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“Maybe he’s gone to the nearest Kmart,” I say lightly. “You don’t have a Kmart here, do you?”
“Yeah,” he admits. “His butler or housekeeper or whatever you want to call him comes here a couple of times a month to pick things up. But he’s not real friendly like either. His name is Jeffrey. Doesn’t talk much.”
“Maybe Ethan Greene is secretly Batman,” I jest.
Rick doesn’t laugh. “Maybe. But he’s no caped crusader for justice, if you ask me. A couple of years ago, a trio of kids from Aberdeen went up to Pine’s Lookout on a dare.”
A tiny shudder creeps up my spine. OK, I know it’s the atmosphere, but still –
“They chugged up in their car, even though we warned them it was private property. Nobody really knows what happened that night, but those kids never came back here to Main Street. They fled back to Aberdeen faster than you could say ‘Halloween’. What happened up there, none of us here ever found out. Those kids weren’t telling.”
I make a mental note to check this story out in Aberdeen.
“But surely someone must have said something,” I say.
He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Then there was that funny incident four years back with the police.”
My ears prick up like antennae. “Police?”
“Yeah.” Rick is clearly enjoying himself, claiming my attention like this. “They came around to Main Street, asking about some hooker from St. Louis who had gone missing. Turns out her pimp says she went with someone who fit the description of Ethan Greene.”
“What happened?”
“The police went up the hill looking for him, but they came back empty-handed.” Rick sounds disappointed. “Hooker was never found.”
“Maybe she absconded with someone else.”
“Or maybe . . . just maybe . . . ” His eyes gleam.
I laugh uneasily, spooked despite myself. “Maybe you’re reading too much into all this.”
I don’t know, but for some reason, I have this awful image of the hooker’s dead body being buried in an unmarked grave behind the Pine’s Lookout mansion that I have yet to lay my eyes upon.
Come on, I tell myself. This is David Kinney we are talking about, or whatever name I think he goes by now. Ethan Greene might not even be David Kinney for all the clues in my sleuthing. I might have been kidding myself this whole trip. Ethan Greene might turn out to be some psychopath who is permanently holed up in his mansion, kind of like the mad scientist in Edward Scissorhands.
“Folks don’t talk without a reason,” Rick warns me. “Say, you hungry? I’ve got a break coming up in fifteen minutes. If you want to grab a quick bite – ”
“No thanks.”
He seems disappointed.
“I’ve already eaten,” I add.
“So . . . you wanna wait till eleven when I get off . . . or do you want to go find my Mom? I can call her right now.”
I make a swift decision. “Sure. Call her. I’ve been driving all day and I need to shower and stuff.” I’m sure I smell ripe, though Rick is too polite to say so. “Do you have an address? I can go find the place myself.”
“Sure.” Rick seems eager again.
He sketches some directions involving turning this way, and that way, and looking out for landmarks like ‘the old red barn’ and ‘the broken scarecrow’ on the back of a magazine. I’m beginning to feel more and more like Dorothy stepping out of Kansas.
“You got it?” he asks me, concerned.
“Yeah, I’ve got it. After all, I found Kelowna, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did.”
“See you later.” I take the magazine and straighten my hair. I’m in a simple red blouse which I wear over a comfortable pair of jeans. I’m dressed to drive long distance, not to impress guys.
Outside, the rain is screaming down as if the sky hasn’t opened since the days of Noah. I don’t have an umbrella. The magazine with the directions is too precious to use as a shade, and so I bolt to my car, very glad for the fact that I parked it curbside.
I drive off, putting my windscreen wipers on max, and even that is not enough to confer visibility of more than ten meters. I have my headlights on too. For once, I’m glad I’m in a small town and there isn’t a lot of traffic for me to contend with.
I’m good at following directions, and so I drive very slowly. It’s a bitch to peer through the rain. The houses and buildings look washed and semi-translucent, like someone has splashed a grey coat of paint all over them. The road is a winding mess.
I don’t know exactly how I wound up at this junction, but I think I’m lost. I stop the car in the middle of the road, aware than any moment, a blaring truck could crash into me from behind. But somehow, I don’t think there are many blaring trucks out here.
