“How?”
“Well, the problem was—wait.” He looked me and frowned. “Do you want the technical explanation? Because my dad says I have an annoying tendency to lecture people on stuff like that. Mechanical and engineering stuff. I’d be happy to tell you exactly, but maybe you’d rather have the nontechnical explanation.”
“Let’s start with the nontechnical stuff,” I said. “What did you tell the ladies was wrong with it?”
“It was too noisy, and using too much fuel,” he said. “I’m pretty sure I could have fixed it—my dad’s generator at home had the same problem, and I fixed it. It’s running fine now. And I could have installed an on/off switch in the house, so they didn’t have to go out in the cold. But the ladies never wanted me to do it—I think they were a little worried that I’d mess it up or hurt myself.”
“Or maybe they didn’t mind it being a little noisy, since Mr. Weaver bore the main brunt of that.”
“Yeah.” He grinned and chuckled softly. “That idea occurred to me, too. But the point is, I knew I could fix it—but I knew better than to do it without their permission. Can you tell Miss Annabel that?”
“You can’t tell her yourself?”
“I would if I could, but she won’t see me.” He looked hurt. “I can understand that she doesn’t need me so much anymore—it’s not like she ever goes anywhere that she’d need me to drive her, like I did Ms. Delia. But I’d just like to talk to her. Give her my condolences. Tell her in person that I didn’t do anything to the generator.”
“She’s hired my PI friend to try to prove that Theo Weaver killed her cousin,” I said. “Do you really think she’d do that if she thought Ms. Delia’s death was caused by something you did to the generator?”
He looked surprised, and almost cheerful.
“That’s good,” he said. “It’d be nice to know she doesn’t blame me.” His face fell again. “Still, I wish she’d talk to me. I used to like driving Ms. Delia around, and then coming back and listening to her tell Miss Annabel everything we’d seen and done. And they’d serve me cookies, and we’d talk. It was like they were actually interested in hearing what I thought about stuff, instead of telling me to shut up like most grownups. I liked them. They were nice ladies. Well, Miss Annabel is and Ms. Delia was.”
“I’ll see if I can bring the subject up,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said.
We fell silent again. I wasn’t sure what Thor was thinking, but I was struggling with a sudden feeling of resentment against him. He’d known my grandmother. They’d been friends. And I’d never get to meet her.
And it wasn’t his fault. Instead of resenting him, I should work on getting to know him. He was another source of information about Cordelia.
Although not, I suspected, the information I most wanted to know.
A little while later, Thor slowed down in front of a faded sign announcing that we were entering the Pudding Mountain National Park. A weathered split-rail fence ran along the road, no doubt to mark the boundaries of the park. A narrow, badly rutted dirt road led through the opening in the fence.
“Hang onto your hat,” Thor said, as he pulled onto the road.
We jounced and bounced along through the woods—and rather steeply uphill—for about three miles. Neither of us spoke. Thor seemed to be concentrating on avoiding the worst of the ruts, and I was afraid if I opened my mouth, a sudden jolt might cause me to bite my tongue off. Thor finally pulled to a stop when we reached a small clearing on the bank of a stream. The road forded the stream and continued, still uphill.
“This is where we feed them,” he said. “It’s about as far as you want to go—the road gets worse across the stream.”
Worse? That was hard to imagine.
Thor began turning the truck around in the relatively narrow space of the clearing.
“I don’t want to leave immediately,” I said. “Let’s look for the emus.”
“I figured you’d probably say that,” he said. “I just like to have the truck ready to roll in case a bear or something comes along.”
If he was trying to scare me—well, no sense letting him know he’d succeeded.
“Is that likely?” I tried to sound calm and interested.
“I’ve only seen one once,” he said. “Actually, I got in the habit of turning the truck around because when we’d bring the feed up, the emus would swarm us, and I didn’t want to run over any of them while turning around.”