Paula Graves - Chickasaw County Captive

Sam felt his chest contract into a painful knot. Kristen turned to look at him, her eyes bright with alarm.

“Where’s Maddy?” she asked urgently.

“At school,” Sam answered, his heart pounding.

“I’ll drive,” she said, and hit the door at a jog.

OUTSIDE TIME WAS MADDY’S favorite time of all. She liked coloring and singing and all the things she did with the teacher inside the school, but outside time was perfect. Just perfect.

Sometimes the teachers played games with them. Miss Kathy was the best at kick ball, and she laughed a lot. Maddy liked to hear Miss Kathy’s laugh. It was a big, booming laugh, straight from her belly. Maddy sometimes tried to laugh just like that, although it came out kind of silly sounding. But that was okay. Daddy said it was okay to be silly sometimes.

Thinking about Daddy made her think about this morning, when he’d told her that Miss Kristen was at work. Miss Kristen was a detective, Daddy said, and her work was Very Very Important. Maddy wondered what was important about being a detective. In fact, she wondered what a detective was, anyway.

She only knew that she liked Miss Kristen. She liked how Miss Kristen didn’t try to treat her like a baby since she was a big girl now. She liked the sound of Miss Kristen’s voice. And she liked Miss Kristen’s smile, even though Miss Kristen didn’t smile nearly as much as Aunt Hannah or Grandmama. Maddy wondered why she didn’t smile as much. Maybe she needs a little girl to love, Maddy thought. Like me.

Across the playground, a little girl screamed, and Maddy looked up with surprise. She saw Cassie Price jumping up and down shrieking, and a couple of the boys in her class had bent over to look at something in the grass.

Maddy saw Miss Kathy and Miss Debbie hurry over to see what was going on. She started across the playground, too, but a big hand reached out and stopped her.

She looked up and saw a tall man in a blue uniform standing just behind her. Her heart gave a little lurch of surprise.

“There’s a snake over there,” he said. Maddy thought his voice sounded familiar. He looked familiar, too, but she didn’t know why. He had a big, bushy mustache and wore a pair of silvery sunglasses. She could see herself in the glasses, she realized with a little smile.

“Come with me, Maddy. I’m taking you to your daddy.”

Was he Daddy’s friend? He had a uniform sort of like her Uncle Aaron’s. Was he a policeman? “I’m not afraid of snakes,” she said. Aunt Hannah had taught her how to handle the little green snakes that played around Grandmama’s garden. She liked to feel their dry, scaly bodies wriggle through her fingers.

“But that’s a poisonous snake,” the man said firmly, taking her hand. She saw he had her backpack in his other hand. She could see the ringed tail of Bandit, her stuffed raccoon, hanging out of the zippered pocket.

The man saw her looking at the tail. He reached into the pocket and gave Bandit to her. She said thank you-Daddy said always say “please” and “thank you”-and hugged Bandit close, not liking the feel of the man’s big hand around hers.

“Where’s my daddy?” she asked aloud.

“He’s waiting for you inside my van.” The man pulled her toward the side gate of the playground fence. They had gone around the side of the school building, and Maddy couldn’t see the other kids on the playground anymore.

The man opened the gate and gave her a little nudge to go through. He closed the gate behind them and pulled her hand.

Maddy looked at the van parked at the end of the small parking lot. It was green and looked old. There were two windows up at the front but no windows in the side. She didn’t see Daddy inside.

“Where’s my daddy?” she repeated, starting to feel scared.

The man opened the door of the van, picked her up and put her inside. He didn’t even have a special seat for her, like Daddy did. Her legs dangled over the seat, and she felt hot tears on her cheeks.

“Where’s my daddy?” she screamed, but the man had already closed the door. She saw him put something in her backpack and toss it into the bushes at the side of the building.

Maddy tried to open the door of the van to run away-Daddy said when you got scared, it was okay to run and find a grown-up you trusted-but she couldn’t get it to open.

The man in the uniform opened the front door and pulled himself into the seat behind the steering wheel. He spoke to her, his voice firm. “No crying, Maddy. You have to be a big girl now, okay?” He pulled a cap from the dashboard and put it on. Maddy’s eyes widened.

Now she knew why the man in the uniform looked and sounded familiar. He was the bad man.

The bad man who hurt Cissy.

Sam clutched the cell phone more tightly as Kristen swerved around slow-moving traffic on I-59. He was on interminable hold, waiting for the preschool’s principal to come on the line. He’d made a call as soon as they got outside the hospital, but the principal had been out of the office and he’d had to leave a message. He’d spent the next twenty minutes certain that Jennifer Franks would return his call at any moment.

When she didn’t, he called again. The principal still wasn’t in her office, but this time, he told the secretary that he wasn’t hanging up until he talked to her boss.

“Still nothing?” Kristen asked, sounding as annoyed as he felt. “You’ve been on hold forever.”

Just then, there was a click on the other end of the line and Jennifer Franks’s breathless voice greeted him. “So sorry, Mr. Cooper. We’ve had a bit of an uproar I’ve been trying to get under control.”

Sam’s stomach twisted. “What kind of an uproar?”

“One of the children found a rather large snake on the playground a little while ago. We’re still trying to find out whether or not it’s harmless, and several of the children are very upset. We’ve had to call some parents.”

Sam tamped down his impatience. “I left a message with your secretary twenty minutes ago-I’m trying to locate Maddy. Did you get that message?”

“No, I’m sorry-my secretary just told me. Maddy’s class was outside for recess when the snake incident happened, but Maddy wasn’t one of the children involved.”

“Where is she now?”

“I assume she’s back in her classroom with her teacher.”

“You assume?”

Across the seat, Kristen muttered a profanity under her breath.

“I’ll check right now. Hold on a moment.”

“I’m on hold again,” Sam muttered.

“For God’s sake!” Kristen jerked the wheel, taking the Impala around a slow-moving coal truck at breakneck speed. “How hard is it to find one four-year-old?”

“Mr. Cooper?”

The fear he heard in Jennifer Franks’s voice made Sam’s blood freeze. “Tell me you found her safe and sound,” he said.

“I’m sorry. We don’t know how it happened.”

“What happened, damn it?”

Kristen shot him a look full of unadulterated terror.

“She didn’t return with the rest of her class after recess,” Jennifer answered, sounding sick. “We don’t know where she is.”

“Get your security guards to start searching every inch of the grounds.”

“I’ve already sent my assistant out to do just that. I don’t think we should panic yet, Mr. Cooper. It’s possible that she was there for the snake incident and ran away to hide because she was scared.”

He wished he could believe that, but he knew that snakes didn’t scare Maddy. He’d actually had to give her a lesson on not touching snakes unless a grown-up was there to supervise, for fear she’d end up trying to befriend a ground rattler or one of the bigger copperheads that roamed the woods near the lake.