Prodigal

Chapter 19

19

JJ closed the front door behind her, joining Grant and Luther standing in the cold. “So what do you think?” she asked.

“He’s crazy, that’s what I think,” Luther said. “Just like his dad. All this hocus pocus shit.”

“Luther, that’s not particularly helpful,” Grant admonished.

“What? I know people didn’t talk much about Virgil Rutledge, especially by the time you were growing up, but don’t tell me you never heard a*********s about him. He was crazy as a goddamned loon.”

“f**k you, Luther,” JJ said.

“That’s not particularly helpful, either, JJ,” Grant said. “Did Adam tell you about his dreams back then?”

“No,” she said. “I asked him, after the blow-up in class, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Everybody was messed up after the way Danny was taken, but I knew there was something else going on. Something Adam wasn’t telling me.”

“Did you tell Adam about Rachel having asthma?” Grant asked.

Luther stared at JJ, arms crossed.

“No,” she said, looking directly at the deputy. “It never came up.”

Grant pursed his lips, thinking. He looked a little bit like Otto had beaten him up, too. “Would Trooper bark at Otto if he were passing by on the road?”

The gears were slow to turn—too slow by a long shot—but JJ eventually got there. “Driving, no. Walking, I doubt it. Unless he did something Trooper disagreed with. So you believe Adam?”

Luther snorted.

“Luther, if you want to wait in the vehicle, I’ll be there in a minute,” Grant said.

JJ almost stuck her tongue out at the deputy as he clomped down the steps. She may have, if Grant hadn’t been watching her, and she hadn’t been waiting for his answer.

“I think Adam believes it,” Grant said, once Luther was gone. “And whether what Adam said he saw is… real or not, it’s something to think about. We’ve got a chopper going up in half an hour. They’ll be looking for places—including cabins—somebody could be holding Rachel. And I’ll have somebody double-check with your other neighbor about hearing Trooper yesterday. But I’m not about to walk into a meeting with federal agents and say my psychic friend—whose best friend was kidnapped when he was a kid—says the girl’s father took her.”

Drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, Luther must have felt JJ glaring at him. He pointed at his watch through the windshield, and Grant held up a couple of fingers in acknowledgment.

The jerk could damn well wait thirty seconds more. JJ put her hand on her hip, feeling more solid, more grounded, now that she had some distance from Adam. “I’m not saying I believe him, either—I don’t think Otto had anything to do with it—but no matter what Luther says, Adam’s not crazy.”

Grant just nodded in that way that said, I hear you, but I’m not committing to anything. “I’ll let you know if I hear something. Keep Evie close.”

JJ bit back an automatic, angry reply, because she knew Grant—unlike her asshole ex-husband—wasn’t challenging her ability to raise her daughter. Instead she said, “Good luck,” and patted the puffy shoulder of his winter coat as he left.

Luther turned around in her driveway too fast for JJ’s liking, and the Sheriff’s vehicle rolled towards the road and out of sight. People said what happened to Danny—and the fact that his body was never found—had cracked something deep inside Grant’s father, that he’d never been the same man after that. Grant was younger than his father had been then, and to be honest, softer. No, not softer—kinder. She hated to think what would happen to Grant if he didn’t find Rachel.

It was finally starting to look like real daylight out. JJ stepped down into the yard and moved the bicycle Adam had nearly tripped over the night before. That girl. What would happen to Evie if her best friend was never found? Would she weather it all but end up married to an abusive asshole? Although JJ felt it wasn’t a bad trade for an amazing daughter. Or would Evie end up stuck at this moment in time, in a perpetual limbo, unable to form meaningful connections with anyone, a ghost of the person she could have been?

Not if JJ could help it.

She trotted back inside the house.

“Everything okay?” Adam asked, still sitting at the table, still obviously in pain.

“Fine,” JJ said, heading for the kitchen and pulling down plates. “You haven’t eaten, have you?”

“No.”

“You take cream and sugar with your coffee?”

“Yes, please.”

She loaded a tray with coffee and muffins and carried it to the table. Adam immediately shoved half a banana muffin in his mouth, wincing a little at his torn lip. “Thanks, JJ.”

“Don’t get yourself too worked up,” she said. “I’m a working mother, so they’re store-bought.”

JJ stared at the bran muffin on her plate, then switched it out for one of the blueberry ones. “You ever go see anybody about this stuff? A professional, I mean?” she asked, popping an unsatisfying bite of muffin in her mouth. Too much sweet, too little substance. She should’ve stuck with the bran.

“Are you asking if I’ve been to a hooker?” Adam deadpanned, but he couldn’t hold off the grin for long. With that damn dimple, he probably hadn’t paid for more than half a dozen drinks in his life, much less for s*x.

“You don’t shave sometime soon, a hooker’s the only kind of woman who’ll be interested,” she said, pointing to some stray muffin caught in his stubble. “Not to mention that fancy shiner you’re getting. Answer the question: have you been to a shrink?”

He wiped his chin, then looked at the napkin to see what he’d caught. “Huh. Thanks. I went once. The school referred me to somebody in Plattsville, right after Danny. I didn’t have much to say. So you still don’t believe me about Otto?”

JJ topped up her coffee, watching a slight post-adrenaline tremor in her hand as she poured. She might have to make another pot. “I know Otto. He and Dorothy and Rachel have lived next door for over five years. Plus, if you’re right about Trooper, he wouldn’t have barked at Otto. I’m pretty confident the man didn’t harm his own daughter.”

Adam didn’t speak, but his eyebrows did the same funny curl toward his forehead—like upside-down commas—that they’d done as a child when he was considering Danny’s latest scheme.

“Pretty soon, they’ll have all manner of law enforcement on the ground and in the sky—thank God—and if anyone can find Rachel, they can.” JJ sighed. “That’s what my logical brain says. But when you showed up on my doorstep last night, I asked how you heard about the girl so fast, and you looked surprised. You didn’t know, did you?”

“Not for sure,” Adam admitted.

“So you had some kind of dream about her—and my barking dog—and you drove from where?”

“A little bitty town outside of Harrisburg.”

JJ shook her head, trying not to look at her fingers while she did the traveling math. “Jesus, what’d you do—just jump in your car and go?”

“Pretty much,” Adam said, picking at the final muffin on his plate.

He was too skinny. His face was drawn and there’d been no fat to mitigate the bruising on his muscled torso. One morning of muffins wasn’t going to make that right, but still… JJ set the remaining pastries on Adam’s plate.

“Finish them,” she said. “I know I’m stepping outside the bounds of the Tulley family character here, but I have to think that you showing up here means something, even if I don’t understand it. That you’re here because you’re meant to be here, and that together, we’re meant to do what law enforcement can’t. Or won’t.”

Like maybe not care if the bastard makes it to trial.

“So what do we do?”

JJ got up and retrieved the cold packs from the counter. She handed one to Adam, and set the other on the table with a clean dish towel. “Here, put this on your ribs. Over your shirt is fine. When you’re done eating, wrap the other one and hold it on your cheek.”

Adam’s eyes strayed to an elastic bandage in the first aid kit, and he raised an eyebrow.

“Mummies don’t have lips,” JJ said, and Adam chuckled, even as the lines of pain in his face deepened.

Elastic bandages—and the little metal claw fasteners shaped like dog bones—had fascinated them as children. They’d once wrapped Danny’s head in one, and he’d walked around JJ’s house, arms outstretched, wide eyes staring and lips smacking. When JJ pointed out that mummies don’t have lips, for some reason it had set them off, and they’d all laughed until they cried. That is, until Danny knocked over a lamp with his mummy arms. Seven years old at the time, they were all terrified of JJ’s dad.

“Did your dad spank you for the lamp?”

JJ shook her head, still smiling, and a tear snuck out of the corner of her eye. She quickly wiped it and pointed at the bandage. “We don’t wrap rib injuries anymore. It restricts the breathing, and may increase the likelihood of pneumonia.” She opened the bottle of pain relievers and put a couple next to Adam’s coffee. “Take these. If we’re gonna figure this out, you gotta be as close to a hundred percent as possible. For that matter, so do I.”

JJ’s head had the dry ache of too little sleep, so she downed a couple with her coffee. Then she began pacing slowly around the living room with her mug. “If we go on the assumption that there is something to learn from your dreams, it seems to me there are two ways to look at it, like dreams in general. What you see could be literal, or it could be metaphorical.”

Adam looked slightly comical with a faded, pink unicorn dish towel covering half his face. “Okay, if I get a vote, I’d say they feel literal.”

“Or Option Number Three,” JJ said, ignoring his vote, “somewhere in between. Could be another father figure.”

“I’d imagine law enforcement’s already looking at anyone who fits that bill. Do we know for sure that Otto is her biological father?”

JJ stopped suddenly, slopping a few drops of coffee from her cup. “What, it’s not enough to slander her father, now you have to slander Rachel’s mom, too?”

Adam held up the hand formerly securing his rib ice pack—albeit slowly and not very high—in penitent surrender.

“Fine,” JJ said. “I’ll interrogate Dorothy as soon as Otto leaves. Alone. What about you?”

“I should talk to Iris. Maybe she remembers something about my dreams I don’t, or maybe she has a better understanding of them than I do.” He adjusted the ice pack, then winced.

“You’ve gotten awfully wimpy in your old age,” JJ said, grinning.

“It’s not that. I just remembered I don’t have a car. Well, not a usable car. I kinda drove mine into the ditch at the bottom of the road.”

“Seriously?” JJ asked, visualizing the spot. “You think we can push it out?”

Adam plopped both ice packs on the table. “It’s a small car, but I don’t think I could push a tricycle out of a ditch right now.”

JJ sat back in her chair, considering. “That’s okay. I’ve got a couple of quick errands to take care of. I can drop you off on the way, and that’ll give Otto time to leave.”

“Okay, then,” Adam said, rising from his chair in a series of furniture-gripping stages. “I guess we should be moving.”

“Think you need a walker, old man?” JJ asked.

“Don’t forget,” he said, “I may seem old, but I’ll always be seventy-two days younger than you.”

JJ grabbed her coat and put her boots on, taking a moment to tie the laces more tightly this time. “That’s only true if we die at the same time.” Then she shook her car keys. “Ready?”