Changing Fortune Cookies

by P. D. Workman

  There was a tote bag that was black on the outside with brightly colored stripes on the lining. Campbell opened it up and shone his phone light inside. Some pretty print fabric like pajamas. Some bottles clinking around the bottom. Things for Kim to take to Deidre at the hospital? Clothes that were familiar and comfy and some drinks to tempt her appetite? Campbell teased the clothing out and unfolded one pajama top.

  Erin’s stomach again took a nosedive. This time, it was Campbell who looked at her for an explanation. Erin pressed one hand to her stomach and the knuckles of one hand to her teeth.

  “It’s a nurse’s smock,” Erin told him. She looked across the car at Mary Lou, worried. What if one of the nurses they had seen had been Kim and now knew they were on to her? Erin fought the impulse to pull out her phone and look the woman up on Facebook to see what she looked like, reminding herself firmly that Kim didn’t have a Facebook account and there was no point in looking to see if one had somehow magically appeared.

  “This stuff wouldn’t still be here,” Campbell said. “The first thing she would do if she thought we were on to her is get rid of everything incriminating. She wasn’t at the hospital. She was at home, watching TV or in bed.”

  But they hadn’t seen the flicker of a TV inside the house, and none of the windows showed lights on inside. For most of the town, it was still too early for bed. Except for bakers who had to be up before dawn.

  And maybe Kim, being a nurse, had to go to bed early for a morning shift. Erin tried to slow her breathing and calm herself down. Kim didn’t know about them. She didn’t know that they were snooping through her trunk. They were perfectly safe.

  Campbell had moved on. He roughly refolded the smock and put it in the pile with the rest. He looked at the soft drink bottles that were clinking around in the bottom of the bag.

  But of course, they were not soft drink bottles any more than the nursing smocks were pajamas. They were medication bottles. Not the orange plastic prescription bottles like Erin got at the pharmacy, but glass vials of clear liquids to be injected with a needle.

  Campbell didn’t let her see them long enough to know whether they were something she might have been giving her grandmother, or something used to incapacitate Joshua during the kidnapping. And maybe to keep him sedated since then.

  “But where is she keeping him?” Erin asked. She looked into the trunk for some other clue. She didn’t think it could be too far away; she wouldn’t want people to notice her absence for long periods of time. She was careful.

  Unfortunately, there was no map in the trunk with an X marking the spot where Joshua was being held.

  “In the house?” Campbell motioned in the direction of Kim’s house. Or her grandmother’s house. Whoever’s it happened to be.

  “No… I don’t think so. Why would she need the night vision goggles? She could just turn on the light.”

  “Then he would see her.”

  “Keep him blindfolded.”

  Campbell nodded, conceding the point.

  Erin racked her mind for anything that the items in the trunk might suggest. The hospital, but of course Kim wouldn’t be able to hold him at the hospital. How? In a closet? The morgue? Masquerading as a coma patient? That didn’t make any sense or require the use of the goggles.

  There were no other clues in the trunk. So forget the trunk.

  Erin walked around the car, using her own phone as a flashlight this time. Mud in the treads of the tires? Some kind of leaves or pine needles that would magically lead them to the exact place in the woods Kim had been visiting?

  On TV, the detective always found the necessary clues. They were always right there, and the detective had everything needed to examine them and to come to a conclusion of the place where the abductee was being kept.

  In real life, lots of missing person cases were never solved. Some abductees were discovered years later. Sometimes, not even their remains came to light. It was too easy to hide someone, especially with all of the caves and wilderness areas near Whitewater.

  Still, Erin kept walking around the car, looking for some clue that they had missed. It was muddy, but she was not an analyst who could tell where the mud had come from. It looked like Kim had been off of paved roads at some point, but how long ago? How far away? She walked past Mary Lou without discovering anything else that would show them where Kim had been.

  When she got around to the driver’s door, Erin slid into the seat.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Campbell warned.

  “I know. I’m not,” Erin agreed, holding her hands up in front of her. Though she had put her hands down on the seat when she had climbed inside. She wiggled around in the seat to try to smear or obscure any handprint she might have left on it. She looked at the sun visors. No maps. No park membership stickers on the windows or hanging from the rearview mirror. No gas receipts in the center console.

  She used her thumbnail to press the release for the glovebox. It was neat and tidy. Owner’s manual. Invoices and receipts for car repairs in a plastic pouch. Sunglasses. She pressed it closed again with her knuckle.

  Campbell walked to the door and looked down at her. “Anything?”

  Erin sat there, looking around the interior of the car. She double-checked the back seat. Fabric bags for shopping. She closed her eyes, thinking.

  They needed to call the police. Like Terry had said, it was too dangerous for them to be investigating it themselves. They needed to let Detective Coleman know what they had been able to find so far. He could get a search warrant. He could get Kim’s phone, and maybe that would tell them where she had been.

  Terry.

  Where she had been.

  Erin’s eyes sought out the small LCD screen mounted above the radio.

  Chapter 46

  Erin ran her finger around the outside, looking for the power button. She pressed and held it in. The LCD screen flashed to life, the brand name splash screen appearing.

  “The GPS?” Campbell asked.

  “The GPS.”

  Mary Lou came closer.

  “What?”

  “What are the chances that she’s going to mark the location she has Joshua on her GPS?” Campbell demanded. “You think she’s going to label it ‘hideout’ or ‘abandoned cabin’? She knows where it is, she’s not going to mark it for anyone else.”

  Erin waited impatiently for it to finish booting up. It didn’t have a lot of battery reserves. Probably it didn’t hold a charge very well and Kim just kept it plugged into the cigarette lighter for power and used it while the car was running. But Erin didn’t want to turn on the ignition. Kim might be nearby, and she just might recognize the sound of her car starting and wonder what the heck was going on.

  The main menu finally appeared. Erin started tapping the menu choices with her fingernail, trying not to leave any fingerprints on the screen.

  “She might not mark it in her favorites, but if she has breadcrumbs turned on…”

  “What are breadcrumbs?” Mary Lou asked.

  Campbell was looking thoughtful. He raised his eyebrows, nodding. “It’s like Hansel and Gretel,” he told his mother. “When they walked through the forest, they left a trail of breadcrumbs behind them so that they’d be able to find their way home again. Breadcrumbs on a GPS show you where you have been, so you can follow them back again.”

  Mary Lou watched Erin fiddling with the menu options. “Do all GPS’s have that?”

  “Most of them do. It’s standard. I don’t know how many are turned on by default…”

  Erin was hoping they were. She finally drilled down through the menus and found ‘previous tracks.’ She paged through them. The hospital. The grocery store. Out to the city and back running errands. Out of town to the east, following a secondary road that didn’t lead anywhere with a label.

  She continued to page back, seeing the same routes repeated several times. She was out on that secondary road every day.

  “Look at this,” she commanded Campbell. �
��Memorize it for when we get back to the truck.”

  She zoomed in, and they both watched the screen intently as it took the route turn by turn, and then back to the house again. Erin tried to commit every inch of it to memory.

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  “Should we take the night vision goggles with us?” Campbell asked. “We might not be able to see where we’re going without them.”

  “No.” Erin shook her head. “We have to leave everything exactly where we found it so that the police can collect it as evidence.”

  “How are we going to explain how we found the route out to… the cabin or whatever it is?”

  “I don’t know yet. That’s not important. We need to get out there.”

  They closed everything up, leaving it the way they had found it, and walked back to the truck. Erin looked at the house several times as they passed, trying not to, but looking for any sign that Kim was in there. Sleeping before the next shift. Tucked away safely so that they didn’t have to worry about her. Her car was still in the garage, so it wasn’t like she was at the cabin waiting for them. The only person waiting for them at the cabin would be Joshua.

  Hopefully.

  Assuming she had no accomplice.

  The lights on Terry’s truck came on as soon as they opened the doors. Erin wished it were an older truck or had some kind of stealth mode. She felt like she was naked in the middle of a spotlight and everybody was looking at her.

  She oriented the truck in the direction the car would have been traveling once Kim pulled it out of the garage and onto the street. She and Campbell watched for the curves in the road, the intersections, and the turns they needed to take to get out there.

  Mary Lou sat in the back, silent, saying nothing to hurry them along or to stop them. Erin tapped the Bluetooth control and gave it the command to call Terry. He answered almost immediately.

  “Are you on your way back?”

  “No. We’re going to another location, where we think Joshua was being held. You can follow your GPS. Have the sheriff drive you out this way. Call Detective Coleman and let him know where we’re going.”

  “You’d better call him.”

  “I’m driving, trying to remember the way. You can give him our locations better, watching us on your GPS. I can’t walk him through it while we’re trying to navigate.”

  Terry grunted. “Fine. Do you want me to stay on the phone with you? Three-way call?”

  “No. I need to focus.”

  “Do you remember what I told you about staying out of trouble and not chasing this person on your own?”

  “She’s at home in bed. Her car is in the garage. All the lights are off.”

  “She could have another vehicle. You don’t know.”

  “There was no space for another vehicle in the garage. It was full of junk.”

  “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have another vehicle. Where did you keep your car?”

  “Well… on the street, because Clementine’s Volkswagen is in the garage. But the car in her garage is her primary vehicle. We know that she—never mind. It’s the vehicle she’s been using. She’s not somewhere else. She’s a nurse. She probably has an early shift.”

  “You know a lot more than you did when you left here. I told you not to poke around.”

  “I think you should come out here. And I think you should call Detective Coleman.”

  “I will. You keep out of trouble and stay safe. Don’t go into any more buildings. Just stay where you are and let the police department do their job.”

  “I will when we get there. I’ll either wait for you or for him.”

  “It won’t be me. He’ll be closer and it’s his jurisdiction. At least, I assume it’s within his jurisdiction.”

  “Unless he tells you he won’t come out until morning.”

  “He’s not going to say that. Not with civilians about to get themselves into a boatload of trouble.”

  “Good,” Erin acknowledged. “I’ll talk to you when I see you.”

  She clicked the button to end the call.

  Campbell smothered a laugh. “I knew you were trouble, Miss Erin, but I didn’t realize just how stubborn you are.”

  “Joshua could be in danger. It isn’t like we can sit around waiting. If I get in trouble for… hurrying things along a little… then I guess I get in trouble.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.”

  They were all quiet, watching the road and trying to remember all of the turns. Erin had been afraid that she wouldn’t be able to remember the entire route. The call with Terry had pushed many of the details out of her head altogether. But she remembered the highway number, so she watched for it on the road signs. Then they only had to find the right exit. That could be challenging at night, especially if it were only a trail. And Erin suspected it wasn’t a paved road. Not with the mud that had been splashed onto Kim’s car.

  The miles clicked by. It seemed like it would take forever, but Erin knew that it was pretty close. As she had suspected, Kim couldn’t take huge chunks out of her day to travel to and from the place where Joshua was being kept. It would be too inconvenient for her and too likely to be noticed.

  Then she started to think that they must have gone too far. She slowed, and they watched for the turnoff or some sign that they had missed it and needed to go back.

  “There,” Campbell said, pointing. “That one is the right angle.”

  Even looking at it, Erin nearly missed it. She slowed some more and pulled onto the gravel road. “You’re sure this is the one?”

  “As sure as I can be.” Campbell didn’t sound too certain of himself, though. “This has to be it.”

  Erin went slower down the gravel road. She had to turn on her high beams to see far enough ahead on the road to be sure she wouldn’t hit some animal or miss a switchback.

  “Do you think she used the night vision here? So that she didn’t have to turn on her lights? No one would even know someone was coming down this road, if they didn’t have their lights on.”

  “Maybe,” Campbell agreed.

  Erin gripped the steering wheel tightly, the truck jouncing around over potholes. She noticed that Campbell was holding tightly to the door handle to keep himself still. “Sorry. Bit rough here.”

  And she was nervous. She was sure she wouldn’t run into anyone out on that road, but what if she did? What if someone were guarding the cabin? What if Kim were out there in a secondary vehicle for some reason? Maybe she banged up the exhaust system on the pockmarked road and had to get a rental until she could afford to fix her car. There were a hundred other reasons she might not be home in bed like Erin had told Terry she would be.

  She looked at the truck GPS, trying to discern whether the route on the GPS screen looked the same as what she had seen on the screen of the GPS in Kim’s car. It was all muddled in her brain. She couldn’t be sure. They could miss the cabin altogether and end up at some other farmhouse or dead end.

  Erin remembered their drive out to Theresa’s house and was immediately twice as anxious. They had been so confident going out there that it was the right thing to do, and that they would find Terry and Jack Ward out there.

  Well, they had.

  Eventually.

  There had just been the intervening incident with Crazy Theresa and her gun and wildly jealous temper in between.

  And Terry and Jack had not been in good condition when they had found them. So why was she repeating the process again? Why run that risk?

  Because if they had waited until the next day, when they could have convinced the police to go out there and talk to Theresa, it would have been too late. For Jack Ward for sure. Maybe for Terry too.

  She wasn’t going to wait one more day to rescue Joshua either.

  Chapter 47

  “I think this is it,” Campbell whispered.

  Erin slowed still more and tried to make out shapes in the darkness ahead of them. There were ghostly buildings ahead of them. And ye
s, the end of the gravel road. They had reached their destination. Erin pulled the truck to a position as far to the right of the road and the clearing where the buildings were as possible and shut off the ignition.

  They waited for all of the truck lights to turn off, and for their eyes to adjust to the dark. Erin wished that she had agreed to bring the night vision goggles. The pale buildings looked completely deserted. Like they had been deserted for decades. Who knew how old they were.

  Was that where Deidre had lived when she had first been married? Had it been the homestead? Or was it just some random abandoned farm that Kim had picked out, something completely unrelated to her family? That would have been safer. Safer to use a place that had no connection with her and her people. Much harder to find that way.

  Erin waited.

  They didn’t know how long it would be until Detective Coleman got there. If Terry had talked him into following Erin right away, he might only be five minutes behind. If Terry had left Bald Eagle Falls with the sheriff or another driver and used their lights and siren, they might only be another fifteen minutes behind.

  They wouldn’t have to wait for long. Terry would know that Erin had stopped. She had told him that they would wait. They wouldn’t go rushing into any abandoned buildings and mess everything up. They wouldn’t put themselves in danger.

  There was no sign of a guard. If Kim had an accomplice, he must be at home asleep as well. Or heading to bed in the next couple of hours. There wasn’t anyone inside, since there were no other vehicles in the clearing.

  Though another vehicle could be parked just behind one of the pale old buildings, or even inside one of them.

  Erin shifted restlessly. Campbell looked at her. She couldn’t see his eyes in the dark, just his face pointed toward her. She imagined that his eyes were begging to be allowed out of the truck, to go start searching the buildings for Joshua. Erin wanted to. She didn’t like sitting there waiting for someone else to come in and do the work. She wanted to be the one to discover Joshua and to bring him to safety.