6 Maple Leaf Hunter (13 page)

Oh my gosh! Not this again. “What coins?” I asked. “I thought you guys already had all the gold.”

“You had ten coins,” he said. “We don’t have them, and the cops haven’t found them, so all we can figure is you pulled a fast one on us.”

My head was spinning. There were too many parts to this story, and I didn’t know all of them. I grabbed the door handle of the SUV and yanked hard. It didn’t open. The child locks were on. The man rolled his eyes.

“Dad said you’re a reasonable person,” he said. “Give me the coins, and that will be the end of everything.”

“I thought you took the coins before we ever came back to the States,” I said. “Darby and Nate’s house looked like a tornado went through it. You could have been more careful.”

“There weren’t any coins in that house,” he said. “I know you have them, and you’re going to take them to Dad’s construction office tonight at ten o’clock. Dad said I could trust you, so no cops. Not that husband of yours either, or those two goofy guys, or the kid. Just you. If you don’t bring them, or I see anyone else, you’re going to have to watch that little blonde girl of yours a lot closer.”

I couldn’t help gasping. Nothing he said had frightened me until he mentioned Lizzie. And if he didn’t have the coins, they had to still be in Alex’s room. I was sure I had put them on his dresser when I returned home from the market with Darby.

Knowing where the coins were, and that giving them to him would keep Lizzie safe, I had no trouble agreeing to his demands.

He unlocked the car and squeezed himself out. He waited for me to extricate myself. My packages from the deli, my purse, and my car keys were on the ground. I leaned down to pick them up. When I stood, he handed a piece of paper to me with an address.

“Make sure you come in your own car,” he said. “And don’t forget to come alone.” He turned to walk away.

“Wait,” I said.

He stopped and turned back to face me.

“What happened to your dad?” I asked. I couldn’t understand why Ralph was still looking for the coins.

The man smirked. “He was picked up in Montreal this morning with the gold bars. He couldn’t fence them, and the police caught him in a sting. The coins you have are my ticket out from all of this.”

Some little corner of my heart ached, and my disappointment was genuine. I had honestly believed Ralph would turn himself in at Silver Run. Instead, he went on the run.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

“She was screaming like a banshee when she found the leech on her leg,” Alex told Detective Bentley. He followed the comment with a hearty laugh.

I think the leech creeped Alex out as much as it did me, and he was secretly glad it hadn’t happened to him when he swam in the river at the lodge.

I sat back in my chair and smiled. Even though Alex had started school a few days late, he had settled in nicely and told Mick over the phone that he was doing well and having a good time. I was pleased to see his car in the driveway when I came home from the deli. I wasn’t sure if he would make the drive home from Columbus to have dinner with us and spend the night, but I was glad he did.

None of us had talked much about what happened in Canada, but with Detective Bentley here, we were finally ready to have a conversation. I think Alex wanted to be here to give his perspective, too.

When I came home limping and sporting a fresh red bump, Mick insisted I lie down on the sofa with ice on both my ankle and my forehead. I told him it was an accident and both mishaps occurred when I lost my balance getting into my car. He wanted to cancel dinner plans, but I insisted we go forward with the evening. In the end, my argument won out, and Darby and Nate took over the cooking duties to make the Reuben sandwiches in our kitchen.

“Susan,” Detective Bentley said. “I think these sandwiches of yours get better and better all the time.”

I only smiled.

“Hey, wait a minute,” Nate piped up. “Darby and I made the sandwiches this time. Are you saying they’re better than Susan’s?” He puffed out his chest with pride.

The detective looked flustered at possibly offending me, but he said, “I think these are the best I’ve had so far.”

Nate clapped Darby on the back with joy. Darby laughed and said, “Yeah, but Susan taught us how to make them, and the Thousand Island dressing is her recipe.” Nate was forced to good-naturedly agree.

Everyone was nearly finished eating. I tore a few pieces of crust from the edge of the last of my sandwich and held them under the table for Joe. He took them gently from my hand and gobbled them down. He hadn’t left my side since coming home this afternoon. I rubbed behind his ears and whispered to him, “You’re a good dog, Joe.”

“If everyone’s done,” Mick said, “let’s move into the living room. We can have coffee and dessert in there.”

“I’m too full for dessert,” the detective said. “Maybe later. But a cup of coffee sounds great.”

Nate made like a waiter and took everyone’s drink order before heading for the kitchen.

My ankle was sore, but I could walk on it. The twist in the back seat of the car hadn’t been severe, and the ankle appeared to be more aggravated than damaged. Still, Mick helped me to one of the two sofas in the room and propped my foot up on a footstool.

Dinner conversation had consisted mostly of light chatter about work and school. The one bright note was when Detective Bentley told us they found the guys who threw the dead cow onto Mrs. Moore’s yard. It seemed other kids in town were also having problems with the Moore Landscaping drivers. A freshman on the Carbide High swim team enlisted his twenty-six-year-old brother and a few of his friends to get the dead cow from a field on the outskirts of town where a local farmer had dumped it. They loaded it into the back of a pickup, and took it to the Moore house during the night. There were no charges filed against anyone except the farmer who had illegally dumped the cow. Detective Bentley finished his story with a heartfelt apology to all of us, but especially to Alex.

The only comments over dinner about our vacation had been to discuss my sprained ankle, my appendicitis surgery, and the leech. The silence in the living room now was awkward.

I took a sip of my raspberry tea before saying, “I want to thank Chuck for joining us.” It always made me a little uncomfortable to call Detective Bentley by his first name, but we had all been friends long enough now, it came more easily to me than it used to. I turned to the detective to give him a warm smile, “I also want to thank you for taking my collect call and helping me when I was in Martha’s house. I would have never thought to look for a crutch, or even to leave the house, so thank you for your guidance.”

Everyone mumbled agreement. He only appeared slightly embarrassed when he said, “I was happy to help, and I’m glad everything worked out. I’m sorry your call was refused at the station when you first called. I’ve already taken care of that, so it won’t happen again.”

Mick was upset when he asked, “You called for help, and they wouldn’t give it to you?”

“She called collect,” the detective said.

Speaking at the same time, I said, “I called collect, and-” I stopped to let him finish.

“Ever since the 911 system went into effect, we haven’t accepted collect calls from anyone,” he said. “There really hasn’t been any reason to.”

Silence surrounded us again. I looked to Alex to help get the ball rolling. There was a lot I wanted to know, and for some reason, everyone had been following Mick’s lead and hesitant to talk about it.

“Alex, I still want to know what happened after Ramsey ran off with me,” I said with a smile. “Did you really see that happen?”

“Wow, Susan,” he said uncomfortably. “Way to jump right in.” He paused for a moment before saying, “I think I’m the reason no one has wanted to talk about this.” No one objected, and he sat quiet for a moment. “I thought the Sasquatch was real at the time, and I figured he would take you somewhere and tear you apart and maybe even eat you.”

I almost smiled, but he was so grave, I held all of my emotions in check.

He continued, “I knew Dad would never forgive me for leaving you there, and I kind of went crazy and wanted to kill myself. I went to the rock quarry, and I was just going to slide off into the water. I figured they would never find you, and I didn’t want anybody to find me either.”

His words shocked me to my core. Tears burned my eyes. I had been trying to convince everyone that I was ok, and I had even been making light of the ordeal. I had been oblivious to how deeply everyone else might have been impacted by the chain of events.

A sorrowful sigh escaped, and I whispered, “Oh, Alex.”

He saw my distress and tried to smile. “I’m ok now,” he said. “But at the time, I went to the edge of the quarry and sat down on a rock. Have you ever heard that if your hair stands up during a storm, lightning is going to strike where you’re standing?”

I nodded my head yes.

“I felt that,” he said. “It had to be survival mode, because I jumped off the rock and just missed getting hit. I thought for sure I’d be deaf from the sound it made.”

Mick chimed in to say, “That’s when he decided to leave the quarry.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I realized if there weren’t any instances of a Sasquatch or Bigfoot ever hurting a human, then maybe you wouldn’t be the first. Maybe you would be ok, so I ran back to the lodge to tell Dad.”

I knew better than to ask Mick or the guys how they felt when they heard the news. Instead, I asked, “When did you figure out it wasn’t a real Sasquatch?”

Nate laughed. “That was all Darby,” he said. “He was the sane one when we were all going crazy.”

Darby smiled and said, “It was so shocking the first time Alex told us what he saw, we made him tell us again. When he said the Sasquatch picked up the gun before he picked you up, I knew it had to be a thinking man, not some animal. So, we did have that part figured out right away.”

“It wasn’t a real gun,” I told Alex. “Ralph said it was a prop gun like they use in theaters. He said he had no intention of hurting us.”

“You could have fooled me,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “It scared me when I saw he was the one to pick me up along the road, but something had changed in him. He was defeated, and he wasn’t angry anymore. I think the blow to his head shook him up quite a bit.”

“Good,” Mick said. “He needed a blow to his head.”

“Too bad he got away with the gold,” Alex said. He looked at Detective Bentley and asked, “Am I in trouble for digging it up and giving it to him?”

“Not that I’m aware of,” Chuck said. “There’s still a lot to untangle yet.”

“He didn’t get away with it,” I said. “He was picked up in Montreal this morning with all four gold bars.”

The detective was quick to ask, “How do you know that?”

Guilt over not telling them about Ralph’s son this afternoon surely showed on my face, and I instinctively opened my eyes wide when I realized my mistake in speaking out. I attempted to regain my composure.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I must have heard it on the news when I went to the store today.”

He frowned. I was certain he didn’t believe me, but he didn’t say anything. I changed the subject.

“Were you able to trace the call to Martha’s house?” I asked.

He shook his head. “By the time I got down to the station, the call had dropped. It was pretty frustrating trying to talk to people in Canada who didn’t want to talk to me. By the time I started making calls, they already had an all-out manhunt going on for you, and no one wanted to take the time to talk to some detective in Ohio. That’s when a woman answering the phone at the local police station put me in touch with that idiot, Richard Rice.” Everyone in the room rolled their eyes at the same time. “I told him where to find you, and he promised to have someone call me back, but, of course he never did. I paced for over an hour before calling the police station again and yelling at the woman. I kept telling her I knew where you were until she finally shut up long enough to listen.”

He rubbed his hands together and ran them up and down on the top of his slacks. It seemed just thinking about the frustration again broke him out into a sweat.

“Did she listen?” Nate asked.

“She eventually put an officer on with me,” he acknowledged. “He knew the exact location when I described the barn with the tobacco advertisement and the surrounding countryside. I found out later it only took thirty minutes before they searched the barn, but you weren’t there. It wasn’t too long after that, and they had a warrant to search Martha’s house. I think you know the rest from there. She’ll definitely be doing jail time for writing the fake prescriptions and for attempted murder.”

Alex frowned and asked, “Why was she shooting at Susan? I never heard the answer for that.”

“She panicked,” Chuck said. “She knew people would think she had kidnapped Susan, and if the fake prescriptions came to light, she’d definitely go back to jail. Ramsey left her holding the bag, and she snapped when she saw Susan was gone. She was going to keep her from talking.”

A shiver coursed through my body, and I felt Mick tighten his grip on my hand.