Nail Biter by Sarah Graves Page B

turned skeletal overnight and the lawn beneath them an autumn patchwork of orange and red. For a moment I thought about raking up a pile of the leaves, then just burrowing under it and staying there.
    Instead I dragged my attention unwillingly back to Bob, who pulled a toothpick from his shirt pocket, stuck it in his mouth, and spoke around it.
    “Girl's mother called in a panic about an hour ago, said the kid's gone,” he said.
    I put down my sledgehammer. Around me lay more wreckage of the old porch, broken planks and rusty remnants of the cast-iron railings. A few yards distant, out of the way of possible flying debris, Ellie's baby daughter Leonora slept in her stroller.
    “Wanda wouldn't just happen to be around here by any chance, would she?” Bob asked, chewing on the toothpick.
    “Huh?” I replied intelligently.
    With the coming of day the stealthy sounds of the night before had simplified in memory, the mystery draining out of them until they were no more than a bit of loose wallpaper rustling in the drafty hall.
    “Around
here
?” I repeated, still not getting it, and Ellie looked puzzledly at him, too.
    Down the street a big orange town truck moved slowly along in front of the other old houses, its grinder roaring as the men alongside it shoved fallen tree limbs and other storm debris into its hopper. From its rear spewed a thick gout of yellowish wood chips, which the workers shoveled into enormous piles for later collection.
    “So I guess she's
not
here, then?” Bob yelled over the sound of the truck.
    “No,” I shouted, my voice too loud as the racket faded all at once. “Why would you even think that?” I added in more normal tones.
    “Her mom said she must've gone sometime during the night,” he replied. “And since you also went missing from those very same premises, at about the same time . . .”
    “Oh, for Pete's sake,” I said when I finally understood, or believed I did. “Marge thinks I
took
Wanda?”
    I'd called Bob when I got home and found the phones
were
working here. So he knew all about Wade coming to get me.
    “I can see why Marge Cathcart might jump to conclusions if she's worried,” I added, “but . . .”
    Bob shook his head. “No, she doesn't think you took the girl. I was just hoping for a nice, simple coincidence, that's all. Like maybe Wanda knows where you live and showed up here.”
    But his face said there was more to it than that. Sighing, he gazed down Key Street toward the old redbrick Peavy Library building on the corner, and Passamaquoddy Bay beyond.
    In 1823 Eastport's harbor was so busy, people said you could walk across the bay on the decks of ships waiting to come in. Now a single scallop-dragger motored on it toward the Canadian shore.
    Bob turned to me again. “Crews cleared the jackknifed truck about two this morning, I met the state cops in Quoddy Village 'bout an hour later.”
    He went on, chewing the toothpick. “They got photographs, asked the tenants some questions, transported Dibble's body out of there, and took a walk through the house,” he finished.
    “Was Wanda there then?” Ellie asked reasonably.
    Bob scratched his head. “It isn't real clear. I guess this kid's a little, um . . . unusual?” he asked.
    “Yes,” I told him, and went on to describe shy, speechless Wanda.
    “Yeah, that makes sense,” he said when I'd finished. “She wasn't in the house but Marge told the state police she probably got scared, decided to hide when she saw all the flashing lights show up in the middle of the night. Wind had gone down a lot by that time and the rain had quit,” he added.
    I already knew when the storm had passed. “So?” I demanded, beginning to be impatient. “Then what?”
    I was sorry about Wanda but it was none of my business and anyway, I wanted to get the porch torn down and the wreckage cleared while the sun was still shining.
    “So the staties figured they'd talk to Wanda when she showed up,” Bob went on, “which