Free Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Page B

goals like finishing school, getting a job, and staying off substances. Or anyway I hoped they were achievable.
    “What's up with all the spend-time-with-Dad stuff anyway, all of a sudden?” I asked.
    Sam opened the washer again, stuffed a few more socks into it, tipped his head consideringly at the result, and added some T-shirts. The way he overloaded the thing, you'd think I charged him a quarter for using it instead of only threatening to.
    Closing the lid, he replied, his face troubled, “It's just . . . I don't know, Mom, but I'm kind of worried about him lately. The way he talks to me, the way he acts . . .”
    The washer began rumbling loudly as it labored; for Sam's laundry anyway maybe we'd have been better off with a cement mixer. Over the sound, he finished, “I think he doesn't feel very good, or something.”
    A snort of unkind laughter escaped me. “Victor? Are you kidding? Sam, the only time he doesn't feel good is when girls half his age turn him down for dates. The rest of the time he's a man of steel, you know that.”
    And especially when it came to his heart, I added silently. Victor was older now and his conquests were fewer, but just as when I was married to him they lasted about as long as the bloom on a fresh-cut rose.
    After that, whammo. But I'd long ago decided not to subject Sam to any more of that kind of information. For one thing, Sam still thought the swath his father cut through the world of women was remarkable, even somehow admirable.
    It was a further reason I thought Sam should spend less time with Victor, rather than more.
    “Probably he ate a bad clam,” I said. “And you'd better look out, he gets even sicker on bouncy little airplanes.”
    But I could see I was getting nowhere. Sam's face closed the way it always did when his mind was made up.
    “Hey,” he said quietly, taking a banana from the fruit bowl. “Mom. I've thought about it, and I'm doing this. I'm sorry if you don't like it, but—”
    Right, message understood. Where chartering a plane down to the Celtics games was concerned, I could stand at the end of the runway and wave as they took off.
    But otherwise I should keep out of it.
Maybe,
I thought in a final little burst of last-ditch optimism,
something else will keep them from going
.
    I turned to another subject. “Sam, do you know anyone—or anyone who might know anyone—who deals in oxycontins?”
    Sam paused in the act of feeding half a banana peel to Monday. The old Lab loved them, even scarfed up shriveled ones from the side of the road when she got the chance.
    Next he fed the other half to Prill, who didn't care for them, but if Monday had something, the big red Doberman had to have it, too. Finally his face turned toward me, grinning.
    “Yeah, actually I do. Why, d'you want some?” my son teased.
    I gathered that during the pause he'd been deciding what to say and how to say it. A recovering alcoholic as well as an ex–drug user, he'd had a bad slip the previous winter. He knew I was touchy on the topic.
    “No. There's a girl missing,” I said, and filled him in on Dibble's murder and Wanda's disappearance.
    Sam frowned thoughtfully, and in that moment he looked just like his father when his father was twenty. Right about then the whole world is a fellow's oyster if only he knows it.
    Victor had known. “There's someone,” Sam said carefully, “I used to hang out with. She might be able to tell you something.”
    Used to
. I kept my face still, determined not to press him for details: when? how? and how well had he known this person?
    He waited until he was sure I wasn't about to come down on him like a ton of bricks, then went on.
    “Luanne Moretti. She lives here in Eastport. You want to make sure the missing girl isn't hooked into the drugs somehow? Is that it?”
    The name wasn't familiar, but there was no particular reason why it should be. “Mmm, not exactly,” I replied.
    I still couldn't believe Wanda was connected to the pills in