Stray Narrow

by Jerusha Jones

  His first shift assignment was to keep watch, from a distance, unobtrusively, just in case. He hadn’t wanted the boy to worry or panic if he was spotted in his gear, lurking among the trees, so he’d taken a few minutes to explain before they’d all departed. And to drop a few hints about life in foster care, life without one’s original parents. Owen knew all about that. Knew all about new parents who could turn out far better than the biological set. Or not. But he’d promised Burke that the best place to live in the whole county was with Pete and Meredith. If anybody had extra love to dump on a kid like Burke, it was them. He’d be safe there. Lots of people were looking out for him.

  Still, he wasn’t surprised, in the wee hours of the morning, when all the lights on the upper story of the farmhouse snapped on, one by one. Mostly the blinds were drawn, but there were cracks and gaps of light, and the small window in the bathroom was ablaze. Then the kitchen light came on, and he saw Meredith’s shadow at the sink. It was another nightmare—had to be. You can give a kid all the assurances possible during the day, but once his subconscious takes over, during sleep, the irrational monsters emerge. Owen knew all about that, too. Knew all about the reasons kids have nightmares.

  He still did, sometimes, but for grown-up reasons now, for Afghanistan reasons. Came with the territory. And he wasn’t at all sure how a woman like Darcy O’Hare would react to that kind of issue.

  But he’d made the call, as instructed. He always followed orders when they came from true superiors. And he figured Frankie Cortland knew what she was talking about in that department. She was a woman, after all. The maternal sort. Bossy. Demanding. He’d known he was being manipulated, ever so unsubtly maneuvered into a certain course of action, but he’d gone along with it.

  Because maybe a woman like Darcy was worth it. Maybe. She’d been agreeable—they had a date planned. Preliminary mission accomplished. Provided his current mission didn’t extend into the following weekend. Yet another reason to catch those two bastards quickly.

  So he prowled, crept through the trees in a deep semicircle around the house, arcing back and forth, rifle at the ready, watching the entrances, eyeing the front door where he and Dale had screwed a sheet of plywood to the door frame to cover the wrecked lock, learning the Sills’ patterns. He’d have to see and recognize the unusual things, the anomalies, if he was to be ready, so he could protect them when the moment came.

  And it would come, he was sure of that.

  oOo

  My job was to keep up appearances. With Burke in tow. That sounds like it ought to be simple. And it is, in theory. But you try acting normal when there’s a very good chance a pair of creeps who’d already murdered one defenseless girl and knocked around a middle-aged man, essentially kidnapping him in his own office, might be looking at you through binoculars, might be shadowing your every step.

  I’d already committed my first deviation from the norm when I retrieved the clippers from the shelf in the upstairs closet before breakfast.

  “Trims,” I announced when the males in the household came downstairs. “Both of you.”

  Pete didn’t really need it, but I hoped that having a role model would encourage Burke to shed his tangled mop with few complaints.

  Not that the boy complained about anything.

  He sat quietly while I buzzed the clippers over his head in the utilitarian one-length-everywhere style. He looked about three years younger when I finished, and his eyes were hollow behind their brightness. All three of us were ghosts of ourselves after the previous harrowing day and very short night.

  When I swept the resulting dead animal’s worth of hair out the door, I thought I saw Owen, or somebody with Owen’s broad physique, out in the trees. Almost like he wanted me to know he was there.

  I nearly waved, out of habit—and then didn’t, in case anyone else was watching too. Owen’s presence was reassuring. The idea of anyone else’s was disturbing—and terrifying.

  Breakfast was a silent affair, as if we were sleepwalking through the motions. Even Burke seemed to have lost his appetite.

  Until, in a voice that held a curious note of triumph, he pointed out, “You haven’t kissed this morning.”

  “You’re right.” Pete set down his coffee mug and skeptically eyed the bandage on my lower lip.

  I cast a quick wink at Burke, and suggested to my husband in a husky whisper, “I have other places that are kissable.”

  Burke exited the kitchen like his scalp was on fire. He made no secret of his stomps up the stairs, either.

  Pete was chuckling deeply as he nuzzled into my neck. “We’re going to have that kid well-trained in a matter of days.”

  “Don’t bet on it.” But I was grinning under Pete’s attentions. How I craved normalcy.

  oOo

  “Where are you?” Sheriff Marge growled into the phone.

  “In my office.”

  “We need you acting normally.”

  “This is normal. In case you forgot, you asked me to develop an exhibit on the history of crime and punishment in this county. And that requires extensive research.” I drew out the word, and Burke offered a slight grin from his cross-legged position on the floor where he’d been hand-drawing a time line for our exhibit, those mineral-green eyes even more gigantic now that they weren’t shaded by overhanging hair. He looked positively unearthly with his grayish pallor and stubbled head. I hadn’t done him a fashion favor with the new coiffure.

  “You need to find a different kind of normal. One that gets you outside.” Sheriff Marge was sounding positively grouchy. She had every reason to be, of course, and I actually found her gruffness reassuring, but I was beginning to wonder if an exacerbating factor was the lack of caffeine. In her newfound zeal to avoid any future kidney stones, she’d taken to glugging copious amounts of barely flavored warm water and therefore trotting to the ladies’ room every half hour. Not fun when you’re also on a roving stakeout. Although she was most certainly not a complainer, I’d been catching hints of her travails in the form of very regular, pestering phone calls.

  “Go for a walk,” she continued. “It’s nearly lunch time. Finney’s down at the Burger Basket & Bait Shop, checking the floats for damage after this last storm. I can get him to fire up the grill for you.”

  “Wouldn’t that seem out of character?” I asked.

  “Just do it.” She clicked off before I could object further.

  She was right, as always. I was just cringing in the back of my mind, knowing that the moment I stepped outside the safety of the Imogene’s thick walls, the little boy with me would have a target on his back. No—I had to correct my thinking. The target had been there from the moment he’d witnessed Cassidy’s murder; it just became easier to hit when he was exposed. Which was the whole point of this exercise.

  I struggled into my coat and helped Burke with his as well. The Taser was clunky and awkward, jammed into my coat pocket.

  Outside, we were greeted by the Big Slush. This is not an official weather-forecasting term, but it’s still highly accurate. We’d worn rubber boots to work, and with good reason. The sun had emerged, with all her cheerful heat, and she was busy evaporating our frozen precipitation into the splatty stuff. Rivulets of water were trickling and gurgling down, through, and under the rapidly diminishing snowbanks in a misleading prelude to the suggestion of a spring thaw.

  We’d left Tuppence at home. We’d had to. She would’ve introduced yet another unpredictable variable into our already congested situation. Sheriff Marge and her deputies were attempting to contain and monitor all possible contacts with us, so they could winnow out the two men they were hunting. But my hound would’ve loved diving nose-first into the muck and digging her way back out.

  As it was, Burke and I splashed across the parking lot, squinting against the brilliant, reflecting light. I could barely see a few feet in front of me for all the glare, so there was no opportunity for surreptitious scanning of the horizon in hopes of catching glimpses of our p
rotectors.

  Finney, clearly, had received advance notice of our arrival, and he was whistling tunefully through the big gap between his front teeth as he rummaged in a large stainless-steel clad refrigerator.

  “Yoo-hoo,” I called to his backside. We’d clumped through the eating area of the floating restaurant and were waiting for permission to enter the hallowed space behind the serving window.

  “Yup,” Finney hollered back. “Pickings are slim, but I could rustle up some grilled cheese sandwiches for you two.”

  “Finney, you’ve been closed since October. The fact that you can produce any food at all makes you my hero,” I replied.

  “Then you might not want to look at how much mold I’ll have to scrape off the cheese.” Finney backed out of the fridge and let the door whump closed behind him. His freckled face broke into a wide grin, and he kept straightening to his full, and very scrawny, height. “Well now, you must be Burke.” He offered a big paw for Burke to shake. “Heard about your plight.”

  That had been another one of Sheriff Marge’s brilliant reversals of strategy. Use the townspeople to protect Burke too, since she had limited paid resources, and there was no way she and her deputies could personally cover every avenue. But when all the shopkeepers and civil servants and farmers know to keep an eye out for two men, whose sketches have been provided—but not posted—they wouldn’t get very far before the warning phone calls would start rolling in.

  It was a fine line she was walking, because if the murderers realized they were being sought, actively, by a whole town, they’d quite logically not come anywhere near us again. The trick was to draw them in for another attempt on Burke without making it obvious.

  Burke seemed enamored—or awed—by the bustling Finney. It was probably related to the way Finney moved acrobatically about the gleaming kitchen, whipping up lunches with what appeared to be disjointed abandon but also remarkable efficiency. Finney had learned to cook in the Navy—he could’ve probably fed a thousand sailors with only a minimal increase in his energetic output.

  But it wasn’t until he plunked three loaded plates down on the stainless steel counter in front of us that I knew he’d been more than forewarned. Someone had made reservations for our lunch, maybe even hinted that the shop needed a winterizing review to start with.

  Sheriff Marge strode in through the side door—the one that led directly from the floating walkway where fishermen tied their boats in the summer, essentially the restaurant’s back porch. I had no idea how long she’d been lurking out there, but she was dressed for the slush in padded ski pants and a bulky jacket and a knit cap pulled down tight over her ears—the second time in my life I’d seen her in civilian clothing.

  “I’m burning up,” she said, stopping between two long tables where the chairs had been upended on top of them to ease floor mopping. She shed several layers and draped them over airborne chair legs to dry.

  “Any activity?” I asked.

  “Nope. This waiting could go on for a long while.” She hitched a hip up onto the stool next to mine and nodded her thanks to Finney.

  Burke had already inhaled half his sandwich, a small packet of salt and vinegar potato chips, and requested a refill of his orange Crush pop. Making up for his lackluster breakfast, no doubt.

  I groaned. “You don’t have the budget for this.”

  “Nope. The guys are all waiving their overtime rates. They’re also waiving sleep, and that’s the more serious problem.” Her eyes were rimmed with a bluish-purple that indicated she should’ve included herself in the sleep-deprived category as well.

  “What can I do?” I murmured.

  “Carry on.” She shook her head. “Just carry on. Owen’s picking at an idea, and it’s a valid one. But it won’t be quick.”

  “What idea?”

  “SeedGenix.”

  Finney whistled softly as he slid plates of apple pie adorned with Butter Brickle ice cream in front of us. The man is a magician. “You’re gonna ruffle some feathers.”

  “Don’t I know it.” Sheriff Marge sighed and slid her mug over so Finney could refill it with hot water. “But it’s the only common denominator. Owen has reconstructed Cassidy’s last two weeks as best he can, but there’s a huge gap when she went missing. Her absence wasn’t reported right away because it wasn’t unusual. As an independent researcher, she had a lot of flexibility in her schedule, but she’d been doing some shadowing of scientists at the major seed companies when she had the chance, even took a trip to the Midwest over Christmas break on her own dime—she’s that interested in their developmental wheat tests. Or in keeping her patrons happy—academic research is a weird and conflicting mix of funding sources. The only seed company out here on the west side of the country is SeedGenix, and her research—what we know of it—seems like it would dovetail nicely with the company’s goals. Owen’s gone out to their headquarters to have a look around.”

  Finney’s eyebrows arched over his freckled face in an expression of concern that made me stop nibbling around the edges of my sandwich. “Unofficially?” he asked.

  Sheriff Marge’s lips pursed, and she weighed her answer for a moment. “Quietly,” she conceded.

  So it was political, this nosing about. Not directly, but the company was too big and too important to the local economy to risk upsetting its management, or board of directors if it was publicly traded. Touchy. I didn’t envy Sheriff Marge one bit. She didn’t have a lot of influence in the matter because SeedGenix wasn’t physically located in her territory.

  I don’t like waiting. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who does. But waiting under stress, waiting under uncertainty, waiting under threat? That’ll wear a person’s soul down to the nubbins.

  CHAPTER 25

  For the past forty-five minutes, Owen had been parked on the edge of a gravel road, the sun glaring across the windshield of his old truck as it sank toward the horizon, with his elbows propped on the rim of the open driver’s side window while he squinted through his field glasses. He was judging the time and distance between himself and the white speck of a 4 x 4 that was cruising toward him at a speed a little too fast for comfort on the potholed track. The Franklin County sheriff’s logo stood out in relief on the 4 x 4’s door. Somebody had called him in, no question about it.

  Because he was glaringly obvious, the exact opposite of the techniques he’d employed during the surveillance duty he’d pulled at the Sills’ house—out of necessity. Frankly, he was surprised that it had taken this long for someone to become suspicious. In Sockeye County, Sheriff Marge would’ve been called before a pickup parked in the same spot at the same time three days in a row.

  There was no place to hide. No trees. Out here on the eastern side of Washington, the topography was a lot flatter, and a lot browner underneath the skiffs of crystalline snow. You could see for miles and miles. Especially with a good pair of binoculars.

  He returned his attention to the bleak parking lot surrounding SeedGenix’s headquarters building on the outskirts of Pasco, Washington. Neat rows of cars baking in the weak winter sunlight, their paint oxidizing to chalky powder. It’d get bitterly cold the moment the sun went down—a dry sort of hacking cold that seemed to numb the whole town into somnolence. Or drunken mindlessness.

  He should know. He’d spent the past two nights moving from tavern to tavern, having noted and followed and plotted the routes of at least twenty different cars from the SeedGenix parking lot at quitting time. About fifty percent of the employees seemed to go straight home, to spouses and kids and split-level ranch houses with respectable yards and mortgages. They weren’t the people he wanted to talk to.

  Hence the taverns and the jukeboxes and the desperate women clamoring for his attention, thick as thieves, clinging to his arms and begging him to dance, laughing boozy breath in his face. His stomach roiled at the thought of another night spent working his way through a series of awkward conversations and confrontations with extremely reluctant employees once the
y realized he wasn’t at the bar for a good time. Ms. Oliphant’s sketches hadn’t gotten him anywhere, yet.

  What he needed was someone disenfranchised, someone whose entire livelihood wasn’t contingent upon their job, preferably someone without dependents. Someone whose moral conscience wasn’t biased by pecuniary considerations. Those people were hard to come by.

  He’d just about memorized the SeedGenix web page that showed the portraits and positivity-enhanced bios of department heads, but he’d probably need to corner a lowlier, rank-and-file employee. But it’d have to be the right rank-and-file employee, someone who knew something and was willing to share the information. Because all the SeedGenix information he’d been able to find in the public domain was full of corporate speakeasy language—big, optimistic, future-expanding words that promised little and apparently satisfied the legal department’s strict censure. Promises that couldn’t be pinned down. Forecasts with prevailing loopholes. A whole lot of nothing concrete.

  His idea was such a long shot that he was a little surprised Sheriff Marge had let him pursue it this far, this long, when the department was stretched as thin as it was. She’d shared his intuition, though. Probably because it was a variant of the old standard—follow the money.

  Two minutes to quitting time—the SeedGenix parking lot was about to suffer its daily mass exodus. And he didn’t want to make that approaching sheriff’s deputy think he was leading him on some sort of cowboy car chase.

  The engine in his pickup turned over with a reliable chug, and he eased his foot off the brake. An orderly retreat, two minutes out, then he’d be mingled in with the departing stampede from SeedGenix and pick out his next mark.

  oOo

  She was frumpy, and she was grocery shopping. Two entirely promising traits.

  She bought her clothes from one of those stores that does all the color coordinating for you and sells complete outfits instead of individual pieces. The clunky beads in her necklace were the exact same shade of dusty-orange-pink as the oversized flowers that cascaded over the left shoulder of her cardigan like a big, fake corsage. Her pointy patent shoes, more appropriate for sitting in an office than for tromping through a dark, icy parking lot and into the climate-controlled Muzak of Smithers’ IGA, were dyed to match. It was a uniform of sorts, nearly regimented enough to compete with his usual khakis, or any of the uniforms he’d worn in the Army previously.