The answer to that question was, Not well at all, and the gravel did a fine job of making me regret going out there barefoot. No, if the dog that had savaged my door had come out onto the road, there would be no way to pick up its trail again. It had vanished, though the heft of the gun in my hand made me think that maybe I wouldn’t mind all that much if it came back. If it did, this time I’d be ready.
Satisfied and feeling my oats, I headed back toward the house. Playing the mighty hunter for a few minutes was one thing, but the day was starting to get on, and I wanted a shower, a change of clothes, and a cup of coffee.
What I got instead was Officer Hanratty pulling into the driveway behind me, screeching to a stop so close I could feel the tiny bits of stone her car threw up bounce off the back of my legs.
For a moment, I considered walking back to the house, but that would have done me no good, not with Hanratty. So instead I let the gun drop, then turned around to face her.
“Morning, Officer,” I said. “This is a pleasant surprise. What can I do to help you?”
“You can put a shirt on,” she said as she heaved herself out of the car. “And you can put the gun in the house. No sense scaring the neighbors.”
“Yes, Officer,” I said amiably. “Care to come in?”
She grimaced, a horrible thing to see first thing in the morning. “It’s either that or I stand out here and yell, so why don’t we do that?”
“Follow me, then.” I traipsed around to the back of the house and up the mudroom steps. She followed me, then gave a shout of surprise when she saw the door.
“What the hell happened here?”
“Dog,” I said, pointing to the tracks. “Wild one tried to get in last night. Tried real hard, too. Why do you think I’m walking around with this?” I patted the gun.
“I thought you were trying to blend in with the locals,” Hanratty replied sarcastically. “Though you do seem to be doing a better job of it than the last time I saw you.”
I thought about where Hanratty had come from, how long she’d been in town, and how she’d lectured me about what life was like here. I thought about saying something. Then I took a deep breath as quietly as I could and bit my tongue for a full ten seconds before trusting myself to speak. “Well, I fell asleep waiting for him to come back and was just checking his tracks before taking a shower. You might want to call animal control.”
“Assuming the dog is wild, yes,” she replied. She stood impatiently at the bottom of the steps. “Are we going to go in or what?”
“Going in,” I said, and I did exactly that. Hanratty followed, and the stairs complained as she did.
I led her into the kitchen, past all the locked doors, without comment. “Coffee?” I asked. She nodded, so I busied myself making a pot, double strength.
“So what brings you out here at this hour?” I asked as the coffee brewed. “Good news on the car, I hope?”
She sank into a chair and drummed her fingers against the tabletop. “More or less. A couple of kids spotted someone driving it around town last night. They didn’t get a good look at the driver, though.”
“Not surprising.” I poured two cups of coffee and brought them over to the table. “Cream and sugar?”
“Black,” she replied. “At least until noon.”
“Black it is.” I shoved her cup in front of her. My cup hit the table a moment later, and I took the chair directly across from where Hanratty sat. “So what part of town was the car spotted in?”
She pulled a notebook out of a pants pocket and flipped through a few pages. “Maynard and Hughes, according to the first witness. Right by the library building. It popped up across town a little while later, then was spotted heading east and out of town. Needless to say, by the time anyone thought to call in, it was long gone.”
I blinked and took a sip of coffee I didn’t taste. “The library, huh? Weird.”
“Yup. Especially since you were there yesterday, too.”
Hanratty got one of my best long, slow looks, which didn’t faze her a bit. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she replied, obviously having way too much fun with my discomfort. “It just means that the car was near the library, and you were near the library, and those are two very interesting facts.”
I leaned back in my chair and held the coffee cup in front of me with both hands. “It could mean that the thief is stalking me. Makes sense after what happened the other day.”
She nodded. “That’s one possibility, certainly.”
“I’d be interested in hearing any others you might have thought of.”
“I’m still working that part out.” She shifted in the chair, which groaned in protest. “I’ve got to examine all the possibilities, you know.”
I nodded like I understood what the hell she was talking about. “Of course. That reminds me, I saw Sam Fuller go into the station house after he dropped me off yesterday. He say anything interesting?”
The officer locked her face into a frown and waggled a round finger at me. “That’s none of your business, Mr. Logan.”
I shrugged and slurped down more coffee. It was almost cool enough to drink, but I wasn’t going to give Hanratty the satisfaction of a cough or a choke. “Just curious. I like Sam. He’s given me a couple of rides, and if he had some kind of trouble, I’d want to help out.”
“Sam’s got no trouble,” she rumbled, emphasizing his name just enough to let me see the obvious comparison. “This may surprise you, but in a town like this, occasionally folks are just friends with the police, and like stopping in to say hello sometimes.”
“Oh, come off it,” I sputtered. Hanratty looked up at me, shocked, but I didn’t give a damn how shocked she pretended to be. The cat was clawing its way out of the bag, so I decided to give it a swift kick in the ass. “A town like this and folks like these—who the hell do you think you’re fooling, Hanratty? You sound like you should be wearing a sandwich board for the local tourist bureau except, oh, wait, Maryfield’s too damn small to have one.”
“Very interesting, Mr. Logan.” Her tone was guarded, and I nearly grinned when I saw her hands curl protectively, reflexively, around the coffee. “But I’m not quite sure I understand where you’re going with this.”
“It ain’t where I’m going, Officer Lee,” I spat out. “It’s where you’ve been. I don’t know what the hell you’re playing at, telling me all about small town this and small town that, but I don’t really care for it. It’s intimidation, is what it is, and I don’t even know why. So why don’t you cut that crap out and try to do some actual police work finding my stolen car, and I’ll try to forget that you came running here from the closest thing this state has to a big city to hide out when things got hot.”
“You don’t know shit, Logan,” she said icily, and she stood. “Remember that the next time you go shooting your mouth off about stuff you don’t really understand.” She put the mug down on the table. “Crappy coffee, by the way. You used to buy all yours at Starbucks, didn’t you?”
“Preferred tea until I got back home,” I said, standing up to show her I wasn’t intimidated. “Can I show you out?”
“No, you can’t.” She marched past me to the kitchen door and put a meaty hand on the knob. “If there’s any word on your car, I’ll call.”
“You do that,” I said, and I sat back down. “Have a nice trip back to town, Officer.”
The only response I got was the door slamming as she went out.
I waited until I heard the police car tearing down the road before finishing my coffee. Even then, I was half expecting Hanratty to kick in the door and arrest me for malicious newspaper reading, or crappy coffee making, or maybe indecent exposure if she was feeling particularly creative. I knew I’d hit a nerve, and hit it hard. My guess was that most of the folks in town were too polite to try to find out anything about their new cop, and the rest too embarrassed to talk about it. Only a big-city boy like myself—and I had to laugh at that descrip
tion—was rude and brash and ornery enough to throw it in her face, never mind that she’d been applying a form of harassment that usually ended up involving the words “You ain’t from around here, are you, boy?”
Well, screw her. Maybe there was something that I didn’t know about her circumstances. In fact, I’d be shocked if there hadn’t been. That being said, all I wanted out of her was a little public service, not lectures on my hometown or suspicious smirks or visits at odd hours.
Of more immediate concern was the fact that my car, complete with mysterious driver, had been spotted near the library. Maybe that was coincidence—by sufficiently loose definition, two-thirds of town was near the library, after all—but it still felt worrisome.
Frowning, I reached across the table for Hanratty’s half-full cup and stopped.
Leaning forward, I could see something else on the table—a pair of black-rimmed glasses peeking out from behind the napkin holder. Hanratty couldn’t possibly have failed to see them. Only I was that stupid.
No doubt Hanratty knew whose glasses those were. She probably knew every prescription in town, now that I thought on it, convincing herself that it was something small-town folks did. Hell, if someone convinced her that it was customary, she’d probably put on a Minnie Pearl hat and a smile, then go line-dance through the town square.
In the meantime, though, she had a bit more information on my comings and goings than I wanted, and some on Adrienne’s, too. The pieces of this puzzle weren’t fitting together yet, but they were all on the same table, and I was getting the vague sense of an ugly-ass picture waiting to be formed.
There was nothing I could do at the moment, though, unless I wanted to pelt down the road in hopes of outrunning Hanratty’s police car. With all due deliberateness, I took the coffee cups over to the sink and dumped Hanratty’s out. After some fiddling with sponges and coffee grounds, I surveyed the kitchen and felt that it was good enough for the time being. My stomach wasn’t settled enough for breakfast, not after last night’s adventure and the morning’s dustup, so I just let the notion go and went around turning the house back into something habitable. That damned Nickel Creek song was in my head, and I found myself whistling bits of it off and on as I went.
But it was morning, with the sun shining and the night’s rain gone. Even with a sore back from sleeping curled up on the mudroom floor, I felt better than I had in days. Maybe it was the mud between my toes, maybe it was the satisfaction of telling Hanratty off, maybe it was just the fact that by the light of day, I couldn’t see ghosts and magical fireflies anymore. Maybe I’d start worrying about them again once the sun went down, but for now I had real flesh-and-blood problems to worry about.
Like, for example, the one that had nearly torn through my laundry room door.
It was pure coincidence that I was at the far end of the house, shutting the mudroom door and locking it, when the phone rang. I thought about letting it go, but curiosity got the better of me, and I ended up running down the hall just in time to catch it.
“Hello?” I asked, a little breathless.
“Mr. Logan?” I heard Adrienne reply. “I hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”
I checked the kitchen clock. It was a quarter past nine—a perfectly reasonable time for someone to call. “Just an early time, that’s all. I try to exercise my constitutional right to be a lazy son of a gun these days.” She started to apologize, and I shushed her. “Really, it’s fine. What can I do for you?”
“Well, it’s about yesterday,” she said.
I let out an exaggerated sigh, full of the blues. “Why do I have the feeling you’re not going to tell me you did some more research on my problem and found the one clue that will magically solve everything?”
“I’m afraid not,” she replied, from the sounds of things smothering a giggle as she did so. “But I did leave my glasses at your house last night.”
“That you did,” I agreed. “And I’m going to be holding them for ransom. Leave three hundred dollars in small unmarked bills by the statue of Joe Johnston downtown, or you’ll never see them again.”
“Not on a librarian’s salary,” she said sweetly, “and in case you’ve forgotten, there is no statue of General Johnston.”
I snapped my fingers up near the phone so she could hear. “Damn. I knew there was a flaw in my cunning plan. So what now?”
She took a deep breath. “I was thinking I could come out there to retrieve them after work, if that’s all right with you. And if you don’t mind, I could maybe bring some dinner along with me. Just to thank you for looking after the glasses.”
“That’s better than trusting my cooking,” I heard myself saying. “I’d be honored.”
“Great.” You could actually hear her smile over the phone. “I’ll be there around six thirty?”
“Sounds good to me,” I told her. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“Me, too,” she said, and she broke the connection.
The next few hours were spent doing what no man in his right mind enjoys doing, which is to say tidying up in hopes of impressing a woman. There was something soothing about it, though, a pleasant change from all the worrying and hurrying and scurrying I’d been doing. By the time I was finished, everything except that scratched-up door looked presentable, which was no mean feat considering my state of mind.
At quarter after six, I declared the place as done as it was going to get, and I moved to take care of the last two special items on the agenda. First was the shotgun, which I propped up in the mudroom with the safety off and the inside door closed.
Second came the door to Mother and Father’s bedroom. I opened it, meeting no resistance. “Don’t make me look bad this time,” I said into the empty air, and then I propped the door open with a book off Father’s shelf—a well-worn hardback copy of Catch-22. I’d never noticed it there before, but then again, there were a lot of things I’d never bothered to notice about Father.
I could explore them later, though. Now, I needed to wait for a pretty lady to show up.
Show up she did, more or less on schedule. I was waiting on the porch, feeling like a schoolboy, when she did. She was wearing a sundress all covered in pink flowers, neck cut high and hem way down low.
I hate the color pink. On her, it looked perfect.
In her hand, Adrienne had a brown paper bag, which I supposed held dinner. She bounced up the steps and smiled, holding the bag up as if it had been a treasure. “Fried catfish and slaw all right?” she asked.
“Perfect,” I told her. “Come on in. I know the head waiter. He’ll give us the best seats in the house.”
We went in then, and she busied herself pulling the various foodstuffs out of the bag while I pulled out plates, glasses, and flatware. By the time I pulled the pitcher of lemonade out of the fridge, she had everything neatly portioned on the plates and was sitting, waiting for me.
“You’re making me look bad here,” I told her, and I settled in across the table from her.
“You look all right to me,” she replied, putting knife and fork to her food. “How was your day?”
“All right,” I told her around a mouthful of catfish. “I had a visit from Officer Hanratty this morning. She updated me on my car.”
“That was nice of her.” Cole slaw started disappearing at an alarming rate.
I nodded in agreement, not trusting myself to manage a proper tone of voice. “Other than that, it was just housekeeping and being a bum. I find I rather enjoy that.”
Adrienne looked past me out the window. “So does the grass, from what I can see. Going to mow that any time soon?”
“The grass ain’t bothering me, so why should I bother it?” She looked stunned at that, like the idea of letting the grass grow hadn’t even occurred to her. It was nearly enough to make me shoot lemonade out my nose. I swallowed hastily, coughing, and put the glass down. “Actually, I just don’t know where Carl stashed the mower. It’s not in the shed, ’cause I don’t have o
ne.” And, when she looked at me in a way that said that answer wasn’t quite good enough, I said, “I’ll get around to it one of these days. Soon, even.”
She was about to say something that I had hopes was approving when the phone rang. Instead, she turned to look at it. I did the same.
It rang again. Jenna, I thought. Crud. I’d forgotten all about her calling.
“Are you going to get that?” she asked.
“Nope,” I told her, and I took another bite of catfish. “It’s dinnertime. I don’t answer the phone during dinner. I also don’t answer the phone when I have company. It’s rude.”
Third ring, this one somehow shriller than the last two.
“Is it now?” Adrienne arched her eyebrows, trying for one and getting both. “And that’s your reason?”
Fourth ring. Jenna always hung up after five, I remembered.
“Yup.” I nodded and looked down into my plate to keep from meeting her eyes. “Besides, I only have three jokes, and if I use them on the phone, then I can’t tell ’em to you.”
The fifth ring cut the air, then cut itself off.
Silence.
Adrienne gave me an appraising look, one I couldn’t read. “I’m sure they’re good jokes, and they would bear repeating. Now finish eating. I’ve got red velvet cake in the bag still, and the frosting’s probably all melted now.”
“Yes’m,” I said, and I went back to work on my catfish.
Dinner was long gone, replaced by conversation, when panic suddenly grabbed me. I turned to look out the window and felt my breath sink its hooks into the back of my throat. The sky had gone from powder blue to something getting on toward navy while we’d been talking, and I’d never noticed.
Last night, the dog had started hunting me in the middle of the night. What if it came back tonight?
What if it came back earlier? What if Adrienne was still here?
She noticed my distraction and followed my look. “It’s getting late, isn’t it?” she said more than asked. I nodded.
“That it is, and I know you have to work tomorrow. I’d hate to keep you too late just because I like to hear myself talk.”
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