“SO, WHAT’S THE PLAN, Stan?” Angie asked me.
It was hard not to smile. It was perhaps the first time I’d allowed the corners of my mouth to go up since coming home several hours earlier from the Metropolitan. Although there had been no “family meeting” to fill in Angie and her brother Paul on what had happened, it didn’t take long for them to put it all together. I’d told Paul a couple of things, Angie had spoken to her mother, then the kids compared notes, went back to me and Sarah individually to try to fill in some of the gaps, and they more or less had it. They’d been so good at information gathering, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they didn’t have a more promising future in the newspaper business than Sarah or I, certainly the way things were at the moment.
Paul, freed of work obligations by me, had gone off to a friend’s house, and Sarah had vanished as well, telling Angie she had errands to run at the mall. I doubted that. She just didn’t want to have to keep avoiding me in the house. She needed more space. We hadn’t said a word to each other since Sarah blasted me in the middle of the newsroom for everyone to hear. I wished I could have been one of the people in the audience, rather than one of the featured players. It would have been the greatest bit of office gossip to chew on in years.
Now I was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of me, staring at the wall.
I had fucked up, and didn’t know what to do.
Then Angie came in, sat down across from me with a cup of coffee of her own, and asked her question.
“I don’t really have a plan,” I said.
Angie stirred her coffee, took out the spoon, and licked it. She and I had been through a pretty traumatic set of circumstances a little over a year ago, and that shared experience had given us a special kind of bond since. She’d grown up a hell of a lot since then. She was in her second year at Mackenzie University, and taking, among other things, some psychology courses. But it hadn’t been her classes that had given her insights into human relationships. She had an instinctive feel about those.
“This is not what it’s supposed to be like around here,” Angie said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Has it ever been this bad between you and Mom?” she asked.
I thought a moment, shook my head. “No. That thing, a couple of years ago, with the purse?”
Angie nodded. It was not an easily forgettable episode in our lives.
“That was dumb, but your mom forgave me. And I’ve tried to be a better person since then, not such a know-it-all, not telling everyone how to live their lives. Trying to keep a lid on the anxieties.”
Angie nodded. “We’ve noticed. You’ve been doing not too badly.”
I smiled again. God, she was beautiful, this girl of mine. “Thanks for noticing. But I let myself get dragged into something where I didn’t belong, and it’s blown up big-time.”
“Where do you think Trixie is?” Angie asked. “She’s really got a daughter?”
“So she said, just before she took off. I guess, wherever her daughter is, that’s where she’s going to go.”
Angie knew Trixie. Of course, she’d met her when we used to be neighbors, but Angie had also consulted Trixie, given her area of expertise, for some background on at least one of her psych courses. “I think she’d be a good mom,” she said.
My eyebrows went up. “You think?”
“She’s a nice person. Like, just because she does what she does doesn’t mean she can’t be a nice person. I mean, you’re the one who’s her friend and everything.”
I sighed. “Look where it’s got me.”
She reached out and touched my hand. “You always get in trouble because you care. You care about us, and you care about your friends. Maybe a bit too much, sometimes.”
I smiled. “How’d you get to be so smart?”
Angie smiled. “Mom.”
“I think she thinks I had something going on with Trixie. She left some lipstick when she kissed me, when I was handcuffed to the railing. I wasn’t really in a position to resist.”
Angie said, “I wonder if all the other girls have these kinds of chats with their dads.”
“I don’t, you know. Have something going on with Trixie.”
“I know. I know you’d never do that to Mom.” She paused. “Or to me and Paul.”
I took a sip of cold coffee. “I don’t know what to do now. I’m suspended, Mom’s been demoted. The cops, Detective Flint, they’re probably wondering whether I really do have anything to do with Martin Benson’s death. Trixie’s run off with my car.”
“Too bad you weren’t able to get hers,” Angie said. “It’s a lot nicer than ours.”
“Yeah, well, the police are probably going over it for hidden bloodstains, hairs, you know the drill, you’ve seen CSI. But Trixie showed up at the house after Benson was killed. I don’t think they’re going to find anything.”
Angie got up and went looking for cookies. “I need an Oreo or I’ll die,” she said. She found the bag in the pantry and brought it back to the table. “So who do you think killed that guy? He wrote for the Oakwood paper, right?”
“Yeah. And I don’t know. But I’m wondering if it has something to do with a couple of guys I actually ran into just the other day. Trying to sell the cops stun guns. When Trixie saw the story in the paper about them, she freaked out.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It may be related to something that happened in Canborough a few years ago. Some biker types who got murdered in a stripper bar.”
“You know that school trip I went on, back in high school, to Quebec City?” Angie asked.
“I think so, yeah.”
“One night, we went to this club where they had male strippers. I put a five right into this guy’s thong. I never had so much fun in my life.”
I pictured it, then tried not to. “How many other things have you done that I really don’t want to know about?”
Angie appeared thoughtful. “Seven,” she said. “No, eight.”
I gave her a look.
Angie said, “So, this Canborough thing, are you going to check that out?”
I blinked. “I don’t know. I was sort of thinking about it, in the back of my mind.”
“In the back of your mind,” Angie said. She took the lid off an Oreo, scraped off some filling with her teeth. “Exactly what kind of journalist are you, Dad?”
“Up until today, I was the paper’s top linoleum expert,” I said with mock pride. “Checking out what happened in Canborough might help me figure out where Trixie went.”
“We could get our car back,” Angie said brightly, as though being down a car were the biggest crisis facing our family at the moment.
“That’s true,” I said. “You know,” I added, “I might have a clue.”
Angie’s eyebrows went up. “I love clues,” she said.
I got up and found my jacket in the front hall closet and dug out the receipts I’d snatched from Trixie’s GF300 seconds before Flint had ordered me out of it.
“Where did you get these?” Angie asked, and I told her. She took them from me, went back into the kitchen where we could look at them under better light.
“What are they?” I asked.
Angie glanced at the first one. “A receipt here, for service, like an oil change or something? It’s for a place in Oakwood.”
That didn’t sound very helpful.
“And here’s one for a dry cleaner, also in Oakwood, another for a coffee at a drive-through, hang on, it’s one not far from where we used to live. Hang on, this one looks interesting.”
It was a gas receipt, from a place called Sammi’s Gas Station, with an address in a place called Groverton.
“Where the hell is Groverton?” I said.
Angie shrugged and went to the front hall closet where we keep, on the top shelf, highway maps, old phone books, and scarves no one wears anymore. She was back in a few minutes with an old map, torn around the edges, which she opened onto the kitchen table. “Who folded this up last time?” she asked, dealing with unnaturally folded creases. I found the index and ran my fingers down to the Gs.
“Groverton. L- 7.” I found the box where the L and 7 intersected. “Here it is.”
It was a small town, about a hundred or more miles east of Canborough. Pretty much in the middle of nowhere.
“Hmm,” I said.
“What?” Angie asked.
“Well, I could ask some questions in Canborough on my way to Groverton.”
“That’s my dad,” said Angie.