A Face at the Window (18 page)

N
ever mind how I found it," Jake told Bob Arnold
shakily, three hours after being dug out. She'd been through the story a dozen times already with a grim-faced State Police detective whose chilly manner had unnerved her more than anything else so far.

"I told you, Ozzie Campbell called me and told me about it,
or hinted, anyway, and if you don't believe it, there's nothing else I can say. What I want to know is how you found me."

But the Eastport police chief wasn't having any of her own questions or theories, and especially not the one about Campbell being right outside the buried vehicle.

"Jake," he persisted doubtfully. "You're sure? It wasn't…"

She'd had a shower, forcing herself numbly through it; now the familiar old overstuffed chair in the parlor of her own big old house seemed to gather her in. She resisted the urge just to close her eyes for a minute.

"It wasn't what?" she said tiredly "A hallucination? Like I was hysterical with fear? Or so oxygen-deprived that I—"

"Hey." Wade put a calming hand on her shoulder. "He doesn't mean it like that. There's a lot going on; he just needs to be sure."

Yeah, yeah,
she thought resentfully. Bob thought her getting trapped in the car was on account of a dumb notion she'd gotten and hadn't resisted. Which was partly true; in hindsight, she should have called him sooner.

But if Lee
had
been in there…"What did Tim Barnard's pals say?" she asked, deliberately changing the subject. Clearly she wasn't getting anywhere with this one.

"Did they know anything? D'you still think one of them took Helen and Lee?" She sipped some of the hot, sweet tea Wade had made.

Not knowing she was missing, he'd hitched a helicopter ride in with a diesel mechanic who needed a part made for the crippled freighter's broken propulsion system. At the machine shop Dana Weatherby ran on the Toll Bridge road, the job would take about an hour once Dana got everything warmed up and running—which the old, retired machinist would, at Wade's personal request. And out on the water the tide was turning, so Wade and the mechanic were going back later tonight.

"No," Bob said, "I don't think the boys did it. They've got good alibis for the whole day. Turns out Jody Pierce didn't just beat up Tim Barnard, he put the fear of God in all of ‘em."

At her questioning look he went on, "When they got picked up on Shore Road, they weren't breaking into a camp like we all thought at first. Jody had got ‘em a job workin’ on it; they was just clearin’ stuff out of there so they could start painting."

Bob shook his head regretfully. "And I heard from George and Ellie. They're on their way home."

So Ellie must've been calling from the airport or even from the plane. There was a message on the machine here in the phone alcove, too, the little red light blinking urgently. But Jake had no stomach for listening to it; not yet.

Bob glanced at his wristwatch. "It's a long flight to New York, though, and after that they need to get up here, so…"

He shrugged. "They might not be home until tomorrow. In the meantime the state and county guys've been working overtime, news bulletins are out and people've been plasterin’ ‘em everywhere, and every cop in the U.S. and Canada's been told," Bob said.

He stopped and sighed deeply. "As for Lee and Helen, though, they could still be anywhere. There's not been a single sighting of either one of ‘em."

He peered at Jake. "There's something else, too, and you'd better hear it from me."

He got up from the sofa and began pacing the rug unhappily. "State guys've called the feds in. It's gone on way too long for this to be a misunderstanding, Helen maybe going somewhere with Lee and not telling anyone. Or running away on purpose. Not," he added, "that there was ever really any possibility of it."

"And now that her car's been found…"

"Right. Now we know she didn't have car trouble, get stuck
somewhere, something like that. Somebody hid her car in the pit."

But not all the way, Jake thought. Just enough so you'd only see it if you were specifically directed to it. "So what's he up to?" she murmured, and both men looked at her.

"It's as if he put the car there on purpose for me to find," she explained, "as if he set it up so I just wouldn't be able to resist crawling in, and then with the backhoe, he—"

Bob met her gaze squarely. He'd already informed her that there was no way of proving that the backhoe had been moved. If it had, it was back in its proper place when he and the rest of her rescuers arrived.

"Jake, that rock slide could have happened by its own self. All those piles are pretty unstable; it's why we tell the kids to stay out."

He frowned, then added, "And that's just one way of looking at it. Another is—and that's what I need to talk to you about— another is that you put her car there, tried hiding it, maybe the slide happened when you were rocking it farther down into the hole."

"What?" She shot up from her chair, spilling tea. "That's crazy, you can't be—"

"Bob," Wade objected, coming back from the phone alcove, "you know better than to think she'd do anything like that."

"Yeah. I do know," he replied. "But the feds won't. Even the state guys're starting to think your behavior's a little hinky."

She stared as he went on. "I mean look at it their way for a minute. All they know about you is, you had Lee before she went missing. You say she went to Helen's but they don't know that. What else happened and when is anyone's guess as far as they are concerned. And," he continued, "now there's this."

He faced her. "You were out looking for Lee. You think this Campbell guy's got something to do with it. I get that, but to
them it looks like you keep on showing up in the investigation in ways most people wouldn't."

She kept her mouth shut tight. Because they were right; she was involved. Just not in the way they thought.

Or would believe. "And this time, you messed up a lot of evidence," he continued. "When they start working on that car of Helen's, your fingerprints are going to be in it. Hair and skin cells, blood that might've come from a struggle, only now…"

Now they'd think maybe Jake had deliberately obscured those things, to cover her own involvement. "So you'd better get ready for it," said Bob. "Get used to it, that until you're ruled out you're on their persons-of-interest list, just like anyone else."

Or more so. Bob turned to Wade. "And don't you go all righteous on me, either," Bob told him. "You read the papers, see TV. You know the ugly stuff that happens to kids."

And, he didn't have to add, the kind of people who ended up being the culprits. As often as not they were the ones who'd been closest to the child; the ones most trusted.

Bob's voice penetrated again. "As for you," he said, "I'm glad you're all right. And it's a good thing you had a cell phone to get me with is all I've got left to say on the subject."

He headed for the door. She hurried after him. "Bob, wait. I don't get it. What about the phone?"

Because that made no sense, it made
absolutely
no—

"The text message you sent me," he explained impatiently. "Without it you'd still be in the pit, so that was smart of you. But if you'd called earlier, I'd have already had my supper, now, ‘stead of my nice, rare burger sittin’ on the counter at home, turnin’ into a hockey puck."

"Thanks, Bob," said Wade, joining Bob at the door. "We owe you one, for sure."

"No!" she blurted when she was finally able to speak. They
both looked at her, Wade curiously and Bob with an unmistakable, not-quite-hidden "Oh, hell, what is it now?" expression.

"Campbell had called me to hint about where the car was, I told you that," she said.

She rushed on past Bob's here-we-go-again look. "And I got a minute or so out of the phone in the gravel pit, when Ellie called me. But in there, the reception was pretty crappy."

Surrounded by the pit's high sand walls and by a mountain of gravel… no wonder the signal had been weak. And then she'd lost the thing.

"But I most certainly did not text-message you from inside the car. I couldn't have, I told you, and even if—"

She took a deep breath. "The only things on that phone that I actually use are the numbers and the redial. I no more know how to text-message somebody on it than I could jump off a building and fly."

Back in the city she might have had some practical reason to acquire such a simple skill. But in Eastport, she'd just never found a reason to.

"Bob, what did the message say?" Wade asked.

Bob looked from Jacobia to Wade and back again. " ‘I'm in the gravel pit, come get me, ha ha ha,’ " he recited. "And then the one word, Jacobia.’ "

Wade looked taken aback. "Ha-ha like laughing?"

"Yep. I figured it was a joke at first. Somebody having fun with me, I thought. Rotten sense of humor but hey, you can't get a message like that and not check on it, can you?"

He turned to her again. "But the phone—it does have a text-messaging feature on it, right?"

She nodded. "Sam bought it for me, so naturally it's got all the bells and whistles." And her protests about not knowing how
to use most of them could be lies, of course. She couldn't prove they weren't.

"Can't someone trace the message?" Wade asked. "Find out who—?"

"Maybe. Maybe not." Bob shook his head vexedly "My phone said ‘anon,’ on the sender line, though, which I know stands for anonymous. So…"

So forget it. Campbell was smart, she realized; he'd have figured out something. Abruptly she came to a decision. "Bob, when that federal team gets here, you tell them I will take a polygraph, give fingerprints and hair samples and saliva, anything. Anything they want."

Her voice trembled; she let it. "In fact, I insist. Also you need to tell them I'll answer any question they ask me, no matter how embarrassing, impertinent, or even potentially incriminating, about absolutely anything. Got that?"

Because the idea that she'd done anything to that child, and then done something else to cover it up, was what Bob was talking about. And soon a lot of other people would be saying it, too.

People with badges. "But I want it all as soon as possible. No, wait," she added as he started to answer.

She held up a finger. "I get it that no one believes me. That no one else has any reason to think Campbell is involved in any of this. I get it, and I understand it."

"Jake," Wade began, "no one thinks you—"

She whirled on him. "Why not? Bob's right: I'm the only one who's heard from the guy. Nobody else can back me up on that. So even Bob's got his doubts, and why shouldn't he? Besides," she added, feeling her shoulders sag in defeat, "it's usually the nearest and dearest, isn't it? That's just the way of the world."

She heard her tone turn bitter, didn't care. "Never mind that my name's Jake. That's what I go by, and everyone knows it."

She saw Bob register this point, that the text message had used her full name, Jacobia. Only a few people in the world would do so and she wasn't one of them. But so what? From a cop's point of view, maybe she'd just been trying to confuse things further.

"So let's get it over with and get me ruled out. Jerrilyn, too. And Jody, if they can find him. The stepfather," she finished, putting an acid twist on the final word.

If
you
can find him, she meant, and saw Bob register that, too. "And then when they finish doing everything by the book, when they're done with their rules and procedures and regulations and when they're done grilling me—after all that,
then
maybe we can all get our heads around the crazy idea that just maybe I'm telling the truth about everything that happened. And we can get back to the business of
finding that baby"

A sob swelled her throat but she would not weep in front of either of them, not now. She absolutely would not.

"Yeah," Bob said quietly into the silence that followed her outburst. "I hear you, Jake. I'll tell them."

He pushed thinning hair off his forehead with a tired hand. "Media's got this now, by the way. Evening news went with it, had a camera truck up here. They even ran a shot of your house."

Great, just what she needed. Although any publicity would be good publicity now, everyone seeing pictures of Helen and Lee and hearing the awful story…

Bob looked out the door past the sawhorses and caution tape she'd set up over the front walk—Had it been just hours ago?—to the silent, empty street.

"They've given up for the night," he said. "I saw ‘em all piling
into the Motel East. But it won't be long before they show up again and when they do, the best idea is ‘no comment.’ Tell them I said so if they get pushy. Which," he added, "they will."

"Yeah," she agreed, resigned. Whether or not being on the news would really help Helen and Lee remained to be seen, but if they stayed missing much longer, Jake and this whole mess would end up being the top story on the Nancy Grace show.

For a brief unwelcome moment she imagined herself the target of the cable show host's sharp, skeptical interrogation style.
But I'd do it; at this moment I would literally do anything,
she thought as Wade went with Bob out onto the back porch.

She let them go, hearing Campbell's sly laughter again in her head, each separate syllable a short, sharp exhalation like a raspy cough or a dog's bark. She remembered it well, just as she recalled the explosive rumble of the backhoe's engine starting.

Perfectly
well;
exactly
like that.

And the question was…

She wandered into the kitchen and sank into a chair, staring at the slow drip-drip of the kitchen faucet and listening to its plink. She should fix it: screwdriver, pliers, faucet washer.

Slowly she rose and went to fetch the tools, their familiar shapes in her hands as always a remedy for disordered thoughts.

…the question was
why?

Nobody came out
here in the woods at night, not this late in summer. On the weekend, maybe, if the weather was sunny and warm, a few Labor Day picnics might end up happening on the shores of nearby lakes, but even those folks would go home when the shadows began lengthening.