“That’s Mitchell’s truck,” I said out loud. Mostly trucks all looked alike to me, but Mitchell’s had the unusual attribute of having one color for the bed, another for the body, another for the hood, and yet one more for the passenger’s door.
For no other reason than sheer curiosity, I decided to follow him. Maybe I’d figure out why he was acting so oddly. A weird Mitchell was acceptable and even desired, but Mitchell’s current weirdness was so out of the ordinary that it needed explanation.
At least that was what I told myself as I followed him onto a narrow gravel road. Far ahead, I watched the back end of his truck run over the ruts and potholes at a much faster speed than I dared push my little sedan. The only thing I knew about oil pans was that they lived on the bottom of vehicles and were a bad thing to thump upon.
My teeth chattered together as my car bounced down the road. Every so often I’d wince in preparation of a pothole too big to go around and sigh in relief when the hole didn’t suck me in forever.
It wasn’t long before I lost sight of Mitchell altogether. While the number of road crossings in the last bumpy mile were zero, there had been a number of long driveways that he could have turned down and been lost to my sight.
When I reached the top of a long hill and saw no car on the road, either in front of me or behind, I knew I’d lost him. “Rats,” I said, and came to a stop. I reached into my glove box for the Tonedagana County map and opened it up.
“Huh.” If I turned around, I’d drive the same two and a half miles of rotten roads before reaching asphalt. If I kept going, I’d drive two miles of gravel road before I reached asphalt. The odds of the gravel ahead being in better condition were minimal, but at least it would be different gravel, and half a mile less was half a mile less.
I folded the map and tucked it away. “Onward,” I said, and forged ahead.
The next mile and a half of road was, if anything, worse than the road behind. It was wetter, for one thing, and mud spray soon covered the hood and spattered the windows. “Stupid weather,” I muttered.
The weather up North was, I’d found, not what you’d call predictable. It could be raining buckets down at the marina, but not raining at all a mile away at the boardinghouse. On the east side of the county, snow could be coming down at a rate that would guarantee a school closing, and the west side would get a dusting. The temperature near Lake Michigan could be ten degrees different from what it was a quarter mile inland. It was odd, but also wonderful in a weird sort of way.
I bounced down into, and up out of, a hole that wanted to swallow me whole, and when my head stopped bobbing, I saw something that made me brake to a complete stop.
Not too far from the road, parked under a tree and covered with a tarp, was a wooden boat. Back farther in the trees was a farmhouse so dilapidated that I doubted it was still being occupied.
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. Had this been one of the boats Adam and Henry had come across? If Adam had already rejected this one as too much work, there wasn’t much point in me getting out into the mud to take a look, but if he hadn’t, maybe this could be the boat of his dreams.
“Buck up,” I muttered. “What’s a little mud?”
I pulled the car as far off the road as I could and got out, immediately stepping into a puddle. I sighed; I’d left my rain boots in the closet because I hadn’t wanted to disturb the sleeping Eddie, and was wearing old running shoes.
But it was just a little mud and would clean off—eventually—so I kept going.
Closer to the boat, I could read the label. Hacker-Craft. The company had been building boats in New York for more than a hundred years, and every one was a beauty. Expensive, too, so it was unusual to see one in a place like this. Adam had mentioned seeing a Hacker, hadn’t he? Was that the one with the hull rot? I crouched down.
“Hey! You!”
I looked up to see a thin, white-haired woman hobbling toward me. “Oh, hello. I was just looking at your boat. I have this friend who—”
“Get away!” She lifted her hands and I belatedly realized that she was holding a long-barreled gun. “You get away right now! You’re trespassing!”
Fear jumped into my throat and I backed away. “S-sorry,” I said, holding up my hands. “I didn’t . . . I wasn’t . . .” My rear end thumped against my car and I fumbled for the door handle with one hand as I continued to hold up the other.
She pointed the gun at my feet. “Get away!” she shouted.
I fell into the car, started the engine, and got.
Chapter 10
The deputy at the front counter took lots of notes. Or he did until I got to the point where I told him exactly where I was when I’d been threatened with certain death.
“You were out on Chatham Road?” he asked. “Just north of County Road 610?”
I nodded. “Half a mile north, probably. Her house was on the east side of Chatham.”
“Uh-huh.” He put down his pen. “Hang on a second, okay?”
It wasn’t okay, but that didn’t seem to matter. The deputy left me alone in the stark lobby. I leaned against the high counter. Decided it was too high to do that comfortably. Wandered around, studying the scarred plastic chairs and decided that I didn’t want to sit in any of them. Stood looking out the tall, narrow window and decided that I didn’t like looking at the world through glass with wire mesh through it. Sighed, and stood near the counter, listening to the hum of the fluorescent light.
I’d just decided that the rhythm of its humming was close to the beat of “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” when I heard footsteps coming my way.
“Ms. Hamilton,” Detective Inwood said. “I had a feeling it was you.”
Since I was sure the desk deputy had described who was up front and since there probably weren’t many other five-foot-tall women in the county with curly black hair named Hamilton, I didn’t applaud his extrasensory powers. “Don’t you ever get a day off?” I asked. “You do know it’s Sunday, right?”
He plucked at his golf shirt. It was a faded maroon and had paint spatters of numerous colors across the front. “This,” he said, pointing to a light yellow, “is the color in the paint can that’s still open in my downstairs bathroom. I hope to return before it dries.”
I squinched my eyes at him. “You didn’t leave the brush out, did you?”
“Wrapped in plastic and in the refrigerator. Now. I hear you ran into Neva Chatham.”
“Hang on,” I said. “Please tell me you didn’t come in just to talk to me.”
“Sorry, Ms. Hamilton.” The detective smiled faintly. “You are not the sun around which my world revolves. Another situation demanded my attention. This is just a little bonus for me.”
I almost laughed out loud. In another five years or so, the detective and I might come around to having a decent working relationship.
“Neva Chatham,” he said. “What were the circumstances?”
So I told the story again, starting with driving down the road, minding my own business, and ending with me sending my car far faster down a rutted road than was good for it. Or me.
“Uh-huh.” Inwood leaned against the counter and put his hands in his pockets. Which meant he wasn’t writing anything down. “So you were trespassing.”
“You’d have to get a surveyor out there to be sure,” I said a little sharply. “There’s a strong possibility the boat was inside the road right-of-way.”
Inwood’s grin came and went so quickly that I wasn’t sure I’d even seen it. “Ms. Hamilton, what exactly are you here for? To press charges? And what would those be? Mrs. Chatham didn’t touch you, so there’s no bodily harm involved. And she didn’t damage your vehicle, so there’s no property damage.”
My mouth opened and shut. What was going on? “A woman threatened me with a firearm,” I said carefully.