“Seeding,” he said. “Watch your step, Sally. You’re not all that steady on your ankle just yet.” He held back the stiff, gnarly branch of a yew tree. There was a barren hill behind the house, and tucked into a shallow recess was a small shack.
“What do you mean, seeding?”
“I don’t like the fact that your dear auntie has treated you like you’re so high-strung no one should trust what you say. I told her that just to see if perhaps something might happen. Then if it does-”
“Amabel would never hurt me, never.”
He looked down at her and then at the shack. “Is that what you believed about your husband when you married him?”
He didn’t wait for her to answer him, just pushed open the door. It was surprisingly solid. “Watch your head,” he said over his shoulder as he stooped down and walked into the dim single room.
“Yuck,” Sally said. “This is pretty bad, James.”
“Yeah, I’d say so.” He didn’t say anything else, just began to look around as he imagined the sheriff had done only days before. He found nothing. The small space was empty. There were no windows. It would be pitch black when the door was closed. Just plain nothing. A modicum of hope, that was all he’d had, but still, he was more than a modicum disappointed. “I’d say that if Laura Strather was kept prisoner here, the guy holding her was very thorough cleaning up. There’s nothing, Sally, not a trace of anything. Well, hell.”
“He’s not hiding in here, either,” she said. “And that’s what we’re really doing here, isn’t it?”
“Both, really. I have a feeling that your father wouldn’t lower himself to stay in this place. There aren’t even any free bathrobes.”
* * *
That afternoon they ate lunch at the Hinterlands. This week Zeke was serving Spam burgers and variations on meat loaf.
They both ordered Zeke’s original-recipe meat loaf.
“The smells make me salivate,” Quinlan said, inhaling enthusiastically. “Zeke puts garlic in his mashed potatoes. Breathe deeply enough and no vampire will come near you.”
Sally was toying with the curved slice of carrot in her salad. “I like garlic.”
“Tell me about that night, Sally.”
She’d picked up the carrot and was chewing on it. She dropped it. Then she picked it up again and slowly began eating it. “All right,” she said finally. She smiled at him. “I might as well trust you. If you’re going to betray me, then I might as well hang it up. The cops are right. I was there that night. But they’re wrong about everything else. I don’t remember a thing, James, not a blessed thing.”
Well, hell, he thought, but he knew she was telling him the truth. “Do you think someone struck you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’ve thought and thought about it and all I can figure out is that I just don’t want to remember, can’t bear to, I guess, so my brain just closed it down.”
“I’ve heard about hysterical amnesia and even seen it a couple of times. What usually happens is that you will remember, if not tomorrow, then next week. Your father wasn’t killed in a horrific way. He was shot neatly through the heart, no muss, no fuss. So, it would seem to me that the people involved in his death shook you so much that’s the reason you’ve blocked it all out.”
“Yes,” she said slowly, then turned around and saw the waitress bringing their plates. The smell of garlic, butter, roasted squash, and the rich aroma of the meat loaf filled the air around them.
“I couldn’t live here and stay trim,” James said. “It smells delicious, Nelda.”
“Catsup for the meat loaf?”
“Does a shark have a fin?”
Nelda, the waitress, laughed and set a Heinz ketchup bottle between them. “Enjoy,” she said.
“Nelda, how often do young Ed and Martha eat here?”
“Oh, maybe twice a week,” she said, looking a bit startled. “Martha says she gets tired of her own cooking. Young Ed is my older brother. Poor man. Every time he wants to see Martha, he has to endure Thelma’s jokes. Can you believe that old woman is still alive, writing in that diary of hers every day and eating that sausage?”