Jennie put all of her fear and all of her fury behind the slap that landed on the side of Jeff’s face, almost knocking him out of his chair. The officer pulled her away before she could deliver another round, and Jennie began to cry.
“What am I going to do? What am I to do?” She wrung her hands as tears streamed down her face. “I’ve lost them”, she whispered. “I’ll never see them again.”
The officer told her that the state police had been called. They had names, descriptions of the girls and the van. “We’ll find your children, Ms. Bateman. We’ll bring them home to you. They won’t get far.”
“What can I do?”
“There is nothing for you to do. Go home.”
“I live in Whitesburg. I can’t…”
“Ms. Bateman, you certainly are welcome to wait here if you’d like. We likely will find them in a few minutes, but it may be a couple of hours or even longer. If you do leave, we’ll call you as soon as we know something.”
“What about him?” She looked at Jeff.
“We’ll transport him to the county jail. Charge him as an accessory.”
Jennie finally decided to leave. Si lived in Athens. She could go to his house, she decided.
She began to walk toward the door, her shoulders hunched over, tears on her face. “I need to call Emma back. I need to call Thomas…My phone…”
She retrieved the telephone from the floor of the interrogation room. The screen was blank. She pushed the button to turn it on, but nothing happened. “No, no, no. Not now,” she wailed as she stared at the black screen.
***
Alexis screamed as she and Kenny were tossed around in the back seat as Askins sped through town. Billy lay on top of Christa, pinning her against their seat, his hand over her mouth, stifling her cries.
Askins finally pulled into a dirt lot beside a convenience store. Alexis recognized the road on the right as the onramp to the bypass. They had driven this way the previous fall when they had come to games. Askins turned fully around in his eat. “Shut up back there,” he roared. “Everyone. Quiet.”
All sounds faded, except for Christa’s pleas for help.
“He said to be quiet, Christa,” Billy said. “Please don’t make me hit you. I’ll move my hand and let you up if you’ll be quiet.”
Alexis thought she heard real concern in his voice. Christa nodded, and Billy removed his hand, slid off of her, then helped her to sit.
“Wimp.” Kenny was holding a handkerchief on his nose. “You need to show her who’s boss. Take control.”
Billy chuckled. “I’m not the one with the busted nose, Mr. Take-Control.”
Alexis gave a quick laugh and Kenny glared across the car at her.
“I hope you at least took advantage of your position.” He smirked.
Askins glowered at Alexis and Christa. “Next one who screams or shouts, next one who waves for help, tries to attract attention…she’ll be sore for a week. Understand? Answer me. Do you understand?” he bellowed when no one responded. Christa nodded. Alexis turned up her nose and stared back at him. He seemed to accept her silence as agreement.
“You all right, Kenny?”
Kenny shot Alexis a nasty look. “Caught me off guard, but I popped her face good.”
Alexis put her hand to her cheek. It was sore to the touch.
“I have big plans for the two of us after we arrive at the cabin.” He smirked again. “Don’t want to bang you up too badly, but you hit me again and I’ll make you pay—now or later.”
Alexis almost gagged. “You and what army?”
Kenny laughed.
“He likes to hit girls,” Billy said. “Just ask his old girlfriend.”
“She never complained about how I treated her,” Billy laughed. “I smacked her a few times, but I made up for it in other ways. Know what I mean, Alexis?”
She turned her head and looked out the window. “Where are you taking—”
Billy interrupted. “Why was that policeman shooting at us, Askins? How did he know what we were doing?”
“He was shooting, I expect, because Jeff Ingram is an A-number-one, first-class, major-league screw up.”
“What happened?”
“Well I don’t really know, do I, boy?” Askins had pulled a road map from a tote bag on the seat beside him. “I haven’t seen him since I let you boys out of the van.” He looked back at Billy. “But the cop knew we were taking the girls. Only four of us were in on the plan, which means that, unless one of you two talked,” he looked at Billy and Kenny in turn, “Ingram ran his big mouth to the wrong person. Worse, they knew exactly where you were. The cop was eying you as I pulled up.”
Billy laughed. “He was just a campus rent-a-cop.”
“Even rent-a-cops have telephones, son. I’m betting that Ingram is in the pokey and the state police will be on our tails.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean, genius, is that they’ll have roads staked out across the state.”
“Now look,” Kenny leaned across the seat. “I want out. You said we’d have no problem. Snatch the girls, spend a couple of weeks getting acquainted…” his eyes traveled down Alexis’s body.
“In your dreams,” Alexis said.
“…and it would all be over. I didn’t sign on for this.”
“It would have been if Ingram hadn’t blabbed.”
“That’s a stupid plan,” Christa mumbled.
“Watch your mouth, little girl. We’ve discussed your attitude before. I’m about ready to let a stick speak for me.”
“Our faces will be on milk cartons in a week.”
“I’m not going down for this. Let me out.” Kenny moved toward the door.
“You can’t get out. Ingram will have told them your name.”
“And Jennie knows your name too, and where you work.” Alexis laughed. “You are going down.”
Kenny glared at her. “Shut up you little…”
“The cop saw you carry Alexis into the car. He didn’t get a good look at me.” Askins held up a sheet of paper. “It’s your name on the van rental too. No, you can’t get out. You’re committed for the duration.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I’m checking the map. They’ll stake out the interstate, so we need to exit the main roads. Ingram doesn’t know where the cabin is, but it’s only about thirty miles from Carrollton. If we can get there, we’ll be safe.”
“Until when? How long do you think you can hide?” Alexis asked in mocking tone of voice.
“As long as necessary. Shut her up, Kenny.”
Kenny yanked Alexis’s arm, pulling her to him. He grasped her hands with one of his and put his other over her mouth. “Bite my hand, and I’ll really get rough.”
Alexis jammed her elbow in his side and he yelped, releasing her. She slid to the other side of the car. “Touch me again and I’ll really get rough.”
***
Emma sat in her car, watching the blip signaling Christa’s location. After a dash with a number of turns, the car had been stationary near an onramp to the Athens bypass for almost fifteen minutes. She had tried to call Jennie to tell her where the children were, but after she’d lost their connection she had not been able to call her back. She didn’t understand what was going on, but she had begun to suspect that Jennie was somehow involved.
She reviewed what she knew. The girls had left the stadium without Jennie, accompanied by two boys. One of them had been telling Alexis what to do and had sounded anxious for her to hang up when Emma had called. Alexis no longer answered her telephone.
Shortly after she’d talked to Alexis, she had found their location. As she had called Jennie to relay the information, Christa had begun to move rapidly, too fast to be walking or even running. They had moved off at a high speed, made a number of turns, and were now stationary. Emma decided that they must be in a vehicle of some type, but she did not believe they had willingly entered a car with two strange boys. Bo
th of them were smarter than that.
Just before she’d lost her connection with Jennie, she’d heard a man, an officer, she assumed, say something about a blue van with an older man driving. Jennie had begun to shout, and the connection had gone dead.
Now, she looked at the blip on her screen. She was not familiar with Athens, so the location told her nothing. She could not tell if Christa was still in the car or not. She had no way to guess what was happening to her, no way at all to know if Christa and Alexis were still together.
She could call Christa, but she’d lost her connection with Alexis while they were talking. She supposed that the boy had taken it from her. She could not risk losing Christa’s signal.
Emma felt as if she should call someone to help—Thomas or the police. She started to dial Thomas’s number. She’d be interrupting his meeting with his editor, but what would she say? That his former wife had lost his children? That maybe they had been kidnapped? That maybe Jennie was involved and her call had been simple misdirection, a plausible cover story? Why would the woman not take her call? She pounded on the seat beside her.
She couldn’t call Thomas unless she had something substantive, something real, to tell him. How about the police? She could tell them where the children were.
Emma scoffed at the idea. She could hear herself trying to explain that the children’s mother had lost them, that their father was in New York and that she was his fiancée. Talk about lack of credibility. In any case, surely the police had a better means to track a vehicle than the app on her IPhone.
She flipped back to the app. The best thing she could do right now was to find the girls. Find them and take them with her. As she watched the screen, the blip began to move. She followed it down the bypass and saw that it turned onto highway seventy-eight.
She dug through the glove box looking for a map. With GPS, they had almost gone the way of horse-drawn buggies, but she found one in the pocket of one of the doors. The highway ran to Atlanta, and Emma realized that she knew where it would enter the city. She would be waiting. Once she found the vehicle, a blue van she assumed, she would find a way to get her girls out.
***
Jennie thanked the officer for her ride and climbed into her car. He heart was pounding and her legs were weak. She plugged her phone into the adapter and pressed Power. Nothing happened.
“No, no, no.” She pounded on the dash. “Not today.” The phone was dead, not just the battery. She had no way to call or to be called.
What was her father thinking? Surely he did not believe that he could kidnap his granddaughters on a busy street in broad daylight and live happily ever after. Where would he go? What would he do? At least he wouldn’t hurt them…
Oh, please don’t let him hurt them.
She shook her head. No, she couldn’t imagine that he would do them serious harm. But what about the boys? She was not so sure about them.
In her mind, she ran over what had happened. The two boys sitting with them at the game. It had all seemed so innocent. The girls had been with her as she’d left the stadium and then…What had happened? She had tripped. And Jeff had caught her.
She screamed. She hadn’t tripped—he had pushed her down—and the boys had moved the girls away in the crowd. He’d better hope that he rots in jail…
She cranked the car and headed toward Si’s house. The officer was right. They were gone and there was nothing she could do. She could not even call Thomas, interrupt whatever it was he was doing in New York and tell him she had lost the children. She was worthless. She could not protect them. She had no business having them.
As she pulled into the driveway, she remembered what Jeff had told her. A cabin on a pond. Not terribly helpful since there were likely thousands of such places in Georgia alone, but her parents were avid fishermen. A couple of months before, the weekend of the girls’ first visit, in fact, they had been off fishing. They had tried a new spot, a pond over near the Alabama line, and they had stayed in a cabin on a lake. Her mother had told her what a nice weekend they’d had, how good the fishing was, how lovely she had found the cabin to be.
“It looked like a shack as we drove up to it and I was rather angry at your father for bringing me to such a place,” she had told Jennie. “Inside, though, it was completely modern, central heat and A/C, dishwasher, good beds.” In addition, her mother had told her, it was isolated. “No other cabin within a mile, at least. We didn’t see another soul the entire time we were there.”
That could be it. Perhaps her mother could give her directions to the cabin.
Si’s wife answered when she knocked and Jennie told her what had happened. Then she went to the kitchen to use the telephone.
“Mom, this is Jennie.”
“Jennie, what’s happened? The sheriff came to the house looking for your Daddy. Asked all sorts of questions. Wouldn’t tell me anything. What happened?”
“Daddy kidnapped Alexis and Christa.”
“Oh, I was afraid he would do something dumb. He’s been talking about them since we were in Charleston. Talking crazy…”
“Has he come home tonight?”
“I haven’t seen him since this morning. He and the boys said they were going fishing.”
“What boys?”
“Kenny Watson and Billy Waters. Kenny is Johnny Watson’s boy.”
That was why he looked familiar. It was not only that he worked at the stable. Jennie felt sick at her stomach. She knew the Watsons. Mean people.
“The sheriff said to call if I hear from him. What should I do? There are two state troopers in a car in front of the house.”
“Call them, Mom. Call them.”
“I…I will.”
“Mom, a couple of months ago the two of you went fishing over near the Alabama line. You showed me the pond on a road map. Can you give me directions to the cabin where you stayed?”
“I can give you the address, but why do you want that?”
“I think that’s where Daddy is taking the girls.”
Her mother recited the address and Jennie wrote it on a napkin. Her new GPS—she had purchased one just a week earlier to prove to Alexis that she was not hopelessly out of date—would take her right to it.
Thanking Si’s wife, Jennie dashed back to her car. She needed to stop at home for the GPS, then she would head out to the cabin. Her guess was that she would find her father and the two boys, along with Alexis and Christa with no problem, and she would bring her daughters home. She backed out of the driveway, pushed on the accelerator, and headed for the interstate.
***
Askins drove west on highway seventy-eight, careful to stay just below the speed limit. He was not really concerned about being spotted, but he wanted to take no chances. The state patrol would be covering the main routes and word of the incident—he refused to say abduction—would undoubtedly take a while to filter down to the county sheriffs.
Since leaving Athens he had seen maybe four cars.
“This highway used to be the main drag between Athens and Atlanta. Hard to believe.” When no one responded, he looked over his shoulder. Kenny and Alexis now sat on opposite sides of the car. Kenny looked as if he might nod off. Alexis’s arms were crossed and she stared straight at him. Defiant, he thought. If her eyes were a death ray, I would be gone.
Christa stared though the side window, her red face streaked with tears. Occasionally, her chest would heave. Billy had one hand on her arm, as if to comfort her.
He would have to make things up to Christa. He had the most hope for her.
Askins stared at the road ahead. He knew the girls were right. Stuffing them in the cabin for a couple of weeks would not suffice. Not since that dumb Jeff Ingram had run his mouth. If he could have slipped them away unnoticed, everyone would have concluded that the girls had run. Teenagers did that sort of thing. Besides, Jennie herself had told him that they didn’t want to be with her in Whitesburg. Perfect cover.
He considered the problem.
Unless Ingram had told everything he knew, then his name and the boys’ names might not be connected to the incident. That would simplify matters. Even if Ingram had named names, he was a drunk, a ne’er do well, a drifter. They could simply stonewall, deny his accusations, and say they had been fishing. He had fish in the freezer at the cabin to prove it. Who would be more believable?
Hiding the girls would be no problem. If worst came to worst, his cousin in Alabama would pitch in. Woodrow Bateman lived so far off the highway that the girls could stay in his barn for years and never see another soul. Trouble was, Askins wanted them with him in Whitesburg, not hiding on Woodrow’s farm.
He sighed. Hiding the guys could be tricky, and he wasn’t sure they would be up for a long-term gig. Kenny seemed to be rather interested in Alexis. That might be all it would take to secure his continued assistance. He’d have to keep tabs on him though. Young kids didn’t seem to place much stock in licenses and preachers and such. He would cut Kenny some slack, but he didn’t want a Roman orgy at the cabin. Of course…if they could keep Alexis quiet or win her over, they could get the two of them married, maybe in Alabama, and they could eventually move in with him and Sheila. That would just leave Billy and Christa.
He nodded. He would think of something.
The sun was beginning to set and Askins was driving directly into it. He flipped the shade down and slowed a bit. Nothing attracted attention like an accident.
Why could Jennie not have cooperated with him? Why, for once in her adult life, could she not do what he asked?
She’d always been the rebel. Sarah had toed the line. Si too. Not Jennie.
Back when she was in high school, she had insisted on taking courses like physics and art history. She’d insisted on honors sections in her other classes. Surrounded herself with geeks—that’s what they’d be called now—brainy boys who were primarily interested in books. She’d turned up her nose at home-ec and childcare and cooking, things a woman needed to know. She’d been boy-crazy, of course, but he wasn’t sure that any of those boys really had known what to do with a girl. He’d run them all off, though, as if they had.
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