by Blythe Baker
I shrugged, wondering what he was getting at. “I don’t remember their exact names. I know there’s a lady named Maria, who seems to be the leader of the pack. A young man around twenty-five years old, who goes by the name Kyle, is there a lot too. There’s a guy who wears a Chicago Cubs hat but I don’t know his name. Sorry. But I don’t think any of them would have a hand in this.”
I watched as Drake grabbed his shoes that had been lying next to his chair, where he’d slipped them off in the night, and pulled them back on. He grabbed his suit coat and tie. He looked like he knew something but he wasn’t going to tell me.
There was no use pressuring him. I learned long ago that trying to get Drake Morgan to do something he didn’t want to do was a waste of time. There was no sense wasting my breath. Still, I couldn’t just let him leave like this.
“Drake, I know we don’t agree about this but I’m going to call the police. Won’t you wait here and talk to them?” I asked.
“No.” He pulled his wallet from his pocket and looked at it intently.
“They’re going to want to talk to you,” I pointed out.
“They can make an appointment with my office assistant,” he said, as he headed for the door.
I frowned. “Don’t you think they’ll find that a tad bit weird? Even suspicious?”
“Just tell them that I’m out looking for her. You won’t be lying.”
And with that he was gone, shutting the front door behind him.
As soon as he left, I discovered my phone lying in plain sight on the coffee table, where it had been all along. Snatching it up, I let out a long breath and dialed 9-1-1.
“She’s about five feet tall. She was wearing a leopard printed T-shirt that was tied in a knot at the hip, black stretch pants, and a pair of gold gym shoes.”
The responding officer, who had come to my house, looked at me like I was making the description up.
“Sounds like she should be easy to spot,” he finally said. He glanced through the open doorway toward his partner, who was outdoors, checking out the note on my veranda.
“I’d think so,” I concurred. “She’s also got quite a personality.”
“She likes to talk to people?”
“She likes to criticize people. Constantly,” I said. “It’s her hobby.”
I looked at Moonshine, who had been quiet while there were new people in the house. Surprisingly. I felt bad for the bird. I thought he could tell his mistress was missing. They understood each other so well.
“Hey, Tiege!” the officer shouted to his partner.
“Yeah?” Tiege leaned his head through the veranda doorway.
“Anything?”
“Without dusting for fingerprints, I can’t see anything from this end.”
“Did you touch the note or anything out there?” the first officer asked.
“No. Not at all. I didn’t see any watermarks or anything different about the pen or handwriting. Looks like your average ballpoint pen. Whoever wrote it printed it to be neat and readable. If I had to guess, I don’t think that’s the person’s usual handwriting.”
The officer looked at me like I had just told him I had been picked up by a UFO the other day. But then, he nodded his head and went to talk to Tiege. They mumbled a few things I couldn’t make out. Before I could inch my way closer to eavesdrop, Tiege walked down the veranda steps and the other guy came back inside and joined me in the kitchen.
“Has your mother-in-law ever stayed out all night before?”
“Not since she came to live with me.” I tried to think about what she used to do when Drake and I were married. “I can’t recall my ex-husband ever telling me she had a habit of running off. As far as I can remember, she never did this before.
Again, I got that strange look from the officer.
“This is your mother-in-law, right?” he asked, as if to be sure he had the correct information.
I nodded.
“But you’re divorced?”
“Yes. Technically she’s my ex-mother-in-law. But she’s staying with me while I get the house in order to sell. It’s a little too big for just one person.” I smiled and rubbed my arms.
“And you said she’s critical of everyone. Is she critical of you?”
I looked at the officer and tilted my head. “Yes, but I’d never do anything to hurt her. She’s not hateful. She’s just selfish and eccentric and a little on the mean side. But I’d never hurt her. Never.”
“Rawk! Lazy!” Moonshine cawed, but his heart didn’t seem to be in it. Even his insults sounded sad with Mamma Jackie gone.
The policeman turned, as if he hadn’t noticed the bird before.
“Wow. Your bird is beautiful.” He took a step closer.
I just shook my head. “He’s not my bird.”
“Hey, pretty bird. Polly want a cracker?” the officer asked as he leaned closer to the cage.
“Fatso! Fatso!” Moonshine squawked, hopping from foot to foot.
“What?” The officer straightened his bulletproof vest.
Moonshine only clicked and whirred.
“Don’t pay any attention to him, officer,” I said quickly. “He misses my mother-in-law. He’s just out of sorts.”
“Hurry up, lazy,” Moonshine said as he bopped his head up and down.
“Now, Moonshine, you need to behave. Otherwise these officers are going to arrest you. Have you ever heard of hard time? You’ll be doing hard time.” I tapped his jingly bell to get his attention.
“That’s really something,” the officer said.
“No, it’s really my mother-in-law’s influence. If you think Moonshine is rude, multiply it about a hundred times.”
I patted the cage and went into the kitchen to grab a couple crackers to give the bird. I stuck one through the bars. With a dainty claw, Moonshine reached up and took the cracker gently from my hand.
“What do you say?” I urged.
“Good luck, lazy,” he squawked.
“Ugh.” I shook my head and left the bird to eat his cracker.
When I looked out the front window, I saw a familiar looking car pull into my driveway. I stepped closer to see if I recognized the driver.
“We called our supervisor, Miss Morgan,” the officer informed me. “Detective Sullivan will probably have some extra questions for you.”
“Detective Sullivan?” I blinked at the coincidence. “Sure. Yes. Of course.”
“Hello, baby boy,” Moonshine squawked as Detective Michael Sullivan entered the house.
Michael ignored the bird. “Maddie, are you all right?” he asked, rushing up to me. “When I got the call to this address, I was worried. This is something about your missing mother-in-law?”
I pulled my hand through my hair. “Yes, Mamma Jackie has been kidnapped.”
Suddenly, I realized I was still in my pajamas, a baggy pair of cotton pants and an oversized T-shirt. It was the complete opposite of how I had looked last night or at any other time Michael had seen me. I looked like I should be living under a bridge.
But this was no time to worry about appearances.
“Can we sit down somewhere?” Michael asked.
“Of course. Pardon my mess, Michael. I’m having my kitchen redone and things are stacked all over. Not to mention all the stuff my grandmother left for me to go through. It looks like an indoor garage sale in here.”
I cleared off the corner of my dining room table and offered Michael a seat. He took out his notepad and looked at me with a warm gaze. Or maybe it was a sly gaze and it was making me warm. I couldn’t be sure. All I was thinking was that I wished I’d taken a moment to dress and comb my hair before his arrival.
“So. Why don’t you tell me what happened?” he began.
“Yes, of course.” I explained everything about last night, after I had left him at Angelo’s. Drake had been worried about his mother. I hadn’t seen her since bedtime the day before. It was impossible for me not to explain that Drake had stayed overn
ight.
“He was just waiting for her to come home,” I added hastily. “He fell asleep in the armchair.” I jerked my thumb behind me, toward the chair in the next room.
As Michael wrote in his notepad, I saw a grin creep over the right side of his lips. I wanted to ask what he was grinning about, but I thought better of it. It wasn’t the time for small-talk.
“Can you think of anyone who might want to do your mother-in-law any harm?” Michael asked.
“I think a better question might be who wouldn’t want to do her harm,” I admittedly honestly.
“Really?”
“Well, maybe not real harm. But Mamma Jackie never learned how to win friends. Let me just say she didn’t care whose feelings she hurt.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” I confessed. “She’s just tough.”
“Do you think she could have decided she didn’t want to be bothered by you or her son anymore and just left on her own?”
“Normally, I’d say yes, that’s a possibility. But she’d never leave without her clothes or her bird. Moonshine is the love of her life.” My nervous fingers played with a couple of loose papers on the table. “Would you like a cup of tea or coffee? I haven’t had my jolt yet this morning. If I don’t get a little of that caffeine in my body, I’ll have a migraine for sure.”
“I’d love a coffee. Thanks. Could Mamma Jackie be suffering from any mental limitations? Like, maybe she went to her car and just forgot where she was headed?”
As I prepared the coffee in the pot on the floor, I shook my head.
“No. I’ve said it before: that woman is as sharp as a tack. Plus, if she’d left on her own or gotten lost on her own, there wouldn’t be that note.” I looked outside to see the officer’s talking, as they continued to walk around the property. “She’s a mean lady but she wouldn’t manipulate us by concocting a kidnapping just for giggles. She’s unpleasant but she’ll be unpleasant to your face. There’s nothing subtle about Mamma Jackie.”
The coffee started to percolate and drip into the carafe. The strong, bitter smell of roasted coffee beans filled the house.
“Michael, I don’t mean to be an alarmist but I don’t think this could be anything but foul play. She made one too many enemies. I just know it.”
“It seems likely.”
For a few minutes, it was quiet between us. I was waiting for the coffee. He was thinking or something. I didn’t want to look right at him for fear he might be looking at me. It felt like he was. That was not a good thing because I looked like a train wreck.
Stop thinking about how you look, Maddie. Could you be a little more narcissistic?
I blinked rapidly, as I scolded myself. Finally there was enough coffee for me to pour two cups. I crouched down on the floor where the coffee pot sat, filled two mugs that I grabbed from the sink, and offered the cleanest one to Michael.
“Do you always keep the coffee pot on the floor?” he asked, taking the steaming cup from me.
“Only when my kitchen is a registered disaster area, I swear,” I joked. “FEMA sent representatives here to inspect the site. That’s how bad this has been.”
Michael laughed, and the sound suddenly sobered us both, reminding us of the situation we were in.
“Do you have a picture of Mamma Jackie that we can take to the station? I’ll also need you to fill out a missing person’s report.”
“Yes, of course. I can do that.”
“Unless you think your ex-husband would like to be the one who fills out the report?” Michael asked, looking at me over his cup of coffee.
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
“You’ve got to admit it’s a little suspicious that he left before we got here. And you said he wanted to know who his mother hung out with. He didn’t already know?”
“I don’t know why he didn’t stick around, but Drake is kind of a complex fellow,” I said. “He’s a workaholic and has sacrificed a lot to get to where he is. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t love his mother, though. He was a mess last night, worrying about her.”
“Was it only her he was worried about?”
“Yes. Wait. Why do you ask?”
“Well, if he had any knowledge of what was happening, perhaps he wanted to make sure you didn’t get mixed up in it. Maybe he wanted to keep you safe from whoever left that note.”
“Drake didn’t have anything to do with it,” I argued. “He’s just as worried about Mamma Jackie as I am. I know that, one hundred percent.”
I sat down across from Michael and gave him my very best poker face. It might not win me a million dollars, but I thought he got my point.
And yet, in the back of my head, I did find it odd that Drake had left before the police came. And I found it even stranger that he hadn’t wanted me to call the police at all.
Like the note said.
But he didn’t write that note.
Are you sure?
Of course I’m sure.
As I argued with myself internally, Michael sipped his coffee then pushed himself up from the table.
“Well, the next time you see Mr. Morgan, please tell him I’d like for him to come down to the station,” he said. “There are just a few questions I’d like him to answer. All routine stuff.”
“I sure will, Michael. Thanks for your help with this.”
“I’m sure your Mamma Jackie will be all right. We’ll do everything we can, and if anything pops up, I’ll let you know right away.”
“Same here. I’m still hopeful she’ll just roll in, waving a stack of bills she won at the Red Chip Casino.” I forced a smile.
“One last thing, Maddie, and I don’t mean to be morbid. But do you happen to have anything that might have your mother-in-law’s hair on it? A brush or comb?”
“Yes.”
I quickly went into Mamma Jackie’s room. It smelled like her perfume, Jungle Gardenia. It was as cheap and tacky as she was. I wanted to cry. Sure, she was a real pip and could be downright cruel, but she was staying in my house. She was staying with me so I wouldn’t feel alone. Now she was missing. What if she was scared? Or hurt? What kind of ex-daughter-in-law was I?
Quickly, I swiped the hairbrush off her dresser and headed back out into the kitchen.
“Here you go,” I said.
Michael produced a plastic evidence bag and slipped the brush inside.
For some reason, it creeped me out, watching him do that. Like it was all so final and the outcome to this was going to be identifying Mamma Jackie by her DNA. I shook the thought from my head and walked Michael to the front door. The other officers were at their squad car already.
“I didn’t get a chance to tell you that I really had a nice time last night,” Michael said.
I felt a flicker of happiness, instantly drowned by guilt, because I shouldn’t be happy right now.
Still, I confessed, “I had a good time too.”
“There was just one bad part.”
“I know. Drake. The two hundred pound fly in the ointment.” I rolled my eyes as I said it.
Michael grinned and then left.
I locked the door behind him. The quiet of the house was terribly unnerving. I walked into the living room and looked at Moonshine.
“Hey, bird,” I called. “You miss your mamma, don’t you?”
Moonshine bobbed his head and squawked.
“Well, since we are all we’ve got, let’s make the best of it,” I said.
I went and got another cracker and slipped it through the cage. Again, with the slow dainty movement of a ballet dancer, Moonshine reached over and took the cracker.
“Good luck, Lazy,” he commented as he nibbled.
“Yeah. I have a feeling we’ll need it, you old buzzard,” I answered almost affectionately.
I looked out the living room window, while Moonshine ate the rest of his cracker in silence.
8
At first, I was afraid the quiet of the house was g
oing to freak me out. But less than twenty minutes after the police left, I got a hysterical phone call from Kelly Ward.
“Calm down, Kelly. What are you saying?”
Kelly Ward was one of those dream employees who showed up every day, never called in sick and felt horrible if traffic or a flat tire made her even five minutes late for work. At first, that was what I thought she was calling to tell me.
“He said I have to close the shop down,” Kelly stated angrily.
“Who said?”
“Daniel Walker.”
It was like a punch in the gut.
“Don’t do anything, Kelly. I’ll be right there.” I slammed the phone down and dashed upstairs to get dressed.
In my blue jeans, boots and a black T-shirt, I stomped downstairs again a few minutes later, rushed out to the car, and drove the short distance to the tea garden entrance down the street.
I left my car in the parking lot and passed through the garden entrance, before hurrying up the hill to the gift shop.
Sure enough, Daniel Walker was in there, harassing my one and only employee.
“Daniel, what is it now?” I asked.
I planted my hands on my hips and stared him straight in the eye. Why couldn’t Michael have still been here when Kelly had called? I’d have liked to see Daniel’s face if I had come from the house with Detective Sullivan and two uniformed police officers. But, it didn’t turn out that way. I had to face the monster alone.
Daniel Walker was one of those people who weren’t happy if they weren’t making someone else’s life miserable. At this point in time, I was that someone.
He owned Daniel’s Stone Quarry, which butted up against my newly acquired property. According to Kelly, Daniel had been after my grandmother to sell her property to him for the past several years. He had tried to bribe her, muscle her, and sweet talk her.
Needless to say, Daniel Walker didn’t like it when I inherited the property after my grandmother died. But he had a plan. It seemed to involve harassing me into shutting down the garden and selling it to him.
He would drive by the garden or past my house often, sniffing around, looking for property code violations that he could report to the authorities. He couldn’t be missed. His bright red truck was seen revving down my block a couple times a day. If I didn’t see it, I could hear it, because he had those huge exhausts attached underneath to make the vehicle growl when he hit the gas. I’d see him on the garden grounds, making notes on parts of the fences that had fallen down. I couldn’t prove it, but I was sure he knocked down those parts of the fences just so he could complain about it. I’d get phone calls from his buddies, telling me that I should sell if I knew what was good for me.
