Never There, page 12
I interrupted. “Back to the maps.”
We ran our fingers along the map lines. “So Grand Rapids isn’t right at all,” I said. “There’s not enough rural land. What we are looking for is flat; I remember corn fields.”
“It’s got to be north,” Jen ran her finger over the map. “I think we should go North, then East.”
“That seems right to me too,” I said. “Let’s go to Cedar Springs first, then start heading toward Kent City and Muskegon.”
We agreed. I jumped in the car with David. We followed Corey north up 131. Corey pulled off and into Cedar Springs. We were trekking along well until suddenly Corey’s truck started swaying and then went across the center line. He had to jerk the vehicle back over to correct. We were taken aback by the erratic driving. Suddenly, he slammed on the brakes and pulled over onto the shoulder.
David followed him and pulled off, and I ran up to the truck to see what was happening.
“Jen pulled the damn steering wheel,” Corey said. “Gave me a damn heart attack.”
Jen looked like she was about to jump out of her seat.
“Did you see the sign?” she shouted. “We have to turn around.”
I waved to David to follow us, and I crawled into the back seat. We turned around and got back to the edge of town. Once there, Jen directed Corey to turn down a side street. How she had managed to see that sign, which was so far from the main road, was beyond me. It took a moment for it to come into full view. When it did, I knew why she was excited. My heart did a flip flop, “Cedar Springs,” I said.
She jumped out of the truck, and I followed her. We ran our fingers along the letters, and it’s like something clicked in my brain. We had been here before. This was the shape of the sign I’d drawn for the librarian. I pulled it out, but the words were different, and the logos for the town associations weren’t on the sign at all: they were behind it.
“This is it,” I said. “But it’s not exactly like I remember. Where did the Rapids come from?”
Missy looked at the sign, “I’ve seen this sign, but this isn’t the one that I remember.”
Corey pulled out the map again and said, “If we were heading to a school field trip, we would have taken 96 up 131 or 57 to here. If we were heading East, which we all think is right, why wouldn’t we take the more direct road, 37 or stay on 96?”
“Maybe there was a traffic jam.” I offered.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“We need to go further.” Jen said, “We’re getting closer. I can feel it.”
I ran back to check on David behind us. “Do you mind if I ride with them for a minute? We’re going East to Muskegon, and we are kind of vibing on the stuff we see.”
“Is there room for me to ride in there with you?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, and realized he felt left out.
We found a shopping center where we could safely park his car and crammed, three to bench seat, in the extended cab Ford. Jen and Missy sat up front, with Missy taking the center, straddling the stick shift.
That left me in the back between Neil—formerly Corey Two—and David. I debated putting them next to each other, but David looked like he was going to eat Neil if I left him unprotected.
Corey drove carefully down the straight road that took us from Cedar Springs to Muskegon. We passed a skating rink, parks, golf club, and it was all starting to feel eerily familiar.
“This is like high school,” Missy squealed from the front, “all of us on a road trip with the Coreys. Remember that horrible fake Pizza Hut we went looking for?”
“Oh God,” Jen said. “It was a Pizza Shack, remember; they built it in an old Pizza Hut.”
“Remember the waiter?”
We all laughed, except David. He wasn’t in on the joke.
“Sorry, David,” Missy said. “You were too cool to hang out with us back then.”
“I was not,” he countered.
“Oh yeah you were. You and John and all the football players only hung out with the other football players, and we were just band and drama nerds.”
“I would have hung out with you if you had asked. Playing football wasn’t even my idea; the coach and my dad pushed me into it,” he said. “And besides, Corey played football and you hung out with him.”
“Yeah, but Corey was both a football player and a drama kid,” Missy argued. “And in football he was a kicker, so you knew he wasn’t like a real football player. You guys never hung out with him.”
I thought for a moment; they probably hadn’t hung out with Corey for other reasons, but I didn’t want to make the drive more tense. I wondered if Corey was bothered by the topic of being left out in high school; it was once a touchy subject, so I moved the conversation along.
“So, I don’t know where you got the idea my cousin John was popular; he certainly was not,” I said in response to Missy’s earlier comment.
“Oh, my gawd, yes he was,” Missy said. “I had the biggest crush on him.”
“Turn here,” Jen jumped out of her seat and smacked the window.
Corey took an abrupt turn onto a highway. We drove just a few miles when suddenly we were all quiet.
“This is it,” Corey said.
“This is it,” I repeated with Jen and Missy.
It was as if he suddenly knew the way. Just a few miles down the highway and he took an exit, following a sign for a state park. I felt a tingle on the back of my neck, and I reached out to David, who held my hand. Corey proceeded slowly and turned onto a side road, slowing more until he came to it. Right in front of us was a faded blue sign and written in chipped white paint were the words: “Cedar Rapids.”
We all stared in silence. I barely registered the words below it, the words that I could not see in my memory, “Whitewater Adventure Park.”
My mind flashed back to the bus ride in 1989. The sign was bright back then, the paint fresh, and the sun was shining. A student called from the back of the bus, “Coach Perry, what’s whitewater?” He answered, “It’s another way to say fast-moving water.”
The flash ended, and the letters of the sign appeared before me, peeled away, revealing the decay of twenty years. We got out of the truck and walked up to the sign; I felt it and imprinted the true sign in my memory.
“It was a water park,” I said, but nobody was by me any longer.
The others had walked past the sign and started up the hill behind it.
Corey had bounded up and was nearly to the top. When he got there, he turned and shouted, “Hey, guys come up here.”
I took off, running up the hill, only just beating Jen to the summit. It was a steep climb, and I had to catch my breath. As I did, I looked out, able to see for long stretches in all directions. On the other side of the hill was an abandoned water park, every inch of it faded.
What was once the main attraction of the park, three intertwined waterslides which let out at a giant lake of green mossy water, were cracked and pale. The gates that surrounded the park were covered in ivy. Cartoonish bear signs, meant to verify height at attraction entrances, had their paint chipped away, especially around the eyes and mouths, leaving gaping dark holes in place of what were once cheery features. The food court buildings had all the glass broken out of them, and where there were once counters, there were now wooden panels vandalized with graffiti. The grass had grown tall all around, and the yellow umbrellas over the picnic tables had torn away and were hanging in shambles from their metal supports.
“Cedar Rapids was never the town,” I said.
“No,” Corey said, shaking his head.
We all stood in silence for a moment, trying to connect the dots of the past we remembered and this place. I had been to this water park when it was open. With each feature I saw, my mind filled in the blanks of what the park used to be. I remembered the water of the lake used to be a crystal-clear blue, and it housed swan boats that we could pedal with our feet. Now the water was murky, and the boats were gone.
Corey looked like something had just occurred to him. “So, the farm…”
He never finished his thought. Instead, he turned away and bounded down the hill and over to his truck. The other guys took off after him while Jen, Missy, and I strolled down, making sure we paid special attention to Jen, who was still catching her breath from the trek up the hill.
When we made it to the base, they were all putting their heads together over a map laid out on the tailgate. We pushed our way in to look at the map.
“What is it?” I asked.
He pointed to the map, and we followed the path of his finger to a big green space not far away, “The farm has to be in here.”
There was a lot of green space east of us.
“I think we should follow this road,” I said, pointing away from the city.
He agreed. He folded up the map and tucked it into his back pocket. We were all still in a bit of shock at the revelation that Cedar Rapids really wasn’t a town. We quietly turned back to the cab of the truck, and just as we opened the door several things happened all at once.
A dark car with tinted windows drove slowly down the abandoned road and came to a stop when it was opposite us. The driver’s side window rolled down, and I saw the Pitbull man from the bar. I only just registered his face when he pulled a handgun out and aimed at Corey’s truck. He hit the passenger’s side door, not aiming at anybody. We all ducked, then moved to the ground, except David. He stayed standing; as soon as the shots stopped, he kicked off fast, rounding the front of the car, then taking off at a sprint to the car. He was only a few paces away when the man pulled the gun back in and sped away, squealing his tires and kicking up dust behind him.
My heart was racing out of my chest. I was shaking as I went to push off from the ground; my palms shook as I pushed up and tried to steady my breathing. Just as I was able to get control of myself, I noticed Jen had rolled on to her back next to me, and her breathing was not steady at all, ‘Hee...hee…hoo… hee...hee…hoo.”
“Shit,” Missy said. “Get her in the truck; we have to get her to a hospital.”
“We need a blanket,” David ordered.
Corey jumped into the back of his truck and pulled a plaid blanket out of his storage box; he laid it on the back seat, then jumped from the back of the truck to the front, firing up the engine. Missy and I gently guided Jen into the center position in the rear and snuggled her in between us.
Corey started to pull away, and David said, “Wait, my car and we need to call the police.”
Jen was breathing hard again.
“I don’t think we have time for that,” Neil said.
Jen closed her eyes and between gasps she said, “Could be a Braxton Hicks Contraction.”
But within a few minutes she was breathing heavily again.
“We need to find a hospital now,” David said.
“No,” Jen said jumping forward, grabbing the collar of his shirt. “You get me back to Lansing. I have a doula. I have a birth plan.”
“I don’t know if we have time to,” Corey started.
“I will make time,” she seethed.
Corey went speeding down the highway, making a quick trek back to 96.
“I’ll figure out how to get my car later,” David conceded when he realized the quickest way back to Lansing wouldn’t take us anywhere near his car.
After we all had a moment to collect our breath Neil asked, “What just happened?”
“That was the guy that said Tammy owed him money.”
“How do you know him?” David asked.
“I confronted him at the bar after she went missing.”
He shook his head, “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
Chapter Thirteen
After a hard night of labor, and one birth plan thrown completely out the window, Jen gave birth to a happy healthy baby boy, born two weeks early. Her husband developed an eye twitch when he heard what had brought on the early labor.
The police met us outside of her birthing room; this time Detective Fowler had backup from Captain Fowler and Sargent Sarita. He was not pleased that we had taken up sleuthing on our own, gotten shot at, and sent a woman into early labor, but we gave him a solid lead on a possible suspect for Charity’s murder and Tammy’s disappearance.
“I’m sure we were close to finding her,” I said. “What did you find out about the phone?”
“We had some burner phone; it didn’t have a plan on it. Tammy had missed some payments, so we thought it might be hers. We weren’t thinking to track Charity’s phone.”
“The key is the farm, and it’s going to be up where we were. I’m sure of it,” I said.
“So, you solved the mystery of your missing town?” he asked.
“I think we did,” I said.
“I’ll tell my sister. It’s been bothering her all week.”
“We didn’t find the farm though.”
“I’m going to find it,” Fowler said. “We’re going to go up there today. We have some help coming in from the locals.”
“Do you think it’s too late for Tammy? She stopped calling.”
“I don’t know. The phone probably died after this many days without a charge. I wouldn’t count her out just yet.”
Jen had her baby at the hospital where David worked, and we were there so long he slunk off to take a nap wherever residents sleep in a hospital. We saw him walk by later in the morning in his white coat and green scrubs. He looked like he’d had a shower, but he certainly didn’t look well-rested.
He nodded to Corey and Missy when he walked by and stopped to say good morning to me.
“Good morning, Doctor David,” Neil interrupted, and David managed a pained smile at him.
It wasn’t long before it was just Missy and me at the hospital in day-old clothes, as the Coreys both had work to do. My grandmother was enroute to pick us up.
After the police left and the baby had arrived, we both crashed, the surge of adrenaline wearing off. We sat low in the boxy hospital chairs. If we’d had even a bit of comfort, we would have been fast asleep.
“Do you think that guy has Tammy?” Missy asked.
I hadn’t thought about it. My mind had been totally occupied with survival mode.
“Huh, I don’t think so. She wasn’t in that car.”
“Why would he shoot at us?” she asked.
“Well, that’s the weird part; he didn’t even shoot at us, did he? It was more of a warning. Like he shot near us.”
“What was he trying to warn us about?”
“Stay away from Tammy, I guess.”
“But you don’t think he had her?”
“I wonder…”
“What?” she asked.
“I wonder if he was looking for her, too and didn’t want us to find her first.”
“And holy shit, what about David, just rushing right in? I kinda wondered what you liked about him; he’s like tall and all, but he’s got a total dad bod.”
“He doesn’t have a dad bod.”
“Too close to a dad bod for me. In high school he was like this chiseled tall Adonis.”
“Hey, he’s still good looking.”
“Don’t get me wrong; the way he ran in there was like, hot.” She fanned her face. “But not like Corey’s cousin. My god, he’s hot like twenty-four-seven.”
I was about to defend David more when Grandma rounded the corner. She had her hands full of lilies, a tiny bear, and a card.
She passed the card to us to sign.
“She’ll know we didn’t get this, Grandma; we’ve been at the hospital all night.”
“It’s about the thought; the card says we wish you blessings of joy, and I’m sure you do.”
“We do.” I signed.
Grandma got to be a normal visitor and dote on Jen and the baby, shaking hands with the riled-up father and hugging her parents. Missy and I were clearly not welcome parties, but Jen insisted that they bring us in. She gestured for one final hug before we left. As I was pulling away, she grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back down and whispered in my ear, “Find Tammy and get that fucker.”
I looked at her sweetly and smiled, “Anything for you, new momma.”
Chapter Fourteen
As much as I wanted to set out on the sleuthing trail again, my eyes betrayed me, and I fell asleep on the drive back from the hospital. I fell asleep in the Buick and woke in my bed when it was dark. I assumed Skeeter or John must have relocated me.
My mouth was full of ick, and I realized I’d completely trashed my borrowed white blouse when I’d dived into the dirt.
I ambled down the stairs with a toothbrush and pajamas in hand and made my way to the bathroom. After I was presentable again, I walked out to the kitchen to find dinner was finished, but Grandma had left out a plate of turkey, gravy, and potatoes for me with a little note, “Gone to church, hope you get this before it’s cold. Your milk is in the fridge.”
I felt the plate; it was cold. I walked into the kitchen, pulled the cling wrap off my dinner, and popped it into the microwave. Then I opened the fridge and found a gallon of chocolate milk with a Post-it note with my name on it that said, “Thank you for working the barn.”
I ate in the kitchen on the stool by Grandma’s phone. I started to come out of my fog and looked up at the clock; it was after eight. I had to search my mind for what day it was, Wednesday, maybe Thursday. I looked at the calendar. I worked at the milk barn on Monday. Sleuthed on Tuesday. Delivered baby on Wednesday. I hung my head. I was supposed to be working with the design committee for the reunion. The committee that Charity was in charge of, and I’d slept right through it.
I wracked my brain for who was in charge now and called Missy. She woke as groggy as I’d been just moments ago. “Hey, Missy, who’s in charge of decorations now?”
“Oh, probably Abby or Anna,” she said. “I don’t have a number for either of them, but I know a lot of people are heading to The Alpine again tonight. Might be able to figure it out there.”
“Are you coming out?” I asked.
“Not a chance, I need to sleep for another twelve hours at least. Are you going to go?”
We ran our fingers along the map lines. “So Grand Rapids isn’t right at all,” I said. “There’s not enough rural land. What we are looking for is flat; I remember corn fields.”
“It’s got to be north,” Jen ran her finger over the map. “I think we should go North, then East.”
“That seems right to me too,” I said. “Let’s go to Cedar Springs first, then start heading toward Kent City and Muskegon.”
We agreed. I jumped in the car with David. We followed Corey north up 131. Corey pulled off and into Cedar Springs. We were trekking along well until suddenly Corey’s truck started swaying and then went across the center line. He had to jerk the vehicle back over to correct. We were taken aback by the erratic driving. Suddenly, he slammed on the brakes and pulled over onto the shoulder.
David followed him and pulled off, and I ran up to the truck to see what was happening.
“Jen pulled the damn steering wheel,” Corey said. “Gave me a damn heart attack.”
Jen looked like she was about to jump out of her seat.
“Did you see the sign?” she shouted. “We have to turn around.”
I waved to David to follow us, and I crawled into the back seat. We turned around and got back to the edge of town. Once there, Jen directed Corey to turn down a side street. How she had managed to see that sign, which was so far from the main road, was beyond me. It took a moment for it to come into full view. When it did, I knew why she was excited. My heart did a flip flop, “Cedar Springs,” I said.
She jumped out of the truck, and I followed her. We ran our fingers along the letters, and it’s like something clicked in my brain. We had been here before. This was the shape of the sign I’d drawn for the librarian. I pulled it out, but the words were different, and the logos for the town associations weren’t on the sign at all: they were behind it.
“This is it,” I said. “But it’s not exactly like I remember. Where did the Rapids come from?”
Missy looked at the sign, “I’ve seen this sign, but this isn’t the one that I remember.”
Corey pulled out the map again and said, “If we were heading to a school field trip, we would have taken 96 up 131 or 57 to here. If we were heading East, which we all think is right, why wouldn’t we take the more direct road, 37 or stay on 96?”
“Maybe there was a traffic jam.” I offered.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“We need to go further.” Jen said, “We’re getting closer. I can feel it.”
I ran back to check on David behind us. “Do you mind if I ride with them for a minute? We’re going East to Muskegon, and we are kind of vibing on the stuff we see.”
“Is there room for me to ride in there with you?”
“Oh, sure,” I said, and realized he felt left out.
We found a shopping center where we could safely park his car and crammed, three to bench seat, in the extended cab Ford. Jen and Missy sat up front, with Missy taking the center, straddling the stick shift.
That left me in the back between Neil—formerly Corey Two—and David. I debated putting them next to each other, but David looked like he was going to eat Neil if I left him unprotected.
Corey drove carefully down the straight road that took us from Cedar Springs to Muskegon. We passed a skating rink, parks, golf club, and it was all starting to feel eerily familiar.
“This is like high school,” Missy squealed from the front, “all of us on a road trip with the Coreys. Remember that horrible fake Pizza Hut we went looking for?”
“Oh God,” Jen said. “It was a Pizza Shack, remember; they built it in an old Pizza Hut.”
“Remember the waiter?”
We all laughed, except David. He wasn’t in on the joke.
“Sorry, David,” Missy said. “You were too cool to hang out with us back then.”
“I was not,” he countered.
“Oh yeah you were. You and John and all the football players only hung out with the other football players, and we were just band and drama nerds.”
“I would have hung out with you if you had asked. Playing football wasn’t even my idea; the coach and my dad pushed me into it,” he said. “And besides, Corey played football and you hung out with him.”
“Yeah, but Corey was both a football player and a drama kid,” Missy argued. “And in football he was a kicker, so you knew he wasn’t like a real football player. You guys never hung out with him.”
I thought for a moment; they probably hadn’t hung out with Corey for other reasons, but I didn’t want to make the drive more tense. I wondered if Corey was bothered by the topic of being left out in high school; it was once a touchy subject, so I moved the conversation along.
“So, I don’t know where you got the idea my cousin John was popular; he certainly was not,” I said in response to Missy’s earlier comment.
“Oh, my gawd, yes he was,” Missy said. “I had the biggest crush on him.”
“Turn here,” Jen jumped out of her seat and smacked the window.
Corey took an abrupt turn onto a highway. We drove just a few miles when suddenly we were all quiet.
“This is it,” Corey said.
“This is it,” I repeated with Jen and Missy.
It was as if he suddenly knew the way. Just a few miles down the highway and he took an exit, following a sign for a state park. I felt a tingle on the back of my neck, and I reached out to David, who held my hand. Corey proceeded slowly and turned onto a side road, slowing more until he came to it. Right in front of us was a faded blue sign and written in chipped white paint were the words: “Cedar Rapids.”
We all stared in silence. I barely registered the words below it, the words that I could not see in my memory, “Whitewater Adventure Park.”
My mind flashed back to the bus ride in 1989. The sign was bright back then, the paint fresh, and the sun was shining. A student called from the back of the bus, “Coach Perry, what’s whitewater?” He answered, “It’s another way to say fast-moving water.”
The flash ended, and the letters of the sign appeared before me, peeled away, revealing the decay of twenty years. We got out of the truck and walked up to the sign; I felt it and imprinted the true sign in my memory.
“It was a water park,” I said, but nobody was by me any longer.
The others had walked past the sign and started up the hill behind it.
Corey had bounded up and was nearly to the top. When he got there, he turned and shouted, “Hey, guys come up here.”
I took off, running up the hill, only just beating Jen to the summit. It was a steep climb, and I had to catch my breath. As I did, I looked out, able to see for long stretches in all directions. On the other side of the hill was an abandoned water park, every inch of it faded.
What was once the main attraction of the park, three intertwined waterslides which let out at a giant lake of green mossy water, were cracked and pale. The gates that surrounded the park were covered in ivy. Cartoonish bear signs, meant to verify height at attraction entrances, had their paint chipped away, especially around the eyes and mouths, leaving gaping dark holes in place of what were once cheery features. The food court buildings had all the glass broken out of them, and where there were once counters, there were now wooden panels vandalized with graffiti. The grass had grown tall all around, and the yellow umbrellas over the picnic tables had torn away and were hanging in shambles from their metal supports.
“Cedar Rapids was never the town,” I said.
“No,” Corey said, shaking his head.
We all stood in silence for a moment, trying to connect the dots of the past we remembered and this place. I had been to this water park when it was open. With each feature I saw, my mind filled in the blanks of what the park used to be. I remembered the water of the lake used to be a crystal-clear blue, and it housed swan boats that we could pedal with our feet. Now the water was murky, and the boats were gone.
Corey looked like something had just occurred to him. “So, the farm…”
He never finished his thought. Instead, he turned away and bounded down the hill and over to his truck. The other guys took off after him while Jen, Missy, and I strolled down, making sure we paid special attention to Jen, who was still catching her breath from the trek up the hill.
When we made it to the base, they were all putting their heads together over a map laid out on the tailgate. We pushed our way in to look at the map.
“What is it?” I asked.
He pointed to the map, and we followed the path of his finger to a big green space not far away, “The farm has to be in here.”
There was a lot of green space east of us.
“I think we should follow this road,” I said, pointing away from the city.
He agreed. He folded up the map and tucked it into his back pocket. We were all still in a bit of shock at the revelation that Cedar Rapids really wasn’t a town. We quietly turned back to the cab of the truck, and just as we opened the door several things happened all at once.
A dark car with tinted windows drove slowly down the abandoned road and came to a stop when it was opposite us. The driver’s side window rolled down, and I saw the Pitbull man from the bar. I only just registered his face when he pulled a handgun out and aimed at Corey’s truck. He hit the passenger’s side door, not aiming at anybody. We all ducked, then moved to the ground, except David. He stayed standing; as soon as the shots stopped, he kicked off fast, rounding the front of the car, then taking off at a sprint to the car. He was only a few paces away when the man pulled the gun back in and sped away, squealing his tires and kicking up dust behind him.
My heart was racing out of my chest. I was shaking as I went to push off from the ground; my palms shook as I pushed up and tried to steady my breathing. Just as I was able to get control of myself, I noticed Jen had rolled on to her back next to me, and her breathing was not steady at all, ‘Hee...hee…hoo… hee...hee…hoo.”
“Shit,” Missy said. “Get her in the truck; we have to get her to a hospital.”
“We need a blanket,” David ordered.
Corey jumped into the back of his truck and pulled a plaid blanket out of his storage box; he laid it on the back seat, then jumped from the back of the truck to the front, firing up the engine. Missy and I gently guided Jen into the center position in the rear and snuggled her in between us.
Corey started to pull away, and David said, “Wait, my car and we need to call the police.”
Jen was breathing hard again.
“I don’t think we have time for that,” Neil said.
Jen closed her eyes and between gasps she said, “Could be a Braxton Hicks Contraction.”
But within a few minutes she was breathing heavily again.
“We need to find a hospital now,” David said.
“No,” Jen said jumping forward, grabbing the collar of his shirt. “You get me back to Lansing. I have a doula. I have a birth plan.”
“I don’t know if we have time to,” Corey started.
“I will make time,” she seethed.
Corey went speeding down the highway, making a quick trek back to 96.
“I’ll figure out how to get my car later,” David conceded when he realized the quickest way back to Lansing wouldn’t take us anywhere near his car.
After we all had a moment to collect our breath Neil asked, “What just happened?”
“That was the guy that said Tammy owed him money.”
“How do you know him?” David asked.
“I confronted him at the bar after she went missing.”
He shook his head, “You’re going to give me a heart attack.”
Chapter Thirteen
After a hard night of labor, and one birth plan thrown completely out the window, Jen gave birth to a happy healthy baby boy, born two weeks early. Her husband developed an eye twitch when he heard what had brought on the early labor.
The police met us outside of her birthing room; this time Detective Fowler had backup from Captain Fowler and Sargent Sarita. He was not pleased that we had taken up sleuthing on our own, gotten shot at, and sent a woman into early labor, but we gave him a solid lead on a possible suspect for Charity’s murder and Tammy’s disappearance.
“I’m sure we were close to finding her,” I said. “What did you find out about the phone?”
“We had some burner phone; it didn’t have a plan on it. Tammy had missed some payments, so we thought it might be hers. We weren’t thinking to track Charity’s phone.”
“The key is the farm, and it’s going to be up where we were. I’m sure of it,” I said.
“So, you solved the mystery of your missing town?” he asked.
“I think we did,” I said.
“I’ll tell my sister. It’s been bothering her all week.”
“We didn’t find the farm though.”
“I’m going to find it,” Fowler said. “We’re going to go up there today. We have some help coming in from the locals.”
“Do you think it’s too late for Tammy? She stopped calling.”
“I don’t know. The phone probably died after this many days without a charge. I wouldn’t count her out just yet.”
Jen had her baby at the hospital where David worked, and we were there so long he slunk off to take a nap wherever residents sleep in a hospital. We saw him walk by later in the morning in his white coat and green scrubs. He looked like he’d had a shower, but he certainly didn’t look well-rested.
He nodded to Corey and Missy when he walked by and stopped to say good morning to me.
“Good morning, Doctor David,” Neil interrupted, and David managed a pained smile at him.
It wasn’t long before it was just Missy and me at the hospital in day-old clothes, as the Coreys both had work to do. My grandmother was enroute to pick us up.
After the police left and the baby had arrived, we both crashed, the surge of adrenaline wearing off. We sat low in the boxy hospital chairs. If we’d had even a bit of comfort, we would have been fast asleep.
“Do you think that guy has Tammy?” Missy asked.
I hadn’t thought about it. My mind had been totally occupied with survival mode.
“Huh, I don’t think so. She wasn’t in that car.”
“Why would he shoot at us?” she asked.
“Well, that’s the weird part; he didn’t even shoot at us, did he? It was more of a warning. Like he shot near us.”
“What was he trying to warn us about?”
“Stay away from Tammy, I guess.”
“But you don’t think he had her?”
“I wonder…”
“What?” she asked.
“I wonder if he was looking for her, too and didn’t want us to find her first.”
“And holy shit, what about David, just rushing right in? I kinda wondered what you liked about him; he’s like tall and all, but he’s got a total dad bod.”
“He doesn’t have a dad bod.”
“Too close to a dad bod for me. In high school he was like this chiseled tall Adonis.”
“Hey, he’s still good looking.”
“Don’t get me wrong; the way he ran in there was like, hot.” She fanned her face. “But not like Corey’s cousin. My god, he’s hot like twenty-four-seven.”
I was about to defend David more when Grandma rounded the corner. She had her hands full of lilies, a tiny bear, and a card.
She passed the card to us to sign.
“She’ll know we didn’t get this, Grandma; we’ve been at the hospital all night.”
“It’s about the thought; the card says we wish you blessings of joy, and I’m sure you do.”
“We do.” I signed.
Grandma got to be a normal visitor and dote on Jen and the baby, shaking hands with the riled-up father and hugging her parents. Missy and I were clearly not welcome parties, but Jen insisted that they bring us in. She gestured for one final hug before we left. As I was pulling away, she grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back down and whispered in my ear, “Find Tammy and get that fucker.”
I looked at her sweetly and smiled, “Anything for you, new momma.”
Chapter Fourteen
As much as I wanted to set out on the sleuthing trail again, my eyes betrayed me, and I fell asleep on the drive back from the hospital. I fell asleep in the Buick and woke in my bed when it was dark. I assumed Skeeter or John must have relocated me.
My mouth was full of ick, and I realized I’d completely trashed my borrowed white blouse when I’d dived into the dirt.
I ambled down the stairs with a toothbrush and pajamas in hand and made my way to the bathroom. After I was presentable again, I walked out to the kitchen to find dinner was finished, but Grandma had left out a plate of turkey, gravy, and potatoes for me with a little note, “Gone to church, hope you get this before it’s cold. Your milk is in the fridge.”
I felt the plate; it was cold. I walked into the kitchen, pulled the cling wrap off my dinner, and popped it into the microwave. Then I opened the fridge and found a gallon of chocolate milk with a Post-it note with my name on it that said, “Thank you for working the barn.”
I ate in the kitchen on the stool by Grandma’s phone. I started to come out of my fog and looked up at the clock; it was after eight. I had to search my mind for what day it was, Wednesday, maybe Thursday. I looked at the calendar. I worked at the milk barn on Monday. Sleuthed on Tuesday. Delivered baby on Wednesday. I hung my head. I was supposed to be working with the design committee for the reunion. The committee that Charity was in charge of, and I’d slept right through it.
I wracked my brain for who was in charge now and called Missy. She woke as groggy as I’d been just moments ago. “Hey, Missy, who’s in charge of decorations now?”
“Oh, probably Abby or Anna,” she said. “I don’t have a number for either of them, but I know a lot of people are heading to The Alpine again tonight. Might be able to figure it out there.”
“Are you coming out?” I asked.
“Not a chance, I need to sleep for another twelve hours at least. Are you going to go?”
