CHAPTER 24
Old Bob was finishing up the Sunday edition of the Chicago Tribune when the doorbell rang. He’d begun the paper early that morning before church and spent his free time during the course of the day working his way through its various sections. It was part of his Sunday ritual, an unhurried review of the events of the world with time enough to give some measured consideration to what they meant. He was sitting in his easy chair in the den, his feet up on the settee, and he glanced immediately at the wall clock.
Ten-forty. Late, for someone to be visiting.
He climbed to his feet and walked out into the hall, the first stirrings of anxiety roiling his stomach. Evelyn was already standing in the foyer, rooted in place six feet from the front door, as if this was as close as she dared to come. She held her cigarette in one hand, its smooth, white length burning slowly to ash, a silent measure of the promptness of his response. The look his wife gave him was unreadable. They had come home together at dusk, bidding John Ross good night and leaving Nest with her friends. They had unpacked the leftover food and eating utensils from the picnic basket, unloaded the cooler, and put away the blanket. Evelyn had barely spoken as they worked, and Old Bob had not asked what she was thinking.
“Open it, Robert,” she said to him now as he came down the hall, as if he might have been considering something else.
He released the latch and swung the door wide. Four youngsters were huddled together in the halo of the porch light, staring back at him through the screen. Nest’s friends. He recognized their faces and one or two of their names. Enid Scott’s oldest boy. Cass Minter. John and Alice Heppler’s son. That pretty little girl who always looked like she was on her way to a photo shoot.
The Heppler boy was the one who spoke. “Mr. Freemafk, can you come help us find Nest, please? We’ve looked everywhere, and it’s like she dropped into a hole or something. And we tried to find John Ross, like she asked, but he’s disappeared, too. I think Danny Abbott knows what’s happened to her, but he just laughs at us.”
Robert Heppler, Old Bob remembered suddenly. That was the boy’s name. What had he said? “What do you mean, Nest has dropped into a hole?”
“Well, she’s been gone for close to two hours,” Robert continued, his concern reflected in his narrow face. He pushed his glasses up on his nose and ran a hand through his unruly blond hair. “She went off after this guy, the one who’s been poisoning the trees? The one you warned her about? She thought she saw him, so she…” He bit off whatever it was he was going to say and looked at the Scott boy. “Jared, you were there; you tell it.”
Jared Scott looked pale and anxious as he spoke. His words were slow and measured. “We were dancing, me and Nest, and she saw this guy, like Robert says. She gets this funny look on her face and tells me he’s the one who’s been poisoning the trees, and I have to find Robert and Cass and Brianna and then we have to find John Ross and tell him to go after her. Then she runs off after this guy. So we all go looking for Mr. Ross, but we can’t find him.”
Old Bob frowned, thinking, Someone’s poisoning trees?
“So, anyway, we can’t find Mr. Ross,” Robert interrupted Jared impatiently, “so we start looking around for Nest on our own. We try to find where she went, going off in the same direction, and that’s when we run into Danny Abbott and his friends coming toward us. They’re laughing and joking about something, and when they see us, they go quiet, then really start breaking up. I ask them if they’ve seen Nest, and they get all cute about it, saying, ‘Oh, yeah, Nest Freemark, remember her?’ and stuff like that. See, we had this run-in with them just the other day, and they’re still pissed off. ‘Scuse me. Upset.