AFTER TWO DAYS OF BOBBING ABOUT ON THE RIVER HERDING milk jugs, I devoted Saturday to helping Dad with the roundup—tracking down as many of the milk jugs as possible and recording where we’d found them. We even started getting calls from people down river, claiming the small reward we had offered for turning in the jugs that got past us. Most of these, as expected, were the ones the sheriff had dumped into the current. None of the jugs washed up anywhere near the beach where Mrs. Grover was found, which Dad and the sheriff concluded was convincing enough proof that her body had been dumped there rather than washing up there. I had to admit, I was convinced. Thanks to the vigilance of the Coast Guard and the contrariness of the currents, we now knew that Mrs. Grover must have arrived on the beach by land, not by sea.
But for the moment I’d decided to let Dad investigate alone. Wonder of wonders, Eileen had showed up Saturday afternoon, even more sunburnt that I was, but in one piece, and presumably
available for measuring and gown selecting. If she didn’t take off before Monday morning.
“Having trouble with your car?” Michael asked. He came across me peering under the hood of my car, owner’s manual in hand, so I suppose that was the logical assumption.
“I’m trying to figure out where the distributor cap is, and how one removes it.”
“You’re having trouble with your distributor cap?” he asked.
“No, but I want Eileen to have car trouble if she tries to leave before I get her in to pick out her gown. In the movies, they’re always removing the distributor cap to keep people from leaving the premises, but I can’t even figure out where the darned thing is.”
After much effort, we succeeded in locating something that we thought was the distributor cap; more important, we confirmed that, whatever it was, once it was removed the car wouldn’t start. After considerably greater effort, not to mention some help from Samantha, who happened to be passing by, we managed to get it reinstalled and start my car again.
We then staged a daring midnight raid on Eileen’s car.