Barefoot Beach (40 page)

I was in my kitchen peeling off soaked sneakers and socks when Jack appeared. I'd texted him on the way home.
You still at Ethan's? All okay?
and received the briefest reply he could manage.
Yes. Fine.
Seven letters that spelled out his mood of the moment.

He scoped the room and finding me alone allowed me a half smile.

I couldn't manage even that. “I thought you'd be waiting this out at the Winslets'. What are you doing here?”

“What you shouldn't be doing. Tying up the deck, making sure everything's in shape for the storm.” He gave me the once-over. “I gotta tell you, you look like a drowned rat.”

He spotted my slicker, still glossy, hanging from a hook near the slider, then peered out to the deck, where anything that could fly had been strapped down and the rest covered and huddled against the siding. “It wasn't smart of you to haul around that stuff. You're not twenty-five anymore, Mom.”

He was heading for the counter. “I'll double-check in a minute. Just want a chance to warm up. God, it's crappy out there. Coffee. I need coffee. You too? Mom, I can't believe you turned over the table by yourself. It's got to weigh more than you do.”

“Well . . .”

I started to tell him that I only helped flip it, because that took four hands, when Scott called in from the front hall, “All set. You're ready for anything short of a category three hurricane. I'm keeping the boots on. That okay?”

Jack held on to his glower for a full sixty seconds until Scott, dripping, materialized in the kitchen. Then it notched up to a glare.

For Scott's work under the pummeling rain, I'd dug through the closet in the mudroom and come up with a pair of steel-toed boots Lon used to wear when mucking around outside. They were a half size too small, but Scott jammed into them. I'd also unearthed a long-buried Oakland Raiders rain poncho. It was a goofy-looking thing in silver plastic with the team logo, but Lon had loved it and it had kept him dry in the stadium seats. Jack registered that signature poncho in a heartbeat and shot Scott a bullet of a look that ricocheted to me. I felt his sting at the sight of the intruder in his father's rain gear, on his deck, in his kitchen, in my life. Scott, unaware, gave him a cheerful, “Hey, Jack.”

Nostrils flared, chin jutted, Jack bobbed his head. He could barely lift his hand for a wordless hi. Scott grabbed a paper towel and blotted his face. He spotted the coffee and poured himself a mug. “Ah, better,” he said after the second swallow. “Nora, just so you know, I walked the perimeter of the house. I lashed down a few of the bushes on the left side and
covered your strawberries. That wind is brutal. I leashed Sarge in your mudroom. I hope it's okay. It's only for a few minutes because we ought to get started.” He hadn't bothered to shed the poncho. “Has Emine's email come in yet?”

“Hold on.” I checked. “Just in. She listed some places Merry frequents.” I ran down the roster. “Six are businesses and she phoned the ones she had names for. They haven't seen Merry. The other three we'll have to check out in person. Some makeup shop in the Gold Coast Mall. A bowling alley in Ocean City, and one of the arcades on the boardwalk. Em doesn't know any of their names. She also sent a recent photo of Merry.” A selfie, mugging, with her eyes crossed, but good enough for an ID.

Jack had been staring intently into his coffee cup, but now he jerked his head up. “This is about Merry? What's she into now?”

I explained the situation and that Mrs. Haydar was frantic with worry.

Jack said, “I don't know about the makeup place or which arcade. I know the only bowling alley in OC is Ocean Lanes.” He leaned back and slid an inclusive look at Scott and me. “But you don't have to guess where she is. I can tell you.”

“What? Where?” I said.

Scott, who'd been an engineering major at the Point, asked, “How?”

“Mom asked me to load some programs and some apps on Merry's new Android. Aunt Margo didn't spare the bucks for that one and Merry's always losing her phone. So along with Fried Zombies and Makeup Mania and maybe twenty more apps, I loaded Lost and Phoned.”

“Ahh,” Scott said. “Yes, good idea.”

“Talk to me,” I said. “What's Lost and Phoned?”

“You lose your phone, this app locates it,” Jack said. “I've got it on my cell too. It's like a GPS. As long as Merry is carrying her phone with her, when you find the phone, you find her. Here, I'll show you.”

He pulled his tablet from his duffel bag. His mood had shifted. Now he was the leader of the pack. “Okay, when I loaded the app into her phone, I also registered her number at the Lost and Phoned website. And I got a password for me because she's a little ditzy, so I figured backup wouldn't hurt.”

“Smart,” Scott said.

Jack raised an eyebrow in acknowledgment, then typed something into the virtual keyboard. The Lost and Phoned info center surfaced, Jack slotted in a password, and a list appeared. “My personal directory. See, there's Merry's number. I'll highlight it. One stroke and we know where she is. Or where her phone is. She could have dropped it somewhere or ditched it on purpose to screw around with anyone looking for her. I don't think she'd ditch it, though. She loves that phone.”

“She knows the app's on there?” Scott asked, leaning over Jack's shoulders to get a better view.

“I told her. But it's buried among all the others and she's a goth, not a geek. If she thinks about it at all, she figures it's tracking her phone, not her. And here it comes.” A map surfaced. “See. Like a GPS, right? Those little red dots called pings mark her trail over the last half hour or so. And . . .” He magnified the screen. “Our girl hasn't moved for all that time. She's at . . . 55 Churchyard Lane.”

“Churchyard Lane?”

Jack said, “I walk the Brinkers' dog and they're at 40 Churchyard. It's kind of back in the woods. Off Miller's Creek and near the wetlands, a twenty-minute walk from downtown. Mrs. Brinker said it used to be a nice community, with a church and all. The church is closed now, and a lot of the original houses have been torn down. Some developer's talking about building out there, but just talking. These days, you've got maybe four houses along the path. Fifty-five Churchyard.” My son thought for a moment. “I'll bet that's the old Henlopen house.”

“Hazel Henlopen,” I whispered. “The Cat Lady. But she passed away this spring.”

“Mrs. Brinker told me they came to take away the cats. But a few hang around anyway.”

“Animals have long memories,” Scott said.

“Wasn't that house condemned? It's probably not safe,” I said. “I'm going to phone the Haydars.”

“Hey, Mom, not yet, okay? It could just be where her phone is. You don't want to get Mrs. Haydar's hopes up, and also that's a bad place to be and if she knows about it, she might worry more.”

“I agree,” Scott said. “So what are we waiting for? I'll go get the real expert.” He turned to Jack. “My German Shepherd, Sarge. He's trained for search and rescue, among other missions. You don't mind sitting in the back with him?”

“Hell, no. I'm a dog person.” I saw my son working to keep a grin suppressed. “You're saying you want me along?”

Scott's voice deepened to one I'd heard him use with Sarge when issuing commands. It was a voice you listened to, trusted, respected. “We're going to need you. If we're going through a condemned house, we'll need all hands on deck.”

Which triggered my clairvoyant flash. I could hear Jack thinking,
Damn right he's going to need me with only one good leg.

“And tools,” Scott said. “I've got some in my trunk, but I'll need a pry bar and maybe a saw.”

“My dad has all kinds in the garage. You can take what you need.”

“Great.” Scott rinsed out his mug in the sink. “Come on. I'll introduce you to my sidekick.”

After they left, I sank into the chair, staring at the tablet Jack had left on the table. The red dots hadn't moved.

I
got moving, though, when I heard my son say in the high squeaky
voice he told me dogs liked, “Hey, Sarge. Hey, boy, how you doing? You're a handsome fella.” And Scott, his voice deeper, but rich with reassurance, telling Sarge that Jack was a good guy. The dog growled blissfully, a hum of gratitude for someone brushing his coat or scratching his neck.

Minutes later, back in my slicker and carrying my tote with four bottles of water nesting in Merry's jacket, I was ready to go. With Sarge leading the pack, we were on our way.

The Henlopen place was a beaten house off the beaten path. The skinny dirt road leading to it was lined on one side with elms and oaks. On the other were wetlands, an amoeba of a marsh clogged with cattails, sedges, and rushes. Above it hung an eerie mist.

As we drove up we took in the shambles of a house. “I've seen worse,” Scott said, “but not in this country.”

Once, it must have been beautiful. Like a has-been film star, it displayed the souvenirs of youth in its bone structure—the elegant sweep of the roof, the exotic cutwork of the gables, the fanciful scroll trim. But time and neglect had eroded its skin. Peeling paint exposed layers of former colors. Absent shingles like missing teeth ruined its expression, and the chimney was crumbling. One of the porch pillars, detached from its overhead mooring, leaned drunkenly against what had once been a swing for two and was now suspended vertically from a single rusty chain. The entry had been sealed with a massive lock and the front door was plastered with a “Condemned” placard washed by rain and bleached by sun to an anemic pink.

Throughout the drive I'd heard Jack softly sweet-talking Sarge, who maintained a quiet demeanor, emitting an occasional low growl, mostly keeping his cool. But when we parked in the driveway and Scott opened the door for the backseat passengers, the dog bounded out, tail wagging.

Scott, Sarge at his side, moved around the car to the trunk and
removed a coil of rope, which he slung over his shoulder, and the large canvas bag loaded with his tools and Lon's. Since he was working with Sarge, he asked Jack to carry the bag.

Scott kept a judicious silence as he scoped the front of the property. Pulling up the poncho hood against the battering rain, he climbed two decaying stone steps to read the faded sign nailed to the door. “The city authorities declared this house structurally unsound, so we're going to have to be really careful in there,” he said.

Two of the windows had been boarded up, but then maybe someone had seen the interior and concluded there was nothing for vandals to steal and, since the house had been scheduled for demolition, had stopped at that.

Scott stepped down, backed off, and looked around. “There's got to be access. Merry got in,” he said.

“Maybe not,” Jack answered. “I mean, the pings tell us she's in the vicinity, but they don't tell us if she's inside or outside the house. She could be anywhere around here.”

If Merry hadn't been able to break into shelter, she might have thought to hole up in the woods, where the trees were natural targets for lightning bolts, and where snakes and muskrats lurked in darkness under the leaf canopy. A dangerous place. I tried to shoo off a more disturbing possibility. If she'd opted to make her way back to the scattering of homes where the Brinkers lived and taken a shortcut around the marsh, whose margins were blurry, she could have easily lost her footing.

Scott seemed to have his dog's ability to read human emotion. He chased away my worst-case scenarios with an upbeat, “Look at Sarge. Already on the job. See him sniffing. All canines have an ability to pick up human scent. Two hundred million scent receptors make for one big, wet nose. In Sarge's case, he's been trained to use it to save human lives.”

The dog, tethered to Scott by a loose leash, had started his perimeter search, trotting over the spongy earth. We followed.

“I thought he was a bomb sniffer,” Jack said.

“He's what we call a multifunction dog, cross-trained by the military to detect IEDs and other weapons and as a combat tracker. Combat trackers alert to generic human presence. But when I got him back to the States, I decided the best way for us to bond was to go through training together, the experienced dog and the new handler. Nothing works better to forge a relationship. We hooked up with law enforcement to qualify him as a SAR, a search-and-rescue dog. These trailing animals can home in on a specific live human scent. Like the Belgian Shepherd on the Osama bin Laden mission.”

“Cool,” Jack said.

“Yup. Sarge learned how to follow that personal mix of microscopic flakes of skin we're constantly shedding, along with sweat, perfume, shampoo, urine, and blood, if the subject is injured.”

Sarge, moving at a canter, stopped to sniff, then reject, pieces of litter along the path.

“Damn, I wish we had something of Merry's to give him,” Scott said.

I halted. “I have her jacket.”

Scott wheeled on me. “You have her . . . ,” he began.

“Jacket,” I repeated, thinking that I'd struck gold because the colonel's eyes were as bright as nuggets of the precious stuff.

As the men watched, speechless, I reached below the water bottles in my tote and pulled up the windbreaker. “Her mother was worried she'd be cold when we found her.”

Scott shook his head in wonderment as I handed it over. “A mother's love, you can't beat it.” He motioned us under an overhang where we'd be protected from the worst lashings of rain. He unzipped the plastic bag and held it out open to Sarge, who was immediately on it. We could see his nostrils rippling as he captured Merry's scent.

“Oh yeah, that's a good one, isn't it, fella? Yeah, you got it now, don't you?” Scott burbled in a cloying tenor. For the next minute or so, he gave the dog a pep talk in that syrupy tone. “Yeah, you're excited, boy. Yeah,
we're going to work. You love to work.” He unclipped the shepherd's lead and in a deeper, authoritative voice, issued the command, “Find this!”

Sarge set the pace, trotting, it seemed to me, with a new sense of purpose while managing to avoid obstacles in the path, mostly brambles and blown shingles. He detoured around a couple of broken two-by-fours. “Grab the longer one of those, will you, Nora?” Scott called back. “Once we're in the house, we'll use it to sound the floor ahead to make sure we're not walking on a surface that will give way under our weight. Falling through a floor sucks.”

“Copy that,” I said as I picked it up, eliciting a turn of his head and a smile.

Our parade had just rounded the second turn when something seized the shepherd's attention and he picked up speed. When he stopped, it was at a side window. He huffed, gave a short bark, then sat statue still, ears perked, nose drawing deep drafts of air. “He's found a scent cone,” Scott explained. “He's picking up a match to the jacket. This is where she got in.”

As we moved closer we could see the window had been knocked out. “Probably with this.” Scott motioned to a denuded tree limb lying off to one side.

He examined the jagged glass. “She smashed the window, reached inside, and unlocked the door. Smart girl, our Merry.”

We took a step to the adjacent door. He turned the handle and pushed it open. He gave us, two humans and a dog, the command, “Stay.”

Above us, the sky was a shroud. We peered inside, where it was even darker.

“We need light,” Scott said.

I groped around the doorjamb and found the light switch on the inside wall. I flipped it. Nothing.

“Mom, first thing they do is cut off utilities,” Jack said. Of course. He unlatched the tool bag, fished out a headlamp, and handed it to Scott, who strapped it on and switched it to broad beam. Jack pulled out two
flashlights, handed me one, and shone his torch ahead on Miss Henlopen's kitchen, then down on the linoleum littered with glass.

“We can walk around most of the larger fragments,” Scott said, “but be aware there may be smaller scattered pieces, spikes that can pierce your shoes.” He looked down at Sarge. “His paws are sensitive, but we didn't have time to stop for his booties.” He fastened Sarge's lead. His tone turned deadly serious. “Before we go in there, you need to know the first rule for any rescuer is not to become a victim. We can't help Merry if the search has to be diverted to help you, and this place could be like a minefield, with all kinds of stuff falling apart. I've got to keep my dog safe. And I'm responsible for you two. I'm open to suggestions, but I've done this before, so inside I'm in charge. Get it?”

“Got it,” I said.

Jack gave an almost imperceptible nod. I caught his expression in the light from my torch. Not happy. I thought I understood why. In his mind, he was under the protection of a leader who'd previously managed to get blown apart and who, in Jack's eyes, wasn't fit for duty.

The dog startled. He looked up at Scott.

“He's onto something,” Scott said.

Jack said, “I heard it too. There. Again. You guys didn't hear it?”

I did then. Mewling cries. Soprano. Feeble. Merry.

“Let's go,” Scott said. Once inside, he began to uncoil the rope. “Our safety line,” he said, as he secured it to a post near the kitchen door. “If all hell breaks loose and we can't see our way to the exit, we'll follow it out.” We moved, deliberately, delicately, Scott yelling Merry's name. No answer. He touched my shoulder. “She knows you. Call for her and ID yourself.”

I used all the voice I had. “Merry, it's Aunt Norrie. Are you here, Merry? Merry, answer me!” I heard only scratching nearby. Jack said, “Field mice probably. No big deal.”

Sarge droned a low growl. Instinct goaded him to chase small prey,
and he acknowledged their presence, but he'd been trained to overcome his natural impulse.

“Listen,” Scott commanded, and the dog slackened on the lead.

Faint baby cries, the same sounds we'd heard at the door, filtered through the din. “Merry!” I shouted her name. Silence, then the scratching noise, and “Ugh!” I felt something scurry over my boot. I leapt aside and swung my light to catch a scampering shadow. “A mouse.” I was panting. “No. Bigger. A rat.” My dancer's reflex lifted me to my toes and I hopped from foot to foot, stifling the urge to run. My teeth chattered a revolted rattle. Scott reached over and squeezed my hand.

Jack swept an arc of light over Miss Henlopen's kitchen. The cries became howls.

“Not rats,” he said. “Cats! Oh shit.”

The place was teeming with them. Most had taken cover. Escaping the strange voices and smells, they'd concealed themselves under tables or on tops of cabinets. From dark places their feral eyes glowed green and gold. Two of the braver ones roamed from the kitchen to the hall, tails up. Sarge was shuddering with suppressed ecstasy. “Easy, boy,” Scott calmed him.

“How did they get in?” I asked.

“Every house has chinks and tunnels, narrow spaces in the basement or attic that open to the outdoors,” Scott said. “See how thin these critters are. They can slip out to hunt, come back for shelter. And you said the Henlopen woman ran a hotel for strays. She must have pulled five stars on Expedia. Word obviously got around.”

“Merry loves cats,” I said. “Especially the homeless ones. I'll bet right now that's the way she sees herself. She's got to be here.”

Scott asked Jack to check the Lost and Phoned app to keep up with Merry's location.

It was a long minute of playing with his iPad before Jack said, “No signal. Mom, try your cell.” Also down. “The storm must have knocked everything out. We're on our own.”

“No, we're not,” Scott replied. He bent down, ruffled Sarge's coat, and gave the command: “Wander.”

We followed as Sarge did just that, ignoring the cats' cries, loping through the first floor, pausing here and there to sniff. He covered the living area, a small bathroom, a nook housing an old-fashioned sewing machine and bolts of fabric, but showed no special interest until he got to the staircase. There he stood at the bottom, nostrils twitching, ears flicking. “That's indicating, not alerting,” Scott explained. “We're on track, but not there yet.” When Sarge placed his front paws on the second step and tugged to go up, Scott motioned us closer. “He cleared this floor. From his reaction, Merry's been around, but he's catching a draft from upstairs that's interesting him.” He held up the flat of his hand. “Feel that?” A whoosh of cooler air from above. “That's where he wants to go, which means so do we. But stay to the sides of the steps. They're stronger there than in the middle.”

He reinforced the “Find” command. Sarge began to climb, and we followed, Scott tapping each step before we mounted it. Some were warped so badly they bowed. Halfway up, Jack lost balance and grabbed the handrail. I saw it waggle and heard his “oomph” as he steadied himself. I nearly tripped over a cat toy. But Scott, handling the lead, trailing the safety line, never faltered. His gait was perfectly balanced, no sway, no wobble, no hesitation.

As soon as the shepherd's paws touched down on the second-floor landing, he bristled with excitement. His tail went into wild spasms. He barked exclamation points. Scott unclipped the lead and gave him consent to go.

As he swept down the hall, his nose worked constantly. He charged through two rooms, in and out, and I swear I saw him shake his head “no” after each foray. We hustled after him in the corridor that had become a wind tunnel.