“He sure seems to be.”
Jeannie winked at me. “Unmarried, too.”
I shrugged off her comment. Jeannie’s mission in life was to fix me up. “Yeah, well, who has the time?”
“Uh-huh. You never have time if you don’t make time, Shelby Lake. Come on, let me fix you a cup of tea, and we can chat.”
I had an hour’s drive home ahead of me, and I was anxious to get back on the road, but I never turned down tea with Jeannie. She grew her own, and her kids sold it at farmers markets during the summer. Once you’d had her tea, you really couldn’t drink store-bought anymore.
Jeannie led me up an old narrow staircase with boards that creaked and shifted under my feet. In the second-floor family room, I plopped down on her threadbare sofa as she went into the kitchen to boil water. She had a homemade, lemon-scented candle burning; that was the only light. The doors to the other upstairs rooms were closed. Everyone else was sleeping.
She returned shortly with tea for me in a china mug that looked as if it had been around for decades. The flower design on it was faded. She had her own tea in a ceramic mug with a logo for the Stanton Raptor Center. Nothing matched around here, and that was fine.
“Here you go, sweetie.”
Jeannie sank into a glider opposite me and pushed herself relentlessly back and forth with one leg on the floor. She was forty years old, with prematurely silver hair that was tied in a bun behind her head. Having four kids, she always said, was what had turned her gray. She was tall and very heavy, but her weight didn’t slow her down. I’d never seen her when she wasn’t busy doing three things at once. As she drank her tea, she turned on the television and muted it, fanned herself with a magazine, and fiddled with the baby monitor that let us listen to the noise of her six-month-old, Hildy, in the nursery.
Life for Jeannie was a constant juggling act, but she never showed any stress about it. Despite the pressures of running the raptor center, she and her husband managed to find time to homeschool all of their kids. Their oldest, Matthew, was sixteen, as deeply religious as his parents, and had already been accepted to college at Northwestern in the fall. The two middle kids were just as bright.
“What an awful thing about Jeremiah Sloan,” Jeannie said. “Are you any closer to finding him?”
“Not so far.”
“If this happened to one of my kids, I think I’d be driving up and down every street in the county shouting their name. Dennis must be a wreck.”
“He is. They all are.”
“People are saying that someone grabbed him. Is that true? It’s hard to believe around here.”
“We’re not sure what happened yet,” I said cautiously.
“Well, I have two boys. Don’t rule out the possibility that Jeremiah wandered off on his own and got into trouble. That’s what boys do.”
“We’re not ruling anything out yet.”
Jeannie opened her mouth as if to say something more, but then she closed it again. She sipped her tea, and her round face in the flickering glow of the candle looked troubled. She played with a loose strand of her gray hair and pushed back and forth in the glider.
“Jeannie? Is there something else?”
“Oh, I’m sure it’s nothing. I shouldn’t say anything. I don’t like to be a gossip.”
“Jeremiah’s missing. This is no time to hold something back.”
Jeannie put down her mug on the coffee table between us. No one could hear us, but she leaned forward in the glider and whispered anyway. “Well, you know I see Dennis a lot. Either he’s over here, or I’m in the ranger station.”
“Of course.”
Dennis’s job in the national forest meant that he was often discovering birds that needed treatment at Jeannie’s center. When healthy birds were ready to be rereleased into the wild, Jeannie worked with Dennis to do so deep in the forest land. That shared bond had made them good friends over the years.
“There was this odd little thing last fall,” she went on. “It makes me kind of uncomfortable to talk about it. I mean, I know the kind of man Dennis is, and I’ve made peace with that, but I don’t like being recruited as a coconspirator.”
My eyes narrowed with concern. “Go on.”
“I was with him at the ranger station, and he asked if my son Matthew would be willing to babysit for Jeremiah that Saturday night. All night. He was wondering if Matthew could sleep over at his house.”
“Why didn’t he have Adrian do it?”
“That’s the thing. Ellen and Adrian were both out of town. She was off at some retail conference in New Orleans, and Adrian went with her.”
“Ah.” I got the picture.
“Yes, you see why it bothered me, right? Dennis was going to be gone all night, and he wanted a babysitter from Stanton, not Everywhere. He didn’t want the news getting around. I was pretty sure he was having an affair and looking for a way to hide it.”
“Well, I doubt it’s the first time, if you believe the rumors.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s true. Like I say, I know Dennis, warts and all. I wasn’t crazy about it, but I agreed to let Matthew do it. He’s been trying to save money to buy a telescope, and Dennis was offering a hundred dollars to have him stay over. I knew Matthew could use the cash.”
“So what happened?”
“Well, it seemed to go fine. Matthew and Jeremiah hung out watching TV and playing video games during the evening, and then he got Jeremiah ready for bed around nine thirty. No problem. Except I got a call from Matthew at one in the morning. He was in a panic.”
“Why?”
“He went to check on Jeremiah before he went to bed himself. The boy wasn’t in his room.”
“He was gone?”
“Yes. Matthew was about to call 911, but I told him first to search the house and then walk around the yard to see if he could find the boy anywhere. That’s what he did. Matthew found Jeremiah hanging out on the back porch below his bedroom window. He said he’d climbed down to watch the stars.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“Well, Matthew was pretty sure that Jeremiah was lying. The boy wasn’t in his pajamas anymore. He’d changed clothes. And his shoes were all muddy, like he’d been off in the woods somewhere. Matthew asked him about it, but the boy swore he hadn’t been anywhere. He said he went out in the middle of the lawn, and that was that.”
“But?” I asked, because I could tell the story wasn’t over.
“But Matthew said something else, too. He told me the boy looked really, really scared. I mean, the poor kid was trembling. It was like Jeremiah had seen a monster.”
Chapter Twenty
I slept through my alarm on Sunday morning. Instead of waking up at five thirty, I woke up at seven. My father was already gone. His cruiser wasn’t in the driveway. I got ready quickly and then made my usual stop at the Nowhere Café for breakfast. Like last night, the tables were filled with out-of-towners.
I called out my order to Breezy and took a seat at the counter next to Adam. He was on the same stool he’d been at the previous night, looking as if he’d never left, except for the fact that he was back in his deputy’s uniform. His eyes were bloodshot and rimmed with dark circles, his hair was dirty, and he had a pot of coffee and four aspirin on the counter in front of him, the universal clues of someone nursing a hangover.
“You get the license plate?” I asked.
“What?”
“Of the truck that ran you over.”
“Ha. Funny.”
I laughed, but Adam didn’t. He popped all of the aspirin onto his tongue and washed it down with coffee.
“Has my father been in here?”
“Yeah, he already went over to the office.”