Shadowmaker (14 page)

“You’re smart, Katie,” Travis said, and smiled at me. “You won’t have any trouble coming up with something.”

“I guess I’ve got too much on my mind.”

“Like what?” He grinned. “Me, I hope.”

“I wish.” Impulsively, I rested my hand on his arm and said, “Travis, I don’t think Lana Jean ran away. I think something happened to her. I feel as though I should look for her … find her.”

He slowed the pickup and pulled to the side of the road
before he turned to look at me. “Look for her where?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“The sheriff searched the alley around Kennedy’s Grill and didn’t turn up anything. I didn’t think he would.”

“Why?”

“Because B.J. told the sheriff that after the kitchen was cleaned and ready for business the next day he saw Lana Jean start walking toward home.”

I began to get excited. “See! That means she didn’t run away, if she was going home!”

Travis frowned as he said, “I hadn’t thought about that.”

“So what happened to her? She couldn’t just disappear.”

Travis took my hand and held it tightly. “Don’t think about it, Katie. Let the sheriff work on it.”

“He’s not doing anything to find her.”

“You don’t know that.”

It dawned on me what he’d said. “Besides, why shouldn’t I think about what happened to Lana Jean?”

Travis shifted uncomfortably and stared out the window, away from me. “Sometimes people cut through town instead of staying on the highway,” he said. “Somebody might have come along who offered Lana Jean a lift.”

“She wouldn’t go with a stranger!”

His voice was so low I could hardly hear it. “Or even forced her into his car.”

“Are you telling me she might have been kidnapped?”

“It could be.”

“But then …?” I shivered, unable to finish the question.

“Katie, face it.… If someone did make off with her, and she hasn’t come back …”

I began to shake. I couldn’t help it. “I tried to pretend she’d be all right, but I knew! Oh, Travis, I knew!”

Travis’s face twisted in agony, and he wrapped his arms around me, holding me until the tears and the torment had passed.

I pushed away, sitting upright, and said, “The woods. She may be in the woods. Take me there, please, Travis. I need to find out.”

His back stiffened, and he stared at me. “That’s the sheriff’s job, not yours,” he said, and I was surprised to see that Travis was afraid.

I probably should have been frightened, too, but sorrow and anger at what might have happened to Lana Jean got all mixed up with my guilt at hiding the truth from myself, and my own interest in Travis. All I wanted to do was prowl the woods, searching for something—anything—that might give us a clue.

“There’s no point in looking for—for whatever we’d find in the woods,” Travis told me, his voice cracking. “If Lana Jean was picked up—and we don’t know for sure that she was—she could have been taken to Houston or Corpus or—or anyplace.”

“The woods is right on the edge of Kluney,” I said. “It would be easy to take her there.”

Travis didn’t answer, so I said, “I shouldn’t have asked you to go with me. I’ll go by myself, or with my mother.”

Travis put the pickup into gear. “Katie, we’ll go to the woods.”

“You can take me home,” I insisted. “I’ll borrow Mom’s car.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t want you wandering around the woods alone. It’s not safe.”

“If you mean that whoever killed the carnival worker might—”

“I’m not talking about the carnival worker’s murder,” Travis said. I noticed that he looked kind of sick, and the skin around his mouth had whitened. “I’m thinking about kids with rifles out there shooting squirrels or rabbits, or even …” His thoughts seemed to shift and he said, “We’ll talk loud and make plenty of noise. That’s our best protection.”

Travis parked his pickup in the dusty lot where the carnival had been pitched, and we walked on into the woods. I wished he’d picked a different spot, but in most places the heavy thicket was so overgrown with vines and scrub it was impenetrable. I reached for Travis’s hand as we stepped into the late afternoon shade and discovered it was as clammy as mine. With the exception of sudden little woodland
snicks
and
cracks
, which made me jump, the woods were smothered in a deep silence.

“What about this noise we’re supposed to make?” I whispered.

Travis pulled me closer to him as he stepped forward. “I’m keeping my ears open,” he said. “If anybody’s in the woods, we ought to be able to hear him.”

Ahead of us on the path was a trampled space, with countless footprints in the moist earth, some discarded cigarette butts, and two empty beer cans.

“Let’s get away from here,” Travis said. He skirted the clearing, picking up speed and tugging me against some bushes that caught and pulled at my shirt and jeans.

“Wait!” I complained, jerking my hand from Travis’s. Frantically, I pushed away a thorny twig that had tangled itself in my sleeve and found a fistful of black cloth in my hand. I ripped it from the twig and stared at it, trying to figure out what it was.

“Hurry up, Katie,” Travis said. “We don’t want to hang around here. This is where the carnival worker’s body was found.”

I shoved the black cloth into the pocket of my jeans and ran to catch up with him.

W
e followed the path for a short way, occasionally breaking into a small clearing, but more often stumbling through spreading vines that matted the uneven ground. There were no signs that anyone else had ever come this way. Finally Travis stopped and turned to face me, asking, “How far into the woods do you want to go?”

I don’t know what I’d expected to find—trees sprinkled throughout a leaf-strewn clearing in a soft afternoon light? Clear signs and clues that Lana Jean had been forced to come this way? Instead, Travis and I found ourselves deep inside a dark, dank, oppressive jungle that terrified me. I slumped against a tree and mumbled, “I want to go home.”

Without a word he turned, pulling me after him, and we
scrambled down the path and out of the woods as fast as we could go.

As we staggered into the empty clearing, I stopped and gulped huge swallows of air, trying to catch my breath. Travis leaned against his pickup and looked as though he’d eaten something that disagreed with him.

“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t know what it would be like in there.” I gave a jerk of my head toward the woods. A thought occurred to me. “You said kids hunted in the woods. How?”

“There are a couple of good-size clearings with paths that lead to them,” Travis answered. He opened the passenger door of the pickup. “Ready to go?”

I didn’t move. “Where are the other clearings?”

He looked surprised. “One I know of is off Boyd Morris’s place, and there’s a kind of trail into the woods where it’s not so thick about a mile or so down near the highway to Corpus. Why’d you ask? You don’t want to try those, too, do you?”

I put my hands to my head, which was beginning to hurt. I had no idea what I’d been thinking, or why. It didn’t make sense. “No,” I murmured.

“Are you okay, Katie?”

The worry in his voice touched me. I straightened and lifted my head before I spoke. “There’s no way I can search the entire woods. You proved it to me.”

Travis put an arm around my shoulders. “Whatever happened to Lana Jean, wherever she is, it’s not your fault, Katie. You had nothing to do with her disappearance.”

“I know,” I said. I climbed into the front seat and waited
until Travis had gone around the truck and settled himself in the driver’s seat before I added, “She thought I was her friend. She trusted me.”

He turned on the ignition and spun the pickup through a spurt of dust and gravel, bouncing over the lot and into the road. “She talked to you, didn’t she, about how she was spying on me and what she heard and saw?”

“A little.” I blushed, remembering that most of our conversations concerned Travis.

He glanced at me, misread my guilty expression, and said, “Or maybe you read it in her journal.”

“I told you, I just skimmed parts of her journal.”

“What parts?”

“Does it really matter?”

“It matters.”

He was angry and trying to hide it, and that disturbed me. “Travis,” I said, “I don’t know why it should bother you what Lana Jean wrote about you. All I read is what I told you—mostly about how good-looking you are and stuff like that.”

I had complimented him deliberately, trying to break his bad mood, but he didn’t respond, so I kept on. “Mrs. Walgren said that she’d stopped reading Lana Jean’s journal entries a long time ago, and I felt the same way after reading the first few. I already told you this. Don’t you believe me?”

His fingers relaxed on the steering wheel, and he took his eyes off the road to throw me a quick glance. “I believe you,” he said. “I’m sorry about getting so uptight. The
woods … the place where the man was murdered … I guess it all got to me.”

“I know what you mean. The woods were awfully creepy. I shouldn’t have asked you to go there with me.”

“I tried to talk you out of it.”

“I know.” I slid closer to him as we entered the road that led to my house. “Will you forgive me?”

“Sure,” he said, and pulled his pickup to a stop where it was hidden from the house by our garage. As he turned around and faced me, his smile was so warm and deep I suddenly felt a little light-headed; so it was no surprise to me that when Travis wrapped me in a kiss that rocked me from my head to my feet, I slid my arms around his neck and eagerly responded.

When we finally pulled apart and looked at each other, the warm, glowing fuzziness between my ears vanished, and all the pieces of my mind seemed to come together again. I realized, as though I’d just come back from another planet, that it was growing dark. If Mom wasn’t still at her computer, she’d be wondering where I was. “I’ve got to go in,” I told Travis.

His smile was cozy as a cat’s. “I think we’ve got something going here between us, Katie.”

That soft way he said my name … I had to take a deep breath to steady myself. “Maybe,” I said.

“Want me to come in with you?”

“No,” I said. “Not now.” Somehow I managed to open the door on my side of the pickup and slid out, awkwardly fumbling to keep my books from falling from my arms. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

As I entered the house Mom looked up from her computer and squinted at me as if I were a character who had wandered into the wrong scene. “Katie?”

I turned on a couple of lights and answered before she could ask. “Mom, I’m late because I asked Travis to take me to the woods so I could look for Lana Jean.”

Mom came back to reality, turned off her computer, and got to her feet, a worried frown on her face. “Oh, honey. What makes you think that …?”

“B.J. told the sheriff that after work he saw Lana Jean walking toward her home.” I dropped my books on the kitchen table as I said, “Mom! Don’t you see? If Lana Jean was going home, then that means she couldn’t have run away.”

Mom put her arms around me, and I could feel the weariness in her body. “Katie, you mustn’t try to work this out by yourself.”

“Travis was with me.”

“Or with Travis or anyone else. Wandering around in the woods isn’t safe.”

“You don’t wander in those woods. They’re all tangled up with vines and some kind of thorny bushes.”

Mom held my shoulders and looked right into my eyes. “I’ll be up-front with you,” she said. “I talked to Mrs. Willis today. She hasn’t heard from Lana Jean. I also talked to Sheriff Granger. He’s been in touch with the police in Houston and Dallas. There’s some indication that a paroled convict, who was on the run after committing a serious crime, came this way and headed south. He could have driven through Kluney the night Lana Jean disappeared.”

My mouth was so dry it was hard to talk. “Do they think he … or that she …?”

“He raped and killed a woman in Houston before heading south. It’s a possibility that Lana Jean may have been another victim.”

Everything I’d been bottling up inside exploded into tears. Mom held me, making comforting, soothing noises, until I stopped crying.

“Mom,” I sniffled as I wiped my eyes and nose. “I didn’t even like Lana Jean that much. But there was something about her that was innocent and trusting and helpless, like a little child. It isn’t fair that someone hurt her and killed her! It isn’t fair!”

“No, it isn’t, but there’s something else that isn’t fair,” Mom said, her gaze never wavering. “And that’s for you to put this burden on yourself. You had nothing to do with her disappearance. There was no way you could have known about it or stopped it.”

Rubbing my nose with my soggy tissue, I said, “You’re right, I guess, but I still can’t help feeling that there’s something I should know now and something I should do. I feel guilty about Lana Jean, and I don’t understand it myself.”

“I’m beginning to realize how difficult this has been for you, having to leave your ballet lessons and your school and your friends and adjust to an entirely different kind of living,” Mom said. “There’s been a great deal of emotion involved, and I think that’s what’s making you feel so caught up in this problem. Believe me, there’s nothing
about Lana Jean’s disappearance that you’re supposed to know or do.”

I nodded halfheartedly, and she said, “Wash your face, and you’ll feel a great deal better. I’m going to make cheese tortellini for dinner. Okay?”

“More than okay.” I tried a smile. “Want me to help?”

Mom grinned. “Only after you wash your face.”

In the bedroom I groped through my pockets for another tissue, and pulled out the piece of black cloth I’d found in the woods. I had no idea what it was or what it meant, but I folded it and tucked it into my little jewelry box for safekeeping before I went to the bathroom to wash my face.

Mom’s right. I had nothing to do with any of this
, I told myself over and over as I splashed cool water against my swollen eyelids, but there was no way I could shake the creepy, uncomfortable sensation in the pit of my stomach. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to get involved with Travis? Maybe there
was
something left for me to do.