Free Nail Biter by Sarah Graves

other hand, if you spilled red wine on a tablecloth at one end of the island, ten minutes later people were arguing the relative merits of bleach versus lemon juice at the other end, and by the way had anyone else noticed that you were drinking a lot lately?
    And it was
my
house the drugs were found in. Well, Ellie's too, but Ellie was so well liked around Eastport that no one would accuse her if she were selling the stuff from a pushcart.
    So I'd be getting the blame, and never mind that the story would be far-fetched in the extreme; on the Eastport grapevine an ounce of
colorful
beat a pound of
believable
.
    “You've made a few enemies in town lately even on top of that,” Bob observed. “Bad-mouthing Gene Dibble, for example.”
    “Yeah,” I said sourly. “Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.”
    Because despite the way I'd soft-pedaled my opinion of him after finding him at the rental house, in my opinion Dibble had been a troublemaking son of a bitch.
    And I'd said so recently, out loud and in public. “Bob, he was outside the fish fry at the Congregational Church last Friday night. Up on his soapbox, loaded to the gills and spouting his nonsense.”
    The gist of it had been that the Quoddy Village tenants were summoning up the Devil. “So what was I supposed to do, just stand there and keep my mouth shut?”
    As I was saying this, my son Sam drove up and went into the house with a laundry bag over his shoulder. Ellie looked at me;
What if it were Sam?
her expression said.
    “No, no,” Bob replied placatingly, “I know what a royal pain he was, Jake. Thing is, though, a lot of other people heard you. His people, who go—went—to those street-corner Sunday sermons of his.”
    “Sermons,” Ellie spat. “That's a laugh. Gene Dibble made a hobby of getting people riled up about anybody who was different. And you know it,” she added to Bob.
    “Yes, I do know it,” he responded evenly. “Eugene approved of white, Protestant, and male, and he had the tar and feathers out for everybody else.”
    He hitched up the utility belt. Bob rarely used any of the items on it, but he said the one time he ended up needing any of them, he wanted them handy.
    Even more, he wanted Eastport's few bad guys to know they were handy. “But that's neither here nor there,” he went on. “The thing is, his pals include some pretty vindictive personalities.”
    “And they talk,” Ellie conceded quietly, having sussed Bob's point, too. Drugs in my house plus Dibble being found dead in it, and now a missing girl . . .
    If you wanted, you could base a fairly effective character-assassination program on all that. Which Eugene's pals
would
want; in short, in the let's-make-a-meal-of-her department it was a pretty good bet that I was about to be served up hot.
    Suddenly that porch wreckage looked like a lot more fun than it had half an hour earlier. For one thing, there were no killers in it, and for another I doubted any missing girls were hiding among the rotted planks, busted support posts, and rusty railings strewn gaily over my front lawn.
    But in Bob's mind Ellie and I were the town busybodies, and I supposed he figured that for once he might as well get some use out of us. I sighed.
    “Okay,” I said. “I'll poke around a little, see what I can find out about where Wanda might have gone.”
    Bob looked satisfied. “Good. She's pretty sure to be here on the island. State guys put a checkpoint on the causeway to try to pick up any known drug dealers, soon as they found the bag and got the truck wreck cleared. So even if she tried hitchhiking, no one could've taken her off in a vehicle.”
    I thought a minute about Wanda hitchhiking, then put the idea immediately into the category of
when pigs fly
. That along with the checkpoint at least narrowed things down a bit. And the island was only seven miles long by two miles wide.
    “And I guess we could put a few feelers out, ask around. But that's all,” I cautioned Bob