“Oh dear,” said Eleanor Prentice, rising at once. “I thought she agreed to wait till Pam was here. Will you show Major Bryant out for me?”
C H A P T E R
16
Saturday afternoon, 22 January
The woman who escorted Dwight down the wide staircase of Mrs. Shay’s house was a hand-wringer who wanted to pause on almost every step to be-moan Jonna’s death and the unlikelihood of finding “that poor little boy” unharmed “because, oh dear, everyone knows why little children are taken and it’s just
Grimly, he saw that more women waited in the foyer so that they could add their own commiserations.
Except that they didn’t. Once again he had made a stereotyped assumption about ineffective, hand-wringing women; and once again, practical women like his mother or Deborah’s Aunt Zell were there to haul him up short.
The blue-haired ladies who met him at the bottom of the steps handed him two large flat boxes. “We know you can’t stay and eat something now,” one of them said briskly, “but we want you to take this back to Paul Radcliff’s office and share it with the officers who are trying to find Cal. It’s way too much food for Laura’s small family and there’s no sense in having it go to waste, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am. And thank you. I know they’ll appreciate it.”
He certainly did, he thought as he carried the boxes back to his truck. He could smell hot biscuits and fried chicken. Despite his anxiety about Cal, his stomach rumbled. The small bowl of soup Mrs. Shay had given him at noon was long gone.
His phone rang just as he put his key in the ignition, and when he answered it, Bo Poole’s voice said,
“Dwight? What the hell’s going on up there, boy?”
As concisely as possible, he told his boss about Cal’s disappearance and the discovery of his ex-wife’s body.
The sheriff listened quietly, asked a couple of questions, then said, “What about those state police agents?
They giving you a hard time? Say the word and I’ll speak to an old buddy of mine in Richmond.”
“That’s okay for now,” Dwight told him. “If things get dicey, I’ll let you know. How’s the Rouse case coming?
Any breaks yet?”
Poole repeated the report that Mayleen Richards had given him a little earlier. “She’s shaping up to be a right good detective, isn’t she? She still hasn’t found much of a loose string to pull on, but they’ll keep on it. She and McLamb left a little while ago to go interview Rouse’s married girlfriend down near Makely. I’ll let ’em know what you’ve told me. They’re all concerned about you and Cal. Gotta run. My pager’s beeping, but you keep in touch, hear?”
Back at the police station, the fried chicken and biscuits soon disappeared as the cold and hungry canvassers came in from the streets. The second box contained two or three pounds of cold cuts and several packages of rolls, and they were going fast, too.
Munching on a ham and cheese sandwich, Paul had to report that there was no word on Cal. “Clark told me that they’ve asked the ME to expedite Jonna’s autopsy in light of Cal’s disappearance. And for what it’s worth, the prints we lifted off the doorknob yesterday don’t match Jonna’s, but they do match the ones on the medicine cabinet. We’ve run them through the system. No hits.”
No hits. He didn’t know whether to be glad or dispirited by that. “A match would’ve given us a name and a description,” he said, stating the obvious.
“On the other hand,” said Paul, striving for something optimistic to give his friend, “no match means it wasn’t a hardened criminal that took Cal. I keep trying to understand why he went with her in the first place. You and Jonna both must have warned him about going off with strangers. And he wouldn’t fall for the old trick about helping to look for a lost pet, would he?”
“No, but he might fall for the line that Jonna was hurt and calling for him. Not ordinarily, but yesterday? When we’d been looking for her and he was already worried and upset? And the woman couldn’t have been a stranger.
Not if she was in the house. She has to be someone he was familiar with and trusted. Mrs. Shay named a couple of her friends—Lou Cannady and Jill Edwards.”
Radcliff was familiar with both names.
“Lou Cannady’s husband owns the local Honda deal-ership and Jill Edwards is president of the PTA.” He handed over the address book that Dwight had given him earlier. “They’re both in here. I had a couple of clerks call every nonbusiness name just in case somebody had any suggestions about Cal. They came up dry.”
He paused as an attractive woman appeared in his doorway. She wore a short red car coat, black slacks, and boots. Her dark blond hair was damp from the rain and the wind had turned her cheeks as red as her coat.
Dwight dropped his sandwich and stood up so quickly that he almost knocked his chair over as he reached for her.
“I was about to call you when I spotted your truck parked out front, so I—”
The rest of her words were muffled against Dwight’s chest.
