Tags:
Fiction,
General,
Mystery & Detective,
Women Sleuths,
Mystery Fiction,
Women Detectives,
Large Type Books,
Crimes against,
Nashville (Tenn.),
Tennessee,
nashville,
Needlework,
Devonshire; Betsy (Fictitious Character),
Needleworkers,
Women Detectives - Tennessee - Nashville,
Needleworkers - Crimes Against
down so hard they couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead. It had piled up three inches deep, but there was no sign a plow had been through. Under the snow was ice, and they found themselves sliding helplessly into one another and the backs of parked cars as they blundered up the aisle.
“What kind of car are we looking for?” asked Betsy, who had forgotten.
“A black, four-door Sable,” said Jill. “Rental plates.”
Betsy chuckled. It was dark and all the cars were so heavily coated with snow it was almost impossible to see their color. Their license plates were covered as well—not that it mattered, Betsy had no idea how to identify rental car license plates.
“It was somewhere around here,” said Jill at last, stopping to peer around. Betsy wondered how she could possibly know that. But when Jill took the keys from her pocket and pressed a button, a car only a few yards away honked and its taillights flashed. “There it is.”
An excellent driver, Jill nonetheless drove very gingerly out of the parking lot. She had the wipers going and the defroster on full blast. The headlights barely penetrated the heavy swirl of snow ahead of them.
“Maybe you shouldn’t take us back,” said Betsy, as the car slithered out onto the street—which hadn’t been cleaned off, either. “We can double up with you, or get another room and go back in the morning.”
“No,” said Jill, after a moment. “No telling if this will be any easier tomorrow, and I don’t want to be out here with a lot of traffic.”
There was almost no one else out right now, the natives being nobody’s fools.
Jill, by keeping her speed under twenty and starting to brake half a block early, was able to stop at a red light.
“This is scary,” remarked Godwin, the first time the normally chatty man had spoken since they left the parking lot.
“Are you sure we should continue?” asked Betsy. She glanced over to see Jill purse her lips and shrug her shoulders slightly to work out the tension. She looked back in time to see the light turn green. Jill gave it the Minnesota pause (Minnesota drivers, among the most dangerous in the country, take a traffic light’s turning yellow as an invitation to floor it), and then took another three seconds to gain traction.
A few blocks later, an intersection offered a light that was already green, and Jill, having gotten up to a grand eighteen miles an hour, didn’t slow. They had gotten barely halfway through when a pickup, traveling helplessly sideways, its driver showing them his appalled, gape-mouthed face, gave her right front fender a glancing blow with his own front bumper. With a horrible bang, the Sable’s airbags inflated. Powder filled the air inside the passenger compartment as their car spun completely around. The bags began to collapse immediately, and Jill, anxious not to be struck again, drove out of the intersection in the direction from which she’d come.
She pulled up to the curb and said, “Everyone all right?”
“I think so,” said Godwin from the back seat. “Yes, all present and accounted for. Except my tummy’s bruised.”
“I’m all right,” said Betsy after taking a few seconds to hear reports from distant limbs. “Are you?”
“Yes.” They got out and Betsy went with Godwin to see how bad the damage was.
“Wow,” he said, looking at the seriously crumpled fender and smashed headlight.
“But we’re not leaking steam or oil,” Betsy pointed out. The engine purred quietly behind the cracked grill, and the tire under the damaged fender seemed fine.
“Where’s Jill gone to?”
Betsy turned around, peering through the thick snow. “There she is.”
Jill had gone back to the intersection to look for the pickup, which had also spun around and was now resting against the curb facing the way it had come. The driver, a stocky young man, was slipping and sliding through the snow toward Jill, his eyes still very wide. Betsy and Godwin went to stand beside