Again, I’ve got zero proof, but I swear he was about to smile.

  Bliss Wilson, a local—I was still learning faces and names—tooted her horn at us in greeting as Deputy Bobby waved her into the parking lot where the craft fair was being held.

  “Why would you tell an editor that you solve mysteries?”

  “Because I did!”

  And that was, technically, true, although I’d had some help.

  Deputy Bobby had made his position clear vis-à-vis sleuthing—he was firmly of the opinion that I shouldn’t ever do it again, and that I should leave all future snooping to professional law enforcement, and that everyone’s lives would generally be safer and easier and better if I kept strictly to writing mysteries in the future, rather than investigating them.

  Right then, he was giving me another of those looks, in case I’d forgotten where he stood on the matter. But all he said was “I meant, shouldn’t you tell him about your other stories? Isn’t that what an editor wants to hear about?”

  “Well, yeah, eventually.”

  “Eventually? How much time do you have for your pitch session?”

  I ignored that. “The most important thing is to start with a hook.”

  “And your hook is going to be that you solve mysteries.”

  “Why did you say it like that?”

  He was definitely hiding a smile at that point.

  “Dash,” Chaleena—one of the aforementioned girls of Two Girls and a Scoop—called from the truck. She poked her head out the window, glanced around for me, and held up a cone.

  “You’re up,” Deputy Bobby said.

  “Just for that,” I said, “I’m not getting you any ice cream.”

  “I don’t want any ice cream. I want to do my job and enjoy a beautiful day.”

  “What is wrong with you—” I began.

  But then, as I watched from the middle of the intersection, Chaleena ducked her head back inside the truck. She was still holding the cone out, waiting for me to take it. And while her attention was diverted, an old woman reached up, plucked the cone from her hand, and turned to stroll away.

  For a moment, all I could do was stare.

  “That lady,” Deputy Bobby said, “just stole your ice cream.”

  2

  “Because she took my ice cream!” I was trying to explain, but Deputy Bobby simply wasn’t understanding. In my frustration, my volume continued to rise. “She stole it!”

  “I know,” Deputy Bobby said. “I saw. In fact, I pointed it out. But believe it or not, ice cream theft isn’t a shoot-to-kill offense.”

  “Then arrest her!”

  A lady in an enormous SUV laid on her horn. Deputy Bobby turned to give her one of his trademark looks, and the horn cut off abruptly. When he turned back to me, some of that saintly patience must have been beginning to wear off because he said, “In the first place, I can’t arrest her because I can’t leave my post. In the second place, why would I arrest her, Dash?”

  “Because she’s a thief!”

  “You saw her—she’s old. She got confused. She took the wrong cone.”

  “That’s ageist.”

  Deputy Bobby sighed.

  “And,” I continued, “they called my name, and she waited until Chaleena wasn’t looking, and then she took it.”

  “Did you hear the part where I said she got confused?”

  “She didn’t get confused. This was—this was planned.” And then genius struck. “This was a heist!”

  “It was not a heist,” Deputy Bobby said.

  “It was. This was sneakery. This was chicanery. This was strategery.”

  He mouthed strategery. Aloud, he said, “Chaleena will make you another cone if you explain what happened.”

  “How are you not seeing what’s going on here?”

  “What’s going on here?”

  “There’s a criminal mastermind operating in Hastings Rock!”

  This time, his sigh was even deeper. “How about I buy us some ice cream on my break?”

  “Oh no. You didn’t want any ice cream. You’re trying to buy me off. You’re trying to silence me.”

  “How much of this is for real, and how much of it is you trying to get a rise out of me?”

  “Sixty-forty.”

  He was silent—and, I guessed, counting to ten in his head. Then he said, “Goodbye, Dash.”

  I turned to stalk away, but my dramatic gesture was ruined by the fact that Deputy Bobby had to grab my arm to keep me from being flattened by a gang of hoodlums in a Toyota Highlander.

  When I reached the sidewalk (safely, thanks to Deputy Bobby), I gave a considering look in the direction of the thief. I could still see her white-haired head bobbing away from me, but in a few moments, she’d be lost in the crowd of visitors. Part of me knew that Deputy Bobby was probably right—she’d taken my cone by accident, and yes, I’d allowed my initial outrage and disappointment and emotions to get the better of me (I mean, cut me some slack—we’re talking about the world’s best ice cream). But another part of me—the part of me that studied people, that observed behavior, that was trying to make a career out of understanding how and why people broke the law, even if it was only in fiction—remembered what I’d seen. Chaleena ducking her head back inside the truck. The woman stepping forward. The way she had reached for the cone. Confident; that was the best word for it. Or maybe there was one that was even better: brazen. I knew what I’d seen, and it hadn’t been confusion, and it hadn’t been a mistake.

  I started down the sidewalk after her. After a few paces, I had to twist to fit between clusters of tourists who had stopped to look into shop windows, and I was forced to loop out into the street where chokepoints closed off the path completely. The woman ahead of me wasn’t having any better luck, so I was able to keep her in sight as I tried to catch up. Then a clear stretch opened in front of me, and I broke into a jog.

  “Excuse me,” I called. “Ma’am! Excuse me!”

  Heads turned. A woman who was sitting for a caricature gaped at me, and the caricaturist added that expression to the drawing. (Not, I suspected, an artistic choice she’d be happy about.) A man in a shirt that said CALL ME GRAMPS held up his hand like he had a question—or, maybe, was checking to see if he was, perhaps, the ma’am in question. But the white-haired woman who had stolen my ice cream cone didn’t look around. If anything, she ducked her head and went faster.

  Something like a thrill went through me. That wasn’t the behavior of an honest citizen. That certainly wasn’t the behavior of a confused old woman. The word heist came back to me.

  (Also, I deeply regretted saying strategery in front of Deputy Bobby.)

  When the woman reached the next store—a gift shop owned by an out-of-town company, notorious among locals for hawking cheap, generic junk—she darted inside.

  I went after her.

  Inside, the whir of a fan competed with the voices of shoppers. A woman held up an oversized T-shirt (the graphic showed a hand throwing the peace sign), measuring it against her teenage—and clearly grumpy—son. A heavyset man in a Roll Tide hat was smelling factory-produced “artisan” soaps, making a face after each one before gamely moving on to try the next. And—

  There. The white-haired lady was ducking behind a wall of display cubes holding, yes, even more T-shirts.

  I darted and glided between tourists, circled around the T-shirt display, and caught a glimpse of my quarry slipping out the back door. She didn’t move like an old lady, that was for sure. I sprinted after her.

  As I neared the doorway, the tail-end of a conversation reached me: “—don’t know; he must have seen me—”

  I stepped out of the shop and saw the woman I’d been following. She had turned, as though waiting for me. And, I noticed, she’d gotten rid of my ice cream cone. I had a single moment to experience a burst of outrage.

  Then something struck me at the ankles, and I tripped.

  I pitched forward, lost my footing on the narrow steps, and crashed down onto the worn pavement of the alley. The landing drove the breath from my lungs, and as my brain tried to reboot, I gasped for air. I was vaguely aware of someone poking and prodding at me. I caught a whiff of a smell I couldn’t quite place—like vinyl or plastic. Somehow, I flopped onto my back.

  Staring up, I recognized the woman I’d been following. Next to her was another woman—white, middle aged, and holding a cane (which I realized, with a kind of brain lag, she had used to trip me on the stairs). In her other hand, she was carrying an enormous beach bag stuffed full of clothes that still had the security tags on them. She was wearing what I could honestly call the most hideous hat I’d ever seen. It was knit. It was befeathered. It was drooping and shapeless and multicolored, and whoever had made it had worked shiny, metallic strands in with the yarn. It looked, I thought, like what Tinkerbell’s puke might look like. And I realized I might have a concussion.

  “He followed you,” the second woman said.

  “It’s not my fault!” the first woman said. “How was I supposed to know?”

  The second woman made a disgusted noise. “Way to go, Joan. You ruined everything.” She stared at me a moment longer. Then she spat and said, “Let’s find Phyllis and get out of here.”

  3

  They were gone by the time I could take a full breath. I got to my feet. I made my way to the mouth of the alley. The music from a calliope rolled down from the next intersection, mixed with the familiar, excited babble of tourists. They thronged the block: a man shepherded two sulky tweens across the street with zero regard for oncoming traffic (Deputy Bobby would have had a fit), and a middle-aged woman was blocking half the sidewalk as she tried to button up a quilted parka (this is a Pacific Northwest thing—I mean, it was June and people acted like they were polar explorers), and two excited little girls had decided this was an opportune moment to test drive their new hobby horses (literally, not figuratively). But there was no sign of the two women who had—what was the polite way to say beat the crap out of me?

  My hands were scraped. My shoulder throbbed. And—I discovered a moment later—my wallet was gone.

  My wallet was gone?

  But it was. And when I went back and checked the alley, I didn’t find it. I remembered one of the women poking and prodding at me, and the only conclusion seemed to be that they’d taken my wallet. And my ice cream.

  So, maybe I hadn’t been too far off when I’d called this whole debacle a heist. I mean, heists—by their nature—always involved more than one person. And these ladies were clearly in the business of heists—not just my ice cream or my wallet, but also, I suspected, that beach bag full of clothes.

  So, what was I going to do about it?

  I could tell Deputy Bobby, but there were two problems with that. First, by the time I found him, the women would probably be gone. The second woman had said they needed to find Phyllis and leave, and that sounded like they weren’t going to stick around while I pulled Deputy Bobby away from traffic duty. If they got away, I didn’t think I’d be able to track them down—I didn’t have a good description (aside from that hideous hat), and I only had a first name. There were probably a fair number of women called Joan, especially of a certain age.

  The other (more serious) problem was that I’d look like a wuss. I mean, I hadn’t exactly taken it like a man when a little old lady had stolen my ice cream cone. And while Deputy Bobby and I were just friends (I mean, even if I’d wanted it to be something more—which I didn’t—he already had a boyfriend), the thought of running back to him with my tail between my legs, to tell him a story about how some senior citizens were mean to me—well, that was too much for my already shattered dignity.

  That was that. I was going to have to find them myself.

  It turned out not to be quite as simple as I’d imagined.

  “One of them had white hair,” I explained to a mom. She was busy wrangling a boy who was trying to peg passersby with an old-fashioned yo-yo. “And the other had an ugly hat. I mean, truly hideous.” My earlier flash of genius came back to me. “Like if Tinkerbell threw up.”

  The mom stared at me; she dodged the yo-yo, without even seeming to see it, as it whistled toward her head. And then she looked around.

  I followed her gaze, and my heart sank.

  Just about every third person was a white-haired lady. And ugly hats—sun hats, bucket hats, knit caps, trucker hats—stretched as far as the eye could see.

  The mom drifted away in pursuit of the yo-yo-wielding boy, but I barely noticed. It wasn’t that the tourists who came to Hastings Rock were exclusively senior citizens. But, on the other hand, they did make up a large share of our visitors. I mean, this was the Oregon Coast—it wasn’t exactly where the next episode of The Real World was going to be filmed. (Was The Real World still even a thing? Did young people say filmed?) How was I going to find these women before they escaped with my wallet and whatever else they’d managed to steal?

  Okay, I told myself: think.

  Hastings Rock wasn’t a big town, and the tourist section was even smaller. Since these women were taking advantage of the crowds of out-of-towners (evidence: the beach bag, the ugly hat, the fact that the shopkeepers were easily distracted by other customers), it made sense that their friend Phyllis would be somewhere in the tourist section too. And that narrowed my search considerably, to a matter of a few blocks along the waterfront and Main Street.

  I set out at a brisk walk. In my head, I divided the tourist section of town into a grid, and I began a methodical search. It was slow going, not only because of the tourists (one dad type was so enthused about being in Hastings Rock that he was having his son take a picture of him with a trash can), but because the layout of the tourist section was, frankly, a maze. The town hadn’t originally been laid out with a shopping district in mind, and so as the tourism industry had reshaped the waterfront and Main Street, buildings had been changed, adapted, and, on many occasions, thrown up on every available inch of ground, so that shopping plazas and courtyards branched off the street in every direction.

  Ten minutes later, I spotted them: the ugly hat was unmistakable (the fact that it was threaded with tinsel helped catch the eye), and I recognized the lady named Joan (who had stolen my ice cream cone). They were with a third woman who had to be in her sixties and was built like a linebacker, and between the three of them, they were carrying at least a dozen bulging beach bags. It looked like they’d hit the stores pretty hard; I’d heard from locals that shoplifting was a real problem during the tourist season, but these women were taking it to a new level. What I wanted to know, though, was how they were going to get out of town. They couldn’t walk, not carrying their ill-gotten loot (was it only loot if you were a pirate?), so where was their vehicle?

  As though in answer to my question, the women turned down a narrow cobblestone pathway between a candlemaker and a place that sold bronze busts of weird old man heads. (If it’s artsy, you can buy it in Hastings Rock.) I picked up the pace—the winding paths off the street could take them all sorts of different places, and I didn’t want to lose them.

  I jogged down the cobblestone path, which was empty, and my steps rang out and echoed back from the buildings on either side of me—a shuttered bookstore, a psychic parlor with the windows papered over, a café that must have closed years ago, its faded sign reading PAQUI’S. The air smelled faintly like mildew and brine and, strangely, like glue.

  The path opened onto a small asphalt lot with a handful of cars. I had a moment to think that this must have been their plan—to get away in a vehicle they’d hidden off the main street. And then a shoe scuffed the pavement, and something jabbed me in the back.

  “Don’t move,” a gruff voice said.

  I didn’t move. In the first place, because I was too busy cursing myself out for having stumbled into what had to be the most obvious trap in the history of the world. And in the second, because I was pretty sure this person—the Phyllis, I assumed—was holding a gun to my back.

  There was something strange about the gun, though. The shape of it, I mean. It didn’t feel right. And while I didn’t exactly have a lot of experience with guns, I’d recently had someone else try to hold me at gunpoint, and let me tell you: the memory is vivid.

  Before I could pinpoint what felt different, a hand grabbed my shoulder and turned me toward a line of Port-a-Potties. Phyllis shoved me into one and slammed the door. Something scraped across the ground outside, and then there was a heavy thunk against the Port-a-Potty’s door.

  “Come on,” Phyllis said in that same gruff voice. “We need to go.”

  4

  It wasn’t that bad, honestly. I mean, I didn’t even think the Port-a-Potty had been used—it smelled like whatever chemicals they put in there, that’s all. Since this was summer on the Oregon Coast, it wasn’t even hot. But, on the other hand, it wasn’t where I wanted to spend the rest of my life.

  So, I kicked, hammered, and shouted for help.

  The shouting didn’t seem to do much, but the kicking and hammering worked. One moment, I was trying to batter down the door. The next, there was a sound as something slid along the Port-a-Potty’s door and then hit the ground with a clatter. I shoved the door open and emerged into the parking lot.

  The women were gone, of course.

  I hadn’t heard an engine start, and a quick glance at the cars in the lot told me the women had left on foot. I briefly considered going after them again, but let’s face it: my pride couldn’t take another blow. Like it or not, it was time to get Deputy Bobby.

  I sprinted back to the intersection where I’d left him, but he wasn’t there. Deputy Dahlberg had taken his place, directing cars in and out of the lot that had been reserved for the craft fair.

  She glanced at me as I approached, and then she gave me a second look. “Everything all right?”

  “Do you know where Deputy Bobby went?”

  Dahlberg’s expression was a little too knowing for my liking, but she only said, “He’s on break.”

 

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