Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Page A

Wade's oversize-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, affectionately known around our house as The Beast.
    “Hey,” he said, “don't I get a hello kiss?”
    Oh, did he ever. “How'd you know I was up there?”
    He shrugged. “Process of elimination. I knew which rooms the tenants had, didn't think you'd be bunking in with any of them.”
    Just the thought made me grimace. “That's for sure. But didn't they need you for . . . ?”
    “The wreck?” He shrugged. “Yeah, probably they did. But I did my share, and after a while I had a feeling maybe you needed me worse.”
    And that in a nutshell was Wade. “Thank you,” I said.
    Wade smiled back at me, a tall, broad-shouldered, craggy-faced knight in rain-soaked armor, riding a squat, four-wheeled steed that belonged in a heavy-artillery battle.
    Then he fired up The Beast with a roar loud enough to wake everyone in the Quoddy Village house, including possibly Eugene Dibble.
    “Hang on,” he yelled, his voice snatched away by the wind as we turned into it.
    The trip home was a wet, noisy, bruising assault on every muscle and bone in my body, The Beast howling as it powered through flooded gullies, swerved around huge uprooted trees, and muscled its way up steep embankments, only its small yellow headlamps glaring ahead of us until we'd bypassed the causeway.
    So it wasn't until the lights of town spread welcomingly before us that I thought again of the sound I'd heard coming from just outside the spare room, back at the tenants' house.
    The deliberate sound, soft but unmistakable, of footsteps oh-so-stealthily approaching my closed but unlocked door.
     

     

Chapter 4
     
    Ellie and I had a sort of game we played back and forth sometimes, called 1823. In it we took turns coming up with facts related to the year in which my old house was built.
    For example, “In 1823,” Ellie said early the next morning after the fiasco out at the rental property, “Edgar Allan Poe was fourteen years old.”
    We were on my front lawn contemplating the porch wreckage; I'd already brought her up-to-date on all that had gone on at the tenants' place.
    “Nice,” I said of her game contribution. We'd used up the easy ones: the Monroe Doctrine, the invention of Santa Claus, and the patenting of roller skates, for instance.
    So we'd gotten a little loose on the rules for what made an acceptable entry; later I would learn that 1823 was the death-year of Edward Jenner, developer of the smallpox vaccine.
    But I didn't know it yet. So when Ellie made a challenging little “your turn” gesture at me, I was about to offer the start of construction on the British Museum in London.
    Just then, though, Eastport police chief Bob Arnold's squad car pulled up to the curb across the street.
    I'd talked to him already, too, and I wasn't particularly eager to do it again; the whole episode was like a nightmare I just wanted to shake free of as soon as possible.
    But now here he was. “Morning, ladies,” he said, getting out of the car.
    A stout, round-faced fellow with a ruddy complexion, pale thinning hair, and small rosebud lips that didn't look as if they belonged on a police officer, Bob wore a gray cop-uniform shirt, blue serge slacks, and black utility shoes.
    His belt was loaded with many items of professional policing gear: sidearm, baton, radio, pair of handcuffs, and so on. “Got yourself quite a project,” he added to me with a glance at the front steps.
    Which was an understatement. Then he said what he'd come to say and I just stood there wondering if I'd heard him right.
    “Oh, you've got to be kidding,” Ellie said finally, but Bob just shook his head.
    The storm had blown through with the speed of a freight train, leaving behind a washed-clean morning sky bright with sunshine and crisp with the threat of early snow.
    “You're saying Wanda Cathcart is
missing
?” Ellie demanded.
    “Ayuh,” Bob allowed unhappily. “'Fraid so.”
    The trees in the yard were stripped, their branches