Tim Wynne-Jones - The Uninvited

“I come by yesterday,” he said, from the other shore. “No one was home.”

“What can I do for you, Mr. Peters?” she said in a businesslike way.

He rubbed his hand down the side of his jeans, as if he wasn’t used to wearing clean clothes and they felt odd. “I got to thinking about last week when I was over here, eh?” he said. “I guess I got a little outta hand.”

He paused but Mimi didn’t respond. If he thought she was going to let him off the hook, he was dead wrong.

“Anyway,” he said. “I thought I owed yous an apology.”

“Apology accepted,” she said.

“I figure it was probably the head injury, eh? Kinda made me… you know…”

“Randy?” she said.

“Yeah, well… uh…”

“Like I said, apology accepted.”

He made a salute as if he were tipping the edge of a cap. He smiled-not a good move on his part, because his teeth were anything but inviting. Then he pulled a flat brown bottle from his jacket pocket and held it up for her inspection. It was a Mickey of something; she could guess what.

“Thought maybe we might have a little Canadian Club to celebrate,” he said.

“To celebrate?”

“Hell, yeah,” said Peters, and he was beaming now. “You see I know who’s been messing around up here.” He looked triumphant. “Your secret admirer.”

This caught her off-guard, but she hoped it didn’t show. “You do, huh,” said Mimi, without a trace of happy surprise in her voice. Which seemed to tick Peters off.

He flung up his finger pointing west, up the road. “It’s the Lee boy,” he said, his voice less cheery by a few degrees. “Seen him with my own eyes.”

Mimi tried to maintain her composure, but it was an effort. “Where’d you see him?” she asked.

“How ’bout I come over,” he said.

“How ’bout you don’t,” she said, her voice sharp. “Just tell me where’d you see this… this person?” He looked put out. “What was he up to, Mr. Peters?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. I seen him a couple times, you know, but the last place I seen him was up that tree,” he said, pointing at a thick and many-branched maple right behind her. She didn’t bother to look. She knew pretty well which tree the stranger had been in Saturday night. And as much as she didn’t want to believe it had been Cramer, it was hard to refute the old codger.

“And what was he up to?” she asked.

“I didn’t stay around to find out,” said Peters, with a great deal of self-satisfaction. “As soon as he was up that tree, I took off to where he hides his boat.”

“His boat?”

“His canoe. A nice one, or it used to be.” There was no way of misinterpreting the mischief in his voice or the smugness in his expression. His crooked canines were on showy display. “I don’t think you need to worry ’bout him no more.”

“Mr. Peters,” she said, her hands on her hips, “what are you saying?”

“I’m getting to it. Keep your shirt on.” She bit her tongue. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “The lad was coming down here by way of the river, see. In his canoe. Down the Eden, then up the snye. But I got him. Got him good.” Then his hand went into his jacket pocket, and he pulled something out and held it up for her to see.

“Know what this is?” he asked.

She peered at the thing gleaming in his hand. “Some kind of drill bit?”

“You got ’er. A nice big five-eighth-inch bit. I put half a dozen holes in his little red boat. Fixed his wagon, I guess you could say.”

Jesus, thought Mimi. “You put holes in his boat?”

“Damn right. Scuppered him.”

She nodded, not sure what to say, surprised to find herself worrying about Cramer. “And what happened?” she said.

But Peters was in no hurry to answer her question. “You see, I got a pasturage backs down onta the river. I was out in the tractor one afternoon a couple days back, and I seen him, the Lee boy, out on the Eden. Didn’t make nothing of it at first. Seen him out there lots. Except, when I looked again, this here time, the other day, like, the boy was gone. That got me to thinking. So I tracked him down.” Peters sniffed and stood up tall.

“So, did he sink? Did he drown?”

“Damned if I know. But I’m guessing he got the message, loud and clear.”

Mimi felt very ill at ease. “So what if he comes around with a shotgun or something?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” said Peters, but it was clear to Mimi from the tone of his voice that he hadn’t thought about it one bit. He hadn’t thought beyond getting vengeance. That’s what this was about. It must have been Cramer who cracked him one on the head. Peters hadn’t done this for her. Or maybe he had, in a way.

“Sure you won’t have a little snoot of this?” he said, holding up the bottle.

“No thank you,” she said.

“Aw, come on,” he said. “Let’s let bygones be bygones.” And now he did head toward the bridge, in surprisingly large steps, and by the time Mimi could get in motion, he was already on the plank that spanned the broken arch. But he stopped in his tracks.

The silence was shattered by the sound of the truck starting up.

The smile vanished on Peters’s face. He spun around. “What the-”

But his words were drowned out by the sound of his vehicle backing down the driveway. Peters turned and ran after it, and Mimi followed, rounding the bend in time to see the truck pull out onto the Upper Valentine, and then with a screeching of the gears and a roar of the engine take off west, with Peters in hot pursuit, yelling his head off and soon enough left in the dust.

Cramer sat on the bank of the river catching his breath and watching Stooley Peters’s old Plymouth long-bed go down. The river was deep here, and there was a roiling turbulence in this stretch, though not enough to suck the heavy old vehicle downstream. He’d left the windows open. She’d go down quick enough. He would enjoy every minute.

He was aware of the fact that this was the second vehicle he had sunk in less than twenty-four hours. How about the Taurus as well? he thought. Maybe this is my calling, sinking things! But no, it wasn’t like that, really. In Peters’s case, he was just paying the old man back, an eye for an eye. What he’d done to Waylin Pitney’s truck filled with stolen merchandise was something more. It was like saying good-bye.

He hadn’t been able to manhandle the barrier out of the way, so he’d had to back the Plymouth up and crash through it. There was just enough cracked and weed-choked macadam beyond the barrier for him to stop from going over and ending up in the drink. He hadn’t counted on the brakes being so soft, the tires so bald. For one brain-numbing moment, he thought he was done for. But the old dame stopped with one front wheel over the lip of the crumbling hillside and Cramer jumped free. The rest was grunt work.

Peters was swearing enough to turn the air around him blue. Mimi worked hard at not smiling. She kept her distance from him, but, judging from the language, it was as if he didn’t know she was there. He ran out of fuel and stopped cursing eventually. Then he got this strained look on his face as if he was thinking and it was hard work.

“You got that little phone on you?” he said, holding his hand up to his ear, with his pinkie extended for a mouthpiece, in case she didn’t know what a phone was.

“It’s back at the house,” she said.

“Well, go get it,” he said, and started marching back down the driveway. But she ran ahead of him and stopped in his path.

“I’ll go make the call for you. You can wait right here.”

He looked as if he might argue the point, but something, probably the determination on her face, made him change his mind.