And on the bright side, at least he wasn’t named Bill Smith. Things could always be worse, right?
I nodded to myself and started clicking.
• • •
The long rays of the sinking sun flared onto my computer screen. Hunger pangs gnawed at me, but those were easier to ignore than the emotion that was creeping into the back of my throat. I swallowed down the feeling and it went into my stomach, where it didn’t mix at all well with the emptiness.
“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?