“I don’t, you know. Have something going on with Trixie.”
“I know. I know you’d never do that to Mom.” She paused. “Or to me and Paul.”
I took a sip of cold coffee. “I don’t know what to do now. I’m suspended, Mom’s been demoted. The cops, Detective Flint, they’re probably wondering whether I really do have anything to do with Martin Benson’s death. Trixie’s run off with my car.”
“Too bad you weren’t able to get hers,” Angie said. “It’s a lot nicer than ours.”
“Yeah, well, the police are probably going over it for hidden bloodstains, hairs, you know the drill, you’ve seen CSI. But Trixie showed up at the house after Benson was killed. I don’t think they’re going to find anything.”
Angie got up and went looking for cookies. “I need an Oreo or I’ll die,” she said. She found the bag in the pantry and brought it back to the table. “So who do you think killed that guy? He wrote for the Oakwood paper, right?”
“Yeah. And I don’t know. But I’m wondering if it has something to do with a couple of guys I actually ran into just the other day. Trying to sell the cops stun guns. When Trixie saw the story in the paper about them, she freaked out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It may be related to something that happened in Canborough a few years ago. Some biker types who got murdered in a stripper bar.”
“You know that school trip I went on, back in high school, to Quebec City?” Angie asked.
“I think so, yeah.”
“One night, we went to this club where they had male strippers. I put a five right into this guy’s thong. I never had so much fun in my life.”
I pictured it, then tried not to. “How many other things have you done that I really don’t want to know about?”
Angie appeared thoughtful. “Seven,” she said. “No, eight.”
I gave her a look.
Angie said, “So, this Canborough thing, are you going to check that out?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. I was sort of thinking about it, in the back of my mind.”
“In the back of your mind,” Angie said. She took the lid off an Oreo, scraped off some filling with her teeth. “Exactly what kind of journalist are you, Dad?”
“Up until today, I was the paper’s top linoleum expert,” I said with mock pride. “Checking out what happened in Canborough might help me figure out where Trixie went.”
“We could get our car back,” Angie said brightly, as though being down a car were the biggest crisis facing our family at the moment.
“That’s true,” I said. “You know,” I added, “I might have a clue.”
Angie’s eyebrows went up. “I love clues,” she said.
I got up and found my jacket in the front hall closet and dug out the receipts I’d snatched from Trixie’s GF300 seconds before Flint had ordered me out of it.
“Where did you get these?” Angie asked, and I told her. She took them from me, went back into the kitchen where we could look at them under better light.
“What are they?” I asked.
Angie glanced at the first one. “A receipt here, for service, like an oil change or something? It’s for a place in Oakwood.”
That didn’t sound very helpful.
“And here’s one for a dry cleaner, also in Oakwood, another for a coffee at a drive-through, hang on, it’s one not far from where we used to live. Hang on, this one looks interesting.”
It was a gas receipt, from a place called Sammi’s Gas Station, with an address in a place called Groverton.
“Where the hell is Groverton?” I said.
Angie shrugged and went to the front hall closet where we keep, on the top shelf, highway maps, old phone books, and scarves no one wears anymore. She was back in a few minutes with an old map, torn around the edges, which she opened onto the kitchen table. “Who folded this up last time?” she asked, dealing with unnaturally folded creases. I found the index and ran my fingers down to the Gs.
“Groverton. L-7.” I found the box where the L and 7 intersected. “Here it is.”
It was a small town, about a hundred or more miles east of Canborough. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
“Hmm,” I said.
“What?” Angie asked.
“Well, I could ask some questions in Canborough on my way to Groverton.”
“That’s my dad,” said Angie.
16
I MADE MYSELF a mental list of things to do.
First, I wanted to know what made Trixie run, what she was mixed up in, who’d killed Martin Benson. I thought maybe, if I could get the answers to some of those questions, it might mitigate the damage caused by my getting mixed up in this whole mess in the first place.
Second, I wanted to get my job back, and get Sarah out of Home! She was about to have her first day with Frieda. I could just imagine Sarah’s reaction when Frieda passed over to her what I’d managed to get done so far on the linoleum story.