Hank Bauer lived in what had once been a hunting camp. He’d purchased the cabin intending to keep the property’s purpose intact, but then his wife learned of his affair with a waitress at Applebee’s, and the hunting camp rapidly became his home. He often told this story as a cautionary tale of the risks of marriage—but never of the risks of having an affair with a waitress, Applebee’s or otherwise.
Those hunting-camp days seemed long ago and far away. He felt some shame over the way his marriage had ended but no real regret for how his life had gone. He was good on his own, always had been, and the marriage and the mortgages had been the real mistakes, the steps out of character. That had been trying on a suit he knew he’d never care for even though it sure looked nice and comfortable on other men. Margaret had called him an arrested adolescent during the divorce, and he didn’t disagree. His life had been mostly games and gambling, drinking and storytelling, hard rock and hangovers. It wasn’t an adulthood anybody should really take pride in, but he’d learned to lose his shame over it all the same. At sixty-one, he was too old to be embarrassed. He’d had fun.
And he’d done well too. Not well enough for the mortgage in Cape Elizabeth that had scared him right into the welcoming arms of Applebee’s, but well enough that it had been a long time since he’d worried about money. He’d found himself in the insurance business by accident—didn’t everyone get there that way?—but the money was steady, you got to meet plenty of people, and sometimes you actually had the sense that you’d helped to ease a person’s mind.
On the day that he returned to his home on twenty-seven acres of woodland and trout-brook frontage and found the kid in the black baseball cap waiting on him, Hank was largely content with his life. The only thing nagging at him that afternoon was Abby Kaplan.
He’d met Abby when she was just thirteen. Her mother had bolted after determining that raising a child was less enjoyable than being one, and so it had been just Abby and her father, who was a good man with a bad booze habit. He was also the most talented natural mechanic Hank had ever seen, probably capable of building a functioning engine out of duct tape and toothpicks if you spotted him the gasoline. Hank’s first encounter with Jake Kaplan’s daughter didn’t have the makings of a lifelong friendship: she had stolen his car.
Hank had a ridiculous, souped-up ’85 Trans Am back then, and he’d trusted Jake Kaplan to retool it. Then one day the police called to tell him they’d recovered his stolen car and had the thirteen-year-old thief in custody. The cops said she’d been doing ninety-four when they clocked her, and Hank’s first question was “How was she handling it?”
He’d told the cops not to press charges, which hadn’t pleased them, as they believed he was aiding and abetting the development of a local delinquent. And maybe he had been. But Abby was honest and apologetic when they spoke, ready for consequences, and Hank was struck by both the sadness of her demeanor—a good kid expecting bad things, as if that were preordained for her—and her infatuation with his old muscle car.
Jake Kaplan, a good ol’ boy’s good ol’ boy with a worldview shaped by drunks and dropouts, didn’t often mention Abby’s missing mother, but that day he did.
“Abby wants to race,” Jake told Hank mournfully.
“So let her race. Don’t need to have a driver’s license on the oval. Ed Traylor’s boy was racing when he was no older than Abby.”
“I can’t let her do that. I’m supposed to raise a daughter to be a woman.”
“Ever heard of Sarah Fisher?” Hank asked.
And so it came to pass that Hank Bauer sponsored Abby Kaplan’s first foray into racing. It was curiosity and amusement at first, and it made for a damn good story; the boys at the poker games loved hearing about how Hank had become the sponsor for his own car thief.
Nobody chuckled after the first races, though. Hank watched her beat older men night after night, and then she went on to the bigger speedways, and when she lost, it was not to better drivers but to better cars. Hank saw that this game, like all of them, had a ceiling that could be cracked only with cash.
Coastal Claims and Investigations became a more serious sponsor then. It wasn’t just because Hank liked the girl and felt bad for her; it was also because he was damn curious to see what she could do with the right machine.
What she did was win. Early, often, and then always. She smoked the drag-racing circuit through northern New England and then got onto the oval and kicked even more ass, and everybody’s bet was on NASCAR or Indy when she’d fooled them all and gone into stunt driving instead. Hank had seen some version of that coming when Abby fell in love with the drift. Even winning a race didn’t put the same light in her eyes that a controlled drift did—a floating test of traction and throttle that looked wildly out of control to the average spectator. If you could control it, though…well, Hank supposed it was a special kind of high.
She’d gone to a couple stunt schools, caught the right people’s eyes, and ended up in Hollywood and then Europe. For a while she’d been shooting commercials in friggin’ Dubai or someplace, bouncing some bastardized supercar turned SUV around a desert. She’d been all over the world driving the finest cars known to man and making good money doing it, and Hank was awfully proud of her.
And now awfully worried about what was keeping her in Maine.
The crack-up she’d had out on the West Coast would have been bad enough if the boyfriend with her had been anonymous. But he was a rising star, his face was on magazine covers, and that crush of attention had made a bad deal worse for Abby. She’d come back to Maine to clear her head, she claimed, but Hank knew better.
Abby was hiding.
Hank had practically begged his way into the Hammel College job when he learned about the girl in the coma. He thought this might be useful for Abby, if for no other reason than it would get her to open up a little, tell him what exactly was wrong so he could go about helping her. That hadn’t worked out, though, and so on the day when Hank arrived at his home to find an unfamiliar white Jeep in his driveway, he was thinking that he needed to get out of this case before it became a real mess.
The white Jeep pushed those thoughts from his mind. Hank didn’t have many visitors.
The rain splattered over the windshield made it look empty, but then the door opened and a kid in a black baseball cap stepped out and waited with a weird half smile. Hank got out of the car into the misting rain.
“Can I help you, fella?”
“Mr. Bauer?”
“That’s right.”
“My name’s Matt Norris.”
“Okay.” Hank waited, but the kid was quiet, hands still in his pockets, odd smile still on his face.
“So you dropped by just to practice introducing yourself?” Hank said. “You did real well on the part with your name. The rest needs work.”
Norris laughed softly. “No. Sorry, my mind wandered. I’m not real sure I should’ve come by at all.” He took one hand from his pockets and adjusted the black baseball cap. “I couldn’t get the cops to listen to me, though.”
Hank straightened. “Cops?”
Matt Norris nodded without changing expression, as if it were perfectly normal to be standing in the rain on a stranger’s property talking about the cops.
“I go to Hammel College.”
Aw, shit. “Yeah? That’s terrific. But Matt, buddy, I don’t step in front of police, okay?”
“You’re a private investigator.”
“No. I’m in the insurance business.”
“You have a private investigator’s license.”
Hank sighed and rubbed his face with a damp palm. “That’s marketing crap. I’m no detective, I don’t want to play one on TV or in my yard in the rain. You got something to say on that wreck, it should be to the cops, not me.”
“Carlos Ramirez wasn’t driving the car,” the kid said. “How ’bout that?”
I almost went bowling, Hank thought. It was a coin-toss decision back there at the office—head to the alley or head home. Why in the hell didn’t I go to the bowling alley?
Something told him the kid would’ve waited, though.
“Come on in out of the rain,” Hank said with a sigh. “You’re going to cause me enough trouble without giving me pneumonia too.”
The kid laughed too loudly. As Hank unlocked his door and held it open for Matt Norris to pass through, he was frowning. It hadn’t been that funny of a line, but from that laugh, you’d have thought the kid was at a comedy club.
Something’s off with him, Hank thought, and then he closed the door to shut out the rain and the darkening sky.