Cranberry Bluff by Deborah Garner Read Free Book Online

more details. That gave her an advantage but still, didn’t guarantee her a spot in the lead. She’d kept an eye on the rearview mirror while driving up to Cranberry Cove. More than once, she thought she was being followed. Each time the car behind her turned off the road. Paranoia, she told herself. It was part of the business.
    A second hesitation had been the nature of Binky’s story, which hadn’t rung completely true. Binky had seemed a little “off” when he said he was trying to help the police solve a robbery. It wasn’t like him to be on the right side of the law. He was a bizarre man, Al “Binky” Martelli. Of course, no one else called him Binky. It had started as a joke when they were first married. Although the marriage had ended, the nickname lived on. For decades they had kept up an occasional correspondence. She had agreed to take the case to help him.
    Now she was having second thoughts. Nothing that Binky had described about Molly matched what she’d seen since she’d arrived in Cranberry Cove. She’d expected a tough, worldly girl, maybe with harsher features and darker clothing. Binky had sent only a vague physical description based on security camera footage.
    On the other hand, the area of the assignment suited her. Binky was sure the northern coast of California was where the girl had headed, which is why he had contacted Sadie in the first place. She welcomed any excuse to drive up the coast. If someone wanted to pay her to do it, who was she to argue?

CHAPTER EIGHT
    Mr. Miller set his briefcase on the bed and opened it, taking out his morning pills. He set each bottle in a neat row across the desk and opened the plastic seven-day container that he used to keep his prescriptions straight. There were so many of them, it was the only way he kept from being confused. Red pills, white pills, blue pills, striped pills. There was one for blood pressure, another to settle his stomach, another for a blood thinner and yet another for his diabetes. It was not a surprise that he’d gathered the physical maladies that he had. He’d always been sickly as a boy, missing school and normal childhood activities. His mother had put him to bed at the first sign of a sniffle or cough. Other children had teased him about being babied. But it was true that he was sick a lot.
    Counting out the pills with precision, he sorted them into the daily compartments. He reprimanded himself for not doing it before. He always prepared carefully for trips, with great attention to detail. But the situation had come out of the blue and required packing in a rush. How he hated rushing around. It broke up his disciplined lifestyle. That was not a good feeling, not good at all. Things needed to be in order, like the cabinets in his kitchen, like the meticulously sorted clothing in his closet. Chaos unsettled him. A doctor had suggested OCD. Maybe therapy would help? That made no sense to Mr. Miller. Out of order was simply out of order. It was not the natural way of life, in his opinion. Lack of organization was intolerable.
    He rarely got travel assignments from the insurance company he worked for. He knew they considered him odd and reclusive. They were right; he was odd and reclusive. They knew better than to send him out on most cases. Places like New York, Boston or Philadelphia made him nervous. Trashcans overflowed and window signs weren’t always straight. He was relieved they never asked him to go to those locations. There was nothing orderly about big cities. But a tiny town, a little inn that was neat and clean – this suited him. And the assignment couldn’t have been more serendipitous. He could hardly believe his luck when his supervisor handed him the case.
    Cranberry Cove was bearable, Mr. Miller thought as he dropped a blood pressure pill in each plastic square. He’d been quite pleased when he arrived. Molly hadn’t pushed him for conversation, and the room’s décor was exactly as he liked, right down