Lethal Little Lies (Jubilant Falls Series Book 3) (3 page)

              “Addison, I’m sorry to interrupt, but I have a problem. Kay’s in trouble.”

Chapter 3 Kay

              The cold winter sun broke through cheap cotton curtains. My head ached as I pushed myself up on my elbows. I was lying face down in the vomit-green bathtub of a cheap motel. A thin line of blood and snot extended from my throbbing nose to the floor of the tub. My right eye was swollen shut and I tasted the blood and raw meat of my lips.

              I didn’t remember a beating. I remembered being told to pull over, an odd, sweet smell and then darkness.

I pushed myself up using the side of the tub and stood, gasping as I caught a glimpse of my battered face in the bathroom mirror. Blood dried brown on the front of my velour blue sweatshirt. Was I bleeding when my captor put me in here or was I dumped into the tub, my wounds the result of striking the awful floor of the tub?

              I ran my fingers through my hair, recoiling as I felt a line of dried blood at the base of my skull.

              I remembered Sunday night.

              When he grabbed me, the knife kept me from turning around and seeing what he looked like as he’d ordered me into the van. I could smell his rancid body odor and his breath, each time he snapped at me, the smell of alcohol and un-brushed teeth turned my stomach.

“Don’t look at me!” he rasped. The knifepoint slid up to the back of my scalp. Sharp, short pain shot across the back of my head and I gasped as I felt him nick me. A thin trickle of blood slid down my neck, pooling briefly in my collar before sliding warmly down my back.

              “Drive,” he ordered.

              “Please, let me go!” I begged. “Please! I’ll give you the van!”

              He ignored my plea. “Turn here.”
              I did as he said.

              “Turn again.”

              I didn’t recognize where we were. The roads were dark and wooded. I’d never seen this part of Plummer County, if that was where we were.

              “Where are you taking me?”

              The knife pressed into the base of my skull again. I gasped.

              “Shut up,” he said. “Turn here. Park it and get out. Don’t turn around to look at me or I’ll kill you.”

              I did as he said. I felt him grab a fistful of the back of my down jacket, an odd sweet smell, and then everything went black.

              Now, I was face down in this bathtub and daylight was fading in the bathroom’s single window. Had I missed all of Monday?

              Suddenly all I could think of was my kids. Would I see them again? I thought of Andrew, tall and so handsome in his flight suit. Would the Air Force let him come home for my funeral?

              In two steps, I was at the door of the bathroom. I grabbed the knob and yanked. Locked.
Shit.

              On the other side of the door, I heard a grunt of angry frustration and a phone being hung up in anger.

              What about PJ, my darling, darling PJ—his wry sense of humor, his geekiness, his brilliance? I hadn’t brought him into the world—I’d simply brought him to mine but he’d been such a blessing. Would I be there to see him graduate from college? Whatever was bothering him at MIT, we couldn’t work it out unless I got out of this alive.

              And Lillian, silly Lillian, so like her grandmother, impressed with the worldly goods her New York boyfriend had and the world that a Barnard education opened up for her. Marcus and I were certain they’d get married—God, she couldn’t get married if I wasn’t there! I wanted to see her standing at the altar, looking into the face of the man she loved.

             
Marcus
. None of it would matter if I didn’t have Marcus. What had happened to us that we’d drifted so far apart? It didn’t matter now. I didn’t care if it was another woman, we could work our way back. We could—
we
had to.

              I had to be home to do that.

              I was going to get home to do that.

              I yanked on the door again and screamed.

              “Help! Help!”

              I heard footsteps—was it one person or two? —come to the door. There were two voices — were they two men? I grabbed the doorknob and pulled repeatedly.

“Let me out! Who are you?”

              There was the sound of a click, but it wasn’t the door.

I turned and looked around. The bathroom was basic. The toilet sat in a small alcove beside the bathtub and the sink jutted from the wall across from the tub, edged with mildewed grout. The window was four glass blocks, cemented together and covered with a faded cotton curtain.

              Suddenly, I felt my Blackberry vibrate in my pocket. I pulled it from my pocket and pushed the button to talk.

              “Marcus?” I asked. God, it had to be. Whatever we were going through didn’t matter now. Whatever I’d said in the letter I’d left on the kitchen counter seemed silly and selfish—I just wanted to be home and in his arms again. I wanted to see my—
our—
children.

              Before he could answer, the door burst open. There was the flash of a gunshot, I screamed and it all went black.

Chapter 4 Marcus

            
 
Addison looked as if she were going to kill me.

“I’m sorry, Addison. It’s Kay. She’s missing and she’s in trouble.”

The police were there instantaneously. It was a cop I didn’t recognize—but who waved to Addison as the three of us shut ourselves in the conference room.

              Briefly, I explained the situation: the letter, the minivan she was driving, the royal blue velour sweat suit she was wearing because it set off her still-red hair, the short, black down jacket she always wore when the weather turned cold.

              “Were you having any marital problems?” The cop’s eyes were clear and icy.

              I sighed. “We’d grown apart in the last year. I don’t know whether it was because our youngest had gone off to college or if it was something else.”

              “Anything extra-marital?” His eyes were piercing.

              “Not on my part.”

              “What about her?”

              I was stunned. Could there have been something? Every time I took out my laptop to work on my novel, she left. Could there have been something? Could she have found someone else? The woman I’d dated after her first husband—and then taken from her second—wouldn’t have done that to me, would she?

              Would she?

              “I-I don’t really know. I don’t think so.”

              The cop made a few notes and nodded.

              “But she’d left this letter, saying that she wanted to think about things.”

              “We’re at an extreme disadvantage, since you honored her request and didn’t call her until late,” the cop said. “If it hadn’t been for your phone call, I’d be tempted to say she’d just gone off to work things out—”

              “Which is what I thought, too—” I hung my head.

              “But she’s obviously in danger,” the cop finished. “We’ll see about putting out a BOLO for her locally and throughout Ohio. She could be anywhere in the state. Do you have any other children?”

              “Yes. One’s in the air force, the other two are in college.”

              “You might want to contact them.”

              I felt my stomach sink. The cop stood and shook Addison’s outstretched hand.
              “How’s your dad?” he asked her as she opened the conference room door.

              “He’s getting up there, a little arthritic, but still living in that house, puttering around the garden,” she said quietly as they stepped outside. “Tell Gary I said hello.”

              Gary McGinnis was the assistant police chief and a good friend of Addison’s.

I laid my head down on the polished table. How could they stand there and chat when Kay’s life was in danger? The conversation dropped to whispers and I heard the door shut.

              The kids. I had to call the kids and let them know. I sat up and fished my cell phone from inside my jacket pocket. I was scrolling through the phone numbers when Addison walked back in.

              “Sorry about that,” she said. “Listen, you know we really need to do a story and get it up on the Web site right away.”

              “I know.”

              “Maybe somebody saw her. It could help us find her.”

              “Yeah.”

              “I’ll do this one and then give Graham a call. He’ll need to follow this up.”

              I nodded.

              “I need to go call my kids,” I said.

              “I’ll do up a rough draft and let you look it over before we send it. I’ll leave you alone.” Addison reached over and touched my arm, then left, shutting the door quietly behind her.

              I flipped open the phone again.

              Andrew’s home number was first on the list.

              Andrew was beginning his career as a new first lieutenant in the air force, following his graduation from the Air Force Academy. Like his late father, the Major, he followed him into the wild blue yonder with a year of undergraduate pilot training.

              He was now settling into his first assignment. His mother privately sighed in relief that, unlike his father, he was flying an unmanned Predator drone from a blank-looking building somewhere in the Las Vegas desert and going home safe after each shift. She would never worry that he would be shot down over hostile skies or auger into the side of a hill, that his wife would receive that same knock on the door she had gotten when his father’s fighter plane became a coffin. Andrew was, like the Major, tall, gregarious and a ladies’ man.

              There was no answer there or on his cell phone. I didn’t know what kind of hours he worked. That was one of the oddities of this war. He was as good as deployed—during his shift. At the end of the day, he got in his car and drove back to his apartment. He’d told us in the event of an emergency to call the Red Cross or family support at Symington Air Force Base in nearby Collitstown. It would take me a little bit to find those numbers, so instead I scrolled down to Lillian’s number.

              Lillian attended Barnard, studying French literature and language. She’d just started her senior year and she and her boyfriend, a WASP-y young man with the pompous name of Bronson Atwater, were going to Paris for a month over the holiday break. He’d come into some trust fund cash and was footing the bill.

              Ironically, Lilly’s education brought out the Marian in her. Like her father, she was tall, her hair strawberry blonde. Like her grandmother, she was haughty and a bit of a snob, convinced there wouldn’t be any opportunities for social climbing here in Jubilant Falls. Her mother and I hoped this young man would make it through grad school in record time in order to take her off our hands and provide her the lifestyle she believed she deserved.

              “Well hello, Father!” Lillian’s voice was warm and confident at the other end of the call. “Bronson and I are having dinner at this perfectly wonderful little place in Little Italy —It’s just right out of
Moonstruck.
Remember that line? The one Olympia Dukakis said? What men don’t know about women…” Her Brooklyn accent was dead on.

              I swallowed. Yeah, what
I
don’t know about women may have cost us your mother. Lillian kept talking.

              “Anyway, it’s just two weeks before Paris—I’m getting ex-
ci-t
ed.” Her voice jumped an octave in the second syllable.

              I swallowed again and managed to speak. “Lillian, honey. I’ve got some bad news. About your mother.”

              The posh tone stopped. The little heathen who used to beat up her older brother was back. “What? What’s wrong with Mom?”

              “She’s missing.”

              “Oh, Daddy, no!”

              “Honey, you need to come home.” Quickly, I told her what happened. There was the brief sound of her hand covering the receiver and then she returned to our conversation.

              “Bronson says we’ll be on the next flight out.”

              “Great.”

              “Daddy, I love you.”

              “I love you too, Lillian.”

              The conversation over, I slipped my phone into my jacket pocket and sighed.

              The conference room door opened. It was Addison.

              “I’ve got a rough draft, if you want to come look at it on my computer,” she said.

              The story was short, but painful to read.

Jubilant businesswoman, wife of J-G reporter missing

By Addison McIntyre

J-G Managing editor

              Kay Henning, owner of Aurora Development, and wife of Journal-Gazette reporter Marcus Henning has been reported missing and is believed to be in danger.

              Mrs. Henning was supposed to travel to Massachusetts to visit the couple’s youngest son, PJ, who is attending Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. When Mrs. Henning did not arrive, PJ called his father who reported the disappearance to the police.

              Attempts to contact Mrs. Henning on her cell phone were successful, but police would not elaborate on the content of those calls except to say that they believed she was in danger and a statewide ‘be on the look out’ notice—or BOLO—was issued to other Ohio law enforcement departments and the State Highway Patrol.

              Mrs. Henning was wearing a blue velour sweat suit and a short black down jacket. She was driving an older maroon Chrysler minivan registered to her husband. She is approximately 5 feet 4 inches tall with shoulder-length red hair.

              Anyone with information about her disappearance is asked to call the Jubilant Falls Police Department.

              “Looks good,” I said. I couldn’t even give Addison a decent quote for the story, unless there was some way to translate the blubbering of a failed man.

              She silently patted me on the shoulder and nodded her understanding.

              “You don’t need to be here,” she said. “I know I yelled at you this morning and I shouldn’t have—I’m sorry. Go home and don’t worry about work. I’ll get Graham Kinnon to come back in off furlough and cover your beat.”

              “And this story?” I asked.

              She nodded again. “They’ll find her. I know they will. That officer is waiting to follow you home. He needs some more information about Kay to jump start the search.”

              “They have to find her. She’s my whole life.”

*****

              Our wedding had been small and intimate, in the chapel of a local church we didn’t attend but whose pastor agreed to marry us. We’d included the children, letting each of them light what the officiating pastor called “unity candle” to signify that we were all a family now, not just simply man and wife.

              No one else attended. The five of us piled into my junker of a car and went out for ice cream.

              What an inauspicious beginning.

              I’d sold all my ratty furniture, boxed up my personal papers and belongings and moved into the house Kay had grown up in, the house we still lived in.

              My father had been proud, in his illiterate Appalachian way that I’d “come into money,” even if I’d had to marry it. My mother knew better.

              “You’re happy now, aren’t you?” she’d asked. “I can see it in your eyes.”

              Our first years together were delightful.

              I continued to work at the J-G. She took over her mother’s real estate business, Aurora Development, and built it up until it was one of the biggest corporations in Jubilant Falls.

              She kept her hand in a number of causes—she was still my Kay after all.

              She became chairman of the literacy center’s board of directors, endowed GED and career programs for high school dropouts, including a day care center for teen mothers to leave their babies while they studied. The homeless shelter was named for her father and, while it didn’t carry the family name, the domestic violence shelter received major funding from Aurora Development. The community enjoyed visiting musicians and amateur theater productions at the high school auditorium through the year, thanks to my Kay.

              She did a lot of good.

              Together, we raised those three kids, taking part in a litany of soccer practices, football games and dance recitals. Christmas was right out of Norman Rockwell and we made sure that the kids understood that their privilege was a gift, not a right. All the kids were required to work at the homeless shelter—and at the domestic violence shelter.

              Kay didn’t want the kids to work at Aurora Development, unless they expressed an interest. She wanted them out on their own, exploring other options, so we went through all the things that kids thought they wanted to do—music lessons, summer science camps, skiing, even a short brush with 4-H and showing livestock.

              Kay and I were passionate with each other, too, long after the honeymoon period passed us by.

              Somewhere we must have just lost touch.

              I pulled my cell phone out of my jacket and tried Andrew’s home number again. This time, he picked up. In the background, I heard a woman giggle, and sigh.

              “Hello?”

              “Hi, Andrew, it’s Dad. Can you come home? It’s about your mom.”

              Once again, I explained the situation. I didn’t tell him I was too drunk the night before to find the one clue that could have kept her safe.

Andrew was silent.

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”