Troubled Waters (The Cass Jameson Mysteries Book 5) by Carolyn Wheat

Author:Carolyn Wheat [Wheat, Carolyn]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781504002264
Publisher: Open Road Media Mystery & Thriller
Published: 2015-02-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

July 16, 1982

Jan stepped out of the AA meeting into hot, bright sunlight. After leaving Harve’s office, she’d passed up a downtown meeting to come to the 1:30 at Our Lady of Guadalupe so she’d be on the spot to start her inquiries. She decided there was no point in asking Father Jerry if he knew anything about a factory; if Dana and Rap were doing something illegal, they wouldn’t have confided in the priest. Instead she asked Belita Navarro, who was now seventeen and worked part-time for the Migrant Ministry, where Dana was supposed to be this morning.

“Ms. Sobel is out by the van Wormers’, I think,” Belita replied, looking up from the typewriter on her desk. “You know, where they got that trailer camp behind the big house.” She wore a peach-colored shirtwaist dress, and her long, glossy black hair was held back by a matching peach headband. Her family had settled out after the parathion accident, her father going to work at the ketchup factory, and her mother cooking for Rosita’s Luncheonette on Superior.

Jan nodded. She could find migrant camps with ease now, even if they couldn’t be seen from the highway. You took the dirt roads, followed the line of poplar trees, aimed for what looked like broken-down, abandoned shacks.

But she’d been to the van Wormer place before. She’d seen the migrant camp. And there was nothing there that could remotely be called a factory.

Still, it was a lead. She thanked Belita and stepped out of the makeshift office. Shading her eyes with her hand, she gazed across the fields toward the van Wormer farm. Too far away; she could barely see the huge, newly painted red barn, with its Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol on the front.

She opened the door to her ancient VW beetle and climbed inside. Driving along the back road toward the van Wormers’ outer fields, the ones farthest away from the farmhouse, she caught a glimpse of something silver glinting in the sun.

Trailers.

Some farmers used old trailers as migrant housing.

But the van Wormers didn’t; they had cinderblock cabins.

So what was causing that silver gleam?

Jan drove along the dirt road, willing herself to go slowly so as not to kick up dust. She wanted to approach as unobtrusively as possible.

The trailers were old-fashioned aluminum cylinders that gleamed in the sun like shards of glass. When you first saw them from the road, you thought maybe they were a mirage, but then you decided it was the sun glinting off a hidden pond behind the cornfield. Only after you’d bounced along the rutted dirt road did you realize that what you were seeing was man-made. And then you hoped they were unoccupied. Hot as hell in there, you thought. I just hope nobody—

You hoped wrong. Jan hoped wrong. When she’d first overheard Rap and Dana talking about “the factory” she’d figured that she was new to the underground railroad and didn’t have to know everything. But Miguel’s death and the growing suspicion that someone had tipped Walt Koeppler changed all that.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.