Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

But if she went to Goat now, with nothing but a hunch, he was bound to go in and ask a bunch of questions and give Earl plenty of time to cover his tracks. While Goat was going through channels, talking to judges, getting search warrants, their chances of getting Tucker back would be slipping away. It was times like these that reminded Stella how convenient it was to be on the more casual side of law enforcing. Luckily, she had a few contacts who would help her get the information she needed without having to involve Goat.

On the other hand, if Pitt Akers had Tucker, waiting was exactly the wrong thing to do. In the case of family abductions—not that Pitt was family, but the man evidently imagined himself to be—early days were critical, and they needed to get on his trail before he had a chance to take the boy so far away that no one could find him.

Stella felt her veins go icy at the thought, and the images of lost children from the Internet flashed through her mind. She’d never forgive herself if she waited too long, if Pitt was even now driving out west to California or down to Mexico or up to Canada, Tucker sitting in a wet diaper and wailing for his mother.

“Stella, you okay?” Chrissy asked, peering at her carefully. “You look like you’re about to faint there.”

Stella forced a smile. She crumpled up the Post-it note and made a rim shot on the wastebasket across the room. Tomorrow—if she was no closer to finding Tucker by tomorrow, she’d tell Goat everything. “I’m good. Come on, Princess. Let’s eat.”

After a no-worse-than-usual lunch of lemon chicken and greasy chow mein served with a bare minimum of chat by Roseann Lu, which Chrissy consumed with gusto befitting a far tastier meal, they returned to the shop and Chrissy set to pacing back and forth. Stella had an inspiration.

From the back room, where she kept spare inventory and cleaning supplies and Costco-sized containers of pretzels and beef jerky, she brought out a large cardboard box. “Fran Colvin started this back when we had that teacher in here doing the quilts,” she said. “Poor Fran, she died before she could finish it.”

“Got that chicken bone in her throat, didn’t she,” Chrissy said, coming to take a look.

“Yup. Anyway, how about I teach you how to do this?”

Chrissy hesitated. “Ain’t there something I can do that’s, you know, for Tucker?”

“But that’s just it,” Stella said. “We’ll make him a quilt. And when he gets home, you’ll be able to tuck him in under it.”

“Oh,” Chrissy said. For a long moment, Stella wasn’t sure she was going to go for it. The girl had a far-off look to her, part longing and part grief and a fast-growing part nail-spitting fury.

The thunderclouds building in Chrissy’s pale eyes worried Stella. The last thing she needed at this point was a loose cannon.

“All right,” Chrissy finally agreed. “Let’s do it.”

Stella explained the basics, then started working the phone, dialing trusted friends—many of them former clients—all over the county, and out to the far edges of the state, to let them know about the missing little towheaded boy last seen wearing denim overalls with a baseball embroidered on the bib. If Pitt—or Roy Dean, for that matter—stopped for a burger or a bathroom break or to pick up a pack of diapers, there would be a lot of women on the lookout, women whose lives had taught them to be observant and resourceful. It wasn’t an AMBER Alert, but it was a start.

She also called a few people who had access to official-type information, the type of information that wasn’t generally available to the average citizen.

Between calls, Stella showed Chrissy how to cut the fabric using a ruler and rotary cutter. The rotary cutter looked like a pink-handled pizza wheel, but its blade was razor sharp and easily sliced through several layers of fabric at a time. When the patches were cut, Stella taught Chrissy to join them into blocks, lining up seams and trimming the thread tails, then pressing the finished blocks at the ironing board. When Chrissy held up her first nine-patch, a homely, uneven affair of blue and brown fabric, she smiled faintly.

“ I made that,” she said. “Damn!”

Stella rested a hand on Chrissy’s shoulder. “Tell you what,” she said. “Sewing’s good therapy. There were plenty of times when I didn’t feel much like dealing with my life. You know? And I’d sit there at my machine—probably sewed a million miles in seams, just thinking about things.”

Chrissy looked doubtful. “This is okay and all, but I’d still rather be doing something,” she said. “Not just sittin’.”

Stella thought how Chrissy had looked just yesterday, puddled in the chair in her living room, eating her way through her worries. She was amazed at the girl’s transformation. She’d got some fight back in her. Telling off the dreadful sisters seemed to be just what she needed.

Chrissy reminded Stella of herself, in a way, on the day when she’d finally had enough of Ollie’s abuse and made the transformation from passive victim to hell-for-leather avenger.

Nobody had told her, that day, to sit down and relax. Nobody had offered to help her set things right, either. Maybe it was a mistake to try to settle Chrissy down, to keep a lid on her newfound anger… but at the same time, Stella couldn’t figure out any way to include her without putting her into danger. And that was something she simply wasn’t willing to do.

She wasn’t going to let another woman get hurt—or killed—on her watch. She had to do the job alone.

“I hear you,” she said, not meeting Chrissy’s gaze. “But really, there’s not a lot we can do today. Until we start hearing back from these folks, we just got to be patient.”

“Who all’d you call, anyway?”

“Oh… just friends, here and there.”

“Stella.” There was reproof in Chrissy’s voice. “I know you think I couldn’t hear you fishin’ around for stuff you ain’t supposed to know, but I am sittin right here not ten feet from you. And I got young hearing. Now, who was it?”

“Well… the DMV, for one,” Stella said, giving in. She supposed there was no harm in letting Chrissy in on some of her strategy. “I wrote down some plate numbers out at Benning’s. I want to see if they’re all registered to him direct.”

“They just gonna tell you that?” Chrissy asked.

“Well, not exactly. But I got a friend…”

“Uh-huh.” From her expression, Stella could tell she’d made the leap.

“Friends that owe me favors, actually.”

“That’s good with me,” Chrissy said. “Who else?”

“Well, I got some law enforcement… contacts, I guess you’d call ’em, up in Kansas City. Thought I’d see if they have any ideas about what kind of… side business Benning and his friends might be running down here.”

She didn’t like the way Chrissy’s eyes narrowed; the girl’s wheels were spinning. Stella didn’t want to mention the mob or organized crime. She saw no point in scaring her.

Chrissy lowered her pinned patches of fabric to the table. “And what kind of business are they running, Stella?”

Stella bit her lip. “Well, I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t be trying to find out, now would I?”

After a few more seconds of frank and suspicious gazing, Chrissy picked up the quilt block again and went back to work.

“But you’re going to tell me soon’s you learn something, right?” she said.

“Mmm-hmm,” Stella said, feeling worse than she usually did about lying.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a lot of success with the rest of her calls. Between the customers who straggled in, helping Chrissy with the sewing, and not finding people at their desks or answering their cell phones, Stella hadn’t made much progress at all when closing time rolled around.