Mrs. Million (21 page)

Barbaraannette nodded slowly, flipping through all the faces she knew. Other than Hugh and Rodney, she could think of no one capable of kidnapping Bobby, and the voice on the phone was not a Cold Rock voice at all. It was more like an Eastern voice. A self-consciously cultured voice. She shook her head. “I don’t know him.”

“You said there were two of them.”

“Yes, the cultured one, and the first one who called, the one who said he’d gotten hurt in the Gulf War. He didn’t sound familiar either, and I don’t know anybody who fought over there except poor Ralphie Jorgenson and he died in a Jeep accident.”

Mary Beth blinked, heavy lids slamming over gray eyes. Barbaraannette imagined she could hear the clank. “We should call the police,” Mary Beth pronounced.

“Dale Gordon? I don’t think so. The last time I talked to him he asked me out. I’d rather date dirt.”

“He asked you out?”

Barbaraannette nodded.

Mary Beth’s lips pulled back, showing her straight, square teeth. “I’ll bet Sheila would like to know about
that.”
Sheila Gordon and Mary Beth were both members of the City Council.

“He said they were separated.”

“Not according to Sheila they aren’t. Well, if you can’t call Dale, maybe you should call the FBI.”

“No. I made this thing happen, I’m going to take care of it myself.”

Mary Beth snorted.

Barbaraannette felt Hilde’s nails dig deep into her forearm. “You’re a good girl, Babba. You always clean your messes.”

“You sure have got a mess this time,” Mary Beth said.

Hilde said, “You leave your sister alone now, dear.” She grabbed Barbaraannette by the shoulders, her eyes glittering. “Babba, you listen to me. I want you to make your mother proud, dear. You put yourself out there and you give them your very best. You’re a beautiful and talented girl. They’re lucky to have you, what with your legs. You’ll make that Lundeen girl look like an arthritic heifer.”

Barbaraannette, Toagie, and Mary Beth stared wordlessly at their mother. After a few seconds Mary Beth said, “Where is she, Barbaraannette?”

Barbaraannette disengaged her arms and clasped her mother’s hands. “Cheerleading tryouts,” she said.

Mary Beth nodded. “I thought so.” She half smiled. “She sure has Ellie Lundeen’s number, though.”

Hilde’s bright, passionate gaze faded to embarrassed bewilderment.

Barbaraannette stood up and began massaging her mother’s shoulders. “You know, I don’t
want
to pay out all that money, even though I can afford it. But we’re talking about Bobby’s life. If I have to pay, then that’s what I’m going to do. If I had an idea where to look—if I could think of one place where he might be, I’d go look.”

“I still say we should call the police.”

Toagie said, “Barbaraannette, what about that letter you got?”

“I got a lot of letters, Toag.”

“I mean that one from the guy that wanted you to send him Powerball tickets. With the picture? Didn’t he write something about getting hurt in the Gulf?”

Barbaraannette remembered the picture. A crumpled, legless man in a wheelchair. “That man didn’t have a leg to stand on. I can’t see him as a kidnapper.”

Toagie persisted. “You said yourself there are two of them. And that guy’s address was right here in Cold Rock. I remember being surprised I’d never seen him around, you know, with the wheelchair and no legs and all. Do you still have the letter?”

Barbaraannette nodded.

Mary Beth said, “Give it to the police or the FBI. That’s what we should do.”

“I know what we should do,” Hilde said.

Conditioned to respond to their mother’s voice they all gave her their attention, but Hilde was simply smiling and looking around, a puzzled expression on her face.

“You’re going back to Crestview, Mother,” said Mary Beth. I’m calling Dr. Cohen right this minute.”

“Back to the hotel,” said Hilde.

Barbaraannette was going through a stack of opened mail on the kitchen counter. “Here it is,” she said.

The return address on the letter was a box number at the Post Office downtown.

Mary Beth said, “Well, that’s that. You won’t find Bobby in a P.O. box. I really think you should call the authorities, Barbaraannette.”

Barbaraannette put on her coat.

“Where you going?” Toagie asked.

“To talk to Hermie.” She was out the door in seconds.

Mary Beth looked at Toagie, puzzled. “Who is Hermie?”

Hilde said, “Hermie the window peeper.”

“Oh. Herman Goss.”

Toagie said, “I think he works at the Post Office. He used to have a crush on Barbaraannette.”

“Who didn’t?” Mary Beth went to the window and watched Barbaraannette drive away. “What does she think she’s going to do?”

Of the forty-six green Taurus owners, Hugh eliminated twenty-two because the purchaser was either too old, too dead, too female, or someone Hugh knew and believed to be incapable of snatching Bobby by reason of character. Phlox had her own opinion about eliminating the women. After all, both she and Barbaraannette seemed to want the man. Maybe they weren’t the only two women in Cold Rock with a thing for Bobby Steele Quinn—or a thing for money. But since they had to start someplace she’d gone along with Hugh’s analysis.

With the twenty-four remaining invoices in hand, Hugh, Rodney, and Phlox began to drive from one address to the next, getting Taurus owners out of bed, catching them in the middle of breakfast, intercepting them on the way to work. In each case, Hugh began the encounter politely, then became more direct as warranted. In the first three cases, all of whom had been sleeping soundly and none of whom appreciated the 6:00
A.M.
interrogation, Hugh quickly decided that the individuals were sincere in their denials. The fourth invoice, one Cory Mittendorf, was incensed enough at having his shower interrupted that he told them to go to hell and slammed the door in Hugh’s face. Finding such behavior suspicious, Hugh had leaned on the doorbell until Mittendorf returned. The resulting interaction was both brief and ugly. Cory Mittendorf was eliminated as a suspect and left with a possible broken nose. Most of the other green Taurus owners they visited were more cooperative; the stack of invoices shrank, and by 11:00
A.M.
they had eliminated all but three.

“G
OOD LORD, ART, I THOUGHT YOU
’
D
be able to handle this.” Nate Nagler placed the last bite of Danish into his mouth and brushed the crumbs from his fingers onto his desk.

Art said, “I
am
handling it, Nate. She just now dropped this cash demand into our laps—”

“Your
lap,” Nagler said, using the edge of a business card to scrape the pastry crumbs into a neat pile.

“Okay,
my
lap. In any case, she says she wants the million in cash tomorrow. I think she’s being blackmailed. I think that someone is threatening to harm her husband if she doesn’t pay him the money.”

Nagler smiled, blinking his black eyes. “The woman offered the money as a reward, didn’t she?”

“Yes, but this is different.”

Nagler looked down at his pile of crumbs. “I don’t see the difference. Our job is to act as a lending institution.”

“I’m wondering whether we should notify the police. I’m afraid she might be making a big mistake.”

Nagler rearranged the crumbs with the corner of his business card, creating a star-shaped pattern. “Mrs. Quinn is a good credit risk. I don’t see where we should involve ourselves in her personal life. Just get her the money, Art.”

Art ground his teeth together, trying to stay calm. Just get the money? It wasn’t that easy. In the first place, Cold Rock S&L was not a member of the Federal Reserve Bank, and the Fed in Minneapolis was the only bank within three hundred miles that would have that kind of money on hand. To get one million dollars in cash, they would have to go through their correspondent, Norwest Banks, and convince them to order the cash from the Fed and get it on a Brinks truck before the end of the day, or first thing tomorrow morning. Naturally, such a request would be greeted with some suspicion, and the only way it would happen would be if Nate Nagler talked to Matt McRae, his friend at Norwest, and convinced them to bypass their usual safeguards and procedures.

Art explained this to Nagler, who had abandoned his pile of crumbs and was now rolling a golf ball back and forth across his desk, a sour expression on his pasty face. Nagler loved to boast of his connections in the banking industry, but he was loathe to test them.

“So you want
me
to handle it?” Nagler said, arching his left eyebrow.

“I just need you to make one phone call. This isn’t an everyday request. If I call Mr. McRae, he’ll just tell me he needs to talk to you. If you’ll call him, I won’t have to bother you again.”

Nagler sighed, shaking his head sadly. “Art, Art, Art,” he said.

Art held his face rigid. Keep it together, stay calm, he told himself, and don’t do or say anything you will regret later. He might have to run an extra seven or eight miles tonight, but it wouldn’t kill him.

Hermie Goss had never wanted to be a postal clerk. He had wanted to be a pilot, but when that hadn’t worked out due to his astigmatism, he had decided to be a fireman. He would have been a good one, but that hadn’t worked out either because of a problem he had with heights, so he’d gone to Northland Business College to learn criminology, a six-month program, and had then tried to find work as a policeman, but Dale Gordon had it in for him because of the incident in his backyard when he’d noticed Hermie looking in his bedroom window. It wasn’t like he’d got caught seeing anything worth seeing. He’d been passing by and saw the lit window and took a little detour into the Gordons’ yard, just out of curiosity, nothing else, and he’d looked in but there’d been nothing to see but Dale’s startled face, and that had pretty much ruined his chance at a career in law enforcement. Hermie thought about Dale Gordon often, and when he did he usually took the opportunity to wipe some snot on whatever letter or package happened to be in his hands.

Hermie had finally landed a job as a mail carrier, and that had gone well for a few years until Mrs. Jacobi accused him of peering into her bathroom window while he was making his rounds. Of course, that had come to nothing. But a few months later the Naglers accused him of the same thing, and even though they hadn’t proved anything his super, Kevin Marney, had pulled him off his route and put him to work behind the counter. Where he could keep an eye on him, he said. Every time Hermie thought about his super he tossed a piece of first-class mail in the wastebasket to make himself feel better, and when a postal worker shot somebody someplace he always made sure Marney got an extra copy of the article.

Life had dealt Hermie Goss a sack of lemons; he was damn well going to share.

There were a few people in Cold Rock, however, who Hermie respected. His mother was one, and the guys at the bowling alley, and Rudy Samm, who owned Rudolph’s Red Nose Bar and Grill, and Barbaraannette O’Gara—he could not bear to think of her as Barbaraannette
Quinn—
who he did not think about as much as he had back in high school but who still represented to him the epitome of feminine beauty. Which was why, when she suddenly showed up on the other side of the counter and asked him about Box 129, he hadn’t thought twice about violating federal law.

“Fella’s name is Morrow, just like you say.” Hermie squinted at the photograph in Barbaraannette’s hand. “Only he ain’t no cripple. Kid’s maybe nineteen, twenty years old. Lemme just check here—” Hermie went back to Marney’s office and found the log book where they kept track of box renters. He carried it back to the counter. “He just give us a new address and phone a couple days ago,” Hermie said. “You know, in case we got a package or something. Here you go.”

Seeing Barbaraannette like that and being able to help her gave Hermie a good feeling inside. As soon as she left he started thinking about making a trip to the restroom to explore his good feeling, but before he could get the
Back in 5 Minutes
sign up on the door, Mary Beth Hultman marched in, paused for a moment to peruse the wanted posters, then zeroed her accusing eyes right on him. Mary Beth reminded him too much of his mother’s sister aunt Aggie, who, when his mother wasn’t there to hear, liked to call him Wormie instead of Hermie. The good feeling went away. He stepped back as Mary Beth pushed her cantaloupes over his counter.

“Herman,” she said, “was my sister just here?” Her voice made him think of clanking cast iron skillets.

“Maybe she was,” Hermie said.

“This is not a time to play games with me Herman Goss. I want you to tell me what you just told my sister.”

Hermie hesitated, not sure how to handle this. He could think of no good reason not to tell her. It wasn’t as if Barbaraannette had sworn him to secrecy. On the other hand, he had something Mary Beth wanted, and he hated to give up the sliver of power. As he thought about it, one of Mary Beth’s hands flashed toward him and attached itself to the side of his head and he suddenly found himself with his face pressed to the top of the counter, his nose inches from Mary Beth’s planetary bosom, his ear a twisted knot of pain.

“Herman? Talk to me, Herman.”

The body in the river had been discovered at 7:30 that morning by Sandra Sanders and Gretchen Wolfe, charter members of the Walk for Life Club, which was sponsored by the Church of the Good Shepherd, which happened to be Police Chief Dale Gordon’s church. In fact, Dale Gordon, as a member of the church board, had voted to sponsor the Walk for Life Club, and he had even encouraged his men to encourage their wives to become members. It might be argued, Gordon thought as he stared down at the elongated bundle of plastic and duct tape, one telltale arm protruding from a rent in the plastic, that he had discovered the body himself. He was glad he had been wearing his uniform when the call came.

“Let’s see who we got here,” he said to Fleishman, the young cop who had waded into the icy river to drag the body ashore. Fleishman removed a few feet of duct tape, then pulled away the plastic bag to uncover the head end of the corpse. It was a young man, probably one of the students at the college. Gordon did not recognize him. “You know him?” he asked Fleishman.