I grab my parka and a pair of boots. Together they hide all but the knees of my red flannel pajamas. I pull on an old ski cap, tuck my hair inside, and avoid looking at the mirror. I’m out the kitchen door, careful to lock it behind me. I don’t normally lock the cottage doors, but I don’t often go for a spin at two-thirty in the morning either.
The roads are slick but empty, and within minutes I’m doing eighty along Route 28, a two-lane road that snakes around the dark shoreline of Pleasant Bay. There is no moon tonight and snow falls steadily as I cross the Chatham line into East Harwich and speed toward Orleans, Geraldine’s hometown.
In no time, I approach the ENTERING ORLEANS sign, a plain square placard I’ve probably passed thousands of times in my life. INCORPORATED 1797, it says. Funny the things you notice doing eighty in the middle of the night.
The flashing blue lights are just about in my backseat before I notice them, though. Damn. At this particular moment, there is probably one police officer on all of Cape Cod who’s not in an all-night doughnut shop. And here he is.
The cop takes forever to leave his car so I jump out of mine. He’s surprised to find me standing in the road-in the falling snow-when he opens the cruiser door. His eyes come to a grinding halt at my knees as he emerges. I wish I’d changed.
The cop shakes his head, then straightens up and faces me, pretending he’s seen nothing out of the ordinary. He looks like a tall version of Opie from Mayberry R.F.D. And he doesn’t look much older than Luke.
“Ma’am,” he says, polite as a Boy Scout, “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait in your car…”
“Officer, listen, I’m an attorney. A former ADA.”
He shakes his head and raises gloved hands to shut me up. “We don’t make the deals, ma’am. The lawyers do that.”
I have an overwhelming urge to smack Opie into silence.
“Please, ma’am, wait in your car. It’s dangerous in the middle of the road.”
I restrain the smack impulse and use my angry mother voice instead. “Listen to me.”
Opie’s head jerks back and his eyes grow wide. His mouth opens, but no words emerge. The angry mother voice is better than a smack any day.
“I’m not looking for a deal. I’m on my way to a colleague’s house-”
He nods knowingly. “And at the rate you were going, you’d have gotten there yesterday.”
“-to make sure she’s all right. I have reason to fear she may not be. Her phone’s been disconnected-it’s out of service, anyway-and I-”
Opie raises his hands yet again, then points to the Thunderbird, ordering me back to it. I’m just a routine middle-of-the-night stop, another speedster with a sob story. Well, I can fix that.
“The colleague I’m worried about is Geraldine Schilling.”
His hand freezes, still pointing at my old car. “Geraldine Schilling? You mean the new DA?”
“Yes. That’s the one.” I wonder how many Geraldine Schillings he thinks there are in Orleans. “She lives-”
“We know where she lives.” He opens the cruiser door, reaches for the radio.
“What are you doing?”
“Calling it in.”
“But I don’t know for sure that anything’s wrong.” The truth is, though, I’m relieved that he’s calling. Geraldine’s house is a stone’s throw from the Orleans station. They’ll be there long before I will.
“Doesn’t matter. You think she’s in trouble and her phone’s out. She’s the DA. That’s enough.”
He gets back into his car and again directs me to mine. “You should head home, ma’am.” He points his radio at me. “Slow. We’ll take it from here.”
Fat chance.
Opie pulls out first, lights still flashing, siren newly activated, but the old Thunderbird is riding his tail in seconds. It’s too bad that the streets are empty, that no one’s around to witness this scene. It’s not every day you see a middle-aged woman in an old car chasing a young cop in a screaming cruiser.