Don't mention it, Sergeant. All part of the job.
Larry went inside - it was dark, hot, and alive with the softly whirring wings of the barnswallows. The smell of hay was sweet. There were no animals in the stalls; the owner must have let them out to live or die with the superflu rather than face certain starvation.
Mark that down for the coroner's inquest, Sergeant.
I will indeed, Inspector Underwood.
He glanced down at the floor and saw a candy wrapper. He picked it up. A chocolate Payday candy bar had once been stowed inside it. The signpainter had had guts, maybe. Good taste, no. Anyone with a taste for chocolate Paydays had been spending too much time in the hot sun.
Steps leading to the loft were nailed to one of the loft's supporting beams. Greasy with sweat already, not even knowing why he was here, Larry climbed up. In the center of the loft (he was walking slowly and keeping an eye out for rats), a more conventional flight of stairs went up to the cupola, and these stairs were splattered with drips of white paint.
We've stumbled on another find, I believe, Sergeant.
Inspector, I stand amazed - your deductive acumen is exceeded only by your good looks and the extraordinary length of your reproductive organ.
Don't mention it, Sergeant.
He went up to the cupola. It was even hotter up here, explosively so, and Larry reflected that if Frances and Harold had left their paint up here when the job was done, the barn would have burned merrily to the ground a week ago. The windows were dusty and festooned with decaying cobwebs which had no doubt been freshly spun when Gerald Ford was President. One of these windows had been forced up, and when Larry leaned out, he had a breathtaking view of the country for miles around.
This side of the barn faced east, and he was high enough for the roadside concessions, which seemed so monstrously ugly when seen at ground level, to look as inconsequential as a little strewing of roadside litter. Beyond the highway, magnificent, was the ocean, with the incoming waves neatly broken in two by the breakwater stretching out from the northern side of the harbor. The land was an oil painting depicting high summer, all green and gold, wrapped in a still haze of afternoon. He could smell salt and brine. And looking down along the slope of the roof, he could read Harold's sign, upside down.
Just the thought of crawling around on that roof, so high above the ground, made Larry's guts feel dauncy. And he really must have hung his legs right over the raingutter to get the girl's name on.
Why did he go to the trouble, Sergeant? That, I think, is one of the questions to which we must address ourselves.
If you say so, Inspector Underwood.
He went back down the stairs, going slowly and watching his footing. This was no time for a broken leg. At the bottom, something else caught his eye, something carved into one of the support beams, startlingly white and fresh and in direct contrast to all the rest of the barn's old dusty darkness. He went over to the beam and peered at the carving, then ran the ball of his thumb over it, part in amusement, part in wonder that another human being had done it on the day he and Rita had been trekking north. He ran his nail along the carved letters again.
In a heart. With an arrow.
I believe, Sergeant, that the bloke must have been in love.
"Good for you, Harold," Larry said, and left the barn.
The cycle shop in Wells was a Honda dealership, and from the way the showroom bikes were lined up, Larry deduced that two of them were missing. He was more proud of a second find - a crumpled candy wrapper near one of the wastebaskets. A chocolate Payday. It looked as if someone - lovesick Harold Lauder probably - had finished his candy bar while deciding which bikes he and his inamorata would be happiest with. He had balled up his wrapper and shot it at the wastebasket. And missed.
Nadine thought his deductions were good, but she was not as fetched by them as Larry was. She was eyeing the remaining bikes, in a fever to be off. Joe sat on the showroom's front step, playing the Gibson twelve-string and hooting contentedly.
"Listen," Larry said, "it's five o'clock now, Nadine. There's absolutely no way to get going until tomorrow."
"But there's three hours of daylight left! We can't just sit around! We might miss them!"
"If we miss them, that's that," he said. "Harold Lauder left instructions once, right down to the roads they were going to take. If they move on, he'll probably do it again."
"But - "
"I know you're anxious," he said, and put his hands on her shoulders. He could feel the old impatience building up and forced himself to control it. "But you've never been on a motorcycle before."