Page 61 of The Boy Who Cried Bear
My shoulders slump. “I know,” I say softly. That’s all I say. It’s all I can say.
“Can we go to the town hall?” I say. “I have the note there, and you can bring yours, along with anyone you might trust.”
“I don’t trust anyone here. Not anymore.”
“Understood. But you’re going to need to at least trust that I seem to be trying to get Max back.”
“Fine.” She withdraws the knife blade. “Let’s go.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I don’t go straight to the town hall. I track down Anders first and ask him to stand guard behind that shed and let me know whether anyone goes poking around it, though I suspect we’ve lost our chance to catch whoever was expecting that note. Of course, Anders notices my bloody hand, but I insist I’ll look after it, which I do with the first-aid kit at the town hall.
Dana meets me at the town hall. Yesterday, she looked frazzled and spooked. Today, she’s furious, and I cannot say I blame her. It’s one thing to think someone from the forest snatched her wandering son. It’s another to think we failed and the person who murdered her husband is now responsible for grabbing Max.
She marches over, barely using her cane, and slaps two notes down on my desk.
The first reads:
Western storage shed. Go around back. Open the hatch. Look inside.
The second:
It’s time for your confession, Dana. That’s how you’ll get your son back. Tell the truth and sign it. Not your fake name either. It’s time to stop living a lie. Write it out and put it where you found this note, and I’ll decide whether it’s good enough.
I read through both notes a couple of times. As I’m rereading, she says, “The first was put in my boot. I found it yesterday morning, when I was going to get a coffee. I ran to the storage shed. I thought Max was there. Instead, I found the second note. That’s when I came back, and you were in my apartment.”
“Because I came to speak to you,” I say. “I was there less than thirty seconds, and while you don’t trust Isabel, multiple people saw us. Someone will be able to confirm that I did not have time to do anything in your apartment, and when you saw me, I was clearly leaving.”
I pick up the first note with tweezers. “This was in your boot. Inside the house?”
She nods. “Our door wasn’t locked. I presume they put it there so I’d be the one to find it, not Carson.”
“When did you last wear them?”
“The day Max disappeared. I was helping Kenny in his carpentry shop, and the boots are steel-toed. I didn’t wear them again until I was going to grab coffee, and even then, it was only because I couldn’t find my sneakers. The night before I wasn’t in a state to put them anyplace I’d remember them.”
So it’d been pure happenstance that she even found the note, given that it wasn’t wet or cold enough to need boots. Whoever put the note there thought they were being clever, but it could easily have gone undiscovered for days.
Why two notes? One only led her to the other.
To establish a place to exchange messages, and to be sure she found it. Maybe also to avoid putting too much into that initial note. Still, like sticking the first one in her boot, it’s someone trying to be clever, but really only making their plan more convoluted.
“I’ll need your boots,” I say.
“For what?”
“Fingerprints. Everyone provides them on entry.”
“You can actually check that?”
“Yes, because I’m actually a detective. Is that why you didn’t bring this to us?” I wave the note in the tweezers. “You didn’t think we could help? You don’t seem to have been warned to leave us out of it.”
“I trusted law enforcement before,” she says. “It got my husband killed. I didn’t need to be told to leave you out of it.”
“Understood. But now that I’m in it, what else can you tell me? This note says to stop lying. I don’t need details, but do you know what this means?”
“No.” She meets my gaze. “I honestly do not, Detective. I’ve been telling the truth since the day we saw that man get shot. My husband and I did nothing but tell the truth and look where it got us. Years on the run, him dead, and now our son taken. We did tell the truth. That was the problem.”
