Foolish of Waylin to park it like this on the lip of a hill, he thought. Cramer watched the truck smash down the slope, bouncing and swerving. He hoped no tree was big enough to stop it, hoped no boulder would catch a wheel and hold firm. What a noise it made, all its innards crashing around. And then finally- splash!
Gravity had finished his job for him, and the rest was up to the creek. It was sad, thought Cramer, that Butchard’s was only four or five feet deep. Then he turned away. There were other important things to do now. This was just the beginning.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
It was unlikely anyone at the Lee household would check the mailbox on Sunday, but Mimi wasn’t the only one at the snye who made regular trips to the window to peer through the curtains out toward the bridge.
Monday dawned cool and overcast. There was a front moving in. Iris left for work before nine but promised to return that evening. Around noon Jay got a call from his mom. They had been trying to get high-speed Internet service at the Riverside Drive house now that there was finally a transmission tower in the area. Apparently, the man could do the hookup that afternoon sometime between two and five. Could he be there? Jay said he would. He wanted Mimi to come with him.
“Are you kidding?”
“No,” said Jay. “Leave Cramer a note or something; tell him we’ll be back this evening.” He laughed and shook his head. “How ironic. Leaving a thief a note.”
“We don’t know he’s a thief, but I don’t want to have that conversation again,” said Mimi. “I’m going to stay.” Jay looked annoyed. “I’ll be careful.”
Jay sat down. “Fine, then I’ll stay. But you can phone Lou and tell her why.”
Mimi growled. “That’s not fair. Trust me, will you, for God’s sake? I know this guy. I swear. There’s some kind of explanation. Go. Scoot!”
But Jay shook his head and looked away. “What I said yesterday about your choice of guys-that came out all wrong.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
“All I meant was that when Lazar started acting out, getting scary, he caught you off-guard, right? You weren’t expecting it?”
Mimi nodded slowly. “I’m naive; is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes.”
“And the implication is I’m being naive about Cramer. How am I doing so far?”
“You’re right on the money.”
“Okay, I hear you. But you have to believe me when I say it’s not the same thing.” Jay opened his mouth to argue, then snapped it closed. He stood up and headed toward the door. “Aw, don’t go away angry,” said Mimi.
“Just go away?” said Jay. Mimi grinned and nodded. He didn’t look happy about it, but he had given in. He always did and she felt a bit guilty about it. He came over to her. “If anything happens to you, I’m going to be really pissed,” he said.
“That is so affectionate,” said Mimi, and went up on her toes to give him a kiss, right on the lips. It didn’t last long-wasn’t meant to. But it was still a bit unnerving. “I’ll be extra specially careful,” she said.
Because the weather looked so bad, he took her car. He hadn’t been gone more than a few minutes when Mimi heard an unmistakable noise out on the driveway.
Stooley Peters had pulled up in his rackety old half-ton. With her own car gone, she thought about locking the doors and pretending not to be there. But considering how quickly he arrived, she figured he must have seen Jay drive away alone. So she bolted down toward the snye, not wanting him to get anywhere near the house, only taking the time to throw on a baggy sweatshirt, which nicely hid her mace canister in its holster.
They met at the snye, she on her side, hoping he’d stay on his. He looked as if he had dressed to go to town. He was in clean denim jeans, a denim jacket, and a mostly white shirt. His hair was slicked down. More like a Sunday-come-calling getup, she thought, which, she had to admit, was better than covered in blood, but not a cheering thought. He didn’t have his dog with him. Mimi wasn’t sure that was a good thing. But what was a good thing was that he was wearing shoes, not rubber boots. If he wanted to ford the snye, he’d have to take the bridge and she’d just pull the plank, if she had to.
“I come by yesterday,” he said, from the other shore. “No one was home.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Peters?” she said in a businesslike way.
He rubbed his hand down the side of his jeans, as if he wasn’t used to wearing clean clothes and they felt odd. “I got to thinking about last week when I was over here, eh?” he said. “I guess I got a little outta hand.”
He paused but Mimi didn’t respond. If he thought she was going to let him off the hook, he was dead wrong.
“Anyway,” he said. “I thought I owed yous an apology.”
“Apology accepted,” she said.
“I figure it was probably the head injury, eh? Kinda made me… you know…”
“Randy?” she said.
“Yeah, well… uh…”
“Like I said, apology accepted.”
He made a salute as if he were tipping the edge of a cap. He smiled-not a good move on his part, because his teeth were anything but inviting. Then he pulled a flat brown bottle from his jacket pocket and held it up for her inspection. It was a Mickey of something; she could guess what.
“Thought maybe we might have a little Canadian Club to celebrate,” he said.
“To celebrate?”
“Hell, yeah,” said Peters, and he was beaming now. “You see I know who’s been messing around up here.” He looked triumphant. “Your secret admirer.”
This caught her off-guard, but she hoped it didn’t show. “You do, huh,” said Mimi, without a trace of happy surprise in her voice. Which seemed to tick Peters off.
He flung up his finger pointing west, up the road. “It’s the Lee boy,” he said, his voice less cheery by a few degrees. “Seen him with my own eyes.”
Mimi tried to maintain her composure, but it was an effort. “Where’d you see him?” she asked.
“How ’bout I come over,” he said.
“How ’bout you don’t,” she said, her voice sharp. “Just tell me where’d you see this… this person?” He looked put out. “What was he up to, Mr. Peters?”
“Well, I’ll tell you. I seen him a couple times, you know, but the last place I seen him was up that tree,” he said, pointing at a thick and many-branched maple right behind her. She didn’t bother to look. She knew pretty well which tree the stranger had been in Saturday night. And as much as she didn’t want to believe it had been Cramer, it was hard to refute the old codger.
“And what was he up to?” she asked.
“I didn’t stay around to find out,” said Peters, with a great deal of self-satisfaction. “As soon as he was up that tree, I took off to where he hides his boat.”
“His boat?”
“His canoe. A nice one, or it used to be.” There was no way of misinterpreting the mischief in his voice or the smugness in his expression. His crooked canines were on showy display. “I don’t think you need to worry ’bout him no more.”
“Mr. Peters,” she said, her hands on her hips, “what are you saying?”
“I’m getting to it. Keep your shirt on.” She bit her tongue. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “The lad was coming down here by way of the river, see. In his canoe. Down the Eden, then up the snye. But I got him. Got him good.” Then his hand went into his jacket pocket, and he pulled something out and held it up for her to see.
“Know what this is?” he asked.
She peered at the thing gleaming in his hand. “Some kind of drill bit?”
“You got ’er. A nice big five-eighth-inch bit. I put half a dozen holes in his little red boat. Fixed his wagon, I guess you could say.”
Jesus, thought Mimi. “You put holes in his boat?”
“Damn right. Scuppered him.”
She nodded, not sure what to say, surprised to find herself worrying about Cramer. “And what happened?” she said.
But Peters was in no hurry to answer her question. “You see, I got a pasturage backs down onta the river. I was out in the tractor one afternoon a couple days back, and I seen him, the Lee boy, out on the Eden. Didn’t make nothing of it at first. Seen him out there lots. Except, when I looked again, this here time, the other day, like, the boy was gone. That got me to thinking. So I tracked him down.” Peters sniffed and stood up tall.
“So, did he sink? Did he drown?”
“Damned if I know. But I’m guessing he got the message, loud and clear.”
Mimi felt very ill at ease. “So what if he comes around with a shotgun or something?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Peters, but it was clear to Mimi from the tone of his voice that he hadn’t thought about it one bit. He hadn’t thought beyond getting vengeance. That’s what this was about. It must have been Cramer who cracked him one on the head. Peters hadn’t done this for her. Or maybe he had, in a way.
“Sure you won’t have a little snoot of this?” he said, holding up the bottle.
“No thank you,” she said.
“Aw, come on,” he said. “Let’s let bygones be bygones.” And now he did head toward the bridge, in surprisingly large steps, and by the time Mimi could get in motion, he was already on the plank that spanned the broken arch. But he stopped in his tracks.
The silence was shattered by the sound of the truck starting up.
The smile vanished on Peters’s face. He spun around. “What the-”
But his words were drowned out by the sound of his vehicle backing down the driveway. Peters turned and ran after it, and Mimi followed, rounding the bend in time to see the truck pull out onto the Upper Valentine, and then with a screeching of the gears and a roar of the engine take off west, with Peters in hot pursuit, yelling his head off and soon enough left in the dust.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Cramer sat on the bank of the river catching his breath and watching Stooley Peters’s old Plymouth long-bed go down. The river was deep here, and there was a roiling turbulence in this stretch, though not enough to suck the heavy old vehicle downstream. He’d left the windows open. She’d go down quick enough. He would enjoy every minute.
He was aware of the fact that this was the second vehicle he had sunk in less than twenty-four hours. How about the Taurus as well? he thought. Maybe this is my calling, sinking things! But no, it wasn’t like that, really. In Peters’s case, he was just paying the old man back, an eye for an eye. What he’d done to Waylin Pitney’s truck filled with stolen merchandise was something more. It was like saying good-bye.
He hadn’t been able to manhandle the barrier out of the way, so he’d had to back the Plymouth up and crash through it. There was just enough cracked and weed-choked macadam beyond the barrier for him to stop from going over and ending up in the drink. He hadn’t counted on the brakes being so soft, the tires so bald. For one brain-numbing moment, he thought he was done for. But the old dame stopped with one front wheel over the lip of the crumbling hillside and Cramer jumped free. The rest was grunt work.
Peters was swearing enough to turn the air around him blue. Mimi worked hard at not smiling. She kept her distance from him, but, judging from the language, it was as if he didn’t know she was there. He ran out of fuel and stopped cursing eventually. Then he got this strained look on his face as if he was thinking and it was hard work.
“You got that little phone on you?” he said, holding his hand up to his ear, with his pinkie extended for a mouthpiece, in case she didn’t know what a phone was.
“It’s back at the house,” she said.
“Well, go get it,” he said, and started marching back down the driveway. But she ran ahead of him and stopped in his path.
“I’ll go make the call for you. You can wait right here.”
He looked as if he might argue the point, but something, probably the determination on her face, made him change his mind.
“Call the cops,” he said.
“Okay. Hey, and I can even tell them the license plate number.”
“You remember it?”
She shook her head. “Not the number, exactly, but I did notice it was issued in 1976. That ought to make it easy to find.”
She hadn’t noticed much in the way of irony in Peters’s conversation so far, but he picked up on hers quickly enough. And he raised his hand as if he wanted to give her the back of it, except that she was a good healthy ten feet ahead of him.
“Around here, missy, it’s against the law to steal somebody’s vehicle.” Then he swiped the air with his large mitt of a hand, as if he’d said all he wanted to say to her, and stomped back out to the road and on toward Paradise.
But what Mimi was thinking was that the Upper Valentine ended in the direction that Cramer was heading. She had run there often enough to know. It was about three miles, she guessed. She could make it in under twenty minutes.
As she changed into her jogging gear, she wondered if it had been Cramer. They had not caught sight, through the dust the truck kicked up, of who was behind the wheel. But considering Peters had scuppered his canoe, as he put it, she had a feeling the old man was right. And if it was Cramer, there was no use waiting around here for him to show.
It was three o’clock when she hit the road, but it looked more like eight. The sky was low and black and heavy with rain. She was glad she’d put on long pants for the run; there was quite a wind. It was 3:25 when she got to the busted barrier.
She stared down the steep hill to the river. She could just make out the right front end of the truck, tilted upward like some black and rusty boulder just under the surface. Even as she watched, it sank from view. Then she looked east and west, her eyes scouring the hillside. The slope was steeper to the west, the brush more dense. If he was still here, that’s where he’d be, she thought. There was no other way out of here.
“I’m not sure if you are here, Cramer,” she shouted to the hillside. “But I’m going to pretend you are and hope maybe you’ll come out of hiding and talk to me.”
She looked around. Nothing. The wind was loud in the trees; the storm was close.
“Cramer?”
The sweat was drying on her, chilling her face and arms. She pushed the hair out of her eyes.
“I don’t know if you got the letter we left at your place,” she said. “We want to talk to you. I want to talk to you.” Oh, this was ridiculous! For the second time in two days, she was talking to an invisible man. A man in the trees, a man up a hill. He had to be there. She could feel he was there.
“I’m not sure what you’ve been playing at,” she said, “but I want to hear your side of the story. Like maybe it was Stooley Peters who was poking around, and you were keeping an eye on him. Or maybe you were spying, but there was a reason. Cramer?”
She turned in a long slow circle.
“Do you like me, Cramer? Because I feel this connection. Do you feel it, Cramer? And I guess what I want to know is why you would steal Jay’s guitars. Why? That’s what I can’t figure out. I can’t see you doing that.”
She stared at the steep hillside and then looked up because she had felt a drop of rain. And then suddenly she looked back down the road because a car was coming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
It was Peters in a car of about the same vintage as his truck, but with a more recent license plate. Mimi watched with despair as he pulled up to within a few yards of where she stood. He got out and with only a nasty glance her way went to the edge of the precipice and looked down. He turned to her.
“Did you see anything?”
She nodded. “It’s gone,” she said.
He swore, looked around, and then looked back at her. “What about the boy?”
She shrugged. A good question, she thought. What about the boy? But then Peters turned to look up, through the rain, at the hillside with which she had been having her one-sided conversation or soliloquy or whatever it was.
“He up the
re?”
“Do I look like I know?”
Peters was standing near enough to her that she could smell whatever gunk he’d put in his hair when he’d come a-calling. But she wasn’t frightened of him at all. His attention was on the hillside. He was chewing away at his lower lip, scanning the brush, as she had done, but, from the stormy expression on his face, it was pretty clear they did not have the same motives. And in the next moment, it became clearer still. He walked over to his car, opened the back door, and took out a rifle.
“You see this, Cramer Lee? You come out right now and I’ll hold my fire. You stay hid and I start peppering the bush with this thing-see how you like that!”
He had been ready to go to her. He had been that close to standing up, making his way down the hill, and coming clean. He even knew near enough what he would say, or at least the first thing he would say. I am not a thief, he would declare to her, his hand on his heart. He would not be tongue-tied. There would be a lot of explaining to do, but everything depended on her believing that he had not stolen Jay’s guitars, although he had a sinking feeling he knew who had. He would explain to her about who Jackson Page was to him and who he was to Jackson Page. That’s how he would start.
And then-Cramer’s luck being what it was-Peters arrived and he had a gun. A shotgun, twelve-gauge, by the look of it. And he might have started shooting, but the storm came instead, and it didn’t take but a moment before there were sheets of rain pounding down on the road, and Peters was running for the shelter of his car. And it still might have worked out, because Mimi wouldn’t accept the old man’s offer of a ride. She backed away from him, yelling at him, though Cramer couldn’t hear through the rain what it was she was saying. But then there was an almighty flash of lightning and a thunderclap, so loud and close that Cramer covered his head with his arms as if the whole roof of the sky was caving in. And when he looked up again, through the gray veils of rain, Peters was dragging Mimi to the car and pushing her in. And they drove off.
The Uninvited Page 21