Page 67 of Wind Valley

“Happened once before, you know. Ain’t the first time someone came out here to get away from bad people.”

“What are you talking about, Pinky?” Maura asked through a mouthful of sausage.

“That professor who used to live in Wind Valley. Said someone was after him for his research. We called him the Nutty Professor.”

“You knew him?” Lachlan set down his fork, half a sausage still speared on the end. He met Maura’s glance, clearly thinking the same thing she was. Why had they never asked Pinky about Dr. Reed before? Then again, he hadn’t seemed important until they’d called him on the phone and gotten such a strange reaction. “Someone was after him?”

“I don’t know, he was pretty paranoid, especially at the end. I never could tell if what he said was real or just in his head.”

Maura suppressed a smile, since many people in town had the same thought about Pinky.

“How did you know him? Did you hang out with him at The Fang or something?”

“Nah, he wasn’t a drinker. He had three little kids. I had a little mining claim on that creek that goes through the valley. That’s how we got to talking. He liked me. He said I was a ‘natural man’ because I never went to school. He sure talked a lot of shit about school considering he was a professor.”

“He was a homeschooler, right?” Lachlan asked.

“His idea of homeschooling was making the kids follow him around while he did stuff. They were too young for school anyways.”

Maura was sure she would have gotten into some serious arguments with Professor Reed. “What else do you remember about that family?”

Pinky screwed up his face and squinted into the rafters, as if that would call up the memories. “He weren’t here for long, but he was hard to forget. Wore black nail polish because he didn’t like seeing dirt under his fingernails, so he just painted ’em. He was always dictating into a little tape recorder. Said it was part of his life’s work. But then he went off the deep end. He thought people were gonna come for his research and that his family would be in danger. He had a name for it. What he was working on, I mean. Something with ‘wave.’ ‘Wavy-gravy gobbledy-golloolly-spectro-something.’”

Maura giggled at his version of Reed’s research. “Catchy.”

Pinky laughed too. “His wife got real worried about him. I’d see her crying sometimes. Then she tried to leave and they got into a huge fight. They must have worked it out, because they all left together.”

“Do you know why they left?”

With a snort, Pinky shrugged. “If you think it’s rough here, imagine how it is in that valley. I don’t know the straw that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. Maybe the electrical storms?”

Lachlan frowned. “Electrical storms?”

“Yeah, sometimes everything would just go dead. It wouldn’t happen in town, just out here. The professor said they’d been getting some electrical storms. Must have been scary, especially for the kids.”

Maura was kicking herself that she’d never asked Pinky about the Reed family. “You never mentioned them before.”

“Why would I? Never saw them again. I almost brought their things to the summer flea market, but they might still come back, you never know. Wouldn’t want to break a promise.”

Maura’s eyes flew to meet Lachlan’s. “Wait. Back up. You have their things?”

“Sure do. Ain’t much, but the Nutty Professor had a couple boxes he wanted to leave here.”

“Did he say why? They had a whole Apache helicopter for their things.”

Pinky shrugged, looking oddly uncomfortable. “I stay out of people’s personal business. Told him I’d hang on to his stuff and that was that.”

Maura rubbed her hands together, practically salivating at the thought of what might be in there. “Can we look through them? Where are they? I don’t remember any boxes like that.”

“That’s because they’re in the shed. All the way at the back. In a pile with a lamp on top. I ain’t heard a peep out of those folks for ten years, so you go right ahead.”

The shed…Maura hadn’t even thought about cleaning up in there. She shot Lachlan a glance. “Ready for another trip through the storm?”

Even with headlamps, they could barely see two feet through the cascading blanket of snow, which was falling thick and fast and silent. They almost missed the shed, which was only about twenty yards from the house.

Inside, Maura scanned the jumbled chaos for the pile Pinky had mentioned. There was the lamp—a vintage model with a stained glass shade. It was perched on a precarious stack of random junk: a waffle iron still in its box, a moldy game of Clue, a gnome figurine with a shock of gray hair, a coil of copper wire, a set of wrenches. Under all of that sat several boxes, which were covered with a cheerful tulip-patterned tablecloth with a prominent scorch mark.

In other words, a classic Firelight Ridge scenario, where nothing was ever thrown away in case it someday proved useful.

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