Shattered Secrets (28 page)

Vic read Gabe the phone number, then said, “I’ll go into New Town to look for her. Leave Peg on the phones here. Don’t panic, okay?”

“Aren’t you worried too? Instead of New Town, how about you drive out to my place, then hers?”

“Because I drove her this morning—remember? She doesn’t have a car.”

“But maybe she had someone take her out to get it, since you and I were gone. It’s a long shot, but—”

“Okay, sure. Stay in touch.”

Stay in touch.
Gabe felt haunted by the past. What he feared most in all this was losing Tess a second time.

* * *

It was just after dark when Miss Etta returned to the book barn, gave Tess another shot—this time in her upper arm—and cut the bonds around her feet. “That drug is for people, not an animal drug, and doesn’t take long to work, believe me.”

She pulled the gag from Tess’s mouth. Tess gasped for air and moved her tongue, trying to get some saliva going so she could speak. She had to talk this woman out of whatever her warped brain had planned. And facing Miss Etta’s mother, whom she recalled now as scary and sadistic, would be a trial too. Why was Miss Etta, at her age, still so completely under her mother’s thumb? Tess remembered how Sybil Falls had demanded hugs and kisses and complete obedience or Miss Etta would beat her as the old woman called her bad and evil. Was there some strain of dementia in this family, or had the entire world gone mad?

But then a thought hit Tess. She’d been just about ready to tell Miss Etta that Gabe knew about Dane’s drug source and that he’d found a list in Dane’s house of who bought drugs from him. She was hoping the lie would scare the woman, but suddenly realized it might make her move quicker to get rid of her—maybe put her out in that graveyard with Jill.

But, especially since Miss Etta didn’t know how much of a dose to give an adult and was worried Dane had been giving her weaker doses, Tess wondered if she could pretend to be under the influence of the drug and wait for her chance to stop this woman? If it was the drug she and Gabe had researched, she knew it made a person cooperate with a doctor’s commands. Maybe she could shove Miss Etta, hit her—something. Mama Sybil must be frail, wheelchair-bound, a paraplegic, so, unless they had more old pistols loaded here, Tess hoped she’d have a chance. She had to fight the effects of the drug, keep telling herself that she could get away from this woman, only pretend to obey her, to stay alert. But she had to find and save Sandy too.

“Upsy-daisy, little Teresa,” Miss Etta said, and helped her to her feet. Tess gasped.
Upsy-daisy,
just like the word
smackings,
triggered a flood of terrible memories. Tess longed to shake off the woman’s hands, but, pretending to be just a bit slow, she let Miss Etta lead her from the book barn. They shuffled past the bookmobile, across the dark yard, up onto the porch and through the back door of the big frame house. Though her hands were still tied behind her, she was desperate to flee. She only felt a bit groggy and thought she could do it. But she had to keep telling herself to comply with this woman’s orders until she could find Sandy.

Miss Etta led her up a set of back stairs that must have once been used by servants. How familiar the house seemed. Her ankles burned, and her legs were sore from being tied so long. Her cut wrist pained her. She had to pretend to be subdued, out of it. Her thoughts rampaged when she needed to keep calm.

If Sandy was upstairs, how Tess wanted to comfort the girl. If only Gabe would realize who had taken her, what had happened. Tess tried to recall what she’d said to Peggy when she left the sheriff’s office. She’d been on the phone with that call about a raccoon bite. Tess couldn’t remember if she’d told Peggy that she was going to the library or not.

Gabe would kill her for walking into a trap—if Miss Etta didn’t kill her first.

29

G
abe took Sandy Kenton’s mother aside in the church parking lot being used as the base, where scores of volunteers had fanned out for the search. Some were already reporting in—that they’d found nothing.

“Lindell, I need to tell you something.”

“You’ve found her?” she demanded, grabbing his arm.

“No, though we keep eliminating possibilities. Tess Lockwood’s gone missing. I just wanted you to know that my deputy and I notified the groups before they left to look for Tess too. I know you’ve talked to her lately. Any unusual hints about where she could be?”

The woman’s face went blank for a moment. She’d aged so much in the six days since Sandy disappeared. Stringy hair, no makeup, the ravages of little sleep. The torment of not knowing what was happening to her only daughter—if she was still alive.

“Tess?” she asked, her voice shaky. “Like, the kidnapper’s taken her again? An adult this time?”

“Around noon today, she walked from the sheriff’s office to the library, left there and disappeared.”

Her eyes widened. “Oh, no! Oh, no, no!” She lifted her clasped hands to her mouth, clenching her fingers. “But wouldn’t that mean the same person who has Sandy and Jill wants to harm her—shut her up? Gabe, I know you’ve lived and breathed this.”

“I— Yes, all over again, times three.”

“I hear Tess is special to you. Don’t look so surprised. This is Cold Creek, you know. Word gets around. I felt close to Tess the few times we talked. She helped me so much, not only that she came back, but just that she understood my pain. We have to find her and the girls.”

“You and Win did a great job with the TV plea you made,” he said. “It’s been running on most channels, some nationwide.”

“So the mayor told me. You know, Tess said she’d thought of running home to Michigan, but there was more than one reason to stay here now. She said she had to help you, stay close to you.”

Tears stung his eye. “Thanks, Lindell. She hadn’t put it like that to me. I’d like to keep her here, but all this has to end. I need to find her—and Sandy—fast.”

He touched the brim of his hat and started away, but she grabbed his elbow. “Maybe they’re together. Sandy, Tess and Jill. I’d like to think that. Tess helped me, and I’ll bet she could help Sandy too.”

“Hold that thought. I’ve got to get back to the search. You’ll be the first to know anything,” he told her and headed toward his vehicle.

He got in, started the engine and pulled away. He was so focused on Tess he’d forgotten to tell Lindell that the Ohio State Highway Patrol was going to fly a chopper over local wooded areas using FLIR, heat thermal imaging. Vic was keeping him updated on any tips or other information that came in on the sheriff’s phone lines or reports from searchers in the field.
In the field
—the standard cop term almost made him laugh, but this time it was literal.

* * *

“Hitchetty-hatchetty, up we go,” Miss Etta recited as they climbed the back stairs, passed the door to the second floor and kept going toward the attic. Tess was convinced Miss Etta sometimes believed Tess was Teresa, a little girl again.

She had hoped that would help to get the woman off guard, but the librarian from hell had outsmarted her again. She held a cocked antique pistol pressed tight to her ribs as they climbed. “As you know I have not one moment’s hesitation about using this!” she’d said, and had given Tess a lecture about the gun’s pioneer history. Tess’s heart nearly pounded out of her chest and not from the exertion of the climb. What if that old gun went off? It was aimed right at her heart.

Miss Etta chattered nonstop about next to nothing until she said something that put Tess on alert. “I swear I’m going to have blisters on my hands from all that digging. It’s been a while since I dug that much, and my shoulder and back muscles are aching like the very dickens. Interesting that one of the greatest writers in the English language had a last name that’s a euphemism for the word
devil.
That’s Charles Dickens, my dear, but he did have a mistress and was unfaithful to his wife, so he wasn’t lily-white. Your father wasn’t either.”

However much Tess wanted to scream at this woman, she had to try to convince her the drug had made her dopey. “He’s gone,” she mumbled.

“Yes, I know, and that is sad for you Lockwood girls that he’s so far away, but perhaps best he’s out of your lives. In the old days, you know,” she rattled on, “these servant stairs were important. The maids and kitchen help slept on the top floor and needed to go up and down without being seen by the family. Speaking of Dickens, servant stairs are very Victorian. Well, times have changed and even my family doesn’t have an ‘upstairs, downstairs’ lifestyle anymore. And this is hardly
Downton Abbey.
”

Tess tried to ignore all that and desperately looked for her chance. She concentrated on what she’d say when she saw Sandy Kenton, the treasure for which Gabe had searched so hard. She was excited that the most recent drug that had been injected into her arm wasn’t making her particularly groggy.

Tess prayed she’d be able to keep her head in this. She counted the turns of the stairs, lit by only a ceiling light on each tiny landing. The steps were narrow and steep. Coming down, she could easily fall, especially if she was pulling a child behind her.

“Now, Teresa, I expect you to apologize to Mama Sybil for running off the way you did, when you knew she loved you. It hurt her terribly. Hurt me too in more ways than one. I’m going to leave you with her and Sandy while I finish something outside, but it won’t take me long, and then I’ll be back. You, of course, will be tied, and Sandy will be on Mama Sybil’s lap. Finally, she’s learned to obey. Spare the rod and spoil the child, you know. You learned that much slower than Sandy. You were quite an independent little miss when you first came to live with us.”

Again, Tess had to force herself not to answer back, to tell this demented woman off. It made her sick to her stomach, but she murmured only, “Yes, Miss Etta.”

“Actually that old saying,
Spare the rod and spoil the child,
only takes its inspiration from the book of Proverbs, but verbatim it goes way back to a poem called
Piers Plowman
in 1377, and then the adage showed up in another poem in 1662.”

Tess wanted to scream. This seemed a nightmare from which she must surely wake. She longed to tell this woman her trivial knowledge was nothing—nothing!—because she was a monster. But she had to hold herself together. At least Mama Sybil would be in her wheelchair, and she should be able to overtake her when Miss Etta went to finish her business. Of digging graves? Even if Miss Etta locked them in, even if she tied Tess, surely, with Sandy’s help—if she wasn’t drugged—she’d be able to get away, break out, rush downstairs with Sandy, or at least get to a phone in the house to call 911. She’d bet her life—which was probably what she was doing—that this house had a landline, maybe with an old dial phone.

The other thought Tess had as they reached the chained attic door was that she was still terrified to face that horrible old lady again. If Mama Sybil had a pistol too, would she be risking a bullet to the brain, like Dane?

* * *

Even after all the negative reports came in from the volunteer teams, Gabe had exhausted himself searching. He was running on sheer adrenaline, guts and fear. He’d explored Tess’s house, attic to cellar, and about jumped out of his skin when his flashlight had illumined a dummy on the floor of the basement. He remembered that Grace had done sewing and alterations to earn extra money before they moved to the Hear Ye compound. It was an old dressmaker’s mannequin, but it had looked like a woman on the floor at first.

He was so desperate that he had requested another search warrant, this one for Bright Star’s compound. He was afraid he was getting to be persona non grata with the judge, but he didn’t care anymore. Not about his health, his job, his life—he just wanted to find Tess, Jill and Sandy safe. Had someone taken Tess off Main Street outside the library?

He drove to the burned-out site of Marva Green’s old house and searched the back buildings again. Nothing but trash, owls and rats. He sat down on an upturned tin tub and tried to think about where else he could search.

He decided to go back to the office, make that call to the church woman who had counseled Tess. His hope was that maybe she’d kind of debriefed little Teresa and could shed new light on what happened all those years ago. He remembered his father saying that Tess’s mother thought it best if no one mentioned the horrible experience, but just tried to go back to normal.
Normal?
Nothing had ever been normal again.

* * *

Miss Etta unlocked the padlock on the chain holding the attic door closed, and it rattled as it uncoiled itself. Tess was tempted to shove the woman down the stairs, but that pistol could go off. And would it endanger Sandy if she was with Mama Sybil on the other side of that door? If only she could get her hands untied like her feet.

Tess steeled herself for what she’d find within, but she also realized that, if Miss Etta locked them in again, they weren’t getting out of this chained door without an ax.

With the pistol still pressed to her side, Tess shuffled into the dim attic. She scanned the length of it, built with a long center section and two wings. A small bed under the eaves, a few toys—and another Mr. Mean leaning against the slanted wall under the eaves. Two bare lightbulbs dangled from the ceiling. Old hump-backed trunks were stored here. Stacks of old-fashioned hat boxes, several old, cracked paintings, bedsprings and a headboard, all suddenly, horribly familiar.

But why would Miss Etta keep her mother up here? Those stairs must be close to impossible for a crippled person in a wheelchair. It was chilly here too, so wouldn’t she keep her mother downstairs? Tess recalled that it was the first floor where she’d been forced to climb onto the old woman’s lap to be cuddled and petted—and held down to be beaten when she disobeyed, all under the watchful eye of a stag head mounted over the fireplace mantel.

As Tess’s eyes adjusted, she saw Mama Sybil at the far end of the room sitting slumped in her wheelchair. And Sandy—she was alive!—sat in her lap.

Miss Etta prodded Tess closer with the gun still in her ribs. Her first instinct was to comfort Sandy, who, thank God, turned her head and moved one leg to show she was alert. She must be drugged or too terrified to speak.

Miss Etta prodded Tess. “Apologize to Mama Sybil for escaping!” She stopped Tess about ten feet from Mama Sybil. “Get on your knees and tell her you are very, very sorry!”

Tess dropped to her knees with the pistol now pressed to the nape of her neck. Before she could speak, a deep voice behind her spoke. “Is this our Teresa come back to us, Etta?”

Tess gasped and jerked.

Sandy stirred on Mama Sybil’s lap and sniffled.

“I’m sorry I ran away, Mama Sybil,” Tess said. “Can I come closer?”

“All right,” the voice from behind intoned. “But you behave or else.”

Miss Etta was speaking for her mother. Tess thought maybe the old woman had suffered a stroke and couldn’t talk.

“On your knees, forward,” Miss Etta said, in what Tess recalled was a perfect rendition of her cruel mother’s voice.

Tess scooted forward. She forced a smile at Sandy and mouthed reassuring words.
Sandy, hello.

Then she gasped. There was no woman holding Sandy. She—it—had no face except an enlarged photograph of Mama Sybil with stuffing behind it and a nylon stocking pulled over it to which a white wig was tied or sewn. The body was maybe wood sticks, like a scarecrow, wrapped with cloth, or stuffed, with fake arms and legs. The gown was old-fashioned and smelled stale and musty. A crocheted afghan was over the legs clear down to a pair of old black, laced shoes. It was so grotesque, yet so real from a distance, that Tess felt she’d been punched in the stomach. She almost screamed.

“She’s not...not there!” she cried. “Is she downstairs? Did she die?”

It was the wrong thing to say. The blow to her head was hard. It stunned her. She heard the child squeal. And then she hit the floor.