I suggested that we look for some positive activities for Daniel – something that would not only occupy him, but also give him a boost in self-esteem, teach him relationship-building skills, and bring him in contact with good male role models. Mart’s water safety class came to mind. I made a mental note to check into the possibility.
“Well, I guess it’d be all right,” the grandmother, Mrs. Crandall, said wearily. “If you can find someplace that’ll have him. But we can’t pay for anything. His mom doesn’t even bother to send child support for him.” She said it in front of Daniel, and the boy just looked at the carpet, trying to hide the tremor in his bottom lip. These adult issues were too much for a ten-year-old to deal with.
“We’ll work that out,” I told her, and patted Daniel on the shoulder.“Do you think some new activities sound like a good idea, Daniel? Some things to get you out of the house?”
Daniel shrugged.
I put on a happy face meant to convince myself, or Daniel, or both. “I’ll get back to you with some ideas and information.” After setting up our next appointment and leaving the family with a workbook about grief in children, I proceeded to my car and sat jotting down notes and thinking that I should have brought some food along with me. It was only nine thirty in the morning, and I was already hearing whispers from the granola bar that had been knocking around my father’s car with me ever since we’d traded vehicles. My next appointment was at least a half hour’s drive away, even deeper into the hills of Chinquapin Peaks. Once that was over, I had an hour and a half before my afternoon appointments, but it would be a long way to anyplace where I could buy lunch.
Starting the car, I gazed across the lake. The shimmering view seemed an odd contrast to the Crandall home, a crumbling three-bedroom brick structure that must have been nice when it was built, but now lacked for maintenance. Backing out of the driveway onto the county road, I considered my location, the route to my next appointment, and the problem of finding some lunch after that. As the crow flies, I could run home in fifteen minutes, grab lunch, and spend a little time with Dustin. Unfortunately, I wasn’t a crow.
The phone vibrated in my jeans pocket as I topped a hill and stopped at a crossroads. Scooting forward in the seat, I slipped out the phone and put it on speaker.
“Hey.” Bonnie, the world’s most cheerful office secretary, was upbeat as always. “Got a couple messages for you. Your ten o’clock canceled, so we moved it to Monday morning at ten. Taz wants to remind you that group meeting next Wednesday should be on your schedule, and someone named Mart McClendon called. He says he’s the . . . game warden? He wanted you to call him ASAP.” The last letter ended on a high note, floating through the phone with an obvious underlay of curiosity. “I hope everything’s okay.” She waited for me to grab a pencil, then she read off Mart’s contact information.
My mind raced ahead as I jotted the number on my clipboard. Mart’s call could be good, or it could be bad. Either Dustin was in trouble again, or Mart finally had news about the little girl at Len’s house. “Okay, Bonnie. Listen, can you tell Taz I won’t be back into the office until the end of the day? I have afternoon appointments out here in Chinquapin Peaks. There’s a little picnic area upriver from here. I think I’ll just use the extra time to pull in there and eat my granola bar while I work on reports. I have my laptop with me.”
Bonnie clicked her tongue playfully. “Sounds like tough duty. Don’t get a sunburn.”
“I’ll try not to make it obvious,” I joked, then told her good-bye and made a couple notes about the Crandall family while I had the pen in my hand. Cases were starting to run together in my head – a blur of names, faces, and furniture that smelled like something other than foam rubber and fabric.
As I dialed Mart’s number, a strange sensation twittered inside my chest – an almost buoyant anticipation – and before I was even aware of it, I was smiling at the empty crossroads and smoothing stray hairs into my clip, as if someone were there. Over the past couple days, our calls about the situation at Len’s house had seemed to linger beyond business. We’d found other things to talk about – Dustin’s progress on the yard work, the way Sydney and Ansley seemed to have adopted Dustin, the horrendously poor condition of roads out in Chinquapin Peaks, even the fact that my father had insisted on ordering some sort of special extra-ply tires for my car, so that I’d be less likely to get another flat. “Good idea,” Mart had said. “Gotta tell you, though. A car isn’t the right vehicle for Chinquapin Peaks.”
“I think I need a tank.” I’d already figured out that my vehicle was going to be a problem on these rural roads, but replacing it was pretty much an impossibility right now.
Mart had chuckled, sending a warm, snuggly feeling through my middle. “Well, now, there’s a picture. . . .”
A moment later the conversation had turned back to business, Mart telling me about his plans to lay in wait for Len this morning and promising to finally get to the bottom of the situation with the little girl.
Now I tried to tamp down the flutter of anticipation as I listened to the cell signal clicking along. What was I anticipating, exactly? Why was I preening my hair and smiling at the stop sign? I contemplated answers to that question while the call ping-ponged off towers.
The phone rang three times, and then Mart’s voice mail picked up. On the recording, he sounded businesslike, slightly stiff. The fluttery feeling inside me evaporated, and I responded in my own business voice.“This is Andrea Henderson, returning your call. Sorry I wasn’t able to reach you. Please feel free to contact me on my cell phone . . .”
The call waiting beeped as I was leaving the message, and I rushed to answer, “Andrea Henderson.”
The call was faint, the voice difficult to hear, “Andrea, this is Mart McClendon. Sorry I missed your call, I . . . ” His voice faded into a haze, and I switched off speaker, pushing the receiver close to my ear.
“Mart? Hello? I can barely hear you. Are you there?” Pulling the phone away from my ear, I checked the screen to see if the call was still connected, then I listened again.
“That better?” Mart’s voice was still faint but clearer. “Can you hear me now?” There was an underlying urgency in his voice that made me straighten in my seat and look around the crossroads. Had something happened with Dustin, or was this call about the little girl?
“Yes, I can hear you. What’s going on? Did you go to Len’s this morning? Did you find anything?”
“I’m . . . there now.” He hesitated, as if he were carefully choosing his words or deciding how much to tell me. The anticipation inside me darkened into dread. Mart was calling with bad news.
“Is Len there? Did you find the little girl?”
“Len’s here.” The response seemed measured, cautious. I wondered if Len was listening in on the call.
“Did you learn anything about the little girl?”
“She’s . . . here, too.”
My head spun. My surroundings fell out of focus, and momentarily I was at Len’s cabin, peering into the school bus, my nose filled with the scent of mold, animal feces, stale bedding and clothes.“She’s there? Who is she? Is she all right?”
Silence answered, and for a horrifying minute, I wondered if the call had broken up, or if something else had happened. “Mart? Mart, can you hear me?” Grabbing the county road atlas, I tried to guess the approximate location of Len’s house and which roads might lead me there.
“I’m here,” Mart’s voice seemed calmer. I swallowed the pulsating mass in my throat. “I’m just at a loss as to how to . . . proceed at this point. It’s a little hard to say what the . . . protocol would be for this . . . situation.” Mart was couching words, trying to make me understand something without coming right out and saying it.
“Mart, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Are you in any danger?”
“No. None.”
“Is Len listening?”
“Yes.”
“And the girl’s there with him?”
“Yes. We’ve been talking about her for quite a while, as a matter of fact. I told Len that, since she misses her mama, she might like to spend a little time with a woman. He wasn’t too crazy about the idea, but I told him I had a friend . . . a lady . . . and he said it’d be all right if my
friend
came by to talk for a little bit. When I called your office, they said you were out on this side of the lake, and I just thought you might take a ride up here, see if she wants to visit with you at all. She’s not too interested in talking with me, but you know how little girls are.”
“Yes . . . I do, but . . . you mean now?”
Mart went on talking as if he hadn’t heard the question. “So far, Len’s been a real good host. Real cooperative. I’d like to keep it that way, if you know what I mean. We’ve looked around his barn and checked a few things out. He’s got a baby raccoon in the house we’re going to have to talk about, but mostly, it’d be good if you could come by and have a chat with this little girl while everyone’s in the mood – just to see where we need to go from here.”
I heard someone speaking in the background, a man’s voice, and then dogs barking. Mart answered, and I realized he wasn’t talking to me. “Yeah, I know you need to head down to the lake, but we have to talk about that raccoon kit in the house and the feather in that cage out in the barn, so you can’t go anyplace right now, Len. You understand? I need you and your granddaughter to stay right here with me. You understand that? You understand what I’m telling you?”
Len’s answer was a muffled slur in the background.
“His granddaughter? She’s his granddaughter?”
“That’s what he says . . . his
daughter’s girl
, and that the mother left her here willingly,” Mart answered. Len was still talking in the background, the cadence of the words speeding up, growing agitated.
“Does he have any proof of that?” How could the little girl be Len’s granddaughter? More than one person in town had confirmed that Len didn’t have a family.
“Well, he told me that she was sick with an earache when her mother brought her here a couple weeks ago, and they took her to the doc at the rural clinic in Moses Lake – the one in the building across from the church. After Len and I talked awhile this morning, we called the clinic. I talked to a friend there, and she did confirm that Len had been in there with the little girl
and
the mom, and that nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary.”
Mart paused again, as the voice in the background increased in volume, and a second barking dog joined in. “Now, Len, just calm down. We’ll get out there and look over those cages in a minute. If that feather is really from a wild turkey, and you didn’t shoot it out of season, you haven’t got anything to worry about there. Just give me a minute to talk on the phone, and then we’ll go look.”
“Mart, you need an investigator from CPS,” I said. “They’re the ones who do the initial case assessments. After they assess the case, then they can draw up a service plan, and if needed, we get a referral, and I can – ”
“Yeah, I don’t think that’ll fly too well.” Mart’s answer was cryptic, a message in code. “
Those people
were mentioned early in our conversation, and that drew a pretty emotional response here – if you know what I mean. I think there’d been some warning from the mom, before she took off, not to talk to any of
those
people . . . from
that
place . . . Okay? That make sense?”
The tumblers clicked in my brain, clarifying the picture. In my short training stint with Taz I’d learned that clients often viewed Social Services personnel as the enemy. Parents with issues saw them as a danger – authority figures intent on taking their children away, and children saw them as the vehicle through which they were removed from all that was familiar and placed in foster homes or emergency shelters. No matter how bad family life was, kids tended to opt for what they knew, to cling to biological bonds, even when those bonds were painful and destructive.
“Yes, that makes sense. I understand.”
“Where are you?”
I checked the map again, then looked at the single, leaning road sign marking the intersection. “Not very far away, I think. I’m at the crossroads of CR 4120 and . . . something. The other road sign is missing. Just judging by the map, I think I might be at the junction of 4120 and 3013. There’s an actual stop sign here, but not much else in the way of landmarks.”
Mart made a contemplative sound. “Stop sign on 4120 . . . Can you see the river?”
“I could a minute ago, but not now. I was headed to the little picnic area just below Eagle Eye Bridge and the Wailing Woman cliffs. I know it’s down this way somewhere. I passed it the other day.” I looked around for more landmarks. “There’s nothing here but trees.”
“Any driveways close by?”
“No. None.” Strike two.
“A big oak tree that’s been struck by lightning?”
“Nope. Sorry.” If the underlying situation hadn’t been so dire, our conversation would have been funny.
“Bullet holes in the stop sign?”
I looked up, checked the sign. “Yes . . . actually, there are.” That wasn’t much of a landmark, really. Half of the signs around had been the victims of drive-by target practice.
“How many?”
“How many bullet holes?” He could tell where I was by the number of bullet holes in the stop sign? This guy was good. “Three. Right in the P. Actually, the sign says STO.”