Lewis Cole 09 Blood Foam by Brendan DuBois

Author:Brendan DuBois [DuBois, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Mystery & Detective, General
ISBN: 9781410482792
Google: YHTrsgEACAAJ
Publisher: Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning
Published: 2015-08-14T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was a two-hour drive up to Lake Pettis, going on Route 16, and Felix dodged the two tollbooths in Dover and Rochester so that our progress wouldn’t be recorded. For the most part it was a quiet drive, save for one time when we were going through a town called Ossipee—and it seemed like we were going through Ossipee for a long time—and we passed a restaurant that sold pizza. From behind me Paula sighed, and I said “What’s up?”

“Oh, not much,” she said. “But did you see that old farmhouse by the road, right past the pizza place?”

“No, I guess I missed it.”

“That’s the point, I suppose,” she said. “A single mom was murdered there, for no good reason. Her boyfriend was in jail, she had sort of taken over his marijuana business, and one moron asked two other morons to help kill her and rob her. She was at the house, they slammed her in the head with a blunt object, tied and taped her up, and dumped her in a pond up in North Conway.”

“Charming,” I said.

“It gets better. No, it gets worse. Her little girl was left behind in her car seat, in the car, parked near the pond. The three idiots sent e-mails and text messages back and forth, so they were scooped up in no time. And the poor single mom . . . she didn’t die from the beating. She died from drowning, after they tossed her in.”

Paula looked out the rear of the Tahoe. “A simple, old, country farmhouse in the middle of quiet New Hampshire, and it was the scene of a murder that makes me queasy to even talk about.”

Felix sped up the Tahoe. “No offense, Paula, but that isn’t really the stirring ‘let’s go get the job done against all odds’ kind of speech we could use right now.”

“The truth is still the truth.”

“Not if you ignore it.”

Since it was late November, most of the gaudy orange, red, and yellow foliage had fallen from the trees, leaving bare, gray limbs from the ghost trees along the sides of the road. Route 16 was mostly two-lane, cutting right through the heart of the White Mountains. We slowed down some as we approached the outlet-mall oasis that is North Conway, and in a few minutes of skilled driving from Felix and skilled navigating from Paula, we passed through North Conway and were again in rural New Hampshire.

“Who picked Lake Pettis?” I asked. “You or him?”

“I recommended us finding a nice remote place for a vacation, and Mark took it from there. He said a client recommended it as a good vacation spot.”

Felix said, “Maybe he was looking for another recommendation. To find a place he could use as a retreat if something happened. Like a Wyoming motorcycle gang going after his butt.”

I knew Paula was tempted to say once again that her fiancé had nothing to do with Wyoming or a motorcycle gang, but she kept quiet as we

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