Firefly Rain (8 page)

“Morning,” I said, taking those steps. “I called in yesterday about a stolen car, and was wondering if I could talk to somebody about it.”

“Hang on one moment, honey,” she said, and she started riffing through the thick piles of paper on her desk. Behind her were a few other desks, mostly unoccupied, and an office door with a nameplate that read C
HIEF
H
ARPER
. The whole place was painted pink for no reason I could understand, though there was still some good hardwood molding up here and there.

The woman caught me looking at the walls over her shoulder. “It got painted that color ten years ago. Some state study said that pink was a calming color and it would help make felons less violent. What they forgot to mention was that it would drive the rest of us nuts, and there’s no money in the budget to repaint it for another five years. Until then, you’ve never seen so many policemen trying to get back to walking a beat.” She laughed, the sort of cackle we used to call a witch laugh when I was growing up. The few policemen working at their desks looked over at her,
then shrugged and went back to whatever it was they were doing. Several had computers on their desks, I noted. Progress reaches everywhere, or so it seemed.

“Here it is, sugar,” she said after the echoes of her laugh died away. She opened the file on her desk, and a meaty finger traced down the scribbles of writing. “One car, stolen from the old Logan place yesterday morning. Mr. Logan—and I am assuming that you are the Mr. Logan in question—called in to report a 2006 Audi missing. Audi. We don’t get many of them around here.” She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Between you and me, I don’t think it was stolen for parts.”

“I don’t really care much what it was stolen for,” I said, “so long as I get it back. Can you tell me whom I need to talk to, Miss…” I let my voice trail away.

“Officer
Hanratty,” she corrected me. She extended her hand to shake. I took it. Her grip was strong, though she stopped short of actually trying to crush my fingers to peanut butter. “And you talk to me. The rest of them would just figure it for a joyride and start asking around the high school cafeteria. Which, come to think of it, ain’t all that unlikely. A pretty little car like that would have been one heck of a temptation.”

“It would have been one heck of a walk,” I retorted. “You don’t get out to my place by walking, and I didn’t hear another car out there.”

“Your place,” she said. Her eyes got a little wider. “Interesting. Tell you what. Why don’t we do this properly? You pull up a chair and I’ll take a statement all policelike, and then you can pretend like you’re back in the big city.” She threw a glance over her shoulder that could have cut steel. “Seriously, I heard what they told you over the phone. We don’t all do things like that, you know.”

“I appreciate that.” There were two chairs near the entrance. I hooked one with my foot and dragged it over, then sat myself down. It creaked a bit, but that was all. I looked around. “Should I be sitting here like this? I mean, I might block the entrance.”

Officer Hanratty laughed again. “Don’t you worry about that. Nobody who comes in here gets past me unless I say so, and if we need to get out, well, you’ll be the first one running.”

I grinned along with her. It was hard not to. She saw my smile and nodded. “Good. Now you’re in the mood, let’s talk about your car. When did you last see it?”

“The evening of the twelfth, just before bed. I’d tried to start it to go into town that morning—well, that afternoon, really—and it didn’t even turn over. So I got out and went inside. I called Carl Powell to see if he’d give me a ride into town. Instead, he brought some groceries out to me. We talked a bit, and then he left. The car just sat there until night, and when I got up in the morning, it was gone.”

“Uh-huh.” Officer Hanratty nibbled on the end of her pencil. “And you say you didn’t hear a thing during the night?”

I nodded. “No footsteps, no engine sounds, no voices. I’ve been up late anyway, keeping… an eye on things. Getting used to the place again. It would have been hard to sneak onto the property. And in the morning, after the car was gone, I checked around where I’d parked it. There weren’t any footprints and no broken glass. No tracks from another car or a tow truck, either.”

“Interesting.” She leaned back in her chair, and it made a weary sound. “So what do you think happened to it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know. It wouldn’t start when I tried it, wouldn’t so much as cough. I can’t see anyone driving it off, even if I did leave the keys in it.” As I said that, I could see her wince.

“You did what?”

“I left the keys in. Locked, of course. It’s one of the reasons I called Carl for a ride into town. I wanted to see if there was anyone around here who did AAA and who could let me back in.” Even as I said it, I knew it sounded hollow. Still, there was no reason to admit I’d just been plain steamed and had locked the keys in by accident. That would make me look like even more of a damn fool in front of this woman, and from what I had seen, she did not suffer fools of any kind gladly.

“That complicates things,” she said, shuffling a few papers on her desk. “I take it no one’s been out to your place to take a look at things?”

“No,” I replied bitterly. “Wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Five minutes after I hung up with your people, Carl Powell came screeching up in his truck. Parked in the exact spot where my car had been. Between his coming in and pulling out, he pretty much wiped out whatever might have been there. Like I said, there wasn’t anything on the ground that I could see, but maybe your people could have spotted something.”

A cup of coffee appeared from somewhere, a mug marked with hand-painted letters that declared the owner’s undying love for the late Intimidator. She took a sip, made a face, and put it down. “Any idea why Carl was out there to see you?”

I licked my lips, well aware it made me look like I was hiding something. “You’re not going to believe this, but he mentioned he’d heard I’d had my car stolen.”

“Oh did he, now?” She leaned forward, her bulk making the desk creak ever so slightly. “And did he say how he’d heard about that?”

“He didn’t.” I couldn’t keep all the bitterness out of my voice. “Pardon me for making a guess here, but he almost sounded like he was rubbing my nose in it.”

Hanratty took another sip of coffee, slow and measured this time. “Mr. Logan, a word of advice. Carl Powell’s better liked around these parts than you are. You might want to keep comments like that to yourself, at least for the time being.” She looked left, then right. “Some around here might even say you deserve to have your nose rubbed in things, just a little bit.”

“Oh, might they?” I got up out of my chair. “So you’re saying that I deserved this, and Carl can get away with it just because he’s got some friends?”

“Keep your voice down and put your ass back in that chair,” she said affably. “I’m saying that you’ve been away a long time, and you seem to have forgotten the way this town works. Now, before you go getting yourself too worked up and make yourself more enemies, why don’t you tell me what happened when Carl came to visit you, and then I can get to work on this?”

It was phrased politely, but there was no mistaking the iron behind her words. I sat myself down, breathing hard. I could tell my face was flushed. The comment about having forgotten how this town worked stung far more than I wanted to admit. I’d adapted to city life pretty well, I thought. I’d made myself into something of an urbanite, even if some of my friends up north had thought it funny to call me “Country Mouse” on occasion. I thought I was able to deal with pretty much any situation calmly and well. Now, to come back here and be told that the town I’d left behind moved to rhythms too complicated for me to figure right off, well, it got my dander up.

Letting my temper show wasn’t going to get me anywhere, though, at least not there and then. I took a deep breath, swallowed, and knotted my fingers together like I used to do in church. “Carl came out to deliver my mail,” I said in slow, even tones. “I admit I yelled at him about where he’d parked, and we talked about what had happened to my car.”

“Talked?” She quirked one eyebrow and smiled at me in a good imitation of a child asked about the whereabouts of a plate of missing shortbread. “Is that what you did?”

“I didn’t accuse him of stealing my car, no, though it did get a bit heated.” I shook my head to clear it. “Then he got back in his truck and drove off.”

Hanratty made notes on some papers in front of her. “That’s all I need to know for now, but I’ll probably need to ask you some follow-up questions. I take it you gave the officers on the phone a description of the missing vehicle?”

I nodded. “Silver Audi A6, Massachusetts plate TMB-324. Just in case they misplaced it.” She wrote the information down with a grunt that might have been approval. “It still had half my stuff in there, too.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.” Hanratty sounded singularly un-sorry, at that. “I assume you didn’t have your furniture in the car?”

“Nope.” I grinned without smiling. “That was all on a moving truck.”

“Was?”

“Was. It got in an accident up in Baltimore, and everything on board the truck was damaged beyond repair. The moving company settled.” I shifted in my chair. “So with the car missing, all I’ve got in this world is what’s in that house.”

Hanratty harrumphed and scribbled something on her paper. “There are worse fates.” A meaty hand plucked the form she’d been marking up off her desk and waved it in the air. “I’ll need you to sign this. Look it over first, if you like.”

“I’d like,” I said, and I took the paper from her hand. It was my statement, more or less accurately written down. I pulled a pen from my pocket and scribbled my name on the bottom.

“Thanks,” she said as I handed it back to her. “I’ll look into
this myself. In the meantime, you might want to go back out to the farm and wait for some news. I’ll call you when I have anything.”

Shoving the chair back, I stood. “Thank you,” I told her. “I’m actually going to try to find myself another car in the meantime, I think.”

Hanratty snorted with laughter. “Good luck. There’s no car dealer, new or used, for twenty miles. You probably want to go back to your house and make a few calls, see if a dealer’s willing to pick you up to bring you out. Either that or try shopping on the internet. I hear people buy cars that way sometimes up in the big city.”

“My laptop was in the car,” I said, mainly to cover the sinking feeling in my gut. “If you want, I can come up with a list of what else I lost.”

“That might be a good idea,” she said neutrally. “Do you have a ride home?”

I shook my head. “Nope.”

She smiled like a mean old porch cat. “Then I guess you’d better start walking.”

I did walk then, all the way back to my front door. Anger fueled me for the first few miles, but after a while that faded and just left me with a long, slow road. A few cars passed me—a very few, truth be told—but none of them slowed. I saw curious faces looking out through their windows, but that was all. I thought I recognized one or two, but I couldn’t be sure. It had, like the woman had said, been a long time.

The first part of the walk was easy enough. Some smart man in Raleigh had designated the stretch of road out of town a state highway. Near as I could tell, that meant that it got paved every so often in order to keep some construction company or other working. Still, it made my walk easier, at least for a while. Eventually, the pavement went away and the road turned to white stone gravel. The houses that lined the road grew farther apart,
the fields more frequent and larger. There were stands of trees I walked past large enough to hide a small army or a herd of deer, and more than once I startled a covey of birds into exploding into the sky. It was nice enough to look at, I thought, but a trifle dull. After an hour and a half of heat and dust, I was even ready for Carl to pull up next to me and order me to get in. No such luck, though. It was just me and the road.

As I walked, I reflected on my conversation with Officer Hanratty. There were things I had left out of my story and I wasn’t sure why, for they surely didn’t paint Carl in a good light. The envelope full of money, for one thing, and the fact that he’d opened my mail, for another. I’d left the fight, if you could call it that, out as well, but that was a bit more understandable. You don’t want to tell a police officer that you attempted to assault the man you think stole your car. You especially don’t want to tell a police officer that the old man in question kicked your ass when you tried.

Officer Hanratty herself confused me. At times she’d seemed almost friendly, like she and I shared some kind of special view on the rest of the town. Other times, she’d been as tight with the old-timers as I could imagine anyone being. There had been an implied threat there at one point, and a sense that she knew more about things than she was telling. Had she talked to Carl already? I couldn’t rule it out, and I had no way of knowing what he might have said. It was a lead-pipe cinch, though, that anything Carl said would be believed over anything I said. Carl was
from
here, after all. I was the boy who went away.