Nabbed in the Nasturtiums Read online

  Those cases are the worst.

  He sent back a sad emoji. Yes, for the family especially.

  She sighed. Of course, as a mother, the first thing you would do is wish you’d gone, arranged to pick up your daughter, or sent somebody else to pick her up because that single misstep cost you a lifetime of grief. Doreen shook her head, wondering at that, then sent a message. No body, Mack?

  No body. So she is considered a missing person, not a dead person.

  Exactly. Interesting.

  But according to what Hinja had said in her notes about Bob Small, her niece was deceased. Doreen sent Nan a text. How did Hinja know Annalise was dead? Her body was never found.

  Nan immediately texted back. The psychic told her.

  Doreen stopped and stared. The corners of her lips kicked up because she knew Mack would not think much of that answer. She wished she could tell him in person, just so she could see his reaction. But she was running out of time, and she wanted to get into this as much as she could. Still, she couldn’t wait, so she sent him a quick text. Asked Nan how her friend knew her niece was deceased and apparently a psychic told her.

  Immediately a series of question marks returned as his response.

  She chuckled and set her phone off to one side because, although she hadn’t had any experiences with psychics, just the thought of them taking part in this investigation made Doreen smile. She wasn’t one to judge. Maybe there was something to this psychic business after all.

  Annalise certainly hadn’t shown up again, and, according to the police file, she didn’t have any credit cards. Back then cell phones weren’t the norm, and probably most people couldn’t afford one, especially for their teenager. Annalise hadn’t been seen or heard from again. As a teen, she didn’t have money to pull a disappearing act or the know-how to disappear so completely. Doreen feared Annalise had been kept captive all these years. A concept which made Doreen wince. Absolutely horrible. If it wasn’t that, then maybe Annalise was dead.

  Looking at these options, Doreen wasn’t sure which was worse. If Annalise had disappeared, free and clear on her own, then maybe she was happily living her life somewhere. But she was only fifteen back then. It was pretty hard to imagine anybody that age having the guts, the knowledge, and the resources to disappear like that. Unless she was with an older man … Doreen frowned at that thought. Not wanting to give up or to lose track of some of these theories, she quickly wrote them down. They weren’t great, but, as far as she was concerned, death was the most likely end, and that was just plain sad.

  But how long ago did she die? Twenty-five years ago, Annalise was fifteen. She’d contacted her mom, as she left home to go to ballet, and, according to the ballet instructor, Annalise had been there for the entire session and had left as she always did afterward. The investigators had checked out the ballet instructor and the other students. Absolutely nobody had seen her beyond when she’d called out goodbye as she left.

  They all had assumed Annalise had gotten home on her own, as the rest of them had. But Annalise hadn’t contacted anybody since then. And none of the other students knew anything about her or where she’d gone. There had been no talk of a date or if anybody she knew had been acting weird or different. Even the ballet instructor had said in complete bewilderment, “Annalise was a straight-A student at school, and she was a perfect student in class here with us. She was a wonderful young lady. We have no idea what happened to her.”

  And that just made Doreen suspicious. Because somebody had to know something. According to the police notes, Annalise’s girlfriend at the time hadn’t had a clue where she’d gone either. The authorities retraced her steps, the path that she had walked all the time, and absolutely nothing had been left behind, like her school backpack or a sweater or anything to suggest that something bad had happened to her. It was as if somebody had just scooped her up and took her away.

  Which, as Doreen thought about it, was probably exactly what had happened. Whether Annalise knew the person driving this supposed vehicle or not, the most likely scenario was that she got into a vehicle somehow, somewhere, and was driven away. But this disappearance happened twenty-five years ago. The internet was still a new phenomenon among public users in the 1990s, and the first social media sites were mostly blogging sites which began around 1999. So the social media that we know today was still a long way off back then, more than two decades earlier.

  So all this made it really that much harder for Doreen to find out anything. According to the police report, they had checked with the school and her friends, who were the non-troublemaking kind. Annalise wasn’t into drugs, booze, or boys.

  Frustrated, Doreen sat back, looked up at Thaddeus, perched on the deck railing beside her at her hand-me-down table, and said, “Thaddeus, we don’t have much to work with.” He immediately walked over and stomped on her notes. She sighed. “That’s not helping.”

  “Thaddeus is here,” he said, as he reached down, pecking away at her notes.

  “And that’s really not helping,” she said, snatching the papers out from under him. She quickly typed everything from her rough notes into her laptop and then turned to her basic notes she had typed up regarding the collection of articles regarding Bob Small. But why would somebody assume he was involved in Annalise’s disappearance? A trail of some of his cases must have led to him finding Annalise.

  Doreen reread her notes that she had already typed up much earlier. One note in there said that the missing girl’s family wanted an investigation into Bob Small because he had been seen in Vancouver around the same time Annalise went missing. But that didn’t mean that he was guilty. Out of the however-many-million people who lived on the Lower Mainland, not all were the kind you wanted to bring home for Sunday dinner with the family. As was true just about everywhere.

  Bob Small might be rolling around, laughing his fool head off at having so many deaths attributed to him here, but that didn’t make him guilty. Doreen had just started looking into the girl’s disappearance, and, only as she sat here, studying her notes, did another thought come to her. She stared at her phone.

  “It’s a bad idea,” she muttered. But she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She had nothing else to really go on, and, if that was a pathway she could follow, then it’s the one she needed to. With a sigh of resignation, knowing it would be the wrong thing to do, she texted Nan. Do you know what psychic Hinja used?

  Nan immediately popped back with a name. Marjorie.

  “Marjorie?” Doreen said out loud, as if she would know who that was. Seconds later her phone rang. She answered it right away. “Hi, Nan.”

  “Marjorie used to live here in the home,” she said, “but, since her fame and fortune took off, she has her own place now.”

  “What fame and fortune?” Doreen asked cautiously.

  “She has been right about so many things that people now pay her a lot of money to give them insight into cases.”

  “Ah, interesting,” she said.

  “She is not a fraud,” Nan said. “Honestly I thought she was at the beginning too. She told me one of my lovers was cheating on me way back when. I was so angry at her—when I found out she was right—that I figured somebody must have told her. So I didn’t have anything to do with her for years. But, over time, I forgave her for telling me the bad news. You know something? Honestly you should never tell people bad news because they just blame you anyway.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hang on a minute. What’s this got to do with anything?”

  “I’m getting there, dear,” she said in exasperation. “Listen.”

  “I’m listening, Nan,” Doreen said. “I’m still trying to figure out what this psychic woman told your friend Hinja and why.”

  “She told her that her niece was dead. That was simple. And this was so many years after she went missing. Everybody could figure that out, and, at the time, I kind of laughed at it and said, Of course she is. Obviously I didn’t say that to Hinja. I mean, that would have just u
pset her, and I didn’t want to do that.”

  “No, of course not,” she said. “So then what?”

  “Then Hinja left it for a while but went back to the psychic a while later and asked for more details. Marjorie said that the girl had been murdered by a serial killer.”

  “But did she have any proof of that?”

  “See? That’s the thing about psychics. They don’t have proof. They can give you information, but they can’t give you a lot of details, and they can’t give you anything that is necessarily very helpful. That was always my problem with psychics,” she said. “But, I mean, I admit that Marjorie has been correct on a few occasions.”

  “A few occasions? Like with you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I told you about the one, so don’t make me bring that up again. It’s not very often that I’ve had men cheat on me, and, when it happens, it’s not something I want to hash out again.”

  “No, of course not,” Doreen said, surprised, “and I’m sorry it happened.”

  “It does happen. But he is dead and gone, and I’m still kicking, so who got the last laugh there?”

  Doreen didn’t even want to delve into that angle, so she said, “Okay, so back to your friend now.”

  “Fine,” she said, “I didn’t want to talk about Bob anyway.”

  “Bob? Please tell me that it wasn’t Bob Small,” she cried out.

  “Who?”

  “You said you didn’t want to talk about Bob.”

  “No, you wanted to change the subject, so I’m not talking about Bob.”

  “Which Bob?”

  After an odd silence, Nan said, “Are you feeling okay, dear?”

  Doreen pinched the bridge of her nose. “Please just tell me that the Bob you are not talking about is not Bob Small of serial-killer fame.”

  “Oh my,” Nan said, and she started to laugh. “It absolutely is not that horrific Bob Small.”

  With a heavy sigh of relief, Doreen sat back and muttered, “Whew, well, I’m certainly glad to hear that.”

  Nan giggled. “I would never go out with a serial killer.”

  “But it’s not like you would know he’s a serial killer,” she said. “I mean, how would you know, right?”

  “Surely I’d know something like that.”

  “Maybe not,” Doreen said. “Nan, with some of these guys, it’s pretty hard to tell who is good and who is bad anymore.”

  “That’s because everybody has the ability to be both,” Nan said in a definitive voice.

  “I think that’s quite true,” Doreen said thoughtfully.

  “It is true,” Nan said. “You should listen to me more often.”

  “I always listen to you,” she said affectionately.

  “Ah, but not really,” Nan said, “otherwise you would have understood this conversation.”

  At that, Doreen stopped and stared down at her phone. “You could be right there,” she said, “because I’m still confused.”

  “Exactly,” Nan said, in a cross tone of voice. “You really should pay more attention, so I don’t have to repeat everything.”

  “I’m sorry, Nan,” Doreen said in a small voice. “So please, what can you tell me?”

  A moment of silence came, as the older woman regrouped her thoughts. “What I can tell you is this psychic woman said it was a serial killer in Vancouver, but he wasn’t always in Vancouver.”

  “Meaning?”

  “He was from here,” Nan said in triumph.

  “What?” Doreen said. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I’m serious,” she said. “I thought I had it written down somewhere. I know when Hinja told me all of this, I wrote a bunch of it down because I didn’t believe it, and I would try to disprove it. But I never could.”

  “You couldn’t disprove that this serial killer was from here?”

  “He was a long-haul trucker, so he drove a truck all around the province and the States. It’s one of the reasons why they figure he’s responsible for so many murders and why he kept getting away with it. Nobody was there to stop him. He was all alone. He didn’t have any ties to anybody, and nobody was expecting him to show up at any particular time. He didn’t have a family, so he had the perfect scenario for a serial killer.”

  “And you’re talking about Bob Small now?”

  “Yes, of course,” Nan said. And then she sighed. “You really do need to get yourself some vitamins or something so you can keep up, dear.”

  Doreen raised one eyebrow, but she kept her mouth quiet. “So, what else, Nan?”

  “That was the problem. Even though we knew that Bob Small had been through the Okanagan Valley, here in Kelowna and beyond, we didn’t have any kind of record as to where he traveled and when.”

  “But, if he was a trucker, there should be logs of his trips. Do you have any idea of his movements?”

  “Hinja had a copy of a logbook from somewhere,” she said. “It should be in that basket there that you have.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said hesitantly, as she stood and walked to her desk, looking at the stuff still in the basket. “I took out all the newspaper articles and lined them up in a chronological manner to see what I could find. But honestly it’s pretty hard to sort anything out. There’s just not enough information.”

  “Well then, let’s hope all that stuff is in her personal belongings coming my way.”

  “Any idea when that’ll arrive?”

  “Nope, not a clue,” she answered cheerfully. “Maybe you should come down here and have some tea or something,” she said. “It sounds like you need a break from whatever you’re doing.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I don’t know, dear, but you do sound a little scattered,” she said, her voice gentle. “Maybe all this stuff with Nick and Mack and Robin and Mathew is getting to you.”

  “It’s definitely getting to me,” she said, “but it’s all at a standstill for the moment.”

  “I don’t think you told me about that,” she said. “What do you mean by at a standstill?”

  Doreen headed back out to her deck, settled at her table again, as she brought Nan up to date on what had happened.

  “Wow,” Nan said. “You need to come down and have tea. I’ll expect you in ten minutes.”

  And, with that, she hung up.

  Chapter 8

  Doreen stared down at the phone in her hand. “Why is everybody hanging up on me all of a sudden?” she muttered. The fact that she hung up on Mack wasn’t the same as everybody else hanging up on her. Besides, Mack was expecting it from her. It was part of their relationship. She frowned at that because, in a way, it was part of their courtship.

  If she were honest, that was the right word for it. She was also a little confused as to how she felt about the whole thing. But what she knew for sure was that, if anything happened to Mack, she would be devastated. And she didn’t want that to happen. But it did leave her feeling fairly confused about her future. Not to mention her present.

  Mack was a main part of her life right now, yet, somehow, she didn’t even know how he came to be there. She’d been determined to keep everybody away and to have nothing to do with marriage or men anymore, having lost as much as she had in her first marriage. But here she was, already embroiled in something, and it got to her.

  Confused, sad, and worried, she got up, gathered all her things, and returned to the kitchen. Her animals followed, without Doreen urging them to. “Come on, guys. If there is one thing I know, when Nan gives an edict, we follow, so let’s go have tea.”

  Mugs immediately barked, heading for the back door again. She said, “Let’s go to the front,” but he was at the back door, insisting.

  She grabbed his leash, looked over at Goliath and Thaddeus, and asked, “Are you guys coming?”

  Thaddeus immediately said, “Coming, coming, coming, coming.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “Do you have any idea where we’re going though?”

  �
��Going to Nan’s, going to Nan’s, going to Nan’s.”

  She stopped and stared. “I don’t get it,” she said. “Sometimes you’re the most intelligent bird I’ve ever seen, like right now, and other times you act like you’re not even there.”

  He gave a harsh cackling laugh that sounded like a ha-ha-ha sound and drove her crazy. She stared at him and said, “Again, that almost sounds like you meant that.”

  “Ha, ha, ha,” he said, laughing yet again.

  She groaned and said, “Let’s go. Maybe I am going crazy. Maybe Nan’s right, and I do need to get down there to her place and find some sanity again.”

  They’d barely been outside for a few moments when she wished she had brought a sweater. She stared at the sky that was suddenly turning dark, then looked at the animals and said, “We’ll run for it. Otherwise we’ll get soaked.”

  There hadn’t been much rain since she had come to the Okanogan Valley. As she flew down the pathway with the animals in tow, she hit the corner at a half run, while the wind picked up. She saw Nan, sitting on her patio, underneath the little protective balcony, waiting for her. She waved a hand in greeting, as Doreen raced across the lawn and jumped under the shelter of the patio. “You realize I’ll have to go home in the rain,” she said.

  “That’s okay,” Nan muttered. “A little bit of water won’t hurt you.”

  “Says you,” she said, with a smile. “Nan, I need to speak with Marjorie. Do you have her last name or her address?”

  Nan frowned. “You know what? I don’t have an address and I don’t think I ever knew her last name. It’s a psychic thing, one name, more mystery.”

  “Can you ask around here? See if anybody else has more info?”

  “Of course.” Nan nodded. “I’ve made tea, dear,” she said, pointing to the patio table, already set with plates and silverware. “Now come and sit down. You need to relax. You’re sounding very overwrought these days.”

  “I was feeling very relaxed and calm earlier,” she protested.

  “You didn’t sound that way.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe I’m just confused.”