Page 15

After my uncomfortable conversation with Janelle, I needed a break, so I stuck the phone number for Oliver’s girlfriend, Bess, in my desk drawer.

I called Jon Flanders to see if there was any update on Marty, but got his voice mail.

I started to leave a message, but before I was finished, Jon was calling me back.

“Hi, Morgan, is everything okay?”

“That’s what I was going to ask you.

Any word on Martin?”

There was a pause before he answered, which I knew didn’t bode well.

“We haven’t found him.”

“Do you still think I had something to do with his disappearance?”

“I don’t,”

he said without hesitation, making me feel better about things.

“Some of the evidence does point a finger at you, but I’m satisfied with your explanations.”

I sensed an unspoken for now in there but let it go.

“Thank you.

And if it helps at all, this morning a young man by the name of Keith Olsen came to my store with one of Martin’s Adirondack chairs in his truck.

He said he spoke to Marty yesterday morning, when Marty called him and asked him to pick up the chair and bring it to me.

So there’s proof that Marty was alive and well yesterday morning.”

“Do you have a phone number for this Keith Olsen?”

“I don’t.

But I’m guessing you can get a license number off his truck with that camera you installed in front of my store and track him down that way.”

For the moment, at least, I was glad to have the cameras in place.

“You bought one of Marty’s chairs?”

Jon asked.

“No, it was a gift.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really.”

“Sounds like Marty was quite taken with you.”

“That’s a flattering thought, but I think it was more of a debt repayment.”

I explained the history of my father and grandfather, their connections to Marty, and the contents of the note that had come with the chair.

When I was done, Jon said, “I’m curious.

Did your parents ever look for a monster in our lake here? Or in any of the Great Lakes for that matter?”

“They did follow up on a report of something seen in Lake Superior once.

That was when I was .

.

.

oh .

. . eight or nine, I think? All of the lakes have had reports of sightings at one time or another, but Superior’s depth and its underwater caverns make it the one most likely to harbor a hitherto unknown specimen.”

“I take it your parents didn’t find anything?”

“Not that time, no.”

A pregnant pause followed.

“You mean they found things other times?”

“Relax,”

I said, chuckling.

“They didn’t find any monsters, per se, but on a trip to Lake Champlain once they did discover some underwater geographic features that could help explain why sightings of these lake creatures are so rare and why no one has ever found a dead one.”

“Do tell,” Jon said.

I opened my mouth to do just that, but before I could utter a word he said, “Wait.

Why don’t you tell me over dinner tonight?”

Now it was my turn to pause.

“I don’t know if we should do that.”

“Sorry.

I thought . . .”

He let out a nervous laugh.

“I don’t know what I thought.”

“You’ve hired me on as a consultant, and I don’t want there to be any hints of impropriety there.

It’s hard enough in the cryptozoology field to come across as legitimate without having a bunch of salacious or suspicious rumors dogging me.

I’m concerned about the optics.”

“The optics?”

He sounded like he was about to burst out laughing, which made me angry.

“Morgan, there aren’t many people who even know that I hired you, and the fact that I did should at least entitle me to an occasional update on the case, shouldn’t it? And if we do that over dinner, what’s the big deal?”

Now I felt stupid as well as angry.

But there was no point in complicating things even more with emotions born out of misunderstandings.

“Fair enough,”

I said, swallowing down my doubts.

“But I still can’t do it tonight because I need to staff the store.

Both Rita and Devon have the evening off.”

“Oh.

Of course.”

I detected a hint of disappointment in his voice, and it heartened me.

“How about if I bring dinner to you at the store? We can eat there and chat.”

I considered his offer.

I did need to eat at some point, and that seemed a safer scenario, one less fraught with innuendo.

“I suppose we can do that,” I said.

“Great! I’ll be there at six.”

And then he disconnected the call without so much as a goodbye.

Perhaps to make sure I didn’t have a chance to change my mind? This felt a little dangerous, a little too close to the fire I’d barely escaped from two years ago.

What was I doing?

I looked over at Newt and said, “I might have screwed the pooch on this one, my friend.”

His ears perked, and he let out a little woof of agreement.

Or maybe it was a woof of disapproval over my choice of metaphor.

I took a moment to contemplate the complexity of human relationships, thinking that animals, even the cryptid ones, were so much easier.

Rita and Devon both took off at five, and Jon showed up at six o’clock sharp.

Very timely, especially considering that he presumably had the ferry’s schedule in the mix.

He came bearing two large brown bags, which I soon discovered contained an assortment of items from a local Chinese restaurant.

“I wasn’t sure what you liked, so I got a little of everything,”

he said with a goofy grin.

He wasn’t kidding.

There were more than twenty containers of food, everything from crab rangoon puffs and spring rolls to moo shu pork and two kinds of lo mein.

There were no customers in the store when he arrived, and we carried the food into my office, where I kept a supply of paper plates and cups in a cabinet.

I opted for the chopsticks that came with the meal while Jon went for a plastic fork.

“I never got the hang of those,”

he said, pointing at the chopsticks with his fork.

“I learned when I was a toddler,”

I told him.

“In Japan.

My parents were there—”

“Looking for a cryptid,”

he finished for me.

I smiled and nodded.

“What an unusual childhood you must have had.

Did you enjoy it?”

I narrowed my eyes at him, chewing on a mouthful of broccoli and beef, wondering if he was asking out of mere curiosity or because of whatever his uncle had told him about what happened in New Jersey.

“I had no complaints,”

I told him.

“I didn’t want for anything, and I got to travel the world and see some amazing things.”

“What about friends?”

Jon asked.

“It must have been hard to make friends with all the moving around and homeschooling.”

I shrugged, partly as a stalling measure because I wasn’t sure the making-friends thing was something I wanted to discuss and partly because my mouth was full of shrimp fried rice.

Eventually, I decided to change the subject and thereby avoid an answer.

“I have a favor to ask of you,”

I said once I’d swallowed my rice.

“I’m really worried about Marty, and I was wondering if you’d let me look around his place.”

Jon eyed me skeptically.

I grinned.

“Well, inside his place.”

“I can’t just let you into his house.”

“Why not?”

“For one, we aren’t certain something has happened to him and—”

“You found his boat abandoned with blood in it and you’re not sure that something has happened to him?”

I echoed, incredulous.

“We don’t know that the blood is his,”

Jon said.

“We know it’s human and not fish blood, but we don’t have anything to compare it to for Marty.

Besides, even if we did, it takes weeks to get DNA back from the lab.

What if the blood is someone else’s? What if Marty hurt or killed someone on his boat and then went into hiding? He could be on the run, for all we know.

If that is the case, I can’t let you into his house, or anything else of his, and risk contaminating evidence.”

“Marty isn’t on the run,”

I said.

“Has anyone been to his place since you and I were out there to make sure he’s not inside injured or dying?”

“The local sheriff’s department went there and knocked.

No one answered the door.”

“Well, if he’s in there seriously hurt or injured, he might not be able to do that, right? He’s a hoarder, you know.

One of those piles in his house could have fallen over on him.

He could be lying in there unconscious.

Shouldn’t you break in to check it out?”

“Without a warrant? No.”

No equivocation there.

“And since his truck isn’t there, it’s unlikely he is.”

Jon looked exasperated with me, but I wasn’t ready to give in yet.

“You said his truck and trailer are still at the boat launch in Sister Bay.

How far could he have gone without his boat or his wheels?”

“To Canada or Michigan in another boat, or anywhere if he was in another vehicle,”

Jon said without hesitation.

Damn.

He had me there, and I think he knew it, because while I can’t swear to it, I think he was biting back a self-satisfied smile.

“I’m sorry, Morgan, but for now we have to be patient and wait for something more to turn up.”

Frustrated, I finally let the matter drop, at least as far as conversing with Jon was concerned.

In my head, it was still very much at the forefront of my thoughts.

It got busy after seven, and without Rita or Devon to help me, I didn’t have much time for Jon.

He kindly cleaned up the remains of our dinner, stuck a couple of containers in the fridge in my office—since it was a mini fridge, not everything would fit—and then he watched me hustle through a busy Wednesday evening.

It was also a successful evening, in terms of sales.

I sold a seventeenth-century wallet made from tanned human skin, a collection of shrunken heads from an island in the South Pacific, a set of shark’s teeth, a deformed cow fetus in a jar of formaldehyde, a 1910 vintage Houdini poster, and a crystal ball that was rumored to have once belonged to a Russian czar, though there was no provenance to prove that.

I also sold thirteen mysteries, mostly current, new-release stuff, but also a couple of older books, including a 1935 edition of Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles that went for fifteen hundred bucks.

Whatever was in the air those last two hours on Wednesday evening, it had people willing to plunk down some serious money for rare and oddball items.

While I didn’t need the money, I loved seeing that kind of action in the place.

Jon, on the other hand, sat behind the counter looking aghast at many of the purchases.

It might have been a little too much for him because at nine, when I was ready to lock the doors and close for the night, he said he needed to get going and left.

He seemed to be in a hurry, but whether it was to get somewhere or just get away from my store, I couldn’t tell.