I promised I’d behave myself, and that was why I stood off to the side and listened, trying my best to look as inoffensive as possible. Chief Lewis had shot me a gimlet glare as I got out of Calvin’s police SUV, but since he hadn’t said anything, I figured I’d been given the green light to stay.
“What do you mean, ‘something’ grabbed hold of the car?” Lewis asked, clearly displeased by Travis’s description of the accident.
“What I said, man.” Travis ran a hand through his stringy hair and then crossed his arms. He kept his gaze resolutely away from the still body on the gurney, or the crumpled wreckage of what used to be a Subaru Forester. “Like, I was driving down the highway — doing the speed limit — and then the back wheels started to skid. Next thing I knew, something jerked on the rear end of the car, and we flipped. Rolled two, three times. I can’t remember for sure.”
“Why wasn’t Ms. Kappas wearing her seatbelt?” Calvin asked next.
Because that was why Travis was still standing upright, no worse for wear except a few bumps on his forehead and the beginnings of a laceration from the seat belt visible against the side of his neck, and Athene was on her way to the morgue. When the car rolled, her neck was broken.
Just thinking about it made me slightly queasy.
“I think she dropped her phone,” Travis said. “I heard her swear, and I think I saw her bend down to get it but she couldn’t reach it. So she undid her seatbelt — and that was when the car started to act weird.”
I fought back a shiver. It sure sounded to me as though someone…or something…had put a hex on the car. However, I knew I’d better keep that theory to myself — at least until Calvin and I could talk in private. I didn’t even want to think how the hard-jawed Chief Lewis would react if I tried to tell him that Travis’s Subaru had been cursed.
Calvin nodded, as if satisfied with the explanation Travis had provided. Lewis, scowled, though, and said, “You been smoking, Travis?”
“No,” he replied at once in wounded tones. “Not that I don’t have the right,” he added, as if he wanted the police chief to understand that he hadn’t abstained because of fear of the law. Like California, Arizona had legalized recreational marijuana use, but that didn’t mean its residents had a license to drive while high. “But Ms. Kappas had contacted me though the app and let me know she wanted a pickup in a few hours, and so I made sure I was sharp and ready to go.”
I had my doubts about how “sharp” Travis was even when he wasn’t partaking, but I could tell he wasn’t lying. And apparently, Chief Lewis also seemed to accept his story, because he nodded and said, “All right. We’ll tow the vehicle in and inspect it, see what kind of mechanical problem caused it to fail like that.”
“Wasn’t no problem,” Travis protested. “I just had a full-on inspection only two months ago. Brakes, suspension, tires…everything was fine. There’s nothing wrong with my car.”
“Well, if that’s the case, then we won’t find anything,” Lewis replied. His gaze shifted to Calvin, and I saw his mouth go flat, even as bristles of red flared in his aura. Definitely no love lost there; I had a feeling he griped to his deputies about having to work with an “Injun,” even if he was savvy enough not to repeat that kind of thing in mixed company. “You need anything else, Standingbear?”
“I’ll take a quick look at the vehicle.” Calvin’s voice was brisk, no-nonsense, although he sounded friendly enough as he directed his next words to Travis. “You need a lift home, Travis?”
“If you could,” the other man said. From his obvious relief, I could tell he was much happier getting a lift from Calvin than from Chief Lewis.
Not that I could blame him.
“Sure thing,” Calvin said, and clapped Travis on the shoulder. “Just give me a few minutes, and then I’ll get you out of here.”
Travis shot him a relieved glance, then headed over to a large boulder on the side of the highway. He leaned up against it, hands jammed in his pockets, and stared, mouth drooping, at the wreckage of his vehicle.
Calvin walked over to me and said in an undertone, “You getting anything from all this?”
“You mean like what I felt down by the river?” I replied in a similar murmur.
He nodded. Across the way, Chief Lewis stared at us with narrowed eyes, but then his shoulders lifted, and he walked back over to his deputy, who’d been standing guard by the gurney next to an EMT the whole time. They shared a few words, and then the EMT and the deputy hefted the gurney into the back of the ambulance.
The slam of its doors seemed far too loud, and I jumped. Calvin gave me a sympathetic glance.
“Hell of a first date.”
“Is that what it was?”
A corner of his mouth lifted slightly. “Maybe. Can you come with me to Travis’s car?”
“Sure.”
I told myself I shouldn’t be feeling so happy, not when Athene Kappas lay dead a few yards away from me in the back of an ambulance. And maybe “happy” wasn’t even the correct word for the way I felt right then.
Excited…hopeful.
Calvin had called our dinner a date, not me.
We walked over to the wreckage of Travis’s Subaru. It had been pushed mostly onto the shoulder; flares surrounded it, letting passing motorists know to give the spot a wide berth. Not that there was probably much traffic coming and going on Highway 60 on a Sunday night, thankfully.
The car wasn’t brand-new, but it looked as though Travis did a good job of maintaining it, because the paint that wasn’t scratched and scraped looked clean, and the tires appeared fairly new as well. I felt a stab of pity for the poor thing ending up like this, because even my unpracticed eyes could tell the frame had been bent and the vehicle was totaled.
I didn’t think I made any kind of sound, but Calvin must have picked up something because he said, “Travis’s insurance will take care of most of it. He had to have it fully insured to be driving for Uber.”
“What about the deductible?” Somehow, I doubted Travis had an extra thousand bucks — or even five hundred — lying around to cover that sort of expense.
Calvin looked as though he wanted to reach out and give me a reassuring pat on the arm. Since we had something of an audience — Chief Lewis and his deputy still loitered on the scene, probably waiting for the tow truck to arrive — he just said, “Then Josie will organize some kind of a fundraiser. They do that in Globe. Take care of their own, I mean.”
Even though I was new to town and probably wouldn’t be classified as one of “their own”…at least not yet…I couldn’t help but be relieved by Calvin’s words. It felt good to be in a place where people looked out for each other.
“That’s good to hear,” I said.
“Not much like L.A., I’m guessing.”
“Not a lot, no.” It wasn’t that people didn’t try to look out for one another when they could, but just being neighbors usually wasn’t enough of an incentive to get involved the way it obviously was in this particular small town.
Far down the highway appeared a set of flashing lights, getting closer. Calvin glanced over at them and frowned.