I froze. Of course. How long would it have taken Mama Warren to call her boy and congratulate him on his new girlfriend and imminent nuptials? She probably called the minute we hung up to ask him where we were registered and what colors we were featuring.
“I think we should talk, don’t you?” he said.
I wasn’t so sure.
Warren said he was calling from Massachusetts. He was headed south with another driver and they’d just made a pit stop at a service station about three and a half hours away from Springfield.
“I want to explain,” he said, “about Monica.”
“Go ahead, explain.”
“I can’t talk now. I’m still on probation with the trucking company and the fella I’m with today is being a real hard case. He’s been busting my chops about being on the phone so much.”
Right. I bet he’d spent a lot of time on the phone with Mom. “What about tomorrow morning?” I said.
“We have to be in Virginia by then.”
They had an official two-hour rest stop planned not far from Springfield. The other driver had a girlfriend nearby. The plan was for Warren to catch some z’s in the truck while his colleague had a conjugal visit. Instead, he offered to come to my place, but there was no way I was giving him my address. I suggested a more public venue, the diner. I’d feel safe there and he knew where it was.
With any luck someone would also be at the police substation across the road, and the Dunkin’ Donuts in that same strip of stores was open late. And even if they were both closed, the Springfield police department sign might be enough of a deterrent if Warren had anything on his mind besides talking.
“The owner of the diner has an office at the back,” I said. “We can meet there if the place is closed.” We agreed to meet in three and a half hours.
If I hadn’t lost track of the time when I was online and then on the phone with Grant I’d have realized that three and a half hours from then was 1 A.M. I wasn’t stupid enough to meet a total stranger in a parking lot at that hour. I hit star sixty-nine on my phone but was unable to connect. Either Warren was in a dead zone or the other driver was still hassling him about the calls and had made him turn off his cell. I drove to Babe’s.
Three or four small parties were crammed into booths, laughing and finishing up with dinner. One guy sat at the counter nursing a soft drink and staring into space.
“Look what the cat drug in,” Babe said. I knew she’d said drug to be funny, but drug had assumed a whole new meaning in the last two weeks, and I didn’t laugh. She pursed her lips. “One of those days?”
“Guess who I just got a call from,” I said, climbing on a stool a safe distance from the others. Babe brought over two coffees, one for me and one for her.
“Let’s see, Sir Paul McCartney-he wants you to redesign the gardens for his new castle?”
“Funny. No, Jeff Warren.”
“I give up. Who’s Jeff Warren?” she asked.
One bleary-eyed day and I had lost touch with all the humans I knew. I brought Babe up to speed on my online research and marathon phone call with Mama Warren.
“Dang it, girl, you do have a knack for this stuff,” she said. We clinked mugs. “So some guy gets a new job driving a truck and everything changes for two towns and one family. This is like that butterfly-wings-on-the-other-side-of-the-planet thing, isn’t it? You’re not seriously going to meet him, are you?”
I shook my head and handed her a note I’d written for Warren. If he had time to meet me tonight, he’d have time to answer some questions, and I didn’t want to forget anything. I asked Babe to tack it to her back door when she closed up.
“Can I read it?”
“Sure.”
Surprise, bewilderment, and finally concern registered on Babe’s face as she read the note with my questions. “Caroline Sturgis knows these people? Whodathunkit? Two weeks ago I would have bet the most dangerous thing she’d ever done was try the new aesthetician at the day spa.” She let out a long low whistle.
“These sound like some nasty characters,” she said, refolding the note and slipping it into her back pocket. “How do we know our truck driver friend isn’t one of them? Or that he isn’t working for this man Donnelley?”
I didn’t know. That’s why my plan was to leave the note on her back door. I’d return at around 12:30 and hide in the shopping strip across the street to see what happened when Jeff Warren arrived and realized I wasn’t coming. My note said something had come up, but wouldn’t he please help us out by answering some questions. Babe didn’t like the plan.
“Why do you have to come at all? Why not just leave the note and see what happens?”
I’d thought of that. But if Jeff really sat down to write the answers like the good boy his mother thought he was, I’d run across the street and tell him I’d just been detained. If he got pissed off and left, then he knew more than he’d suggested and had another reason to want to meet me.
“Can’t you just call O’Malley?” Babe said, still trying to talk me out of it.
“And tell him what? I’m meeting a man, does he want to make it a threesome? Jeff Warren knows something. By accident or design, he’s the reason this whole thing started. I’ll be careful. Besides,” I said, coming around the counter to refill my coffee mug, “he’s a hardworking guy-even his two gold-digging ex-wives admit that. And his mother says he’s a good boy. Aren’t you always after me to find some nice guy?”
Babe was not amused.
“What did you find out about this Donnelley character and the woman who was arrested with them?” she asked.
After Warren’s call, I did an online search for Kate Gustafson and the charming Mr. Donnelley. It didn’t take long. Kate had been paroled after serving two years of her sentence. She died in a fire at a bar not long after that. Eddie’s digital trail seemed to end a year and a half ago, right after his release from prison. Disappeared like a puff of smoke.
But how does someone intentionally disappear? No doubt, like everything else, things were easier if you had money. Caroline had done it, but that was years ago before everything we did left an online trail like the silvery tracings of a slug. Now it was harder. We might just as well have microchips placed in our necks like some suburban pets.
I never knew how they reckoned amounts from years ago versus current dollars, I just knew whatever the number was then, it would be worth more now. In 1986, I was a fine judge of Cabbage Patch dolls and Strawberry Shortcake merchandise, but I didn’t know what any of it cost.
“Pete and I bought the diner around then, for a helluva lot less,” Babe said. “If someone invested that money wisely for him, Donnelley could have been sitting on quite a pile when he got out. With that much money he could have bought a new identity and gone anywhere in the world.”
Except something told me Donnelley hadn’t left the money with a trusted financial adviser who’d invested it soundly on his behalf. More likely he’d hidden it or given it to a compatriot who didn’t spend twenty years in jail. Was it possible Caroline knew where the money was, or had it, and she was still lying to Grant, to all of us?
If Caroline’s parents and grandmother didn’t die leaving her well provided for, where had she gotten the money she was living on when she met Grant? My head was swimming with different scenarios. I had to find out what really happened and Jeff Warren could fill in some of the blanks.
“I don’t like this,” Babe said, handing over her spare key. She made me promise to call her after Warren and I met, just in case.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” I said.
“You’re already doing something stupid.”