The First Ladies Club Box Set

by J B Hawker

  “Well, she might be, by now, but she wasn’t when I left to come and look for her. Guess I’d better get back before she goes out looking for me, too. We could chase each other all night, at this rate. Thanks, Shirley. See you Sunday.”

  “Night, Pastor,” Shirley replied, looking after him with a puzzled expression as he drove away.

  The house was still dark when Scott returned.

  Maybe Naidenne was inside, lying down in the dark with a headache. He hadn’t even gone inside before beginning to call around and look for her.

  Scott felt a little foolish as he went into the house, turning lights on as he went from room to room.

  His anxiety returned when he reached the kitchen and saw an overturned chair and groceries scattered on the table and countertop. The grocery bags had the logo of the discount store between Bannoch and Tillamook. Naidenne had apparently stopped there on her way home and gotten back earlier.

  Scott ran up the stairs, hoping to find his wife in their room, resting. He told himself she must’ve had a sudden headache, interrupting her in the middle of putting away the shopping.

  When he didn’t find her upstairs, he began to be seriously worried.

  It was getting late. Naidenne would never stay out like this without letting him know. It just wasn’t like her.

  Not knowing what else to do, Scott called the Sheriff’s office to see if they had a report of an accident.

  “…Well, thanks, Deputy Williams, but I’m really getting worried. She’s never stayed out like this without letting me know…I see…At least twenty-four hours, if there’s no sign of foul play. Got it. I don’t suppose a tipped-over chair and some spilled groceries count, do they? Yeah, like you said, she’ll probably walk in at any moment with a perfectly good explanation. Well, thanks again.”

  Scott hung up and proceeded to make equally unproductive calls to the regional hospitals.

  He couldn’t just go to bed without knowing where Naidenne was, so he went out to his car and headed for the highway.

  Even though the evidence pointed to Naidenne having returned safely from Tillamook, Scott had to do something, anything. All he could think to do was drive the same route she’d driven, looking for her disabled car. She must be out there somewhere, and he had to find her.

  *

  Schramm got confused trying to find the house he’d checked out earlier. Scenery and landmarks looked different while driving than when he’d been on foot.

  After a few wrong turns, he got back on the right road and eventually parked in the gravel driveway outside his chosen love nest.

  He left Naidenne trussed up in the back seat while he took the alcohol into the house.

  He came back, drinking from a bottle of beer, and paused in anticipation before opening the passenger door. With an evil grin, he jerked it open and pulled Naidenne out by her bound feet. She fell heavily onto the gravel, moaning softly.

  “Oh, I knew you’d be a moaner. I’ll have you moaning like you’ve never moaned for your preacher-man.”

  Schramm kneeled beside his captive and began to run his hands over her, from the top of her head, down over her face and shoulders to her breasts, where he paused, breathing heavily, and pushed Naidenne’s sweater up under her chin, uncovering her bra.

  He pulled out his knife and slid it under her wispy bra and between her breasts. With a quick upward thrust, he cut the fabric apart and brushed the two halves aside, leaving Naidenne’s naked upper body exposed to his stares and the chill night air.

  Taking the point of the knife, he lightly pricked first one nipple then the other, grinning widely when she flinched.

  “I knew they’d be pink…I just knew it,” he muttered.

  With the flat of the knife, he caressed each breast in turn, as Naidenne tried desperately to block out her awareness of his touch. She strived to fill her mind with happy memories, prayers, math problems, anything to lift her consciousness away from this present horror.

  Sliding the knife blade down her stomach, Schramm inserted it under the waistband of her slacks where, with another sudden slice, he cut off the button and the top part of the zipper.

  Schramm’s arousal had reached fever pitch; he was unable to control himself and flung his body across Naidenne’s still tightly bound legs, his body weight grinding her knees together painfully.

  She felt first his hands, then his lips and tongue, sliding over her breasts. Having this beast licking and sucking where she’d hoped to feed her baby made her feel sick.

  Schramm fumbled with his jeans then began to thrust himself against her thighs. When he began to slide his fingers beneath the front of her pants, Naidenne was suddenly thirteen years old and back in her childhood bed being assaulted for the first time.

  She vomited into her mouth behind the gag and began to retch and choke.

  His climax quickly spent, Schramm noticed her distress and pulled the filthy gag from Naidenne’s mouth.

  She coughed and spit and began to breathe again, lying limply on the gravel.

  “Don’t you worry, little lady. There’s plenty more where that came from,” he said, taking a long drink of beer. “I can take my time, from here on in.”

  Just then, a pickup went by on the road and Carver realized he needed to get rid of the car.

  “But first, we need to get you settled in a nice quiet place to wait for our next go-round.”

  Schramm pulled Naidenne to her feet and half dragged her into the house, where he led her to a windowless room with acoustical walls and ceiling. The beer and rum were on the floor.

  He threw her down on the plush carpet, kneeling down to run his hands over her, once more. He leaned forward to kiss her but stopped.

  “Phew! Puke breath! Here, take a swig of this,” he said and poured beer into her mouth.

  Naidenne choked and spit it out.

  Grabbing her chin in his rough hand, Schramm forced her lips open and splashed more beer into her mouth, then pressed her jaws together until she swallowed with a cough.

  He finished the beer in one swig, and then uncapped the rum.

  “That’s better. Now you just stay here while I put that car of yours out of sight. We don’t want to be interrupted before we’ve had our fun, do we, now?”

  Taking a long pull from the rum bottle, Schramm pushed his hand between Naidenne’s still-bound thighs, leaned down and nipped at her breast and began to breathe heavily, once again.

  Sitting back on his haunches, he pulled out his knife and cut a thin, wavy line from her breast to her navel, and then hesitated as he held the knife over the apron tied around her knees, shaking his head.

  “Nah, gotta get rid of the car first. But I’ll be back, never fear, I’ll be back, real soon.”

  He finished the rum, grabbed another beer and left.

  Chapter Sixteen

  She was alone. Naidenne felt the sting of the shallow cut on her abdomen and a trickle of blood running down her side. She knew the man planned to rape and kill her when he returned.

  Now was her one chance to escape.

  Naidenne knew this house. She sold it to the owners and followed the progress of their renovations before their money ran out and the house went into foreclosure.

  This room had been remodeled into a media room, but it was originally the home’s formal dining room. The built-in media cabinet on the far wall hid a Victorian-era dumbwaiter.

  Below there was a full basement.

  The lower level kitchen suffered from wall seepage issues and the buyers had boarded it off with a false wall, rather than deal with expensive foundation repairs.

  Naidenne had watched the couple slap cost-cutting cosmetic cover-ups on several of their remodeling projects. If only they had done the same with the dumbwaiter, it could be Naidenne’s way out.

  She was afraid to try to leave the way she’d come in. Schramm could come back that way at any moment. Hobbled as she was, she’d never get far enough away to elude him.

  Her only hope
was to hide.

  She rolled onto her stomach and tried to wriggle over to the media cabinet, the carpet pulling at her wound, leaving streaks of blood behind her. Rolling onto her back, she was able, by means of a scooting hop on her bottom, to make awkward progress.

  Coming up against the cabinet, she managed to get to her knees. Turning her back to the wall, she used her hands on the shallow bottom shelves to push herself to her feet, ignoring the intense pain in her shoulders.

  She shuffled sideways until she was in front of the deeper middle shelf meant to hold the TV. Getting a grip under this shelf, she pulled up and felt it move. Little by little, she pushed her hands further under the shelf, until she was able to get an elbow underneath and create a larger opening.

  She swiveled around, ducked her head into the space and beheld a gaping well of darkness beneath.

  She was in luck!

  Thinking she heard her attacker returning, she pushed her upper body through the gap and kicked off with her feet, plummeting down the chute into the blackness; the loose board dropping back into place behind her.

  *

  His focus clouded by drink and his plans for Naidenne, Schramm was having trouble keeping the car on the winding mountain road. He took a hairpin curve too fast and veered off into a gulley where the car banged into a pine tree.

  The collision popped open the driver’s door and Carver fell out, his head bleeding from the impact. He got to his feet and staggered a few steps before sinking unconscious to the forest floor.

  *

  Scott saw the light of dawn illuminate the window as he sat at the kitchen table, a half-full mug of long-cold coffee between his outstretched hands.

  After driving back and forth on the highway for hours, he’d returned to the parsonage to wait for word of his missing wife.

  When he returned home, there was a message light on the answering machine and he eagerly grabbed up the phone, but it was only a prayer chain call about a church member’s upcoming hernia operation.

  Scott tried to remain calm and believe everything would be okay, but as the night passed, his hopes had grown weaker.

  Although the twenty-four-hour time limit to report a missing person had not passed, Scott called the Sheriff’s Office again, reporting the continued absence of his wife.

  The officer he spoke with promised to ask all the units to keep an eye out for Naidenne and instructed Scott to call back, if she failed to turn up that day.

  He didn’t know what to do, but he couldn’t go on as if everything was normal.

  Scott showered and put on fresh clothes, then began calling Naidenne’s friends, again.

  *

  “That was Scott Davidson on the phone, Tyrone. He said Naidenne is missing. No one’s seen her since our meeting yesterday,” Eskaletha Evans told her husband as he sat at the table finishing a bowl of oatmeal.

  “Where does he think she might be?”

  “He has no idea. Deenie has never gone off like this. He sounded seriously worried. We’ve got to help him find her.”

  “If her own husband has no idea where to look, what makes you think we could find her?”

  “I don’t know, but we’ve got to try,” Eskaletha insisted.

  “I’ve got a funeral this morning, so I’m afraid I can’t be much help on your wild goose chase, my dear. Why don’t you ask your First Ladies to form a posse? You are always looking for unsolvable problems to tackle.”

  “You can make light of this if you want, but Deenie is my friend. I think I just might take your suggestion.”

  After her husband left, Eskaletha made some calls and an hour later she was calling to order an extraordinary, emergency meeting of the First Ladies Club in her living room.

  “We need to retrace her steps. She told us she was going to a doctor in Tillamook. Anybody know which one?” Judy asked.

  “Didn’t Scott say she came back from there before she disappeared, though?” Olivette said.

  “He said he thought she had, but that was only because of a couple of grocery sacks. I don’t think we should assume anything,” Peggy offered.

  “Ladies! We need a plan of attack, and Judy is right. First things first. We must start at the point where she was last seen by all of us, and track her movements from there,” Eskaletha stated.

  “So, who knows which doctor she was seeing?”

  The women looked at each other, but no one spoke up.

  “Well, then, Scott will know. Who would like to call him?”

  Elizabeth raised her hand, and then took her cell phone into the dining room to make the call.

  “What do we do when we find out which doctor?” Gwennie asked.

  “We will call to determine if she actually made it to the appointment and try to find out if she said where she was going when she left.”

  Elizabeth came back into the room.

  “I just spoke with Scott. He already called Naidenne’s doctor and verified that she left after her appointment. He said he’d gone to the discount store where the bags came from and a checker remembered Naidenne stopping in yesterday. But, it’s an odd thing. The clerk remembered her because she was buying rum and made a special point to let the man know it was for fruit cakes, not drinking. He thought it was funny.”

  “So why is that so odd?” Judy asked.

  “The odd thing is that there was no rum at the house with the other groceries. Scott found the register slip, and there was a carton of beer missing, too.”

  “Surely, he doesn’t think Naidenne went on a drinking binge or something.” Peggy said.

  “I don’t think so, but it is odd,” Elizabeth replied.

  “What are the police doing about this, anyway?” one of the women piped up.

  “They don’t want to be bothered until she’s been gone so long no one can find her!” Judy said.

  “You know, they might get involved sooner, if we put a little pressure on them,” Eskaletha remarked.

  “Let’s go over to the Sheriff’s Office, right now, and launch a protest!” Judy suggested.

  “A sit-in!” Gwennie agreed.

  “I don’t think we need to make a scene but going over there together to talk to the Sheriff and let him know we think this is a serious matter, couldn’t hurt,” Elizabeth added.

  *

  After the First Ladies Club descended upon the sheriff, firmly impressing upon that good man the seriousness of the situation, he assured them he would instruct his officers to look into the disappearance of their friend, beginning immediately.

  Convinced that Naidenne’s unexplained absence was finally being taken seriously, the women dispersed to their respective homes.

  After they left, the sheriff made two phone calls. One was to the husband of the missing woman, requesting him to come to the office and answer a few questions and the second call was to Portland, requesting help in a missing persons case.

  *

  “Sit right here, Mr. Davidson,” Detective Rasmussen, the man sent down from Portland to handle the investigation, directed Scott to a chair in the small interrogation room.

  “Thanks.”

  “Now, if you can just tell me in your own words what happened to your wife.”

  “I don’t know what’s happened. That’s why I reported her missing. That’s what I’ve been telling the other officers all morning. I want someone to find her,” Scott replied.

  “Are you saying you refuse to cooperate, Mr. Davidson?”

  “Of course not! I’ll tell you anything I can to help, but I don’t know where Naidenne is.”

  “Okay, if you want to be that way…let’s go back to the beginning. When did you last see or speak to your wife?”

  “We were together at breakfast yesterday. I went to the church around eight. I called my wife before noon to let her know I had a lunch meeting and was going out of town after that. She had a club meeting in the early afternoon and an appointment with her doctor in Tillamook later. We said we would see each other at home f
or dinner, but when I arrived, she wasn’t there.”

  “Why was she seeing a doctor? Had you hurt her?”

  “What? Of course not. She’s been having some women’s complaints she needed to get checked.”

  “Who was this lunch meeting with?”

  “I met with a member of the congregation, Harvey Wilson.”

  “What was this meeting about?”

  “The Wilsons are going through a rough patch. Harvey needed to talk.”

  “So, you were commiserating with another guy with marital problems, huh?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I am his pastor. And my wife and I do not have any problems.”

  “Then why did she run off?”

  “She didn’t run off!”

  “And you know that because you know where she is, don’t you? Where is she, preacher? What have you done with her?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Okay, so you went out of town after lunch. Where did you go?”

  “To call on a former church member in Cannon Beach.”

  “I suppose this former member will confirm your whereabouts…”

  “Well, no. She wasn’t there. I’d forgotten she was going to be in Seattle this week.”

  “Convenient. So you don’t have an alibi for the time you say your wife went missing, is that right?”

  “I don’t know why I would need an alibi. I don’t know why you think I would hurt my wife, but you are wrong. I love Naidenne, she’s missing, and I am worried about her. I didn’t do anything to her.”

  “I understand your sister has recently disappeared under suspicious circumstances, as well. Did you kill her, too, just to whet your appetite, maybe? How many others have there been, preacher?”

  “What’s the matter with you? My sister isn’t dead. She just went out of town to clear her head about her romantic relationship.”

  “Oh, yeah, the banker. Now, that’s a funny thing…he’s gone missing, too. What are you, an equal opportunity killer, or did he catch on to what you were doing and need to be eliminated?”

  “You must be out of your mind. Do you think we’re in a television show, Detective? All your unreasonable and unfounded accusations would be funny, if my wife wasn’t missing. I hope there are saner men out looking for her, right now.”