Sunshine and the Shadowmaster

by Christine Rimmer

  “Marnie,” he said. “Yes. I remember Mark mentioning her. Anywhere else?”

  “He might go to Kenny Riggins’s, Marnie’s friend. The three of them hung out together most of the time. And maybe to my Grandpa Oggie.”

  “Oggie Jones?” Lucas uttered the name as if it tasted bad. “Why would my son go to Oggie Jones?”

  Though Heather adored her grandfather, she didn’t waste time defending him. Grandpa Oggie was a very outspoken old fellow. He often rubbed people the wrong way.

  She explained, “Mark and my grandfather seemed to hit it off. Mark was always stopping by my aunt Delilah’s, where Grandpa lives now, to visit with him.”

  “Who else?”

  “That’s all I can think of offhand.”

  “Call them, then. Now. Your uncle’s house first.”

  Heather went to the kitchen where, with Lucas looking impatiently on, she called her uncle Patrick’s house. Her aunt Regina answered. Heather quickly explained the problem and Regina said that she hadn’t seen Mark since last January. She left the phone to ask Marnie, but Marnie said she hadn’t seen Mark, either. Before she hung up, Regina promised to call Heather right away if Mark showed up at her house.

  “Well?” Lucas said when Heather hung up.

  “They haven’t seen him.”

  “Call your grandfather.”

  Heather dialed her aunt Delilah’s house and spoke with her grandfather.

  “What did he say?” Lucas demanded almost before Heather could disconnect the line.

  “He says he hasn’t seen Mark, and he’ll call if he does see him.”

  “Fine. Call the Riggins kid.”

  The results of that call were the same as the previous two.

  “They haven’t seen him?” Lucas asked when Heather had hung up.

  Heather shook her head.

  “Think. There must be somewhere else he might go.”

  Heather pulled out a chair for herself and sank into it. “I’m sorry. Mark only stayed with me once—and then only for a couple of weeks. As far as I know, when he wasn’t with me, he was with Marnie and Kenny—or my grandfather. No one else comes to mind.”

  Lucas seemed to be studying her. “Let me ask you this. If Mark acted so strangely last night, why didn’t you keep a closer watch on him?”

  Heather sat very still. She knew exactly what was happening here. Lucas wasn’t ready to deal with his own responsibility in this. So he was setting her up to take the blame for Mark’s second disappearance.

  “Did you hear my question, Heather?” he asked, prodding her.

  She looked him straight in the eye. “Yes. I did.”

  “Well?”

  Very slowly and deliberately she explained, “The way he acted didn’t seem so strange while it was happening. It was only looking back on it, after I saw that he was gone this morning, that it seemed odd to me.”

  “So what you’re saying then, is that he behaved strangely, but you ignored it—until now, when it’s too late to do anything.”

  Heather decided she’d had enough of his sideways remarks. She cut to the point. “Are you accusing me of not watching out for Mark?”

  He lifted a black eyebrow at her and looked at her as if he wanted to burn a hole in her with his eyes. “Did you watch out for Mark?”

  Though the power and intensity of the man intimidated her, Heather steadfastly refused to cower before him. She remembered the first rule of dealing with an overbearing male: never let him see you sweat. She’d learned that rule early on, having grown up in the rowdy family known locally as the Jones Gang.

  She told Lucas, “Yes, I did watch out for Mark. And I’ll do everything I can now to find out where he went. In fact, I think I’m doing pretty well here, all things considered. If anyone’s guilty of ignoring Mark, it certainly isn’t me.” She paused, just a moment, to let that sink in.

  Then she continued, “Besides, as far as I can see it, our job right now is to find out where Mark went, not sit around discussing who’s to blame that he’s run away again.” Heather put both hands on the table and pushed herself to her feet. “And now what I’d like is a cup of coffee. I’ll make some for you, too, if you’ll stop acting like a jerk.”

  Lucas looked up at her for a moment, his gaze watchful and measuring. Then he said, very gently, “I’d like that.”

  She nodded. “Good, then.” She carefully pushed her chair beneath the table and went to the counter. She was scooping coffee grinds into a filter when Lucas spoke from behind her.

  “I apologize. You’re right. You’re not the one to blame here.”

  Heather kept scooping coffee. Otherwise she surely would have cried. If she’d ever wondered how much Lucas Drury really cared for his son, she never would again. The raw truth had been there in his voice just now.

  “Apology accepted,” Heather said without turning, because she sensed he didn’t want her to see him right then. She poured cold water into the reservoir, slipped the filter basket in place and switched on the coffeemaker before she faced Lucas again. By then, he looked as composed and aloof as ever.

  “Though it’s a slim bet, I should call my housekeeper in Monterey, see if maybe Mark has been in touch with them there.”

  “Yes, of course. Go right ahead.”

  Heather waited while he made the call, then looked at him questioningly after he hung up.

  “Nothing,” he answered bleakly. “Any ideas about what to do now?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Heather hesitated. What she had in mind was the next logical step, but it wasn’t an easy one to take. “I think we’re going to have to call the sheriff’s station.”

  Lucas rubbed his temples, then he turned and walked over to the window that opened onto the backyard. He stuck his hands into his pockets, planted his legs slightly apart and stared out at the new day.

  Heather tried to soften the seriousness of it all a little. “Actually I can just call my uncle Jack at home. He’s a deputy at the station now.”

  Lucas didn’t turn. “Who the hell’s your uncle Jack?”

  “He’s my father’s half brother. Grandpa Oggie is his dad. Didn’t you meet him last winter?”

  “If I did, I don’t remember him. And I never heard of Oggie Jones having a son named Jack.”

  “Neither did we. Until last fall. It’s a long story, but now Uncle Jack lives here in town. He’s head of our local volunteer search and rescue team and he’s a sheriff’s deputy, too.”

  “I see,” Lucas said. And then he was silent. He went on staring out the back window.

  Behind Heather, the coffeemaker gurgled and sputtered as it finished filling the pot. Heather waited—for the coffee to be ready and for Lucas to give her the go-ahead to make the call.

  But apparently, Lucas wasn’t quite ready yet to accept what had to be done. When he spoke, it wasn’t about Mark at all.

  “The walnut tree looks the same,” he said of the old tree in the middle of the back lawn. He turned his hooded gaze on her. “Did you know I built a fort in that tree, years ago?”

  Heather nodded. “Don’t you remember? It was still there when Jason Lee and I came along. We played in it, too.”

  “You and Jason Lee.” He gave a low chuckle. She could hear affection in that chuckle—and she could hear pain. “Joined at the hip from the first day of kindergarten, right?”

  She smiled a little herself, feeling close to this strange man at that moment, connected to him through their mutual love for another man who was with them no more. “We were best friends. Always.”

  “My brother was a happy kid.”

  “Yes.”

  “And a happy man.”

  Heather tasted tears at the back of her throat. She swallowed them, then carefully said, “I need to call my boss and tell her I’ll be late this morning. And then after that, we really should report Mark missing.”

  Lucas just looked at her.

  She held up h
er hands, palms out. “I don’t know who else to call, Lucas.”

  Lucas’s shoulders lifted in a shrug. He turned back to the window and his contemplation of the old walnut tree. “Yeah. I know. Call your boss. And then your uncle. Go ahead.”

  Chapter Three

  Lily Tibbits yelled for a few minutes when she learned her head waitress was going to be late. But Heather wasn’t bothered. She worked hard for Lily—and Lily always yelled when things didn’t go her way. Heather waited until Lily had to stop for a breath and then promised to be in as soon as she could.

  Heather hung up and called her uncle Jack. He said he’d be right over.

  While they waited for Jack, Heather offered Lucas some breakfast. He said he wasn’t hungry. And she realized she didn’t have much of an appetite, either. So she excused herself to go to her room, where she swiftly changed into the jeans, white shirt and tennis shoes she always wore to work.

  The doorbell rang just as Heather finished tying her shoes.

  “Hey, Sunshine,” Uncle Jack said when she let him in. Uncle Jack always called her Sunshine. It was the name people had started calling her when she began working part-time at Lily’s seven years before, when she was only sixteen. Now she responded to it as readily as she did to Heather.

  “Uncle Jack.” She gave him a quick, fond hug. Then she stood back and grabbed his arm. “Come on. Mark’s father is in the kitchen.”

  They found Lucas sitting at the table staring into his empty coffee cup. He glanced up when Heather led Jack in. The two men exchanged a long look.

  Then Jack stuck out his hand. “Lucas, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Jack Roper.”

  Lucas stood and the two men shook hands.

  * * *

  “Our biggest problem,” Jack said when Heather and Lucas had described the events leading up to Mark’s disappearance, “is that if Mark doesn’t want to be found, he’s going to be working against us all the way. It’s one thing to bring out the search and rescue crew when the missing person is lost on a mountain somewhere, praying for rescue—and it’s another thing altogether to hunt down a runaway. Also, since Mark has hitchhiked on his own before, it’s fully possible that he’s taken to the road again. He could be in another state by now.”

  Still, Jack promised that everything that could be done would be done. He questioned Lucas and Heather in depth and even read the letters that Mark had sent Heather, though in them he found no clues as to where Mark might be now.

  “Someone should be here to answer the phone at all times,” Jack said, “just in case Mark decides to get in touch.”

  Since Heather had to work, she called around until she found someone willing to sit by the phone all day. Tawny, who was Heather’s Aunt Amy’s teenaged sister, arrived ten minutes after Heather called her. Meanwhile, Lucas contacted his house in Monterey and gave instructions that the phone there was never to be left unattended.

  Next, Jack took Lucas down to the sheriff’s station, where Lucas filled out a missing person’s report. Within an hour from the time Jack Roper had arrived at Heather’s house, there was an all-points bulletin out on the missing boy.

  Jack mobilized the local search and rescue unit and they set to work in teams, looking for signs of Mark in the woods surrounding North Magdalene. Meanwhile, the sheriff’s deputies had the job of knocking on doors all over town, branching out from Heather’s house, asking anyone and everyone if they had seen Lucas Drury’s ten-year-old son.

  Heather produced a recent school picture that Mark had sent her. They managed to make a fairly good photocopy of it on the copy machine over at the North Magdalene School, so they could put together a flyer about Mark. The deputies carried copies of the flyer with them, passing them out to everyone they interviewed. And before Heather went in to work, she walked up one side of Main Street and down the other, tacking up a flyer on every available surface.

  Sheriff Pangborn assigned Jack the job of personally interviewing Marnie Jones, Kenny Riggins and Oggie Jones, the three people in town most likely to have more information about Mark. Lucas wanted to be there for those interviews.

  Jack reluctantly agreed. “All right. But you’ll be an observer and that’s all.”

  Lucas swore that he’d keep his mouth shut.

  * * *

  They went to see Marnie Jones first.

  From a chair in the corner of Regina Jones’s big, old-fashioned living room, Lucas studied the girl. She had short-cropped brown hair, blue eyes, a pugnacious nose and a dirt smudge on her cheek. A quick, ruthless intelligence shone in her eyes. And “pint-size hell-raiser” seemed to be written all over her. Lucas’s guess was that this girl would be fiercely protective of anyone to whom she’d given her friendship.

  He wondered at his quiet, well-behaved son. How strange that he’d have chosen this feisty Jones kid as a pal. But then it struck Lucas: Marnie Jones was exactly the kind of friend he himself would have chosen when he was a boy—had anyone in this gossip-ridden, inbred town been willing to be his friend.

  Guilt pierced Lucas, twisting deep. Heather had said Marnie and Mark were real buddies. But until today, he’d only been vaguely aware of Mark’s friendship with the girl. His sister-in-law, who’d spent two weeks with Mark last winter, seemed to know more about his son than he did.

  “Marnie, I want you to tell us where Mark is,” Jack Roper instructed.

  “I don’t know,” Marnie replied tightly. “I told you, I haven’t seen him since last January.”

  Regina Jones, Marnie’s stepmother, stood behind the girl. She put her hands on Marnie’s shoulders. “You must tell them whatever you know, Marnie. It’s very important.”

  “It’s the God’s truth, Gina. Last winter’s the last time I saw him. And I don’t know where he is or where he went. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  Regina looked at Jack. “She’s telling the truth. I’m sure of it.”

  Lucas, silent in his corner chair, thought so, too. He wrote fiction for a living, after all. And to be good at that, you had to have a handle on body language. Marnie sat with one ankle hooked across the other knee and both hands wrapped around her raised leg. Her chin was stuck out. She looked ready for a fight, if it came to that. But she didn’t have that pulled-in, cagey look that would have said she was hiding something. And she didn’t look the least bit nervous, either.

  No, the signs weren’t there. Not a one.

  Jack said, “All right, Marnie. Then do you have any idea of where Mark might have gone? Can you think of someone he might have asked to help him?”

  The little chin protruded further. “Yeah. Me. He could have asked me. But he didn’t.”

  “What about where he might have gone?”

  “Far away, prob’bly.” The words had escaped her lips before Marnie realized they would only bring on more questions. She ducked her head a little, like a turtle pulling into its shell.

  But Jack Roper didn’t allow her to retreat. “Why do you think he would go far away?”

  “Don’t know,” Marnie mumbled, as if by answering out of the side of her mouth, she could make the questions go away.

  “Marnie,” Regina Jones said softly.

  Marnie glanced up at her stepmother. “Aw, Gina.”

  “Tell them all you know, honey.”

  Now Marnie shifted uncomfortably, lowering one sneakered foot to the floor and crossing the other one on her knee. She glanced back at her stepmother again. Regina nodded in encouragement.

  “It’s just...what he said in his letters.”

  “What letters?” Lucas demanded. “You have letters from my son?”

  “Lucas.” Jack gave a quick shake of his head.

  “Sorry,” Lucas muttered.

  “Answer the question,” Jack said to Marnie. “Do you have letters from Mark Drury?”

  Marnie looked rebellious, but she did nod.

  “We need to see them,” Jack said.

  Marnie stuck her thumbnail in h
er mouth and chewed on the cuticle for a moment.

  “Marnie.” Regina made the name into a reprimand.

  “Oh, all right. I’ll get them.” Marnie bounced to her feet and disappeared down a hallway.

  She returned a few minutes later carrying a stack of envelopes tied together with fishing line. Jack held out his hand.

  Marnie clutched the letters to her chest for a moment, then stuck them out. “I want ‘em back.”

  Jack smiled as he took them. “You’ll get them.”

  “When?”

  “Marnie.” Regina was shaking her head.

  “I got a right to know. They belong to me.”

  “Soon,” Jack promised. “I want a chance to read them carefully, and then I’ll return them.”

  Nothing was going to stop Lucas from reading those letters, too. He decided the best way to see to that was to ask Marnie if he could look at them. “I’d like to read them, too,” he said quietly.

  Marnie turned her blue gaze on him. “They’re mine.”

  “I know. And I’m asking. Will you let me read them?”

  Marnie took her time answering. She looked at Lucas through narrowed eyes, clearly doubtful that he could be trusted. Lucas suppressed a sigh of relief when she ruled in his favor. “All right. You can read them. But I want them back as soon as you’re done.”

  In another room, a baby began to cry. Regina started to excuse herself. Jack said there was no problem. They could see themselves out.

  * * *

  They interviewed Oggie Jones next. Lucas had never much cared for the crafty old troublemaker.

  It was a local legend that Oggie Jones had stolen his now-deceased wife, Bathsheba, from Lucas’s father, Rory, decades ago. Rory had later married Lucas’s mother and Lucas had come along. Indirectly, he supposed, Lucas owed his existence to old Oggie Jones.

  But Lucas had never managed to muster up any gratitude. For one thing, it was hard to be grateful for the hell on earth that his early childhood had been. And beyond that, Lucas just plain didn’t like Oggie’s attitude.

  The old loudmouth thought he knew it all and had no qualms about telling any and everyone exactly what he knew. And then, when the fool finally shut up, he’d do it with a gleam in his eye that seemed to say he was hoarding secrets too important to share. It irritated Lucas no end to think that his son had befriended this particular old man.