Then waited for his heart to stop pounding. He heard no yells, saw no irate vice president chasing him. With luck the owners of the house behind him weren’t home, or at least weren’t looking out the windows as a trash thief took refuge in their shrubbery. Milo accepted that he would be buying a new pair of pants, and inched further into the bushes—black raspberry, with a bumper crop—and peered through the branches.
Minutes passed. His breathing slowed. One car drove by at a decorous pace. In the placid evening he could hear the lazy drone of a bumblebee. When his phone tolled softly after ten minutes, signaling a text message, he heard that, too.
Zaffer had written, “Stay put. We’ll pick you up.”
While he waited Milo ate berries and watched Gordon Pearce wheel a trash can down his driveway to the road’s edge. Pearce’s hair was more tousled now, and his face was flushed, as though he’d been running. He did not look around but returned quickly to the house. A moment later the Jeep came down the drive, and Pearce gunned the engine in the direction of US 23.
By the time Zaffer pulled up, Milo was cramped, stained, and scratched. And elated. He slung the trash bags into the truck bed, then climbed in front next to Ellie. She and Zaffer were almost as sweaty and disheveled as he was.
“Where’d you two go, out for dinner?” he asked.
As soon as they’d seen Pearce head their way, Zaffer and Ellie had taken off at full speed back toward the truck, prepared to plunge off the paths into the underbrush if he got close. But he hadn’t. He’d yelled and trotted a little way after them, then must have decided the damsel in distress was too fast for him, and turned back to his house.
This was Zaffer’s account. Ellie said that since the screaming girl could barely keep up with her supposed attacker, Pearce could see that neither one of them needed rescuing.
“You were supposed to be chasing me, you know,” she told Zaffer. “I was so afraid you might drive off without me, I didn’t even stop for my shoe.”
Milo looked down. Sure enough, she wore only one polka-dot flip-flop.
“I would never have left you! I just didn’t want him to recognize either of—”
“It worked great,” Milo said hastily. “Pearce practically had his hands on me when he heard that scream. I thought you were being murdered.”
Ellie stopped arguing to bask in this praise. “Thank you. I couldn’t stand the thought of him catching you. And I wasn’t going down there to say I was with you. It made me want to scream.”
“Well, it scared the hell out of me. And Pearce.” Milo grinned. “We are home free, boys and girls.”
They laughed, and savored their close escape. Zaffer brought them back to earth. “Where am I going?” he asked as they entered Valeene.
“My house,” Milo said. It was nearly nine o’clock and he’d been up since six a.m., but adrenaline pumped through him. “Nobody’s home.”
He led the way to the deck behind his house. The fireflies were out, and it would be full dark soon. “Back here the neighbors won’t ask what we’re doing. Mrs. Gillespie keeps an eye on the whole street.”
“And this way you won’t have a girl in the house without your mom being home,” Ellie said seriously.
Zaffer gave a crack of laughter. Milo hoped the twilight hid his flush. “You heard that?”
“I hear like a cat.”
So she’d also heard his mother say Ellie seemed awfully interested in Milo. Jesus. “I’ll get some newspaper,” he mumbled, and vanished into the house.
“And rubber gloves!” Ellie called.
They spread out the contents of the first bag. Within moments they discovered that Gordon Pearce was not a friend to the environment. And unlike one of Zaffer’s cousins, he did not archive his Playboy magazines.
Ellie was disgusted. “Porn! That so figures. And these grass clippings should be in a Yard Waste can. They’re compost!”
“They smell like elephant poop,” said Zaffer.
“And these beer bottles are returnable.”
“Yeah,” Milo said. “Who cares if he’s a robber? Let’s nail the bastard for recycling violations.”
“They got Al Capone for tax evasion, you know,” Ellie said defensively. She put another pizza carton on the “True Trash” pile. This was considerably larger than the “Keep” pile.
Zaffer held up a crumpled paper napkin. “Found something!”
“We don’t care if he blows his nose,” Milo told him.
“Even if he blows it at The Smokehouse in…Ypsilanti? Eight times?”
Milo told him to stick one of the less disgusting specimens in a Ziploc bag. They weren’t needing many of these. Most of the trash was just…trash. Orange peels, eggshells—wasn’t there a garbage disposal in that fancy house?—junk mail, and a lot of cardboard that in the Shoemaker household would have landed in the recycling bin. Milo had to admit that Ellie had a point. Pearce’s office at work might be tidy but his domestic trash was a mess. Where Tim Shoemaker had always torn his discarded paper into neat quarters, Pearce favored the wadded-up ball approach. Luckily for them.
Ellie shook crumbs off one of these and flattened it out. “Here’s a February invoice from the Grosse Ile Yacht Club, transferring ownership and storage charges to Pearce. For a forty-five-foot yacht.”
“Hunh,” said Milo. “If he didn’t get a boat until February, why’d he need a van in January?”
“Maybe he got a new boat. What kind of money does a vice president make, anyway?” Zaffer wondered. And this time Milo didn’t shush him. If Ellie knew the answer, he wanted to hear it.
“This one makes $91,000 plus a bonus, which last year was $7000,” Ellie said. “I saw his salary report before Betty caught me.”
“That’s good money for Valeene. But a forty-five-foot yacht? Seems like a stretch.”
“What do yachts cost?” At Milo’ incredulous look she bridled. “I never bought one!”
“A ton. Believe me, it’s a stretch.” She probably didn’t know milk was cheaper at Sam’s Club than at the Valeene Country Market, either.
“Well, if I did buy one, I’d come up with a better name than The Lucky Stiff.” She handed Milo the invoice for his baggie collection.
The warm night went cold. Across the deck Milo’s eyes met Zaffer’s. Queasiness that didn’t come from garbage roiled his gut.
After Zaffer left to drive Ellie back to her car, Milo roamed his empty house. Moodily he stared into the freezer. How many casseroles did his mother think a person could eat in one week? He reached for the ice cream but put it back. Ellie was right; combing through trash did wreck the appetite.
He wandered into the TV room and finally found the remote control under the chair where his mother did her writing. Copies of her latest efforts were spread across the table.
Milo was willing to be distracted from his own thoughts by anything. Maybe his mother’s stories were getting better?
“Wendy and Will, Apart.”
Wendy was angry at Will because he had gone out to kill the bear alone. If she had known, Wendy would have gone with him. If the bear proved too strong—and that was almost always the case, bears being much larger than wolverines—then they would die together.
Will had killed the bear and the forest was buzzing about it—a mighty battle!—but he’d been killed doing it. Wendy could not forgive him. That winter was the longest, coldest, darkest she had known. But she survived.
In the spring she gave birth to kits, her last gift from Will. When the warm sun touched their bodies, the winter cold left her heart and Wendy forgave him. If they had both died fighting the bear, these three kits with their sharp, perfect ears would not have been born.
That was enough for Milo. He wandered outside, coming to rest on the porch steps in the dark. The cricket choir was loud tonight. Fireflies taunted him in a “now you see it, now you don’t” way. Much like the facts he was learning about Gordon Pearce. Respectable. Crooked. Which was it?
The Lucky Stiff. No
way was that accidental. Picture stories might heal his mother, but Tim’s son needed closure in the real world before any winter cold left his heart. He wanted Pearce to be an embezzler so bad he could taste it. The only embezzler. And a killer. Because then Tim Shoemaker would not have died by accident. Or suicide. And someone would pay.
Twisted into this desire was a painful corollary. If his father had been set up and killed—if he’d never been a thief or a coward—then Milo himself was scum. For believing so readily; for leaving his father’s death unavenged.
Alf Farnon believed it, too! part of him protested. But another part, his internal judge, was merciless. Alf Farnon wasn’t Tim’s son. He could be forgiven for being fooled. Milo could not.
***
Chapter 14
Days passed. Milo avoided Ellie and even Zaffer, pretending he was swamped in Payroll, ignoring text messages or giving short, noncommittal replies. He was planning to unearth the truth about an executive who might be deadly—he needed time to decide if he should put his friends in danger. His fingers flew over adding machine keys while his mind raced faster. How might Pearce have tricked Tim Shoemaker to his death? How could he have gotten him to the quarry in his own car and forced him over? Had he killed him somewhere else, then driven him to the quarry? Had Tim put up a fight? Milo invented scene after scene. Each one inflamed him more.
But he couldn’t get revenge—not the police kind, not even the Relative Justice kind—without proof.
On Friday, the bold headline in The Valeene Herald hailed him from halfway down his driveway. Milo slipped off the rubber band and read: “Wolverine Rail? Fire Engine Plant Wins $300 Million Grant.”
There was the story, just as Clyde had described it to Uncle Paulie. Milo read, and sensed his destiny coming into focus. Executive Assistant to Alf Farnon. Frequent visitor to his boss’s house. Favorite son—in the political sense, of course.
The whole plant was buzzing when he got to work. Even Amber and J’azzmin, who avoided text any longer than a Tweet, had heard the news on the radio. The company festivities planned for the Fourth of July suddenly rated more enthusiasm. The railcar grant was a White House initiative. Wolverine Motors would show America—or that part of it in viewing range of Valeene’s Channel 64—how worthy it was of taxpayer money.
When Milo got to Payroll Leslie had the morning paper on her desk and the light of battle in her eye. They’d been slacking off. That was all over. Not only would every report be brought up to the minute, but the department itself needed to shine, in case Mr. Farnon brought the governor or the board of directors by. Amber and J’azzmin rolled their eyes. “It could happen!” Leslie insisted. She wanted cabinets dusted, dead plants tossed, Beanie Babies and nail polish bottles stashed out of sight. Milo grinned and applied himself to his work. He doubted anyone important would visit them. Still, he remembered Zaffer buffing the fire truck windshields. It wouldn’t be Milo Shoemaker leaving bent paper clips on the carpet of Payroll glory.
Just before lunch he ducked into the stairwell to answer a text. He could see Zaffer out the window raking gravel. Milo watched him answer his phone.
“Shoe! Where have you been? Did you hear about the rail grant?” Zaffer didn’t let him answer. “This was ‘it,’ what Pearce was talking about on the phone! You were right!”
Hearing the rail grant on everyone’s lips had clearly boosted his faith in Milo’s deductive powers. “And what about that boat, eh? A forty-five-footer! No way he earned all that money. He’s in it up to his neck. What do we do next?”
Which settled Milo’s qualms about enlisting his friend. In a few years 2nd Lt. Zaffer would be defending against enemies foreign and domestic. It was only patriotic to let him get some intelligence practice right now.
“Let’s check out that bar he gets those napkins from,” he said. “The Smokehouse. Tonight?”
Zaffer groaned. “You know that girl we met in the park? I’m taking her to a movie. But tomorrow’s good.”
“All right. Call me.”
Milo was intent on a mission to catch a robber, embezzler, and possible father murderer. And yet, when Amber lounged back to the office from her afternoon break to report she’d seen Alf Farnon catching the airport shuttle out front, his first thought was not to wonder where Farnon had gone. It was that tonight, Ellie would be home alone.
Unlike Gordon Pearce, the Farnons were listed in the phone book. Milo ran a rapid eye over the big brick house on the outskirts of Adrian, mentally estimating its resale value in this market, and wondered if the housekeeper would answer his ring. But Ellie herself opened the door.
She eyed him quizzically, and touched the loaf of French bread sticking out of the paper bag in his arms. “Some guys bring roses.”
“So go eat with them,” Milo said. “I thought you might like a home-cooked meal, but if you’re busy…”
“Don’t be a nut. Come in.”
He followed her across lustrous hardwood floors, past French doors showing off a white-carpeted living room, past a study with sports car prints on the wall. In a kitchen twice the size of the Shoemakers’, she got ice cubes from the freezer. Milo counted twelve Lean Cuisine dinners in there, in two tidy stacks. Alf Farnon couldn’t eat at home much; that executive bulk was not maintained on 350 calories a meal.
He set his bag down. “Did Frances break her arm?”
“Who?”
“Your wonderful housekeeper. Your household treasure for years.”
Ellie looked up from filling water glasses. “Ah. Actually, we’ve started using a cleaning service.”
“Since when?”
“Since…always.”
“Is that so. Did you lie about your cat, too?”
In answer, she opened a cabinet and yanked out a bag of cat treats. Then pulled him to a little pantry off the kitchen where a litter box sat on the floor. “It was a white lie, that’s all. I don’t need people feeling sorry for me. Got it?”
“Got it.” Milo felt a rare spurt of irritation at the Great Alf Farnon, quickly squelched. A man had to live his life. It wasn’t as though Ellie was five years old. What was more disturbing was how easily she had lied to Milo. And to his mother! Oh, and you don’t lie? By omission?
Yes, well, no time to weigh degrees of honesty now. If Ellie’s lie was white, Milo’s deceptions were well into rainbow shades. She was smacking forks down onto the table as though punishing it. Milo took his mother’s chicken-broccoli casserole and wedged it on top of the frozen dinners.
“I have a better idea,” he said. “Let’s eat out. I know this place in Ypsilanti with great napkins.”
They went in Milo’s car on the grounds that a shabby Ford Fiesta was less recognizable than a red Mustang convertible. And much less likely to get stolen. Besides, when Milo took a girl on a date—not that this was a date—he liked to drive.
He sneaked another glance at Ellie. Strange girl. She had immediately endorsed his suggestion to go out, her touchiness vanishing as quickly as it had come. She’d disappeared upstairs and reappeared wearing dressier flip-flops and a curly blond wig. Her mother’s chemo wig.
“She’d love to think I was getting some use out of it. What if I end up on a bar stool next to Gordon Pearce?”
“We walk away,” Milo said firmly. Ellie only laughed, and peered at him over a pair of drugstore reading glasses. In truth he was glad she’d disguised herself. So intent had he been on cheering her up, he’d forgotten his resolve to keep her clear of any danger.
“What if he recognizes me?” Milo said now. “We’re fresh out of wigs.”
“Eh, you’re not so noticeable by yourself,” she said airily. “It’s the two of us together that would freak him out. He might tell my dad.”
Milo was still working out whether being unnoticeable was a good thing or not—not, he suspected—when she added, “You’ve been awfully low-profile this week. I thought you and Zaffer might be off detecting without me.”
They would have been, except fo
r Zaffer’s date. Silently Milo thanked the owner of the salami dog. “No way! Not when you’re so good with a pistol.”
“Oh, hell. I left it at home.” She patted her little purse. “I do have a really sharp nail file.”
“Thank God.”
After a forty-five-minute drive, during which Milo had time to covet Ellie’s smart phone with the GPS app, they arrived at The Smokehouse. Milo didn’t know why he’d expected a dive—Pearce’s prison record, maybe—but the place wasn’t bad. It was big, and crowded with office workers and mechanics and college students from nearby Eastern Michigan. It had a long bar, several dining rooms of linen-covered tables, and deep, comfortable booths. Frank Sinatra was singing “Night and Day” over the speakers. “Retro,” Ellie called that, though Milo bet management just liked the music. He scanned the crowd for Pearce but didn’t see him.
The hostess looked so searchingly at him he wondered for a moment if there was a dress code—in Ypsilanti?—but then she said, “Right this way,” and led them to a corner booth.
“Enjoy your dinner.” Her unnaturally white teeth flashed in a smile.
“Did you slip her a twenty?” Ellie said as they opened their menus. “Or does this wig turn me invisible?”
“Guess I’m noticeable to some people.”
“Maybe she heard you’re a friend of Zaffer’s,” Ellie suggested, and snickered.
Their waitress was a no-nonsense student from Eastern who didn’t seem to find Milo anything special, thankfully. She recommended the steak. This arrived sizzling and cooked as ordered, the oven fries crispy, the local asparagus buttery and hot.
A few moments of serious eating passed. Ellie sighed with satisfaction.
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