Read Online Nail Biter by Sarah Graves - Free Book Online Page A

happen?”
    Here I should perhaps make clear that in the past Ellie and I had cleared up a number of fairly grisly Eastport crimes. Obsessed stalkers, murderous embezzlers, and in one truly horrid instance a corpse dangling upside down from a graveyard gate had helped form our unwanted reputation as . . .
    Well, as snoops. Emphasis on
unwanted
reputation; what we
wanted
was normal life. But if wishes were horses, one of my dogs would be winning the Kentucky Derby right this minute.
    Bob gave in at last. “Actually the reason Marge asked for you two is that I told her to.”
    “And that would be because . . . ?” Ellie appeared stern, which on her was quite a trick.
    He held out his hands. “First of all, the state cops've got a murder and felony drug weight to keep them occupied. I mean, you should've seen their eyes light up.”
    I could imagine it. “So all by itself, if it's just a simple teenaged runaway case . . .”
    Bob nodded briskly. “Yep. Oh, they'll do everything that's in the procedure book. Everything necessary,” he emphasized. “I'm not sayin' they'll sell it short. Put out the word, bulletins, the whole nine yards. But even after all that, in the end I figure there's two ways it could go.” He raised an index finger. “They'll decide maybe Wanda's got something to do with the felonies, and when they do find her, that'll be a mess.”
    Another finger. “Or . . . hey, kids run off. The girl didn't know Dibble. How could she? Only fifteen years old and a
young
fifteen, from what the mother told me.”
    I caught the drift. “So maybe Wanda won't show up
and
they won't find her. Because they
didn't
make a connection when maybe they should've.”
    A connection that might help find her, he meant. Because despite my impression of her, I supposed it wasn't impossible for Wanda to have known about the illicit pills. After all, Sam was a lot younger than fifteen when he first learned how to skin-pop cocaine using the TB syringes he'd stolen from his father's medical bag.
    And if such a link existed, recognizing it might be the key to finding her. But I could think of a third way things could go, too.
    A worse way. “Wanda Cathcart,” I said slowly, “couldn't fend for herself in a roomful of kittens. Drugs or no drugs, if she ran off on her own—or worse, if someone took her—she could be in a lot of trouble.”
    “Yeah,” Bob said. “There's that. Don't know why anyone would take her, though. She didn't see anything out there, did she?”
    “You mean like who dunnit? Bob, she's timid and she's speech-impaired but she seems perfectly normal intelligence-wise. Seeing a murder . . . I think she'd have been trying to tell us about it.”
    True, there had been her frightened expression. And even now that I'd dismissed them I supposed the sounds I'd heard last night
could
have been made by someone creeping stealthily to the door. But . . .
    “Anyway, if she had seen something, why wouldn't she have tried telling her mother?” I asked.
    I knew one thing for sure: When I opened that door on my way out of the little room, I'd found no one. And it was still none of my business. Stubbornly I hefted the sledgehammer.
    “Maybe what happened,” I suggested, “is that Wanda just got tired of the witches of Eastport.”
    I went on to describe the scene at the Quoddy Village house, a mixture of New Age mysticism, old-world superstition, and Gregory Brand's patronizing style, which he'd displayed both during and after the canned-goods dinner we'd all . . . well, “enjoyed” might not be exactly the right word for it.
    “Greg's like one of those how-to-empower-yourself gurus that used to be giving thousand-dollar seminars all over the place,” I said, “before people with money got tired of mingling with the great unwashed in seedy hotel banquet halls and started hiring individual life coaches instead.”
    I turned toward the remnants of the porch, readying the hammer. “And kids can spot a phony a mile