Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [77]
Outside in the yard, the dog sat up, tilted his head back and howled as if a fire truck was splitting the night with its siren.
Chapter 28
Rocky hit the redial button. She had already left a message at the funeral home ten minutes ago. She wanted to speak to a person, not a recording. She wanted the phone number of Liz’s parents. The funeral home had been listed in the obituary and that was all she had. The Townsends were unlisted; she’d already tried calling Information. She’d gone into Tess’s house and tried everything to search for them on the Internet. Nothing. Isaiah was still out of town and he had been the only one to talk to them on the phone. As a last-ditch effort, she tried the vet clinic in Orono, but they were closed for two days. “In case of emergency, leave a message for the doctor on call and he’ll get back to you.” Rocky had tried the doctor on call and he said he couldn’t give her information from another veterinarian’s office.
Cooper had been gone for four days and Rocky was frantic. She had never been this clear about anything. She had made a terrible mistake and now she was going to fix it. She hit the redial button for the funeral home in Providence seventeen more times in the next hour. Then on the eighteenth time, a voice said, “Harsdale Mortuary.”
Rocky’s voice stuck in her throat, then she swallowed hard and spoke. “I’d like to call the Townsends in Providence to offer my condolences and I believe you handled the arrangements of their daughter Elizabeth. Do you have their phone number?”
“Who’s calling please?”
“This is an old friend of Liz’s from Maine. I just found out about her death,” said Rocky. Why had she fabricated this lie, why didn’t she just tell the man that she was the dog warden and that she needed to get in touch with the Townsend’s about the dog?
“We can’t give out phone numbers of our clients. But you can send your condolence card to us and we’ll be sure to get it to them,” said the as yet unidentified man.
“I’ve already done that. Now I want to call them. Calling is better. I mean I used to have their phone number, but I’ve changed address books and that was back when Liz lived with her parents. I just don’t have the address now, it’s not like I never had the address and phone number. So could you just give me the street address? I’d like to send flowers too,” said Rocky.
“We can handle the flower arrangements also. What would you like to send? Do you have a price range?” he asked.
Rocky hung up.
Because she was desperate for any connection to Liz and Cooper, Rocky decided to drive over to the old Hamilton place where Liz had so briefly lived, possibly for only a few days. Tess had described it as one of the few old houses that had ventured toward the center of the island. Almost all the old vacation houses were built as close to the shore as possible, but this house was the last house on a sandy road that plunged inward, crossing a small bridge over a marsh, surrounded on both sides of the lane by impenetrable growth, tangled and dense.
The road ended in the yard of an older house that had gone through a series of additions and remodels. Like so many of the houses, it was built on the uncompromising waves of rock that layered much of the island. The core of the weathered house was tucked behind a façade of screened in porch. On either side, newer additions had been attached with limited regard for symmetry.
She opened the door on the truck and the groaning creak of door hinges sounded louder out here. She made a mental note to blast the hinges with WD40. The owners of the house had made a heroic effort to keep about an acre cleared of the encroaching undergrowth. Rocky looked at the large outbuilding where a riding mower was likely to live. She grabbed her gloves from behind the front seat and slammed the door shut. A damp wind whistled in the clearing. She was not going to think about Hill today.
Had this been Liz’s dream, to come here with her