I woke up early on Sunday morning. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept in, since the lacy curtains in Tansy’s guest room weren’t exactly conducive for sleeping much past sunrise. Besides, ever since I’d come back to Texas, I’d had a list a mile long of things that had to be done so we could open the store on time.
Paint the walls. Mount the shelves. Order the industrial espresso machine. Get all the permits. Hire an inspector. Take the cat to the vet. Set up the website and e-store. Sort through arriving inventory. Tansy had a great ear for music and unsurprisingly knew almost every musician in Austin, so we spent our evenings listening to live music and gathering albums to sell on consignment. Sip & Spin was positioned to be the premier destination for local music lovers.
And now those plans were shot full of holes.
I sat up and stretched. I put on my glasses and checked my phone. One text message. For a second, I allowed myself to hope that it was Uncle Calvin. Instead, it was Beau, sent at 5:00 a.m. asking if I had any news.
What kind of person texts at 5:00 a.m. on a Sunday? The same kind of man who would break up with a girl he’d been dating for five years over text, I mused. I didn’t text him back. If I maintained radio silence long enough, he’d come find me. Maybe he’d bring a Sonic Rt 44 Cherry Limeade as a bribe. A girl could dream.
I opened the notepad app on my phone and made a list of what I wanted to accomplish today. It felt wrong, to be so focused on looking for my wayward uncle when I should be more concerned about the dead woman. I reassured myself that the police would figure out who murdered her. In the meantime, if I didn’t find my uncle, we would lose the record shop.
Besides, who knew? Maybe Calvin knew something that would help find the killer. Buoyed by that possibility, I got up and started my day. A shower and two cups of coffee later, I borrowed my sister’s car and headed out to tackle my list. First up was George’s Auto Body, on the far side of town.
Tucked away by the train tracks was a crumbling industrial park. The long, low buildings that housed everything from shipping companies to sketchy telemarketing schemes were surrounded by cracked asphalt parking lots. George’s Auto Body was at the far end, where the husks of car corpses long picked apart by vultures sat in crowded rows, waiting for repairs that never came. George Martín, the shop’s namesake, had long since retired. His daughter Esméralda Martín-Brown ran things now.
I stepped inside the open garage door into a cavernous bay. Along the back were shelves lined with an assortment of common parts from windshield wipers to spark plugs. There was a rack of tires, and the scent of new rubber and old oil filled the air.
Most of the space was consumed by two hydraulic lifts. Both were centered over a shallow pit in the cement. Only the far station was occupied. Loud curses came from underneath a rusty, and apparently stubborn, Toyota Celica.
“Hello?” I called.
“Be right with you,” a muffled voice replied. A Hispanic woman emerged from under the car. Esméralda had dark curly hair that was kept in check by a brightly colored oil-stained scarf. She wore a long-sleeved Henley under denim overalls.
It was mid-March, and the forecast called for highs in the low seventies, which was downright arctic to lifelong Texans. Even so, Esméralda was sweating. She removed her gloves and ran the back of her arm over her forehead. “How can I help you?” she asked, but she wasn’t looking at me, instead staring past me to my sister’s car. “Didn’t I give you a tune-up last month? Everything okay?”
“The car’s fine,” I assured her.
She turned to me. I’d expected her to say something about me not being Tansy, but either she was more familiar with cars than people or my sister and I looked more alike than I realized. Sure, I was a few inches shorter, a dozen pounds heavier (on a good day), and seven years her junior. In contrast to my sister’s year-round tan, I was still pale from my long stint in Oregon. My hair hung all the way down my back and I was wearing my favorite purple glasses, but there wasn’t so much as a flash of hesitation on the mechanic’s face. I was driving Tansy’s car, and we bore a passing resemblance to each other. Therefore, I must be Tansy.
“I’m here for my uncle, Calvin Voigt,” I said. Cedar River was a small enough town that even if I didn’t actually know Esméralda Martín-Brown, I knew who she was. I just couldn’t be sure she knew who Tansy and I were related to.
“Eighty-six Ford Bronco,” she said.
“Yup,” I confirmed. “Has he been in recently?”
She shook her head. “Your uncle is a do-it-yourselfer. Which explains why that old bucket of his never runs right for long. Last time he came in here was a year or so ago, looking for a tailgate. Got real disappointed when I didn’t have any spare Broncos sitting around, so I directed him out to the junkyard in New Braunfels. Did he ever find the part he was looking for?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea. Well, thanks for your time.”
“No problem. Needed a break anyway. Toss me that bottle, will ya?”
I glanced over and saw a reusable water bottle decorated with unicorn decals and pink flower stickers. I grinned at it. I adored unicorns. “Here,” I said, walking the bottle over to her. “Love the unicorns.”
She returned my smile. “Who doesn’t?” She took a swig of water, set the bottle on the ground, and disappeared back into the pit under the car.
That wasn’t a total waste of time, I told myself as I got behind the wheel and navigated the road weaving through the industrial park. At least once I could afford a car, I knew where I would take it if it ever needed work.
My next stop was the car rental agency on the other side of the complex. There were half a dozen shiny vehicles parked behind a fence, ranging from practical four-door sedans to full-size vans and a truck that looked like it could haul a house.
Behind the building was a long runway lined with hangars on one side. Cedar River Municipal Airport was most often used for hobby planes and the occasional helicopter. There were over seven hundred airports in the great state of Texas. The largest, like DFW International, were practically cities unto themselves. Ours was the wind-sock-on-a-stick variety common to rural areas.
Uncle Calvin used to house a plane here. I remember him taking me up in it when I was just a little thing. There is nothing in the world like the sensation of being in a tiny plane that wasn’t much more than an engine and some fiberglass wings. The bank repo’d the plane when I was in junior high. I remembered thinking at the time how unfair that was, but looking back, I’m starting to think that anyone as irresponsible as my uncle was probably better off without a pilot’s license, especially now that he was on the run.
I let myself into the rental car office. A friendly voice greeted me. “Howdy! I’m Mickey. How can I help you today? We’ve got a special going on right now—rent four days for the price of three. That sound like something that interests you?”
I approached the counter and the eager, yellow polo shirt–clad employee. “Actually, I’m looking for some information. My uncle, Calvin Voigt, rented a car from you a few weeks ago.”
They typed something into the computer before looking back up at me. “Yes, indeed. Was there anything wrong with the car?”
“No, no.” I shook my head. “Not that I know of, at least. He returned it, right?”
“Certainly did,” Mickey confirmed.
“And he hasn’t been back to rent another car since then?”
“Nope,” they said. “Just between you and me, if he did come back, we wouldn’t rent to him because we found out his license was invalid.”
Bless small towns. If I’d tried having this conversation in Austin or Portland, they wouldn’t have talked to me at all without me providing two forms of ID and a warrant. They certainly wouldn’t have volunteered that Calvin’s license was invalid.
Then an idea sparked in the back of my brain. If his license was invalid, he’d have a hard time boarding a commercial flight, but he might have found another way out of town. “He didn’t by any chance rent a plane, did he? Or maybe charter a flight?”
Mickey leaned over the keyboard again, hit a few keys, and looked back up at me. “Nope,” they said again. “At least not through us. Most of the plane owners handle their own reservations and file their own flight plans. A few rent out their planes when they’re not using them, but we haven’t had anything come through here in a while.”
But even though the rental agency was a dead end, it had given me plenty to think about. My uncle wasn’t the most responsible person in the world. He had his own way of doing things, and his own moral code. Calvin would never kill someone, but if he knew something he might not volunteer that information to the cops. And if he was on the run because of, oh, I didn’t know, a couple years’ worth of unpaid traffic tickets finally coming to haunt him, he wouldn’t be so foolish as to rent a car or hire a plane through a legit agency. Besides, he had enough friends that he could just as easily call in a favor or two and get all the help he needed to leave town and lie low until the heat was off.
Which would have been fine if he hadn’t jumped bail and ditched his ankle monitor. A few days in jail and a fine was turning into a serious offense, and now my uncle’s actions could cost us the record shop. Assuming, of course, that the cops cleared the murder scene and we were ever allowed to open. “What a mess,” I muttered to myself.
“Excuse me?” the clerk asked. To be honest, I’d forgotten about them.
“Sorry, I wasn’t talking to you. Thanks for your time. Have a great day.”
“You too,” Mickey said as I turned and walked away.
Back in my sister’s car, I retraced my path back to Main Street and parked in the gravel lot behind United Steaks of America. Despite the name—which wasn’t as punny as our only brewpub’s, The Bitters End—United Steaks was the most upscale restaurant in town. That probably was everything there needed to be said about Cedar River.
Once I was inside, the maître d’ greeted me with a scowl as he looked me up and down. I glanced down at my outfit. Fitted jeans. A Soundgarden T-shirt. Flip-flops. United Steaks had a dress code, and I didn’t fit it.
The greeter was meticulously dressed in a crisp white shirt under a maroon blazer, with black shoes and black pants. He was clean-shaven with slicked-back hair and no jewelry. “Do you have a reservation, miss?”
It was a good thing I wasn’t trying to get a table. I doubted they’d seat me dressed like this. I just needed to talk to the owner so I could ask him about the receipt I’d found at my uncle’s house. Calvin had a talent for never picking up a tab. So why had he done so here last week? “I’m not here for lunch. I stopped by to see Rodger.”
Rodger Mayhew had been our neighbor growing up. He was the youngest homeowner in the neighborhood, and the only single father. His daughter, Monica, was a sweet kid. I used to earn a few dollars babysitting her after school on occasion while Rodger was at the restaurant.
“I’m sorry. Mr. Mayhew isn’t coming in today.”
“Oh?” I hadn’t known Rodger to ever miss a day of work, especially not on a busy weekend. “Is everything okay?”
“Not exactly.” The maître d’ looked around to verify no one was nearby. It was just after eleven in the morning. The restaurant had barely opened and the lunch rush had yet to start. I’d saved this stop for last for that very reason, hoping it would be the best time to talk to Rodger without bothering him. “I’m afraid Mr. Mayhew’s daughter was murdered Friday night.”
“What?” My brain felt like it was spinning. I grabbed the edge of the greeter’s stand to steady myself. Unless Cedar River had gone very much downhill in recent years, the chances of two separate murders taking place in the same week, much less on the same night, were impossibly, infinitesimally small.
Focusing on Calvin’s disappearance and the potential consequences to Sip & Spin had helped me if not forget, at least compartmentalize, that I had found a dead body in the supply closet of our record shop. I’d convinced myself that the police would solve the murder and my world would go back to normal. I’d taken solace in the fact that while it was tragic that someone had died in my shop, at least it was a stranger.
But the truth was that I’d known the victim. It was little Monica Mayhew.