Beware False Profits Read Free

last night, but he didn’t show. At first Maura thought maybe his plane was just late.”
    “Then she knew what flight he was on?”
    Ed looked at me as if my IQ had suddenly dropped into an unacceptable range. “Aggie…”
    “So okay, Maura isn’t a detail person. But knowing Joe, he left all the information. He probably laminated copies and posted them all over the house. He probably made Tyler memorize arrival times and airline phone numbers to repeat back to Maura at hourly intervals.”
    “Maura says Joe goes to the same meeting in Manhattan every month and has for over a year. He leaves on the first flight out of Columbus on the third Thursday and comes home at the same time on the third Friday evening. And that’s all she knows.”
    “Only this time he didn’t come home? And he didn’t call her?”
    “That’s the strange part. Apparently she did get a call. She has caller ID, so she knows it came from Joe’s cell. But the call was garbled, the way they are when the tower’s too far away, or the caller’s inside a building. She thinks it was Joe on the other end, but she’s not even sure of that. And she couldn’t understand a word.”
    I could just imagine how frustrating that had been. But Joe had called home. Maura knew he was alive and probably just held up in New York. Why had she bothered Ed?
    “Did she call his hotel?” Ed gave me the “look” again and I narrowed my eyes. “You’re telling me she doesn’t know where Joe stays when he’s here?”
    “Apparently he moves around. She says he shops for the best deal every time. She doesn’t keep up.”
    This didn’t sound believable. “Joe knows Tyler could have a problem while he’s away. He would never leave without telling Maura where he’s staying.”
    “That’s why he carries the cell phone.”
    “So, has she tried to call him back?”
    “She’s not that helpless. Repeatedly, apparently. Through the night and all morning until she called here.”
    “How did she know to call you?”
    “The whole church knows we’re in New York this weekend, even Maura.”
    “Can’t she just wait and see if he shows up today on a later flight? It’s a weekend. Maybe Joe just figured he’d take a little time for himself for a change.”
    “You’re forgetting something.”
    I racked my brain, then I realized what Ed meant. “Mayday!”
    “You got it.”
    Mayday!, complete with exclamation point, is the Helping Hands yearly fund-raiser on the first Sunday afternoon of May. It’s a big deal for Emerald Springs. Unless you’ve lived in a small town, you can’t understand how important an event like this one is in community life. We don’t have a symphony or ballet—unless you count the annual spring recital of Bela’s Ballerinas, featuring seven-year-olds wearing tutus and lipstick. There’s no auditorium for fifty miles that’s large enough to showcase touring companies with third-rate casts of old Broadway musicals. So for the most part we entertain ourselves. And each year Mayday!, a spring carnival with pony rides, games of skill, and more junk food than you can shake a corn dog at, is happily anticipated.
    Planning for Mayday! takes all year, and dozens of people spend the whole weekend doing the necessary physical labor. Last year I spent an entire day setting up and taking down tables in the food tent. I’ll confess removing myself from table duty was one of the joys of coming to New York this particular weekend.
    “Joe told me once that they raise more than a quarter of their yearly budget at Mayday!,” I said.
    “So Joe would never willingly miss it.”
    “But what does Maura expect you to do?” I saw the answer in Ed’s eyes. “No, Ed. We aren’t going to spend our only Saturday in Manhattan looking for Joe, are we? Please tell me we aren’t.”
    But of course we did.
    Now, after a day of following clues, here we were at the Pussycat Club on a borderline seedy East Village street. There had been compensations.