Page 78 of Hold Your Breath
“I’d rather not leave you here alone while that Brent asshole is roaming around.”
Walking over to where he stood, she’d given him a light push. “Go. I’ll be fine. I have my phone, and I’ll call you if anything happens. I’ll even set your alarm.” He’d had a security system installed in his house the day before. How he’d managed to do that on such short notice after a snowstorm was a mystery. That promise had done the trick, though, and he’d reluctantly headed to Station One.
To occupy her jittery brain while she waited for Ian to return her call, Lou started on the list of contacts for the support groups. She began with the diabetes list, but she was connected to voice mail for the first several phone numbers. On the fifth call, someone answered, but he flatly refused to share information about group members. The next live voice she’d reached was the husband of the group coordinator. He knew the time and place of the next meeting, but couldn’t tell Lou anything other than that. After that, call after call went to voice mail.
Ending the latest fruitless call, she sighed. This investigative work was frustrating. She figured it made sense that not many people answered, though, since it was Saturday morning. Punching in the next number, this one for a group that met in the nearby town of Otto, she hit “send” and waited for the recorded message.
“Hello?”
The live female voice startled Lou, and she sat up straight. “Oh, hi! Sorry, I wasn’t sure if I’d get anyone on a Saturday. I had a question about the Otto Diabetes Support Group?”
“Sure!” The voice warmed. “I’m Mary Dorring, the coordinator. Were you interested in joining us? We get together at seven on Tuesday evenings, in the Otto Library’s meeting room.”
“Hi, Mary. I’m Lou. I’m actually calling about my uncle.” She figured she’d stick with the uncle story she’d concocted at the VA clinic. It was a little lame, but she couldn’t think of any other way to find out someone’s identity when she didn’t know his name.
“Oh, is he the one wanting to join?”
“He’s already a participant—or was. He disappeared on us a few months ago, so we—my family and I—are trying to locate him. I was hoping he’s still been attending the meetings.”
“Okay,” Mary said slowly. “What’s his name?”
“Grant Dutton, but he has a few issues with paranoia, so he might be using another name.”
There was a pause. “I’m not sure how I can help you, then. I haven’t met anyone named Grant Dutton.”
“Well, he’s white, sixty-five years old, about five-ten, a hundred and fifty pounds, gray hair, and he had two toes on his right foot amputated last year.”
“Oh!” The brightness in Mary’s voice put Lou on high alert. “Do you have another uncle named…oh, now what was it? Something unusual. Not Dexter, but something similar…Baxter! That was it!”
Lou blinked at the unexpected detour and scribbledBaxter—brother?next to Mary’s phone number. “Um…yes! Uncle Baxter. Why do you ask?”
“He called just a few days ago, looking for his brother. The description matched what you gave me. He asked for a different name, though…maybe one of your missing uncle’s pseudonyms?”
“Very likely,” Lou improvised, her brain scrambling for an explanation. “They’re really close. If anyone would know what name Uncle Grant was using, it’d be Uncle Baxter. Do you remember what the name was?”
“Oh dear. Let me think. It was Willard something. You don’t hear that name very often these days, so I remembered that part. Willard…oh, what was it?”
In the pause that followed, Lou wrote “Willard” on the list under her previous note. Biting her tongue in an effort not to scream at Mary to remember, which would not be helpful, she underlined Willard’s name several times, tearing the paper with the last violent stroke of her pen.
“I’m sorry,” Mary said. “I don’t remember the last name. You can check with your Uncle Baxter, though, can’t you?”
“Um, sure.” Racking her brain for a reason why shecouldn’task her uncle, she came up empty and gave a silent sigh. “Thank you for your help.”
“Of course. Good luck locating your uncle.”
“Thank you,” Lou repeated. “Bye.”
As soon as she ended the call, her finger was poised over Callum’s name on the screen of her cell. She hesitated, though, not wanting to interrupt him yet again while he was working. The new information was chewing a hole in her brain, however, and she was dying to share it with him. Just as she decided to compromise and send him a text, the phone rang in her hand, making her jump.
It was Ian calling, and she hurried to accept the call. “Ian!”
“Yes.” He sounded wary, and rightfully so. She didn’t call him regularly—or ever—so her message, combined with her overenthusiastic greeting, must have struck him as very odd.
“I was hoping to talk with you,” she said, pacing from Callum’s living room to his kitchen and back again, too wound up to stand still. “Can we meet?”
“Okay.” His answer was slow in coming and even more cautious than his initial response.
“Good.” After a short pause, she asked, “Today?”
