by Claire Booth
‘Uh, yeah, that’s fine. Go ahead,’ he said. He gave her a nod that was more firm and confident than she’d seen in a while. He went into his office for a minute and emerged with some paperwork and a travel coffee mug. ‘Call me if anything comes up. I can come right back and—’
Her compassion only went so far. She stood up and made shooing motions with her hands, but her voice was kind. ‘Get on with you. Out. Have a good time, relax, relive your college exploits. Whatever. Just get.’
He gave her a smile she couldn’t quite decipher. Amusement, with a little bit of gratitude? He paused on his way out the door. ‘And with the jail thing, just watch your back with you-know-who. I don’t want you hassled because of me.’
She gave him a wave as he left, and then sat down to work on the staffing schedule. She didn’t anticipate mere hassling. She expected people to flat out choose sides. And she was looking forward to it.
TWO
Hank was all set with Jerry. His college roommate had been delighted by his call.
‘Dude, of course you can stay here. As long as you need to. Guest bedroom’s all yours. We’ll go paint the town. I’ll show you all the new places.’
Jerry had no kids, two divorces, three cars, and the disapproval of every one of his friends’ wives. Hank loved him. And he loved Columbia. He was actually looking forward to this. It was a good feeling. He pulled a duffel bag out of the closet, but before he started packing he needed to find Aunt Fin.
She was just finishing a game of Candy Land in the living room. The kids were getting ready to start another one when Dunc yelled out from the kitchen that he was ready to walk the dog. Fin usually went with him. Hank caught her eye and gave her a discreet head shake.
‘I’m going to pass tonight, Duncan,’ she called.
She waited until she heard the door slam, then stood up and told the kids she needed to take a break from the game. She turned on a Maggie-approved cartoon program and followed Hank into the kitchen, sitting down with a concerned look on her face. She knew he would only want to talk about one thing, and he didn’t want others overhearing.
‘Fin, I want to apologize in advance for this. I might be putting you in an awkward position, and that’s certainly not my goal.’
He explained that he’d basically been ordered to leave town, by both his wife and his priest. So he was going up to Columbia. His good friend lived there, which made it a perfectly understandable destination choice. But seeing Jerry wasn’t his real reason for going.
Fin leaned forward. Anticipation and dread made her face flush all the way to the roots of her snow white hair. Hank reached across the table and grabbed her hand. He didn’t need her having a heart attack.
‘I’m going to look into it – into your problem,’ he said. ‘This is the perfect opportunity to poke around without anyone thinking it’s strange for me to be up there. Who knows? I could find your husband’s secretary, and everything will be fine.’
‘But you need a break. After … all that with the crash. That’s the point of you leaving. That you won’t be doing police work. I just told you because I thought you might know what I should do. I didn’t mean that you should do something.’
She really was a very nice lady.
‘I know that.’ He gave her hand a squeeze. ‘But this would work out pretty well. It would give me the opportunity to see what’s going on. The only thing is, we need to come up with a reason to explain why you’re not coming with me. Why you’re still staying here in Branson.’
Comprehension dawned. ‘Oh. Because under normal circumstances, I’d probably go, too. I see. I mean, how long do I need to be visiting my brother?’
Hank nodded. They just needed an excuse to account for why she was continuing to stay here, he said. She studied the pumpkin-motif tablecloth for a moment.
‘No.’ She raised her head and looked him dead in the eye. ‘I am a grown woman, and I should go home.’
That wasn’t what he meant at all. He spent fifteen minutes trying to talk her out of it.
‘Fin, please,’ he finally said. ‘You’re scared. Please let me figure out what’s going on before you go back.’
‘No. I married Lew and I can’t cower down here anymore. If he’s responsible for Tina being missing or hurt, I’m going to have to face it – face him – eventually. It might as well be now.’
‘What’s now?’
They both jumped a good foot out of their chairs. They hadn’t heard Duncan come in. He rolled his eyes and let Guapo off the leash. Before Hank could stop her, Fin was on her feet.
‘I’m going home. Now. Well, tomorrow. That’s what we were talking about. It’s a good opportunity. I can give Hank a ride.’
Wait, what? How would he get home if she drove him up there? And, more importantly, how would he survive three hours in a 2008 Buick LaCrosse with ride-the-brakes Aunt Fin? She gave them both a firm nod and went off to pack. The two men stared at each other. Dunc shrugged.
‘She blows in, she blows out. No warning either way. Same as Mary Poppins, only old and crabby.’
‘Like you’re so young and cheerful,’ said Hank.
Dunc barked a laugh. Then he wagged a finger at Hank. ‘I’m still sure that she came down here to get away from Lew because she thinks he’s having an affair. She’s just too embarrassed to say anything to me about it. So you be nice and don’t upset her any more than she already is.’
Hank said he would try. And he meant it, although not in the way Dunc wanted. He was going to try his damnedest to show Fin that her worries were unfounded. All he had to do was prove that Lew hadn’t killed anybody.
Sam Karnes got there first thing in the morning. It was his third trip out to the split-level with the added-on garage on a little street just off Highway 65 as it headed north toward Springfield. Two days ago, the first call had come in. Folks came home to find their house burglarized. He took the report, Alice Randall took pictures and dusted for prints around the broken window, and they assured the couple they’d investigate and each drove off in their department vehicles. Yesterday, the lady called back with a list of additional items that were missing. That wasn’t all that unusual. But she’d done it again last night. So here he was, pulling into the gravel driveway in his squad car, the sun barely up. The garage door was open, and both the woman and her husband stood inside. The cruiser crunched to a stop on the rocks, and Sam climbed out. He didn’t get three steps before the lady was at him, flapping a sheet of paper.
‘Here’s the more I was talking about,’ she said. ‘They’ve cleaned us out, that’s what.’
The garage looked pretty darn full to Sam. He walked toward it.
‘Mrs Balefski, ma’am, we went through all of this when I took the report two days ago. We looked through your garage. Just like we went through the house.’
She kept waving the paper at him.
‘Look, kid,’ she said. ‘Just because you’re inexperienced don’t mean that we got to suffer. You got to add this stuff to your report. The insurance – they’re telling me that I can’t file a claim till it’s all reported to the cops.’
Sam took the paper, which had the wonderful effect of getting Mrs Balefski to take a step back. He ignored her dig at his appearance – it wasn’t his fault he looked younger than his twenty-six years – and scanned the list, which ran the full front and back of the sheet. He picked an item at random.
‘OK, show me where the cordless drill was stored.’
‘What?’
‘Where did you keep the drill? And the power washer?’
Mrs Balefski looked at her husband, who was leaning against a garage support post and eating a piece of toast. He finished it before turning and picking his way through the junk into the back of the tilted building. Sam followed, less sure-footed in the mess and more than a little suspicious of the construction. He doubted the county building department had signed off on it. Or even knew about it. They got to a back-tool bench, and Mr Balefski pointed at a jumble
of wires in the middle.
‘They were on top of there.’
Everything else Sam asked to see was the same. It had all been kept on top of other messes, surfaces that didn’t keep an imprint or a dusty outline that would lend credence to their claims. He decided to make them go through the whole list – he hadn’t been planning to, but after five or six questionable locations, he figured he was going to make them work for it. He took photos of everything and scribbled in his notebook. They started to look a little worried.
They should. Sam was now beginning to doubt the antique family silverware they told him about yesterday as they’d showed him the empty box under their bed. They, of course, hadn’t had a receipt.
He got to the end of the list and saw the last item.
‘A car?’ he said before he could stop himself. ‘You didn’t notice a car was missing?’
Mr Balefski straightened up, said yes in a pretty indignant way, and stomped out the main garage door and around to the back. While the side of the building was clear and paved with gravel, the area behind it was full of household junk and untamed weeds. No part of it could be seen from the house.
‘There weren’t nothing back here important, so we didn’t think to look closer,’ the man said.
‘Except a car.’ Sam looked at the semi-clear rectangle where it must have been parked and tried not to roll his eyes.
Mr Balefski glared at him and jabbed a finger at a bunched-up tarp. ‘That was covering it, and from out there’ – he waved toward the front of the garage – ‘I could see the edge of it and thought the damn car was still back here.’
Sam would have been a lot more inclined to give this guy the benefit of the doubt if the rest of the ‘stolen’ list had seemed more plausible. He readied his pen and asked for the details. A 2002 Honda Civic, blue, two-door, dent in the passenger side.
‘You have the VIN?’
‘It’s on the damn car.’
OK. That was enough. He knew people didn’t tend to grant him a lot of respect because of his age, and because of looking kind of tall and gawky. But Hank had flat out told him. Being treated like a youngster was one thing. Being disrespected was something else. And that had to be dealt with firmly, fairly, and fast.
‘Mr Balefski. I’m talking about whether you wrote down the VIN somewhere safe. Like a responsible vehicle owner.’ Sam readied his notebook and pointed his pen at the guy. ‘I’m going to ask you the same question about the license plate. Which could be on the damn car, too. But if you don’t have it written down, then we’re done here. Am I making myself clear?’
They stared at each other for what felt to Sam like an excruciatingly long and awkward time. Maybe he shouldn’t have said that last bit. Finally, the guy stomped back out front to his wife. She hurried into the house and came out with another sheet of paper with a Missouri license plate number. They bought it second-hand and never wrote down the VIN, she mumbled. Sam took it, folded it into his notebook with their itemized list and walked back to his car without saying another word. The woman trotted after him. The guy didn’t.
‘Would it be important to know if the keys were in the car?’ she whispered to Sam. He turned toward her and she shooed him back in his original direction. ‘I might’ve left ’em in there. Cuz I can’t find ’em in the house.’
Now Sam did roll his eyes. She gave him a dirty look and stepped away as her husband approached.
‘Uh, so this stuff’s going to get added to the report, right?’ she said a little too loudly. ‘So we can tell the insurance company?’
Sam told her how to request a copy of the official report once it was done and drove off before they could think of anything else they were ‘missing’. He waited until he was out of sight of the property before he pulled over and ran the plates on the cruiser’s computer. It did come back to a 2002 Civic belonging to the Balefskis. He let out an exasperated sigh and entered it as stolen. He couldn’t add a ‘skeptical’ notation to the computer database, but the narrative attached to his police report would sure mention it.
THREE
Hank and Fin wanted to be on the road by eight. He was disappointed with how blasé the kids were about him going away. They were more upset that Fin was leaving. Maggie and Dunc, on the other hand, tried to hide their relief. It hadn’t been easy having another adult in the house for so long.
He loaded Fin’s bags in her cavernous trunk. And then approached her carefully.
‘It’s still a little dark out. I’m happy to drive.’
‘Oh,’ she said, clearly surprised at the offer. ‘I don’t … well, I usually do my own driving.’
Hank had experienced it once. He really didn’t want to again. He shot a look at Maggie and Dunc, who were on the porch in their bathrobes. Maggie gave it a try.
‘It’ll give you a chance to do some more knitting.’ That was good. She even unleashed her persuasive take-your-medicine doctor voice.
Fin didn’t look swayed. Dunc waved her over.
‘Come here, Finella,’ he told his sister. He put his arm around her shoulder and led her out on to the front lawn. Thirty seconds of talk and she came back over, got her knitting out of the trunk, gave Hank the keys, and settled herself in the passenger seat. He was too surprised even to say thank you. Instead, he walked back to the porch to give Maggie one last kiss. Then he shot Dunc a quizzical look.
‘I told her you’re still in a funk, and it’d probably make you feel better if you could drive,’ Dunc whispered. ‘You know, make you feel like you were doing something right for a change.’
Maggie groaned. Dunc shrugged. ‘Well, it worked, didn’t it?’
And that was the important thing. Hank would take any kind of character assassination if it meant escaping Fin’s brake-heavy driving. He slapped Dunc on the back and got in the Buick. As they pulled away, the kids finally deigned to notice, popping out of the front door and waving madly.
They headed up Highway 65 at a leisurely pace. Which was all the car was suited for. It was big and low, and the soft suspension made it feel like they were floating along. The steering needed the barest touch. He fiddled with the seat adjustment until he was comfortable, and they rode in easy silence through Springfield and east on the interstate until the exit for the city of Lebanon. From here on out, it was mostly a connection of little-frequented roads through rural Missouri. Luckily, Fin was amenable to having breakfast at the Steak ’n Shake first. He had a couple of breakfast tacos and Fin ordered a stack of pancakes. They both got milkshakes for the road.
Hank waited until they were out of Lebanon and sailing north on Highway 5. It was a big improvement over the two-lane danger that he and Maggie used to drive in college when they came down to see her family in Branson. Now it had stretches of passing lanes and wide center dividers. He remarked on it and Fin told him to wait and see the wonderful stretch of US 54 from Lake of the Ozarks up toward Jeff City. It was now a full-on divided highway. Just heavenly, she said.
‘We’ll definitely get there faster than I expected,’ Hank said. He took a sip of chocolate shake and looked over at her. ‘So I guess we should start talking about Tina.’
Fin poked at her shake with the straw. Hank could practically hear the internal conversation she was having.
‘You’re worried,’ he said. ‘I think I know you well enough to say that you don’t get that way if there isn’t cause. So you’re not going to tell me that you’re probably overreacting, or that I should forget it. You’re going to tell me what you know, and you’re going to let me take it from there. And if it really is nothing, then we’ll find that out, and no one will be the wiser. OK?’
She swished her melting drink around and then looked at him with blue eyes amazingly like her brother’s. ‘OK.’
Hank turned his gaze back to the road. She didn’t need him constantly looking over as she tried to collect her thoughts. They drove another few miles before she began to speak.
Tina had been hired about a year ago. Maude had
retired, and Lew needed a new secretary. Although nowadays, apparently, they’re called administrative assistants. So the ad was placed, online and in other such tech-y places, and Tina Hardy applied. She was in her mid-forties, which was certainly younger than anybody in the office, except the young men who did the driving and truck-loading. When Hank asked for more of a description Fin figured she was probably about five foot six, with glasses and dark blonde hair that was shoulder length and carefully highlighted. She seemed to fit in well. She was into a few things that the other ladies weren’t, like working out and foreign films, but she was nice and had participated in the office Secret Santa, which was a big plus. She knew what she was doing as far as the job went. She was good at all those business software programs – even designing a couple of ads that Lew used to promote the company.
Of course, Closeout Castle was already a local institution, so the ads just needed to herald new arrivals and reinforce the treasure hunt aspect of the chain’s stores. ‘How Low Can Lew Go?’ is what he’d ask folks in the commercials. Customers could find everything from high-end small appliances for eighty percent off to novelty pencils for a nickel each. And the selection was constantly changing. People would come from all over the state to Columbia, conveniently situated right in the middle. Until lately. People weren’t willing to drive anymore. They wanted it shipped to them. They wanted to do it all on their computers. Point-and-click, point-and-click. These days, Lew said that phrase like it was a profanity.
But back to Tina. They were happy with her job performance – her and Lew and Marco Cortello, the company’s financial officer. She included herself in that list because ever since she married Lew twenty years ago, they kept her in the loop on things. Until about six months ago. Then it gradually started to change. She didn’t even notice it at first. As she looked back on it now, though, she could see that Lew had slowly stopped discussing things with her.
