“Yeah, well, this particular board is getting sneaky,” she said, helping me into bed, pulling the blankets up. “They like to sneak in things at the last minute, or adjourn the meeting and sit around and have a coffee break, where, oops, some town business gets discussed with nobody else in the room.”
“Tricky.”
“Yeah, well I’m one trickster who won’t let that nonsense get by.” Paula smoothed out the blankets and sheet and said, “I may be getting older, and the First Amendment’s getting creaky and well-worn, but at least in Tyler, I won’t let journalism die.”
She stroked my face, sat down next to me on the bed. “What kept you up last night?”
“Power outage. Lasted a few hours. And then when the lights popped back on, well, that woke me up and kept me up for a bit.”
“I see,” she said. “And what else?”
I didn’t want Paula to worry but I also didn’t want to dance around what had been going on. For all she had been doing for me, she deserved at least that.
“Had two visitors with flashlights stop by,” I said. “Knocking at the door.”
That caused her concern. “Mormons are usually too polite to pull off stunts like that, and Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t go out at night. And I don’t think it’s Girl Scout cookie time, though I may be wrong.”
“They were amateur genealogists.”
She made a face. “Ugh. The worst. What the heck were they doing at your house?”
So I spent a few minutes explaining who Dave Hudson was, and his apparently supportive yet embarrassed wife. When I was finished, Paula said, “Good for you. This place has history, but it’s still your place. I’d tell them to go to hell and not come back.”
“Well, I told them that when I felt better, I’d let them in.”
Paula got off the bed, kissed me. “Not so fast, buddy o’ mine.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that when you feel better, I intend to take a day or two off, and make meals for you, and give you a nice bath in your tub, and wash every inch of you, and when you’re nice and dry, I intend to give you a nice, close, thorough examination by visiting nurse Paula Quinn.”
A grumpy part of me wanted to say that the last time that had happened, she had found a lump on my back, but by God I wasn’t going to say that. “Will you wear one of those sexy nurse costumes you see at Halloween?”
She kissed me again. “Who says I’ll be wearing anything?”
I slept some more and then found my way downstairs to get the lights off. After I spent an exhausting ten minutes or so restocking books, Diane Woods came by, with lunch in one hand and her large soft leather briefcase in the other. She looked tired but she also looked good. There were still scars on her face, but I had seen her for weeks in a bed at a rehab center, when she had looked much worse.
Seeing her like this, mobile and in better health, was always good.
We set up at the kitchen counter, and soon enough we were dining on lobster stew, Caesar salad, and warm French rolls.
As we ate and talked, I kept looking at her innocent-looking briefcase, which I knew contained her laptop, whose chips and circuitry held a series of ones and zeros, the crime scene photos of a dead woman who didn’t deserve to die from a violent crime in her home.
“What have you been up to?” she said.
“Oh, you know, jogging and weight lifting, trying to get back my girlish figure.”
Diane made a serious point of leaning over to look at my baggy T-shirt, sweats, and overall flabby appearance. “Hate to tell you, Lewis, but you’ve got a hell of a ways to go.”
“Gee, ya think?”
Diane buttered another roll. “No dancing, then. Have you gotten your biopsy work back yet?”
“Not really.”
“Lewis, it’s an either/or. What the hell does ‘not really’ mean?”
“It means my tissue samples were removed and sent to a testing facility.”
“All right.”
“But the testing facility is in California.”
“How the …”
“Human error. And to make it more fun, it’s been lost in transit, even with a tracking number attached to it.”
She stopped buttering her roll. “You seem to be holding up pretty well.”
I took a spoon of the lobster stew. It was hot, sweet, and filling. “Not much else I can do. Panicking and swearing and all that—what would it get me?”
“I’d tell you what it’d get me. I’d be down at the doctor’s office and I’d raise some hell.”
“For what purpose?”
“To make them upset and make me happy.” She took a healthy bite of her roll. “Some days, that’s a good combination. Even if you can’t get an answer to what you’re looking for, making people miserable for making you miserable is a reasonable payoff.”
After another spoonful of stew, I asked, “What’s up with Maggie’s investigation?”
“The state police’s investigation, overseen by Assistant Attorney General Martin and assisted by the Tyler police, don’t forget that.”
“With you bitching about it all the time, how can I?”
She laughed and said, “It’s going. The net is widening. The state police have gotten surveillance camera footage from the tollbooths on I-95, to run the license plates, see if anybody suspicious came off and on the exits during that night. We’ve also done another canvass of the neighborhood, and the only bit of info is one of the neighbors saw a car parked deep into some woods off the road … no license plate, no make or model.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning how the hell do we know? It was parked near a neighboring house of Maggie’s. First thought was maybe the car was keeping an eye on the road, the house, who knows what …”
I kept my face as bland as possible, knowing the car belonged to the man
