“They used to go out,” I said.
“Yeah. But she broke it off. Roman took it hard.”
I didn’t have it in me to feel bad for Roman at the moment. My head was still throbbing from where he’d hit me.
“So, anyone you can think of,” I said to Sanders.
And then I felt like slapping my head. “Try her cell,” I said, and handed him my phone again.
He entered a number and listened. “It’s gone straight to voice mail. Claire? It’s your dad. Where the hell are you? I just got off the phone with your mother. We’re both worried sick. If you get this, call me right away, okay? Just call me. Or call Mr. Weaver. I’m using his phone. Please, okay? I love you.”
Sanders handed the phone back to me.
“If it went straight to message, it means the phone is off, right?” he said.
“Or the battery’s dead,” I said.
“This is terrible. I just don’t know what— No, I’ll do what you said. I’ll start asking around.”
I felt, at that moment, some small sense of relief. I didn’t have to carry all the weight of this on my shoulders. Sanders had a better handle on Claire’s friends than I did. He might have her tracked down before I could do it.
What nagged at me was why Claire had lied to him. She’d told him why she wanted to go, but not who it was going to be with. The surveillance video I’d seen at Iggy’s showed she’d gotten into a car with someone.
“Okay, you do that,” I said. “We’ll talk in the morning, see where we are. That sound like a plan?”
Sanders nodded.
Annette had a concern of her own. “You’re not going to tell anyone about us, are you?”
“Tell you what,” I said. “You can buy my silence with a lift home. I’ve had some car trouble tonight.”
I ran out to the cab, rapped lightly on the window so as not to scare the driver to death, and settled up with her. I scanned the street for cop cars and didn’t see any, although there were a few regular vehicles parked along the curb. I suppose it was possible someone was slunk down behind the wheel of one of those.
Then I walked briskly to the rear of Sanders’ house and mounted the steps to the kitchen door, just in time to see Annette slip out of Bert’s arms. He’d left the outdoor lights off, which meant Annette needed a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness so she could navigate her way across the yard, around the garage, and between the houses that backed onto Sanders’ property.
Luckily, no dogs barked and no motion-sensitive lights flashed on. Annette was, indeed, unsteady on her feet — her heels were three inches at least — going from grass to gravel to sidewalk and taking care to sidestep trash cans, bicycles, and lumber scraps, so I took her hand and led her through the worst of it.
“Why the hell I wore these shoes I’ll never know,” she said. “Well, of course I know. Is there a man alive whose motor doesn’t get a kick start from high heels?”
It struck me as a rhetorical question, so I let it go. Once we’d come out from between the houses and were on the sidewalk of the next street over, I let go of her hand. But she latched onto my elbow and held on until we were almost to her car.
“You’re a nice man, you know,” she said. “I’m sorry for all your troubles.”
We were coming up on a black Beemer sedan. “This one,” she said, taking a remote from her purse and hitting the button. The taillights flashed. “Why were you taking a taxi, anyway?”
“Long story,” I said, and slid in on the passenger side.
There was no need to tell her where I lived. During Scott’s stint at her store, she or Kent had dropped him off several times. Scott wasn’t old enough to drive, so Donna or I usually chauffeured him back and forth. But when we were occasionally unavailable, he got a lift with friends or coworkers.
“I really appreciate you keeping quiet about me and Bert,” she said as she buckled her seat belt. “I mean, this is probably just a passing thing with Bert anyway.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I’m a realist. I know Bert. I know what he’s like.”
“And what’s he like?”
“Oh, come on,” she said, putting the Beemer into drive and easing her foot down on the gas. “Like you haven’t heard.”
“He likes the ladies,” I said.
“That’s putting it mildly.” She laughed. “I know I’ve only got a limited amount of time with him before someone else catches his eye. It’s why Caroline left him. He was screwing some other professor at Canisius.” I thought about Donna’s comment, about the woman at work Sanders hit on when she was a student and he was still teaching. “For a while there, he was even doing it with someone else at work.”
“His work?”
“No, mine. Rhonda McIntyre?”
I didn’t know the name.
“Hot little thing, I admit. And about forty pounds lighter. But what she had on me in the youth department I could more than make up for in experience. Bert thinks I never knew about her, but I could tell. The way she looked at him when he came into the store, or if they ran into each other on the street. It was back in the summer. He still believes I think he was only seeing me. Anyway, Rhonda doesn’t work for us anymore.”
“Did you fire her?”
“She quit all of a sudden, couple of months back. I think she actually left town, got a job somewhere else, broke it off with another guy — a cop, as it turned out, who she was finding kind of freaky, and who didn’t know she was seeing Bert on the side. Or on her back.” Annette chuckled. “Just as well she quit. I’d have had to find a way to cut her loose, dropped some hints to Kent that she was taking an extra cut off the top with cash deals, fudging some receipts, something. But in the end, I didn’t have to. It’s bad enough, knowing this thing I’ve got going with Bert has an expiration date, but while I’m still in the ‘best before’ days, I want him to myself. You think there’s something wrong, wanting a bit of excitement in your life?”
“I guess it depends what kind. Maybe you should try white-water rafting.”
“It’s just that my life these days... it’s just life, you know? Today’s going to be like yesterday and tomorrow’s going to be exactly like today. But with Bert, even if it’s just for a while, I can have a few days that aren’t like all the others. You have to admit he’s a handsome man. I mean, you can say that and it doesn’t mean you’re gay or anything.”
“He’s a handsome man,” I said.
“He’s got the looks to be a lot more than a small-town mayor. He could be a governor or a senator or anything like that if he decided that’s what he wanted.”
“It’s not what he wants?”
“He’s not ambitious that way,” Annette said. “He just wants to make a difference wherever he happens to be at the time. He cares about being a good mayor, about doing what’s right. That’s why he’s in this fight with Perry, who, I just want to say, is not that bad a guy. I think he does right by this town, and I’m not just saying that because he’s Donna’s brother, you know? Maybe he goes a little overboard now and then, I’ll grant you that. But Jesus, you don’t really think he has Bert’s house bugged, do you? I mean, that would be — that’d be bad.”
I shrugged.
“How’d you get looking for Claire in the first place?”
I told her, briefly, about the night before.
“God, kids,” she said. “You can never predict what they’re going to do.” She appeared to be thinking. “This thing with Hanna — that’s just so awful. You think maybe Claire ran off because she knows who did it?”
“Claire took off before it happened, so no.” I pointed. “We’re almost to my street.”