Blue Heaven Part 7

Jess watched as Hearne strode across the lobby and greeted a man sitting in a lounge chair. The man was portly, Hispanic, and well dressed in a light brown suit, Jess noticed.

"Well," Jess said, extricating himself and nodding at the poster Fiona had mounted on the wall, "that's a good thing you're doing. I'll keep an eye out myself since I'm upstream of Sand Creek."

Hearne and the well-dressed man went into Hearne's office, and before the door shut, the banker said, "Take it easy, Jess. I'll call you."

"Thank you, Jim."

Fiona watched the exchange, and Jess could see the wheels spinning in her head.

"Does that mean you get to keep your ranch?" she asked eagerly.

ON HIS WAY out of the lobby doors, Jess paused to look at the poster. MISSING, it said, ANNIE AND WILLIAM TAYLOR. LAST SEEN AT 2:30 P.M. FRIDAY NEAR RILEY CREEK CAMPGROUND ON SAND CREEK. It said Annie was last seen wearing a yellow sweatshirt, jeans, and black sneakers and William was dressed in a short-sleeved black T-shirt, jeans, and red tennis shoes; one of them might be wearing an adult's fly-fishing vest.

The school photos of the children tugged at his heart. Jess thought about how you could see the future personalities of adults in the photos they took when they were children if you cared to look hard. Even now, when he stared at the photos of his son in his home, he could see what he would become. Not that he'd known it at the time, though. But the clues were there, the blueprint. If only he had known.

William smiled broadly, his hair a comma over his forehead, his chin c.o.c.ked slightly to the side. He looked happy-go-lucky and tragic at the same time. It was Annie who most affected him, and he found himself staring at her likeness, mesmerized by it. She was blond, open-faced, clear-eyed, and looked to be challenging the photographer. But there was something in her eyes and the set of her chin. He immediately liked her and felt an affinity he couldn't explain. Had he met her before? He searched his memory and came up with nothing.

Maybe it wasn't that he'd seen or met her before, but what she represented to him. Maybe her photo made him realize how much he had wanted grandchildren. The thought embarra.s.sed him. It wasn't something he thought about or pined over. In fact, this was the first time it had occurred to him with such force. He wished he could start over somehow, maybe do things differently this time, maybe do things right. So instead of an empty house and failing ranch, he would have kids around like these to spend his time with, impart some of his knowledge, tell them they could be ... exceptional.

He stood back and shook his head at the thought but continued looking at the poster.

Phone numbers for the sheriff's department were written underneath the photos.

As he walked outside, Jess glanced over his shoulder and could see the well-dressed man opening a briefcase and spreading the contents out over Jim Hearne's desk.

Sat.u.r.day, 9:14 A.M.

MONICA TAYLOR was beside herself. Annie and William had been missing for over twenty hours. She hadn't slept, eaten, showered, or changed clothes since Tom had walked out of her home the evening before. It had been a long night, made worse when smoke rolled out of the oven-she had forgotten about the lasagna-and set off the alarms. She stood on her front lawn, weeping uncontrollably, being comforted by a volunteer fireman, while the rest of the crew charged through her front door with extinguishers and hoses, tracking mud across the carpet and linoleum, to emerge a few minutes later with a black, smoking, unrecognizable pan of black goo. The neighbors who had been outside in their bathrobes or sweats went back inside their houses.

Before the lasagna burned, sheriff's deputies had been there twice, once to hear her initial concerns and again near midnight to obtain photos of the children and descriptions of what they'd been wearing when she saw them last. The difference in their att.i.tudes from the first visit, when one of the deputies had actually tried to pick her up, to the second, when even the flirting deputy averted his eyes and spoke somberly, brought home the growing seriousness of the disappearance.

The sheriff eventually tired of her hourly calls throughout the night, and sent over a doctor, who prescribed Valium. The Valium took the edge off her pain but didn't make it go away. All she had to do was look at the school photos of Annie and William, the frames now clouded with a film of sticky smoke residue, to bring it all back.

She had developed a routine, of sorts, that consisted of walking through the house and out the back door into the yard, circling the house to the left, and reentering through the front door, all the while clutching the cordless phone as if to squeeze it into juice. As she pa.s.sed the hallway she glanced at herself in the mirror, seeing someone who was almost unrecognizable. The woman who looked back had redrimmed eyes, sunken cheeks, matted, ratty hair. She seemed to be folding over on herself when she walked. Monica now knew what she would look like when she was old.

When the telephone rang, and it rang often, she would gasp, ask G.o.d that it please be one of her children, and punch the TALK b.u.t.ton. It was never Annie or William, but the sheriff's office, a concerned neighbor, the local newspaper, or a rural mail carrier named Fiona Pritzle, who told Monica that she, Fiona, was "the last person on earth to see those kids alive." The phrase had nearly buckled Monica's knees, and made her reach out for the wall to steady herself.

Over and over, Monica replayed the morning before, each time revising the situation so Tom left the house before breakfast or, better yet, that he'd never come at all. She hated herself for what happened, and she asked G.o.d, over and over, for a second chance to make it right. She thought G.o.d, like the sheriff, was likely getting tired of hearing from her lately, especially after all these years when He never even entered her mind. But there would be no more Tom, she vowed. No more Toms, period.

Monica had never been blessed with a road map. Her own parents had not provided one, certainly not for a situation like this. She always envied those who seemed to have a map, a plan, a destination, something inside that provided a framework. In times of confusion and despair, she had little to fall back on and no one to call on for advice or support. Certainly not her mother. And who knew where her father was?

It was tough raising two children alone. The men she met were either divorced themselves and loaded with baggage or quirks, married and looking for a fling or an easy out, or immature like Tom. None of them had the potential or desire to be a good father to her children, which was what she yearned for. Annie needed a man in her life, but William needed one even more. Sure, the men she met were interested in Monica. But not Monica and her children. She couldn't really blame them, but she did. There had been too many years wasted hoping, too many years of listlessness and paralysis, treading water, hoping some man would throw a lifeline. Monica was well aware of the fact that she was not the only single mother in the world. Her own mother had the same experience, after her father-who called Monica his princess, his angel, his b.u.t.ton-had left without saying good-bye. But that's where the similarity ended, because Monica loved her children deeply.

But she'd been weak. The desire she'd had for Tom now seemed to have happened in another life. It had been so pointless, so shallow, so selfish. Sure, she'd wanted him in her bed. Once, there had been many. But she wasn't an animal. She'd learned to control herself, not to give in to her basest instinct anymore. There'd been other men-better men-who'd wanted to stay over. The most recent was Oscar Swann. But she'd refused him, and them, explained that her children-their family-came first. Her children needed a father but not simply a male, and certainly not a series of them. Monica knew what that did to children because it had happened to her.

The phone rang in her hand, startling her like it did every time. As she raised it to her mouth, the receiver chirped and the phone went dead. She had forgotten to charge it.

She slammed the telephone into the charging cradle, trying to will it to ring again. It didn't.

For the first time she could remember, her life was absolutely focused: She needed her children back.

SHE WAS at her kitchen table, staring again at the digital time display on the microwave, when Sheriff Ed Carey rapped on the screen door of the mudroom.

"May I come in, Miz Taylor?"

She looked up at him and nodded, not having the energy to speak.

As he entered, she searched his face for some kind of indication of why he was there. She swore that if he wouldn't meet her eyes, if the news he brought was bad news, she would die right there, on the spot. But Carey's face was blank, and maybe a little facetious, as if he were playacting at being concerned but wasn't very good at it.

Sheriff Carey was tall and wore his uniform well, but there wasn't much he could do to disguise the potbelly that stuck straight out from his trunk and strained the b.u.t.tons on his short-sleeved khaki shirt. When he was inside, he removed his straw cowboy hat and adjusted his belt up, which slipped back down under his gut with his first step.

"I tried to call you earlier," he said, nodding at the phone, the question why she didn't answer hanging in the air.

"The phone was dead," she said, her voice a croak, as if she was using it for the first time. "So that was you."

He nodded and gestured toward a chair.

"Do you have anything to tell me?"

He sat down and looked around for a place that was not dirtied with soot to put his hat down. Finally, he perched it on his knee.

"I need to ask you a few questions," Carey said, and this time he let his eyes slip away from hers.

"Oh, no ..."

"No, it's not that," he said quickly, realizing what she had leaped to.

"You haven't found them?"

He shook his head. "I wish I had better news, but I don't. What I can tell you is that one of my deputies found some things up by Sand Creek. A fly rod and a shoe stuck in the mud. I was hoping you could identify them."

Her mind raced. Of course she could identify a shoe if it was Annie's or William's. But what was the brand of the fly rod Tom said was missing?

"I could do that," she said. "But I might have to call someone to identify the rod."

"That would be Tom Boyd, I presume?"

"Yes."

Carey nodded, and reached for his breast pocket. "You don't mind if I take a few notes, do you?"

"No, why should I?"

Carey shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He was the new sheriff, barely elected just a few months ago in a close contest. His background was in real estate. She wondered how much he really knew about his job. Forty-nine percent of the county wondered the same thing.

"My deputies think this may be more than, you know, the kids getting lost."

Monica felt as if something were rising in her from a reserve she didn't know she had. She wished the Valium would wear off so she could concentrate better.

"What are you saying to me?"

"Well, Miz Taylor, we've decided to treat this matter as a criminal investigation, not a missing persons case. The rod was found hung up in some brush a hundred yards from the river. The shoe was found in a mudhole farther up the path, and it was easy to see and find. That leads my deputies to believe that whoever lost the shoe-and we think it might have been Annie-could have easily turned around and pulled it out. But she didn't. That indicates that she might have been in a hurry. You know, like she was running from something or somebody."

Monica felt her eyes widen. Her breath came in short bursts.

Carey produced a quart-sized Ziploc bag and held it up to the light. Inside was a muddy shoe. The sight of it seared Monica, welded her to her chair.

"It's Annie's" she said, scarcely raising her voice. "Who were they running from?"

Carey put the shoe on the table and turned his hands, palms up. "That, we don't know. My men have found some prints in the mud up there, but they're bad ones. The rain last night fouled up anything definitive. We're still looking, and my guys are combing the area on a grid, inch by inch."

The world had suddenly made a hard turn and darkened. Throughout the sleepless night, she had envisioned her children lost somewhere in the forest, huddled together in the rain. She had hoped they'd found shelter of some kind and were smart enough to stay put. She had even thought of the creek, thought of them falling into it and being swept away. It was awful, that thought. But she hadn't considered what the sheriff was now telling her. That her children were prey to someone.

"Oh, no ..."

She stared at the shoe, the smears of mud on the inside of the plastic, the laces broken. As if violence had been packaged in a neat container.

Carey narrowed his eyes and looked at her, studying her. "Miz Taylor, are you going to be okay?"

She shook her head slightly. "No, I'm not. You're telling me that someone was after my children."

"We don't know that yet," he said. "It's speculation based on very little evidence. But we can't rule it out, and we need to cover everything. It could be they'll turn up any minute. Maybe they stayed at a friend's, who knows?"

She continued to shake her head. Her throat constricted. It was difficult to get air. She had given a deputy the names and numbers of all of Annie's and William's friends, and had called their parents herself. None of them had seen her children.

"Miz Taylor, I need to ask you if you know of anyone who may have something against you, or your kids."

"What?"

"Has anyone threatened you? Stalked you? Do you know if your children had any trouble with anyone who might try to scare them or hurt them? They each have a different father, right?"

"Right," she said, wincing at how it sounded. "But neither is around, as you know."

William's father, Billy, had been killed in a prison riot at the Idaho State Correctional Inst.i.tution in Boise. She had divorced him three years before, while he was on trial for owning and operating four methamphetamine labs, which apparently generated a lot more income for Billy than his struggling construction business. The marriage had been dead by eighteen months after the ceremony but went on for two more years. Billy had been proud of the fact that he fathered a son, but didn't particularly like William and, like Tom, called him a mama's boy. William barely knew or remembered his father, but sometimes talked about him as a mythical being, a stoic and legendary Western outlaw. Monica didn't encourage William's projections but didn't disparage Billy in front of her son because she didn't think it would serve any good purpose. Annie knew Billy for what he was, and rolled her eyes when her brother talked about his father the outlaw. But Billy'd never threatened his son, or Monica, because by the end he simply didn't care about either of them.

Up until a year ago, Annie had a.s.sumed Billy was her father, too. Then she did the math. That had been a bad day for Monica, when Annie asked. When she did, Monica simply said, "He's watching over you." Annie didn't really accept the answer. It was obvious it didn't satisfy her. Monica knew there would be more questions as time went by, and she had dreaded them. Now, Monica hoped Annie would be back so she could answer them.

"Is he dead?" the sheriff asked.

"Something like that. He's incarcerated as well."

The sheriff eyed her closely, withholding judgment. Yes, Monica thought, I'm used to those looks, I know ...

"We need to explore every possibility so we can rule things out," Carey said, interrupting Monica's thoughts. "First, and pardon me for being rude, but I a.s.sume that your family is fairly low-income. Correct?"

She nodded. It was obvious.

"Anyone you can think of at your place of work? Disgruntled employees?"

"No. Nothing unusual."

He glanced at his notes. "You're the manager of women's casual apparel at the outlet store, correct?"

She nodded. "It provides a steady income and decent health benefits for the kids. It's a meaningless job."

"Any problem with the neighbors?"

She shook her head. She kept her distance from her neighbors except for inevitable pleasantries about the weather or school-related topics. The only thing she could think of was when a single retired bachelor down the block complained about William and Annie cutting across his yard as they walked to school, and she told the sheriff about it. The sheriff made a note.

"What about your extended family? Is there money there? Would a kidnapper have a reason to hold your children for ransom?"

"My mother cleans houses and tends bar in Spokane," Monica said evenly. "My father has been gone for years. We have nothing."

"Any others?"

She thought of her cousin Sandy in Coeur d'Alene, the only cousin she knew. Sandy was married to a city councilman and had four bright kids. She'd invited Monica to picnics and family functions for a while, and used to call to invite her to church. Sandy had even said maybe she could help Monica "meet a nice man." Sandy knew about what happened to Billy, as everyone did. They were decent gestures from a decent woman, but Monica couldn't bring herself to accept. She didn't want to be Sandy's project, or the object of her effort at good works. Monica had been too stubbornly proud to accept help. Sandy rarely called anymore.

So many people-Sandy, the banker Jim Hearne, her neighbor down the street who was always inviting her to church and bingo night-had tried to help her since the divorce, but she never saw it as help at the time. Hearne especially had watched out for her, and had always been there to help in his quiet way. She often saw the attempts as interference, or as pity. That had been a mistake, Monica realized now. Maybe if she'd opened up more, there would have been someone to take William fishing.

The sheriff raised his hand. "Like I said, I need to rule out every possibility. This is bound to be uncomfortable for you."

She nodded again. "Not as uncomfortable as having my children missing."

The sheriff smiled sympathetically, then his eyes hardened. "This Tom Boyd. A neighbor reported that she saw him leaving your house last night. She said he was visibly angry, and she heard him yell and slam your door shut. She said she heard you yelling, too. Was there some kind of disagreement?"

No, she thought. The sheriff can't be going in this direction. "We had an argument."

"What about?"

She swallowed. "Tom found out his fishing rod and vest were missing. He thought Annie had taken them. He didn't get along with Annie very well, and I told him to leave."

She knew how that sounded. So: "But I'm sure Tom had nothing to do with it. The kids were gone for a long time already when it happened."

The sheriff asked her for the time of the argument.

"It was around six," she said. "I waited two more hours before I called you."

She could see Carey calculating it in his head. Tom would have had enough time, and enough light, to track down Annie and William.

"Tom called me last night," Monica said. "It was after ten. Maybe ten-thirty. He asked whether my kids had come home."

"How did he sound?"

Monica swallowed. "He was drunk. He was at some bar."

Carey nodded, as if she'd confirmed something. "He was seen last night at the Sand Creek Bar. The bartender said he was inebriated. Still in his uniform, very distraught and upset. They refused to give him more drinks, and he got angry and left around eleven."

Monica seized on the words inebriated and distraught.