by J. S. Bailey
“It’s who I am.”
“Is it?”
“You know I get bored. Working for you keeps things interesting.”
Troy’s eyes grew cold. “Your contributions to this enterprise have taken a nosedive ever since you found your grandfather and started gallivanting around the county with him, and with Trish Gunson dead—again thanks to you—our income has taken a plunge. We can’t expand unless you keep bringing in fresh merchandise. Do you understand?”
“I do.” Hunkler Enterprises encompassed three distinct businesses, none of which Jack had ever told his grandfather about because he suspected that Graham, despite his own iniquities, would not have taken the news well.
One side of the business involved working with buyers from all over the Pacific Northwest. Jack’s work was simple: arrange for the capture of as many young and ignorant human beings as possible, who would then be sold to the highest bidder.
It wasn’t Jack’s job to know what happened to those people afterward.
The second business was known only to those with whom Troy had some level of trust. Its darker nature had enthralled Jack when he first learned about it—and to think it had only come about because of sissy-boy Vincent’s peculiar gift!
The third side of Troy’s business—logging—was the one the public got to see. Jack had never been part of that division. The employees who gleefully obliterated Oregon’s forests didn’t even know that the other two divisions existed.
“Then I have a proposal to make,” Troy said, bringing Jack back to the present. “Show me you’ll continue to be a worthy part of this company, and I’ll promote you. Fail me, and you’re gone.”
In this instance, “gone” could very well mean “dead” since Jack knew too much about Troy’s business.
A spark of anger flared up within Jack but he quelled it. “What do I have to do?”
That smile again. “Bring me five.”
“Five?”
“By next Saturday. That gives you eight days.”
“Don’t you mean you want four? I already got one this week.”
“No.”
Jack didn’t bother masking his irritation. “Are you nuts? It’s hard enough for me to get two in one week. This is freaking Hillsdale. You want more, send me up to Portland.”
Troy’s cold eyes studied him. “You know Portland is Lyman’s territory. I send you up there and he finds out, he’ll rat us all out before you’ll know what hit you. If you’re willing to move—assuming that you achieve your promotion—I’d much rather send you back to Sacramento. I’m sure you won’t mind so much now that your grandfather’s gone.”
“What do you mean, gone?” Jack sat up straighter in his chair. “He’s just in lockup.”
A muscle twitched in Troy’s cheek. “I take it you have yet to hear the news.”
Jack’s insides squirmed. “I rarely watch that stuff.”
“It wasn’t on the news. I heard it through some of my contacts at the prison. Graham Willard suffered a brain aneurysm the other night and they don’t think he’s going to recover. The old man’s a vegetable. As good as dead.”
Jack didn’t want to believe it. “How do you know your contacts weren’t misinformed?”
“They never are.” Troy folded his hands together. “But it seems we’ve strayed a bit. Get me five more by next Saturday, Jack. I wouldn’t want to be in your place if you fail.”
CARLY ARRIVED at Bobby’s house in her red Chevy Aveo. She unfolded herself from the car just as Bobby walked out the door with a PlayMate cooler full of Sprite in hand. Her auburn hair was brushed out and tied back once more, she wore the same orange sleeveless blouse she’d had on the day they met, and a giant pair of red-framed sunglasses hid the upper part of her face.
“Did you bring the picture?” she asked.
“Trust me, that’s about the last thing I’d forget right now.”
He made a move to get in his Nissan, but Carly said, “Hold it, Roland. I said on the phone I’d drive.”
“But this trip was my idea.”
“And driving you there was mine. What’s the matter? Do you feel emasculated if a chick is behind the wheel instead of you?” She shoved her sunglasses onto her forehead and grinned.
As far as Bobby could tell, she had yet to shed a tear today. “It’s called being a gentleman,” he said.
“Lord, now you’re acting like Randy. Get in and let’s go.”
Bobby obeyed and set the cooler on the floor between his feet, eager to be on the road. Sitting around the house waiting for Carly to show up had increased his anxiety for the woman in the photograph, as if delaying learning more about her would place her in even greater danger.
Once Autumn Ridge lay behind them, Carly said, “Why do you want to find this woman so badly?”
Bobby looked at her in surprise. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“I’m just curious.”
Bobby stared straight ahead through the windshield. Homes grew sparser and were being replaced by woods and patches of farmland. “Who else is going to do it?”
“The police?”
“The police barely have anything to go on. Besides, Randy doesn’t trust the police. Why should I?”
Carly’s expression soured. “Randy has every reason in the world not to trust a cop. I mean, look what his dad did to him. If I were him, I wouldn’t trust one, either.”
Bobby whipped his head to the side and gaped at her. “What did you say?”
Color rose in her cheeks. “Crap. I figured he’d told you.”
“But he did.” The day Randy was shot, Randy told Bobby about a child he’d known who was molested by his policeman father. The abuse went on for years even though the child reported him to the other cops, but nobody believed him until a neighbor accidentally witnessed the abuse and reported it. “He said it happened to someone else. I wondered if he was talking about himself but figured I was wrong.” He paused, thinking of Randy’s tired face and the bags that lined his prematurely-aged eyes. “Jesus,” he whispered. Then, “Sorry.”
“In this case,” Carly said, “I don’t think saying Jesus’ name should be considered using it in vain.”
“What happened to Randy’s parents after he was taken away from them?”
“It isn’t a very nice story.”
“I kind of got that already.”
Carly sighed. “I only know what I’ve been told. I was practically still a baby when all this went down, and none of our family even knew Randy yet so I might not have all the details right.”
“Well, what do you know?”
“Parker Bellison, the scumbag who did it, was murdered in prison a few months after he got put away.”
“Geez.”
“And then Barbara, Randy’s mother, slashed her wrists because she was so upset her husband was gone.”
Bobby was starting to wish he hadn’t asked. “She wasn’t upset that her own kid was abused and stuck in foster care?”
“As far as I know, no. Some people are like that. They just don’t care.”
“See?” Bobby said, jumping at the opportunity to change the course of the conversation to something more positive. “That’s why I want to figure out who this woman is and try to find her. Everyone needs someone to care about them.”
“But why do you care?”
He opened his mouth to reply but paused. It was true he wanted to make a greater effort to help people, but he had the idea that if the woman’s kidnapping had happened prior to meeting Randy, he still would have done his best to track the woman down.
“I just do,” he said. “I wasn’t always that way, though. I used to kind of be a jerk.”
“A jerk can still care about people, you know. Case in point? My father.”
They stopped for gas in a rural town with the unlikely name of Bird, and while Carly stood outside chatting with the attendant who filled the tank, Bobby withdrew the now-wrinkled picture from his pocket.
Why did he really care
about finding the woman? She was a stranger, and for all he knew she might be as depraved as Randy’s parents or as arrogant as Bobby’s old boss at the Stop-N-Eat.
He wouldn’t be able to judge her character unless they met. If she turned out to be cruel, that wasn’t his problem. At least he would have done his part in bringing her to safety.
The Spirit murmured, She needs you.
Goosebumps lifted the hairs on his arms. “Can you at least tell me her name?”
No response.
Bobby stuffed the picture away when the attendant hung up the nozzle.
“Who calls their town Bird?” he asked when Carly got back behind the wheel.
“I don’t know. Further north there’s a town called Boring.” She eased back onto the road and continued east, where the straight blacktop devolved into curves that Carly took too fast.
“My hometown should have been called Boring,” Bobby said, “but they named it Eleanor instead.”
“That’s a pretty name.”
“It isn’t a pretty place. Half the town is addicted to heroin, and it’s on the Ohio River, so when you aren’t fortifying your house against a flood all you can do is stare at Kentucky all day.”
“Is Kentucky boring, too?”
“Pretty much.”
The Aveo’s tires squealed as Carly rounded another curve in excess of the speed limit. Bobby gripped his knees and prayed he wouldn’t wet himself if the car flipped. “Are we there yet?”
“Are you serious or just trying to annoy me?”
“Do you drive like this all the time or are you just trying to kill me?”
She eased off the accelerator as they moved into another curve. “Sorry.”
After a while a brown sign that whizzed by on Bobby’s right announced that the Mountain Lake Campground was two miles ahead.
Thank you, God.
The road leading back to the campground came into view on their left. Bobby was grateful when Carly slowed down sufficiently to make the turn. He sat up straighter in his seat and watched as they passed a secondary turnoff that led to a trailhead.
“You ever do much hiking?” Carly asked.
“No. Only a couple times when I was a kid. In Kentucky, actually.”
“I thought you said Kentucky was boring.”
“I’m not much of a hiker. Sometimes I pass out. Phil says it’s because I need to exercise more.” Which to Bobby seemed counterintuitive, but he wasn’t about to argue with a nurse on health-related topics.
“That’s too bad,” she said as they approached the park office which, like the shower house in the picture, looked like a log cabin. “Hiking can be a lot of fun if you’re with the right people. Now hand me that picture.”
Bobby passed her the wrinkled image, wishing he’d thought to make copies before heading out here.
They drew to a stop alongside the office. A glass-covered bulletin board mounted on the outside wall at vehicle height displayed flyers pertaining to fire ordinances and upcoming park activities and a hand-sketched map of all the campsites. Bobby wished the map showed where Mystery Woman had stayed.
The office window slid open just as Carly was lowering hers. “What can I do for you today, ma’am?” a cheery woman wearing a khaki park uniform asked when she appeared in the opening.
“We’re looking for someone,” Carly said without preamble. “And we think she was staying here.”
She passed the picture out the window and into the woman’s hand. The woman took it and frowned, then passed it back. “We get a lot of campers so I don’t remember this lady in particular, but if it helps, that building behind her is Shower House A. You can see it just down the way there.” She leaned out the window and pointed, and perhaps a tenth of a mile away Bobby could see the cabin from the picture sitting to the left of the campground road among scattered tents and popup campers.
“Can we drive on back and see if she’s still here?” Carly asked. “We don’t plan on camping. We just want to talk to her.”
Bobby lifted his eyebrows but said nothing so the park employee’s suspicions wouldn’t be raised.
The woman glanced behind her, and in a lowered voice said, “Technically I’m supposed to make you pay a visitor’s fee, so try to make it quick, okay?”
“Don’t you worry. We’ll be out of here before you can blink.” Carly rolled up the window and moved the car forward at a crawl.
“You know she’s not here anymore,” Bobby said, agitation forming in his gut.
“We can still ask some of the other campers about her. They might have seen something fishy going on.”
Bobby shrugged, having no argument against that. “Okay.”
Carly pulled into an empty campsite next to the shower house, and they both climbed out. Bobby held up the picture and looked from it to the shower house door. “Whoever took the picture would have been standing about where I am, unless they had the camera zoomed in.” He squinted at the image again. “And the shadows are different. I think it might have been taken earlier in the morning than it is now.”
“Too bad we don’t know what day it was.” Carly turned and walked toward a blue and white tent erected three sites down from them.
Bobby straightened his shoulders and followed.
A bearded man sat on a campstool next to the fire barrel prodding at its smoldering contents with a stick. “Hi,” Carly said to him. “We were wondering if you might have seen the woman in this picture.”
Bobby hurried up beside her and passed the picture into the man’s hand, feeling about as awkward as a Jehovah’s Witness on his first door-to-door route of evangelization.
“What is this?” the man asked. “Some sort of investigation? I don’t want no part of it.”
“We think she was staying near here,” Carly said, undeterred.
Scowling, the camper examined the paper half a second before shoving it away. “I didn’t see nothin’. You’ll have to ask someone else.” He returned his attention to the fire he was attempting to kindle.
Bobby glanced at Carly, shrugged, and together they proceeded to the next occupied campsite and repeated their question to the couple staying there.
They didn’t strike gold until they reached the fourth site, where a plump, sixtyish man who had a white beard rivaling that of Santa Claus sat at a picnic table untangling fishing line. A plastic tackle box lay open on the table beside him.
His eyes lit up when he saw the picture. “I sure did see her. Maybe two mornings ago? I was coming back from the toilet and saw her emptying out her car into the fire barrel at that spot over there.” He pointed at the Aveo. “She seemed awful excited about something, but I couldn’t figure out what was so special about getting rid of trash. Odd thing was, she didn’t have a tent or anything. I think she spent the night in her car.”
Bobby’s pulse thudded out a rapid beat behind his ribs. “Was someone with her?”
“Yeah. Blond guy, average height. I didn’t get a good look at him.”
“Did he have a car, too?” Bobby asked.
“Yeah, but I don’t remember what it was. Might have been black, though.”
“Thank you,” Carly said, giving the man the sweetest smile Bobby had ever seen her use. “You’ve been very helpful.”
“Yeah,” Bobby said, his thoughts whirling. “Thanks.”
They returned to the Aveo.
“I’m going to see if her garbage is still here,” Bobby said, starting down a short slope to where that site’s picnic table sat yards away from the rusty fire barrel.
Carly came with him. “How will you know it’s hers?”
“I won’t, but it’s all we have to go on right now.” Bobby sat on his haunches beside the ring, knowing the other campers probably thought he’d flipped his lid.
The pit was full of garbage consisting in large part of McDonald’s wrappers and empty Mountain Dew bottles. Bobby picked up a large stick lying in the grass beside the pit and prodded at the mound of waste to see what might
be underneath it.
“Oh for goodness sake,” Carly said, and dug her hands into the mound.
Bobby set the stick aside and did the same.
Beneath the wrappers and bottles was a mound of wrinkled receipts from gas stations and restaurants from as far away as Indiana and as close as Autumn Ridge.
“Looks like someone came an awfully long way to get here,” Carly said, arranging the receipts on the ground by date. “Look, the earliest receipt is from a gas station in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”
Bobby was in the middle of examining a receipt from a place in Hillsdale called The Pink Rooster. “I don’t know anyone in Michigan.” He handed it to Carly and pulled out another from the same place that was dated the next day. “What’s The Pink Rooster? A restaurant?”
She wrinkled her nose. “It’s a bar. I’ve heard things about it.”
Her tone made his stomach squirm. “What sort of things?”
“The place is crap. My friend Amber’s ex-boyfriend took her there while they were still dating and she said when she finished her beer she found a burnt match lying in the bottom of her glass, and they wouldn’t even give her a refund!”
“You have friends?”
Spots of pink appeared on Carly’s cheeks. “Just because I hang around with Randy and the gang doesn’t mean I don’t have other friends, too. Amber and our friends Carmen and Julia have known each other since grade school.” Sadness filled her eyes. “Though I do admit there’s been a bit of a rift between me and them lately. I can’t tell them about the Servants, and they think I’m a bum for not having a paying job or going to college.”
“Are you going to go to college?”
She shrugged. “I’ve thought about studying to be a social worker. I’ll do that someday, but right now my job is with you. Anyway, back to The Pink Rooster. My cousin Brandon works for the health department, and The Pink Rooster always ends up having a ton of violations.”
“Then how is it still open?”
“They do clean up every once in a while, and their stuff is cheap. It draws customers like a landfill draws rats, no offense to Mystery Woman here.”
