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Mitch looked around the room, hoping to find an address book or some clue where Nina might be.
The room was bare except for the bed and four-drawer dresser. There were no knickknacks, no photos, no personal items other than clothing in here or in the living room.
All of the drawers in the dresser had been pulled out, the sparse contents dumped on the floor. All except the bottom drawer.
He moved to the dresser, squatted down and pulled on the stuck drawer. Empty. Still squatting, he glanced under the bed. Nothing but dust balls.
The lack of clothing bothered him. Even counting what Nina was last seen wearing, the woman had only about four days’ worth of clothes.
That seemed odd to him. But if there were more belongings, where were they? And why did she leave them behind when she’d come to Timber Falls?
It made him wonder if this was only to be a short stay.
He started to get up, shoving the drawer back in as he rose. It stuck. He had to pull hard to get the drawer to slide out again. As he did, he heard a soft metallic clink.
Withdrawing the drawer completely, he turned it over, curious what had made the sound. There were several pieces of torn masking tape stuck to the bottom. Something had been taped there but had broken loose.
Setting the drawer aside, he crouched down and felt around under the dresser until his fingers touched something small, metallic and cold.
His heart leaped as he withdrew a tarnished-silver baby’s spoon and saw that the handle was in the shape of a duck’s head. The same shape that had made Dennison Ducks famous. Even through the tarnish, he could read the name engraved on the spoon’s handle: Angela. He felt a chill spike up his spine.
He’d heard that Wade Dennison had hired a jeweler in Eugene to make specially designed silverware for each of his daughters. First for Desiree, then two years later for Angela. Could this be Angela Dennison’s baby spoon? And if it was, what was Nina doing with it twenty-seven years after the baby had disappeared from her crib?
CHARITY RAN through the rain to her old VW bug parked in front of Betty’s and sat for a moment with the heater running as she tried to shake off her chill.
She’d seen the black truck again and there was no doubt in her mind that it was following her. Worse, she thought, looking at the small white box with the bright red ribbon sitting on her passenger seat, she suspected the driver had left her the present.
She stared at the box for a long moment before picking it up. There was no writing on it, not even a store logo. She opened the lid again and parted the white tissue paper.
Earlier all that had registered was that the stone was heart-shaped. She’d been so excited about getting a present from Mitch that she hadn’t noticed that the stone was also blood-red and cold to the touch. She shivered as she turned the stone over.
There was nothing on it. No lettering. No artist’s imprint. Nothing. The shiny surface seemed to capture what little light the gloomy day afforded, absorbing it deep within, as if harboring it like a secret.
She pulled out the tissue paper to make sure there wasn’t something inside the box that she’d missed. Like a clue as to who had left it for her. Earlier it had seemed like a gift. Now it felt more like a threat.
She stuffed the heart back into the box, hurriedly closing the lid. The defroster had finally cleared enough of her windshield that she could drive the two blocks to the post office. But as she started to pull out, she caught a glimpse of a black pickup one street over.
She shifted into gear and took off after it. As she reached the corner, she half expected the truck to be gone. But there it was, creeping along as if the driver was lost. Or sightseeing. Could she be wrong about it following her?
There was only one way to find out, she thought, as she floored the gas, roared past the pickup and then hit her brakes, skidding sideways to block the street.
She leaped from her car into the pouring rain, ran up to the driver’s side of the pickup and jerked the door open.
A startled gray-haired man stared out at her. Beside him, a younger woman with blond hair clasped both hands over her chest as if she was having a heart attack.
Too late Charity noticed that the windows on the pickup weren’t tinted. This wasn’t the black truck she’d seen earlier, the one she was sure had been following her. On closer inspection this pickup was a much newer model. Worse, she knew the driver.
“Charity?” the elderly man gasped.
She groaned. “Mr. Sawyer, I’m so sorry. I thought you were someone else.” He’d left Timber Falls about ten years ago after his wife died, but he’d kept the old Victorian house at the edge of town that had been in his family for generations.
“What in heaven’s name were you thinking?” the blonde next to him demanded.
“It’s all right, Emily,” Liam said to the woman. “It’s just Charity Jenkins. She’s a good friend of my daughter Roz’s.” He turned to Charity. “This is my wife, Emily. I’ve moved back home.”
He’d remarried? And come back to Timber Falls? Charity had noticed someone painting the old place just the other day, but never dreamed Liam Sawyer would return.
“Congratulations,” she said, trying to hide her surprise and embarrassment. “I hope that means Rozalyn will be coming up to visit.” She hadn’t seen her friend for several years now.
Liam smiled ruefully. “She’s awfully busy. You know she’s a famous photographer now.”
Charity nodded, the rain dripping off the front of her hood. “I have all her books.”
“Could we get going?” Emily asked Liam.
“I’m sorry,” Charity said again, realizing the rain was getting into the pickup. Liam seemed oblivious to it, though. “I’ll move my car.”
He smiled at her. “It is good to see you, Charity. Please stop by and visit.”
“Tell her to wait until we get settled,” Emily said. “The place is a disaster. It’s going to take months to get it into any shape at all.”
Charity sprinted back to her car and hurriedly pulled away, thinking about Roz as she drove to the post office to pick up her mail. She and Roz had been inseparable as kids. Of course Roz would be coming to visit her father, no matter how busy she was. It would be good to see her again.
Postmistress Sarah Bridges looked up as Charity came into the small post office. “Just got all the mail out,” Sarah said from behind the caged opening on the left. To the right was a row of mailboxes.
“Anything good in mine?” Charity asked as she walked down to her box and, using her key, opened it to see a stack of bills.
“You know I never pay any attention to who gets what,” Sarah called from behind the wall of boxes.
Uh-huh. Charity flipped through the stack as she walked back to where Sarah stood. Sarah was a good source of gossip.
“So what’s new?” she asked Sarah.
“Liam Sawyer’s remarried and back in town.”
Darn. Charity hoped she had the jump on that story. No such luck. “I know. I just saw them.”
Sarah shot her a look. “What do you think of the new wife?”
Charity might have shared her thoughts on Emily Sawyer if it hadn’t been for an old loyalty to Roz. “I only saw her for a minute.”
Sarah nodded, lips pursed, eyeing her as if she was holding out. “Well, you have a good day.”
Charity doubted that, given how the day had gone so far. She pushed open the door and made a run for her car through the rain. She hadn’t gone but a few steps when she caught a movement from the alley between the post office and bank.
An instant later she was hit by what felt like a freight train. Her mail went flying as she was knocked down in the mud by someone wearing a large dark raincoat. The cloaked figure stopped, back turned to her and knelt to hurriedly scoop up her mail from the wet ground.
She pushed herself up into a sitting position, too stunned to stand—until she realized the person in the dark raincoat wasn’t picking up her mail to give her, but going through it!
“Hey!” Charity cried.
The dark raincoat didn’t turn. Behind her Charity heard Sarah come out of the post office. “Charity?”
The figure dropped the mail and took off at a run down the alley.
“What in the world?” Sarah demanded, charging out to scoop up the wet mail and help Charity to her feet as the dark raincoat disappeared around the corner.
Charity took the mail from Sarah, her gaze still on the street where the figure had vanished. She heard an engine start in the distance. A few seconds later, a black pickup with tinted windows roared off two blocks away.
MITCH TUCKED the baby spoon in his pocket as Florie swept back into the bungalow on a gust of wind and rain.
“How’s the client?” he asked, trying to cover the fact that she’d startled him.
“Problems of the heart,” she said with a wave of her hand. “She’s going to call me back. Have you figured out where Nina has gone?”
He shook his head. “When she arrived she didn’t have a job, you said.”
Florie nodded. “She asked me about a bungalow, I said I had one, she said she’d take it and then she asked me how to get to Dennison Ducks.”
So Nina had been confident she was going to get a job at the decoy plant. It was the biggest business in town, and maybe Nina had experience that made her confident she’d be hired. But Mitch also knew jobs at the plant were hard to come by. Nor were there many openings, because wages and benefits were good and with so few jobs in Timber Falls, employees tended to stay.
“What kind of paperwork did you get her to fill out before you rented her the bungalow?” Mitch asked, hoping for a clue as to Nina Monroe’s life before she showed up here.
“None, other than her name,” Florie said with a shake of her head. “I just go by whatever vibe I pick up.”
“Vibes, instead of a former address or references?” he asked, unable to hide his disbelief.
“I’ll have you know vibes are much more reliable than references.”
He sighed. “But you told me her vibes were bad.”
Florie flushed. “Actually, no, I said they were weird. I remember thinking she was awfully nervous. From her aura I could tell she had man trouble. But with women that’s usually the case, isn’t it?”
“But you rented to her, anyway?”
“She had cash,” Florie said with an embarrassed shrug.
He counted to ten. “She get any phone calls while she was here?”
“Just one. From some woman. Sounded old. Maybe her mother, or grandmother. Nina didn’t want to the take the call but finally did. I heard a little of it. Nina said, ‘How did you find me? I told you to leave me alone.’ She paused, then said, ‘Right, you’re worried about me. That’s a laugh. Don’t call here again. You’re just going to mess things up.”’
Not bad for hearing only a “little” of a one-sided conversation. “The woman ever call again?”
Florie shook her head. “And before you ask, the number was blocked. You know, on my caller ID. I only checked because I didn’t like the vibes I got from the caller. Just like what I’m picking up now about Nina. Worse vibes than before, you know?”
He knew, thinking of the missing woman and the baby spoon in his pocket.
Chapter Four
Back at his office, Mitch closed the door and went straight to his computer. He typed in Nina Monroe’s name and her social security number Wade had given him—not surprised by the results.
Nina Monroe had lied about not only her social security number, but her name, as well.
“I’m going to get some doughnuts,” Sissy said, sticking her head in the door.
“Lemon-filled?”
She nodded and smiled. “You need anything be fore I go?”
He shook his head and waited until he heard her leave before he went down to the basement where the old files were kept.
He dug out Angela Dennison’s file, dusted it off and took it back upstairs.
Sheriff Bill “Hud” Hudson had been like a father to Mitch, as well as a mentor and friend. Hud had also been a first-rate sheriff and the reason Mitch had taken the same career path, instead of following his father’s example and becoming a drunk.
Hud had been sheriff at the time of Angela’s disappearance. At first, it was believed that the baby had been kidnapped. But no ransom demand was ever made and no body was ever found.
Not far into the file, Mitch started seeing a pattern, one he didn’t like. In these types of cases, the parents are usually the first suspects, and Wade and Daisy Dennison were no exceptions.
In Sheriff Hudson’s interview with Daisy, she testified that she didn’t recall seeing Wade until the baby was discovered missing the next morning. She’d said she’d gone to bed early and didn’t know when Wade had gotten home.
Wade, however, said he returned home at his usual time to find that Daisy had been drinking. They’d argued. She’d gone to bed. He’d slept in the den until he was wakened by the nanny early the next morning screaming that the baby was gone.
The nanny, Alma Bromdale, said she’d put the baby to bed about eight that night and gone to bed early herself. She’d taken some cold medicine that made her drowsy and thought that was why she hadn’t heard anything in the adjacent room where the baby was sleeping.
That meant none of the three had an alibi.
Alma Bromdale. Mitch wrote down the name in his notebook. The nanny had been with the Dennisons for more than two years. She’d been hired just before the Dennisons first daughter, Desiree, was born. Alma was twenty-five at the time, from Coos Bay and had listed her job experience as one previous nanny job, baby-sitting and a nanny course through the adult-education program at the high school. She must be about fifty-two now.
Alma had been fired the day after the presumed kidnapping and had left Timber Falls. Mitch checked the telephone directory online. There was only one Bromdale in Coos Bay—Harriet Bromdale. A relative? He wrote down that name, as well, wondering what in the hell he was doing.
So he found an old baby’s spoon with a Dennison duck head and “Angela” engraved on it. And so Nina Monroe was the right age and was now missing. Did he really think Nina might be the missing Angela?
He looked down at the file again, shaking his head. He didn’t know what to think. Hud had noted in his interview with Alma that she’d seemed scared and upset, both natural for someone who’d just learned that the baby she was responsible for had been stolen—and from the adjacent room.
Alma had admitted that Wade and Daisy fought and, yes, she’d overheard them arguing about the paternity of the baby. Wade didn’t think it was his.
Mitch swore under his breath.
The alleged kidnapper had climbed the trellis to the second-story room, but was believed to have taken the baby down the back stairs and out through a rear door on the first floor. Unfortunately, Sheriff Hudson had noted Wade had initiated a search of the area, using a few Dennison Duck employees, before calling the sheriff, and they’d tracked all over and destroyed any evidence there might have been outside the baby’s bedroom window.
Baby Angela had been wearing a pink nightshirt. The only other item taken from the room was the quilt from her bed. Nothing else. No baby spoon, but Mitch knew that the spoon could have easily been overlooked.
He continued down the list of suspects to the live-in housekeeper who’d been fired a week before the abduction, a woman by the name of Georgette Bonners.
Georgette had been angry and, like Alma, had nothing good to say about the Dennisons. She had also alluded to the fighting and the question of the baby’s paternity.
On the night of the abduction, Georgette said she was with her husband, Tim. He confirmed it. Both were now deceased.
