I was relieved to hear Bart’s nails click along the tile as he came to me. But he whimpered slightly, something I rarely heard. I felt my way to the wall and flipped the switch that turned on the single light. Instantly my house seemed more natural. It was a light I was used to. Then I walked around and turned on several more lights, taking some time to lean down and comfort Bart. The dog was spooked. His wide little body, a cross between a boxer and a bulldog, was shaking.
The place looked in order. I checked the back door and the windows, and everything was secure. But there were a few little things out of place. The magazines on my coffee table were too straight. I wasn’t that neat. They were usually plopped in an uneven pile. The drawers in my kitchen were not quite how I had left them. I remembered grabbing a pen and paper to make a grocery list and leaving my main junk drawer a mess. It was still chaos, but not the same chaos that I left it in.
My house had been searched. By professionals. Probably in the late afternoon, so they thought they were leaving everything in order when they shut down all the lights. I took a quick glance through the bedrooms and single bathroom, but nothing obvious was missing.
I immediately went to the high cabinet in my kitchen, to a stack of dish towels and extra pot holders. I stood on my toes to find the blue oven mitt I was looking for. I pulled it down, reached inside, and slid out the Beretta 9mm that fit inside the mitt like it was made for it. An old trick I learned from a chief petty officer in San Diego. No one ever wants to look through your kitchen linen.
As soon as my head hit the pillow, Bart was up on the bed, nuzzling in close to me. I wrapped my left arm around him and kept the pistol in my right hand. I was nearly unconscious in seconds.
It felt like I had only dozed off for a minute when my alarm went off, blaring Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused.” Habit pushed me up out of bed, and I led Bart to the front door so he could race outside and do his business.
Bart opted to stay in the house while I headed off to work and went through the motions of delivering papers. Maybe that’s why I kept this job: on the days I needed it, I didn’t have to think about it at all.
I was hungry and looking forward to chatting with Mabel, so I got to the diner a few minutes earlier than usual. Now every time I walked into a public place I automatically looked for the three strangers. This morning it was just locals. But there was one surprise. Instead of Mabel behind the counter, it was the lovely Tina herself. She rarely stepped in as a waitress anymore, preferring to run the kitchen and do all the restaurant managing.
Tina had been a year ahead of me in school, and she still looked great, if a little stern. She’d always been businesslike, but this morning she acted like a Marine drill sergeant, barking orders back to my cousin in the kitchen and telling her nephew to be quicker busing the tables.
My booth was taken, so I sat at the counter directly in front of the door. Tina managed to flash me one quick smile and got right to the point. “Make it fast, Mitchum. What do you want?”
“Where’s Mabel?”
“She didn’t show this morning and she’s not answering her damn cell.”
I could tell it wasn’t a good time to pursue any more questions about the tardy waitress. Not if I didn’t want to risk her job.
Instead, I just said, “It’s not like her. She never misses a shift. She needs the money.”
But Tina’s glare told me Mabel might not get a second chance.
Chapter 13
I may have been overreacting, but with all the crazy shit going on around town I needed to go check on Mabel. She had seemed fine the night before. Maybe the double shift had caught up with her and she had just missed her alarm.
The double-wide trailer she had lived in with her mother, before her mother died of a brain aneurysm two years ago, was only a few blocks from the diner, at the end of a gravel drive behind the post office on Orange Street.
Every one of the fourteen trailers in the tiny park was well kept, and Mabel’s had a few pieces of flair that told you a younger person lived inside. A little hand-painted street sign pointing south that said KEY WEST 2230 MILES, the doormat that read BRING JOY OR BEER INTO THIS HOUSE. I knocked on the door and got no answer. I thought about walking back to my car and grabbing my pistol. Instead, I slipped my hand into my pocket and felt my knife for security.
I tried the knob and found the door unlocked, then called out in a loud voice, “Mabel, it’s Mitchum.” Nothing. I eased into the front room, quickly scanning in all directions, then called out again. The heat was on, and Mabel’s beat-up Chevy was in the carport.
I crept down the cramped hallway toward the bedroom, calling her name again. I paused to knock gently on the bedroom door, then pushed the door open.
I froze. Sprawled on the floor next to her bed was Mabel’s pale body. Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, she had a hypodermic needle stuck in her ankle. I knew she’d overdosed. I knew she was dead and, most important, I knew she didn’t normally use drugs.
My brother would’ve told me if she’d had this kind of problem. After all, he was the local drug dealer.
Chapter 14
I was lost. At least for a while. I still had hope of finding Bailey Mae, but Mabel was gone. Gone forever. I just sat in my car, shocked, while the cops and the coroner examined the trailer. I wanted to leave. To be productive. But I couldn’t. It was as if I’d been hit in the stomach. I was shattered.
I didn’t have time to grieve. People were counting on me. Alice and Bailey Mae needed me. Through some deep sixth sense, I felt like Bailey Mae’s disappearance and Mabel’s death were somehow connected. I had to swallow my grief and find Bailey Mae. I had to get some goddamn answers.
I headed straight to my brother’s house, north of Milton. He always said he liked some distance between work and home. A different set of cops got to harass him. The house and detached garage sat off a long gravel driveway that entered directly onto Route 9. The place was rented, of course, with no neighbors close by.
I didn’t see any cars but went to the front door anyway and pounded like I was the lead member of a SWAT team. No answer. He didn’t pick up his cell when I called, either. Was he avoiding me? If he was, it was the most common sense he’d shown in a long time.
I came back down to Marlboro and started thinking how crazy it was that my quiet little town had gone off the rails in the last few days. I had to find out why. I would go on the offensive and nothing could stop me.
The search for Bailey Mae started again with a vengeance. I was asking questions about her at the businesses up and down Route 9, showing them the photo of the three strangers that Mabel had taken.
I worked my way all the way down to Newburgh before I found a barber who didn’t know anything about Bailey Mae but thought he had trimmed the hair of one of the men in the photo. He said it was just a touch-up on a crew cut. Similar to a military style. The older man had never seen the customer before or since, and the man was alone when he came in to get the trim. That was three days ago.
I stopped at a gas station on North Plank Road, just before it met Route 9, to fill up. I knew the doofus working at the station was one of my brother’s regular pot customers. I almost didn’t say anything to the gangly twenty-year-old with greasy hair that hung down into his face.
He came out of the station and walked up to me at the pump. “Hey, Mitchum. Where’s your brother?”
“Why?” I knew the reason.
“I’m low on weed and someone said he had a new shipment this morning.”
I shook my head and couldn’t believe how open people were about doing something illegal. I didn’t care about pot use; it just annoyed me how much money my brother made doing something that was against the law.
“You heard about my cousin, Bailey Mae?”
He nodded his head. “Natty was by here asking about her yesterday. I haven’t seen her.”
I held up my phone. “What about any of these three?”
He took a second to st
udy the photo then surprised me by saying, “Yeah, I’ve seen them a couple times. All three of them were in a dark SUV.”
“When was the last time you saw them?”
“Yesterday afternoon.”
Chapter 15
I went by a couple diners in Newburgh. They were bigger, impersonal places, and the people there didn’t know my cousin. They didn’t recognize the strangers on my phone. At the second diner, the waitress made me a turkey sandwich because she thought I looked tired and underfed. While I wolfed it down, she refocused her attention on the other tables, leaving me all alone.
As frustrated as I was, it was kinda nice being in Newburgh. It was bigger than our town, and it would be easier to go unnoticed there. That’s where I’d stay if I came to the area from somewhere else.
I got nothing from a couple of hotels on the main drag, so I stopped at one tucked off Windsor Highway, called the Red Letter Inn, an obvious nod to The Scarlet Letter and adultery. What a nice place.
The clerk barely looked up when I walked through the front door. He was about my age, but much heavier and not particularly chatty. He didn’t even grunt as I stepped up and stood by the counter. Behind him, a small TV played Family Feud.
Even after I cleared my throat, he didn’t acknowledge me. Then I held up a photo of Bailey Mae and said, “I was just wondering if you’ve seen this girl. She’s missing.”
The man looked up, scratched the three-day-old growth on his chin, and gave the photograph a cursory examination. His eyes shot up to meet mine briefly, and all he said was “Nope.”
I stood there, thinking of different ways to approach this idiot. I dug in my pocket and pulled out my phone, calling up the photograph of the strangers. As I held it up, the man said, “If you’re not checking in, you need to be on your way.”
I essentially ignored him as I held up the phone and said, “What about these three? Have you seen any of them?”
Now he lifted his head and gave me his full attention. “What do I look like to you? Lost and Found?”
He was big. An inch or two taller than me and at least eighty-five pounds heavier. But I was at the end of my rope. I had to dig deep to be polite as I kept the phone in position and said, “It’s really important. Have you seen any of these three people?”
But now he wouldn’t even look up.
I pulled a pizza flyer from the edge of the counter, flipped it over, and took a moment to write on it in tiny letters. I slid the flyer across the counter and said, “I guess you know this already.”
The big man glanced at the paper, then took a second to try and read it. The letters were so small he had to lean in close and put his head near the counter.
That’s when I grabbed his hair and slammed his face into the counter as hard as I could. “It says, ‘You’re an asshole.’” Then I pulled him right over the counter into the lobby. It was a lot more work than I thought it would be.
I jerked his face up so he was looking at the photo on my phone. I tried to keep my tone even when I said, “Like I was asking, have you seen any of them?”
The big man, who had a trickle of blood running down his face from a broken nose, focused on the photograph, then turned and looked at me sheepishly, saying, “The guy on the left is in room 16. He’s driving an older Ford pickup with a snowplow on the front of it. Looks like he’s in the military. A little strange, maybe even scary.” Then he took a moment, wiped the blood with his bare hand, and said, “But not as scary as you.”
Chapter 16
I helped the clerk clean up and get settled in his chair. He understood that he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone I’d been asking questions. The look on his face told me he’d keep that promise.
It was time to use some of my private investigation skills. This was the one area I was a little weak in, but it was time to try it: surveillance. I was going to conduct my own stakeout at the motel. I parked my car across the highway, at an empty strip mall. No one coming down the road would give a beat-up station wagon a second look.
There was a pickup truck with a professional-looking snowplow attached to the chassis parked directly in front of room 16, which was the last one on the left side of the motel. The truck had been backed into a spot, so I couldn’t read the license plate. It didn’t matter; I just wanted to see where he’d go.
The whole experience made me feel like a legitimate private investigator. It didn’t have anything to do with my knowing the background of someone who needed help and understanding what they were looking for. Often my private investigation business was more about comforting elderly people than actually solving some kind of crime. I never took divorce or cheating cases, and I slept pretty well most nights. Now, in my station wagon, I was waiting for someone who might be dangerous to leave the hotel. Shit was getting real.
Chapter 17
I felt the weather move in before the snow started to fall. In a few minutes the road was completely blanketed, and more was coming. I looked at my watch and realized it was getting late. I sat, staring at a motel that no one had come out of or gone into in more than three hours. Maybe that’s why I don’t do much surveillance. It’s definitely frustrating.
I couldn’t wait any longer. I grabbed my pistol from under the seat, tucked it into my belt, and crossed the road quickly on foot. The motel office was dark, and no one moved anywhere on the property. I checked out the snowplow before I stepped to the door. It was bolted to the truck’s chassis and about four feet wide. It looked like it was used to clear small roads or trails. I was trying to think: What kind of trails needed to be cleared around here? The roads were all handled by commercial snowplows, and even though I’d seen a few of these around over the years, none were as expensive and elaborate as this. Usually they were homemade jobs on the front of beat-up pickup trucks that would clear driveways for ten bucks. This was something else.
I moved to the room. There were no lights, and I felt no movement inside when I placed my hand on the door. The moist air made me shiver. At least I think it was the air. I was in uncharted territory professionally. This was nothing like finding out who’d hacked a Facebook account or looking for a husband who had had a few too many drinks.
I couldn’t waste any more time. I rapped on the door. In a reasonable fashion at first, then a bit louder. My right hand rested on the butt of the pistol underneath my untucked shirt.
There was no answer, and none of the other customers opened their doors, either.
I looked down at my watch and realized time had gotten away from me. I had to race back to Marlboro to get my papers ready to deliver. But I’d be back to have a talk with the guy at the Red Letter Inn.
Chapter 18
It was one of the worst mornings I could ever remember. I’ve seen heavier snowfall, but not this early, when no one was ready for it. Bart had no interest in leaving the comfortable confines of our little house. His flat face looked out the window as I trudged through the snow that had accumulated on my front walk in just a few hours. And the snow was still falling.
As soon as I got to the loading dock and grabbed the papers Nick dropped off, I realized I was just going through the motions. I could do this job with my eyes shut. Almost literally. If it wasn’t for the fear of hitting a pedestrian, I might even try it one day. Some days I was in a hurry, and I could be efficient and fast. Today it was just a duty. It was my responsibility to deliver papers, and I was going to do it. I recognized that some of the elderly people on my route depended on the papers for their window to the world. But today it was more about killing time and giving my mind a rest.
As I pulled away from the loading dock in my sagging station wagon, my head was somewhere else. It wasn’t somewhere pleasant, but at least it wasn’t dwelling on the fact that Mabel was dead and Bailey Mae was still missing.
Just a block from the loading dock, as I pulled up to the closest intersection, I felt a sudden impact. Wham! My whole world started to spin. It was as if I felt the collision before I even heard the d
eafening crash. My giant old station wagon spun across the icy road, and nothing I did with the steering wheel or brakes seemed to make any difference at all.
As the car started to slow its wild spin, I felt a second impact as the station wagon drove into thick trees on the side of the road. The abrupt stop threw me from the driver’s seat into the passenger seat, and my papers spilled from the crates in the rear all over the car.
Somehow I managed to open the passenger door and tumble out onto the cold, hard ground. For the first time, I wondered if the people in the other car were hurt. I struggled to my feet and took a moment to catch my breath and get my bearings. When I looked up, I recognized the vehicle wedged against mine. It was the Ford pickup truck with the snowplow, and it had done a number on my front quarter panel.
As I processed this image, I saw a figure slide out of the driver’s side of the pickup. I didn’t even know if it was a man or a woman. All I saw was the gun.
I quickly patted my waistline. Damn it. I’d left the pistol in the car. That was a mistake, and now I had to make sure it wouldn’t be a fatal one.
I took three quick steps and jumped behind a snowbank, hoping to put some distance between me and my attacker just as he fired two quick shots.
My head jerked as I felt the impact of the second shot. I was hit.
Chapter 19
Even though I’d been shot, I somehow managed to low crawl through the brush until I was behind a thicker stand of trees about fifty feet from my disabled car. I leaned up against a tree, taking shallow breaths, and ran my fingers up my forehead and over my scalp. There was some blood, but the bullet must’ve only grazed me, because my brain was still functioning. I was alive and able to see, and I still understood what it meant to be scared.
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