Gone With The Whisker

Chapter 19

Kate and I sat in my car near the same spot the bookmobile had parked less than a month earlier. Deeper in the shade, though, because it was getting hot. We were so far underneath a maple tree’s low-hanging branches that the car was probably invisible to the casual glance. Our activities, however, were far different than that of bookmobile day; my niece was looking through the windshield with no interest in anything and I was texting Rafe.

Me: On Brown’s Road with Kate. All fine, see you soon.

I hit the Send button and immediately turned the phone off, just in case he was paying attention to his own cell and shot off an immediate text of protest.

“There’s not much out here,” Kate commented.

She was correct. There was not. Well, not if you equated structures created by humans with “much.” On one side of us was a lovely northern forest of maples, beeches, and birches, a depth of green that reached as far as the eye could see. On the other side was a field that had once been cleared for farming, but had been abandoned years ago. Scrub trees and shrubs dotted the acreage and it wouldn’t be long before there was little difference between the two sides of the road.

Less than a hundred yards south of where we sat, the field came to an end and the trees closed in, filling both sides of the road. I studied the narrowing roadway and wondered how far it went before it petered out to nothing. The map function on my phone showed it going another half a mile, but my phone’s map had led me astray before.

“We should talk to those people,” Kate said. At my puzzled look, she pointed across the field to an old farmhouse.

I shook my head. “No. It’s—”

She cut me off. “Why not? Oh, wait. I know. It’s because all my ideas are stupid, right? Sure, you called them melodramatic, but I’m pretty sure that’s another word for stupid,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Mrr!” Eddie said from the back seat.

Over my shoulder, I sent him a glare that was meant to convey the message of “Cut that out because I don’t need you adding to my woes right now, thank you very much,” but the effort was lost on him because he’d turned around in the carrier and all I could see was his hind end.

I turned back around and faced my niece. “What I was going to say was that I looked up the ownership of that house and it’s under foreclosure. No one lives there, and hasn’t for over a year.”

“But maybe someone is living there anyway,” she persisted. “Someone could have broken in.”

“Do you see any signs of that?” I asked.

She peered through the windshield. “Well, no, but if anyone was hiding out, it only makes sense they’d try to hide all the signs.”

I wondered when kids learned about Occam’s razor. Not that I could remember when I’d figured it out. Last week, perhaps? “You’re right,” I said. “But if someone is hiding out there, I don’t want to walk up and knock on the door. Isn’t that when things start to go bad in horror movies?”

Kate shrugged, muttering, “Mom doesn’t let me watch stuff like that.”

“Wise woman,” I said, earning me a Look from Kate.

“Why, because this way I never know what anyone is talking about?” she demanded. “What is it with grown-ups? Don’t you remember what it’s like to be a kid? Always being told what I can’t do, what I have to do, what I should be doing?” She flung her hands about. “Mom and Dad keep telling me I need to act like an adult before I get treated like one, but how will I ever learn how to act grown up until they treat me like I have half a brain in my head?”

At long last, I was clueing into the fact that Kate’s frustrated anger didn’t necessarily have anything to do with her kindly aunt Minnie. “Kate, sweetie,” I said, “don’t you see? They’re treating you this way because they actually do remember what it’s like to be young.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” she said flatly. “If they remembered, they’d be . . . I don’t know . . .”

“Be what? Nicer to you?” I smiled. “Unfortunately, that’s not the way it works.”

“It should!” she practically yelled.

I was torn between two competing reactions. The first one was to murmur sympathetic noises, to coo auntly endearments, and to give Kate a comforting hug. The second one, which was the wrong one, was to laugh out loud. Sadly, it was also the stronger reaction and Kate saw my mouth twitch.

“You’re laughing at me.” Her eyes narrowed.

I shook my head. “No, I’m not. Laughing, yes, but at myself, not you. See, I remember having almost this exact conversation with Aunt Frances the summer I turned seventeen.”

“Not sure why that’s funny,” Kate muttered.

It probably wasn’t, not to her, so I changed tactics. “Growing up is hard. You think you’re an adult because you’re so much smarter and more capable than you were a year ago. But you’ll think the same thing next year. And the next and the next. And about the time you hit thirty, you’ll realize it never stops.”

“Thirty?” Her eyes bugged out. “Mom and Dad are going to treat me like a kid until I’m thirty?”

That hadn’t been what I meant. Then again, she wasn’t ready to hear the truth; that parents tended to permanently think of their offspring as children, no matter how old they were.

“Let’s go for a walk.” I tied my car key to my shoelace and opened the car door, though walking hadn’t been my intention when we’d driven down here. At the time, I thought we’d take the car as far down the road as the road would go, see what we could see, then turn around and head for the raspberry patch. Now, however, I thought a walk in the woods might do Kate some good. Aunt Frances and I had taken lots of walks during my youthful summers, and I was finally realizing that those hadn’t happened by accident or because my aunt was such a friend of the outdoors. “Open your window a little, will you?” I asked. “Eddie could use the—”

“Mrr!!”

“—the fresh air.”

“You’re not supposed to lock animals or small children in the car during the summer,” Kate said.

Now why did her saying that irritate me? I took a deep breath, which didn’t do as much to calm me as I’d hoped, so I took another one. “The point,” I said, “is making sure they’re not in an overheated vehicle long enough to endanger their health. If you look at where we’re parked, you’ll note that the car is completely shaded by trees, and will stay that way until”—I looked up at the sky—“after lunch. And since that’s a couple of hours from now, I can’t come up with any likely scenario putting Eddie in danger.”

Kate tossed her head. “You don’t have to sound so much like a librarian.”

Since I was a librarian, I figured everything I said made me sound like one, but for once I was smart enough to keep my thoughts inside. “He’ll be fine.” The risk of theft out here on this deserted road felt so low as to be nonexistent. “The car is locked and the windows are rolled down to allow for airflow. I don’t see how even Eddie will be able to find a way to damage anything in the short time we’ll be gone, do you?”

She shrugged, but didn’t say anything, so I considered that a win for Minnie. Not that it was a contest, of course.

I looked in at Eddie through the slightly opened window. “See you later, pal. We won’t be—”

“MRR!!”

“Yes, I’ll miss you, too,” I said soothingly. “I’m so glad we have this kind of bond. Back soon, okay?”

“Is he going to be okay?” Kate asked, looking backward as we walked down the side of the gravel road, listening to the sound of Eddie’s unhappiness.

“He’s fine,” I said. Eddie’s howls could be prodigious, but as James Herriot might have said if the Yorkshire veterinarian had found himself with Eddie as a patient, if he could howl that loudly for no real reason, he probably didn’t have anything wrong with him except recalcitrance. “He’ll get tired soon. When we get back, I bet he’s sound asleep.”

Kate didn’t look convinced, but she kept walking alongside me, and by the time we reached the part of the road that was bounded by trees on both sides, we could barely hear him at all.

“Oh, no!” Kate slapped the pockets of her tight shorts. “I forgot my cell phone.”

“You can live without it for a few minutes, can’t you?”

“What if we need to contact someone? You have yours, but what if it breaks? What if the battery runs down?”

Sighing, I knelt down, untied my car key, and handed it over, because some things aren’t worth arguing over. Her light feet ran off, the car door opened, there was a pause, the car door shut, and she hurried back. I took the proffered key and tied it back on my shoe. At least she’d come back. Some kids might have driven off, leaving their poor aunt stranded.

We started walking again. Fifty yards later, the road took a slight turn and we couldn’t hear a thing except the sough of wind in the leaves and our own footsteps. It was quiet and peaceful, and I was just beginning to enjoy myself when Kate said, “So this is where that Courtney drove that day?”

I stared at her. “Excuse me?”

My niece sighed heavily. “Really? I can hear, remember?”

“But . . .” I tried to recall what conversations I’d had with whom that she might have overheard and quickly came to the conclusion that I hadn’t a snowball’s chance of pinning down anything specific.

“I. Was. In. The. Room,” Kate said, loud enough to startle any nearby wildlife. “Just because I don’t say anything doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”

“Well, sure, but . . .” I stopped talking, because my brain was catching up to the circumstances. At some point Kate would realize she might have been better off keeping that tidbit to herself. I, however, wasn’t going to be the one to bring it to her attention. That sounded like a sibling’s job.

“So this is where she went?” Kate asked.

I blinked, pulling out of my mini-reverie. “Has to be,” I said. “This road doesn’t connect to anything. It dead-ends just up ahead.” I’d confirmed this by peering at the county’s aerial photography and Google Earth. The road proper petered out quickly, narrowed to a two-track, then faded into a vanishing trail.

Kate swiveled her head, looking left and right and left and right. “And there was a second car?”

“A truck. It was ahead of Courtney’s.”

“Is this like a hangout place? For kids.” She paused. “You know. For . . . stuff some of them like to do?”

I laughed. “Kate, I know what kind of stuff teenagers get up to. I was one once, remember?” Not that I’d been invited to those kinds of parties, but I’d known who went, where they were, and what happened. “And if you’re thinking Courtney and whomever came out here to do whatever, they didn’t need to. Courtney has an apartment of her own.”

Kate managed to shove her hands in her shorts pockets. “There are still good reasons she could be meeting someone out here. The guy could be married and doesn’t want to be seen going into her apartment. Or maybe she’s meeting another woman. Maybe her family will disown her if they find out she’s not straight, and her grandmother is dying and the last thing Courtney wants to do is disappoint her granny, so she’s hiding her true self for now.”

Staring at my niece, I said, “Kate, that’s—”

“Dumb?” she cut in, her chin up. “Stupid? No, wait. Melodramatic?” She drew the word out long.

“What I was going to say is that both of those sound plausible.”

“I figured you’d say that, and . . .” She paused. “Wait, what?”

“Both of those scenarios are reasonable and possible.” Kate continued to look at me blankly, so I went on. “As possibilities, they’re sound. The next step is to find a causal link. Some concrete fact,” I hastened to add, since I’d heard myself lapse into jargon that some might call librarian-y, “that gives credence . . . that makes a good case for one of those theories being true.”

“Or both.” Kate almost grinned. “Don’t you see? Courtney could be hiding her lesbian self from her family, and her lover could be married.”

Another possibility I hadn’t considered. Still, if I’d given a nod to the separate theories, it wasn’t going to go well if I put the brakes on now.

“Lots of could be’s,” I agreed. “But to get the sheriff’s department to take any of this seriously, we have to come up with something more than a theory.” Due to my prior interactions with personnel from said department, this was something I understood at a bone-deep level. “How about . . .” I mentally tacked over to another point of view. “What do you think we should do next?”

“If you seek a pleasant motive, look about you,” Kate said.

Her statement was amazing in two ways; one, that my Florida-bred-and-born niece knew that Michigan had a state motto, and two, that she could misquote it so aptly. I made a mental note to look up Florida’s state motto. “There are lots of trees about us, but not much else.”

“We’re not at the end of the road yet,” Kate said, striding forward. “Courtney and whoever came out here for a reason. All we have to do is find it.”

She made it sound easy. But since I’d been thinking pretty much the same thing when I’d decided to drag her out here, I shouldn’t be harboring so churlish a thought. “Bad aunt,” I muttered, hurrying to catch up with Kate’s longer legs. I was, however, thrilled that Kate was finally enthusiastic about something while in my presence.

“What’s that?” Kate asked. “Do you see something?”

“Nope.” I fast-walked to her side. “Do you?”

“Not yet. But it has to be here.”

She spoke so confidently that I didn’t have the heart to tell her the harsh truth: that it was possible—even likely—that we wouldn’t find a thing other than old tire tracks, which weren’t proof of anything other than an extended stint of parking.

We walked through the dappled sunlight, looking down at the road, looking deep into the forest, even looking overhead. But all we saw were trees, trees, and more trees. All pretty, of course, in their various stages of growth, but none of it could be interpreted as a clue.

Just as my research had indicated, as we walked, the road became two tracks of dirt bisected by a low grassy hump. Though we studied the gravel and dirt, too much time had passed to see anything more than the vague outlines of vehicle traffic, and even those disappeared as the two-track became a narrow meandering trail, then a deer-wide trail, and eventually there was no trail at all.

“Kate,” I called, for she’d taken the lead and was ten yards ahead of me. “Come on back. There’s nothing to find up there.”

“You don’t—slap!—know that. Maybe something’s just ahead. Maybe all we have to do is go a little farther. Wouldn’t it be too stupid to give up just before—slap!—dang these mosquitos!”

“Come on back,” I repeated more firmly, and this time she did so. “Tell you what,” I said. “I’m as disappointed as you are that we didn’t find anything. But”—I held up my hand to silence her upcoming protest—“maybe you’re right, and what we want to find is just ahead. However, we need to come prepared. We need mosquito repellant. Plus water, a compass, and a decent pedometer to tell us how far we walked. And we need to tell someone where we’re going.”

She sighed, but it sounded less a teenage sigh of the-world’s-so-unfair and more a sigh of resignation. “Fine,” she said, but the surliness was mostly absent. “That makes sense.”

I let out a small breath. “Now let’s get back before Eddie starts to worry.”

Side by side, we traipsed our route in reverse. “Isn’t it funny,” I said, “how things can look so different depending on the direction you travel?”

Kate glanced around. “Not sure what you mean.”

“Well,” I said, gesturing. “I didn’t notice that tree on the way out. See all the holes? That means it’s old, or diseased, and insects are starting the decay process.”

Her eyes went wide. “Bugs did that?”

“No, but yes.” I laughed at her expression. “Sorry. But the bugs are in there, eating away at their dinner, and that’s what attracts the pileated woodpeckers. They’re big birds, and—” I stopped.

“And what?” Kate had continued walking, but now saw I’d fallen behind. “What’s the matter?” Then she saw what I’d already spotted, the faintest hint of a trail, which we hadn’t noticed before because of a log blocking the view from that direction.

“Well,” I said. “It seems we’ve found something.”

“Yeah. And look at this.” Kate pointed at the log. “Its bark is different from this tree.” She thumped the woodpecker’s lunch buffet.

“Or,” I said slowly, “any of these other trees.” Not that I was Nature Girl, by any stretch—the pileated woodpecker’s habits was pretty much my full knowledge of woodland creatures—but even I could tell the difference between the bark of deciduous trees and that of conifers. Given that we were surrounded by maples, birches, and beeches, why were we looking at a pine log? “And,” I said, “it’s been cut. You can see the saw marks.”

Kate squatted down to get a closer view. “Okay, I see them now.” She popped upright and looked at me.

I looked back.

The conclusion was obvious. Someone—read Courtney and her cohort—had created this path and hidden its entrance. The big question now was, where did the path lead?

I tucked my curiosity away and put on my Aunt hat. Two people had already been killed and I was not going to put my niece in danger. “We need to leave,” I said. “Now that we have something solid to tell Detective Inwood, he and Ash will follow up on this and—Kate, wait!”

Because she had bolted away from me faster than a runner out of starting blocks. She tore through the trees faster than her aunt could follow, which I was doing, of course, because I wasn’t about to let her go down that trail all alone, but she had youth and—yes, I can admit it—fitness on her side, and her lead on me grew longer and longer.

“Kate!” I called. “Stop!”

She didn’t.

I summoned the biggest, best Librarian Voice I could muster. Through my panting breaths, I yelled, “Katrina Abigail Hamilton! Stop right now!”

To my surprise and shock, she did. At least the noise of her crashing through the underbrush stopped, and I suddenly found that I could run a little harder and a little faster, and my thoughts ran along with me.

Please don’t let her be hurt. What happened up there? Please, please, don’t let her be hurt. I’ll never forgive myself. Please, please, please . . .

I rounded a bend in the path and saw my niece, sound and whole, standing next to a small building. It was a classic Up North structure: a patchwork siding of half metal and half plywood, with a complicated roof that from a distance looked like a bunch of rusty highway signs tossed up every which way. Bigger than an outhouse and smaller than most sheds, its solidly wood door might or might not have had ancient barn origins, but the chain and lock that fastened it shut were bright and shiny.

Hmm.

“Aunt Minnie?” Her voice was unrepentant. “You need to look at this.”

With relief, I slowed to a walk for the last few yards. “What I need to do,” I said firmly, “is get you out of here and back to the car. Let’s go. Now.”

“But look!” She pointed. “See?”

And since I was human, I felt compelled to look. What I saw was a small and dusty window, just high enough off the ground that I couldn’t see inside, even standing on my tiptoes.

She saw my difficulty and took a knee. “Here. You can get up on my leg.”

“Kate—”

“Just a quick look. Then we can go.”

Thinking things that would instantly disqualify me for the Aunt of the Year Award, I grabbed the edge of a piece of plywood and clambered on top of Kate’s leg. As the shed’s interior was illuminated only by the light that came in through that window, it took a moment for my eyes to identify what was on shelves.

And I suddenly understood everything.

Because on those shelves were hundreds of short plastic bottles.

Prescription medications.

“What’s in there?” Kate asked.

“Pills,” I said. “Lots of them.” I flashed back to that day at Ann Marie and Rupert Wiley’s house. Courtney’s over-the-top reaction when I’d walked into the room. How she wasn’t supposed to be handling medications at all.

“They’re stealing them, aren’t they?” Kate’s voice was high and excited. “Selling them on the black market.”

I slid off her leg and hit the ground with a bump. Nicole. She’d had back problems. Could she have been addicted to opioids? Had she been buying from Courtney?

Even though Up North lacked many Big Box types of shopping opportunities, there were avenues for selling stolen goods. It was my guess that Courtney’s stash had a high percentage of opioids and she was making a pretty penny on sales, enough money that she and her partner were willing to kill to keep the operation going.

Only . . . who was the partner?

A metallic click made me freeze, and a male voice said, “Hold it right there.”