The Taking of Carly Bradford

Tyler shifted his weight and checked his cell phone one more time, even though it had not vibrated since he’d arrived at the hospital. He replaced the phone, then took a deep breath to quiet his increasing anxiety, his need to do something.

Finally, he gave in to the gentle urgings of one of the nurses and sat in a hard plastic chair near the bed. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his hat in one hand. He examined the band closely, for no good reason. He just needed somewhere to look that wasn’t Dee—or the smears of Dee’s blood that still streaked his clothes.

How could he have been so blind? Tyler knew that deer leapt out on that stretch of road all the time, yet he’d trundled through, his mind so on Carly that he had become oblivious to everything else.

Lord, I could have killed Dee. Please let me be more alert and aware.

Not that he was normally unaware of Dee. In fact, he’d been increasingly aware of her since she’d arrived in Mercer, with her sharp wit and soft Southern accent. He looked forward to their lunchtime meetings at the café, her questions about Mercer’s residents and history, her thoughts about life in the South.

Tyler rotated his hat in his hands. He enjoyed the way she looked, too, despite the weight she said she wanted to lose. He didn’t get that, the weight loss thing, even though he could stand to lose a few pounds, as well. He liked Dee’s curves, the way her dark hair caressed her shoulders with the soft curls at the tips. She barely came up to his shoulder, so she was maybe five-two, but she seemed just right to him.

What is taking so long? He glanced at his still silent phone again. Never had he so badly wanted to be in two places at once, to see how she was doing here, but also at the scene of her attack. Maybe I should let Maggie take over here. Then he immediately dismissed the thought. Wayne and Fletcher were certainly capable of handling the gathering of any evidence, whereas Maggie had no training with crime victims. He needed to be here when Dee awoke, not Maggie.

He paused. Interesting friends, those two, the New Yorker who had adopted Mercer as her home and the Southerner who had seemed so lost a few months ago. Maggie had been tough on Dee at first; now they were friends. Maggie could be surprisingly hard on the writers at the retreat, even though she was younger than most, maybe thirty-one or so.

Hmm. How old was Dee? Tyler shifted in the hard chair, trying to find any kind of comfortable position, as he attempted to do the math of Dee’s life. He looked again at her face, so oddly relaxed now under the crisscrossing bandages. He knew she’d been married for about ten years, and that her son had been eight when he died three years ago. That would make her, what, early to mid-thirties? She still moved like a younger woman, though…

He stood, pulling his phone out again, as if the ring tone had stopped working for some reason. Still nothing. He glanced at the clock again. Stop getting distracted.

He paced slowly, quietly. There had been too many distractions lately. Focus on the case. What if Dee’s mumblings about the sandals were right? Were the sandals yet one more thing they had overlooked? He knew without a doubt they had searched that stream bank. With a child Carly’s age, the stream always got checked first.

Yet all previous cases of missing children in Mercer had been about runaways, all of whom had returned home quickly. In his ten years on the force, nothing like this had happened. A true kidnapping. And although he’d gained a lot of confidence and experience in the four years since he’d become chief, Mercer did not lend itself to giving him experience in major crimes. Robberies, assaults, an arson or two, the occasional domestic dispute—these were routine. But since the town had separated itself from the county and organized its own law enforcement department apart from the county sheriff’s team, the police had handled only one murder and no other major crime.

Tyler’s mouth twisted grimly, and he dropped back down in the chair. Of course, Mercer’s low crime rate gave him plenty of time to obsess about a missing little girl. The very idea of someone swiping a kid filled Tyler with a stomach-churning revulsion. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would be cruel to a child, and he knew most kids were found within a day or so—or not at all. Whether or not they were found depended a lot on the initial investigation.

The initial investigation. Tyler felt out of his league and terrified of making another misstep. He had made plenty in this case, even with the FBI and the state police helping and his best friend, former NYPD detective Fletcher MacAllister, looking over his shoulder. An Amber alert had not been issued due to the lack of evidence that Carly was in immediate danger; no proof existed that she’d been taken as opposed to running away. He had told Carly’s parents—and the media—too much about their investigation. The lack of evidence had panicked him into asking the wrong questions of the wrong people, leading to a lot of misinformation in the press, and the Bradfords were even more devastated by the publicity. Every day the case had grown colder as early spring rains washed away the last semblance of evidence. There were, in fact, no leads at all, and even now no evidence that she’d been kidnapped. Not even a clean indication of a crime scene.

Yet everyone in Mercer knew that the happy princess had not run away. Tyler ached to prove it. To find her.

He shifted in the chair. Stop whining. Focus on the facts. What few there are.

The Bradfords had no known enemies. Jack and Nancy Bradford were beloved members of the community with no apparent enemies. Even though Jack was a Portsmouth surgeon, he’d been out of medical school only a few years. He’d never been sued and only had one complaint against him registered with the American Medical Association—and the AMA had cleared him in that case. Nancy had given birth to Carly when she and Jack were still in college, barely making ends meet. They were a family made close by hardship, and they adored each other. Almost no one Tyler interviewed had a bad word to say about them.

Carly often played in the woods, but at no set time. The only conclusion anyone could draw was that it had been a random act, a moment of opportunity. A cruel stranger who had happened to see the lovely child skipping along after her dog and decided to…

“Tyler?” The voice came from behind him, and he turned. The young woman who stood there—tall, blond and exceptionally thin—could have been mistaken for a model, except for the white coat and the perpetually exhausted look of an E.R. physician. As police chief of a small town without a hospital, Tyler knew all the E.R. docs in Portsmouth and Manchester. “Hello, Anna,” he said quietly.

Her warm smile was genuine but looked as tired as her eyes. “Hi, Tyler. She one of your Mercer folks?”

“Yes. And a friend.”

Anna nodded. “Then you might want to keep an eye on her for a few days.” She slipped her hands into her jacket pockets and her doctor mode took over. “She took quite a blow across the face. She says it was from a tree branch, and I don’t doubt that. No sign of concussion, though, which is good news. As you can see, we’ve stitched up the cuts and given her something for the pain.”

“Pain.” Tyler took a deep breath. “Will she be coherent if I talked to her about what happened?”

Anna paused, focusing on his eyes, considering the question. After a moment, she glanced at Dee, then shook her head. “She has a lot of meds in her now, but she’s asleep, not unconscious. She should stir soon, but she’ll still be loopy. She didn’t make a whole lot of sense before the meds, but now, you may not be able to tell when it’s Dee talking and when it’s the drugs doing the speaking. She needs to rest for a day or so, but she’ll be okay and far more able to tell you her story tomorrow. The nurse is prepping the release paperwork, so they’ll bring her out in a few minutes. Mostly, she needs quiet.”

Tyler nodded. “Thanks. We appreciate your help.”

Anna paused, then put a hand on his forearm. “If she needs me, page me. I’ll meet you here.”

He wrapped his fingers briefly around hers, then she returned to her work.

When Tyler returned from the treatment area, Maggie stood immediately. “How is she?”

Tyler held up the two plastic bags the hospital had loaned him, one holding a pair of white sandals, the other the contents of Dee’s pockets. “Shook up. Her face is all scratched up, and her left eye is black and swollen shut. Her doctor thought she’d broken her nose, but it’s just badly bruised.”

She looked up at Tyler, then pointed at the bag with the sandals. “What are those?”

He motioned for her to sit, then dropped into a chair next to her. “She kept mumbling about these all the way here. I couldn’t even get her to let go of them. She kept repeating that she’d heard a voice in the woods, demanding that she drop the sandals. She ran, but the voice chased her.” He paused, watching her closely. “She says they’re Carly’s.”

Maggie fell back in the chair as if she’d been punched, and her voice became a tight, hushed whisper. “Carly’s? How could they be Carly’s?”

He shrugged. “She said she found them by the stream.”

Maggie straightened. “That’s impossible. We searched every inch of that stream bank, the entire run of it. The whole town did.”

“I know.”

She shook her head. “And we’ve had other false finds. They can’t be Carly’s.”

“I know.”

“It’s almost too weird to believe.” She paused. “If I didn’t know Dee, I’d think she was…” Her voice trailed off, and she seemed to sag a little.

“Hallucinating?” Tyler asked.

Reluctantly, Maggie nodded.

“Except she didn’t smack herself in the face.”

They fell silent a moment, then Maggie pointed at the other bag. “What’s in that one?”

“The stuff from her pockets.” He turned the bag so they both could see the contents: a cell phone, keys, a pack of mints and a Swiss Army knife. He frowned at them. “She carries a Swiss Army knife?”

“Everywhere she goes. I think it belonged to her husband. Dee isn’t crazy about carrying a purse.” Maggie looked down at the floor a second, then back up at him. Squaring her shoulders, she stood. “What if she’s right? What if these are Carly’s and someone did attack Dee? What then?”

Tyler rose as well, watching her face closely, trying to read her meaning. Was this about Dee? Or the fact that those woods bordered the retreat’s property? Fletcher had once told Tyler that Maggie seemed to adopt all the writers at the colony, taking them under her wing no matter what their age. Encouraging, sympathetic, and patient with the creative egos, Maggie became their sister, mother, or daughter, depending on their needs. He also knew that Dee held a special place in Maggie’s heart. Tyler saw that in her now, the light of deep compassion in her hazel eyes.

He took her hand in his. “Then we’ll protect her. We’ll get her story and investigate. We’ll call the FBI and ask for their help again. We’ll have to revisit a lot of what we’ve done on Carly’s case.”

Maggie breathed deeply, her voice barely above a whisper. “If they are…I mean…would this mean she could still be in the area? Does this mean that Carly is still alive?”

THREE

Somewhere over her head a door slammed violently, and a scream of pure fury echoed throughout the house. Carly Bradford whirled away from the narrow window of the basement room and dropped back down on the bed beneath it. She scooted close to the headboard and drew her knees up close to her chest, waiting, her eyes locked on the overhead vent that allowed in cool air and a lot of noise from upstairs. She followed the booted footsteps as they crossed the ceiling, then thudded down the stairs into the basement and across the short passage outside her door. There was an odd sound of rustling metal that she could never quite figure out, then keys rattled, the lock scraped and the door swung open.

Her captor entered, face red with anger, and Carly knew immediately that the sandals had not been found.