Missing

by Sharon Sala

“Breakfast,” she said briefly, and walked past him without an invitation to come in. “I was hoping you’d stay. I’ll show you how some of the things work here, then you’re on your own.”

  Wes stood there with the basket in his hand, smelling fresh biscuits and fried ham and watching the slight sway of her walk as she went into the kitchen. She paused in the archway, then turned around.

  “Well…come on.”

  He followed because intuition told him that her agenda for the day was probably better than his own—and because he suddenly couldn’t wait to sink his teeth into this food.

  “There’s a small can of coffee in the basket,” she said. “You’d better like it black, because I didn’t cart any milk or cream.”

  “Black is good,” he said, somewhat leery of her presence. Then he set the basket on the table. “I didn’t expect this,” he said.

  Ally filled the carafe on the coffeemaker with water, poured it into the machine, then pushed the On button before turning around.

  “I know that,” she said. “Just like you never expected a meal and a place to stay when you asked me for a drink of water.” Then she pointed to the basket. “Dig in. The coffee will be ready soon.”

  Wes Holden was a tall man, but in here he looked immense and somewhat distrusting of her presence.

  “Don’t think you’re going to get this kind of treatment again,” she said, and then grinned. “Consider it your welcome-to-the-neighborhood visit. One is expected, but one is all you get. After that, it’s up to you whether or not you want to return the kindness.”

  Wes nodded, took out a biscuit and ate it in three bites.

  “That was phenomenal,” he said as he reached for another.

  “Thank you. Mother always said I had a light hand with bread-making. I’m glad you enjoyed it.”

  “Still am enjoying it,” he said, and bit into the second one.

  “Coffee is ready,” she said, and poured him a cup, then began prowling through the pantry. She poked her head out long enough to ask, “Can you cook?”

  “Enough,” he said, talking around the mouthful of biscuit and ham.

  She nodded, then showed him where and how to light the gas pilot on the water heater, and how to operate the washer and dryer.

  “There’s enough laundry detergent left to do a couple of loads. After that, you’ll need to get more. Do you have any money?”

  Taken aback by her lack of pretense, he answered before he thought to hide the fact that he was more or less broke.

  “Not enough to brag about.”

  “Are you hindered in any way?”

  “What?”

  She pointed to his body. “You know…weak back…hard of hearing…that sort of thing.”

  He wondered if being on the verge of insanity counted, then decided not to ask.

  “No. Nothing like that,” he said.

  “I heard they’re needing help at the feed store in Blue Creek.”

  “Blue Creek?”

  She frowned. “Didn’t you come through town on your way up the mountain?”

  “No.”

  Her eyes widened. “Then how did you get here?”

  “I don’t know. I was on a highway, and I just walked off it and started up into the trees. Your house was the first place I’d come to.”

  “You came up the steep side.”

  “I guess,” Wes said.

  “Lord have mercy,” Ally said softly.

  “That would be a first,” Wes countered, then turned his back on her and reached for his coffee.

  Ally’s heart went out to him, even as she frowned. That wasn’t the first time that he’d indicated a huge lack of faith in a higher power.

  “Anyway,” she continued, as if the conversation hadn’t taken a detour, “the feed store down in Blue Creek needs help. I heard Danny talking about it to Porter at breakfast, only Porter wasn’t interested.”

  “Danny is your brother?”

  “Yes. So’s Porter. Gideon is my father. He works at a lumber mill.”

  “So don’t you think Danny has already applied for the job?”

  “No. He’s worked there before. He and the owner didn’t get along.”

  “Then what makes you think I would be any different?” Wes asked.

  Ally shrugged. “Well, for starters, you’re a whole lot bigger than Harold James, who owns the store. Harold is sort of bossy, and Danny is quick to anger, but you look like a man with a long fuse.”

  Her reference to not being quick-tempered almost made Wes laugh. He choked back what had started out as a chuckle, again shocked at himself for even entertaining joy.

  “So you don’t think I’m the type of man to fight back?”

  Ally looked at his face, then down at his hands.

  “I think if you wanted to, you could do a whole lot more than hit him,” she said, and then headed for the door.

  Wes followed her in spite of himself.

  “Uh…hey…where are you going?” he asked.

  “Home.”

  He stopped. “Just like that?”

  She paused, then turned around.

  “Did you have something else you wanted to say to me?” she asked.

  Put on the spot, he immediately shook his head no.

  “Okay, then. Neither do I. Have a nice day, Wes Holden.”

  “Yeah…uh…you, too…and, uh, thank you for the food.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and walked out onto the stoop.

  Wes followed. “Hey…about Blue Creek.”

  “What?”

  “How far is it from here?”

  She pointed down the road from which she’d come.

  “Five miles. Population eight hundred and forty-six until Georgia Lee gives birth to her seventh, at which time there will be eight hundred and forty-seven. Tell Harold I sent you.”

  “All right, and…thanks.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and kept on walking.

  There was a moment when Wes thought about going with her, just following her down the mountain and into that sweet-smelling house. The way her mind worked was fascinating, and he thought he might like to just sit and listen to her talk.

  Then reality surfaced. He went back into the toadstool house and headed for the kitchen. There were four more biscuits and some ham that needed his undivided attention. After that, he was going to do a little gardening, then take a walk—maybe down to Blue Creek, maybe to see a man named Harold James about a job.

  Eight

  Roland Storm had known the day the lab rats tried to gnaw through the cages to get to the leaves on the other side of the wire that he was on to something big. That was six months ago. Today, when he’d come into the lab to run the tests, he’d realized that there might be a big drawback to his experiment. Eleven of twelve rats were belly-up in their cages.

  Dead.

  Odd injuries were also evident on the bodies, injuries that made no sense. The rat cages had been side-by-side along the wall, although none of the rats had been caged together. He stared intently at the bodies, trying to figure out why the two front paws of nearly every rat were bloody—some horribly mutilated and one missing a paw completely. When Roland found the paw in the adjoining cage, he inadvertently shuddered. What in hell had happened here?

  His shock turned to horror as the twelfth rat suddenly fell over on its side, its body racked with spasms. A white froth appeared at its mouth, and a few agonizing seconds later, it was dead.

  “Shit,” Roland muttered. “What just happened?”

  Roland had a master’s degree in biology, a Ph.D. in genetic engineering and a Ph.D. in chemistry. He was no novice at research, but nothing about this particular project had prepared him for one-hundred-percent failure.

  After years of experimentation and dead ends, he had been certain he had created the perfect hallucinogenic drug. More addictive than heroin, so as to keep users in need, easy to grow, harvest and ingest, and a genetic hybrid, which made it impossible to ide
ntify, since the plants grew in naturally irregular heights and shades of green, and could not be duplicated without his notes, which meant he would control the entire market.

  From the air, the field would appear as one that had been left fallow by a farmer with more land than time and overgrown by weeds. On foot, a dozen DEA agents could come upon a field of the stuff and never see it as something other than grayish-green weeds with thick stalks. He called it Triple H for “heaven and hell of a high,” because that was what a user would get, at least if his analyses were correct.

  None of it might ever have happened if not for the unexpected inheritance of this house and land from a distant uncle. It had been a godsend in more ways than one. Not only did he now have a home, but also the perfect setup for his work. He had the isolation he needed to conduct experiments without interruptions, and once he’d developed the hybrid, he had the fifty acres of land on which to grow his genetically altered crops.

  He lived alone, worked alone, slept alone, content to be the last house at the end of the road that began eight miles away down in Blue Creek. No one but the mailman ever came this far.

  Watching the last test rat die, he wondered where the hell he’d gone wrong. Disappointment ran deep as he moved to the cages, took out a rat and laid it on an examining table. He needed to know what had happened, and the only way to do that was to conduct autopsies—twelve of them, to be exact.

  With a muffled curse, he slipped on his lab coat, positioned the rat flat on its back and picked up a scalpel.

  Three days and twelve autopsies later, Roland Storm had come to a rude awakening. There was a horrible problem with Triple H. One that he would never have envisioned, but the proof was in the tests—and the livers.

  Triple H had been super-successful as a hallucinogenic, but the drawback was that it never dissipated. The build-up of the drug in the soft tissue samples was staggering. In fact, not only did it hook a user on the first try, it also turned out to be the drug that kept on giving. The build-up of Triple H in the rats’ livers was astronomical. The livers had all but solidified, and the rats’ brains looked as if they’d exploded. If he didn’t know it was impossible, he would also have surmised that the nerve pathways in the body had tried to reroute themselves.

  He stood for a few moments, trying to come to terms with what to do. Logically, he should destroy the crop and start over. While it was obvious that the first part of his experiment worked—one use and they were hooked forever—there still wasn’t any market for something that would eventually kill everyone who used it.

  The instant addiction had been the perfect marketing strategy, and would have insured a constant and growing market. But what the hell good did that do him when he was also killing off his customers as quickly as he made them?

  He stared at the last of the dissected and dismembered rodents, then swept them into the garbage, yanked off his surgical gloves and tossed them in on top. Dropping his lab coat across the back of a chair, he headed up the stairs. He needed fresh air and a clear head to make a decision as monumental as this.

  Once outside his house, he struggled to make sense of his failures. It just wasn’t fair. All those years—wasted. He moved toward the path that led to his crop, then hesitated, went back to a shed, took a can of gasoline and resumed his trek.

  As he neared the meadow, he could see the long, fernlike leaves of the mossy-colored plants dipping and swaying like exotic dancers flaunting their assets at paying clients.

  His eyesight blurred as he contemplated destroying so many years of work. It wasn’t fair. His earlier work in cancer research at Lackey Laboratories outside Pittsburgh had been underappreciated and the credit for his work often taken by his superiors. He had resented it—and them—on a daily basis and let it be known. When they finally let him go, he was actually relieved, even though it had left him financially destitute. It was during that time, when he’d come so close to becoming homeless, that he realized there was big money to be made in creating designer drugs. He’d done a little of that on his own, while living in fear he would be caught. Roland was anything but a social animal, and the idea of doing time in a prison horrified him. Being in confinement with the dregs of society would destroy him, and he knew it, so when he learned of his West Virginia inheritance, he considered it a sign from God.

  He’d retreated to the small home on the mountain above Blue Creek to lick his wounds. But the rage had still festered as he plotted the different ways he could enact revenge. He stewed about it so long that what had once been anger at one company and a specific set of individuals had become anger at the entire human race. Now he’d come to this.

  As he stared at the crop, an idea began to evolve. He needed to look at what he had from a different angle. He had created a drug that was so addictive it could never be kicked. No amount of rehab, no drugs to help withdrawal, nothing—and it was lethal. So what if he unleashed it on the world, anyway? What if every drug user was dead? It would end the need for pushers, which would ultimately end the war on drugs. It would be the perfect proof that he was the smartest and best scientist in the world—and he would get rich in the process. But could he do it? It would amount to him becoming the largest mass murderer ever. But then he reminded himself that addicts didn’t count. They were already useless to their families and to the world. He would be doing them a favor by ending an addiction they could not end on their own.

  He stared at the field, well aware of the weight of the can of fuel he was holding. All he had to do was pour it at the edge of the field, then strike a match and watch it burn.

  But the longer he stood there, the more convinced he became that he would be a fool to destroy this. He kept thinking that he could go down in history as the man who ended the war on drugs.

  Once there was no longer a need for Triple H, he would destroy everything linking himself to it and follow the money he’d banked in Switzerland. Rampant drug use would be a thing of the past once people realized what had happened. They would be too afraid of another Triple H epidemic to take a chance on anything that gave them an unnatural high.

  Having made his decision, he felt a huge weight of relief. He’d started his career trying to make the world a better place and had been somewhat conflicted over the fact that he was going to become involved in the drug trade. But this was different. He felt back on track.

  He retraced his steps to the shed, replaced the can of fuel and then cleaned up the lab. It was time to begin the next phase of his plan—the harvest. But for that, he was going to need help, which immediately presented its own kind of problem. Who could he hire who would be trustworthy enough to keep quiet about what he was doing?

  It occurred to him that isolating himself from the residents of Blue Creek might not have been in his best interests. Except for the occasional trip to the grocery store, he had no other associations. But with forty-some acres of Triple H nearly ready for harvest, it was time to switch tactics.

  He changed his shirt and shoes and headed for his truck. Time to go shopping.

  Wes was outside the house with a pair of garden clippers that he’d found in the barn, trimming back the overgrown vines from windows and doorways, when he heard the sound of an engine coming from up the road. His first instinct was to hide. He didn’t want confrontation. But when the truck appeared and the driver showed no sign of interest in his presence, he relaxed, then resumed his task.

  From the moment Ally Monroe had come knocking on the door with a basket full of ham biscuits, he’d known he was going to stay. She’d offered food, shelter and friendship, nothing more—which was good, because it was all he could handle. However, he couldn’t stay anywhere without money, so as soon as he finished what he was doing, he was going to walk down into Blue Creek and see about getting a job.

  Roland Storm couldn’t believe it. Someone was living in Dooley Brown’s old place. He’d seen the man out working when he’d driven by.

  From the day he’d moved onto the mountain, he and Do
oley Brown had been adversaries. It was as if the little man had seen right through everything Storm pretended to be. Still, Storm had chosen to ignore him until he’d caught Dooley Brown in the patch. He’d watched the little man picking leaves off a stalk and slipping them into a small plastic bag; then he’d followed him down the mountain and into the house.

  To his credit, when Dooley Brown had turned around and seen Storm standing in his living room, he hadn’t panicked. Instead, he had waved a hand toward the sofa.

  “Have a seat, neighbor,” Dooley said.

  Taken aback, Storm had hesitated, then frowned.

  “You have something of mine,” he said, and pointed to the corner of a plastic bag sticking out of Dooley’s pocket.

  Before he thought, Dooley’s hand went to the bag. Then he sighed.

  “What? This?” He pulled it out and dangled it between his fingers. “It’s just some herbs. I was going to boil them to make a tea.”

  Roland grinned. “Tea.”

  Dooley nodded, then pointed to his obviously crippled knees. “It’s for my arthritis.”

  For a few moments Storm actually considered that he was telling the truth, but he couldn’t take the chance.

  “Sorry,” he said, and snatched the bag out of Dooley’s hand. “You’ve made a big mistake.”

  He stuffed the bag into his own pocket, but instead of leaving, he quietly shut the door. When he turned around, the old man was gone.

  It only took a few moments to go through the house. When he didn’t find him there, he ran down into the cellar beneath the house and found him trying to escape through an outer door. He’d killed him then and there, while taking great care to make sure it looked like an accident. It was easy to break his neck, less simple to break his arm. Who would have known such a genetic defect as Dooley Brown would have muscles like a bull? Still, he’d managed to do it, then positioned the body at the bottom of the cellar steps so as to make it appear that he’d tripped and fallen.

  But that had been months ago, and now his gut was churning as he continued the drive into Blue Creek. While he hadn’t associated with his neighbors, he had made it a point to know who they were and where they lived, and he knew for certain that the man living in Dooley Brown’s house was a stranger. Storm couldn’t afford to trust strangers to mind their own business. He would find his hired hands, then see what was up with his new neighbor.