen meals in a variety of flavors, mostly vegetarian. In some cardboard boxes on the floor were non-perishable items: breakfast cereal, tuna, canned fruit, and pasta.

  Of all the things he’d seen or not seen in this room, the Trader Joe’s dinners provided the biggest clue to Caitlin’s status in life. The nearest Trader Joe’s store was in the Albany suburbs, over two hours south. He knew this because Penny, Edwin, and Lucy constantly lamented their lack of access to the quirky gourmet store since they’d all moved to the Adirondacks from New York City. Whenever one of them visited friends in Manhattan, or when Frank visited his daughter in Chappaqua, the others all submitted long lists of items to be procured at Trader Joe’s. Honestly, he didn’t understand what all the fuss was about.

  But he knew one thing: There were no Trader Joe’s in rural or poor areas, so Caitlin was from a prosperous urban area. And Caitlin, or whoever had brought her here, was a bit of a health nu
t. There were no cookies or chips or soda in the food supply.

  Finally, Frank moved on to the desk that held Caitlin’s art supplies. There were three sketch pads: small, medium, and large. The smallest she’d used to make studies of little bits of nature: a snapdragon’s plume, a blue jay’s feather, a mushroom’s knobby surface. The medium pad held studies of landscapes—quick sketches of turtles on a log, a spindly tree growing out of a rock, lichen growing on the side of a maple. But the largest pad was where she composed her final works. This would have been too large to carry on a hike, so she must have taken the smaller pads to sketch ideas, then composed the larger works here in the room.

  Apart from the TV and one battered paperback mystery novel, Caitlin’s only source of amusement was her artwork.

  “Look,” Mina said as Frank flipped through the medium pad, “that is a rough sketch of the picture of Sarah. In the final portrait she gave us, every detail of Sarah’s hair and clothes is complete.”

  Frank studied the drawings intently. Most had been done with charcoal, but some were watercolors. The artwork revealed a keen eye for detail: the pattern of sunlight and shade, the tilt of a bird’s head, the scattering of leaves on a path. All the landscapes had a remarkable 3-D quality that proved the young woman knew a lot about perspective and shading. Frank was willing to bet she’d studied art as more than just a high school elective.

  The desk was so full of art supplies that Frank suddenly realized he’d overlooked something. He backtracked into the room, his eyes scanning the bedside table and desk. “There’s no phone in this room?”

  “No,” Mina said. “We had the landlines removed. We were paying extra for multiple lines that no one even used. Everyone uses a cell phone these days.”

  “Except Caitlin.”

  Chapter 6

  Frank wasn’t sure what to do about the Patels’ missing guest.

  He reassured Mina and Sanjiv that no crime appeared to have been committed in Room 12. Caitlin had every right to walk away from the motel—from her entire life—if she wanted to.