Mortal Danger

been cut.
    Someone had wanted to keep Traia from calling for help.
    Traia’s daughter followed the detectives’ directions as she walked through the house. She looked more carefully than she had earlier. She had been so frightened then that something had happened to her mother. She still was, but she grew calmer.
    “I can see now,” she said, “that there are several things missing. Her clock radio is gone, and she has an old antique radio from the thirties. That’s not here.”
    She pointed to her mother’s dresser top, where necklaces and brooches were tangled together. “She keeps her dresser as neat as everything else—not like this.”
    “Is anything missing?”
    She shook her head. “I’m not sure. I’ll have to go through her jewelry box and the drawers to be sure.”
    Traia Carr had a small safe, which had been pried open. Oddly, the detectives found three hundred dollars in cash still inside. But the money was hidden from view.
    “Someone who wasn’t familiar with this safe could have missed this,” Bruce Whitman said.
    “My mother has a special ring,” Traia’s daughter said. “She keeps it in this safe. It was made especially for her—with the birthstones of all her grandchildren. There isn’t another one just like it. But it’s gone….”
    “What about clothing?” Dick Taylor asked. “Can you look more closely and tell us if anything—anything at all—is missing?”
    She carefully searched her mother’s neat closet, shaking her head. “Nothing’s gone—but wait! Her purple robe isn’t here. That’s her favorite.”
    It didn’t look good. No woman disappears voluntarily wearing only her bathrobe.
    Traia’s daughter had noticed recently that her mother was inordinately cautious about whom she let into her house.
    “She keeps her doors locked—all the time. And she has this chain on it. Even if she’s expecting someone, she always checks through the peephole before she’ll open the door. She would never let a stranger in.”
    “Is she afraid of anyone?” Jarl Gunderson asked. “Has she mentioned anyone to you—by name?”
    The young woman shook her head. “No, no one. But that’s like her; she never wants to worry me. She might tell one of her friends if she’s scared of someone. But she was in such a happy mood yesterday at our picnic. She didn’t seem worried about anything.”
    But perhaps she had been. Searching the outside of her house, they found crushed flowers beneath several of her windows and footprints in the dirt outside her bedroom window. Someone—perhaps a voyeur, perhaps somebody looking for a way to get in—had obviously stood close to her windows, watching her when she didn’t know it.
    The detectives realized that if someone had abducted Traia Carr, it almost had to be someone she knew—and trusted—or she never would have let him in in the first place. Her daughter didn’t think she was afraid of anyone, but she admitted her mother wouldn’t want to scare her.
    Still, Traia was gone. And so was her car and many of her belongings.
     
    A door-to-door canvass of all the houses in the 3rd Street neighborhood produced negative results. One neighbor said he’d heard loud voices on the night of July 4, but he paid them little attention. With so many teenagers living at the Berrios residence, loud music, shouts, and laughter—even screams—were more usual than unusual.
    Like most small-town cops, Jarl Gunderson knew almost everyone in Marysville. He knew that Traia’s divorce had been friendly and that she and her ex-husband were on good terms. And he knew that Traia had a good reputation; the men she chose to date were primarily those she had known for a long time. Some of them were a good deal younger than she was, but there was no crime in that. She was attractive enough to appeal to men in their forties.
    Gunderson talked with one of her bakery coworkers who seemed to be close to her.
    “Was there anyone who frightened Traia?”
    “No, I wouldn’t say exactly afraid ,” she mused. “But she told me about this one guy she’d had trouble with. He was at her house, and he was kind of ‘liquored up’ and I guess…well, he made a pass at her that she didn’t appreciate. She said she pushed him out the door and locked it. She said she wasn’t going to let him come over anymore.”
    The witness didn’t know the man’s name.
    “Was he angry?” Gunderson asked. “Did he ever try to see her again?”
    “Not that she ever