Instead of sleep, though, I lay there, staring up at the canopy, replaying every word of the conversation, every pause, every movement, every angle. I’d been so encouraging. I’d been so supportive. I groaned and dragged a pillow over my face. I’d offered to help him fix things with West.
At excruciating length, I considered one important question: what in the world was wrong with me?
Around three in the morning, though, I stopped worrying about that question because I remembered something else.
I had promised to finish that stupid story.
Why, I wanted to know. Why had I said that? Because it had seemed…right at the time. Because it had seemed like a show of solidarity. Because, if I peered uncomfortably into the deeper waters of my soul, it had been something I could offer him. And, of course, because it had been Deputy Bobby.
I wailed (silently). I gnashed my teeth (careful not to chip the enamel). I got out of bed. I got back into bed. I grabbed my laptop. I put my laptop back. I decided now was the perfect time to give the bathroom a quick scrub—after all, I wanted it to be clean for Deputy Bobby.
I had scoured three quarters of the tub when I reached the tipping point. I washed my hands, sprinted to the laptop, and started typing as fast as I could. And, an hour and a half later (not counting the two breaks I took to indulge in sweaty panic attacks), I was done. It wasn’t a long story, and I’d already drafted most of it at various stages. And because it was a short story, the premise was simple: Will Gower, a private investigator on the mean streets of Portland, Oregon, was hired to investigate the disappearance of a missing man. The only clue? An unsigned letter asking the missing man to meet at a place known only as “the eagle’s nest.” Because Will Gower knows the underbelly of the city like nobody else, he recognizes the reference: a local crime lord names all his safe houses after different birds. Will Gower rushes off, and of course, he’s dead wrong. (A poor choice of words, maybe—I mean, I can’t kill Will Gower.)
It’s one of the oldest tricks in the mystery writer’s handbook. A piece of evidence appears to mean one thing, but it actually means something else. The deftest handling of this leads the reader to make their own misinterpretation (Christie is the master of this, of course). But even someone ham-handed like me can make it work if the protagonist knows—or thinks he knows—what the clue might mean.
(Spoiler alert: The Eagle’s Nest is also, it turns out, the name of a café that closed years ago—and had once been where our missing man used to meet with his lover. Once Will Gower figures out this second meaning to the clue, the rest of the story falls into place, and the jilted lover confesses to murder. See? Easy peasy.)
It might not have been a great story. It might not have even been a good story. But it had—energy, I guess. If you’ve ever picked up something and known, from the first page, that there was something there, even if you didn’t know exactly what, it felt like that. The voice was part of it; I knew Will Gower’s voice, and I knew what those dark, rain-washed streets would be like. And I liked the twist. The plot might need a little more development, maybe one more complication—
Before I could go too far down that road, I said a hundred Hail Marys (I didn’t say any—I wouldn’t even know how to start) and I emailed my dad the file.
The wave hit me all at once:
Everyone was going to hate it.
It was garbage.
He was going to be so disappointed.
But there wasn’t any way to unsend the email, and so, after wallowing for a while, I dragged myself to the bathroom. I finished cleaning, and then I showered and got dressed. I hadn’t heard any movement from Deputy Bobby’s room. Maybe he’d taken me seriously about the we put the bed in bed-and-breakfast thing. More likely, he was even more exhausted than I was.
Indira wasn’t in the kitchen or the servants’ dining room, but she’d left huckleberry pancakes, and I found my stash of emergency syrup. (There’s a secret compartment, no joke, in the floor of the butler’s pantry. Intended, no doubt, for people like me, who were the unjustly targeted victims of Keme and Indira’s campaign to, quote, “not eat like you’re in the movie Elf.”)
The pancakes were still warm, by the way. That’s real love.
As I ate, my mind turned to Gerry’s murder. I was convinced now that it had been murder. And I suspected the murder had something to do with the blackmail Gerry had kept in his safe. I took out my phone and swiped through the photos I’d taken during those last, frantic minutes of my search with Deputy Bobby. So many names I didn’t recognize. Financial paperwork. Photos of, uh, compromising situations. Gerry had been a class act. And as I swiped, I found myself turning over, in the back of my head, what Jen had told us: Gerry’s interest in younger men. That was fine, of course, unless it became predatory. And judging by the way Gerry had pretty much groped me in public, I didn’t think Gerry was the take-no-for-an-answer type.
I was so caught up in that train of thought that I almost missed a name I did recognize. I swiped back, zoomed in, and stared. The file was for Nate Hampton: used-car salesman and city councilor for Hastings Rock. The same man, conveniently enough, who had attacked Gerry at the surfing competition.
It took me a few minutes of zooming in and reading the documents I’d taken pictures of to realize what I was seeing. One of the documents showed a statement for an account titled “Hastings Rock Sewage Improvement Fund.” And the second document was a statement for Nathan R. Hampton’s personal checking account. You didn’t have to be a financial genius to see the money moving into the Sewage Improvement Fund and then being transferred to Nate’s private account. Nate Hampton, who was on the city council. Nate Hampton, who had attacked Gerry at the surfing competition.
I sat, listening to the house’s silence. Still nothing from Deputy Bobby. It was an ungodly hour (nine o’clock), and I didn’t want to risk waking him. Plus, I didn’t want him to get in trouble with West again for involving himself in the investigation. Besides, I wasn’t even sure what I was going to do. Maybe I wouldn’t do anything. Maybe I’d just go for a drive and scope things out.
Sure, I thought.
I grabbed my keys and headed to the coach house.
Chapter 10
Hampton Automotive was on the outskirts of Hastings Rock, located on a prime patch along the state highway. It looked like any used-car dealership: a big, illuminated sign; an enormous lot filled with cars and crossovers and trucks, and yes, even the occasional minivan; pennants strung overhead, fluttering in the wind. I couldn’t find a parking spot, so I wedged the Jeep along a red stretch of curb near the service department’s roll-up door. Maybe, I considered, at that exact moment, Deputy Bobby’s internal parking monitor was going off. Maybe he was sitting straight up in bed, eyes glowing, his whole body energized with the possibility of writing me one final parking ticket.
But I sincerely hoped not.
When I got out of the Jeep, the sound of the pennants’ snapping met me, and from farther off, the boom of hearty, middle-aged-man laughter. It took me a moment to spot the group: a big guy with a goatee not unlike Gerry’s, in a sport coat and a striped button-up, thundering more laughter as he guided a young couple toward what appeared to be much more car than they could afford. The day was bright, the sky fringed with puffy clouds to the west, and one of those inflatable tube men wobbled and cast a dancing shadow across the lot. The air was crisp to the point of making my teeth ache, and my first deep breath caught the smell of fresh paint and rubber. I decided I seriously (seriously, this time) needed to dig around and find my winter coats.
Inside, Muzak met me (Taylor Swift crossed with a synthesizer), and the smell of freshly popped popcorn mixed now with the odor of new tires. It was a large, open room, with glass walls on three sides, and amidst the decorative straw bales and plastic pumpkins and a little animatronic witch’s head that cackled every time someone walked past it, someone had parked sixty thousand dollars’ worth of Audi. A woman in a black dress made her way toward me. I recognized her from the Otter Slide, and I thought her name was Maya.
“Welcome to Hampton Automotive,” she said. “How can I help you today?”
I glanced around. “I had an appointment with Mr. Hampton.”
“Oh.” Maya looked toward the back of the room, where cubicles offered the illusion of privacy. “He’s finishing up a sale right now. If you wanted to look at something in particular, Mr. Dane, I can help you until he’s free.”
Small town. Small, small town. “No, thanks. I’ll just putz around until he’s free. Maya, right?”
She smiled at me. “Let me know if you need anything.”
As Maya returned to her desk, I meandered—purposefully. Without making it too obvious, I let my rambling take me toward the cubicles at the back. I pretended to look at the Audi. I pretended to be impressed with the decorative hay bales. I pretended to have an obscene amount of interest in a poster on the wall explaining Hampton Auto’s lifetime alignment policy. I was inching toward a row of chairs, complete with while-you-wait pamphlets on an end table, when Maya’s voice broke through the Muzak.
“Hampton Automotive wishes you a happy Halloween,” she said. “This season, treat yourself to one of our new arrivals.”
I looked around. I was the only one in the showroom.
Maya wore a wry grin as she lowered the phone from her mouth and stage-whispered, “I have to do it every fifteen minutes.”
And, by sheer coincidence, at that moment I arrived at the chairs lined up outside Nate’s cubicle. I got a glimpse of the space inside: plaques on the walls announcing the DEAL OF THE MONTH, which apparently Nate had a track record of winning (and awarding to himself); framed print advertisements for Hampton Automotive, all of them featuring a close-up of Nate’s face; a photo of a billboard (guess whose face?); and, just for giggles, novelty foam car keys as long as a yardstick. Nate sat behind a particleboard desk, nodding enthusiastically as an older couple explained something about their finances; to judge by Nate’s face, he was from the wait-for-an-opening-to-talk school of listening. A whiff of overpowering cologne wafted out, and I hurried past the opening and dropped into a seat.
“—can’t afford it, Nathan,” the woman was saying. “We’re on a fixed income. In fact, we shouldn’t even be here—”
“Right, Mrs. Carlson,” said Nate. “Right. Right. But the way I see it, you can’t afford not to buy it. This is the deal of a lifetime. I’m practically giving you this car.”
“It’s a good deal, Betty,” the man said. “The deal of a lifetime.”
“Listen to your husband, Mrs. Carlson. You don’t want to do something stupid.”
It was refreshing, I thought, to have a front-row seat, so to speak, to somebody else sticking his foot in his mouth.
“Excuse me?” Mrs. Carlson said.
“I mean—”
“Listen to me, Nathan Hampton. I swatted your bum in preschool, and you’re not too old for me to swat it again.”
“No, that’s not what I—”
“Roger, we’re leaving.”
