Chapter 12 #2
“Sure, sorry,” he said, heading back to the till inside his booth.
I could feel Ricky looking at me. “A receipt?”
I looked over my shoulder at him. “Don’t you want to get reimbursed? Gas is expensive.”
“It was five gallons! I’ll live! We’re in a hurry.”
“Here you go,” the attendant said, emerging again and handing the card and receipt through the window. The car began to move before he fully withdrew his hand.
As Ricky peeled out, I leaned out the window, calling back to the attendant, “Thank you!”
Back on the highway, Ricky waited until we were clear of the town before opening it up, trying to regain sight of the red Toyota.
I had a feeling we were sharing the same unspoken worry, that the woman could have turned off the highway at any time, but within a few miles we saw her again up ahead, trundling along behind a logging truck with a few other vehicles between us.
Ricky eased up, falling into the flow of traffic, still watchful but less hurried. His hands loosened their grip on the wheel, dropping down onto the spokes as we slowed to a fifty-five-mile-per-hour Oregon mosey.
“Okay,” he said at length. “She’s headed back south. We know she’s not staying at the inn, but she met with Lis at the park not too far away. Who do we think she is?”
I tried to remember what we had heard of the conversation between the two women. “She wanted Lis to inherit, which suggests that she had a stake in it as well. A girlfriend or partner?”
“Aw, no,” Ricky protested. “Gay people can’t be the bad guys. It’s bad representation for our community. Besides, do we even know Lis is gay?”
“She is,” I said. “Cecilia told me so.”
“Ooh, I thought I’d never get to learn anything from your top-secret meeting with her,” he said, a touch of mockery in his voice.
“But still, maybe … maybe this lady is someone Lis owes money to. Maybe Lis owes her a bundle, and the only way she can pay is by inheriting her mother’s millions. Maybe she’s with the mob!”
“Are there a lot of lesbian mobsters? That red truck doesn’t look like a mobster car,” I said. “Shouldn’t it be a big black Cadillac or something?”
“Hey, we don’t know that this lady is a lesbian. Haircuts can be deceiving. And I’m sure mobsters these days can be whoever they want and drive whatever they want. There’s plenty of room for bodies in the bed of a pickup.”
“Still, I think they’re together,” I insisted. “Didn’t this woman say, ‘this is what we’ve been waiting for,’ or something like that? A mobster wouldn’t put it like that.”
“Dang,” Ricky said. “It’ll be a real bummer if, at the end of all this, it turns out the killer in the family is the gay one.”
“You wouldn’t kill for me?” I cocked an eyebrow and grinned at him. “Even if we could somehow make it all look accidental, and afterward we’d be gazillionaires?”
“For a fake boyfriend, no. That’s definitely real boyfriend stuff. That might even have to be husband stuff. As fake boyfriends, whichever of us didn’t inherit the gazillions would have no legal claim to them. That would be foolish.”
“And bad representation for our community,” I reminded him, trying not to think too hard about what Ricky’s stance on marriage might be, or mine.
“Yeah, that too.”
For miles we headed south, the red pickup remaining a few cars ahead of us as the highway wound through farmland, slowed through tiny towns, climbed hills as we approached the coast once again, and hugged the bluffs above the Pacific.
We had covered much of our route back to the Rose Beach Inn.
Ricky mused, “I wonder how close we’re gonna get. …”
We were getting very close indeed, only a few more miles to go. “Or maybe she’ll keep going,” I said. “I wonder how much further. We do still have to get our things and check out, you know.”
“Look, she’s signaling!” Ricky pointed for a second, before following suit.
She was turning left, off the highway toward the town of Rose Beach.
We followed her down into the little valley, no cars between us now but keeping a bit of distance.
As we entered the downtown commercial district, the red Toyota swung into one of the angled parking spots along the street in front of the movie theater.
We slowly motored by, then pulled into a spot on the next block, both of us keeping our eyes on the red pickup in the mirrors.
The woman got out and walked toward Ronnie’s Roastery on the corner. We sat in the car and waited, our necks craned toward the café. I wondered aloud, “Do you think Mrs. Wise knows her?”
“Maybe,” Ricky said. The woman emerged from the café carrying a disposable coffee cup, crossing the street and walking slowly up the block toward us, window shopping as she went. “Let’s find out.”
We got out of the car right as the woman passed in front of it. At the sound of our doors, she turned to look, then smiled and nodded at us, continuing on her way. We hustled in the opposite direction, to Ronnie’s.
The café was empty once again when we entered, the jingle of the bell over the door echoing from the black-and-white checkerboard linoleum on the floor to the high ceiling, which on closer inspection appeared to be an old tin ceiling under countless layers of thick paint.
Mrs. Wise looked up from where she was washing her hands at a small sink behind the counter. “Hi, boys! Back for another piece of cake?”
“Not this time, I’m afraid,” Ricky said. “We passed a woman coming out of here a second ago, and I know we met her here in town the other day, but I can’t remember her name. Isn’t that embarrassing?”
“That is embarrassing,” Mrs. Wise nodded gravely. “I’m, like, twice your age, and I don’t forget people’s names after just a couple of days.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Ricky coughed. “So you remember her name?”
“Well, no,” Mrs. Wise admitted. “But that’s not because I forgot it. I never knew it in the first place. She doesn’t live here in town, I don’t think.”
“It was worth a shot,” I said. “Thank you anyway.”
“You’re welcome,” she beamed. “Come back anytime, Mr. Popp, Mr. Warner.”
“No need to rub it in my face,” Ricky muttered as we left. We looked down the street to where we had last seen the brown-haired woman. She had stopped near the end of the next block to look into a store window. We hung back, loitering on the corner in front of the café.
“How do we follow someone without them noticing when there’s nobody else around?” I looked up and down the small downtown, taking in its all-but-deserted streets.
“She’s window shopping,” Ricky pointed out. “Can’t we window shop, too?”
“I suppose so,” I said, and we stepped off the curb to cross the street. The first store on the opposite corner was a liquor store.
“Ooh, they have Crown Royal,” I said to Ricky, looking in the window as he kept the corners of his eyes fixed on the woman down the block. “What exactly is Crown Royal? Is it whiskey?”
“Yes, it’s whiskey,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it.”
“Do you like it?”
“Not really.”
The next two storefronts were vacant. The brown-haired woman was still in front of the store at the end of the block, her back to the window now, talking on her phone. I was beginning to get concerned about how quickly we’d get close enough to look conspicuous.
As we neared the middle of the block, we encountered a small shoe store.
The window display was mostly dominated by women’s shoes—clogs and hiking boots and sandals.
“Look, Birkenstocks,” I said, finding a small corner of the window devoted to shoes that were at least unisex, if not specifically targeted at men.
“I’ve always wondered if I should get a pair. ”
“Those you would like,” Ricky said, still looking down the street but distractedly raising a foot and wiggling his toes at me from within one of his own sandals. “Great arch support. Classic German style. You may think I’m joking, but when you get to my age …”
“Okay, old man,” I started, but he interrupted me.
“No, look—she’s moving again.”
The woman was off the phone, heading across to the opposite side of the street, where she turned and started back down in our direction.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Should we cross, too? She hasn’t gone inside anywhere else, and if Mrs. Wise is right and she’s not from here, nobody else is likely to know who she is, either.”
“It’s a waiting game,” Ricky whispered back.
“If we follow her long enough, maybe she’ll take us back to wherever she’s staying, since she’s from out of town.
Then we can figure out a way to find out who she is.
” We started toward the end of the block, tracing the woman’s path to the corner where we’d cross the street, too, but moving more quickly now.
“And what is it again,” I wondered, “that we learn by finding out who she is?”
“Something,” Ricky intoned. “Which is better than nothing.”
I couldn’t argue with that. We crossed to the opposite side of the street at the end of the block.
By now, the woman had made it nearly back to the other end of this block.
We moved quickly but as quietly as we could to follow her.
She crossed to the next block and it looked like she was making a more direct path now, back to her car, but as we reached the cross street, one of the windows caught her eye and she made an abrupt stop.
I pulled up short, too, right before crossing the street, but Ricky, in his zeal, was caught off guard after he had already stepped off the curb.
“Oh!” he said, trying to reverse course, and then, “Ohhh!” as his classically stylish German sandal caught on a storm drain and he went down, toppling into the street, his legs twisting over each other as he fell.
He said a few other choice words as he strained to pull himself up into a sitting position in the gutter. I scrambled over and crouched down. “What happened? Are you hurt?”
“Ugh, my ankle,” he sputtered, clutching at his leg and doubling over in pain. “I got caught on this stupid drain and twisted it. Cripes, Oliver, this is bad.”
I looked up and around, wondering what I should do, if I should call for help.
But there was no need for that. Help was already on the way. The medical hero of the day, the brown-haired woman, was running across the street, straight toward us.