Bogeyman

by Gayle Wilson

  “This is Blythe Wyndham. I need to speak to Sheriff Jackson.”

  There was the slightest hesitation. Maybe he was checking. Maybe—

  “He’s on another line, Ms. Wyndham. I think he’s talking to the FBI. I can have him call you. You gonna be at this same number?”

  “No.”

  Until she said the word, she hadn’t made up her mind. She had intended to ask Cade if anyone had looked out there. Now, however…

  “Could you just give him a message, please. As soon as he gets off the phone. It’s very important.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Can you hold on one second…” There were paper shuffling noises in the background. “Okay.”

  “Ask him—No. Tell him that I’ve gone out to the Wright house. Tell him that…Tell him that Sarah always felt safe there. Maybe…Maybe that’s where she’s gone.”

  “Sarah?”

  “Maddie. My daughter. Tell him I think she may have gone to the Wright’s house.”

  “Ms. Wyndham, don’t you remember? The Wright’s house burned to the ground.”

  His tone was one you’d use to a child. Or to someone whose mind was clouded with age. Condescending. Slightly pitying.

  “I was there,” she said. “I’m not likely to have forgotten. Do you have the message?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then you see to it that Cade gets it as soon as he gets off the phone. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Whatever you say.” Snotty, yet still polite.

  “What I say is, if Cade doesn’t get this message, I can assure you he isn’t going to happy with the one who screwed up. In case you’ve forgotten, there’s a homicide investigation as well as a kidnapping going on.”

  “No, ma’am. I haven’t forgotten.” Subdued. There was no longer any trace of youthful arrogance in the voice.

  “Then whatever you do, don’t forget this either.”

  Without waiting for a response, she carefully put the phone down on the cradle, struggling for control. She took a deep breath, her promise to Cade echoing in her heart.

  She had tried to get in touch with him. She’d tried to explain. After her reminder of what was at stake, she believed that the kid would tell him where she’d gone. And she had no doubt as soon as he knew what she was thinking, Cade would come.

  The more she thought about this, the more certain she was that she was right. If she was, she owed Tewanda an apology. Tewanda and Delores.

  Please, dear God, let me be right.

  She was almost to the door when the thought struck her. If she hadn’t been in this room, it probably wouldn’t have crossed her mind, but since she was…

  She turned, retracing her steps to the highboy. She opened the small middle drawer at the top. Her grandfather’s Colt lay where she’d hidden it in an effort to protect Maddie.

  Gingerly, her fingers curled around the coolness of its metal. She picked it up, again surprised by its weight.

  Despite growing up in a culture that valued firearms, she had never been comfortable around them. Thanks to that upbringing, however, she knew how to fire a gun. As to why she wanted to take this one with her…

  For the exact same reason she had put it away. In order to protect her daughter. And she would do that any way she could.

  28

  “S heriff! Got a message here for you.”

  Jerrod’s call stopped Cade before he could escape down the hall to his office. He had just spent twenty minutes in the street outside answering questions from the media outlets that had picked up on the alert.

  When he’d stepped back inside, the reception area had been crowded with people. Volunteers who’d come to offer their help. Deputies from both Davis and the adjoining counties, who had just come in from the field. Townspeople who had stopped by for a progress report or to be a part of the excitement.

  He turned to see the kid at the reception desk holding up a folded sheet of paper. At least Jerrod had sense enough not to blurt out whatever information it contained.

  Cade walked over to him, nodding to a few people he hadn’t yet spoken to this morning. He reached for the note.

  “Oh, and the kid’s mother called,” Jerrod said as he placed the paper in his hand. “Said to tell you she was going out to the Wright place. Something about her daughter always feeling safe there.”

  “Are you sure it was Ms. Wyndham?” So much for convincing Blythe to stay put.

  “Yeah, but…I think maybe she’s losing it. I mean it’s understandable and all, but she kept talking about Sarah. Like maybe she was thinking that her daughter…You know.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Maybe…ten minutes. Could have been a little more than that. It’s hard to keep track of when calls come in, with as many as we’re getting. I know she called before I took that one.” Jerrod nodded to the note. “That’s from the police in Dothan. They think they may have a sighting.”

  Cade fingered the paper open and read the contact information for the Dothan Police Department. “Any details?”

  “Just that. Said for you to call ’em.”

  Cade nodded. He turned, intending to do that from his office before he went out to the Wright place to check on Blythe. Hoyt was standing behind him, so close he’d almost run into the old man.

  “They got something in Dothan?”

  “Maybe. Doesn’t sound too definitive.”

  “You’ll get a lot of those. It’s the price you pay with an alert. Every whiny, blond-headed kid who needs a nap and is being drug through the mall instead is gonna have folks spending a quarter to call the locals.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  “You okay?”

  “Just…” Cade shook his head. “Feeling pulled in a dozen directions and none of them leading anywhere.”

  “You’re doing good. Just keep on doing what you’re doing. There ain’t any more you can do, Cade, believe me.”

  “I need to go check on Blythe.”

  “Want me to go over there?”

  “She’s gotten it in her head that Maddie might have gone back to the Wright place.”

  “She thinks he took her there?”

  “I think she believes the kid went there on her own.”

  “That’s probably…What? Four miles. She thinks a four-year-old is gonna walk that far. Even if she could find her way over there—”

  “It’s less than that if you don’t stick to the roads.”

  “And that baby’s gonna know those shortcuts? Sounds like the poor girl is clutching at straws. Even if the kid wanted to go back there—”

  “It isn’t that.”

  As Cade tried to think how to explain Blythe’s obsession with Sarah’s murder and that house, he became aware that other people were listening to their conversation. He took Hoyt’s arm to draw him down the hall to the privacy of his office.

  “So what is it?” Hoyt asked as Cade pulled the door to.

  “Just…” Cade realized that nothing he could say would ever make the pragmatic ex-sheriff understand how a child who’d been dead for twenty-five years was playing a part in this. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe Blythe’s gone off the deep end, but I still need to go see about her.”

  Hoyt said nothing for a moment. “Like that, is it? ’Bout damn time if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t,” Cade said shortly. “What I am asking you is to check with this guy.” He held out the note from the Dothan police. “See how reliable their sighting is. If there’s anything to this, get all the details you can.”

  Hoyt retrieved his glasses from his shirt pocket before he took the paper. He read the note through the bottom of the bifocals and then looked up at Cade. “When you get Blythe, you bring her here. By the time you get back, they might have apprehended whoever this is. Somebody’ll have to go over there and identify the child.”

  Cade nodded, but his mind was still on the other message Jerrod had given him. It wasn’t Maddie who’d felt safe
at the Wright house. It was Sarah.

  Because the killer had never come there to find her.

  There was some logic to the idea that Maddie might go there. If she’d been running away from someone. And if, like that night in Miz Ruth’s backyard, Sarah had told her to hide.

  So now you’ve bought into Sarah guiding her? Sending her to the place where she always felt safe?

  Which made him just as gullible as all those people the Hardy woman bilked out of their hard-earned money.

  “You going?”

  Cade looked up to find Hoyt watching him over the tops of his glasses. “Yeah. Yeah, I am. You can handle this?”

  “Since before you was sucking on your mama’s teats.”

  “Thanks, Hoyt.”

  “You bring her on back. Maybe we’ll have some good news by the time you get here.”

  Blythe pulled her car into the drive, automatically maneuvering it to the space in front of the detached garage. Where she’d always parked when they’d lived here, she realized.

  She hadn’t been back since the morning after the fire. Not even to see if there was anything left to salvage.

  The still-smoldering ruins had told her then all she needed to know. Looking at those same ruins through the car window now made her realize how ridiculous it was to think Maddie might have come all this way.

  As long as she was here…

  She took a breath and then opened the door. When she stood up, she could see the shell of the house over the top of the car. Behind it stretched the same swath of winter-dead grass she’d hobbled across that night in an attempt to stop Maddie from running straight into the arms of a madman.

  The same reason that had sent her here today.

  She closed the door, the sound seeming to echo in the surrounding stillness. She had been aware of the house’s isolation during the time they’d lived here, but she’d never felt it more strongly than this morning. This place seemed to exist on a different plane from the frenzy of downtown.

  Everyone else was out looking for Maddie, and she was here. Once more listening to a cold wind sweep through the pines that lined the back of the property.

  She walked to the front of the car and slipped the lock out of the hasp of the garage door. She pushed it open, hinges protesting as they always had. The thin winter sunlight filtered into its dim interior, exposing the few rusting tools hanging on the walls. Cans of paint whose colors she’d never had time to explore. Even the push mower her landlady had assured her she’d be welcome to use “come summer.”

  There was nothing else. No cabinets or toolboxes. No storage units. Nowhere to hide.

  “Maddie?”

  The word seemed tentative. Too soft. But the sound echoed in the empty space.

  “Maddie, are you in here?” She had strengthened her voice, but there was still no response.

  She hunched her shoulders against the cold and her growing sense of despair. As she turned to step outside, she started to put her hands into the pockets of her jacket for warmth. The right one encountered her grandfather’s pistol, its metal colder than her hands.

  Her eyes scanned the huge lot, skimming across the ruin, still surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape, and then tracking back to the trees. Her breath formed a white cloud of vapor before her as she began to walk toward the remains of the house.

  Part of a wall on the far side was still standing. As she approached, she could again smell the acrid stench that had filled her nostrils during that terrifying flight across the roof. With it, the sense of panic she’d felt then returned.

  They had almost died that night. Both of them.

  That had been his plan. And except for a closed door, it would have succeeded.

  She had reached the yellow tape, which was held up by stakes driven into the ground. She bent, slipping under it.

  When she straightened, she could see over the pile of charred timbers that were all that was left of the walls on this side. The side where the fire had started.

  “Maddie? Where are you?”

  She had pitched her voice to carry across the shell. The wind, however, seemed to catch the words and throw them back at her, rendering them powerless.

  She turned her face away from it, calling again. “Maddie? Answer me, Maddie? I’ve come to take you home.”

  I don’t have a home. I don’t have anything anymore. Without Maddie…

  “Maddie, are you here?”

  Something stirred in the rubble. A scurrying noise like rats in a wall.

  Blythe’s head snapped around as she tried to determine what she was hearing. Whatever had made the sound, it seemed to originate near the center of what had at one time been her home.

  Holding on to the top of the pile of rubble in front of her for balance, she stepped across blackened timbers and into the house. As soon as she put her weight down on her lead foot, whatever she’d been standing on shifted. She would have fallen had she not been holding on to something. As it was, her ankle, the one she’d injured the night of the fire, twisted.

  She gasped with the pain, but then, determined to reach the place from where the sound came, she ignored it. Still holding on to the fallen timbers, she brought her other foot across.

  Limping slightly, she picked her way across what was once the parlor, where most of their possessions had been stored. She didn’t bother to look at the charred and waterlogged objects in her path, other than to avoid them.

  Given the almost total destruction of the house, it didn’t take long to become confused as to what room she was crossing. The blackened refrigerator, however, still stood against the wall the fire had not brought down. Using it as a point of reference, she began to move in that direction.

  When she reached the area where she believed the sound had originated, she stopped. “Maddie? Maddie, where are you?”

  Then she waited, listening for a repetition of what she’d heard. If it had been an animal, her nearness would cause it to freeze. If it had been something else—

  A low creak sharpened her focus on the part of the ruin that had been the kitchen. As she watched, a small section of the floor seemed to undulate.

  She blinked to clear the wind-induced moisture from her eyes, trying to figure out what she was seeing. The sheet linoleum had been burned away or melted by the fire, but the subfloor seemed intact. Despite the scorching they’d received, she could even distinguish the pattern of the boards.

  The section that had shifted before moved again, literally lifting away from the surrounding planks, revealing a dark narrow line.

  Trapdoor. Blythe’s realization of what she was seeing was instantaneous. No longer conscious of the dangers of the uncertain footing, she ran toward it.

  She grabbed the edge and tried to throw the door back, but its weight was too great. She stooped in front of the crack, putting her fingers around the raised edge, preparing to use the larger muscles in her hips and thighs to provide the leverage needed to lift it.

  Before she did, she whispered the word she had shouted this morning until she was hoarse. “Maddie?”

  “Mama?”

  As if the trapdoor weighed nothing, Blythe lifted it and threw it back. It crashed into the burned floorboards, sending up a cloud of soot and debris.

  Blythe was unaware of any of that. The world had shrunk to a pale, ash-smeared face and a pair of wide blue eyes looking up at her from what appeared to be a hole under the floor of the Wright’s kitchen.

  A well, she realized belatedly. An inside well, from the days before they’d had city water out this far. Covered over as it had been by the flooring, she’d had no idea it was here. How her four-year-old could have known…

  She reached down, holding out her hand. After only the slightest hesitation, Maddie put hers into it. Blythe pulled, lifting her up and then squeezing her against her chest without allowing her feet to touch the floor.

  “Maddie. Maddie.”

  She held the little girl away from her, unable to believe she’d real
ly found her. Stifling the sobs that formed in her throat, she asked, “Are you hurt?”

  The blond hair, as begrimed as her face and hands, swung against her shoulders as the child shook her head.

  “What are you doing out here?”

  As she waited for an answer, the blue eyes moved away from her face, seeming to focus on something behind her. The hair began to lift on the back of Blythe’s neck. Almost afraid to turn and see what her daughter was looking at, she pivoted on her toes to face the road, keeping one arm around the little girl.

  A police cruiser was pulling into the driveway. The rush of adrenaline eased, allowing her to take a breath. She hugged Maddie to her side. “It’s okay,” she comforted.

  In response to that reassurance, the little girl melted against her. When the door opened and Cade stepped out of the patrol car, Blythe took another breath, her euphoria producing an inclination to laugh hysterically.

  Why shouldn’t she? She’d been afraid that she had lost Maddie forever, and yet here she was, apparently unscathed by her ordeal. And now Cade was here to ensure that whatever had happened to drive her daughter into the cold and the darkness last night wouldn’t happen again.

  “Blythe?”

  “I found her,” she shouted, the wind once more whipping the words away. “She was in the old well pit. She seems to be—”

  She stopped because Cade’s hand had jerked upward as if he were reaching for his hat. It flew off, spinning backward.

  She had time to think that the wind had caught it before the sound of a rifle shot cut through the stillness, destroying any pleasant fantasy about what was happening.

  Her arm tightened around her daughter to pull her closer. Unable to tear her eyes away, she watched Cade’s body react again, the upward movement of his hand stopped in mid-motion to clutch at his chest. The second shot was an echo to the first, although everything seemed to be happening in slow motion.

  “Cade!”

  Her scream, too, was snatched away by the wind. Unable to believe what she was seeing, she watched as he began to fall backward. His body hit the ground hard enough that his head bounced.

  And then he didn’t move again.