“James was going to go into those woods behind his mom’s friend Lois’s house in the lull between the lunch and dinner crowds and see what’s there.”
“And?”
“I sort of thought he’d call and tell me what he’d found. It’s a little past five-thirty, and he should have gotten back to the restaurant over an hour ago.”
“And you thought he’d call you the minute he got back. It’s just possible some disaster was happening in the kitchen, and when he’s got it under control, he’ll call you.”
Harriet sighed.
“You’re right. He never said he was going to call immediately. He’s just busy.”
Lauren pointed to their right.
“Here comes Jorge, delivering your aunt.”
Jorge pulled up to the unloading area and helped Beth and her knee scooter out of his white truck.
“I will be so glad when I’m free of this contraption,” she said.
“How much longer will that be?” Lauren asked.
“I see the doctor next Wednesday.”
Mavis, Connie and Carla came up the sidewalk carrying the three lavender boxes.
“Shall we get this show on the road?” Mavis asked and led the way into the auditorium.
Harriet was checking her phone for the seventh time when the introductory remarks ended. She looked up to see who was taking the podium next and noticed Sandra Price sitting in the first row. Her hair was done in an old-fashioned beehive, and her back was ramrod straight. Tension radiated off the woman, even from three rows away. A muscular man in a gray suit sat beside her. She elbowed Lauren, sitting to her left.
“Look who’s sitting in the front row,” she whispered and glanced pointedly toward Sandra.
“I wonder what changed her mind.” Lauren whispered back.
“I wonder who her date is.”
Harriet studied the man in gray. His suit looked expensive—not a match for Sandra’s Walmart look. She turned her attention back to the stage in time to see Stuart Jones adjusting the microphone.
“Like a rosebud plucked too soon…” he started, and Harriet had to look away as Lauren pointed her finger into her mouth and mimed gagging.
“Are we sure he’s really a published poet?” she whispered.
“He said he was,” Harriet whispered back. “And I looked him up on Amazon. He does have a couple of books.”
“Hush,” Aunt Beth scolded from Lauren’s other side.
Stewart droned on for another five minutes, and Harriet used the time to check her phone, which was now silenced. Still nothing.
Nancy returned to the podium and announced the naming of the Amber Price Annex, a new building that had just been erected adjacent to the strip mall where Carey Bates Center for Missing and Exploited Children was located. She called Sandra up to the stage.
Sandra climbed the four steps to the stage, and Stewart came from behind the curtain and escorted his foster mother to center stage, where Nancy Finely was joined by Patrice Orson.
“How much did she have to give to get a building?” Josh Phillips said in such a loud stage whisper that the entire audience fell silent. He looked around to be sure he had everyone’s attention. “Come on, if I gave ten thousand dollars, and all I get is a homemade rag, how much did she give, huh?”
The quilters in the audience gasped, and the woman behind him leaned forward and whispered something Harriet couldn’t hear. Judging by the woman’s raw silk suit and conspicuous display of diamonds, she guessed she was one of the other quilt recipients. If this had been a movie, burly security guards would have come out of nowhere and taken him by the elbows and hustled him out of the auditorium before he could say anything else. But, this was Foggy Point. No guards dressed in black came out of the shadows.
The man in the gray suit hurried up to the stage and grabbed the microphone.
“We’ll be taking a brief intermission. I hope you’ll join us in the lobby for a glass of champagne.” He then stepped off the stage in one leap and came up the aisle to confront Josh. She couldn’t hear what the man said, but almost before she could see what he’d done, the anonymous man had twisted Josh’s arm behind him and had Josh’s fist held in the middle of his back. He pushed Josh forcefully up the aisle.
“You can leave quietly, or I can call the police, your choice.” she heard the man say as they passed her aisle.
“Let me go, you gorilla! You have no right to hold an American citizen against my will. And what about free speech?” Josh was getting louder, and the man jerked his arm higher, causing him to cry out.
When they got past the auditorium seating area, the man turned Josh and directed him toward a side door that did not lead into the lobby. The door swung open from the other side, and the man in gray shoved Josh out. She wasn’t sure, but she thought it was an exit directly out to the sidewalk. The door closed, and suit guy straightened his jacket and tie, relaxed the muscles in his face and disappeared into the lobby.
“Well, that was fun,” Lauren said. “Want to go get some champagne?”
“No, I want this to be over. I’m getting kind of tired of these people and their drama.”
Aunt Beth leaned forward.
“You and me both. I’d like to know who tampered with my car. When I know who did that and why, I can put all this…” She gestured toward her bandaged ankle. “…behind me and get on with life.”
Connie stood up.
“I’m going out to the restroom. Does anyone want a snack while I’m out there?”
“Nothing for me. We haven’t been here long enough to need anything,” Lauren told her.
People dribbled back into the auditorium, and Nancy and Patrice returned to the podium. Sandra Price and her mysterious companion were not in the audience when Nancy welcomed everyone back. No mention was made of the now-absent Josh, or the naming of the new building.
Patrice was in the middle of a PowerPoint presentation telling all the scary statistics about human trafficking and about the success their program had achieved in bringing young people home when Harriet’s phone vibrated. She glanced at the screen and was a little curious when it didn’t say James’s cell number but instead the land line at the restaurant.
“This is James,” she whispered. “I’m going out to call him back.”
Aunt Beth’s brows pulled together, and she pressed her lips tightly closed, but she didn’t say anything. Harriet could tell her aunt disapproved, but she needed to talk to him.
She squeezed past Lauren and two other women and went as quietly up the aisle as she could manage, pressing redial on her phone as she went.
“Smuggler’s Cove,” a female voice said.
“Can I talk to James?”
“Is this Harriet? This is Yvonne. Do you know where James is?”
Harriet’s heart felt like it had dropped to her feet. Yvonne was one of the restaurant’s maître d’s.
“I assumed he was at the restaurant. He went to check something out between crowds, but he was going to be back before the dinner rush.”
“He left at two-thirty and told the students he’d be back in an hour. I got here at five, and he still wasn’t back.”
Harriet glanced at the time on her phone and put it back to her ear.
“So, you haven’t heard from him in four hours?”
“We’re really worried. So far, the students are managing to keep the food coming, but they’re stressed to the breaking point. And this isn’t like James.”
“Let me see if I can find him.”
“Hurry, please,” Yvonne said and hung up.
Harriet tapped a quick text to Lauren.
James missing going to look.
Me 2 came back almost immediately, and a moment later, Lauren burst into the lobby.
“What do you mean missing?”
“That was the restaurant. He left to go check the woods next to Fogg Park at two-thirty, and he hasn’t been back since.”
“I’ll drive,” Lauren said. “My
car’s closer.”
“I can’t remember the name of the street. When we looked at the map it backed up to a green space that bordered the park.”
“Didn’t you say his mom’s friend lived on the same street as Sandra Price?”
“Yes!” Harriet said and entered the Price address into the map program on her phone.
They drove through Foggy Point in grim silence until Lauren turned her car onto the street Sandra Price lived on and pulled to the curb several houses away.
“You don’t happen to know Lois’s last name do you?”
Harriet thought.
“I don’t think anyone ever mentioned it.”
Lauren pulled her tablet computer from her bag and opened the search function.
“What are you doing?” Harriet asked as Lauren rapidly tapped numbers onto the screen.
“I’m looking at the property maps on either side of the Prices. The city maps tell the ownership and tax history.” She kept entering addresses. “And we have a winner. Two doors to the right.”
Harriet got out and headed for Lois’s door. It opened before she could knock.
“Are you James’s friend Harriet?” A stocky gray-haired woman asked. She grabbed Harriet’s hand and pulled her inside. “I’m so worried. James came here this afternoon and told me he was helping you follow up on something. He asked to go through our back gate to go into the woods behind our property. He said he’d stop back by on his way out. Only he never did.”
Lauren followed Harriet into Lois’s entryway.
“Maybe he was running late and left without stopping.”
Lois pointed out the front window and down the street.
“My neighbor was hosting her bridge group, so James had to park down the street. Look, his car is still there. Besides, he left Cyrano here. He’d never leave without his dog.”
Harriet and Lauren both looked, and sure enough, James’s white catering van sat at the curb at the end of the street.
“What’s in the woods?” Lauren asked.
“Behind our house, it’s just trees and the creek. Years ago, Maudene Price lived on the part behind Sandra’s house and the two houses beyond. I think the county took it over for back taxes when she died, and they deeded it over to the city to expand the creek restoration project. I think salmon come up the lower end of the creek. Nowhere near here, but the city is restoring the habitat anyway.”
Harriet paced across the entry hall into the living room and back.
“Are there any structures back there?”
“The house pretty much fell apart before all the legal work was done. I think Sandra’s husband tried to fight it in court. He wasn’t successful, but he managed to drag it out quite a few years.”
“Did they clear the site?”
“No, some kids set the remains on fire years ago. The foundation and stone fireplace are still there.”
“Can we access that area from your yard?” Harriet asked.
“It’s a little bushy in a couple of places, but you can get there. It’d be better if you were wearing jeans.”
“Yeah, well. We don’t have time for a wardrobe change.” Harriet said.
Lois led them from the living room to the kitchen. Harriet’s phone rang before they reached the back door. She glanced at the screen, prepared to send the caller to voicemail, but hesitated when she recognized Detective Morse’s number.
“Hello?”
“Hey, I just wanted to let you know something happened at your cave. It was going to take so long to get surveillance equipment, I decided to buy a game-cam at the sporting goods store and strap it to a tree, pointed at the cave mouth.”
“And?”
“You and Lauren stumbled across something major. My game cam wasn’t sophisticated enough to be monitoring it real-time. It required me to take a thumb drive, download the data from the camera, and carry it back to a computer. I finally did that today, and it was a revelation.
“Someone stashed a group of people there for three days earlier this week. They brought them in on Monday morning and took them out Thursday morning. Unfortunately, the image of the vehicle they came in wasn’t very clear—the techs are working on trying to clean it up, but for now we don’t have anything. The people wielding the guns were wearing black clothes and black ski masks. I just wanted to reiterate that you and Lauren need to stay clear of that area.”
“Wow.”
“What?” Lauren asked.
“I’m putting you on speaker,” Harriet told the detective. “Lauren’s here, and we’re with Lois…”
“Fletcher,” Lois whispered.
“Lois Fletcher,” Harriet said. “We’ve got a situation here ourselves.”
“And that is?”
Harriet explained about the missing chef.
“Stay put, I’m coming over.”
Chapter 28
Detective Morse took less than ten minutes to arrive. Harriet had spent the time pacing from the front room to the back door and back again, while Lauren texted Beth, Mavis and Connie.
Lois held the front door open as soon as Morse parked at the curb.
“I’m Lois. James is the son of my best friend. He came by today and asked if he could go through my yard to access the green space. He said he’d stop on his way back, and he never came, and his van is still parked down the street,” she blurted without pausing for breath.
Morse looked at Harriet.
“And what, exactly, was he looking for?”
Harriet explained about the pipe, the vent theory, and their discovery that the green space bordered Fogg Park.
Morse looked thoughtful.
“That’s all pretty preposterous. I mean, a vent coming from the green space to the park? I know there are stories of tunnels across the Mexican border or from taverns in a town to the shipping docks for shanghai purposes, but out in the middle of the woods? What would be the reason for that?”
No one said anything. Morse put her hands in her back pants pockets.
“Having said that, I wouldn’t have guessed anyone was holding people in a cave in Foggy Point. There’s nothing to connect that with Chef James, that I know of, but he does appear to be missing. I’m going to call for some backup to search the woods, and we’ll start an official missing person report, even though it hasn’t been twenty-four hours.”
Harriet stepped over and stood toe-to-toe with her.
“I want to help.”
“You know I can’t let you do that. If James is out in the woods hurt, or if there’s evidence that will help us find him, we need trained officers to handle it. The best thing you can do is go down to the station and tell the duty officer all you can about James’s whereabouts before he disappeared. I need to call people and get things started. It’s going to be dark soon.”
Morse made a series of phone calls and barked orders to whoever was on the other end of them. Foggy Point PD cruisers pulled up in front of Lois’s house, and a pair of evidence technicians walked down the street to James’s van.
Harriet sat with Lauren and Lois in the living room.
“We can’t just sit here.”
Lois’s eyes grew wide.
“The police told us to stay in here out of their way.”
“Actually, she didn’t,” Lauren told her. “She wanted Harriet to go to the police station to tell them about James’s disappearance. Only she didn’t go, because she realized Morse was trying to get us out of here. She knew that because we’ve already told Morse everything we know about James’s disappearance, which is pretty much nothing. We also have history with Jane. She tells us all the time to keep our noses out of police business.”
Harriet sighed.
“I’d stick my nose in now if I thought it would help find James. Unfortunately, this time, Jane is right. They’re professionals in searching, so we don’t have much to contribute.”
“I’m sure James isn’t lying out there hurt,” Lois said. “He knows every inch of those woods. Besides,
they aren’t that big—it’s maybe eight acres. If he’d sprained his ankle, all he’d have to do is holler. We’d hear him from here if he was calling out.”
“Or, to state the obvious,” Lauren said, “he’d use his cell phone.”
Harriet’s shoulders slumped.
“I’ve been calling his cell phone since before we left the prize ceremony. It goes straight to voicemail.”
“Would you gals like some tea or a soda?” Lois asked.
“I’d like some water,” Lauren told her.
“I’ll have tea,” Harriet said.
Lauren turned in her seat so her body blocked Harriet from Lois in the kitchen and the police in the dining room.
“Okay, what are you thinking? I know you don’t want tea at a time like this.”
Harriet took a deep breath.
“This might be another wild-goose chase, but I can’t help but think this has something to do with the vent or tunnel or whatever it is sticking out of the hill in Fogg Park. The fact that someone is using the cave to house people makes me believe even more that there could be an underground place of some sort.”
“So, how does that help us with the James situation? Are we going to go to the vent and try to tap Morse code or something?”
“Be serious. I don’t know Morse code, and I’m pretty sure you don’t, either. But, am I remembering right—at dinner a couple of weeks ago you said you were working on software that went with a sewer-scoping camera?”
“I see where you’re going. Yes, I still have one of the cameras to test the software with. It’s currently in the sewer line in front of my apartment. My landlord has been letting me test my program. I can get it out but it will take fifteen minutes or so. You’ll have to hose it off as I pull it out.”
“Let’s go get started.”
“We don’t know that the vent actually goes anywhere.”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
Lois came back with their tea and water. Harriet took a sip then set the cup down on the coffee table.
“Thanks, we’ve got to go check something out.”
Lauren led the way back to the car.
“This all raises the question of what’s going on. Who on earth would be trafficking people in Foggy Point?”
Disappearing Nine Patch (A Harriet Truman/Loose Threads Mystery Book 9) Page 23
