A Scarlet Cord

by Deborah Raney

She heard the wide front doors creak open, then close again. Within seconds, the towering man stepped into Darlene’s office, removing his hat as he ducked through the doorway.

  Darlene covered the receiver with her hand and gave him a nervous smile. “I’ll be right with you.”

  Before she could say another word, Pastor Steele opened the door to his adjacent study and stepped into Darlene’s office. He extended his hand to the lawman. “Hi, I’m Pastor Don Steele. How can I help you?”

  Darlene quietly replaced the receiver in its cradle and busied herself with some paperwork on her desk.

  “Tom Stanton.” The man introduced himself as he accepted Pastor Steele’s outstretched hand. “Deputy Stanton, from the county sheriff’s office. I’d like to speak with you for a moment if I could, Reverend Steele”—his eyebrows leaned in Darlene’s direction as he finished—“alone.”

  “My office is right this way.” Pastor Steele led the deputy into his office, pulling the door partially closed after the officer had ducked inside.

  From her desk, Darlene could barely hear their muffled voices. Quietly, she got up and went over to the copy machine in the corner behind her desk and switched it off. Without the hum of the copier, the two men’s voices carried quite clearly.

  Darlene sat back down in her padded desk chair and pretended to proofread the bulletin.

  “… what we discovered after talking to Mr. Ellington’s brother is quite interesting,” Officer Stanton was saying.

  “You’re sure about this?” Pastor Steele asked.

  “Well, we have a couple more leads to follow up on. We don’t want to scare him off before we have the evidence we need to convict, but I think we are just days away from bringing him in.”

  Darlene sat perfectly still, straining to hear the rest.

  She heard defeat in Don Steele’s voice. The minister sighed heavily, and Darlene could almost picture him hanging his head the way he did when one of his flock went astray. “I’d always hoped they were wrong about Joel.”

  “I didn’t know him, of course,” Stanton said. “Read the stories though. Seemed pretty cut and dried to me. Just a matter of finding the guy.”

  “Will he be brought back here to the county for trial?”

  “Well now, he hasn’t been officially charged, but if—”

  The rest of Stanton’s sentence was lost as the motor of the water fountain down the hall kicked on. Darlene could feel her heart galloping, and a fine film of perspiration beaded her upper lip. They must have found Joel. And now it sounded as if he was going to be charged with taking the money for the building fund.

  It was awful to think of him being found guilty. She wondered if it would make any difference when the authorities learned that the money had long since been replaced by the insurance and several generous donations, including a contribution of three thousand dollars that she herself had given from her mother’s life insurance policy.

  Her shoulders sagged at the thought of her mother. Not a day went by that she didn’t weep over the senseless death of the wonderful woman who had given her life.

  Melanie’s thoughts drifted, and she succumbed to the warmth of the morning sun and the comfort of the deck chair. She started awake when Karly came back out with the baby in her arms.

  “Oh! I must have fallen asleep,” Melanie said, yawning and stretching. “Here, let me have him.” She held out her arms, and Karly transferred little Parker into them. “Does he need to be burped?”

  As if on cue, the baby emitted a rumbling belch.

  “Not anymore,” Karly laughed.

  Melanie stretched Parker out on her lap and cooed senseless baby talk to him. There was something so hopeful and reassuring about a tiny new baby.

  “I’m going to make a pot of coffee,” Karly said. “Do you want some?”

  “Sure, I’ll take a cup. Are the kids back yet?”

  “No. You apparently haven’t seen Tad’s backyard.” Karly described the Swiss Family Robinson–like tree house Tad Goldstein’s father had built in the neighboring yard. “I think Brock and Jace would just move in over there if we’d let them.”

  “Oh, Jerica will think she’s died and gone to heaven.”

  While Karly rattled dishes in the kitchen, Melanie watched the infant with fascination, trying to remember when Jerica could possibly have been this small. Parker’s bright little eyes already tracked the exaggerated movements of her head, and he seemed to be mimicking the faces she made at him, working his round O of a mouth with furrowed forehead. Amazing. What an incredible miracle babies were.

  Karly brought a tray out, and they sipped coffee and admired the baby, soaking in the rare spring sunshine. The sun was high in the sky when their reverie was interrupted by the distant slam of the front door and the clatter of sneaker-clad feet across the kitchen tile.

  Melanie looked at Karly with a knowing smile. “It must be lunch time. Here, I’ll go fix some sandwiches.” The baby was dozing now. She gave him back to Karly, then gathered the coffee mugs and magazines that had collected on the deck before going into the kitchen. The boys were standing in front of the open refrigerator jostling for front and center.

  “Hey, guys. You hungry?”

  “Starving,” Jace declared. “Can we have pizza?”

  “I think your mom and I decided on sandwiches. Can you handle that?”

  “Sure,” Brock said, with a tough-guy shrug. “PB and J?”

  “If that’s what you want. Where’s Jerica? Did she like the tree house?” Melanie asked.

  “I dunno,” the boys said in unison.

  “What do you mean … She came back with you, didn’t she? From Tad’s house?”

  They both shook their heads matter-of-factly. “She never went to Tad’s,” Brock said. “She said she had something else to do.”

  “What? You mean she’s been here all this time?” Melanie hadn’t heard a peep out of Jerica all morning. She glanced at the digital clock on the microwave, and her heart lurched. It was 11:30. It had been almost two hours since the boys had gone to play at the Goldsteins’.

  “Hmmm,” she said, pushing away a spasm of alarm. “She must have fallen back to sleep. Would one of you guys go back and tell her that we’re making lunch?”

  The brothers raced each other down the hallway yelling. If that didn’t wake Jerica up, nothing would.

  But just as quickly, they came back out to the kitchen. “Jerica’s not there.”

  “What?”

  “She’s not in the bedroom.”

  Melanie’s stomach clenched. “Are you sure?”

  “Yup. She’s not there,” Brock declared.

  “Well, she has to be somewhere.” It came out as a bark, and she could see by the crestfallen expression on Brock’s face that she’d spoken too harshly. But now her fear took over. She hurried back to the bedroom. It was empty. Retracing her steps down the hall, she looked into the bathroom and poked her head into each of the other bedrooms off the hall. All were empty.

  Panic pumped adrenaline through her veins. She raced down the steps to the basement family room. The lights were off and the television screen was black and silent. Where else could she be?

  Melanie took the stairs two at a time back to the kitchen, shouting Karly’s name.

  Her sister-in-law came in from the deck, cradling Parker in her arms. “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t find Jerica, Karly!” She heard the hysteria rising in her own voice. “The boys said she never went with them to the neighbors’—to Tad’s.”

  Karly looked from Brock to Jace. “Jerica didn’t go with you?” she repeated.

  They shook their heads again, faces solemn now, as if they were afraid they were in trouble.

  “Let me put Parker down,” Karly said, her face grim. She took the baby back to the nursery, and when she came back a minute later she knelt in front of her eldest son. “Brock, this is important. Do you know where Jerica is?”

  “No, Mom. I haven’t seen her si
nce this morning.”

  “Jace?”

  The five-year-old’s eyes were wide. “I don’t know where she is, Mom. She was gonna go to Tad’s with us, and then she said she had to do something.”

  Melanie bent to join Karly at the boys’ eye level. “What, Jace? What did she have to do?”

  “I dunno. She didn’t tell us.”

  Melanie looked at Karly. “Where else could she be?” She rose to her feet and started down the hall again. “Jerica? Jerica Beth! Can you hear me?” Karly and the boys followed suit, parading through every level and room of the house shouting for Jerica—to no avail. They gathered back in the kitchen several minutes later, quiet and sober.

  Karly took charge. “Brock, you and Jace go look around the neighborhood. Maybe she tried to follow you guys to Tad’s and got lost. I’ll check the yard. Mel, you go through the house one more time. She’s got to be somewhere.”

  When they’d left, the dead silence of the house told Melanie with certainty that Jerica was not inside. She walked through the house again, this time listening for a telltale sound instead of shouting Jerica’s name. Finding not so much as a clue, she began to search in ridiculous places. She opened cupboard doors and rummaged through clothes hampers. Macabre images swarmed her mind like angry hornets.

  She remembered that Matt had caught the kids making forts out of the bunk-bed mattresses a couple nights ago. Melanie went to the boys’ room, cleared away the lumpy quilts and lifted the mattresses off the platforms, dreading what she might find. She went to the other bedrooms, doing the same.

  She walked into the guest room where Jerica had slept last night. The quilts had been pulled up in a lumpy heap, and the decorative pillows were propped neatly against the headboard—Jerica’s feeble efforts to make the bed after she’d crawled out of it that morning.

  Melanie went to the end of the bed, spread her arms wide, and grabbed two corners of the quilt, giving it a shake to make sure that none of the lumps in the blankets were child-sized. The comforter settled back onto the bed, and at the edge of her vision, she saw something flutter against the pillows.

  She took a step toward the head of the bed and held her breath as a tentacle of raw terror snaked up her spine.

  Thirty

  A smudged sheet of ruled paper rested against the pillows, one side ragged where it had been ripped from a spiral notebook. Melanie picked it up and slumped onto the bed at the sight of the childish scrawl. She read her daughter’s sweet misspelled words. As their meaning soaked in, her hands began to tremble violently.

  Der Mommy,

  I am ging to fine Jole for you.

  Love,

  Jerica

  Melanie’s breath caught in her throat. Where in heaven’s name would Jerica have imagined Joel might be found? Her thoughts raced as she tried to think of the conversations she’d had with her daughter. Had Jerica overheard her or Karly say something this morning, before they’d realized she was standing on the deck? What had they said that would make Jerica think she could find Joel? Desperately she replayed her conversation with Karly, trying in vain to imagine how her own brain might have processed things when she was Jerica’s age.

  How far could a determined little girl get in two hours? What if someone had picked her up? The thought sent a blade of ice through Melanie’s heart: What was she doing sitting here? Every second was critical now. Clutching the note, she stumbled blindly down the hall and into the kitchen where Karly was on the phone calling the neighbors.

  She thrust the paper into her friend’s hands.

  “Oh dear God!” Karly whispered as she read her niece’s scribbled words. “Let me call you back, Ann. We just found … a note from Jerica.” Karly pressed the End key and set the phone on the counter, inspecting Jerica’s note more carefully.

  “We need to call the police, Mel,” Karly said in a hushed voice.

  Her palms clammy, Melanie nodded numbly and grabbed for the phone.

  Karly took it from her. “Let me call.” She punched in the emergency number.

  Melanie stood nearby, the blood draining from her face, her hands trembling. She threw up a desperate prayer while Karly told the dispatcher what had happened and gave a description of Jerica. “No, ma’am, we’ve already checked all the nearby neighbors. Like I said, she left a note. We’re pretty sure she’s run off. Yes, that’s right. She’s six. Jerica.” Karly spelled the name into the phone. There was a long pause while she listened, then, covering the receiver with one hand, she looked at Mel. “What was Jerica wearing today?”

  Melanie’s memory came up utterly blank, and she felt herself edging over the brink of panic. Shaking uncontrollably, she racked her brain trying to picture what Jerica had looked like as she’d stood on the deck just hours ago. What kind of mother couldn’t remember what her child had dressed in that morning? “I … I can’t remember! Karly, I can’t remember!” By the sound of her own voice, she knew she was losing it.

  “Hang on just a minute,” Karly said into the phone. She put a warm hand on Melanie’s arm. “It’s okay, Mel. I can’t remember either. We’ll think of it. It’ll come. Just stay calm. Was it … was it that little pink corduroy set?”

  “No. No, I just put that in the washer last night. Oh, Karly, I can’t remember. What’s wrong with me?” She put her head in her hands, trying to block a barrage of terrifying thoughts. She willed herself to be calm. And there it was: She remembered tying ribbons in Jerica’s pigtails last night. Bright orange ribbons. Jerica had been so taken with the new hairstyle that she’d insisted on leaving them in when she went to bed. This morning she’d put on the outfit that matched the ribbons.

  “It was her orange overalls,” she told Karly now. “Remember? The ones Jace teased her about? He told her she looked like a pumpkin. Remember? And she probably had that little orange-and-yellow striped T-shirt on with it. It has Oshkosh embroidered on it. So do the overalls. That’s what she usually wears with them anyway.” She knew she was rambling, but thankfully Karly was already relaying the information into the telephone.

  “And she had ribbons in her hair. Orange ones. Bright orange ones. Be sure and tell them that. Pigtails.”

  “That’s right,” Karly confirmed, her head bobbing. “Oh, good. That’ll make her easy to spot.” Karly finished describing the outfit to the dispatcher, and answered a few more questions. She hung up and put an arm around Melanie. “It’s going to be all right, Mel. The police are sending a car out right away. We’ll find her. Don’t worry.”

  “I want to go look,” she said.

  “Okay. Maybe … maybe one of us should stay here. In case the police call back. I know the neighborhood, Mel. I know where the kids play. I’ll take the boys with me, and we’ll drive around for a while … You can stay here with the baby and answer the phone. And … talk to the police.”

  The reality of the words felled her: The police. They’d had to call the police to search for her daughter. She crumpled into a chair and slumped over the kitchen table.

  “We’ll find her, Mel,” Karly assured her, rubbing gentle circles on Melanie’s back. “I promise you, we’ll find her.”

  Karly went to check on the baby, then herded the boys out to the car. Melanie dragged herself up and followed them out to the driveway, the cordless phone clutched in one hand.

  As they drove off, she felt as though they’d left her behind in a shark-infested ocean. In a daze, she went into the house and walked back to the guest room again.

  A sob rose in her throat. “Oh, dear Jesus,” she prayed, her voice rising in hysterics. “Help us, Lord. You have to help us find her. Please, God. Please.”

  A dozen grizzly newspaper accounts swirled through her mind—stories of lost children that had ended in unspeakable tragedy.

  Keep her safe, Father. Oh, please, God. Please. Don’t let me lose her, too.

  Darlene Anthony had just taken off her coat when Pastor Steele called her into his office.

  She hung her coat on the back
of the door and went into the adjoining office. “Did you have a nice lunch, Pastor?”

  “Hello, Darlene. I have some rather bad news, I’m afraid. I just got a call from Jerry LaSalle. Melanie and Jerica are out in New Jersey visiting Mel’s brother, and Melanie just called him to say that Jerica is missing. Apparently she ran away.”

  Darlene gasped. “Oh no! How awful!” She forced herself to swallow the lump in her throat and blurted out, “Why would she run away? How long has she been missing?”

  Don Steele took off his glasses and wiped them on the sleeve of his oxford shirt. “Jerry didn’t really have any details, but apparently, Jerica … well, she went looking for Joel.”

  “Joel Ellington? Oh, my goodness!”

  “Yes. They had a neighborhood search organized when I talked to Jerry a little while ago, but so far … nothing. Naturally they’re all pretty scared.”

  Darlene put a thin hand to her mouth as the seriousness of the situation registered. “Oh, that poor little girl. Melanie must be worried sick.”

  “Jerry said they’d call back here as soon as they have any news. But they wanted to get it on the prayer chain right away this morning. Would you get those calls started, please, Darlene?”

  “Of course. Of course …” Flustered by such dreadful news, she went over the information again with Pastor Steele to make sure she had the details right. She tried to jot down some notes, but her fingers wouldn’t seem to cooperate. Finally, she gave up and went to the phone in her own office. Trembling, she managed to dial the first number on the prayer chain.

  By noon people all over Silver Creek and beyond were praying for Jerica’s safe return. As the day wore on, the phone in Darlene’s office rang repeatedly. She could only tell the callers that Jerica was still missing and that they would let the prayer warriors know the minute they had something new to report.

  At 1:30 that afternoon the phone rang again. “Cornerstone Church. This is Darlene.”

  “Darlene? Jerry LaSalle here.” Darlene hardly recognized the elder’s voice. He sounded terrible.

  “Jerry. Oh, we’ve all been praying for you. Do you have any news?”