She inquired formally, “Good morning. You two have introduced yourselves?”
“Uh-huh.” Dani grinned.
“Good.” Beth returned to the kitchen.
“I guess you’ll be staying here now, with the fire and all,” said Dani.
Robert’s entry spared him the need to reply to this at once.
He saw Tom and mumbled, “Oh.”
“Good morning, Robert.”
“Hi, Tom, is something wrong with the Nash?”
Name something that isn’t wrong with the Nash
. Aloud he reassured him, “The car is running well enough. There was a fire in the campus housing unit they assigned me to. I hadn’t even moved in. They sent me here for the night.”
Robert started to frame a question but Dani cut him off, elevating a right arm and hand across the table. “Hi Robert. We finally meet. I’m Danielle. Call me Dani.”
Robert came fully aware of her oversized presence and her unconventional closeness to Tom. He offered a hand. “I’m Robert Matthews. I live in a long-term room upstairs.”
“I know. Beth told me about you. I’ve been here five days but I usually don’t do breakfast. When did you get here, Robert?”
“I’ve been in town for twelve weeks, but only a week in this house. You’ve got a sort of an accent. Are you from the West?”
This inquisitive sparring was interrupted by Beth’s return with platters of French toast and bacon. She seated herself at the end of the table. “So now everybody has met?”
Three heads nodded, and Robert shifted his concentration to breakfast. Beth engaged Dani in home cooking conversation, and Tom tried to focus on where he was going to lay his head for nights to come. Ignored by the women, he ate with haste. Then he pushed back his chair. “That was great; thanks. I’d better get over to the housing office and see what plans they might have for me.”
“You should just stay here,” countered Dani.
“That would be terrific, but there’s no way. I can’t afford the room I just slept in. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to drive back into Houghton.”
“In your little tiny car?”
“Actually, it’s Robert’s car.”
“Ah.” Dani stared accusingly at Robert until he fidgeted in his seat.
“I’m loaning it to Tom because I hit his car with my Plymouth yesterday at the intersection.”
“Ouch, what did the cops say?”
Tom was surprised by her tone of alarm. She had been toying with them about the Nash like a cat with a mouse. Now she looked frightened.
“We’re handling it ourselves, Tom and I,” Robert assured her.
Dani relaxed in approval. “That’s good. But be careful, Tom. Old cars are unreliable, and it’s got to be awful cramped for you.”
“That thing
is
more a toy than a real car,” added Beth, ignoring a glare from Robert.
Dani joined the attack. “Beth is right. That tiny thing is dangerous for a man your size. My car is new. Just let me know if you ever need a ride.”
“Thanks, but the Nash will be fine. I really have to get going now.”
Beth followed him out and stopped him at the base of the porch stairs. “Tom, if there’s nowhere else to stay, you can use one of the rooms I haven’t refinished yet like Robert’s, at the dorm room price. It might be shopworn, but it’ll be clean, dry, and spacious.”
He was pretty sure she was interested in the added income, not him, but “spacious” was impossible to resist. “I’d like that. I’ll see if I can work it out with the university housing office.”
“What’s to work out? You’re no freshman or sophomore. You can live where you want.”
What he had to work out was staying in her house with no one knowing about it. But he couldn’t tell her that. He yielded. “I’ll just report in to them, then. I have to get going. It’s Saturday and they close at noon or maybe eleven; I don’t remember for sure.”
****
The clerk at the housing office looked at Tom’s shiny new student ID, looked at him, and looked back at the ID. “Mr. Hawk, there’s someone who wants to talk to you.”
“Really? Who?” Tom had a vision of sunburned guys in double-breasted silk suits with machine pistols.
“Campus security, about the fire in the room we first assigned you.”
“Oh.”
“Wait in one of those chairs and I’ll get him. It’ll only be a few minutes.” He disappeared into an office behind the service desk, dialed a number, and closed the door. Tom went through the usual fight or flight adrenaline rush and willed himself to take a chair. Had they found the fat man from L.A?
After four long minutes the clerk returned with a campus cop sporting a name badge that proclaimed
MAKINEN
. The cop said, “Mr. Hawk. I’m glad you’ve come in. We need to ask you about the fire and about your roommate. We were wondering about your relationship with him.”
“What relationship? I met him once, yesterday.”
“How can I put this? He doesn’t like you much. He referred to you as ‘that thug.’”
“We have differing views on military service.”
“Oh. But one of you had a visitor who was overcome by smoke, came to, and took off.”
Tom lied. Smoothly, he thought. “It had to be his visitor. You should talk to my roommate some more. I came here a week ago from Arizona. I don’t know anyone and hadn’t even moved in.”
“I didn’t realize all that. We were hoping you might help us to understand why this man was in a corner behind the door, and whether he may have caused the fire.”
“I can’t help you. It must have been someone the roommate doesn’t want to talk to you about.”
“I see—his visitor, not yours?”
“His.” Tom may have stated this too firmly. Did Makinen see how much he was sweating?
The campus cop studied him for an uncomfortable moment and gave up. “All right, we’ll talk to your roommate again.
Someone
started that fire. Maybe our visitor will still reappear and explain himself.” He sounded like he didn’t believe his own words, but he nodded to Tom and left.
The housing clerk returned and looked at him indifferently. Tom requested, “Since I’ve been burned out, I’d like a refund of my housing money. I’ve found a permanent place off-campus.”
He waited to be grilled on where he would be living, prepared to lie and to either give his old address in Houghton or to make one up. But the clerk only glanced at the ID again and nodded. “I’ve still got your bank cashier’s check here somewhere. I’ll get it for you and void out everything from yesterday.”
“That’s perfect,” Tom assured him.
****
Getting in and out of the tiny Nash with the screwed-up shoulder and back drove Tom crazy. Plus he had a sensation of being watched as he struggled to exit it at the B&B. Maybe he was right, because Beth was at the door a second or two after he rang the bell.
“You’re ready to move in?”
She was being friendly again. He still held hope she wanted his presence for benefits beyond the paltry added revenue. Then he remembered Claire telling him he wasn’t as pretty a boy as he let himself think. Where the hell was Claire, anyway?
He nodded. “If the offer still stands.”
“It certainly does. Come look at the room and see if it will do.”
It was fine. It was like she’d described it: run down, but clean and comfortable looking. It was a corner room with three good-sized windows and was only a touch smaller than Robert’s. “This is great,” he asserted, giving the double bed a test bounce.
“Good. I’ll keep Robert from following you around making amends. He broke a vase the day he moved in, and it took me three days to get him to stop apologizing about it. I think his mother made him this way. I met her once and she’s quite a piece of work.”
It was Dani, not Robert, that Tom was worrying about. But he said, “I know he’s not a student and he works delivering pizzas. Is that his whole life?”
“No. He works for a local guy doing several things.”
She had answered reluctantly, he thought. “I think he told me he has lived here for a week?”
“Yeah. It seems longer. Sorry. I shouldn’t talk about my guests that way. Robert is excitable and it’s probably Gary who makes him so jumpy. I’d be a nervous wreck if I had to work for that man.”
“Gary Grant? Grant’s Grocery?”
“Uh-huh. Where the geriatric gang gathers and gossips.”
He wanted to ask her more questions about Grant, but she was already shifting position uncomfortably, and he wasn’t about to do anything that would change her mind about his suitability as a boarder. “Can I get my things from the car and move in now?”
“Absolutely. I’ll help you.”
Tom pushed two weeks’ rent on her (part of Robert’s money). Once he felt he’d unpacked sufficiently to establish himself in this new kingdom, he went to find her and let the conversation drift to Gary Grant. She was arranging bric-a-brac in the treacherous china cabinet. He was gratified to see small pads under the front feet tipped it back against the wall, adding stability.
“Looks like you’re getting killer cabinet tamed.”
“Oh, hi. Yeah. Is the room all right?”
“It’s perfect. By the way, this G-G’s Pizza that Robert works for, is the pizza a good product?”
“Not really. You wouldn’t like it, Tom.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s not ‘G-G’ for ‘Gary Grant,’ is it?”
She turned to the cabinet, face away from him before she answered. She moved so as to make it less than rude, but it was still strange. She conceded, “Yup. He names everything after himself.” She started fussing with some crystal.
He stayed stubbornly behind her, waiting.
Finally she turned back to face him. He hadn’t heard her speak in anger before, and it was not pleasant to hear now. “You’re not going to give up, are you? I give up. After Dani grilling me, my resistance is down. So here it is. Gary is my first cousin; that’s none of
my
doing. Gary is a wheeler-dealer, if it’s possible to be such a thing in a burg this small. Besides the grocery store and what he’s doing with Robert and the pizza boxes without a restaurant license, he’s incorporated as Grant Industries, Grantronics Technology, Grant Minerals Corporation, and maybe one or two more that I don’t know about.”
“He has all those businesses?”
“He has all those incorporations. I’ve got enough to do without trying to figure out which ones are real enterprises.” She held a cleaning cloth and was rubbing furiously at an imaginary smudge on the main shelf of the cabinet.
“Sure, no problem, I’m sorry if I touched a nerve.” He started away before he offended her beyond repair.
She called him back. “Wait, Tom, I’m sorry. Look, I told you I had financial help from a cousin. It’s him. Gary has a piece of this place, and taking his money was the dumbest thing I ever did. The man meddles and he seldom improves a situation when he does.”
She made the grocer sound unpleasant or worse. It was paranoia, but he still had to ask her. “Gary hasn’t spent any time out west, has he? He doesn’t have any contacts on the Pacific coast?”
“He’s never been west of Minneapolis. I don’t see why you’re so interested.”
“I’ve agreed to work for him. I’ve got to have some money.”
“Oh boy, that’s how it started with me too.”
“Pardon?”
“First I needed some money for closing costs and I cut him in on my B&B. Then I asked him to help a couple of my friends get draft deferments. That’s how it all started, I suppose.”
He wanted to follow up, but she put the cleaning cloth down abruptly and walked through the swinging door to the butler’s pantry and kitchen.
He retreated to the porch. He
had
to work for Gary. The other jobs if there were any, would expose him on or near campus, and at one-third the wage. Classes would start the day after tomorrow, Monday, but the only reason he was going to go back to campus now was to find the fat man and find out who he was. Good luck with that. He didn’t have a description. He had been afraid to ask for one and bring suspicion back on himself.
He assumed the fat man in the dorm room had been looking for him and might trace him to this house. He had to be ready for that. It was time he made a circuit of exploration of the Kessler’s property. Heading across a broad front lawn comprised of more dandelions than anything else, there was little to see once you were away from the house. There were thick trees on three sides of Beth’s estate, trees from which a sniper could blow Tom’s head off the minute he stepped out the door. There was a field which maybe had once been a large vegetable garden with a collapsed fence, and more trees.
The fourth side, the rear, was more interesting. The murmuring Little Superior River, deep enough for small boat traffic, bounded the property, and there was even a short area of sandy beach. A decrepit rowboat, looking long unused, was tied to one of two posts of a collapsed and rotting dock. The boat and ruined dock looked romantic, and quite unsafe.
Where was the fat man? Once he found him, what exactly could he do next? Take him to the police and start the whole safe house business again? He thought not.
Back at the house Dani greeted him. “Hey, I hear you’re going to be staying here after all.”
“It looks like it.”
“That’s super. We’re really going to get to know each other. Good decision.”
He had a feeling she
knew
he had no choice. Dani smelled more and more like trouble.
Chapter Five
Trouble. Tom asked himself if he was going looking for it now, like some nutty addiction. He parked the Nash in the side alley next to Gary Grant’s grocery again, checking for a little lunatic blue-haired woman with a baseball bat before shutting down the riding mower-size engine. He walked to the front of the store, trying to decide whether or not to go in. Beth Kessler had warned him to stay away from Gary, but she might have been less than honest in saying she wasn’t jealous of a prosperous relative. He could go in there, give Gary’s money back and walk away. And then he could find a job washing dishes from eight to twelve p.m. for minimum wage of a buck-something an hour.
A man on the creaky side of eighty walked out and nodded pleasantly. Tom nodded back and entered the grocery store.
“I was wondering when you would show up,” complained Gary.
“I got burned out of the place I was going to live in. I had to find something else.”