Mountain Sheriff

“Hey!” Charity cried.

The dark raincoat didn’t turn. Behind her Charity heard Sarah come out of the post office. “Charity?”

The figure dropped the mail and took off at a run down the alley.

“What in the world?” Sarah demanded, charging out to scoop up the wet mail and help Charity to her feet as the dark raincoat disappeared around the corner.

Charity took the mail from Sarah, her gaze still on the street where the figure had vanished. She heard an engine start in the distance. A few seconds later, a black pickup with tinted windows roared off two blocks away.

MITCH TUCKED the baby spoon in his pocket as Florie swept back into the bungalow on a gust of wind and rain.

“How’s the client?” he asked, trying to cover the fact that she’d startled him.

“Problems of the heart,” she said with a wave of her hand. “She’s going to call me back. Have you figured out where Nina has gone?”

He shook his head. “When she arrived she didn’t have a job, you said.”

Florie nodded. “She asked me about a bungalow, I said I had one, she said she’d take it and then she asked me how to get to Dennison Ducks.”

So Nina had been confident she was going to get a job at the decoy plant. It was the biggest business in town, and maybe Nina had experience that made her confident she’d be hired. But Mitch also knew jobs at the plant were hard to come by. Nor were there many openings, because wages and benefits were good and with so few jobs in Timber Falls, employees tended to stay.

“What kind of paperwork did you get her to fill out before you rented her the bungalow?” Mitch asked, hoping for a clue as to Nina Monroe’s life before she showed up here.

“None, other than her name,” Florie said with a shake of her head. “I just go by whatever vibe I pick up.”

“Vibes, instead of a former address or references?” he asked, unable to hide his disbelief.

“I’ll have you know vibes are much more reliable than references.”

He sighed. “But you told me her vibes were bad.”

Florie flushed. “Actually, no, I said they were weird. I remember thinking she was awfully nervous. From her aura I could tell she had man trouble. But with women that’s usually the case, isn’t it?”

“But you rented to her, anyway?”

“She had cash,” Florie said with an embarrassed shrug.

He counted to ten. “She get any phone calls while she was here?”

“Just one. From some woman. Sounded old. Maybe her mother, or grandmother. Nina didn’t want to the take the call but finally did. I heard a little of it. Nina said, ‘How did you find me? I told you to leave me alone.’ She paused, then said, ‘Right, you’re worried about me. That’s a laugh. Don’t call here again. You’re just going to mess things up.”’

Not bad for hearing only a “little” of a one-sided conversation. “The woman ever call again?”

Florie shook her head. “And before you ask, the number was blocked. You know, on my caller ID. I only checked because I didn’t like the vibes I got from the caller. Just like what I’m picking up now about Nina. Worse vibes than before, you know?”

He knew, thinking of the missing woman and the baby spoon in his pocket.

Chapter Four

Back at his office, Mitch closed the door and went straight to his computer. He typed in Nina Monroe’s name and her social security number Wade had given him—not surprised by the results.

Nina Monroe had lied about not only her social security number, but her name, as well.

“I’m going to get some doughnuts,” Sissy said, sticking her head in the door.

“Lemon-filled?”

She nodded and smiled. “You need anything be fore I go?”

He shook his head and waited until he heard her leave before he went down to the basement where the old files were kept.

He dug out Angela Dennison’s file, dusted it off and took it back upstairs.

Sheriff Bill “Hud” Hudson had been like a father to Mitch, as well as a mentor and friend. Hud had also been a first-rate sheriff and the reason Mitch had taken the same career path, instead of following his father’s example and becoming a drunk.

Hud had been sheriff at the time of Angela’s disappearance. At first, it was believed that the baby had been kidnapped. But no ransom demand was ever made and no body was ever found.

Not far into the file, Mitch started seeing a pattern, one he didn’t like. In these types of cases, the parents are usually the first suspects, and Wade and Daisy Dennison were no exceptions.

In Sheriff Hudson’s interview with Daisy, she testified that she didn’t recall seeing Wade until the baby was discovered missing the next morning. She’d said she’d gone to bed early and didn’t know when Wade had gotten home.

Wade, however, said he returned home at his usual time to find that Daisy had been drinking. They’d argued. She’d gone to bed. He’d slept in the den until he was wakened by the nanny early the next morning screaming that the baby was gone.

The nanny, Alma Bromdale, said she’d put the baby to bed about eight that night and gone to bed early herself. She’d taken some cold medicine that made her drowsy and thought that was why she hadn’t heard anything in the adjacent room where the baby was sleeping.

That meant none of the three had an alibi.

Alma Bromdale. Mitch wrote down the name in his notebook. The nanny had been with the Dennisons for more than two years. She’d been hired just before the Dennisons first daughter, Desiree, was born. Alma was twenty-five at the time, from Coos Bay and had listed her job experience as one previous nanny job, baby-sitting and a nanny course through the adult-education program at the high school. She must be about fifty-two now.

Alma had been fired the day after the presumed kidnapping and had left Timber Falls. Mitch checked the telephone directory online. There was only one Bromdale in Coos Bay—Harriet Bromdale. A relative? He wrote down that name, as well, wondering what in the hell he was doing.

So he found an old baby’s spoon with a Dennison duck head and “Angela” engraved on it. And so Nina Monroe was the right age and was now missing. Did he really think Nina might be the missing Angela?

He looked down at the file again, shaking his head. He didn’t know what to think. Hud had noted in his interview with Alma that she’d seemed scared and upset, both natural for someone who’d just learned that the baby she was responsible for had been stolen—and from the adjacent room.

Alma had admitted that Wade and Daisy fought and, yes, she’d overheard them arguing about the paternity of the baby. Wade didn’t think it was his.

Mitch swore under his breath.

The alleged kidnapper had climbed the trellis to the second-story room, but was believed to have taken the baby down the back stairs and out through a rear door on the first floor. Unfortunately, Sheriff Hudson had noted Wade had initiated a search of the area, using a few Dennison Duck employees, before calling the sheriff, and they’d tracked all over and destroyed any evidence there might have been outside the baby’s bedroom window.

Baby Angela had been wearing a pink nightshirt. The only other item taken from the room was the quilt from her bed. Nothing else. No baby spoon, but Mitch knew that the spoon could have easily been overlooked.

He continued down the list of suspects to the live-in housekeeper who’d been fired a week before the abduction, a woman by the name of Georgette Bonners.

Georgette had been angry and, like Alma, had nothing good to say about the Dennisons. She had also alluded to the fighting and the question of the baby’s paternity.

On the night of the abduction, Georgette said she was with her husband, Tim. He confirmed it. Both were now deceased.