Lucy and I asked for a few minutes to dress.
“Hector, we have to stop meeting like this,” I said, opening the door. The roly-poly security guard was flanked by the same two cops who’d found Lucy’s car in the parking lot.
“One of you ladies Lucinda Cavanaugh?”
Lucy raised her hand shyly as if she was in school; that was probably the last time anyone had called her Lucinda.
The two cops were following up on an anonymous report of a woman stranded in a cabin on the Quepochas reservation. We all looked at Lucy to see what she’d say; it took her all of thirty seconds to get her story together.
“I was stranded, briefly, but my friends came and gave me a lift home.” That was one way to put it-I was a novice liar compared to Lucy.
“Ms. Cavanaugh, you do know that that domicile has been used as a hiding place for William and Claude Crawford, who are wanted for questioning in the murder of Nick Vigoriti?”
“I don’t know anything about that. No one was there when I arrived.” Which was technically true at the time. “I was hiking and I ran out of trail mix so I got tired. The cabin seemed like a good place to wait it out until my friends could come to get me.” Now she was pushing it. I wished I could tell her to keep it simple.
“You were hiking on the Quepochas reservation? Ms. Cavanaugh, we have information that suggests you were brought to that cabin against your will.”
“Absolutely not. Who knew you weren’t supposed to hike there? I thought it was part of the Appalachian Trail.” Even Hector snorted at that one. “My friends will tell you what a health nut I am. I’d had a long drive from New York City and simply wanted to stretch my legs.” If Lucy didn’t watch it, she’d tick these guys off and finish telling her story at the police station. Strangely enough, they seemed to believe her.
“It’s true,” I said. “She’s a walker. She even counts steps.” The exchange was surreal.
Babe said nothing. She stood in her underwear and a Rush T-shirt, with her arms folded, looking tough. The cops seemed to know they weren’t going to get anything out of her, but they tried anyway. She gave one-word answers that were vague enough to be useless. And Lucy and I had branded ourselves as flakes-first, me by reporting Lucy’s car as stolen when it was right there in the Titans parking lot, and now Lucy for having gone walkabout on a strange trail with only a bag of gorp in her back pocket.
If Lucy didn’t tell the cops that Claude took her to the cabin, he couldn’t be charged with abducting her; that would solve at least one of his legal problems. Like Betty had, Lucy helped Claude dodge a big bullet.
Just then, the elevator bell rang and I heard voices in the hall. One of them I recognized as Stacy Winters’s. She was yakking on a cell phone and hung up just as she got to my room.
“What do we have here? Have you girls been grilling cheese sandwiches on the hotel radiator? No, it’s something else, isn’t it?”
We all waited for her routine to finish, then one of the uniformed cops spoke up.
“This is Ms. Cavanaugh,” he said, pointing to Lucy. “She has assured us that she’s all right and in fact went to the Crawfords’ cabin alone and of her own volition.”
“So, you weren’t abducted, not missing, just out.” She resisted the urge to use the word poof.
“That’s correct,” Lucy said. Babe’s example and her own successful exchange with the two less experienced cops gave her the confidence to stand up to Winters. “I’m quite all right. Although I’m a little put out that your men felt the need to go through the bag in the trunk of my car.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Winters said. “If you want to make a claim for damages it’s form C104. You can download it from the town’s Web site. Ms. Holliday, I think the sooner you and your friends leave our little town, the happier we’ll all be. You ladies have a good night.”
When she was a safe distance away, Babe mouthed the word bitch. I agreed.