C Box - Blue Heaven

“I tried to call you earlier,” he said, nodding at the phone, the question why she didn’t answer hanging in the air.

“The phone was dead,” she said, her voice a croak, as if she was using it for the first time. “So that was you.”

He nodded and gestured toward a chair.

“Do you have anything to tell me?”

He sat down and looked around for a place that was not dirtied with soot to put his hat down. Finally, he perched it on his knee.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” Carey said, and this time he let his eyes slip away from hers.

“Oh, no…”

“No, it’s not that,” he said quickly, realizing what she had leaped to.

“You haven’t found them?”

He shook his head. “I wish I had better news, but I don’t. What I can tell you is that one of my deputies found some things up by Sand Creek. A fly rod and a shoe stuck in the mud. I was hoping you could identify them.”

Her mind raced. Of course she could identify a shoe if it was Annie’s or William’s. But what was the brand of the fly rod Tom said was missing?

“I could do that,” she said. “But I might have to call someone to identify the rod.”

“That would be Tom Boyd, I presume?”

“Yes.”

Carey nodded, and reached for his breast pocket. “You don’t mind if I take a few notes, do you?”

“No, why should I?”

Carey shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He was the new sheriff, barely elected just a few months ago in a close contest. His background was in real estate. She wondered how much he really knew about his job. Forty-nine percent of the county wondered the same thing.

“My deputies think this may be more than, you know, the kids getting lost.”

Monica felt as if something were rising in her from a reserve she didn’t know she had. She wished the Valium would wear off so she could concentrate better.

“What are you saying to me?”

“Well, Miz Taylor, we’ve decided to treat this matter as a criminal investigation, not a missing persons case. The rod was found hung up in some brush a hundred yards from the river. The shoe was found in a mudhole farther up the path, and it was easy to see and find. That leads my deputies to believe that whoever lost the shoe-and we think it might have been Annie-could have easily turned around and pulled it out. But she didn’t. That indicates that she might have been in a hurry. You know, like she was running from something or somebody.”

Monica felt her eyes widen. Her breath came in short bursts.

Carey produced a quart-sized Ziploc bag and held it up to the light. Inside was a muddy shoe. The sight of it seared Monica, welded her to her chair.

“It’s Annie’s” she said, scarcely raising her voice. “Who were they running from?”

Carey put the shoe on the table and turned his hands, palms up. “That, we don’t know. My men have found some prints in the mud up there, but they’re bad ones. The rain last night fouled up anything definitive. We’re still looking, and my guys are combing the area on a grid, inch by inch.”

The world had suddenly made a hard turn and darkened. Throughout the sleepless night, she had envisioned her children lost somewhere in the forest, huddled together in the rain. She had hoped they’d found shelter of some kind and were smart enough to stay put. She had even thought of the creek, thought of them falling into it and being swept away. It was awful, that thought. But she hadn’t considered what the sheriff was now telling her. That her children were prey to someone.

“Oh, no…”

She stared at the shoe, the smears of mud on the inside of the plastic, the laces broken. As if violence had been packaged in a neat container.

Carey narrowed his eyes and looked at her, studying her. “Miz Taylor, are you going to be okay?”

She shook her head slightly. “No, I’m not. You’re telling me that someone was after my children.”

“We don’t know that yet,” he said. “It’s speculation based on very little evidence. But we can’t rule it out, and we need to cover everything. It could be they’ll turn up any minute. Maybe they stayed at a friend’s, who knows?”

She continued to shake her head. Her throat constricted. It was difficult to get air. She had given a deputy the names and numbers of all of Annie’s and William’s friends, and had called their parents herself. None of them had seen her children.

“Miz Taylor, I need to ask you if you know of anyone who may have something against you, or your kids.”

“What?”

“Has anyone threatened you? Stalked you? Do you know if your children had any trouble with anyone who might try to scare them or hurt them? They each have a different father, right?”

“Right,” she said, wincing at how it sounded. “But neither is around, as you know.”

William’s father, Billy, had been killed in a prison riot at the Idaho State Correctional Institution in Boise. She had divorced him three years before, while he was on trial for owning and operating four methamphetamine labs, which apparently generated a lot more income for Billy than his struggling construction business. The marriage had been dead by eighteen months after the ceremony but went on for two more years. Billy had been proud of the fact that he fathered a son, but didn’t particularly like William and, like Tom, called him a mama’s boy. William barely knew or remembered his father, but sometimes talked about him as a mythical being, a stoic and legendary Western outlaw. Monica didn’t encourage William’s projections but didn’t disparage Billy in front of her son because she didn’t think it would serve any good purpose. Annie knew Billy for what he was, and rolled her eyes when her brother talked about his father the outlaw. But Billy’d never threatened his son, or Monica, because by the end he simply didn’t care about either of them.

Up until a year ago, Annie had assumed Billy was her father, too. Then she did the math. That had been a bad day for Monica, when Annie asked. When she did, Monica simply said, “He’s watching over you.” Annie didn’t really accept the answer. It was obvious it didn’t satisfy her. Monica knew there would be more questions as time went by, and she had dreaded them. Now, Monica hoped Annie would be back so she could answer them.

“Is he dead?” the sheriff asked.

“Something like that. He’s incarcerated as well.”

The sheriff eyed her closely, withholding judgment. Yes , Monica thought, I’m used to those looks, I know …

“We need to explore every possibility so we can rule things out,” Carey said, interrupting Monica’s thoughts. “First, and pardon me for being rude, but I assume that your family is fairly low-income. Correct?”

She nodded. It was obvious.

“Anyone you can think of at your place of work? Disgruntled employees?”

“No. Nothing unusual.”

He glanced at his notes. “You’re the manager of women’s casual apparel at the outlet store, correct?”

She nodded. “It provides a steady income and decent health benefits for the kids. It’s a meaningless job.”

“Any problem with the neighbors?”

She shook her head. She kept her distance from her neighbors except for inevitable pleasantries about the weather or school-related topics. The only thing she could think of was when a single retired bachelor down the block complained about William and Annie cutting across his yard as they walked to school, and she told the sheriff about it. The sheriff made a note.

“What about your extended family? Is there money there? Would a kidnapper have a reason to hold your children for ransom?”

“My mother cleans houses and tends bar in Spokane,” Monica said evenly. “My father has been gone for years. We have nothing.”