by Lisa Wingate
“You oughta help Reverend Hay with his next theater production, down at the Tin Building, Sheila.” Nester turned back to the domino game. “You got a flare for the dramatic.”
Snorting, Sheila smacked a hand on the counter and turned away, quitting the conversation.
“I saw a truck … a gray Ford with a dog in the back and a little dark-haired girl in the passenger seat,” someone offered from over by the door.
All three of us swiveled around, and there was Dustin’s mom. I’d forgotten all about her, which was good, since this morning’s meeting hadn’t come out too shiny.
Sheila jumped on the new information. “You did? Where? When?”
Dustin’s mom took a few more steps across the room, a little wrinkle in her nose as she eyeballed Dorsey’s collection of wall-mounted fish and stuffed wildlife.“Yesterday. Somewhere up in Chinquapin Peaks.” Motioning vaguely toward the hills, she walked past me like I wasn’t there, on her way to talk to Sheila.
I watched her pass by. Nester caught my eye and pointed behind her back, his mouth circling in a silent whistle and his eyes wide, like, Look ’a-there, Mart, a real, live g-i-r-l.
I made out like I didn’t notice – Nester or the girl.
“I was out on the other side of the lake yesterday afternoon, and my car broke down,” she told Sheila. “The truck went by, and it was all just very … odd.” She introduced herself to Sheila, and the name clicked in my memory. Andrea. Andrea Henderson.
Sheila shook her hand. “Oh, so you’re Dustin’s mom. Sorry we were in such a rush when you picked him up. One minute I heard someone coming in the door, and by the time I finished with the bus customers, Dustin was gone.”
“My sister came to get him, actually,” Andrea said. A flash of emotion crossed her face, but she smoothed it away, just as quick.This woman was cool as an icehouse latch, when she wanted to be. “I hated that I couldn’t be here to help sort things out. Yesterday was pretty crazy. About the time Dustin was … AWOL on the lake, I was trying to get myself out of the backwoods with a flat tire. While I was stuck there, a gray truck came by with a seriously nasty dog chained in the back. There was an old man behind the wheel, and a little girl in the passenger seat. She turned around and looked at me when they passed. The driver stopped, and I thought he was going to get out and help me, but he didn’t. He just drove away.”
Sheila flashed a sneer my way, as in, Mart, I told you that old man was up to something.
In the booth, Nester perked up, sensing a topic that’d be even more interesting than the day’s fishing report. “Was the truck all rusted up? Did it have a old greasy-haired man in a blue ball cap drivin’ it?”
Andrea described Len and his truck to a T– right down to Len’s dry-rotted ball cap and the way his truck wheezed and belched like a chain smoker gasping for air. Tired or not, my interest level went up.
“The whole thing gave me goose bumps at the time. I didn’t quite …” She paused, her gaze taking in a stuffed bobcat with a quail in its mouth, her lip curling on one side. “I didn’t quite know what to make of it, but I was busy trying to figure out how to change a tire.” Her mouth twitched at the corners, like the memory was funny now. Guess she did have a sense of humor, after all. “But sometimes you get just a base-level reaction, and you don’t pay too much attention right then, but it bothers you later, you know? It bothered me that the little girl was a mess, dirty and unkempt, and that she wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. I just brushed it off as a grandparent who didn’t know the laws, or didn’t take time to buckle her in.”
Nester rolled a narrow look at me, then turned back to Andrea. “That’d be Len, all right. But he ain’t nobody’s grandpa. Len’s never had a family. He went off to Vietnam right after high school. Got shrapnel in his head. He wasn’t no Rhodes Scholar before that, but after, he come home and lived with his mama and daddy, and they took care of him. But they been dead quite a while, I reckon. Nobody’s seen either one of them in years. Len probably dug a hole and buried them up there in the hills. That man’s simple as a mudbug and smells twice as bad. Mart, there’s no way some woman would be getting with him and makin’ babies.” Nester leaned back and frowned at me, concerned.
A question came to my mind, and I just went ahead and asked Andrea. “What were you doing up on the other side of the lake? That’s pretty remote territory.” It wasn’t like me to be interested in other people’s business. Normally, I was happy to let them keep theirs and I’d keep mine. Simpler that way. But I had to admit that all of a sudden, I was curious about Dustin’s mom. I couldn’t quite put a finger on why that was. In some way or other, Andrea Henderson just didn’t add up.
Andrea seemed to think about that for a minute – like she wasn’t sure whether she should tell. “I had an appointment up that way.”
Appointment had a funny ring to it. “An appointment?” What kind of business would someone like her have on the other side of the lake? The land was worthless, half of it only accessible by logging roads the county didn’t even maintain. Back in the day, the area suited rumrunners and mash brewers. Now it attracted pot growers, meth boilers, and folks like Len, who had to live anyplace they could.
The outgoing game warden had warned me to watch myself over there. Stumble off into some redneck’s marijuana patch, you’ll wake up dead, he said. Don’t try to be a hero out there. You spot something like that, you back off and call the boys from Drug Enforcement. That’s their problem. You can notify the county sheriff, but you won’t get him to go up there, either. He ain’t an idiot. He finished the conversation with stories about hikers, tourists in canoes, and hapless sheriff ’s deputies who’d stumbled into the wrong field and were never heard from again.
“You a real estate agent, or somethin’?” Nester asked, trying to answer the same question I was pondering.
“I’m a counselor working on contract with the Department of Family and Protective Services.” Andrea flicked a glance my way. Maybe she knew what I was thinking. The lady whose kid’s been running loose on the lake tells other people what they’re doing wrong?
Nester seemed surprised, and Burt blinked and sat back. He probably knew what it took to deal with some of those families in Chinquapin Peaks. “I thought Tazinski did the CPS work up there. We had some dealings, back when I was principal at the school.”
Andrea stood a little taller, like she was trying to convince us that she was up to the job. “Dr. Tazinski hired me to assist in his practice. All the fieldwork for CPS is too much for him. He’s had some health issues.”
Burt’s look turned serious. “You ought to be careful out in that area. Tazinski tell you that? Be sure you know exactly where you’re going. Some of those folks don’t cotton to strangers driving up. Isn’t that right, Mart?”
Everyone but Andrea turned my way. “Some of them,” I said.
Pop wheeled his chair from behind the counter. “Well, I been knowin’ Len Barnes all his life, and I just can’t feature that he’d hurt anybody. I’ve bought vegetables and jerky from him for years. Never known him to cause any trouble.”
Sheila frowned sideways at him. “Daddy, you don’t know Len at all, really. That’s the truth of it. Just because he comes here with tomatoes and jerky, that doesn’t mean you know what he’s doing the rest of the time. He poaches in the park and lays out catfish lines when he isn’t supposed to. Maybe he does other things, too. Look at that case that was just in the news. That man had neighbors, for heaven’s sake, and a criminal history, and everybody just told themselves he was a little odd, or whatever. Now they think he may have been involved in the disappearances of other children over the years – three at least.”
Nester nodded, stroking his chin. “There’s been four kids go missin’ around the lake and never been heard from again in the last … what … twenty years or so? First one was that little Sanford child. Disappeared from the fourth-grade field trip and they never found him. They dragged the lake and searched the woods for weeks, remember?
In ninety-one, that was.”
Burt cast a concerned look my way. “That’d be about the time we stopped seein’ Len’s folks, Mart.”
I figured it was time to tone down the speculation, but Pop beat me to it. “All right, now, y’all. You’re gonna have the man tried and convicted, and there ain’t one shred of proof he done anything. Maybe that little girl belongs to one of his neighbors, or a relative, or somethin’.”
“What neighbors and what relatives?” Sheila shot a worried look my way. “We need to call somebody. Mart, you’re law enforcement. Get the sheriff to go up there. If you tell him to do it, maybe he’ll actually get off his duff and go.”
“I think Len’s place might be over the county line,” Burt put in.
Nester snatched a napkin from the basket and slid a pen out of his shirt pocket, like he was ready to take notes. “Somebody oughta check with the FBI and see if there’s been any little girls of that description reported missin’, or …”
“All right, now, hold on a minute,” I said loud enough to get everyone’s attention before we spun off into an episode of redneck CSI. “Everybody just calm down before we run Len up the flagpole. We don’t even know …”
The door opened and Reverend Hay stepped in, carrying a nice rod-and-reel combo. Looked like he’d been on the lake, or else was headed that way. He had on all the official gear, straight out of a Field and Stream catalog. Being only a little over thirty and a big-city transplant to the Lakeshore Community Church, Hay had to work hard to fit in. He’d bought himself a used two-man bass rig, but he couldn’t keep it running half the time.
He crossed the room and handed his rod to Burt. The thing was bird-nested so badly, he’d probably never get the line untangled.
“Well, Reverend Hay, you’ve got a mess here,” Burt observed. “It’ll need new line again.”
Hay nodded. “I was afraid of that.” He sauntered over to the drink machines, his long legs sagging and straightening like the pants on a scarecrow. Nester examined the reel while Reverend Hay whipped himself up an Icee.“Hey, Mart, you give any thought to what I asked you the other day?”
“Yeah, not really.” Hay’d caught me at the gas station last Saturday and hit me up about helping with one of his productions at the Tin Building Theater. That was about as far from my kind of thing as it could get.
“We’re doing The Waltons’ Christmas as our production this fall. You’d be perfect for the sheriff.”
Andrea gave me a surprised look, and Nester chuckled.
“You going to put Mart in the play?” Burt asked. He was chugging like a steam engine when he said it.
I could feel Andrea watching, and all of a sudden, I remembered the public humiliation that’d ended my acting career in the eighth grade. A guy doesn’t recover easily from a blow like that.“Think I’m gonna have to pass on that for now, Reverend Hay,” I said.
Hay shrugged, good-natured as usual.“Give it some thought. I’ll be casting for a week or two.” He filled his cup in different-colored layers, like a kid turned loose at the ice cream counter. “Hey, anybody know if old Len’s got a family?”
All of a sudden, he had the eyes of everybody in the room. He was busy making Icee art, so he didn’t notice the rest of the crowd hanging in air.
“What?” Nester scooted to the end of the booth. “You see Len with somebody?”
Hay finished drawing his Icee and noticed everyone’s attention trained on him. His eyelids lifted on the top and stretched on the bottom, so that he looked like Wile E. Coyote, right about the time he realizes he’s stepped off a cliff. “Well, yeah. I ran across him at the Crossroads earlier, and there was a little girl playing around in the cedars, up by his truck. I stopped to pick up some vegetables, and he seemed kind of flustered. It was a bit hard to understand what he was trying to tell me, but I think he said she was his daughter. I didn’t know Len had anybody. Anyway, I thought I might go up to his place tomorrow and try to make a vis – ” He stopped midsentence and set the Icee on the counter. “What am I missing, here?”
Sheila plunked down a roll of quarters she was about to unwrap. “That does it. I’m calling Social Services.”
Every fishing water has its secrets… .
And to yield up these mysteries,
it must be fished with more than hooks.
– Zane Gray
(Left by an Irish poet riding out a thunderstorm at the Waterbird)
Chapter 9
Andrea Henderson
My mother always warned that, sooner or later, I’d stick my nose into something that would be the death of me. Perhaps her fear hailed from the fact that I’d come into the world early, in fragile health, or perhaps it was just her nature, but she felt the need to convince me that I was created only to aspire to small, manageable, predictable things. Were I to attempt something grander, I would be going beyond my abilities and inviting disaster. Any path other than the one she’d laid out for me was the road to ruin. Leave other people to their own affairs until you have your own house in order. God did not appoint you the keeper of the world, Andrea Jane.
Maybe those very warnings were the reason I felt the need to step into the middle of the developing situation at the Waterbird. When the game warden told the woman behind the cash register to hold off calling Social Services until he could go across the lake and take a look, the first words out of my mouth were, “I’m coming with you.”
He gaped at me, his face slowly turning stern under the brim of his straw cowboy hat. “Listen, this isn’t some field trip. Once we get across the lake, we’ll be going the rest of the way on foot, and I don’t know how far that’ll be. I’m not exactly sure where Len’s place is, but I’ve got an idea where he puts his boat in and out of the river.You don’t look like you’re dressed for a hike in the woods.” He motioned to my pantsuit and pumps, which I’d already decided were headed for the closet, only to come out on non-field days. When you’re rummaging around low-rent apartment complexes and slogging through horse pastures and chicken yards to get to houses, casual attire is a must.
The game warden was probably right, but I couldn’t help feeling that he was questioning my credentials rather than my clothes. “I can handle it. I’ve been through worse to get to CPS cases.” In my one and a half actual days in the field.
He quirked a brow. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed underneath. His hand rested on his belt, like he was going to draw down on me. I wondered if that was a habit, or if he meant something by it. Arrogant jerk. No wonder the incident with the kids had turned into such a mess yesterday. “Listen, lady, I’m not a babysitter. When we show up sniffing around Len’s place, he’s as liable to take potshots at us as to roll out the welcome mat. People up there don’t appreciate visitors.”
“Yes, I know. I work up there, remember? I’m aware of the risks.” Inside me, the still, small voice of caution was whispering, Are you out of your head? What do you think you’re doing? You’re not the keeper of the world, Andrea Jane. Mind your own affairs and let other people mind theirs. In spite of the fact that I wanted to rail against my mother’s admonitions, I knew she was probably right. I’d called Dustin to tell him I was stopping at the store and would be a little late getting home. He wasn’t expecting me to be gone for another hour, or however long this would take.
On the other hand, Dustin was safe, warm, and dry. That little girl might not be. In the corner of my mind, the rusty gray pickup was passing by, a snarling dog in the back, the little girl pressing her hand to the window glass, her blue eyes watching me, curious, intent, needy in some way that touched a place deep within me. “Listen, if you send this over to CPS, there’s no telling when, or if, it will be investigated. All you have right now are a few vague suspicions. Nobody’s seen anything happen to this child. CPS has to focus on the most critical incidents – cases in which a risk to the child has been identified.
“If you go up there, if you do find that this … Len has a little girl with him, the situati
on becomes even more complex. You won’t be able to count on the little girl to tell you the truth. Kids are very coachable. They quickly attach to their caretakers, even ones who hurt them. There are certain questions to ask, certain red flags to look for.”
Before the words were even out of my mouth, I’d made up my mind. Every once in a while, you just feel a tug on your soul and know there’s something you’re supposed to do. If the game warden was going up there, one way or another, I was going along. With no real evidence and no complaint, CPS here could take weeks to look into it, if ever. In the meantime, anything could be happening to that little girl. It wasn’t accidental that I’d been there when that truck passed by yesterday. I was meant to see.
“I think she should go with you, Mart,” the pastor, Reverend Hay, interjected. “In general, children are more comfortable with a woman. I’d be willing to ride along, as well.”
The clerk behind the counter nodded.“I agree; you need someone along who’s trained in dealing with children in crisis situations.”
The game warden, Mart, lifted a hand, palm-out like a stop sign. “Hold on a minute. Nobody knows there’s a situation happening here. I’m just going to take a look around – figure out exactly where Len’s place is, and see what I can see. Could be you’ve all got yourselves in a tangle over nothing.”
“You know there’s more to it, or you wouldn’t be going,” I insisted.
Mart drew back, blinked, and rubbed one eye with the pads of his fingers. “Listen, if there is a … something criminal involving this little girl, it falls under the penal code, not parks-and-wildlife code. It’s the county sheriff ’s jurisdiction.”
