She jiggled the wonky handle and pulled the door open. Glared at the clothes inside and shut it again. Slammed it with the palm of her hand, jiggled the handle again, and opened the door to see the Otherworld passageway. “Fucking door,” she muttered, and walked through, slamming it behind her. Crockery rattled in the kitchenette cupboards.
“Well, that was interesting,” Chudo-Yudo said to himself, hauling another bone out from underneath a couch that had no underneath. “Change is in the air. Babas hate change. This is going to be fun.” He settled down to take a nap, humming a little Russian lullaby he’d learned back in the Old Country long ago from a peasant woman. He couldn’t remember if he’d eaten her or not, but he liked the song anyway.
*
AS LIAM HIT town, emerging from scrubby fields back into an area with cell reception, his phone beeped insistently at him to let him know he had voicemail. A quick glance showed him three messages from Clive Matthews, president of the county board, and all-around pain in his ass.
Liam contemplated throwing the phone through the window and running it over with the squad car. He settled for shoving it back into its holder on his belt. He knew what the messages would be without listening to them anyway: Why haven’t you solved these crimes yet? Why don’t you have any leads? Maybe we should consider replacing you with someone more competent. Call me when you have something to report. And you’d damned well better have something to report soon. The man had had it in for Liam since he beat out Clive’s son in-law for the sheriff position. Clive had already made it quite clear that if Liam couldn’t solve these crimes, or god forbid, another child went missing, he could kiss his job good-bye.
Liam pulled up to a spot in front of Bertie’s, got out, and plunked some change into the meter. A tattered pink poster with a gap-toothed youngster on it fluttered at him from a telephone pole, asking Have you seen this girl? Suzy Townsend, the first child to go missing, almost five months ago now. That had been late February, bitter cold and snowy with a wind that gnawed at the bones. Suzy had been visiting a friend’s house; the two small children bundled into snowsuits, making angels in the front yard. And then her friend’s mother went into the house to answer the phone, and suddenly, there was only one.
Suzy’s poster had company now, a multicolored patchwork of proof that he was failing at his job. A woman he knew from the Methodist church’s potluck dinners, passing him on the street, averted her eyes and scowled as she went by.
The bell over the door dinged as he entered, barely audible over the hum of voices and the clatter of dishes. As he stood, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dimmer light inside, he cast his glance over the room, scoping out the vicinity more out of habit than any expectation of trouble.
At a few minutes after noon on a Friday, the small restaurant was almost full. There was no décor to speak of, unless you counted Bertie’s collection of license plates from all the states she’d lived in before she settled on upstate New York, and a lopsided bulletin board layered with announcements for the next library book sale, a yoga class for seniors, and the usual collection of kittens in need of a good home. Some of the fliers were so old, those kittens probably already had kittens of their own.
The mismatched tables were covered with cheerfully worn red-and-white gingham-checked plastic tablecloths, and the napkins were paper. But the customers usually sounded happy, and the place smelled like fresh apple pie and hot coffee.
Liam used to think Bertie’s was heaven. Now the conversations were muted, and people shot sideways glances at their neighbors when they thought no one was looking. There were barely any children in evidence, despite it being the midst of summer vacation. Folks were keeping their kids close to home these days. Inside, behind locked doors. All the children who’d disappeared had been outside when they vanished; that knowledge turned the playgrounds into ghost towns of abandoned swings and vacant monkey bars, and emptied the swimming pools of their laughing, cannonball-jumping, Marco Polo–playing youthful summer crowds. Clive Matthews had a few choice words to say about that too.
A waitress came up to Liam, menu clenched in white-knuckled hands. “Any news?” she asked. Her son went to school with the missing boy, number two. Liam just shook his head.
Then he caught sight of Belinda Shields across the room, sitting with her elderly parents at a table full of barely eaten food, and he had the cowardly impulse to back out the door, get into the car, and go pick up something at the pizza place down the street. It was already too late, though, as their eyes met over the heads of the other diners, and she waved a hand for him to join them.
Damn.