Stutter Creek (6 page)

With only a split second to decide, John had scooped up the bloody mass of bone and fur on the run. He’d then grabbed a coworker’s hand and would have pulled him from the open chopper door if he hadn’t helped to hoist the big Shepherd inside first. John jumped in when the bird was already two or three feet off the ground. Fortunately, there was a private doctor at the company headquarters who owed John a huge favor—John had been his bodyguard on several occasions. He took care of the wound and made sure the dog was comfortable on the company’s private jet. Then he gave John a giant-size bottle of canine antibiotics and wished him luck.

Now, John let Turk down gently, making sure not to jar the still-stiff shoulder. It would probably always require cortisone shots to keep from freezing up, but John thought it was a small price to pay for such a remarkably close call.

With one more pat on the big dog’s head, he turned to finish unloading the truck. In addition to a new generator and refrigerator, John had also splurged on a California King mattress set, a new sofa, and an extra-large recliner. Everything he’d had before had been ruined by mice and squirrels. He regretted not paying someone to look after the place while he was gone, but it was never his intention to be away so long.

It was still hard for him to believe he had been away from this place for over twenty years. It felt as if he’d never left. The intervening years had passed so quickly, it was as if they belonged to someone else. As if he’d been someone else, perhaps.

Recruited for private security duty right out of a six year stint in the Army, he’d spent the majority of those twenty years moving from place to place, always looking over his shoulder in his effort to protect whomever he was working for at the time. It had been quite an exciting life.

He’d never had time to settle down. Actually, he’d never found any reason to settle down. But, the years abroad had changed him. He’d vowed to make Kazakhstan his final assignment, especially after he’d nursed the loyal Shepherd back to health. It was as if Turk was the sign he’d been looking for, the sign that it was time to try living a normal life for a change.

John chuckled as he remembered how much red tape he’d had to go through to get Turk into the States. He reached down to ruffle the broad head again, but the dog was standing off near the edge of the yard, looking at him.

“What?” he asked, as though the dog could answer. He automatically scanned the perimeter of the clearing, immediately alert for anything out of the ordinary. Turk didn’t bark or whine, he just stood looking at John, obviously wanting something.

He wrestled the new, Indian-blanket-inspired sofa onto the dusty porch and strode to where Turk appeared to be waiting patiently. Before he reached him, however, the Shepherd turned and disappeared into the forest.

John was dumbfounded. Turk was usually so well behaved, like a furry shadow at his heels. In fact, today was the first time he had ever seen the animal have an original thought, other than trying to drag himself to the chopper after the shooting. But, of course, that had just been self-preservation.

He had never acted like this before. Come to think of it, maybe the dog had never been in a pine forest before. Probably wants me to check out a chipmunk or something, John thought, trailing along with a bemused expression on his face.

Chapter Eight

In her bright, cheerful living room, Barbara Myers was beginning to worry. Truthfully, she had spent all evening worrying. Now at nearly midnight, she was beginning to panic. The television was on, but Barb couldn’t concentrate on anything, not even Leno, her favorite talk show host.

Something wasn’t right. Amanda had never failed to call when she said she would. Barb was expecting to hear all about her midterms.

She had spent a very restless evening, dialing the number of Mandy’s little green cell phone, hoping against hope that she had just left it at the dorm or let the battery run down, or even lost it, anything. Finally, she could stand it no longer. She had called Kami. Her older daughter immediately insisted they call The Water House Bar & Grill in Pine River to see if Mandy was at work.

Barbara clasped her hands together tightly. “Are you sure, Kami? I wouldn’t want to get her in trouble with her boss.”

“This is Mandy, Mom, not me,” Kami said. “Mandy wouldn’t simply forget to call you. Something’s wrong—if you don’t want to call her boss, I will. Just give me the number.” And just like that, it was decided.

In The Water House Bar & Grill, Myra listened to Mr. Pope, the manager, speaking to someone on the phone. She thought it was Mandy’s mom.

He was telling the person that Mandy had picked up some boy and hadn’t shown up for work. Then he stated that behavior like that would not insure Mandy’s job no matter how out of character it seemed.

As he was reading the caller the riot act, Myra was on her way out the door, her shift finally over. She had worried about Mandy all evening. Now, she whipped out her own cell and tried calling Mandy’s phone one more time—for good measure. But she got nothing, not even voice mail.

Myra stood there, chewing the cuticle around her thumbnail, one hand twirling the dark ponytail that had slipped almost completely free of its elastic band. “Mr. Pope,” she said, reaching toward him hesitantly. “May I speak to Mandy’s mom?”

Her boss turned even more crimson than usual. “Not now, Myra. Besides, this isn’t her mom, it’s her sister.” He glowered down at her and she wished she could slip out the door or melt into the floor.

“Please?” She straightened her spine as she spoke. “I—I think something is wrong. Mandy would never ditch work . . . ”

Mr. Pope looked at the tiny girl again. “Myra, right?” he asked.

She nodded, pulling her sweater around herself protectively. Myra was the newest employee. She hadn’t spoken directly to the “big” boss since her initial interview except to answer yes sir or no sir.

Finally, he seemed to realize what it must have taken for her to speak up. He held out the phone.

Myra could hear a woman’s voice saying, “Hello, hello? Are you there?”

Taking a deep breath, she responded, “Hello, I’m a friend of Mandy’s here at the Water House, I think something has happened . . .” Then she told Kami everything that Amanda had said on the phone. She also told her she would go to the police station if necessary. Her voice trembled as she spoke.

After they hung up, Kami called the Pine River Police Department. The tremble in the other girl’s voice frightened her badly.

The officer on phone-duty took down her name, and Mandy’s name. Then he advised her to make the trip to the city the next day if they still hadn’t heard from Mandy. “We can’t report an adult as missing until twenty-four hours have passed—unless we have extenuating circumstances. ”

Kami relayed the conversation Myra had told her about, especially the part about Mandy picking up a boy on the highway. That seemed to make him take her a bit more seriously.

“You say she was on her way to work when this occurred?” he asked.

“Yes,” Kami replied. She exhaled, relieved that he was beginning to see the urgency. “And she hasn’t been heard from since.”

After a few beats of silence, the officer said, “And I don’t suppose she was in the habit of picking up stray men, er, boys. Right?”

Exasperated, Kami blew her bangs out of her eyes and forced herself to remain calm before she answered. “She was valedictorian of her class, first in our family to go to college, she was doing great. She had never missed even one day of work so far—”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “I’m getting the picture. Which reminds me, when you come in, bring a good picture. We’ll get it on the air ASAP, provided she doesn’t turn up before then. She could’ve just had car trouble, you know. Could be walking into town as we speak.”

The officer’s voice held no conviction. The fact that she apparently had a cell phone and didn’t call to report a flat or other car trouble didn’t bode well as far as the he was concerned. And that part about picking up a boy . . . that sounded like a bad joke. He would have to get a statement from the friend, but first, he was going to contact the Highway Patrol and get a duty report from the unit responsible for that stretch of highway. Maybe the trooper had seen something, an abandoned car, perhaps. “First things first,” he muttered to himself, “that’s what my mama always said. First things first.”

***

Beth was so glad to finally be at the cabin. It brought back so many great memories, especially the memory of John, a huge young bear of a man. He had been wandering close to their cabin when her dad had spied him and called him over. His hair was dark blond hair and his eyes were the color of seawater.

Thinking of those eyes now made her recall the protective way he would “spot” her every time she was about to do something daring, like swinging from the ancient knotted rope out over the lake. She hadn’t even known it was there, but when he showed it to her, she’d clambered up onto the giant boulder to reach it before he could test it first.

Remembering the way he’d stood, arms crossed over his bare chest, waiting for her to let go or return to the bank—poised to leap in and pull her out if necessary—those were the memories that had brought her back each and every year until she’d met and married Sam.

Beth rubbed her arms and put away the past. John had been eighteen and she barely fourteen. He had been like a big brother to her, gentle but annoying. They had fished with her dad and camped out in the woods. They’d built shelters and climbed mountains, all things tomboy that Beth had loved back then. It had been absolutely . . . magical. And then he had simply disappeared. He’d never known how her feelings for him had changed over the course of that summer. They’d gone from platonic to knight-in-shining-armor crushy, and she had never told him.

The next trip to Stutter Creek, a few months later, she had cajoled her dad into taking her all the way up the mountain to John’s cabin, but it had been deserted. He obviously hadn’t been there in a long time. She never saw him again. He had told her he had an aunt in Houston, but his parents had died in a car crash when he was seven. He’d never mentioned his aunt’s name; all Beth knew was that her last name wasn’t the same as his.

When John finally did return to the mountain, he had immediately checked out the old Brannock cabin, but of course, it was empty. He supposed he should have been more forthcoming about his childhood way back when; how his aunt had taken him in after his parents death. And, also, how he’d always felt it was somehow his fault that she was so distant and disinterested. It wasn’t that his aunt was cruel; she’d just been a career woman who didn’t want children. Maybe if he had told Beth all that, then she would have understood why he had never returned to his little cabin near Stutter Creek. Even though he’d bought the property with his parents’ insurance money, and even though he’d built his little cabin right in the middle of it, once he’d met Beth, his desire to live alone and hide from the world had disappeared. And yet, he never felt that he could admit that fact to anyone.

That was when he’d decided he needed to see some more of the world before he let himself become a hermit. Years later, he finally admitted to himself that he had “lit out for the territories” mostly because he felt guilty as hell for having fallen for a fourteen-year-old girl.

He had set out to find a girl his own age. Someone with whom he might share the same sort of connection as the one he’d felt with Beth. In his journal, he’s admitted that he was afraid something wrong with him. Why else would he have enjoyed such platonic, tomboyish things with a little girl and her dad? He had never enjoyed himself or felt so at ease in his whole life as the summer he spent with them at Stutter Creek.

Later, after he’d joined the Army and seen life behind enemy lines, he’d come to believe that it wasn’t just Beth that had made him feel so different; it was Beth and being part of her relationship with her dad. He’d never realized how much he had missed out on when his own parents passed away. Eventually, John convinced himself that his feelings for Beth had just been brotherly, and he’d squashed down and ignored the fact that from then on he compared every girl he met to her.

***

Locking the car after her last trip with the ice chest, Beth stopped and listened to the forest. She’d always felt very lucky to have the National Forest as their back yard. It literally backed right up to their land. There would never be a subdivision or a dividing of their acreage. Her dad had lucked out when he’d bought the little five-acre plot so many years earlier.

Over the years she would intermittently talk her dad into hiking up to John’s old cabin again, but he was never there. It just became more and more decrepit, as if the forest was in a battle to reclaim it, and the forest was winning.

Inhaling deeply, Beth savored the tang of pine. The humid air was like a balm. Her dad had loved these piney woods, the fragrance, the wildlife, the isolation, and especially the little creek that bordered the property. In fact, it was this very creek, the crystal clear Stutter Creek, which gave the small nearby town its name.

All her life, when they needed to get away, one or the other of them would utter the simple question, “Stutter Creek?” And in no time at all they would be packed and in the car. Eventually, she’d even mastered the art of “cabin” packing: pajamas, pair of jeans, couple tee shirts, cut-offs for swimming in the creek, bug spray, and some food. No makeup, hair dryer, curling irons, none of that. Just real life stuff.

Her daughter, Abby, had been the same way. She’d thought Sam was, too. Now, she just didn’t know. Their whole life together seemed like little more than a sham. It was hard to even think about him anymore. It seemed like no matter which memory surfaced, she had to stop and examine it, to see if it had been tainted by the lie that was his infidelity.

In other words, he had burst her bubble, big time. No longer was she the Cinderella who had married her prince and lived happily ever after. Now she felt more like the village idiot; one who had never known everyone else was making fun of her all along. It seemed as if everyone had known about the affair but her.