Liberty or Death (17 page)

About that same time, Andre had started showing an increased interest in children himself. He'd begun talking about our wild brown girls and willful boys. That had scared me to death. I preferred the Andre who fretted over his sister Aimee's seeming inability to control her reproduction to the one who talked with shining eyes about making me pregnant. But there is something immensely sexy and profoundly moving when a man who loves you wants you to have his child. At least for me. And then fate, or chance, had intervened and planned it for us.

Right now, I could see I was a third wheel. I stood and picked up my purse. "Why don't I leave you two alone for a while and go run some errands."

Harding gave me a quick smile over his son's head, and nodded. "Sure. If you don't mind. Take your time."

On my way out, I asked the guard if there was a limit on how long the visit could be. "Usually," he said. "But with this guy... if we can't let him go... the least we can do is give him some time with his kid."

"Right. If they ask for me, I'll be back soon." I rushed to my car, and drove up the street to a little shopping mall, where I bought myself some shorts with elastic waists, a voluminous sundress, and a couple of loose tops. All my clothes were getting too tight. It seemed too soon, but Suzanne said every pregnancy was different. Mine looked to be the elephantine variety. At this rate, by the time I delivered I'd be as big around as I was tall. And that would be substantial.

Thinking about the long drive home, I popped into a grocery store and got a pack of juice boxes, a bottle of water, two apples, and some oatmeal cookies. I passed up the beckoning candy bars and bags of chips. This baby of mine was going to be made with good ingredients. I also got a coloring book, a drawing pad, and a package of markers for Lyle. I wanted some time to talk to his dad.

When I came out, Roland was leaning against my car, arms folded. In the wilting heat, he looked freshly pressed and formidable. I don't know what it is about uniforms. They make some guys look so great. Roland was one of them, his cop attitude unaffected by the fact that he was holding a gaudy pink-and-gold Victoria's Secret shopping bag.

"How's Kavanaugh?" I asked.

He smiled. "Why did I know that would be your first question?"

His crisp affect made me feel more dowdy and disheveled than ever. Fat, unlovely, and ineffectual. Maybe it was the heat. "Because I feel responsible." I sagged against the car beside him, even though the sunbaked metal burned right through my clothes.

"Uh huh. You're not. That could have happened any time, any place." I didn't argue, because it was true. The potential for sudden, unexpected danger is one of the dark undercurrents in a cop's life. I still felt guilty. "She's fine. We've made out that it's worse than it is. Doesn't look too good for a cop who shot to kill to walk away with not much more than a scratch."

Macho guys. Macho gals. I didn't believe him. "A scratch, Roland?"

"She was wearing a vest. Well, yeah, it's more than a scratch. It's a gouge and a cracked rib. It's not pretty and it will leave a scar..." He adjusted the tilt of his hat and looked away. Tough guy that he was, that they all were, and schooled though they might be in nonsexist attitudes, it was hard to have a sister trooper get shot. And it was hard to have a pretty woman left with a scar. "Bullet caught the edge of the vest, which slowed it down, but didn't quite stop it. The angle was a problem. Trouble with vests is that they don't fit women so well. Still..."

He held out the shopping bag. "Jack wants you to wear this."

I took the bag, peered in, and fingered the heavy navy-blue vest. I looked down at my sleeveless blouse. "It's ninety degrees, Roland."

He thumped his chest. "I'm wearing one."

I thumped his chest, too. "Man of steel," I said. He swung a fist toward my chest, stopping well short of the mark. A modest guy. "When am I supposed to wear it?"

"Use your judgment."

A bulletproof vest. My own handgun. A dingy room in a town so full of menace the air shimmered with it. Nothing in my life held even a shred of normalcy anymore. I gripped the bag with both hands and stared at Roland. "I feel like I have less of that every day."

"I don't like to hear things like that." There was a protective growl in his voice.

I was afraid he'd report my lapse to Jack Leonard as evidence that I was losing my nerve, so I changed the subject. "Heard any good moose stories lately?" Roland collects moose stories.

"Haven't heard
anything
good lately," he said grimly.

"Kavanaugh's not dead." I pulled out the list of license numbers. "I don't know if this is worth anything, but these are some of the plate numbers from the guys who were at a militia meeting two nights ago. After midnight. In the church basement."

He took it gingerly between two fingers and did not show the appreciation I'd hoped for. "Jack's gonna be pissed."

My disappointment was tempered by reality. Had I really expected him to be proud of me, when I wasn't even sure I was proud of me? Getting this stuff had been an accident, and even then, it had scared the pants off me. Besides, Jack wanted me to stay home and dust the ferns and Roland was Jack's man. There wasn't anything I could do, short of leaving, that would please Jack. "So don't tell him. Or tell him you got it from a high whitehorse souse. Or from the Bard of Bored Overseers. I don't care. But when you get the list, I'd like a copy."

"Jack's gonna..."

I grabbed his wrist. "Roland. Goddammit! This is my life..." He gave me a look, pure cop attitude, and I dropped my hand, shaken. He didn't usually do that. Usually he was my friend. But a threat to one cop intensified the "us vs. them" in the rest, and I, alas, was them. Sort of. Enough to have forgotten you don't grab a cop. Maybe I was too judgment impaired for this job.

"What church?" he asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know the name. It's the one on the opposite corner, down the street from the restaurant. Corner of the street Harding's house is on."

He shoved the list into a pocket and raised a hand to his hat, cool, crisp, and inscrutable. "Yes, ma'am. Catch you later."

"Roland, wait..." He paused, a wary expression on his face. "Norah Kavanaugh was my contact. What am I supposed to do now?"

What he wanted to say was on his face and in his eyes—get the hell out of there—but he didn't say it. All he said was, "We'll be in touch."

"How the heck..." But he just shrugged and turned away. The trouble was, I reminded him too graphically of their failure to find Andre. And seeing him reminded me that I wasn't doing much better.

"You really wanna help?" he said.

Here it comes,
I thought. He's finally going to say it—stay home and stay safe. But he didn't. Instead, he said, "See if you can get Harding to tell you why he doesn't want to be let outta there. Or..." He hesitated before he said it, so this was the real inside stuff. "See if he knows what happened to his wife, Paulette..."

"She left town," I said.

His eyebrows arched. "Oh, really? In a box, a barrel, or a bag?"

Shoot, I thought. There wasn't any aspect of this that wasn't a can of worms, was there? Because I knew Roland wasn't just trying to scare me. He was observant enough to know I was already scared silly. "What do you know?" I demanded.

"Know?" he said bitterly. "Next to nothing. But what we suspect is that the woman who called Pelletier was Paulette Harding. And both Paulette and her roommate, Mindy Parsons, have disappeared."

It was hot enough to fry eggs on the sidewalk, yet I felt chilled to the bone.
Never let 'em see you cry,
I thought.
Never let 'em see you're shaken. Not even your friends.
I'd gone into this thing knowing it was ugly, but I was just a citizen. I could still be shocked at how it kept getting uglier. I swallowed. Tried for levity. "Yeah. Okay. I'll see what I can find out without asking any questions. Tell Jack to let me know when he wants to meet again. He can leave a message in the hollow oak or something." He nodded but I could see he didn't get the lit ref. He didn't grow up reading Nancy Drew.

I put my shopping, including Jack's latest gift, in the trunk. A bulletproof vest in a lingerie bag. Looked like Jack hadn't completely lost his sense of humor, either. Or his sense of the absurd. That was more like it. There is little in the world less sexy than a bulletproof vest. More like a straitjacket and about as comfortable. At least it wasn't pink.

Back at the jail, I got into the visitor's room so easily it was scary. The place wasn't heavily guarded. Didn't they know there was a rampaging militia out there threatening to storm the joint? Maybe not. Everyone was going around like it was just another peaceful summer day. But it's like so many things, until you hear about it, it doesn't exist, and then, suddenly, it's everywhere. Less than a week in Merchantville, and I'd become totally paranoid. I saw danger lurking behind every rock, a potential threat behind the wheel of every pickup truck.

As long as he could be in the same room, Lyle was happy to settle down and draw, expressing delight over the variety of colors and the marker's paintbrush tips. I pulled up a chair and tried to make conversation with his father. It wasn't easy. Jed Harding had no small talk.

He was a slight, wiry man with graying blond hair pulled back in a ponytail. His face was deeply lined. I knew he'd suffered a lot from his Agent Orange exposure, and the story of it was right there, etched in deeply around his eyes and mouth and in the gaunt hollows beneath his prominent cheekbones. He wore the defeated look of a man who was trying not to let life get him down but who'd been punched one too many times to have much faith left anymore. He still had an outdoorsman's leathery tan, but there were smudges under his eyes, and, like his mother, he looked utterly worn out. I was torn between competing desires: to feed him hearty soup, and to tuck him under my arm and run out of there.

"I hope you don't mind my bringing Lyle down. It was a bit forward, with you not knowing me, but he asked and I had the time..." I didn't know what else to say. In the silence, there was nothing but the squeak of markers. "Lyle's kind of... I don't know... hard to resist."

"You're the new girl over to Theresa's?" he asked. I nodded. "He likes going over there. Drives Theresa nuts. He took a shine to one of the other waitresses. Girl named Mindy. Paulette's roommate. She used to baby-sit for him sometimes." He hesitated, then added, "His momma used to work there."

"Your wife," I said.

Jed Harding stared out the window, not nonchalant but tense, the muscles in his neck taut. He hesitated, his eyes shifting briefly to the boy, and then back to the window, where they stayed, before he nodded. "She run off. Town was too small for her." He swallowed and ducked his head. A bad liar.

"Won't she come back now, with what's happened? You in jail and Lyle needing someone to care for him?" I asked.

He shook his head and I waited, eager for what he'd say, but all he said was a flat, "That ain't gonna happen." I couldn't ask why not without being too pushy.

"Good of you to bring the boy down. I miss him something fierce." He reached out and tousled Lyle's hair. "He's a good boy. How'd you meet him? He come around bothering you at the restaurant? I wouldn't of thought my momma would let him do that."

I shook my head. "She didn't. I found him in a ditch at the back of the parking lot. He'd run away from home, trying to come see you."

His hands were clasped on the table in front on him and when I said this, the knuckles went white. "Rough on him. Boy loves his daddy," he said simply. "Hard to figure, with me being such a hotheaded jerk and all."

"Everyone is trying to get you out, you know," I said.

He nodded. "I heard."

"And you know about the cop they've taken?"

Another nod. "Yup. Got a state cop in here 'bout once an hour, wanting to know am I a part of that. Who's in the militia? Who's behind this? Asking where are they keeping this fella they took. Telling me things'll go easier on me if I cooperate." He shrugged. "I told 'em. I'm no part of it. The kidnapping. I don't hold with that sort of thing. And, the way militia's organized, I don't know who's in charge. I don't think they believe me, though. Can't tell 'em who did it if I don't know, can I?" He said it to the table, not to me.

I was sure what he said was part of the truth. I'd done my reading about militias. Knew about the philosophy of organizing in small cells for protection. It was also part untruth. I'd seen that meeting at the church. Maybe they didn't know the command structure, but the players knew each other. Still, he had his reasons for not helping the police. Jed Harding had been part of the militia. He could disapprove of what they'd done in this case and still not want to rat out his buddies. Maybe it went deeper than that. He couldn't rat out his buddies and expect to survive once he got out of here, and he had a child to take care of. A child who was still out there and vulnerable.

"Cops don't believe me when I tell 'em this, but the militia, they didn't entirely trust me, know what I mean?" He tapped his temple. "Got somethin' wrong in my head."

"There's a lot of support for you in Merchantville. Talk about maybe taking some more steps..."

"Oh, Jesus, no!" he burst out. "I lost my head, that's all. I never meant for it to come to this." Lyle looked up in surprise, noted that his father was okay, and went back to coloring.

I was supposed to be subtle. Just a casual visitor conveying his son, chatting for a few minutes before heading back north. I'd already talked too much; asked too many questions. But I couldn't hold it in. I asked the one question I needed answered. "You know these men. Do you think, even if they let you go, that the militia will release that cop?"

He shook his head. "How could they?" he said.

"They're not going to trade you without seeing him."

"Don't want to be traded," he said, abruptly. "Never asked to be."

"What?"

"I don't want 'em to let me out of here. I keep telling 'em that. Nobody seems to listen."

This was what Roland wanted to know. "But why?"