Chapter Four #3
“Spoken like a truly loving aunt,” Kit said. “And the chef at that restaurant is a her.”
“Whatever. The dinner Ned made for us at Christmas was spectacular.”
“It was.” Kit nodded. No need for Beth to know that Ned had taken his full year’s vacation to fill in at the café, or to remind her that in addition to his degree from the Culinary Institute, Ned had a degree in accounting.
He’d been alerted to the possibility of someone lifting cash from the café’s till and planned on being very observant.
If someone was stealing from his beloved aunt, Ned was determined to sniff them out.
Beth looped Kit’s scarf around her neck as she was leaving and said, “I wish I could go with you. Imagine, seeing where Mom grew up. You have to take lots of pictures. You have to let me know every detail of what you find, promise?”
“Of course. I’ll share everything with you.”
Now Kit squirmed uneasily in her seat. The flight was bumpy and there was turbulence over Massachusetts, so she was grateful when the plane landed in Augusta. She headed for the rental car desk and picked up the keys for the vehicle she’d reserved online.
“Lucky you.” The chipper woman behind the rental desk greeted her with a broad smile. “We’re out of SUVs but you got the last sedan with all-wheel drive. 2021 Subaru. I hope that works.”
“I’m sure it will be fine.” Kit smiled in return as she signed the rental agreement. “Thanks.”
She took the keys and went off to find her car.
She plugged Banks’s office address into the car’s GPS and turned on the heater.
It was colder than she’d expected, and the sun had yet to peek out from behind the low-lying white clouds.
She’d worn her heaviest coat, but she still felt the chill.
She called the attorney’s office to let him know that she was on her way as he’d asked her to do.
“Just so we know when to expect you,” he’d told her. “It shouldn’t take much more than an hour and a half, give or take, for you to get here. If you’re not here in three or so, we’ll know you took a wrong turn.”
“Won’t I know if I take a wrong turn? I mean, eventually, right? I’d know?”
“Not necessarily. It’s pretty rural out here.”
“I have GPS on my phone.” She glanced at the dashboard. “And the car I rented has navigation.”
“Not always reliable. You can’t count on always getting a signal.”
“Great,” she’d muttered.
“We won’t leave you high and dry. I’m going to give you some landmarks to watch for at places where you might miss a turn or get confused. Basically you’re going to get on the highway and just head west, stay on the same road until you reach the turnoff for Tolerance. Ready to take this all down?”
Kit fumbled in her bag for the notebook she always carried with her. She skipped the first several pages—old grocery lists, appointment reminders she’d jotted down on the fly before adding them on her calendar—and found a pen.
“Okay. I’m ready.”
For the next several minutes, she wrote down everything Banks told her, from which lane to get into coming out of the airport all the way to where to park when she arrived at his office, and which diner in which town to stop at if she needed a snack, and where the gas stations were located.
“Any questions?” Banks asked.
She looked over what she’d written. “No, I think I got it all. Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome. We want to make sure you get here today while it’s still light. The roads can be confusing if you’re unfamiliar with them. Now, you keep my number handy. Don’t hesitate to call if you think you might have strayed somehow.”
“I will. And thanks again. I appreciate it, Mr. Banks.”
“It’s just Banks. We’ll look for you in a few hours, then.”
Kit took a deep breath and propped her phone up in one of the cupholders. In the other, she placed an unopened bottle of water. Then she turned on the ignition and headed out.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken off on her own—had she ever? It felt strange not to have Russ in the front seat next to her. Strange, but somehow freeing.
The wide, well-worn highway began to narrow the farther west she drove.
Soon the road was two lanes that ambled through one small town after another with miles of roadway in between.
Most of those miles were outlined by trees, lots of pines, some hardwood forests.
Early spring had already come to Pennsylvania, but here in Maine, winter was holding on.
The vestiges of the last snow still lined the shoulders of the road and clustered around the trunks of the trees.
Fields were mostly empty except for a small house or the occasional abandoned trailer, next to which sat an old car or three, the tires gone, maybe the rear window missing.
There were towns that hardly looked like towns at all, with no center or downtown that she could see, just a few businesses along the road and a scattering of houses.
She passed two roadside motels, one boarded-up 1950s relic, and another farther down the road, newer by at least three decades, with two cars in the parking lot and a flashing Vacancy sign out front.
From one small town to the next, she passed several gas stations, one auto parts store, a heavy-equipment rental place with excavators and backhoes, bulldozers and cranes, all lined up nicely behind a chain-link fence.
Several times, she’d had to hug the shoulder of the road when logging trucks passed her, their drivers in much more of a hurry than she was.
Outside the town of Toney, a low one-storied building with Stuff painted on one side had clusters of items for sale on the side lawn.
The tiny town of Downey had a post office in a small clapboard building and a railroad crossing.
A log cabin had a sign out front that said Trading Post, and a large metal family of Bigfoots (Bigfeets?) lumbered across the back of the parking lot.
She viewed each bleak landscape with increasing disappointment.
Where was the Maine of the magazine articles, the well-laid-out villages with white spired churches and well-kept historic houses lining picturesque streets, the lakes where old men fished from grassy shores or from small boats, the ponds where kids ice-skated in the winter?
She hadn’t expected the rock-lined coasts or the harbors where lobstermen and fishermen brought their boats to dock at the end of the day: She’d looked up Tolerance on the internet and knew it was well inland.
As much as she’d have loved to have seen one of those coves encircled by pines and dotted with snug cottages, she knew not to expect any such thing.
But would it have been too much to ask for an occasional white clapboard church or a town with more than a gas station, a luncheonette, a Laundromat, and a convenience store?
Maybe throw in a cozy inn or a historic B and B?
Here and there along the route, signs directing left or right turns off the highway teased with the names of towns that sounded exactly like what she’d been hoping to find.
Maple Springs. Lincoln’s Bridge. Hopeful.
But she knew better than to divert from the highway.
She’d fall down the rabbit hole of cute shops and spired churches and she’d have to call Banks and tell him she was lost.
An hour into the drive, the inconsistent sun had completely disappeared behind the clouds and had yet to reappear, so of the less-than-inspiring sights out the window, what she could see was backdropped with gloomy gray.
All in all, the drive from Augusta had been one big boring disappointment, the only interest having been the number of serious potholes she managed to avoid.
Welcome to Maine, she mused. Home of your ancestors.
She was beginning to question the wisdom of taking this trip alone. Maybe she should have given more thought to Russ’s suggestion that she simply have Jeremy Banks dispose of everything that had been left to her and send her a check. No fuss, no muss. No driving through a cold gray day.
Or she should have waited until Russ retired and had him accompany her. Would she have been able to talk him into the trip? He had more or less dismissed any thoughts of Maine other than the value of the property she’d inherited, so maybe not.
And then she saw the sign with an arrow pointing off to the left: Tolerance, 1 mile.
Kit turned on her directional signal—though no other cars were on the road—and for better or for worse, made the turn onto Davy’s Mill Road.