A Welcome Grave (5 page)

“Any of those stories crucial?” I asked.

“Not particularly. Why?”

“Take a road trip with me. Scenic southern Indiana.”

“Ugh.”

“Come on, corn is gorgeous this time of year. Supposed to make the ladies swoon.”

“I see. So this means you’re finally taking it up a notch, proposing romantic road trips instead of making sophomoric remarks about my ass?”

“I was thinking of a package approach.”

She hesitated. “Are you serious about this?”

“Absolutely. I’ve got a client throwing tens of thousands of dollars at me to locate a missing heir. Hell, I can probably bill you out as a subcontractor. I’ll let you contribute somehow—holding my gun, maybe.”

“You can hold your own gun, soldier.”

“No bonus for you, then. I’m serious, though. Want to go along for the ride? Take a day down there, a day coming back.”

“I guess. I’ve got an interview to give early, but I could probably leave by ten.”

“Good,” I said, and although the idea had been spontaneous, I was glad she’d agreed. I was tired of working alone.

“Who’s the client?” Amy asked.

“Karen Jefferson.”

Silence.

“You’re working for the woman you were once engaged to,” Amy said mechanically. “She of the recently murdered husband. Same guy she left you for.”

“That’s her.”

“Are you out of your mind? Why would you possibly put yourself in this situation?”

“Easy money. Nothing more to it.”

“Oh, please, Lincoln. That’s so weak.”

“It’s not weak if it’s the truth, Ace. The cops came to question me about Jefferson; she found out about it and called to apologize. Then she asked me to find Jefferson’s son. He’s in line to inherit a few million and doesn’t know it. Doesn’t know his father’s dead, either.”

She didn’t say anything.

“Hang on to the skepticism as long as you’d like, Amy, but the only reason I’m doing this is for the money. There’s a lot of it promised to me, and the agency can certainly use it with Joe out of work, stacking up medical bills.”

“Okay,” she said, and then it was quiet again.

“I’ve got things to work on,” I said eventually. “I’ll see you in the morning? You can give me shit for taking this case for the entire drive if you’d like.”

“See you in the morning,” she said and hung up.

I sighed and turned the phone off. I hadn’t expected Amy to be particularly impressed with me for this one, but hopefully she’d decide against taking my suggestion to heart and berating me for the entire drive.

I spent a few hours finishing the only case report I had to write. You can afford to spend a little extra time on polish when you’ve got nothing else waiting ahead of you. It’s a luxury most small business owners aren’t hoping to encounter, however. When that was done, I locked the office and walked back up to my building, changed clothes, and went down to the gym to work out. I lifted for an hour, then left the gym and went for a run. The air had a chill to it when I returned, the sun fading and leaving my building dark with shadows. I stood on the sidewalk and stretched, looking up at the two stories of old stone that became my home after my fist connected with Alex Jefferson’s face and ended my police career. I thought about Karen in the extravagant house near the country club, and how empty it had felt that morning. I wondered if it felt emptier still when the sun went down.

A
my came by my apartment at ten the next morning, as planned. She pulled her Acura into the spot beside my truck, came to a jarring stop when her tires ran into the parking block, and then put it in reverse and backed clear again.

“She’s landed,” I said. I was standing in the doorway to the gym office, talking to Grace, who was asking me to diagnose a car problem that began with a “thwackity thwak” sound and progressed to a “clankity clank” upon reaching highway speeds. I’d recommended taking the vehicle to an actual mechanic, and, when that was dismissed with a snort, I’d suggested she wear headphones when she drove.

“Hey,” Amy said. She was wearing jeans and a thin jacket over a white cotton shirt, sunglasses tucked into her hair above her temples. She’d straightened her dark blond hair about two months earlier, and I still wasn’t used to it. It looked great, but there was something carefree about the natural curl that I missed.

“Traveling light?” I stepped into the parking lot with her. She had a small purse over her shoulder but nothing else.

“No,” she said, leaning against the hood of her car and stretching her legs out in front of her. “I don’t think I’ll be making the trip.”

I frowned. “You have to work, or did something else change your mind?”

She gazed up at me for a moment, then away.

“Are you backing out on this just because I’m working for Karen?” I asked.

“No.”

“Okay. It’s not that, and it’s not work, and yesterday you were up for it, but today you’ve changed your mind. What’s the deal?”

She sighed and tugged the sunglasses free from her hair, then ran one hand through it. “Why do you want me to go along?”

I tilted my head and looked at her, puzzled. “Thought it would make the trip more enjoyable for me, and thought you might enjoy it, as well.”

“Why?”

“Why would you enjoy it?”

“And you? Why would you enjoy it more because I was along?”

When I was a kid, I went to a camp once where they had a row of small platforms scattered across a pond. Some of the platforms would float when you landed on them; others would sink immediately. You’d try to cross the pond by jumping from one platform to the next. Each leap had the potential to sink you, but you didn’t know which one would do it. Right now, the conversation had that feel.

“Why would I enjoy it more?” I echoed. Anytime you start repeating questions when you’re talking to a woman, you’re in trouble.

“Yes.”

“I imagined it would make a long drive a lot more fun. Getting kind of tired of working alone.”

“So you want me to be your surrogate Joe?”

“What? No.” I shook my head and stepped away from her. “I imagined we’d have a good time, because we usually do. Thought it would add some laughs, a little banter, turn a boring road trip into an enjoyable one.”

“I’m a source of banter, then.”

“Amy.” I looked at her hard. “What the hell is this about? We hang out together all the time, but you think it’s odd I’d ask you to go along on this?”

“I don’t want to be Sundance to your Butch,” she said. “Not just on this case, or on your little trip. In general.”

I gave a short laugh and spread my arms. “Where is this coming from? We’ve been friends for almost two years. Now you’re having some sort of identity crisis with it?”

“How many lasting relationships have you had in the last two years, Lincoln?”

I dropped my arms. “Roughly? Zero.”

She didn’t smile. “And me?”

“You’ve dated a few assholes.”

“Lasting relationships?”

“Zero.”

“Right.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Can you tell me that’s unrelated? Do you think it is, at least?”

“Probably not.”

She smiled sadly. “There ya go. And I know the story—you’re not good with relationships, and the friendship’s too important to jeopardize. But here we sit.”

“So you’re disagreeing with—”

“I’m not disagreeing with anything, and not saying anything other than that I need to think a few areas of my life over and maybe redirect them.”

“Kind of comes out of nowhere this morning.”

She laughed and shook her head. “If you think this comes out of nowhere, then your agency is really hurting for detectives right now.”

Someone pulled into the parking spot beside us. It was one of my regulars, and when he climbed out of his car, he decided it would be a good opportunity to talk sports and weather for about five minutes. I smiled and nodded my way through it. After a while, Amy dropped her sunglasses over her eyes and stood up.

“I’ll catch you inside,” I told the guy, holding a hand up to interrupt him. “Okay?”

He went in, and I turned back to Amy. She had her hand on the door handle.

“Amy . . .”

“I’ve got to get to work, and you’ve got to get to Indiana, of all places. We’ll talk when you get back, okay?”

I didn’t answer. She got in the car and pulled away, and I swore loudly and sat down on the parking block. A second later the door opened and Grace stuck her head out.

“Everything okay, boss?”

I turned to her. “Any idea what it means when your friendship starts making a thwackity thwack sound that progresses to a clankity clank?”

“Yeah,” she said. “It means you screwed up.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding. “And how to fix it?”

“Stop being scared,” she said, and she went back inside.

“You’re fired,” I told the closed door, and then I stood up and got into my truck.

______

The third time my truck dipped down a steep hill and left my stomach at the top, I got the idea that this portion of Indiana wasn’t what I’d expected. About five hours out of Cleveland, I’d passed through Bloomington and turned back to the east, heading for Nashville. The highway between the two towns was a winding two-lane, cutting through hills with a cruel sense of humor. One minute I’d be laying hard on the accelerator, coaxing the truck up a hill that made the motor grind; the next, I’d be hard on the brake, trying to keep from alarming the driver in front of me on the steep downgrade. The road twisted too much to let me take my eyes off it for long, but when I did, the views were spectacular. Hills rolled away from the highway across sprawling fields and into dense woods lit with colors so vibrant I doubted even the best camera would be able to successfully capture them.

After about thirty minutes of driving along a highway that was clearly designed by the forefathers of the roller-coaster industry, I ran into a backed-up line of traffic so long that I assumed it was the result of a car accident, or maybe some late-season road repair. It turned out to be the wait to get into Nashville. It took ten minutes just to pull onto the one main street that cut through the little town, which, ironically, was called Van Buren, while Main Street was a little offshoot to the side.

There appeared to be a construction code for the town, and it involved a lot of logs and old wood siding and shingles, everything having the look of a New England village at about the turn of the century. In case you missed the point, a number of the little shops incorporated the word “old” into their name, often underscoring it with an
e
at the end: Ye Olde Fudge Shoppe. Ambience.

The sidewalks teemed with people laden with shopping bags, and small public parking lots were filled and had waiting lines. I saw license plates from North Carolina, Florida, Arizona, and Ontario. I hadn’t gotten around to making a hotel reservation, figuring they probably didn’t fill up too often in a place like this, but now it occurred to me that could have been a mistake. I stopped at the first hotel I found, a building halfway up the hill above the town. The parking lot was jammed, so I pulled into the entrance and left my hazard lights on while I went inside and asked for a room. The question produced a smile from the receptionist.

“You don’t have a reservation?” she said.

“No.”

“It’s October.”

“So it is.”

Her smile widened. “You don’t know the area, do you?”

“Nope.”

“You want to stay in Nashville in October, you make a reservation.”

I looked around, thought about the little street I’d driven through, wondered what great draw I could have missed.

“No offense,” I said, “but what brings so many people to this town?”

“Leaves.”

“Leaves?”

“The kind on the trees,” she said.

“People come from all over the country to see leaves?”

“Drive around a little bit. Look up. You’ll be impressed. There’s shopping, too.”

“Of course there is.” I looked back out at my truck. “Well, can you tell me where the nearest hotel with a vacancy would be?”

“Bloomington, probably. That’s about thirty minutes up the road. You aren’t going to find anything closer tonight. I’m sorry.”

If staying near the town was going to be such a hassle, maybe I’d try to get in and out in a night. All I had to do was find Jefferson’s son and give him the news, then head home. The drive wasn’t that bad, and it beat bouncing from hotel to hotel, hoping to find one with a room open.

“I’m just here to pass a message to someone,” I said. “He lives on Highway 135. Is that nearby?”

She nodded and pointed. “Just keep going up the hill. Van Buren turns into 135.”

I thanked her and walked back out to my truck, drove to the front of the parking lot, and saw that it was going to be about a five-minute wait just to pull back into the traffic.

“All this for leaves,” I said, looking around.

But, damn it, the leaves were spectacular. Crimson, orange, and burgundy splashes everywhere you looked, climbing the hills and surrounding the town. The crisp air smelled of them, too, and of rain and wood smoke. I’m not much of a country boy, and in places surrounded by pavement I’ve always been able to find the kind of moments of beauty that other people find deep in the woods, but I do acknowledge that if there’s one season that the city really kills, it’s autumn.