“I know where you can get some of those,” I said. “Keep it down.”
She chattered quietly about Claude and about her stay, just to keep herself calm, almost like a mother soothing a baby, all the while the cracking of twigs and muttering of voices grew louder.
I told Lucy to find some matches, then kill all the candles and the lanterns except for one. “And get your poker. You may need it.”
Thirty-three
The faint rumble outside grew louder. Lucy was hyperventilating. She stood up and held the poker like a golf club with instructions from me to aim at the knees, shins, or forearms—a cute cop in Virginia had once told me those were the best places to go for. Minimal strength required, maximum damage inflicted.
The door creaked open and we stood flattened against the wall behind it. In seconds, as I hoped, bodies tumbled over the bungee cords; in the dark I couldn’t tell how many. I threw the tarp over them and Lucy started maniacally flailing away to a chorus of screams and “what the . . .” A figure in skintight jeans stood in the doorway, taking off a helmet and shaking out her hair. Babe Chinnery.
“Stop, stop.” I pulled Lucy back before she killed somebody and three unhappy men scrambled to their feet.
“How did you get here? I would have sworn you weren’t even going to get my message,” I said.
“Alba’s a good kid. She said you sounded funny, which at her age could mean anything from indigestion to an oncoming freight train. Then I remembered seeing you tear out of Springfield yesterday looking like the devil was chasing you, so I thought maybe something was up. Luckily Charlie, Danny, and Ken were in the diner when you called.”
They had been heading back to Marcus Dairy to pick up Danny’s bike. Since men don’t usually say no to Babe, she had had her choice among three Harleys and she got them to take her to the reservation and then climb the mountain.
“I’d just gotten my turkey and cranberry wrap,” Danny said, rubbing the life back into the thigh that Lucy had whacked. “It’s probably all soggy by now.”
“You have food?” Lucy asked, sidling up to him.
“You gotta be kidding. First you crack me in the leg with a poker and then you expect me to give you my dinner?”
“Some people might consider it foreplay.”
“Ooooh, I like this girl. C’mon outside, honey, dinner is served.”
“You’re lucky Caroline Sturgis isn’t here, too,” Babe said, following Danny and Lucy out to the bikes.
That stopped me in my tracks. “Are you serious?”
“She’s been camped out at the diner for thirty-six hours with some news she’s itching to tell you,” Babe said. “She needs to get out and have more fun . . . like you girls.”
Oh, yeah, this was big fun.
“The ride was sweet,” Danny said, climbing onto his bike with Lucy wrapping herself around him. “Until we met those a-holes.”
“What a-holes?” I asked.
“Some big guy and a runt trying to get up the mountain in a crappy Toyota,” Danny said. “They had a hell of a blowout. Looked like they drove over a steel claw.”
“Hey, we told them we’d help them out on our way back, but they got rude, yelling in some foreign language. They left their car on the road, and started back down the hill, smacking each other and taking turns swigging from a bottle of vodka.”
Thirty-four
The six of us made our way back to my car. With Charlie’s help I backed the Jeep down to a spot where I could safely turn it around.
The Ukrainians’ car had to be moved out of the way so the Jeep could pass. They’d left the windows open and the doors weren’t locked, but they hadn’t been so accommodating as to leave the key in the ignition.
With five hundred or so pounds among them, not including leathers, Charlie and the other guys tried moving the car with brute force but it wouldn’t budge. They tried again and when the veins started popping out on necks and foreheads we made them stop. They looked at one another and I heard Danny say, under his breath, “Dude, I know she’s hot, but I’m not scratching up my bike to move that hunk of junk.”
The assembled brain trust gave it some thought, but pushing the car with either the Jeep or the bikes was not a good plan. Besides, we might overdo it and send the car sailing off the side of the mountain. In any event, it wasn’t necessary. Babe Chinnery climbed off Charlie’s bike and brushed the three men aside. She slid into the Toyota and her head disappeared under the steering wheel.
“Six years of hanging out with drunken roadies and musicians who frequently lost their wallets, their airline tickets, their wives . . . and their car keys,” she explained, calmly hot-wiring the car. Another of her not-so-hidden talents. Once the engine came to life, Charlie put the car in neutral and single-handedly pushed it into the brush and out of the way into one of the wider switchbacks. Macho man stuff, undoubtedly for Babe’s benefit.
The Toyota was a junker—its owner was clearly not the kind of guy who took his car in for a tune-up when the little red light flashed and told him to. Red masking tape held one of the brake light covers on. Inside, the car stank of cigarette smoke; fast-food wrappers littered the floor of the backseat; and there were plenty of beer cans, as well as three empty bottles of Popov vodka.
“Nothing but the best,” Babe said. “You know these losers?”
“Not in the biblical sense,” I said.
One of my hand weeders was embedded in the Toyota’s left front tire and I poked around in the dirt road as much as I could by the headlights of the Harleys looking for the other one—I didn’t want any of us to suffer the same fate the Michelin Man and his friend had.
“Find it?” Babe asked.
“No. Just didn’t want to take any chances.” A ridiculous thing to say under the circumstances.
“I think this Toyota was the car I saw on the way to Oksana’s. The same one that followed me to the gas station on the highway,” I said.
“What the hell for?” Babe asked.
Lucy was hovering, wolfing down Danny’s soggy but still edible turkey sandwich. Danny stood by, wondering how she’d thank him.
“Why are you looking at me?” she said, mouth full.
“They were following me because they thought I was you.”
Lucy was used to being followed, at parties, at conferences; she’d even been followed into the ladies’ room once at a bar on the Upper East Side, but that time it hadn’t been entirely unexpected or unwelcome.
“Why would anyone want to follow me?”
“It has to be your story.”
“The Quepochas’ fight for recognition has been going on for twenty years,” Lucy said. “And people have been arguing about casinos for just as long.”
Maybe. But Titans’s financial difficulties had only recently come to light. I was betting that they were connected and that connection was the catalyst for Nick’s murder.
The bikers helped me load my gear and tools on top so that Babe and Lucy could ride with me. Once again the blue tarp and the bungee cords came in handy. In the car I brought the girls up to speed, as Charlie slowly led us down the mountain. They left us at the entrance to Titans with a standing invitation for a meal on the house at the Paradise; Lucy promised Danny a personal, gourmet thank-you in New York in exchange for his turkey sandwich.
I suggested we crash in my room and drive home in the morning. “There are two double beds and a love seat. Does that work for you two?” Babe and Lucy agreed and we walked to Lucy’s rental car to get her overnight bag. Even from a distance we could tell something was wrong. The trunk of the car wasn’t closed properly. Inside it, Lucy’s expensive red leather suitcase was zipped closed but with a small scrap of fabric stuck in the teeth.
“Hey, that’s my Burberry.” She unzipped the bag and saw that her usually carefully packed clothing had been rummaged and thoughtlessly restuffed in the bag, her expensive scarf stuck in the zipper.
“You know, I’m used to this when I fly,” she sai
d, pissed off and checking to see if anything was missing. “Generally there’s a slip of paper explaining why it’s critical to national security for some lonely TSA guy to sniff my undies, but here, for crying out loud?”
“It was probably the cops,” I said. “I reported you as missing.” I’d call Winters in the morning to tell her everything was all right.
“You did? That was so sweet,” she said, refolding her things.
“Don’t get too mushy,” I said. “No one paid any attention until I reported your car as stolen.”
“Nevertheless,” she said, “you’re a real friend.”
So was Babe. If it hadn’t been for her, Lucy and I would still be on the mountain with two angry Ukrainians trudging up to meet us. Maybe I wasn’t quite as alone in the world as I sometimes felt. And maybe I shouldn’t keep quite so tight a grip on that F word.
A handful of stragglers were hanging out in the Titans lobby when we entered. Hector chatted with a young Hispanic couple near the corpse flower and gave me a nod as I came in, then a longer look when he saw Babe and Lucy trailing behind me. On our way to the elevator, Helayne, the bartender, waved. I knew she wanted me to go over, but I pretended it was just a hello wave; I’d had as much excitement and new information as I could handle for one night.
“What, is this your new hangout?” Lucy asked. “Does everyone here know you?”
“It’s your fault. I’ve spent so much time in this lobby waiting for you, I was beginning to feel like an employee . . . or a hooker.”
In the room we dumped our things and I put on the television for white noise. Lucy took the love seat, Babe and I the double beds. Before long we’d spread out and had Hoovered the contents of the minibar; we sat in our underwear drinking little nips as if it was a pajama party.
“How did you ever get mixed up with these guys?” Babe asked.
“The Titans casino is never going to happen,” Lucy said, popping peanut M&M’s into the air and catching them in her mouth. “At least that’s my story. The Crawford brothers don’t want the casino,” she said, searching for the last nut in the bag. They’d seen what had happened on other reservations when the casino operators came in. A handful of tribal leaders got fabulously wealthy, and the majority of the members—if they really were members—got stipends, which turned the young people into drug addicts and wastrels—chronically unemployed, undereducated, and more interested in flashy cars and electronics than in preserving their culture.
“That may be honorable, but is it really up to them if that’s what most of the tribe wants?” I asked.
“According to them, they are most of the tribe, one of the seven original families of record in the 1910 census, at least legitimate ones—although Daniel Smallwood has been quietly recruiting members for the last few years with the promise of a big casino payoff,” Lucy said. “The newest legitimate member of the tribe is their nephew, the famous baby Sean.”
When Lucy agreed to meet with the Crawfords, they had suggested she also get in touch with their old friend Nick Vigoriti. They knew the tribal side of the story and Nick knew the hotel side.
“What did he have against the casino?” Babe asked.
Lucy shook her head. “I never found out,” she said, crumpling the M&M bag.
Just then, in the same way that your eyes eventually get used to the dark and you can make out things you couldn’t moments earlier, the white noise of the television turned into real words, “Breaking News.”
Detective Stacy Winters spoke. Claude Crawford had been apprehended near the old Yankee Shoe factory. William James Crawford is a fugitive but we have good information and feel that he will be in custody soon. The two brothers are believed to have been responsible for the recent murder of Nicholas Anthony Vigoriti. Anyone with information on the whereabouts of William Crawford is urged to dial the number on your screen.
The reporter went on to chronicle the brothers’ past offenses, including the covered wagon fire. File footage showed the blaze and two staggeringly handsome men being led away. “Now I know why you stayed,” Babe said.
“And now you know why he didn’t come back,” I said.
“How can they say this stuff without being sure?” Babe said. She knew how; we all did. And being even a small part of the system, Lucy felt rotten about it.
“You met him,” Babe said. “Did he seem like a killer to you?”
Lucy didn’t think so, but she had been so taken with Claude that she hadn’t paid much attention to Billy.
“He was younger than Claude. He had a Michael’s shopping bag with him.”
“Does that make him a nice guy?”
“No! But it made him look . . . I don’t know, craft-y . . . safe, normal,” she said.
Unless there was a gun in the bag, I thought. I could tell Babe was thinking the same thing.
Four loud knocks on the door jolted us. Lucy yelped; Babe jumped up and ran for her handbag.
“Do criminals knock?” Lucy whispered.
Sometimes. If they don’t want you to think they’re criminals. “Who is it?” I asked, trying to sound tough.
“It’s Hector, ma’am. And the police.”
Thirty-five
Lucy and I asked for a few minutes to dress.
“Hector, we have to stop meeting like this,” I said, opening the door. The roly-poly security guard was flanked by the same two cops who’d found Lucy’s car in the parking lot.
“One of you ladies Lucinda Cavanaugh?”
Lucy raised her hand shyly as if she was in school; that was probably the last time anyone had called her Lucinda.
The two cops were following up on an anonymous report of a woman stranded in a cabin on the Quepochas reservation. We all looked at Lucy to see what she’d say; it took her all of thirty seconds to get her story together.
“I was stranded, briefly, but my friends came and gave me a lift home.” That was one way to put it—I was a novice liar compared to Lucy.
“Ms. Cavanaugh, you do know that that domicile has been used as a hiding place for William and Claude Crawford, who are wanted for questioning in the murder of Nick Vigoriti?”
“I don’t know anything about that. No one was there when I arrived.” Which was technically true at the time. “I was hiking and I ran out of trail mix so I got tired. The cabin seemed like a good place to wait it out until my friends could come to get me.” Now she was pushing it. I wished I could tell her to keep it simple.
“You were hiking on the Quepochas reservation? Ms. Cavanaugh, we have information that suggests you were brought to that cabin against your will.”
“Absolutely not. Who knew you weren’t supposed to hike there? I thought it was part of the Appalachian Trail.” Even Hector snorted at that one. “My friends will tell you what a health nut I am. I’d had a long drive from New York City and simply wanted to stretch my legs.” If Lucy didn’t watch it, she’d tick these guys off and finish telling her story at the police station. Strangely enough, they seemed to believe her.
“It’s true,” I said. “She’s a walker. She even counts steps.” The exchange was surreal.
Babe said nothing. She stood in her underwear and a Rush T-shirt, with her arms folded, looking tough. The cops seemed to know they weren’t going to get anything out of her, but they tried anyway. She gave one-word answers that were vague enough to be useless. And Lucy and I had branded ourselves as flakes—first, me by reporting Lucy’s car as stolen when it was right there in the Titans parking lot, and now Lucy for having gone walkabout on a strange trail with only a bag of gorp in her back pocket.
If Lucy didn’t tell the cops that Claude took her to the cabin, he couldn’t be charged with abducting her; that would solve at least one of his legal problems. Like Betty had, Lucy helped Claude dodge a big bullet.
Just then, the elevator bell rang and I heard voices in the hall. One of them I recognized as Stacy Winters’s. She was yakking on a cell phone and hung up just as she got to my room.
; “What do we have here? Have you girls been grilling cheese sandwiches on the hotel radiator? No, it’s something else, isn’t it?”
We all waited for her routine to finish, then one of the uniformed cops spoke up.
“This is Ms. Cavanaugh,” he said, pointing to Lucy. “She has assured us that she’s all right and in fact went to the Crawfords’ cabin alone and of her own volition.”
“So, you weren’t abducted, not missing, just out.” She resisted the urge to use the word poof.
“That’s correct,” Lucy said. Babe’s example and her own successful exchange with the two less experienced cops gave her the confidence to stand up to Winters. “I’m quite all right. Although I’m a little put out that your men felt the need to go through the bag in the trunk of my car.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Winters said. “If you want to make a claim for damages it’s form C104. You can download it from the town’s Web site. Ms. Holliday, I think the sooner you and your friends leave our little town, the happier we’ll all be. You ladies have a good night.”
When she was a safe distance away, Babe mouthed the word bitch. I agreed.
Thirty-six
After a full two hours of sleep, I woke up at 6 A.M. Through half-open eyes I saw Babe fully dressed and holding a cup of coffee.
“You didn’t make that in the room, did you?” I’d heard horror stories that they used the same brush to clean the coffeepot as they used to clean the toilet.
“Not a chance. Got it downstairs. There’s a very chatty waitress named Laurie in the coffee shop. She thinks both brothers were in on it and were trying to use Lucy as their alibi.” We looked at Lucy, curled up, still asleep on the love seat. “The bellboy disagrees. I haven’t had a chance to poll the rest of the staff.”
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