by Unknown
Lila’s eyes went wide, and she gripped the handle of her handbag hard. Her sister shifted slightly so she was standing behind Lila.
“Um, now . . . ,” Stella began, but realized she didn’t really feel like scolding Chrissy. This anger of hers might not be such a bad thing. In fact, it just might be something they could use.
She grabbed the book Lila wanted from the rack and slipped it into a plastic merchandise bag along with the binding tape. “You got a deal,” she said, and gently pushing Chrissy out of the way, rang up the sale and quickly counted out the ladies’ change.
Lila Snopes took the bag and the change without comment. She shoved the money in her purse, and the two old ladies scuttled out of the store without a backward glance.
When they were gone, there was a long silence. Chrissy stared at the shop door and took a few deep breaths. After a few moments she turned to Stella with a nearly placid expression and handed her a Post-it note.
“I took a message for you,” she said.
Stella squinted at the note. In curvy lettering was written: “Call me on my cell.”
“That’s great,” she said. “Thanks. Call who?”
Chrissy looked at her in surprise. “Well, the sheriff, of course.”
Stella’s heart did a little rollover, but she kept her expression neutral. “Oh. ’Cause see on the note, it just says . . .” She pointed to the Post-it. “Never mind. When did he call?”
“He didn’t call, he stopped by. After that lady was here the first time. Maybe an hour ago?”
“What did he say? I mean, besides to call.”
“Well, mostly he told me not to worry. But you know what, Stella? I’ve been thinking. I think y’all ought to stop trying to make me feel better. I mean, I’m Tucker’s mama. I need to know what all’s going on, so I can help find him.”
Stella hesitated. She admired the girl’s guts and was relieved to see Chrissy provoked out of her listless funk. But her instinct was to tell Chrissy to stay out of it. It wasn’t just that she’d always worked alone—there was also the promise she had made to herself after Lorelle Cavenaugh died: that she would never do anything to endanger a client again.
Chrissy was still a client.
Letting Chrissy anywhere near Benning and the rest of them—or letting her tag along on the hunt for Pitt Akers—was insanity.
“Anything else?” she asked carefully.
“Sheriff Jones asked where you were. Oh, you know, I guess I could have given him your cell phone number. I didn’t even think of that.”
“That’s okay. He’s got it,” Stella said. “Did you tell him?”
“Tell him what?”
“Where I was. You know, out at Benning’s.”
“Oh, no, I didn’t. ’Cause you remember, you said—”
“I remember. But when it’s the sheriff who’s asking—no, scratch that.” She had been about to tell Chrissy that, despite her earlier warning to keep Stella’s errand a secret, the sheriff was an exception. But that wasn’t really true. As much as Stella was sort of wishing she’d been back in time for his visit, she wasn’t ready yet to fill him in on her search.
She needed to find out a little more about Benning’s side dealings. After her visit, she was more inclined to worry about that angle: there was something about the way Arthur Junior had reacted when she mentioned Tucker. Earl Benning was shiftier and meaner-looking than she remembered, that was true; and yet when he kept insisting he didn’t know anything about Tucker, there was an element of something resembling fear in his eyes, a nervous quality to his voice.
Enough to make Stella think twice. Just because she couldn’t figure out why Roy Dean might have taken Tucker to the salvage yard didn’t mean it hadn’t happened. Some men, she had learned, didn’t always need good reasons to do bad things.
Earlier, as she left Benning’s, Stella had taken a good look at his house. A recent-model silver Camaro was parked in front of a glossy black Ford F-450, and around the side a pair of Sea-Doos were loaded on a trailer. On the other side of the house, on a larger trailer, a sweet blue and white closed-hull Ski Nautique was pulled up under a carport. On the porch, a long-legged bleached-blond gal in a bikini top and a pair of cutoffs lounged in a deck chair.
Cars, boats, toys, and women . . . none of those came for free, at least not for a man like Benning.
Stella needed to find out where the money was coming from. That would lead her to the business Earl and his friends were conducting. And that information, with any luck, would lead her to Roy Dean.
And from there, just maybe, to Tucker.
But if she went to Goat now, with nothing but a hunch, he was bound to go in and ask a bunch of questions and give Earl plenty of time to cover his tracks. While Goat was going through channels, talking to judges, getting search warrants, their chances of getting Tucker back would be slipping away. It was times like these that reminded Stella how convenient it was to be on the more casual side of law enforcing. Luckily, she had a few contacts who would help her get the information she needed without having to involve Goat.
On the other hand, if Pitt Akers had Tucker, waiting was exactly the wrong thing to do. In the case of family abductions—not that Pitt was family, but the man evidently imagined himself to be—early days were critical, and they needed to get on his trail before he had a chance to take the boy so far away that no one could find him.
Stella felt her veins go icy at the thought, and the images of lost children from the Internet flashed through her mind. She’d never forgive herself if she waited too long, if Pitt was even now driving out west to California or down to Mexico or up to Canada, Tucker sitting in a wet diaper and wailing for his mother.
“Stella, you okay?” Chrissy asked, peering at her carefully. “You look like you’re about to faint there.”
Stella forced a smile. She crumpled up the Post-it note and made a rim shot on the wastebasket across the room. Tomorrow—if she was no closer to finding Tucker by tomorrow, she’d tell Goat everything. “I’m good. Come on, Princess. Let’s eat.”
After a no-worse-than-usual lunch of lemon chicken and greasy chow mein served with a bare minimum of chat by Roseann Lu, which Chrissy consumed with gusto befitting a far tastier meal, they returned to the shop and Chrissy set to pacing back and forth. Stella had an inspiration.
From the back room, where she kept spare inventory and cleaning supplies and Costco-sized containers of pretzels and beef jerky, she brought out a large cardboard box. “Fran Colvin started this back when we had that teacher in here doing the quilts,” she said. “Poor Fran, she died before she could finish it.”
“Got that chicken bone in her throat, didn’t she,” Chrissy said, coming to take a look.
“Yup. Anyway, how about I teach you how to do this?”
Chrissy hesitated. “Ain’t there something I can do that’s, you know, for Tucker?”
“But that’s just it,” Stella said. “We’ll make him a quilt. And when he gets home, you’ll be able to tuck him in under it.”
“Oh,” Chrissy said. For a long moment, Stella wasn’t sure she was going to go for it. The girl had a far-off look to her, part longing and part grief and a fast-growing part nail-spitting fury.
The thunderclouds building in Chrissy’s pale eyes worried Stella. The last thing she needed at this point was a loose cannon.
“All right,” Chrissy finally agreed. “Let’s do it.”
Stella explained the basics, then started working the phone, dialing trusted friends—many of them former clients—all over the county, and out to the far edges of the state, to let them know about the missing little towheaded boy last seen wearing denim overalls with a baseball embroidered on the bib. If Pitt—or Roy Dean, for that matter—stopped for a burger or a bathroom break or to pick up a pack of diapers, there would be a lot of women on the lookout, women whose lives had taught them to be observant and resourceful. It wasn’t an AMBER Alert, but it was a start.
She also c
alled a few people who had access to official-type information, the type of information that wasn’t generally available to the average citizen.
Between calls, Stella showed Chrissy how to cut the fabric using a ruler and rotary cutter. The rotary cutter looked like a pink-handled pizza wheel, but its blade was razor sharp and easily sliced through several layers of fabric at a time. When the patches were cut, Stella taught Chrissy to join them into blocks, lining up seams and trimming the thread tails, then pressing the finished blocks at the ironing board. When Chrissy held up her first nine-patch, a homely, uneven affair of blue and brown fabric, she smiled faintly.
“I made that,” she said. “Damn!”
Stella rested a hand on Chrissy’s shoulder. “Tell you what,” she said. “Sewing’s good therapy. There were plenty of times when I didn’t feel much like dealing with my life. You know? And I’d sit there at my machine—probably sewed a million miles in seams, just thinking about things.”
Chrissy looked doubtful. “This is okay and all, but I’d still rather be doing something,” she said. “Not just sittin’.”
Stella thought how Chrissy had looked just yesterday, puddled in the chair in her living room, eating her way through her worries. She was amazed at the girl’s transformation. She’d got some fight back in her. Telling off the dreadful sisters seemed to be just what she needed.
Chrissy reminded Stella of herself, in a way, on the day when she’d finally had enough of Ollie’s abuse and made the transformation from passive victim to hell-for-leather avenger.
Nobody had told her, that day, to sit down and relax. Nobody had offered to help her set things right, either. Maybe it was a mistake to try to settle Chrissy down, to keep a lid on her newfound anger . . . but at the same time, Stella couldn’t figure out any way to include her without putting her into danger. And that was something she simply wasn’t willing to do.
She wasn’t going to let another woman get hurt—or killed—on her watch. She had to do the job alone.
“I hear you,” she said, not meeting Chrissy’s gaze. “But really, there’s not a lot we can do today. Until we start hearing back from these folks, we just got to be patient.”
“Who all’d you call, anyway?”
“Oh . . . just friends, here and there.”
“Stella.” There was reproof in Chrissy’s voice. “I know you think I couldn’t hear you fishin’ around for stuff you ain’t supposed to know, but I am sittin right here not ten feet from you. And I got young hearing. Now, who was it?”
“Well . . . the DMV, for one,” Stella said, giving in. She supposed there was no harm in letting Chrissy in on some of her strategy. “I wrote down some plate numbers out at Benning’s. I want to see if they’re all registered to him direct.”
“They just gonna tell you that?” Chrissy asked.
“Well, not exactly. But I got a friend . . .”
“Uh-huh.” From her expression, Stella could tell she’d made the leap.
“Friends that owe me favors, actually.”
“That’s good with me,” Chrissy said. “Who else?”
“Well, I got some law enforcement . . . contacts, I guess you’d call ’em, up in Kansas City. Thought I’d see if they have any ideas about what kind of . . . side business Benning and his friends might be running down here.”
She didn’t like the way Chrissy’s eyes narrowed; the girl’s wheels were spinning. Stella didn’t want to mention the mob or organized crime. She saw no point in scaring her.
Chrissy lowered her pinned patches of fabric to the table. “And what kind of business are they running, Stella?”
Stella bit her lip. “Well, I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t be trying to find out, now would I?”
After a few more seconds of frank and suspicious gazing, Chrissy picked up the quilt block again and went back to work.
“But you’re going to tell me soon’s you learn something, right?” she said.
“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said, feeling worse than she usually did about lying.
Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lot of success with the rest of her calls. Between the customers who straggled in, helping Chrissy with the sewing, and not finding people at their desks or answering their cell phones, Stella hadn’t made much progress at all when closing time rolled around.
She and Chrissy stopped by the FreshWay to pick up dinner fixings. When they got home, Todd was doing skateboard tricks across the street in old Rolf Bayer’s driveway. Stella was surprised, since Bayer had always been hostile to everyone in the neighborhood, and seemed to reserve a special hatred for kids. He’d yelled at Noelle years ago for making chalk drawings on the sidewalk in front of his house.
“Hey,” she called, walking into the street as Chrissy took the groceries into the house. “You tryin’ to get Bayer to call the cops on you?”
Todd shot out into the street, leaping over the curb and landing hard, then skidded to a stop next to her. As usual, he hadn’t bothered to tie his shoes; it was a wonder that the puffy, enormous things stayed on his feet.
“He told my mom he was going to sic the city on us!” he said in a tone of outrage. “Called us trash. So I told him I was gonna skate on his driveway until I broke something and then we’d sue his ass to hell.”
Stella figured she knew what had Bayer’s dander up—the Groffes’ lawn had been neither watered nor cut in a long time, and the girls usually left their Big Wheels and Cozy Coupes in the front yard.
“Well, lemme ask you something,” she said. “You ever thought about cutting that grass of yours?”
“Mower’s busted,” Todd muttered, toeing the ground.
“Ah,” Stella said. Poor Sherilee. In her line of business, Stella occasionally forgot that getting rid of a bad man was only the first step to getting one’s life back. And with Sherilee’s schedule, she could see how lawn care might have fallen down on the priority list. “Well, look here, mine’s working fine. You go and get it out of the garage. It’s got gas in it. Put the clippings in the garden bin, okay? I don’t want to see them left out on the lawn.”
“Aw, Stella—”
“Shut up, punk, and listen. When you’re done with that, come on back here and I’ll loan you some sprinklers. Hoses if you need ’em, too. That lawn is officially your job, now, hear?”
Todd crossed his arms and glowered at her. “Why the fuck would I want to do any of that?”
It had been a long day, and Stella’s patience was stretched thin. Without thinking she reached out for the collar of Todd’s grimy T-shirt and twisted until she was practically choking him.
“Look here,” she said. “You want to grow up like the dirtbag who walked out on your mom, or you want to maybe be someone she can be halfway proud of? Huh?”
It wasn’t until Todd made a strained gasping sound that Stella realized she might be squeezing a little too hard, and relaxed her grip. Todd rubbed at his throat and glared at her.
“Besides,” she said, softening, “there’s twenty bucks in it for you.”
“Mom won’t let me take no money,” Todd muttered.
“Well, that’s right. She shouldn’t. But I’m going to give it to you anyway. That can be our secret.”
Todd stared at her a moment longer. Finally, he nodded. “I’ll do it for ten,” he said, and as he trudged into her garage to get the mower, skateboard tucked under his arm, Stella felt an odd little tug at her heart.
Maybe there was a chance for the kid.
Inside, she put a pot of Rice-A-Roni on and tossed some pork chops with bread crumbs and Lipton French onion soup mix, drizzled them with butter, and stuck them in the oven. Chrissy was slicing veggies for a salad and setting the table, so Stella took her cell phone out to the screen porch at the back of the house and dialed Noelle’s number.
“Hi. You’ve reached Noelle! Gerald and I aren’t here right now . . .”
Stella’s throat tightened at the sound of her daughter’s voice. She called a few times a week, alway
s when she knew Noelle would be at work, which wasn’t hard to do, because Noelle worked long hours at the beauty shop.
This Gerald thing on the machine was new. But it wasn’t a surprise.
Stella knew a fair amount about Gerald already. An old client who lived in Coffey e-mailed Stella to let her know when Gerald and Noelle started keeping company. Within two weeks of their first date, Stella had his priors memorized. Could draw his family chart from memory, the whole unremarkable clan over in Arkansas. Knew the details of the warrant he was avoiding across the state line, for putting his old fiancée in the hospital.
Stella still didn’t understand what it was that made a girl who grew up in a house filled with anger and violence seek out the same. Even if Ollie never smacked Noelle, she was barely six the first time she saw him punch her mother—and Ollie doled out a steady stream of verbal abuse to both of them. Why hadn’t Noelle arrived at adulthood, looked around, and said to herself, “Oh goody, look at all these perfectly nice, ordinary men—they’re not one bit like Dad”?
But Gerald wasn’t the first man her daughter had dated who treated her badly.
He was the second.
Unfortunately, Stella had dealt with the first one so decisively that he lived in Alaska now, not daring to show his face in the continental U.S. Stella didn’t regret it—not even when Noelle called her up sobbing and cursing and promising never to speak to her again for the rest of her life.
No, she only began to regret it when Noelle went out and found herself someone worse.
Stella dialed her daughter’s number again and listened to Noelle’s voice, that sweet voice that had called her “mama,” had shrieked with laughter during tickle fights, had sung in every concert the Prosper High School chorus put on.
“Oh, sugar, why do you want to do this to yourself?” Stella whispered, then hung up when the phone beeped.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket and rocked back and forth on the glider. She was keeping a close watch. If things got to where she needed to intercede with Gerald, she would. But she’d learned a lesson, and the fact that it broke her heart didn’t make it any less important that she stay a little further out of her daughter’s life than she wanted.
