“What’s this for?” I asked.
“You’ve been repeating the same three names under your breath. Why don’t you write them down?”
I felt my cheeks get warm. “Thank you,” I said. “They all wanted me to say hello to Gram next time I speak to her and I was afraid that I’d forget somebody’s name. I hadn’t realized that I was talking out loud.”
My grandmother was somewhere on the Atlantic Canadian coast with her new husband, John, in an RV that wasn’t much bigger than a minivan. John looked like he could be actor Gary Oldman’s older brother. He had the same brown hair, streaked with gray, waving back from his face, and the same intriguing gleam in his eyes. There were thirteen years between them, which had raised some eyebrows, but Gram didn’t seem anywhere near her seventy-three years and, even more importantly, she didn’t care what other people thought.
I took the pencil and paper from Mr. P. and scribbled down the three women’s names before I forgot them.
“At your age when you talk to yourself it’s charming,” Mr. P. said. “When you do it at my age they start asking if you eat enough roughage, and watch to make sure you’re not wearing your underwear on the outside.” He hiked up his pants and gave me a wink and a smile. “Sometimes I do, just to mess with people.”
I watched him head down the hallway, nodding at Charlotte as she came from the kitchen. I wasn’t sure if the old man might have been messing with me.
Charlotte smiled as she walked up to me. Like Mr. P., she reached over to pet the top of Elvis’s head. “The class was lovely, Sarah. Thank you. I know Isabel roped you into it.”
“It was fun,” I said, taking the fabric tote she was carrying. “Is this everything?”
She glanced in the top of her bag and then nodded.
“Where could I drop you?”
“Oh, I don’t mind walking,” she said as we started across the parking lot. “I don’t have that far to go,” she pointed at the carryall, “and my bag’s not that heavy.”
I pulled my keys out of my pocket. “I have time.”
Charlotte’s glasses had slid down her nose, and she frowned at me over the top of them. “Thank you, dear, but I’m perfectly capable of getting an empty cookie can and a canister of tea bags home.”
“I know that,” I said. “I also know that no matter what you said, you’re worried because Maddie didn’t show up and you plan on going to check on her. I thought maybe I could go with you.”
She fingered one of the buttons on her rose-colored sweater. “I know I’m being an old worrywart. It’s just not like Maddie to not call if she wasn’t coming.”
My mother had always told me to trust my instincts. Now I was wishing I’d paid more attention to the funny feeling I’d had about Arthur Fenety and at least asked Sam if he’d heard anything about the man. Because he owned The Black Bear, Sam knew pretty much everything that was happening in North Harbor. Maddie had been a nurse and she was one of the most responsible people I’d ever met. I wasn’t going to ignore my gut feeling again.
“You’re not being an old worrywart,” I said. “I want to check on Maddie, too. We might as well go together.”
Charlotte patted my arm. “All right, let’s go see what’s going on.”
“Does she still live at the end of your street?” I asked as I slid onto the front seat of the truck. I set Elvis down and he settled himself in the middle, between us.
She nodded. “Oh yes. That house has been in her family for close to a hundred years. I can’t see her selling it.”
In North Harbor a hundred years didn’t really make a house that old. There were lots of buildings that dated back to the late 1700s and early 1800s.
Charlotte fastened her seat belt and reached over to give Elvis a scratch under his chin. “We’re probably worrying about nothing.”
“Probably,” I agreed. “But it doesn’t hurt to check.” Once we got there I’d decide how to sound Maddie out about Arthur Fenety.
I backed out of my parking spot, made a tight turn in the tiny lot and pulled out onto the street.
“You drive like your grandmother,” Charlotte said, folding her hands in her lap. Elvis was looking straight ahead out the windshield.
“That’s probably because she’s the one who taught me how to drive,” I said. “Do you remember that old one-ton truck she had? She called it Rex.”
“Heavens, yes,” Charlotte said, with a shake of her head. “Don’t tell me she taught you how to drive on that old rust bucket.”
“She did,” I said, grinning at the memory of being behind the wheel of the old green truck for the first time, front seat squeaking as we bounced down a pothole-pocked dirt road just on the outskirts of town. “Liam took driver’s ed, but the class was the same time as honors math, so I was going to have to wait an entire term to learn to drive. I didn’t want him to get his license months before I did.”
There’s only a month between my brother—well, strictly speaking, my stepbrother—Liam and me. My mom and his dad had gotten married when we were in second grade. One moment he’d be a pain-in-the-butt, overprotective big brother, making it pretty much impossible for me to date anyone, and in the next he was covering for me when I set the vacuum cleaner on fire. (Another long story.)
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Charlotte shoot me a skeptical look. “Your mother agreed to let Isabel teach you how to drive?”
“Well, I didn’t exactly tell her.”
“And I’m thinking you didn’t exactly tell Isabel that you didn’t have your mother’s permission for driving lessons.”
“Pretty much.” I stopped at the corner and looked over at Charlotte. Elvis seemed to be as interested in the story as she was.
She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. “I can’t believe I’ve never heard this story. So, what happened?”
I grinned. “I got my license two hours before Liam did.”
“And?” Charlotte prompted.
“And I was grounded for two weeks and couldn’t drive for a month.”
She laughed. “So was it worth it?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “Not only did I get my driver’s license before Liam got his, I could drive a stick and he couldn’t.”
Charlotte pushed her glasses up her nose. “Let me guess,” she said. “Isabel taught him how to drive that old truck, too.”
I nodded. “You know Gram. She’s big on being fair.”
Gram was my dad’s mother. She had no biological connection to Liam, but she’d always considered him to be her grandchild, too.
I put on my blinker and turned onto Charlotte’s street.
“That’s Maddie’s car,” she said, pointing through the windshield.
“Maybe she’s here, then,” I said. I pulled up to the curb in front of the little stone house. It looked just the way I remembered it, like it belonged on a winding lane in the English countryside, not on an East Coast, small-town street.
Maddie’s wasn’t the only house in town with a beautiful garden. Even though the growing season was short in Maine, there seemed to be flowers everywhere in the late spring and summer; in window boxes and planters in front of the shops and in backyards like Maddie’s.
I’d seen Maddie only twice, briefly both times, since I’d been back in North Harbor. She’d been visiting her son, Christopher, in Seattle when I arrived and since she’d gotten back we hadn’t had much of a chance to spend time together. Probably because of her new romance, I realized now.
“Stay here,” I told Elvis. He meowed what I hoped was agreement.
Charlotte and I got out and walked up to the front door. She turned the antique crank doorbell and we waited.
“I don’t think she’s here,” she said after a minute or so.
I knocked on the yellow-paneled door with the heel of my hand. There was no response to that, either. “Maybe she went somewhere with her friend,” I said. I tried to keep the little twist of anxiety spinning in my chest out of my voice.