Running with the Demon - Terry Brooks [141]
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.
Anyway, I tell them this isn’t funny, that there’s a guy out there poisoning trees, and he might hurt Nest. Danny says something like ‘What guy?’ and I can tell he knows. Then he and his Neanderthal pals push me and Jared down and go right past us and back to the dance. That’s when we decided to come get you.“
Old Bob stood there, trying to sort the story through, trying to make some sense of it, still stuck on the part about someone poisoning trees in the park. It was Evelyn who spoke first. ‘
“Robert,” she said, coming forward now to stand in front of him, her eyes bright and hard in the porch light. There was no hesitation in her voice. “You get out there right away and find that girl and bring her home.”
Old Bob responded with a quick nod, saying, “I will, Evelyn,” then turned to Nest’s friends and said, “You wait here,” and went into the kitchen to find a flashlight. He was back in seconds, carrying a four-cell Eveready his walk quick and certain. He touched his wife on the shoulder as he brushed past, said, “Don’t worry, I’ll find her,” and went out the door and into the night.
When John Ross was able to stand again, Josie Jackson helped him walk back up the hill, bypass the crowded pavilion, and maneuver his way to her car. She wanted to drive him to the hospital, but he told her it wasn’t necessary, that nothing was broken, which he believed, from experience, to be so. She wanted him to file a police report, but he declined that offer as well, pointing out that neither of them had the faintest idea who had attacked him (beyond the fact that they were probably MidCon union men) and that he was a stranger in the community, which usually didn’t give you much leverage with the police in a complaint against locals.
“John, damn it, we have to do something about this!” she exclaimed as she eased him into the passenger seat of her Chevy,