Free Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Page A

Arnold.
    With any luck Eugene Dibble's killer would be identified and arrested quickly, along with his partner in the drug deal—for that surely had to be why Dibble had ended up dead—and the murder part of this fiasco would be over, along with any rumor of my own participation in it.
    “We can ask Sam to let us know if he hears anything. Check some of the places the kids hang out here on the island, too,” I finished reluctantly.
    Woodsy secluded areas, private little coves, reachable only if you clambered down steep, loose-shale cliffs . . . these had been the places Sam and his friends spent time in as young teens.
    “Me too,” Ellie put in loyally. Because she was right; if Lee were ever missing
we'd
want someone to help
us.
    But there was another reason that I was agreeing to look for Wanda Cathcart, and Ellie probably sensed it. Personal and complicated, it boiled down to the number of people who really do need assistance in this world versus the number who ever get any.
    Young female people, especially. I wasn't up for facing that thought directly, though; not yet. Firmly I shoved away the clammy feelings memory summoned up at the idea of Wanda somewhere alone right now.
    Or worse, not alone. “So okay,” I told Bob again. “But as for Dibble and the drugs, and whatever else people might decide to say I'm involved in—”
    Gossip fodder or no, it was Wanda who interested me, not some mouth-breathing slime toad whose drug deal, predictably and I thought deservedly, had gone south—
    “The rest of this whole mess,” I finished to Bob, “is up to the Maine State Police.”
    Even as I spoke I think I sensed the emptiness of my remark, the foolishness of insisting to myself that in this instance, as in no other, bad things might not lead irresistibly to other bad things.
    Or to worse ones. But at the time I thought I could limit my own involvement. Curtail, as they say, the collateral damage. Because the real reason I'd agreed to Bob's request had nothing to do with my vulnerability to local rumor, Bob's problem, or my feelings for Ellie's daughter Leonora, who might someday need assistance herself.
    The reason was in me, and in the still-fresh, incineratingly shameful memory of my own narrow escape from the kind of trouble I hoped Wanda
wasn't
in, right this very minute.
    That is, if you could actually call what happened to me an escape.
    I could.
    Mostly.
     
     
    After Bob Arnold left and Ellie took Lee to day care, I went inside, where Sam wanted to explain to me why plane chartering was Really No Big Deal Whatsoever.
    “Mom, I'd like to hang out with him more, okay? He's my dad, I want to spend time with him, and he picked this. So is that so strange?”
    “Of course not,” I replied. “I just don't see why you can't do it here in Eastport. I mean he
moved
here to be near you, so you
wouldn't
have to spend zillions of dollars just to—”
    Sam frowned briefly into the washing machine, so heavily loaded it might as well have been trying to mix concrete, then closed the lid and turned to me.
    “Mom,” he said patiently. “I knew you wouldn't approve. But it's all arranged, so try to be cool about it, all right?”
    Outlined against the tall, bright windows of my old kitchen, Sam was tall, dark-haired, and muscular, graceful in the way men are who are comfortable on boats. Today he was wearing dungarees, old deck shoes, and a white T-shirt that said “I'll try to be nicer if you'll try to be smarter” in black letters on the front.
    “How can I be cool about you and your dad turning into a pair of jet-setters?” I demanded.
    It wasn't a jet. From what I'd heard it was a small twin-engine turboprop, and I wasn't all that comfortable about Sam getting onto one of those, either. But the real point was that Victor seemed to be buying Sam's affection, and by doing so getting Sam used to things he couldn't afford and would yearn for later, when he should be thinking about practical matters.
    Achievable