by Laurie Cass
“Not a good plan,” I muttered to myself, and took a long drink of water from my coffee mug. Which helped a little, but not very much.
Sighing, I pulled out my cell phone and made the call. Better to get the task over with now than to stew over it.
“Hi, Minnie,” Irene Deering said.
There was a lot of noise in the background, so I figured she must be at her waitressing job. “Can you talk a minute?”
“Sure. I’m on break. What’s up?”
“I’ve been trying to track Seth Wartella online,” I said. “I’ve been looking at Facebook, Pinterest, all those.”
“What did you find?” Irene asked, her voice tight.
“Nothing,” I said. “Absolutely nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Exactly that.” Suddenly I couldn’t sit still any longer. Phone in hand, I stood and paced around my office. “He wasn’t anywhere. I couldn’t find any sign of him on the Internet at all.”
“You know,” Irene said slowly, “that sort of makes sense. Before he went to jail, he was all over the Internet. That’s part of the evidence they used against him, the timing and content of some of his Facebook posts.”
That did make sense. I stood in front of my office window. It was dark enough now that what I mostly saw was myself looking back at me. “There’s been no trace of Seth Wartella since he walked out of prison.” I pulled in a deep breath and let it out. “He’s vanished.”
Chapter 11
My uneasiness about Seth didn’t dissipate overnight. It didn’t go anywhere as I showered and dressed the next morning and it didn’t go away as I crunched through my cornflakes.
It was only after I’d hauled Eddie’s carrier up the steps of the bookmobile and finished the pretrip checklist that my mood started to shift, because I’d finally looked around and seen that it was going to be a beautiful spring day. Janay Lake was flat calm, the sky was blue, and though the morning was a little chilly, it was supposed to get close to sixty degrees later on, and who could ask for more than that?
“Mrr.”
“It’s April,” I told Eddie as I strapped his carrier into place. “It’s pointless to ask for summerlike weather in April. You’ll doom yourself to disappointment. Can’t you be happy with the blue sky?”
He didn’t say anything, as he was busy rearranging himself on his pink blanket. It had been crocheted for him last summer by one of my aunt’s boarders and he’d taken to the soft fuzzy thing as if it had been a long-lost brother.
“Cats always want more.” Julia laughed as she came up the steps. “Life with a cat is one long negotiating session.”
“No wonder I’m tired all the time,” I said, glancing back at the books. All shipshape and seaworthy. Ready to go, Captain!
Julia slid into the passenger’s seat. “You’re tired because you’re working too hard.”
“Not true. I didn’t go into the library the entire weekend.”
“When was the last time you did that? And when’s the next time you’re going to take off two entire days in a row? Even better, when are you going to take a full week of vacation and get a true rest?”
“Mrr,” Eddie said.
“See?” Julia asked. “I’m not the only one who wonders these things.”
I snorted and turned the key in the ignition. The bookmobile’s engine started with a happy rumbling sound. “Eddie only wants me to take time off so he can get me to let him in and out and in and out all day long.”
“Eddie?” Julia looked down at the carrier by her feet. “Is this true? Are you really that self-centered?”
There was a long pause; then came a quiet “Mrr.”
“Told you,” I said, grinning, and I dropped the transmission into drive, starting another day on the bookmobile.
• • •
At the end of the day, we pulled into the farm drive next to Adam and Irene’s house. “I’ll just be a minute,” I said to Julia. “I talked to Irene last night and she said Adam was on a John Sandford kick.” I picked up a plastic bag that held half a dozen of the thrillers set in Minnesota. “Are you okay here with Eddie?”
Julia unbuckled her seat belt and stretched, which made her look a little bit like a cat herself. “Me, Eddie, and three thousand books.” She smiled. “I think I’ll manage to find something to do.”
The Deerings’ driveway seemed shorter that day, but maybe that was because I was carrying a smaller bag of books. I knocked on the front door and poked my head in. “Adam? It’s Minnie.”
“In the kitchen,” he called. “Come on in.”
Adam was sitting at a square wooden table. Nothing was in front of him; he was just sitting there. He had the look of a man who’d tried to walk a little too far and had dropped into the closest chair available.
I gave his face a quick study. He was pale, but not sweating and not shaking. “Doing okay?” I asked, emptying the bag onto the table.
“Better now,” he said, reaching for Buried Prey. “Thanks for stopping by. Irene said you might.”
“Did she tell you what I found out about Seth?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Not that weird, I suppose, but here I thought all that social media stuff was supposed to make it easy to find people.”
“Not if you don’t want to be found,” I said. “And if . . .” My voice faded away.
“What?” Adam asked.
“Where did Irene think she saw Seth?” I couldn’t remember her saying, and I’d neglected to ask.
“Chilson,” he said. “Downtown, somewhere. She was driving through town and saw him on the sidewalk.”
Downtown? Excellent. It would take time, but I could work with that.
“Why?” Adam asked.
“Another possible area of investigation,” I said vaguely, sounding even to myself as if I were spending too much time with law enforcement officers. Then I remembered the other thing I wanted to tell him. “I think I found one of those wooden boats that you and Henry found.”
Adam immediately brightened. “Where? Do you know what kind it was?”
I told him about my bumpy, rutting time and finding a tarped-over Hacker-Craft on the side of Chatham Road.
“Sounds right,” he said, nodding. “Was there a cranky old lady with it?”
“She came at me with a gun,” I said crisply.
“What?” Adam’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re kidding. Neva?”
“You know her?”
Adam shook his head. “Henry did. Back in the day, she used to date his older brother. He went downstate to college and really never came home. Got married and moved to Virginia, Henry said, and died a few years ago of a heart attack.”
“Neva didn’t come at you with a gun?” I asked. “Did you look at the boat?”
“Henry did, mostly. Once I saw that hull rot I got a little nervous.” He stared off into space. “But now that I think about it, what’s a little rot? That could still be restored to a beautiful boat.”
I headed back to the bookmobile, thinking.
Maybe Henry had earned the wrath of Neva because of her long-ago failed relationship with his brother. It seemed odd that a romance from fifty years ago could have anything to do with what was happening now, but who knew? And though Adam had said he didn’t look at the boat, he’d been close enough to note the hull rot. If he’d been that close, Neva would surely have seen him, and who could say what she might be capable of?
Frustration pulled at me and I lengthened my stride, trying to outdistance it.
All I was finding was more questions. I was going to have to start finding answers. And sooner would be much better than later.
• • •
I swallowed the spoonful of clam chowder. “You’re nuts. There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s the best I’ve ever had.”
Kristen frowned mightily and tossed the spoon by which she’d fed me into the nearest kitchen sink. “Why do I even ask? You’re the worst taster ever.”
“B
ecause I like the food you make?” I looked around for a stool and pulled one up to the restaurant’s kitchen island. It looked as if the preopening dinner Kristen had invited me over to eat wasn’t going to materialize, not if she was still tweaking tomorrow night’s recipes. Ah, well. It wasn’t as if we’d go hungry.
“You like anything you don’t have to cook.” She stirred the chowder, reached for a jar of some spice I couldn’t identify, and added a couple of shakes. “That might do it.” She grabbed another spoon and tasted. “Ha! Now, that’s the best clam chowder ever.”
“Let me try.” I found a clean spoon and reached forward to fill it with the thick, chunky chowder. “Mm,” I said. “You’re right. That is the best ever.” To me it didn’t taste any different from the previous spoonful, but why tell that to the cook, especially if there was a chance she might ban me from the crème brûlée that was coming up later?
She ladled two bowls almost to the brim and dragged another stool over to the island. As we sat side by side, companionably slurping up chowdery goodness, I felt warm and cozy and content with life in general. Clam chowder did that to me.
“So, what’s going on in your life?” she asked, when the bowls were half-empty.
My contentedness snapped away. “I told you about Adam Deering almost getting hit by that car, right?”
Kristen nodded. “You never told me the whole story, though. You never told me how close you came to getting hit.”
“Me?” I blinked at her. “It was aiming for Adam. Anyway, I’ve been trying to find Seth Wartella. The guy from Chicago.”
“Seth who?”
I frowned, midslurp, which was harder than I thought it would be. “I haven’t told you about him?”
“Busy, busy, busy.” She waved at the kitchen around us. “Maybe, but if you did it got mixed up with the staff schedule or the produce delivery schedule or that asparagus soup recipe I’ve been working on.”
Or maybe I just hadn’t told her, knowing that she was wacky busy with the restaurant opening. But she was relatively calm right now, so I told her about Irene’s possible sighting of the man her husband had helped put in prison.
Kristen was frowning. “Why do I know that name?”
“Seth?”
“No, Wartella.” She drummed her short fingernails on the stainless steel counter. “Wartella . . .” She grinned. “Got it. Tony Wartella. He’s a conservation officer. Didn’t you come across him last year?”
“That’s right,” I said slowly. “I’d forgotten.” Last Thanksgiving, I had indeed talked to an Officer Wartella about what might have been a hunting accident. “I wonder . . .”
“If Tony and that Seth are related? You could be right. I think Tony is originally from the Chicago area.” Kristen pointed south, in the direction of far-off Illinois. “I can find out, if you want. Tony and his wife are regulars on Tuesday nights.”
That was the night she offered a special—buy one dinner, get another half off—something that a lot of locals appreciated. “That would be great,” I said, then went on to tell her about not finding any trace of Seth on the Internet, at which she shrugged.
“My mom’s not on any social media, either, and the only crime she ever committed was the time she stayed too long in a parking space.”
“That’s not a crime,” I said.
“Tell that to my mom.” Kristen scraped up the last of her chowder. “She got a ticket and had to pay a fine, so now whenever she has to fill out a form that asks if she’s ever been convicted of a crime, she says yes.” She looked over. “You going to finish that?”
I pushed my bowl toward her. “There’s one other weird thing.” When I told the story of the recent out-of-town Mitchell sighting, she was suitably surprised, but when I told her about stopping to look at the wooden boat and being threatened by a gun-toting senior citizen of the female persuasion, she looked appropriately frightened and indignant on my behalf.
“Why do they let people like that have guns?” she asked.
“I reported it to the sheriff’s office,” I said. “But she didn’t fire the gun, she was on her own property, and I have no proof there was ammunition in it.” I shrugged. “But she did scare the daylights out of me.”
“What’s was her name?”
“Neva Chatham.”
“Huh. There are lots of Chatham stories floating around.” Kristen scooped out the last of my chowder and spooned it into her mouth. “I wonder how many of them are true. Can’t say I know any Chathams personally.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said, then started thinking about families. About family resemblances and family traits and how while sometimes if you know one member of a family you know what they’re all like. Then again, sometimes members of the same family, even siblings within a year or two of each other, are very different, and not always in a good way.
“What’s the matter?” Kristen asked.
“Just thinking,” I said, then started to tell her my exact thoughts.
But before I got halfway through, she rolled her eyes, stacked our dishes, and got up. “Sometimes you think too much,” she said. “And you can quit with the protest; you know it’s true.”
“Do not,” I muttered.
“Well, you’re wrong.” She opened the door to the closest refrigerator. “And if you want dessert, you’ll admit that you’re wrong.” Grinning, she pulled out two ramekins of crème brûlée, both already topped with local greenhouse strawberries and sprigs of mint.
Clearly blackmail, but it was blackmail of the most excellent kind.
“You were right,” I said mechanically, “and I was wrong.” When she continued to hold the ramekins out of reach, I sighed and finished our time-honored litany. “I’m sorry.”
“Apology accepted.” She slid the desserts down the counter. “So, are you going to try to stop thinking so much?”
“Don’t see how that’s going to happen.” I picked up the spoon that was sliding toward me.
Kristen plopped onto her stool and picked up her own spoon. “Just as well. If you didn’t overthink everything, you wouldn’t be you, and then where would you be?”
On a count of three, we plunged our spoons through the crackly sugar crust and I knew there was absolutely nowhere else in the world I wanted to be at that moment other that sitting next to my best friend.
• • •
It was when I was walking home, post-dessert, that my cell rang with Tucker’s ring tone. While we’d been texting almost every day, or nearly, we hadn’t actually talked since I couldn’t think when.
“Hey,” I said, smiling into the phone. “I was just at Kristen’s, eating way too much excellent food. What did you have for supper?”
“Leftover pizza, I think. Although that might have been yesterday.”
I laughed. “Doesn’t your mother feed you?”
“I’ve been taking extra shifts,” he said. “There’s a lot to learn here, and the more hours I work, the more I learn.”
Which sounded good, but I was suddenly getting a bad feeling about the turn the conversation was taking. I stopped walking and sat on a nearby bench. The sun was down, the streetlights were on, and the sunset’s afterglow filled the west part of the sky with a fading golden blush. “So you’re working a lot,” I said carefully.
“It’s the best way to learn.”
“Yes, you said that.”
The silence between us grew long and thick. I sat there for so long, not talking, that I almost forgot who was on the other end of the phone.
“So,” Tucker said, “it looks like I won’t be able to make it up there in June.”
“Yeah.” I suddenly couldn’t stand to sit any longer. I got to my feet and started walking. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.”
“Minnie, I’d come up if I could.”
“Sure. I know.” Sort of.
“It’s just that I don’t want to miss any opportunities. If I’m going to go anywhere and do anything, I need
to make the most of this fellowship.”
“Sure. I know.” Which I’d already said, but Tucker didn’t seem to notice my repetition.
“Why don’t you come down here?” he asked.
And do what, sit and talk to his parents while I waited for him to come home from the hospital because he couldn’t turn down a chance to take an extra shift, even when it was the first time he’d seen his girlfriend in months? No, thanks.
“It’s a really busy time for me,” I said. “With the book fair and all the summer people coming and vacations starting, it’s going to be really hard for me to get away.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I kind of figured, but I thought I’d ask.”
I squinted at the sky’s last light and wondered exactly what he’d meant by that. Had he hoped I’d say no? Because that was what it sounded like. “You know I’d come down if I could,” I said, echoing his own statement. And again, he either didn’t notice the repetition or chose to ignore it.
“Sure.”
We made stilted small talk for a little longer, and by the time I got back to the houseboat, my phone was back in my pocket. I opened the door and was greeted by the sight of my cat sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor and staring straight at me.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You overheard that entire conversation and are now ready to offer romantic advice.”
He didn’t move. Didn’t even blink.
“Strike one.” I tossed my jacket onto the pilot’s seat. “Second guess. You were deeply lonely without me and have been sitting there for hours, pining for my return.”
Eddie lowered his head slightly but didn’t break eye contact.
“Strike two, huh?” I leaned down to scoop him up. “Third guess. When you woke up from your most recent nap, you realized I still wasn’t home and have been sitting there for the last thirty seconds, wondering if your food supply will ever be replenished.”
“Mrr!” He nudged the side of my face with his head.
“You are such an Eddie,” I said, nudging him back, and as his purr started, the sting of Tucker’s phone call faded away almost as if it had never been.
