“He deliberately ran into her?” Selby was trying not to shout.
“Mr. Selby, we can’t say deliberate, and we can’t say him yet. We don’t know if it was a man. We’re figuring maybe she was just shook up and he — the driver — took her to a hospital. We’ve checked East Chester General and St. Luke’s, but nobody’s treated anyone answering your daughter’s description.”
“Hold it.” Selby said to the clerk, “Call the airport and get me on the next flight to Philadelphia. Tell them it’s an emergency.”
“You’ll have to use the pay phone, Mr. Selby. I can’t tie up this switchboard.”
Selby reached across the counter and took a grip on the clerk’s shoulder.
“Make that call,” he said. “Make it now, you hear me?”
“All right, all right.” The clerk dialed rapidly, his finger-flicks petulant.
Selby said, “Trooper, tell Mrs. Cranston I’ll be on the next flight to Philadelphia. Is my son there now?”
“No, sir, he’s still down on Fairlee with Trooper Jimson. We got four squads covering the back roads, Sergeant Ritter is checking the GPs in Long Grove and London Mill. We got everybody out, don’t worry.” Trooper Karec cleared his throat. “Your daughter could be here waiting for you by the time you get home.”
But Trooper Karec was wrong; when Selby got home four hours later, Shana wasn’t there. Selby knew that with chilling certainty when he walked in and saw his son and Mrs. Cranston sitting stiffly beside the phone. A growl sounded as their German shepherd came hurtling down the stairs, the ferocious challenge fading into whimpers at the sight of Selby.
“Blazer’s been up in Shana’s room,” Davey said. “He wouldn’t come down after the troopers left.”
“Can I fix you something to eat, Mr. Selby?” Mrs. Cranston was standing but she kept her large, worn hand on the phone. “There’s pot roast, it’s cold now, but I could make you some sandwiches.”
“No, that’s all right, thanks.”
Davey sagged against his father and began to cry. His emotional collapse was shattering; he had obviously kept his feelings under control until that instant, but the effort was too much for his years and strength.
“She’s lost, isn’t she, dad?” The firelight glinted on his tears. “She took a wrong turn or something. Nobody’d hurt her, she’s lost, I know it. She’s waiting for it to stop raining and come home...”
Selby changed into slacks and a sweater, his senses painfully intent on the silent phone.
He and Davey sat in the study with sandwiches and coffee in front of the fireplace. The light glowed on the leather furniture and hardwood floors. Rain came lightly down the windows. A few of the panes were from the original Quaker farmhouse, the glass flawed and burled and smoky, and the rain found these wavy fissures and followed them in swift, darting patterns, a flashy contrast to the newer glass where the water fell in slow, level rhythms.
On the plane ride from Memphis, Selby had forced himself to face the obvious possibilities as unemotionally as possible. Shana would be found safe and sound. At a doctor’s office, at somebody’s house, somewhere. Or she’d be found injured, or dead. Or she would remain missing...
“I brought her bike back up here.” Davey had washed his face and dried his eyes. He was Sarah’s gift to them, Selby always thought; he had her dark hair, her quick smiles, and warm, brown eyes. “I put it behind the kennel run,” he want on, “where it will be out of the way. It’s got some red paint on it, the bike, I mean. It’s pretty banged up—” His breath caught, and he looked steadily into the fire. “There’s some red streaks on the frame and sprocket. I’m thinking about that car on the logging road, dad. Remember we called you about it?”
“Yes,” Selby said, but that call from Shana seemed like a time in another world, the plastic motel room, his brother and the girl who loved boats, the grim sergeant, all of them receding now into shadows.
“You said it was a sports car,” Selby said, “with a low silhouette like a Corvette, wasn’t it?”
“I couldn’t tell what color it was because it was night,” Davey said, “but it wasn’t white or yellow or anything like that. It had to be a dark color, maybe brown or red.”
The phone rang. They heard Mrs. Cranston answer it. Selby was up and moving when she said, “Oh, bless you, baby. Your daddy’s right here, ’course he is.”
Selby ran from the study to the foyer.
“Baby, here he is.”
“Shana, are you all right?”
“Yes, daddy, but—”
“Where are you?”
“Daddy, he hurt me.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at Barby Kane’s in Little Tenn.” Her voice became ragged and thin; she was crying. “Come and get me, please. Don’t bring Davey or anybody. Promise, daddy.”
“I’m leaving now, honey.”
“Hurry, daddy. But don’t look at me, please, don’t look at me. Just take me home.”
Chapter Five
Early Saturday morning an edge of light spread over the trees in Selby’s meadow. He was alone in the study, an untasted glass of whiskey beside him. To distract himself he had been glancing through his father’s diaries, the words occasionally blurring in front of his eyes.
Merwin Kerr, their family doctor, had been upstairs with Shana since about four that morning, almost two hours. Troopers Milt Karec and Ed Jimson were on their way to East Chester General with the rolls of film and other medical evidence which Paramedic-Sergeant Edith Redden had compiled from an examination of Shana’s injuries. This evidence would be developed and classified at the hospital’s laboratory, since neither the sheriff’s substation nor the East Chester Police Department had the facilities for sophisticated forensic work; such analyses and evidential procedures were routinely processed by local hospitals on a rotating basis.
The paramedic-sergeant had explained to Selby that this was not an ideal arrangement, that the police department should have its own labs and staff for such work, but there were money problems, there always were, and the voters had chosen to cut off their noses by voting down a measure for the funding of such a facility and the personnel to operate it.
Selby suspected there was a deliberate therapy in the nurse’s determined explanation of her department’s staffing problem. In those strange and dreadful morning hours, he was numbly grateful for it.
Little Tenn had been a hellish nightmare. The trailer park was originally named Pleasant Acres. Some years before, a sign at the entrance had announced this, a big square sign hanging between tall posts. The lettering was quaintly stylized, a blend of Amish and Old English characters surrounded by yellow daisies, painted to resemble rows of smiling, welcoming eyes.
When the dogwood and wild apple trees flowered, the park was fringed by a profusion of pink and white blossoms. In that season the pathways among the trailers were swept clear and clean by fresh winds. There were parties in the central campground of Little Tenn, kegs of beer and cider, corn-on-the-cob and pork ribs roasting over open grills. Square dancing and Bible readings broke out with the first flush of spring, and the Jessup boy with his second sight and visions shouted prayers and prophecies with such wild-eyed fervor that it made the hand-clapping spectators homesick with longing for revival tents, and pines and swamps and mossy trees.
But the Pleasant Acres sign had blown down and nobody seemed responsible for putting it back up. Rain and snow turned the paths into ribbons of mud. Only Casper Gideen had done anything about it; he and his sons flagstoned a lane from their trailer out to Fairlee Road, giving them year-round access.