The Twisted Window (4 page)

"I'll get it!" she called now to her aunt and uncle, who had taken root in the living room an hour earlier for their usual marathon round of postdinner television watching.

She went out into the entrance hall and opened the door. As she had expected, Brad Johnson was standing there.

"Hi," he said. "I've been told this is the house where all the action is. I thought I'd better come by and check out the rumor."

"I think I've heard that line somewhere before," said Tracy.

"You're right," Brad acknowledged easily. "It worked so well at lunch today I thought I'd try it again." He smiled at her. "Want to go get a hamburger at McDonald's?"

"Thanks, but I've already eaten," Tracy told him. "Hours ago, in fact. My aunt serves dinner right on the dot of six."

"Then maybe you've had enough time to get hungry again," Brad said. "If not, come along for the ride and to keep me company. Order a Coke or something. Take pity on a lonely newcomer. After all, you're the only person I know in Winfield."

"You know Gina," Tracy reminded him.

"If I'd wanted to buy Gina a hamburger, I would have called her. I do know she's 'the only Scarpelli in the phone book.'" His smile broadened, as though the two of them were sharing a private joke. "I'm afraid Gina's not my type."

"And you think I am?"

"I think you might be. I'd like a chance to find out."

"Has it occurred to you that you might not be my type?" Tracy's voice was cool, and she did not return the smile.

"I don't get it," Brad said, looking puzzled. "You said I could call you. I thought that meant you wouldn't mind going out with me."

"Tracy?" Aunt Rene called from the adjoining room. "If that's the boy collecting for the paper, tell him I mailed his check yesterday."

"It's not the paperboy," Tracy called back to her. "It's somebody from school."

"Then invite her in. There's no sense holding a long conversation in the doorway."

There was a moment of silence, during which Tracy could picture her plump aunt struggling to hoist herself out of the easy chair that was her designated evening nesting place. Then, the feat having been accomplished, she came bustling out into the entrance hall.

"Why, hello!" she exclaimed, obviously surprised to discover her niece's caller was a boy. "I'm Mrs. Stevenson, Tracy's aunt."

"Nice to meet you," Brad responded politely. "I'm Brad Johnson. I stopped by to see if I could talk Tracy into going out for a Coke."

"That doesn't seem such a good idea on a school night," said Aunt Rene. "Young people need their sleep if they're going to be alert in class."

"But it's only eight thirty!" Tracy protested. "You can't expect me to go to bed at that hour!"

"This close to the end of the school year, you must have homework," her aunt said. "Finals are coming up soon. Shouldn't you be studying?"

"I've finished my homework, and we don't have finals for a month yet." Tracy knew even as she spoke that what she was doing was ridiculous. Her aunt had provided her with the excuse she needed, and she should have been taking advantage of it. It would be nothing short of lunacy to go out alone with this stranger who, she had come to suspect, might not even be named Brad Johnson.

Despite that, she heard herself speaking up defiantly. "Actually, a Coke would taste pretty good right now. That meat we had for dinner tonight made me thirsty."

"Tracy, dear, I really don't know about this," said Aunt Rene. "Maybe we ought to see what Uncle Gory thinks."

Tracy turned to face her aunt, disconcerted as always by the distorted resemblance to her mother. Even after seven months of living in the Stevensons' home, she still had not become fully adjusted to seeing Danielle Lloyd's small, neat features and expressive eyes in the alien setting of Irene Stevenson's fleshy face.

"We're going to get a Coke," Tracy stated firmly. "We won't be long. We're just going over to McDonald's."

Without giving her aunt a chance to voice further objections, she stepped through the open doorway into the sweet spring evening.

"I'll have her home in an hour, Mrs. Stevenson," said Brad.

"Well, see that you do." Aunt Rene regarded them helplessly. "Have her back by nine thirty at the latest, and be sure to drive carefully!"

Brad's light blue Chevrolet Impala was parked in front of the house. He started to lead the way to it and then slowed his pace when he realized Tracy was not following along behind him.

"Is something the matter?" he asked, turning back to face her.

"I want to walk," Tracy said.

"Walk?" Brad stared at her in disbelief. "You want to walk all the way to McDonald's over on Eighth Street?"

"We don't need to go to McDonald's," Tracy told him. "I don't really want a Coke. I only said that to get the point across to Aunt Rene that I'm sick to death of her salty corned beef." She spoke slowly and carefully in an attempt to conceal her nervousness. "What I'm trying to say is, I don't want to ride in your car."

The smile slowly faded from Brad's face.

"What's wrong with my car? You have something against Impalas?"

"No," said Tracy. "I don't have anything against the car itself. The thing is, I don't ride with people I don't trust."

She started to walk north along the sidewalk in the direction of Third Street. After a moment's hesitation, Brad took a few swift strides and fell into step beside her.

"I don't get it," he said in bewilderment. "I thought we were friends."

"Let's not play games, Brad—if your name actually is Brad," Tracy said. "If you're looking for someone gullible, then Gina's your better bet. She believed everything you told us in the cafeteria. She's a small-town girl who doesn't know much about con men."

"You're talking crazy," Brad said.

"No, I'm talking smart. I let myself get snowed at lunch today, but that isn't going to happen again." She glanced across at him in an attempt to read his expression, but as they passed beneath a streetlight his eyes were thrown into pockets of darkness. "You were lying when you told Gina you were taking Shakespeare. I took that class myself last semester. I had to take it then, because it isn't offered in the spring."

"You're right," Brad said after a moment's hesitation. "I did lie about that."

"That's not all you lied about," Tracy continued. "The truth of it is you're not even a student at Winfield. I stopped by the office after school today and asked the secretary to look up your name. There isn't any Brad Johnson in the computer register. The secretary told me this same sort of thing has happened before. Last spring there were a couple of young guys who kept hanging around the campus, acting like they were students. It turned out they were dealing drugs they'd smuggled up from Mexico."

"I'm not pushing drugs," Brad said.

"Then what are you pushing?"

"I'm not pushing anything. It's not like that at all." They had come opposite the park now, and he gestured toward a bench positioned in the shadows at the edge of the playground. "Let's go over there and sit down. It's too hard to talk when we're walking."

"I'm not going into the park at night," said Tracy. "Just this afternoon, right in broad daylight—" She broke off in mid sentence, struck by what she was saying. A wave of comprehension swept over her, and she swung abruptly around to confront him. "It was you, wasn't it? You're the one who was hiding and spying on me!"

"I did follow you into the park today," Brad admitted. "I don't see anything so terrible about that. I needed to talk to you and wanted to catch you alone, I didn't expect you to go tearing off like you did before I'd even had a chance to call out to you. Come on over and sit down and I'll tell you everything."

"You can explain anything you need to explain right here."

"What are you scared of?" Brad asked her jokingly. "Do you think I'm Jack the Ripper, looking for a victim?" When Tracy didn't respond, he regarded her incredulously. "Seriously, is that what you do think? Don't tell me you're afraid I'm going to attack you!"

"That sort of thing does happen," Tracy told him. "It happened to my mother. Mother was an actress with a walk-on part in a Broadway show. She was just getting home from work one night when she was robbed and stabbed. It happened in the hall right outside our apartment."

Brad seemed taken aback.

"That's heavy," he said. "It's no wonder you're jittery about strangers. Still, that didn't have anything to do with me. I give you my word, I don't go around stabbing people."

"Why should I trust you when I don't even know who you are?"

"My name's Bradley Johnson," Brad said. "If you want proof, I can show you my driver's license. I come from Albuquerque, just the way I told you at lunch."

"At lunch you also told me you were a student at the high school."

"I had to say that, or you wouldn't have been willing to talk to me. There's something important I have to get done in Winfield. I went to the school to see if I could find someone to help me."

"And I lucked out and got chosen?" Tracy's voice was edged with sarcasm. "So, when do you plan to tell me what my duties are?"

"I have to locate a girl," Brad said, ignoring the tone of the question. "Her name is Mindy, and I think she may be in Winfield."

"I don't know any girl named Mindy," Tracy told him.

"I didn't expect you would, but you can help me find her."

"Why do you need to find her? Did she run away?"

"Hardly," Brad said shortly. "Do you want to see her picture?" Without waiting for an answer, he fished in a pocket of his shirt and extracted a color photograph. He thrust it out at her. "That's Mindy, the way she looked last summer."

Tracy glanced at the picture, casually at first, and then with more interest. "Why, she's only a baby! I thought you were talking about a girlfriend."

"She was eighteen months old when Mom had this picture taken. Like I said, that was back last summer. By now, she's two and a half."

"Your mother had this picture taken? Mindy's a relative?"

"She's my sister," said Brad. "No, actually, she's my half sister. My father died of a heart attack on my thirteenth birthday. Then my mother married a guy named Gavin Brummer. They had Mindy, and not too long after that, Mom and Gavin got divorced."

"You don't look much alike," said Tracy. "Mindy's so blond."

"She gets that from Gavin. My dad had brown curly hair." He paused, as though trying to decide how to phrase his next statement. "Four months ago Mindy was taken."

"Taken?" exclaimed Tracy. "Do you mean she was kidnapped?"

"That's the term I'd use," said Brad. "The cops call it 'child-snatching.' Gavin had been hanging around our place all that morning. He finally got me so mad I couldn't take it any longer, and I drove over to my friend Jamie's house to simmer down. Mom thought Gavin was leaving when I was. He was out in the yard, saying good-bye to Mindy, when our phone started ringing inside the house Mom went in to answer it, and when she came back out a few minutes later both Gavin and Mindy were gone."

"Does your mother have custody of Mindy?" Tracy asked him

"Of course Mom has custody Gavin's a creep "

"My mother got custody of me when my folks were divorced," Tracy said.

Brad was too caught up in his own story to respond to the statement

"Mom fell apart after Mindy was snatched," he said "So did I, for a while there. I guess you could say we were both m shock You get so used to trusting people in authority, and Mom and I sat back like a couple of zombies, waiting for the police to track Gavin down "

"I shouldn't have thought that would have been hard," said Tracy "From things I've read, it seems like it's almost impossible for people to disappear without a trace They take pieces of their old lives with them when they relocate. They look for the same kind of work and stay in touch with relatives. Gavin wasn't a stranger, he was your stepfather. You must have some idea about how to find him "

"I do," said Brad, "but the police weren't interested in hearing it. Lieutenant Souter, the officer in charge of the investigation, treated me like I was a moron, too young or too dumb to say anything worth listening to Mom was just as bad. She wouldn't listen to me either I tried to get her to hire a private detective, but she couldn't seem to take in what I was suggesting.

"That's when I decided to do my own detective work. I called the office where Gavin had worked and asked if they had any idea where he might have gone His boss wouldn't talk to me, but the boss's secretary did She told me Gavin had written for a job recommendation She couldn't remember the town the letter came from, but she did recall it was in Texas. When she said that, it suddenly hit me that Gavin had gotten a birthday card a few months earlier from a sister in Winfield. Like you said, people who 'disappear' tend to keep in touch with relatives It seemed to me that Winfield would be a good place to look for him "

"That makes sense," Tracy acknowledged. "But even if he's moved here, wouldn't it be likely he'd be going by another name?"

"I thought about that," said Brad, "but I decided I'd check it out anyway I called directory assistance and what do you know, they have a new listing for a G Drummer at the Continental Arms."