Homicide My Own - Anne Argula [19]
I looked at Odd and thankfully he jumped in and said, “Look, how many beds are in that cottage?”
“How many beds?” said Frank. “It’s the honeymoon cottage! There’s only the one.”
“You take the bed, Quinn. You decide what sheets.”
“Do you have a rollaway bed?” I asked them.
“You don’t even wanna sleep in the same bed?” asked Frank.
“We’re not lovers,” I said. “Look at us, I’m old enough to be his mother.”
“Not that old,” said Odd.
“I have a twenty-two year old son in the Navy, for cripessake. Look, we’re working partners. We had no plans to stay over, it just turned out that way.”
“I still have to know what kind of sheets you want,” said Angie.
Flannel sheets were so nice to the touch but they might make me hot. And what was I going to sleep in? I’d have to wash out my skivvies overnight, which put me in that bed in the buff, and Odd in the same room. What if I got hot and kicked away the flannel sheets? Why does everything get so complicated as we get older?
“Just plain cotton,” I said, finally.
“Really? Most people prefer flannel.”
“Yeah, well…”
“Plain sheets it is.”
We tried to make our escape, but she had one more preference to nail down. “What about music? Country? Soft rock…”
I shut the door, started up the car. “Forget about the music, we brought our own,” I said through the open window, thinking about Odd’s tapes.
Angie smiled knowingly. “Brought your own music, hey?” she said, looking up to her husband. “I believe someone is not being entirely honest with us.”
“Or with themselves!” chortled Frank.
We did wind up taking a kind of random tour of the island, in a light rain, down a little winding country road lined with tall cedars. We passed the Tribal Headquarters, the most imposing edifice on the island, and a few intersections of small commerce: a grocery store and video rental joint combined, an auto repair shop, a small nursery, the sheriff’s sub-station.
“Can you believe those two? I wonder what their story is,” I said.
“I’m sure we’ll find out,” said Odd.
“Not if I can help it. They give me the creeps. How could they believe you and I…came in uniform…looking to shack up…you, your age, and…me?”
“You’re a good-looking woman, Quinn, you’d have no trouble finding a guy in his thirties.”
I flushed. My ears were about to blow off. He had no idea. “What would I do with one?”
“The usual stuff.”
“I’m gonna slap you silly.”
“You never thought about it?”
“I’m a married woman, da frick.”
“Well, that’s a tribute to Connors.”
How does he know what I’ve thought about or what I haven’t thought about? And I loved the way he attributed everything to Connors.
“A thirty-year old man,” I told him, “is about twice as mature as a fifteen-year old boy, which puts him at about eighteen. Don’t need one, don’t want one.”
“I was only paying you a compliment.”
“Save it for someone who’ll believe it.”
We found ourselves on the back edge of a boatyard, and a haphazard arrangement of boats on stands, some tarped over. Suddenly Odd said, “Stop the car! Stop! Here!”
I pulled over. “What’s wrong?”
“That boat….” he said. We were looking at a derelict of a fishing boat, blistered and broken, no longer seaworthy. He got out of the car and looked at it through the chain link fence. I killed the engine and joined him there. The boat was called Northern Comfort.
“Yeah, it’s an old boat. What about it?”
“I know this boat. I’ve seen it before.”
“Where?”
“I can’t remember.”
Then, after a moment, he said, “I know who owns this boat, who skippered it for a living.”
“Who?”
“This was Frank’s boat.”
“Frank from Frank and Angie?”
“He made his living on this boat, crabbing.”
“Frank, the weird innkeeper? The man’s half-crippled.”
“Yeah, he got that way working on this boat…the Northern Comfort. It was a good boat in its day.”
“When did he say anything about a crabbing boat?”
I knew the answer. He never did. Odd was not hearing me. He went off in his dreamy way and said, “The money was good. Crabbing