Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103719 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 519(@200wpm)___ 415(@250wpm)___ 346(@300wpm)
Back on the county road, he followed the twists and turns, but the magic was gone. He was simply about getting himself from point A to B now.
When he came up to the house that Lydia had rented, he pulled off onto the shoulder, but didn’t go down the driveway. No reason to. There were children’s bikes in the front yard and a swing set off to the side. A minivan was parked by the back door, and a black Lab who was thick as a couch cushion got to his or her feet and started barking at him.
Well, guess she had given up her lease. He’d assumed she was still getting her mail there and that that was where she had gone when she’d brought her fall and winter clothes over.
Maybe she’d moved out then.
Hitting the gas, Daniel kept going, even though he wasn’t sure where to head next. That issue was solved quick. Candy, the WSP receptionist, had a small house just out of town, and even though he couldn’t remember her last name, he knew where her place was. Cutting the acceleration as he came up to her mailbox, he didn’t bother with a turn signal as he piloted the way onto her drive—
Another short stop.
Lydia’s car was in the driveway. Which might have been good news—the kind of thing that suggested the WSP had lost some funding but was still a going concern working out of Candy’s home—except he’d been told the sedan had been totaled when his woman had hit a deer.
The vehicle looked very structurally sound, not a ding or a dent on it.
Footing the bike forward, he left the engine at an idle, got off, and walked around the front of the car. Nope, no catastrophic damage. No obvious repairs—and besides, given that she’d told him it had been totaled, there should have been no way that kind of shit could have been fixed in a week or ten days, especially out here in the sticks.
The town’s mechanic only worked when he felt like it.
“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
At the Brooklyn accent, Daniel looked over to the front door of the cottage. Candy, last name chemo-brained and forgotten, was leaning out, and yeah, wow. Her hair was the color of a pumpkin, an orange that had absolutely no foundation in the natural chromatics of human follicles. The sixty-year-old was wearing a knitted sweater that had a Santa scene on it, the reindeer racing over her shoulder, the big guy in the red suit with the white beard perched on her hip. The yarn’s knotting was such that there was a sculptural quality to the depiction.
In contrast to all that winter-ready, she was wearing flip-flops—and her toenails were a shiny red and green, like she was in the process of polishing them.
Clearly, she was all ready for Christmas. Like maybe she’d started her countdown on Labor Day.
“Hey,” he said as he went over to the woman.
“You’re looking… great.”
“You never were a good liar, Candy.”
“Ah, how would you know.” She stepped aside. “Where’s Lydia? You wanna come in?”
Well, that answered one of his questions. “I’m okay, and I don’t want to take up much of your time.”
“Time’s all I got. Come in.”
After he shut off the bike’s engine, he was all but sucked into the house, and the decor was like the dress code the woman always sported, full of knickknacks and homey stuff.
“Hey, I know that,” he said.
“What?”
Going over to a diorama that was on a bookshelf full of figurines, he nodded. “Thomas Kinkade. They sold twelve hundred of these things in two minutes last month.”
Candy’s blue lids went wide. “How the hell would you know that?”
“I’m a fan of QVC, too.”
“No shit. I guess all those drugs really did fuck you up.” She laughed. “I’m kidding.”
“No, you aren’t.” He didn’t want to sit down. But where was he going? Not back to C.P. Phalen’s right now. “Ah, so can I ask you a couple of things?”
“Is this a job interview? Because I’m technically enjoying unemployment and I have another six months to go. I’m treating it like a staycation. I’m making bread and knitting.” She ran her hands down her sweater. “I made this. It’s ugly as hell, but I’m proud of it. Then again, I live alone with cats who don’t have an opinion about my clothes—what was the question?”
He debated about how honest to be. Then decided to take a page out of Candy’s vibe.
And fuck it.
“How long has the WSP been shut down?”
Candy went over and sat down on her plaid couch. Moving a set of needles into her lap, she resumed some kind of knit-purling with bright pink yarn. “It’s about three months now, but I’m doing good. I got a year of severance up front. I have to say… Lydia really took care of me when she closed shop.”