The Great Escape (Wynette, Texas #7)(25)

Finally a piece of luck. Maybe she could get her questions answered without having to see him again.

The old man rested his forearm on the bar. “He don’t talk much. Kind of standoffish. Never heard what he does for a living.”

“Yeah, that’s the way he is,” Viper said. “Is Goose Cove far from here?”

“Island’s only ten miles long,” his pal replied. “Nothing’s too far from here, although some places are harder to get to than others.”

Their directions involved a confusing number of turns, as well as locating a boat shed, a dead tree, and a boulder somebody named Spike had spray-painted with a peace sign. Fifteen minutes after she left the bar, she was hopelessly lost. She drove aimlessly for a while and eventually managed to get back to the main road, where she stopped at a bait shop that was closing up for the night and got another set of directions, almost equally confusing.

It was getting dark by the time she spotted the battered mailbox with the name REMINGTON faintly visible on the driftwood sign above it. She turned off the road into the potholed drive and parked in front of a double set of garage doors.

The big, rambling beach house had started life as a Dutch Colonial, but over the years, it had been haphazardly expanded with a porch here, a bay there, another porch, a short wing. Its weathered shingles were the color of old driftwood, and twin chimneys poked from its jumbled roofs. She couldn’t believe it belonged to Panda. This was a house designed for families—a place for sunburned kids to chase their cousins up from the beach, for moms to trade family gossip while their husbands fired up the charcoal grill, where grandparents stole naps on a shady porch and dogs lazed in the sun. Panda belonged in a run-down fishing cabin, not at a place like this. But the address checked out, and the men had been clear about the name Remington.

An unimpressive front door stood to the right of a two-car garage. On the landing, a chipped clay flowerpot held some dead soil and a faded American flag from a long-forgotten Fourth of July. The door was locked. She followed an overgrown path around the side toward the water, where she discovered the heart of the house—a sprawling screen porch, an open deck, and rows of windows facing a sheltered cove with Lake Michigan just beyond.

She made her way back around the house looking for a way to get in, but everything was locked. She’d seen a couple of inns while she was driving around, some guesthouses and bed-and-breakfasts, so there were plenty of places to stay. But first she wanted to see inside.

She reached through a piece of torn porch screening and unfastened the hook latch on the door. The boards creaked as she wove between some chaise longues with mildewed canvas cushions that had once been a bright marine blue. A broken wind chime made of spoons hung crookedly in one corner, an abandoned cooler sat in another. The door to the house was locked, but that didn’t stop Viper. She broke one of the small glass panes with a rusted garden trowel, reached inside, and opened the lock.

The musty scent of a closed-up house met her as she stepped into an old-fashioned kitchen. At some point, the tall wooden cabinets had been unwisely painted institutional green. They still bore what were surely the original cup handles and matching drawer pulls. An exceptionally ugly fake Victorian table sat in a breakfast nook too small for its size. The scarred white laminate counter held an old microwave, a new coffeemaker, a knife block, and a salt crock stuffed with bent spatulas and scorched plastic spoons. A ceramic pig dressed like a French waiter sat by the sink.

She turned on some lights and explored the downstairs, walking through a living room and a sunroom and sticking her head into a musty den before ending up in a large first-floor bedroom. The queen-size bed had a navy-and-white-patterned spread, end tables shaped like cable spools, a triple dresser, and two unmatched upholstered chairs. A pair of cheaply framed Andrew Wyeth prints hung on the wall. The closet held a windbreaker, jeans, sneakers, and a Detroit Lions ball cap. The sizes seemed about right to belong to Panda, but that was hardly conclusive proof that she’d broken into the right house.

The attached bathroom with its outdated robin’s-egg-blue ceramic tile and fresh white shower curtain was no more revealing. She hesitated, then opened the medicine cabinet. Toothpaste, dental floss, Advil, an Atra razor.

She went back to the kitchen and inspected the one object that was out of place, a state-of-the-art German coffeemaker, exactly the sort of thing a highly paid professional bodyguard who loved good coffee might own. It was what she discovered in the refrigerator, however, that convinced her she’d found the right place. On a nearly empty shelf, she spotted a jar of orange marmalade, exactly the same brand she’d seen Panda slather on her homemade bread.

“Real men eat grape jelly,” she’d said when she’d seen him pick up an identical jar at the grocery near Caddo Lake. “I’m serious, Panda. If you buy orange marmalade, you have to turn in your man card.”

“It’s what I like. Deal with it.”

The refrigerator also held two six-packs of Coke. No beer. She’d spent countless highway miles thinking about that first morning when she’d awakened by the lake and seen the pile of empties from the six-pack Panda had bought the previous night. What kind of bodyguard drank when he was on duty? But try as she might, the only real drinking she’d witnessed involved his taking a few slugs before she’d gone into the trees and the sight of him draining the bottle when she came out. Then there was the six-pack he’d set on the dresser their first night in that motel. How much of it had she really seen him drink? Not more than a couple of sips. As for their time at Caddo Lake … He’d only drunk Coke.