“Now what?”
“I have no idea.”
“I guess we call a tow,” Allie said.
“With what? Do you still have that cell phone you took from your house?”
“Yeah, but I don’t dare use it. You can track a person’s location with a cell phone.”
“That can’t be true.”
“Look. I’ll get out and walk to the nearest business and borrow their phone.”
“What do you think a tow costs, though?”
“No idea,” Allie said. “I never called one. I’m barely old enough to drive, remember?”
She opened the door and stepped down out of the van. She stood on the sidewalk for a moment, digging into the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out what Bea thought she recognized as the one-ounce gold bar. To Bea’s surprise, the girl pressed her lips to it, right through its plastic bag.
“Guess I can kiss this goodbye, though,” Allie said.
Then she slammed the door and she was gone.
“So, is someone coming?” Bea asked before the girl could even jump back into the passenger seat.
“Yeah.”
“How much is it going to cost?”
“I still don’t know.”
“You didn’t ask?”
“I asked. Of course I asked. But it didn’t help. He said there was a ninety-five-dollar hookup fee. And then it’s five dollars a mile to tow it to a repair shop. After . . . I forgot. There are a few miles they throw in for free, but not many. I forgot the number. They’re a repair shop, the tow truck people. So they can tow it into their own place. So they know where they are. But I had to put the guy on the phone with the lady in the store so she could tell them where we are. I didn’t talk to him after that, so I have no idea how many miles it’ll be.”
“Oh. Okay. Well . . . we’ll manage, I guess. You still have your computer. And the gold bar, and your phone, and . . . what did you call that other thing?”
“My iPad?”
“Yes. I have no idea what that is. But it’s worth money, right?”
“Yeah, but we have another problem. There’s no pawnshop. The lady let me look in her phone book. There’s just a listing for a guy who buys gold and coins and stuff—”
“That’s perfect. That’s exactly what we need.”
“—in Eureka. Unless we want to go inland, which I think we don’t.”
“Oh. How far away is Eureka?”
“I don’t know in miles. But I could show you on the map.” Allie pulled the map from the glove compartment and opened out its folds. “Here’s us,” she said, pointing to Fort Bragg. Then she slid her finger up the coast. Way up the coast. “And here’s Eureka.”
“Oh dear. Too far to walk, I’d say.”
“Too far to walk in a week. And . . . Oh. That figures. Our tow is here.”
“So fast?” Bea asked, her voice full of dread.
“Of course so fast. Because we need time to figure this out. If we’d wanted him to hurry, he would have been slow.”
“Definitely your starter,” the man said after Bea had attempted to crank the engine again at his request.
He was, quite surprisingly, Bea’s age. Maybe even a little older. She would have guessed him to be eighty. Well past retirement age. He was clean shaven with neatly cut sideburns, but his snow-white hair flowed long and tumbled past his collar in the back. Bea felt it unfair that her hair had thinned while this gentleman’s, not so much.
“So what do we do?” Bea asked him through her open driver’s window.
“We put in a new starter and get you back out on the road.”
“Okay, then. I guess that’s what we’ll do.”
She climbed out of the van and watched him back his tow truck up to her front bumper. She felt the girl standing close to her shoulder, but did not turn to look, or acknowledge her presence. She just stood and watched the man do work that he was by all rights too old to do, and felt the sun bake down on her scalp and the wind toss her hair—such as it was—back and forth across her eyes.
“When do we tell him we don’t have the cash to pay for this?” Allie whispered into Bea’s ear.
“We might have the cash. How much of your cash is left?”
“Less than a hundred dollars. How much do you have?”
“Not much.”
“So back to my original question . . .”
“Let’s get the thing safely into the man’s shop, and then we’ll figure something out.” Bea almost added, “I hope.” She decided against it.
The man came out into the customer waiting area and found them. They had been sitting for the better part of an hour. Bea had drunk three cups of coffee and regretted the last two. Allie had been chewing on her thumbnail at regular intervals until Bea slapped her hand away.
The man settled himself onto the couch with them. Maybe to make them feel more comfortable. Maybe his old bones got tired over the course of a day’s work. Hard to imagine they wouldn’t.
He lifted a baseball cap from his flowing white hair and scratched his head briefly.
“I had my mechanic go over every inch of your van. Everything that could affect you over a long trip. Some good news, some bad. I wish the balance was better, but what can you do?”
“Let’s hear the good news anyway,” Bea said. “Even if it isn’t much.”
“He says there’s a level at which the van has been cared for well. The oil is clean and topped up. All the fluid levels are good.”
“My husband Herbert taught me a little about that.”
“Well, you did a good job. The fan belt is frayed, though. It could go at any minute. And the hoses in your cooling system are very bad. Very old. The rubber is mushy and cracked, especially at the elbows. You can’t imagine how much trouble that can cause. One of those babies gives way, you lose all your coolant, the engine overheats, and that could be the end of the old girl.”
Bea blinked for a moment, a bit taken aback.
“What old girl?”
“Your van.”
“Oh. I see. For a minute there I thought you meant me.”
He threw his head back and laughed. It was a big sound, a genuine thing, emanating from deep in his chest. It made Bea like him some.
“I’m Casper,” he said, reaching out a hand for her to shake.
“Like that little boy ghost who wanted to be everybody’s friend,” Bea said, shaking it. “I’m Bea, and this is my granddaughter, Allie.”
Casper tipped his baseball cap at the girl. “Young lady,” he said. Then, to Bea, “When I was born there was no such thing as Casper the Friendly Ghost. Not yet. Life was so much simpler back then.”
“Sorry. You must be tired of hearing that. So, these hoses . . . is that a big, expensive thing?”