Page 28 of Kiss Across the Universe
The waffle tracks, the newest, were Archie’s Explorer. Also new were the wide treads of Kit’s truck. There were many more sets of chevron shaped tracks that matched the winter tires on Taylor’s Jeep.
Kit crouched, examining the many tracks, sorting them out. He turned his head, then shuffled around the puddle to look more closely.
There. There was a set of tracks that did not match any of the others. It was faint, and had been nearly obliterated by the two sets of tracks—Archie’s and Kit’s—that had come after it.
But on the far side of the puddle, the strange set of tracks had jinked sideways by nearly a foot as the car emerged from the puddle. As it wasleaving. Had the driver been surprised by the puddle? Or distracted in some other way? Say, something in the car with him?
Kit made himself take another controlled breath, tamping down his reaction to that possibility.
Because the car had emerged from the puddle, the tracks were built up into a near-perfect Braille representation of the tire tread.
Kit bent even closer to study them.
There were white flecks among the nearly black dirt. White flecks that weren’t local.
Kit frowned, reached out and nudged one of the raised ridges with a finger. It crumbled apart.
The white wasn’t small pebbles. It fell apart as the grey earth did, then, as a breeze wafted by, the white flecks lifted up and drifted away. They were lighter and smaller than the grey dirt.
Kit patted his pockets and found a pen, one of the very old ones with a clear case and a simple cap at the top and the nib at the bottom, without a click top, a clip, or fancy ergonomic design. The stars above knew how long it had sat at the bottom of his pocket. Years, likely.
He pulled the plastic ink tube out of the shell and broke it off at the nib, then shoved the nib back into the case, making sure it was sitting firmly. Then he took the cap off the back end and carefully scooped up as much of the white flecks as he could, while trying to avoid the grey dirt. When the pen case was three-quarters full, he capped it and put it back in his pocket.
He got back into the truck, started it and drove down the curved, descending track to the main road.
A tire didn’t usually hold dirt in the treads. It had to pass through very moist mud to pick up and hold it that way. But even a few miles of highway driving would warm up the tire, the grooves would expand and the mud would drop out.
So the tire had to have come from somewhere local. Somewhere very close by. No more than a couple of miles, and via local roads with slower speed limits than the open highway.
Aran had said he thought Alannah was still in Canmore. The mud seemed to confirm that.
There was mud all over Canmore at the moment, now the snow fall from last week was melting. But mud made of the white, very fine sand he’d scooped up…that wasn’t local. He’d never seen soil like that around here.
So.
Kit ran through the people he knew, who might be able to point him in the right direction. He settled upon the perfect candidate by the time he reached the highway overpass, and had to pick a direction.
He turned left to head into Canmore.
Even though it wasn’t the peak tourist season, there were still a lot of cars Kit didn’t know. Lots of out-of-province plates, and even a smattering of US plates. A lot of the faces moving about the main streets in the center of Canmore were unknown to him, too.
That might be a problem, he reflected. He didn’t know who he was looking for.
He drove around the secondary roads to the edge of town where the light industrial businesses were located. He turned through the open gate of a property fenced off with chain-link. The fence held a big sign, right next to the gate.Joe’s Rocks and Soil.
Josef Ratansky himself was dealing with customers. A pickup truck was backed up to a pile of pea gravel, the owner shoveling gravel into the back and sweating heavily, while Joe gave him advice.
All the other piles of dirt and rocks in the big yard were covered with enormous canvases and staked down. Joe was anticipating the next snow fall. He survived the winter with contracts from the town to shovel snow from the sidewalks with the little cat he used to move soil around the yard.
Kit nodded at Joe as he got out of the truck.
“More peat moss, Kitty?” Joe called out in his thick Russian accent, grinning. He’d called Kit “kitty” ever since he’d learned Kit’s full name.
Kit didn’t know the guy shoveling pea gravel, but he nodded at him anyway. He had to be a new resident, to be buying pea gravel. Probably filling in holes and depressions in his driveway and footpaths before the snow came to stay for the winter.
“No, no peat moss,” Kit told Joe. “Not today. I’ve got a question for you.”
The new resident stopped to wipe his brow and leaned on the shovel. Kit suspected that he wasn’t curious so much as looking for any excuse to stop shoveling. His face was very red.
