The Midnight Plan of the Repo Man (31 page)

“My oh my,” I breathed.

Liddy Wexler had been survived by her only son, Franklin. Her family was best remembered for a huge ranch they owned in the 1940s, much of which had been parceled off, but of which 240 acres still remained in the family.

Another piece of the puzzle.

“I don't see what this has to do with me,”
Alan complained from his position in the center of the universe.

“It's interesting, don't you think? If Liddy Wexler hadn't been in the fire, her son wouldn't have owned the ranch, and wouldn't have made the money from the sale to the factory.”

“And that ties him to Nathan Burby how?”

“I don't know.”

“And motivates him to murder me why?”

“Look,” I said agitatedly, “it's a clue. You're killed. A month later, a nursing home is firebombed, and one of the people who dies there just happens to be the mother of your murderer. There's a chunk of land involved in her estate, and it winds up six months later being sold to a company that sticks a big factory on the site.”

“Are you saying Wexler blew up the nursing home?”

I rubbed my head with my hands. “I don't know.”

“I wish you'd warn me before you'd bring your hands up in front of your face like that. It startled me,”
he noted.

I slapped my hand against my forehead.

“Hey!”
he protested.

“I'll touch my face any damn way I want,” I informed him. I realized that several people in the library, startled by the sound of the slap, were staring at me as I ranted to myself. I smiled and pointed at the microfiche machine as if its presence explained why I'd just hit myself in the face. When they looked away, I stood up.

“What now?”
Alan wanted to know. He sounded disappointed we weren't going to waste any more time trying to find stories about him in the newspaper. I delayed responding until I had closed the library doors on all the quiet eyes that had been tracking me as I left.

“The only person who has given us any information we can use is Katie,” I reasoned. “So probably the best thing to do is to just go ask her if she can think of any connection between Wexler and Burby.” I felt pleased with myself—a perfectly acceptable excuse to call on Miss Lottner.

Alan was silent while I started my truck and backed it out of the library parking lot.
“Ruddy, I don't know how to say this…”

“But based on past experience I'm going to guess you'll say it anyway,” I observed.

“It's just that Katie didn't exactly seem, well, receptive to you last time you saw her.”

“Alan, if I went through life only talking to people who were glad to see me, I wouldn't be much of a repo man, now would I?”

I pulled out my cell phone from the glove compartment and dialed Katie's number. A woman answered on the second ring. “Hello, may I speak to Katie, please?” I requested formally.

“May I tell her who's calling?” came the cautious reply.

“Yes, it's Ruddy McCann. From…” I trailed off. Nothing I could use to complete the sentence seemed very promising. The repo agency? A bar in Kalkaska? Prison?

“Oh hi, Ruddy. It's me. I thought that was you.”

“Katie! Hi!” I chuckled, feeling my brain cells dribble out my ears until I was completely drained of anything else to say. I sat there, snorting witlessly.

“Use your words, Ruddy,”
Alan encouraged.

“I thought you were your mother. I mean, answering the phone.” There, two complete sentences.

“No, she and Nathan went out of town. They said it has all been a little much.”

“I'll bet it has,”
Alan muttered.

“Ah. Well, look. I'm sorry, about, you know, the last time I saw you.”

“Why are you sorry?” I thought I could hear the hostility returning to her voice, and cursed myself for reminding her.

“Well, you just seemed … I just thought it sort of ended badly.”

“And you are apologizing to me?” she said in disbelief. “Dwight threw you up against the car and practically broke your arm, and you say you're the one who is sorry?”

I frowned. “Well, he didn't throw me, I leaned there myself. I wasn't fighting back, or anything.”

There was a long pause, and then, to my surprise, she burst out laughing. “That is such a guy thing to say.”

“I guess it is.”

“I'm the one who should be sorry. And I wasn't mad at you. Dwight and I…” She sighed. “I told him … well, let me just say that the two of us don't belong together. Never did, really.”

“Yes!”
Alan cheered.
“See? What did I tell you?”

“I'm so sorry about your engagement breaking up; that must be hard,” I said properly, giving myself points for sensitivity.

“Oh, I bet you are,” she replied sarcastically.

My heart decided it was time to turn up the volume on its pounding a little bit, and for another long silence, that's all the noise we made between the three of us. What did that mean? That she knew of my interest? And approved?

“So are you calling from the bar? It seems awfully quiet,” she finally asked.

“No, actually, I was just in East Jordan, and I thought I should call you.”

“You're here?”

I looked around. “Yeah. Down the street from the library, actually.”

“Oh.” She thought about it for a bit. “Come on over, then.”

 

 

23

Katie, Me … and Her Dad

 

I imagined her in her travel trailer but she was standing in the house doorway, framed in yellow backlight, so graceful and feminine my mouth went dry as I pulled up in my truck. Her eyes seemed lit with a mischievous humor, and they never left mine as I stepped inside. “So you split your time between a bar in Kalkaska and the East Jordan Library?” she asked lightly.

I felt myself blushing. “Oh, well … I was looking up things from when your dad disappeared.”

As soon as I said it the light went out of her eyes and I wanted to shout
Wait, come back!
at her.

“I sold this house once. They've remodeled the kitchen since then,”
Alan noted, sounding like a Realtor.

“What sort of things were you looking for?” Katie asked, her voice a bit flat.

I shrugged, oh so not wanting to talk about this. “Did you remodel your kitchen?”

“What?” She looked around, bewildered.

“It looks modern, like maybe you had it worked on,” I explained lamely.

“The countertops and cupboards,”
Alan supplied helpfully, as if I cared about any of this. I wanted to slap my forehead again.

Katie offered me a beer and I eagerly accepted, but she seemed stiff as she got one for each of us. I sat on her couch and she settled into a chair, curling her legs underneath her body as she regarded me warily.

“Why would you be doing that, looking into my dad?”

“Ask her about other stories; there must have been some more coverage that we didn't find,”
Alan instructed. I could feel myself hating him.

I took a breath. “I just want to understand him, that's all. Ever since the dream, I can't get him out of my head.”

Alan had already heard that particular joke and didn't laugh. Katie was watching me steadily.

“There were a couple of stories about the nursing home fire.”

“Oh,
that,
” Katie said in disgust. “Right, my dad disappears and then a month later there's a fire, so he's a suspect?”

“Did you know any of the people who were killed?”

“No, I don't think so.” She looked sightlessly into the distance. “I remember I was pretty angry. Everyone forgot all about my father; all they wanted to talk about was the bomb and how all these people were killed.” She seemed to catch herself. “I mean yes, it was horrible that people died and everything. I get that. But my dad was still missing, and no one cared anymore. The only person to even mention it was this guy from the ATF or whatever it is called. Oh, and Nathan, of course.”

I went very still. “Nathan Burby?”

“Oh, I'll bet
he
mentioned it,”
Alan fumed.

“Right, he was always asking how I was doing.” She flipped a wrist as if getting something off her hands. “I'm past that, though. What's done is done.”

“Then he sold the land,” I prompted.

“What?” her eyes regained their focus.

“For the factory, I mean.”

“Oh, no.” Katie shook her head. “That was a huge shock.”

“I guess I don't understand.”

“The city didn't tell him. They didn't have to; it was in the lease. The city council was working with the company that bought it, but Nathan didn't find out about it until the deal was already set. I mean, he wasn't exactly unhappy about it, because he got paid ten thousand dollars for every coffin he had to move, and he's got a lot more room at the new property, but still, he had no idea.” She gave a sigh. “Why?”

“Oh. Nothing. I just, you know, was curious.”

Katie glanced at her watch, and I felt my heart sink.
“It's getting pretty late,”
Alan remarked.

“I had a repo up here the other day,” I blurted, grabbing at something to say just to stay there. She smiled encouragingly so I told her about trying to pick up Einstein Croft, starting with the first try, the encounter with Doris the Attack Goose, and my efforts since then. When I told her about Kermit dropping the pickup off the tow truck, she threw back her head and laughed with delight.

“Now I just have to hand him the court summons, and my work is done,” I finished.

“How are you going to do that? It seems like he's hiding from you.”

“I haven't figured that out. It's not worth it to me to sit in front of his house all day and night, waiting for him to make a run to the grocery store.” Maybe I would make Alan do it while I was asleep.

“Then the sheriff's department goes and gets it? How do you feel about
that
?” she inquired, her eyes twinkling. She laughed again as she saw the implication of her question register on me.

“Well yeah, but those guys are armed. I mean, they can just see Einstein driving by and pull him over.”

“I was kidding.”

“They drive police cars. It's not a real repo,” I argued.

“I know.” She shook her head, grinning. “Want another beer?”

She jumped up before I could reply and went into the kitchen. I watched the rear end of her jeans as she walked away from me.

“Hey!”
Alan shouted.

I jerked my eyes away.

“We shouldn't be drinking and driving,”
he admonished.

Katie was still smiling when she came back from the kitchen. “Let's go look at the lake,” she suggested, handing me a brown bottle of beer.

“Sure, okay,” I agreed, pretty much willing to do anything she wanted. I followed her out the back door. The lights were off in her trailer, but the moon glinted off the silver sides and the yellow grass glowed white as I treaded beside her, my breath making foggy swirls.

“We're not going in the trailer,”
Alan informed me tightly. The trailer, I recalled, was where Katie usually slept.

He was right; that's not where we were going. Just past the trailer the backyard, which had been bulldozed flat by the homebuilders, dropped away sharply, a steep hill that became steeper the closer it got to the lake. We stood at the lip of the hill, regarding Patricia Lake—a still, black body of water, a hundred acres or so, glimmering below us.

“We built the steps,” Katie informed me.

“Steps?”

She pointed and I squinted. Where the hill became too steep to walk down, a long flight of stairs took over, leading all the way to a sliver of beach. “The people who lived here before us never went down to the lake, if you can believe it. I mean, trying to get down there would be like falling off a cliff. So Mom hired these guys to put in the steps.”

We were talking about this, I realized, just to have something to talk about. “They did a nice job,” I noted lamely.

“They look too steep to me,”
Alan complained.
“They should have put in a landing.”

If he were there next to me instead of in my head I would grab Alan and fling him down the hill.

I saw that Katie was getting aggressive with her beer, tilting the bottle up for long swallows. Something was going on with her, but I was both figuratively and literally in the dark. I snuck glances at her in the night, tilting my own bottle up and ignoring Alan's puritanical sighs.

“Okay,” she announced. “I'm cold.”

The lake-viewing portion of the evening was over. We retreated from the lip of the hill and trooped back into the house. Katie grabbed the empties and I heard them hit the recycling box as she grabbed two more from the kitchen.

“More beer?”
Alan observed sourly.

When Katie returned she sat down on the couch next to me, hard, bouncing me a little like it was a game. We clinked bottle necks in a gesture that was both silly and fun.

“It's probably time for us to go,”
Alan observed frostily.

He repeated variations on this declaration for the next ninety minutes, while I took the tiniest possible sips of that beer, dragging out the experience as long as I could. Being with Katie felt free and easy and natural, so of course I had to screw it up. “I'm glad you're not going to marry Dwight after all.”

Her expression sobered. She gazed at me, no longer smiling.

“I mean…” God, what did I mean?

“He's not a bad guy,” she said.