by Marvin Kaye
“Well, they’re staked out at points all along the route. At least they were, until the Collins fiasco.”
“And you weren’t invited?”
“Maybe I misplaced my invitation,” Lucy said.
She turned to her computer, verified that her latest Google search had found nothing useful, and keyed in another query. She didn’t want to discuss with her mother, or with anybody, the fact that she and her office were often ignored by everyone in law enforcement above the county level. The lack of respect was even harder to bear because her late father had been the sheriff here for many years—but the reason for it was clear: Lucy Valentine was not only small-town, she was female.
The phone rang. Lucy answered it, a routine call from an elderly citizen to report a suspicious-looking stranger cruising one of the more affluent areas, and while she made a note and tried to reassure the caller she watched her mother from the corner of her eye. The truth was, Frances Valentine didn’t much like the fact that her daughter was sheriff, even if it did mean Lucy was treading in her father’s footsteps. Fran had informed her many times that not only was it a dangerous job, it was taking up too much of her time. It kept her from getting out and meeting other young people. Lucy knew all too well what her mother meant by “other young people”—it translated to “potential husbands.” Fran wanted grandchildren, and the clock was ticking.
But the fact was, Lucy liked her work, and—although her superiors seldom recognized it—she was good at what she did.
She replaced the receiver and said, “Ludie Mae Russell. That woman’s scared of her own shadow.” She punched in numbers, reached Deputy Zack Wilson, and asked him to drive by Ludie Mae’s house a few times, maybe even hit the siren once or twice. This actually killed two problems with one stone: she wanted to keep Zack away from the visiting bigwigs as much as possible—he was pushing eighty, and was more apt to shoot the governor by accident than keep others from shooting him. When she hung up this time she rubbed her head again with invisible shampoo and leaned back wearily in her desk chair.
“Aren’t you supposed to use the radio to call your deputies?” Fran asked.
“The dispatcher’s at lunch, and I’m tired. One of the blessings of cell phones in the field.” Lucy had a sudden thought. “By the way—the attorney general’s here as a part of the guv’s entourage. He specifically told me he didn’t want you meddling in this little issue.”
“Cell phones versus radios?”
“The kidnapping case.”
“Why would the AG say that?” Fran asked. “I don’t even know him.”
“He knows you. I guess he hasn’t forgotten that you scared off that Federal agent last year.”
“I kept him from arresting the wrong man. If you recall, he suspected credit-card fraud because he wouldn’t believe a cherry bomb could destroy a mailbox full of—”
“You blew up a restroom in a public building, Mother.”
“A trashcan in a restroom. A demonstration, for his benefit.”
“A surprise demonstration. Anyhow, our esteemed AG said, ‘You tell Frances Valentine to keep her nose out of this.’ And those were his exact words.”
Fran harrumphed and waved a dismissive donut, raining crumbs and powdered sugar all over the sheriff’s desktop. “He’s an idiot. Since when have I poked my nose into any of your cases?”
“Let me count the times.”
“While you’re at it, count the times I solved them.” Fran seemed about continue, then paused, squinting. “Wait a second,” she said. “Why would someone kidnap Penny Collins anyway? She’s got no money—she’s a retired teacher, like me.”
“Come on, Mother. Her son’s Martin Collins. Collins Enterprises?”
“But Martin and Penny aren’t even on speaking terms.”
“Maybe the kidnappers didn’t know that.”
“They’re not very good kidnappers if they didn’t.” Fran sagged into a chair and took a bite of donut. “Ransom demands?”
“Two calls, so far. I was there for the second one.”
“So you heard the suspect’s voice?”
“And Penny’s too. She was allowed to speak, I guess in order to convince her son she was alive.”
“What’d she say?” Fran asked, chewing. It was the first time the sheriff could remember ever seeing her mother frown while eating something.
“She said she needed a doc.”
“A doc? For what?”
“Who knows. She just said, ‘Go back and find Dr. Thorpe.’” Lucy held out a hand. “Here, give me one of those.”
Fran passed her the bag. “Was this message intended for her son?”
“I suppose.”
“And that’s all she said?”
“That’s it. ‘Go back and find Dr. Thorpe.’”
“I don’t know a Dr. Thorpe,” Fran said.
“Neither do I. Nobody does, including Martin.” Lucy nodded toward her computer. “I’ve been checking—there’s only one physician named Thorpe within two hundred miles, and he’s a pediatrician in Memphis.”
“And what about the ‘go back?’ What’s that mean?”
“Beats me.”
Lucy watched her mother mouthing the words several times, as if tasting them. Finally Fran said, “Maybe it’s a clue.”
“A clue to what?”
“Don’t know. Maybe she’s trying to tell us who snatched her, or where she is.”
Both of them fell silent. Fran tilted her head back and studied the ceiling tiles. Sheriff Valentine finished her donut, licked her fingers, and took another. Outside the open window, the day was clear but as hot as hell’s griddle. Birds sang in the oak branches.
“So where is she?” Lucy asked, her mouth full.
Fran kept her attention on the ceiling. “About what Penny said, on the phone…”
“Yeah?”
“Did you notice anything strange at all? Any pauses, any emphasis?”
The sheriff thought that over. “Actually, she hesitated for just a second, between the words ‘find’ and ‘Dr.’ And she seemed to drop the second ‘d,’ like ‘find…Octor Thorpe.’” She dusted her hands together, adding more donut crumbs to those on her paperwork. “But that makes even less sense.”
“Octor Thorpe.” Fran stayed quiet a moment, as if weighing that. “And nothing else was said?”
“In the phone call? No. Well, yes, one thing, but it wasn’t a message. It made me think they might be outside.”
“Outside? What do you mean?”
“Penny slapped her face, or neck—at least it sounded like a slap—and said, ‘Not gnats!’”
Fran turned to scowl at her. “‘Gnats?’ You sure?”
“Yep.”
“But that’s crazy—and whatever else she is, Penny Collins isn’t crazy.”
Lucy shrugged. “I’m just telling you what she said.”
Fran sat up, then stared past the file cabinet and the fake potted plant and out the window in the direction of the library across the street. She looked, Lucy thought, like someone trying to spot enemy ships at sea through a heavy fog. A warm breeze through the window riffled the papers on the desk. Fran hadn’t yet asked why the A/C wasn’t on, so Lucy hadn’t bothered to tell her it was broken again.
Fran said, out of the blue, “What are the stops on the governor’s ‘tour’ today? Do you know?”
“Of course I know. Why?”
Her eyes came back into focus. “What are they?”
The sheriff pulled a printed sheet from the mess on her desktop and read aloud: “The Becker mansion, the Civil War memorial, the O’Reilly house, a speech at Stanton Park, and the Myers Plantation. Why, you want to join the parade?”
“I want to figure out what’s going on,” Fran said. “Something’s funny about the timing, here.”
“The timing of what?”
“You said Penny’s words don’t make sense. You’re right, but I’ll tell you something else that doesn’t: a kidnapping on the day of th
e governor’s visit. Anybody who’d snatch someone local, demand ransom, and plan ahead enough to make it all work, would also know the town’d be crawling with state police today. The Highway Patrol’s probably thick as mosquitoes along that so-called tour route.” She fixed Lucy with a stare. “Why kidnap somebody now, on this particular date?”
A good point, Lucy realized, but she couldn’t see how the two could be connected. She just shrugged. Why do criminals do anything? If they were smart they wouldn’t be criminals.
She ran a hand through her sweaty hair again and decided it was probably a good thing there wasn’t a mirror in her office. Changing the subject, she said, “How well do you know Penny Collins?”
Fran bit into another donut and munched on it a while before answering. “We were never really close, I guess. We taught at the same school for years, so we saw each other every day, but we didn’t get together after hours or anything. Your daddy was alive then, of course, so I wouldn’t have wanted to.” She frowned again, and her chewing stopped so suddenly Lucy wondered if her mother’s peripheral functions needed to slow down, like dimming lights, when her brain was fully engaged. “But we both loved words and word games, I remember that. We liked puzzles, Penny even more than I.”
“What kind of puzzles?”
“Any kind. Crosswords, Boggle, scrambled phrases, coded messages, anything—she was fascinated with them. Always worked the Jumble in the daily paper. We’d compete sometimes to see who could solve it first.”
“And she won?”
Fran’s frown eased up a little. “Not always.” She finished her snack and wiped her hands with a napkin that looked as greasy as the bag it came out of. “Point is, we both liked word games, and—”
She paused, her napkin frozen in midair. Her face brightened.
“—and she would know that you’d call me to help on this.” Fran stayed silent a moment, then nodded to herself. “She would know. So when she was allowed to say something on the phone to her son to prove she’s alive, there’s a good chance she’d say something with a hidden meaning, something that’d give me a hint about what’s going on.” She turned now to stare at her daughter. “Remember what I said earlier, about clues? There’s something there, in what she said, Lucy—and we’re missing it.”
“I’m missing something in what you said. How would Penny know I’d call you?”
“Because you always do. You told me, when I first walked in here, that you were about to.”
Lucy wasn’t sure why that irked her, but it did. She shifted a little in her seat. “I was just going to tell you what happened. Not to ask you to get involved.”
If Fran heard this lie, she gave no indication. Her eyes were narrowed to slits now, focused on something she could probably see only in her mind.
“The thing is, I need to handle this on my own, Mother,” Lucy continued. “Dad taught me well—I know what I’m doing. Besides, I’ve been told to butt out of the Collins case. And so have you.”
Still Fran didn’t respond. Half a minute dragged by. Lucy turned back to the computer and Googled “Thorp, M.D.” Without the E this time. Still no hits, at least none for locations anywhere nearby. What the hell had Penny been talking about?
Finally Fran said, “But that doesn’t mean we can’t work on it from the sidelines. Right?”
The sheriff looked up at her. “We?”
“What the attorney general doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
“You’re saying you have some thoughts about all this?”
Fran sat up straight in her chair. “That call you heard. How much did the kidnappers ask for?”
“In ransom? Fifty thousand.”
“To be delivered where, and when?”
“A place in the woods outside town, two p.m. today.” Both of them looked at the clock. It was half past noon. “We’ve been ordered to stay away from there, too,” Lucy added.
Fran seemed to ignore that. “But the state guys are checking it out, aren’t they. Watching that area.”
“I imagine so.”
“More thinning of their numbers, and their attention,” Fran murmured. “And fifty thousand’s not enough.”
“What?”
“I would have asked for ten times that, and gotten it.”
“I don’t follow you—”
“I think they asked for what they knew Martin Collins might have on hand, and could deliver quick.” She fixed the sheriff with a stare. “Something’s going on here, Lucy, I’m sure of it. Something beyond a simple kidnapping.”
Lucy did a palms-up. “Even if that’s true, what can I do about it?”
“You can hand me that notepad and pen,” Fran said.
Five minutes later the sheriff’s phone rang. She picked up, listened a minute, and blew out a breath. “Okay. You might as well get back on parade duty,” she said into the receiver. She hadn’t meant to use that term, but realized that what she’d almost said—“crowd-control duty”—would have sounded even more demeaning. She hung up and looked at her mother. “That was Malone.” The other of her two deputies. “He’s on his way back from the Collins’s house.”
“How’d he get to stay there,” Fran asked, “when you didn’t?”
“He had a civilian shirt in his car. I told him to put it on, and gave him my camera. Nobody looked at him twice.”
“Impersonating a reporter. Good thinking.”
Lucy shrugged. “It didn’t help. He told me there are no new developments.”
Fran, who had been doodling on Lucy’s notepad and tapping one foot on the floor, stopped doing both and looked up at her daughter. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“There are new developments?”
Fran leaned forward, her face even more stern than before. “You said Penny’s words were ‘Go back and find…’ etc. Right?”
“That’s what she said.”
“What if she meant ‘go backward?’”
Lucy blinked. “Go backward how? Where? In time? Back to town?”
“Take the words ‘Not gnats,’” she said. “You told me that was the last thing she said, on the phone. Remember what I said about her unscrambling words, working the Jumble? What if she meant, by ‘go back,’ that we should spell it backwards?”
“Not gnats?”
“Forget the exact spelling, and the silent G. Think of the sound—the way it sounds when it’s said.”
“What…?”
“Consider this,” Fran said, waving her notebook. “What if I was right—what if the kidnapping is related to the visiting VIPs? What if whoever did this snatched Penny to complicate things, to create a diversion like we said? They might not care about the money. The two-o’clock drop time, and location, could be a complete lie. A misdirection.” She lowered her voice. “What if these same people are planning something, for the event?”
Lucy’s stomach went cold. “You mean like, a terrorist something?”
Fran hunched closer over the desk. Her eyes gleamed like a kid’s on Christmas morning.
“What if,” she said, “Penny heard them discussing their plans? What if she knew, at the time of the ransom call, what they were going to do? Or at least where they were going to do it.”
“Spit it out, Mother. What have you found?”
Fran reached forward and slapped her notepad down in front of Lucy. On it, among the doodles, she had written the word NOTNATS.
It took the sheriff only an instant to spell it backward—and gasp. Silently Fran nodded toward the printed sheet on the desktop, the one with the list of tour stops.
Good God…
Heart thudding, Lucy snatched up the phone and punched numbers. Seconds later she said, “Malone? Head for Stanton Park. You understand me? Stanton Park. I’ll meet you there.”
“Why?” asked the voice on the phone. “What’s happening?”
Lucy locked eyes with Fran and said to him, “You won’t believe it.”
The George J. Stanton Municipal Park, an open area with
few trees and no surrounding buildings, was the least guarded of the stops the governor and his group were scheduled to make. After all, there were no visible risks—the place had clear sightlines and no good hiding places for a sniper or saboteur. As a result, only one man, Highway Patrolman Brian McAlpin, was posted there to monitor the scattered crowd, and he was tired and sweating and bored half to death.
He woke up a bit, though, when he saw a county-mountie roaring into the gravel parking lot, followed by another cruiser marked with a sheriff’s star on its door. In the car with Sheriff Valentine was a woman the patrolman didn’t recognize. The three of them piled out of the two cruisers and jogged in his direction.
“What’s the problem?” McAlpin asked. Whatever it was, he wasn’t worried. He’d been told to order the local lawmen away if required. Or maybe he should say lawpersons.
“We need to evacuate the park,” the sheriff said. “Move everybody out.”
He raised his chin. “On whose orders?”
“On mine.” Sheriff Valentine turned to look east. “How long till the governor and his group get here?”
“Ten minutes. They’re about to leave a place called the O’Malley house or O’Rourke house or some such, downtown. Why?”
“We’ve had a bomb threat, that’s why.”
That stopped him. “What?”
“You heard me. Divert the governor’s party and help us get these people away from here.” She glanced around and pointed. “At least past that corner.”
Still the cop hesitated. This sheriff was a pretty lady—boy was she pretty, even with that rat’s-nest hair—but he had his orders.
“I’m not sure I—”
“Now,” the sheriff said.
Fran and Lucy helped Deputy Malone and the state trooper herd the crowd away and then stood and listened as the patrolman phoned his bosses and explained the situation. He didn’t seem at all certain that he’d done the right thing, and from the look on his face the folks on the other end of the phoneline weren’t pleased either.
Afterward, the sheriff and her deputy and the HP officer watched the deserted park in the distance, the crowd watched the cops, and Fran watched her watch. When fifteen minutes had passed, everyone’s face—not just the patrolman’s—showed doubt. Lucy’s feelings went beyond that, to barely-controlled despair. The bomb-threat excuse had been Lucy’s idea, a magic phrase that she’d known would get action. The truth was, they had no clue what might happen, here. If anything.
