Killing Beauty

Three

Three

The guy across the road was still mowing. He didn’t look over at me. The kid was still playing basketball. He glanced at me, but looked away quickly, finding nothing in his glance to interest him. Good.

When I got to the car again, I unlocked the trunk, threw the towel in, then closed the trunk and unlocked the car. I slid into the driver’s seat. Danella quickly sat up.

“Well?” she asked.

“Your mother isn’t there,” I said. I started the car.

Danella slunk down in the seat without having to be told.

“Where would she be?” Danella asked.

I turned the car around and headed toward my place.

“I don’t think she’s living there any more,” I said. “Your things are gone.”

“My things?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

“You must have had clothes and books, or toys, or something. The house is empty.”

I saw the panic in her face when I glanced in the rearview mirror.

“They must have taken her because I escaped,” she said. “I should go back so they don’t hurt her.”

“We should go to the police,” I said.

“No!” she said. “They swore they would kill us.”

“They can’t hurt you,” I said. “You’re with me. I know where your mother works, so we can tell the police and they’ll find her.”

“They can’t hurt me,” she said, “but they can hurt my mother! Please, please don’t take me to the police.”

I rubbed my face. I knew what I should do, but I didn’t want to go to the police either. Nate Gunderson had probably never dealt with a kidnapping. I hadn’t been primary on any kidnapping either. But I’d been a detective for twenty years. I could protect this kid and figure out what to do.

If I told my ex what I was doing, he’d psychoanalyze me. Suggest it was because our son Scott went to live with him when he was twelve. Scott’s choice. I never got over it. Blah, blah, blah. But that wasn’t true. I had gotten over it. I was just a sucker for a kid in trouble. I figured I’d want someone to protect Scott if I wasn’t around. I wished someone had protected Amanda that night the six of us went out. She’d been a kid. We were all children, really. Andy was the oldest at eighteen, Sylvie the youngest at fifteen. No one had protected us—protected us from each other as it turned out.

I did not want to be thinking about all that old s**t.

Didn’t like it.

When I’d rescued Danella on the trail, I thought she’d be with me for about ten minutes—long enough for me to drop her off at the sheriff’s office.

Now what?

I drove up behind my house and parked the car under the Doug fir, next to my son Scott’s old green van. None of my neighbors could see us from here.

“You can get up now,” I told Danella.

I turned around so I could see her. She pushed off the blanket and sat up.

“The housecleaner was at your house,” I said. “She said she thought Maggie’s child was a son.”

Danella looked at me. Did she flinch? Did something change?

“No,” she said. “I’m obviously a daughter. I never met anyone who cleaned the house. We cleaned the house. My mom probably called me Danny, so that lady thought she meant I was a boy.” She sounded annoyed.

“What color is your room?”

“My room?” she asked. She looked out the window, frowning, as if trying to remember something. “Blue. It’s blue. We painted it just before.” She looked back at me. “You think I’m lying about all of this?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’m trying to figure it all out. Let’s go in the house.”

We got out of the car, ducked under the overhang, and stood in front of the back door until I unlocked it. Then we walked through the small mud room/laundry room, opened another door, and stepped into the large kitchen. One of the reasons I bought this house was because of this kitchen. The cupboards were tall and white. The floor was hardwood—ridiculous in a kitchen, but I loved it.

Danny was looking around. The kitchen was clean and empty of boxes. The rest of the house was cluttered with boxes I still hadn’t unpacked.

“Sit,” I said, pointing to the long wooden table. I pulled the Bigfoot Fruit Leathers from my back pocket and dropped them onto the table as she sat in one of the chairs. “You need some water or anything?”

Danella shook her head.

“I’m going to make some calls,” I said. “You need the bathroom, it’s right down the hall.” I pointed. She nodded. She took one of the fruit leathers and began taking off the wrapper.

“I got those at your house,” I said. “In the fridge.”

“Mom always puts them in the fridge,” she said, “even though I don’t like them cold.” She looked over at me. “See. That proves I live there.”

I didn’t say anything. I went into the living room, walking along a path between the boxes that I had made when I first moved in. I stepped over to the windows and closed the blinds. Then I sat in the chair by the land line and flipped through the telephone book until I found the number for Darby’s.

Crap. It was Saturday. Nobody would be there.

I tried anyway. The phone rang and rang. I was about to hang up when someone answered.

“Darby’s, Christopher here.” Christopher. Christopher Darby?

In a Southern accent, I said, “Um, could I speak to Maggie Green, please?”

“No one named Maggie here,” he said. “No one with the last name Green either.”

“I could have sworn this was the number she gave,” I said, my accent getting thicker. “You sure you know everybody there? You sound like the man in charge. The man in charge usually doesn’t know everybody.”

He laughed. “As a matter of fact, I am the one in charge, and I do know everyone. I don’t know anyone named Maggie or Margaret who works here. We’re a fairly small shop.”

“Huh,” I said. “This isn’t Deirdre’s Hair Salon, then?”

“It is not,” he said.

“I do apologize. That’ll teach you for answering the phone yourself on a Saturday.”

“It will indeed,” he said. “Have a good one.”

Didn’t know any big muckety-mucks worked on Saturdays.

I put the phone down. Danny was standing in the archway between the kitchen and the living room.

“She’s not there?” she asked.

“Not as far as I can tell,” I said.

Danny looked around the cluttered room. “How long you been here? A few days?”

“A few months,” I said.

“If my mom left the house, that means she’s in trouble, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I met you less than thirty minutes ago. I don’t know who you are or what is going on.”

Suddenly she looked older than her eleven years. “I should have waited,” she said. “I shouldn’t have run away. I should just go back.”

She pulled on a strand of hair and nervously twirled it around her finger. She looked like she was going to throw up.

“Go make yourself a sandwich,” I said. “I’m going to talk to the sheriff. I won’t tell him anything about you, but I’ll find out if he knows Mitchell and Herman.”

She nodded again and started to slowly turn around.

“Do you want me to make the sandwich for you?” I asked.

She shook her head. Then she looked back at me.

“Can I call my mom?”

Oh crap. Why hadn’t I thought of that?

“Sure,” I said. I picked up the receiver—my land line was unlisted. “Give me the number.”

She recited it for me, and I pressed in the numbers. “Don’t say anything no matter what happens,” I said. I pressed the speaker phone button. It rang once. I glanced at Danella. She was biting her little finger. It rang again. Then again.

“Where is she?” Danella asked quietly.

On the fourth ring, the message kicked in, “This is Maggie Green. I can’t come to the phone right now. Leave a message.” After the beep, I said, “Ms. Green, this is Katherine Smith. I needed to speak to you about a refund check I’m sending out to you. I need to speak with you as soon as possible to make certain I have the right mailing address. Please call me.” I recited my phone number, and then I hung up.

“What does that do?” Danella asked.

“Most people will call back if you’re offering money,” I said. “So if she’s OK, she might call back. Even if they’re holding her, maybe they’ll let her call back. It’s about money, after all. It’s a shot in the dark. We can call again later. I didn’t want you to speak because, for all we know, your kidnappers think you got lost in the forest. Why did they take you on the trail anyway? That seems like a strange thing for kidnappers to do. Where were they keeping you?”

“I don’t know where it was,” she said. “Some room in some house somewhere. When they took me out of the house they made me wear these sunglasses—they looked like sunglasses—only I couldn’t see out of them. I tried looking out, but the Mitchell guy kept telling me to look straight ahead. Inside, there was a living room and a kitchen that I was allowed to go into. There was a TV. No books. That was torture. I slept on the couch. I didn’t see where they slept. One of them was always watching me. No phones, except theirs, and no pictures or knick-knacks or anything.”

I smiled. “Observing like a cop.”

“I was trying to figure out how to get out of there.”

“Tell me everything you can remember until you saw me,” I said.

“They never opened the windows and it got stuffy in there.” She came into the room, moved a box out of the way and sat on the couch. Something about the way she moved reminded me of a deer—almost on her tiptoes. She wasn’t afraid, but she was wary. She’d experienced trauma, that was for certain. After Andy killed Amanda, I had walked on tiptoes for days. Months? Took a long time to find my ground.

I was thinking about Amanda again. Thinking about that night thirty some years ago when the six of us went out on a group date and only five of us returned. That sounded so dramatic when I thought about it that way. It wasn’t like I’d seen her killed. We paired off. Andy and Amanda set out in one direction, Sylvie and Doug in another, and Nate and I stood by the truck arguing until I stomped away. Literally. I remember stomping. I remember the feel of the hard ground as I kicked the earth, angry with Nate. I walked away, into the near night, off some logging road in the Gifford Pinchot forest. The air had tasted like cedar.

My ex—Peter Smith—told me many times that I had spent my whole adult life trying to save a series of young girls who were stand-ins for Amanda.

I told him that was psychological horseshit. For one thing, I rarely thought about Amanda. For another thing, I tried to save boy children, too.

“Every boy child except your own,” Peter said once.

“Because Scott doesn’t need saving,” I said.

“Sometimes a child needs his mother.”

“f**k off,” I told him. It seemed like he was always trying to guilt me about Scott. I never understood why. Scott had chosen to go live with Peter. Not because I was a bad mother or because we didn’t get along. Sometimes a boy needed his f*****g father.

Or that’s what I always told myself.

I rubbed my face.

Didn’t want to go to any of these places from the past.

“OK. Then what?” I said. “The house was hot and you ended up at the trailhead?”

“Herman said he had to get out or he’d go crazy,” she said. She bent the empty Bigfoot Fruit Leather packaging back and forth as she talked and then wrapped it around her index finger. “Mitchell said he’d heard about this trail. Mystic Trail, I think he called it. He’d always wanted to go on it. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said sure. Anything to get out of there. I had to promise not to scream or do anything because it would only take seconds to call and have someone hurt my mom. He reminded me that he knew the police anyway, so no one would believe me. Once we crossed the Bridge of the Gods, he let me take off the glasses. We hardly saw anyone on the trail, and we didn’t go far, but I kept a lookout for something that would save me. You passed right by us. I knew you were the one who could help. I told them I had to run to the bathroom.”

I passed them? I didn’t remember seeing her before she said, “Help me.”

“By the creek, you know, down from the parking lot,” she said.

Oh yeah. I’d been pissed about some barking dog off its leash. I was fantasizing about picking up its owner and throwing him in the water.

Not paying attention in the woods was stupid on so many levels.

“You told them you had to go to the bathroom and they let you go?” I said.

“They didn’t have a leash on me,” she said. “I pretended I had to go. They got uncomfortable any time I had to do any girl stuff. That’s what they called it. As if boys don’t have to pee.”

They seemed awfully casual with her for a couple of kidnappers. I’d never heard of a kidnapper taking their kidnapee to the park. Didn’t seem very smart. But in my experience, most criminals were none too bright.

“I’m going to talk to the sheriff,” I said. “See if I can get some answers. I won’t mention your name. Are you old enough to be left home by yourself?”

“I was kidnapped by myself,” she said. “I can stay by myself.”

I rolled my eyes. Tough kid. Not city tough. Not homeless street kid tough. But she could take care of herself. Up to a point. I had been like that when I was her age, too.

“Make yourself that sandwich,” I reminded her as I got out of the chair. Danella stood, too. “Sit at the kitchen table and eat it.”

“If I can find it,” she said, looking around at the living room filled with boxes.

“Hey, the kitchen is perfectly clear,” I said. I saw a sliver of a smile on Danella’s lips. She was teasing me. Good. She had some good coping skills. Bad s**t happened to everyone. How they coped with the bad s**t determined how well they’d survive in the short and long run.

“I’ll walk, since it’s a couple blocks away,” I said. “Keep the door locked and the window blinds closed. Don’t answer the door or the phone. Stay inside. Don’t touch anything.”

She nodded. “OK.”

“No one knows you’re here,” I said, “or even suspects you’re here. You’ll be OK.”

“I know,” she said. “You’ll find my mom, won’t you?”

“Probably not in the next fifteen minutes,” I said, “but we’ll figure something out.”

“You really know the sheriff?” she asked.

“Sure, we dated a bit when we were teens,” I said, “and hated each other for a bit after that. We both became cops.”

“You said earlier you used to be a cop.”

“I was,” I said. “I retired about eight months ago. Moved to Beauty Falls several months later.”

“Retired?” she said. She frowned. “I thought old people retired. I mean people older than you.”

I laughed. “Cops usually retire earlier than most people.”

Especially when they were asked to retire after they were caught having s*x with their confidential informant.

By “they” I mean me.

“So you can find out stuff that most people can’t,” she said, “because you know people who are still police. You’ll be able to find my mom.”

“I don’t know what I can do,” I said. “But I’ll do something. Try to be patient.”

“Would you be?” she asked. “If someone had taken your mom?”

“No,” I said, “but you don’t even know if they have her.”

“I know she’s in trouble,” Danella said, “and someone’s gotta help her. I hope they don’t hurt her because I ran away.”

She suddenly looked so vulnerable. She had that wiry skinniness kids of a certain age possess. Like giant Gumbys. Made her look like she could fold and bend and survive almost anything. Until right this second. She was a kid. And she needed her mother.

Maybe I could help with that.