That wordless dread was growing in Jonah. “You’ve been down there?”
“Yeah. I stayed away from the prints, circled. There’s nothing, Jonah. And there should be. All around the place where the prints stop, there would have been prints if they’d gone on. There’s no way they could have jumped far enough, and no sign at all they did. No sign of a vehicle, no sign of a horse. No sign of a third person. I’d dare anybody to back up that bank, putting their feet in exactly the same spots as when they went down; it’s slippery as hell and there’s nothing to hold on to.” She drew a breath and let it out slowly. “If this is a prank, it’s a damned good one. But I don’t think it’s a prank. I think those two kids walked down that bank to the flat area—and something happened.”
“Something took them,” he said slowly.
Sarah nodded. “That’s the only thing I could think of. It’s like something just swooped down and carried them away. And judging by the footprints, they had to be lifted cleanly, straight up. No sign of a struggle. No sign of a fight. There are houses close enough to hear if someone had screamed. Even in the middle of the night.” Without turning, she jerked her head back and toward the other side of the road. “Mildred Bates is watching us from her front porch now; she sleeps with her windows open and the slightest sound wakes her. Her bedroom windows face this way. Less than fifty yards from here to there. If there had been any kind of a commotion, she would have heard—and called us. She didn’t.”
“So, where are those kids?” Jonah said slowly. “And how the hell did they just . . . vanish?”
Jonah didn’t voice what he felt, that what they were looking at was not exactly an ending—but the beginning of something. The beginning of something bad. The beginning of something that was going to shake his town to its foundations.
ONE
There was no hope at all of keeping the disappearance of Amy Grimes and Simon Church quiet, Jonah knew that. In fact, he expected to find both sets of parents in his office when he returned to the station. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t do whatever was possible to minimize the . . . strangeness of all this while he tried to figure it out.
“Okay,” he said, after considering the matter. “Roust Tim out of bed and get the station’s tow truck out here. I don’t much like moving the car, but I sure as hell don’t want to leave it just sitting, and we don’t have the manpower to guard it.”
“I’ll tell him to hurry,” Sarah said calmly.
Jonah eyed her. “Left him in bed sleeping, did you?”
“Not that it’s any of your business—Chief—but, yes, I did. It’s his day off too.”
Jonah didn’t forbid his people to get involved romantically; he was a realist. And he preferred openness to sneaking around. Not that Sarah or Tim, both sensible professionals, had made it obvious, but Jonah knew, and he figured if he knew then everyone else did too.
“Well, tell him I’m sorry, but it can’t be helped. We need to get this car into the police garage, pronto.”
“Copy. Want to call Sully and get his dogs out here?”
“I doubt there’ll be time before we get a downpour. We’ll just have to wait and hope we get a lead. Maybe the dogs will come in useful then.”
“What’ll you tell their parents?”
“Damned if I know. Lie through my teeth, probably. Or just say what little we’re reasonably sure of. Say the kids were clearly eloping, must have had car trouble—and we’re investigating the rest.”
“And how are we investigating the rest?”
“Get the good camera out of the back of my Jeep and start taking pictures. The car, the way it was left, that bank. The footprints. You know the drill, Sarah.”
“Copy that. I take it you’d rather no one else saw the scene as we found it.”
“I’d rather, yeah. Call Tim, and wait till he gets here. He won’t have to be told, but remind him nobody but the three of us will know about how the car was left and the footprints until I say different. Once you have the pictures and he has the car, both of you get back to the station. I’d also rather nobody too nosy just wandered out here to see what was going on.”
“Mildred Bates has been watching.”
“Yeah, I can feel her eyes boring into my back. But she can’t see over the edge of the bank even with binoculars, she’s virtually immobile with that cast since she wrenched her knee, and I don’t expect even her to come out here, especially once the car is moved. With a little luck, once the car is moved she won’t wonder if there’s anything else to see out here.”
“Like the footprints?”
“Exactly.”
A rumble of thunder made them both look up at dark clouds rolling in.
“Shit,” Jonah said. “Weather’s coming in faster than the forecast. Get those pictures, Sarah. Close the car doors. And when Tim heads back to the station with the car, you follow. If there’s a little more luck for me today, the rain will wash away those footprints before anybody else sees them, and nobody will realize something very weird happened here.”
“Hope you got a lot of luck stored up,” Sarah said as she headed for the back of Jonah’s Jeep. “I’ve got an awful hunch we’re going to need every bit of it.”
Since it wasn’t raining yet, Jonah walked farther up the road a stretch, just to see if anything else looked odd, but found nothing. And no sign that a car had pulled off the road. In this area, the weeds pretty much ran right up to the road, trimmed back later in the year; in May even the hardiest of weed was hardly more than a foot tall.
Giving that up, Jonah returned to the abandoned car. Thunder rumbled again. “Hurry,” he called out to Sarah, who was near the bottom of the bank, placing a ruler beside each footprint before she photographed it.
“Yeah.” She didn’t look up. “Meet you back at the station.”
Jonah wanted more hot coffee, lots of it, and he wanted breakfast. He had a feeling he’d need to be fortified. He got in his Jeep and headed for town, pretending not to see Mildred Bates beckoning imperiously to him. Sarah must have used her cell while he’d been checking out the road to call Tim, and lit a fire under him to get here in a hurry, because Jonah passed the police tow truck, lifting a hand to Tim as they came abreast but not slowing.
The small downtown diner, simply named the Diner, hadn’t been open long this morning; Jonah was the first one to take a seat on a stool at the counter, and the booths were all empty. The coffee was just beginning to percolate.
He wished it would hurry.
He didn’t waste time calling out his usual breakfast order, hearing an acknowledgment yelled from the back. A glance at his watch told him he still had time before the usual breakfast crowd arrived. The waitresses hadn’t even arrived yet. But then he noticed something odd.
“Hey, Clyde? Is your clock right?”
The owner/operator, who usually cooked and was fixing Jonah’s eggs and bacon in the kitchen, popped his head into the opening where the waitresses picked up orders. “What? Loud back here, Jonah.”
Loud because he played country music on an old CD player. He favored Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings.
“Your clock.” Jonah raised his voice and nodded toward the clock that hung in a place of prominence on the wall behind the cash register. Clyde had gotten it on his honeymoon, apparently having stopped at some point at one of those touristy places along the side of the road that sold novelty items.
The big clock boasted an eagle, its gradually unfolding left and right wings showing the time. Most thought but never said that it was a peculiar-looking bird, especially at certain times when the wings were sort of cockeyed.
Clyde was very proud of it.
“My clock? What about it?”
“Time right?”
“Yeah, I set it when I came in this morning. Used my cell phone.” He vanished back into the kitchen before Jonah’s bacon burned and before Waylon could get to the chorus.