Miranda and the D-Day Caper

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER TWO

Miranda stayed with it a while longer. Perhaps it was the catch in Skip’s voice and the pleading look in his bleary eyes, which wasn’t at all like the playful older cousin of yore. At any rate, he finally began to zero in on his predicament.

It seems he’d obtained the below-street-level sublet from his old school chum Chris Holden, the one he was temporarily replacing at the radio station. An adjacent alleyway was where he parked his old clunker of a Volvo. The other night, as he descended the steps by the iron railing, things started to percolate. Across the way, that dubious van pulled in, a door opened, and something was dropped off.

While he was watching, a high beam from a tactical flashlight from the direction of the van scanned the iron railing and focused tightly on Skip’s face.

“You getting this?” said Skip, gesturing wildly, trying even harder to hold Miranda’s attention as her patience wore thin. “As I start to head down the stairs, I spot a manila envelope dangling from the railing by a thread. Inside the envelope, there’s a Post-it note telling me to sign the enclosed document from the Liberty Broadcasting System contracting me to abide by the non-disclosure agreement forthwith. I’m given one hour to affix my signature, insert the document in the envelope, and drop it in the rusted mailbox of the abandoned house next door.”

“But brave, intrepid Skip crumples it up,” said Miranda, hazarding a guess to hurry things up.

“Sleepy Skip, figuring this is totally off the wall and dying to get to bed, tossed it in the nearby trash can. Shortly after, glass shatters via a high-powered pellet gun aimed at my window. Next, a hissing noise from outside turns out to be the leaking tires of my old Volvo. Taken together with the threatening calls at the station, I pack up and split right after the AAA truck comes by and takes care of the flats. I snatch Duffy and, in my panic, cover so many miles that I wind up at a motel in Pennsylvania near the Bucks County Playhouse.”

“Where you once appeared in some Story Theater show. I get it. But why not hole up there until you get your wits together?”

“Because when I emerge to get a bite to eat, there’s a note on my windshield telling me to keep going and stay strictly on the eastern seaboard.”

Miranda shook her head. “However, still scared witless, Skip takes off again, and even more sleepless and fatigued, decides to fake them out and heads due west instead. Then drives south full tilt through the Virginia and Carolina Blue Ridge, miles and miles out of the way.”

“How did you know?” said Skip, lowering his waving arms.

“Because, Doctor Watson, you’d been to Asheville during that improv gig I caught a couple of years back. Black Mountain was only a short drive east. You remembered I had just been through an escapade which, in your loopy, burned-out condition made me an operative you could hook up with. All the while checking your rearview mirror and reassuring Duffy the cat.”

Dropping his storytelling act, he said, “As you guessed, I was in a panic. I kept remembering the map on Russ Matthews’s wall.”

“Oh, no. What map?”

“The one in his office. With a check mark for Savannah and Charleston and a red pushpin smack-dab all the way west to Asheville. If I could hide out close by and consult with a crackerjack sleuth and relative . . .”

“Whoa,” said Miranda, leading him back to the picnic table, sitting him down, and hovering over him this time. “Let’s deep six the crackerjack sleuth bit once and for all. A rattled church lady client asked me to look into poison pen letters slipped under her door. After a bit of poking around, I traced it back to a child she’d abandoned years ago but who, as a lady deacon of the church, didn’t want anyone to find out. Ergo, a bit of poking around doth not a crackerjack operative make. Moreover, I had to rely on my ex—a local detective now on the force in Raleigh—to corral said perpetrator and throw away the key. Ta-da! End of story. Are we clear now? Have you got this straight?”

Maybe Skip heard her, maybe not. Closing his eyes, elbows on the table, holding his head in his hands as if all the energy had suddenly gone out of his body, he began murmuring. From what little she could make out, there was something about pulling in at the Black Mountain Motel, tossing and turning, hearing Duffy make a familiar yowl when he was hungry and the deep growl of a motorcycle. Miranda strung it together to surmise that when he crawled out of bed at first light, someone must have slipped in, grabbed Duffy, sliced his collar, tossed aside his white ribbon leash, and split.

His murmuring became harder to decipher yet more insistent. Being Duffy-less without his ginger tabby pal . . . left with five days to carry out his midnight cry of Paul Revere . . . or raise the white flag, get Duffy back, and to hell with saving the country . . . based on a cryptic note discovered at the station on Russ Mathews’s desk two days before: Down to the wire, D-Day minus seven.

Then the murmuring segued into muffled sobbing.

She tried to console him, patted him lightly on the back, but to no avail.

Miranda slipped away and edged past the Mud Buddies canopy. The air was still crisp, the sky still a vibrant Carolina blue, the Seven Sisters range still a fresh verdant green. But her basic assumptions had been turned around, inside out. Instead of an older cousin she’d always looked up to, who ministered to her and always managed to slough everything off, here was Skip coming apart at the seams.

She crossed over the grassy aisle back to Trudy and the apple turnovers. She wondered what in the world Harry, her confidant and part-time lover, would make of this. Some shadowy plot trickling down and across this great land about to implode in this neck of the woods? Oh really, Miranda? Give me a break.

She paid Trudy for the turnovers, taking in the pie lady’s ever-radiant smile emanating from some trouble-free parallel universe. “How did it go? What’s up? Something new?”

Miranda merely returned the smile.

Clutching the pastry box, she doubled back and paused at the far end where the bluegrass trio still held forth. The ragtag assortment of little kids and dogs had thinned out, doubtless because the tunes had become quite heart-tugging. At the moment, the lead gal dressed in a hand-me-down cowgirl outfit was wailing, “If you’re hurtin’, hon, can’t you see? If you’re hurtin’, hon, you can count on me.”

There was no way she could piece this all together, let alone fill in the gaps. Skip himself was too discombobulated to lay things out in a straight line. At best, she could only come up with a starting point and, little by little, take it from there.

She turned the corner and hurried back past the vendors. Skip was still at the picnic table, totally slumped now, no longer murmuring a word.

She strode right over, plunked down the pastry box, and, calling on her take-charge self, said, “Okay, kiddo. In my line of work, we speak in tangibles. We put aside overblown concerns. We take soundings. We do preliminary assessments. At the Tavern, before I book an act, I arrange for an audition. As for assessing property, I check out the lay of the land, the condition of the home, the comparable market value. I zero in on the realities.”

Slowly raising his weary head, he said, “What are you saying?”

“Given a supposed window of five days left—which happens to be the allotted time in which I need to book new acts at the Tavern and post new property listings—we’ll look into the matter of a purloined cat. If, by some quirk of fate, the scope actually happens to widen and I can draw the salient details out of you . . .”

“Go on,” said Skip, sitting up straight, the color returning to his cheeks.

“The purloined cat, Skip. Our sole and only tangible. Steering clear of some gonzo classified maneuvers to save America.”