“Then turn around and give Paul and Rich backup. Wasn’t there a woman at the condo? Around seventy?” Tyler asked. “Emma something. I don’t know her well. She moved to town two or three years ago.”
“That’s around the time Trevor started seeing the Schattenmann!” Taylor blurted out beside Tom.
“Is that you, Taylor?” Sheriff Tyler asked, and Tom cringed, expecting a reprimand from the man. Instead, he surprised Tom.
“It is, Uncle Tyler. Sorry I haven’t been able to see you yet,” she said.
Uncle Tyler. He was that close to the Alenns, was he?
“I know, me too. Stay safe, Taylor, and whoever else is with you. I’m finishing up by your aunt’s house. The abducted girl lived down the block from them. Looks like she was riding her bike. A witness saw an older woman in a hatchback pulled onto the side of the street before taking off,” Tyler said.
“That’s her, Sheriff. Emma Jeanne, the one from the condo. I saw her driving away from the condo right before I got the call about these guys on Wood Street.” Tom thought about it. The scrunchie could have been Carl being a weirdo. So he’d found the hair elastic, and for some reason, took it home. That might be the only explanation. But the shirt – Fredrik’s pajama top in his storage unit. That could have been someone else. It was so neatly folded. Carl was messy, but Emma wasn’t. She would have folded that top perfectly, and likely had.
“Shit. Get to the orchard, Tom. I’m going to radio Rich and tell him to stay put until we both get there.” Sheriff Tyler ended the call, and Tom slowed the car, turning his signal on. The bar was on the right, and he pulled into the gravel parking lot before starting to turn around. A loud pop, and the car dragged to the side.
“What was that?” Isabelle asked from behind his seat.
Tom parked away from the parking lot entrance and opened his door. He could smell rubber, and stepped out to see his rear driver’s side tire not just flat, but torn wide open. Broken bottles were scattered around the lot, and Tom saw a few snickering patrons outside, smoking at the bar’s front door.
“That was a bunch of assholes getting their jollies on a Saturday night.” Tom made sure his safety was on, and strutted for the lit cigarettes waving in the night air.
_______________
Darrel stopped short of the orchard entrance. No matter what the property looked like, Paul was always going to think of it as Granny Smith’s Orchard. He could imagine the picturesque rows of eighty-year-old apple trees, all flush with fruit. The smell was magical, but when Paul tried to remember the scent, all he got was a whiff of damp soil, like the dirt-walled room he’d woken up in when he was a kid. He glanced at his nails, as if expecting to find black dirt under them, and Darrel cut the engine.
Paul’s brother-in-law reached for the door handle, but Rich set a hand on his shoulder from the backseat.
“The sheriff said to hang tight. So that’s what we’re going to do, okay, Watson?” the deputy said, trying to force authority into his high-timbred voice.
“Tyler better hurry the hell up, then,” Darrel said, and he moved closer to Paul. “You okay? You haven’t been out here since it was up in flames.”
Paul tilted his head to one side, then the other, feeling his neck crack. “I don’t know what to feel.” He turned so he could see Rich’s face. “Is that her car?”
The parking lot lights were casting a yellow glow on the sparse cars, and Rich pointed toward the lot. “Sure. It’s the blue hatchback there. We saw it pulling out earlier.”
Paul wanted to get out, to run to the building and bang on her door. But all that would do was endanger himself, and likely others in the complex. Where was it hiding? The rain had slowed now, and Paul got out. The truck’s interior light popped on, and Darrel cursed while fumbling for the manual override. He got it off, and Paul gave him an apologetic look.
“We’re like a damned beacon up here, Paul. If she’s keeping an eye out, she saw us,” Darrel said, and he got out too.
“I said to stay put.” Rich’s voice was muffled as Paul and Darrel each shut their doors softly.
Darrel and Paul met at the front of the truck, and Paul heard Rich clamber out from the truck’s backseat. “I told you to stay in the truck.”
“Look, junior,” Darrel started, avoiding the deputy’s stare, “we’re going to walk the perimeter, see if anything’s out of place. We won’t go near Emma’s unit, okay?”
Rich looked ready to argue but nodded slowly. “I’ll wait here for the sheriff. When he gets here, I’ll tell him you went for a piss.”
“Together?” Darrel laughed. “Come on, Paul. Let’s go see what needs seeing.”
Paul felt for his gun and found it safely tucked into his pants. He wished he had a better spot for it and grabbed it, making sure the safety was on. “No flashlight,” Paul said, and he took Darrel’s silence for agreement.
The orchard’s chain-link fence was removed now. It had been twelve years since Tyler, Nick, Jason, Darrel, and Paul had cut into the fence, going to look for Tommy O’Brian, and it felt like even longer as Paul stepped past the cast-iron gate and onto the property.
Images flooded his memory as his foot touched the ground.
The lantern slowly burning out. So slowly. Leaving him alone in the dirt room with no light. Noises on the other side of the thick wooden door. He was so scared.
Clawing his way down the hallway, pushing through mounds of
