“Guess it’ll have to be,” I coughed out, and set my hat to rights again as she stepped back. She was smiling, and for just a moment, all I could think was that those were the kind of eyes a brown-eyed girl oughta have.
The coon rocking his cage jarred my brain back to life, and I stepped away. Man, I’d been out on the lake too long. “See you at the park.”
“It’ll take me a while to get there.” She slipped her keys out of her pocket, and suddenly we were all business again.
We parted ways, and I headed around through the broomweed and the tall grass back to the woods. I made the walk at a good pace, just in case Len changed his mind, but I was also getting my head clear. It wasn’t like me to get distracted by a pretty girl when I was working. Actually, it wasn’t like me to get distracted at all, not in the past few years, anyway. I didn’t need the complication. Getting involved with somebody only meant bringing up the past, eventually – talking about Aaron and Mica, and trying to explain why Laurie kept calling. For the last few years, it’d seemed like there was too much muck in my life to drag someone else into it. It was easier just to work, and not think about it, and not have to talk about it.
Especially not to someone who did therapy for a living. Somebody like that would have a field day with me. She’d want to dig down to the core of everything – figure out the
meaning
of it, decode it and decide how to cure it. I wasn’t interested in ending up as an emotional ball of goo on someone’s couch. I’d been through enough mental warfare in the past three years to last me a lifetime. Coming to Moses Lake was all about moving on, letting that go, leaving it behind. I shouldn’t have told Andrea the Robin Hood story, either. Not only did it make me look like a sap, but also it pointed out that I was one of four back then. I didn’t want anyone here bringing up the kinds of questions you answered at class reunions, or when you ran into a high school girlfriend at the Dairy Queen –
where’ve you
been, how’s life been treating you, how’s your family?
I was upriver long before Andrea rolled into the little picnic area across from the cliffs at Eagle Eye. The park was usually empty during the heat of the day. Toward evening, a few fishermen and maybe a picnicking family or two would show up, but for now, we had the place all to ourselves. Andrea looked down the row of stone tables as she got out of her car, seeming surprised there was no one else around.
“Guess I should find a little more populated place to stop off and do my paperwork in the future,” she said. “The last time I passed by here, half of the spots were full.”
“Depends on the time of day and the day of the week.” I slid off the picnic table where I’d been waiting. “When it’s this hot, you won’t find many people at a day-use area like this, especially since there’s no real swimming beach here. The park headquarters has a nice picnic grounds by the gift shop and the caverns, if you’re looking for someplace where there’s a little population. That might be a better choice. You’ve also got a church camp a few miles upriver in that direction, and then a few miles farther upriver, in my partner’s end of the county, there are a couple bakeries and a café in the little Mennonite settlement. Good eatin’ there. There’s the artist colony about six miles south of here, down on 2300. The artist colony has a decent little coffee shop – never know what you’ll see hanging around there – artists, weavers, quilters, hippies, beetle-bug cars and all manner of exotic pets. It’s interesting, anyway.”
Her forehead narrowed, like she was trying to picture those places. Then she seemed to leave off the idea. “Thanks for the tip. I’ll watch for those spots while I’m making my rounds. To tell you the truth, right now I’m lucky just to find my way to appointments. Even with the county road map and the GPS, I’d be completely lost if I didn’t have directions from my boss with valuable tips like,
turn
by the tree with the big knothole that looks like a face
, and
go until you see
the orange fence post
.” Walking closer to the picnic table, she rolled her eyes. “You know how many orange fence posts there are around here? That is
not
a landmark.”
“That’s the way navigation’s done in the hills, cowgirl,” I said, just playing with her a little. “Knotholes and fence posts. It’s a different kind of work environment.”
“Truly.” She stopped by the picnic table and braced her fingers on the small of her back, looking over the four-foot drop to the riverbank. “By the way, I almost got stuck in the mudhole coming back. I forgot to stay to the side.”
“Bet you won’t forget again.”
She answered with a smart-aleck twist of her lips, and I decided that even if we had gotten off on the wrong foot to begin with, she was okay. “I’ll mark the artist colony and the church camp on your map for you, if you want. The state park HQ’s probably already on there.” I sat down on the edge of the table again and rested my feet on the bench.
“That would be helpful. Thanks.” Squinting against the reflection from the river, she took in a long breath and let it out, her mouth straightening like she was thinking about something – getting down to business, I figured. All of a sudden, she looked like a woman with something on her mind. “What’s that sound?” she asked absently.
I listened for minute. There was a mockingbird overhead going through a couple dozen birdcalls, one right after the other. “Mockingbird. They’re always nested here at the picnic grounds where they can scavenge people’s leftovers. You come here night or day in the summer, you’ll hear mockingbirds. Earlier in the spring, there was a pair nested in a branch right by the restroom. It was pretty good entertainment, watching them take strafing runs at the tourists. They’re gutsy little birds. Pushy.”
She glanced toward the squatty limestone restroom. “Actually, I meant the other sound – that moaning sound. What is that?”
“That’s the mockingbirds, too. They’re copying the Wailing Woman.” I pointed to a sign down the hill by the water – one of those points-of-interest markers that told the legend of the Wailing Woman. “Not too much wind in the cliffs right now, so she’s kind of quiet, but those mockingbirds have heard her enough that they do a pretty good imitation. They’re probably the only mockingbirds in the world that know how to cry.”
Andrea cocked her head to one side, listening.“That’s the strangest thing. You know, in a million years, I wouldn’t have known what that was.”
“Oh, sure you would, if you’d been here a few times,” I told her. “Every place in the woods has its own sound, if you stop and listen.The river has a sound, and the hills have a sound, and the rocky draws have a sound, and the cliffs have a sound. Folks wouldn’t get themselves so lost in these hills, if they’d stop and listen.”
Andrea smirked at me. “Easy for you Daniel Boone types to say. Some of us feel like we’re wandering blind up here. It all looks the same. It’s no wonder hikers get turned around.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed. “Well, here’s a free tip – if you’re ever lost, head for the water. In the summer, there’s plenty of traffic on the lake, and if we’re hunting someone in the cold weather, we’ll have boats and a helicopter out.”
“I don’t think I’ll be doing much hiking.” She moved to the edge of the drop-off, where she could take in the historical marker. I waited while she read the legend of the pioneer woman whose baby daughter had disappeared from the wagon train. Even after days of searching, the woman wouldn’t leave her daughter behind and travel on with the wagons. Legend had it that she wandered those cliffs and the river basin still, trying to find her baby. According to Burt and Nester, that tale had scared many a Boy Scout and kid camper, and kept them from roaming into the woods at night.
“That’s really sad.” Andrea came back to the picnic table. “My dad told us about the Wailing Woman, but he never brought us to see the sign. My parents didn’t like to come to this side of the lake.”
“Most people from Larkspur stay around Larkspur.” I probably could’ve skipped saying that. It sounded like criticism. “Thanks for showing up today,” I added. “I had myself in something of a bind, there. I figured it’d really send Len into a panic if I got the sheriff ’s department involved, and you were the next person I thought of, since you already knew what was going on. I didn’t want to leave Len there with that little girl until someone looked things over. I’ve got to admit, I haven’t come upon anything quite like that before.”
“Me neither.” She slid in on the other side of the picnic table, so that there was just a little space between us. “The question is, what happens now?” She seemed to expect me to come up with an answer.
“Shoot if I know,” I admitted. “I deal in displaced animals, like that fella down there in the crate.” I motioned to my boat, which was tied up in the shade, with the little bandito finally all worn out and asleep.
Andrea braced her elbows on her knees, pressed her hands together like she was praying, and blew a long breath through her fingers. “If you had to guess – you know more about Len than I do – do you really think she’s safe with him?”
I stopped to consider that a minute. The protocol was to report it to the appropriate agencies and let them investigate, but what I wanted to say about the cooperation I’d had out of the county sheriff probably wasn’t proper to say in front of a lady, and in the professional sense, it wasn’t the right thing to speak ill of another branch of law enforcement. If you did, you’d likely find yourself twisting in the wind when you needed backup. Most places, the folks from the county sheriff ’s office are good as gold, but in this county, they only provided services where they felt like it.
Andrea tapped her thumbs together, impatient for an answer. Considering everything I’d seen that morning, I gave the best one I could. “It’s just a hunch, a gut feeling based on what I could gather from watching Len with Birdie. I think he really does care about the little girl, and he’s doing his best to look after her, but I also know that we’ve got to find out who she really is. The mother did leave her there on purpose, apparently. So did the mom mean to abandon her, or is the mom coming back? Len’s had Birdie for a couple weeks, and he’s given her whatever medicine the clinic sent home and changed his normal routine so that he could take care of her – even to the point of carrying her down to the lake in the morning when she’s still asleep.”
I tipped my hat back and stretched the knots from my neck, trying to make sense of it all.“Let me just put it like this – I don’t think the situation would be high on the sheriff department’s list. There isn’t any evidence of a crime, for one thing. We’re in Chinquapin Peaks, for another, and having a dirty kid isn’t a crime. Leaving your kid in the care of a friend or relative isn’t, either. If it were, there’d be a lot of kids in this county taken away from their parents.”
Andrea nodded, seeming to understand. “Is it likely she is Len’s granddaughter – might he have a legitimate claim to her?” She rested her chin on the tips of her fingers and cut a sideways glance at me, her eyes catching the river’s reflected light. “I mean, what if he’s not even supposed to have her? Maybe the mother brought her up here and dropped her off during some kind of custody dispute, and she’s trying to hide Birdie here. Len could be involved in something he’s not even aware of.”
“Definitely possible,” I admitted. “If somebody told Len that child was his granddaughter, he’d probably believe it. He just keeps insisting she’s his daughter’s girl. When I asked him how that could be, being as he never had a family, he got flustered and said his daughter lives with his wife, somewhere a long ways away. The name they used at the clinic wasn’t Barnes. It was Marsh. The little girl’s name is Lillian Marsh. I’m guessing
Birdie
is a nickname, and Marsh is her daddy’s name. I took a look at Len’s record over the weekend, and other than fish-and-game violations and an outstanding ticket for the license plate light on his truck, he’s clean. There’s no evidence that he’s ever been tangled up with anything involving women, minors, or sex offenses. I don’t think he’s got the mental capacity to be – not on purpose, anyway.”
Andrea’s shoulders rose and lowered with a breath. Her stomach rumbled, and she looked at her watch. “I don’t think we’re much better off on my end. I’m professionally obligated to report any suspicions of child neglect or endangerment, and abandonment falls under that spectrum. But it’s not considered abandonment unless the child is left for three months or more. I’ll make CPS aware of Birdie’s situation, but I don’t know if anything further will happen right now. Like you said, Len seems to be taking care of her. If CPS were to investigate, I might get a referral for family counseling. They would want to find the mother, of course, and see what her situation is.” Her stomach growled again, and I realized I had a hollow spot inside, too.
“You saw how Len feels about Social Services,” I pointed out.
“He let
me
talk to Birdie. Maybe you could get a CPS investigator in there the same way you got me in.”
“What, tell him I’ve got another girlfriend who wants to drop by?” I asked, wondering if even Len would fall for that one again.
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. For a second, I was just looking at her lips. “Guess nobody would be stupid enough to believe that.”
I leaned away, surprised. “Well, dadgum. I think my pride’s hurt.”
She blinked three times fast, then the corners of her eyes crinkled. “All of the CPS investigators in this county happen to be
men
.” Her mouth hung open on the last word, while she waited for me to catch a clue.
“Oh, yeah . . . hey . . . Well, forget that idea. Looks like we need a plan B.”