Дана Стейбнау - Spoils of the Dead

They brought their faces close to the map. “There?”

Wy pushed his finger away. “No, there.”

Mainsail Drive was a left turn off East Bay Road and if the elevation contours were accurate, climbed nine hundred feet in a series of twists and turns to end just beneath the bluff that held up the road their own house was on, Heavenly View Drive. There were many streets in the subdivision but the scale wasn’t large enough to include their names.

Wy looked at Liam, eyebrows raised.

He stepped back from the map, still speaking in that unnaturally loud voice. “Damn it, I’ve got that interview with Garfield at three o’clock and it’s going to be a long one. I can’t get out there and back in time. I’ll have to wait until afterward.”

Garfield? Wy mouthed at him, and he made a come-along motion with his hand.

“I’ve got some errands to run,” she said obediently. “Why don’t we meet up at home and drive out after dinner?”

She was rewarded by an approving nod. “That sounds great, I’ll see you then.”

“Okay.” She took a step back, only to be snatched up in his arms and thoroughly kissed, just long enough for things to get interesting before he let her go again. Her hair had come loose from its braid and fallen into her eyes and she frowned at him while she tried to tuck it away again with shaking hands.

He noticed and grinned.

She stuck her nose in the air and left with as much flounce as she could muster on shaky knees. “Ms. Petroff,” she said as she passed the aide’s desk.

“Ms. Chouinard.”

In the fleeting glimpse Wy had of her, she saw that the aide’s professional mask had slipped a little.

She looked, Wy thought, afraid.

Liam didn’t close his door as that might have given the game away. He sat down at his desk and pulled open the central drawer where he’d put the file folder containing the square and his notes on the list of suspects. He stopped himself from picking it up at the last moment.

He couldn’t be sure but he thought it wasn’t in the same place he had left it. It was farther back in the drawer now, exposing the pencil tray.

He raised his head and looked in the direction of the front office. If he had had any doubts, they were gone now.

Wy was waiting at the door when he drove up and she hustled down the steps and into the truck. She was carrying a paper bag. “I made you a sandwich,” she said. “What did she do?”

He investigated the bag. Tuna with mayo, onions, and sweet pickles on white, his favorite.

She handed him a thermos. “Coffee.”

“I love you.”

“I know. Now give.”

“She stayed at her desk all afternoon,” he said around his first bite. He put the Silverado in gear and backed out of the drive one-handed and turned right on Heavenly Drive.

“You were there, too? What about your fake appointment?”

“I turned up the volume so she could hear it and hit the ringtone on my phone, which I pretended to answer and pretended to be disappointed that my fake meeting had been cancelled.” He looked at her. “‘F*ck and Run,’ Wy? Really?”

“What?” she said, making with the big eyes. “Who doesn’t love Liz Phair?”

“Maybe a little NSFW with the ringtones, is all I’m saying.”

“You should talk.” She made a strategic change of subject. “You don’t really think Ms. Petroff killed Erik Berglund, do you?”

He glanced at her before turning right on Alder. “Anybody can kill anybody, Wy. As you well know.”

“But—”

“Did you follow the link I sent you?”

“Yes.”

“So you know that thirty years ago her father’s brother and Erik’s best bud disappeared off the same stretch of beach that Erik’s dig fronted. Erik was found unconscious from a knock on the head. Due to retrograde amnesia he never regained his memories of that day.”

“Yes.”

“She would have known the story from her family. I think when Erik showed back up in the Bay that she would have wanted to talk to him. But she didn’t mention that.” He stopped at Sourdough at the bottom of the hill and turned left, crossing Spit where it became East Bay. He pushed the trip meter until it registered zero and continued down the road. “Her parents know something, too. You were there, you saw their reactions to Berglund’s death.”

Wy thought of Kimberley, weeping silently over the sink in her kitchen. “I don’t know, Liam. I think there might be something else going on there.”

“She lied to me about knowing where Erik was living,” he said flatly.

Liam could forgive a lot, but seldom a lie. And he had liked young Ms. Petroff, so the betrayal stung all the more. And he had liked Erik Berglund, too, which only added to his determination to find out what had happened to him. “Just… talk to her before you slap the cuffs on her, okay?”

They took two wrong turns before Wy spotted a street sign leaning up against a telephone pole. The white letters on the green sign were faded but legible. “Mainsail Avenue,” Wy said, pointing.

Liam turned left and immediately the road went from a two-lane paved blacktop to a one-lane, continuous buffalo wallow. Liam wasn’t prepared for the first dip and bounced both of them off the roof of the cab. “I’m guessing not a borough-maintained road,” Wy said, grabbing the handle and hanging on for dear life. “This is worse than that goat track that leads to the judge’s house.”

He slowed down to a crawl, which helped a little. The trees overgrew the road to where their branches whapped the pickup’s rear views hard enough to move them so far out of alignment that he couldn’t see behind him. Not that he could have anyway. It was as if the sun had set three hours early.

Mainsail Avenue was fairly straight for about half a mile, when it ended in a cross street called Reefpoint, so marked by another faded sign, and saw their first house, followed by six more equally spaced along the road that stretched an equal distance either side of Mainsail. “One-acre lots, you think?”

“Looks like,” Wy said.

“And fighting the vegetation back every minute of every day. Noon is probably the only time these people see daylight.”

Reefpoint climbed to Halyard, where another six houses were carefully spaced out along its length. Halyard climbed higher, with a switchback thrown in, and ended at Turnbuckle. “What were the roads that Sybilla said led to Crow’s Nest?”

“Telltale, then Backstay,” Wy said. “She called it an aerie. I think we’re good if we just keep going up.”

Sure enough, Turnbuckle ended in Telltale, this time after two switchbacks and a decrepit wooden bridge over a narrow creek.

“Did your ears just pop?” Wy said.

“Uh-huh.” Liam wrestled the truck around another hairpin turn and up another switchback. He checked the indicators for engine temperature. Nothing in the red so far. “If they lost some of these trees…”

“I was thinking the same.”

Here the houses were smaller and closer together and built only on the right, or up side of the street. “Developer must have run out of money,” Liam said.

Backstay had no homes at all on it that they could see, but the amount of fill necessary to put in a foundation would have beggared anyone who wasn’t a billionaire. The ground now fell so steeply away from the road that they caught glimpses of the view they had both imagined and it promised exceedingly fair.

There was no street sign at Crow’s Nest but it was the only turn remaining so they took it, another hard hairpin right. The grade was so steep Liam shifted into low and let up on the gas very slowly. “I don’t think they have to worry about being burglarized.” He wondered how big a turnaround there was at the top. He was definitely turning in his miles for this case.