Over the hills and everywhere
AS I DROVE TOWARD THE MOUNTAINS, I thought of how I'd seriously underestimated the work required to put out a weekly newspaper. I'd thought it would be a snap, leaving me with plenty of free time to finish up my second novel. Instead, I seemed to be working twenty-two-hour days and was never caught up with anything. I hadn't even looked at my half-finished manuscript in two months.
P. J. Mullins never worked that hard-I'd been told that often enough-and I was well aware of that fact. She'd earned new respect from me, and I couldn't wait until she was well enough to come back and take over again.
There were times, when I was snowed under at the Chronicle, I questioned my journalistic ability, and I had to remind myself that I'd often felt overwhelmed when I was working on the paper in New York. Although I'd won a couple of prizes for my investigative reporting, I'd never really felt comfortable with what I was doing there. What I need to do, I thought, is finish my novel and hope it's a best-seller. Then I'll never have to worry about working again. With pleasant thoughts of movie contracts and TV series drifting through my head, it seemed only a short time until I reached Corny's Corner.
The Iron Ore Road was still clogged with vehicles, but the parking situation at the crossroads was now better organized. A man in his youthful eighties, wearing a Day-Glo orange vest with black letters that said FIRE POLICE on the front, directed me to an empty place in the field. There were few media vehicles visible. I assumed they'd moved on to the latest tragedy du jour.
Walking was treacherous; the depth of the plowed furrows was hidden by the light dusting of snow. Wary of twisting an ankle, I slowly made my way to the area where the headquarters tent had been set up. I didn't recognize any of the women at the coffee and doughnut table, although one of them waved at me, which made me feel good.
Since Luscious was back in the borough, I wasn't sure whom I'd find inside the tent. The freckle-faced youngster in a Lickin Creek police uniform, studying a map, had to be the force's latest part-timer. One of a nonstop parade of recent graduates of the nearby junior college's criminal justice program. Once they had a little experience under their police belts, they moved on to “real” jobs elsewhere.
He recognized me immediately. “Hi, Tori. I've been looking forward to meeting you. My name's Afton Finkey.” He extended his hand, which I shook.
I thought I'd grown accustomed to the odd names Lickin Creekers gave to their defenseless children, but Afton was a new one. I couldn't resist commenting, “I don't think I've ever met an Afton before.”
“Thank you,” he said, with a smile that revealed braces. “My mother heard the song ‘Flow Gently, Sweet Afton’ while she was carrying me and thought it would make a nice name. I really am glad you're here to help us, Tori. Luscious says he wouldn't know what to do without you.”
All I could think was: Now I've got two Lickin Creek policemen to play nursemaid to. However, after talking to Afton for a few minutes, I realized Luscious had left a competent person in charge.
Unfortunately, there was still no sign of the missing child. More volunteers had arrived from all over the tri-state area, and Afton told me he was expanding the search area.
“Trouble is,” Afton said as he showed me the enlarged area on the map, “a little kid like that could be easy to miss. If he fell into a cave, and there's lots of them out there, or got knocked out, he wouldn't hear us calling for him.”
“What do you think his chances of survival are?” I asked.
“Pretty good, if he's conscious. The temperature's stayed above freezing. And he's a mountain boy; he should know how to take care of himself-for awhile anyway.”
A cellular phone rang, and Afton picked it up. His boyish face turned grim as he listened. After a few moments, he disconnected, snatched up his coat, and jammed his arms into the sleeves.
“Gotta get up to the Poffenbergers',” he said.
“What's wrong?” I asked, trailing him outside.
“The kids-seems they've changed their story.” His long legs had already carried him halfway across the field.
“Wait for me,” I said, trying to keep up with him.
I drove behind the cruiser, as fast as I dared, to the Iron Ore Mansions Trailer Park. At the entrance to the park, I groaned, “Oh, no.” Just inside the gate, media vans lined both sides of the narrow street. I saw television crews from as far away as Baltimore and the District of Columbia, as well as many from the tristate area of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and West Virginia. What had happened? I parked and leaped from the truck, fearing the worst.
Mr. Poffenberger, dressed in an ill-fitting blue suit, was standing in front of his trailer, talking to a female reporter who looked vaguely familiar to me.
Several people stared at me as I approached, as if trying to decide whether or not I was worthy of being interviewed. Most decided, correctly, I was not worth bothering with, but one young reporter, who must have been desperate, thrust a microphone in my face. “Would you care to make a statement?”
I brushed him aside with practiced scorn-I hadn't been in the news business for ten years for nothing-and he backed away.
Through the open door, I saw Afton standing in the living room with his back to me, so I squeezed past Kevin's father and went inside. Mrs. Poffenberger sat on the sofa, nursing her yellow-bundled baby. Her hair hadn't been combed today, and her puffy nose was nearly as red as the drooping Christmas poinsettia on the coffee table.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
Her eyes opened wide, as though she were surprised someone would care how she felt. “Uh-huh. They told me in the emergency room it weren't Kevin in the quarry.” She wiped her nose with the milk-stained diaper that was draped over her shoulder.
“You should have stayed in the hospital,” I said.
“Yeah, sure. You going to pay the bill? 'Scuse me. The baby needs changed.” She left the room with the baby.
“What did the kids say?” I asked Afton.
“Now they're saying a man in a black sports utility vehicle took him.”
My jaw dropped. “Kevin was kidnapped? Why the hell didn't they tell us that before?”
“Let's ask them,” Afton said, his face grim. He reached through the open front door and tapped Mr. Poffenberger on the shoulder, interrupting his interview with an anchorman from NBC. “Get the kids in here. Now!” he ordered with surprising authority.
Within a few minutes, an assortment of Poffenberger children had been rounded up and sat in a semicircle on the orange shag carpet before us. Kevin's parents sat side by side on the couch. Another couple, parents of Kevin's cousins Pearl and Peter, took the recliner-he, seated, she, perched on an arm.
“Now,” the young policeman said sternly, “let's hear what happened. And I want the truth!”
As one, the little towheads turned to Pearl. With her eyes downcast, she began her tale. “It was a guy in a big black boxy kind of car,” she said. “We was walking along the road, and he stopped and said he needed some directions. Kevin went over to him, even though I told him not to, and the guy grabbed him and pulled him into the car and drove off.”
“Which way?” Afton asked.
“Down the mountain. Toward town.”
“This man-what did he look like?”
Pearl appeared to be thinking. “We couldn't see his face very good, because he was wearing a ball cap pulled down real low. But he had a beard. Didn't he, Peter?”
Her brother Peter nodded. “Yeah, a beard and a ball cap.”
“What team?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“You said he was wearing a ball cap. I wondered what team?”
“It wasn't a real ball cap,” Pearl answered. “Just one of them hats that look like ball caps. It advertised tractors or something.”
“Yeah,” Peter said. “Tractors.”
“Did you notice anything else? How old do you think he was? How tall was he? What kind of clothes he was wearing?” Afton had his notebook out.
Pearl scrunched her forehead as if she were working really hard at remembering something. “He wasn't a real young guy. Maybe as old as her,” she said, jerking a thumb in my direction. “He never got out of the car, so I don't know how tall he was. Wait! I remember he was wearing a red-plaid flannel shirt.”
A bearded man, about thirty years old, wearing a cap advertising tractors and a plaid flannel shirt. Pearl had just described half the men in Lickin Creek!
“Why didn't you tell your parents right away about this man?” Afton asked. “Why did you let us believe Kevin had wandered off by himself?”
The little faces all looked at Pearl, waiting for her to answer. “The guy told us he'd come back and get us if we told,” Pearl said.
“You were afraid, is that right?”
The heads nodded in unison.
“How about the vehicle? Did you catch a glimpse of the license plate?”
The forehead scrunched again. “Texas,” Pearl said. “I think it was a Texas plate.”
Afton asked a few more questions, with unsatisfying results, and finally told the children they could leave.
“Can we sleep over?” Pearl asked her mother.
The woman looked at Kevin's mother, who gave a slight nod. But one of her children began to whine. “I don't want to sleep with Peter. He always pees the bed.”
The scathing look Pearl directed at her brother should have immediately cured his enuresis problem.
“I'll call Luscious and the state police,” Afton said to me as he pulled on his coat. “We need to put out an APB for that sports utility vehicle.”
“You're not going to call off the search on the mountain, are you?” I asked him.
He shook his head and glanced into the kitchen, where the adult Poffenbergers had all adjourned. I could hear them popping the tabs off beer cans. The children had turned on the TV and were enthralled by an incredibly violent cartoon. He lowered his voice so only I could hear. “I don't really believe anything that Pearl says. This abduction story doesn't ring true.”
“Exactly what I thought,” I said. “I'd sure like to get that girl alone for five minutes. See what I could get out of her.”
Afton sighed. “I know how you feel, but for the time being I have to follow up on her story.”
Pearl, in front of the TV set, was watching us with a thoughtful expression on her face. I wondered what she'd overheard.
Afton opened the front door and jumped back, startled, as the press began shouting questions at him.
“You coming?” he asked me.
“You go ahead,” I said. “I need to talk to Mrs. Pof-fenberger for a minute.”
I'd just recalled that Praxythea had asked me to bring her something, preferably metal, of Kevin's. It couldn't do any harm, I thought, so I went in search of Mrs. Poffenberger. I found her in the bedroom with the baby.
She handed me a tiny pocketknife, saying it had been Kevin's birthday present. Although I wondered about the family's judgment in giving a small child a knife, I accepted it with only a word of thanks.
“They're going to find him, Mrs. Poffenberger. I know they will.” I wanted to offer her some encouragement, some hope.
“Yeah, sure.” Her voice was flat. I could tell she'd already given up.
I drove through late-afternoon shadows back to the borough. As I approached downtown, a volunteer traffic cop in a yellow vest signaled me to stop. I rolled down the window and asked, “What's the matter? Water main burst again?”
“Nah, they're setting up the Nativity scene in the square so the traffic needs detoured. You can take a right on Oak, a left on Elm, another left, this time on Maple, and then-”
“Thanks, I'll find my way.” Lickin Creek isn't very big, but its one-way streets could have been the inspiration for Dante's circles of Hell. Why the borough council chose rush hour to close Main Street was beyond my comprehension.
After circling aimlessly for about fifteen minutes, I ended up where I'd started, only this time the traffic cop took pity on me and let me through. As I drove past the fountain in the center of the square, I saw Yoder Construction Company workers busily turning it into a manger.
Because of the time I wasted being lost, it was dark when I pulled through the gates into the Moon Lake compound, but my house was illuminated by floodlights like a Broadway theater on opening night. Trucks and vans lined the dirt road and filled my circular drive.
More media people, I realized. Cables lay coiled in the grass like a nest of pythons.
Praxythea stood on the front porch in a black bodysuit that covered her from neck to toe but hid nothing. Didn't the woman own underwear? She was speaking into a microphone held by a beautiful, raven-haired Asian woman.
As I approached the house, I recognized some faces from the tabloid news shows, and I heard snatches of predictable phrases: “-astounding new developments-search for bearded man-tristate area-possible connections with children abducted in Florida and Texas-noted psychic's vision directed police to a deserted quarry where…”
“Be careful up there,” I called to Praxythea and several familiar talking heads. “That porch roof is liable to cave in.”
They ignored me, as did the news crews on the lawn, so I took my life in my hands, climbed the steps, and entered the house through the front door. I gathered up the mail that lay on the carpet and flipped through the envelopes while I hiked to the kitchen. Damn! Still nothing from Garnet. I tossed the envelopes on the table to look through later.
I refilled the cats’ bowls with Tasty Tabby Treats, and while they happily and noisily chewed their food, I checked the iguana to make sure it had water and some of the lizard food Oretta had left with it. As far as I could tell, he was all right, but I tossed in a little lettuce as a treat. Then I prepared two cups of instant coffee and doctored mine with the powders that represented sugar and cream.
Praxythea entered and sank into a chair across the table from me. “How did you know I wanted this?” she said with a smile, picking up one of the cups.
I didn't return her smile. “Maybe I'm the psychic.”
“You're upset with me,” she said.
“It doesn't take a psychic to know that.”
“Publicity is very important. Without the media attention, the people who need me most wouldn't know about me.”
“And it sells books.”
“Of course. Money is important, no doubt about it. It gives me the freedom to go where I'm needed.”
“Okay, Praxythea, you're a saint.” Before the protest could burst from her parted lips, I took Kevin's pock-etknife from my handbag and handed it to her. “See what you can do with this.”
It was a small knife, just the right size for a child's hand. I could imagine how excited Kevin must have been when he first saw it. Would he ever see it again?
Praxythea held it between the palms of her hands, closed her eyes, and bowed her head over it. I refilled my cup and waited.
Her eyes popped open, and she laid the knife on the table.
“What do you think?” I asked.
“He's still alive.”
Despite my disbelief, I experienced a surge of hope. “Can you tell where he is?” It was baloney, I was sure, but it couldn't hurt to check every option.
“You'll make fun of me if I tell you.”
“Come on, Praxythea. Tell me.”
She stroked the blade of the knife with her emerald-clad finger. “You're not going to like this, but here goes. I saw him… by the edge of running water.”
I groaned. “I should have known you'd say that. It's always something about ‘the edge of running water.’ You should be ashamed of yourself.”
“I was right last night,” she said defensively. “They found the child exactly where I said he'd be.”
“But it was the wrong child, Praxythea.”
“There had to be a reason why I was sent those images when I was concentrating on contacting Kevin,” she said. “I'm sure there's a connection.”
“Like a serial killer who strikes every thirty-seven years? Give me a break!”
In the terrarium in the corner next to the stove, Icky squeaked. I think he was staring at me, but it was hard to tell. “I don't need your editorial comments,” I muttered to the reptile.
Fred jumped onto my lap and I stroked his soft orange and white fur. Medical testing has proved having pets is good for your health. I agree that petting a cat is soothing, but I wondered what on earth an iguana could do for anyone?