by James Hunt
“We are helping her,” Mike said.
“It’s not enough,” Lindsy said.
Mike pulled Lindsy closer, hands on her waist. “We’ll figure this out.”
Lindsy looked up at her husband and saw the confidence in his gaze. “How can you be so sure?”
“Because you don’t quit,” Mike said. “No matter the odds.”
Lindsy kissed him, thankful to have his support.
“You ready to head back?” Mike asked.
Lindsy shook her head. “I need to take a walk. Blow off some steam.”
Mike nodded. “All right. Want some company?”
Lindsy smirked. “Sure.”
The pair walked hand in hand down the street, leaving the RV parked at the sheriff’s station. There was a slight chill in the air as they passed the closed shops on Main Street, and Lindsy regretted not bringing her jacket. She always forgot how much cooler it was in the mountains due to the elevation.
Main Street didn’t have too many lights, and Lindsy found the town even eerier at night. Everything looked more sinister, the few lights casting long shadows down the street. They passed the library where she had visited earlier and saw the closed sign showing in the window.
Lindsy was about to stop and comment on the librarian that had helped her when Mike stopped walking and squeezed her hand in alarm.
“What?” Lindsy asked, her voice a whisper.
Mike gestured down the street. “Look who it is.”
Lindsy caught sight of a pair of shadows beneath an awning on the sidewalk outside of an old building. She had to squint to see who it was, but saw Sheriff Torrence speaking with the Mayor.
Lindsy pulled Mike closer to the building so they remained hidden, and while they were too far away to hear what was being said, it was obvious by the mayor’s reactions that he was furious.
When the accosting was finished, Sheriff Torrence removed an envelope from inside his jacket and then handed it to the mayor. The mayor snatched it out of Torrence’s hands and then stormed off, leaving Sheriff Torrence to smoke a cigarette by himself, and then he slowly meandered back down toward the station.
Lindsy and Mike hid down an alley while Torrence passed, and once he was gone, Lindsy looked back up toward the mayor, who was still walking.
“What do you think that was about?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know,” Lindsy answered. “But I’m going to find out.”
11
Mike made his objections known about following the mayor, but Lindsy wasn’t backing down.
“It’s not a good idea,” Mike said.
“Just head back to the RV,” Lindsy said. “I’ll be less conspicuous following him alone.”
“I’m not leaving you out here,” Mike said.
Lindsy knew Mike was worried, but she could handle herself. “Go back to the RV, keep an eye on the sheriff, all right?”
Mike clenched his jaw, taking a few steps after her, but unable to catch her. “Lindsy—Lindsy, wait!” But it was too late. She was already gone.
Lindsy trailed the mayor to the city hall building where he walked to a side door with a coded keypad and disappeared inside.
Most of the building’s windows were dark, but as Lindsy waited and watched, she saw a light turn on in an office on the top floor. She saw movements of a shadow inside and figured that it was the mayor in his own office. Whatever the sheriff had given him, the mayor deemed it essential enough to bring it back to where he worked.
Lindsy hung back at a safe distance, scoping out the area, trying to see if the mayor was looking to meet anyone else. But judging by how dark the building was and the late hour, Lindsy assumed everyone who worked in the building had gone home. She considered following him inside, but she didn’t know what kind of security they would have.
But as Lindsy circled the building, she saw no signs of any security cameras. The small town probably didn’t expect much crime, and Lindsy also considered the possibility that a lack of cameras installed was perhaps to the benefit of the mayor and any nefarious characters he chose to meet. Plausible deniability was a politician’s best weapon.
Lindsy eventually watched the mayor step out of the same side door, enter a code to lock the door, and then walked to his vehicle.
When the mayor drove off and Lindsy was unable to see the vehicle’s taillights anymore, she sprinted over to the entrance where the mayor had exited and the keypad he had used to enter.
The numbers on the pad presented billions of different combinations a person could use, but Lindsy had a few tricks up her sleeve.
Lindsy pressed her hand against the keypad and concentrated. She was able to feel the last few buttons the mayor had pressed, the digits appearing in her mind in quick flashes.
The effort caused a sheen of sweat to cover her body beneath her clothes. Still, she eventually uncovered the numbers, guiding her hand in the same motion as the mayor until she heard the door’s lock disengage.
After Lindsy caught her breath, as using her powers like that typically drained her, she took a moment to examine her surroundings. The side entrance brought her into a hallway that was lined with a few paintings and entry tables with flowers on them. It was very dark inside, save for a few emergency lights that were on, so she couldn’t see everything very well. But the smell reminded her of the same old smell of the police station, and she imagined the same yellowness she saw in that building.
The flooring in the hallway was carpeted, so Lindsy didn’t have to concern herself too much with making too much noise as she made her way down the hallway. She found a staircase on the first floor, and just before she stepped inside, she heard a cough echo from somewhere else on the first floor.
Lindsy froze, first afraid that someone in the building had found her out, but as she waited for the authorities to come and whisk her away, she realized that whoever was inside didn’t know she was here.
Curious to see who else was in the building, Lindsy followed the noises to a small office at the end of a hall, where the glow of a television set dumped into the hallway. She paused at the crack in the door and peered inside to find an overweight security guard with his back to the door, leaned back in his chair with these feet on the desk, watching an I Love Lucy re-run.
The volume was turned down low, probably because the guard still wanted to make sure he could hear anyone sneaking around. Glad to see that logic was working.
Lindsy left the guard to his television and returned to the stairwell, knowing she would need to remain very quiet the rest of the time she spent inside.
When she reached the top floor, it didn’t take long to find the mayor’s office, which took up nearly the entire top floor. And unlike the rest of the building, it looked like it had been completely renovated. New carpet, new paint, decorative and ornate furniture.
Everything in the office was there to convey a message of utter luxury and decadence that was supposed to create a sense of power and authority to anyone that visited the mayor. But all Lindsy saw when she looked at it was a man who believed himself above the people that elected him into office.
Unsure of how much time she had before the guard made the rounds, if he even did that, Lindsy went to work trying to find out what she could from the contents of the mayor’s office.
The first place Lindsy searched was the desk. But aside from some stationary and standard legal documents that were probably in every political office across the country, Lindsy wasn’t able to find anything damning.
With the desk not bearing the fruits she wanted, Lindsy turned to the rest of the office. She checked behind paintings on the walls for a safe, she looked beneath the couches and chairs, but no matter where she looked, she found no place where the mayor might keep anything confidential.
It was possible the mayor had taken the documents home with him or even stashed them in another place, but when she concentrated hard as she did with the padlock, she knew the answer to what she sought was in this room. But sh
e was growing exhausted, and she wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to find it before she ran out of steam.
“Where would you be?” Lindsy whispered to herself. She stood in the middle of the office, hands on her hips, trying to figure out where the right hiding spot for information might be. And then she realized that because this mayor was a little small-time, and if he had the local sheriff in his pocket, then the man probably believed he was untouchable.
And that kind of arrogance would lead to someone who believed they could get away with anything, and people who thought that didn’t take any precautions to hide things.
Lindsy walked back over to the desk and stared down at the desk calendar that covered the dark oak surface. She lifted the desk calendar to reveal a mess of envelopes and papers hidden beneath.
“Son of a bitch,” Lindsy picked up one of the envelopes and checked the contents, confused at what she was looking at.
They were adoption papers for a young girl, complete with the medical work done on her. According to the birthdate, the child was still an infant and around the same age as Carla’s daughter. There were also medical documents for the Maples baby, and the girl that was being adopted had the same blood type as Angela Maples. A photograph of the infant was included, and Lindsy noticed the two infants looked similar.
Had the mayor and the sheriff taken Carla’s child as leverage, and then tried to pawn the infant off to some adoption agency?
Lindsy flipped through the papers a few more times, making sure she wasn’t missing anything, and then moved onto the next documents she found.
In addition to the adoption papers, there was also an exact copy of the arrest report for Carla, which outlined the charges against her and painted a very unflattering image of the young mother. She was described as deranged, violent, and unfit to care for a child. In other words, it was the exact opposite of what Lindsy had observed when she had first met Carla Maples.
But what was curious was the fact that the mayor and the sheriff were dead-set on destroying the image of the mother, but there wasn’t anything on Daniel. She didn’t want to believe the husband had anything to do with all of this, but the fact that all of the evidence was so one-sided against Carla made Lindsy question Daniel’s motives.
More documents revealed the dire condition of the town of Roster. The township was bankrupt, and Lindsy saw the deadline with the real estate development company coincided with the payment dates for the town to stay afloat. If the real estate development deal with the resort fell through, the town would go belly up.
It was all starting to fit together. The mayor wanted the Maples gone, and when they wouldn’t budge on selling their land, the law got involved.
And then Lindsy stumbled across something that she had to read over twice. The mayor had a letter of attorney from Daniel Maples, stating that if his wife was incapacitated or deemed unfit to hold the property, Daniel forfeited his right of ownership.
Lindsy frowned, stunned by the omission. She racked her brain, trying to figure out why he would give the mayor something like this, and came to the only conclusion the evidence offered.
Daniel was working with the mayor.
Lindsy still wasn’t sure what the adoption papers were for, but she would figure it out in due time. Whatever the mayor and the sheriff had planned, Lindsy knew she wouldn’t be able to get it sorted out here. She picked up all the documents and carried them to the nearest copier outside of the mayor’s office, where she assumed the mayor’s secretary worked.
The copier was a little noisy, and Lindsy remained on edge the entire time it was on. She kept glancing back over to the stairwell she had come up, listening for footsteps.
When the machine spat out the last piece of paper in the tray, Lindsy scooped everything up and hurried back into the office, where she returned all of the original documents beneath the desk calendar just as she heard the door to the stairwell open and the guard step onto the floor.
Lindsy immediately ducked beneath the desk, pulling the chair close, the copies of the documents still in her hand.
“Mayor?” the guard asked, flashing a beam of light across the floor.
Lindsy did her best to control her breathing as the security guard grew closer, but it became harder for her as the security guard entered the mayor’s office, the beam of light passing over the desk.
The guard walked around the office, Lindsy able to track his motions because of the flashlight until he reached the desk and stood directly in front of it. He paused for a moment, and Lindsy was confident she was going to be found out. She held her breath, hand over her mouth, her lungs starting to ache.
The guard took his time by the desk, moving things over the top before he moved the chair from beneath the desk and sat down.
Lindsy shivered as the man’s knees came within inches of touching her face.
“Feels pretty good,” the guard said, muttering to himself. “I could do this job. Sign shit. It wouldn’t be hard.” He laughed and pounded his fist on the desk like he was angry about something. “I don’t care what they said; I want the governor on the phone now!” He added a spat of bravado that was typically reserved for thriller movies and television before he leaned back, chuckling.
Lindsy stared at the guard’s shins. She wasn’t sure how much longer she was going to be able to hold her breath, and then the guard stood and rolled the empty chair back beneath the desk. He walked away, clicking off his light, and once he was in the stairwell, Lindsy drew in a quiet, deep breath.
She remained under the desk for a little while longer, giving time for her heart rate to come down before she stepped out from beneath the desk. If the desk had been any shallower, the guard would have knocked into her, and the jig was up.
Not wanting to press her luck, Lindsy hurried back down the stairs and checked the first floor to find the guard back in his office watching television. She exited out the same door she entered, making sure to enter the code to lock it and then sprinted back down the main street, wanting to get this information to Mike immediately.
12
The small table in the RV didn’t allow for much space to spread the documents out over the table, so a lot of the papers overlapped one another when Lindsy set them out for Mike to see. But before he even looked at them, she knew Mike would need to work through the anger over how Lindsy had retrieved these documents.
“This was reckless,” Mike said, the muscles along his jaw clenched when he wasn’t speaking. It was rare for him to get mad, but the only times he got angry was when Lindsy put herself in danger as she had at the mayor’s office. “They would have locked you up for this and would have come up with dozens of different charges to make sure you wouldn’t get out.”
“But I didn’t get caught,” Lindsy said. “And what I found was well worth it—”
“No!” Mike shouted, and he kicked the wall with his foot, causing the RV to rock back and forth. “That’s the problem, Lindsy, it wasn’t worth it! You can’t keep jumping head first into this case without looking! We’re in dangerous territory right now, and we’ve already got a target painted on our backs! The last thing we need is to give these people an excuse to come out here and try and hurt us!”
Mike turned away, walking to their small bedroom nook, where he eventually sat on the end of the bed, rubbing his eyes in exhaustion.
Lindsy hadn’t realized how wound up he had been since all of this started. She had known he would be mad, but she hadn’t anticipated him being this angry.
“I’m sorry,” Lindsy said, keeping her distance.
Mike dropped his hands, leaning forward with his elbows pressed into the top of his thighs. “One of the things I love about you is your dedication. Everything you’ve ever done, you’ve always gone all in. But sometimes that comes at the cost of not thinking everything through. And sometimes that makes me feel like you don’t even hear me when I’m talking to you.”
“I do hear you,” Lindsy said.
�
��Apparently not,” Mike said, pointing toward the documents. “I don’t want this to be the case that does us in, Lindsy.”
“Hey,” Lindsy said, walking over to him and sitting next to him on the bed. “We’re going to be fine.”
“Sometimes, I wonder where your head is at,” Mike said, staring forward.
“My head is right here,” Lindsy pointed to her skull, and smiled, but Mike’s serious expression didn’t change.
“Okay, you’re right,” Lindsy said, no longer playing around. “It was reckless, but what I found proves the mayor and the sheriff are working together, and it also proves the mayor has a vendetta against the Maples.”
“Listen, what you found indicates the mayor and the sheriff are up to something,” Mike said. “But I don’t know what you were trying to accomplish by obtaining all of this. It’s not like we can turn this over to the court, and if it comes back to us that we were involved, I can guarantee we’ll be in a cell right next to Carla while she goes on trial.”
“You always think we’re going to get caught!” Lindsy laughed. “And we haven’t been caught yet. We’ve gotten pretty good at this, you know.”
Mike rolled his eyes. “Just because we haven’t been caught doesn’t mean it won’t happen. We’re playing with fire.”
“Well, we can’t just sit here and do nothing!” Lindsy shouted.
Mike remained silent and then quietly reached for Lindsy’s hand.
“You know the reason why I get worried about you doing things like this? It is because I don’t want to lose you,” Mike said. “After what happened seven years ago… I don’t want to be alone, and I certainly don’t want to be without you.”
Lindsy reciprocated his touch and kissed him. They held each other, saying nothing, until Mike finally leaned back and sighed.
“What you found, it looks like they’re trying to cover up Angela’s abduction,” Mike said.
