Onyx Webb: Book One Page 4

  Savannah, Georgia

  June 2, 1979

  Despite Quinn’s rules, admonitions and a few direct threats to Juniper’s prom date, the boy made his first move within minutes of climbing in the back of the stretch limousine. The constant barrage of lured comments, unwanted physical advances—and when that didn’t work, outright begging—continued all night.

  “What is it about guys?” Juniper asked a friend after seeking refuge in the safety of the women’s restroom. Watching her father make passes at waitresses and flight attendants during the seven years he paraded her around the country had caused her to question the motives of all men at an early age. After all, if her dad—whom she totally adored—was a total sleaze-ball, what were the chances she’d end up with a great man someday?

  “It’s the prom, Juniper,” her friend said as she applied another layer of red lipstick to her already-red lips. “I mean, you’ve gotta give it up sometime, right? It might as well be in a cool hotel.”

  That was helpful.

  Juniper glanced at the clock, saw it was eleven o’clock, and made the decision to spend the next hour exploring the hotel and surrounding grounds instead of returning to the ballroom.

  After gazing at the hotel’s art collection, Juniper wandered around the pool area and sculpture gardens, ending up in the oldest part of the building where she saw a black Blasius & Sons grand piano.

  How long had it been since she’d even placed her fingers on the keyboard? Six months? A year? She wasn’t even sure if she could play anymore, at least not to the standards to which the concert community would expect from a world-class pianist.

  She was tempted to take a seat and play.

  But didn’t.

  At 11:45 p.m., Juniper walked through the hotel’s large front doors and out to the street. Across Drayton Street, on the northern side of Forsyth Park, she could see a brightly lit fountain. Realizing she had fifteen minutes before the limousine would be coming to pick them up, Juniper stepped off the curb and crossed the street.

  As she walked down the path toward the fountain, Juniper remembered performing there once, when she was ten or eleven.

  She wondered if it was the same one they turned green on St. Patrick’s Day. It looked like the one, she thought as she stood at the wrought-iron fence that surrounded the gleaming fountain.

  And that’s when the inspiration hit her.

  Should I? Heck, why not? It would at least make prom night memorable for a good reason. Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? They’d come and arrest her? She could see the headline: Child Piano Prodigy Arrested Barefoot in Park Fountain.

  Juniper gathered her dress up to her hips and swung her left leg over the metal railing, then her right leg, and dropped to the ground. As someone who prided herself on following the rules, Juniper felt a certain degree of excitement knowing she was officially trespassing.

  Juniper hiked up the bottom of her prom dress so as not to ruin the delicate chiffon material by getting it wet—her tan legs exposed beneath her—and jumped into the gleaming white fountain.

  Looking down, Juniper could see the gold ankle-bracelet—sparkling and shimmering in the water—a gift from Quinn for her sixteenth birthday.

  And then she heard a horn blare in the distance.

  Juniper gazed across the park toward the hotel and could see the long line of limousines pulling out, one after the other.

  It was midnight.

  Juniper climbed from the fountain as fast as she could, scaled the small metal barricade and began fast-waddling toward the hotel, which was all she could manage in her tight-fitting gown.

  She reached Drayton Street just as the last of the limousines pulled from the hotel driveway and disappeared into the darkness.

  Chapter Ten

  Orlando, Florida

  January 12, 2010

  K

  oda had the dream again. It was the same dream he’d had his entire life.

  In the dream, Koda is six years old, wandering through the basement of his house, which was a palatial mansion on the outskirts of Charleston, South Carolina—built on the site of the historic Stono Slave Rebellion. It was the house where Bruce Mulvaney had grown up, and then Koda as well.

  The dream began with Koda wandering aimlessly from room to room, until—inevitably—he would hear a woman screaming. He would follow the sound of the screams, getting louder and louder, but every time he thought he’d found the source, they would simply fade away.

  Then the screams would begin again.

  But it wasn’t simply the woman’s screams that terrified him—it was the knowledge that the woman who was screaming was his mother.

  “Where are you?” Koda calls out, running frantically from room to room until he could make out her words.

  “Help me… help me… please… please… please…”

  Suddenly he knows where the screams are coming from—they’re coming from the other side of the wall.

  He looks for something to use to break through the wall, but there is nothing, so he begins clawing at the bricks with his fingers until they are raw and bleeding.

  Then the screams stop.

  Koda curls into a ball on the floor and begins to sob.

  He knows he has failed her.

  He knows his father has failed her.

  And he knows he will never see her again.

  When Koda woke from the dream—bathed in sweat, his face wet with tears—it took a full minute to get his bearings as to where he was.

  He was in the master bedroom in MPI’s penthouse apartment on the thirty-first floor of the 55 West building in downtown Orlando. Because the building sat directly across the street from the iconic beige-and-green SunTrust building where Mulvaney Properties offices occupied the twenty-sixth and twenty-seventh floors, Koda could look out the window and actually see into his father’s office.

  The clock read 5:30 p.m. and things came back to him.

  The day—his first day at work—had not started well.

  Though Bruce had warned him to be on time, Koda overslept and walked into the office at 9:10 a.m.

  “Even after I warned you to be on time, you have the audacity to drag your sorry ass in here forty minutes late?” Bruce said, loudly enough for all to hear. “Go home and pull yourself together, and be here on time tomorrow. And if you ever come in here stinking of alcohol again, I swear I’ll fire your ass and you can go to work flipping burgers at McDonalds.”

  Koda rolled from the bed, pulled on a pair of gym shorts and made his way into the living room where he found Dane sitting on the sofa deeply involved in a game of Resident Evil V.

  “Watch out for the spike ceiling,” Koda said.

  Dane stopped playing and looked up, shocked to see Koda standing there. “What are you doing here? I thought you were at work?”

  “Long story,” Koda said. “Get dressed, I’m hungry.”

  “Can you afford it?” Dane asked.

  The question hit him hard. This was the first time in his life Koda had to even think about what things cost, and if he could afford it. Maybe his father was right—maybe he was a welfare baby.

  He walked to the kitchen counter, opened his wallet. He had two credit cards, which he wasn’t entirely sure were still active, and $346 in cash. Was that enough to buy dinner with? He didn’t know. He hadn’t looked at the price column on a menu in his life.

  “Yeah, I got a few bucks,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  When Koda and Dane walked through the front doors of the 55 West building onto Church Street, the first thing they noticed was what they didn’t see: throngs of screaming girls waving signs reading “Marry Me, Koda.” No one knew Koda was in Orlando.

  And it was nice.

  “There,” Koda said.

  The place was called DJ’s Chophouse. With twenty-five-foot-high ceilings and amazing architecture, the restaurant occupied the bottom floor of an old five-and-dime. Upscale in every way, DJ’s served prime dry-aged steaks and
strong drinks, catering specifically to Orlando’s movers and shakers who flooded into the city during the day.

  It was perfect.

  Koda and Dane took seats at the bar and an attractive brunette approached. “Hi, I’m Robyn. So, what can I get for the sexiest guy I’ve ever seen?” the bartender asked.

  “Tito’s on the rocks,” Koda said.

  “No, I meant him,” Robyn said pointing to Dane. “You? You look like hell.”

  “I get that a lot lately,” Koda said, slightly annoyed.

  “I’ll have an Amstel Light,” Dane said.

  “She’s funny,” Dane said as she walked away.

  “She likes you,” Koda said. “And she’s got a great ass.”

  “She was just being friendly,” Dane said.

  Koda shrugged. “Maybe, but might be worth a shot.”

  When the drinks arrived, Robyn watched as Koda tipped his head back and downed his vodka then ordered another.

  Robyn turned to Dane. “Is your friend intelligent?”

  “Smart?” Dane asked. “That’s a loaded question. But seeing that Koda is sitting right here, I’m going with yes.”

  “Why do you ask?” Koda said.

  “Because it looks like you’re in the fast lane to getting seriously hammered,” Robyn said. “Don’t get me wrong—I personally don’t care if you drink yourself into oblivion—but as a professional bartender I’m required to cut you off if I determine you’ve had too much, and differentiating between being very drunk and the simply stupid is a tough task.”

  After a few seconds of silence, Koda managed a response. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Of course,” Robyn said. “Koda Mulvaney, son of Bruce Mulvaney and grandson of Declan Mulvaney, heir to the Mulvaney fortune and recently crowned sexiest man alive.”

  “You got all that from People?” Koda snorted.

  “No, I got all that from your father,” Robyn said. “Your dad comes in here two times a week, puts back a few double martinis, and then when he’s good and relaxed he pulls out his wallet and shows your picture to anyone who will look. It must be wonderful having a dad who loves you so much.”

  Chapter Eleven

  St. Louis, Missouri

  August 7, 1904

  When Catfish Webb finally left the emergency room at the fairgrounds, he was in shock, pain, and a state of physical exhaustion. The last thing he could afford was to lose time sleeping, but he had no other choice.

  After a fitful nights’ sleep and still in excruciating pain, Catfish found the St. Louis public library. He read the various newspaper accounts regarding “The St. Louis Child Snatcher” and the six victims whose bodies had been discovered over the years. The last girl to be taken—Katherine Keane—had gone missing six years earlier and had yet to surface.

  No one, including the police, had come up with a viable theory for the abductions, but the pattern was clear: a young girl would go missing, and two or three days later the previous girl’s body would be found. It was always a bizarre scene, according to the reports.

  Each with a scar running through both the top and bottom lip, where several teeth had either been knocked out or pulled.

  Each girl so pasty-white she looked as if she had not seen sunlight in years.

  Each in a yellow, hand-embroidered dress, with a pair of white, patent-leather shoes set on the ground next to the body as they were several sizes too small to fit.

  Despondent but with no options left, Catfish returned to the fairgrounds. He sat on a bench close to where he and Onyx had first entered the previous day.

  He looked at his watch and realized that he’d lost Onyx within five hours of walking through the fair’s front gates. Small tears formed in the corners of his eyes at first, turning into deep uncontrollable sobs.

  Then a miracle happened.

  Catfish was not a religious man, and not one to believe in miracles, but what happened next truly was.

  A young boy walked by holding a Kodak Brownie camera and Catfish heard him ask, “Daddy, can I take a picture of the Indian?”

  Geronimo.

  Onyx had gone to take a picture of Geronimo.

  Catfish closed his eyes and replayed the events of the previous afternoon. The woman holding Onyx by her left hand, which was empty—and how Onyx had turned and waved with her other hand.

  It had been empty, as well.

  Catfish jumped to his feet and began to run.

  Stormy Boyd could not get Catfish Webb out of his head. Boyd wasn’t fearful over what the man might do to him should the worst occur. He feared the regret of knowing he hadn’t done everything within his power to help.

  The only lead of value was the white button Webb said he’d seen pinned to the woman’s dress. If she was an official volunteer at the fair, not someone who had simply found the button or stolen it, then her name would indeed be on a list. The question was: how big a list?

  It took less than an hour for Stormy to use his position to secure the list, which was as sizeable as he had feared: 586 people, all from the St. Louis area, who’d replied to newspaper advertisements offering free passage into the fairgrounds in exchange for volunteering.

  When he was young, Stormy used to sit on the porch of the family cabin in the Ozark Mountains and watch his father literally “whittle away” the day. Over time, it had become a game between the two of them. His father would grab a piece of oak or pine and pull out his knife.

  “What do you think is inside this one, son?” Stormy’s father would ask.

  “I don’t know, Daddy, a duck maybe?” Stormy would reply, playing along, choosing a different animal each time.

  “A duck, huh?” his father would say with a sly smile. “Well, what do you say we find out?”

  Then Stormy would sit there for the next hour and watch as—bit by bit, cut by cut, chip by chip—the knife would whittle away whatever wasn’t inside, eventually exposing what was.

  The lesson had served him well as a detective, because whittling was what detective Stormy Boyd excelled at most.

  He started with what he knew. They were looking for a woman. Based on her gray hair, and the date the first girl disappeared, she was at least fifty. And the woman had, or once had, a daughter named Lucinda.

  Boyd whittled away every man on the list, reducing it from 568 names to 391.

  By a stroke of good fortune, the organizers had asked for—and listed—the date of birth for each volunteer. Working back fifty years from 1904, he whittled away every woman born after 1860. The average life expectancy for females being 48.6 years, he was able to whittle away another 368 names, leaving him with just 23 possible suspects.

  Next stop was a visit to the county registrar’s office and his first significant obstacle of the day: the building was locked. A note on the door read: “Fair Hours: 8 a.m. - 1 p.m.”

  He glanced at his watch: 1:22. He did what any good detective would do under the circumstances. He took off his coat, wrapped it around his hand, and broke the window.

  Once inside, he took his list and cross-referenced it against the county records to see if any of them had a child named Lucinda.

  One did.

  Obedience Everhardt.

  Obedience was listed as having been married in 1857. Her husband, Titus, was shown as missing in action in 1865. He had been a passenger on the Sultana, which sank due to a boiler room explosion. The couple had one daughter, Lucinda, born 1859, with no recorded date of death. If she was still alive, Lucinda would be one of the lucky few who survived the typhoid epidemic that decimated much of the population of St. Louis during the summer of 1865.

  Then Boyd looked at the address—23 Hickory Street, E. St. Louis, Missouri—and realized he knew the neighborhood all too well.

  It was time for Detective Stormy Boyd to pay Mrs. Obedience Everhardt a long overdue visit.

  Catfish pushed his way to the front of the line at the lost and found, irritating other fairgoers, and recounted the events of the previous day to
the man behind the counter. People gasped in horror and waited silently with Catfish as the employee searched beneath the counter. When the man stood up with the Kodak Brownie in his hand, a cheer went up.

  “Is there a place to get these pictures made?” Catfish asked.

  “The Kodak Company has an exhibit,” the man said.

  “Yes,” a woman said. “I had some pictures made yesterday. I’ll take you.”

  Once there, Catfish went through the story again, but this time the young man in charge explained that his request—to have film made into picture prints while he waited—was simply impossible.

  From the corner of the exhibit, a thin man in wire-rimmed glasses, sharply dressed in a gray double-breasted suit, stepped forward. “I heard your story, sir. If ever there was a time to do the impossible, I believe now is that time.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Catfish said. “My daughter’s name is Onyx, and I’ll gladly pay…”

  “There is no need for that, Mr. Webb,” the man said extending his hand. “I wish only that you find your daughter, safe and sound, and perhaps speak kindly of Eastman Kodak to your friends. My name is George Eastman.”

  Another miracle, thought Catfish. Maybe there is a God after all.

  It took less than an hour for the film to be developed and the prints to dry, at which time the young man brought them out and handed them to Catfish. Slowly, one at a time, the Cajun laid the photographic images on the counter.

  He’d reached the final few photos and was losing hope. Only two more to go. And there it was… Geronimo. She had gone back.

  With a single photo still to look at, Catfish took a breath, held it, and slid the picture of Geronimo to the side. It was her, the gray-haired woman.

  There was no doubt in his mind.

  The only thing left to do now was to head to the neighborhood where the girls had gone missing and later been found and show the photograph to as many people as he possibly could.

  To his surprise, virtually everyone Catfish showed the picture to, recognized the woman, though none of them knew her name or where she lived until he showed the picture to the owner of a fabric store.