“Listen, Sully,” Otis said as the boys took off for the lodge. “I—”
“Otis?” he interrupted. He already knew he’d come down pretty hard on them. “I was listening to them. I know they just wanted to help. But they could be lying in a ditch someplace.”
Otis shook his head. “That’s not what I was going to say. There’s something wrong here that I haven’t had a chance to tell you about and…”
As Otis’s words trailed off, Sully followed his gaze across the clearing and saw that Grace and Lauren were halfway to the Mercedes. He watched them for a moment. Well, actually, he watched Lauren, thinking it would be easier to keep on hating her if she looked like the old crone he’d originally expected her to be.
Of course, he wasn’t having any real trouble keeping on hating her. No, it was no trouble at all, he told himself firmly. And the sooner she was gone, the better he’d like it.
Then Grace called, “Sully?” and he glanced at her.
“I invited Lauren to stay for dinner, but she says she has to get going. Maybe if you asked her…?”
“Oh, I really can’t,” Lauren said, looking over toward the men. “I appreciate the invitation, but I don’t want to be too late getting back to the city.”
“Don’t let her leave yet,” Otis said quietly.
“Are you kidding?” Sully muttered. “It’s getting late. If she stayed for dinner, the next thing we knew Grace would be saying she shouldn’t drive all the way back tonight, and invite her to stay till morning.”
“But, Sully, I—”
“And I sure don’t want her here overnight,” he said, starting for the car. “So don’t you go pressing her to stay for dinner.”
“But, I’m just trying to—”
“I mean it, Otis.” There was no way he was risking the possibility of that woman being at Eagles Roost overnight. Maybe she hadn’t had any ulterior motives for coming here, but there was still the little matter of her having gone behind his back and calling Otis. And besides that… Well, he wasn’t even clear on all the besides, but if she was here when he woke up in the morning he’d probably find her trying to bathe Roxy in the kitchen sink or something.
“Well,” Lauren said, extending her hand to Sully when he reached her. “Grace showed me around. So next year, if you apply for funding again, I’ll be in a better position to help you out.”
He nodded, shook her hand and forced a “Thanks.” But there was no way he’d ever ask for her help again.
“I said goodbye to the boys,” she went on. “And to Grace. So I guess that just leaves you, Otis. It was nice meeting you. All of you,” she added, her glance encompassing the three of them. “I hope things work out.”
“They will,” Sully assured her curtly.
“Thank you again for bringing Billy and Hoops home,” Grace said, shooting Sully a dark glance.
“Yes. Thanks,” he muttered.
Lauren gave them a final smile, then climbed into her car. She closed the door and became invisible behind the dark glass.
He exhaled slowly, surprised that he didn’t feel like shouting hallelujahs. Another minute or two and the woman would be driving out of his life, which was exactly what he wanted. So why was he thinking he really should have insisted she stay for dinner?
“You weren’t very hospitable, Sully,” Grace whispered as the engine purred to life.
“She’s really very nice,” she added when he said nothing.
“Look, Sully,” Otis said, “you’ve got to listen to me before she takes off. That woman—”
“Sully?” Billy the Kid hollered from the porch.
Sully turned as Lauren began backing her car around.
“I told you,” he called, “to stay in your room.”
“Yeah, but I just thought of somethin’.”
“Sully!” Otis snapped. “In another three seconds it’ll be too late.”
As Sully looked at him, Lauren gave a short toot on her horn and started down the road, tiny clouds of dust rising behind her wheels.
“Sully, make her wait a minute,” Billy yelled, racing down off the porch and starting across the clearing at a dead run.
“I’m telling you, Sully,” Otis muttered. “You might be real sorry you didn’t listen to me.”
“Billy, what’s wrong?” Grace asked as he reached them.
“Sully,” he said, “I forgot before, but doesn’t Joe’s garage close at six?”
He nodded.
“Well it’s after six, and she’s outta gas.”
Sully stood staring at Billy, telling himself the boy was joking. He didn’t look as if he was, though.
“Really, Sully, she is. When we was comin’ home, a warnin’ light came on. Way before we even turned off the highway. And a little bell kept dingin’.”
“Well why didn’t you point out Joe’s when you got to North Head? You had to drive right past it.”
“We did point it out. And we told her it was the only gas station around, too. But she asked how far from town to here. And when we said only about five miles she said she still had a gallon or two, so she’d gas up on her way back to the highway. That she didn’t want us to be even later gettin’ home.”
“Sully?” Grace said. “You’ll have to go after her.”
He nodded, although he hardly needed Grace to point it out. This wasn’t New York City, where Lauren could hail a cab if she actually did run out of gas. But that probably hadn’t even occurred to her.
Lauren Van Slyke shouldn’t be let loose without a keeper, he decided. She was worse than any of his kids. Nobody in her right mind would merrily drive past the only gas station within thirty miles when she was almost out of gas.
“Can I go with you, Sully?” Billy asked.
“No. You can go on back inside,” he said, checking his pocket for his car keys.
“Now,” Otis muttered, “do you finally have time to listen to what I’ve been trying to tell you, Sully?”
“Can’t it wait until he gets back?” Grace said. “Lauren’s going to run out of gas and not know what to do.”
“Grace, she’s hardly going to have a nervous breakdown if she has to sit in her car for two minutes.”
Sully wasn’t sure that was true. Lauren Van Slyke didn’t strike him as a picture of stability. But even though he doubted she’d remain exactly calm, cool and collected, he stood waiting for Otis to tell him about whatever he figured was so important.
“That woman who phoned me,” Otis said, “wasn’t Lauren Van Slyke.”
“What woman?” Sully asked.
Otis gave him an impatient look. “The woman who phoned asking questions about Eagles Roost. If that was Lauren Van Slyke who was just here, then the woman who phoned wasn’t her.”
“What?”
“I told you, that other woman’s voice was all scratchy.”
“Well, yeah, I remembered that. But I figured she must have had a sore throat or something.”
“Uh-uh. It’s not only the voice. The way she talked was different. Which is why I was trying to tell you about it before she left. So you could ask her what the deal is. I mean, why would the other woman have identified herself as Lauren?”
Sully wearily shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe Lauren asked her to.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Grace put in.
“No? Well it makes as much sense as driving around in the wilds of upstate New York with almost no gas. Or taking her cat to the office for a bath.”
“Oh, she didn’t do that at all,” Grace told him. “The cat was a stray she’d just picked up outside the building. And she was bathing it because it was filthy. She told me the story while I was showing her around.”
“Oh,” Sully said. In that case, maybe she wasn’t quite as flaky as he’d thought. Still, no one would ever suggest her chief virtue was common sense. He’d bet her Mercedes was gasping its last this very minute.
“You know, Sully,” Grace continued, “I really think yo
u misread her yesterday. And now that Otis is saying she isn’t the one who phoned him… Well, I just wonder if there’ve been funny things going on that we don’t know about.”
LAUREN DRUMMED her fingers on the steering wheel, trying to drown out the voice in her head. It sounded exactly like her father’s, and it was saying she’d just made another of her little errors in judgment. Unfortunately, it was right.
She’d been certain she had enough gas left to make it back to Dead Head—or whatever that little town was called—but it turned out she’d only had enough to get about halfway. Which meant that last night hadn’t been the greatest time to forget to charge her cell phone.
She glanced at it again and mentally kicked herself, then stuck it back into her purse. At least the phone being useless didn’t count as an error in judgment. She could blame that little problem entirely on the cat.
He hadn’t liked the drive home from the office any better than he’d liked his bath, and he’d conveyed his feelings by caterwauling the entire way from Madison Avenue and East Fifty-Second up to East Seventy-Third—which was an awfully long twenty-one blocks in the five-o’clock traffic even without a cat yowling in your ear. And that was exactly where he’d been yowling, because he’d decided the only safe place to be was wrapped around the back of her neck—like one of those horrible dead-fox-neck furs her great-aunt Dorothy still loved to wear.
At any rate, when she’d finally gotten him up to her apartment he’d dashed around as if possessed, bouncing from one piece of furniture to the next. And she’d been so busy chasing after him, making sure he didn’t commit cat suicide by diving headfirst into something hard, that the last thing on her mind had been plugging in the phone.
Putting her thoughts of both the cat and the phone aside for the moment, she tried again to decide which direction she should walk. Despite being certain there were wild animals in those woods, she’d ruled out simply sitting here and hoping help would come along.
She hadn’t grown up in New York City without learning it could be fatal to trust a stranger. If someone came along offering to help, the odds on his being a serial killer had to be at least as high as on his being a Good Samaritan.
Besides which, the road between Eagles Roost and Dead Head was just some kind of secondary back road and there hadn’t been a single other car along it since she’d left the lodge. So either she walked into town, where she knew there was a gas station, or she walked back to Eagles Roost.
There was no gas there, of course, but there was that roast beef dinner with all the trimmings. Merely recalling how delicious the kitchen had smelled was enough to make her stomach growl.
Then she thought about the thunder-at-mid-night look Sully would give her if she turned up at the lodge again, and decided that going on to Dead Head would be the better choice.
Grabbing her purse, she got out of the car, locked it, and started in the direction of town. She’d only gone about a hundred yards, though, before she heard a car coming down the road behind her.
Fervently hoping it was the Good Samaritan and not the serial killer, she stopped and looked back. What she was hearing actually proved to be an old pickup truck covered with more brown rust than black paint.
When it pulled up beside her, her heart began beating faster. The two men in the cab were in their early thirties and muscular, with greasy long hair. Neither was wearing a shirt, and for a moment she couldn’t help wondering if they were completely naked—a couple of Adirondack nudists.
They looked, though, more like they might be escapees from the nearest maximum-security prison than residents of a nudist colony. In fact, one of their faces… She wasn’t sure, but she thought she might have seen it one night while she was channel surfing—on a segment of “America’s Most Wanted.”
“Hey, darlin’,” the passenger said, leaning his head and bare shoulder far enough out the window that she could smell beer on his breath. “That your Mercedes back there?”
She nodded, telling herself to relax. She didn’t necessarily have reason to panic.
“Problem with it, darlin’? Want us to take a look under the hood?”
For an instant, she considered saying she’d intentionally parked it back there and had some good reason for hiking down the road. When she couldn’t think of any reason that was plausible, though, she simply managed a smile and said, “Thanks, but I just ran out of gas.”
“Oh, so you need a lift to town,” the driver said. Then he belched and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
“Well…no. Thanks again, but I enjoy walking.”
The passenger’s gaze drifted down to her feet, then started slowly up her legs. When it finally got all the way up to her face, he smiled.
That made her more nervous yet. In Manhattan, the only time a stranger ever smiled at you was when he wanted something. And she was afraid to even think about what this fellow might want.
“Darlin’,” he said, “town’s over two miles from here. You won’t enjoy walkin’ that far in those high heels. So why don’t you just slide on in with us? We won’t hurt you none, will we, Roy.”
The driver shook his head. “You got nothing to worry about from me an’ Snake.”
Snake? Her heart began beating faster yet. She’d been right about the prison. Surely only criminals were ever called Snake, which meant that getting into that truck with them would go far beyond any little error in judgment.
Before she could think of what to say next, she spotted a minivan heading down the road and began praying there was a white knight driving it.
When it pulled up behind the truck, she saw Sully was driving. That certainly dashed her hopes about any white knight, but under the circumstances she was more than happy to settle for him.
Not surprisingly, the first thing he did was glare at her through the windshield—before he even opened his door. But this time she didn’t care. As long as he got her away from these men, he could feel free to glare at her all the way to the gas station.
He climbed out of the van and nodded to the two in the truck, saying, “Hey, Roy. Snake.”
Of course. Sully knew these felons.
“Hey, Sully,” they greeted him.
“Let’s go,” he said to Lauren.
“Lady a friend of yours?” Roy asked him.
“Something like that.”
“We were tryin’ to help her out,” Snake said. “But I guess she didn’t like the looks of us.”
Sully laughed. “No wonder. You two really need cleaning up at the end of the day. Roy and Snake,” he added, glancing at Lauren, “build houses.”
“Or whatever else needs buildin’,” Snake said.
Lauren cleared her throat uncomfortably. Just because Snake and Roy weren’t suits, she shouldn’t have assumed the worst. They were merely a couple of working men. And Snake probably only smelled like a brewery because they’d stopped for a beer or two after a hot day’s work.
“It wasn’t that I didn’t like your looks,” she offered politely. “It was just…well, as I said, I enjoy walking. I live in Manhattan and everyone walks there. And I thought that since this was such a nice summer day… I guess it’s closer to evening by now, isn’t it. But, either way, I decided I really wouldn’t mind the walk to the gas station and—”
“Can we get going?” Sully interrupted. “Grace is holding dinner until we get back.”
“I’m not going back,” she informed him with a cool glance. As glad as she’d been to see him, the feeling was fading fast. His can we get going? had sounded a whole lot more like an order than a question, and she didn’t take kindly to being ordered around.
“I’m going to Dead Head,” she elaborated. And if he didn’t want to drive her, she’d darn well go with Roy and Snake, now that she knew it would be safe.
Roy and Snake, though, had begun to laugh about something.
“North Head,” Sully muttered to her. “The town is North Head, not Dead Head.”
“Oh. Well, wha
tever, that’s where I’m going. Then as soon as I get some gas I’ll be on my way again.”
“Lauren, the gas station in North Head closed at six. And I’m not driving thirty miles and back to the next closest one until I’ve had dinner. So can we please go back to the lodge?”
CHAPTER FIVE
Billy the Kid’s new plan
DINNER, SULLY THOUGHT, had taken a lot longer than usual—mostly because every time Lauren had finished telling the boys one story, they’d gotten her started on another. They’d barely sat down at the table before Grace had prompted her to tell them about how he’d walked in while she’d been bathing the cat. And she’d made the story sound a lot funnier than things had seemed at the time.
All in all, she’d turned out to have a surprisingly good sense of humor—when she wasn’t busy cutting off his funding, or playing Ice Princess, or doing one of a hundred other things that he didn’t find the least bit amusing.
“Hey, you guys,” he said as the last of the boys polished off his second serving of Grace’s apple crumble. “None of you helped get dinner ready today, so you’re all on cleanup detail.”
As they began pushing back their chairs, Sully got the coffeepot and filled four mugs for the adults, glad he was finally going to be able to ask Lauren about that woman’s phone call. He’d been awfully tempted to raise the subject earlier, in the van, but he’d decided not to say anything without Otis and Grace there. By triple-teaming her they should be able to get at the truth.
“Let’s take our coffee into the family room,” he suggested. “Give the boys space to clear the table.”
Before any of the others rose, though, Lauren said, “You know, I’ve been thinking I should just phone a garage and have some gas brought to my car. There’s no point in one of you having to drive me someplace. And if I called right now—”
“I think you should stop worrying about getting gas tonight,” Grace said. “I think you should just stay right here until morning.”
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