Long Lost

  The minister did so. “Yes. I know this man.” He looked suspicious. “Why do you want to find him?”

  “I’m his brother.” I managed to keep my hand steady as I shook hands with the minister. “Brad Denning.”

  “No. You’re mistaken.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Denning isn’t Pete’s last name. It’s Benedict.”

  I didn’t know what struck me more, that Petey was using his own first name or that he’d taken the last name of the minister who’d wanted to adopt him after the fire. My stomach soured. “So he still won’t use the family name.”

  The minister frowned. “What do you mean?”

  My heart pounded harder. “We used to live around here. But a long time ago, Pete and I had a falling—out. One of those family arguments that cause such bad feelings, it splits the family apart.”

  The minister nodded, evidently familiar with what that kind of argument had done to some families in his congregation.

  “We haven’t spoken to each other in years. But recently, I heard that he’d come back to town. This was the church we used to go to. So I thought someone here might have seen him.”

  “You want to be reconciled with him?”

  “With everything that’s in me, Reverend. But I don’t know where he is.”

  “I haven’t seen him since …” The minister thought about it. “Last July, when Mrs. Warren died. Of course, he was at the funeral. And before that, the last time I saw him was … Oh, probably two years. I’m not even sure he’s in town any longer.”

  “Mrs. Warren?”

  “She was one of the most faithful in the congregation. Only missed one service that I can remember. When Pete showed up two years ago and volunteered to do handiwork for the church for free, Mrs. Warren took a liking to him. She was amazed by how completely he could quote Scripture. Tried to trick him several times, but he always won.”

  “That was my dad’s doing, teaching Pete the Good Book.”

  “Well, your father certainly did an excellent job. Mrs. Warren finally offered him a handyman’s job on her property. Our loss, her gain. When she missed that service I mentioned, I was convinced she must be sick, so I telephoned her, and I was right—she had a touch of the flu. The next time she came to church, Pete wasn’t with her. She told me that he’d decided to move on.”

  “Yeah, Pete was always like that. But you say he was here for her funeral?”

  “Evidently, he’d come back and was working as her handyman again. In fact, the way I hear it, she left her place to him.”

  “Her place?”

  “Well, she was elderly. Her husband was dead. So were her two children. I suppose she thought of Pete as the closest thing she had to family.”

  “Sounds like a kind old lady.”

  “Generous to a fault. And over the years, as she sold off portions of the farm her husband had worked—it was the only way for her to survive after her husband died— she made sure to let eighty acres around her house go wild for a game preserve. Believe me, the way this town’s expanding, we could use more people like Mrs. Warren to preserve the countryside.”

  “Reverend, I’d appreciate two favors.”

  “Yes?” He looked curious from behind his glasses.

  “The first is, if you see Pete before I do, for heaven’s sake don’t tell him that we’ve spoken. If he knows I’m trying to see him, I’m afraid he’ll get so upset that he might leave town.”

  “Your argument was that serious?”

  “Worse than you can imagine. I have to approach him in the right way and at the right time.”

  “What’s the second favor you want?”

  “How do I find Mrs. Warren’s place?”

  9

  Two miles along a country road south of town, I reached a T intersection. I steered to the left, and as the minister had described, the paved road became gravel. My tires threw up dust that floated in my rearview mirror. Tense, I stared ahead, hoping that I wouldn’t see a car or a truck coming toward me. The countryside was slightly hilly, and at the top of each rise, I was afraid that I’d suddenly come upon an approaching vehicle and that he’d be driving it. Maybe he wouldn’t pay attention, a quick glimpse of another driver, but maybe he paid attention to everything. Or maybe he wouldn’t recognize me with my beard, but if he did, or if he recognized Kate’s Volvo (Jesus, why hadn’t I thought to bring another car?), I’d lose my chance of surprising him. I’d have even less chance of finding Kate and Jason.

  Sweating, my shirt sticking to my chest, I saw the expanse of thick timber and undergrowth that the minister had said would be on my left. I passed a mailbox, a closed gate, and a lane that disappeared into the forest. Mrs. Warren’s house was back there, the minister had said, where she could watch the deer, the squirrels, the raccoons, and the rest of what she’d called “God’s children” roaming around the property. Relieved that I hadn’t seen anybody and hence that no one had seen me, I kept driving, more dust rising behind me. At the same time, I couldn’t help worrying that the reason I hadn’t seen any activity was that Petey wasn’t there, that he’d moved on.

  Petey.

  Yes.

  Each X ray had shown a particular tooth with four roots that grew in distinctive directions. The child’s had been smaller and less pronounced than the man’s. Nonetheless, it hadn’t been difficult to see that one had evolved into the other. Not that I’d relied on my opinion. Before going to the various churches, I’d made sure to be at a dentist’s office when it opened. With cash I’d gotten from a local bank, I’d paid the dentist a hundred dollars to examine the X rays before he attended to his scheduled patients. He’d agreed with me: Man and boy—the X rays had belonged to the same person.

  So there it was. The man who’d claimed to be my brother had told the truth. The FBI had been wrong. Lester Dant hadn’t assumed Petey’s identity. Petey had assumed Lester’s . But that disturbing discovery settled nothing. The reverse. It prompted far more unnerving questions to threaten my sanity.

  This was clear. After Petey had tricked the police into thinking that he was heading west through Montana, he’d taken Kate and Jason in the reverse direction—back to Woodford. Because he no longer had to lay a false trail by abandoning vehicles that he’d carjacked, it wouldn’t have been hard to avoid capture. All he had to do was carjack a vehicle that had a license for a distant state. The driver wouldn’t have been expected for several days. By the time he or she was reported missing, Petey would have reached Mrs. Warren’s property and hidden the car. Meanwhile, he’d have switched license plates several times and hidden the car owner’s body somewhere along the interstate.

  Mrs. Warren. Petey had been confident that he could intimidate her, because that’s what he’d done a year earlier. At the church where I’d learned about Petey and Mrs. Warren, the minister had mentioned that Petey was Mrs. Warren’s handyman, that she never missed Sunday service except for an uncharacteristic absence one Sunday two years earlier, one year before Petey took Kate and Jason from me. Petey must have done something so dismaying to Mrs. Warren that she found it impossible to go to church that Sunday. When the minister phoned her, certain that only something dire would have kept her away, she’d claimed that she had the flu. The next Sunday, she’d been in church again. Meanwhile, she’d said, Petey had left the area.

  The minister’s phone call had probably saved Mrs. Warren’s life. His concern for her must have made Petey think that the minister was suspicious, must have driven Petey away. But when Mrs. Warren felt safe, why hadn’t she confessed the horrors that had happened out there? The answer wasn’t hard to figure. Like Mrs. Garner in Loganville, she’d been ashamed to let the other church members know what Petey had done to her. What’s more, Petey had no doubt terrified her with a threat to return and punish her if she caused trouble for him.

  Maybe she started feeling secure again, but then, to her fright, Petey came back a year later. He might have found a way to hide Kate and Jason from her.
No mat—ter—her torment resumed. He intimidated her severely enough to make her put him in her will. “He feels like a son to me,” she’d have been forced to tell her lawyer, coached to sound convincing. Petey would have stood next to her in the lawyer’s office when she signed the document, a reminder of his warning that if she turned against him, he’d make sure that she spent her remaining years in agony. Then he’d have kept her a prisoner at the house while he dropped a word here and there among the congregation that she hadn’t been feeling well lately. That way, people would have been prepared when she died. After all, as the minister had said, Mrs. Warren was elderly. Maybe one night she passed away in her sleep— with help from a pillow pressed over her face.

  As I sped back to town, I used my cell phone to call Special Agent Gader, but his receptionist told me that he wouldn’t be in the office for a couple of days. I phoned Payne’s office but got a recording that said he wouldn’t be in the office for the rest of the week. I had a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach that told me his wife’s biopsy hadn’t been good.

  That left getting in touch with the local police, but when I parked outside the station (the same brick building from years ago), I had a disturbing image of policemen piling into squad cars and rushing out to Mrs. Warren’s. I feared that their arrival would be so obvious that if Petey was in that house, he’d notice them coming and escape out the back. I might never learn what he’d done with Kate and Jason. Even if the police did manage to capture him, suppose he refused to answer questions? Suppose he denied knowing anything about where Kate and Jason were hidden? If they were still alive, they might starve or suffocate while he remained silent. Think it through, I warned myself. I needed more information. I couldn’t trust the police to go after him until I knew exactly how they should do it.

  10

  The pilot said something that I couldn’t quite hear amid the drone of the single—engine plane.

  I turned to her. “Excuse me?”

  “I said, Woodford’s over there.”

  I glanced to the right, toward where she pointed. The sprawl of low buildings, old and new, stretched toward the interstate.

  She put so much meaning into the statement that I shook my head from side to side. “I don’t understand.”

  “You told me you wanted to see how the old hometown looked from the air.”

  “More or less.”

  “Seems like less. You’ve barely looked in that direction. What you’re interested in are those farms up ahead.”

  We flew closer to the eighty—acre section of woods and underbrush. Although the day was sunny, there was a touch of wind. Once in a while, the plane dipped slightly.

  “You’re a developer, aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “We’ve had our share of development the last five years. Seems like every time I look, there’s a new subdivision.”

  It was an easier explanation than the truth. “Yeah, too much change can be overwhelming.”

  I stared down at the large dense section of trees. I saw the lane leading into it from the gravel road. I saw a clearing about a hundred yards into it where a brick house was surrounded by grass and gardens.

  I’d bought one of those pocket cameras that had a zoom lens. Now I pulled it out and started taking photographs.

  11

  Back in my motel room, I spread out the eight—by—tens on a table. I’d paid a photographer to stay open after hours and process them. Now it was after dark. My eyes ached. To help keep me alert, I turned on the television— CNN—and as an announcer droned in the background, I picked up a magnifying glass and leaned down over the photographs. They were slightly blurred from the plane’s vibration. Nonetheless, they showed me what I needed.

  One thing was immediately obvious. No one would have noticed it at ground level, where the front, sides, and back of the house couldn’t be viewed simultaneously. But when seen from above, the grass and gardens in back of the house looked different from those at the sides and the front. They seemed to have had work done on them recently. The area seemed slightly lower than the others.

  Sunken? I wondered. As when ground settles after it’s been dug up and then refilled?

  In the background, the CNN announcer explained that a distraught man with a gun was holding his ex—wife and his daughter prisoner in a house in Los Angeles. A police SWAT team surrounded it. With greater intensity, I stared through the magnifying glass at the photos, confirming that a section of grass and garden in back of the house did appear slightly lower than what was around it.

  I noticed a blue pickup truck parked next to the house. I studied a stream that wound through the middle of the woods in back. But what I kept returning to was that area behind the house. The grass seemed greener there, the bushes fuller, as if they were getting more attention than those at the front and the sides.

  I set down the magnifying glass and tried to calm myself. There was nothing sinister about relandscaping, the police would say. A blighted lawn and old bushes had been replaced with healthy ones. But what if the lawn and bushes had been replaced because something had been built under them?

  On the television behind me, the announcer reported that the hostage situation had ended badly. As the police tightened their circle around the building, the man had shot his daughter and his ex—wife, then pulled the trigger on himself.

  I stared at the television.

  12

  When I’d driven past Mrs. Warren’s property, I’d made the mistake of using Kate’s Volvo. Petey might have recognized it. This time, I drove only to the outskirts of town, where I left the car among others at a shopping mall. I put on my knapsack and hiked into the countryside.

  As in most midwestern farm communities, the road system was laid out in a grid that contained squares or rectangles of land. Avoiding the road that fronted Mrs. Warren’s property, I took an indirect route that added several miles, coming at the wooded eighty acres from the road behind. Under a bright, hot sun, I hiked past fields, past cattle grazing, past farmers tending their crops. I adjusted my baseball cap and moved my fanny pack to a more comfortable spot on my waist, trying to look as if I didn’t have a care in the world, that I was merely out for a pleasant day of walking. In truth, I wanted desperately to run. The adrenaline burning through me needed exertion to keep it controlled. If I didn’t do something to vent the pressure swelling inside me, I feared I’d go crazy. To my right, across a field, the woods got larger. Nearer. Kate and Jason. They’re alive, I told myself. They have to be.

  Worried about being noticed crossing the field toward the woods, I waited until a car went by and there wasn’t any other traffic. The stream that I’d seen in the photographs crossed the field and went under the road. I climbed down to it. Its banks were high enough that I was out of view as I walked next to the water. In contrast with the stark sun, the air was cool down there.

  After five minutes, the stream entered the trees. I ducked under a fence, climbed the slippery bank, and found myself among maples, oaks, and elms. The noise I made in the undergrowth troubled me, but who would hear me? Petey wasn’t going to be patrolling his fences, guarding his property against intruders. The logical place for him to be was at the house. Or maybe he’d be off somewhere, committing God knew what crimes.

  The forest cast a shadow. A spongy layer of dead leaves smelled damp and moldy. I wiped my sweat—gritted face, took off my knapsack, and pulled out a holster that I’d bought that morning. It was attached to the right side of a sturdy belt. My spare fifteen—round magazine was in a pouch to the left, along with two other newly purchased magazines. A hunting knife went next to it and a five—inch long, thumb—width flashlight called Surefire, which the clerk in the gun shop had shown me was surprisingly powerful for its size. I took the pistol from my fanny pack and shoved it into the holster. The weight of the equipment dug into my waist.

  Thirsty from nervousness, I sipped water from one of three canteens in the knapsack. I ate a stick of beef jerky an
d several handfuls of mixed peanuts and raisins. Uneasiness made me urinate. Then I put on the knapsack and pulled a compass from my shirt pocket. Unlike a year ago, I’d taken the time to learn how to use it. Remembering the photographs, estimating the angle that I needed to follow in order to reach the house, I took a southeast direction, making my way through the trees.

  All the while, I listened for suspicious noises in the forest. The scrape of a branch might have been Petey creeping toward me, but it turned out to be a squirrel racing up a tree. The snap of a twig startled me, until I realized that it was a rabbit bounding away. Birds fluttered. Wary, I scanned the undergrowth, studied my compass again, and moved cautiously forward.

  The next time I stopped to get a drink, I checked my watch, surprised to find that what had seemed like thirty minutes had actually been two hours. The air felt thicker. Sweat stuck my shirt and jeans to me. I took another step and immediately dropped to a crouch, seeing where the trees thinned.

  On my stomach, I squirmed through the undergrowth, the moldy smell of the earth widening my nostrils. I crawled slowly, trying not to move bushes and reveal my position. From having designed homes for wealthy clients, I was familiar with intrusion detectors. I watched for anything ahead of me, motion sensors on posts or a wire that might be attached to a vibration detector. Nothing struck me as unusual. In fact, now that I thought about it, an intrusion detector would be useless in the woods. The animals roaming about would trigger it.

  Animals? I suddenly realized that for a while I hadn’t noticed any animals. Nor a single bird. The sense of barrenness reminded me of what I’d felt at the Dant farm.

  Snakes? I studied the ground ahead of me. Nothing rippled. Taking a deep breath, I squirmed forward. The trees became more sparse, the bushes less thick. Peering through low branches, I saw a clearing. A lawn. A flower garden.