Chapter 10 Jo
Chapter 10
Jo
Jo pulled up in Luther Yount’s driveway, turned off the engine, and sat for a moment, thinking about how she’d approach this. Connecting with kids had never been her strong suit. She’d dealt with too many wayward teenagers, reckless because of their immature brains and surging hormones and the general stupidity of youth. Too often, her warnings to straighten up fell on deaf ears, which led to the predictable consequences: smashed cars, broken bones, shocked parents who could not believe their Johnny would do such a thing. Jo herself had never gone through any such wayward phase, and she had little patience for kids who did.
Callie Yount was not one of them. The girl was homeschooled, and her most frequent companions were of the four-legged kind, not the sort of bad influence that can lead a girl astray. It was Callie’s innocence that now posed a problem for Jo: How to sensitively question a girl whose closest relative—in fact, her only living relative—was a suspect in a probable abduction?
She climbed out of the cruiser and caught a whiff of farm smells: Manure. Hay. The scent of sun-warmed fields of clover and timothy. Luther’s cabin, which he’d built himself, was modest but sturdy, designed with an engineer’s eye to withstand heavy snowfalls and ice storms. She’d visited the house this past winter, and she remembered it as dusty and cluttered with books and hanging bundles of herbs. On that visit, Luther had not been particularly welcoming; she doubted he’d be any friendlier this time.
She knocked on the door and Luther appeared, wearing his usual scowl and baggy overalls. At once he stepped out of the house, closing the door behind him.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Yount,” she said. “I’m here to—”
“You finished with my truck? Can I have it back?”
“It’s still at the state lab.”
“I have a farm to run, and I need it. How long’s it going to be there?”
“As long as it takes. I’m not here about your truck. I’d like to speak to your granddaughter.”
He glanced back at the closed door, then at Jo. Said, softly: “Why?”
“She spent the morning with Zoe. Maybe Callie knows something or heard something that could help us.”
“If you talk to my granddaughter, someone else has to be there. It can’t be just you.”
“Of course. That’s standard procedure when we question children.”
“Then I can stay?”
After a pause, Jo nodded. “You can stay.”
He opened the door, waved her in. “She’s doing her homework.”
On this beautiful afternoon, homework was the last thing most teenagers would want to be doing. Certainly not the excruciating-looking homework that Jo saw spread out across the kitchen table where Callie was sitting. The textbook, Introduction to Calculus , lay open to a page filled with incomprehensible symbols. Who on earth made a fourteen-year-old kid study calculus on a summer’s day?
An engineering professor. That’s who.
Callie saw Jo and immediately put down her pencil. “Did you find her?”
“No. Not yet. That’s why I need to talk to you.” Jo pulled out a chair and sat down at the table, facing the girl. “Tell me about your morning with Zoe, beginning to end. Everything she said. Everything you remember.”
“Maggie already asked me about it.”
“Maggie? When?”
Luther said, “Hours ago. Right after she got back from Maiden Pond.”
“I told her everything I could remember,” said Callie. “She and her friends are going to find Zoe.”
“She and her friends are not police officers.”
Luther grunted. “Maybe they should be.”
Jo paused to rein in her irritation. Managed to say, in a civil tone: “Maggie Bird means well, Mr. Yount. But she has no role in this investigation.”
“Seems to me she’s a step ahead of you here. Just like she was back in February.”
That stung because it was true. It wasn’t Jo who’d rescued Callie from the abandoned farmhouse where she’d been held prisoner. It was Maggie who’d swooped in and freed the girl, Maggie who’d delivered her to the hospital.
Jo took a calming breath. “All right, Callie. How about you just tell me what you told Maggie?”
“You could ask her.”
And she’d never let me forget it.
“No, I want to hear it from you. Tell me how you met Zoe Conover.”
Callie nodded. “It was real hot yesterday. I got done with my chores early, so I asked Grandpa if he’d drop me off at the pond, where a lot of the kids hang out. Usually I ride my bike there, but my chain’s broken and Grandpa was going to the post office anyway. I figured I’d just go with him.”
“So you got to the pond, and ...?”
“I saw this girl there, swimming. She went underwater for a really long time, and I got worried that maybe she’d drowned, so I swam out to her and she popped right up. Told me she was training herself to hold her breath for three whole minutes, and could I hold mine that long? We had this contest, and she beat me every time. She said she took the lifeguard test and she passed it, but they won’t let her work as a lifeguard because she’s not sixteen yet. She wants to go to the Olympics, and that means she has to train every single day.”
This was now getting into the weeds. “Tell me how she came home with you. Whose idea was it?”
“Both of us, I think. I told her I had goats and a cow, and would she like to see them, and she said she’d ask her dad. Then Grandpa came back from the PO and drove us home.”
“How did she seem yesterday? Happy, unhappy?”
“She was fine,” said Luther.
“Callie?” asked Jo.
“She was fine,” Callie echoed. “Just like Grandpa says. Not moody, not upset. She didn’t talk about running away. She didn’t say anything was wrong in her family. She likes her new dad. She doesn’t have a boyfriend. She isn’t talking online with anyone who wants her to go away with him. She just talked about swimming and how she’s learning to dive and whether she could come back another day to watch me milk the goats.”
These must be all the questions Maggie had asked, and here were the answers, recited in one convenient package. It made Jo feel superfluous, following in Maggie’s much quicker footsteps. How the hell did the woman always manage that?
“Okay,” sighed Jo. “What time did Zoe leave the farm?”
“It was getting close to lunchtime,” said Luther. “I told her I had to leave for Augusta, so I’d drop her off at the pond.”
“Callie? Is that how you remember it?”
“Just like Grandpa said.”
Jo looked at Luther, then at the girl. Their stories were perfectly aligned, maybe too perfectly. The downside of allowing Luther to listen in.
“And ’cause Maggie asked, you’ll probably want to know this too,” said Callie. “Zoe had her backpack with her when she left. She was wearing a red-and-pink dress and sandals. I remember the sandals, ’cause I was worried Rosie might step on her feet, and that would hurt.”
“Rosie?”
“My cow.” Callie gave a sigh of exasperation. “You could talk to Maggie. She knows all this, and she could help you.”
“I’m sure she could,” Jo muttered.
“Zoe likes it in Maine. She wouldn’t run away.”
“Then where do you think she is, Callie?”
The girl fell silent for a moment, then looked at her grandfather, as if he had the answers. Luther gave a sad shake of his head.
“That’s not something we want to think about,” said Luther.
Neither do I, thought Jo.
Back outside, Jo paused by her cruiser and looked across the field toward Blackberry Farm, but did not see Maggie’s truck. What was the woman up to now? For that matter, what were all five of those retirees up to? The Martini Club, they called themselves, which sounded so droll, so flippant. But Jo knew enough about them to know that harmless was not a word that applied to them. They were not people she ever wanted to cross swords with, and, fortunately for Jo, they were all working on the same side.
For now.