Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(34)
Suddenly, though she felt safe in his arms, she also felt silly. Exploding in tears like that. Almost using baby talk. Clinging to Gabe the way little Kelsey had clung to her at the Hear Ye compound earlier. She was acting like an idiot, when she had to keep control.
“Tess, are you seeing or hearing anything else? Did the scarecrow trigger any other memories?” Gabe asked.
She shook her head, then sniffed and sat up straight, wiping her wet cheeks with the palms of both hands. She wriggled out of his arms, and he helped her stand. Keeping her back to the thing on the floor, she moved a few steps away, fumbled in her purse for a tissue and blew her nose.
“Sorry I acted like a kid,” she said.
“I’ll bet you need to get back to that again to remember.”
“Like I said—it’s all I can recall.”
“Smackings and Mr. Mean. It’s a start. I know I’m asking you to go to a place you don’t want to face, Tess.”
“A place I can’t face, not from fear, but because I just can’t remember more. The helplessness, feeling abandoned by my family—I can’t get more than that. But why was that thing left when the kidnapper took Sandy? Surely not to scare or warn me.”
“I’d hate to think so. Maybe in hustling Sandy out the door, it was dropped, not deliberately,” he said. “I swear, we’ll go over this dirty, crude scarecrow with a fine-tooth comb.”
“I can’t believe I blurted that out—Mr. Mean,” she said, wiping under her eyes. “I don’t think it’s the monster from my dreams. That one is bigger, louder—more like that corn reaper.”
“How about you go with me to Aaron Kurtz’s to take a close-up look at his harvester?”
“But he’d get suspicious. What if he did see something, if those presents he sent all of us that next Christmas were because of guilt? Besides, I was thinking of seeing him on my own. You might spook him.”
“Tess, that’s not a good idea.”
“All I know right now,” she said, “is that I need to head home. I’m glad you’re going to take that scarecrow apart and maybe trace something.”
“About Aaron,” Gabe continued, “I usually have good instincts about people and I think he’s a good guy. Vic and my dad looked at him, interviewed him years ago.”
“Years ago...” she echoed as she headed for the door, giving the scarecrow a wide berth. “I’m going to get it all back, Gabe, whatever it costs.”
*
After Tess left the room, Gabe picked up the scarecrow and looked at it closely. He knew it might take days for the BCI lab to check this out, and he needed something now. Tess’s reaction when she saw the scarecrow had reminded him of soldiers with blast-induced trauma. In her cry, “It’s him! It’s him!” he’d heard shouts of “Incoming fire!”
The scarecrow had an orange, pointed cap. He might be crazy, but the stitching on it looked done by hand, not a machine. There was no tag on the cap. He squeezed the hemp-cloth head, tied with frayed cord at the neck. Nothing seemed to be secreted within except the stick it was on, spearing the body crotch to head. The hair was yellow yarn, the outfit black cotton, but even that color didn’t keep the dirt from showing. The thing looked really old. And it was far smaller than the scarecrows he’d seen used to keep birds out of a garden or field.
It had no resemblance to the friendly-looking scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz movie that ran on TV every year. Yeah, Mr. Mean did look scary, as if he was made specifically for Halloween, perfect for this time of year. Some of the straw from the stuffed body stuck out where the wrists and ankles would be. It had no arms or legs, only smaller pieces of gray wood to simulate limbs that must be nailed to its wooden backbone. Swung hard, it could definitely hurt a child, be used as a paddle or weapon.
Looking closely, he thought that the pieces of straw stuffing poking out of the body looked fresh. But the wooden stick backbone looked old.
And then he saw what he was looking for—anywhere to start a search, find a link.
Just showing under the cloth of the body was a price tag still stuck to the wood. The machine printing was smudged, and there was no bar code, so the purchase couldn’t be too recent. At the top of the tag, he could barely read the words. Mason’s Mill. The local lumber mill, owned by his friend Grant Mason, was just outside town.
*
Tess was more determined than ever to get inside the Hear Ye compound. They had lots of gardens there, so maybe they had scarecrows too. Tess took her father’s old dowsing wand and drove down the road to the small parking lot. What luck that Lee had said he’d needed her to give a second opinion on his dowsing site, so she had an excuse to come back. Even if she did not locate the girl who had screamed—and she knew how they guarded everyone here—maybe she could at least get more information and then tell Gabe.
She parked and walked up the gentle hill Lee had pointed out. From there, she gazed out over the fenced-in buildings to the fields beyond, stretched out above Cold Creek. Not a scarecrow in sight in the pumpkin patches or gardens with late tomatoes or dying pepper plants tied to wooden stakes. There was a small cornfield, probably just for the use of the community, since so many booths at the Saturday farmers’ market uptown had corn. No scarecrows there either, though she did see a couple of tin pans attached to stakes by strings, dancing in the breeze to keep the birds or raccoons away.