Mountaindale was nearly a ghost town, especially after the summer. One of the smaller resort hamlets, it had lost nearly all of its bungalow colonies and small hotels to the economic downturn. Most of the stores were boarded shut. There was so little traffic that the light was no longer working at the center of the hamlet. The streets were deserted, but luckily one of the hamlet’s old-timers, an elderly, bald man with two patches of gray at his temples, was making his way toward the old synagogue briskly, despite the fact that he was walking with a cane. McShane honked his horn and pulled up beside him.
“Excuse me,” he said.
“Yes?”
“You know a John Allan?”
“Of course I know John Allan. John Allan was town assessor longer than you’re old. Is there a fire at his house? I just saw the ambulance follow the fire truck going in that direction.”
“No, not a fire. Where’s his house exactly?”
The old man lifted the cane and pointed.
“Follow the Spring Glen road a mile and a half and turn left on Sandburg Creek. He’s the third house on the right. Tell him Dave Malisoff sent you. I used to be the mayor.”
“Thanks. I’ll tell him,” McShane said, and shot off. He nearly drove past the Sandburg Creek road. He had to hit the brakes hard and the car spun around on some gravel. He accelerated and climbed the hill, which then descended rapidly toward the creek. The road ran along the creek for another couple of miles before the first house appeared. There were people standing in the front, looking in the direction of the Allan residence. The same was true for the second house. All had been roused by the sirens and commotion, which fell like heavy thunder on the otherwise peaceful rural setting.
McShane saw the ambulance in the driveway ahead and the fire truck right beside it. He pulled up quickly and hurried out. One of the volunteer firemen was standing by the fire truck with the radio phone in his hand.
“What’s happening?” McShane said, looking toward the half-dozen men gathered in the field.
“Trying to get a locksmith to meet us at the hospital. Jesus, what a sight,” he said.
McShane ran toward the group. They lifted Anna Gold onto the stretcher and began to make their way back toward the ambulance.
“How is she?”
“Pretty bad,” one of the paramedics said. “It looks like she was pregnant and she aborted.”
“It must be Anna Gold,” McShane said. He moved to the stretcher and walked along, revolted by the weird sight himself. “Can she talk?” he asked the paramedic. “Did she tell you her name?”
“She’s incoherent, in shock.”
“Did she say anything at all?”
“Something about a wheel in the water…Mommy falling off a cliff.” He shook his head.
“She’s been through hell. All sorts of contusions and traumas. Her feet are slashed. She looks like she ran miles. She came out of the woods back there. Ask the old man about it: He found her,” he said, nodding toward a tall man with a tanned face and a shock of thick gray hair.
McShane nodded.
“She going to make it?”
“Blood pressure’s low. I’m not sure what other internal injuries there are,” the paramedic said.
McShane stopped walking beside them and they continued to the ambulance. He watched them for a moment. John Allan joined him.
“Damn craziest thing I ever did see,” he said.
“Mr. Allan, I’m Detective McShane,” he said showing his ID quickly. “What happened?”
“Well, I don’t know exactly. I heard my dog yapping like mad and came out. She was standing over something in the field and barking. I couldn’t make anything out from the porch, so I walked down and saw her just lying there, moaning. I ran back to the house as fast as I could and called for an ambulance and the police. I told ’em to bring up a torch or something to get that box off her head and collar off her neck. There’s a chain too. You see it?”
“Yeah. You didn’t see anyone else?”
“No, sir, but I didn’t look around. Coulda been someone in the woods back there. I don’t know. Damn crazy thing,” he said, shaking his head. His eyes were still glassy from the shock and excitement.
“Paramedics said she mumbled something about a wheel in the water. That make any sense to you?”
“Wheel in the water?” He thought a moment and then nodded, his face brightening. “Sure does.”
“What does it mean?”
“Gristmill, down at the end of the road. It’s the last place on the right, the old Corning place…. Makes sense,” he said, nodding again. “That’s why she come out of the woods from that direction.”
“Anyone live there?”
“Yeah, a married couple. One of the Corning girls, Judith. She was in the Army, a nurse, for a while. Her husband’s in medicine too. He’s a lab technician over at the hospital. Name’s Gary, Gary Dunbar.”
“Do they have any children?”
“No, sir, they don’t. They’re loners, keep to themselves, don’t so much as wave when they drive past. Margaret and Jack Corning were kinda like that too. My wife, Ruth, she died two years ago, was the only one on the street talked much to Margaret, but she never liked her.”
“Thanks,” McShane said. He returned to his car and radioed the station. “Tell the sheriff I believe we’ve located Anna Gold. They’re taking her to the hospital. It looks like she might have been held by a couple named Gary and Judith Dunbar. They live just past the Allan residence. I’m heading over there now.”
“You wanna wait for backup? Billy’s on his way.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “But tell him to keep coming.”
He pulled out and continued down the back road, which lost any trace of macadam after a while and was just hard-packed dirt and gravel. The two-story house soon came into view and he saw the gristmill right behind it. The front door of the house appeared to be wide open. He drove up slowly, stared a moment to see if anyone would appear, and then turned off the engine. He sat there, waiting. It was deadly quiet.
Cautiously, he stepped out of the vehicle and reached back to unfasten his pistol. He started toward the front door, watching both sides of the house as he walked. On the porch he listened again. There was just the heavy, monotonous sound of the gristmill turning in the water.
“Hello?” he said, knocking on the doorjamb. He waited, listened, and then pounded again with his closed fist. Nothing. Anxious now, he took out his pistol and entered the house. Despite the bright day, the house was dank and dark, all the window shades drawn down, no lights on. The living room on his right was full of shadows created by the illumination that leaked in and around the drawn curtains. He gazed into the dining room and went on to the kitchen. The back door was open, so he went to it and peered out.
A loud creak in the building spun him around. His heart was pounding, and for a moment his eyes played tricks on him. He thought someone was standing in the kitchen doorway, but it was only an apron hooked on the door. He listened and then stepped out back. The yard was overgrown, and he could see where someone had trampled the high grass. He followed the path, which led him around and back to the front of the house.
He paused, listened, and gazed up at the curtained windows. One window was open and a piece of the curtain flapped in and out.
“Anyone here?”
The sound of the stream, the gristmill, and some crows cawing was all he heard. He returned to the house and went down the hall toward the stairway, pausing when he saw the open door to the basement. Cautiously he looked down the basement steps. There was a light on, the bulb fixture and bulb dangling from the ceiling. The basement itself didn’t look like much from where he stood. It had a hard dirt floor with nothing covering the stone foundation.
Nevertheless, the fact that the light was still on indicated that someone had been there recently. He started down the stairs. The old wooden steps groaned under his weight. He paused at the bottom and looked around, surprised to see anot
her door and what looked like another room, but a room built independently of the basement, obviously tacked on at a much later time.
“Anyone down here?” he called. The silence filled him with trepidation. Maybe he should have waited for Billy before exploring this house. Another loud creak in the building spun him around toward the stairway, but there was no one there. Slowly he approached the doorway of this add-on room and gazed through it.
A bedroom with a bathroom—how curious, he thought—and then he saw the table turned over, the dishes shattered, the food splattered over the floor. He entered the room and noticed the hook over the bed and the fact that there were no windows.
It looked like a prison cell, he thought, gazing at the stark white walls. This was surely where they had kept her.
He hurried out of the room and up the basement stairs. Then he climbed the stairway to the second story and bedrooms. He peered into what was obviously a baby’s nursery and looked at all the furniture, the stuffed animals, the paraphernalia for infants. Some of it looked brand-new; some of it look faded, old.
He continued to the second bedroom, which was obviously the master bedroom. The bed was unmade, a closet wide open. He stood there for a moment, listening. Then he entered the room, checked the bathroom, and started to look at things on the dresser and vanity table. He opened the drawer to one of the night tables and perused the contents. He was about to close it when something caught his eye: a telephone number on an index card and a business card attached. He studied it for a moment and then put it in his pocket. So much for the FBI’s theory that this was part of a national conspiracy, he thought.
The sound of a car driving up spun him around and sent him out and down the stairs. Billy Slater got out of a patrol car just as McShane stepped out of the house.
“What d’ya got?”
“The woman found in the field was Anna Gold. I’m sure these people were the ones who had abducted her. She was kept here, shut up in the basement, but she escaped, running through the woods toward the Allan place,” he said, pointing with his pistol. “I’ve checked it out. There’s no one here now, but from what the paramedics said, she mumbled something about someone going over a cliff. My guess is she was pursued through the woods, either by one or both of them. Better get some reinforcements for a search party. Keep your eyes peeled in case one of them appears. These are very strange and dangerous people.”
“Right.” Billy reached for his radio phone and McShane reentered the house and went to the kitchen, where he had seen a telephone on the wall.
When it rang three or four times, he thought no one was home, but then Miriam Gold picked up.
“Your sister’s been found,” he said. “She apparently escaped by herself, but she’s injured. They’ve taken her to the hospital emergency room.”
“Oh, my God. I’ll go there immediately.”
“It’s not a pretty story,” he warned. “Brace yourself.”
“I’ve been prepared ever since you came to our door,” she replied.
He smiled.
“I imagine you have,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”
“Thank you.”
“Where you going?” Billy asked when he came charging out of the house and toward his car.
“To finish solving the case,” he replied. “There’s one loose end I want to stitch up myself.” The anger building inside him painted his face crimson.
He shot away, spitting gravel, his bubble light going.
It wasn’t until he was through Mountaindale that his rage cooled enough for him to realize that he had better make one more stop first. What if only the woman had been chasing Anna Gold through the woods?
He had better go to the hospital, he thought.
26
Gary Dunbar pushed his cart out of the elevator on the third floor, heading for rooms 303, 307, and 308 to get blood samples for lab work. He wasn’t thinking about anything in particular. In fact, he was a bit drowsy this morning. He had fallen asleep quickly the night before, especially after all the wine they had drunk and the loving way she had massaged him with her skin oil. However, Mommy was very restless and twice had gotten up during the night. The last time was close to daylight. He knew she was experiencing another one of her anxiety attacks. It always got worse when they had a new incubator downstairs for a few days.
“Something always goes wrong,” she told him. “We get so close and then something always goes wrong.”
“It won’t happen this time,” he reassured her. “We’re doing it all right.”
She agreed, but she couldn’t shake off the anxiety. He knew that as time went by and they got closer and closer to the delivery, she would get even worse. He was preparing himself for that; he had stockpiled the tranquilizers. He decided he would start his vacation at the beginning of the ninth month and be home all the time. Once it was all a success and they had their baby, Mommy’s anxiety problem would be solved forever. Nothing succeeds like success, he thought, and remained confident.
He had practically sleepwalked through breakfast. Mommy didn’t get up to eat with him as she usually did. He had to go upstairs to tell her he was finished and would be leaving for work. When she saw the time, she jumped up and rushed to get the food downstairs.
“Why didn’t you wake me?” she demanded.
“I knew you needed your rest, Mommy,” he told her, but she was angry at him and wouldn’t say good-bye, have a nice day, as she usually did. He expected she would be calmed down by the time he phoned her in the afternoon, but he also expected she would lecture him at dinner and chastise him for not putting the baby’s needs before their own.
“A good parent is one who sacrifices constantly for his or her children,” she would tell him again and again. He laughed to himself, anticipating. She was sure to illustrate with the bird’s nest on the back porch. “Look at how those birds spend every ounce of energy feeding their young. There’s nothing else in life for them until their offspring can take care of themselves. Learn from nature, Daddy. It’s one of the benefits of living out here.”
He’d agree and apologize and promise never to let it happen again, but that wouldn’t stop the anxiety attacks. Only the little blue pills would do that, he thought sadly.
He chugged along the corridor toward the nurse’s station, where he noticed the entire floor staff, nurse’s aides as well as nurses, gathered around the counter, jabbering. Why were they always so full of gossip? Why did they always have so much to say to each other? he wondered, not wholly unenvious.
“Gary,” Martha Atwood called to him as he approached, “did you hear about the woman they brought into the emergency room this morning?”
“How would I hear?” he replied. “I was in the lab, getting myself ready.”
She smirked, but she was too excited not to talk—as were the others, he noticed curiously.
“She had a metal box locked over her head. Some sort of horrible mask, and a collar with a chain attached on her neck. It’s the woman in today’s front-page story,” she added, holding up the local paper. “The one who had been abducted from the Van’s Supermarket lot, Anna Gold.”
Gary felt the blood drain from his face.
“She apparently escaped from her captors,” one of the nurse’s aides added. “She was pregnant, but she aborted and went into shock.”
“Didn’t you get the call to go down?” Shirley Morris asked.
He shook his head.
“Not yet, or else Margaret Downing was called,” he said, but the sound of his voice was foreign, distant. He felt like two people, one cringing inside, the other putting on a face and performance for the nurses and the aides.
“Gruesome, what some people will do to other people,” Shirley said, and they all resumed their chatter at once.
Gary gazed ahead at his assignments. He pushed his cart, but when he reached the corner he turned left instead of right and moved quickly toward the exit, which brought him to a service elevator. As soon as the
doors opened, he got in and pushed the button for the basement level. There was a phone near the entrance to pathology.
His heart racing, he dialed home and waited as it rang and rang. Finally a man said hello.
“Who is this?” he demanded.
“Bill Slater, sheriff’s deputy. Who’s this?”
Gary cradled the receiver quickly.
Where was Mommy? How did Anna escape? Their baby was gone, really gone?
He realized there wasn’t much time. He had to do something and do it quickly. Less than ten minutes later, armed with enough potassium chloride to initiate heart failure, he hurried toward the emergency room.
When he got there, he saw the police in the lobby and the metal mask, which had been removed, along with the collar and the chain, being gathered and studied by a few of them. He approached the nurse on duty, a tall, slim black woman named Adamson. She was always friendly but not very warm to him.
“What happened to the woman they found?” he asked. “I just heard the story upstairs.”
“Horrible.”
“Is she still alive?”
“Yes, but she’s fallen into a coma. We had to get her into ICU and start a blood transfusion. Gruesome thing.”
He nodded and walked toward the elevator. He returned to the lab, retrieved his cart, and headed for the second-floor ICU just about the time McShane pulled into the emergency-room parking area.
Leo Hallmark greeted him at the doorway.
“I guess you found your missing woman,” he said. “They sure put her through hell.”
“How is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Under Abduction Page 20
