“I can use my phone. He’s on my list, too,” she said. That was news to me. Perhaps my sister was getting a little more prudent as she got older. Having the chief of police’s number on automatic dial meant that at least she was finally beginning to realize that we couldn’t handle every situation by ourselves. I never would have believed it if Maddy hadn’t told me herself.
She put her phone on speaker so we could both talk to the chief of police.
When he picked up, I said, “Chief, this is Eleanor.”
“Am I on speaker? I hate speakerphones. You know that.”
“Sorry if it’s inconvenient, but I thought you might like to know that someone is following us. Maddy and I just noticed him four cars back, and I doubt that he realizes that we’re onto him. Care for a guess about who it might be?”
“It’s not Bernie Maine, is it?” he asked.
“It is indeed, or at least his car,” Maddy said.
“Don’t do anything, Eleanor,” the chief said.
“If I stop driving, he’s going to rear-end me,” I said.
“You know what I mean. What I should have said was, ‘Don’t do anything different.’ Where are you right now?”
“We’re on two-fifty-eight, between Cow Spots and Timber Ridge.”
“In which direction are you traveling, and which town are you closest to?”
I looked at Maddy and asked, “We’re about ten miles from Timber Ridge, wouldn’t you say?”
Before she could answer, Chief Hurley asked, “How should I know?”
“I was talking to Maddy,” I said.
“That sounds about right to me,” my sister said.
“Are you heading toward town or away from it?”
“Toward,” Maddy said.
“I’ll be there in nine minutes,” he said.
“Are you sure you don’t . . . Maddy, did he just hang up on us?”
“He must have, unless there’s a dead spot in my coverage here.” She leaned forward and closed her phone. I doubted that her action looked that suspicious from the distance Bernie Maine was from us, but something must have spooked him. At the next intersection of an old country road, he pulled off abruptly.
I did a wide U-turn on the shoulder as I told Maddy, “Call the chief and tell him what’s going on.”
“Yee-haw, I just love a high-speed car chase,” she said.
“When you tell him that, try to find a way to word it so that his head doesn’t explode,” I said as I pulled my car onto the road Maine had just taken. It was paved for fifty feet before it changed into a dirt road, and I could see the dust springing up like a plume behind the BMW.
“Hang on,” I said as I pressed the accelerator down closer to the floor.
“Chief, we had to take a detour on Meadowbrook,” Maddy said out loud as soon as he answered. I was glad we were on speakerphone again, no matter how the chief of police felt about it.
That was when it hit me. In my haste to follow our suspect, I’d completely missed the name of the road we were on, a crucial bit of information that my sister provided. Then again, I’d been pretty intent on not driving into a tree, so my attention had been focused elsewhere, like on not killing us.
“What are you doing there?” he screamed. “You were supposed to drive straight to Timber Ridge.”
“There was a change of plans,” I said as I fought my car’s desire to become airborne. “Bernie got suspicious and shot down a side road.”
“And you had to turn around and follow him. Is that it?”
“What choice did we have? We couldn’t just let him get away,” I protested.
“Listen to me. You are to stop your car immediately, pull over, and wait for me. Do you both understand?”
“You . . . break . . . can’t . . . ,” Maddy said in a stuttering voice before she hung up. “What do you think, Eleanor? Was that convincing?” she asked.
“I bought it, and I was sitting right here beside you.” When I looked ahead again, I lost sight of Maine’s car in some tortuous twist. The road was now more of a path than a legitimate country lane, and I had to wonder if Maine was going to run out of room soon. The real question then would be, what would we do with him if we caught him? I tried not to think about that and focused on the road ahead instead.
It was a good thing that I did, too.
We hit a patch of gravel I spotted barely just in time, and as the front tires hit it, I felt us start to spin. Fighting down my sense of panic, I remembered from a driver’s ed class a long time ago to turn into the skid. It didn’t save us completely, as we slid off the shoulder and nearly hit a tree, but it kept us both from being injured, and that was a win in my book any day.
“Are you okay?” I asked Maddy as I tried to start the car back up.
“I’m just peachy. Now I know what an ice cube feels like in a blender.”
I wanted to continue the chase, but my vehicle had other ideas about that.
The car wouldn’t start. Maybe it was flooded. I gave it two minutes and then tried again.
Nothing.
I got out, and Maddy joined me. After I popped the hood open and looked inside the engine compartment, Maddy asked, “Sis, do you have any idea what you’re looking at?”
“No. I took home ec, not shop,” I said.
“My, how our public educations have let us down,” she answered.
A minute later the chief of police drove up and parked with his front bumper nearly touching mine.
“Forget about us. Go after him!” I said a little louder than I should have.
“He’s long gone,” the chief said. “He must have cut back onto the highway, because if he’d stayed on this dirt path, he would have had to run me off the road to get past me.” He glanced at my car and asked nonchalantly, “Having car troubles?”
“It won’t start,” I admitted.
He reached under the hood, fiddled with something, and then said, “Try it now.”
Still nothing, not even a whir, a grind, or a grunt.
“Sorry,” the police chief said. “That’s the sum total of my car knowledge. Should I call Bob Pickering and have him come out and tow this to his shop?”
I put the hood down on the Subaru, patted it affectionately, and then said, “You might as well. We’re not going to be moving otherwise.”
“Let me see if I can get him,” he said and then looked at Maddy for a second. “Besides, your phones don’t get reception out here, do they?”
Maddy pulled out her phone and acted surprised. “Hey, I’ve got bars now. Imagine that. We must have been in a dead spot.”
“If you’d caught up with Bernie Maine, that’s exactly what might have happened. I distinctly remember telling the two of you to stay away from him,” he said.
“Do you see him anywhere around here?” Maddy asked.
“Maddy, you’re not nearly as funny as you think you are.”
After the chief talked to Bob and gave him directions to where we were, I said, “I’ll stay here with the car. Maddy, maybe the chief here will give you a ride back into town.”
“You don’t have to,” the police chief said. “Bob said that he had his own key to your car. Is your Subaru in the shop that much?”
“Not often, but it runs in spells,” I admitted. I glanced at my watch and saw that if we didn’t hurry, we were going to be late getting the Slice ready to open for the day. “Is there any chance you could give us a ride to the pizzeria?”
“I don’t see why not.”
“Can I ride in back?” Maddy asked. “I’ve always wanted to be a perp. Isn’t that what you call them?”
“Maybe they do on television,” he said. “I don’t care where you sit, if you don’t. Eleanor, do you want to ride back there with her?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ll sit up front with you, if you don’t mind.”
“Then let’s go.”
As we drove, Kevin repeated his earlier scolding. “That was incredibly reckless of you to
follow him like that.”
“Hey, he started it,” Maddy said from the back.
“It doesn’t matter who started what. I told you that the man was armed. I’m just afraid how it might have ended.”
“Do you really think that he’s that dangerous?” I asked Chief Hurley. “He’s a businessman, for goodness’ sake.”
“You tell me. One man’s dead, and Bernie Maine is one of my prime suspects. How much more dangerous can you get?”
“So, do you really think he did it?” Maddy asked, peeking her head out from the cage that separated us.
“I like him for it better than most of the other suspects on my list,” Chief Hurley said.
“Hang on a second,” Maddy said. “Did you just share something with us?”
“Sorry. It won’t happen again,” Chief Hurley said as he shook his head. As much as I loved my sister, there were times when I wanted to stick a sock in her mouth.
“Chief, I still can’t figure out why Bernie was following us. It was pretty risky, wasn’t it, given that you’ve been looking for him all day?”
“Is that a jab coming from you, too, Eleanor?”
“No way. I know how slippery the man can be. But why is he so interested in us? We’re not making any progress at all.”
“Who knows? He’s got to realize that the two of you have been digging into his life these past couple of days. Maybe he thinks you got lucky and stumbled across something that could nail him. After all, even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then.”
I wasn’t sure I liked the analogy, but I wasn’t about to comment on it. “So, does that mean that you’ve written off Rebecca, Samantha, and Kenny?” I wasn’t about to include Bob’s and David’s names in that particular roster.
He shook his head. “Like I said, Maine’s the most likely, but nobody’s been eliminated. To be honest, I’m kind of surprised that you left Vivian Wright off of your list.”
“That’s because Art Young got us her alibi,” Maddy said.
I turned and stared hard at my sister, and she got the message immediately. Maddy made a motion as though she was locking up her lips, but if she was, I wanted the key so nothing else could slip out “accidentally.”
“How did he manage to do that?” Chief Hurley asked.
“I’m not sure,” I said, “but the man I spoke to felt as though Art’s involvement was enough to ensure that he was telling the truth.”
“I thought you two were through,” the chief said.
“We were, but we’re back on again.”
“So you got him to use a little muscle for you to get what you wanted. Are you sure that this is really a guy you want as a friend?” the chief asked. He made no bones about his displeasure with my renewed friendship.
“He doesn’t give me any grief about you being one of my friends, so why should you care about him?”
Chief Hurley took his gaze off the road for a second to look at me. “Are we friends, Eleanor?”
“Well, if you had asked me before, I would have said yes, but hearing that question, now I’m not so sure.”
“Easy. I didn’t mean anything by it. To be honest, I’m flattered that you feel that way.”
“I’ll be your friend, too, if I can turn on the siren,” Maddy said.
I looked back at her, and she just grinned. Evidently, riding in the back of a squad car was making her feel a little goofy. If that were the case, I was going to make sure that it didn’t happen again anytime soon.
The chief ignored her request, and soon enough, we were in front of the Slice. I wasn’t sure about the message it was sending to the rest of Timber Ridge for us to climb out of a patrol car, but I couldn’t do anything about it.
“Thanks for the ride,” I said as I opened the door.
“Hey, there aren’t any handles back here,” Maddy protested.
The chief smiled at me for a brief second, showing a glimpse once again of the young man I’d been crazy about in high school. “What do you think, Eleanor? Should I drive her around the block once or twice before I let her out?”
I smiled back at him. “You’d better not. She might get to like it and ask you to do it again sometime.”
“That’s a good point,” he said as he unlocked the back door from his control panel.
Maddy climbed out, and as the chief started to drive away, he said, “Be careful, you two.”
“You’ve got it,” I said.
After he was gone, I said, “I know it’s going to be anticlimactic after that high-speed car chase and taking a ride in the back of a genuine police cruiser, but do you feel like making some pizza?”
“It’s almost always my first choice of things to do,” Maddy said. “Sorry about all of that blabbing earlier. I don’t know what got into me.”
“I don’t either,” I said. “I was about to strangle you at one point.”
“Then I’m glad that there was a cage between us,” Maddy said with a grin.
I was about to unlock the front door when I saw that someone had written something on the window glass. In the gaudiest shade of red lipstick I’d ever seen, it said BACK OF in bright letters. It was written in block print, and I doubted there was a single fingerprint anywhere near it that belonged to the person who had written it, but I pulled out my phone and called the chief of police, anyway.
“I can’t leave you two alone for three minutes, can I?” he asked after he drove back to the Slice and got out of his squad car. Being the chief of police gave him the privilege of driving straight onto the brick-paved promenade, and he’d been known to take advantage of it before. “Where is it?” he asked.
I pointed to the door as Maddy said, “We keep wondering what we’re supposed to do with the back of something.”
“You both know they meant to say, ‘Back off,’ ” the chief said. “Whoever was writing it was obviously interrupted before they could finish.”
“Do you think someone saw them doing this?” I asked as I looked across the promenade for any potential witnesses. Unfortunately, the square was deserted.
“I don’t have any idea.” Chief Hurley pulled out his camera from the trunk of his car and took a few pictures. After that, he took some powder and dusted it on the glass.
Nothing showed up at all.
“When was the last time you cleaned this?” he asked.
I shrugged, but Maddy said, “Josh cleaned it right before he left last night. He wanted something to do since it was kind of quiet, and I didn’t see what it could hurt.”
“Probably nothing,” the chief said. “I was hoping for a palm or a fingerprint, though.” The police chief packed up his little kit and then returned it and the camera to the trunk of his car.
“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s all you’re going to do?”
“I’ll have one of my men canvass the area in case someone saw something, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up.” He could see that I wasn’t happy with the minimal effort, so he asked me, “Eleanor, what else do you want me to do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “You’re right. I just hate that someone tried to scare us off like that.”
“As threats go, it’s a pretty benign one,” Chief Hurley said. “Here’s some cleaner and a few paper towels you can use to get rid of it. This is pretty powerful stuff, so go wash your hands as soon as you are finished with it.”
“Hang on a second,” Maddy said as she pulled out her cell phone and took a few pictures herself. “Go on. I got it,” she answered.
After I cleaned the window and handed the spray bottle back to the chief, he said, “If there’s nothing else, I’m going to take off.”
“See you later,” I answered. “Thanks for coming back so quickly.”
“That’s my job, to serve and protect. Seriously, though, call me if anything comes up, no matter how trivial it might seem to be to you.”
“We’ll do our best,” I said.
He let that slide as he got into his cruiser and drove away.
“Now more than ever. A little normalcy would be nice right about now.”
Unfortunately, that ended up being the last thing we got.
Chapter 16
“Eleanor, Maddy says she needs you up front,” Greg said as he came into the kitchen a little later. He was working double shifts to make up for his absence lately, and we were glad to have him. “She said to tell you that it’s important.”
“Tell her I’ll be right there,” I said as I slipped the final pizza order onto the conveyor. Peeking in through the other side of the oven, I saw that I had around five minutes before the first sandwich on the conveyor was due to come out.
I walked out to the dining room, wondering what was so urgent, and that was when I saw my sister talking to Rebecca Whitmore.
As I approached them, Maddy said, “Okay, she’s here now. Now go ahead. What was it that you wanted to tell me?”
“I found some money in the hidden drawer, just like you said, and I thought that it was only fair to split it with you,” she said as she started digging around in her purse.
“That’s really nice of you,” Maddy said, “but if it’s a lot of money, you don’t have to give me half.” We both knew that ten thousand was substantial, and it was odd that Rebecca was being so generous.
When she pulled out a slim envelope, there was more than cash there, though. “All I need is for you to sign a waiver for the rest of Mom’s stuff, and half the money is yours.”
“So, you’re trying to buy me off, is that it?” Maddy asked, not taking the envelope.
“Believe me, I’m doing you a favor. All that Mom left behind were bills and two mortgages. There’s not going to be anything left, so I’d advise you to take this and be happy that you’re done with it.”
“Well, I can’t sign anything until I know how much we’re talking about,” Maddy replied, studying the skinny envelope. Unless Rebecca had deposited the money and written her a check, there was no way that there was five grand in there.
“I’d really rather it was a surprise,” Rebecca said stubbornly. “Does it honestly matter how much it is? This is pure profit for you.” She pulled out another copy of the waiver we’d seen before and handed it to Maddy, along with a pen.
The Missing Dough (A Pizza Lovers Mystery) Page 18