Corkscrew Read Free

waste of time arguing with them. I got back in the cruiser and drove down the narrow road behind all the cottages, keeping an eye out for his son. As I drove, I called the OPP and gave them the report. The kid was probably still in my bailiwick, but it's policy to alert them. If he'd gotten tired of his family, he could be out on the highway hitching a ride someplace. The guy at the dispatcher's desk took the call without comment. Missing boys generally come home when they're hungry.
    He wasn't on the road or at the lock, where a crowd of youngsters usually hang around, golden little teenyboppers with cans of pop and squeals of laughter, and gruff, shy boys trying out their newly breaking voices. They were doing all the standard thirteen-year-old things, shoving one another, giggling and joking. It restored your faith in kids. I lingered a minute or two, talking to the lockkeeper. He's an older man, a World War II veteran with one leg gone, who used to be the mister at the police station until he stepped on the wrong side of the law. I couldn't talk him out of the mess he was in, so he was put on probation and lost his job. I managed to get the township to give him this one. It keeps him busy all summer and supplements his pension. I guess he's grateful for it, but he's always a bit shamefaced around me.
    "Okay, I'll watch for him," he promised, then reached down to pat Sam, who still remembers him from the old days.
    "Thanks, Murph. I'll take a run through town, check around. Call if you see him." I nodded and hissed at Sam, who sprang to my heel and followed me back to the car. I let him in, and he sat tall on the passenger side, looking out of the window as I drove off, over the narrow bridge and into the center of Murphy's Harbour. You have to brake fairly smartly or you could drive right through it. There's a marina and the Lakeside Tavern on one side, a small string of stores on the other.
    There were more kids here, older this time, one of them even with a car. They were sipping Cokes that were probably laced, or at least flavored with rum from the mickey I'd seen the oldest one buy that morning when I checked the liquor store. They were listening to rock music and trying out the tentative mating patterns they'd progressed to after a few summers of squealing and shoving down by the locks. The town is small enough that I knew most of them by sight.
    None of them had seen the missing boy. The boys were elaborately casual about telling me, showing how grown-up they were, but the girls, as usual, were more sensible. They studied the photograph and promised to watch for him. One of them was the daughter of Nick Vanderheyden, the man who runs the Lakeside Tavern. He'd been there since spring, after the previous owner had been murdered and the place was bought by another man with a string of hotels and taverns.
    She was fifteen, and I figured she had a kind of crush on me. If she was waiting table in the Tavern when I dropped by, she always shuffled positions so that she served me. And I got my meal faster than anybody else in the place, even the big spenders from the cruisers tied up outside. She's young enough that her comments usually choke themselves on giggles, but she's a nice kid, dark-haired and pretty in an intense way. She'll be a looker when she grows up.
    "That's the Spenser boy," she told me, and giggled. "He's always around here. He usually tries to take my picture." She blushed at the thought and amended it. "Our picture, any girl's picture."
    That was interesting, and I followed it. "Is he a pint-sized ladies' man, Beckie, would you say?"
    That convulsed her, and her friends. I waited until the laughter had petered out. "He thinks he is," she said. "He always acts, oh, you know, King Cool."
    "Has he made friends with anybody, boys or girls, that you've noticed?"
    She looked at me, shading her eyes with one hand. "Not really. Oh, he tries an' that, tags along, but generally one of the guys tells him to get lost