Let Loose (24 page)

I strolled in as casually as I could, toolbox
in hand.

George wasn’t behind the desk, and Peter was
nowhere in sight either. Some other officer who I’d only seen in
passing said he was filling in for George while my weak link (in
regards to providing information) was busy with other business.

Getting a trailer to Craig’s I guessed.

I asked for Peter. He was busy too.

I started to leave, but the officer, more
observant or at least on task than I was, called after me. “Did you
want to leave that?”

Realizing I still had the toolbox gripped in
my hand, I walked back. “I really wanted to talk to George or
Peter.”

“They’re busy.”

“Yes, but...” I trotted out my best case of
cow eyes. I might as well have mooed at him for all the good it did
me.

“Is the box for one of them?” he asked.

“Yes. No.” I sighed. “They both know what it
is. Peter was supposed to pick it up, but I was... out.” I set the
box on the counter.

“So, it’s personal?” He eyed it like a
deranged jack-in-the-box might pop out of it at any moment.

“No... it’s...” I sighed again. I was giving
so much and getting so little in return. “Evidence.”

“Oh?” His expression changed. He picked up
the phone and punched in some numbers.

I could tell when Peter came on the phone.
The younger officer stood a little straighter and his voice
deepened an octave.

I sighed again, this time from
incredulity.

“He said to bring it back.”

I placed my hand back on the handle.

“Not you. Me. I’ll just need you to sign a
couple of things.”

And that was that. I was cut off with no new
information and booted out the door as if I wasn’t owed at least a
little tidbit of something.

o0o

I did what I often did when faced with a
difficult situation: I went to Rhonda’s to lament.

She turned the sign on the door to “Closed”
and ushered me to the nonfiction section where we could talk
without would-be customers seeing us and doing something annoying
like asking to be let in to
buy
something.

“So that’s it. Craig killed Red,” she
announced.

I followed her through the shelves to a table
that she loaned out to local groups for meetings.

There were books on everything from breast
feeding to plotting your next thriller strewn across the table.

Rhonda stacked a few of them into a neat
pile, then sat down facing me. “You agree, don’t you?”

“It makes sense. Living on the road, he had
access.” I held out one hand, ticking off my reasons. “If he is
behind the snowmobile thefts and Red saw something, he has motive.”
I looked at her. “He had a weapon.”

“Or we think he did,” she corrected.

“He had to. He put the gun in the trash,
thinking it would be hauled off to the landfill, but I found it
instead so he came to my house to get it back. Then, because he
thought things were getting complicated, he hid the gun at Ethel’s
to frame her for the crime.”

“But why did Peter arrest Ethel in the first
place? For the thefts, I mean.”

I shook my head. “Maybe Craig framed her for
that too.”

“How?”

I didn’t know, but the potential case against
Craig was strong.

“What about Ethel? Have you talked to
her?”

I shook my head and pulled out my phone to
try again. Ethel didn’t answer her phone, but Carol answered
hers.

I gave Rhonda a thumbs up. It was good to
know that Carol and Ethel weren’t out playing vigilante.

“Is Ethel with you?” I asked.

“Ethel? No. Not here.”

I frowned. “She isn’t at her apartment
either. When did you last talk to her?”

“Earlier...”

I could hear something being shuffled around
in the background.

“If she isn’t home, where could she be?” I
asked, getting a bit annoyed.

There was the creak of what sounded like
hinges and then a drawer opening.

It was obvious the older woman was not
focusing on our conversation. I frowned again.

“She can’t drive,” I said.

“Ethel is good at getting rides. I’m sure
she’ll turn up.”

Turn up? What the hell kind of response was
that?

“Listen, Lucy, it was nice of you to call,
but this isn’t really a good time. The girls and I have... plans.
I’ll catch up with you some other time. All right?”

The line went dead.

“What was that about?” Rhonda asked.

I slipped the phone into my pocket. “I wish I
knew.” I relayed the side of the conversation that Rhonda hadn’t
been able to hear.

Rhonda was as befuddled as I was by Carol’s
behavior, but she shook it off and refocused on the more obvious
issue. “So she doesn’t know where Ethel is.”

“It didn’t sound like it.”

We stared at each other for a moment.

“If Carol doesn’t know where she is...”
Rhonda made a face.

“I know. I would have thought she would have
been more concerned with Ethel’s absence.”

“You said she sounded distracted. We can’t
know what she is dealing with. She is older.”

I wasn’t sure if Rhonda was suggesting that
Carol might be losing it or that she might have some health
emergency that kept her from worrying about Ethel, but either way,
it left the job of locating Ethel to us.

We talked a bit more, going back over what we
knew and where we thought Ethel might possibly have gone and with
whom.

Rhonda placed a hand on my arm. “When you
were at Craig’s, did Peter or George go inside?”

“No. They stayed in the yard.” Still mulling
over Carol’s behavior, it took me a minute for the full implication
of Rhonda’s question to sink in.

My heart sinking, I looked up. “So Ethel
could be there. She could be inside.”

Captive.

o0o

Rhonda, Kiska, and I were at Craig’s in under
twenty minutes.

Not knowing when the police would arrive to
remove the snowmobile, I’d opted to park on the logging road
again.

“But don’t we want the police here?” Rhonda
asked.

She could be so innocent at times.

I held a strand of barbed wire up so she
could step through the fence. “If the police see us, they’ll want
to know why we’re here.”

She made it through unsnagged. I, on the
other hand, left behind another serving of burrito.

“And we’ll tell them.”

Stomping down more feathers, I shook my head.
“Do you know how long it would take them to get a warrant or
whatever they’d need to go inside Craig’s? We can’t leave Ethel
trapped in there that long.”

“If she is in there.”

I scowled at my friend. I thought we’d agreed
that Ethel had to be trapped inside Craig’s. “If she’s in there, we
have to rescue her or at least get some evidence that she’s in
there. Then the police can just break down the door or whatever
they need to do to free her. There has to be cause.”

Seriously, Rhonda needed to watch more
TV.

I waited, watching to make sure my
non-TV-addicted friend understood these basics; then picked up
Kiska’s lead and followed the trail Kiska and I had blazed earlier
through the snow.

We checked Craig’s shed first. Nothing there
but more junk. Rhonda pushed a stack of cardboard with her toe.
“Maybe he was telling the truth about the toolbox. I don’t know how
he’d ever know if something was missing.”

With the shed crossed off our list, we walked
to the house. There was a front door and a back door. Both were
locked.

“That,” Rhonda said. “Would have been way too
easy.”

We circled the house again, looking for
another obvious entry point.

Since temperatures had been hovering in the
mid-single digits for the past week, I wasn’t holding out a lot of
hope for an open window. Sure enough, not a one was to be
found.

After the second circle around, Rhonda held
up a finger and jogged back to the shed. In a few minutes she was
back, holding a crowbar.

“What are you going to do with that?” I
asked, somewhat shocked.

She made a prying motion. “Open a
window.”

“Oh.” For a minute, I’d thought my friend was
going to go hardcore and start smashing glass. Not that I wouldn’t
smash some glass myself if needed to save Ethel, but I was still
hoping for a more subtle way inside.

Ten minutes later, we’d found it in the form
of a window that was closed but unlocked. We didn’t even need the
crowbar. We left it sitting outside while we took turns scrambling
through the window and onto Craig’s bed.

“Ugh,” Rhonda exclaimed, holding up her hand
to reveal a palm covered in cheese.

Craig, it appeared, was a late night snacker.
He’d left a plate of nachos on his bedside table and Rhonda, in her
hurry to get off of his unmade bed, had placed her palm right in
the jalapenos.

“He’ll get rats,” she added, holding her hand
out as if the processed cheese product might crawl up her arm and
into her mouth.

My stomach growled.

She looked at me in disbelief.

“What?” I asked. I’d missed lunch.

Shaking her head, she stepped over some dirty
laundry and opened the door that led to the hall.

While she went to find the bathroom, I went
to the back door and let Kiska in. With his lead firmly in my hand,
I immediately felt safer.

Craig’s house was small. It didn’t take long
to establish that Ethel wasn’t there, at least assuming she was
alive and not shoved in one of the many boxes and trunks we found
stacked in a back room that Craig apparently used for everything
from laundry to embroidery.

Rhonda held up a pillow. “Peonies?”

I squinted. “Looks more like tulips to
me.”

Shaking her head, she dropped the pillow onto
a pile of clean towels. “Ethel isn’t here.”

“No...” I placed my hand on a steamer trunk
circa 1901.

Rhonda, in the process of picking up a half
stitched bouquet of daisies, froze. “You don’t think...?”

“If we think he killed Red—”

The crash of breaking glass sounded from the
front room. Rhonda and I jumped. A rock rolled down the hall toward
us. Kiska wandered over and stared down at it.

Deciding it was not food, he sat down.

I grabbed Rhonda by the arm and pulled her
away from the room’s door and whatever else might be coming down
hall. “Someone just threw a rock through the front window.”

Staring at the grapefruit-sized piece of
stone, Rhonda muttered, “Ya think?”

Voices came from the living room.

“Grab my arm. Pull, Susan! If you can wrangle
a horse, you should be able to...” The rest of the sentence was
drowned out by the sound of something falling, followed by cursing
and then, “I said I’d open the door. Why didn’t you just wait with
Milly?”

I looked at Rhonda. “Susan,” I mouthed. Which
meant the other one, the one cursing, was probably... Rhonda and I
looked at each other. “Carol,” we mouthed together. And it sounded
as if at least one of the twins too.

The sound of footsteps and the front door
opening and closing followed.

I stood frozen, unsure if we should reveal
our presence or not. Rhonda seemed to share my indecision. She
stepped back until her calves pressed up against the steamer trunk
that I’d been contemplating opening. “What should we do?” she
whispered.

“I don’t know...” I placed my hand on Kiska’s
collar and pulled him away from the door. Then tiptoed back to the
doorframe where I could listen better.

“Are they looking for Ethel?” Rhonda
asked.

I held a finger to my lips.

“Where should we look?” Susan asked, sounding
frustrated.

“He said the desk.”

“Desk?” There were more sounds of things
falling.

Rhonda stepped closer. “They’re making a
mess. Craig is going to know someone was here.”

Except... I peered around the corner.

Susan stood with her back to us, pulling on
Carol who seemed to have slipped on a stack of magazines Craig had
left piled by an easy chair.

I motioned for Rhonda to be quiet and then
lowered my body to the floor and crept on my hands and knees into
the living room.

Hidden behind the couch, I listened as Susan
got Carol onto her feet and the two of them divvied up how they
planned to search Craig’s house.

“There is no desk,” Susan declared.

“There’s a table. I’ll check that. Milly, you
go into the bedroom. Susan, you check over there.”

Susan muttered something under her breath and
Milly walked past me on her way into the bedroom.

I crawled forward a bit, so I would be better
hidden when Milly walked back this direction and also so I could
see what Carol was doing.

She picked up a spiral notebook with a
picture of wildflowers on the cover.

Milly screamed. “No! Back! Carol! Susan! A
wolf!”

More shrieking followed, the
can’t-understand-it, makes-no-sense-to-anyone kind of
shrieking.

Except it made sense to me, way too much
sense.

Kiska.

Worry over what the crazed woman might do to
my dog beat out my desire to stay hidden. I dashed into the
room.

Milly stood on the bed, her hands over her
face and her knees shaking.

Kiska, empty nacho plate beside him, sat on
the floor staring up at her in complete awe.

Susan and Carol rounded the corner of the
door behind me.

“Lucy! What are you...?” Carol glanced around
taking in her screaming friend, my satisfied dog, and the fact that
all of us were somewhere none of us were supposed to be.

I crossed my arms over my chest. “I could ask
you the same thing.”

Carol’s eyes narrowed. “We were invited
here.”

“By a rock?” I asked.

“A—?”

“Through the front window?” I motioned to
Rhonda who had just walked in carrying the stone in question.

“We lost our key.”