He pounced on his cell phone when it rang.
“She’s fine,” Juliet said. “She was just back from the Museum of Natural History when I got here.”
“Put her on.”
“We’re still in the lobby. Let me get her up to my apartment. Then I’ll have her call you.”
Joshua gripped the phone. “Juliet—”
“Trust me, Joshua, okay?”
And he heard his daughter say cheerfully, as if she hadn’t done a damn thing wrong, “I’m fine, Dad. Really!”
Relief and anger flooded over him, and he knew his sister was right; if he talked to Wendy now, in his current state, he’d just make matters worse. “All right,” he told Juliet. “I’m on my way home. Have her call me there.”
It was almost dark when he reached White River Junction. The temperature had fallen. He parked in the short driveway of the Victorian he’d bought after his divorce and had slowly renovated over the years. His downstairs tenant, Barry Small, a member of the Greatest Generation, was up on a stepladder, stringing pumpkin-shaped lights across the porch in his shorts.
Joshua got out of his truck. “You’re going to freeze your nuts off.”
“Good. At least I’ll know they’re still there. Grab the other end of these lights, will you? I picked them up at Wal-Mart on sale.”
“Pumpkin lights?”
“For the trick-or-treaters.”
Joshua didn’t point out Halloween wasn’t for nearly a month.
Barry stretched a bony arm, hooking a length of wire over a thick staple. “You can never have enough light up here this time of year. Another few weeks and it’ll be darker than the pits of hell at three-thirty in the afternoon.”
He wasn’t exaggerating by much. Except for his years in the army during World War Two, Barry had lived in Vermont his entire life, but he hated the long, dark winters. From October through the middle of May, he’d bitch to Joshua and threaten to move to Key West. He was a widower with four adult kids, none of whom lived in Vermont.
“How’s Wendy the Vegan?”
“She’s with her New York aunt,” he said, outlining his daughter’s adventures for the day.
Barry glanced down from his stepladder, his lined face picking up the orange glow of one of his plastic pumpkins. “You sound irritated, Trooper Longstreet. Cut the girl some slack. She took a train to New York. It’s not the moon. You’re just ticked off because she likes everyone else better than she does you.”
“Thanks, Barry.”
The old man shrugged. “Comes with the territory.”
Joshua walked behind him and caught the other end of the lights. “I think you’re going to need another strand. You’re about three feet short of the other end of the porch.”
“This is it. It’ll have to do. I’m only spending so much on pumpkin lights.”
It wouldn’t do. It’d look bizarre, but Joshua didn’t care.
Here he was on a cool autumn night, stringing up pumpkin lights with his eighty-year-old tenant and neighbor.
“I have no life, Barry.”
The old man put one hand on Joshua’s shoulder, balancing himself as he climbed down off his stepladder. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you for how long? I made up a pitcher of margaritas. We can pretend we’re in Acapulco.”
Joshua eyed the old man’s lights. Pitiful. “Got salt for the margaritas?”
“And little umbrellas.”
Before he realized it, Joshua cracked a smile.
Barry gave him a victorious slap on the shoulder, and they headed inside.
Six
Ethan could tell that the bartender didn’t like him. He had trim gray hair and looked as if bartending was his vocation, not the backup plan, and he’d had his eye on Ethan since he took a high stool at the bar and ordered a Belgian beer on tap. The restaurant was on Amsterdam Avenue, on a corner, with a lot of windows and a neighborhood feel. He had more to tell Juliet. They hadn’t talked much on the tense ride uptown. She’d ordered him to meet her there after she got her wandering niece settled. Ethan almost told the bartender that he was there at the request of a deputy U.S. marshal, but doubted the man liked federal agents any better than whatever he thought Ethan was.
“Not from around here?”
“No, sir. Texas.”
“There’s no smoking in here. It’s the law.”
“I quit smoking.”
The guy rolled his eyes. “When?”
Ethan glanced at his watch. “About six hours ago.”
Muttering about how much he hated wiseacres, the bartender set a frosty glass in front of Ethan and moved to the opposite end of the bar to wait on another customer, presumably one who didn’t smell like cigarettes.
Ethan had finished his beer and was resisting ordering another one when Juliet pushed past a trio of women examining the menu posted in the entry and sat next to him. “Saving me a seat?”
“It was easy. Nobody wants to sit next to me.”