Firefly Rain Page 6

  “Your place,” she said. Her eyes got a little wider. “Interesting. Tell you what. Why don’t we do this properly? You pull up a chair and I’ll take a statement all policelike, and then you can pretend like you’re back in the big city.” She threw a glance over her shoulder that could have cut steel. “Seriously, I heard what they told you over the phone. We don’t all do things like that, you know.”

  “I appreciate that.” There were two chairs near the entrance. I hooked one with my foot and dragged it over, then sat myself down. It creaked a bit, but that was all. I looked around. “Should I be sitting here like this? I mean, I might block the entrance.”

  Officer Hanratty laughed again. “Don’t you worry about that. Nobody who comes in here gets past me unless I say so, and if we need to get out, well, you’ll be the first one running.”

  I grinned along with her. It was hard not to. She saw my smile and nodded. “Good. Now you’re in the mood, let’s talk about your car. When did you last see it?”

  “The evening of the twelfth, just before bed. I’d tried to start it to go into town that morning—well, that afternoon, really—and it didn’t even turn over. So I got out and went inside. I called Carl Powell to see if he’d give me a ride into town. Instead, he brought some groceries out to me. We talked a bit, and then he left. The car just sat there until night, and when I got up in the morning, it was gone.”

  “Uh-huh.” Officer Hanratty nibbled on the end of her pencil. “And you say you didn’t hear a thing during the night?”

  I nodded. “No footsteps, no engine sounds, no voices. I’ve been up late anyway, keeping… an eye on things. Getting used to the place again. It would have been hard to sneak onto the property. And in the morning, after the car was gone, I checked around where I’d parked it. There weren’t any footprints and no broken glass. No tracks from another car or a tow truck, either.”

  “Interesting.” She leaned back in her chair, and it made a weary sound. “So what do you think happened to it?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t start when I tried it, wouldn’t so much as cough. I can’t see anyone driving it off, even if I did leave the keys in it.” As I said that, I could see her wince.

  “You did what?”

  “I left the keys in. Locked, of course. It’s one of the reasons I called Carl for a ride into town. I wanted to see if there was anyone around here who did AAA and who could let me back in.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded hollow. Still, there was no reason to admit I’d just been plain steamed and had locked the keys in by accident. That would make me look like even more of a damn fool in front of this woman, and from what I had seen, she did not suffer fools of any kind gladly.

  “That complicates things,” she said, shuffling a few papers on her desk. “I take it no one’s been out to your place to take a look at things?”

  “No,” I replied bitterly. “Wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Five minutes after I hung up with your people, Carl Powell came screeching up in his truck. Parked in the exact spot where my car had been. Between his coming in and pulling out, he pretty much wiped out whatever might have been there. Like I said, there wasn’t anything on the ground that I could see, but maybe your people could have spotted something.”

  A cup of coffee appeared from somewhere, a mug marked with hand-painted letters that declared the owner’s undying love for the late Intimidator. She took a sip, made a face, and put it down. “Any idea why Carl was out there to see you?”

  I licked my lips, well aware it made me look like I was hiding something. “You’re not going to believe this, but he mentioned he’d heard I’d had my car stolen.”

  “Oh did he, now?” She leaned forward, her bulk making the desk creak ever so slightly. “And did he say how he’d heard about that?”

  “He didn’t.” I couldn’t keep all the bitterness out of my voice. “Pardon me for making a guess here, but he almost sounded like he was rubbing my nose in it.”

  Hanratty took another sip of coffee, slow and measured this time. “Mr. Logan, a word of advice. Carl Powell’s better liked around these parts than you are. You might want to keep comments like that to yourself, at least for the time being.” She looked left, then right. “Some around here might even say you deserve to have your nose rubbed in things, just a little bit.”

  “Oh, might they?” I got up out of my chair. “So you’re saying that I deserved this, and Carl can get away with it just because he’s got some friends?”

  “Keep your voice down and put your ass back in that chair,” she said affably. “I’m saying that you’ve been away a long time, and you seem to have forgotten the way this town works. Now, before you go getting yourself too worked up and make yourself more enemies, why don’t you tell me what happened when Carl came to visit you, and then I can get to work on this?”

  It was phrased politely, but there was no mistaking the iron behind her words. I sat myself down, breathing hard. I could tell my face was flushed. The comment about having forgotten how this town worked stung far more than I wanted to admit. I’d adapted to city life pretty well, I thought. I’d made myself into something of an urbanite, even if some of my friends up north had thought it funny to call me “Country Mouse” on occasion. I thought I was able to deal with pretty much any situation calmly and well. Now, to come back here and be told that the town I’d left behind moved to rhythms too complicated for me to figure right off, well, it got my dander up.

  Letting my temper show wasn’t going to get me anywhere, though, at least not there and then. I took a deep breath, swallowed, and knotted my fingers together like I used to do in church. “Carl came out to deliver my mail,” I said in slow, even tones. “I admit I yelled at him about where he’d parked, and we talked about what had happened to my car.”

  “Talked?” She quirked one eyebrow and smiled at me in a good imitation of a child asked about the whereabouts of a plate of missing shortbread. “Is that what you did?”

  “I didn’t accuse him of stealing my car, no, though it did get a bit heated.” I shook my head to clear it. “Then he got back in his truck and drove off.”

  Hanratty made notes on some papers in front of her. “That’s all I need to know for now, but I’ll probably need to ask you some follow-up questions. I take it you gave the officers on the phone a description of the missing vehicle?”

  I nodded. “Silver Audi A6, Massachusetts plate TMB-324. Just in case they misplaced it.” She wrote the information down with a grunt that might have been approval. “It still had half my stuff in there, too.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” Hanratty sounded singularly un-sorry, at that. “I assume you didn’t have your furniture in the car?”

  “Nope.” I grinned without smiling. “That was all on a moving truck.”

  “Was?”

  “Was. It got in an accident up in Baltimore, and everything on board the truck was damaged beyond repair. The moving company settled.” I shifted in my chair. “So with the car missing, all I’ve got in this world is what’s in that house.”

  Hanratty harrumphed and scribbled something on her paper. “There are worse fates.” A meaty hand plucked the form she’d been marking up off her desk and waved it in the air. “I’ll need you to sign this. Look it over first, if you like.”

  “I’d like,” I said, and I took the paper from her hand. It was my statement, more or less accurately written down. I pulled a pen from my pocket and scribbled my name on the bottom.

  “Thanks,” she said as I handed it back to her. “I’ll look into this myself. In the meantime, you might want to go back out to the farm and wait for some news. I’ll call you when I have anything.”

  Shoving the chair back, I stood. “Thank you,” I told her. “I’m actually going to try to find myself another car in the meantime, I think.”

  Hanratty snorted with laughter. “Good luck. There’s no car dealer, new or used, for twenty miles. You probably want to go back to your house and make a few calls, se
e if a dealer’s willing to pick you up to bring you out. Either that or try shopping on the internet. I hear people buy cars that way sometimes up in the big city.”

  “My laptop was in the car,” I said, mainly to cover the sinking feeling in my gut. “If you want, I can come up with a list of what else I lost.”

  “That might be a good idea,” she said neutrally. “Do you have a ride home?”

  I shook my head. “Nope.”

  She smiled like a mean old porch cat. “Then I guess you’d better start walking.”

  seven

  I did walk then, all the way back to my front door. Anger fueled me for the first few miles, but after a while that faded and just left me with a long, slow road. A few cars passed me—a very few, truth be told—but none of them slowed. I saw curious faces looking out through their windows, but that was all. I thought I recognized one or two, but I couldn’t be sure. It had, like the woman had said, been a long time.

  The first part of the walk was easy enough. Some smart man in Raleigh had designated the stretch of road out of town a state highway. Near as I could tell, that meant that it got paved every so often in order to keep some construction company or other working. Still, it made my walk easier, at least for a while. Eventually, the pavement went away and the road turned to white stone gravel. The houses that lined the road grew farther apart, the fields more frequent and larger. There were stands of trees I walked past large enough to hide a small army or a herd of deer, and more than once I startled a covey of birds into exploding into the sky. It was nice enough to look at, I thought, but a trifle dull. After an hour and a half of heat and dust, I was even ready for Carl to pull up next to me and order me to get in. No such luck, though. It was just me and the road.

  As I walked, I reflected on my conversation with Officer Hanratty. There were things I had left out of my story and I wasn’t sure why, for they surely didn’t paint Carl in a good light. The envelope full of money, for one thing, and the fact that he’d opened my mail, for another. I’d left the fight, if you could call it that, out as well, but that was a bit more understandable. You don’t want to tell a police officer that you attempted to assault the man you think stole your car. You especially don’t want to tell a police officer that the old man in question kicked your ass when you tried.

  Officer Hanratty herself confused me. At times she’d seemed almost friendly, like she and I shared some kind of special view on the rest of the town. Other times, she’d been as tight with the old-timers as I could imagine anyone being. There had been an implied threat there at one point, and a sense that she knew more about things than she was telling. Had she talked to Carl already? I couldn’t rule it out, and I had no way of knowing what he might have said. It was a lead-pipe cinch, though, that anything Carl said would be believed over anything I said. Carl was from here, after all. I was the boy who went away.

  The fact that she made me walk back to the house angered me as well. Whatever the good law enforcement officers back in town might think, I wasn’t some spoiled city boy who expected the police to drop everything to ferry me back home. I had not expected Officer Hanratty to give me a ride back to the farm, even though it would have been the work of minutes for her to do so. But the unrestrained glee when she’d told me I’d be walking, well, that was something else again. The woman could have at least called me a cab, assuming there were any cabs to be had, or sent me out with an officer who could at least pretend to look at the site. Maybe she, too, was trying to teach me something about the town I’d come back to. If so, she’d done a piss-poor job. All I knew was what the sights along one particular road looked like these days. Hell, I hadn’t even bothered to walk around town.

  Still, some aspects of the conversation did cheer me slightly. If this was just Carl—or one of Carl’s friends—trying to put me in my place, then I had every reason to believe that the car would reappear soon. I didn’t hold out much hope for recovering the contents, but they were all insured. So was the car, and I chuckled to think about Carl trying to provide cash for that particular transaction. The image of the old man walking up to my porch with another envelope stuffed with twenties was enough to make me laugh out loud, and it sped my steps as I headed back down that dusty stretch.

  My knees ached and my feet burned by the time I made the turn from the road to my driveway. I’d belonged to a gym in Boston—I’d gotten more business done there than at the office—but there’s a world of difference between running on a treadmill and walking down a country road. For one thing, on the treadmill you know you’re doing it to yourself. If you want it to stop, all you have to do is hit the switch and walk away. The only thing keeping you on there is pride. Well, pride and the fear of doing less time than the man on the treadmill next to you. Out here, though, deciding that I’d had enough just wasn’t an option. If I didn’t want to walk anymore, that was fine, but I’d be sitting on the side of the road until I felt like walking again.

  Therefore, it was with visions of a cool bath to soak my feet in and a tall glass of lemonade that I turned my face toward the house. The driveway was empty, which I expected. Even if Hanratty had decided the joke had gone far enough, and called whoever had stolen the car to return it, there was no way they could have driven it past me to get it to the house. More likely it would take a few days to let Hanratty save face and make it look like she was working on things.

  My heart skipped a beat, though, when I saw there was a package on the porch. From where I stood at the end of the drive, I couldn’t make out many details. Brown paper, yes, and about the size of a loaf of bread. That was all I could see at a first glance.

  “Just a package,” I said out loud, daring someone to contradict me. Silence was my response. I felt a fool being suddenly uptight over a box, but with all that had gone on, anything out of the ordinary was enough to get my pulse racing. I hadn’t ordered anything, nor did I have any friends or family who were likely to send me something unannounced. That left suspicion and fear to argue it out over where that package might have come from, and neither of them had any answers I liked.

  On the other hand, I was tired and my feet hurt, enough so that I didn’t really give a good goddamn. I looked around to see if anyone was there, and I didn’t see anything else out of the ordinary. No windows were broken, no doors were left ajar, and no one had done any fool thing like paint a warning on the side of the house. Nope, it was just a box in brown paper, sitting on the porch like it was the most natural thing in the world. Which, in hindsight, I had to admit it was.

  One last glance over my shoulder told me that there was no dust plume on the road, and no Carl coming up behind me. “Well, screw it,” I told myself, and walked forward. It was only a box. That was all. It probably had mail-order fruit or AOL discs or something equally worthless inside.

  But my breath still caught in my throat when I went up those porch steps, and my hand shook when I knelt down to pick up the box. It sat there, unadorned with any stamps or postage. There was no return address on it, just my name scrawled in big black letters. Magic Marker, it looked like, and poor handwriting to boot. The box was wrapped in brown paper and tied off with string. Ragged bits of tape sealed the ends and folded over onto themselves. It looked harmless enough, and I nearly opened it right then and there.

  My hand was halfway to the box when I reconsidered and pulled myself back. It was probably nothing. I knew that. It was just a box. I knew that, too. But something made me leave it there on the porch and go into the house instead. It took a minute’s hunting on the kitchen table, but I found myself a pencil and brought it back out with me. Slowly, I slid the pencil, eraser-end first, under the string. Just as slow, I lifted it up, dangling it ever so delicately as I stepped off the porch and backed into the kitchen. I could see the pencil bending under the strain; that box was heavy for its size. My wrist ached to hold it, and my steps got a bit faster. A turn to the left and I was facing the sink. That’s where I put the package, thankful that the sink basin was
dry.

  The whole time I was moving it, the box failed to rattle, buzz, or explode. For that, I was deeply grateful, but I knew better than to push my luck. I briefly considered running tap water over the thing, like I’d seen in a movie. That notion only lasted a moment, though. The odds of it being paper or something else that would get soggy were a lot better than the odds of it being something dangerous. Instead, I went to the kitchen counter and got out a good, sharp knife from the block. Knife in hand, I turned to the sink and addressed my problem.

  The string was humped up in the place where the pencil had been. Gingerly, I sliced through that spot. Nothing happened, except the twine broke neatly into two pieces.

  “You’re a paranoid dumbass,” I informed myself, and I tugged the string away. It slithered out from under the box and dangled from my finger. Nothing but package string, the same as you’d get at a butcher or use for flying a homemade kite. It was clean and new. There was no dirt or fraying to it, and no smell. In other words, it told me nothing, except that whoever had wrapped the package had done it not too long ago. Nodding at my own perceptiveness, I put the string down on the counter and turned my attention to the box itself.

  I stared at it for a minute. Then I tucked the point of the knife under one of the corners where the tape came up. A little shove and the knife went through the paper. Then, carefully, I sawed along the line of the box edge, cutting the paper as I went. When I’d made it all the way across the top, I turned it and did the same down the short side. The knife caught in a couple of places on particularly thick layers of tape, but a moment’s patient back-and-forth with the edge cut through even that easy enough.

  With half the paper on the top flapping free, I put the knife down and lifted the corner up. Underneath was an old cardboard box. It smelled musty and looked frail, and I found myself reluctant to tear away the rest of the paper for fear the whole thing would just fall apart.