Orchids and Stone (24 page)

“Promise me, Minnie. Promise you’ll wait right here, okay?”

“I promise.”

Daphne cast one fearful look in the direction of the vacation house. They weren’t far from it, but they were in dense cover. With one parting squeeze to Minerva Watts’s arm, Daphne bolted in the general direction of her truck, running like life depended on speed. She leapt over rocks and roots and stumps. When vines twirled around her ankles, she kicked her feet free. When she crashed to her hands and knees in muddy grime, she shoved herself to her feet and ran on.

On the main street, she fired up her truck and spun a one-eighty. Her
tools flew and clanged in the truck bed. She floored the accelerator, braked
hard at the intersection, and zipped down the nearest cul-de-sac, squeal
ing to a stop by the last two houses. Flying from her truck, she ignored a
man who gawked at her while checking his mail, and darted through
the
side yards between the houses.

Barging straight into the woods, Daphne felt winded. She was no runner and it was tough footing with undergrowth that trapped her legs. She wove between trees, searching for the spot with the stinging nettle, searching for pink and calico.

“Ow!” Daphne yanked her hands up when the thigh-high nettles slipped their acid onto her palms. “Fuckety-fuck.”

It hurts you the most when it’s in full flower.

Where was Minnie? Was this the spot? Daphne swirled, searching the trampled ground, then turned again, casting about in the woods. She found the stump, the exact footprint in the woods where she’d left the little old lady. Daphne saw the path she’d forced into the brush when she’d run for her truck and saw brush she and Minnie had trampled when they’d progressed from the vacation house.

Had Minnie tried to follow her? Daphne climbed onto the stump, craning her head. The flash of pink was brief and low, a flit through trees, back toward the Rainier Court Vacation House. Launching herself, Daphne dodged trees, trying to retrace the route that had brought her and Minnie to this spot. By the time she got close enough to glimpse the deck, she could see Minnie, cloaked in a long black wool coat, held close by the black-haired woman. They were walking around the vacation house, heading for the front.

Daphne charged, gasping, feeling her heart bang against her chest wall. Before she neared the back deck, Minnie and the other woman were out of sight. An engine roared to life and car doors slammed. Daphne pelted around the house, screaming as the threesome pulled away in the white car.

Minnie Watts sat crammed between the man and woman in the front seat of the white sedan. Daphne’s pulse increased in a crescendo that teased of what she wouldn’t achieve as she chased the car down Rainier Court, falling farther behind with every stride.

When the car reached the main street and she didn’t, Daphne screamed again. “Stop! No, stop! Wait!” She raced after the car with all her power.

With the car’s violent lurch as the man took the corner onto the main street, Daphne found new speed, but she couldn’t scream in top flight. She passed the next street, but it was hopeless. Pulling blocks farther away in seconds, the car fled, outstripping her human strength. She thought it turned right on another main street up ahead but couldn’t say which one because it was so far away. Daphne’s lungs demanded several sucking gasps before she had enough breath to cry out to the entire neighborhood.

“Call the police! Help! Call 911!” Then she ran again making another block before the rank futility of her effort seeped through her core. Too winded to cry, she slumped, elbows and knees on the pavement as she struggled for breath.

CHAPTER 23

The threat of screeching brakes forced Daphne to her feet. She rose from
the asphalt still gasping for air, and wiped her face.

A car door opened and a man’s voice asked, “Ma’am, are you all right?”

She turned. It was a uniformed police officer, with a patrol car behind
him. She lurched toward him, then twisted and pointed down the road in the opposite direction.

“There’s a car, a white car. You’ve got to stop it.”

He indicated the passenger’s side of his car. “Get in.” As he got back behind the wheel, he leaned across the seat to open the door for her.

Daphne threw herself around the front bumper and into the police car, drawing her knees up, wanting to put her feet against the dashboard to brace herself.

“Seatbelt,” he said.

She buckled herself in, ready for hot pursuit, but he drove not much faster than the determined side of normal, no screaming tires, no lights and siren.

He spoke rapid-fire and cryptically into his dashboard radio, a number of other voices and squelch returned, and then he said, “Ten-four.”

“It went up and turned off to the right down here somewhere,” Daphne said as they arrived within a few blocks of where the car had turned off.

“Describe the car. Make? Model? And start talking about why we want this car.”

“It’s white,” she said. “Just white.” Shit! The car color, that’s all she had. Daphne took a breath. “It’s a four-door. A sedan. And it’s a late-model, like, new. Clean. I bet it’s a rental.”

“Foreign? American?”

“I don’t know.”

“And which road did it turn down?”

“I don’t know. One of these. I was way back there. One block from Rainier Court. I was on foot.”

“Okay,” he said, braking his patrol car to the curb. “What’s going on between you and the occupants of the white sedan?”

“They took a lady. An older lady named Minerva Watts. They’re holding her and I think they’re stealing from her.”

“Who are they?” He spoke into his radio again, but Daphne couldn’t make out the quick code.

“A man and a woman. I don’t know their names. Guff. The woman called the man Guff. I don’t know if it’s a nickname or what.” She looked around as he turned his car around with a smooth one-eighty in an intersection. He was driving them back toward Rainier Court. She sat up stiff and straight, rising with her voice. “Wait, what are you doing? Go after that car.”

“What’s your name?” he asked. And as soon as she told him, he said, “Miss Mayfield, other officers are closer than I am to that car. If they see it, this white late-model four-door with three occupants, two women, older one named Minerva Watts, and a man named Guff, they’ll stop it for me and I can work from there. Right now, you and I will begin at the beginning.”

As he passed Rainier Court, Daphne pointed. “There. That’s where it started. I mean, today it did. This goes back to Wednesday. It’s kind of complicated.”

He pulled up to the end of the last cul-de-sac, to her ill-parked truck, and they both got out, walking the few feet to her truck.

Giving her a pointed glance of appraisal, he said, “So, neighbors call about a young white woman in jeans and a black T-shirt. They say she drove up at a high rate of speed in a Toyota pickup with a camper shell on it, and she went running between these houses into the woods. And the neighbor calls back, says the woman is now running and screaming on the next road—”

“Rainier Court,” she supplied.

He nodded, gave a quick smile, and said, “Right before I arrive, this woman is screaming, running down the main road, down Everson, and she’s shouting for people to call 911.”

“That was me.”

“So I gathered. We got another call from a Rainier Court resident.” He walked around her truck, peered in the windows. “Why do you have all these tools in the back?”

“I’m a roofer.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“You said begin at the beginning,” she told him. “I’ll try to make it brief.”

She described driving to Rainier Court, feeling intimidated about going straight to the front door, then parking on the main road and hiking through the woods until she arrived at the back of the vacation house. She skipped how she got into the house, concentrating instead on Minerva Watts’s credit cards arranged on the dining table, the man and the woman, their comments, the add-on lock that kept Minnie confined to the bedroom, and the few details Minnie had related.

The officer turned in place, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and answered a squawk on his radio with a mumble as he listened to her story. He asked how far into the woods she’d gone after moving her truck to this cul-de-sac, and everything she could tell about the couple leaving with “the Watts woman.”

“Oh, God. I never should have left her. I never should have left Minnie in the woods alone. I left her! I left her by herself.” Sobs made Daphne tremble even as she told herself to pull it together.

He spoke into his radio some more and this time Daphne caught a bit of a woman’s voice. “. . . registered to a Daphne Mayfield on Mapleview Drive.”

My truck,
she decided.
He ran some kind of check on my truck.

“Let’s go take a peek at the end of Rainier,” he said.

“Yes, good. Rainier Court. Can I drive myself instead of going in your car?”

“Sure.”

Another patrol car was there, parked right across the driveway of the Rainier Court Vacation House. A blond man in uniform stepped away from the neighboring house as a woman in sweatpants hurried back inside.

The blond officer shrugged at the officer following Daphne. The two men conferred by one patrol car, with the blond officer shooting skeptical glances at Daphne.

“There’s more,” she called out. Closing the distance between them, Daphne told them in a rush, “They’re holding her, stealing her money, kidnapping her. You have to believe me. You have to do something.” She could not lose ground with the police. This new guy and the blond man had to believe her.

The first officer continued to regard her with a set, grim face. And the blond guy said, “Calm down, ma’am.”

She wiped tears from her face. “I don’t want to calm down,” she said. “Please, please, believe me. No one believes me. Look, I have this card, this officer’s card.” She pulled it from her pocket. “Officer Taminsky. He knows what’s going on, I mean until today. He doesn’t know about today. He knows about before.”

“Before,” the first officer said, taking the card and then stepping away to spurt words and numbers into his radio. When he gave her his attention, she told him the rest, the before. Wednesday in the park, Thursday at Minnie Watts’s house.

“And she asked them not to take her brooch. And the woman called her
lady
but when she saw me, she called Minnie
Mother
, and poor Minnie, she was so glad to see me, just like today.” Daphne took a breath and told them about Guff grabbing her, about the car accident and getting arrested for reckless driving, then again how one thing led to another today.

“And the guy said ‘this one isn’t as Alzheimer’s-y as the others,
’
” Daphne reminded them, wondering how many others there were.

“How ’bout a security sweep around back,” the blond officer said to the first. “Make sure the place is secure.”

The first officer nodded and told Daphne, “Wait right here.”

Waiting in front of the vacation house, Daphne thought about how she’d told Minnie Watts to wait.

Bits of motion in neighboring windows caught her attention. She was being watched by people who hadn’t so much as stepped outside when she’d screamed for help.

Turning her back on those unhelpful neighbors, she squinted up at the officers’ silhouettes moving upstairs in the vacation house.

As soon as they came outside, she asked, “Did you find anything?”

“We weren’t searching the house, per se,” the first officer said.

“No,” said the blond, “just making sure it’s secure. And there’s nothing remarkable in there.”

Daphne clenched her jaw. The couple would have taken their papers and Minnie’s credit cards. She pictured the details, the roses on the table. What happened to the little add-on lock she’d pulled off the bedroom doorknob? She had a vague memory of dropping it when she knelt on the floor to help Minnie don shoes. She swallowed and faced the first cop.

“That woman put her coat over Minnie and—”

The blond cop looked at Daphne for one second, then told the first officer, “Sounds like she was taking care of her. After all, you say she addressed the Watts woman as her mother and—”

“Suppose she put the coat on her to disguise Minnie?” Daphne fired back. “To make her harder to see, harder for me to find her?”

The blond made little calming motions with his hands. “Suppose they ran because you chased them?”

“No, listen to me. That woman, Minerva Watts, she’s in trouble. These people are holding her, keeping her against her will. And I think they’re stealing from her.” Daphne snapped her fingers, remembering another piece. “She just sold her car wholesale to Fremont Ford. You can check that out.” As soon as she said this, she remembered the dealership telling her they couldn’t check on the sale until Monday.

The first officer squinted, as though he were trying to believe or trying to pretend while he listened to her talk again about the first car, the impound lot men’s comments, and what Officer Taminsky had learned when he checked out Minnie’s house on Eastpark and talked to the neighbors.

“Quite the circle-jerk,” the second officer said to the first.

Daphne looked at him. “What?”

“Maybe they’re running from you because you’re chasing them and you’re chasing them because they’re running from you.”

Circular reasoning wasn’t going to get her out of this mess, wasn’t going to help Minnie Watts. Daphne felt her tension grow, credibility slipping as the blond cop headed for his patrol car. Desperate to be believed, she repeated, “The guy said ‘this one isn’t as Alzheimer’s-y as the others’ and he was kind of in a tiff with the woman—”

The first cop pointed a finger at the house. “With Minerva Watts?”

“No, with the other woman.” Daphne eyed him. When he’d told her to get in his police car right away and pursued the white car, he’d given up because they were too late to catch them. He’d chased without needing more of a reason from her, right from the start. She studied him for hope.

“Miss Mayfield,” he said, “people just say ‘this one’ sometimes. It does not mean there were others. It’s just an expression.”

“Not this time.” Her jaw thrust forward. “Not in this instance. Look, I think there were others. Saying she wasn’t as Alzheimer’s-y as the others means there are other victims. See, this stolen car from California ended up here in Seattle.” She explained more about the impound, the abandoned car on the same block as the car rental agency and how the clerk had mentioned this house had just been rented. She talked about what the impound lot boss had said regarding the survivor coming to collect the car and the car being all that could be collected out of an estate because the owner—an old person—had recently signed things away to a charity that went defunct. And maybe the same thing was happening now, here.

“A lot of ifs,” said the first cop.

“But he said ‘this one’ like there were others.” Daphne felt angry tears on her lower eyelids.

“This one,” said the blond. “The others. Could be just an expression.”

Daphne shook her head. “Those people are holding that old woman. She was locked in a bedroom!”

“Sometimes people have to do that with their older relatives,” the blond cop said as he turned to go.

She watched him drive away but couldn’t stand the sight and closed her eyes. When she opened them to the sound of another vehicle, Officer Taminsky was pulling up. The first officer stepped to Taminsky’s driver’s door and they conferred for some minutes.

Daphne walked over. After all, they hadn’t told her to stand where she was.

“Yeah, I checked that on the way over,” Taminsky was saying. “A day-shifter impounded the car. Dispatch says they got calls associated with that impound from an out-of-state owner. Sounds kind of complicated.”

“Quite a few ifs,” the first cop said again.

Daphne nodded, then shook her head. “Not too many ifs. I wish they’d stopped and you could have talked to them. I tried to stop them. Why didn’t they stop? Why didn’t someone come out and help me stop them? Why didn’t someone else call for help sooner?”

“Why didn’t you call us instead of going into that house?”

“I don’t have a phone, remember? Guff got it when he grabbed my jacket Thursday. He grabbed me.” Then she pointed to the neighboring houses. “Lots of people must have seen. Someone should have called 911.”

“Someone did. We had two calls on you.”

“They should have called sooner.”

The first cop eyed the houses around them. A few faces were visible at windows, watching the spectacle. “People don’t always call the police when they see something suspicious. They’re reluctant to intervene, can’t decide what to do. They relieve themselves of the job. Officer Taminsky is going to finish up here, Miss Mayfield. Bye now.”

Because he was willing to see, Daphne showed Taminsky where she’d parked her truck on the main road, where she’d run into the woods. They went behind the house, too, and she showed him where she and Minnie had hidden.

“You made an unlawful entry into the house.”

Daphne closed her eyes. “What is the worst-case scenario?” she asked. She imagined being arrested again.

“I think we’re both imagining the same worst-case,” he said. “That there’s a couple victimizing this Minerva Watts. That impounded Lincoln, well, it’s odd, the history there, what we’re hearing from the man claiming the California Lincoln, the other person on the registration and title.”

She nodded and let the tears fall.
He believes me. This will get fixed.

He raised an appraising eyebrow. “That Lincoln was abandoned not long after you followed it from Minerva Watts’s home, not far from where you got in a traffic accident while pursuing it.”