Hidden Falls (27 page)

“No,” he said. “Should I? You can hardly tell it’s a person. It’s just a shape in the trees.”

He probably said that about tumors. “It’s a person, all right.”

“You think it might be the person who wrecked your boat?” Ethan scooped hash browns into his mouth. “What if it’s somebody who had something to do with Quinn’s disappearance?”

“You all need to relax and give Quinn some space.” She was getting tired of stating the obvious. These people were like a brick wall. Dani clicked the next photo, another shot of the same scene. “He does sort of look like the guy who visits Quinn.”

Ethan dropped his fork. “A guy visits Quinn?”

Dani shrugged. “About once a year, usually in the late fall. They meet out on the lake and pretend to fish, but they never come back with anything.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Don’t know. It’s been the same dude for about fifteen years. Before that I was too young to notice.”

“What does Quinn say when you ask him about it?”

“Why would I ask him? It’s not my business. If he wants to borrow my boat, I trust him.”

“Dani,” Ethan said, “this could mean something. Who is this guy?”

“I told you, I don’t know.” She enlarged another segment of a photo. “Besides, I don’t think this is Quinn’s friend after all. He’s not old enough.”

Dani opened up her own Dropbox account and moved copies of twenty photos to it. She would enhance them later. This might not be Quinn’s friend, but it could be her vandal. She needed a better look at his face.

9:16 a.m.

Sylvia Alexander wished she had dropped a charging cord for her cell phone into her purse that morning. She had a feeling she was going to need it. The phone, sitting squarely in its holder affixed to the dash in her car, rang and she reached to push A
NSWER
and S
PEAKER.

“Good morning, Marianne,” she said.

“I wish it were a good morning, Mayor,” her assistant at Town Hall responded. “I’m just calling to give you a heads-up that things are already crazy around here.”

Sylvia thought she’d done a reasonable job calming everyone the day before. Yes, Quinn was still missing, and yes, her shop had been vandalized, but the sheriff’s department was on top of both situations.

“We need to continue to communicate our confidence that the proper authorities will lead the search for Quinn and my store will be open again soon.”

“No, Mayor, it’s not that. Something else happened.”

Sylvia pulled out of her subdivision and onto the highway. “I didn’t get a call about anything else.”

“Someone just called Cooper Elliott a few minutes ago. It’s about Dani’s boat.”

Sylvia clenched the knuckles of both hands around the steering wheel. “What about Dani’s boat?”

“George Kopp found it at the bottom of the falls this morning. Or at least he found pieces of it. He’s sure it was Dani’s because of the green stripe. She painted it that way herself.”

“Back up,” Sylvia said. The boat didn’t matter. “Is Dani all right?”

“George didn’t see her. He went to her cabin, but she wasn’t there, and she’s not at her house in town, either. That’s why he called the sheriff.”

Sylvia refused to panic. When she wasn’t fishing, Dani often hiked, or someone could have called her to fix a broken pipe. Not being able to reach Dani immediately meant precisely nothing.

“Keep trying to call her, will you?” Sylvia said.

“I’ll try, but what should I do about all the people here to see you?”

“I only have one appointment this morning.” Jack Parker was due in at about ten. After that meeting—which Sylvia hoped would be blessedly short—she planned to spend the day cleaning up the shop, whether or not she got hold of Dani to help. Dressed in jeans and a cabled sweater Quinn had given her for her birthday years ago, she wanted to feel close to him today.

“I keep telling everybody that,” Marianne said. “They all say they
have
to talk to you.”

Sylvia blew out her breath. “I’m almost there. I need to call Lizzie before I come in.”

She ended the call and at the next stop sign pushed Lizzie Stanford’s number on her speed dial.

“I’m going to be a little later than I thought.” Sylvia spoke with practiced calm to Lizzie’s voice mail. “You can either go in by yourself and get started on cleanup or wait for me later. I’ll call when I’m on my way.”

Lizzie would prefer to wait, but Sylvia always liked to give her the option to take initiative.

At the edge of town, Sylvia turned off of Main Street and steered toward the street two blocks south where Town Hall was situated. The two-story limestone building was compact but pillared in a manner no doubt meant to make an authoritative statement seventy-five years ago. It housed the chamber of commerce, the mayor’s office, the town council chambers, and the Hidden Falls Historical Society. Because it was two blocks off of Main Street and not an immediate neighbor to any business more exciting than the mortuary, normally Town Hall was a quiet place. Governing a town of ten thousand people wasn’t time-consuming. The mayor didn’t even receive a stipend worth accepting, and the administrative assistant only worked three hours each morning.

Today, though, people loitered on the sidewalk. They ought to have been tending their own businesses or getting on with their errands. Sylvia parked her car, knowing she had approximately twelve seconds before someone would realize she had arrived.

It was Betty Pullman who spotted her first. She lurched from her huddle outside Town Hall and toward Sylvia.

“I always thought Hidden Falls was a safe place to live,” Betty said. “I’m starting to wonder if we ought to move to Birch Bend.”

Sylvia sidestepped this trap. She wasn’t going to advise anyone on where they should live or why. If she pointed out that Birch Bend was a good deal larger than Hidden Falls and closer to the interstate, both factors that likely increased exposure to crime, she would only further frighten Betty.

“Good morning, Betty.” Sylvia adjusted her grasp on the small brown briefcase she carried back and forth to Town Hall. For the most part, she kept important active documents in her possession.

“Have you heard from Dani Roose?” Betty stood between Sylvia and the group lurking on the steps of Town Hall.

“No, I haven’t.” Sylvia touched Betty’s shoulder and smiled at the others on the sidewalk, trying to read their faces.

Shock. That’s what she saw. Betty’s sentiment about the safety of Hidden Falls was widely held. Three peculiar episodes in as many days were disconcerting. Certainly they were disconcerting to Sylvia. She had been on the town council for many years and mayor for a good deal more, and never had Hidden Falls experienced anything that remotely resembled a crime wave.

Sylvia reminded herself that this wasn’t a crime wave. It was still possible Quinn left under his own steam, and anyone could have untied Dani’s boat with benevolent, if misguided, intentions.

“Tell us you’re going to get to the bottom of this.” Patricia Healy, Henry’s wife, fixed her enormous brown eyes on Sylvia. Behind Patricia stood three people Sylvia recognized as employed in Main Street shops.

Sylvia pointed toward the door of Town Hall. “I’m going to go in that door and do the job you all elected me to do. When the time is right, we’ll let you know what we find out.”

The huddle parted, and Sylvia climbed three cement steps. She always suspected the architect of the building meant them to be marble and went to his grave shrouded in disappointment with a town council that voted down the expense. Inside the building, Sylvia paused halfway up the stairs to her office and took out her cell phone to dial Dani’s numbers. She still had the phone to her ear, listening to the vacant ringing, when she pushed open the door to the small anteroom outside her office.

Marianne sprang to her feet, which signaled three women and two men to do the same as all heads turned toward Sylvia’s entry.

“Who are you calling in to find Dani’s body?” one of them asked.

Body?
All anyone had seen so far was a broken boat and they had Dani halfway into her grave.

“Let’s take one step at a time.” Sylvia dropped her phone into her purse. “I’ll need some time before I can say anything definitive.”

“Have you spoken to anyone in the sheriff’s office?” Marv Stanford, Lizzie’s father, had a pen poised over a miniature yellow legal pad, ready to craft an account for the
Dispatch.

Sylvia didn’t blame him. The last few days were the busiest news days Hidden Falls had seen in years, maybe even decades.

“When I have something worth your ink to print, you’ll be the first to know.” Sylvia lifted her eyes to the group as a whole as she moved toward her office door. “In the meantime, we should all keep calm.”

Marv cleared his throat. “George Kopp says he found a piece of the hull that looked like it had been drilled through.”

“You know I can’t comment. We’ll have to wait to hear from Cooper.”

Why hadn’t Cooper Elliott or someone else from the sheriff’s office called her before letting her walk into this bundle of anxiety? Cooper wasn’t in the habit of revealing information prematurely—or at all—but he had to realize people would expect Sylvia not to be the last person to hear the news. Getting hold of Cooper went to the top of her mental list.

The faces in the room, including Marianne’s—and even Marv’s—weren’t merely curious. Events of the last three days, whether crimes or not, were unsettling. Sylvia was the mayor. It was her job to do what she thought was in the best interest of the residents of Hidden Falls.

Quinn would have offered some wise advice. The damage in Sylvia’s shop would have pained him, and he would have been out looking for Dani. Sylvia missed him. She wanted him to walk through the door. Now would be an ideal moment.

“As I said, we’ll take things a step at a time,” Sylvia said. “I encourage all of you to go about your normal day. If you see or hear something you think may be significant, call me or speak directly to Cooper Elliott.” When they had something definite to say, word would get around. It always did in Hidden Falls.

She strode across the room, past Marianne’s desk, and into her private office.

Dumping her briefcase in a side chair, Sylvia again pulled her cell phone from her purse.

Nothing from Quinn.

Nothing from Dani.

Nothing from Cooper.

She’d said the right things to the people on the sidewalk and in the anteroom. She would say them again, she was sure. Calm, professional, official. Sylvia wanted to do nothing that might interfere with any of the investigations.

Investigations.
What an odd word to use about anything that happened in Hidden Falls.

Sylvia set her cell phone on her desk in plain sight and went through the motions of powering up her desktop computer and flipping through the file of correspondence Marianne had laid beside it. Even mayors got junk mail—leadership conferences a small town couldn’t afford to send anyone to, offers of business services she didn’t need, newsletters she hadn’t subscribed to.

And a hand-addressed, square gray card envelope with no stamp.
Quinn.

Sylvia scooted around her desk and pulled open her office door. A new set of faces stared back at her.

“Marianne,” she said, “can I see you, please?”

Once the door was closed again, Sylvia held out the envelope. “Where did this come from?”

“Quinn gave it to me with strict orders to give it to you with today’s mail.”

“Quinn said that? When?”

“He came by with it last Thursday, I think it was.”

Sylvia focused on breathing normally as she tore the flap open. She carried this card in her shop, a simple “thinking of you” greeting. A drawer in her study at home held every card Quinn gave her over the years.

But why today?

Congratulations,
he had written inside.
Twenty years in business is an accomplishment worth celebrating.

It was the anniversary of opening Waterfall Books and Gifts. Sylvia doubted anyone else in town would have realized that. She’d forgotten herself. Of course no one else was there every night after work for two months arranging stock and preparing for the opening. Quinn had done that for her. Even now the thought warmed her.

“Is everything all right?” Marianne asked.

Sylvia slid the card back into the envelope. “Very. Now tell me about the people out there.”

“As soon as the others left, more came in. They all want to see you.”

“I suppose I should speak to them.”

Marianne opened the door. Sylvia looked across the waiting room to see Jack Parker enter.

“There’s your appointment,” Marianne said.

“Good morning, Jack.” Listening to Jack’s pitch for handling the town’s legal affairs was the last thing on Sylvia’s mind, but she had promised to hear him out. “Come right in.”

“Hey!” A man scrambled out of his chair. “Why does he get to go right in when we’ve been waiting our turn?”

Sylvia smiled. “Because Mr. Parker has an appointment, which he made two weeks ago. I know you all have questions and concerns. Please feel free to leave detailed messages with Marianne, and I promise to read them all carefully.”

She closed the door on the protests and shook Jack’s hand properly. “The latest news is causing quite a stir.”

“I don’t know Dani Roose personally,” Jack said, “but she seems to be all anyone is talking about this morning.”

“Dani grew up in this town.” Sylvia gestured to a chair where Jack would be comfortable. She chose to sit behind her desk in case she had to remind Jack whose territory they were in.

“I’ve heard she’s a bit of an odd bird,” he said.

Sylvia shifted in her chair. “She has her own approach to life, but people have known her a long time. Hidden Falls is a tight community. These last few days have been unnerving.”

“I could make some calls,” Jack said.

“What kind of calls?” Sylvia was dubious.

“I have connections with people who might help track down Quinn. I can call in some favors. It won’t cost anything.” Jack turned a palm up. “Wouldn’t it help settle things down around here if people knew what really happened?”