Blunt Darts Read Free Page A

Eleanor Kinnington. Everyone calls her Mrs. Kinnington. She’s a little tower of power, and she was ripping mad that the judge had skipped the appointment. She asked if it was convenient for me to come there for dinner the next evening to discuss Stephen. I said I’d be happy to come, but the judge wasn’t there the next night, either, and Mrs. Kinnington apologized for him through clenched teeth.
    “I had a terrific dinner and talk with her, though. She must be nearly eighty and needs hand braces, the kind polio victims use, to walk around. But she’s really sharp. Anyway, she said the judge would never allow his son to go to a private school. I got the impression that it was for local political reasons, as if it would seem that the local public schools weren’t good enough for a Kinnington. She encouraged me to help Stephen as much as I could. I got the feeling that she thought the wife’s death was really a blessing in disguise.
    “Anyway, after that I began giving Stephen some separate reading assignments that he really enjoyed. I also got to be good friends, in a formal sort of way, with Mrs. Kinnington, because we’d discuss Stephen from time to time.”
    Valerie paused for a moment to take a sip of wine. I found her way of running parenthetical thoughts and sentences together to be a little tough to follow, but oddly not tiresome.
    “Um, I have to stop drinking this wine or I’ll never stay straight enough to finish the story. Anyway, about two weeks ago, Stephen disappeared.”
    “Kidnapped?”
    “Apparently not. It seems that he packed his things one afternoon and, well, left.”
    “You mean he ran away from home?”
    “Well, yes, but not exactly. I mean, no neighbor saw him shuffling along the sidewalk with a stick and stuffed handkerchief over his shoulder. And he packed really thoroughly, as if he expected to go a long way for a long time.”
    “Has he been heard from?”
    She shook her head as she stole another gulp of wine. “No, and the police haven’t found a trace in two weeks.”
    “What police?”
    “The local Meade police. Technically, I guess he’s just a missing person, since there’s no evidence of kidnapping. But there’s been no publicity, so no one is on the lookout for him except some agency that the judge hired. You see—”
    “Wait a minute. What agency?”
    “Oh, somebody and Perkins on State Street.”
    “Sturney and Perkins, Inc. They’re one of the best, Val.”
    She smiled. “But they haven’t found anything. And I bet they’re not nearly as good as you.”
    I set down my wine glass and fixed her with my best counselor’s look. “Val, Sturney and Perkins have a substantial staff. In a specific crime-type case, sometimes one operative is better than an army. That’s because he or she can get inside the investigation without causing ripples until he wants to make something happen. But a missing-person case requires a computer-type approach, assembling all the information you can from all sources and trying to blanket the areas he might be in with investigators, police and private.”
    “But then why haven’t there been newspaper articles with pictures of him to help?” she asked, her eyes glittering.
    “Maybe the police and Sturney, et alia, feel that publicity would just invite a lot of crank calls or start the wrong people looking for him.”
    “You mean like criminals the judge put away?” she asked.
    “One example,” I said.
    “But right now he’s out there with them anyway. I mean, he’s in their element, where he’s more likely to be hurt by someone who doesn’t even know who he
    is.”
    She was becoming upset, so I decided to shift gears a little. “By the way, if his disappearance has been kept so much under wraps, how do you know about his packing and so forth?”
    She blinked a few times and played with her nearly empty wine glass. “Well, that’s how I came to see you. Stephen didn’t come to school for two days—you see, he took off