I drove down the lane very slowly—not only to avoid overtaking Haver, but also because I quickly realized that the inch or two of unplowed snow covering it camouflaged quite a lot of nasty bumps and ruts. Only a dirt lane, I suspected, and probably one that followed an old game trail as it wound gently through the woods. Then I saw that the trees ended a little way ahead.
I slowed my car and crept ahead even more slowly until I reached the point where the lane emerged from the woods. I spotted a small, rundown farmhouse with a thin thread of smoke emerging from the chimney. To the right of the house was a disheveled barn. The dirt lane split in two as it neared the buildings, with the right fork dead-ending at the barn while the left fork petered out a little beyond the front door of the farmhouse. Haver’s silver rental Honda was parked on the left side.
Just for a moment I contemplated how satisfying it would be to drive up to the farmhouse, march inside, and confront Haver and his bootlegger.
Then I put the car into reverse and backed up until I was out of sight. I was about to make a three-point turn when it occurred to me that Haver might spot my tracks and realize someone had followed him partway down the lane.
Of course, there was always the question of whether he’d even care. If I were sneaking around—and he definitely had been sneaking when he left the theater—I’d have noticed the tracks. But I’d also have been keeping a close eye on my rearview mirror. Haver hadn’t seemed particularly wary during our drive—hadn’t made any evasive maneuvers. But still.
I carefully backed out, so the only tracks visible were straight down the center of the lane, the way he’d expect to see them. The snow wasn’t falling all that heavily, but a few more minutes of it would erase all traces of my passage. Well, not all traces—I willing to bet that almost any Shiffley in the county would have known that two cars had gone in and one had backed out—and probably even determined the make and model of both vehicles. But a city slicker like Haver probably wouldn’t be able to tell my tracks from the tracks he’d made going in.
The road was deserted, so it was easy to back out onto it, point my car away from town and drive a few hundred yards until I was out of sight of the lane. Then I parked my car along the side of the road and prepared to hike back to the lane.
But first I rummaged in the back seat. Yes, my binoculars were still there. Last week I’d taken Dad and Grandmother Cordelia out to some remote location in the middle of the Blue Ridge Mountains so they could participate in their beloved Christmas bird count. It had been snowing that day, too.
It occurred to me that if someone came along and spotted my car, they might wonder why I was parked in the middle of nowhere. So I opened my copy of the Audubon guide to a plausible species—pages 638–639, the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis)—and left it lying open on the passenger seat. The idea was to suggest that I’d spotted a large bird soaring overhead, looked it up in my guide, and then impulsively leaped out of the car, binoculars in hand, to stalk the wily raptor to its nest. That would also be my cover story if anyone accosted me as I hiked in to spy on Haver. “Do you know if you have red-tailed hawks nesting in your woods?” I could exclaim. “I think I saw one flying across the road just now!”
As I trudged down the road and turned into the lane, it occurred to me to wonder if Dad’s obsession with mysteries and his love of dramatizing things were beginning to rub off on me just a little too much.
I traveled down the lane as quickly as possible, though I kept a wary eye—and ear—open for anyone coming or going. As I neared the point where the lane emerged from the woods, I left it and slipped through the trees on the right side until I reached a point at the edge of the woods, around a hundred yards from the lane.
I found a spot where two dead trees had fallen, one across the other, making a slight shelter—the trunks and branches overhead kept off the worst of the snow, and the overlapping trunks cast a shadow that should make me less visible if anyone from the farmhouse looked my way. I sat on a stump, pulled out my binoculars, and focused in on the house.
A very ordinary farmhouse, with an even more ordinary barn beside it. Both a little rundown, but not in danger of falling down anytime soon. Neither had been painted recently, so the house was a graying white and the barn a graying red. No farm animals in the field—which was a relief, because if there had been in this weather, I’d have had to make a quick call to animal welfare.
An enormous woodpile flanked the house, and smoke rose from the chimney. I also spotted a propane tank near the back door. An old but serviceable-looking pickup truck was parked under a rough plank carport between the barn and the back door. Apart from Haver’s silver Accord, still parked in front of the farmhouse, there didn’t seem to be any other vehicles. And no rusted hulks or bits of obsolete farm equipment lying about, so either the occupant was an unusually tidy farmer by local standards or he hadn’t been here long.
And just who was Haver visiting? I pulled out my phone and opened my GPS app. It took a while to find a signal, thanks to the cloud cover, but eventually the app showed the little arrow representing me blinking in the middle of a big blank area. I could just barely see the line representing the road I’d parked on off to one side of the screen.
I clicked around until I found the place where the app showed me my latitude and longitude. I copied it down, then texted it off to Randall Shiffley, asking him if he could figure out who lived there.
“I can,” he replied. “Why?”
“Could be Haver’s bootlegger,” I texted back.
“Grr. I’m on it.”
I shoved my phone back into my pocket and returned to surveying the house with the binoculars. Haver’s visit seemed to be taking rather a long time. I’d more than half expected to have to dive into the woods on my way down the lane—why would Haver stay here much longer than it took to hand over money and receive a bottle?
Unless—we’d jokingly referred to the unknown miscreant who’d been supplying Haver as his bootlegger. What if whoever lived here really was a bootlegger? And what if Haver had to wait until his latest batch of moonshine was ready? Or—
The front door of the farmhouse opened, and Haver stepped out. He was cradling something in his left arm. Something wrapped in brown paper, but the shape was unmistakable. A bottle.
He was followed by a tall, angular man carrying a box covered with a quilted blanket, the kind movers used to wrap furniture.
“Blast,” I muttered. “Is that a whole case of booze?”
Haver opened the rear door of his rented Honda and the man carefully deposited the blanket-covered box inside. Then they turned to face each other. They stood for a few moments, looking uncomfortable, as if not sure whether a handshake was required. Then the unknown man nodded, turned on his heel, and went back inside.
Haver stowed the brown-paper-wrapped bottle in his passenger seat with meticulous care before getting into the driver’s seat and starting the car. He turned around slowly in the snowy farmyard and headed back down the lane.
No way to get back to my car in time to follow him, but I was pretty sure I knew where he was going. I pulled out my phone again and texted Ekaterina, my contact at the Caerphilly Inn.
“Haver has found another bottle,” I said. “Possibly headed your way. See if you can intercept.”
“Affirmative,” she texted back. “Over and out.”
Apparently I’d managed to approximate the CIA-approved way for one operative to talk to another.
I glanced at my phone. It was one forty-five. Haver had fifteen minutes to get to the afternoon rehearsal. Clearly he wasn’t going to make it. I couldn’t make it, and I knew every possible shortcut.
So I called Michael.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” I asked.
“There’s good news? That’ll be a first for the day. Start with that.”
“I think I just managed to tail Haver to his bootlegger’s house.”
“If that’s the good news, I’m not sure I want to hear the bad. Although I bet I can guess—he’s getting smashed.”
“He wasn’t the last time I saw him, but who knows what he’ll get up to on the way back to town. The bad news is that he’s definitely acquired a bottle, and may even have a case, and even if he has decided to save it for tonight, he’s going to be at least fifteen minutes late for rehearsal.”
“Blast. Well, I’ll alert the chief that his officers might have a crack at that long-awaited DUI arrest and then see what we can get done without the one actor who’s in every damned scene in the play. Are you coming back now?”
“Not till I get as much info as possible on the bootlegger,” I said.
“Good idea.”
“Oh, and I convinced O’Manion that it’s to his advantage as well as ours to force Haver to accept a minder.”
“I’m not sure we have the budget for a minder.”
“Mother’s finding someone,” I said. “So whoever it is will work free or cheap.”
“Free or cheap is good.”
“Also, since I’ve found the bootlegger, we won’t need to hire Stanley to do it,” I added. “And maybe we can sell all the booze Ekaterina has confiscated and use the proceeds to pay the minder.”
“I like the way you think.”
We said our good-byes, and it wasn’t till after we hung up that I realized I hadn’t asked how his meeting with the Dean of Finance had gone. But given his mood when I’d called, perhaps I didn’t need to ask.
I continued to study the farmhouse for a few more minutes to give Haver plenty of time to get clear before I headed for my car. But just as I was about to stow my binoculars in their case, the door opened again and the tall man strode out.
Tall and gaunt. He ambled across the farmyard and disappeared into the barn. I studied his face as he did. From a distance, when all you could see was his general build, he could easily be mistaken for Randall Shiffley, or any of his enormous extended family. But the more I watched, the more the resemblance vanished. He didn’t move like a Shiffley—he had an awkward, abrupt pace instead of a Shiffley’s loose-limbed grace. And with the binoculars I could see that his thin, almost skeletal face didn’t look a bit like a Shiffley. I breathed a sigh of relief. If Randall caught one of his cousins undermining the festival by getting Haver drunk, there would be hell to pay. Of course, out in the more rural parts of the counties, it seemed as if every fourth mailbox was a Shiffley. The bootlegger could still be a Shiffley by marriage. Or one who had gotten shortchanged in the genetic pool.
I wondered if it was safe to leave now.
The gaunt man emerged from the barn, pulling keys out of his pocket, and got into the truck. I hunkered down again. I pulled out my phone again, texted Randall the pickup’s license plate number, and asked, “Also, who is this?”
The pickup roared into life and rattled across the farmyard and down the lane to disappear into the woods.
I checked my phone. I figured I’d give Mr. Bootlegger another ten minutes before I hit the lane.
But there was no reason not to start picking my way through the woods. I eased myself out of my shelter—
Just then a loud roaring echoed over the fields. I froze. It sounded just like—
“Caligula,” I murmured. Caligula had been the largest and nastiest of the tigers at Grandfather’s zoo, until common sense had prevailed and Grandfather had given him to the Doorley Zoo in Omaha, where there were plenty of keepers to handle him and his disposition wouldn’t prevent him from playing a valuable role in the zoo’s breeding program for endangered species. Tiberius, the remaining male tiger, was too old to cause much trouble, and the tigresses, Livia and Vipsania, were sly and sneaky rather than overtly violent. But Caligula had given me nightmares.
And what I’d heard sounded incredibly like the sullen, angry way Caligula would roar when he was profoundly not in a good mood.