Chapter 5 #2
She looked at him in surprise and laughed in his face, “Oh, right. So, I’m also supposed to be doing that while I’m sitting here talking to you, right?”
He blinked, then let her go, muttering, “Right. So, it was your nosy neighbor.” He quickly opened the door, smiled at the officer. “Good afternoon, Officer.”
The cop eyed him suspiciously.
He smiled his genial I’m perfect smile and added, “Uh, there appears to be some sort of misunderstanding.” He looked at his daughter and said, “You need to clarify this, honey.”
“Yes. I surely will.” She walked over to the police officer and shared, “I’ve asked my father to leave, but he’s refused and is bothering me.”
The police officer immediately turned to her father, who stared at her in shock.
Gail repeated, “So now I’m asking again, please leave.”
The fury slid through his gaze, and he was red in the face. “You need to be careful, young lady,” he threatened, his voice barely above a hiss, “that you don’t make a mistake.”
She nodded. “Yes, I will keep that threat in mind.” Then she turned to the officer and said, “Please escort him out. And please provide any protection as is needed for my neighbor who called this in.” She pointed to the door beside hers.
Immediately the two uniformed men stepped aside and waited and watched to see what her father would do. He brushed past her, hissing at the policemen, “Don’t touch me.” And then he was gone.
One officer followed him down to make sure he left, and the other one turned to her and asked, “Are you okay?”
She released a long shuddering sigh. “I don’t know,” she admitted, taking a deep breath.
“I need to figure out a way to deal with what appears to be long-term blind obedience to my vengeful father, now confronted by a very troubling awakening to the control issues of a lifetime. I’m not sure anybody has any answers. I surely don’t.”
He looked at her sympathetically and offered, “If you need more help—”
She nodded and thanked him. “I may need to change the locks on the door again. He just found out he doesn’t have a key anymore, but he has a way of making things happen.”
He replied immediately, “That’s probably the best thing to do then.”
“But it may not stop him.”
“In that case, contact us again. And worst case,” he added, “you’ll have to get a restraining order, but you need a reason for that first. And it doesn’t sound like he’ll make it easy on you either way.”
“Nope. He sure won’t,” she agreed, trying to control the bitterness in her tone. “He’s a big man in town. What he says goes.”
He smiled and told her, “Yet you are a person in your own right, and you have options. I get that, from your perspective, it doesn’t look like you have any options at all, and that can be a hard thing for you to get your head wrapped around.”
She shook her head. “He’s powerful, as in very powerful.”
He frowned at her and asked, “You want to tell me more about the problem here?”
She shook her head. “I just need to figure out what I will do.” When he hesitated, she smiled and added, “I don’t think he would cause physical harm to me.”
“But you don’t sound very sure.”
“Well, he has a temper, as you saw,” she pointed out. “So, … I’ll assume that he will come to his senses, but I also can’t be sure.”
He nodded, his gaze thoughtful as he looked at her and shared, “I have a daughter, and she’s somewhere around your age.
I always warn her about the people in her world.
Usually when it comes to violence, it’s somebody in our own world, rather than strangers,” he told her. “So, I want you to keep that in mind.”
And, with that, he was gone.
This time, Riley had a flashlight he’d borrowed from Derek.
Rory was now beside him as they moved with a surety and a speed that Riley hadn’t shown the first time.
Jacob was supposed to come with Riley, but Rory volunteered at the last minute.
Riley was not one to turn down the help.
When they finally came to a stop between a left-hand and a right-hand tunnel, the younger man looked at him and noted, “You’re moving at a much faster clip than earlier. ”
He nodded but didn’t elaborate.
Rory sighed and asked, “So, you want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Nope.”
After another noncommittal sigh, he added, “The others think I’m an idiot for coming down here.”
He shot him a look and laughed. “And a lot of people would say that I was an idiot for coming down here with you.”
The kid looked at him in surprise and asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know you. You’ve been belligerent with me before. And, the last time that you were down here, your cousin met a very bad end.”
“Not end,” he corrected immediately.
“No, maybe not his end down here but a very bad accident.”
“But I didn’t do it,” Rory declared, “and I’ve been down here lots, looking and trying to figure out just what did happen.”
“And what did you figure out?”
He shrugged. “As far as I can tell, it was an accident, but nobody wants to believe it.”
“Of course not,” Riley said. “Everybody wants somebody to blame.”
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Rory asked, turning to him.
“Everybody thinks it’s somebody else. Everybody thinks it’s something else.
And yet it’s really simple. Yet it’s not even simple,” he retracted.
“It’s just … sad because accidents do happen.
There are tunnels. There is water inside some of the tunnels.
There are all kinds of places here to head to the wharfs, where they can get shanghaied as they always were in olden times. ”
Riley nodded. “Something happened to your cousin, and, whether it was deliberate or accidental, we may never know.”
“And that will drive my uncle absolutely batty,” Rory noted.
“And yet does Derek have a reason for why he thinks it was deliberate?”
“A reason? I think he would probably just say instincts.” When Riley just stared at him, Rory replied, “And you’ll probably just laugh at that too. Surprised?”
“Hell no,” he stated, with the wave of the light around. “Instincts have kept me alive more times than I care to admit,” he shared. “So, no, I do not take instincts lightly, particularly the instincts of somebody who has a great love for the victim. That’s usually the strongest radar we have.”
Rory frowned at that. “For a while there, I really wanted to believe that something was going on.”
“Because?”
“Because I wanted, … I wanted there to be a reason for this to happen.” He shook his head “But the longer we keep looking and the longer we find nothing, it feels very much like there is no why. Like there is no big mystery. It happened, and we are left to deal with it. And that’s the part that I think my uncle is really struggling with, as you can imagine and understand why,” Rory said. “So, what can we do?”
Riley responded, “The only thing we can do is try to find as many answers as are available and go from there.”
“And if there are no answers?” Rory asked.
“That is always the hardest. If there are no answers, you are left with a lifetime of wondering and what ifs,” he explained, “and nobody likes those.”
The young man walked beside him. “You seem to be pretty certain that the dog is here.”
“I’m certain that the dog was here,” he clarified, his tone simple.
“But why though?”
He shone the flashlight on one of the paths off to the side. “Because of that.”
Rory stopped, looked at it. “Dog tracks.”
“Dog tracks that are high on the side wall because this passage in particular, which is lower, has had some water seep through,” he detailed, “and the dog was staying out of the water.”
“But you can’t know that it was Timmy’s dog,” Rory countered, staring at the tracks still.
“Sure, I don’t know it’s that dog, but I do know it’s a good-size dog, like a German shepherd, and that most people don’t come down here with animals.
Most animals don’t like it down here,” he pointed out, “and I’m not saying Cain does either, yet he was trained for water ops.
All I’m saying is that I’m pretty sure the dog I’m looking for was down here. ”
Rory shook his head. “Those tracks haven’t dried, but, as you’re about to tell me, there hasn’t been a chance for them to dry because they are in such a moist area, which is very true. So, it still doesn’t mean that the same dog is here.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Riley agreed, “but I heard him earlier.”
“You what?” Rory stopped in his tracks to stare at him.
“I have really excellent hearing, and I’m pretty-damn sure I heard a dog, which is also why I’m back down here right now.”
Rory frowned at him and asked, “And if you’re wrong?”
He laughed at him. “If I’m wrong, there’s no foul, is there? If I’m wrong, I wasted an hour or two trying to find him, but, if I’m not wrong,” he added, “just think of what that means.”
Rory shrugged. “It just means that the dog could still be here, but it doesn’t mean shit about my cousin. We still don’t know anything about Timmy.”
“No, maybe not,” Riley acknowledged, “and maybe that’s part of what’s going on here. But I would say that the better part of whatever’s going on, Cain knows about it. While it might be a little hard to extract the information from him, it’s still doable and worth trying.”
Rory stopped and snorted. “Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. It also depends on how traumatized Cain is and whether he’s been well-treated or mistreated. So, stay tuned because once I find the dog, then I’ll go into the next part.”
“And what’s that?” He frowned at him.
“I thought we understood that already.” He chuckled. “The next part is finding out what happened to your cousin.” With that, Riley forged ahead.