proved to be snug inside their homes.
As he drove on, he tried not to think of Miriama out in the cold and wet. He was thinking he should go by Mrs. Keith’s, too, when he got a call. The signal was patchy, but he recognized Evelyn Triskell’s voice: “. . . Vincent… his car.”
26
“Evelyn, where are you?”
It took him two minutes of conversation through crackling static to work out that Evelyn was somewhere on the road out of town. Telling her to stay put, he did a U-turn and headed that way. A car went past him in the opposite direction around the halfway point, but they passed on the turn and he couldn’t see much of the make and model through the heavy rain. It had been small, though, not a truck or an SUV.
It was another ten minutes later that he caught the blurred rear lights of a car on the side of the road—and it wasn’t Evelyn’s old Mini. It was Vincent’s silver Mercedes, a car the other man usually only drove for short trips and never in this kind of weather.
Bringing his vehicle to a stop beside the crippled sedan and turning on his hazard lights as well as the blue and red flashers atop the roof and in his front grille, Will got out. Vincent’s car had smashed into the ditch, the front crumpled in. Not enough to have crushed the driver, but enough that the car would need a tow. More worried about Vincent than the car, Will blinked the rain out of his eyes and wrenched open the driver’s-side door.
Vincent looked at him, a streak of blood down one side of his forehead and a faint smile on his lips. “This is the last thing you need, isn’t it, Will?”
“Where’s Evelyn?” Will yelled to be heard over the pounding rain that thundered on his head and dripped in rivulets down his face. The extremely low visibility made it difficult to see any markings on the road right in front of him, much less farther down the road; Evelyn’s smaller vehicle could be lying broken ten meters up and he’d never spot it.
“Evelyn?” Vincent stared blankly at him for a second before shaking his head. “I sent her home. She was driving back in after running one of the hunters home, and she saw I’d spun off the road. Insisted on stopping to call you.”
Will knew the chairwoman of the Golden Cove Business Council; a bulldog had nothing on her. “How could you possibly have convinced Evelyn to go home?” At least that explained the car Will had seen heading into town—it had been the size of Evelyn’s compact.
“Wayne.”
Will should’ve thought of that himself—Evelyn’s husband was in a wheelchair as a result of a stroke, and while he had good mobility around the home, he still relied on Evelyn for a lot. He was older than her by fifteen years at least and far more frail.
If Will had realized Evelyn wasn’t home, he’d have checked on Wayne during his patrol. The Triskells lived on his street and he often lent them a hand if they needed physical help with something. Half the time, the request was a thin excuse for Evelyn to attempt to pump Will for scandalous details about her fellow Covers.
“How seriously are you hurt?” He’d automatically grabbed a flashlight as he left his vehicle, now focused it on Vincent’s head wound.
Blue and red flickered against the night around them, the police lights incongruously like neon flashes in a bar.
“It doesn’t look too bad from here.” Will could see a little blood along Vincent’s hairline, but there was no sign of a gash.
“It’s fine.” Vincent raised his hand to his forehead. “I’ll probably have a headache tomorrow, but that’s about it.”
“We still need to get you in front of a doctor,” Will began.
“Dominic de Souza isn’t in any condition to help anyone.” Vincent’s tone was tight. “And I don’t think you’re going to be driving me out of Golden Cove for treatment. We’ll be in more danger from the weather than I am from this shallow cut.”
The other man was right. With Dr. de Souza crushed by Miriama’s disappearance, and the town cut off by the heavy rain and rising winds, Vincent would have to wait until tomorrow to get any medical care. That was, if the rain let up. “Come on,” Will said, “I’ll run you home. Grab your stuff.”
Vincent didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but Will had things