Just Try to Stop Me

by Gregg Olsen

  Janet Robinson had kind eyes. She could see that Shelly was on the edge of unraveling. She told her to sit, and Shelly slumped into a chair by the window.

  “Have you called everyone you can think of?” she asked.

  Shelly indicated that she had. She’d looked all over the house for any kind of clue that would suggest her mom might have gone to visit a friend or her cousins in Spokane. There was no trace. She’d gone to work and then somewhere between work and home she’d vanished.

  “You have to find her,” Shelly said, stiffening in the chair. “I can’t live without her. She’s really all I have.”

  Later, after the officer left the Mulligan house, those words would play over in Shelly’s head as she sat by the relic landline that her mother insisted was necessary “because in the event of a terrorist attack all cell phones will be shut down.” She’d rolled her eyes at that one. Laughed about it with friends. Right then, she hoped it would ring. She’d not been sick that Friday. Not really. She just didn’t want to fill her time off from work with her mother’s company. It was as if God was punishing her for her selfishness. Her little white lie. She prayed for a second chance.

  I’ll never lie to her again if You bring her home, she said to herself.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

  The Port Angeles library was closed, but as Janet Robinson turned into the parking lot, she noticed a car parked by the door. The white Versa had a bumper sticker that read CATS RULE. It had to be Tansy Mulligan’s. She ran the plate to be sure.

  It was.

  Janet called dispatch. “Jim, do me a favor. Can you get me Hilda McLean’s address? I’m out at the library. Found Tansy Mulligan’s car.”

  “Sure thing. Hold on.”

  Five minutes later Janet Robinson was standing in Hilda McLean’s kitchen. Hilda was the library director. Her husband, Craig, managed a marine supply store downtown. The McLeans knew that a police officer in their kitchen at that hour meant something was seriously wrong. Hilda told the officer that Tansy had worked for the library for at least five years, and as a volunteer for at least five years before that. When the library district won a grant for a mini mobile van, Tansy got the job driving it.

  “She loved getting out in the county bringing books to people who couldn’t make it into town,” Hilda said. “The fact that you’re here asking questions about Tansy is scaring me, Officer.”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. McLean. I’m sure there’s some reasonable explanation for her absence from home. Did she have a boyfriend?”

  Hilda didn’t think so. “She never mentioned one to me. I don’t believe she was interested in dating, anyway. She was busy with the library, her garden, her daughter, and of course, those cats. Add in the new car, and she pretty much was living her dream.”

  “Is there some reason why Tansy might have left her car at the library over the weekend? I saw it in the parking lot on the way over to see you.”

  Hilda fiddled with a loose thread on her sleeve. “Sometimes Tansy took the van home if she’d been out late on a run,” she said. “That was perfectly fine with us. She’d bring it back the next morning.”

  “But she didn’t,” the officer said. “She went out on Friday to deliver books, but didn’t return for her car that night or Saturday. Didn’t that concern you?”

  Craig spoke up. “We went to Seattle Friday to see a show.”

  Hilda’s face was lined with worry. “I have Saturday off . . . and well, with the holiday no one would have called me. We’re short staffed as it is.”

  The officer made some notes. “Just on the off chance that something happened on her route—the van broke down, maybe? An accident? Something like that—can you provide her scheduled deliveries?”

  The library director reached for her phone. “I have it right here. I’ll send it to you.” She looked up from what she was doing. “Come to think of it, she hasn’t been taking the van home lately. Not since she got that new car.”

  Janet thanked the McLeans and promised that someone would get back to Hilda when they found Tansy and the van. It was almost shift change so she called dispatch that she was heading back to close out her day.

  There were eighteen stops designated for Friday, the last day anyone saw Tansy Mulligan. Her route started in town and wound its way deep into the backwoods of the peninsula.

  The last name on the list was Wilder.

  “I’ve got Tansy Mulligan’s route and scheduled stops from the library director,” she told the dispatcher.

  “Sounds good,” the dispatcher said.

  “Heading in now to write it up and get some sleep. Early matinee with the kids tomorrow.”

  When she arrived at her desk, she slid into her chair and typed out a report on Tansy’s case, adding information about the car, the van, the conversation she’d had with both the daughter and the library director. It was late and she was tired. In her haste to get home and into bed, she forgot to include the schedule of where Tansy was supposed to be the day she was last seen.

  It was a tiny mistake that would cost lives.

  * * *

  The mean green machine rumbled toward the orchard. Brenda put her arms around Sherman’s shoulders and leaned in to murmur in his ear. She could taste the sweat collected on his temple. Nervous? She wasn’t sure and that bothered her a little. She’d always been able to home in on the true feelings of others. Tension. Fear. She could sense the weakness of another and with an unexpected swiftness pounce with words or actions when they couldn’t see what was coming. Or maybe, she thought, it could be the afterglow of killing the library van driver.

  Sherman let Brenda nuzzle him as he drove up the rutted little incline. Tansy Mulligan’s lifeless body bounced up and down in the shovel. Her arm flopped out, and he noticed that she wore a charm bracelet. It probably had some sentimental value. He wondered if Tansy’s daughter would search for it in her house, hoping to find it and wear it in remembrance of her mother.

  Instead it would be buried in the orchard, never to be found. Like Tansy’s body.

  “What are we going to do with the van?” Brenda asked.

  “Burn it, I guess,” he said.

  Brenda loosened her grip as the tractor came to a stop next to the disturbed ground that indicated where Patty Sparks’s body had been concealed.

  “The smoke will give us away,” she said.

  Sherman leaned into her and gave her a kiss.

  “We’ll do it tonight, baby.”

  She let her hand roam his chest, then lower.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “We will. Start digging.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  Kelly Sullivan had no idea what time or even what day it was. She’d been so thirsty that she’d done what she’d promised herself never to do. She’d taken a drink provided by a stranger. A few minutes after she guzzled the bottled water with the already loosened cap that had been dropped at her feet, she felt a little woozy and passed out.

  It was quiet in the horse stall when she woke. She lay there. Still. Listening. Straining to hear something that would tell her what had happened to the others. She was all but certain that Blake was gone. Maybe Chloe too. That left her and Amber.

  She leaned into the wall.

  “Amber, are you still there?”

  “Kelly? Are you okay?”

  “I guess so,” she said. “I don’t really know. They drugged me.”

  “Me too,” Amber said.

  “Did they do something else to you?” Kelly asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amber said, her voice muffled by the wall between them. “The freak said he’s coming for me. I’m scared, Kelly. I don’t want to die.”

  “We are not going to die,” Kelly said.

  The sound of a sob. Then Amber spoke. “I think they killed Blake,” she said.

  Kelly steadied herself in the darkness. In her bones, she was sure the others were dead.

  “What about Chloe? What happened to her?” she asked.

  “I don
’t know,” Amber said. “She’s gone. I couldn’t hear her scream. Not like the way Blake screamed. Oh, God, Kelly what is happening to us?”

  “We’re going to get out of here. Nothing is going to happen to us.”

  Amber stayed silent.

  “Amber? Can you hear me?”

  After what seemed like a very long time, Amber answered.

  “Yes. I hear you. I hope you’re right, Kelly. This isn’t right. I don’t want you to die.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  While Summer was with Elan, Birdy sat on the dining chair next to the sofa. She put her hand on her mother’s. Natalie looked at her with a sideways glance, and then closed her brown eyes.

  Natalie broke the silence.

  “What kind of shoes will you wear, Birdy?”

  Birdy’s eyes returned to her mother. Still shut.

  “Excuse me, Mom?” she asked.

  “To dance on my grave,” Natalie said. “I hope to God you’ve packed something with a spiked heel. I’m sure you’ll want me to feel every single step.”

  “You’re not funny,” Birdy said.

  “No, I suppose I’m not. Hard to be funny when you can barely breathe.”

  “Just rest, Mom.” Birdy scooted the pale pink sheet over her mother’s concave chest. The port from her chemo protruded so high that Birdy thought it might burst. It was like a tent. Her mom had been off chemo for more than a month. The port was going with her to the grave, a reminder at death that medicine was no match for some kinds of cancer.

  “I have plenty of time for resting,” Natalie said, her voice a little softer than it had been when they first arrived. The morphine had sapped her, for sure. It was more than that, though. The drug had eased her pain and maybe her mind too. She wasn’t going to fight. She wasn’t going to insult. She’d done all of that so many times before.

  “Mom,” Birdy said, “Despite everything, you need to know that I’ve always admired you.”

  Natalie’s eyes fluttered under her lids.

  “Mom?” Birdy asked.

  “I’m still here, Birdy. Get me a cigarette, will you?”

  “No, I won’t.”

  Natalie’s eyes opened for a split second. “Then call Summer,” she rasped. “She’ll do it.”

  “She’ll be back shortly,” Birdy said, relieved that she didn’t have to give her mom a cigarette. It was stupid. Sometimes principles felt that way. “Did you hear me, Mom? Did you know that I admired you?”

  Tears flooded Birdy’s eyes. She felt the muscles in her throat tighten.

  “Why? I was nothing. Nothing at all. Nobody will miss me when I’m gone.”

  A tear rolled down the forensic pathologist’s cheek and she wiped it away.

  Natalie glanced over at her.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?”

  “No, Mom,” Birdy said. “I’ll miss you. Summer will. The little kids in the family will.”

  Natalie, a little more alert than she had been, looked over at the muted TV. A woman named Joy was rhapsodizing over the flocked hangers she’d created in twenty-two colors. Natalie’s eyes lingered on the screen.

  “I shouldn’t have had kids, Birdy. I wasn’t meant to be a mom.”

  “You did fine,” Birdy said. “You always managed to get us through the day, off to school.”

  “That wasn’t because I loved you. I wanted you gone. I wanted to go to the bar, get drunk, meet a man at the motel. I wanted to have a good time. Having kids wasn’t a good time.”

  “You grew into it, Mom,” Birdy said, fishing for words that weren’t a complete lie. “You did okay.”

  “Did I, Birdy?” Natalie asked.

  Birdy patted her mother’s hand and held up a glass of water with a bendy straw pointed at her thin, stretched lips.

  Natalie refused the drink.

  “I’m not thirsty,” she croaked. “What’s the use? I’m going to die tonight. Maybe right now.”

  “No, you’re not, Mom.”

  “I cheated on your father,” Natalie said.

  “I know, Mom.”

  “More times than you know.”

  “It’s all right,” Birdy said. “Daddy loved you. He would have forgiven you. Have you forgiven yourself?”

  Natalie’s sunken eyes studied Birdy.

  “Can’t do that, little Birdy,” she said. “Can’t get away from all the things I’ve done. It isn’t that I’m not sorry. There isn’t enough sorry and regret in the world for someone like me.”

  “You’re wrong, Mom.”

  Birdy watched her mother slip back to sleep or unconsciousness. Her chest moved the fabric of the sheet ever so faintly, her fingers reflexively moving as though she was strumming a guitar. Maybe in her mind she was? She’d played in a band when she was younger. That’s where she met Mackie Waterman. The story had been told a million times about how he’d swept her off her feet in the middle of the band set. How they’d wound up in each other’s arms that very night. How she’d never met a man so good as Mackie.

  Birdy didn’t need those thoughts in her head, but there they were. How her mother had hurt her father over and over. He’d drowned while out fishing by himself in the straits. He hadn’t left a note, so there had been no proof it was a suicide. While Birdy could have thrown all her hatred for what he did at his feet, she instead put it all on her mother. She’d called her every name in the book. She told her that she was nothing but a common whore. It was ugly stuff. Words that she’d wished she’d never said.

  Birdy forgave herself. She had only been a girl when it happened. She knew that whatever had happened between her father and her mother had been their doing, not hers.

  There were a million questions she could have asked her mother over the years, but she didn’t. She never asked who Elan’s father was, though she thought it might have been her dad’s cousin, Jay. He’d been coming around the house a lot at the time to help with chores that Mackie would have done.

  Had he been there.

  She’d told her mother that she’d admired her, but Natalie hadn’t asked why. Birdy admired her for holding her head up around town, on the reservation, among members of the extended family. She’d been called those same ugly names by everyone behind her back and she didn’t let it break her. At least that’s what Birdy had always believed. She wondered now if her mother’s perseverance had been inner strength or merely the ability to survive. If the lies she told herself got her though the day, then good for her.

  “She asleep?”

  Birdy turned to see Summer come in.

  “Did you visit?” Summer asked.

  “We talked,” Birdy said. “I told her I loved her. She asked what shoes I was going to wear to dance on her grave.”

  Summer smiled. “Sounds like a great visit.”

  “You and Elan?”

  “Better, Birdy. Thanks for bringing him.”

  “He wanted to come, Summer. He misses you.”

  * * *

  Port Angeles officer Janet Robinson stepped out of the movie theater, her husband and children in tow. While the special morning screening had been a fun one, empowering for her daughter, exciting enough for her son, something niggled at the officer. She’d been thinking about the missing library employee, Tansy Mulligan. Inside, she felt sick. Popcorn and the realization that she’d made a terrible error in her haste to get home warred with her insides.

  “Honey,” she told her husband, Sal, “I need to stop at the office.”

  “Can’t it wait?” he asked, looking frazzled as he fiddled with a car seat that didn’t want to lock.

  Janet didn’t think so. “I don’t think I filed the locations where Tansy Mulligan visited on Friday. It will only take a minute.”

  “Kids need to get home.”

  Janet looked at her son and daughter. They were drowsy.

  “You’re right,” she said, though she didn’t really believe it.

  “Maybe you did file that report?” he asked, turning the ignition on their miniva
n.

  Janet looked out the window. “Yeah, I probably did.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  It hadn’t rained that hard in weeks. Pellets of water tore at the roof of the barn and made the tack room sound like it was under the largest kettle of popcorn in the world. Brenda sat in her chair, her shapely legs crossed just so. Her mouth was a gash of dark pink lip color. The lights Sherman had ordered from a catalog were on her. Something was perturbing her.

  She shot an angry glare toward her lover.

  “When I told you that I needed a state-of-the-art studio to film my updates, I never in my wildest dreams thought you’d set me up in a damn barn, Sherman.”

  “I didn’t know it would rain,” he said, looking at her with pleading eyes.

  She flicked him away with her hand. “This is Washington, you moron. Of course it rains. All the time. Every second of the day.”

  He wanted to tell Brenda the state had just experienced a record dry spell, but contradicting her would only invite a magnitude of anger not commensurate with his perceived transgression.

  “Check my hair,” she said. It was not a request, but a directive. Brenda never made a request. Question marks were for the weak.

  Sherman dropped everything and went over to Brenda, looking her up and down. She was, in his estimation, perfection. Part of him suspected that she only invited him to check her hair to prove the point that she didn’t need him for anything at all. In his heart of hearts, Sherman Wilder just couldn’t go there.

  “The rain’s stopped,” she said, her tone no longer impatient. “I’m ready now.”

  Sherman looked around the tack room turned studio. Yes, indeed. Everything was perfect. He’d moved the light slightly to flatter her, but he didn’t say so. He didn’t want credit for doing the mundane tasks that she required. Instead, he wanted acknowledgment and recognition for the major things that he’d done for her.

  “The feed is completely untraceable,” he said.

  “I know,” she said, checking her face in a handheld magnifying mirror. “That’s why you’re my love.”

  The mood had shifted as it always did when the focus was on her. Sherman understood that something inside her held an unbreakable compulsion to be the center of all attention.