“We have to do this on the lawn?” asked Leslie, not losing her smile.
“Dare,” said Alex gently. “What are they going to do? Shoot me? Let’s go in and have some coffee and talk.” He looked at Leslie. “I have a stalker, a former student. She quite often calls in complaints and we have police officers come to investigate strange noises, screaming, shots fired. You name it. The Tempe PD knows her, but occasionally she gets one through to a rookie. The fire department was here last week at two in the morning because she reported a fire. I guess she got tired of not getting a response.”
“We are definitely not here because someone called in a complaint,” Leslie said. “We’d like to interview you about an attempted kidnapping—yours—that happened in June of 1978.”
Both men’s faces went blank with surprise.
Darin recovered first. “You never told me you were kidnapped. Freaking damn it, Alex. You’d have been six in ’78. June. You’d have been five.”
“Attempted.” Dr. Vaughn sounded shell-shocked. “I don’t think the police even believed me. My dad installed a security system and my mom fed the dog steak every day for a week.”
“No one believed in fairies back then,” Anna said. “We’re all clapping our hands for Tinker Bell now, though. We have a missing child who lives four blocks from where you grew up. Would you mind talking to us about what happened?”
“Sure,” he said. “I guess. I was five, though. And it’s been a long time.”
“How about I go next door and see if your mom is home,” said Darin. “That woman has a mind like a steel trap. She’ll remember what you told her when it happened.”
“You think it was a fae?” asked Dr. Vaughn.
“He was green and hairy. His hands had six fingers with claws on them,” Anna said matter-of-factly. She’d memorized the words on the first reading—it hadn’t been hard. The boy’s terror and the police officer’s skepticism rang through in the dry words typewritten on paper older than Anna. She continued, “His voice was funny—like on TV sometimes. He had a long yellow tongue and he called you a barn. He said, ‘Come here, barn.’” She looked at the police officer. “If someone reported it now, Darin Richards, instead of years before the fae admitted their existence, what would you say it was?”
“Barn,” said Darin. “‘Bairn’ means child, right? If he was in Scotland instead of Scottsdale.”
“Yes,” said Leslie.
“You go in and have some coffee,” said Darin. In a gentler voice he said, “That sure explains some of your nightmares, Alex. You take them in and I’ll be right back.”
The mad scientist—well, mad mathematician—paced back and forth in the house even though he’d seated Leslie and Anna at the table and put coffee in front of them. He had that kind of kinky hair that never lies down right, and it was about two inches too long or ten inches too short to look good. Especially if it belonged to the kind of person who grabbed it and twisted or pulled when he was nervous.
Anna thought he was adorable. She wanted to adopt him as a big brother and give him a big hug to calm down his rising anxiety.
“My dad was a cop,” he said.
Leslie nodded. “That was in the report.”
“If he hadn’t been a cop, there wouldn’t have been a report,” Dr. Vaughn said. “He believed me. By the time I was ten, I didn’t know why. Hell, I kinda don’t believe me now. I mean, this thing looked like it was eight feet tall, and it ran away from my dog and a horseshoe I threw at it?”
“That dog impressed whoever wrote the report,” Anna said. There hadn’t been any photos of the dog in it, but she had a pretty good idea that “BFDog” in the report (complete with exclamation point and a penciled-in remark that read “I’d have run from that thing, too”) meant it wasn’t your average run-of-the-mill dog.
“Yeah.” Dr. Vaughn quit pacing and grinned. “My dad brought him home from work one day a few years before the … incident. I don’t remember it, but it’s one of those family stories, you know? My mom was scared of him and wanted Dad to take him back where he found it. Then that big dog walked up to her and put his nose on her foot and sighed. He stared at her until she fed him. She was a goner after that.”
He smiled at the memory, then sobered. “We only had him for another month or so after that. One day, he just wasn’t around. Maybe he was hit by a car or something. I think Dad knew exactly what happened because he never went looking for him. And hit by a car is the kind of thing you might not tell a kid. Hey, I ran across a photo of him the other day.”
He booked out of the kitchen, the speed an indicator of how grateful he was for the distraction, and Anna could hear him in another room opening and shutting drawers.
Leslie started to say something, but Anna shook her head. She could hear people talking just outside. In a moment Darin opened the door and escorted a tiny female version of Dr. Vaughn into the kitchen.
She frowned at Leslie and Anna and sat down opposite them with regal suspicion. “Darin tells me that you are here to ask about the time something came into our yard and tried to take my son away,” she said.
“We think it was a fae,” Leslie said. “It sounds like a fae. It acted like a fae. And a fae took a little girl and left a changeling, a fetch, in her place. We are trying to find that little girl. She is five years old. The attempted abduction of your son is not far from where we think our girl was taken. Thirty-odd years might be a long time for us, but it’s a minute to one of the fae.”
The stiffness left Dr. Vaughn’s mother’s back, and she softened. “Thirty years doesn’t feel that long ago to me, either.” She looked up at her son’s partner and said, “Sit, sit, Darin. I gather that Alex never told you about this.”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“Well, I think he wanted to believe it didn’t happen.”
“What do you think?” asked Leslie.
“I think my son never exaggerated or lied about a thing in his life, no matter how uncomfortable it made him. He was twelve when he told us he liked boys instead of girls. That was right after some friend of his got kicked out of his home for doing the same. Stupid people tossing away the most precious thing God saw fit to give them, I say.” She looked at Leslie. “So yes, I believe him. I also believe we have not been introduced. I am Mary Lu Vaughn.”