“THAT WENT WELL,” MERCY SAID TO ELVIS as they stood together on the porch and watched them drive away.
She could see that the encounter with Amy and little Helena had affected her. She felt energized; the same buzz that coursed through her when she was on duty reverberated through her now. Today the mountains and the woods and the sky spoke to her, not calling her to escape but calling her to act.
Elvis felt this sense of mission, too; she could see that in the way he nudged her with his cold nose, bullying her to get moving. She felt useful for the first time since Martinez died.
This is what it felt like to engage with the world, to care what happened next, and to whom. This was dangerous. But this was living.
The Malinois cocked his dark triangular ears.
“I know, you’re right. We’d better go find them before they get into any more trouble.”
Within five minutes Mercy had restocked her pack and they were on the move. The rainfall had stopped as quickly as it had begun, making tracking Amy and the baby pretty easy. She found broken twigs, disturbed debris, and footprints in the mud leading into the forest. The light morning shower made the work easier for Elvis, too, because cool, moist air kept the scent closer to the ground.
They traced the young mother and child northwest through the woods to the county road. There the trail ended abruptly.
“Probably hitched another ride,” she told the dog. She wondered if the game warden had called off the AMBER Alert yet. If not, another witness might come forward, as Mabel Hennessy had done.
Meanwhile, there was another place to look.
“Home.” She trudged back through the wet forest, Elvis bounding ahead. When they arrived at the cabin, she settled on her end of the couch and booted up her laptop. The shepherd curled up on his side and dozed off while she Googled “Amy Walker.” What came up confirmed much of what the teenager had told her. She’d been a student at Northshire Regional High School and a member of the drama club, and stills of her in costume as Helena in a production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream appeared on the school’s website. A short video clip of the scene in which Helena delivers her famous monologue revealed Amy as a surprisingly good actress. The baby’s birth announcement was reported in the Northshire Review-Journal, but there was no mention of the father. And Karen Walker, Amy’s mother, had posted several photographs of both her daughter and her granddaughter on her Facebook page.
“Bingo.” She researched the mother online and found that she lived with her husband, Donald Jonas Walker, in the middle of nowhere northwest of Sunderland. She knew that her mother’s house wouldn’t be Amy’s first choice, but if she felt that she had nowhere else to go … it was worth a shot.
Mercy snapped her computer shut. “Wake up, soldier.”
At the sound of her voice, the dog awoke.
“Time for a ride.”
Elvis jumped from the sofa and trotted over to her pack. He carried it back to her, dropped it in her lap, and waited patiently while she pulled on her boots.
She smiled. He was happy to be back at work. And she was, too.
* * *
THE WALKERS’ RESIDENCE was even more dilapidated and depressing than Mercy had expected. There was an old rusted green Dodge truck on blocks and nothing but weeds and dead leaves and dirt where the front yard should be. The old tin-roofed farmhouse had seen better days; its gray paint was peeling and its windows were boarded up as often as not. The front porch sagged under the weight of years of wear and tear, neglect, and three abandoned sofas.
But what struck her the most were the cats. She sat in the Jeep, momentarily stunned by the spectacle of dozens of tabbies, torties, and calicos peeking out from under the house, cuddling on the couches, lounging on the steps and the railings, and crowding every inch of the planked floor. Elvis danced on the passenger seat beside her, desperate to leap into the fray of felines.
She peered through the gloom, looking for more of them. There had to be more of them.
But other than the cats on the porch, the place seemed deserted.
“Stay,” she told the shepherd, who pushed at her hand on the steering wheel with a cold nose as if to say, Come on. Let me go.
“Stay,” she repeated firmly, but she left the hatchback open so she could call for him if she needed him. And to see if he could really resist the siren call of all those cats.
Mercy stepped carefully around the kitties, few of whom bothered to move. Many seemed lethargic; she hoped that the listlessness was not due to hunger or disease but that was probably a faint hope at best. She would call the animal rescue folks when she got home. But first she needed to talk to Karen and Donald Walker.
At the front door, she paused, then rapped sharply on the faded blue painted wood. The door creaked open.
“Hello,” she called. “Mrs. Walker? Mr. Walker?” She listened for any sound of human activity inside. At first she thought they might be sleeping in, but she could hear the muted broadcast of a soccer game on television. Martinez had loved soccer like she loved baseball—and they’d spent many a long night in the desert debating the relative merits of each sport.
A black cat slipped through her legs. Her nose was smudged with red. A sudden roar from the TV signaled a goal, and the little pussy sprang off the porch and across the yard and disappeared around the Dodge. Still no sign of the Walkers or anyone else.
Mercy whistled for Elvis and heard the phlegmatic creatures screech as they scuttled away from the Malinois as he tore up to the house. To his credit, he ignored them all and halted at her hip. At her nod, they entered the house together.
The small front room was cluttered with empty Bud Light cans and old newspapers, scattered potato chips, and what was left of a half-eaten bologna and cheese sandwich. A flat-screen TV played the game she’d heard, a repeat of Arsenal playing Manchester City, in Manchester, home team leading 2 to 1, much to the screaming crowd’s delight. Martinez loved Manchester City, almost as much as he loved Club America and the Houston Dynamo.
Under the dingy window that looked out on the yard sat a ragtag version of the velveteen love seat that graced the parlor in her parents’ stately brownstone in Boston.
The love seat appeared to be the only tidy spot in the room. Even the cats weren’t sitting on it.
In the middle of the room about three feet away from the television loomed a torn black faux-leather recliner, its back tilted toward Mercy. She could see a pale hairy hand spilling off to one side of the chair’s right arm.
“Mr. Walker?” she asked as she circled the recliner to get a better look.
Splayed in the seat was a thick-bellied middle-aged man with white spindly legs sticking out of knee-length Hawaiian-print shorts and a white wifebeater shirt that partially revealed a colorful tattoo wrapping around his left bicep and disappearing over his shoulder. He had a broad, jowly face and dyed jet-black hair that came to a widow’s peak high on his forehead.
But the most striking thing about him was the Buck hunting knife that stuck out of his chest, right under his left nipple, the fatal bulls-eye of a dark red blood blotch that stained his T-shirt with death.