New Title 1 (24 page)

Eve came to the door after three knocks and peered out through the screening. This afternoon her facial bruises looked even worse: discolored streaks of purple and yellow on left forehead, right cheek, left jawline.

"Have you heard anything about your daughter?"

She shook her head. "I bet she's dead."

She needed somebody to talk to. I felt guilty for not having more time.

"I found out some things this morning, Eve. I think I'm finally figuring out what's going on. I also think that I know who may have kidnapped her and why."

She touched a trembling hand to her face and started crying bitterly. "You know one time—what I did one time, I mean?"

I couldn't take it. I opened the screen door quietly and stepped inside and took her in my arms and held her. She was very near the edge. Very near.

"I got mad at her one time and I slapped her right across the face. She couldn't've been more'n five years old. And I slapped her right across the face. I just keep thinkin' about that now, how I treated her when she was so little. What a terrible mother I've been to her."

Her sobs came in small eruptions now, and she choked on words the way a small child does who is crying too hard to speak intelligibly.

"You've been a good mother, Eve. You've got to stop thinking that way."

She had to cry herself out.

I led her over to the couch and plumped up a couple of throw pillows, then found the bedroom and dragged out a blanket and got her covered up. In the bathroom, I filled a glass with cold water and snagged the Excedrin bottle. Sara, the sweet golden retriever, followed me back into the living room and gave Eve three affectionate laps with a big pink loving tongue and then went over on the far side of the room and sat and watched all the human stuff going on.

I got three tablets down Eve and said, "Have you eaten breakfast yet?"

She shook her head, her cheeks red and rough from her tears. Her eyes were watery and forlorn.

"I really have been a terrible mother. You just don't know. Gabbin' on the phone when I should've been spendin' time with her. Bowlin' with the girls when I could've been taking her places."

I knelt next to her and said, "We aren't perfect, Eve, and it's too much to expect we ever will be. All we can do is try."

She looked at me and said, "Maybe he's dead, too."

"Your husband?"

"Uh-huh."

"So you haven't heard from him?"

She shook her head.

I took a washcloth I'd run lukewarm water over and laid it gently across her forehead. She smelled of tears.

"I'll check back with you later this afternoon," I said.

"I wish my husband was like you."

I smiled. "That's a nice compliment, but you don't know me very well."

"I know you enough."

"Well, I know you enough, too. And you're a very decent woman. And a very good mother."

I kissed her on the cheek. "I need to ask you something, Eve. And you've got to tell me the truth."

She looked at me tearily and nodded.

"Has your husband come into some money over the past few years?"

She nodded.

"A lot of it?"

She paused. "Well, a lot for us, anyways." She nodded to the new furnishings and the new TV. "And then he bought a brand-new Ford and paid cash for it. He's in trouble, isn't he?"

"I'm afraid he could be, Eve."

"I knew he was. But I was afraid to think it was true."

She had angled her head away, was getting trapped in her own despair again.

"Did your husband ever work for Reverend Roberts?"

She turned back to me, tried to read my face. "This has something to do with Reverend Roberts?"

"Not necessarily," I lied. "But I'm curious."

"Well, sure, he used to have a kind of cleaning service on the side."

"What kind of cleaning service?"

"Oh, you know, clean rich people's houses."

"But Reverend Roberts has a maid."

"Richard didn't clean the house. He cleaned the church."

"I see. How about Sam Lodge?"

The eyes searching my face again. "How'd you know about him?"

"Lucky guess."

And it was.

"Well, Richard, he used to clean the Lodges' house, with their antiques and all. Then Lodge started inviting Richard to go along on his antique trips, help carry the heavy stuff. It wasn't too long after this that he started . . . well, being unfaithful. I could smell the other women on him. And now he's gotten Melissa kidnapped."

She broke again.

I leaned over and put the fresh side of the washcloth on her forehead and held her hands as she gave into her tears, her entire body shaking.

"I was such a rotten mother."

"C'mon, now, Eve. You know better than that. You really do."

"You don't know. You just don't know. All the times I could've spent time with her

and—"

Then she fell to crying again.

As if understanding that Eve needed great care and fondness, Sara trotted over and gave her a few more love licks on her teary cheeks.

Eve laughed through her tears. "Good old Sara."

"She sure is," I said.

Eve looked up at me, a sad stricken glance. "Please find my daughter. Please. You don't know how bad I wanted to call Jane Avery. But I can't. So you're my only hope. My only one."

"Maybe I'm getting closer," I said.

She reached up and took my hand. "I really appreciate all this. Don't think I don't."

"You'd do the same thing for me."

And she would, too.

I leaned down, got her pillows straight behind her head, kissed her on the cheek again, got the washcloth straight on her forehead and said, "I'll try and call you early this evening. Let you know how things are going."

She gave my hand a squeeze and then sighed deeply and closed her eyes.

Maybe she'd take a little nap, after all.

I spent the next few hours in the old stone library, the one with the lion and the gargoyle respectively guarding the entrance.

People came through the front doors knocking rain off their hats and shaking out plastic raincoats and smelling of fine chill air.

I sat in the reading room looking through back issues of the
New Hope Clarion
, which was the weekly paper. I had dug out the papers from five years ago.

I saw stories that made me feel I was in some kind of time warp. Pleasantly so. No banner headlines about serial rapists or shootouts at drug busts or four-year-olds mysteriously snatched from playgrounds . . . No, here the headlines ran to tractor pulls and VFW picnics, to softball tournaments and concerts in the town square. There was a great old
Twilight Zone
episode about a commuter who looked out his train window every day and fancied that he saw a peaceful turn-of-the-century town there just waiting for him to visit. So one night, sickened by a grisly job in advertising and an equally grisly wife, he jumps off the moving train . . . and dies. And when he wakes up, there he is, in the turn-of-the-century town. There are a lot of such towns in Iowa even today, and you don't need to jump from a moving train to find them, either.

After an hour or so, I took a break, ambling down the hall to the restroom and then to a small room where a coffee vending machine stood next to a Frigidaire from the early 1960s, on the face of which was a sign that read PEPSI 25 cents. Who could pass up a bargain like that? The room had three small folding tables with a few chairs designated to each table. It was a room for sack lunches and lazy lunch-hour gossip.

While I was sitting there drinking my bottle of pop, a white-haired elderly woman wearing a flowered summery dress and a cute little straw hat bought a Pepsi of her own and sat at the table next to mine.

We smiled at each other in the way of polite strangers, and then I decided that if she was a long-time citizen here, she just might be able to help me.

After introducing myself, I said, "Have you lived here a long time?"

"Oh, my, yes," she smiled. "Nearly seventy-five years."

"It's a wonderful little town."

She laughed. "You must be from the city."

"These days I am."

"People my age who grew up in towns like these have a lot of great memories but not everything was so wonderful."

"Oh?"

"Well, we didn't have a hospital here until 1932, for one thing. A lot of people died by the time somebody could get them to Cedar Rapids. And for another thing, if you lived on a farm, the way my folks did, you didn't have running water and electricity until about the same time the hospital was built. And the state didn't get around to building good roads until well into World War Two. But the worst of it were the outhouses. There're a lot of jokes about them these days but believe me, back when you were a young girl trying to be a proper lady, outhouses were no fun at all, especially on winter mornings."

I laughed. "You make it sound pretty bad."

"No. I just make it sound realistic. It was a much better world back then, but you sure had a lot of inconveniences."

I coughed. Getting drenched while ducking bullets was probably going to net me a nice strong head cold.

"Did you ever know a man named Brindle around here?"

"Stan Brindle?"

"Why, yes. Stan Brindle."

"Sure I knew him. Most folks did. He was a pretty prosperous farmer up until the late eighties," she said, sipping her Pepsi.

"That's what I'm trying to find out."

"Oh?"

"What put him out of business, I mean. So suddenly."

"Well, it's no secret. The same thing that put a lot of other farmers around here out of business. He came out of the seventies looking very good on paper but owing the bank a lot of money. In the old days, a farmer could always borrow against the next year's harvest if he needed to. But credit was drying up everywhere."

"So he went bankrupt?"

She nodded. "That and some trouble."

Which is what I had been looking for in the newspaper stacks—the trouble Stan Brindle had gotten into.

"Drugs," she said.

"Selling them, you mean?"

She shook her head, looking old-lady elegant as she did so.

"Not selling them. But letting drug dealers use his farm to store their drugs and have some of their meetings. Cousin of his from Davenport, I believe, he was the one actually running the drugs."

"They got caught?"

"Yes, they did."

"Did Brindle go to prison?"

She frowned. "He made it as far as county jail. He was in there two nights and he hanged himself with a belt he wasn't supposed to have. It was pretty sad. I knew Stan ever since he'd been a little boy. He was a big dreamer, and sometimes he could be a braggart, but he wasn't really a bad boy. Not really. In fact, he was pretty much straight until he met Reverend Roberts."

"The same Reverend Roberts who's in town now?"

She smirked. "The one and only. After he started getting into so much financial trouble, Stan and his wife decided that they needed to start going to church again. You know how people do when they're desperate. 'I don't want to hear a peep out of you, God, unless I get in trouble.' That sort of attitude. Well, anyway, they started going to church there and then they started socializing with the reverend and his wife. And the reverend started spending a lot of his spare time out at the farm, hunting and things like that. That was what he said, anyway. But what really happened was that he started having an affair with Stan's wife, who was one of those very pretty, shy little women who always wound up getting dominated by their men. Rachael, her name was. Anyway, one night things got so bad—apparently he'd caught them in bed—that Stan went over to the reverend's house with a shotgun. Took a couple of shots, too, but missed. Law got called in and everybody in town pretty much knew what happened and Rachael moved away, went back to Springfield, Illinois, which was where she was from originally. It was after that that Stan got caught up in the drug thing with his cousin from Davenport."

"But you say that the reverend used to spend a lot of time at the farm?"

She nodded. "A lot."

If that was the case, the good reverend would know a good place to bury bodies he needed to get rid of, bodies belonging to young girls he'd molested while filming them performing illegal sex acts. Then, for the first time, I thought of Mike Peary's letter to Nora, in which Mike detailed how several girls who'd visited New Hope had later been murdered. Traveling around the countryside and killing young girls would be no trouble for a man who was already traveling anyway.

She looked at her watch. "Oh, heck."

"What?"

"I wanted to be home in time to watch Oprah. She's the only one of those talk-show people I can stand. She seems genuinely sincere." She looked out the gray window at the dripping rain. "But I'll never make it in time."

"Tell me where you live. I'll give you a ride."

"But don't you want to go back to your newspaper stacks?"

"Thanks to you, I won't need to. You told me everything."

She beamed. "Well, it's nice to know that somebody finds me useful at my age."