Nick of Time (A Bug Man Novel)

by Tim Downs

  “Don’t worry, I’m just passing through. Hey—how about that new sheriff of yours?”

  “Ed Yanuzzi? You know about him?”

  “Just met him today. Your very own FBI agent—not bad for a small town.”

  “Yeah, he’s terrific.”

  “People here seem to like him then?”

  “What’s not to like?”

  “A couple of things come to mind . . . May I have my check please?”

  The waitress looked down at Nick’s plate—it was empty. He had managed to consume his entire dinner during their brief conversation. She glared at him, then ripped a sheet from her pad and slapped it on the table.

  “Can I charge this to my room?” he asked.

  “You’re staying here?”

  “Isn’t it wonderful? We’ll be able to see each other again and again.”

  Nick left the restaurant and headed back to the front desk. Holly looked up at him and smiled as he approached, and Nick noticed that she seemed to tip her head from side to side slightly as she looked at him, as though she were considering different poses for a portrait.

  “Hey. Here—those directions you asked for. I wrote them out for you.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got another address I need help with—it’s on the lake.”

  “Oh, sure, that one’ll be easy—that’s just a couple miles from here.”

  Nick looked at her handwritten directions; they filled most of a page. “How long will it take me to get to this place?”

  “Gosh. Hard to say. Maybe . . . I don’t know, more like—”

  “An hour? Less? More?” Nick stopped—he was starting to talk like her.

  “No, not more. Less, maybe. A lot of back roads out there . . .

  Half an hour, I’d say.”

  Nick checked his watch; with any luck he could make it out there, ask Keller’s widow a few questions, and make it back again in time for his nine o’clock phone call with Alena. It might be a little tight, but the alternative was to just sit around and wait until morning—and Nick didn’t like to sit around.

  “Thanks for the directions,” he said.

  “You going now? Out there? Tonight?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who lives way out there?” she asked.

  “A lady,” he said. “See you later.”

  13

  Nick pulled over onto the shoulder and turned on the dome light to check the directions—for the fifth time. What’s that woman’s problem? he wondered. How hard can it be to write out a simple list of directions? A bloodhound with a Garmin couldn’t follow this list. Nick had once read a controversial study claiming that most women lack the spatial capabilities of men; it was as if Holly was trying to single-handedly prove the study true. He read from her directions again:

  Turn left on Anderson and go 3 miles

  But before you do that,

  turn on Compton Woods

  When you come to the fork, take it

  Nick was awestruck by the woman’s ability to convert a logical sequence of thought into indecipherable gibberish. Holly seemed to dump random factual information into a mental blender and then serve it up like some sort of cognitive smoothie. It was truly a gift—a twisted, perverted gift from some dark corner of hell, yes, but a gift nonetheless—and he found himself despising it and marveling at it at the same time. Who thinks like that? he wondered. Who reasons that way? And then a terrifying thought crossed Nick’s mind . . .

  Maybe all women do.

  Thirty minutes later he found the final turn. At least that desk clerk got one thing right: “Way out in the boonies” was no exaggeration. A winding gravel road took his car down into an isolated hollow where a rustic cabin sat askew in a small clearing. The cabin was rectangular in shape and had a shallow front porch overhung by a corrugated roof; the walls were made of wooden planks that appeared to have been left unfinished, but it was difficult to tell in the scant moonlight that filtered down through the surrounding tree-covered hillsides.

  There was a door dead center in the cabin with a window on either side, and the windows glowed with a warm orange light. Somebody must be home, Nick thought. It’s a good thing, ’cause I’m sure not driving all the way out here again. There was a car parked to the left of the cabin with a New York license plate; Nick pulled his car up alongside it and got out. He walked across the gravel drive and stepped up onto the hollow porch, surprised by the loudness of his footsteps in the dark, half expecting a face to appear in the window at any moment.

  He knocked.

  A moment later the door opened a few inches and he found himself looking into the face of an attractive woman with short black hair.

  The woman looked him up and down. “Well, hello.”

  “Sorry to bother you so late,” he began. “Are you Michelle Keller?”

  “I might be. Who wants to know?”

  “I’m Dr. Nick Polchak. I was wondering if I could ask you a couple of questions.”

  “About what?”

  “About your husband.”

  She opened the door a little wider. “About Marty? What about him?”

  “If you’ll let me come in, I’ll be happy to explain,” he said.

  “How did you know where to find me?”

  “Sheriff Yanuzzi told me—he gave me this address.”

  She paused. “Well, you must be telling the truth, ’cause Ed’s the only one who knows I’m here.” She stepped back and let the door swing open. “C’mon in, hon. Can I get you something?”

  “No, thanks,” Nick said. “I’m good.”

  “You don’t mind if I do? There’s not much else to do way out here.”

  “It’s your house.” As he said those words he took a quick look around the cabin. The room appeared to be lit by oil lamp only. The walls were made of knotty pine, and the lamplight made the shellac look glossy orange. There was a kitchenette at one end of the cabin with a chipped Formica countertop and false veneer cabinets. The opposite end of the cabin was dominated by a queen-size bed on a simple black-iron frame. Judging by the trophy mounts on the walls and the spartan decor, it was not her house—it clearly belonged to a man.

  She turned to Nick with glass in hand. “Go ahead—say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “‘Nice place you’ve got here.’”

  “I’d be lying,” Nick said.

  “And you’re not the kind of man who lies? Honey, I’ve heard that one before.”

  Nick didn’t respond.

  “It’s home,” she said with a shrug, “at least for a couple of days a month.”

  “Where’s home the rest of the time? New York?”

  She sat down on an old leather sofa covered with a web of faint white cracks and patted the seat cushion beside her. “Sit down, hon. Make yourself comfortable. Stay awhile—it gets lonely out here.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because it gets lonely in New York too. It’s ‘Nick,’ right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Dr. Nick, you said. Imagine that—way out here, late at night, all by my lonesome, and a handsome doctor comes knocking at my door.”

  Nick wondered how much she’d had to drink. “Sorry to disappoint you,” he said, “but I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m a forensic entomologist.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I specialize in the insects that are attracted to decomposing bodies.”

  She shuddered. “Honey, you sure know how to change a mood.”

  “That’s another specialty of mine.” He crossed to the opposite wall and adjusted his glasses to take a better look at two framed photographs that hung one above the other near the window. The top photo showed a grinning Ed Yanuzzi with his index finger hooked through the gill slit of a very large fish; in the bottom photo a rifle-toting Yanuzzi posed beside the rack of a glassy-eyed buck. Nick turned to Michelle. “Does this cabin belong to the sheriff?”

  “Yes,” she said simply—and nothing mor
e.

  Nick made no comment.

  “Shame on you,” she said. “It’s not like that at all.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Are you married, Nick?”

  “Funny you should ask. I’m getting married on Saturday.”

  “No kidding. Here in town?”

  “No. In Virginia.”

  “Wow—you’re a long way from home.”

  “No problem. I know the way back.”

  She paused. “You don’t seem like you’re in any hurry to get there.”

  He didn’t reply.

  “What are you doing way out here, Nick? Is it lonely in Virginia too?”

  Nick decided it was time to change the subject. “I need to ask you a few questions,” he said. “Your husband, Marty— the sheriff tells me he died several months ago in a hunting incident.”

  “That’s right. It was the beginning of deer season—just a stray bullet from out of nowhere.”

  “And his death was ruled an accident.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you satisfied with that?”

  “Am I satisfied? What kind of a question is that?”

  “What I mean is, do you have any reason to believe otherwise?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is there something you’re trying to tell me?”

  Nick took a seat on the opposite end of the sofa. “I had a friend,” he said, “a forensic botanist out of Philadelphia named Pete Boudreau. Did your husband ever mention him?”

  “I don’t think so. Why?”

  “They were working together shortly before your husband’s death—at least, they traded a number of phone calls.”

  “Working on what?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. Your husband made a trip to Philadelphia just a month before his accident. Do you remember that trip?”

  “Sure. Marty said he was working on some kind of old case and there were people in Philadelphia who might be able to help him solve it.”

  “Did he tell you what the case was about?”

  “Not really.”

  “Did you ask?”

  “You’re about to get married, right? Well, let me tell you something about marriage. You can start out loving someone, but if you’re not careful you can lose interest. One day you wake up and you don’t talk anymore; you don’t touch; you don’t have any friends in common; you don’t care about what they do anymore.”

  “So you lost interest in Marty and got interested in Ed Yanuzzi.”

  “I told you, it’s not like that.”

  Nick shrugged.

  “Why are you interested in my husband?” she asked.

  “I’m not—I’m interested in Pete Boudreau. Pete was murdered a few days ago in his home in Philadelphia. I want to know why—I owe him that.”

  “And you think it might have had something to do with Marty?”

  “Both men were working on the same case; both men died within months of each other.”

  “My husband was killed in a hunting accident.”

  “Your husband was killed by a bullet—so was my friend.”

  “You’ll get over it. I did.”

  “So you don’t remember any details about the case your husband was working on? You never overheard any of Marty’s phone calls with Pete?”

  “Marty would have made the calls at work,” she said. “Long distance is a lot cheaper on a cell phone, and we got lousy cell reception out where we lived.”

  That comment sparked Nick’s memory. He checked his watch—it was 9:15. He hurriedly took the cell phone from his pocket and opened it. “Excuse me—I have to make a quick phone call.”

  The woman smiled. “You’re kidding, right? There’s no way you’re getting a cell signal way out here.”

  Nick checked the phone; she was right. “Do you have a landline here?” he asked.

  “This is a hunting cabin,” she said. “Ed has the phone turned on for a month or two during hunting season, then has it disconnected again.”

  Nick did a quick mental calculation: It was a good forty-five minutes back to town, and by that time Alena would have given up and gone home—again. He let out an audible groan.

  “Is there a problem, hon?”

  “I promised to call my fiancée at nine,” he said. “I forgot—again.”

  “No big deal. Call her when you get back to town.”

  “I can’t. It’s . . . complicated.”

  “Marriage is like that,” she said. “So many things to remember, so many things to explain. You sure you’re ready for this?”

  “It’ll take some getting used to,” he mumbled.

  She cocked her head to one side and studied him for a moment; then the corner of her mouth turned up in a smile.

  “Funny,” she said.

  “What is?”

  “You don’t strike me as a man who’s getting married in a few days.”

  “You know what else is funny? You don’t strike me as a grieving widow.”

  “It’s been months,” she said.

  “Some people would call you a fast healer.”

  “Grieving gets old. I guess I’m not very good at it.”

  “Were you ever?”

  She wagged a finger at him. “There you go again, changing the mood.”

  “What mood were you hoping for?”

  “Warm. Friendly. We can see where it goes from there.”

  “This isn’t a personal visit,” Nick said.

  “Are you sure about that?” She slid a little closer on the sofa. “You’re getting married in just a few days and here you are in the middle of Nowhere, Pennsylvania, with me . . . Why is that? You were supposed to call your fiancée, but you forgot all about her . . . Who forgets his fiancée a few days before the wedding? I don’t know what your mind’s on, honey, but it sure doesn’t seem to be marriage. What are you doing here, Nick?”

  “I told you. I’m looking for answers.”

  She rested her hand on his forearm and said, “Are you sure that’s all you’re looking for?”

  Nick got up from the sofa. “I should be going.”

  “Is that all you wanted to ask? I’m disappointed. You didn’t ask me anything personal.”

  “A dead husband isn’t personal?”

  “I mean about me. You know, something like, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’ ”

  “Your husband died a few months ago,” Nick said. “You moved away, but you come back to town a couple of days every month—and when you do, you stay in the sheriff’s cabin way out in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “I’m not stupid, Michelle. What I’m wondering is why the sheriff told me where to find you.”

  “You seem like the determined type. He probably figured you’d find me anyway.”

  “He didn’t have to make it this easy.”

  “Maybe he has nothing to hide.”

  “Or maybe he thinks there’s nothing I can find. Your species makes that mistake all the time—that’s what keeps people like me in business.”

  “My species?”

  “Thanks for your time,” Nick said. “Say hello to Ed Yanuzzi when you see him; somehow I have the feeling he’ll be stopping by.”

  She opened the door for him. “You don’t know what’s going on here, Nick.”

  Nick looked at her. “Does the sheriff’s wife?”

  14

  Hey—you’re that witch, aren’t you?”

  Alena sat at the end of the bar nearest the door at the Endor Tavern & Grille. She did her best to ignore the man by keeping her eyes fixed on the cell phone lying open on the counter in front of her. Three bars—she had a strong signal and the phone was apparently working, but it was almost ten o’clock and once again there had been no phone call from Nick. She wondered if she had accidentally turned off the ringer; maybe the phone had never worked at all. She wondered if she had been wasting her time staring all evening at a lump of us
eless plastic with a tiny glowing screen. Maybe this is Nick’s idea of a joke, she thought, and she felt like hurling the worthless thing against the wall. But that would only draw more attention to her—and attention is the one thing she didn’t want.

  “You’re the woman who lives up on the mountain—the one with all the dogs. It’s Alena, right? Alena Savard.”

  I never learn, she thought. Once again Alena had chosen to take the short walk down to Endor rather than make the long drive—though this time she had fully intended to wait for Nick’s call on the front stoop of Resurrection Lutheran Church. That’s exactly what she did—until it started to rain. Then she was forced to hurry from door to door along the main street of Endor, searching for an open establishment that could provide her shelter from the rain. But businesses close early in a town the size of Endor, and Alena soon ended up exactly where she had been the night before—standing in front of the Endor Tavern & Grille.

  Through the window she could see the rain still falling steadily on the street; the streetlamp made the asphalt look as slick as oil. It was the rain that had driven her inside—it was the only thing that could have. By 9:15 it had been starting to come down hard and that left her with only two options: go home or come inside. She chose the latter, and right now she was sorry she had.

  How hard can it be to make one lousy phone call? Each night she had to make the long trip from the top of the mountain all the way down to Endor; what did Nick have to do, punch a few buttons? Is that too much to ask? How busy is the guy, anyway? Last night he couldn’t call because he was in jail—at least, that was the lame excuse he gave Gunner. So what’s his excuse this time? Maybe he lost his phone; maybe he broke his button finger; maybe he had temporary amnesia and lost his memory. But in her heart Alena knew that there could only be one explanation for Nick missing two phone calls in a row . . .

  He just didn’t want to call.

  “Hey. Honey. I’m talking to you.”

  The annoying man at the opposite end of the bar had been trying to strike up a conversation with her for half an hour. He had apparently recognized her the moment she walked in and began to toss out clever little questions and comments like baited hooks. Alena never responded and had been careful not to make eye contact, but the guy just wouldn’t give up. At least he had kept his distance so far—but now, from the corner of her eye, she saw the man pick up his drink and move to the barstool next to hers.