The Summer We Lost Alice (29 page)

The manager would have been roused. He had telephoned the sheriff and talked to a deputy who had called Sammy. Sammy reached for his pants as soon as the telephone rang because a phone call to the sheriff in the middle of the night always carries a call to duty.

People would have gathered around, summoned from their beds by the police and pressed into service. Some people, parents themselves, would have produced flashlights and helped Kaitlin's mother search. They'd have peppered her with questions. "What was her name again? How old did you say she was? When did you see her last?" They would scatter about the motel, shining their flashlights and calling her name.
"Kaitlin! Kaitlin!" Some of them would open the trash bins and look inside, hoping their worst suspicions would be proven wrong.

Kaitlin's mother had alternated between panic and despair, between anger and terror. She would not sit. She would not be comforted. The worst thing in the world was happening to her and she was helpless in the face of it. Eventually she had thought to telephone her husband, which she had put off because there was nothing he could do but blame her. It was all her fault that this unbearable thing had happened. She would have sold her soul to make it go away, to wake up and find Kaitlin in the bed beside her.

These images tore through Flo's imagination like the wind the night before had ripped through the town. It scattered her tranquility as the wind had scattered the leaves of the trees. Flo knew these images were true, at least in their essentials if not the particulars. She knew precisely how Kaitlin's mother was feeling at this moment, because one time, long ago, that bereft and inconsolable woman had been her.

* * *

A wail from downstairs, part animal and part human, broke through Cat's early morning drowsiness. She leaped out of bed and dashed down the hallway, down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs she collided with Ethan and Heather who had also been awakened by the cry.

"Kitchen!"
Ethan said. They ran to the kitchen where they found Flo staring at the newspaper in shock. The awful moan had come from her.

Flo looked up and said, "There's been another one. A little girl's gone missing."

Ethan's nose started flowing red. He hung his head in the sink while Heather went for tissues. Flo began reading the article aloud. When Ethan's nose was stopped, he and Heather and Cat crowded around Flo. They finished reading the article together. After the final paragraph, in which Sheriff Sam Morse Jr. said he could neither verify nor deny that the girl's disappearance was linked in any way to that of Willy Proost, they sat at the table in silence, each lost in his or her individual dark thoughts.

The air had gone out of Flo's enthusiasm for breakfast waffles. She kept the coffee cups full. Cat put bread in the toaster. They read the article
together again, trying to find the unspoken facts that lay between the lines.

"Mother and daughter were staying at the motel after driving in from Colorado," Cat read. "Doesn't say what they were doing here. No mention of relatives."

"Just passing through?"

"Funny that it's a mother and daughter so near the start of the school year.
Marital troubles, maybe."

"That Unger boy isn't right, but he never seemed like the kind to hurt anybody," Flo said.

Cat explained to Ethan and Heather, "The Ungers own the motel. Their boy Ward's the manager. Scuttlebutt is that they only keep the place so he has a job of sorts."

"Ward was in a car wreck that summer you were here," Flo said. "Not long after you'd gone.
Left him with brain damage."

"I never would figure him for a killer," Cat said, "but you never know.
The Bates Motel and all that."

Ethan asked Cat if she could get him a few minutes with Sammy.

"I don't think you'll have to worry about that. He'll come around."

Pretty soon Matt and Brittany were up and breakfast was in full swing. Eggs were fried and more toast appeared.

Cat turned on the radio. She learned that school had been canceled for the day. Not that anyone in Meddersville was going to let their kids out of their sight anyway, once the news got around.

"I'm calling Jimmy, see if he'll give me the day off," Cat said.

"I'm sure he will," Flo said. "He has kids himself."

Matt and Brittany excused themselves. Cat told them they had to get washed and dressed even if they weren't going to school, they couldn't
lay around in their pajamas watching television.

"There's nothing good on anyway," Matt said.
"Just baby shows."

"Can we play outside?" Brittany asked.

"Backyard only, where I can keep an eye on you. Brush your teeth first."

The kids ran upstairs. Minutes later, Sammy drove up accompanied by a deputy. Flo offered to fry up some bacon and eggs.

"This ain't a social call, Flo," Sammy said. The deputy looked chagrined.

"But it has been a long night," he said. "We been up since midnight, and with one thing and another—"

"How do you like your eggs?"

"
Scrambled'll do real fine," Sammy said. "Where could we go to have a few words with Ethan?"

"Right here's good enough,
Sheriff," Ethan said. "Should I call my attorney?"

"That's your right, of course. You're not being charged. I just
got some questions."

Ethan motioned for Sammy to pull up a chair. He sat across from Ethan, with Cat and Heather on either side. The deputy stood by the back door. Matt and Brittany filed through. The deputy watched them through the screen still ripped from the dog's intrusion.

"My brother'll mend that screen for you," he said. "He's cheap but he does good work."

"Send him by," Flo said.

"Deputy," Sammy said, "if you don't mind, we're here on duty."

The deputy apologized
. Sammy got down to business. He pulled out a notebook and a pencil.

"Where were you last night around ten o'clock, Ethan?"

"Here, with us," Cat said. "We spent the evening in the basement and then came up to see what kind of damage the storm did."

"And you were with him the whole time, Cat?"

"She was," Heather said. "We were all together. The whole family."

"You don't happen to have any sort of connection to the
missin' girl or her mother, Miss ... I'm sorry. Your name again?"

"Her name is Heather but we call her Alice," Ethan said. "She's Alice reincarnated, you see. And that stray dog is Boo, but we'll talk about him later."

"Why is it," Sammy said, "that when I ask a question of one person, I get an answer from somebody else? And your wisecracks ain't helpin' a thing, Ethan."

"He's telling it like it is, Sammy," Flo said, adjusting the bacon in the pan. "There's more going on here than meets the eye.
As you should know."

"Mother—"

"Well, he should." She lifted the skillet off the stove and walked over to the table. Cat got up to get plates and offered her seat to the deputy. The way Flo stood next to Sammy with the skillet, it seemed she was about to throw hot grease in his face. The bacon continued to sizzle on the hot cast iron.

"Heather possesses the spirit of Alice," Flo said. "Doesn't matter how we know, we just do. She saw your daddy bury Martin Dale."

Sammy's jaw dropped. The deputy, who was leaning back in his chair, grabbed the table to keep from falling over. Everyone started talking at once. Many words were spoken but little information was conveyed until Sammy called for silence. He flipped his notebook to a new page, licked the tip of his pencil and poised it above the pad.

"All right," he said.
"Again. One at a time."

* * *

"You people take the cake," Sammy said once the story had been laid out. "You, especially," he said to Ethan. "First it's witches, now it's spirits accusin' my own father, who's in the hospital, of bein' a child-killer. Cat, I take back ever' good thing I ever said about your family. You're all certifiable."

"Sammy, I know it sounds crazy. We're still trying to get our heads around it ourselves. And nobody thinks your dad is behind the latest disappearances. But, Sammy, he knows more than he's saying about that summer. You have to ask him about it."

"I'll do no such thing! The shock itself could kill him!"

Matt came in and helped himself to a glass of water. Cat glanced over at him, concerned that he would overhear something he shouldn't, but he seemed to be ignoring them.

"You don't come right out and accuse him, of course," she said. "Just drop a few hints. Tell him you know what Heather said about—you know. Feel him out. Get him talking."

"Forget it."

"Okay," Ethan said, "then our conversation's over."

"I have a couple more questions about last night—" Sammy began, but Ethan cut him off.

"I want a lawyer," he said.

"Me, too," said Heather.

Flo and Cat chimed in.

Sammy sighed. He closed his notebook, resigned.

"Is that it?" the deputy said.

"That's it. They're
lawyerin' up."

Sammy scooted his chair away from the table and motioned for the deputy to do the same. They thanked Flo for the breakfast
. The deputy promised to send his brother around to fix the screen, and then they left. As they drove off, Ethan turned to Cat.

"Think he'll say something to his dad?"

"Oh, yeah. The seed's planted. All we have to do now, is wait."

NO ONE lawyered up.

The state police showed up to question Ethan, Heather, and the family, who managed to discredit themselves immediately by telling the truth as they saw
it. The looks that passed between the investigating officers assured everyone that they wouldn't be back any time soon. The police produced a warrant signed in a shaky scrawl by Judge Sam Morse Sr. from his hospital bed. Ethan willingly opened his mouth for swabbing. His DNA went into a plastic bag that was duly logged and sent to a lab in Kansas City.

The motel room from which Kaitlin had disappeared yielded a plethora of DNA samples, thanks to
Ward Unger's lackadaisical attitude toward housecleaning, but investigators doubted that the perpetrator was ever in the room. Most likely it was a crime of opportunity. The young girl was spotted outside the room, gone out to see the storm, perhaps, while her mother slept, or to buy a snack from the vending machine outside the office, and the kidnapper struck suddenly. Such was the theory. The storm didn't help any, sweeping away anything that might have linked the kidnapper to the motel and blowing in a lot of irrelevant debris.

The investigators who spoke with Ethan, Flo, and Catherine did not give out any details on the crime. All the family knew was what they read in the paper and saw on television. Obviously, some facts were being withheld.

The police brought in dogs but no scent trail was discovered. They searched nearby fields in an ever-widening circle around the motel. The search turned up nothing. It was as if Kaitlin had been lifted into the air by spirits.

A cross-country trucker who had stayed at the motel the night of the storm, forced to pull off I-70 by strong winds, left the motel as soon as the storm passed. He was detained outside of Kansas City. For two days, his conviction seemed to be nothing but a formality. The public cares less about facts than it does impressions, and the trucker's profile did not serve him well.

The first strike against him was that he wasn't white. He was a citizen, legal by birth in San Antonio to Mexican immigrants, with brown skin, pitch black, pomaded hair, and sideburns that were too long, somewhere between Elvis and Wolverine. He was missing a front tooth. He had not shaved for two days by the time the photograph was taken that ran in all the newspapers and on television. He was outraged at his detention, a situation that was forcing him, as an independent owner/operator, to offload his cargo and hire a replacement driver to finish his run to St. Louis.

He was once arrested for lewd conduct. This fact nearly nailed his coffin at the outset. People were convinced he was a sexual deviate and many retained that belief even when his "lewd conduct" turned out to be mooning a highway patrolman at the age of nineteen.

The trucker was as good as lynched but for one obstacle to prairie justice—absolutely no evidence could be found to link him in any way with Kaitlin. His truck was scoured for fibers, hair, fingerprints, and blood. It came out clean—but not clean in the sense of "scrubbed." The cab was littered with paper cups and food wrappers from every stop he'd made in the past thousand miles. No one at any of the stops between Meddersville and K.C. had seen him with a young girl.

He was fingerprinted and released, thanks (in the minds of many) to a justice system that had lost its teeth, gonads, and mind. For the next three days it was taking your life in your hands to admit to being any shade of liberal within fifty miles of
Meddersville.