by Karen Harper
She stood, facing the door, bracing her thighs against the edge of the table. When the door opened, it wasn’t Gabe, but a man she knew even after all these years, though he was heavier than she recalled.
Mayor Reese Owens paused at the door, as if to see if she recognized him.
“Mayor Owens.”
“Nothing amiss, Teresa. Or it’s Tess now, I hear. The sheriff and Agent Reingold are still taking questions at the press conference. I made an opening statement. Ann told me you were in here, and I wanted to both welcome you back and suggest— Just a minute,” he said, holding up a hand. He was out of breath and leaned over to prop his fists on the table. “Suggest you not stay long,” he rushed on as he seemed to get his breath again. “Not stay long in town and the area, I mean. I know that sounds terrible here in friendly Cold Creek, but it’s for your own good as well as the community’s. You showed sound judgment in not attending the press conference. I hear your presence here has already stirred up reporters, and that doesn’t do anyone any good. I’m thinking of you too.”
“Then perhaps you’ve heard I don’t intend to stay long. I only want to spend time with my cousin’s family, sell my house and head back home. If I’m such a liability, you could buy my house and land—take up a community offering—to get me out of here quickly.”
“Now, I know you’ve been through the mill, your family too. But as mayor, I’m charged with protecting the greater good. Sorry I came on so strong.”
He edged around the table toward her. “I knew your father, you see. The day you disappeared he should have been sticking closer to home.”
“He was working that day. Out of town.”
He made a snorting sound. “I don’t want you and Gabe to get so close you start thinking you’re on this case too. Bad enough having Agent Reingold back in everyone’s hair. Just keep clear of the investigation and Gabe. Those who don’t pay attention to history are condemned to repeat it. This is police business and mine too.”
“I see you make it your business to know everyone’s business. And why, if you want this case—cases—solved, don’t you want all the help you can get, Agent Reingold’s, mine, anyone’s?”
“Don’t you go getting snippy with me,” he said, shaking a finger at her. “Like I said, I’m thinking of you too. In other words, don’t you and Gabe go repeating the sins of the parents, if you know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yeah, well, here’s your daddy’s phone number out Oregon way if you’re so big on reunions,” he said, digging in his jacket pocket. “And speaking of that, here’s hoping that crazy Bright Star Monson doesn’t suck you into his cult like he did your cousins.”
Before she could tell him that he ought to find a way to get the Hear Ye community out of the area instead of her, he stopped shuffling toward her, cocked his head and backtracked.
“I hear the others coming and I want to know how they did,” he said, and hurried from the room.
Tess slumped back in her chair. How had that man been elected, over and over, for at least two decades? He was obnoxious and kind of creepy.
She picked up the small piece of lined paper the mayor had tossed on the table. The phone number had her father’s name, Jack Lockwood, scribbled in big, loopy writing.
Why did the mayor want her to call her father? Maybe her father wanted her to contact him because he was afraid to approach her after everything that had happened. Maybe he knew something that could help. But had the mayor suggested her father had done something wrong? Sins of the parents?
She heard muted voices down the hall and sat in her chair, waiting. Waiting for the scarecrow.
* * *
It was barely five minutes later when Gabe came into the room. He carried a large, clear plastic bag with him, but he kept it behind his hip. She gripped the edge of her chair seat and shifted back in it.
“Sorry if Mayor Owens bothered you. He says you were defiant and sassy—I like the sound of that.”
Tess looked at him instead of what he held. She knew he was teasing—was he flirting?—but she was too upset to respond to that.
“He did bother me,” she admitted. “I think he was implying my father knows more than has been said about the day I disappeared. He gave me his phone number.”
“I have it and may use it. But if the man hasn’t contacted any of you for years...”
“I just might let you call him, though I’ve thought of doing it myself many times. I’ll talk to my sister Char. She’s a social worker, good at those kinds of things...counseling and comforting. I meant to call her anyway.”
“Tess, Mike brought the scarecrow back. Want to have a look?”
“Not really. But it’s something important, I know it is. And I’m doing it for Sandy, Amanda, that second victim, Jill Stillwell too. It’s not just for me.”
“Okay,” he said. He closed the door behind him. Maybe he didn’t want the mayor or even Vic Reingold to hear her comments for some reason.
He came around the table and put the nearly two-foot-long bag down on it. Weren’t field scarecrows a lot bigger than that?
He smoothed the plastic to show the scarecrow clearly. He watched her face. She bucked back so hard her chair nearly tipped over. “It’s him! It’s him!” she shouted.
Gabe put a firm hand on her shoulder. “It’s who, Tess? Who?”
“Mr. Mean,” she said, and burst into tears. “See his face? See how awful he is? It’s not me that’s bad, it’s him!”
Gabe grabbed the thing, threw it facedown on the floor and kneeled beside her chair. He pulled her into his arms, and held her.
“It’s all right,” he said, rocking her as if she were a child. And that’s what she felt like. A frightened child. The face on that thing—glaring eyes, frowning face, teeth showing. But not huge teeth like on the green monster.
“Tell me more about Mr. Mean,” Gabe said, his voice gentle. “He’s the one who hit you?”
“Yes. Yes!”
“But who made him hit you?”
“I did. If I was bad.”
“Tess, are you sure it wasn’t your mother or father who had Mr. Mean?”
“No—ask Kate and Char.”
“Okay, okay. But tell me about Mr. Mean.” His voice was soothing, coaxing. “I won’t let him hurt you ever again.”
Suddenly, though she felt safe in his arms, she also felt silly. Exploding in tears like that. Almost using baby talk. Clinging to Gabe the way little Kelsey had clung to her at the Hear Ye compound earlier. She was acting like an idiot, when she had to keep control.
“Tess, are you seeing or hearing anything else? Did the scarecrow trigger any other memories?” Gabe asked.
She shook her head, then sniffed and sat up straight, wiping her wet cheeks with the palms of both hands. She wriggled out of his arms, and he helped her stand. Keeping her back to the thing on the floor, she moved a few steps away, fumbled in her purse for a tissue and blew her nose.
“Sorry I acted like a kid,” she said.
“I’ll bet you need to get back to that again to remember.”
“Like I said—it’s all I can recall.”
“Smackings and Mr. Mean. It’s a start. I know I’m asking you to go to a place you don’t want to face, Tess.”
“A place I can’t face, not from fear, but because I just can’t remember more. The helplessness, feeling abandoned by my family—I can’t get more than that. But why was that thing left when the kidnapper took Sandy? Surely not to scare or warn me.”
“I’d hate to think so. Maybe in hustling Sandy out the door, it was dropped, not deliberately,” he said. “I swear, we’ll go over this dirty, crude scarecrow with a fine-tooth comb.”
“I can’t believe I blurted that out—Mr. Mean,” she said,
wiping under her eyes. “I don’t think it’s the monster from my dreams. That one is bigger, louder—more like that corn reaper.”
“How about you go with me to Aaron Kurtz’s to take a close-up look at his harvester?”
“But he’d get suspicious. What if he did see something, if those presents he sent all of us that next Christmas were because of guilt? Besides, I was thinking of seeing him on my own. You might spook him.”
“Tess, that’s not a good idea.”
“All I know right now,” she said, “is that I need to head home. I’m glad you’re going to take that scarecrow apart and maybe trace something.”
“About Aaron,” Gabe continued, “I usually have good instincts about people and I think he’s a good guy. Vic and my dad looked at him, interviewed him years ago.”
“Years ago...” she echoed as she headed for the door, giving the scarecrow a wide berth. “I’m going to get it all back, Gabe, whatever it costs.”
* * *
After Tess left the room, Gabe picked up the scarecrow and looked at it closely. He knew it might take days for the BCI lab to check this out, and he needed something now. Tess’s reaction when she saw the scarecrow had reminded him of soldiers with blast-induced trauma. In her cry, “It’s him! It’s him!” he’d heard shouts of “Incoming fire!”
The scarecrow had an orange, pointed cap. He might be crazy, but the stitching on it looked done by hand, not a machine. There was no tag on the cap. He squeezed the hemp-cloth head, tied with frayed cord at the neck. Nothing seemed to be secreted within except the stick it was on, spearing the body crotch to head. The hair was yellow yarn, the outfit black cotton, but even that color didn’t keep the dirt from showing. The thing looked really old. And it was far smaller than the scarecrows he’d seen used to keep birds out of a garden or field.
It had no resemblance to the friendly-looking scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz movie that ran on TV every year. Yeah, Mr. Mean did look scary, as if he was made specifically for Halloween, perfect for this time of year. Some of the straw from the stuffed body stuck out where the wrists and ankles would be. It had no arms or legs, only smaller pieces of gray wood to simulate limbs that must be nailed to its wooden backbone. Swung hard, it could definitely hurt a child, be used as a paddle or weapon.
Looking closely, he thought that the pieces of straw stuffing poking out of the body looked fresh. But the wooden stick backbone looked old.
And then he saw what he was looking for—anywhere to start a search, find a link.
Just showing under the cloth of the body was a price tag still stuck to the wood. The machine printing was smudged, and there was no bar code, so the purchase couldn’t be too recent. At the top of the tag, he could barely read the words. Mason’s Mill. The local lumber mill, owned by his friend Grant Mason, was just outside town.
* * *
Tess was more determined than ever to get inside the Hear Ye compound. They had lots of gardens there, so maybe they had scarecrows too. Tess took her father’s old dowsing wand and drove down the road to the small parking lot. What luck that Lee had said he’d needed her to give a second opinion on his dowsing site, so she had an excuse to come back. Even if she did not locate the girl who had screamed—and she knew how they guarded everyone here—maybe she could at least get more information and then tell Gabe.
She parked and walked up the gentle hill Lee had pointed out. From there, she gazed out over the fenced-in buildings to the fields beyond, stretched out above Cold Creek. Not a scarecrow in sight in the pumpkin patches or gardens with late tomatoes or dying pepper plants tied to wooden stakes. There was a small cornfield, probably just for the use of the community, since so many booths at the Saturday farmers’ market uptown had corn. No scarecrows there either, though she did see a couple of tin pans attached to stakes by strings, dancing in the breeze to keep the birds or raccoons away.
She noticed a more distant field, where they had erected what some around here called hoop houses, plastic-draped tunnels that were unheated but could extend the growing season as if they were little greenhouses. No scarecrows were needed there, though the crops, hidden beneath what looked like long gravestones, would have to be watered.
The dried dowsing wand in her hand made her think of what Mayor Owens had said about her father. She’d wanted to call him for years, but she knew it would upset her mother and sisters. The mayor had warned her and Gabe not to repeat the sins of their fathers. For Gabe, perhaps he meant that he’d better not fail to solve the abductions as his father had. But for her, the warning made no sense.
“Hey, Tess!” Lee’s voice interrupted her thoughts. He was running up the knoll, waving a dowsing wand. She’d figured the guard at the gate had announced her presence. As old-fashioned as the Hear Ye cult people dressed, did they carry cell phones or walkie-talkies to be able to communicate so fast?
“How is everyone?” she asked. “I hope Kelsey and Ethan at least get some time with the gifts I brought them.”
“Oh, sure. Sure, they will.”
It scared her to realize she didn’t believe him, didn’t trust her own cousin. Had Sandy Kenton learned the hard way not to trust the person who must have approached her in the familiar back room of the store, where she played so happily with her mother nearby? Had Tess herself known her abductor and was the shock so awful that she’d forgotten who it was? Maybe the drugs the kidnapper gave her also caused amnesia. But when the drugs wore off, why didn’t her memories come back?
“Tess, don’t look so upset. I’ll see that the kids play with the things and remember who they came from. You’ll see us all again. How about we do a family picnic down by the creek before it gets real cold?”
“That would be great. Lee, I was thinking it would be optimal if you had the well inside the compound,” she said, hoping to get him to take her there. “I see a lot of land there. How about we pace that off, then check out here after? If the same water source you think you’ve found up here could be located on lower ground, then—”
“My task is to be certain there is water here so we can drill outside the fence, not bring in outsiders to drill within.”
Well, she thought, that ploy didn’t work, but then she’d been naive to think walking around with this wand inside the fence would get her inside the building where she’d heard the screams. Annoyed at herself for her desperation, she held her father’s old wand out straight-armed and began to walk the area. This wasn’t what she’d wanted to do, to get back into something she considered kind of...well, esoteric, paranormal, despite Kate’s lecture to her about people like Einstein believing in it. But maybe her try at dowsing for the first time in years would give her an excuse to phone her father, as if to ask for advice.
“I don’t think this old wand is worth much,” she called over her shoulder to Lee.
“Here, use mine,” he said, and brought it toward her. “I don’t want to influence you with what I found, but try toward me just a bit more.”
With his wand, she walked the contour of the hill closer to where he’d stood. Nothing happened. Her arms began to tire. Perhaps as a child, when this came so naturally to her, she believed in it, but now—
The wand jerked downward, even pulled her hands down. She stopped, went back. It happened again. Chills raced through her, the nape of her neck to her stomach. She glanced toward Lee, who looked excited. Then she saw a pale man dressed in light blue, loose, flowing clothes coming up the gentle slope of hill toward them. His hair was stark white, and it seemed he had no eyes at all. Then she saw they were pale gray-blue.
“Bright Star,” Lee said with a nod of his head that was almost like a bow. “This is my cousin Tess Lockwood and I believe she’s verified the water source I’ve found. Tess, our guide and leader, Bright Star Monson.”
Up close, the man seemed to suck all the air toward himself despite the fact that t
hey stood on a windy hill under open sky.
“Tess, the lost sheep who has been delivered,” he greeted her. He extended his hand. She clung to the wand, then pulled one hand away to shake his. Dry, papery skin, cool to the touch. He held her hand. She pulled it back.
“Yes,” she said, “I think Lee has found water here, but on a knoll it might take a deep well.”
“I have been told by experts we are on a large shelf of shale here, but I know deep wells are the best for living water,” Brice Monson replied with a smile. “And how wonderful to have that gift. Believe me, I understand a special gift from God. And I hear you were distressed by the cries from the justice session yesterday. I assure you the child is the better for correction. I can see, though, how that would deeply move a young woman who has suffered much. But we are all one family here, content in whatever state we find ourselves. Of course, we would be delighted should you join us for a worship service someday. Sheriff McCord has been to visit, and all are welcome who have pure intent.”
Brice Monson’s eyes seemed to bore into hers. Could he read her thoughts? Did he know her intent wasn’t pure? Tess shuddered, but hoped the two men thought it was just the breeze. She had a strong urge to flee, but she tried not to show how repulsive Monson seemed to her. Surely she was not reacting to him the way she had done with the scarecrow earlier. Her instant, instinctive aversion to this man must be because she felt he was ruining Lee’s family’s future, not that she recalled him from her own past.
“Thank you for the invitation,” she said. “And I wish you well with your drilling of the well.”
As if she’d said something wildly clever, Monson laughed, displaying large white teeth and a pale tongue. Lee joined in. Tess said goodbye and made herself walk away slowly, but she really wanted to run.
12
With the scarecrow hidden inside two brown paper bags overlapping end to end, Gabe got out of his cruiser and strode from the parking lot toward the main entrance to Mason’s Lumber Mill. The large, loud place was a fourth-generation, family-owned business. It employed a lot of locals and he knew there were plans to expand and hire more.
