dash and saw Carter’s truck approaching and since neither he nor Ida Belle showed any sign of slowing and the road didn’t exactly hold two larger vehicles side by side, it wasn’t going to be pretty.
“Hang on!” Ida Belle yelled.
I grabbed Gertie’s strap and hugged the passenger’s seat, hoping I had the strength to keep both of us from bouncing out of the van. The van swerved to the right and Gertie and I slammed against the side. Ida Belle yelled for Carter to move as we went by, and I looked back to see his truck throwing up grass and dirt from the side of the road. Then he must have reached the bear because the truck swerved hard to the side, hit the ditch, then flew into the woods. The bear stopped running, looked at the truck, and decided either she’d accomplished her goal or we were no longer worth her time. She turned around and sauntered off into the woods on the other side of the road.
Ida Belle slowed to a stop and looked back at me. “I guess we have to go check on him, right?”
“We can’t exactly head back to Sinful in a stolen van,” I said, just noticing the windshield was gone. “In a stolen, really broken van. What happened?”
“I shot out the windshield so I could hot-wire it,” Ida Belle said. “We weren’t going to leave you. You’re fast but you wouldn’t have outlasted that bear.”
I sighed. “You got a good story for this one? Because that whole trailer hitch thing isn’t going to work.”
Ida Belle shrugged. “He can’t prove anything.”
“You mean besides trespassing and grand theft auto?” I asked.
Ida Belle waved a hand in dismissal. “It was an emergency situation. These things happen.”
“Maybe in Sinful,” I said.
Gertie nodded. “Remember the time Lester thought he was being chased by rabid raccoons and stole Sheriff Lee’s horse? Everyone headed downtown to watch him circle around, trying to get the horse to go faster. Sheriff Lee was limping after them, yelling at the top of his lungs.”
“So what was chasing him?” I asked.
“A couple of dachshunds,” Gertie said. “He was drunker than Cooter Brown.”
“Who is this Cooter Brown you keep mentioning?” I asked.
“It’s a saying,” Gertie said.
I shook my head, no longer trying to keep up. “We might as well head back and face the music before Carter adds assaulting law enforcement vehicles to our crimes.”
“I’m still going with the trailer hitch story,” Ida Belle said. “Trust me on this one. Carter is not going to throw me in jail when I’m about to marry his uncle.”
“Oh, that’s a great angle,” Gertie said. “Shame we can only use it once, but there you go. Instant out.”
I didn’t think for a minute it was going to be instant or out, but I was happy to let Ida Belle take the lead. God knows, I couldn’t come up with anything better and the truth was definitely not the way to go.
Ida Belle managed to get the van turned around and we headed back for the site of the bear-versus-truck showdown. Carter was out of the truck and frowning at it, probably trying to figure out how he was going to get it out of the ditch when he had two flat tires. This was not going to go well.
“What the heck were you thinking?” he asked as we pulled to a stop.
He strode up to the driver’s door and glared at Ida Belle.
“We were thinking if we slowed down that bear was going to climb into the van and have us all for lunch,” Ida Belle said. “She ripped the door clean off. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t for fun.”
He stuck his head in the window and looked back at the missing door and then Gertie and me. We waved and smiled. He didn’t smile back.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “And why are you in Molly’s van? Why is that bear chasing you?”
“We went out in the boat to look for Molly,” Ida Belle said. “I’ve known the statistics on such things since before you were born so don’t start preaching them to me. I wasn’t ready to call it quits so we didn’t. While we were out, I wanted to stop by Molly’s place and take a look around her driveway to see if that’s where my trailer hitch came loose. It’s missing and I’ve already checked everywhere else that we drove yesterday.”
“You expect me to believe that something wasn’t secured properly on your