Sunny tensed a little—all too often, she’d catch some disaster just as she was ready to escape from the office. It seemed to go with the territory in the tourist biz.
Hearing her father’s voice on the other end of the line didn’t automatically let her relax her shoulders either. She’d come back to Kittery Harbor from New York when Mike Coolidge suffered a heart attack and needed someone to take care of him. It had been a scary time, made a little scarier when the newspaper she’d worked for back in the city had laid her off in absentia from her job as a reporter. Sunny had had to face the challenge of handling an irascible patient while also finding some way to turn her work experience into a paycheck. Ken Howell, the editor of the local paper, couldn’t fit a full-time reporter into his small operation. So in the end, she’d wound up at MAX. Her salary was pretty pitiful, but at least she got a chance to do a little writing for the site in between sieges of grunt work.
But now, as she listened to her dad over the phone, he sounded pretty cheerful rather than scared or aggravated. Sunny had to admit, he’d definitely improved over the past few months. Mike had even recently started driving a little on local errands, and had undertaken a walking program—putting in three miles a day of indoor hoofing around the outlet malls.
Still . . .
“Give me the bad news first,” Sunny told her dad.
“Nothing exciting,” Mike quickly said. “I found your friend Shadow yowling outside the kitchen door this morning. Dunno what happened, but when he came in, he was limping. Now I see that he’s still favoring one paw since he got up from his latest nap.”
“Did you look—” Sunny began, but her father broke in unceremoniously.
“Uh-uh,” Mike objected. “Even on a good day, I don’t think that cat would tolerate me poking at him—especially in a place that hurts.” He gave a sour chuckle. “And he has the claws to back up a hands-off policy.”
Sunny sighed. Her dad had a point. He and Shadow had settled into a sort of wary truce following some friction when the cat had first adopted Sunny. Shadow had since settled pretty comfortably into the Coolidge household in spite of Mike’s initial fulminations, and now, having enjoyed a couple of months of peace and quiet, Mike certainly didn’t want to get on Shadow’s bad side again.
“Did you give Jane Rigsdale a call?” Sunny asked.
“Of course, especially since she promised you that the mangeball gets a free ride whenever he needs it,” her dad replied, every inch the thrifty Yankee trader. “She said she’d fit you in at the end of her Saturday hours.”
“A little,” Mike said. “I thought we might eat out tonight. Picked up a little football pool money on last night’s game.”
Sunny laughed. “I thought it sounded like you were cheering harder than usual for the Pats.”
“Yeah, well,” her dad responded. “I thought we might grab a bite at the Redbrick.” He hesitated for a second. “Unless you and Will have plans.”
“Sure, why not?” Sunny replied. “I’m just closing up the office.”
“Would you mind coming to get me?” Mike broke off in embarrassment. “I’m still not ready to go driving at night. And besides,” he went on, sounding a bit more like his usual self, “we’ll save on gas, using only one car.”
Sunny calculated the amount of money in her pocket and the amount of gas in her SUV. They’d be awfully close to E on the gas gauge on the way back into town. Maybe some of Mike’s ill-gotten gains could finance a fill-up at Sal DiGillio’s service station. “I can be home in half an hour,” she told him. “With luck, we can get to the Redbrick in time to beat the dinner rush.”
