The Chesapeake Diaries Series (76 page)

“Thanks, Beck. We appreciate it.” Dallas and Brooke spoke at the same time.

“Hey, what else does a small-town cop have to do on a day like this? The crowd’s been well behaved and we haven’t had one fender bender since the weekend began. Knock on wood.”

He drove off slowly and made a right onto the first side street.

“I’ll take the opposite side of the street,” Grant told the two women. “You two split up this side. Keep in touch.” He crossed and went into Petals and Posies, the florist on the corner of Kelly’s Point and Charles.

“I’ll start with Bling,” Dallas told Brooke. “You take the next shop and we’ll go every other one until we run out of stores.”

Brooke nodded and the two women took off. When they met up in the parking lot next to the market twenty minutes later, they were both obviously distressed.

“No one’s seen them.” Dallas had to bite her lip to keep from crying when Grant crossed the street to join them.

“No luck here, either,” he told them. “All right, let’s think like six-year-olds for a moment. Where would you go on a day like today, and why?”

“I can’t think,” Brooke told him. “I feel like stopping people on the street and asking them if they’ve seen two little boys.”

“There are so many kids in town today.” Dallas
pointed across the street. “There are five little boys who look to be around six right over there.

“Maybe they went to the library,” Dallas thought out loud.

“It’s closed today,” Brooke told her. “But maybe the park …”

The three took off at a trot, back across Charles, down Kelly’s Point, across the parking lot. When they got to the park, they were out of breath. They split up, each taking a section, but the boys were nowhere to be seen.

“Sir, have you seen two boys around this tall?” Dallas asked one older gentleman who sat on a folding chair watching a softball game.

“You gotta be kidding, lady.” He laughed. “You know how many kids ‘that tall’ have gone past here in the past hour alone? Kids are everywhere today.”

“Thanks,” she muttered.

The boys were not in the park, nor were they down at the dock. They saw Beck’s car pull into the municipal building’s parking lot and ran to see if he’d had any luck, but he got out of the car shaking his head.

“No luck, guys,” he told them. “But Hal and Mia are both out looking for them by car now. There’s always the chance that I missed them somehow. I’ve called everyone on duty and asked them to check whatever area they’re in and report back. The whole town is covered now, so we should start hearing back soon. Why don’t you come in and wait for—”

“I can’t,” Dallas told him, the tears she’d been holding back finally starting to flow. “I need to keep looking.”

“Me, too.” Brooke nodded.

“Let’s check the house,” Grant suggested. “Maybe they went back there for some reason.”

“Bathroom, maybe?” Brooke guessed.

“Could be. Brooke, why don’t we get Clay up here to drive back to the farm, see if they headed out there for some reason.”

“All right.” She dug the phone from her pocket and walked toward the road as if she couldn’t stand still.

“Let’s get my car and drive up to River Road,” Grant told Dallas.

“You drive up, I’ll walk,” she said. “Maybe I’ll see something along the way that we’d miss if we were both in the car.”

“You want to drive and I’ll walk?”

She shook her head and backed toward the road. “I want to walk. I’ll meet you there.”

Dallas all but ran back to Charles Street and all the way to River Road. At some point, Grant must have passed her, but she didn’t notice, just as she was unaware of the darkening sky and the distant rumble of thunder. She broke into a trot when River came in sight, her eyes darting back and forth across the sidewalk. She didn’t know what she thought she’d find, but it was the only thing she could think of to do. When she reached the edge of Berry’s property, she ran across the lawn, unable to wait until she reached the drive. Grant was on the front porch when she got there. The look on his face made it clear that he’d seen no sign of the missing children.

“Does Cody have a house key on him?” Grant asked.

“No. But he knows where Berry keeps a spare.” She ran around to the basement entrance and moved a rock that was near the flower bed. “It’s still here.”

“Maybe he used it, went inside, used the bathroom or got a snack, locked up the house—”

“Put the key back under the rock?” Dallas finished the sentence, then shook her head. “If he’d come home, and if he’d gotten the key, he’d have left it inside, and probably left the front door open.”

She started toward the back of the house. “Maybe they’re out back …”

They called both boys, but there was no response. The dogs were barking inside and Dallas used her own key to let them out. She ran through the house, calling their names, from the basement to the third floor, but the house was silent.

She went outside and sat on the steps when her legs gave out on her. Her head in her hands, and shaking all over, she began to weep.

Grant came up the stairs and sat next to her, his arms around her, and rocked her slowly.

“Someone’s taken them,” she said through her sobs. “Someone has them, right now. It’s the only explanation I can think of.”

“Dallas, let’s not—”

“I know my son, Grant. There’s no way he’d disappear like this on his own, and not for this long a time, unless something or someone was stopping him. If he’d gotten separated from Brooke, he’d have gone back to the tented area. He’d go where he knew someone he knows would be. If he didn’t find us, he’d
have gone to Berry, or if he couldn’t find her, he’d have gone to Scoop. At the very least, they’d have gone back to Clay.” She shook her head, her voice breaking. “I think someone has them. I think they’ve been kidnapped …”

Chapter 21

Dallas sat still as a stone on a chair in the living room. Her heart had been racing since the moment she realized that Cody and Logan were not with anyone they should have been with. That had been seven hours ago. Since then, Beck had closed off all roads leading in or out of town, and had set up a checkpoint where the backseats and the trunks of all vehicles leaving St. Dennis were checked. Hal viewed the surveillance tapes from every shop on Charles Street, and Clay Madison and his buddies had gone up and down every street in town calling for the boys.

There’d been no sign of either boy.

Beck had called the FBI and requested their assistance, and several agents had already arrived in St. Dennis. Agents in Arizona had been dispatched to the rehab center where Emilio was staying, and while no one was saying he was a suspect, after informing him that his son was missing, they requested and received a list of everyone who’d visited him since he signed himself in.

“You don’t really think he’d kidnap his own son, do you?” Dallas asked when she’d been told.

“It’s not unusual for noncustodial parents to take off with their kids, or hire someone to do it for them,” explained Beck’s wife, Mia, who as a former FBI special agent had been involved in several such investigations.

Dallas had shaken her head. “He wouldn’t want to be bothered on a full-time basis. Believe me, I know this man. And he’d never have taken Logan, too. Uh-uh,” she’d said softly. “Emilio is capable of many things, but this isn’t one of them.”

Her head pounded and her throat was raw, and the hole in the bottom of her stomach just kept getting bigger and bigger as time passed with no word from or of the boys. Her hands shook when she tried to lift the glass of water or the cup of coffee that Grant brought her from time to time, and her legs were like rubber when she tried to stand. She sat next to a traumatized Berry and held her hand, and tried to keep herself in check for her aunt’s sake. Dallas knew that it would take next to nothing to put either of them over the edge at that point, so she focused on giving the illusion of remaining calm and rational, when inside, she knew she was neither.

Brooke was at her family farm with her mother and the FBI agents who were busy searching the fields and the marsh across the road from the property, but there’d been no sign that the boys had ventured that far out of town. So far, three agents had gone through Berry’s house from the attic to the basement, and had covered every inch of the carriage house.

Outside, the storm that had been threatening all day had unleashed a furious wind and a torrent of rain that hit the living-room windows unrelentingly. Lightning split the sky over the Bay and thunder clapped overhead.

“If he’s out there, he’s cold and he’s wet and he’s scared to death,” Dallas said mostly to herself.

Grant had held her as she sobbed and done his best to keep both Dallas and Berry grounded, holding their hands and reminding them that the search had begun immediately once the boys were determined to be missing. He answered the questions that the agents had about the festival and who had been where at what time, and all the while he was sick inside at the thought that something really bad had happened to the two boys.

Every time the phone rang, Dallas jumped, afraid to answer it, and afraid not to. She’d been instructed by the agent in charge what to do if the call was from someone claiming to have the boys—what questions to ask, what not to say while the agents attempted to trace the call. But the only calls she received were from Paige, who’d heard that the boys were missing, and who, with Steffie, was on the way to River Road, and from Emilio, who was on his way east and demanded to know how Dallas could have been so neglectful that some pervert had been able to walk away with his son.

“Hey.” Grant had taken her chin in his hand and forced her to look into his eyes. “Emilio is an ass. You know it and I know it. His opinion isn’t worth shit. Don’t let him put this on you.”

“It is on me,” she’d said quietly. “I should have kept a closer eye on him. I shouldn’t have let him and Logan go off alone.”

“They weren’t alone,” he’d reminded her. “They were with Clay, and then they were with Brooke. And I’m not pointing the finger at either of them, Dallas, but you can’t be with a child every second of every day. And they still could turn up.”

“The FBI is here,” she reminded him. “They’ve put a tap on my phone and they have agents crawling all over St. Dennis. They apparently don’t think the boys will just ‘turn up.’ ”

“That’s their job. They’re doing what they do whenever there’s a report of a missing child,” he told her. “They have a protocol to follow and that’s what they’re doing.”

“Miss MacGregor.” The agent in charge of the investigation, Vic Turner, stepped into the living room. “If we could just go over a few things with you again …”

“Certainly.” She nodded.

“You’ve said there’d been no strange phone calls, no suspicious cars in the area, no one hanging around the property …” He was going back over her previous statement.

“That’s correct. I haven’t noticed anything like that since we arrived in St. Dennis,” she told him.

“Dallas, there was the boat early in the week,” Grant reminded her.

“What boat?” the agent turned to him to ask.

“We were out on the dock one night and a boat came into the river off the Bay and slowed for a moment, then took off downriver,” Grant said.

“Had either of you seen this boat before?”

Dallas and Berry both nodded. “It’s been around for the past few weeks,” Dallas replied. “And now that I think about it, it has seemed to slow down then speed up again.”

“But that’s the boat that took the photos,” Grant said.

“What photos?” the agent asked.

Dallas explained about the pictures in the tabloids several days earlier.

“Do you have the paper?” Turner asked.

“No,” Dallas said, “but there might still be a few at the store.”

“What kind of boat was this?”

Grant described it. “As a matter of fact, it was almost identical to a boat owned by a gentleman in town. I can get the specifications on it, if you’d like.”

“Please.” Turner nodded.

Grant went into the kitchen to make the call to Carter Harwell.

“Miss MacGregor, can you think of anything else?” Turner sat on the edge of a nearby chair.

“I can’t. I’ve gone over every minute since we arrived, and I can’t think of any time when anything happened that set off any alarms.” She turned to Berry. “Have you thought of anything, Berry?”

Berry shook her head. “I can’t think of anyone who’d want to harm that dear boy.” She corrected herself: “Those two dear boys.”

Grant came back into the room with a description of the boat, which he handed to the agent, telling him, “There are several marinas upriver. If the boat
is docked on the New River, someone will know about it.”

The doorbell rang and everyone jumped, but when the agent answered the door, Steffie and a white-faced Paige were on the porch. They came in carrying several bags from Scoop. After hugs all around and some tears, Stef said, “We brought ice cream. We figured no one would be eating dinner and maybe you’d want something later. I’ll just put it in the freezer. Unless you want some now?”

When everyone shook their head, Dallas took the bags and went into the kitchen, followed by Steffie.

“This was nice, Stef, thanks,” Dallas told her.

“We didn’t know what to do,” Stef admitted. “So as soon as the shop cleared out, we grabbed some stuff out of the cooler and locked the door and jumped in the car. I’m afraid I’m not much help. I don’t know what to say or do.”

“Neither do I,” Dallas admitted, tears in her eyes. “On the one hand, I feel that if something horrible has happened to Cody, I’d know, wouldn’t I? I’m his mother. I should know if something bad …” She choked back a sob. “On the other hand, if nothing’s happened to him … where the hell is he? Why isn’t he here?”

Steffie shook her head.

No one slept except Paige, who curled up on a Victorian love seat around midnight.

“She must be exhausted,” Berry observed. “That’s the most uncomfortable piece of furniture in the house.”

Though the worst of the storm passed during the
night, rain was still coming down in the morning and the wind was only beginning to die down. At eight
A.M.
, the doorbell rang, and Agent Turner answered it. There was muffled conversation in the foyer, then Emilio blasted into the room.