Page 80 of Return of the Spider
“In due time for him too,” she said, closing the file, hopping off the hood, and reaching out to shake our hands.
The sheriff’s detective opened her file to show us photos taken from different angles and at different times of day, all featuring an older model Ford Galaxie in front of a farm gate. She said the vehicle belonged to thirty-three-year-old Elizabeth “Bunny” Maddox, a stripper with a minor rap sheet and a long history of alcohol and drug abuse.
“Bunny, I have been told, has always been something of a wounded soul who cannot cope with life,” Girard said. “She had her kid taken away from her a few times because of it. He’s currently living down in Florida with her mom. Bunny lives up the drive there with her brother Calvin and a cousin of theirs named William Mars. Maddox and Mars are both carpenters. Clean sheets. No history with the police. And they both say that Bunny has been mostly clean since getting together with a merchant mariner named Billy Gallivan.”
Sampson said, “I sense a twist coming.”
She tensed a little. “Yeah, so, anyway, Calvin calls the sheriff’s office and says he’s not sure if his sister Bunny ‘has been kidnapped or just gone off the wagon with another guy who had cocaine.’ That’s a direct quote.”
“So?” I said.
“So we did not pay it much attention for about three days because Calvin was high and shitfaced at the time and admitted on the first call that prior to her engagement, Bunny had been known to occasionally disappear on benders with guys she’d just met,” Girard said. “But then Calvin calls back three days later, stone sober, and says Bunny has now missed two ship-to-shore calls from Billy and another with the social services worker monitoring her custody case. He said his sister lived for Billy’scalls and that, drunk or high, she would never miss a call that involved her son, and now she had missed both.”
Girard said she’d finally driven out to meet Calvin. By that time he’d moved the Galaxie because he and his cousin needed to use the drive.
But Bunny’s brother had thought ahead enough to take photographs on the night of his sister’s disappearance and again the following morning.
“What about the van?” Sampson asked as an older maroon Dodge pickup in need of a muffler job came around the corner from the south.
“I’ll let Calvin tell you himself.”
The truck rolled to a stop and the engine was mercifully silenced. Calvin Maddox, a lean, rawboned man in his thirties, climbed out. He had sawdust on his Carhartt pants and denim shirt, and his hands were calloused and strong when he shook ours.
“Wish you all had come out when I said to in the first place,” Maddox said, taking a step to one side and spitting out the chew he had in his cheek.
“We went over this, Mr. Maddox,” Detective Girard warned.
“Yeah, yeah, I know it didn’t seem high priority or nothing. Bunny’s only a stripper, an unfit mother, and an addict. No priority there. No humans involved.”
The detective said, “We’re here, Calvin. I’ve been here ever since Bunny missed her custody call.”
“Yeah, but not for three days,” he said, staring at the ground. “Anyway, what do you all want to know now?”
I said, “You saw the van?”
Calvin nodded, gestured north toward a rise in the gravel road. “Over the knob there, just as it was pulling out.”
“Start at the beginning,” Detective Girard said softly.
Maddox still wouldn’t look at her, but he told us how his sister had pretty much quit cocaine after her last rehab. She usually left her shift at the strip club, headed for a liquor store, bought food for dinner, and came home. The night of her disappearance, she’d called him right before leaving work to ask if he wanted her to pick up ham or chicken for dinner.
“She usually comes straight on in from there,” Maddox said. “She was still drinking, but trying to keep it under control, and she didn’t want to be driving, you know?”
We shrugged.
Bunny’s brother went on. “Anyway, I was watching the Monday night football game with our cousin and noticed Bunny wasn’t back yet. I went out on the porch and saw there were headlights shining up the drive and then there weren’t.”
He had grabbed a beer and walked down the drive in the rain. He saw Bunny’s car in front of the gate. But the gate was closed, which was strange, because he knew he had left it open ninety minutes earlier when he’d returned from work.
He’d walked over and looked in through the Galaxie’s window and seen Bunny’s purse and groceries, and the keys were in the ignition.
“That’s when I heard an engine idling over the knob there,” Maddox said, walking in that direction. We followed him until he stopped at the crest of the rise.
He pointed sixty yards downhill to the lowest spot before the next rise. “Old, banged-up white van was down there, parked just off the road on the shoulder. I don’t know if the driver saw me or what, but when I started to jog down the hill, the van pulled out and drove off fast, spitting gravel.”
Sampson said, “You see the license plate?”
“Nope. But my old game-trap camera up the road did.”
