“Yeah, one guy.”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know. Nondescript. Thirties, I think, tall and skinny, buzz cut. He said his name was Bob. Bob Evans, like the restaurant. He paid cash for three nights upfront, and he said he didn’t want maid service.”
“That didn’t raise red flags with you?” I asked.
“This is the Rest in Peace, Shelby. Around here, anything less than an active smell of decaying flesh doesn’t worry me much.”
Adam peered through the office window at the motel parking lot. “Is his car here? What does he drive?”
“A big gray Cadillac, I think.” Rose stood up and eyed the lineup of vehicles. “Yeah, the car’s here. He’s in room 106.”
Adam didn’t wait for me or discuss what we should do next. He banged through the screen door and took long, determined cop steps down the row of motel rooms. If there was a chance to be a hero, Adam was always right there. By the time I caught up with him, he was thumping his fist on the door of room 106. I went over to the gray Cadillac and squinted through the windows to see if I could spot anything inside.
I did.
The floors were thick with dirt and pine needles. Bob Evans had been in the woods. I also saw a large water canteen and a plastic bag tipped over on the back seat, spilling out a head of romaine lettuce and a small container of dried fruit chips. I recognized the logo on the bag. It came from Ellen Sloan’s mini-mart.
I spun back to the motel room door. No one had answered.
“He’s in there,” Adam told me. “He’s trying to ignore us, but I hear somebody moving around.”
“This could be our guy, Adam. Be careful. The boy could be inside.”
“Mr. Evans,” Adam shouted, banging louder on the door. “Police.”
The motel room door opened two inches. A chain lock dangled across the space. I saw one nervous brown eye and a round face that dripped sweat. I also noticed a noxious smell busting out of the shut-up space.
“What do you want?”
“I want you to open the door, Mr. Evans,” Adam told him.
“Why? What for? I haven’t done anything.”
“Then you won’t mind if we take a look inside.”
“Well, I do mind. I paid for the room, it’s mine, you have no right to come in here.”
He was right. We didn’t. But in the midst of the standoff between them, I heard the thump of something inside the motel room, like the sound that someone would make who was trapped behind a locked door.
“Adam, he’s got somebody in there!”
Adam heard the noise, too. As Mr. Evans shouted in protest, Adam slammed a shoulder against the motel room door and ripped the chain lock away from the frame. He piled through the doorway and tackled Mr. Evans to the ground. I leaped over the two of them like a steeplechase runner and landed in the middle of the worn, stained gray carpet. The only other door in the room was the bathroom door, which was closed. I heard the same heavy thud from the other side that I’d heard before.
“Jeremiah! Jeremiah, is that you? It’s Shelby Lake, everything’s okay.”
I ran to the bathroom door and yanked it open. The instant I did, something erupted from inside, collided with my legs, and knocked me flat on my back. A snuffling, grunting noise filled my ears, and something huge and black began licking my face with a slobbering tongue. I shoved the thing away in horror and scrambled to my feet.
Adam had a knee shoved into the back of Bob Evans and already had cuffs around the man’s wrists.
“Let him go!” I screamed.
Adam hadn’t caught up to what was going on. “What? Why?”
“Let him go! It’s a pig! It’s a pig!”
I said it several times, and I may have added an adjective in front of “pig” that began with the letter f.
The victim who’d been trapped inside the motel bathroom was a miniature pig, all black, probably at least a hundred pounds, looking like a beer-bellied drinker at the local bar. The animal snorted its way over to Bob Evans, who was still trapped under Adam, and shoved its flat nose into the man’s face.
“Snuffle Man!” Adam exploded. “This is what Mrs. N heard? The guy was chasing after his pig?”
“Looks that way.”
Adam flipped the man over and grabbed his collar. “I don’t believe this. Why were you hiding it, buddy? You could have gotten yourself killed.”
“The motel doesn’t allow pets,” Bob Evans gasped from the floor. “The penalty’s like a hundred bucks if you bring one in the room.”
Adam shook his head in disgust and freed the man. The two of us were breathing heavily as the shot of adrenaline drained from our systems. When I glanced at Adam’s belt, I saw that he’d gone so far as to unsnap the holster clip on his gun. We were all lucky. This could have gone south very fast.
A pig. A pet pig.
Not a child.
I got out my phone to call my father and give him an update. The Rest in Peace was a dead end. We were no closer to finding Jeremiah.
Chapter Ten
After we left the motel, Adam and I drove the short distance down the highway to the Sloan house. Trina Helvik answered the door, and I could see a crowd of people behind her. It looked to me as if half the town was waiting for news with Ellen and Dennis. Adam and I needed to search Jeremiah’s bedroom for clues, but I asked him to start without me. I wanted to talk to Trina first.
She grabbed a sweater and followed me down the steps. We made our way along the fringe of an elaborate garden, where the flowers had shut themselves up against the cool night. The house lights threw our shadows across the grass.
“How is Ellen doing?” I asked Trina.
“Oh, she’s in rough shape as you’d expect. Ellen isn’t the kind of person who can just sit there and do nothing. She likes to be in control of the world, and this is something she can’t control.”
Trina always had good insights into what made people tick. That was what made her a successful coach. Control was how Ellen Sloan lived her life, with everything in its proper place. The garden at her house was like that, manicured in neat, colorful rows and free of weeds, with decorative fencing to keep out the rabbits. Her mini-mart was the same way, with every box of cereal or can of soup in perfect alignment with the one next to it.
“Have you discovered anything at all about where Jeremiah might be?” Trina asked.
“No. Nothing yet.”
“That’s so sad. That poor boy. I hope he’s okay.”
“I know. Me, too.”
Trina’s face was stoic like a good Scandinavian, but she was also a parent with a daughter the same age as Jeremiah. I knew what Trina was thinking, that it could just as easily have been her child who disappeared.
“Did you get my message? I found Anna hanging out in the cemetery this afternoon.”
“I did. Thank you for bringing her home, Shelby. Sometimes that girl is so headstrong.” She added with a smile, “She reminds me of a certain high school volleyball player I used to coach.”
“A little bit,” I agreed.
“Did Anna say what she was doing there?”
“She was looking for Jeremiah. She’s very upset about him.”
“Aren’t we all.”
The two of us kept walking through the Sloans’ large, sloping backyard. The forest loomed at the end of the grass. If you hiked into those woods, eventually you would find yourself on Keith Whalen’s land a mile away. The trails led past Black Lake, where the Striker girls used to swim on Saturday afternoons. Trina would join us there sometimes, bonding with her players. It was during those lazy days, laughing together and telling stories, that I began to see her as a friend even more than a coach.