Grab & Go (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 2) (5 page)

CHAPTER 6

What really steamed me was that if Skip owned the terminal building and land, then so did I. One of the joys of not having a prenuptial agreement. I’d just been kicked off my own property.

I raced along the county road, my knuckles white on the steering wheel. I tried to gulp calming breaths. I needed a clear head. Time was of the essence, and I couldn’t afford rash mistakes.

A phone rang from the depths of my purse. I swerved over to the shoulder, scattering gravel and leaving a deep set of tire tracks in the soft mud. The car was still rocking on its springs when I found the right phone and answered.

“Nora? Josh.”

“Oh, hey.” I tried to sound nonchalant. “Thanks for calling me back.”

“No problem. Thanks for using a different phone to call me. Next time we talk, I’ll have a different one too.”

“Things are that bad?” I asked.

Josh snorted softly. “There’s a Shari’s on Lancaster Drive, just off exit 253 on I-5 in Salem. You know it?”

I blinked a few times. Salem was a few hours south, in a different state. “I can find it.”

“It’s open 24 hours. When can you be there?” Josh’s voice had slipped down to a whisper.

My mind flitted over any commitments I might have, any plans. I drew a blank, which was exactly the problem. “Tomorrow? Mid-morning?” I whispered back.

“I’ll park on the south edge of the lot, a black Honda Accord, by 10:00. Don’t go into the restaurant until you see me there.” He clicked off.

I tapped the phone against my palm. I just wanted answers. And everyone — absolutely everyone — was being cagey. Self-preservation? Fear? I chewed on my lower lip. People who don’t know what they’re talking about refer to the long arm of the law. I was learning that criminal organizations have much more far-reaching and tenacious tentacles.

Movement in the rearview mirror caught my eye. A white Jeep Cherokee rolled up close to my rear bumper, a familiar face behind the wheel. I groaned and quickly dropped the phone into my purse. Didn’t Des have a vast, rural county to look after?

I put on my best law-abiding smile, the knot in my gut hoping against hope that Des wasn’t out in this particular corner of the county responding to a trespassing report from Lee Gomes. I rolled down my window.

“You okay?” Des’s words puffed little steam clouds as he leaned down to peer into the Subaru for the second time that day.

“Sure. Just pulled over to answer a phone call.” I widened my smile. “Safety first.” I didn’t mention that I’d been significantly exceeding the speed limit at the moment the phone rang.

Des straightened and scanned the length of road ahead of us. “Running errands?”

“Right.” I mentally expanded my definition of ‘errands’ to include snooping. Just another item checked off my nonexistent to-do list.

“Going home now?” Des ran a fingertip along the top rim of the side mirror. His nails were short and clean, his fingers strong and callused where they should be, a tiny, scabbed-over nick on his thumb. Maybe he hadn’t been joking about the whittling.

“Yeah.” I feared my monosyllables weren’t making a good impression, but I was fresh out of lies. Effusing over the truth at this moment would just get me into more trouble.

Des shifted his weight and studied the tree-infested scenery along the road in the opposite direction, frowning. “All right, then.” He thumped my window ledge and crunched through the gravel back to his ride.

Des waited for me to pull back up onto the road, then followed me — close, but not too close for the icy conditions — all the way to Mayfield. What wasn’t he telling me? Was I under suspicion? For what? I supposed I wasn’t making it easy for him to confide in me.

I slowed, used my turn signal properly, and pulled into the ivy-masked entrance, waving over my shoulder. Des flashed his lights once in acknowledgment and sped past. My personal escort service. I wondered just how many people knew of my exact movements, no doubt following my little blipping indicator on blue screens.

oOo

I found Clarice all alone in the kitchen, scrubbing fifty years’ worth of baked-on grease off industrial-sized cookie sheets. If she was resorting to this level of deep cleaning, it was a sure sign of boredom, and I didn’t feel so bad about proposing my harebrained and semi-desperate idea.

I pulled her outside for a chat in the cold. I was suddenly paranoid about bugs of the listening variety. To the best of my knowledge, the FBI hadn’t had unfettered access to the areas of the mansion we were living in, but it’s not like the place was secure. Even though I’d given them permission to watch me, I wasn’t sure just what all that entailed or to what level of detail. To ask my main contact, Special Agent Matt Jarvis, now would indicate I was considering
not
being watched. I didn’t want to put them on high alert, especially when I was about to do something — yet again — illegal.

Clarice’s face is wrinkled like rivulet tracks in the desert. I needed the input of the experience behind those creases. It came in handy that she’d been arrested once. At least she’d know what I might be getting into.

“You are most certainly not doing this by yourself,” Clarice huffed when I finished, her lips pressed into a tight pucker. I’d known I was running that risk before I’d started talking, and I blew a sigh of relief.

“You’ll serve as lookout?” I asked.

“I’m going in with you. Somebody has to run the copy machine.” Clarice’s eyes behind the cat’s eye glasses were stern. “We both know your deficiencies, girl.”

I opened my mouth to argue, then thought better of it. “What about CeCe,” I asked instead.

“Cinch,” Clarice snapped. “Eli’s spent all morning trying to convince her she’d like sleeping in a bunk bed better than the bed we have set up for her. I might just relent on the issue and ship her off to the bunkhouse.”

“Eli’s here?” My voice pitched up, even though I wasn’t surprised. The kid knew everything about everything that was happening at Mayfield and was adept at sniffing out whatever was more interesting than his own schoolwork.

“They’re playing some kind of addition game they made up. He’s been entertaining her for hours.”

If I didn’t know better, I might have inferred from her tone that Clarice resented being supplanted as CeCe’s favorite companion. I bit back a grin.

Back in the kitchen, Clarice and I held forth in an artificially longwinded conversation about needing a few things CeCe had forgotten at home and Clarice’s desire to leave the Gonzales’s freezer stocked with home-cooked meals. All excellent reasons for us to drive to their house tonight and spend a long time there.

Then I took a walk. The silent woods suited my mood, offsetting my fidgety exhaustion, both physical and mental, soothing my mind. It was incredibly tempting to consider wandering off between the trees and never returning.

I wouldn’t be the first. Dwayne Cotton, Mayfield’s resident hermit had done it, decades ago. Bodie Ramsay, the newest boy at Walt’s camp for the unwanted and reforming, had done it.

But I’d leave behind a horrible mess that endangered my friends. Nope. Better to blunder through than to go AWOL. Far better.

I found Walt in the cubbyhole he calls an office, a strange offshoot of a storage space beside the river rock fireplace in the end of the bunkhouse that functioned as a classroom for the boys. The boys — except Eli, that is — were hunched over laptops and books at their desks, making that soft, shuffling murmur that indicates deep thinking and concentrated study. A few pairs of inquisitive eyes followed me as I tiptoed through the room, but I held a finger to my lips and grinned back at them.

Walt was in a similar pose, elbows planted on the desk, hands supporting his head, as he scowled at a stack of composition books in front of him. I quietly latched the door behind me and slid into the chair opposite him. If Walt had his preference, he’d be outside, cold and wet, doing some kind of hard labor, rather than stuck behind a pile of paperwork.

“Grading?” I asked.

“Creative writing assignments — poetry, short story fiction, some crazy sci-fi stuff.” Walt shook his head. “For some of these kids, the alternate universe they create in their heads is far better than the real one they came from. I don’t blame them.”

“I haven’t forgotten your suggestion that I be the judge and jury this time around,” I said.

Walt’s brows arched over his pale blue eyes. I’ve decided they’re the color of a winter sky — or a glacier. “You have a lot on your mind right now.”

“Which means I could use a diversion.” I held out my hands, and Walt shoved the composition books across the desk to me. “But I need a favor,” I added.

Walt frowned. He’s heard those words from me before.

“Can CeCe stay here with you and the boys tonight? She has her heart set on sleeping in a bona fide bunk bed.”

Walt snorted a soft chuckle. “I presume Eli hatched the idea?” He ran a hand through his hair which was growing out from the close cut I’d given him a few weeks ago. “Sure. She’ll have eighteen more boys wrapped around her little princess finger before the evening’s over.”

“It’ll be good for them.” I grinned.

“Is she sleeping through the night?” Walt’s tone went even lower.

I nodded. “We haven’t told her exactly what happened. She just knows that her daddy’s sick, but that he’s getting better at the hospital. She’s a trouper.”

Walt slouched in his chair until his head was level with mine and steepled his fingers in front of his chin, his probing eyes fixed on me. “What about you?”

I don’t enjoy being on the receiving end of Walt’s therapy questions. I scrunched my face. “Sleeping? It’s only been one day.”

His eyes didn’t flicker. “Since the shooting. But it’s been, what — twenty, twenty-one days since your kidnapping?”

“Catnaps,” I tried.

Walt has this way of waiting until you answer the question he really asked, not the question you want to answer. It’s highly irritating.

I sighed. “Not yet.” Then I straightened. “Do you have a map of the Mayfield property?” Ahh, a diversion.

Walt got a new crease between his brows, but he swiveled to the bookcase behind him and started flipping through file folders stuffed on edge into the shelves. After a few minutes, he whirled back around and unfolded a large paper on the desk.

“From 1964. The nursing home director had plans for expansion and ran through some zoning stuff with the county, but then the company decided it would be too expensive and shut the place down instead.” Walt smoothed the map with his fingertips. “Things haven’t changed much, except a couple of these buildings, like the dairy barn, aren’t standing anymore.”

“This is the property line we share with the Gonzales family?” I asked, pointing to the south. We’re neighbors, but I’d hate to be the one to count the acres of densely timbered land between our respective residences. No roads crossed the area in 1964.

“Yeah. They have the only less-than-an-acre residential developed plot. The rest of the land around them is protected BLM old-growth forest.”

I needed a trail. But if I asked Walt, he’d want to know why. Instead, I let my finger and my gaze drift west into a large portion of the Mayfield property I hadn’t explored yet. “I’ve seen the mountains — St. Helens, Adams and Rainier. Dill showed me from the top floor of the mansion. Are there other viewpoints out here?”

Walt grabbed a pencil and circled two spots. “They’re a climb. If you go, I’ll go with you, or a couple of the older boys. With the overnight temps, you don’t want to get stuck out there.”

I smiled into his worried eyes. “Maybe in the spring. Just planning ahead. Okay if I borrow this?”

Walt’s lips flattened, just a little, but enough. He knew I wasn’t telling the whole truth. “Nora—” he murmured. “It’s Hank, isn’t it? What’s going on — besides a couple disgruntled former employees?”

“Des talked to you?” I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice.

“And Etherea. And Bob. And Gus.” Walt tipped his head, a tiny smile rippling across his face. Right — the neighborhood information relay. Operational at speeds faster than light.

I sucked in a deep breath. “Skip is what’s going on. Hank had — has — some suspicions. I need to—” I held up my hand at the warning look on Walt’s face, “check them out. You won’t be able to persuade me not to, so let’s not go there.” I rested a hand on his arm. “I’m the one with the best shot at this, better than Des, even. Because I knew Skip. I lived in his orbit for several years. The passwords—” I bit my lip. There were some things Walt didn’t know about what I’d found in my husband’s bank accounts and what I’d done with the money. “Well, I think Skip means for me to be the one investigating.”

“He might well be dead, Nora,” Walt whispered. “You know that, right? I don’t mean to be harsh, but are you sure the risk you’re taking is worth it?”