“Hey, I’m willing to do whatever it takes to drive the killer out into the open,” I said.
I was about to say something else when I glanced in my rearview mirror and saw a black BMW following us five or six cars back. “You are not going to believe this.”
“What’s happening?”
“Don’t look behind us, but I think I just found Bernie Maine.”
“Are you kidding?” Maddy asked. She started to turn in her seat, but I put a hand on her shoulder.
“What did I just ask you? If you have to look, use the vanity mirror on your visor.”
She did as I requested and then slowly nodded in agreement. “It’s Bernie, all right, unless somebody else is driving his car. What’s he doing following us?”
“I don’t have a clue. If he’s tailing us, he must be lost. Could he honestly believe that we’re a threat to him?”
“He must. Why else would he risk being caught following us? That’s not exactly an inconspicuous car he’s driving. What are we going to do?”
I had taken my phone out and had put it on the dash between us. “I’m going to call Chief Hurley,” I said.
“He’ll see you making a call, and we can’t afford to spook him,” she said. “Let me do it.”
“Go on, then. Grab my phone and try to get him,” I instructed her. “He’s on my contact list.”
“I can use my phone. He’s on my list, too,” she said. That was news to me. Perhaps my sister was getting a little more prudent as she got older. Having the chief of police’s number on automatic dial meant that at least she was finally beginning to realize that we couldn’t handle every situation by ourselves. I never would have believed it if Maddy hadn’t told me herself.
She put her phone on speaker so we could both talk to the chief of police.
When he picked up, I said, “Chief, this is Eleanor.”
“Am I on speaker? I hate speakerphones. You know that.”
“Sorry if it’s inconvenient, but I thought you might like to know that someone is following us. Maddy and I just noticed him four cars back, and I doubt that he realizes that we’re onto him. Care for a guess about who it might be?”
“It’s not Bernie Maine, is it?” he asked.
“It is indeed, or at least his car,” Maddy said.
“Don’t do anything, Eleanor,” the chief said.
“If I stop driving, he’s going to rear-end me,” I said.
“You know what I mean. What I should have said was, ‘Don’t do anything different.’ Where are you right now?”
“We’re on two-fifty-eight, between Cow Spots and Timber Ridge.”
“In which direction are you traveling, and which town are you closest to?”
I looked at Maddy and asked, “We’re about ten miles from Timber Ridge, wouldn’t you say?”
Before she could answer, Chief Hurley asked, “How should I know?”
“I was talking to Maddy,” I said.
“That sounds about right to me,” my sister said.
“Are you heading toward town or away from it?”
“Toward,” Maddy said.
“I’ll be there in nine minutes,” he said.
“Are you sure you don’t . . . Maddy, did he just hang up on us?”
“He must have, unless there’s a dead spot in my coverage here.” She leaned forward and closed her phone. I doubted that her action looked that suspicious from the distance Bernie Maine was from us, but something must have spooked him. At the next intersection of an old country road, he pulled off abruptly.
I did a wide U-turn on the shoulder as I told Maddy, “Call the chief and tell him what’s going on.”
“Yee-haw, I just love a high-speed car chase,” she said.
“When you tell him that, try to find a way to word it so that his head doesn’t explode,” I said as I pulled my car onto the road Maine had just taken. It was paved for fifty feet before it changed into a dirt road, and I could see the dust springing up like a plume behind the BMW.
“Hang on,” I said as I pressed the accelerator down closer to the floor.
“Chief, we had to take a detour on Meadowbrook,” Maddy said out loud as soon as he answered. I was glad we were on speakerphone again, no matter how the chief of police felt about it.
That was when it hit me. In my haste to follow our suspect, I’d completely missed the name of the road we were on, a crucial bit of information that my sister provided. Then again, I’d been pretty intent on not driving into a tree, so my attention had been focused elsewhere, like on not killing us.
“What are you doing there?” he screamed. “You were supposed to drive straight to Timber Ridge.”