“Thanks, Bill,” he said. “I hope I’m just overreacting.”
I wish he had been.
—
These are cruel times, I’ll admit. But all times are cruel; most just don’t get so much press. We have the nightly news, using everything from terrorists to carbohydrates to scare the shit out of us, and they love to draw exes over the eyes of innocent faces. A child’s terror, a parent’s misery, are good for the ratings. So every time we hear about a kid that doesn’t come home for dinner we remember the others: the girl snatched from her driveway by a handyman; the girl taken from her bed by the “quiet” old man down the street; the pretty child dragged into the brush by a stranger. We can’t help but remember them.
As a father, those kinds of stories were carved into me, but I never expected to be facing one in my own backyard.
It took me a few minutes to wake Lisa. She mumbled and rolled away from my touch. Her “migraines” were becoming more frequent. I tried to be patient, but the scratch of frustration at seeing her this way was with me a lot. Every time one of the girls asked, “Is Mommy sick?” it felt like a punch in my gut. I grasped Lisa’s shoulder real tight and gave it a good shake. When her eyes opened and seemed like they might stay that way for more than a second, I told her to throw on some clothes and get downstairs.
“You need to watch the girls. I have to go out.”
“I’ll bet,” Lisa muttered, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. She shot me a cutting glare and blinked. My wife looked around the room, dazed, then back at me. “What are you doing home so early?” she asked, as if I’d just walked into the room.
“Get dressed,” I said, no longer worried about upsetting her. “Put on your clothes and get downstairs. I don’t have time to argue with you. Maggie Mayflower is missing, and I don’t want Dru and Gwen going out until we know what happened. They’ll need some supper. I’ll leave money for a pizza. Now hurry up. I have to leave.”
“Don’t want to keep her waiting,” she said with a voice as bitter as it was garbled.
I shook my head and left the room. For the last year or so, Lisa’s accusations had gone from casual, nearly joking, to outright hostile. They were ridiculous, and I wasn’t going to stand around trying to defend myself against a pill-fueled delusion. I had more important things to worry about.
—
I pulled into the Salems’ driveway, still fuming over Lisa’s behavior. After parking, I just sat behind the wheel for a minute, letting the steam in my head dissipate a bit. I didn’t want to carry too much frustration in with me when I questioned little Emily. The last thing either of us needed was for me to lose my temper.
Dick Salem greeted me at the door with a strong handshake and a serious expression. He had the narrow face and flat chin of a Saxon, with a sweep of auburn bangs like the wing of a robin draped across his brow.
“Has she said anything?” I asked, letting go of Dick’s hand.
“No, sir,” he said, as if he was a subordinate officer. “She’s in a state, and I didn’t have a bit of luck.”
He invited me in and led me across the living room. The impeccably clean house, the new furniture, the attention to warmth and hominess, reminded me of what my own home was missing, and my thoughts drifted back to Lisa’s doped stare. She’d been beautiful once, intelligent and talented. Those days were gone. That woman was gone, replaced by a suspicious wife and a failing mother who insulated herself with pills.
I followed Dick down a brightly lit hallway, decorated with two dozen family photographs in neat wooden frames.
“She saw something,” Dick said of his daughter. “We know that. She said she promised not to tell, said she was scared. So we know she saw something. Talked to somebody. Duke called about five minutes ago, so I’m on my way out to help with the search, but Olivia will be here. You just let us know what needs to be done.”
“You go on ahead. See if you can’t catch up to Les at the park. If he’s not there, just drive up and down Whitehall.”
Dick stopped in the hall and turned on me. “You think it’s one of those molesters?” he whispered. “You think we got one of those bastards in town?”
“I don’t know what to think yet, Dick. Let me see what Emily has to say.”
“Yes, sir.”
He pushed open the door, and Emily flinched. She lay on the bed, curled up knees to chest. Her large blue eyes erupted with fear and then calmed upon recognizing her father.
“Emily,” Dick whispered, “this here is Sheriff Cranston. You remember him from the church picnic at Labor Day?” Emily didn’t respond. She just stared at us both, trembled. “Well, he’s going to ask you some questions, sweetheart. I want you to try and answer him, okay?”
No response.
What I had in my head was that someone had approached both Emily and Maggie. He decided he was going to snatch Maggie, and, to buy himself time, he put some deep, dark fear into Emily. Any adult would ignore such a threat, but Emily was a little girl who’d just had her first encounter with a real-life monster. It was no wonder she doubted her safety.
I approached the bed slowly, crouched down, smiled as pleasantly as I could.
“You know you’re not in any trouble, don’t you?”
I detected a slight movement of her head. Yes, she understood.
“And you know that nobody is going to hurt you. You know that you’re safe, don’t you?”
No response.
“You met someone kind of mean today, didn’t you? I’ll bet he said that if you told your parents what you saw something bad was going to happen. Maybe to you. Maybe to your parents. Maybe to Maggie. But he wasn’t telling the truth, Emily. He was a liar. The only way he can do something bad is if you don’t tell us what happened. You know that, don’t you?”
No response.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll bet he didn’t say anything about me guessing what happened, did he?”
Emily shook her head rapidly. When she realized what she had done, the sparkle of fear returned to her eyes.
“That’s okay. If I guess what happened, it’s not your fault. So I’m going to guess that it was a man who said those bad things to you.” Her chin dipped slightly toward her chest. “And he took Maggie away in his car.”
No response.
“He didn’t drive? He walked away?”
Her chin dipped again.
“Did he take her down Whitehall? Up Whitehall? No. Did he take her toward the woods on the far end of the park? I’ll bet he did, didn’t he?”
Her chin dipped.
—
From above, the city of Luther’s Bend looks like an eye, due in part to the city circle in the middle of town and the wetlands to the west where the river cuts a sharp angle across one marshy edge and a stand of conifers angle in from the south. To the east, Wilhelm Mathers Park fans out from a thick forest of pine and spruce, looking like a teardrop floating sideways. At the point of that teardrop is what’s called The Den. Late at night, rebellious kids from unfortunate homes met under the jutting forest cover to smoke dope, snort meth, drop acid, and drink whatever spirits they’d managed to steal. The broad end of the park, the one running along Whitehall Road, was neat and well kept, suffering none of the litter or abuse inflicted on The Den. A new playground was erected a few years back, far enough from the street to keep curious toddlers from having easy access to passing car bumpers. Like most playgrounds, it had a set of swings, a jungle gym with a deep pad of sand below, a teeter-totter, a merry-go-round, and a kind of treehouse that stood only five feet off the ground. Thick plastic tubes ran from the main structure of the fort, curling and arcing like intravenous tubes.
This was where Emily Salem and Maggie Mayflower would play together for the last time.
After getting what information I could from Emily, I instructed Olivia Salem to take her daughter to the emergency clinic on the north end of town. Emily was suffering from shock and should be checked over by Dr. Laughlin. Then I cal
led Duke and told him to round up whomever he could and meet me at the east end of the park.
“Ed can watch the station. I’m going over to the Mayflower place to get a picture of Maggie from Viv. Bring flashlights and the talkies. Get on the horn to the state police and let them know we have a kidnapping, probably a youth sex offender. Caucasian. Approximately six feet. The guy is probably in his fifties, could be older. Slender build. Brown eyes.”
That was the best description I could get from Emily. After playing the guessing game for twenty minutes, feeling the distance spreading between Maggie Mayflower and me with every time-consuming question needling my chest, I took what I had and left. By the end of it, though I kept my voice steady and the smile plastered to my face, my frustration with Emily Salem was bordering on rage.
We’d lost too much time already.
I drove up Whitehall, my headlights cutting through the late-evening gloom to fall across half a dozen cars parked at the curb. Another car pulled up behind me and Arthur Milton met me at the trunk of my car.
Arthur was a good enough guy, but he had a reputation in town that kept a lot of us folks at a distance. Arthur was a confirmed bachelor in a town that didn’t quite understand the concept. Now, he wasn’t queer or anything like that. No, he liked the women well enough, maybe too much, and he didn’t let a little thing like wedding vows get in his way. Though mostly rumored, Arthur was said to have bedded a good number of married women and caused more than one divorce in his day.
“Arthur,” I said. “Glad you could help out.”
“It’s not true, is it? I mean, it can’t be true.”
“We know that Maggie was led into the woods by a middle-aged man. That’s about it right now.”
“Dear Lord,” he whispered, shaking his head.
I retrieved the halogen lantern from my trunk, tested it, cutting a thick white line through the night air. Satisfied, I closed the trunk and looked at Arthur, wondering as I always did in his company, how such an unremarkable looking fellow might have such luck with the ladies.
He was thickly built, though his gut wasn’t spilling over his belt. Balding and blunt of feature, he wasn’t an ugly man, but he wasn’t likely to be mistaken for Casanova anytime soon, either.
With Arthur on my heels, I set off toward The Den, where several flashlight beams were already sweeping the tree line.
“So, what’s the plan?” Arthur asked.
“Well, I’ll tell you, I don’t know exactly. There’s nothing but woods in those woods, and nothing for miles but more woods with nothing in them. We’re just going to have to do a sweep, hope we can find a trail of some kind. No matter what happens, it’s going to be a long night.”
“Well, you got me for as long as you need me.”
“Thank you, Arthur. We can use all the help we can get.”
We padded over the soft grass until we met up with the men and women, ten in all, at the tree line. I knew them, of course. Duke’s brother, Mel, was there, cradling a hunting rifle in his arm and looking every inch the persona of bad country heritage. His running buddy, Reed—also armed with a rifle—puffed on a cigarette and eyed me with suspicion as I approached. The one face I most expected to see, that of Les, Maggie’s father, wasn’t in the crowd.
“Where’s Les?”
“He went on in the woods with Garrett Newman and his boys. Told us to tell you he was heading southeast.”
Though I said “Good,” I didn’t mean it. The last thing I wanted was for Les to stumble across an ugly scene in which his daughter was involved. He shouldn’t have to see something like that. No one should. Silently, I prayed that whatever was to be found in those woods would be found by someone else.
“Okay, gather ’round,” I said.
“We got a few other boys out there,” Mel said, before spitting a foul, dark wad of tobacco juice onto a discarded beer can. “Ha. Bull’s-eye. But yeah, Ramsay and Baker went in about twenty minutes ago, too. Reed and I was just about to wade in, but Duke said we should wait on you.”
“Good,” I said. “First thing, no guns. You go into those woods, you leave the firearms behind. I don’t want you boys shooting each other in the dark.”
“What if the fucker’s packing?”
“Then you get out of there and call me up on your talkie.”
“I ain’t leaving my baby,” Reed said, hefting his rifle.
“Then you can go on home. I appreciate the help, but we’re playing by my rules. Understand?”
Reed scowled and let his baby droop at his side, its muzzle grazing over the lawn and clipping the beer can his buddy had spat on moments before.
“Okay,” I said in as loud a voice as I could muster. “This is how it’s going to work…”
—
“I’m glad you didn’t let those boys bring rifles into these woods,” Arthur said, trudging next to me. “They’d be shooting at every bug fart.”
Arthur and I followed the path that I felt was the most likely. It cut straight back from The Den. Though narrow, the path was defined and easy to navigate, which I figured would make it attractive, at least initially, to a man who I assumed wasn’t familiar with the territory. Every twenty yards or so, we’d come across a broken branch or a displaced bed of needles that made me think we were on the right track. Despite this minor sense of accomplishment, nagging pessimism crawled on me like ants. Not only were the woods pitch black—the sliver of fingernail moon swaddled well behind thick clouds—but the forest went on for miles. Sure, the man might have dragged Maggie along this trail for a while to gain distance, but at any point he could have veered off, gone north or south, doubled back, and we wouldn’t be any the wiser. And the noise Arthur pointed out added to the frustration. Branches snapped, logs settled, animals hunted and foraged. Insects buzzed and chirped. Add to that the tromping boots of a dozen concerned adults, bouncing off of tree trunks, echoing through the needles and brush, and I began to understand just how intimidating this particular haystack was.
“We don’t want to make things worse,” I said, responding to his comment about keeping the men unarmed. “If it were daylight, I might have a different feeling about it.”
“Well, you did right.”
I wondered if Arthur’s worry went deeper. Who could tell which of the men in the party had a wife Arthur had known?
I cast a glance over Arthur’s head, saw the distant sweep of a flashlight revealing thick tree trunks in silhouette on the rise. The beams looked tiny and insubstantial amid the vast, rolling darkness. My spirits withered and drooped.
We weren’t going to find this guy unless he wanted to be found.
As it turned out, that’s what he’d wanted all along.
—
We walked for more than an hour before Arthur found the shred of cloth dangling from a nettles branch. The scrap was baby blue, the color of the cotton sweater Maggie was wearing when she disappeared.
“Okay, I’m going to get the boys over here,” I said.
Arthur nodded, looking proud of himself and eager to continue the search. He did a quick turn, surveying the woods on all sides with a sweep of his shoulders and head.
I got on the talkie and told the search party to head toward my position. It didn’t occur to me that few, if any, of the party knew where my position was. I hadn’t thought in terms of coordinates or landmarks. I did the only thing I could think to do. I told everyone to look for my flashlight beam. I’d direct it up and get as many to me as possible.
“We’ll wait for ten minutes and then move on,” I said.
“We’re just going to wait?” Arthur asked.
“For now.”
“How about I go up a ways? I’ll stay on the path. I won’t go far. I just think we’re getting close.”
“That material could have been there for hours,” I said, refusing to allow a break in my pessimistic hide. “It means they came through this way. That’s all.”
“I won’t go but fifty yards,” Arthur sai
d.
“Okay,” I told him. “But you stay on the path. If you get the slightest urge to go off of the path, you fight it, and you get your ass back here. The same goes for if you see or hear anything. We don’t know if this man is armed.”
“Good,” Arthur said, so anxious to move on that he was dancing from foot to foot.
I imagined he was hoping to come out of this a hero with a story to tell his women. I didn’t mean to be so uncharitable to Arthur, but the thought leapt into my head and decided to stay for a bit.
So I stood there with my lantern aimed at the sky like a guy under a spaceship’s teleportation device, and Arthur took off down the path.
He wasn’t gone a full minute before he started shouting.
—
“She’s here! Sheriff! Bill! She’s over here.”
I dropped my arm and was in a full sprint before the lantern’s beam came horizontal. Branches scraped across my chest, tore at the sleeves of my jacket. The scene before me jerked and leaped as the light bounced from side to side. Ahead, I saw Arthur kneeling down by a pile of blue with what looked like two white sticks jutting from it. My heart beat too fast, my throat tensed, closed around a knot.
Maggie Mayflower was laid out on the path, her hands and feet bound together and secured to thick tent stakes, driven deep in the ground. I saw all of this long before I reached the little girl.
I never quite reached Arthur.
A flash of movement from the right startled me. I stumbled on the uneven trail and caught myself in time to see Arthur being carried away.
He screamed, his voice tearing through the forest, high and shrill. He sounded like a child himself. The peals of fear formed no words that I could understand, just one piercing cry after another. In the beam of my lantern, he seemed to be floating over the ground, his eyes and mouth wide while his arms and legs swatted and kicked. Of his attacker, I saw a muscled arm wrapped around Arthur’s midsection. Then a back and two powerful legs, pumping and stomping on the earth as he raced deeper into the woods, his struggling captive held with as little effort as a pillow or a doll. The man’s size and strength exceeded the description little Emily Salem had given me, and I immediately considered the likelihood that the withered old man she’d described wasn’t working alone.
Dark Screams, Volume 9 Page 9
