One last call before I hit the road—I dialed my pal at the Springfield Bulletin to report on the corpse flower's progress, or lack thereof.
"Jon, how's it going? Listen, I don't think this baby is going to pop for another two or three days. Do you really want me to stay up here that long? It's only seventy miles, I can always drive back when it does bloom." I told him what I had and he agreed there was enough pre-bloom material for a Sunday feature, so I closed down my computer while we were still on the phone.
"Guess what? Some guy was killed here last night. I talked to him before it happened."
"Well, it'd be damn hard to talk to him after. You're yakking to me about a potted plant when there's been a mysterious death at the old hotel," Jon said. "You will never be a newspaperman. Spill." Jon must have seen too many old Rosalind Russell movies when he was young and impressionable, and liked to affect a 1940s newshound's lingo. It was quite endearing. I told him as much as I knew.
"What does Lucy think?" he asked. "She's got a nose for news."
"She's not here. She stood me up."
Jon and Lucy had met a few months back, and he nursed a puppy-dog crush on her, which she wisely ignored. He knew about the accident on 95 and offered to contact the local hospitals to make sure she wasn't laid up somewhere. Part of me thought he was overreacting, but in the back of my mind I felt like a lousy friend for not having thought of that; I was too busy working her love life into the equation.
"Good idea. My cell signal goes in and out on the Merritt," I said, "but call me if you hear anything. I'm coming home."
Eight
I'd wasted most of the day waiting for Mishkin, but it wasn't a total loss. Apart from my free session with Sveta, Mishkin had instructed the front desk to comp my stay. Since Lucy and her corporate credit card had never showed up, my friends at the Bulletin would be happy about that.
I went outside and waited for the parking attendent to bring my car. Two young guys, one in a gold vest and another exuding all the health and charm of a heroin addict, stood there lighting up. I tried to stand where the secondhand smoke wouldn't drift my way.
The valet pulled my Jeep around to the front of the hotel. I handed him a couple of bucks and pulled out, fiddling with my cell and hands-free cable. I hated talking while I drove, but if Jon or Lucy called, I wanted to know as soon as possible.
There'd be congestion near the hotel, but the Merritt Parkway should be clear by the time I got on it and with any luck I'd be home by 10 P.M.
Can a road be sexy? If it can, then the Merritt is one sexy road. There's a pitch and sway to it that can make you feel like you're dancing with two tons of steel. The more times you drive it, the better you know when to stay to the right and when to lean to the left. And the trees are beautiful. You'd never think that most of the time you're only five minutes away from a Home Depot or a Wal-Mart. There's even a spot near one of the few gas stations where a cell tower has been camouflaged with fake branches—Pinus cell-ostrobus, someone had dubbed it—to make it less offensive.
I was about an hour into the drive and the light was fading. Through the trees the sky had turned pink, then orange, then inky blue. The Jeep's headlights turned on automatically. And so did those of the car trailing a little too close behind me. I checked the speedometer. I was going sixty-five mph, fine for me at this hour, and if he wanted to pass, why the hell didn't he just do it? No one else was around. All right, be cool. Some drivers like to have a lead pony, especially at night. I sped up a tiny bit. He kept pace.
A friend of mine used to be a regional sales rep for a pharmaceutical company and found herself driving all over the East Coast at odd hours of the day or night. She bought an inflatable man doll, and would strap him into the passenger seat for nervous-making occasions just like this. She'd put sunglasses and a hat on him, and throw one rubber arm over the back of his seat to make it seem like she wasn't alone. When she started calling him Ronald, we all got a little worried.
Just pass, you moron. I tensed up, then relaxed a bit as we swung around a long curve and I saw a third car behind the guy trailing me.
I knew there was a Mobil station ahead on the right, and decided to stop for a pee break and a diet Snapple, and to lose my convoy. I signaled well in advance of the stop and pulled in to the middle of the rest area, beyond the pumps, the dog run, and the minimarket.
First one car, then the other, pulled in. They killed their lights fast, and crawled to the far end of the rest area.
Nine
No one got out of either car. And no interior lights suggested that the drivers were either looking at maps or making phone calls. I repositioned my side-view mirror to get a better look at what they were doing. Nada. Were they together? Had they stopped because of me? Why would I even think that? I wasn't usually the jittery type.
I grabbed my bag and casually, I thought, jogged toward the presumed safety of the service station's market. So casually I forgot to lock the car. I fished around in my pocket, found the keys, and locked it with the remote, accidentally hitting the panic button that's supposed to keep robbers away, but really only scares the car's owner. No one even reacted. So much for panic buttons.
At the gas pumps, a young woman was finishing up. She looked about Amanda's age, with multiple piercings in the ears, but not in the eyebrows or nose as far as I could see.
The girl tore off her credit-card receipt, then stuck her head in the driver's-side window and poked her sleeping passenger. "You owe me twenty bucks for your share of the gas." The friend mumbled something and twisted herself into an even more contorted position than before. "Missy can sleep anywhere," the girl said to me, when she saw me looking.
"It's a gift."
She finger-combed her long thick hair straight back from her forehead and it flopped right back into the same position, framing her face when she dropped her hand. "You know how far Greenwich is? We're driving to Missy's parents'."
They looked like Greenwich. Blond, blue-eyed, good kids really, but at that stage of life where they could go either way. The piercings could move from her ears to her tongue or further south, and the artfully streaked hair could turn to a modified Boy George with splashes of green or pink if my last visit to the East Village was any indication of current trends.
Missy and her friend were only half an hour away, and I was twenty minutes from Springfield, but I took my time giving her directions, chatting and keeping one eye on the two cars at the end of the lot. What the hell were they doing? Or didn't I want to know? And when did I get so nosy? I'd heard there were rest stops on the highway that were unofficial hookup spots but had never really believed it. And if that's what they were up to, what was it to me?
The girls finally drove off, and I entered the minimarket, setting off the shrill buzzing doormat, startling me and rousing the small dark clerk who was catching some zzz's behind his Plexiglas shield. His goldtone name badge read RAVI.
He nodded at me, as much to wake himself up as to suggest anything remotely like customer service might be forthcoming. Then he pointed to the back of the narrow building, where the restrooms were, before I'd even asked. I still had a funny feeling about those two cars outside. I was in no hurry to sequester myself in a small locked room, so I killed some time reading the nutritional information on a package of Ring Dings, then started mindlessly plucking items off the shelves as if I did all my grocery shopping at the gas station: water, diet Red Bull—the nice jumbo cans—nuts . . . I drew the line at Slim Jims, even though there'd been a time in my life when I'd considered them one of the basic food groups, along with beer, muffin tops, and martinis.