Wild Horses (34 page)

K
AI
sat still at the picnic table, hoping to become invisible. Old habits died hard.

“It is our understanding that Miss Putney could be here. Also, we need to talk to her boyfriend….” Officer Pettori looked down on his clipboard. “Hal Kenson?”

“I’m right here,” Hal announced from across the picnic table. His face was ashen. “Where is she? Where did she go?”

“That’s what we are here to determine,” the policeman said. “If you don’t mind coming down to the station with us?”

There was an obvious assumption of cooperation from Hal’s side, and Hal was just about to nod his assent when his father growled right next to him. “Now, officer. Unless you have anything to charge him with, you can question him right here, in the presence of his attorney.” Tibor’s mouth stretched into a humorless grin. “That would be me. Tibor Kenson, attorney-at-law, at your service.”

Pettori looked at the woman in uniform next to him, an unspoken communication passing between them before he turned to Attila. “Mr. Keleman, is there a room we could use where we would have some privacy?”

Attila nodded. “Follow me. You can use the living room.”

“Alright. I will need to interview everyone who knows Lindsey Putney and who might shed some light on her disappearance.”

“Shit,” Rita said once the police, Hal, and Tibor disappeared inside the house. “I should have known this was more serious than it looked on the surface.”

“What happened?” Attila asked, eyebrows raised in both concern and curiosity.

“She called last night. Hal wanted to go pick her up. She wanted to stay over on account of some row with her mother, but I didn’t think it would have looked appropriate… you know…. Her mother can be just such a terror. I talked Hal out of it, and now she’s gone.”

“But you knew about the big fight,” Kai sounded off, displeased with Rita’s prudish attitude. “We all talked about it.”

“Yeah.” Rita took a swig of her beer. “Dammit. I should have just let him do what he thought was right. She’d have been safe with Hal—now the question begs to be asked, where is she and is she alright?”

Kai drank some of his beer and set it down. A dark shadow passed over his brow.

“What is it?” Attila appeared behind Kai again, giving the police and Hal some privacy. His knees touched Kai’s back from behind and he kept his voice low.

“Well, it’s just, when I was eighteen and disappeared from the house, my sister apparently tried to file a missing persons report on me. She knew I’d been kicked out by our idiot stepfather, but she wanted to make sure I was okay. The police did find me, and they asked me if I was fine, but they also told me that being a ‘missing person’ is not against the law—especially not when you’re an adult. Now, if it’s a little kid, they have the Amber Alert and such. When an elderly person goes missing, there are ways of tracking that, you know, for people with dementia or other conditions. But for regular adults, you can be missing and the police aren’t allowed to tell your family where you are unless you say it’s okay. So—” Kai took another swig. “—if Lindsey wanted to disappear, she could. The police would be allowed to tell her mother that she is okay, but that’s all.”

“You’ve gone through all that?” Attila murmured in Kai’s ear, and Kai only nodded. Flashes of his past clouded his mind and he blinked hard to suppress them.

I’m here now.

I’m never going back to… that.

He closed his eyes and leaned into Attila’s side. He had done it all and tried just about everything. He’d turned into the kind of person his stepfather once predicted he would become, but now, against his stepfather’s predictions, he was here as a full-fledged partner of Attila Keleman. He wasn’t that slut anymore, and he’d never be so needy and desperate and unworthy as he had been back then. His black leather chaps were long gone, left behind along with a kinky collar and a length of red, silk rope.

Attila, his bent arms folded behind his head.

Attila, his skin looking pale in contrast with the crimson rope that bound him, sitting on his knees, erect and needy.

Attila, his eyes glued to Kai’s lips in expectation of rapturous release.

Kai frowned, displeased with his train of thought as well as his body’s reaction to it. He banished both immediately, rubbing his temple against Attila’s hip in search of the man’s clean scent. He lowered his forehead and pressed it against Attila’s hip, hiding his flush. Such thoughts were unworthy of him. Attila, his lover, was a man of breeding and class, and Kai, the product of filthy gutters, had no business thinking of him in such lewd terms. That life was long gone and far away, and the only loving Attila would get would be the sweet and gentle variety. He felt like he would drown in shame for even visualizing his lover—his partner—in anything resembling his old gear.

I refuse to be an unworthy slut. I’m better than that.

He would rise to Attila’s dizzying heights, leaving the muck down below.

“Kai’s right,” Rita said, pulling him into the present moment. “The police are here either because there was some sign of foul play, or because somebody indicated Lindsey might not be here of her own free will.”

“She would never!” Attila gave his sister a horrified look.

“Yes, she would,” Rita said, her expression grim. “Nothing would please Mona Putney more than making trouble for Hal—not just because he won’t react to her come-ons, but also to feel the heady rush of power over her daughter’s boyfriend.”

S
OON
, both father and son emerged from the house, followed by the officers. Their features were tense, as though they were about to lose a high-stakes game of cards.

“Mr. Keleman, we’ll need access to the stables.” The policeman did not say “please.”

“For what reason?” Attila inquired.

“Do you have something to hide?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. I am protective of the horses and do not like them to be disturbed needlessly. Either give me a rational reason, or bring a search warrant.”

The two officers exchanged another look. “Listen, Attila. You might be hiding a girl who might have gotten kidnapped. Do you really want that kind of publicity connected to your name?”

Attila looked at the officer with glacial calm. She was his height, trying to wear her authority like a borrowed coat.

She’s young.

“I am Mr. Keleman to you, Officer Greene. All I ask is that you give me a rational reason. I do not recall leaving the door open to veiled threats.”

Officer Greene’s older and more experienced partner sighed, cleared his throat, and said, “Hal here confessed to spending time with the missing young woman last night.”

“Is that against the law?” Attila inquired.

“Her mother is concerned. There have been cases of young women being abducted. This applies to other locales, mostly, but we need to check it out all the same.” Officer Greene volunteered the information as though the people in her company didn’t follow the news.

“Her mother wields a lot of clout and makes significant political contributions, is what you’re trying to say.” Rita’s voice cut through the darkness of the evening.

“Hal,” Attila turned to his nephew. “What is the connection between Lindsey and the barn?”

“Well, Uncle ’Tila,” Hal said in a rather small voice, “she called last night and wanted to stay over with me, but Mom said no. So I picked her up later that night—”

“You snuck out,” Rita said, her voice cold.

“I don’t need to sneak out. I’m an adult. But it’s your house and I respect that.”

“And…,” Attila prompted him.

A guilty look crept into Hal’s eyes. “I brought her here and let her sleep in the hayloft.”

Hal and Attila looked at one another. There was sudden understanding in Attila’s eyes. During his illness, the youngsters helped with the horses and, when they were tossing bales of hay down from the loft, they must have discovered his and Kai’s little love nest.

With a resigned sigh, Attila beckoned to the two police officers. “If you would follow me.”

They trudged up to the barn in a single file, minding their footing in the dark. The police used their powerful flashlights to scan the area around them. Attila opened the barn door, greeted by a few symbolic barks of the barn dogs, and accompanied by Tibor, Kai, and Hal. The officers entered the space once the light was on.

“Over there.” Hal pointed at the wooden ladder that reached into the hayloft. “She was supposed to wait for me up there, and I was supposed to bring her dinner when all the party action died down.”

The woman cop climbed the ladder, testing the springy wooden floor underfoot with suspicion. She turned on her flashlight and looked into the corners.

“There should be a navy and white backpack,” Hal reminded her. “If it’s not there, she must have taken it with her.”

The woman nodded, then disappeared. “It’s a maze up here,” she called down. There were just sounds of rustling and occasional footsteps for a while. “I got something!” she called down, and Attila knew she must have found the mattress. Soon she reappeared, an evidence bag in hand. “I found a used condom.”

“Just one?” Officer Pettori asked, sarcasm lacing his voice.

“No, actually—there’s a whole box! Unused, that is.”

“S
O
LET
me get this straight.” Rita laid into her older offspring once the police were gone. “You not only ‘liberated’ Lindsey from her mother’s house, you brought her to your uncle’s barn without bothering to ask his permission!” Her eyes glinted, her shoulders were stiff, and it looked like steam would start shooting out her ears at any moment. “Then the two of you have the nerve to spend the night up there and leave a DNA sample to assuage the curiosity of the local police department.”

Kai shot an alarmed look at Attila, who raised one eyebrow in a query.

“What is it with you two?” Rita barked at them. “What aren’t you telling me?”

Attila faced his sister with all the dignity he could muster. “Actually, we don’t know whose DNA is in that condom.”

“You surely jest.” She sat down, her heavy head barely supported in her hands, as though the weight of the world was on her shoulders.

“Kai and I like to spend the night in the hayloft every so often,” Attila explained. “I thought we always cleaned up after ourselves”—and now he shot an irritated glance at his lover—“but there might have been an oversight.”

Before she had a chance to explode, Hal piped up from next to his silent and much amused father. “Uncle ’Tila, I’ll replace every condom we took. Seriously! It’s just, it’s so hard to find privacy, and when we discovered the nest all supplied with bottles of beer and water and… you know, supplies… it felt just like winning the lottery!”

Tibor’s raucous laughter split the air, soon joined by everyone else’s. Even Rita uttered a few wry chuckles while her older son just stood there, red in the face and awaiting the judgment of his elders.

“Your father was conceived in that hayloft,” Grandpa Keleman said in a wistful tone. “Oh yes, those were the days. We didn’t have all the freedom you young people have nowadays. You think you were sneaking around? You don’t know what sneaking around really is! We had to avoid generations of curious relatives in our search for a quiet moment.”

Attila walked up to his nephew and looked into his eyes, all serious. “I do not begrudge you the use of my condoms, Hal. The beer, though, that was Kai’s, and you shall have to atone for your theft. Once you replace it, there is some tack that needs to be cleaned.”

Once that was settled, they remained and debated what might have become of Lindsey.

“She was supposed to be right up there,” Hal said, repeating himself again. “I thought she was just keeping quiet when Grandpa went riding, but she must have been gone by then. I already texted her when I was in the house with the police, and she usually replies right away, but there’s been nothing.”

“Her phone might be off, or dead,” Attila murmured.

“She hoped she could catch up with her dad as soon as he got back to Pittsburgh. Besides, she was fascinated by city life,” Kai said. “She always wanted to know how I lived in Pittsburgh and how things worked down there.”

“Did you tell her?” Attila asked, his eyes narrowed.

“I told her most of it—I might have painted some of my ‘survival skills’ as ‘adventures’, I guess…. She seemed sort of fascinated by my strategies of making do while homeless.” He paused, stretching his arms above his head and cracking his back. “She was kind of floored by the fact that I made it all the way up here on a bicycle.”

A sudden silence fell. Soon, Kai was the unwilling recipient of nervous looks. “What?”

Attila turned to him. “Kai, go check on your bike.”

Attila betrayed no surprise when Kai arrived at the patio again, upset and out of breath.” It’s gone. She knew it was there—she saw me pump up the tires.”

Attila and Kai exchanged a loaded look. They both knew why Kai had been getting the bike ready for the road.

“That was before… you know,” Kai floundered. “I’m… I’m here now.”

“I know.” Attila closed his eyes. “I’m getting tired. If you’d excuse me, I will leave you to the rest of the festivities.” He rose, and Kai rose with him.

“I’ll be right back,” he promised to his birthday party guests before he disappeared inside the house.

K
AI
stood in the door to the bedroom, leaning on a doorjamb, his arms folded across his chest.

“What is it?” Attila asked as he rummaged through his dresser drawers.

“What do you intend to do?”

“I intend to go to sleep. The antibiotics kicked in just fine for me, but it has been a long day and I am feeling a bit….”

“Exhausted?” Kai supplied.

“Totally,” Attila exhaled, as though the admission came hard to him.

“You want to go after her.” There was no question in Kai’s voice.

Attila raised his head to face him, his hair falling down his shoulders. “It is reasonable to assume that she will head for those parts of town you described to her. We should both go—it will make the search easier.”