Dead Ends (Main Street Mysteries Book 2)

by Sandra Balzo

She stepped close to AnnaLise as if confiding – so close that AnnaLise got a whiff of her menthol cough drop. ‘I'm not a good “sharer,” you see.’

  AnnaLise felt her eyes go wide. Fingers already on the doorknob, she twisted it now, backing as she went. ‘Yes, well, enjoy your lunch and, Suzanne, I hope you have a great year at U-Mo.’

  ‘Oh, I will.’ Porsche apparently forgotten, the girl had caught sight of what – or who – she'd been looking for. ‘Be right back.’

  Her mother followed her gaze, a sour look pinching her face. ‘Suzanne, I will not have you chasing after that boy. He has no – ’

  But Suzanne was already pushing past AnnaLise and cleared the doorway before the electric chime had a chance to bong.

  ***

  ‘We should probably take my car,’ Daisy said as they rounded the corner.

  ‘Your car?’ AnnaLise said, stopping by her mother's Chrysler, parked on the street for the duration of the garage's renovation, as was AnnaLise's Mitsubishi Spyder convertible. ‘I thought you wanted me to drive.’

  ‘I do, but I thought you might prefer my car on Sutherton Mountain. I know how you hate the steep ups and downs.’

  ‘I hate all the mountain roads,’ AnnaLise said, unlocking the Spyder's passenger side door for her mother. ‘But I'd prefer a car I know.’ Besides, compared with the pert little Mitsubishi, her mother's car drove like a boat wallowing on the waves.

  AnnaLise swung open her door. ‘Why are we driving up there anyway? The neurologist is in Boone and that's the opposite direction.’

  Daisy slid into the passenger seat and half-turned to regard her daughter as she got in on the other side. ‘I promised Ida Mae Babb we'd come by and she'll still expect it, even though now it will be after my appointment, instead of before it.’

  Ahh, the 'errand.' ‘Sorry,’ AnnaLise said, thinking it was true in more ways than one. Not only had she held up her mother, but now, instead of driving on the mountain safely at midday, it might be late afternoon or even early evening before they'd be knocking on Ida Mae's door two-thirds of the way up Sutherton Mountain.

  ‘Well, you sure didn't seem in any hurry,’ Daisy said, ‘while you were chatting up James Duende. Then your friend from way up north comes in with his family and you're practically shoving me out the door. It struck me as a touch rude – not to me, but to them.’

  ‘Well, I felt guilty for keeping us at Mama's and didn't want you to miss your doctor's appointment on account of me.’ AnnaLise started her car and pulled away from the curb, turning left onto Main Street. Just past Mama Philomena's she saw Suzanne Rosewood next to a parked yellow sports car, talking to the driver of a pimped out – for outdoor business, not indoor pleasure – black pick-up truck. The yellow car was a Porsche. AnnaLise knew that because Ben had bought it for his wife last Christmas. ‘Isn't that Joshua Eames – ’

  ‘Please, AnnaLise,’ Daisy continued, unimpeded, ‘give me credit for knowing my own daughter.’

  ‘Knowing . . .?’ AnnaLise slowed at the intersection of Main Street and the state highway and glanced anxiously over at her mother. Had Daisy sensed something between her and Ben? ‘You're saying I wanted to make you miss your – ’

  ‘Oh, no. I'm saying you looked guilty, all right. I just didn't think your reaction was because of keeping me waiting.’

  AnnaLise floored it, turning left onto the highway and narrowly missing getting t-boned by a white truck. The bushy-bearded man driving the vehicle didn't lean on the horn, or even throw her the finger.

  ‘Daisy, people are just so damn nice here. It's not natural.’

  ‘We just recognize which side our bread is buttered on,’ Daisy said. ‘That was Lester Moose in that truck. He might be on the elliptical trainer at Peak Fitness tonight, talking about the idiot who pulled out in front of him, but he'd never be rude to a tourist outright.’

  AnnaLise hadn't gotten past the specter of a big mountain man like Lester Moose on an elliptical trainer. ‘I'm not a tourist,’ she muttered.

  ‘No?’

  Daisy was hazing her and AnnaLise knew it. She also knew continuing the discussion about guilt wouldn't lead to anything but her connection to the Rosewood clan. Then again, Daisy's appointment with the neurologist was probably not her mother's first choice of topic, either. That left: ‘So why are we stopping by Ida Mae's?’

  ‘She suggested we come by to take a look at the new deck Fred Eames put on, seeing as he's doing work for us. If you ask me, Ida Mae's just looking for a little company. Gets lonely up there now with her husband gone.’

  ‘You don't have any real worries about Fred working on the garage, do you?’

  ‘Not so long as he confines himself to Monday through Friday on our project. Weekends, I hear, he drinks.’ Daisy twisted to look behind them. ‘AnnaLise, the speed limit is forty-five on this stretch and you're doing barely thirty. You'd best step on it or people might not wait until they hit the gym to work out their frustration with you.’

  AnnaLise glanced in her rear-view mirror to see at least a dozen vehicles stacked up behind the Spyder. Then she glanced at the cliff that had been cleaved to form the highway. ‘The sign says CAUTION: FALLING ROCK.’

  ‘That sign has been there since you were a little girl. You just never paid it any mind.’

  ‘Well, I'm older and wiser now.’

  ‘Older and scared-er,’ Daisy said, and AnnaLise could feel the weight of her gaze. ‘And scared isn't a good way to live, no matter your age.’

  ‘I'm not scared,’ AnnaLise said, startled. She'd been working very hard at convincing herself that Ben's wife did not know about the affair. That it truly was the Porsche Tanja was talking about sharing, not her husband. But if she could look that murderous just about a car, how would she feel about –

  ‘You are feeling scared,’ Daisy said, ‘and you are feeling guilty. I just don't know why. I'm hoping it's not over me.’

  There was just a hint of a sniffle at the end of the last.

  ‘You?’ AnnaLise asked, ashamed that in addition to Daisy worrying about her own very real problems, the older woman was troubled about her daughter's hypothetical ones as well.

  But what to do? Confess to her mother she'd had a year-long adulterous affair with a man who was now sitting in Mama's restaurant with his betrayed wife and daughter?

  Granted, AnnaLise had come to her senses and ended it, but that didn't excuse it. Didn't excuse her, either, from the stupidity that made the journalist – of all people – believe that she and Ben were different. That only she understood him and that he, and he alone, ‘got’ her. That she must be pretty and smart and funny, because this man – this intelligent, powerful, older man – said so.

  And, biggest lie of all, that if nobody found out about their affair, no one would be hurt.

  AnnaLise, Daisy would say if she knew, a married man?

  And, worse, a married man, who – as cool as Ben Rosewood had played it – now didn't seem to be able to simply let go, witnessed by the text messages and emails she'd been systematically deleting without reading after the first two or three from him.

  AnnaLise had finally sent one last text message, composed painstakingly on her computer first, so she'd be sure to get it right. A clear and concise argument written in parallel structure and using the ‘Rule of 3’ Ben followed in making his closing arguments to juries.

  AnnaLise could hear the district attorney now, explaining why ‘three’ was the magic number: ‘Think about it. Julius Caesar's Veni, vidi, vici – I came, I saw, I conquered. Lincoln's We can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow – this ground. Even FDR's very own advice to speakers: Be sincere, be brief, be seated. We remember them, we repeat them, we live by them, all because of the Rule of 3.’

  Even the man's explanation of the rule was in triplicate. So, in answer to Ben's ‘Why can't we be together?’ AnnaLise replied:

  ‘Three reasons – you have a wife, you have a daughter, and I have a mother who needs me. Do
not text me, do not email me, do not call me.’

  If only she'd thought to break the ‘Rule of 3’ to add a fourth: ‘And don't ever show up on my doorstep.’

  Four

  The appointment with the neurologist was a huge relief or a colossal waste of time, depending on which of the two Griggs you believed.

  The doctor had been two hours late, meaning they'd finally gotten in to see him at 4 p.m. When he'd entered the exam room, where they'd been waiting another twenty minutes, he'd asked Daisy a few questions and suggested memory exercises she could do at home before saying she should call his medical assistant – who'd already left for the day, naturally – to schedule a CT scan and MRI ‘just to be safe.’

  ‘Talk about the bum's rush,’ AnnaLise said as they drove back toward Sutherton.

  ‘The man had an emergency,’ Daisy said, looking like the cat who swallowed the canary. Or worse, the Cheshire Cat who swallowed the canary. She seemed so smug, in fact, that AnnaLise wanted to scream.

  ‘Besides,’ Daisy continued, ‘I had no trouble with his little tests. On the other hand, when you tried to "play" along . . .’

  ‘Nobody uses analog clocks anymore,’ AnnaLise muttered. ‘How the hell should I know where the big and little hands are supposed to be?’

  ‘But you do know how to count, right?’ The suppressed grin in Daisy's tone was palpable.

  ‘I'm a word person, so sue me,’ AnnaLise exploded. ‘Besides, who counts backwards from 100? By sevens, no less.’

  ‘And the date? I suppose – ’

  ‘Last Monday was Labor Day,’ AnnaLise snapped, ‘and a short week is always confusing. Besides, when I'm working – ’

  ‘I'm sorry, dear. I didn't realize Wisconsin was over the international dateline,’ her mother said mildly. ‘Or perhaps you time-travel at the newspaper?’

  Daisy was having way too much fun with this. And why shouldn't she? The woman had just been given a reprieve. Besides, for the most part, Daisy herself was unaware of the memory blips that AnnaLise all too clearly noticed. The lost keys or forgotten clothes in the washer didn't bother AnnaLise. Who didn't do those things occasionally? No, it was more the two incidents, both witnessed by other people, in which Daisy Griggs, the mid-life woman, slipped back into Lorraine Kuchenbacher, the teenage girl.

  It had given AnnaLise the creeps, so she'd told the doctor about them. And what had he replied?

  ‘Interesting,’ Daisy's daughter repeated, starting the car. ‘He said your memory glitches were “interesting.” And where does he get off keeping us waiting all afternoon? What could he have been doing for two hours? Performing – ’

  ‘Brain surgery?’ Daisy finished for her. ‘Could be, I suppose. Or maybe neurologists leave that to the neurosurgeons. Whichever, dear, it does no good to sputter. Besides, you went next door to the office supply store. I was the one cooling my heels in the waiting room.’

  ‘I invited you to come with me,’ AnnaLise said stubbornly. ‘And I'm not sputtering.’

  ‘Yes, you are. And for the record, even reading old magazines is preferable to following you around while you shop for printer ink and red Flair pens. Besides, I wanted to call Ida Mae and let her know we were going to be late.’

  ‘What did she say?’ AnnaLise looked at the clock – the digital clock – on her dashboard. ‘It's past five-thirty, maybe we shouldn't – ’

  ‘Honestly, you are such a worry wart, AnnaLise. Besides, we could have cut a good ten minutes off our trip if you’d taken the Blue Ridge Parkway. And we'd have gotten off before the section that spooks you.’

  The Blue Ridge Parkway runs nearly 470 miles through the mountains from Shenandoah National Park in Virginia south to Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina. A breathtakingly beautiful drive with scenic vistas that drew people from all over the world, the local stretch of Parkway provided a handy shortcut between the town of Boone to the south and upper entrance of Sutherton Mountain, at least when the route wasn't packed with rubber-necking tourists.

  But it wasn't the gawkers that, in Daisy's words, 'spooked' AnnaLise. Her problem started at the Parkway's Milemarker 303.4, the Linn Cove Viaduct. The viaduct skirted Grandfather Mountain, essentially Sutherton Mountain's big brother to the west, so as not to destroy that mountain's delicate ecosystem. Seeing it from a distance, you would swear the snaking concrete span and the vehicles crossing it were suspended in thin air. And they were. Above forty-one hundred feet of nothingness.

  AnnaLise didn't like nothingness. In fact, she even hated the viaduct which performed the same function on their own mountain. Not nearly as long or impressive – a simple ‘c’ curve tucked against the mountain, as opposed to the Linn Cove Viaduct's long sweeping ‘s’ – the Sutherton version had been dubbed simply a "bridge" rather than the more pretentious "viaduct." Semantics aside, Sutherton Bridge still danced a precarious semi-circle around a gorge deep enough to give AnnaLise conniptions.

  ‘Well, not to worry,’ Daisy said. ‘It won't be dark for another couple of hours, so you don't even need to concern yourself about getting down the mountain before nightfall. Besides, the people who stay at Hotel Lux drive up and down it without a problem and some of them are two or three times your age.’

  ‘That's because they have cataracts as thick as quarters and cars the size of cabin cruisers. They just point downhill and let ’er rip so they won't miss the early-bird specials at Mama's.’

  ‘“They,” and the rest of our visitors, keep this town solvent,’ Daisy scolded. ‘I won't have you badmouthing them.’

  Sure, AnnaLise thought, until they ignore the no-parking sign in front of your garage and block you in. Again.

  But she didn't say it. Instead, ‘I just meant that Ida Mae might have given up on us and is having dinner.’

  ‘Sure you did.’ The dollop of sarcasm was unmistakable. ‘Here, take Main Street, but don't forget to bear left toward the mountain.’

  AnnaLise turned onto Main Street and then bore left, as ordered. The opposite direction would have taken them home. Instead, though, she was reluctantly circling Lake Sutherton clockwise on Main, a route which would eventually take them up Sutherton Mountain.

  The western side of the lake was dominated by large homes with names like Miller House, Preston Place, Watkins Nest and Cranswick Cottage. Then came the north boat launch, the post office and Lucky's Bait Shop. A handy arrangement since during the during the summer months, mail was delivered to the lake homes by boat.

  Tourists paid fifteen dollars a head for the fun of riding along to cheer on the college-age runners who hopped off the boat on one side of the property, raced to the flagged boxes to deliver and collect the mail and then, with luck, hopped back on the vessel – which never stopped or slowed – before it was out of leaping range.

  Lake Sutherton was cinched at the waist like a figure eight and just below the belt was Bradenham, Mayor Bobby Bradenham's homestead. Just north of Bradenham was the turn-off for what had been White Tail Island, now converted into ‘Hart's Landing.’

  A half-mile north of Hart's Landing was where Main Street began to climb the mountain. This so-called ‘low entrance’ took visitors past the strategically placed Sutherton Real Estate office, which handled properties on both the lake and mountain. AnnaLise's friend Kathleen Smoakes headed the rental division.

  ‘How far along are the Eames on Ida Mae's deck?’ she asked her mother as the little Mitsubishi passed the first tee of the eighteen-hole golf course and then six clay tennis courts, already covered in fallen, wind-blown leaves.

  ‘Done, I hope. That rickety thing was practically falling off the place. As tight as the woman is with money, I finally convinced her that she'd best fix it before someone landed on the expert slope without wearing any skis.’ Ida Mae's place was one of the many stilt-supported chalets on the fringe of the ski hill.

  ‘I hear you.’ AnnaLise nodded at a rustic wooden lodge diagonally across the road from the tennis courts. Located at the base of th
e ski hill where all the runs came together, the place would be jammed with parka-sheathed skiers in a couple of months. Now, though, the lodge was nearly deserted, the metal benches for the chair lift detached and lined up on the grass, half of them looking newly painted. ‘Speaking of skiing, it looks like they're getting a jump on the season.’

  ‘The lodge has to be ready for the first snowfall, whenever that should come,’ Daisy said. ‘Besides, they've taken to doing ski-lift rides on fall weekends. I hear it's beautiful, what with the changing leaves and all. We should do it this weekend before you leave.’

  Again, that push-pull in Daisy's voice. Wanting her daughter to stay, but hoping she wouldn't need to.

  ‘Sounds good,’ AnnaLise said, though the very thought of it shot acid into her stomach. Someone born and bred in the High Country should not be afraid of heights, but there it was.

  AnnaLise stepped on the brake to make the tight left turn onto Ridge Road, which would take them up the mountain without needing to cross the Sutherton Bridge. As with most things in life, though, there was a price: the narrow switch-back roads. They were especially a problem for AnnaLise's Spyder, which had an amazingly wide front-axle and long wheelbase for a car so small, meaning that while it held the road very well, the convertible had the exaggerated turning radius of a tractor-trailer.

  ‘You're going to have to give it some gas, you know,’ Daisy said, looking back at a shiny black panel truck emblazoned with the words "Scotty the Electrician" coming up fast behind them. ‘The road climbs about five hundred feet in elevation during this section.’

  Said ‘section,’ in AnnaLise's estimation, being maybe the equivalent of only eight city blocks. The grade was so steep she was afraid her poor Mitsubishi's twin tailpipes were scraping.

  But AnnaLise stepped on the gas and the little car leapt forward, just in time for another hairpin turn. She slammed on her brakes and was rewarded with a screech of tires behind her and the sound of a horn.

  Negotiating the bend, they continued to climb, the panel truck on their tail. ‘Back off,’ AnnaLise said into the rear-view mirror.