Chasing Happy Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Afterword

  Chasing Happy

  Jenni M Rose

  Copyright © 2017 by Jenni M Rose

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This book is dedicated to:

  My husband and constant companion, who barely raises an eyebrow when I google things like how to make a time machine out of a microwave.

  My kids, who know their mom is the one in the waiting room of whatever activity they have going on, nose against the laptop, picking away at writing a book.

  My sister, my best friend, for always having my back.

  My writing partner, Daniella, for telling me when it’s good and when it sucks, and always keeping it real.

  Subscribe to Jenni’s Mailing List!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Afterword

  Prologue

  There was a saying about bad things being from the wrong side of the tracks.

  The Railroad District was so bad it was like being across the tracks from the wrong side of the tracks. Decades ago, after the trains stopped running through Littlehope, the Railroad District became a ghost town.

  The few homes or apartment buildings left in the district stood abandoned, no one wanting to buy them. Companies went out of business or moved to a better part of town. Everything had fallen into disrepair. So much so, even the local motorcycle gang, The Scorpions, had their clubhouse somewhere else. Pimps, dealers, and hookers were the only ones who did business or lived there and every cop within a fifty-mile radius knew it.

  It hadn't changed in the few weeks since Butch Hardy had been there last.

  Still run down and still depressing as hell.

  They drove past newspaper covered storefronts and burned out shells of buildings on their way to pick up a slippery scumbag that was running heroin and girls out of a flophouse in the railroad district.

  "How's the Kinsley case coming?" Jim asked.

  Butch looked at the deputy driving and let out a frustrated breath. "Same."

  He hated that answer but if anyone could understand his frustration it would be Jim. Butch had known Jim for years and respected the hell out of him. As a Deputy for the county, Jim always tried talking him into switching departments but he wouldn't leave the police department.

  Jim kept quiet for a minute. "There are some we never get, Butchy. Some slip through our fingers and some we never even come close to catching. It'll eat you alive if you let it. Some cases you just have to leave at the office if you want to survive. This might be one of them, kid."

  Butch nodded, knowing the older investigator was right. His wife, Erin, hinted at the same thing but she’d never tell him to let it go. She knew him better than that.

  They and a dozen other cruisers convened around the corner from their suspected target and formed two small lines. They filed around either side of the small house, the windows all boarded up. A television blared through the walls, loud male laughter and the distinct sounds of a woman having sex wafted around them. Butch, as instructed, went in with Jim at the front, ready to clear each room.

  They breached the door with a loud bang, the sound out of place in the quiet day, as were the screams and shouts that followed. He entered, gun drawn, scanning the dilapidated kitchen for threats. Two sheriffs rushed past him, removing two screaming hookers while he and Jim moved to the next room.

  Breaching the room created chaos. There were at least ten sheriffs, a handful of women and two large men all in one room. The men shouted and Butch wasn't sure if they were shouting at the women or the police. He assisted in cuffing and removing both men, neither of which were small or willing.

  "Happy!" one woman wailed as Jim cuffed her and dragged her out of the room. "Happy!"

  Butch spotted an unopened door and stepped around a coffee table littered with booze, cigarette butts, and heroin. Needles, all used, scattered across its surface.

  "Lot of sharps over here. Be careful," Butch warned the others.

  Hand on the doorknob, he turned his head.

  To take stock of everyone else in the room, to look at the table again he wasn't sure. That's when he saw her, on the floor, crouched next to the coffee table. She stared up at him as if awaiting his next move. She looked to be about four and her eyes, even from a short distance were unlike anything he'd ever seen, the right eye as clear as the Caribbean ocean, the left half the same clear blue but the entire bottom half was black as night.

  "Jim," Butch called, firm yet quiet as to not startle the child. Her eyes shifted away from him for a split second but came right back. When he caught Jim's body out of the corner of his eye he spoke. "I've got a door here I haven't checked but ran into a little situation. Have someone come get this room?"

  Jim, brows drawn, peered around the coffee table and got a glimpse of her. She was so small, in just the right position he could have missed seeing her entirely.

  "You got it," Jim answered.

  When the other investigator took his place, Butch stepped toward the child. Her eyes tracked him but she didn't move a muscle otherwise. He could tell she'd been in that spot for some time. A newspaper sat in front of her and she had a pencil in her hand. There were a few stray pens on the coffee table next to her, mixed in with small pouches of heroin and needles.

  "Hey there," Butch murmured, squatting a few feet away from her. "I'm Detective Hardy. What's your name?"

  She watched him for a few seconds before answering. "Where are you taking my mom?"

  Butch shook his head in disgust. He and his wife Erin had been trying to get pregnant for a few years. Sometimes, it struck the wrong chord with him that people
who would love and care for a baby weren't able to have them, but people like this child's mother could.

  "She'll have to go down to the sheriff's office. So will you."

  She tilted her head then, her mismatched eyes widening, pupils dilating slightly. For a moment, Butch wondered if she might be having a seizure or if she'd gotten into the drugs around her, but when he reached out to her she focused and pulled out of his reach.

  "Okay," she answered, as though the moment hadn't happened.

  Butch sat at his desk processing paperwork for the sheriff's raid, and waiting on child protective services. The little brown haired girl was sitting in a chair across from him swinging her skinny little legs back and forth. She hadn't said a word on the ride to the station despite being asked multiple questions.

  Besides being found in a crack house, she was rail thin and filthy, but she was also observant, watching everyone and everything around her. She had a habit of closing her tiny hands into fists and scratching her palms, over and over.

  "You hungry, kid?" He asked.

  She shrugged and continued to look around the room, always watching her surroundings.

  "Want to tell me your name yet?"

  She never looked at him but he noticed her head stopped moving. She'd stopped scanning the room and was staring at one of the far walls. He looked as well but all he saw was the same old bulletin board.

  "What is it? What do you see over there?"

  She slid off the chair and walked to the wall, Butch right behind her. The kid climbed onto a chair to get a closer look, then ripped a page off the board, staring intensely at it for a second before turning her face to him.

  "I know her."

  She thrust the paper at him but he didn't have to look at it to know what it was. He'd put up that flyer of Elaine Kinsley himself.

  Elaine was six years old, had red hair and blue eyes. When she'd gone missing two months ago, one of her front teeth had been missing. She stared back at him from the flyer, smiling and happy, looking so innocent.

  He sighed, remembering the wounded sound Elizabeth Kinsley made when she realized her baby girl wouldn't be coming home from school. He'd sworn to them he would bring Elaine home and he'd meant every word. He dedicated every spare second he had to the Kinsley case and finding that little girl.

  The rest of the department understood his drive to bring the child home. Most pitched in where they could, but the fact was, Elaine's case had gone cold. As lead detective the brunt of the work, after the initial searched failed, fell on him.

  "You know her?" He repeated, numb.

  "She plays outside with me when we live near the grass."

  "The grass?"

  "She lives by the grass. I don't have any grass and she lets me come over and play."

  There was no way Elaine Kinsley, blue blooded daughter of a prominent lawyer and his country club wife, lived anywhere near the child standing in front of him.

  "I don't think so, kid," he told her taking the flyer from her to put it back up. "This little girl is missing."

  Lured from the playground at school while the teachers had their backs turned.

  "Lainey's not missing," she told him with a shrug. "I know where she is."

  Butch's breath caught in his throat. No one knew Elaine's parents called her Lainey. None of the media had that information. It wasn't on any of the flyers. There was no reason for this child to know that detail.

  "How do you know her name?" Butch asked, his voice hoarse.

  The little waif shrugged. "She told me."

  "And she lives where?"

  "At the grass."

  Butch held his patience in check, reminding himself that this kid was just that. A kid. Not to mention she'd been through her own type of ordeal today. He added on top of that her living conditions for who knows how long and he knew she needed his patience.

  "If we ask your mom, would she know where the grass is?" He asked, wanting to choke on the word mom.

  She nodded her agreement.

  He should have waited for CPS to come and approve speaking with the mother regarding the child, but he didn't. If what the kid said was true, Elaine was alive somewhere. Somewhere in town, no less. He would get her and he would do it today.

  Butch settled the kid back at his desk and stormed into the holding area. It stank of stale cigarette smoke and vomit.

  "Who's kid is this out here?" He barked.

  A dozen sets of glazed eyes watched him but only one sat up straighter, her wrists still cuffed to a bar on the wall. She was a junkie, track marks climbing each of her arms, dressed in a ripped, stained half shirt, and a skirt that couldn't have been more than a few inches of fabric in total.

  "I need to see my baby!" She shrieked. "Where's Happy?"

  Happy? The poor, sad little urchin's name was Happy?

  The woman wailed, begging to see her child

  "I'll let you see her if you tell me where it is she's talking about," Butch told her unsure if he meant it or not. "She said you were living somewhere that had no grass but she played with a little girl nearby. Where's that?"

  Happy's mother tugged on her cuffs again and sent pleading eyes his way.

  "Let me see her and I'll tell you anything you want."

  "Tell me where she's talking about."

  She huffed and looked away.

  "Tell me about the grass. Where the other little girl played,” Butch demanded.

  The woman turned to glare at him. "There's no other little girl. Happy didn't play with anyone. She's nuts, okay?"

  "Tell me." Butch knew she could be telling the truth. He could be pinning his hopes on the word of some junkie's liar daughter, but what else did he have? He kept reminding himself that the kid called Elaine, Lainey. How would she know?

  "And you'll let me see her?" The mother asked.

  Butch nodded.

  "Fine," she sighed. "I was staying at the motel on Beech Street. I saw Happy playing across the street a coupla times, talking to herself like always." She swung her eyes back up at him and sneered. "Lotsa tall grass there."

  Back in the railroad district, Butch was driving his unmarked with the unlikely named Happy in the backseat. She seemed to get more agitated as they got closer to the motel on Beech. Her little foot was shaking back and forth and she was scratching her palm non-stop.

  Beech Street was a complete wasteland. He tried to imagine how anyone could raise a child in that kind of neighborhood. Drugs, gangsters, hookers and more seemed to be the status quos, but it made him wonder how many other children lived in this area.

  He heard Happy's stomach growl from all the way in the front seat and he kicked himself for never making sure the kid got something to eat.

  "You hungry, Happy?" He asked.

  She met his gaze in the rear-view mirror. "It's okay."

  It was okay that she was hungry or she was okay?

  "You want me to stop and get you something to eat?"

  "No," she told him, her voice firm.

  "We're almost there, okay?"

  After another block, he pulled up to the motel in question and let Happy out of the backseat. She pointed at the motel.

  "That's where we lived." She then swung her gaze across the street. "That's where Lainey lives."

  Butch followed her gaze. He felt his stomach drop and all the hope leave his body. No one was living at that house. It was an old two story home, nothing but a burned-out shell with boarded up windows and doors just like every other building in the district. The grass hadn't been green in a decade, almost more a wheat field.

  "Honey, I don't think anyone's living there."

  As though she didn't hear him, Happy crossed the street toward the house. She didn't even look before she stepped into the street. Out of pure instinct, Butch trotted after her and grabbed her hand as she crossed.

  When she looked up at him he reminded her, "Always look both ways before you cross the road."

  She let him hold her hand as she walked r
ight into the grass.

  "Lainey," she called. "Are you here?"

  She scanned the yard and called out a few more times.

  Butch tugged her hand, ready to tell her it was time to head back when she let out a little squeak.

  "There you are," she smiled.

  Butch looked around and saw no one. He glanced at Happy who obviously thought she was looking at something. He wondered how much damage the drugs had done to her brain or maybe she was nuts, like her mother said.

  "C'mon Happy. Time to go," he told her, disappointed.

  "No," she pulled his hand with hers. "She's here."

  Butch looked around again. "Happy, honey. There's no one here but us."

  "This man's been looking for you. I told him you've been here in the grass," the little girl told no one. "Tell her." He felt her tug on his hand.

  "Happy," he started

  "Tell her," she insisted.

  "There's no one here!" He growled. "There's nothing here."

  "Lainey's here." Her left eye bore into him, the top crystal blue and the bottom black. "Tell her. About the paper."

  Butch pinched the bridge of his nose and pointed his face to the sky. What the hell was he doing here? Talking to thin air with some crazy, junkie's kid? He'd lost it. Gone off the rails somewhere.

  "She misses her parents but can't find them."

  "Well, they've been looking for her nonstop," he shouted, angry at her for wasting his time. "I don't have time for you to jerk me around, kid. We're going back to the station."

  "She wants to know who's taking care of Gizmo."

  Butch felt himself still. Gizmo was Elaine Kinsley's kitten. Her very well loved and pampered kitten.