Death by Chocolate

Chapter Six

Chapter Six

While Paula dashed up and down the stairs and back and forth through the rooms, I shoved aside my own rising fears and methodically searched the house and yard. When I came in from the back, she ran to meet me, her eyes wide with terror, questions and hope.

I shook my head. "He's not out there."

She turned to charge away again, but I grabbed her by the shoulders and forced her to stop and look at me. "You've got to calm down." I tried to convince myself at the same time. "There's no need to worry. Zach probably woke up, saw you were asleep and made good his escape. I don't see his orange truck anywhere. I'll bet he took it with him, wandered over to Fred's house and right now he's got Fred down on the floor rolling that truck around and making dumb noises."

She bit her lip, and I could see she really wanted to believe that scenario. "But Fred would have phoned me if Zach wandered over."

I knew she wanted me to find a logical refutation for that, but I couldn't. I had to settle for a diversionary tactic. "You call him while I go check my house to see if Zach's there."

She nodded and headed for the phone, so easily taking my directions, assuming I knew what I was talking about, that I knew what to do in this kind of a circumstance.

I didn't, and was, in fact, almost as panic-stricken as Paula. The situation had a bad feel to it.

I went home and searched my house. I didn't find Zach, but I did notice Adam Trent's card lying on my nightstand. I picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of my cutoffs.

I was outside on my hands and knees, peering under my porch, when Fred came over.

I looked up at him. His normally unreadable expression was readable. He was worried too. That made me more worried. "Paula called," he said.

"What do you make of it?"

"I don't know. It's hard to believe she left the door open. I've seen maximum security prisons that weren't locked up the way she locks that house."

I nodded, filing away for later reference the fact that he'd seen maximum security prisons. "But there's no way Zach could have turned that deadbolt even if he could have reached it."

"No, he couldn't," Fred agreed. "Which means she must have left the door open."

"I suppose it's possible. She's been pretty stressed since that visit from the cops."

We hurried to Paula's house and, as we ran onto the porch, a sudden chill darted down my spine while a shadow seemed to fall over the place. I wondered if King Henry would treat Paula's porch with the same disdain and fear he'd had for the porch across the street yesterday. Would he sense that someone bad had been there?

And that thought recalled the hole through the hedge with the perfect view of Paula's house.

My own panic climbed another notch.

Paula burst through the door. "Did you find him? We need to search the neighborhood! He's got to be around somewhere!"

"We need to call 911," I said.

After yesterday's reaction to the cops, I wasn't surprised when her terror escalated. "No! He's just wandered off. He's only a little boy. He can't have gone far. We'll find him any minute. There's no reason to call the police!"

"They have people trained to search for missing kids."

Fred moved closer and wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "We're going to find him. All kids like to play hide and seek." I looked at Fred in amazement at this purported knowledge of the activities of all kids. Before he met Zach, I'm quite certain he believed we were born as adults, and all those little people were an alien race. Sometimes he still acted like he wasn't quite sure.