Dangerous Developments

Dangerous Developments – Excerpt

CHAPTER ONE

The toast popped up at 6:42, and Dust was already at her feet.

He had crossed the kitchen from his bed in the corner without a sound, arriving at the precise moment the element clicked off, the way he did every morning. His nose worked the air. His tail moved once, twice, and held.

Frank caught the first slice before it had cleared the slot. She tore the corner off and held it out. Dust took it from her fingers and retreated to his bed to work on it with the seriousness of a dog who understood that this was the arrangement and there would be no renegotiation.

“Same time tomorrow,” she said.

She carried her plate to the kitchen table where the morning edition of the Maplewick Bay Beacon lay folded to a quarter of its size, like her father had done it. The winter light came through the kitchen window thin and grey, the kind of November morning on the coast where the sky and the water and the air between them were all the same colour and you couldn’t tell where one ended and the next began. The window was beaded with condensation. Beyond it, the street was empty.

Frank ate her toast and read without hurrying. She flipped to the classifieds and reached for the red pen, pulling the cap off with her teeth. This had been her morning ritual for months: toast, newspaper, circling potential parts for the expansion. A used hydraulic lift in Victoria. Decent price, seller claimed good working order. She circled it and set the pen down.

Two additional service bays. She could picture the fourth bay finished, the lift installed, Deshawn running the service side while she took on the restoration work she’d been turning away for years. The kind of work her father had loved. She’d been planning it since before he retired, sketching layouts on the backs of invoices, and the permits were close. Close enough to feel real.

She turned the page. A notice about the waterfront development vote tonight, the council session that had been the subject of conversation at every counter and checkout in town for weeks. Frank looked at it for a moment, then folded the paper and pushed back from the table.

“Time to go,” she said.

Dust lifted his head. His ears shifted forward.

Frank grabbed her keys from the hook by the door. “Come on.”

She pulled into the gravel lot behind Mercer’s Garage at ten past seven, the faded blue pickup crunching over frozen patches that hadn’t seen sun in days. The garage stood solid against the grey sky, red brick and large bay doors, the paint on the sign above faded to a colour that was no longer quite red and not yet pink. Her father had hung that sign himself, thirty-one years ago. Frank had helped, standing on the tailgate of his truck, holding the bolts while he drilled.

She cut the engine and glanced at Dust, who was standing on the passenger seat with his tail going.

“Hold on.” She climbed out, circled to the passenger side, and lifted him down. “There.”

Dust put his nose to the gravel and trotted toward the side door, following the scent trail he followed every morning: motor oil, rubber, cold concrete, and the ghost of yesterday’s takeout.

Frank unlocked the door and stepped inside. The garage was cold and dark and smelled like decades of engine work soaked into every surface. She could have found her way through it blind. She turned up the heat first, then the compressor, listening to it build pressure the way she listened to everything mechanical, with her whole attention.

The door went up with a rumbling groan that she felt in her chest. November air came in off the street, raw and salt-edged. Frank stood in the doorway for a moment, hands in her pockets. The town was still waking up. A light on in the bakery down the block. A dog walker on the far sidewalk. The harbour cranes visible above the roofline, motionless against the overcast.

She did a slow circuit of the bays before she did anything else. She always did. Bay 1, Bay 2, the quick-job bay at the back where the floor jack lived. Not checking for anything in particular. Just reacquainting herself with the space, making sure everything was where she’d left it and the world hadn’t rearranged itself overnight.

The hydraulic lifts stood at rest, arms lowered, waiting. The pegboard along the east wall held its tools in their outlines, each one traced in marker so the gaps showed when something walked off. Her father had put those outlines up thirty years ago. Frank had never taken them down. She’d added to them, newer tools filling in around the originals, but the old traces were still there underneath, faded now to almost nothing.

She stopped at the workbench and ran her hand along the edge. The wood was worn smooth in the places she always stood, the grain raised in the places she didn’t. She’d been meaning to resurface it for three years. She kept not doing it.

In the corner, the expansion blueprints sat rolled in their tube. She didn’t take them out. She knew what they showed. Two more bays on the eastern wall, a proper waiting area, the coffee station she’d sketched herself on the back of an invoice at two in the morning. What the blueprints couldn’t show was what the expansion meant, which was that her father’s garage would outlast both of them, which was the point.

Dust had finished his circuit and settled on his cushion beside the front desk. He looked at her with the patient attention of a creature who understood that she needed a minute and was prepared to give her as many as she required.

Frank turned up the heat and went to check the appointment book.

She had pulled on her coveralls and was checking the torque wrench calibration when she heard it: a Volvo engine, six-cylinder, with a slight miss on one of the upper cylinders. The sound came up the street before the car did.

A silver Volvo pulled into the lot. Mayor Ursula Underwood parked with the precision of someone who had parallel-parked the same car every day of her life and stepped out clutching a designer handbag that had no business being this close to a garage.

Frank looked at her and stopped what she was doing.

Ursula’s salt-and-pepper hair was mussed on one side, pressed flat as if she’d slept on it and not checked. Her blouse was buttoned wrong at the collar, one button off, the kind of thing Ursula Underwood would never have allowed past her front door on any normal morning. Her hand went to the pearl necklace at her throat, fingers working the strand like rosary beads.

“Morning, Mayor,” Frank called. “You’re out early.”

“Frank, thank goodness you’re open.” Ursula crossed the lot with quick, tight steps. “I know I don’t have an appointment, but my car is making the most dreadful noise. I can’t drive it to the council meeting tonight like this.”

“Let’s take a listen.” Frank gestured toward the Volvo. “When did it start?”

“Yesterday evening, on my way home.” Ursula’s voice had a quality Frank had never heard in it before, something strained and thin, like a wire under too much tension. The mayor was the kind of woman who could chair a four-hour budget meeting without raising her voice. This was different. “It’s a ticking sound. When I accelerate.”

Frank popped the hood and motioned for Ursula to start the engine. The Volvo rumbled to life, and Frank leaned in close, her ear near the valve cover, listening past the normal rhythm of the motor to the thing underneath. There. A subtle, distinct tapping, regular as a heartbeat but wrong.

She straightened up. “Could be a few things. Might be as simple as needing an oil change, or it could be the valve lash. I’ll take a closer look.”

“How long will it take?” Ursula pushed back the sleeve of her blouse to check her watch, and as she did, a MedicAlert bracelet slid into view, stainless steel with a red emblem. Frank had never noticed it before.

“I have meetings all day,” Ursula continued, “and then the council vote tonight.” She broke off. Her fingers went back to the necklace.

“Big vote,” Frank said, wiping her hands on a shop rag.

Ursula’s expression changed. Something closed behind her eyes. “The development project. Quentin Osborne’s proposal for the waterfront property.”

Frank kept her face neutral. The waterfront development had been a slow-moving storm for months. If approved, the construction zone and rezoning could put her expansion permits into a bureaucratic holding pattern that might last years. She’d seen it happen to other businesses on the coast. One large project absorbs all the oxygen, and everything smaller suffocates.

“It’s a complicated situation,” Ursula said. Frank didn’t think she was talking about the politics. “There are strong opinions on both sides. And some of them are not…” She stopped. Shook her head. “Never mind.”

Frank waited, but Ursula didn’t finish the thought.

“I can have my mechanic Deshawn give you a lift when he gets in,” Frank said. “He takes the ferry, so he’s usually here by eight-thirty. I should have your car ready by this afternoon.”

“I’ll call Bill Langston. He owes me a favour.” Ursula managed a smile. “Thank you, Frank. I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She hesitated, and when she spoke again her voice was lower. “Sometimes I think you’re the only person in this town who fixes things. No agenda. No politics.”

“Cars are simpler than people,” Frank said. “They tell you what’s wrong if you listen.”

Ursula handed over her keys. Her hand was trembling, and they both noticed it, and neither mentioned it. “I’ll be at Town Hall most of the day.”

Frank watched her walk to the edge of the lot and make her call, one hand holding the phone, the other still working the pearls. Her shoulders were hunched forward, pulled in, as if she were bracing against something that had nothing to do with the cold.

Dust appeared at Frank’s side and sat, looking up at her.

Frank looked down at him. “Something’s off,” she said. “And I don’t mean the valves.”

She went back to the Volvo and leaned under the hood again. The engine was off now, ticking as it cooled, and she put her hand on the valve cover and held it there. The metal was warm. She could feel the residual vibration in her fingertips, the memory of it still in the metal.

She got her tools and started working.

By midday the garage was full. Frank was elbow-deep in the Volvo’s valve train, confirming what she’d suspected, when the side door opened and Deshawn Lewis came in, unwinding a scarf from around his neck. He was a tall man, broad through the shoulders, with hands that could palm a basketball and thread a spark plug wire with equal ease. He moved through the garage like he belonged there. Which he did.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Ferry was running behind. Fog.”

“Unprecedented,” Frank said, not looking up.

Deshawn laughed, a sound that filled the bay.

He hung his jacket on the hook next to Frank’s and went to the coffee pot. He poured a cup, looked at it, and looked at Frank.

“This could dissolve a crankshaft.”

“Then it’s ready.”

Deshawn pulled up the stool he’d claimed on his first week and never relinquished, despite there being three others. Frank had never mentioned it. Some things in a garage established themselves through repetition until they became fact, and Deshawn on that particular stool was one of them.

“You eat this morning?” he said.

“Toast.”

“Frank.”

“I had half a sandwich yesterday.”

“That’s not what I asked.” He picked up the work orders from the counter and flipped through them without looking at her. This was how he did it, she’d learned. He never pushed directly. He came at things sideways, no sudden movements. “I’ll grab something from Lucy’s when I do the Neilson pickup. You want the usual?”

“I’m fine.”

“I know you’re fine. You want the usual?”

Frank tightened a bolt. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.”

Deshawn set the work orders down. He didn’t say anything else about it, which was why it worked.

He took a sip of coffee and winced. “I see Her Honour’s car is in. What’s the verdict?”

“Valve adjustment. Nothing serious.” Frank straightened up and reached for the red bandana in her back pocket, wiping her hands in slow, methodical passes. “But she was off this morning. Nervous. More than nervous.”

“About the car?”

“About the vote tonight. Osborne’s development.”

Deshawn’s face changed. He set the mug down on the workbench and leaned against it, arms crossed. “Half the town’s been talking about it. My neighbour on the island’s got a petition going. You planning to go?”

“I have to. If that development gets approved, the rezoning alone could freeze my permit application. We’d be looking at a year, maybe two, before they even review it again.”

“More than that.” Deshawn looked at her. “If they reclassify this stretch, we’re done. You know that.”

Frank tightened a bolt, then stopped. She was tightening a bolt that was already tight. She set the wrench down. “This isn’t about making more money, Deshawn.”

“I know what it’s about.”

She picked up the wrench again and turned back to the engine.

Frank nodded. She didn’t trust herself to answer. She picked up the wrench again and turned back to the engine.

“We’ve got a Caelum coming in at two,” she said.

Deshawn’s whole posture shifted. He loved the luxury SUVs the way some people love racehorses. “Can I take it?”

Frank pulled the bandana out again, caught herself, and put it back. “I suppose. If you want to.”

“I want to.”

“Then Mrs. Peterson’s Honda is yours first. Oil change and tire rotation, second bay.”

Deshawn pushed off the workbench and headed for the Honda, pausing to scratch Dust behind the ears on his way past. Dust accepted this as his due and went back to sleep.

Frank turned to the Volvo. She’d finished the valve adjustment an hour ago. The car was ready. But Ursula hadn’t called to check on it, and it was past one o’clock. Ursula, who confirmed appointments by phone, who sent follow-up emails, who once called the garage three times in a single afternoon about a squeaking brake pad. The silence was wrong.

“I’m going tonight,” she said to the empty bay. “Deshawn, you should come.”

From the second bay, Deshawn’s voice came back muffled. “Can’t. Promised my sister I’d watch the kids. Last ferry’s at six.” A pause. “But you’ll tell me everything tomorrow.”

“Everything worth telling.”

She closed the Volvo’s hood and stood with her hand on the warm metal for a moment.

The engine was fixed. The ticking had been exactly what she’d thought: valve lash, a fifteen-minute adjustment. But she kept thinking about the other ticking. Ursula’s hands, the unfinished sentence, the bracelet she’d never noticed in all the years she’d serviced that car. A machine tells you what’s wrong if you pay attention. People do too, if you’re willing to hear it.

She washed her hands and locked up.

The Maplewick Bay Town Hall was full by the time Frank arrived. She had to park two blocks away and walk through the cold with Dust at her heels, his short legs working double time on the wet sidewalk. The white building was lit up against the dark, every window bright. The clock tower rose above the town square, its face glowing.

Inside, the meeting room had been set up with rows of folding chairs, and nearly every one was taken. Frank stood at the back for a moment, reading the room.

Bill Langston was near the back, and when he saw Frank he raised a hand. Frank nodded back. His face was tight.

“Quite the turnout,” a voice said beside her.

Frank turned. Felicity Ward, round glasses catching the overhead light, her hair tied back in its usual bun, clutching a binder to her chest.

“Seems like it,” Frank said.

“I saved you a seat. If you want it.”

Frank looked at her. “Thanks.”

They made their way through the crowd, Dust drawing hands from every direction. Frank lifted him when they reached their row and settled into the chair with the dog on her lap. From here she had a clear view of the council table at the front: five chairs behind a long wooden desk, the mayor’s seat in the centre, its leather back slightly higher than the others. A glass of water had been set at Ursula’s place. The glass was full. The chair was empty.

To the left of the table, Quentin Osborne stood in conversation with three men in suits that cost more than Frank’s monthly revenue. Frank had fixed Osborne’s Stroud twice last year. Both times he’d stood in the bay watching her work, asking questions that weren’t about the car, questions about the property, the lot, how long she’d been there. She’d answered in monosyllables and charged him full price.

He caught her looking and offered a nod. Frank returned it and looked away.

On the opposite side of the room, Maryam Kramer sat alone at the end of the council table, annotating a stack of documents without looking up. Her gaze passed over Osborne’s group once, didn’t stop, and landed on the empty mayor’s chair. Her mouth thinned.

Frank scratched Dust’s ear. The dog settled against her, warm and heavy.

The clock on the wall read 7:03. The other four council members had taken their seats. Kylan Aguilar, at the far end, was arranging papers with the restless energy of someone who would rather be anywhere else.

At 7:05, the room began to shift. Conversations that had been animated started to stall. People checked their watches, looked at the empty chair, looked at each other.

At 7:08, Osborne pulled out his phone, glanced at it, and put it away. One of his investors leaned in and said something. Osborne shook his head.

At 7:10, Aguilar leaned over to Maryam and whispered something. Maryam frowned, checked her watch again, and looked toward the side door. Behind Frank, George Pritchard, the retired postmaster, shifted in his chair and muttered to no one in particular, “She’s never late. Not once in twelve years.”

At 7:12, a woman two rows ahead turned to her companion and said, loud enough for Frank to hear, “Do you think she’s not coming? Do you think she’s refusing to hold the vote?”

The companion shushed her, but the thought was loose in the room now, moving from row to row. The noise level rose, not louder but different in quality: less anticipation, more unease.

At 7:15, Frank said to Felicity, “This isn’t like her. Something’s wrong.”

The side doors to the chamber opened.

Josie Burnett came through them, trying very hard to hold herself together and not entirely succeeding. The mayor’s assistant was pale, her face drained of colour in a way that went beyond the fluorescent lighting. She held a folder against her chest with both hands, gripping it to steady her hands. She walked to the council table, and her path was not straight. She corrected once, as if the floor had shifted under her.

She reached Maryam Kramer and leaned down. Frank watched Josie’s mouth move, watched Maryam’s face go still, watched Maryam’s hand reach out and grip the edge of the table. The other council members leaned in. Aguilar’s head came up. The colour left their face.

The room felt it before the words came. The murmur started at the front and moved backward through the rows like a wave, and Dust lifted his head, ears forward, body tense against Frank’s lap.

Maryam stood. She crossed to the microphone. Her posture, normally straight and confident, was rigid, locked, the posture of someone holding herself upright by force of will.

She cleared her throat. The room went silent.

“I regret to inform you that tonight’s meeting must be adjourned.” Her voice was steady, but Frank could hear the effort in it. “We’ve received word that Mayor Underwood has been found deceased at her home.”

The silence held for one full second. Then the room broke open.

Frank did not move.

Around her, people rose from their seats. Voices overlapped, questions and exclamations and the sharp intake of breath that sounds the same in every throat. Felicity’s hand went to her mouth. Dust pressed closer against Frank’s chest.

Frank sat still and watched.

Osborne stood frozen near the front, his face blank, unreadable. He looked at his investors. They looked at him. No one spoke. Then Osborne’s hand went to his portfolio, and he began gathering his papers. Across the room, Aguilar sat with their head bowed, both hands flat on the table.

Maryam was speaking again, something about privacy and the mayor’s family and a future announcement about rescheduling, but the words were being swallowed by the noise in the room.

Frank’s eyes found Josie Burnett.

The assistant had moved away from the council table. She stood alone near the side wall, apart from everyone, her folder still clutched to her chest. Her hands were shaking. Her eyes moved around the room in quick, darting passes, not looking at anyone, not settling. Then they landed on Frank.

For a moment, they held. Josie’s expression was not grief, or not grief alone. There was something else in it. Like a sound in an engine that didn’t belong. Then Josie looked away.

Frank watched her for another few seconds. The young woman’s breathing was shallow and fast. She stood with her back to the wall as if she needed something solid behind her.

“She found her,” Frank said.

Felicity leaned closer. “What?”

“Josie. She found the mayor.”

Frank sat with that for a moment. Then she looked at the room again, at the people moving and talking and not knowing what to do with themselves. She thought about Ursula that morning, standing in the garage lot with her blouse buttoned wrong and her hands shaking, starting a sentence she didn’t finish. Eight hours ago. Less.

“I saw her this morning,” Frank said. “She was stressed. But she was alive. She was standing in my garage, worried about a ticking sound in her engine.”

“People die,” Felicity said. Her voice was gentle. “Heart attacks. Strokes. It happens.”

“She wore a MedicAlert bracelet. I saw it this morning when she checked her watch.” Frank paused. “But she ran every morning. She was careful about her health, whatever the bracelet was for. And she dies tonight, the night of the biggest vote of her career.”

Felicity looked at her.

“That’s a hell of a coincidence,” Frank said.

The room was thinning. People moved toward the exits in small groups, leaning into each other, voices low. Near the front, Officer Norton stood with the town clerk, their conversation inaudible but their faces grave. Maryam had joined them, speaking with the controlled urgency of someone who was already thinking about what came next.

Felicity buttoned her coat. “I have to get going, Frank.”

Frank nodded. She walked Felicity to the door, Dust padding between them.

At the threshold, Felicity stopped. “Are you coming?”

“I think I’ll stay a minute.”

Felicity studied her face. “All right. We’ll talk later.”

She went out into the cold, and Frank turned back.

The meeting room was half-empty now. The folding chairs sat at angles where people had pushed them aside in their hurry to leave. Frank moved along the back wall, Dust at her heels, and watched the last of the crowd filter out.

George Pritchard passed her, adjusting his suspenders with unsteady fingers. He stopped when he saw her. “Awful thing,” he said. “Awful thing.” He shook his head and kept walking.

Near the front, Osborne’s group was gone. The chairs where they’d stood were empty. Frank noted the speed of the departure.

She drifted closer to where Norton stood with the town clerk. Their voices were low, but the room was quiet enough now that pieces carried.

“…found at home…”

“…could be her diabetes, but we’ll need to…”

Frank stopped. Diabetes. The MedicAlert bracelet, sliding into view as Ursula pushed back her sleeve that morning. She hadn’t known what to make of it then. Now she did.

Dust pressed against her ankle. Frank looked down at him. He was watching her with the steady, patient attention he reserved for moments when she was working something out.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Outside, the November air cut through her canvas jacket. The streetlights along the square cast wet circles on the pavement. Behind her, the town hall doors opened and closed as the last residents left, carrying the news out into the dark streets of Maplewick Bay, where it would travel from house to house and phone to phone until by morning everyone would know and no one would know enough.

Frank zipped her jacket and walked to her truck. Dust kept close to her legs, not stopping to investigate the sidewalk the way he usually did.

They drove home in silence.