Dry Spell: A Mercy Watts Short

by A W Hartoin

  Janine stuck my head underwater to rinse, announced I was beautiful, and needed no further help. I helped rinse her, dry her, and put on her favorite kitty cat PJs. She ran out of the bathroom for storytime leaving me with Medusa hair and soaked to the waist. Ellen came in with a fresh cup of coffee and watched me ring out my T-shirt.

  She smiled. “Now that takes me back to spring break.”

  I groaned. “Don’t remind me.”

  “You want a shirt? You can borrow one of Jeremy’s. Mine won’t fit.”

  I sneered at her. “What are you trying to say? That I’m rotund.”

  “You’re not rotund. You’re…interestingly proportioned.”

  I looked down at my chest. “I think they’re bigger.”

  “I think you’re right. No more Monkey Lalas.” Her grin grew wider.

  “Or brownies or ice cream or happiness,” I said.

  “It’s not that bad. You just need to work out.”

  “I did and now you’ll have to help me up. It wasn’t worth it.”

  Ellen helped me off the floor and it was a struggle. My spaghetti legs had gone to sleep.

  “That was Iron Fit. Just workout like a normal person. Get Chuck to help you.”

  Chuck was my cousin by marriage and seriously fit. He thought nothing of hitting on me and dating all my friends. “Pass.” There was no way I was going to admit my flab to Chuck. I’d rather pretend he didn’t notice it and figure it out on my own.

  I followed Ellen to her room and she gave me a dry shirt, a Nebraska Huskers tee that put twenty pounds on me. Chuck was definitely not seeing me in that. Especially with the two wet spots that my bra soaked through the front.

  Ellen bit her lip and then asked, “How did it go?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “How good?”

  “I really don’t know. She gave me a fairly decent description for a four-year-old.”

  “You don’t think it’s a fantasy.” It was not a question. She knew me as well as I knew her.

  I fanned out the shirt, willing the spots to dry. “It feels weird. I don’t know what to say. Authentic, I guess.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that. What now?”

  “I’ll see what Dad says and go from there.” I didn’t mention that schizophrenia caused detailed delusions and there’d been documented cases in childhood. I’d be looking into that, too.

  “What did he say? I feel so ridiculous that he knows.”

  “Don’t. He wasn’t shocked or amused or anything. I’ll let you know what he comes up with. And one more thing, what would make a bike a big girls bike?”

  “What?”

  “Janine said the girl is a big girl because she has a big girl bike.”

  “It’d be a regular bike, not a tricycle and no training wheels. Janine is dying to get rid of her training wheels.”

  “How old would that make her?” I asked.

  “At least five, more like six.”

  Ellen and I went into the girl’s room and tucked them in. I promised to give Jilly her own private bath complete with a hair washing next visit. She went right to sleep, but Janine watched me solemnly with her pink pony coverlet pulled up to her chin. I sat on the edge of her cushy bed and kissed her velvety forehead.

  “Will you help that big girl?”

  “I’ll try, sweetie.”

  She yawned and snuggled down. “Mama says you can do anything.”

  I glanced at Ellen, who smiled and nodded.

  “Your mama is generous.”

  Janine closed her eyes and I slipped out. I gave Ellen and Jeremy a ton of reassurance and went to my parents’ house with plenty of fear and questions of my own.

  I found Dad at home in his office. He held a phone to his ear and had his feet propped up on his desk. He was in the middle of an enormous yawn when I walked in. Whoever was on the other end of the line was giving him an earful.

  “Look, Mr. Peterson, I’m telling you in my professional opinion your wife is not having an affair,” Dad said.

  Dad waved me to the sofa and gave me a look of agonized boredom. Customer service was never Dad’s favorite part of the business.

  “I can’t take pictures of a man that doesn’t exist.”

  There was another five-minute pause in Dad’s side of the conversation and then he said, “If you insist, I’ll give it one more week, but I want you to understand that I believe that this is pointless and a waste of your money. Good night.”

  Dad hung up the phone and did a hand scrub on his face.

  “Sounds like a fun guy,” I said.

  “He’s a laugh riot and an idiot.”

  “He wants his wife to be having an affair?”

  “He’s desperate for it. He wants a reason to divorce her, but the woman weighs four hundred pounds. I don’t know how a man could have sex with her, much less want to.”

  “Why’d you take the case?”

  “He’s a client of Big Steve.”

  Enough said. Big Steve was my mother’s former employer and one of the most prestigious lawyers in St. Louis. He was also my lawyer when I had the need. Big Steve sent Dad a tremendous amount of business. Sometimes you had to take the chaff with the wheat.

  “How’d it go with Janine?” Dad said, his eyes searching my face for an answer before I opened my mouth.

  “Pretty good, I think. She gave me a nice, little description.”

  “How was she?”

  “Fine. Same old Janine, wasn’t scared or anything.”

  “Do you believe her?” Dad took his feet off the desk, folded his long legs under his chair, and reached for a file.

  “I guess I do. She was factual. It’s definitely real to her. It could be an elaborate delusion, but it didn’t seem like an attempt for attention or anything. She wasn’t all that interested in talking about it either.”

  “Ellen’s girls have never lacked for attention and you’d know if the family had a history of mental illness.”

  “I would and they don’t. Did you find anything on the house?”

  “Zero. There have been no known murders or suspicious deaths in Ellen’s subdivision ever. Let’s have a drink.”

  He led the way down the stairs to the first floor and into the living room. My mother calls it the parlor because she’s like that. He poured himself a generous whiskey and looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “I’m driving.” I didn’t say that whiskey was only good for hot toddies, and even then I had to be pretty ill before I’d drink it. Dad didn’t like it when I disparaged his beloved Tullamore Dew, so silence was required.

  Dad swirled the golden liquid in his vintage lowball glass. “What’s the description?”

  “She has long brown hair with multiple pink barrettes. She’s pretty and wears a pink shirt with a shiny heart on it. She has a pink bicycle without training wheels. Ellen says that makes her, at least, five and I’d say no more than twelve.”

  “Not bad, not bad at all. Was it hard to get it out of her?”

  “No, except she wasn’t interested. She didn’t give it much thought either. I mean, she wasn’t making it up as we went along.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

  “I doubt I need to tell you.” He smiled, took a sip of whiskey, and put his arm around my shoulders. I curled into his body, laying my head on his chest, and listened to his strong, steady heartbeat.

  “Check missing persons. Maybe the Walsh site.”

  “That’s a good start.”

  “Then maybe I’ll ask Uncle Morty to take a look.”

  Uncle Morty was my honorary uncle and sort of a business partner to my father. He’s an all-around whiz with the computer and camera. He got a sort of sick thrill from exposing peoples’ criminal tendencies.

  “Always a good option.” Dad said.

  I made a move to leave, but he said, “Stay a while. Mom’s out for the evenin
g and you know how lonely I get.”

  Dad wasn’t the lonely type, but I stayed anyway. It was nice to know my father, who didn’t require company, enjoyed mine.

  The next morning I fired up my laptop, designed by Uncle Morty to be ridiculously over-equipped and did several hours of research. I started with children and mental illnesses and wished I hadn’t. You never know what goes on in the world until you ask the question. Then I decided to depress myself further by moving on to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I learned more than I wanted to know about missing children. The statistics were staggering. I wanted to go over and lock Ellen’s doors for her. What I didn’t find was a missing local girl in a pink heart or any connection to a pink bike. There were thousands in the database within the age group. I’d hoped to find a match for the pink in Missouri or Illinois. But that would have been too easy, and a trip to Morty’s was a must.

  I went without calling. I wasn’t much of a caller and Morty was always in. He was practically a shut-in and went out only for a case. Even his groceries were delivered.

  Uncle Morty answered his door slowly and wearing his usual uniform, extra, extra large sweats purchased a decade ago. “What do you want?”

  “Help.”

  “Naturally. What makes you think I’m in the giving mood?”

  “I never think that. Dad sent me.”

  He snorted and hiked up his pants. “Let’s get to it then. I’ve got a full day.”

  What he needed was a full day of cleaning with all the old dip containers and pizza boxes littering all surfaces. It took Morty a while to recover from the weekly Dungeons and Dragons games he hosted. I resisted the urge to get a garbage bag and followed him to the second bedroom that he used as an office. No mess in there, just a ton of computer equipment and various snooping gadgets he tested for Dad. I suspected he used them on his more attractive neighbors, but I could’ve been wrong.

  “Didn’t Dad call you?” I asked.

  “He did. So did you manage to add two and two on your own?”

  “Nice. You know I just stopped a murder in Honduras.”

  “Yeah, yeah. And made yourself more notorious in the process like a freaking moron. Carolina speaking to you yet?”

  My mother was speaking to me in very short sentences. A photoshopped bikini shot made it on to the national news and Mom had had it with notoriety and didn’t quite believe that I hadn’t meant for it to happen.

  “We’re good.”

  He snorted and fired up his computer. “You’re a real brain trust. What’d you find out?”

  I perched precariously on a chair stacked up with tech manuals. “So you believe Janine?”

  “I believe what I’m paid to believe.”

  “You’re going to charge me to help a four-year-old girl?” I asked.

  “You’re damned skippy.”

  Groan.

  “You know my friends are still convinced that you’re evil.”

  “You think that bothers me, but I don’t give a shit. What’d you find out?”

  “Not much. I was working on the assumption that the girl, if she exists, would be local, but there are only eighteen missing girls that are close to fitting during the last twenty years. All but two were runaways or parental abductions. Neither of the abducted ones fit the age criteria.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Sixteen and two.”

  “What’s wrong with the parental abductees? I assume you’ve read the literature.”

  “I skimmed it and I get your point. Parents kill their kids all the time, but it doesn’t make sense to me. Janine says she has her bike with her. Aren’t most parental abductions fairly simple to figure out? Somebody doesn’t bring the kid back from visitation or picks them up from school unnecessarily. So everybody knows who has the kid, even if they can’t find them. Burying the bike is to hide evidence that the kidnapper ever had her. That way there’d be no connection between the kidnapper and the girl.”

  “Now you’re cookin’ with gas. Tell me exactly what Janine said.”

  I told him everything. It was kind of fun to watch his mind working. He didn’t write anything down and his small brown eyes bored into me, taking it all in.

  “That ain’t shit, but call me tonight and we’ll see what happens.”

  “What are you going to do?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  And I didn’t. One of the advantages to Uncle Morty was that he would cover all bases. If there was something to be found, he would find it.

  I went home and discovered my boyfriend, Pete, asleep on the sofa with my cat, Skanky draped over his neck like a scarf. Skanky probably could’ve cleaned his rear on Pete’s face and he wouldn’t have woken up. Pete was a surgical resident and he’d taken to sleeping at my place because it was close to the hospital and I had food. I didn’t wake him. He needed the sleep and I didn’t want to talk about Janine anyway. He wouldn’t get the missing girl research. He’d order a CAT scan. Pete was all science.

  I went to take a boiling hot bath, call my coordinator and find out where I’d be working next, a quiet podiatrist’s office out in South County. Hopefully, there wouldn’t be any fitness freaks that would try to drag me to classes designed to kill me.

  The bath didn’t calm my mind and I got desperate. I started cleaning around the now snoring Pete. I wasn’t a clean freak, but I needed to turn off my brain. My apartment was never cleaner than when I was upset. I practically sterilized the bathroom.

  At five, I called Morty with my stomach in my throat. I don’t know what I was hoping for. I didn’t want to hope at all. I didn’t want that little girl to be real, but if she wasn’t, where did that leave Ellen?

  “Uncle Morty, it’s me. Did you find anything?”

  Mort paused after saying hello and I knew. Of course, he’d found her. She wasn’t in Janine’s head after all.

  “Glenville, Kentucky. She disappeared in 1999 with her pink bicycle. Her name’s Janet Lee Fine.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’m sure. It’s her right down to the heart on the pink shirt.”

  “Shit. I guess I have to tell Ellen.”

  “Nah,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “It could be a coincidence.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said.

  “Don’t you know nothing? There’s connections all over the damn place. Janine could have seen a news report on her, a flyer, if they reopened the case. Maybe she’s describing some kid at school. Who the hell knows? Ellen’ll just get freaked out.”

  “I have to help Ellen. She’s scared to death.”

  “You’ll have to find Janet then and cops been looking for over a decade.”

  “The cops didn’t have Janine,” I said. “Too bad this isn’t a local thing. At least I know the area, but she’s probably in Kentucky. What am I supposed to do with that? There’s an awful lot of dirt in Kentucky.”

  “There’s a lot of dirt here. You need more details. Go back to Janine and try again. Concentrate on location. Call me after.”

  We hung up and I called Ellen to invite myself over. Even though I didn’t say anything definitive she did freak out a little and told me to come for dinner right then. I didn’t have time for a Kronos stop, so I ate a granola bar on the way. Since it was healthy, I found it in the back of my cabinet so it was good and stale. I felt like I was eating a bar of wood shavings. Ellen’s cooking would be a welcome relief.

  Dinner turned out to be a hearty, home-style affair with lots of cream of mushroom soup. It reminded me of my grandma’s cooking and it was good.

  Both Ellen and Jeremy smiled a lot and joked with the girls, but it seemed forced and pained somehow. The grooves under Jeremy’s eyes had deepened and turned a shade darker. Ellen’s hands shook when she unboxed the chocolate pie she pulled out of the fridge. I waited until the girls went to hunt for
the cat and then asked, “What’s going on?”

  “The usual,” said Ellen.

  “Meaning he hasn’t gone away?” I said.

  “No, he hasn’t gone away,” said Jeremy.

  Ellen’s smile wavered and turned downward. “Now she’s talking about ducks and water. She says that there are people all around the girl. She wants to know why they don’t help her. I don’t know what to say.”

  “You seemed so happy tonight I thought he’d gone.”

  “I feel better. Something’s being done. We’re not sitting around waiting.”

  Jeremy stood and abruptly left the room. Ellen filled our coffee cups and folded a napkin into a complicated triangle.

  “He’s not thrilled,” she said.

  “I got that. What’s wrong, other than the obvious?”

  “I think he’s upset that you’re taking this seriously and even worse your dad is. Before it was Janine's imagination and now it’s real.”

  “Sorry about that. I don’t know what else to tell you, except we’re doing our best. Do you mind if I talk to Janine now?”

  “Give Jilly her bath first. If you don’t, she’ll never give you a minute’s peace.”

  I gave Jilly her bath and had my hair scrubbed. I hadn’t gotten all the tangles out from Janine’s washing yet. By the time Jilly was finished, I needed professional help. After she dried and dressed, Ellen put her in front of a DVD and I took Janine to her room. We colored at her desk. Janine drew her specialty, unicorns, and I did a complicated beetle, who kept trying to bite the unicorn.

  “Do you remember what we talked about when I gave you your bath?” I asked.

  “Uh huh,” Janine said, not looking up from her drawing.

  “My daddy and I are trying very hard to help the little girl, but we need some more help from you. Do you think you can do that?”

  “Okay.”

  “Your mom said you mentioned ducks and water?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Are they near the girl?”

  “Sometimes.” Janine eyed me and giggled. Her unicorn was now pooping on my beetle. The little skunk.

  I drew a beetle with a bigger mouth and jagged teeth. “Did the girl move?”