As far as Lucy was concerned, it felt like a date. With the prospect of a whole free evening, she was carefree and lighthearted. Nana had the kids. She and Tommy were on their own with her new friend Doris safely stowed in the backseat of Tommy’s Ford Explorer. The old woman sat dozing, her head resting against the closed window and her treasured photo album clutched tightly to her breast.
Tommy’s friend in the state patrol had given him Doris’s home phone number, but when they tried calling, no one answered. The original plan had been for Tommy and Lucy to retrieve Doris’s car from the impound lot and tag-team it back to the house. The hitch in that program came along when the towing company required full payment and an impound fee before releasing the vehicle. Yes, a purse had been found in the abandoned Jaguar; yes, the photo ID clearly belonged to Doris Ralston. Unfortunately, of the several credit cards stashed in the old woman’s wallet, there wasn’t one that was valid. They had all been canceled.
“Okay, then,” Tommy said. “We’re not paying it. Somebody who’s driving around in a Jaguar can cough up towing charges a lot easier than we can. We’ll just take her home and drop her off. After that, I’ll take you to Applebee’s for dinner.”
Dinner together without the kids? Lucy thought. What could be better?
Seemingly worn out by her adventure at Burger King, Doris slept the whole way home.
“I still don’t understand how she wound up on I-8,” Tommy said. “If she was going to Palm Springs, like she said, why wasn’t she on I-10?”
“She probably got confused at one of the freeway interchanges,” Lucy said. “When they stack one road over another, it’s easy to get mixed up.”
The guy at the towing company had been kind enough to give them printed MapQuest directions to follow back to Doris’s house. As they were going up the hill from Lincoln Drive, Doris sat up in the backseat. “Almost home,” she said, looking around. “It’s just a few more blocks.”
Except when Tommy tried to turn off Upper Glen Road, they found the driveway blocked by a fire truck and an officer who told them they couldn’t proceed.
“What is it?” Doris asked, alarm in her voice.
“There’s been a fire, ma’am,” the officer said. “No one’s allowed on the property until after the fire investigators finish their work on the scene.”
“But that’s my house,” Doris insisted. “I live there.”
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this, ma’am. I’m afraid nobody lives there anymore. What was your name again?”
“Doris,” she said firmly. “I’m Doris Ralston.”
“Well, I’ll be!” the officer exclaimed as a smile spread across his face. “If you’re Doris, I need to call the detective right away. Everybody thought you were dead!”
Doris bristled at that. “As you can see, I’m not at all dead. Now, if you’ll just get in touch with my daughter, we can straighten all this out.”
Except it turned out that wasn’t the least bit true. It was another hour before Tommy and Lucy were able to divest themselves of Doris and her problems.
“She told me she was scared of someone,” Lucy told the detective who came to collect her. “She said she didn’t want to go home. And she said something had been stolen.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the detective said. “We’ll look into it.”
It was almost ten o’clock by the time Lucy and Tommy stopped at Applebee’s on their way out of town.
“Thank you for helping me with Doris,” Lucy said. “A lot of guys wouldn’t have bothered with a poor old woman like that.”
“Yes,” Tommy said with a grin. “I don’t think your pal Richard from work would have lifted a finger.”
“Are you kidding? That jerk was ready to call the cops on her for sitting in the booth and not buying food, like she was trespassing or something. But what’s going to happen to her now?” Lucy worried. “With her house gone and her daughter missing, who’s going to take care of her?”
“I don’t know,” Tommy said. “We did what we could. Now we need to look after us. What would you like to eat?”
“Anything at all,” Lucy Ramirez told him with a smile, “just so long as it isn’t a Whopper.”