I walked back to the corner of the shop and hesitantly tipped my head around the corner. It took forever, but finally the house was in view. Pat Corley was not standing on the gravel in between the two buildings.
I stared at the house a long time, forever maybe, until it felt like no one was moving inside there. I walked out of the safety of shadows and pressed up against the shop door, tilting up on my toes and reaching way up, fingertips searching for something the shape and size of a key.
Miracles do happen. Found, I didn’t knock it to the ground.
It slid in easily and the knob turned easily in my hand. That having gone so well I totally expected a siren to go off once the door was all the way open. It didn’t. I looked back at the house. Nothing going on, at least, not that I could see or hear. I slowly pulled the door shut behind me.
Enough light sourced from the moon-illuminated sky, filtering in through the back window, I could almost negotiate the shop floor without turning on the flashlight. Almost.
The shop smelled like oil and gas and metal. Tools. It smelled like tools. They were all over. A big table set against the wall in the corner and two big rolling trays in between the side door and the Jeep.
The Jeep. Maybe it was Uncle Bob’s. Maybe he’d gotten sick and tired of fussing with the trucks. Just out and out bought himself a Jeep.
I snapped a photo of the Jeep with my phone. Checked it. Way too dark. It could be a picture of anything. I could’ve taken it at the bottom of the sea for all it showed definitively. Realizing I had a flashlight, I aimed it at the Jeep, and took a much higher quality photo. Right after I took it, I stood still, listening for any sign of movement outside, or coming from the house.
Mojo had disappeared. Whoever it was had taken her inside.
To mask their movements. To keep me from knowing where they might be.
I swore.
I texted Sherman again. No reply.
I decided to try and look for something, some sort of evidence, and if it was there, grab it, and then I was going to get out.
I walked up to the Jeep, walking on tiptoe. The canopy was attached to the Jeep frame. The driver’s side door was locked. I walked around to the passenger’s side door. Locked.
I put my hands up against the window and tried squinting, like that would let me see inside better. I thumbed the flashlight on and looked inside the Jeep. The sweeping light revealed nothing of interest, nothing that cemented the facts of the Jeep’s ownership.
I walked around the back of the vehicle. Rushing, I bumped into the Jeep, the big spare tire in back, and my hold on both the phone and the flashlight loosened. In a moment’s decision, I chose to save the phone. The flashlight hit the floor and rolled towards the back wall, up against the base of the supply shelf set in front of the window stationed dead center in the shop’s back wall.
Kneeling down, I had my hand on the flashlight when the beam from another flashlight covered me. Like a dummy, for a moment I thought, oh, I’d somehow turned the flashlight on and the beam was reflecting back on me.
Then the overhead lights snapped on. They were hooded fluorescents, hanging from the ceiling. They began to buzz almost the moment they came to life. All the shadows in the shop fled.
Uncle Bob stood with his upper torso leaning into the shop from behind the open side door. His hand had left the light switch already. It had the flashlight in it. He continued to push the door open and once he was inside far enough, in his left hand I saw the unmistakable black shape of a handgun.
Missing his signature baseball cap, and kind of squinting at me, either from the hour or being perturbed, he didn’t look quite himself. He didn’t appear as seriously pissed as Dad yelling at Sherman, but he didn’t look thrilled to see me, not in these circumstances.
The gun certainly wasn’t helping either.
“Lucy? What are you doing here?”
I was still crouched down.
Uncle Bob looked around like he half expected even more unwelcome guests to be standing around inside the shop at this time of hour.
“Does your dad…Your dad doesn’t know you’re out here now does he?” he asked.
“He’s asleep.” Almost whispering it.
“Well now,” he said, “well now why don’t you…Why don’t you get up and we’ll…I’ll, I’ll take you back home, ok?”
He turned a half turn back towards the door.
“Yeah. We’ll just…I’ll just take you back.”
He tugged at his pajama top jammed errantly into the waist of jeans.
I stood. Pointing at the Jeep I said, “Whose Jeep is this, Uncle Bob?”
He turned and looked at me, his head thrust out at an angle like he hadn’t quite heard me correctly.
“How’s that?”
“Whose Jeep is this?”
“It’s mine.” Snap. Automatic.
“It is?”
“It is.”
“Since when?”
“I just…Had it a couple days now.”
“You didn’t have it on Friday.”
“Well, you know, I bought it, but I had to have it, uh, looked at. Detailed.”
“I didn’t think you liked Jeeps.”
“I like them fine. I mean,” he tried to say with a laugh, “with all the trouble the trucks have been giving me, only a crazy man wouldn’t think about trying some other vehicle to get out and about.”
The smile on his face faded at sign that I wasn’t so easily cheered by his realization.
“Why does the muffler on your truck sound like the muffler I heard while I was being held by the kidnappers?”
He tapped the gun muzzle against the length of his thigh. He looked into the space immediately in front of him like the lights were reflecting off some bubble of air visible only to him and the answers to the question were there, he only had to interpret them right then share his knowledge.
“I heard it when you came over today. When you drove up to the house I wasn’t sure if that’s what I was hearing. I wasn’t sure if when I was kidnapped I heard anything. But I think it is. Why would that be? Why would you be so close to where I was being held? That doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t make sense at all. Why is Pat Corley’s Jeep here? Don’t tell me it isn’t his. Please don’t. And if…And if you…And if you and he had something to do with me being…Then where’s Maddy? What did you do with Maddy? Where is she? Where’s Maddy?”
When I reached up to brush my nose with the back of my hand part of me seemed surprised that tears now wet my cheeks.
He continued ticking the gun muzzle off his leg.
When he took a step towards me I backed away.
“Lucy.” He whispered. “Look.”
He knelt and set the gun on the shop floor. Standing he held his hand up, the fingers spread like that made the gun even more out of his hand than it already was. He stepped towards me.
I turned and hurriedly walked around the back of the Jeep and down the passenger side towards the rolling garage door.
Grabbing for the skinny bar slid through the vertical track I managed to drop the flashlight. It clattered on the floor. I struggled with the bar. It was like it’d been soldered to the frame. I stood and put my weight against the door, trying to push it down so the vertical bar would wobble in the slot and I could yank it out, get the door open, get out of the shop, and get away from here.
Uncle Bob walked down the passenger side of the Jeep. He still had his hands up, showing me his palms. He kept saying my name. Kept saying it and he kept getting closer.
I screamed and jerked on the security bar. It finally snicked out of the frame. I shoved it so viciously the arc my hands followed whacked my knuckles off the vertical track.
I grabbed the handle and shoved the door up. I ducked down and smacked the back of my head on the bottom of the rising, rattling garage do
or.
I saw darkness. Freedom.
I ran right into the person standing outside the garage door.
I bounced off them and screamed, screamed because I figured it was Pat Corley, screamed because it might be my last opportunity to try and get someone’s help.
I fell on the ground, bounced on the gravel. I looked up.
Jack Ford stood illuminated by the shop lights.
He looked at me, and then he looked at Uncle Bob.
Jack looked pissed.
Chapter 41
Jack had followed me from the house.
Earlier in the day he’d bottomed out. He hadn’t slept since Thursday night. First he’d stayed up for hours, worried about me and then stayed up ever since Maddy had been taken.
Around the time Sherman was driving me to see Kitty, Jack had collapsed and taken in a good 4 hours of sleep.
He needed it. He needed to be refreshed, to be able to think, be at the top of his game. He didn’t need a lot of sleep to maintain that. Just enough.
He’d heard me sneak out of the house. He’d allowed me to get a good lead and then ran after me, through the dark.
Several times he’d dropped low to the ground, anticipating when I might pause and look back at the fields I was walking across. It was the training from the action movies that’d made him a worldwide movie star. The training served him. Informed not only his roles, but his entire life.
Jack offered me his hand. I took it and he helped me up.
“What’s going on here?”
“Nothing,” I said. Scared of getting in trouble for some reason.
“Lucy,” said Jack. “You’re shaking.”
Uncle Bob said nothing when Jack glanced at him.
“You were yelling,” Jack said to me.
“He’s-“ I said. “He knows something. That Jeep. That’s the bus driver’s Jeep.”
Jack looked like I was sputtering absolute nuttiness. He looked at Uncle Bob.
“She’s upset,” said Uncle Bob. “You know. From the-“
“Jack. He was out where I was being held by the kidnappers.”
I’d grabbed his arm. Squeezed it to capture and hold his eyes.
“When I was held, I heard the truck. That green piece of shit over there. I heard that truck. I know I did. I know it was his.”
Jack looked from me to Uncle Bob.
Jack had this look on his face he’d used sparingly but effectively portraying his best-known role, Quantum. He looked like Quantum had just been given some seriously concrete intel that shed unflattering light on someone he thought he could trust. Someone he now knew had lied to him, lies with catastrophic results.
He took a single step towards Uncle Bob and Uncle Bob backtracked as though he were facing a man with a knife in hand.
“I don’t know what she means. Look. I know. She’s upset, all right? She’s upset. I get it. We all are.”
Jack asked, “Whose Jeep is that?”
“Mine.” Saying it emphatically. Without a doubt.
Jack walked past Uncle Bob into the shop. He looked at the Jeep. Then to his right. He walked out of view. I could hear him moving tools around somewhere behind the still rolled down garage door.
He walked back into view with a seriously long handled axe in hand.
“I’m guessing the Jeep is locked, yes?”
I nodded, and mouthed, “Yes.”
Jack walked around to the passenger side door, seemed to mentally measure the placement of his blow, turned the axe so he’d be leading with the meat not the blade, and then wound back and with a single stroke shattered the passenger side window.
There was no wallet or license or registration inside the Jeep. There was a duffel bag crammed down behind one of the front seats, mostly empty except for a pair of handcuffs and a roll of duct tape.
Inside the jockey box, underneath a sealed packet of Kleenex and a roll of Chapstick and several stray sticks of Big Red chewing gum, was a pamphlet for the Ashmond Gun Club.
Chapter 42
Confronted, Uncle Bob shut down.
Frustration mounting, I thought Jack might grab him and shake him or just decide to beat a confession out of him.
“Bob,” he said, “if you know where Maddy is, if you know where she is, you need to tell me. She’s my wife. She’s my wife, Bob. I need to know where she is.”
Bob looked rattled. His eyes bobbled about like inside his skull one by one doors to rooms where slamming shut.
Without a word he turned around and walked for the house, gravel crunching under foot. The screen door closed behind him, but he didn’t shut the main door. Mojo woofed. I could see her shape moving behind the screen door.
Jack said, “We need to get moving on this.”
He looked at the house.
“He doesn’t have a gun does he?”
“He set it down inside the garage.”
“Does he have two?”
We looked at each other and then both ran to the house. We both clicked to the same mental image. Bob with a gun didn’t present danger to us. Only to himself.
Mojo was super excited to have people in her house. She woofed at us, her fuzzy rear end twitching back and forth faster than ever before.
Uncle Bob stood in his living room, still, quiet, his face not unlike that you’d imagine coming upon seeing the survivor of some massacre or any near incomprehensible tragedy.
Jack pulled out his phone.
He hit speed dial. Looked at me. “Dina,” he said then tilted the phone back up around his mouth. Moments later Jack spoke into the phone.
“I need a pick up. Lucy and I are at Bob’s. Right. Uncle Bob’s. I’ll explain once you get here.”
Done. He hung up. A little past 2 a.m. now. Didn’t matter. Dina was turned on just like that. Jack’s personal Lobot.
“Why?” he asked me. “Why take you? Or Maddy? Money?”
To Uncle Bob he asked, “Do, do you need money? Is that it? I don’t understand this. I don’t get this.”
Uncle Bob said nothing.
“No,” I said. “Not money.”
“Then what?”
I couldn’t get it out of my chest at first. My face crumpled up and I hated it. I didn’t want to cry in front of people. I looked so ugly crying. Maddy looked beautiful, but Maddy looked beautiful tying her shoes or wiping her nose. It was too much of the McCall DNA in me. I’d seen my aunt sobbing before and I knew that’s what I looked like when I got down to participating in a tear fest.
“It’s you,” I said. “And Horace. And Lucentology. It’s the religion. Dad didn’t want you to, to…He thought Maddy was…”
Jack’s brow crumpled.
“It was Dad,” I said to Uncle Bob. “Wasn’t it? Dad did all of this. You’re just part of it. Dad did all of this. He took Maddy. He got you and Pat to…” I shook my head.
The only sound in the house those produced by Mojo, her muzzle buried against her back right leg as she did battle with fleas. She sneezed several times and minutes later, at the sound of the SUV pulling into the driveway, she abandoned her battle to hop up and look through the screen door outside, woofing, tail end whipping back and forth in anticipation of a stranger’s pets.
Chapter 43
Dina called my uncle Mr. McCall as she ushered him into the SUV backseat. She didn’t seem the type to call him Bob.
When Dina arrived at Uncle Bob’s house her hair was pulled into a short ponytail and she still had on the black suit jacket and button down shirt, but she wore a pair of parachute pants, pockets up and down each leg. I could imagine each pocket bearing a clip of ammunition, handcuffs, maybe even some sort of grenade.
Dina didn’t argue when I said we should take Mojo with us. I knew her. I knew she’d freak out without someone at the house with her. Mojo happily hopped up onto the
lowered SUV tailgate. Inside, she worked her muzzle into the back of Uncle Bob’s head. He was still zoned out. I called Mojo over and the length of the trip she bellied up behind the backseat and stayed underneath my hand, receiving a steady course of ear scratches.
When we pulled into our driveway and parked in front of the house, I opened my door in the backseat and would not have been surprised to see steam roiling off the vehicle.
I remembered Jack’s open invitation from the wedding to hop into a Lamborghini on his friend’s private track. I couldn’t imagine the experience being all too different from witnessing Dina’s handling of the SUV.
The headlights illuminating the gravel road, the dashboard lights, it was like being in the cockpit of a spaceship hurtling through the unknown.
Driving fast as she had been, Jack talked to her the whole time, filling her in on what we knew. When she asked questions she asked in a hushed voice. Low key, in control. You might’ve thought it was sleepiness keeping her so reserved, but then a glance at the speedometer would’ve retired the notion immediately.
Uncle Bob stayed in the SUV. Mojo snuffled her still zoned out master and then promptly forgot all about him as I told her to come on out in that tone of voice that promised a ball or stick was about to be thrown.
The sky that night was clear. The stars were out in force.
The house was dark.
Dina asked, “How do you want to do this, Mr. Ford?”
“I don’t know.”
He dug the point of his shoe into the ground.
“Do we wake him up?” asked Dina.
“No,” I said.
They both looked at me.
“If anyone should go in there it should be me.”
Jack nodded. Dina stared at me. I didn’t know if one of the things she’d asked Jack had been could they trust me. If the father and the uncle were in on it, why not the younger sister? The photograph flashed through my head. My unconscious body. Maybe that convinced her. Or maybe that made her even more wary of me, that I was willing to play along, go that far to make Maddy’s abduction appear more legitimate.
I still didn’t know her participation level in Nick Verney’s murder. Or if she’d even had a part. Now wasn’t the time to sort all that out.
“It should be me.” I said it already moving past them towards the front door.