I didn’t waste any time. I started Bob’s car and rolled back into the street, using gears instead of brakes to slow my backward movement. I left the headlights off until I'd gone nearly a block. The street remained deserted behind me.
“Don’t worry, Jack, everything’s going to be okay,” I assured him—and myself—as I retraced my turns and headed for home again. I drove a little over the speed limit, and no headlights stayed in my rear-view mirror for more than a few blocks. And no one pulled me over for speeding.
Ten minutes later I was home. As I pulled into my drive, I reached up to the passenger-side visor to press the button on the remote control for the garage door. A rattle of panic ran through me when it wasn’t I couldn’t feel it. It took a moment to remember I wasn’t in my own car. I'd have to go through the house to raise the garage door to park Bob’s car inside.
I fumbled in my purse for my own keys and led Jack to the porch. He graciously allowed me to enter first and bounced in behind me. Across the living room, Emily Ann flowed off the couch and stretched, her thin tail waving. She and Jack touched noses in greeting before she came to lean against me so I could rub her chest.
“Hey, sweet pup,” I said, “were you a good girl?” She was always a good girl, so this was a mere formality. I padded into the kitchen. A bottle of merlot sat on the counter. I wrenched the cork out of the bottle and poured myself a glass. “Did you take any messages?” I said to Emily Ann, who had followed me. “I'd better check.”
I keep only one phone in the house, in the bedroom, and the dogs jostled at my heels as I traipsed down the hall. The bedroom was in darkness, but no red message light blinked. Emily Ann had taken no calls. Bob had not phoned to tell me he’d met someone else and been swept off his feet, or that the woman in red wanted a ransom. I took a swig of my wine, and looked down at the dogs. Jack sat in front of me and looked up beseechingly, the tip of his tail moving on the floor.
“Oh. Yes. Your dinner,” I said. Emily Ann, hearing a word related to food, wagged as well. “You’ve had yours, you opportunist,” I told her. We trailed back to the kitchen, where I grabbed a cake pan from a lower cabinet. I went to the garage where I kept the bin of dog food and scooped some into the pan, grabbing a handful for Emily Ann as well.
Being in the garage reminded me that Bob’s car was still sitting in my drive. I reached for the button to open the garage door, but my hands were full of dog food. First things first. I went back to the kitchen, settled Jack with his dinner, and fed Emily Ann’s snack to her piece by piece as I drank a couple more sips of wine.
One thing about feeding dogs, it’s not a time-consuming occupation. In less than two minutes the food was gone, and I let both dogs into the back yard. Another couple of minutes and they were back, jostling each other for my attention. I patted them both, took one more sip of wine, and picked up Bob’s keys so I could bring in his car.
That’s when the phone rang.
Chapter Six
“Maybe it’s Bob,” I said to the dogs. They heard the excitement in my voice as an invitation to play and began to tussle with each other. I had to push around them, and before I reached the bedroom, the machine beeped to signal that the outgoing message was over.
“Hey! Lou! Pick up the phone! I know you’re home, you know I know it, you know you can’t hide from—“
I grabbed the receiver. “Kay,” I said to my cousin, “you’re going to wake my neighbors.”
She lowered her voice a trifle. “Yeah, well, they sleep too much anyway. Did you and Bob have fun tonight?”
“He—”
“Anything interesting happen? Did you kiss him yet?”
“No, he—”
“Just because your husband was a lying sleazebag son of a bitch doesn’t mean all men are,” the font of wisdom on the other end of the line continued.
“We don’t have a kissing kind of relationship, and besides—”
“I like Bob, and obviously he likes you, even though you are reluctant about the kissing, which is probably only natural after Roger, and—”
“I think he’s been kidnapped,” I butted in. My legs gave way and I sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. There was a pause, then a snort of laughter.
“That is good,” Kay chuckled. “Space aliens?”
“No. Woman in red, at the grocery store.”
Another pause, longer this time. “Louisa, what are you talking about?”
I took a deep breath. “Bob and I went out to dinner this evening, and afterward he went into the grocery store to get some dog food while I waited in the car because it was raining and I wore my velveteen sneakers and he came out with a woman and got into her car and they drove away and I tried to follow but I lost them.”
“Whoa, whoa, wait a minute! Slow down. You’re not making any sense. You and Bob went to dinner—”
“Right.”
“And then you went to a grocery store? He really knows how to show you a good time, doesn’t he?”
“Kay,” I flared, sitting up straighter, “the Food Right was on the way to my house and he needed to get food for Jack. He said he was going to run in for a minute and come right back out.”
Jack must have heard his name. He appeared in front of me and leaned heavily against my legs.
“Okay, okay. Whatever. He ran in for dog food and came right back out, but he came out with another woman?”
“Yes. And he didn’t have any dog food.” I leaned over and patted Jack’s head.
“I hate to say it but that is pretty damned tacky.” I could tell from her voice that she was wrinkling her nose the way she does when she doesn’t like something. An image of her in first grade faced with a slimy wad of canned spinach on her lunch plate swam up from my memory.
“It would be more than tacky if he did it on purpose.” I sat back up. “And I suppose he could have. After all, Roger—”
“Don’t even go there,” she snapped. “I forbid you to ever compare Bob with Roger, even if Bob did leave you at the Food Right. I mean, ditching you at the store is nothing compared to—”
“Yes, yes, okay,” I interrupted in turn, waving my free hand. “You’re right, Roger was far beyond tacky. But Kay, I don’t think he did it on purpose. Bob, I mean. The woman was practically glued to his side, and I think she had a gun or a knife or something.”
“What!”
“Well, I couldn’t really see her hands,” I admitted. “She was partly behind Bob and she kept one hand in her jacket pocket. But why else would he just walk off with someone and not even look my way?” I chewed my lower lip as I pictured the scene again. “He walked…I don’t know, sort of stiffly. Tense. Not talking and laughing together like you would if you’ve just picked someone up. Or met someone you know. She made him unlock the car door. As though she had to keep her eyes on him the whole time. And they both got in the passenger side, and he slid over behind the wheel to drive.”
“Wouldn’t the transmission get in the way?” she asked.
“The car had a bench seat. I think. It was an old car. A gray Mercedes with the silver thingie on the hood.”
“So at least he went off with someone who had a cool car.”
“I don’t think Bob cares all that much about cool cars,” I said, annoyed.
“True, look what he drives. And don’t get all huffy at me. I know it's just like yours. So what did this woman look like, anyway?”
I described the woman and her red suit and heels.
“Weird outfit for a grocery store,” my cousin said. “Maybe she just ran in for something too and saw Bob and—”
“Decided he was on her take-out menu for tonight?”
“Maybe they knew each other.”
“It's possible. I just don’t know. Anyway, they drove off, and I followed them—”
“He left his keys? He must have, I can't see you hotwiring a car.”
“Yes, he left his keys. So I could listen to the radio. And I bet you can't hotwire one either. Anyway
I followed, and a Pinto pulled out in front of me and they were getting further away, so I passed it and I was probably speeding a little, because a cop pulled me over and I lost them.”
A little silence played along the line. “A cop?”
“Yes.”
“Not…”
“Yes.”
“Did he know who you were?”
“You mean that I'm your cousin? Oh yes.”
“Did he manage to piss you off?”
“Yes.”
“That figures. What did he do?”
“You mean aside from not listening to me until the Mercedes had disappeared from sight, and telling me that in his professional opinion it made perfect sense for a man to go off in a Mercedes instead of a Honda, especially with a blonde involved? Other than that he pretty much told me to drive carefully and call him if I got a ransom note.”
“Goddammit!” she snarled. I knew she had bounced to the edge of whatever she was sitting on. “How dare he talk to my cousin like that! This is so typical. What a lug he is!”
“Thanks, Kay.” I was warmed by her partisanship. “But to be fair, I was telling him a really weird story, I was driving someone else’s car, and I was speeding. Not a whole lot, it isn’t easy to speed seriously in an eighty-nine Civic, but still. Anyway, after he let me go, I went back to the store to look for Bob. Just in case it hadn’t really been him. But he wasn’t there. So I went to his house to get Jack.”
“No sign of Bob?”
“No, but I found a phone message. I saw the machine blinking and thought maybe he’d called and maybe I should listen—” I realized I was twisting the phone cord around my finger and stopped.
“Anyone would have done the same,” she assured me. “What was the message?”
“Someone telling Bob that he’d been found and should be careful. That was pretty much it.”
“Did you take the tape with you?”
“No, I—”
“That’s what they always do in the movies.”
“Yeah, well, in the movies they have phone machines with tapes in them. This was the digital kind that doesn’t use a tape. But I thought the police should know about it so I called them.”
“Did Kerry Sue Maddock answer the phone? I swear that is the stupidest woman in town.”
“No, your friend Ed had already made it back to the station.”
“Uh oh. What happened?”
“He asked me to play the message for him.”
“Then what did he say?”
“Before I managed to erase the message or after?” I hedged. I shrugged my shoulders to release some tension.
“Louisa! You erased it?” She sounded like she was choking back a laugh. “Of course you did. Why do I even ask?” My track record with electronics is not outstanding. “Then what?”
“He told me either to wait and see if they called again, or go home. He sounded like he was tiptoeing around a nut case. I'm sure he thought I'd made the whole thing up. So I hung up and came home. What did you tell him about me, anyway?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You never said you had a cousin in Seattle?”
“Of course I told him that. But we haven’t spoken to each other for months, so he wouldn’t know about your more recent history, or rather Roger’s, if that’s what’s worrying you. I certainly didn’t tell him anything about it.”
“Kay, everyone in the world knows about all that.”
“They do not! Geez, get over it!”
“Easy for you to say. But anyway, I got Jack and started home, and someone was driving close behind me soon after I left Bob’s place, and I made a bunch of turns and a car was always behind me. I finally shook it off and came home.”
Now that I'd narrated this madness to another person I felt impossibly tired. I wanted to let my lead-weighted bones collapse on the bed and sleep until all this—whatever it was—was over. Stress takes me that way.
“Louisa, what have you gotten yourself into? This whole thing is so weird,” Kay said. “It will probably turn out to have a mundane explanation, but it is weird.”
“No kidding,” I agreed. “Do you think I should call Officer Johnson again?”
“It's actually Chief Johnson,” she said.
“He’s the chief? You never said you were dating the chief of police. What was he doing out chasing speeders? Shouldn’t he have been at the station telling everyone else what to do?”
“Hey, it's a small town, they all do everything.”
“Well, anyway, should I tell him about being followed? He already thinks I'm insane. Maybe I should call someone else, the county sheriff or the FBI or something.”
She snorted. “Louisa! The FBI? By the time they figure out where Willow Falls is, Bob could be back again.” Silence. I knew she was rubbing the bridge of her nose as she thought. “Listen, don’t call anyone else tonight. In movies a person always has to be missing for twenty four hours before they’ll start looking for them.”
“You think?” I asked, wanting to believe her. “But what if I delay and something happens to him?”
“Something’s already happened to him,” she pointed out. “But you have no idea if he went with that woman voluntarily. I know you think he didn’t, but we can't be sure.”
“Not being sure is making me nuts. If I knew for certain that he’d ditched me I could just get really mad, or if he was kidnapped I could make someone look for him. As it is I can't do anything.” I sighed and shifted restlessly on the bed, then saw that I was still holding Bob’s keys. “Listen, I just remembered, I left Bob’s car in the driveway and I want to move it into the garage.”
“All right, sweetie, you move the car in and get some sleep. Will you be okay by yourself? Do you want me to come over?”
“I'll be okay,” I assured her. “After all, Emily Ann and Jack are here.”
“No problem then.” I could hear a grin in her voice. “No harm can come to you with those two in the house. I'll be in the store early tomorrow if you need me. Ambrose is having a piece picked up practically at dawn.”
“Did you need me to work tomorrow?”
“No, that’s okay. But if Bob’s not back by tomorrow afternoon we will have to decide who to report his disappearance to. Call me immediately if you hear from him. When you hear from him.”
I hung up the phone and slumped on the edge of the bed. I knew if I let myself lie down, even for a second, I’d never get up again that night. Still, I was about to fall back onto the covers when I realized both dogs had sneaked up behind me and were curled on the bed flank to flank. I didn’t have the heart to disturb them. I forced myself to my feet and out to the garage. My car was far enough to the side to be able to park the other, so I pressed the doorbell-like button that opens the garage door.
The door started up and the overhead light came on. Too late, I realized I was spotlighted for anyone who might be outside. I felt I was in one of those dreams where you’re on stage and don’t know what the play is, let alone what your lines might be. What if someone had followed me home, and here I was armed only with bunch of keys? I didn’t even have the dogs to protect me, assuming that their friendly overtures to everyone they met would be any protection.
But when the door was up, no one was in sight. I quickly moved the Honda inside beside its twin, pressed the button again, and went back into the house. The damp night air, not to mention the fear I'd felt when I stepped out into it, had revived me. I was wide awake again. I sat at the kitchen table to finish my glass of wine, hoping it would lull me enough to bring sleep.
The only sounds were the ticking of the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel and its chime on the quarter hour, and the low hum of the refrigerator. I rolled the stem of the wine glass around in my fingers as I thought of this evening. It struck me that Bob was a watchful person, always looking around him when he was out in public.
I heard a thump from the bedroom. Nails clicked on the hardwood floor of the hall. Jack appeared in f
ront of me.
“Jack,” I said to him, “I'm confused. Bob’s the first guy I've gone out with since my husband died, and I was married for a long time, but I don’t recall having the person you’re with being swept away by a woman in red as part of the conventional dating ritual. Of course, everyone says things have changed since the last time I did any of this, but still, this seems somewhat out of the norm.”
Jack yawned.
“And of course it had to be a blonde. My recent experience with blondes has not been good. I know of one in Seattle…no, you’re too young for that story.”
Jack gave himself a mighty shake, so that his ears made a leathery flapping sound and his lips flew up to expose his shining teeth. He turned and started toward the bedroom, looking over his shoulder at me.
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s call it a day.”
I leaned over to untie my shoes. They were soaked through and the pattern of silver moons and stars barely showed through the smears of mud. I put them in the trash and went to bed.
Chapter Seven
I expected to stare into the dark for most of the night; that single glass of wine was not enough to have a soporific effect. But Jack’s presence helped; he’s a snuggly dog. He pressed his long back against my side, and his warmth spread into me. Emily Ann lay crossways near the top of the bed with her chin three inches from my shoulder. I was asleep in two minutes.
The red numbers on the digital clock glowed 5:37 when my eyes unglued the next morning. I tried to pull the quilt a little higher on my shoulder but it wouldn’t budge. Jack was still snoring beside me, and for a moment I had no idea what he was doing in my bed. Then I remembered Bob getting into a Mercedes with an unknown blonde and driving away; Chief Johnson who thought I was insane; ominous phone messages and hiding in a stranger’s driveway to elude a following car—if Jack had not been at my side I would have been sure it was all a dream.
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