The Why of Things: A Novel by Elizabeth Hartley Winthrop Read Free Book Online Page B

go do something to get our mind off things. What do you feel like doing?”
    Eloise sighs, and then gives her mother a serious look. Joan waits for the impossible, like “going back to Maryland,” but, “Ice cream,” Eloise finally says. “Can we go to Salah’s?”
    *  *  *
    O NCE it finally arrives, the tow truck is unlike any Eve has ever seen. It’s enormous, with a large crane folded on the back, giving the whole rig the leggy look of a cricket or a praying mantis. The driver—the tag sewn onto his shirt reads Tim—has backed it over the grass to the edge of the quarry, where Anders has directed him, and is now getting everything ready for the task at hand. He presses a button and flaps extend from either side of the truck, two near the back wheels, two near the front.
    Eve asks Tim what the flaps are for, and in response, he presses a second button that lowers the flaps to the ground. “Stability,” he says. He pulls down on a lever. The crane begins to extend.
    Eve watches, cringing at the sound of metal sliding against metal. “How high does it go?” she asks.
    “Forty feet.” Tim rotates the base of the crane just a bit so that it’s angled out over the water. “Longest stage two rotator in the industry. Fifty-ton capacity.”
    “That’s a lot,” Eve says, absently pulling up clumps of grass with her bare toes. “What would you ever need to lift that’s fifty tons?”
    “You never know,” Tim says. He disappears around the other side of the truck. Eve can hear gears shifting and the hissing sound of hydraulics, but she doesn’t see anything happening.
    “What are you doing, anyway?”
    The rig emits a few more sounds before Tim answers. “Prepping the drag winch,” he says. “You ask a lot of questions.”
    Eve flattens her mouth. She looks across the grass to where her father stands talking with the policeman who has also finally arrived, and two divers, who are not the same divers as last night. She is disappointed—she’d have liked to ask them what else they saw down there—but she isn’t surprised. Eve supposes you couldn’t pay them to dive here again.
    Tim reappears around the side of the truck. He leans back against the rig, rolling his shoulders with a grimace. He sniffs, then folds his arms. He seems vaguely bored to Eve, which annoys her. She thinks of all the boring jobs he could have been called to do today, towing cars that have broken down on the side of the highway, or that are illegally parked and blocking driveways or fire hydrants. “You don’t ask a lot of questions,” she comments.
    Tim looks at her.
    “Aren’t you curious why you’re pulling a pickup truck from the bottom of a quarry?”
    Tim moves his jaw from side to side as if he has to give the question some thought before answering. But he never answers, and shifts his attention to Anders and the divers and the policeman, who are walking across the grass toward them.
    Anders motions to Eve to get out of the way as Tim begins to give the divers basic instructions on how to connect the cable to the tow hook, and where to find the tow hook underneath the body of the pickup. The policeman stands off to the side, filling out paperwork on a clipboard.
    “Shouldn’t they have sent a detective?” Eve asks her father in a low voice. “Aren’t policemen more like first responders?”
    “I don’t know,” Anders says. “I don’t know what they’d send a detective for.”
    “Right. Because there was so obviously no foul play.”
    Anders doesn’t answer.
    The divers put on their masks and headlamps and flippers. One gets into the water, and the other guides the cable in his direction, which Tim is lowering using controls on the side of the truck. The first diver grabs hold of the hook at the end of the cable and waits for the second diver to climb into the water.
    Eve gives her father a nudge in the side. “Do you think the divers from last night didn’t want to come back, or do you think it’s