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bewildered. “What are you all doing out here this late? And what are you digging up?”
    No one wanted to burden him with the tale of Maggie Madison. Gramps basically explained that we’d found the race car while looking for something else and stopped when we saw the door with the arm attached to it.
    Scott was a very nice young man who was totally dedicated to Duck. He was also a little reserved and careful when it came to voicing opinions. He simply shrugged and said, “I’ll call this in to the chief. He might want to talk with all of you.”
    Gramps put his arm around my shoulder. “I’m going to take Dae home, Scott. She hasn’t been feeling well. The rest of you are welcome to come wait at the house until Ronnie gets there. I think we have some coffee, and I baked an apple pie yesterday.”
    Scott didn’t question it. Gramps might not be the sheriff of Dare County anymore, but everyone still listened to what he had to say.
    We slowly filed out of the tent. The cold air was like a blast of reality. I only thought it was freezing inside.
    I was surprised when Shayla and her grandmother went along with the plan, but they respected Gramps’s word too. Flourine rode to the house with us, sitting with me and Gramps in the front of the golf cart. It was a snug fit. I was pretty sure she was flirting with him too.
    Shayla left her car at the Duck Shoppes parking lot, which was next door to the spot where the new town hall was being built, and rode with Kevin and Ann in his pickup.
    I was confused and not sure what to do next. Obviously, finding a body in a car was going to put off trying to locate Maggie’s bones.
    It would also stop any further work being done at the town hall site, which was good. I didn’t have to worry about anyone drilling a hole for the geothermal work through Maggie’s house for now.
    Finding the race car was completely unexpected. The area would no doubt be a crime scene for a while until the police could figure out what had happened. I kept wondering what they would find. How could something that bizarre have been there? Who put it there and when?
    I made coffee when we got back to the house. Ann called the local woman she’d left babysitting Betsy at the Blue Whale while she and Kevin went out.
    It seemed Ann had changed a lot in the past year. I couldn’t imagine her caring about a child’s welfare when I’d first met her. I felt bad that she seemed to know so much about what was going on in my life while I knew nothing of hers.
    As usual, everyone gathered around the big kitchen table. Its scratched and bumped surface had seen many late-night conversations between Gramps and other law enforcement officers down through the years. I used to sit and listen to them talk long after I should’ve been in bed.
    I’d always looked up to Gramps and secretly wanted to be a police officer when I was a child. I’d never said anything about it, not sure if I would be allowed to join those exalted ranks.
    Once I was old enough to consider it seriously, my mother had died and I’d dropped out of college. I began spending all my time collecting things that eventually went into Missing Pieces.
    Now I knew joining the police wasn’t for me. It took a certain mind-set that I’d noticed in Kevin, Gramps and even Tim, to a lesser degree. You had to have a suspicious nature and believe that the law was the best way to get things done.
    I didn’t always agree with that notion.
    Shayla, Flourine and Ann were having a heated discussion about Maggie Madison and why we hadn’t found her bones. Flourine was convinced that Maggie had manipulated the car to cover the spot where her bones were buried.
    “That doesn’t even make any sense,” Ann argued from her perspective as an ex–FBI psychic who’d once found missing children. “If you’re saying the witch’s bones have power and she’ll rise again if we dig them up, why would she put anything in our way?”
    Flourine, obviously a little angry