Hide & Find (Mayfield Cozy Mystery Book 3) (5 page)

CHAPTER 6

The next morning, the four of us wedged onto Lentil’s bench seat. I’d tried to persuade Loretta to take the day off, to recuperate from her exertion yesterday. She had to be sore after the bout of hard manual labor since she’d just spent two months at a luxury spa rehab facility where her most challenging physical activities were soaking in the hot tub and getting pedicures.

“The world’s a tuxedo, and I’m just a brown shoe,” she’d replied in a perky tone. “Bring it on.”

I didn’t know how to argue with that. Or even what it meant, exactly. Except that she was determined to be helpful. And equally determined not to be left out. I wondered how much the desire for a drink was haunting her. Maybe she needed constant distractions.

Clarice had rolled her eyes but kept her objections to herself. In fact, she’d turned notably quiet since Loretta’s arrival. I didn’t expect them to become close confidantes, but silent irritation wasn’t going to help. Another worry to add to my list.

We dropped Emmie off at the Gonzales house for a play date with CeCe. Sidonie waved when she opened the front door, beaming and svelte and stunningly beautiful. Her extra maternity weight had melted off in record time. Could have something to do with the fact that her husband had been shot, almost killed, and hospitalized shortly after the twins were born. A diet of institutional food, anxiety, and nursing infants will do that to a person. She herded the two excited little girls inside the house with a final wave.

So now I was down to only two witnesses. One knew exactly what she was getting into (Clarice), and one I hoped to shelter in blissful oblivion (Loretta). Still, it felt like I was trying to manage a three-ring circus with a less-than-shoestring budget and blind elephants.

At the very least, though, this task was giving me road time in Lentil. I shifted through the gears, learning where the transmission was sloppy and where it was stubborn, listened to her engine growl, played with the pedals until I could feel their sweet spots of engagement. Her hood ornament stuck up like a gun sight, the ram’s head reminding me of the Terminator, Mayfield’s resident, omnivorous, omni-ravenous goat.

I backed Lentil up to dock B-15 which was clearly marked in large, painted characters over the last giant roll-up door. Before we had untangled ourselves from the seatbelts and climbed out of the cab, Hank had the door open.

Using a rear tire as a boost, I crawled over the side into the truck bed. Hank grabbed my hand and helped me up the two-foot jump to dock level.

Inside the long warehouse, men and machines moved quickly, beeping, hard tires squeaking on the polished concrete floor. Interstate commerce didn’t take weekends off.

“Here it is.” Hank pulled a dirty, quilted blanket off a small mound to reveal wood crates cross-stacked two-deep. He motioned me over. In a low voice, he said, “I took the liberty,” and he scooted the loose lid of one of the crates to the side so I could see inside.

My jaw dropped. “Why’s it so big?” The bar sported an imprinted logo of a pouring crucible above the words RAND REFINERY.

Hank pulled a sheaf of folded papers from a pocket and spread them out so I could read the fine print. “The bill of lading calls them Good Delivery bars. Eleven kilograms each.”

I did quick math in my head. “Three hundred and eighty-some ounces per bar,” I groaned. “Single kilos would be hard enough to shift. What am I going to do with eleven at a pop?”

But Hank didn’t have an answer for me. The look on his face showed he was extremely glad that it wasn’t his problem. Although he would never complain, I expect he was eager to get the crates off his dock.

Normally, shipments like this one come with armed guards and bulletproof-plated trucks providing vault to vault service. But I hadn’t wanted to draw attention and instead chose the most innocuous, albeit least secure, method — bulk cargo. I’d run the risk of losing the shipment, but then it wasn’t exactly mine to start with.

Clarice and Loretta were standing in the pickup bed watching us, stomping their feet to keep warm while their breath rose in steam clouds over their heads.

“Seal it up.” I took a deep breath. “No going back now.”

There were only a dozen crates. Hank and I carried them one at a time, handing them off to Clarice and Loretta who lined them up over the truck’s rear axle. Almost three hundred pounds of precious metal. Clarice strapped the quilted blanket over the crates.

When we were finished, Loretta thrust her hand Hank’s direction and introduced herself. I grimaced. My manners had gone the way of weekly manicures and stiletto pumps.

One of Hank’s brows pitched up, but otherwise he retained his stoical composure while responding to her greeting. “Pleased to meet you. I guess you made the connection that my wife and I are your next-door neighbors then, since Emmie’s playing with CeCe today. Let us know if you ever need anything.”

“Will do,” she chirped.

We piled into the cab. I slid Lentil into first with no mishaps, and we pulled away, riding noticeably lower in the back.

Maybe it was a subconscious thing — my forgetting to introduce Loretta to my friends. I didn’t know what to do with her myself — how much I should tell her, how much I could trust her, where her loyalties lay, her emotional strength and stamina — nothing. So how could I explain her to others? I was trying hard not to consider her a burden — a restricting, if cheerful, tagalong.

As we approached Woodland, Loretta started recognizing her surroundings. “Ooo,” she squealed, “there are the gigantic piles of logs. My goodness, what would anyone do with so many logs?”

“Paper,” Clarice grunted.

“Who writes anymore?” Loretta giggled.

Clarice dug her Day-Timer out of her capacious tote bag, clicked her pen and emphatically scrawled a note on a blank page in her large, looping handwriting. “Unit 236,” she growled and jabbed the pen to the right.

I slammed on the brakes and made a tight turn into the driveway for Six Shooter Storage Solutions. The sign featured a two-foot-tall revolver, and the words were arranged as though they were spraying out of the muzzle like bullets.

“Classy establishment,” I said as I pulled through the open chain link gate topped with razor wire.

“Car carrier,” Loretta said. “That’s what Jorge was driving. Lexuses. Can you imagine? He had eight cars worth over $50,000 each. That’s why the sides of his trailer had curtains, so people couldn’t see the cars and be tempted to steal them.”

“The only establishment lax on certain documents,” Clarice muttered. “You want class, you have to drive another hundred miles — maybe two.”

“And Jorge picked you up? In a Lexus car carrier.” I was struggling with clarity.

“In Vancouver by the fairgrounds. I figured I could trust that brand,” Loretta trilled. “They have an excellent reputation. He used to drive for Wayer —  Waverhouse — or something, so he had theories about the log piles.”

“Weyerhaeuser,” I corrected. Wow, I was getting acclimated. I now knew the names of the big regional lumber companies. However, comprehension in the current conversation was proving elusive. “Theories?” I repeated.

“236,” Clarice shouted.

Good thing we were wearing our seatbelts. Loretta’s hitchhiker-picking-up truck driver friend’s speculative ideas about ecological management were going to have to wait. They probably involved aliens, speckled mushrooms, and body snatching anyway. A consequence of all those late nights on the road with only talk radio to keep him company.

Clarice popped her door open and slid out of the truck. She marched over to the unit she’d rented on Friday while I was bonding with Selma, jammed a key in the padlock, and wrenched it open. The roll-up door required grunting and heaving from the deadlift position, but she managed.

The storage facility was bigger than I would have expected for a town the size of Woodland. Maybe the developer was ambitious, or land was cheap. Or maybe the locals were really good at accumulating excess junk just like everyone else in the United States. Regardless, our unit had a lovely slab of bare concrete for the floor with flimsy metal walls and looked just like the other three hundred units arranged in long rows on the property. Anonymity. It would do.

I backed into the opening until Lentil’s nose was just inside. Clarice hauled on the looped chain, bringing the door crashing down. Privacy. Well worth the seventy-five-bucks-a-month, one-year lease she’d scratched an illegible signature on.

A single bulb burned brightly overhead, casting weird shadows.

“I don’t suppose I can ask what’s in the crates?” Loretta chirped, her brows pitched up to a point in the center of her forehead. “Why they’re so heavy?”

I opened my mouth to apologize for all the secrecy, but Clarice blurted, “Nope,” through my open window before I had a chance.

“Get your scrawny self out here and help,” Clarice added and went to the back of the truck to release the tailgate.

Loretta leaned near my ear and whispered, “Is she always like that?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry. We talked about this before, when your suspicious friend Marco showed up at the spa — how Skip’s in trouble, is involved in something—”

“Darling, you don’t have to explain,” Loretta interrupted, patting my thigh. “Not one bit. I often wondered if Skip wasn’t too smart for his own good.” She sighed. “Call it a mother’s intuition. But he brought me you — the sweetest daughter-in-law I could have ever hoped for.” She accompanied the last remark with a little squeeze. “Let’s go help before old Crabby Face chews our heads off.”

Loretta bounced out of the cab, chattering the whole way. “So what is there to do around here? I can’t join a Moose Lodge or an Elks Lodge or anything like that now because I’m an alcoholic. I counted five taverns on our way here. But these people must have other hobbies. Maybe church groups? Like a ladies’ auxiliary or something?” She flashed an expectant smile back and forth between Clarice and me.

“We haven’t exactly been civic-minded lately,” Clarice growled, dropping a crate in the corner of the storage unit with a heavy thud, “unless you count going to dinner with the sheriff.”

“Ooo.” Loretta struggled to slide a crate off the tailgate. “Sounds exciting. Is he handsome?”

Clarice snorted. “Wouldn’t be my place to say.” She cast a meaningful glare my direction. “I wasn’t invited.”

“It was just friendly. That’s all.” My voice squeaked with defensiveness.

“The sheriff is sweet on you?” Loretta had to rest against the back wall with a crate cradled in her arms to consider this idea. “Well, of course, he is,” she added matter-of-factly. “When’s the next date?”

“It was not a date,” I said firmly. “I’m — uh, I’m married.” As if I needed to point out that basic information to my mother-in-law. “Des is just very kind — and very concerned. And wants to keep his county safe,” I finished in a rush.

“Uh-huh,” Clarice grunted. “And he makes Bananas Foster for just everybody.”

Loretta giggled. “She doth protest too much, me thinks.”

Clarice nodded knowingly in Loretta’s direction. “He’s smitten.”

It was my turn to snort. “Oh yeah. An abandoned woman with her very own FBI detail that is practically hyperventilating at the prospect that she’ll lead them to her fugitive criminal husband. She lives on a dilapidated poor farm and drives this old beast.” I smacked Lentil’s flank. “And is teetering on the tightrope between right and wrong in the hopes that—” I scrunched my eyes shut so the tears wouldn’t fall, “—that maybe someday her problems will go away, and she’ll no longer endanger the people she loves,” I finished in a whisper. “So incredibly romantic. What’s not to like?”

I opened my eyes to find Loretta and Clarice staring at me, stricken, pale-faced.

I gulped. “I didn’t mean it to sound like that.”

But Loretta slung her crate onto the pile and rushed me, wrapped her arms around my neck in a crushing hold. “That’s why I’m here, sweetie.”

Clarice cleared her throat. “Me too, actually.”

Loretta continued smothering me, and my gut twisted into a horrible knot. How many men had run out on her over the course of her difficult life? And I’d just accused her son of the same thing. How heartbreaking must it be for her to realize that Skip, the boy she’d raised, was just as fickle, just as unreliable, as all the other men she used alcohol to try to recover from? I cringed at the cruelty of my words.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into her frizzy hair.

“We’re tougher than that.” Loretta stepped back, but kept my shoulders pinned between her bony hands. And I caught a glimpse of steel in her eyes — the thin blade of both hope and terror, the taut wire that was holding her together. “Do you know the Serenity Prayer?”

I gave her a feeble grin. “It’s the telling the difference I have trouble with.”

Loretta trilled a delicate laugh. “Join the club. But all you get from sitting on the pity pot is a big ring around your butt.”