Dying to Read (9 page)

 8 

Cate drove home still in shock about what Willow had told her about Jeremiah Thompson/Cooper Langston. It was disconcerting how easily he’d deceived both Uncle Joe and her, scary how she could have put Willow’s life in danger if she’d given “Jeremiah Thompson” Willow’s address.

But she had fulfilled her assignment as a PI now. She’d tell Uncle Joe and write a report for the files. She’d get rid of Cooper Langston when he called and get back to looking for a real job.

If she could just blast that vision of Amelia lying dead on the concrete out of her head. And get rid of a feeling she couldn’t quite pin down, like when a name or word hid just out of reach somewhere in your subconscious.

When Cate got home, she found Rebecca in a bathrobe, surrounded by a gardenia scent of shampoo, with a towel around her head. She was watching the news on TV, a sacked-out Octavia overflowing her lap. She said they’d been planning to move Joe to a nursing home the following day for a few weeks of physical therapy, but he’d run a fever this evening and would be in the hospital a little longer. She sounded weary and discouraged, and new lines of worry cut between her eyes.

Rebecca turned off the TV and they joined hands to pray for Uncle Joe. Willow had sent brownies home with Cate and they shared them, soft but chewy, crunchy with nuts, and altogether delectable. When Cate went to her room for the night, Octavia followed. Cate snuggled the cat into her canopied bed, but two minutes after Cate was in her own bed, she felt the cat cuddle up beside her.

“Snuggling is okay,” she told the cat. “Just don’t give me any more advice.”

In the morning, Rebecca drove her own car to the hospital. Cate returned two calls that were on Belmont Investigations’ answering machine and made notes to pass along to Joe. She’d barely set the phone down when it rang again. Her intuition kicked in with a name. Mitch! She was surprised when her heart gave a non-PI-ish flutter. Then she looked at the caller ID. Not an Oregon number. This was more normal. Her intuition had reverted to its usual not-a-clue status.

“Belmont Investigations. Cate Kinkaid speaking.”

“Well, howdy there, little missy. Is Joe handy?”

Jeremiah Thompson. Spoofing again.

“I’m sorry, he’s still unavailable.” Her mind did a spin and loop as she tried to decide how to handle the call.

“So, do you have that little redhead’s address for me now?”

“Is this Mr. Thompson?” she inquired as if she didn’t already know, stalling for time while she decided what to do.

“Yes, missy, it sure is. You got Willow’s address for me?”

“I’m, um, working on it. Are you sure you can’t give me any more information about her?” she added. Knowing whatever he knew about Willow might help her escape him. “Oregon’s a big state.”

“Well, like I tole you, she’s a real fanatic about the tree stuff. Hey, did I mention she might be using some other name? Holly or Aspen or Laurel. Some tree thing. I don’t like saying this, but Willow’s kind of a flighty little gal, not too reliable. Always jumpin’ up and movin’ around, busier’n a squirrel packin’ nuts.”

Willow, flighty, always “movin’ around”? Of course she was always moving around! Because she was afraid of him. With good reason.

“Mr. Thompson, I think it would be best if you gave up this search for Willow,” Cate said. “In fact, I must inform you that the agency cannot continue working for you at this time.” Under the circumstances, Uncle Joe would surely approve of that decision.

Silence. “You found her, didn’t you?” The accent hadn’t totally disappeared, but it had definitely moved north. “I already sent Belmont a deposit, you know. Cash on the barrelhead.”

Stalking Willow, and now demanding his money’s worth! “I don’t know anything about that, Mr. Thompson, but I’ll see that you get your deposit back.” Sweetly she added, “If you’ll just give me an address there in Texas to send it to?”

“I’m a-thinkin’ you Oregon folks are a buncha shysters, that’s what you are,” he growled. Southern style, of course.

“And I’m a-thinkin’, Coop, that you’d better back off and leave Willow alone!”

Uh-oh. Not a smart move. But his blatant deception fired her temper into the red zone. She expected him to sputter and ask what in tarnation she was talkin’ about, but instead total silence translated into a peculiar ringing in her ears. She squelched a nervous impulse to jump into the silence.

“You have found Willow, haven’t you? And she’s told you some off-the-wall story about me.” No trace of accent now, and no longer the voice of a shaky old man.

“I know now that Willow has no great-uncle named Jeremiah Thompson and no dead grandmother in Texas. But that there is a man named Cooper Langston right here in Eugene looking for her, and he’s certainly not someone she wants to find her.”

“Of course she doesn’t want me to find her! Look, there’s a whole lot more to this situation than you know, and it sure isn’t whatever wild story Willow told you. The fact is—”

“We’ve heard enough of your ‘facts.’ And the next episode of this story is that Willow is going to the police to get a restraining order against you.”

To her surprise, he laughed, a deep, all-male chuckle. “Don’t hold your breath on that one,” he advised.

The comment made Cate both curious and uneasy, especially since Willow
had
seemed reluctant to go to the police about Coop. But no way was she going to let him suck her in with more wild stories. “Okay, this conversation is over,” she said. “If you won’t give me an address, you won’t get your deposit back. But thank you for using Belmont Investigations.”

She hung up the phone. Good-bye, Jeremiah Thompson/Cooper Langston. She’d get busy on a new internet site for job hunting that she’d recently heard about.

But there were a couple of loose ends to tie up first.

Cate drove around by the construction area. One yellow dinosaur was loading chunks of asphalt and concrete on a dump truck, another was digging more ditch. Another tree had been felled, and the raw stump and crushed branches gave Cate a pang. Couldn’t they have done this a different way? Willow’s tree was still standing, and Cate couldn’t tell if Willow was in it. No one seemed to be paying attention if she was.

Cate obviously couldn’t go wandering through the construction zone with the machinery running full blast, so she went to the house on Lexter. She hoped to find that Willow had decided to take time off from tree-sitting to contact the police about both Amelia and Coop, but no one answered her pounding on the door. She decided to drive on to Beverly’s, since that was the second item on her to-do list. She’d come back to the tree later.

At the little house on Westernview, Cate knocked and Beverly yelled, “C’mon in.”

Cate pushed the door open under the tinkle of the wind chimes and caught a whiff of fresh paint. “You really shouldn’t holler for just anyone to come in,” she scolded. “What if it were a burglar or home invader at the door?”

“You think my yelling ‘Go away, I’m not home’ would be more effective?”

“It wouldn’t hurt to keep the door locked. And then take a peek through the window first.”

“I’ll think about that. So, now that we have that settled, I’m glad to see you again.” Beverly pointed the remote at the TV and flicked off a game show.

Impulsively, Cate reached into the wheelchair and hugged her. “I wanted to come and tell you I located Willow. She feels really bad that you think she may have taken your ring. She mentioned that you sometimes hide it and then can’t recall where.”

“Well, yes, I guess I’ve done that.”

“She said you might have put it under the mattress or in the freezer. I’ll help you look, if you’d like.”

Beverly touched a finger to her cheek. “Oh, my. I did make some Kool-Aid cubes a while back. They’re really good to suck on, you know? And sometimes the neighborhood kids come around for them. Maybe I did put the ring in there.”

Cate inspected a half dozen trays of rainbow-colored cubes from the freezer section of the old refrigerator. No ring. At Beverly’s suggestion, she also defrosted several frozen containers of chili and stew in the microwave, enough so she could poke around in them with a spoon. No ring. But Beverly said they may as well completely thaw one of the containers of chili and some cornbread too, if Cate could stay for lunch. Cate said she could. Before they ate, Beverly took Cate’s hand and offered a blessing.

“Awesome chili,” Cate said when she spooned up a second helping.

“Willow made it. The cornbread too. She always made extra so we could freeze some. But I’m going to run out pretty soon. I do miss that girl.”

“She told me why she picked up and left so suddenly. It had to do with a man.”

“A man. I shoulda known.” Beverly nodded, a frown puckering her forehead. “I hope she didn’t get involved with some guy who’ll do her wrong. There’s a lot of ’em around, you know.” Apropos of nothing, or so it seemed to Cate, she added, “Mitch has a lot of good qualities, as a man. A real handy kind of guy. I think he’s interested in you. You could call him up and tell him about finding Willow to kind of get things going.”

“I haven’t had much luck with relationships.”

“Finding a good man isn’t
luck.
It’s you and God, seeing what’s right for you,” Beverly chided. “Did Mitch tell you about himself?”

“A little.”

“You do like him, don’t you? He’s a great guy. He can do all kinds of things. He’s going to paint the outside of the house in a few weeks. He has to fix Roberta Elly’s fence first.”

“I like him okay. But it seems a little, oh, self-serving to go to church occasionally just to pick up painting and handyman jobs.”

“That’s what he told you?”

“He didn’t exactly tell me that, but you had to trick him into going to church this past Sunday.”

“That’s true,” Beverly conceded. “But . . .”

“But?”

“I don’t know if Mitch would want me to tell you or not.” Beverly buttered a square of cornbread while she thought. “Well, phooey, I’ll tell you if I want. Painting isn’t a job with Mitch. He and a partner have a business doing individualized computer setups for small businesses. The Computer Solutions Dudes. They write some of the . . . what do you call it? . . . software themselves. He says they aren’t running Bill Gates any big competition, but they do okay. That’s his real job.”