His Sweet Read online

  “How old do you reckon she is now?” One of Solomon’s legs had fallen asleep while going through the books, so he forcefully rubbed and shook it, trying to bring it back to life.

  “I’m not sure, but 2042 days means she’s been keeping these journals somewhere between five and six years.” She skimmed over the first entry. “It says here that she’s so happy to have gotten the notebooks, because now she can make a diary just like her daddy. It’s as if she didn’t get the notebooks right away and could have been with the perpetrator some time before the first entry.”

  “Well, let’s look at the bright side. We at least have some idea of how old she is and when she went missing.” He attempted a reassuring smile.

  “Solomon, there is no bright side to this case,” Yolanda responded, obviously not in the mood for any platitudes. “I’ve set some things in motion, called Coosa County on my way to the office this morning, and they’ll be sending someone to help us out. I also called Tallapoosa and they’re going to do their best to try to spare a patrolman. They’ve got that Scandinavian festival and said they need all hands on deck, but we’ll see. I for one think this case is more important than some drunk Vikings.”

  “Yeah, one would think. The festival is now? I thought it was later on in the season.” He took up his phone to look at the schedule. “Which was the last book, by the way?”

  “This one.” She handed it to Solomon, who set his phone aside before flipping to the last entry and starting to read.

  “2042 — Today was the best day of my life. Mister Whiskers let me go outside for the first time since I moved in with him. It was beautiful. There were birds and grass and even the sun in the sky. It was the most amazing thing I have seen in my whole life. He said I had been a good girl the last few weeks, and this is what I get when I behave. I am so happy, and I will always behave from now on if it means I get to go outside.” Solomon paused, frowning.

  “It must be quite the sight to go outside after being locked away for years. I can hardly imagine.”

  “Right. There is something about this entry that is really bothering me, for some reason. I don’t understand why this creep would suddenly let her go outside after all that time. I would think she’d have been beaten into compliance years ago, so why now?” He turned the page he was reading toward her. “See this? She even drew some azaleas and birds to commemorate the occasion. The poor thing.”

  “Oof, she’s just so precious. It’s astounding how good a person she seems to be despite everything that’s happened to her.” Yolanda shook her head. “But you’ve got a point. There’s something off with this passage. Then there’s the question of why he got rid of the notebooks. I’m guessing he didn’t think anybody would find them up there. He probably reckoned they’d have been destroyed by the elements long before being discovered, not realizing that the back of the barn is pretty well sheltered.”

  “He no doubt put them there before those boys built their slide. When did they say that was?”

  “About a month ago, in early May.” She grabbed a calendar from her table and started skimming through it, pointing at the date she had circled when speaking to the boys.

  “That fits.” Solomon looked deep in thought. “So if she saw blooming azaleas that means it was early spring, maybe March or even April. So this entry is around two to three months old.”

  “Yes, probably. Maybe he was showing her the world because he has some sort of a plan for our girl. Something she hasn’t realized.”

  “I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

  “Me too.” She looked at him, her eyes a whirlwind of emotions.

  684

  I sometimes think back to the day that I disappeared. I call it my disappearance, since I think it’s what my family believes happened. I was supposed to come straight home from school every day. Just walk directly home and never, ever talk to strangers. My friend Susan always joined me on my way home. She lived three houses down our street, but that day she had been away from school for over a week because she was ill.

  Mom said she had something called kissing sickness and that I was not to go near her. I tried to explain that I wasn’t going to kiss Susan, but she still refused to let me go. Said she knew we sometimes played dress-up, sharing lipsticks and eye shadow, and any contact with Susan’s spit could infect me. I replied, “Yuck!” and remember scowling in a vain attempt at convincing her that she was simply overreacting. She still wouldn’t let me, and I never saw Susan again.

  That day I disappeared, I remember being very happy. I had won a prize for my painting in art class, and it was to be displayed for the whole school to see. I was just ecstatic and really excited to tell Mom, Dad, and my brother all about it. I’m sure they would have been super proud of me and even taken me out to Pizza Hut to celebrate. I was consumed in thought over what topping I’d choose for my pizza when I rounded the corner onto my street and saw a puppy on the sidewalk. He was all alone and seemed lost. I picked him up, scared that he might get hit by a car, and I was just about to take him home with me when this man came. The man was big and bearded but looked so very friendly, just like Hagrid in the Harry Potter movies.

  He said he was the puppy’s owner and asked if I could carry it to the car for him. I didn’t know what to do. I tried telling him that I wasn’t allowed to talk to strangers and that he should just take the puppy from me then and there. He didn’t want to, said he was afraid he’d drop it. I felt so bad for the little thing, he was shaking like a leaf in my hands, so I followed the man, knowing full well that I shouldn’t. The man had one of those really big trucks that you need to climb up into, and he asked me to put the puppy in the passenger seat.

  I couldn’t reach. I really, really, really tried, but it was so high and my arms just were not long enough. Eventually I climbed up two of the steps and carefully placed the puppy on the cushion. I gave it a final pat on the head and was just about to go back down when the man’s big arms grabbed me by the waist and shoved me in after the dog. It all happened so quickly, I didn’t even manage to scream or kick or do anything. Before I knew it, I was inside his truck, and the door slammed behind me, almost hitting my leg. I couldn’t open it no matter how hard I pushed the handle. I was petrified and started pounding on the windows as hard as I could, crying frantically and yelling for my parents.

  The next thing I knew, the man had gotten in the driver’s seat and told me that if I didn’t stop this ‘fucking noise’ he’d kill the puppy. I was so scared he meant it that I stopped. I didn’t dare say a word the whole time, and we drove for a very long while. I’m not sure where we went, but I remember falling asleep on the way, and when I woke up, the sun was shining and the puppy was gone. I asked him what he had done to it, and he said that he had taken it home just like he was going to do to me. He said he was going to take me home.

  The assisting deputy who was sent over from Coosa County was a woman in her early twenties named Tyne. Yolanda greeted her, and with practiced ease, Tyne corrected her pronunciation. She had been named after her grandma, she explained, who had always pronounced it “Tawny.” Her blond hair was done up in a French twist, and the only thing missing from the very picture of a southern belle was a broad-brimmed hat and a frilly dress. She seemed nice enough, and despite having obviously gotten the job because her father was the sheriff, she also appeared very competent. After she had been with them for a couple of days, Yolanda acknowledged that her help had been extremely valuable.

  “I think I’ve found something, y’all,” Tyne said and walked swiftly over to Yolanda’s table, pointing at an entry numbered 684. The young woman’s jeans were tight enough to make the sheriff wonder how they didn’t cut off the blood flow to her feet, but the sheriff swiftly pushed those thoughts aside to listen as the new arrival started reading.

  When Tyne had finished, Yolanda mused, “You’re right, this gives us more pieces to the puzzle. It’s interesting that the girl mentions the trip having been long and that she fe
ll asleep during it. That means she could have very well been coming in from another state. The question is, how far could this guy have driven in one sitting?”

  “It’s impossible to say. The maximum time truckers are allowed to drive in one haul is eleven hours, and that’s only if they’ve had a ten-hour rest prior to that—but I’m guessing he wasn’t on the job.”

  “No, probably not. Her notes only mention her dozing off that one time, so I suppose we can assume that he didn’t drive for days on end. That might let us narrow things down a bit and save some much-needed time.” This was likely turning into a federal case, but they didn’t have anything more to go on than speculation and guesswork based on the notebooks. Yolanda didn’t want to hand the case over to the government’s bureaucratic mess of an agency yet, since there it was likely to end up forgotten in a dusty old file cabinet in the basement of some high-security building.

  “All right then, let’s start off with a believable estimate, say sixteen hours. I find it extremely unlikely that the kidnapper would drive non-stop for any longer than that. Let me just first check this one statistic...” Solomon interjected and started hammering wildly on his computer. They watched him click and clack on his mouse and keyboard, manipulating the view on the monitor like a man possessed. Time seemed to stand still until he finally let off a slightly satisfied breath. “I’ve just quickly looked up some numbers. There is an average of 115 children abducted by strangers every year in America. Multiplying that by the years she’s been gone gives us a very large number, and since we can’t really pinpoint when she was abducted, we’re going to have to go back even further, just adding to the already massive pile for us to go through.” He pointed to his screen, where he had opened up the statistics from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

  “All right, your sixteen hours sounds like a good start, but how many states does that cover?” Yolanda moved closer to Solomon to watch as he Google Mapped the distances and wrote down the states within their range. They traded back-and-forth comments on whether to measure from the borders or the middle of the states, and once they were done, she counted the final list. “That makes twenty-seven states. Well, at least we eliminated almost half of the country,” she drawled.

  “Yeah, but that’s a good start, y’all. These cases are never easy,” Tyne said. “I remember my daddy working on one of them a few years back. There was this little boy who went missing, and practically the whole county gathered to look for him. We put up fliers on every light post and announcements on TV and the radio, but despite our efforts, nothing came of it. The boy had last been seen in his family’s backyard before he just up and disappeared, like the earth had swallowed him whole.” Tyne shook her head as she recalled the memory. “Most people thought it was the older brother whodunit. He had a nasty temper, that boy. My daddy put the screws on him something fierce, but the boy swore on the Holy Bible that he hadn’t even been at home when it happened. Turned out later that his alibi was solid as a Crimson Tide linebacker. He had been messing with some kids down at the arcade, and they had him on video, stealing a little girl’s teddy bear and throwing it in the trash, that nasty li’l hoodlum.”

  “Who was it that took the boy?” Solomon turned away from his desk to give Tyne’s story his full attention.

  “We never found out. The case remains unsolved to this day. That poor boy’s body didn’t turn up until weeks later, and by then it had been floating down and ’round the Coosa River for Heaven knows how long. The local coroner said he had been strangled, but any evidence the perpetrator left behind was washed off in the stream. It was a real tragedy, and the family never recovered. It all ended in a messy divorce and custody battles a couple of years later.” She shrugged. “Sometimes the Lord works in such mysterious ways that even the pastor can’t help make any sense of it.”

  Yolanda smiled at Tyne’s account of the events but realized that it wasn’t an appropriate reaction to the subject matter and quickly turned her face somber. It always tugged at her heart strings when people could use religion in a positive way, to make sense of something so terrible. They’d say it was God’s plan and therefore it would be all right. Although not a strong believer in the Almighty herself, despite her mother’s hard-working efforts to turn her Orthodox, she understood the need for solace and found it a beautiful thought. What had really turned her off literal-belief Christianity was how it frowned upon homosexuals. Ever since she was a teenager, she just couldn’t come to terms with discrimination against other people.

  “I guess we’ll have to continue looking through these pages to see if we can find some other clues to help narrow our search. Does she give any more information about the name of her school, teachers, or anything else distinctive?” Yolanda asked, just about to finish the notebook she had been reading.

  “No, there’s not really anything usable so far. We just have her age from our earlier approximation, but since she doesn’t even know how old she is herself, it’s hard to say if we’re even right about that,” Solomon replied, just starting to write his notes into the report.

  “Wait, here’s something,” Tyne exclaimed in obvious excitement. “I think this is it. I’m almost sure we can use this right here...” She pointed. “It should be enough to at least narrow it down to a few people.”

  “What, what is it?” Yolanda and her deputy both practically surged out of their seats before crowding their new coworker.

  755

  I used to play the piano, and I was actually pretty good at it. I started learning when I was four years old and took lessons every week until the day I disappeared. I miss playing the piano. It felt wonderful to run my fingers along the keys and hear the music they created. I even used to think that someday I’d become a grand pianist and perform at concerts, and the audience would throw roses at me while applauding for an encore. That was my Plan B in case I never made it as a magician.

  I was once asked to accompany the chorus at my school’s Christmas concert. I practiced and practiced until I was sure I wouldn’t make any mistakes. Then once we left for the recital, I realized I had forgotten to bring some of my sheet music. I said to myself that everything would be all right; I wouldn’t need it since I knew the piece so well. Deep inside, however, I had doubts, and those doubts ended up getting the best of me. I started playing but fumbled and couldn’t finish the last song. I felt so bad, devastated, like I had done something horrible.

  Once we were back home, I was crying in my room, and my dad came and sat with me. He told me that he was proud of me, that he was so proud of all the hard work I had put into practicing for that concert and that I had done such an amazing job with the songs. He said he knew I could have played that last piece, too, because he had heard me do it so many times. He also said that even the best and most incredible people make mistakes on their journey, and this mistake meant that one day I would become something wonderful. I shouldn’t be sad; I should be happy because that night I had proven I could make a mistake in front of a whole bunch of people but still walk away with dignity.

  Dad had made it better. He somehow always managed to do that. I think that’s why Peter and the Wolf used to be my favorite children’s musical and probably still is. Not because of the flute and the oboe and how we learned which sound each of them makes. Not because of the enjoyable music that came wrapped around a fairly decent story. Not because I had always liked wolves and how mystical they seemed to be. It was because of the main character and how he had been so lucky to have the same name as my dad.

  He looked somber, as if his whole complexion had been overlaid with a grayish hue, and his expression followed along. He attempted a smile and shifted his chair closer to the table as Yolanda entered the room, before leaning toward her and interlacing his fingers. Peter had driven directly from Washington, a whopping thirteen hours behind the wheel, in the hope of getting information about his little girl. Yolanda’s suggestion of having the conversation over the phone had fallen on
deaf ears; he had insisted that he needed to come.

  “You said you had news. What did you find?” he asked, not wasting any time on aimless chitchat. His sorrowful eyes revealed a small glimmer of hope.

  “Well, as I mentioned over the phone, we’re not sure the child in question is your daughter, but since your name—” Yolanda attempted.

  “Sheriff, please!” He swallowed hard, obviously struggling to compose himself. “If you’ve found her body, just tell me. We’ve been waiting so long for news that it’s better to just get it over with.”

  “No, we haven’t found a body,” she quickly responded and watched as his eyes filled with hope once again. Yolanda wasn’t fully up to speed on the appropriate amount to share in situations like these, so she decided to spill some of the beans; he deserved at least that. “What we did find are stacks of notebooks, written by a girl who seems to have been kidnapped. They also contained some details that may identify the girl, and we were hoping you could perhaps help us with that.”

  “Of course!” His response was so eager that he unintentionally raised his voice. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know. Can I see the books? Can I read them?”

  “Not just yet,” she replied calmly, raising her hands in a placating gesture. “My staff and I are still trying to read and analyze the notebooks, so any information you can give me about your daughter would be useful. Could you for example tell me something about her interests? Something we could use as a reference?”

  He bit his lip in thought. His eyes lit up briefly as a sliver of recollection flickered into a smile. “She loved animals—dogs, cats, elephants, you name it. I often found her looking at squirrels up in the trees or crawling under bushes after chipmunks. I used to watch her playing in the yard from our living room window, and every time she discovered a new creature, her whole demeanor would change. The compassion in that child was truly a sight to behold, seeing how she tried to flatten the grass to make it easier for the little critters to travel across it.”