Текст книги "Full dark, no stars"

Автор книги: Стивен Кинг

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 24 страниц)

You like Bud, Bud likes you, Tess thought.

She took off her dark glasses so she could walk without stumbling into something and crossed the foyer to peep into the main room. It was vast and redolent of beer. There was a disco ball, now dark and still. The wooden floor reminded her of the roller-skating rink where she and her girlfriends had all but lived during the summer between eighth grade and high school. The instruments were still up on the bandstand, suggesting that The Zombie Bakers would be back tonight for another heaping bowl of rock n roll.

“Hello?” Her voice echoed.

“I’m right here,” a voice replied softly from behind her. – 25 -

If it had been a man’s voice, Tess would have shrieked. She managed to avoid that, but she still whirled around so quickly that she stumbled a little. The woman standing in the coat alcove-a skinny breath of a thing, no more than five feet three-blinked in surprise and took a step back. “Whoa, easy.”

“You startled me,” Tess said.

“I see I did.” The woman’s tiny, perfect oval of a face was surrounded by a cloud of teased black hair. A pencil peeked from it. She had piquant blue eyes that didn’t quite match. A Picasso girl, Tess thought. “I was in the office. Are you the Expedition lady or the Honda lady?”

“Expedition.”

“Have ID?”

“Yes, two pieces, but only one with my picture on it. My passport. The other stuff was in my purse. My other purse. I thought that was what you might have.”

“No, sorry. Maybe you stashed it under the seat, or something? We only look in the glove compartments, and of course we can’t even do that if the car is locked. Yours wasn’t, and your phone number was on the insurance card. But probably you know that. Maybe you’ll find your purse at home.” Neal’s voice suggested that this wasn’t likely. “One photo ID will be okay if it looks like you, I guess.”

Neal led Tess to a door at the back of the coat area, then down a narrow curving corridor that skirted the main room. There were more band photos on the walls. At one point they passed through a fume of chlorine that stung Tess’s eyes and tender throat.

“If you think the johns smell now, you should be here when the joint is going full tilt,” Neal said, then added, “Oh, I forgot-you were.”

Tess made no comment.

At the end of the hallway was a door marked OFFICE STAFF ONLY. The room beyond was large, pleasant, and filled with morning sunshine. A framed picture of Barack Obama hung on the wall, above a bumper sticker bearing the YES WE CAN slogan. Tess couldn’t see her cab-the building was in the way-but she could see its shadow.

That’s good. Stay right there and get your ten bucks. And if I don’t come out, don’t come in. Just call the police.

Neal went to the desk in the corner and sat down. “Let’s see your ID.”

Tess opened her purse, fumbled past the.38, and brought out her passport and her Authors Guild card. Neal gave the passport photo only a cursory glance, but when she saw the Guild card, her eyes widened. “You’re the Willow Grove lady!”

Tess smiled gamely. It hurt her lips. “Guilty as charged.” Her voice sounded foggy, as though she were getting over a bad cold.

“My gran loves those books!”

“Many grans do,” Tess said. “When the affection finally filters down to the next generation-the one not currently living on fixed incomes-I’m going to buy myself a ch?teau in France.”

Sometimes this earned her a smile. Not from Ms. Neal, however. “I hope that didn’t happen here.” She wasn’t more specific and didn’t have to be. Tess knew what she was talking about, and Betsy Neal knew she knew.

Tess thought of revisiting the story she’d already told Patsy-the beeping smoke detector alarm, the cat under her feet, the collision with the newel post-and didn’t bother. This woman had a look of daytime efficiency about her and probably visited The Stagger Inn as infrequently as possible during its hours of operation, but she was clearly under no illusions about what sometimes happened here when the hour grew late and the guests grew drunk. She was, after all, the one who came in early on Saturday mornings to make the courtesy calls. She had probably heard her share of morning-after stories featuring midnight stumbles, slips in the shower, etc., etc.

“Not here,” Tess said. “Don’t worry.”

“Not even in the parking lot? If you ran into trouble there, I’ll have to have Mr. Rumble talk with the security staff. Mr. Rumble’s the boss, and security’s supposed to check the video monitors regularly on busy nights.”

“It happened after I left.”

I really do have to make the report anonymously now, if I mean to report it at all. Because I’m lying, and she’ll remember.

If she meant to report it at all? Of course she did. Right?

“I’m very sorry.” Neal paused, seeming to debate with herself. Then she said, “I don’t mean to offend you, but you probably don’t have any business in a place like this to begin with. It didn’t turn out so well for you, and if it got into the papers… well, my gran would be very disappointed.”

Tess agreed. And because she could embellish convincingly (it was the talent that paid the bills, after all), she did. “A bad boyfriend is sharper than a serpent’s tooth. I think the Bible says that. Or maybe it’s Dr. Phil. In any case, I’ve broken up with him.”

“A lot of women say that, then weaken. And a guy who does it once-”

“Will do it again. Yes, I know, I was very foolish. If you don’t have my purse, what property of mine do you have?”

Ms. Neal turned in her swivel chair (the sun licked across her face, momentarily highlighting those unusual blue eyes), opened one of her file cabinets, and brought out Tom the Tomtom. Tess was delighted to see her old traveling buddy. It didn’t make things all better, but it was a step in the right direction.

“We’re not supposed to remove anything from patrons’ cars, just get the address and the phone number if we can, then lock it up, but I didn’t like to leave this. Thieves don’t mind breaking a window to get a particularly tasty item, and it was sitting right there on your dashboard.”

“Thank you.” Tess felt tears springing into her eyes behind her dark glasses and willed them back. “That was very thoughtful.”

Betsy Neal smiled, which transformed her stern Ms. Taking Care of Business face to radiant in an instant. “Very welcome. And when that boyfriend of yours comes crawling back, asking for a second chance, think of my gran and all your other loyal readers and tell him no way Jose.” She considered. “But do it with the chain on your door. Because a bad boyfriend really is sharper than a serpent’s tooth.”

“That’s good advice. Listen, I have to go. I told the cab to wait while I made sure I was really going to get my car.”

And that might have been all-it really might have been-but then Neal asked, with becoming diffidence, if Tess would mind signing an autograph for her grandmother. Tess told her of course not, and in spite of all that had happened, watched with real amusement as Neal found a piece of business stationery and used a ruler to tear off the Stagger Inn logo at the top before handing it across the desk.

“Make it ‘To Mary, a true fan.’ Can you do that?”

Tess could. And as she was adding the date, a fresh confabulation came to mind. “A man helped me when my boyfriend and I were… you know, tussling. If not for him, I might have been hurt a lot worse.” Yes! Raped, even! “I’d like to thank him, but I don’t know his name.”

“I doubt if I could do you much good there. I’m just the office help.”

“But you’re local, right?”

“Yes…”

“I met him at the little store down the road.”

“The Gas amp; Dash?”

“I think that’s the name. It’s where my boyfriend and I had our argument. It was about the car. I didn’t want to drive and I wouldn’t let him. We were arguing about it all the time we walked down the road… staggered down the road… staggered down Stagg Road…”

Neal smiled as people do when they’ve heard a joke many times before.

“Anyway, this guy came along in an old blue pickup truck with that plastic stuff for rust around the headlights-”

“Bondo?”

“I think that’s what it’s called.” Knowing damn well that was what it was called. Her father had supported the company almost single-handed. “Anyway, I remember thinking when he got out that he wasn’t really riding in that truck, he was wearing it.”

When she handed the signed sheet of paper back across the desk, she saw that Betsy Neal was now actually grinning. “Oh my God, I might actually know who he was.”

“Really?”

“Was he big or was he real big?”

“Real big,” Tess said. She felt a peculiar watchful happiness that seemed located not in her head but in the center of her chest. It was the way she felt when the strings of some outlandish plot actually started to come together, pulling tight like the top of a nicely crafted tote-bag. She always felt both surprised and not surprised when this happened. There was no satisfaction like it.

“Did you happen to notice if he was wearing a ring on his little finger? Red stone?”

“Yes! Like a ruby! Only too big to be real. And a brown hat-”

Neal was nodding. “With white splatters on it. He’s been wearing the damn thing for ten years. That’s Big Driver you’re talking about. I don’t know where he lives, but he’s local, either Colewich or Nestor Falls. I see him around-supermarket, hardware store, Walmart, places like that. And once you see him, you don’t forget him. His real name is Al Something-Polish. You know, one of those hard-to-pronounce names. Strelkowicz, Stancowitz, something like that. I bet I could find him in the phone book, because he and his brother own a trucking company. Hawkline, I think it’s called. Or maybe Eagle Line. Something with a bird in it, anyway. Want me to look him up?”

“No, thanks,” Tess said pleasantly. “You’ve been helpful enough, and my cabdriver’s waiting.”

“Okay. Just do yourself a favor and stay away from that boyfriend of yours. And stay away from The Stagger. Of course, if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll have to find you and kill you.”

“Fair enough,” Tess said, smiling. “I’d deserve it.” At the doorway, she turned back. “A favor?”

“If I can.”

“If you happen to see Al Something-Polish around town, don’t mention that you talked to me.” She smiled more widely. It hurt her lips, but she did it. “I want to surprise him. Give him a little gift, or something.”

“Not a problem.”

Tess lingered a bit longer. “I love your eyes.”

Neal shrugged and smiled. “Thanks. They don’t quite match, do they? It used to make me self-conscious, but now…”

“Now it works for you,” Tess said. “You grew into them.”

“I guess I did. I even picked up some work modeling in my twenties. But sometimes, you know what? It’s better to grow out of things. Like a taste for bad-tempered men.”

To that there seemed to be nothing to say. – 26 -

She made sure her Expedition would start, then tipped the cabdriver twenty instead of ten. He thanked her with feeling, then drove away toward the I-84. Tess followed, but not until she’d plugged Tom back into the cigarette lighter receptacle and powered him up.

“Hello, Tess,” Tom said. “I see we’re taking a trip.”

“Just home, Tommy-boy,” she said, and pulled out of the parking lot, very aware she was riding on a tire that had been mounted by the man who had almost killed her. Al Something-Polish. A truck-driving son of a gun. “One stop on the way.”

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, Tess, but you should be careful.”

If she had been home instead of in her car, Fritzy would have been the one to say this, and Tess would have been equally unsurprised. She had been making up voices and conversations since childhood, although at the age of eight or nine, she’d quit doing it around other people, unless it was for comic effect.

“I don’t know what I’m thinking, either,” she said, but this was not quite true.

Up ahead was the US 47 intersection, and the Gas amp; Dash. She signaled, turned in, and parked with the Expedition’s nose centered between the two pay phones on the side of the building. She saw the number for Royal Limousine on the dusty cinder block between them. The numbers were crooked, straggling, written by a finger that hadn’t been able to stay steady. A chill shivered its way up her back, and she wrapped her arms around herself, hugging hard. Then she got out and went to the pay phone that still worked.

The instruction card had been defaced, maybe by a drunk with a car key, but she could still read the salient information: no charge for 911 calls, just lift the handset and punch in the numbers. Easy-as-can-beezy.

She punched 9, hesitated, punched 1, then hesitated again. She visualized a pi?ata, and a woman poised to hit it with a stick. Soon everything inside would come tumbling out. Her friends and associates would know she had been raped. Patsy McClain would know the story about stumbling over Fritzy in the dark was a shame-driven lie… and that Tess hadn’t trusted her enough to tell the truth. But really, those weren’t the main things. She supposed she could stand up to a little public scrutiny, especially if it kept the man Betsy Neal had called Big Driver from raping and killing another woman. Tess realized that she might even be perceived as a heroine, a thing that had been impossible to even consider last night, when urinating hurt enough to make her cry and her mind kept returning to the image of her stolen panties in the center pocket of the giant’s bib overalls.

Only…

“What’s in it for me?” she asked again. She spoke very quietly, while looking at the telephone number she’d written in the dust. “What’s in that for me?”

And thought: I have a gun and I know how to use it.

She hung up the phone and went back to her car. She looked at Tom’s screen, which was showing the intersection of Stagg Road and Route 47. “I need to think about this some more,” she said.

“What’s to think about?” Tom asked. “If you were to kill him and then get caught, you’d go to jail. Raped or not.”

“That’s what I need to think about,” she said, and turned onto US 47, which would take her to I-84.

Traffic on the big highway was Saturday-morning light, and being behind the wheel of her Expedition was good. Soothing. Normal. Tom was quiet until she passed the sign reading EXIT 9 STOKE VILLAGE 2 MILES. Then he said, “Are you sure it was an accident?”

“What?” Tess jumped, startled. She had heard Tom’s words coming out of her mouth, spoken in the deeper voice she always used for the make-believe half of her make-believe conversations (it was a voice very little like Tom the Tomtom’s actual robo-voice), but it didn’t feel like her thought. “Are you saying the bastard raped me by accident?”

“No,” Tom replied. “I’m saying that if it had been up to you, you would have gone back the way you came. This way. I-84. But somebody had a better idea, didn’t they? Somebody knew a shortcut.”

“Yes,” she agreed. “Ramona Norville did.” She considered it, then shook her head. “That’s pretty far-fetched, my friend.”

To this Tom made no reply. – 27 -

Leaving the Gas amp; Dash, she had planned to go online and see if she could locate a trucking company, maybe a small independent, that operated out of Colewich or one of the surrounding towns. A company with a bird name, probably hawk or eagle. It was what the Willow Grove ladies would have done; they loved their computers and were always texting each other like teenagers. Other considerations aside, it would be interesting to see if her version of amateur sleuthing worked in real life.

Driving up the I-84 exit ramp a mile and a half from her house, she decided that she would do a little research on Ramona Norville first. Who knew, she might discover that, besides presiding over Books amp; Brown Baggers, Ramona was president of the Chicopee Rape Prevention Society. It was even plausible. Tess’s hostess had pretty clearly been not just a lesbian but a dyke lesbian, and women of that persuasion were often not fond of men who were non -rapists.

“Many arsonists belong to their local volunteer fire departments,” Tom observed as she turned onto her street.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Tess asked.

“That you shouldn’t eliminate anyone based on their public affiliations. The Knitting Society ladies would never do that. But by all means check her out online.” Tom spoke in a be-my-guest tone that Tess hadn’t quite expected. It was mildly irritating.

“How kind of you to give me permission, Thomas,” she said. – 28 -

But when she was in her office with her computer booted up, she only stared at the Apple welcome screen for the first five minutes, wondering if she was really thinking of finding the giant and using her gun, or if that was just the sort of fantasy to which liars-for-profit such as herself were prone. A revenge fantasy, in this case. She avoided those kinds of movies, too, but she knew they were out there; you couldn’t avoid the vibe of your culture unless you were a total recluse, and Tess wasn’t. In the revenge movies, admirably muscular fellows like Charles Bronson and Sylvester Stallone didn’t bother with the police, they got the baddies on their own. Frontier justice. Do you feel lucky, punk. She believed that even Jodie Foster, one of Yale’s more famous graduates, had made a movie of this type. Tess couldn’t quite remember the title. The Courageous Woman, maybe? It was something like that, anyway.

Her computer flipped to the word-of-the-day screen-saver. Today’s word was cormorant, which just happened to be a bird.

“When you send your goodies by Cormorant Trucking, you’ll think you’re flying,” Tess said in her deep pretending-to-be-Tom voice. Then she tapped a key and the screen-saver disappeared. She went online, but not to one of the search engines, at least not to begin with. First she went to YouTube and typed in RICHARD WIDMARK, with no idea at all why she was doing it. No conscious one, anyway.

Maybe I want to find out if the guy’s really worthy of fanship, she thought. Ramona certainly thinks so.

There were lots of clips. The top-rated one was a six-minute compilation titled HE’S BAD, HE’S REALLY BAD. Several hundred thousand people had viewed it. There were scenes from three movies, but the one that transfixed her was the first. It was black-and-white, it looked on the cheap side… but it was definitely one of those movies. Even the title told you so: Kiss of Death.

Tess watched the entire video, then returned to the Kiss of Death segment twice. Widmark played a giggling hood menacing an old lady in a wheelchair. He wanted information: “Where’s that squealin’ son of yours?” And when the old lady wouldn’t tell him: “You know what I do to squealers? I let em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time, thinkin’ it over.”

He didn’t shoot the old lady in the belly, though. He tied her into her wheelchair with a lamp cord and pushed her down the stairs.

Tess exited YouTube, Binged Richard Widmark, and found what she expected, given the power of that brief clip. Although he had played in many subsequent movies, more and more often as the hero, he was best known for Kiss of Death, and the giggling, psychotic Tommy Udo.

“Big deal,” Tess said. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”

“Meaning what?” Fritzy asked from the windowsill where he was sunning himself.

“Meaning Ramona probably fell in love with him after seeing him play a heroic sheriff or a courageous battleship commander, or something like that.”

“She must have,” Fritzy agreed, “because if you’re right about her sexual orientation, she probably doesn’t idolize men who murder old ladies in wheelchairs.”

Of course that was true. Good thinking, Fritzy.

The cat regarded Tess with a skeptical eye and said, “But maybe you’re not right about that.”

“Even if I’m not,” Tess said, “nobody roots for psycho bad guys.”

She recognized this for the stupidity it was as soon as it was out of her mouth. If people didn’t root for psychos, they wouldn’t still be making movies about the nut in the hockey mask and the burn victim with scissors for fingers. But Fritzy did her the courtesy of not laughing.

“You better not,” Tess said. “If you’re tempted, remember who fills your food dish.”

She googled Ramona Norville, got forty-four thousand hits, added Chicopee, and got a more manageable twelve hundred (although even most of those, she knew, would be coincidental dreck). The first relevant one was from the Chicopee Weekly Reminder, and concerned Tess herself: LIBRARIAN RAMONA NORVILLE ANNOUNCES “WILLOW GROVE FRIDAY.”

“There I am, the starring attraction,” Tess murmured. “Hooray for Tessa Jean. Now let’s see my supporting actress.” But when she pulled up the clipping, the only photo Tess saw was her own. It was the bare-shoulders publicity shot her part-time assistant routinely sent out. She wrinkled her nose and went back to Google, not sure why she wanted to look at Ramona again, only knowing that she did. When she finally found a photo of the librarian, she saw what her subconscious might already have suspected, at least judging by Tom’s comments on the ride back to her house.

It was in a story from the August 3 issue of the Weekly Reminder. BROWN BAGGERS ANNOUNCE SPEAKING SCHEDULE FOR FALL, the headline read. Below it, Ramona Norville stood on the library steps, smiling and squinting into the sun. A bad photograph, taken by a part-timer without much talent, and a bad (but probably typical) choice of clothes on Norville’s part. The man-tailored blazer made her look as wide in the chest as a pro football tackle. Her shoes were ugly brown flatboats. A pair of too-tight gray slacks showcased what Tess and her friends back in middle school had called “thunder thighs.”

“Holy fucking shit, Fritzy,” she said. Her voice was watery with dismay. “Look at this.” Fritzy didn’t come over to look and didn’t reply-how could he, when she was too upset to make his voice?

Make sure of what you’re seeing, she told herself. You’ve had a terrible shock, Tessa Jean, maybe the biggest shock a woman can have, short of a mortal diagnosis in a doctor’s office. So make sure.

She closed her eyes and summoned the image of the man from the old Ford pickup truck with the Bondo around the headlights. He had seemed so friendly at first. Didn’t think you were going to meet the Jolly Green Giant out here in the williwags, didja?

Only he hadn’t been green, he’d been a tanned hulk of a man who didn’t ride in his pickup but wore it.

Ramona Norville, not a Big Driver but certainly a Big Librarian, was too old to be his sister. And if she was a lesbian now, she hadn’t always been one, because the resemblance was unmistakable.

Unless I’m badly mistaken, I’m looking at a picture of my rapist’s mother. – 29 -

She went to the kitchen and had a drink of water, but water wasn’t getting it. An old half-filled bottle of tequila had been brooding in a back corner of a kitchen cabinet for donkey’s years. She took it out, considered a glass, then nipped directly from the bottle. It stung her mouth and throat, but had a positive effect otherwise. She helped herself to more-a sip rather than a nip-and then put the bottle back. She had no intention of getting drunk. If she had ever needed her wits about her, she needed them about her today.

Rage-the biggest, truest rage of her adult life-had invaded her like a fever, but it wasn’t like any fever she had known previously. It circulated like weird serum, cold on the right side of her body, then hot on the left, where her heart was. It seemed to come nowhere near her head, which remained clear. Clearer since she’d had the tequila, actually.

She paced a series of rapid circles around the kitchen, head down, one hand massaging the ring of bruises around her throat. It did not occur to her that she was circling her kitchen as she had circled the deserted store after crawling out of the pipe Big Driver had meant for her tomb. Did she really think Ramona Norville had sent her, Tess, to her psychotic son like some kind of sacrifice? Was that likely? It was not. Could she even be sure that the two of them were mother and son, based on one bad photograph and her own memory?

But my memory’s good. Especially my memory for faces.

Well, so she thought, but probably everyone did. Right?

Yes, and the whole idea’s crazy. You have to admit it is.

She did admit it, but she had seen crazier things on true-crime programs (which she did watch). The ladies with the apartment house in San Francisco who had spent years killing their elderly tenants for their Social Security checks and burying them in the backyard. The airline pilot who murdered his wife, then froze the body so he could run her through the woodchipper behind the garage. The man who had doused his own children with gasoline and cooked them like Cornish game hens to make sure his wife never got the custody the courts had awarded her. A woman sending victims to her own son was shocking and unlikely… but not impossible. When it came to the dark fuckery of the human heart, there seemed to be no limit.

“Oh boy,” she heard herself saying in a voice that combined dismay and anger. “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.”

Find out. Find out for sure. If you can.

She went back to her trusty computer. Her hands were trembling badly, and it took her three tries to enter COLEWICH TRUCKING FIRMS in the search field at the top of the Google page. Finally she got it right, hit enter, and there it was, at the top of the list: RED HAWK TRUCKING. The entry took her to the Red Hawk website, which featured a badly animated big rig with what she assumed was a red hawk on the side and a bizarre smiley-head man behind the wheel. The truck crossed the screen from right to left, flipped and came back left to right, then flipped again. An endless crisscross journey. The company’s motto flashed red, white, and blue above the animated truck: THE SMILES COME WITH THE SERVICE!

For those wishing to journey beyond the welcome screen, there were four or five choices, including phone numbers, rates, and testimonials from satisfied customers. Tess skipped these and clicked on the last one, which read CHECK OUT THE NEWEST ADDITION TO OUR FLEET! And when the picture came up, the final piece fell into place.

It was a much better photograph than the one of Ramona Norville standing on the library steps. In it, Tess’s rapist was sitting behind the wheel of a shiny cab-over Pete with RED HAWK TRUCKING COLEWICH, MASSACHUSETTS written on the door in fancy script. He wasn’t wearing his bleach-splattered brown cap, and the bristly blond crewcut revealed by its absence made him look even more like his mother, almost eerily so. His cheerful, you-can-trust-me grin was the one Tess had seen yesterday afternoon. The one he’d still been wearing when he said Instead of changing your tire, how about I fuck you? How would that be?

Looking at the photo made the weird rage-serum cycle faster through her system. There was a pounding in her temples that wasn’t exactly a headache; in fact, it was almost pleasant.

He was wearing the red glass ring.

The caption below the picture read: “Al Strehlke, President of Red Hawk Trucking, seen here behind the wheel of the company’s newest acquisition, a 2008 Peterbilt 389. This horse of a hauler is now available to our customers, who are THE FINEST IN ALL THE LAND. Say! Doesn’t Al look like a Proud Papa?”

She heard him calling her a bitch, a whiny whore bitch, and clenched her hands into fists. She felt her fingernails sinking into her palms and clenched them even tighter, relishing the pain.

Proud Papa. That was what her eyes kept returning to. Proud Papa. The rage moved faster and faster, circling through her body the way she had circled her kitchen. The way she had circled the store last night, moving in and out of consciousness like an actress through a series of spotlights.

You’re going to pay, Al. And never mind the cops, I’m the one coming to collect.

And then there was Ramona Norville. The proud papa’s proud mama. Although Tess was still not sure of her. Partly it was not wanting to believe that a woman could allow something so horrible to happen to another woman, but she could also see an innocent explanation. Chicopee wasn’t that far from Colewich, and Ramona would have used the Stagg Road shortcut all the time when she went there.

“To visit her son,” Tess said, nodding. “To visit the proud papa with the new cab-over Pete. For all I know, she might be the one who took the picture of him behind the wheel.” And why wouldn’t she recommend her favorite route to that day’s speaker?

But why didn’t she say, “I go that way all the time to visit my son?” Wouldn’t that be natural?

“Maybe she doesn’t talk to strangers about the Strehlke phase of her life,” Tess said. “The phase before she discovered short hair and comfortable shoes.” It was possible, but there was the scatter of nail-studded boards to think about. The trap. Norville had sent her that way, and the trap had been set ahead of time. Because she had called him? Called him and said I’m sending you a juicy one, don’t miss out?

It still doesn’t mean she was involved… or not knowingly involved. The proud papa could keep track of her guest speakers, how hard would that be?

“Not hard at all,” Fritzy said after leaping up on her filing cabinet. He began to lick one of his paws.

“And if he saw a photo of one he liked… a reasonably attractive one… I suppose he’d know his mother would send her back by…” She stopped. “No, that doesn’t scan. Without some input from Ma, how would he know I wasn’t driving to my home in Boston? Or flying back to my home in New York City?”

“You googled him,” Fritzy said. “Maybe he googled you. Just like she did. Everything’s on the Internet these days; you said so yourself.”

That hung together, if only by a thread.

She thought there was one way to find out for sure, and that was to pay Ms. Norville a surprise visit. Look in her eyes when she saw Tess. If there was nothing in them but surprise and curiosity at the Return of the Willow Grove Scribe… to Ramona’s home rather than her library… that would be one thing. But if there was fear in them as well, the kind that might be prompted by the thought why are you here instead of in a rusty culvert on the Stagg Road… well…