“We have an overnighter planned for this weekend.” When Jack was silent, she looked up. “Someday you’re going to have to deal with my having a real relationship.”
Jack gave a little smile. “So this one isn’t real?”
She put her magazine down. “I don’t know. Alastair is lovely. A real gentleman, but there’s something missing.”
Jack leaned back in the chair, his leg in its cast stretched out. “Passion, maybe? That feeling where he so wants to touch you that he can’t sleep? When he leans over you, the smell of your hair makes him dizzy? The way seeing you even talk to another man makes him feel so primal that he wants to hit, maim and kill? That’s what’s missing?”
She was blinking at him.
“Sir, your truck is ready,” the dealer said.
Jack stood up. “You ready to go? We need to decide what to do next. Or if we want to stop.”
Kate was still thinking about what he’d said. Jack held out his hand as though to help her stand up. She didn’t take it but stood on her own.
“Let’s let Aunt Sara decide.”
“I’ll tell you now that nothing stops her.” He turned toward Sara. “Medlar! You ready to go or have you plotted a newGame of Thrones?”
She got up and went to them. “Games the Children Plotis more like it. What have you two cooked up that leaves old me out?”
“After what happened last time?” Jack said. “You’d probably drive your toy car up into the bed of my new pickup and ruin the paint job.”
Kate smiled. “Her yellow, your black. You’d have a bumblebee truck. Hey! You could rename your company Bumblebee Construction. The motto would be Powerful and Fast.”
“Or We Buzz to Please,” Sara said.
Jack shook his head. “My two joke makers. Let’s go home.”
Sara lowered her voice. “Can’t. We have someplace to go first. I found Verna’s landlord, Lester Boggs. Or his widow, anyway. She lives in Hollywood.”
“We take a plane?” Kate asked.
“Hollywood here,” Jack said. “The real one. What are we supposed to find there?”
“Verna traded her nice car to Boggs for an old van, which she packed full of everything they owned,” Sara explained. “We believed they were, uh, ‘taken’ on Friday. Roy saw the van there on Saturday morning. But when Jack and Captain Edison went there later, the van was gone. So who took it?”
Jack and Kate stared at her in silence for a moment.
“Come on,” Sara said. “Let’s go see if his widow knows anything.” She hurried to the door, Kate behind her, Jack on his crutches coming up last.
As always, Kate sat in the middle. She enjoyed fiddling with the new truck’s radio and its GPS system. Sara gave her the Boggs address and she fed it into the system. The female voice told Jack that he needed to make “a legal U-turn” and go back the way he’d come to get on I-75. The map showed the route as going south, then across Miami, then back up I-95. They were to make a huge U to get to someplace that was straight across.
“That’s helpful,” Kate said.
Jack ignored the GPS and drove them directly to an old, quiet suburb. Kate read the house numbers. The one they wanted was well kept.
“Not like his tenants’ places, is it?” There was a muscle working in Jack’s jaw.
As soon as he pulled into the driveway, the front door opened and a young man came out. “Hi. I’m Trent, Lester’s son. You wanted to see the things Dad stored?”
Sara stepped forward. “I sent the text. Yes, we’d very much like to see what you have.”
“I’d love to show it to you.” They followed him to the garage. He punched in the numbers and the door slowly rose. Inside was a hoarder’s paradise. Boxes, bags, a basket full of wigs, toys were all jammed together from floor to ceiling to form an impenetrable wall. The mass seemed to go all the way back but they couldn’t see past the outer shell.
“How old is all this?” Sara asked.
“Older than me,” Trent said. “My dad couldn’t part with anything.”
