Missing

by Bill Noel

  Grandma’s face alternated between anger and embarrassment, and the grandfather cut our negotiating short and told me that they might be back to get the photo. Seldom was I happy to miss a sale, but this had rapidly become one of those times. The five-year-old successfully manipulated the mature, fifty-year-old couple, and they made an awkward beeline toward the sand, surf, and happiness for the kid. Where was Charles when I needed him?

  Just before noon, the bell over the door alerted me to another potential customer. I was in back writing a grocery list to restock the refrigerator; actually, “grocery list” may have been a bit of a misnomer. All the items could be bought at a liquor store.

  I left the list on the table and walked into the gallery to greet the latest arrival. I was met by a tall, maybe six foot two, and stocky gentleman in his midforties who looked totally out of place in the beach community. He reminded me of the overpaid vice presidents at my former employer. He wore a lightweight, dark gray, two-piece wool suit, a bright yellow tie with small, geometric squares, and a crisp white shirt with a button-down collar. He looked like he had stepped out of a Ben Silver catalog rather than out of city hall. It was Joshua Lally, Folly’s new mayor.

  He looked around the gallery and briefly took in the framed photos on the wall. To my knowledge, this was his first time in. He then turned to me. “Good day, Mr. Landrum,” he said with a slight grin. “I’m Mayor Lally.”

  His photo had been in the local paper nearly every issue since his election in April, so I obviously recognized him. In most of the photos he had been dressed nearly identically to how he looked today. Only the tie seemed to change.

  He had taken two steps into the gallery and appeared to be comfortable there. I walked over and extended my hand. He wiped some imaginary dust off his sleeve and made no effort to shake. “Welcome to the gallery, Mr. Mayor,” I said.

  Apparently he had reached his limit of small talk. “I would like to buy you lunch,” he said and looked around the room. “Is this a good time?”

  I had heard that he was all business, and none of my friends had more than a hello relationship with him. According to the articles in the paper, Lally had made boatloads of money when he sold his company, which had developed groundbreaking off-track betting software. He had sold the company to an international conglomerate and walked away with millions. The articles were vague about how he had landed on Folly Beach.

  It wasn’t the best time to leave, since Charles wasn’t around to handle the throngs of customers, but I was curious about what had inspired the luncheon invitation and agreed. He walked to the sidewalk and turned toward the beach without saying anything. I locked the door and followed. It was already in the upper eighties, and I wondered why sweat was not rolling down his arms, out his monogrammed shirtsleeve, and past his gold cufflinks to his manicured nails. I felt totally underdressed but drastically more beach appropriate in my khakis and green polo shirt as we silently walked across Arctic Avenue and up the steps to the Folly Pier. Locklear’s Low Country Grill was the only restaurant at the pier, so I assumed that was our destination.

  There were several people milling around Locklear’s since it overlooked the beach, but the restaurant still had empty tables.

  “Good afternoon, Mayor Lally,” said the smiling, twenty-something, sunburned hostess. “May I help—”

  “Table for two. Private,” he interrupted.

  She nodded, looked around the dining area, and walked us to a table as far from the entry as possible. The table was beside a large window that overlooked the ocean. She still had a smile on her face, but it wasn’t nearly as sincere.

  A college-aged waiter was at the table as soon as we were seated. He set two glasses of water in front of us and asked if he could get us anything else to drink.

  Lally glanced at the menu and without looking up said, “Iced tea, two slices of lemon, and three packets of Equal, not Splenda, not Sweet ’n’ Low, not too much ice.”

  I said that water was fine.

  No one was seated at the tables nearest us, but Lally looked around and took a deep breath. I had the impression that he would have had the management shoo out any patrons in proximity. “I’m not one to beat around the bush,” he said.

  You can say that again, I thought and nodded.

  “Officer O’Hara told me that you dragged one of our teenage citizens into the police station and made him share some cockamamie story about an abduction.”

  I cocked my head. “Yes, I—”

  He abruptly raised his right hand and shoved it, palm first, toward me. “Let me finish,” he barked.

  “Officer O’Hara said, and I completely concur, that the story was simply a teenage fantasy. Your young friend has seen too many dramas. His imagination has run wild, and you encouraged him to cause trouble.”

  The waiter returned, and Lally looked at the tea put in front of him. “I said two slices of lemon. There’s only one. Can’t you count?”

  The waiter quickly apologized and scurried away to get more lemon.

  Lally shook his head. “I can’t stand incompetence.”

  His career in politics will be quite interesting, then, I thought and then shrugged.

  “Forcing a teenager to go to the police is not my reason for this talk,” he continued. “But it is a symptom.” He glared at me. “Since you arrived on Folly, what, six years ago?”

  He didn’t wait for an answer or even give me time to shake my head again.

  “You have done nothing but butt into the affairs of law enforcement. You’ve agitated our, how shall I say this, more bohemian citizens, irritated upstanding residents, and gone out of your way to embarrass the government.”

  The waiter returned to the table with a new glass of tea with the appropriate number of lemon slices and asked if we were ready to order. The mayor waved him away.

  “If you mean helping the police catch—”

  He raised his hand again. “What I mean, and hear this clearly, is that I will not tolerate your meddling, agitating, and officious behavior.” He lowered his hand and took a sip of his two-lemon-slices tea. “Is that clear?”

  I nodded.

  “Another thing, Mr. Landrum. I understand that you are friends with our current director of public safety.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Chief Newman and I have—”

  “When I owned my company, I gave each of my employees one mistake. After all—” He grinned. “We are human and make mistakes.” The grin faded. “One chance never became two. Termination was the only alternative. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” I said. “But do you think that will work with city government?” I hesitated and wondered what to say next; after all, this was the first chance he’d given me to finish a thought. “Government is a people business, and people make varying degrees of mistakes. Take your police department. Each officer makes hundreds of subjective decisions each day—do I stop a car for going one mile per hour over the limit, two miles, three, when? Most everyone leaving Cal’s bar has been drinking; how much is too much? All subjective judgments.”

  “Good points, Mr. Landrum. Perhaps I’ll consider them. But let me make one more point.” He looked around the room; no one was near. “I do not like Chief Newman. I believe he has been on the job too long. He is way too tolerant of misbehavior. He is not tough enough on those who disturb the peace of our hardworking, respectable citizens. If he didn’t have substantial support on the council, he would have been gone the day I took office.”

  The waiter returned to the table and again asked if we were ready to order. Lally said that we would let him know when we were ready and turned back to me. “Four years ago my mother died. I took over the family home on the west end of Folly. I lived in Raleigh where my company was and decided to remodel the house and use it as a vacation home. Then I had the opportunity to sell the company, so I decided to tear down
the antiquated structure and build a permanent house and move my family here. Several million dollars later, I had built a house. I thought it would be peaceful and private.” He hesitated and took a deep breath. The happy sounds of families eating lunch at such a scenic location reverberated around the restaurant, but all I could focus on were the harsh, unemotional words coming from the mayor.

  “I was wrong,” he continued. “Cars and loud trucks sped past it like the road was a drag strip. Kids actually walked through the yard to the beach. And the neighbor next door parked a thirty-foot-long fishing boat in his side yard. You know what the idiots at city hall said?”

  I know what I would have liked to have said, but I merely shook my head.

  “They said, and this is a direct quote, ‘That’s Folly.’” He gave a sinister laugh. “I’d invested millions of dollars in this island to be told, basically, there was nothing to do about the problems.”

  There had been an on-and-off battle over the years about what Folly was or what it should be. In dumbed-down terms, it was a classic battle of those who wanted to leave Folly alone versus those trying to make it more like Daniel Island or Kiawah—enclaves for the well-heeled, private estates. If anyone would let them, the second group would add a toll booth. One iconoclastic local had suggested issuing passports to the “country of Folly.” Mayor Lally fell hard on the metamorphic side of the continuum. And it was obvious that he thought that the kinder and gentler approach of law enforcement encouraged by Chief Newman caused irreparable damage to what the new mayor thought Folly should be. The mayor’s unofficial campaign slogan had been, “Let’s take the folly out of Folly.” He promoted tourism, but he meant tourism by the wealthy; he wanted more expensive condos and possibly a second luxury hotel. He wanted upscale shopping and even hinted that two four-star restaurants had committed to him that if he was elected they would move here.

  I was as big a fan of politics as I was of colonoscopies, so I hadn’t followed the election closely, but Marc Salmon had told me that the only reason that Lally got elected was because the previous mayor had taken to drinking his breakfast, lunch, and midafternoon snack. Salmon said, “Even Folly could take only so much alcoholic imbibery.” The straw that broke the mayor’s reelection was when, under the influence everyone assumed, he had asked the council to resign so he could appoint Flipper and Alvin and the Chipmunks to replace them. He did garner a couple of hundred votes in the election from those who thought the new council would have been an improvement.

  Lally straightened his tie, wiped nothing off his mouth with the napkin, neatly folded it, and placed it on the table. “Mr. Landrum, I will do whatever necessary to see that your chief is replaced. Further, I will not tolerate any rogue citizen interfering in police business. If anyone does—“ He pointed his index finger at me. “I will make his or her life a living hell. Believe me, I can do that.” He nodded. “They tell me that you are bright, so I know you understand what I am saying. I shall not repeat it. That is clear, isn’t it?”

  “Perfectly,” I said to the back of his head. He was already on his way out of the restaurant, but he stopped at a table near the door and shook the hand of the gentlemen seated with a small boy. He patted the youngster on the head and laughed.

  His message was clear—way too clear.

  CHAPTER 22

  NOT ONLY HAD THE MAYOR NOT-SO-SUBTLY threatened me to butt out of almost everything except running my gallery and assured me that he would get rid of my friend as police chief, he had also taken me to a lunch at which I never got any food and he stuck me with the tab for his tea, two slices of lemon, and Equal, not Splenda, not Sweet ’n’ Low.

  I wasn’t sure my legs were stable enough to walk, so I remained at the table and looked out to the patio tables and the beach. Two iridescent blue Grackles were fighting over a fry that a young girl had dropped on the deck. Another bird with scary, bright golden eyes had a monarch butterfly trapped against the fine, mesh screening that protected diners from other less-appetizing bird by-products and was ready to have it for lunch. I felt like the butterfly.

  I was too shaken to return to the gallery. I wanted to take a walk, but it was too hot to go far. Instead, I walked to the end of the fishing pier; a place where I had often gone to think. There was a brisk sea breeze near the far end, and a group of optimistic fishermen watched their poles and hoped that the straight fiberglass rods would bend toward the water. I found a vacant wooden bench under the second level of pier and in the shade. I sat facing the beach and rehashed what the mayor had said and wondered why he felt the need to come after me. True, I had been involved in a few terrible situations, but I had never intentionally stood in the way of law enforcement investigating the murders. True, I had gone with Samuel to report what he had seen. What was so wrong with that?

  And then there’s Samuel’s story. I looked left past the Tides and the Oceanfront Villas to the public walkway where Samuel had witnessed whatever. He had told me, and repeated to Officer O’Hara, a convincing story of seeing an abduction. Yet when Karen and I had stood at the spot Samuel claimed he was standing when he saw the incident, we had agreed that it would have been impossible for him to have seen what he described. If he had been thirty yards closer to Ashley Avenue, he could have witnessed the abduction, or at least, some of it. But he had been asked more than once where he was, and he hadn’t wavered in his description.

  The smart thing to do would be to write off Samuel’s story the way that Officer O’Hara and Mayor Lally had apparently done. Samuel had a history of letting his imagination run amok. His version didn’t appear feasible. And if he did see something, it could easily be explained as horseplay.

  But hadn’t a body been discovered that fit the woman’s description? Hadn’t she been murdered in a timeline consistent with his story? And wasn’t the detective from the sheriff’s office assigned to the case someone who I doubted could find a murderer in Sing Sing?

  Charles had once pointed out that most smart thoughts left the brain when one left the congruous forty-eight states and crossed over the Folly River. I smiled to myself and said, why not. It was time to find Samuel and confront him with what Karen and I had seen. My young friend might be at home, since it was Saturday. I took a chance and walked to his house.

  “Hi, Mr. Landrum,” he said as he answered the door. If Samuel was surprised to see me, it didn’t show. He said that his dad was at work and he was getting ready to walk to Roasted, the coffee shop in Tides, to get some ice cream and “check out” the ocean.

  He asked if I wanted to walk with him. My back was already soaked with sweat, and the only thing that had kept my forehead from burning was the brim of my Tilley. No, I didn’t want to walk six more blocks back to nearly where I had left minutes earlier, but I said, “Sounds good.” I figured that after he got his treat at the hotel, we would be a couple of blocks from where he said he had seen the crime. I envisioned a show-and-tell in the near future.

  “The air conditioner’s broken,” he said as he closed the door behind him. “Dad says it’s on the fritz, whatever that means. All I know is it’s making a lot of noise and blowing out air, but it’s all hot.”

  Samuel’s pace was much quicker than mine, and I slowed him down more than once. Roasted overlooked the hotel’s pool and the beach. The pool was packed, and the beach looked like a solid mass of skin, flimsy swimsuits, and children scampering in and out of the water in time with the waves that slapped the shore.

  On the way, Samuel talked about the first few days of school, shared that two of his friends from last school year had moved out of state, and commented on how crowded the sidewalk was. He didn’t ask why I had appeared at his door or mention the abduction. We got our treats, moved to the lobby, and sat in two comfortable chairs that faced the beach.

  He glanced up from his ice cream. “Did you come to tell me, umm, to tell about the girl? Was she the one they found the other day?”

&nb
sp; It had been on his mind since I had arrived at his house, but he had patiently waited for me to bring it up. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But I’d like for us to walk over to where you saw it happen. Is that okay?”

  “I guess so, sure. Now?”

  “Good time as any.”

  He took the last bite of ice cream, wiped his hands on his cargo shorts, which almost reached the top of his tennis shoes, and then popped out of the chair. We left by the side door and walked through the hotel’s parking lot to the sidewalk along Arctic Avenue. The block-long, four-story Oceanfront Villas was on our left, and I asked Samuel if he had seen the girl of his dreams again.

  He sighed. “Nah, I think her school started. I haven’t seen her since last weekend.” He smiled and waved toward the condo. “Her loss.”

  I laughed.

  We walked a hundred yards or so farther to the spot where the road took an abrupt right angle and turned away from the ocean. Several hurricanes and years of erosion ago, Arctic Avenue had continued parallel to the ocean for several more blocks. Today, that was just a memory for island old-timers.

  “Show me exactly where you were when you saw it,” I said. We stood off the edge of the road and looked at the sand dune that rose approximately six feet above the berm. It was covered with sea oats and the slatted wooden fence placed to protect the dunes.

  At a forty-five degree angle to our right were the elevated public restrooms, the ramp down to the parking lot, and a row of trash containers. We were within ten feet of where Karen and I had stood.

  Samuel twisted his tennis shoe in the sand, glanced at the dune in front of him, and then looked at me. He didn’t make eye contact. “Pretty sure I was right here,” he mumbled.

  “And where was the girl when you first saw her?”