An Angel to Die For

by Mignon F. Ballard

  I tried Mom’s number again, then again a short time later. Still no answer. The fire in my stomach smoldered, and even though he may not be my enemy at the moment, I could have easily belched flames at Sonny Gaines’s brother. In fact I could barbecue the entire family.

  “So all that talk about leasing our land for a nursery was nothing but a smoke screen,” I said.

  “Not at all. Peter Whisonant’s married to my aunt Julia and he really is interested in expanding in your area. In fact, he’s been looking around for over a year now for a place like yours.” Pug Gaines smiled. “I just happened to be the one who found it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Prentice, it may surprise you to know I’ve known where you lived for some time now. In fact, I even came to your house a few times, but no one was there. I knew as soon as I saw it that it was exactly what we’d been looking for, and Uncle Peter agreed. But except for chance, it has nothing to do with our looking for Joey.”

  “Then maybe you can explain why your father is running around terrorizing people when you admit he has serious problems?” I asked. “You must know his behavior’s not normal. Why haven’t you gotten some help?”

  “As a matter of fact, he’s been under a doctor’s care. He was hospitalized for a while and when they did let him come home we had somebody there full-time. He slipped away while the nurse was in the shower—had another set of car keys we didn’t know about. He’s a crafty one, Dad is, and completely round the bend as far as Sonny is concerned.”

  I could sense Pug’s eyes on me, but I kept mine on the road. “Believe me, Prentice,” he said, “I had no idea what my father was up to until he called this morning. We were frantic—didn’t even know where to find him.”

  “I’m surprised,” I told him. “Your whole family has such a talent for surveillance, you should change your name to Pinkerton.”

  “I suppose I should be insulted.” Was he smiling? “You’re referring to Aunt Julia, I suppose. She didn’t mean to frighten you by meeting you at the mall. She thought you were expecting her.”

  I remembered the woman saying something about her nephew trying to get in touch with me to let me know she wanted to talk. “So you’re the nephew,” I said. “Your aunt gave me the impression she thought everything had been arranged, that you were supposed to have prepared me for her showing up like that.” I swung around a creeping vehicle with an out-of-state license plate, pushed the speed up to seventy, and took my chances with the State Patrol. “Well, I wasn’t,” I said.

  “Wasn’t what?”

  “Wasn’t prepared. You know very well what I mean.” I looked at the clock. It was after three and we were still over an hour away.

  “Hey! That was hardly my fault. It’s a little difficult to have a conversation with somebody who hangs up on me, avoids me like I’m foaming at the mouth.” My passenger sighed. “We Gaineses really aren’t a bad lot, Prentice. Honest, we’re more or less a peaceful clan.”

  “Huh! Less is what I’ve heard!” I swerved to avoid a hubcap in the middle of the road.

  “Who told you that?” Pug Gaines kept the roar in his voice to a minimum, but it was there just the same.

  “If I tell you, promise you won’t go after him with a lynch mob?”

  He grunted. “I honestly don’t know where you get these notions.”

  “The funeral director in Athens, Tennessee. I spoke with him a few weeks ago and he gave me the distinct impression your whole family was out for blood. Our blood.” I glanced at him as I spoke. “That tended to make me a bit leery, if you know what I mean, especially since there was no rational explanation for it.” I almost bit my tongue to keep from ranting further.

  “I’m afraid our dad would be the reason for that,” Pug said. “When Sonny was killed, he just went berserk; we couldn’t do a thing with him. Aunt Julia—she’s Dad’s sister—and I finally got him calmed down, and my brother gave him a sedative. Willis is a general practitioner.”

  I nodded, trying to keep the relatives straight. “Just how many of you are there?”

  “I have a younger sister in grad school and Willis, my older brother, is married and lives in Chattanooga, but I guess we seem like a crowd when we get together,” he said with a laugh.

  His voice sobered. “And then there was Sonny, the baby, and Dad’s favorite. Always was—he made no bones about it. Sonny could do no wrong. Wild as a stallion and just as headstrong. I’m afraid Dad spoiled him rotten.

  “That was his undoing,” he added softly.

  “Your father seemed to blame my sister for the accident,” I said. “They said Sonny had been taking drugs, but I can’t see where that was Maggie’s fault. After all, he was the one who was driving.”

  Maggie had stayed away from drugs in high school, but I couldn’t vouch for what she did after she left home. However, if my sister had anything like that in her system the day she was killed, it hadn’t shown up in her autopsy report.

  Pug Gaines touched me gently on the shoulder. “Now you see why I wanted to reach your mother and Joey as quickly as possible. There’s no reasoning with my father where Sonny’s concerned.”

  “How did your father know where to find me?” I asked.

  He stretched his long legs and leaned forward, as if that would make us get there faster. “My dad has more eyes than a seed potato. I expect somebody told him, probably somebody back in Ruby. He has some old hunting buddies there.”

  I thought about the woman at The Toy Box Child Care Center who seemed a little more than eager about locating Joey. “Jackie Trimble,” I said, glancing at my passenger.

  “Ah, yes! Named after her old man. Jack Trimble and Dad went to school together. The guy has a lot of cousins . . . and they have cousins, and so on.” He smiled. “Comes in handy, don’t you think?”

  “It certainly helped your aunt Julia track me to that mall. Poor Tisdale Humphreys! He had no idea he was harboring a spy in the man hanging his wallpaper.”

  Pug chuckled. “That was just a happy accident. I’m surprised you figured it out.”

  “Actually Ola Cress did. Besides her, Mr. Humphreys was the only one who knew where we planned to meet.”

  “I guess we do seem a sneaky bunch,” Pug admitted, “and maybe we’ve handled this all wrong, but damn it, Prentice, this baby is important to us too. We were afraid we would lose him, that he might just disappear and we’d never know where to find him. We may have resorted to what seems like desperate measures, but you, of all people, should understand that.”

  I couldn’t argue with him there.

  We both grew silent as we got closer to Tanner’s Crossing. Pastures became greener the farther south we drove, weeds straggled tall around fences, and the sun streamed in through the windows so brightly I had to turn on the air conditioner. After a while we left the main road for a straight and narrow lane where dark pine thickets pressed in on either side with their suffocating creosote smell.

  “There oughtta be a covered bridge about a mile down the road here,” Pug said, reading Mom’s directions. “Turn left at the next road and it should be about a half mile on the right. There’s a tabby wall, she says . . . that’s that plaster made of crushed shells, isn’t it? And a wrought-iron gate.”

  We thundered over the dark, narrow bridge and turned onto a sandy road lined with live oaks. Soon I saw the crumbling, vine-covered walls of Ellynwood and came to a stop in front of the gate. I don’t know what I had been expecting, but it wasn’t this. The place looked like Sleeping Beauty’s garden after the grounds-keeper had taken a century-long snooze. Maybe it once had been landscaped, but now nature had draped it thick with vines, smothered it in dense green foliage.

  “My God,” Pug said. “Reminds me of the set of a Tarzan movie.” He got out and swung open the creaking iron gate and it screeched shut behind us with a grating, metallic clang.

  The road ahead seemed to trail into nowhere, yet somewhere at the end of it my mom and Joey waited. Or at least
I prayed that they did.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  If I’d been on foot, I think I would have tiptoed through the dark tunnel of foliage and held my breath until I reached the other side. The air was heavy with jasmine whose fragrant white blossoms trailed from tree to tree, and even though it was barely after four, the road lay steeped in twilight. I drove steadily, but not too fast, and thought of how appropriate it would be if our car had a figurehead like the bow of a ship to part the veil in front of us. The atmosphere was thick enough to swim in, and it wasn’t all humidity. I was torn between my eagerness to get to the cottage and my dread at what we might find.

  “Your father. He doesn’t have a weapon, does he?” I said to the man beside me.

  “I told you, he’s a hunter.” Pug looked straight ahead, his hand on the door handle. “If he’s here, you let me handle him,” he said.

  I didn’t answer. If what Pug Gaines reported was true, his father had been at Ellynwood for a good part of the day. He had plenty of time to carry out his plans—and I whimpered to think of what his plans might be. But the people at the sheriff’s department had promised to see if everything was all right and we hadn’t yet heard back from them. Surely this must be a good sign.

  When we finally did come out into the sunlight my spirits lifted. Azaleas that soon would be in bloom bordered an emerald lawn skirted by neat gravel paths. I heard the trickle of water and noticed a fountain in the center of what appeared to be a rose garden. Terraced steps led through a vine-covered wall to the bronze statue of a nymph perpetually pouring water. Storybook Land. But this was no fantasy, and if Pershing Gaines had his way, there would be no “happily ever after” for us.

  I could hear Pug’s breathing as he sat as rigid as stone beside me searching the landscape for any sign of the people we hoped to find.

  The two-story stone house, flanked by enormous live oaks, was bigger than the cottage I expected and I wondered fleetingly what the house that burned must have been like. Mom’s friend’s family must have money to throw away to be able to afford the upkeep on a place like this.

  I parked beneath one of the oaks and started for the door, but Pug held out a hand. “Let me,” he said quietly, and I reluctantly stood aside and let him ring the doorbell, then waited while nobody came.

  “I’m going in,” I said, trying to push past him, but Pug Gaines held me back. “Wait,” he whispered. “Just give me a chance to see if he’s here. If I hear him, I’ll try to signal you somehow.” He had tucked the cell phone inside his jacket, and now passed it to me. “Here. You might need this.” And with that he quietly opened the door and slipped inside.

  I couldn’t just stand there! Quietly I circled the outside of the house, walking on the soft green grass to muffle my steps, and in a small parking area in the back I found my mother’s rental car. She had pulled it up close to the door of what looked to be the kitchen, probably to unload her groceries. I glanced in the window of the car, fearful of what I might find, but I only saw what appeared to be a discarded grocery list and Joey’s stuffed rabbit on the front seat. His carrier was still in the back. Through the kitchen window I glimpsed Pug Gaines emerging from a room off the breakfast area and I tapped on the back door and signaled for him to let me in.

  We found the back door unlocked as well. Pug shook his head. “Nobody’s here. I’ve looked all over.”

  “That’s Mom’s car out back,” I said, “and her keys are on the counter. They have to be here somewhere. Maybe they’ve gone for a walk.”

  I looked in the refrigerator where a bowl of fruit salad, garnished with a sprig of mint, waited to be served. A tenderloin of pork marinated in something that smelled like ginger. My mother had gone to the store and made preparations for supper. A container of formula mix and a box of baby cereal waited on the counter. Three places were set at the table with a pot of hyacinths in the center. Their heavy fragrance perfumed the room, made me feel queasy. I opened the back door and stood on the steps where a robin twittered nearby. “Shut up!” I told him. I wanted my family and I wanted them now! Joey’s nursery rhyme quilt and two of his bibs hung from a clothesline to the left of the door and a third had fallen to the ground. I brought them in and put them on a chair. But where in the world was the baby they belonged to?

  “Wouldn’t your dad have a car?” I asked Pug as we went through the house a second time. “I didn’t notice it parked outside. How would he get here?”

  “You saw how vast this place is, Prentice. I’m sure there’s another entrance—probably several. He’s too sly to park it right out in the open. If he’s here, it’s somewhere around here too.”

  I looked at the clock. It was almost five. I knew my mother, and I knew her habits. If she expected me for supper, she would be waiting for me with dinner in the oven when I arrived. “I think we should search the grounds,” I said. “There’s some kind of building out back that looks like it might’ve been a storehouse or something . . .”

  Oh, God, what was I saying? What did I expect to find in there?

  The small brick building sat about fifty yards from the house, and like much of the wall around the estate, it was almost hidden by vines. The one tiny window I could see was set high in the gable, and it, too, was obliterated by a proliferation of honeysuckle. I began to run as we approached the weatherworn wooden door that, I saw, had been fastened on the outside with a heavy nail bent through the latch.

  “Is anybody in there?” Pug called out, and I heard a muffled thump as the old door shook.

  “Mom! Is that you? Is Joey with you?” If I could, I would have poured myself through the crack as Pug removed the nail, then tugged open the heavy door. The tears I had been holding back came suddenly with a cry so deep it hurt. “Mama?” I sobbed, resorting to a term I hadn’t used in years.

  But it wasn’t my mother who stumbled out of the dark, musty building. It was Ola Cress.

  “You’ve got to find them before he does!” she said, sobbing. “Please, oh, please do something!” The woman was crying so I could hardly understand her, and she brushed her arms and shivered, although it wasn’t cold. “Spiders!” she said, shuddering. “I hate spiders!” Ola continued to slap at her arms and looked back into the dank room behind her as if she suspected the creepy little varmints to be in close pursuit.

  “Where’s my mom? And Joey? What happened? Who did this?”

  I took Ola’s arm and tried to speak calmly. Although I really wanted to shake her, it wouldn’t help the others for me to lose my cool. Pug disappeared inside the building to look around, but I could see with a glance that no one else was there.

  “A man—at first we thought he was the gardener—but I’m sure it was that Pershing Gaines.” Ola trembled as I led her back to the house. “He seemed to be weeding the same area of the flower bed over there for an awfully long time, and your mother got a little suspicious. He wasn’t the man who has been here before she said, but I convinced her he was probably just a helper or something. I really thought we’d be safe here.” Ola pointed to a hoe that had been thrown aside next to the garden wall. “See, that’s what he was using.”

  “What has he done with my mother and Joey?” Back at the house I poured Ola a glass of water and made her sit down. Her breathing seemed ragged and it frightened me. “Do you have a prescription? Can I get you something?”

  She gestured toward a bottle of pills on the windowsill over the sink and I hastily twisted off the top and shook one into her hand.

  “I tried to warn your mother,” Ola said after she gulped down a pill. “Yelled as loud as I could. I think she ran . . . I hope she did. Maybe they got away.”

  “But her car is still here,” I said.

  She nodded, frowning. “He said he did something to it—the distributor or something. Besides, she wouldn’t have had time. He would’ve seen her, stopped her.”

  “But where could she go? And with a baby! Joey might cry and give them away.”

  “He’d just been fed, s
o he won’t be hungry—and he’s a good baby,” Ola said, sitting a little straighter.

  Pug came in and sat opposite us at the polished maple table, still set for supper. “Didn’t the sheriff send somebody? We called earlier and they promised to check on things out here.”

  “About an hour ago, yes. In fact it was right before I went outside to see if Joey’s quilt was dry. Of course we had no idea this would happen!” She took another sip of water. “If only they’d come a few minutes later!” Ola Cress frowned. “But how did you know to call them?”

  Pug looked at me and I explained to the terrified woman as tactfully as I could that this was Pershing Gaines’s son Pug, but that he was one of the “good guys.”

  I don’t think she believed me. “He came at me from behind,” she said. Water sloshed on the table as she set down her glass. “By the time I saw him it was too late to do anything but scream—and oh, God, I didn’t know what he meant to do! Before I knew what was happening, he’d dragged me over to that awful old shed and locked me inside. I hollered and yelled and kicked on the door, but it didn’t do any good . . . and then I heard you come and I screamed and kicked some more. I thought you’d never hear me!”

  Ola’s face turned white and her voice shook, so I made her lie on the living-room sofa and covered her frail shoulders with a sweater. “I think you need a doctor,” I said, remembering I still had Pug’s mobile phone in my pocket. “And I’m calling the police.”

  The woman sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, throwing the sweater to the floor. “No! No, please don’t! He said he’d kill her if we did that.” She darted a nervous look at Pug. “That’s the last thing he told me, and he meant it too. I know he did. Had a gun and swore he’d use it.”

  I looked at Pug. “So what do we do now?”

  “We find them. I really don’t think he’d hurt your mother, Prentice, but I want to be there when we find him. Maybe I can talk some sense into him.” He turned to Ola. “Do you have any idea where she might’ve taken Joey?”