By the time Faye unlocked her car door, she was no longer the only person around. Someone was walking up the street. He walked closer to her than she liked as she opened her car door, but he didn’t look her way as she got in. She quickly locked the door, chagrined to think that he was hearing the loud thunk of her automatic locks, but not chagrined enough to sit unprotected so near a man with such an angry face.
He wore a nametag like the one pinned to the shirt of the man who had just groped her hand while selling her a slice of pizza. It said that his name was Mayfield.
She’d seen Mayfield before, walking down Kali’s street. She recognized the tattoos and the towering mohawk. Like Linton, the handsy convenience store clerk, he didn’t bother to speak to her. But he looked, and he kept looking until she drove away.
Chapter Fifteen
As Faye neared the campground where she would be staying with her crew, she noticed a nondescript gray-blue car driving behind her that she was virtually certain was McDaniel’s. Had his route coincidentally overlapped with hers? How likely was that? Or had he maybe been following her ever since she got out of his car, waiting down the street while she bought an awful slice of pizza?
She’d never know for sure whether she’d had an unofficial bodyguard escorting her back to her cabin, but she was comforted by the thought, nonetheless. And also, it would make Joe happy to know there was a policeman looking out for her.
No, it wouldn’t. It would completely freak him out to know that a detective, who would absolutely have a feel for how much danger she was in, had thought she needed to be protected.
She did know one thing for sure. Nothing on Earth could coerce her into telling Joe about her conversation with McDaniel or about the straightforward bluntness an experienced detective had used to describe the danger surrounding her.
Jeremiah and his crew were already at the campground, moving in. He met her at the car, saying, “We set up the clotheslines and the camp stoves close to your cabin, but kept the campfire far enough away so the noise won’t disturb you.”
Jeremiah was a big guy, with big hands, big feet, big ears standing out straight beneath his close-cropped black hair, and a big mouth. He grabbed her duffel bag and jerked his head in the direction of her cabin. Faye didn’t stop him, but she also didn’t really need help carrying her gear. Years in the field had taught her to travel light. The heaviest thing she carried was her bargain-sized jug of sunscreen.
“I’ve hired you some great kids, Dr. Longchamp-Mantooth. Smart, enthusiastic, strong, funny. You’ll like them. And energy? We’ve been staying in the university dorms for a week while they did their training, and I learned on Day One that I had to make plans for the evening or they’d do it for me. I didn’t spend all the training budget you gave me, because I wrote my own teaching materials instead of buying books, so I used what I saved to take them to movies in the evenings. I hope that was okay?”
Jeremiah really should have asked permission for that kind of budget-juggling. Faye would have said yes, but still. She held her tongue, though, because she admired his initiative, even while she wished he was a bit more respectful of the chain of command. She was also a little dizzied by the force of Jeremiah’s personality and the amount of information he was dumping on her.
“We grocery-shopped on the way here. Hot dogs were on sale, so I had enough left in the food budget for marshmallows, chocolate, and graham crackers. That’ll keep ’em busy in the evenings.”
This was a bit of budget-juggling that Faye could totally get behind. “I was wondering why you were planning to build campfires in this heat.”
“Is it ever too hot for s’mores?”
The answer to that question, in Faye’s mind, was a resounding, “Are you out of your mind? No!” and she said so.
She took her duffel bag from Jeremiah and said, “I need to shower. Badly. And I need to get my work clothes organized. You’ve told them where the laundromat is? After a week, they probably need to do some washing. I sure do.”
Faye clutched Sylvia’s cardigan shut to hide her ill-fitting clothes. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about the reason she needed to shower and do laundry.
Jeremiah nodded that, yes, he’d shown his employees where the washers were, and Faye wasn’t surprised. Anyone with Jeremiah’s over-the-top level of organization had surely given them a thorough tour of the campground as soon as he parked the ancient sedan he used to carry them around. Faye was spoiled, because she usually had the unobtrusively efficient Joe as an assistant, but Jeremiah seemed more than up to the task.
It had made sense for Joe to stay home and tend the children and the garden. He might even get the porch painted before she got home. She didn’t like being forced by finances to do this job without him, but it looked like Jeremiah and his contract employees had been a good choice for hired help who could get this job done.
Faye had rather enjoyed watching Jeremiah herd his young charges through dinner, barking orders and cracking jokes with every breath. He had pooh-poohed the camp stove, insisting that they roast their hot dogs on sharp sticks over the campfire while he pulled ketchup, mustard, relish, and mayonnaise out of his cabin’s refrigerator.
She’d laughed out loud when he had handed a rangy twenty-something named Richard an onion and a paring knife and told him to chop. Richard, who wore his long hair natural and who also wore a
