by Lin Stepp
Jack snapped his answer back. “Well, I don’t know the Watkins very well.”
Actually, Jack knew Joe and Elizabeth Watkins quite well. They were wealthy, and the socialite types in this rural community and Jack wasn’t sure how conscientious they would be in minding a large group of fourth and fifth-grade girls at their big home in the mountains. The whole idea made Jack nervous.
“You’re being mean, Daddy. Everyone else is going. It’s not fair!” Morgan stomped out of the kitchen and ran up the stairs to her bedroom.
Meredith drifted out after her, dribbling tears and giving Jack accusing stares.
He and the girls engaged in another zinger of a fight two days later. Morgan and Meredith went tubing without having an adult with them. Jack couldn’t find them at the house, and he overreacted—losing his temper and saying a few words he regretted now.
Morgan had yelled at him in retaliation. “I’ll bet our mother wouldn’t talk to us like that and say bad words!”
That accusation had led to yet another fight. The atmosphere between Jack and his girls had been mutinous now all week.
Things seemed testy at Grace’s, too. Jack could feel her strain every time he stopped by. The sheriff had suggested Margaret not go out alone—and that she should try to have someone with her at all times. Vincent had stepped up to take the protective role of staying close to Margaret. Not a tough job, in Jack’s eyes, considering how smitten Vincent was with Margaret. But Grace still felt nervous that the sheriff and his staff had not found Crazy Man.
In all honesty, Jack’s mood had not been helped by finding another note from the man in his car last week—right after the incident with Margaret. It had been scrawled on one of Jack’s business cards, left on the front seat of his Jeep. It read: I saw you with her.
Jack had no idea whether this note referred again to the man’s seeing him with Ashleigh Anne that day when Althea was hospitalized or to some new incident since—like seeing him with Grace out in the moonlight. Both issues were highly confidential, and Jack balked at sharing the notes. Covertly—and somewhat guiltily—Jack tucked the new note away with the other one he’d found earlier and didn’t give it to the sheriff. His conscience smarted him over this indiscretion—and it made him crosser carrying his guilt around about it.
It was Friday now, and Jack was heading over to Bebe’s to pick up the girls. It had been a hectic day for him, showing property all morning and through his lunch hour to a set of demanding clients. Grace had called at about noon and suggested he and the girls come over to the Mimosa for dinner, and Jack had welcomed the idea. The quick hamburger he’d grabbed at a drive-through hadn’t been very satisfying.
Grace’s voice rolled over Jack’s phone, throaty and mellow. Even the sound of her voice turned him on these days. “Margaret and Vince are going into Maryville to dinner and a movie, Jack. So I thought maybe you and the girls might like to come here for dinner. I’ll make the girls my lasagna; they love that. And I got a movie at the video store we can all watch together.”
Jack felt grateful for the offer. He hoped it would help heal the breach with the twins. He hated it when they were angry at him.
He found Bebe sitting on the porch cutting up some late okra into a pan.
“Where are the girls?” he asked after buzzing her on the cheek.
She looked up in confusion. “They didn’t come over here today, Jack. They told me you were going to drop them off at Grace’s for the day instead.”
Jack muttered an expletive. He doubted they were at Grace’s. He’d just talked to her earlier, and she hadn’t mentioned anything about the girls’ being there when she offered her invitation to supper.
“Dang girls. I wonder where they’ve taken off to!” He paced the porch, trying to think. “I let them talk me into allowing them to walk over here this morning, Bebe—rather than me dropping them off. It’s only a short distance on our own private drive. I never thought to check to see if they got here. They walk over here all the time.”
Bebe offered him a sympathetic look. “Well, it never dawned on me that they were telling me a fib when they called me either, Jack. Don’t be too hard on yourself. They probably just wanted to sneak off and do something they knew neither of us would approve of. It’s not like you and Roger didn’t pull the same sort of tricks yourselves when you were that age.”
She put her pan of okra down and stood up to brush off her apron. “We’ll start calling everyone we know. Those girls will turn up. You can cut a piece of fresh apple pie while you are phoning. I just took it out of the oven.”
Jack grinned. Bebe always offered food in a crisis.
Thirty minutes later, Jack and Bebe stood comparing notes, trying to see if they could think of anyone else to phone. No one had seen the girls.
A curl of fear crawled up Jack’s spine. “That loony man’s still on the loose, Aunt Bebe.”
Bebe tried not to look panicked at the thought, but Jack saw the alarm pass over her face. “Let’s not jump to conclusions, Jack.”
However, they were both upset enough to call the sheriff now. And to begin making other calls around the community—in case anyone had seen anything suspicious.
Finally, Jack called Grace. He hadn’t wanted to upset her until he simply had to.
She acted amazingly calm. “Have you been up to the house to check the girls’ rooms for clues? When my children pulled tricks like this, I usually found clues in their rooms about what prank they had gotten up to.”
“I didn’t think of that.”
“Well, why don’t you head to your house to look? I’ll walk up the hill to meet you and help you out.”
A short time later, Jack and Grace had finished a search of the kitchen at Jack’s house—where Jack had last seen the girls—and started to look in the girls’ bedrooms. The two cheery bedrooms, decorated in sunny yellows and blues, connected with a small sitting area between them where the girls each had a desk to do their schoolwork.
“Where do Meredith and Morgan keep personal stuff they don’t want anyone to see?” Grace asked.
Jack scratched his head in thought. “They have what they call a ‘treasure box.’ It’s actually an old pink jewelry box with one of those old snap clasps. It was Bebe’s when she was a girl, and she gave it to them. They usually put things in there they consider valuable.” He laughed. “Like an old dime-store ring they found when we were out hiking one time.”
“Well, you look for that. I’ll check both their desks.”
Jack soon found the treasure box under Morgan’s bed. It was locked, but Jack located the key in Morgan’s bedside table.
Grace sat down on Morgan’s bed to look through the box with Jack.
“Good heavens, Jack! Look at this.” She held out a movie magazine picture of Celine Rosen to Jack. Familiar black words were scrawled across it in bold pen. The message, blazoned across the picture, read: He ran your mama off.
Jack felt sweat break out across his brow.
“That wicked man!” Tears filled Grace’s eyes, and she shook the picture as if wishing it was Crazy Man. “Whatever possessed him to send two little girls something like this! Especially at their age and when they’ve only just learned who their mother is!”
Jack sat stunned for a moment. Why would anyone do this? Who would hate him this much to upset his little girls this way? To revive old valley gossip from long ago. “Do you think the girls believed this, Grace?”
Grace shook her head and blew out an exasperated breath. “I don’t know, Jack. Children are very impressionable.”
Taking the jewelry box from Jack to dig further into it, Grace pulled out an old school note, which she read and then discarded, and then a folded computer printout.
She scanned over it and looked up at him with panicked eyes. “Oh, Jack, this is a printout of an e-mail from Celine, dated last week. She invited the girls to come out to see her in California. She was evidently responding to an e-mail they had sent her earlier. She even
offered to arrange airline tickets for them.”
Jack snatched the e-mail from Grace to read it himself, his heart pounding.
“I’ll bet that’s where they have gone, Jack.” Grace jumped up from the bed and started across the room, looking around. “Do the girls have suitcases? Where do they keep them? We need to look.”
Jack felt stunned. “They’re not even ten. They can’t travel by themselves.” He couldn’t seem to take all this in. “How could they get to the airport? Surely they wouldn’t just take off like this. California is all the way across the country.”
Grace was already digging through Morgan’s closet. She turned back to look at Jack where he still sat on the bed, trying to think. “Jack, you’re not helping me here. Those girls might have flown out to California to see their mother.”
She paced back across the room to pick up the magazine picture again. It had water stains on it and looked weatherworn. “This is the picture from that movie magazine I found out in the gazebo—just before all that mess happened with Margaret. I figured it might belong to the girls, but I left it there for them to come back and get later on. My guess is that Crazy Man was listening to them talk about their mother out there in the gazebo. He could easily have been hiding in all that brush behind it. He must have taken this magazine later on and decided to write this note to the girls.”
Grace put her hand over her heart. “But why would he do such a thing? Why would he frighten and upset two little girls?” She paced across the room. “I’d like to get my hands on that man, I can tell you. I’m mad enough right now to take him on all by myself!” She punched a fist into her hand.
Jack fingered through the trinkets of the girls’ treasure box to see if there might be any other clues. He found a folded slip of notebook paper under a four-leaf clover one of the girls had taped between two pieces of waxed paper. Scribbled on the note paper in Meredith’s childish scrawl—with daisies replacing all the dots over the i’s—was Celine’s name, and a street address in Hollywood. Or at least Jack assumed that’s what it was.
He held it up to Grace. “Where do you think the girls got this? Even I don’t have Celine’s most recent address.”
Grace studied it. “You can get anything off the Internet today. Especially about movie stars. And you know Celine Rosen has become quite a star in her own right. Celine might have given it to them, too.”
Jack shook his head. “Grace, do you really think Morgan and Meredith might have flown out to California to Celine’s? They’re not even ten! How would they know what to do—how to get to the airport? Or how to get their tickets?” He knew he was repeating words he’d said earlier, but he couldn’t seem to help it.
“Those are smart girls, Jack.” Grace picked up the printout of the e-mail from Celine to study it again. “Plus it certainly looks like Celine was a party to their travel plans. She tells them here she’d be delighted for them to come to see her before school starts. My guess is that she called and talked to them and then made their travel arrangements.”
“Why wouldn’t they have told me about this?” Jack shook his head.
Grace’s eyes narrowed in annoyance. “Oh, honestly, Jack. They knew you would never let them go to California. You wouldn’t even let them go to that slumber party at Mary Jean Watkins’s house.”
“I had my reasons for that.” Jack knew his reply was sharp and testy.
Grace turned to him. “Look, Jack. The whys of this situation are not really important right now. What is important is that two very young girls might have made their way all the way to Hollywood, California, to Celine Rosen’s home. We need to learn if that is so. If you have any contact information for Celine, we need to locate it.”
She gave him an exasperated look. “And you need to get up and search around these girls’ rooms and see if any of their clothes and belongings are gone. You should be able to tell if some of their clothes are missing, Jack. And you should know if they have a suitcase or duffle they usually take when they are going on a trip. We need to see if those are missing, too.”
Jack seemed to wake to action then. He strode down the hall to search in the storage closet to see if the girls’ duffle suitcases were still there. They weren’t. In searching their drawers, he found pajamas and favorite clothes missing—plus toothbrushes and hairbrushes from the bathroom.
He groaned. “Confound it! They’ve really gone out to California! Grace, I have no current information on Celine. I haven’t heard from her in four or five years. And I know she’s moved since then. There was some TV show on one night talking about fancy spreads in Hollywood that the stars owned. Celine’s was one of the ones they mentioned. They showed some palatial Spanish mansion with walls and security all around it. In Beverly Hills, I think.”
Grace gave Jack a sympathetic hug. “I’ll go search on their little computer to see if they saved any other information about this trip … or if they left any other notes around.” She started toward the girls’ desks. “You’d better call Sheriff Walker. See if he can help you get any contact information through the police department in Los Angeles. After all, these girls are in your custody. And Celine didn’t get your approval for this trip.”
Jack grimaced. “I wouldn’t put it past Morgan to have told her I said it was okay.”
“Even so,” Grace reasoned, “Celine should have talked to you to confirm that you’d agreed to let the girls fly out. There’s no excuse for her encouraging those girls in a trip like this at their age—and alone!”
Jack headed downstairs to find his phone. The next hour proved to be a difficult one. There was tight security around Celine’s home, and it wasn’t easy to gain any contact information. Sheriff Walker finally dropped over to tell them he’d made a connection with a detective in Los Angeles willing to help recover the girls. Twenty minutes later the detective called Jack.
“You need to fly out here,” he said. “We’ve found record of the girls arriving on a direct flight that came in earlier today. The stewardess saw that they were picked up. She said they were met by a security guard from Celine Rosen’s staff—who showed the flight attendant identification. That’s the last that’s been seen of them.”
The detective paused. “My feeling is that the twins are at Celine Rosen’s place. But in case there’s an attempted kidnapping involved, I think we shouldn’t alert her before we go over there to retrieve the girls. And I would hate to go in there to get those little girls alone and frighten them. I’ll be able to get through her security, but I think you should be with me.”
“You’re right.” Jack agreed. “I’ll get the first flight out that I can and go with you.”
“Call me as soon as you get that arranged. I’ll post a couple of officers to watch the house until then, to make sure the girls don’t leave.” Jack heard him shuffle some papers. “My name, again, is Cole Strader. I’ll meet your flight, and we’ll go over to see if we can find your girls as soon as you get here. We’ll have backup in case we need it, but it may be that she simply wanted to see the girls. You say she hasn’t seen them since they were born and that you think the girls contacted her. She might have just been curious. Everything might be okay.”
“Then why haven’t she or the girls called me?”
The detective grew quiet for a moment. “I don’t know that, Mr. Teague.”
Jack hung up the phone and turned to Sheriff Walker and Grace. “I’m going to fly out to California. This detective and I will go over to Celine’s place when I arrive. He can get me in past her security. He thinks it’s best we don’t alert her first.” He sighed. “Just in case it might be a kidnapping—and in case she might try to hide the girls in another location before I get out there.”
Offering a hand to Swofford Walker, he said, “Thank you, Swofford. I appreciate all your help. I’ll keep you posted as I can.”
The sheriff nodded and turned to leave. “Want me to go by to talk to anyone for you?”
“No.” Jack shook his head. “I’l
l call Bebe and my mother after I make my plane reservations. They’ll tell anyone else.”
“And get folks to praying.” Swofford hitched up his pants. “Be sure someone calls the minister. Me and the missus—we’ll sure be lifting this up.”
“Thanks.” Jack saw Swofford to the door, and then came back to slump into a chair at the kitchen table, a phone book in his hands. He opened the book to the airlines’ numbers. “I know the Internet is faster, but I’m going to look up some phone numbers, too, in case I can’t find what I want online.”
He glanced up at Grace. ‘You can go on home now. I’ll call you as I can and let you know how things are going.”
Grace crossed her arms. “I’m going with you, Jack. You might as well book for two.”
Jack heaved a sigh. “There’s no need for that, Grace. My guess is it will be six hours or more getting out there.” He looked at his watch. “Even with all the time-zone changes, it will probably be ten or eleven at night by the time I can get to the Los Angeles airport. And I’m sure I’ll need to stay over. You don’t need to put yourself through all that.”
She gave him a stubborn look. “There’s no point in arguing with me, Jack. I’m going. And that’s final.” She sat down at the table and put her hand over his. Her voice softened then. “I want to be a help to you, and I want to go for the girls.”
He wanted to argue, but as he looked into her eyes, he knew it would be of little use. She had that determined set to her mouth that he’d come to recognize.
Jack shook his head and shrugged in resignation. “Well, let’s see what flights we can find.”
CHAPTER 21
They couldn’t get a direct flight. However, Jack was fortunate to find an evening flight with an airline going out of Knoxville and connecting through Memphis before heading straight on to Los Angeles. It was a six and a half hour flight. They wouldn’t arrive in California until nearly eleven p.m. Pacific time, even with the time change from East to West.
