just the other day. Trying to sell the cops stun guns. When Trixie saw the story in the paper about them, she freaked out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It may be related to something that happened in Canborough a few years ago. Some biker types who got murdered in a stripper bar.”
“You know that school trip I went on, back in high school, to Quebec City?” Angie asked.
“I think so, yeah.”
“One night, we went to this club where they had male strippers. I put a five right into this guy’s thong. I never had so much fun in my life.”
I pictured it, then tried not to. “How many other things have you done that I really don’t want to know about?”
Angie appeared thoughtful. “Seven,” she said. “No, eight.”
I gave her a look.
Angie said, “So, this Canborough thing, are you going to check that out?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. I was sort of thinking about it, in the back of my mind.”
“In the back of your mind,” Angie said. She took the lid off an Oreo, scraped off some filling with her teeth. “Exactly what kind of journalist are you, Dad?”
“Up until today, I was the paper’s top linoleum expert,” I said with mock pride. “Checking out what happened in Canborough might help me figure out where Trixie went.”
“We could get our car back,” Angie said brightly, as though being down a car were the biggest crisis facing our family at the moment.
“That’s true,” I said. “You know,” I added, “I might have a clue.”
Angie’s eyebrows went up. “I love clues,” she said.
I got up and found my jacket in the front hall closet and dug out the receipts I’d snatched from Trixie’s GF300 seconds before Flint had ordered me out of it.
“Where did you get these?” Angie asked, and I told her. She took them from me, went back into the kitchen where we could look at them under better light.
“What are they?” I asked.
Angie glanced at the first one. “A receipt here, for service, like an oil change or something? It’s for a place in Oakwood.”
That didn’t sound very helpful.
“And here’s one for a dry cleaner, also in Oakwood, another for a coffee at a drive-through, hang on, it’s one not far from where we used to live. Hang on, this one looks interesting.”
It was a gas receipt, from a place called Sammi’s Gas Station, with an address in a place called Groverton.
“Where the hell is Groverton?” I said.
Angie shrugged and went to the front hall closet where we keep, on the top shelf, highway maps, old phone books, and scarves no one wears anymore. She was back in a few minutes with an old map, torn around the edges, which she opened onto the kitchen table. “Who folded this up last time?” she asked, dealing with unnaturally folded creases. I found the index and ran my fingers down to the Gs.
“Groverton. L- 7.” I found the box where the L and 7 intersected. “Here it is.”
It was a small town, about a hundred or more miles east of Canborough. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
“Hmm,” I said.
“What?” Angie asked.
“Well, I could ask some questions in Canborough on my way to Groverton.”
“That’s my dad,” said Angie.
16
First, I wanted to know what made Trixie run, what she was mixed up in, who’d killed Martin Benson. I thought maybe, if I could get the answers to some of those questions, it might mitigate the damage caused by my getting mixed up in this whole mess in the first place.
Second, I wanted to get my job back, and get Sarah out of Home! She was about to have her first day with Frieda. I could just imagine Sarah’s reaction when Frieda passed over to her what I’d managed to get done so far on the linoleum story.
And finally, I had to repair things between Sarah and me. I thought that if I could accomplish the other things on my list, this last and most important thing on it would fall into place.
A trip to Canborough and Groverton, I hoped, might help me accomplish a few of my goals.
Once Sarah had left for work, I put in a call to a local car rental agency and reserved a sedan. I told them I’d probably need it a couple of days. I just didn’t know whether one day out of the city would be enough to do everything I might need to do, so I grabbed an overnight bag from the closet and tossed it onto the bed. I had saved packing until Sarah was gone so I wouldn’t have to answer any questions about what I might be up to, assuming, of course, that she would even have asked me. Even though we’d slept in the same bed the night before, and been in the kitchen at the same time grabbing some breakfast, we had not spoken.
I didn’t want to give her the wrong idea, seeing me pack a bag. She might think I wasn’t coming back. No sense getting her hopes up.
I tossed a couple of pairs of socks and boxers into the case. I must have been in the bathroom, my head full of the sounds of brush scrubbing teeth, when Sarah returned to the house and came upstairs.
She was standing in the bedroom, staring at the open case on the bed, when I came out of the bathroom. She looked at me, bewildered.
“I forgot my watch,” she said.
“You won’t need it in the home section,” I said, trying to sound apologetic. “Deadlines are somewhat ethereal. Although Frieda’s fairly rigid about cookie time. You won’t want to miss that.”
Her eyes went back to the overnight bag. “You’re going away?”
“Uh,” I said. “I was just throwing in a few things-”
“Maybe that’s a good idea,” Sarah said.
“Huh?”
“I mean, maybe we do need a bit of time. Apart, I mean.”
“You see, I was actually-”
“Where are you going to stay? Are you going to go back up to your father’s place? He might be happy to see you. You know, spend some time without all that other stuff hanging over you.”
“Uh, no, I’m not going to see him.”
“I can’t imagine Lawrence Jones would let you move in with him,” Sarah said softly. “Even for the short term.”
“No, I don’t imagine he would,” I said, feeling a growing emptiness. My detective friend Lawrence, he liked his world well ordered. I would be a piece of paper not lining up with the edge of his desk.
“Have you told the kids?” Sarah asked.
“The thing is, Sarah,” I said, “I wasn’t actually leaving. I was just figuring to be away overnight, maybe two nights at the most, sorting out some things. But not actually leaving. But now maybe I should get a bigger suitcase, take a few extra things, if that’s what you’d like.”
She started to speak, stopped, opened her mouth again, closed it. Finally, “I just figured, when I saw you packing…”
I looked into Sarah’s eyes and said, “I would never leave you.” I paused. “Unless you didn’t want me here.”
Sarah broke eye contact, saw her watch on the bedside table. She went over, picked it up, slipped it over her
