Page 25 of Tied to Trouble

On an impulse, she picked up the phone and dialed her home number, getting her mother on the line. When she found out that Az had been there to pick her up at 7:00 p.m. and left, she carefully put the receiver down, trying to stifle the disappointment. Her mother had suggested she might be at Bev’s, but he hadn’t come after her.

“I...I think I’ll go home and get in an early night, Beverly,” Mandy said painfully. “I’m tired after all the excitement of today.”

Beverly nodded in sympathy and waved goodbye to her friend as she pulled out of the driveway.

A few minutes later, Mandy slipped into her bedroom with barely a few words to her mother and Randy, declaring tiredness and an early night. She lay back on her bed with Mags at her feet and stared at the moon out her window. If she hadn’t wanted to be with Az tonight, then why did she feel so bereft and lonely? She should be happy that she wasn’t with him. That he wasn’t bossing her around and spanking her.

It was what she’d wanted—wasn’t it?

She turned on her side as tears welled up unbidden and unwelcome. Sniffling, she turned her head into the pillow and cried.

Mags whined and crawled on her belly up to where she could lick the tears from Mandy’s face. Mandy put her arm around her faithful friend and finally fell into a troubled sleep.

Chapter 6

Az woke with a start, instantly awake and searching for the source of whatever had awakened him. The silence was deafening, the Whippoorwills’ calls absent in the night air. Glancing at the lighted dial on his watch, he realized it was almost 11:00 p.m. He must have fallen asleep.

Some stakeout expert he was.

With a wry grimace, his eyes automatically searched the shoreline, his senses on alert.

Finally, he spotted a movement off to his left, near the top end of the lake on the opposite side. Getting his binoculars out of the glove box, he trained them in on the movement until he realized that it was a man rolling something off the back of a pickup truck. He swore under his breath when he realized it was a barrel. It had to be weighted because it sank immediately when it hit the water. Another one soon followed.

He watched as the man lifted the back gate of the pick-up so he could read the license plate. Unfortunately, there was no back license plate, and he huffed in frustration. He watched until it pulled away, then got out of his truck.

Working his way along the edge of the woods beside the road, he made his way to the spot where the lanes on either side of the lake converged into Possum Lake Road. Whoever it was would have to come past here to leave the lake area; there was no other way out. He waited in the shadows, his ears straining to hear the sound of an approaching truck engine, but it didn’t come.

“What the hell is going on?” he muttered to himself. He glanced at his watch again. It was almost midnight. The dumper should have been here by now—if he was coming.

Tired of waiting, Az began hiking along the forest edge and up the other side of the lake. It took him about thirty minutes on foot, but he finally reached the upper side of the lake where the truck had been dumping.

Cautiously, he looked around but didn’t see the mysterious truck. Walking to the water’s edge, he stared down into the dark, murky water, but saw nothing. Whatever the man had dumped, it must have been heavy. According to the ranger services, this area was over forty feet down, and the bank was steep. You would need to be a good swimmer to dive in at this point. Needless to say, it was discouraged with warning signs.

Puzzled, he followed the tracks of the truck around and back towards the picnic area, carefully keeping in the shadows. How had he missed them? Even if they’d gone on around the lake and past his truck, he would still have seen them when they came onto Possum Lake Road. Another twenty feet and the answers were staring him in the face. “The old logging road. I’d forgotten about that,” he muttered.

That road hadn’t been used for years, except for kids doing off-roading in their four-wheel drives. Some of the more enterprising kids would even go over the mountain and down into the other side of Mockingbird Hollow, but it was a rough ride. Not too many wanted to risk tearing up their trucks for a lark.

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