Chapter 3 #2
“Names,” Mrs. Foster replied, deciding apparently not to push with any more questions.
She released her hold on the piece of paper.
“Tucker and Cody Wheeler. Twelve years old, both of them. They’ve been skateboarding outside the shop every afternoon after school for the past two weeks.
There’s a curve in the curb right where my display window is, and they like the way it lets them ride up on the sidewalk and back down again. ”
“I’ve seen the twins skate past the station, too.”
“Well, then you know what a danger they are,” Mrs. Foster continued with her complaint.
“It’s only a matter of time before one of them comes around that curve and runs straight into Mrs. Latham coming out with her arms full of azaleas, or worse, falls off into the road and gets hit by Jim Crowder’s truck, because Jim is doing fifty up Main Street at lunchtime no matter how many times Reed told him not to. ”
“Mr. Crowder isn’t driving fifty miles per hour, Mrs. Foster.
He’s keeping to the speed limit. It just seems like he’s driving fast because everyone else drives below the thirty-five-mile-per-hour posted speed limit.
Regardless, I’ll have a word with the boys,” Hadley promised, folding the paper and putting it in the back pocket of her jeans.
“You should know that I can’t tell them not to skateboard on the sidewalks, but I can caution them to be more mindful of the pedestrians. ”
“You might also have a word with Mr. Pritchard while you’re at it,” Mrs. Foster added with a huff of disappointment.
“I love that man dearly, but he stepped off the curb in front of the post office last Wednesday without looking either way, and the only reason a UPS truck didn’t take him out was due to the driver slowing down to read the address on a package. ”
“I will, Mrs. Foster. I’m sure the residents appreciate your concern for their well-being.”
“Bless your heart.”
There were several ways to take such a saying, and Hadley wasn’t so obtuse that she didn’t know where this one landed. Either way, she decided to take the chance that Mrs. Foster would want to continue conversing about townsfolk, even if the individual in question did live a town over.
“You, by chance, don’t know of a man named Roland Mercer, do you?”
Mrs. Foster’s eyebrows drew together as she considered the name.
“Mercer?”
“Yes, Roland Mercer. He resides in Holloway,” Hadley shared, hoping the additional details would spark something in Mrs. Foster’s memory. “Early fifties, maybe.”
“Can’t say I know a Roland, but I do know some Mercers in Holloway.
They have a daughter who got married out of the First Methodist there about ten or twelve years ago, and I did the flowers for it.
Big white affair. The mother of the bride wanted lilies of the valley, which were not in season at the time, and I had to special order them out of Little Rock for an exorbitant price. ”
Mrs. Foster held up a finger as if she recalled something important.
“Wait. I do believe they had a son,” Mrs. Foster replied as she squinted her eyes in thought. She tapped her chin, and it wasn’t long before she was successful in her endeavor. “I never met him, but I do recall the bride saying her brother was some professor at some university down South.”
Hadley wondered whether Mrs. Foster might have the wrong Mercer family.
“Well, I appreciate the information,” Hadley replied, intentionally keeping the reason why she was inquiring about the Mercers to herself. Gossip in this town ran rampant when one wasn’t careful. “I’ll make sure to have a word with the Wheeler twins, Mrs. Foster.”
“You do that, Chief Dawkins.”
Hadley kept her eyes on the woman as she exited the station, mulling over the title.
The older residents had begun to refer to Hadley’s position properly, but those she’d grown up with still had trouble viewing her as their local law enforcement.
She told herself time and again that it didn’t bother her, but who was she fooling besides herself?
She turned and reached over Reed’s desk. She picked up the manila folder and read the sticky note again. There was no stopping the ache that spread behind her sternum up into her throat when the image of his burnt remains inside his scorched truck flashed in her mind.
She needed another antacid.
After crossing to her desk, she took the time to tuck the file in her own drawer underneath the pile of Mrs. Foster’s weekly notes.
Hadley wasn’t sure why she kept them, but she couldn’t bring herself to throw them away.
Maybe Reed had been the same way, which would explain why he’d kept reports that he hadn’t actually filed or entered into the system.
She closed the drawer with a flick of her wrist.
There was only one reason Reed would have meant to show her that file.
He must have believed there was a chance that Roland Mercer had something to do with Missy Claymont’s disappearance back then.
She’d been seventeen years old when she had been taken from the Cane County Harvest Festival in October of 2024.
A moonlit Saturday night with a thousand people on the festival grounds and not one of them aware that she’d been abducted.
The case had gone cold inside a week. By the time the following October had rolled around and Missy had been missing for an entire year, the media had stirred up the past and latched onto the local urban legend of the Threshing Man.
The state police had offered their services, prompting Chief Brosmer to send Hadley back to her hometown.
The same place where the residents had believed her brother had murdered Emily Esten.
What had been intended as a missing-person investigation had become something far worse, yet it was also the very reason her brother was free.
Hadley had spent the back half of last October tracking a man who had taken seven girls over five decades, and by the time she had stood in the doorway of a hidden cabin in the pines behind the Hobbs farm with her weapon drawn, the man she had been chasing had been the wrong one.
The initial killer, Emanuel Telfort, had died of a stroke about a month before Missy was taken by his son.
Kalen had inherited the family legacy without ever quite learning the trade, and Missy had been the first girl he had tried to take on his own.
He had kept her for a year in a cabin no one in town had known was there.
Fortunately, Missy had been alive when Hadley had found her.
Catatonic, chained to a metal cot, but alive.
That had been Hadley’s case, and she had unearthed forty-seven years of crimes in the same week.
In all honesty, Whistlerun had not stopped grieving since.
Missy had been the case Reed and Hadley had been working on when he was killed.
What she hadn’t known was that Reed had taken a trespassing call on October second. Three weeks before he died.
Hadley reached for her blazer on the back of her chair.
There was only one person who pulled the strings in this town, and that was the same person who had pinned the chief’s badge on her last year. Mayor Warren Caldwell was the only one who could have gotten Reed to drop the trespassing citation, and she fully intended to find out the reason why.