Gone Duck

by L. L. Muir

She shook her head in self-disgust. When faced with the possibility of getting whacked, a normal person’s first worry wouldn’t be for their job. Normal people would be upset they’d never see their families again. But no, not her. She’d been concerned that she’d never get to tell anyone how the Keefer Boone series would end. And she had such a killer ending planned!

  But Hot Neighbor was concerned with more important things. Like saving real live people from actual bad guys, not fictional ones. He’d given up a chunk of his life to find the proof he needed so an old woman wouldn’t have to be sliced open like a guinea pig.

  She washed her hands in a cracked little sink and thought back to the moment it all started. When he’d blown through her bookshelf and found her in the bathroom, he’d probably been looking for the duck and the trap door. But she’d messed that up, clutching the duck like she had. He was just too much of a gentleman to take it out of her hand.

  Yep. Boy Scout.

  She needed to cut him some slack. And if he’d used some secret agent skills and killed those two men from the elevator, he’d done it in her defense. It wasn’t like some middle-grade fiction novel where no one could truly be dead or it wouldn’t be appropriate for young audiences. She had to remember that. This wasn’t a Keefer Boone plot. This was real life.

  Too bad she wasn’t good with real life. As Macey McDaniels, she would be smart to slip away from Shawn and keep her head down until the confusion was over. Of course Keefer would grab a baseball bat and jump into the fray. Mortimer Coffee would see it as an opportune ride-along and try to get as much story material out of the experience as possible.

  The question was, who did she need to be in order to make it to the end of the story alive?

  She looked into her own eyes in the mirror while she dried her hands. Alone in a room of white tiles.

  All of us.

  * * *

  He’d given her five one-hundred-dollar bills. After she got a Coke and a heavy sack full of road trip food, she stuffed her thick wad of cash deep into her pocket and sat in a booth to wait for Hot Neighbor to finish his shower. It was going to take a while to think of him as Shawn. They were way beyond Neighbor Dude. Maybe Hot Shawn…

  A young couple set their phones aside to dig into their Truck Stop meal of fries and burgers.

  “Hey,” Macey said quietly, “I’ll give you twenty bucks for five minutes on your cell. I just need to Google something.”

  The boyfriend frowned, but the girl nodded and stretched forward to hand her the phone. Her opportunist boyfriend held out his hand for the cash.

  “Thanks.” Macey stood and stretched to give a twenty to the girl. Little Donald Trump noted the time on his own phone.

  Macey pulled up the internet and did a search for Mortimer Coffee. She didn’t like to Google herself and fought like hell to resist doing it—bad reviews lurked out there, waiting for foolish authors to come looking for them. But this was an emergency. Her professional world might be tumbling down around her ears and she couldn’t stand the suspense of it all.

  The top result was a news report from a Salt Lake station. Mortimer Coffee Identified. She clicked on the video.

  The reporter claimed that dozens of families were caught in a lockdown at the Salt Lake City Police Public Safety Building earlier that day.

  The children of police officers had arrived in hopes of meeting the famous children’s author. But not only had the reclusive author left the building, Mortimer Coffee is rumored as having fled from police custody. Shots were fired, but there is no word whether or not the beloved creator of the Keefer Boone series was hit. We hope for the best, of course, but young readers were shocked to learn that Mor Coffee, as the author is often called, isn’t a man after all. According to a plethora of social media postings, this is the face behind the name.

  There was a picture of her smiling and signing away while she sat next to a smelly Duck Dynasty wannabe. The bill on his cap kept all but his beard from showing.

  This young woman, whose real name will not be released unless official charges are filed, is reported to be one of our own—a Salt Lake City resident.

  Does she live in your neighborhood? Have you been residing closer to Keefer Boone than you could have ever imagined? If so, give us a call here at the station. We’d like to hear your story.

  “Oh, pulease,” she mumbled. She could just see the little monsters, who lived upstairs at the Pepperidge Manor, telling some reporter how horrible she’d been to them all their lives. Mor Coffee’s reputation was about to go down the toilet.

  I’ll have to get a frickin’ nose job.

  She tried to go back to the search results, but another news story caught her eye. A woman’s name was in bold letters.

  Dorothy Jean Lyman.

  “Oh, no.” She clicked on it. She didn’t know the woman. Had no feelings about her at all, but she prayed she was okay. She didn’t want to have to be the one to tell Hot Shawn that Lacrosse had gotten to the old gal first. But if her head was missing…

  Gah! She had to stop thinking like a writer.

  She waited for the story to load.

  She just needs to be okay. But if she’s okay, there would be no reason for her name to be on the news.

  A full-time resident of The Grand Teton Assisted-living Center in Rexburg, who has apparently been living under the assumed name of Dorothy Jean Smith, has been missing since 10:00 this morning. The eighty-two-year-old suffers from Alzheimer’s and officials fear the worst if she isn’t found before morning. Temperatures will drop to the 40’s tonight and elderly folks have a much harder time keeping up their body temperatures…”

  “Have you lost your mind?” Shawn stood over her looking more outraged than hot with his hand pointing at the phone. “What’s the last thing I told you?”

  Macey rolled her eyes and handed the phone back to the girl. By the look on Donald Trump’s face, she’d gone past the five minute mark, but by the nervous way he moved away from Shawn, she could tell he wasn’t going to call her on it.

  “Thank you,” she told the girl, then started scooting out of the booth. “If you plan to yell at me, we’d better go outside.” She stood up and grabbed her Coke and the sack of munchies. “So if I bloody your nose, we won’t violate some health code.”

  The girl laughed. Macey gave her a wink, then wrinkled her nose at Little Donald before she headed for the door.

  Shawn took her arm a bit more gently than she expected and led her away from the door. They stopped with a glorified ashtray between them. He tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. He was either waiting for a confession or wondering where to start chewing on her.

  The smell of cigarette butts made it impossible to tell how well he’d scrubbed, but he looked clean. Shiny, buffed nose, but tired eyes. She nearly took pity on him.

  “I didn’t make any calls, okay? I didn’t search for Dorothy’s name. I searched for mine. Plenty of people search for Mor Coffee’s website every day. No one would have thought anything about it.”

  “What about Dorothy?”

  “There was a news report about the lockdown and about me being a woman. Then there was another story. I recognized Dorothy’s name.”

  He grabbed her arm again just above the elbow. “No!”

  “It’s all right. She’s missing from the home. They think she wandered off, that’s all.”

  He shook his head fast. “No. They got to her! There’s no way they find me and you the same day she wanders away from the home. They’ve already got her!”

  The poor guy started pacing.

  “Listen. Shawn, listen to me.”

  He glanced at her, then shook his head and started pacing again.

  “People with Alzheimer’s take off all the time. There used to be a guy in the neighborhood who would just walk around and around until someone pointed him toward his house. And he wasn’t even very old.”

  She put a hand out to stop him. He wasn’t hearing her.

  “Shawn. Tell me t
his. What would you do if you knew for sure they hadn’t gotten to her yet? If you believed she just wandered off and got lost? Huh? What would we do?”

  He took a deep breath. “Same thing we were doing—get to Rexburg as fast as possible to find her before Lacrosse’s people. If her name is on the news, Lacrosse already knows where to look.”

  He hurried toward the car. Macey didn’t want to slow down his momentum, but she didn’t want to hold back information. So once they were back on the freeway, she told him the part about the reporter knowing her real name.

  “Do you think they could have learned about her alias from someone besides Lacrosse?”

  Shawn nodded. “She’s got Alzheimer’s, remember? She probably spends a good part of her day arguing with people for calling her the wrong name. Last time I saw her, she was only lucid half the time. I was counting on her caregivers not believing her. I know it’s not nice to say, but I was hoping they could convince her that her real name was Smith. I knew there was no way she would answer to anything but Dorothy Jean, so I couldn’t change that.”

  Five minutes later, his adrenaline must’ve been spent, and he slowed their speed to eighty.

  “I never expected you to be an optimist,” he said, not taking his eyes off the road. “You know, back there.”

  She snorted. “Me? Are you kidding? That wasn’t me.” She looked out the side window so she wouldn’t have to see how he reacted to what she said next. Admitting you were crazy wasn’t something you wanted to do face to face, especially when you were admitting it to your hot neighbor.

  “It wasn’t you?”

  “No.” She changed her mind and decided to face him. “That, Neighbor Dude, was Mortimer Coffee.”

  He laughed. And he did it for a damned long time. She was fuming by the time he stopped.

  “Let me out. Anywhere along here is good.”

  He laughed again, but briefly. “Oh, come on, now. What did you expect, teasing me like that? You don’t really believe you have two personalities do you? I mean, if that were true, you’d be seeing a shrink, not a simple therapist, right? And all you do is run your plots past her when you think they’re missing something.”

  She wrinkled her nose at him—a nicer version of what she really wanted to do, like show her fangs and hiss at him—for spying on her.

  “For someone who has been spying on me for…how long?”

  “Six months.”

  “Six…” She groaned. “You sure don’t know me very well.”

  “Yeah. Well.” He was back to focusing on the road and checking his mirrors. “Maybe you’re right.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t consider myself an easily offended person but…”

  “But what?”

  “But what in the hell is that supposed to mean? Maybe you don’t know me after all? What the hell?”

  He shrugged his shoulders in a surrender kind of way. “You’re offended because I don’t think you have a split personality. Then you’re offended when I concede that maybe you do. I’m completely on board now. Way to sell it, sister. Or should I say bro? Who am I talking to now?”

  If he wasn’t driving at the moment, she would have given him a good pinch.

  The next hour passed in silence. It wasn’t a good thing, fighting with him. The only thing that was really helping her keep it together was the sense that she had someone on her side, and that someone might like her a little. If he suddenly realized he didn’t like her, she was alone again.

  Alone, and out of her element.

  “Hey,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I just don’t like it when you start trash-talking my favorite writer.”

  She snorted. “Yeah. Right.”

  “No, really. Ask me anything. I know everything about Keefer Boone, remember? When we went to that elementary school, they only stumped me once or twice.”

  She shook her head. “You only know the books because you were trying to find out where the files were hidden.”

  “Oh, not true. They’re great books. Okay, so they’re a little above my reading grade level, but…”

  She laughed.

  “I believe that before we started arguing, I was trying to thank you for what you did back there. Calming me down. Getting my head back in the game.”

  “No problem.”

  “As a matter of fact, I think you’re pretty great.”

  She shook her head and looked away, embarrassed.

  “Whoever you are…”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  They entered Rexburg at quarter to midnight. Shawn stopped at a Circle K convenience store and went in to see if the clerk had heard whether or not that old lady had been found yet.

  He came back out with hot burritos. “I don’t mean to knock your stash, but I needed some real food.” He nodded at the sack of candy and chips on the floor at her feet. “Who picked that out, anyway? Keefer?”

  She pretended to be offended. “Are you kidding me? That’s sacred road trip fare, my friend.” She grinned and took the real food he offered. “But Keefer wouldn’t mind a burrito too.”

  “They haven’t found her,” he said. “Apparently, with tens of thousands of college students more than willing to stay up late, they’ve pretty much combed the town.”

  “So maybe she’s hiding on purpose. Maybe Lacrosse’s people came looking for her and she was lucid enough to get away.”

  Shawn smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Coffee. Just what I was hoping too.”

  “So…where would she hide?”

  He shrugged. “Not a lot of places would be open late around here. BYU doesn’t approve of its students being out late.”

  “Post offices are open all night, right? So people can check their mail at least. And that would be warm.”

  They checked the post office. Nothing.

  “Grocery stores. She could wander around Walmart all night.”

  “She’s not a skinny bag of bones. She wouldn’t last shopping all day, let alone all night.”

  “Maybe she’s in a hotel room?”

  “I doubt she had money on her. It would be great if someone has just taken her in, but they would’ve called the police.”

  Macey had no idea where normal people would go to hide. They’d probably run to family, or to co-workers, which she had none of. And neither would Dorothy.

  She picked up the sack of snacks and started digging around for inspiration. “What did she do for a living? Did she work?”

  “She was a librarian.”

  “Librarians are the bomb in my business. Maybe she could’ve hidden in a library if she got in before they locked up.”

  “She’s a clever old girl.”

  “May as well try, right?”

  “There are three libraries in town,” he said after a quick check. “One on campus and two in town. Let’s try the Madison Library on Center Street since it’s closest to the Grand Teton Assisted Living Center.”

  Macey smirked. “Grand Teton.”

  Shawn chuckled and grabbed a cowboy hat from the back seat that had a long pony tail hanging off of it. He pulled it on and scooted lower so the top of it didn’t hit the ceiling. Macey was surprised how a little poor posture could transform someone.

  “I know,” he said. “Either people in Idaho don’t speak much French or they don’t care that an old folk’s home is called Big Breast Assisted Living.”

  They drove past the poorly named center first to see if any of Lacrosse’s goons were lurking around. The place was lit up like a movie set with television crews.

  “Slow news day.” She ducked down so she couldn’t be seen. She wouldn’t be able to recognize them, but they might have seen a picture of her.

  “I almost hope they’re here,” Shawn said as they pulled past. “If they are, that means they’re looking for Dorothy Jean too. If they’re not, that means they already have her—Bingo!”

  “What?” she whispered, even though the windows were up.

  “A
couple of suits that don’t belong. Watching the crowd—whoops! Time to show off my stickers. Hang on.” He took a sharp right turn and laid his hand on her shoulder to steady her. “Sorry about that. They were looking a little too closely.” He watched the rearview, though he faced straight ahead.

  “Did the stickers work?”

  “Looks like it. They’re back to searching the crowd.”

  With Lacrosse’s people in town and her face on the news, Shawn helped her attach a dark wig to her head. She didn’t think it looked remotely natural, but she didn’t complain. Then he pulled out a little brush and turned her eyebrows to a matching shade, and she had to admit he knew what he was doing.

  She couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. He finally had to close the visor for her.

  The idea of an old woman hiding out in a library after hours started to sound ridiculous, and though she didn’t think Dorothy Jean would be inside, Macey went along with the plan. It was the only plan they had.

  The outside perimeter of the library itself was awash with light. They passed by it and parked down a block and a half. Hot Shawn lost the cowboy hat.

  “A long pony tail in a BYU town will draw too much attention,” he said. “Besides, if Dorothy Jean is in there, I need her to recognize me.” They got out and headed down the sidewalk. He took Macey’s hand. “College town. Everyone’s supposed to be in love, right?”

  She was flooded with half a dozen emotions. It had been so long since she’d held hands with anyone, she wondered if she was doing it right. And she couldn’t seem to line up her walking rhythm with his. She stumbled across a raised edge of concrete and bumped into him.

  He laughed. “Don’t worry about it. Awkward helps us blend in. Look.” He pointed with their joined hands. Across the street, walking in the opposite direction, was a couple who stumbled along because they were having a hard time taking their eyes off each other.

  “Aw. How cute is that?”

  Suddenly Shawn swung her around to face him. He stepped up close and looked down into her face. She couldn’t breathe, wondering what he was up to. He put their entwined hands behind her back and pulled her closer.