Cadillac Cathedral by Jack Hodgins

had followed the maroon Lexus and the Henry J past the row of strip malls and gas stations and the houses with Homes for your Future signs on front lawns and had got out onto the Old Highway beyond the town limits, a long train of cars and trucks had accumulated behind them, all apparently unwilling to pass. Horns honked, but not, it seemed, with impatience. In his rear-view mirror he could see people with heads and naked torsos out their car windows,waving their shirts about as though participating in a football victory parade.
    Only when he’d entered a long slow curve in the road could he see in his rear-view mirror that the train of vehicles following him had grown to include several cars and trucks and a large number of panel vans wearing the brightly painted logos and outright advertisements of businesses — including a well-known tourist resort, a recycling depot, a fishing lodge, a ski resort, a home-moving van, a landscape firm, a building contractor, a pest exterminator and a farm dedicated solely to the cultivation of daffodils. The last of the vehicles to appear from behind a stand of alder was an orange school bus, which pulled out and passed all the others and would have passed Arvo as well if the driver hadn’t decided to pull in right behind the hearse and, in effect, lead the parade of hangers-on. This bus, he could see now, was filled with students singing robustly out their open windows — to the fields of cattle they passed and the campers in the wooded campsite, to the mail boxes and bus shelters and private homes and to the clear blue sky and all the rest of the world that witnessed this patient parade down this paved and winding road in the general direction of the city.

CHAPTER 6

     
     
    A LITTLE MORE THAN thirty minutes south of town the Henry J suddenly turned off the road and onto the gravel parking lot between a small white stucco grocery store and a sprawling heap of wild-rose bushes. This had to mean that something was wrong. Arvo turned in as well, and pulled up to the right of Peterson, nose to a weathered log meant to prevent you from driving down the pebble beach and into the Strait. A few scrawny poplars trembled from the breeze off the water. What was left of the parade that had followed them out of town slowed down and almost stopped, probably uncertain whether to turn in as well. But then, as though they’d somehow decided all together that the slow-pokes they’d been following had finally reachedtheir destination, they took off in a rush, letting the roar of their collective acceleration reverberate down the avenue of broad-leaf maples.
    Peterson rolled down his window and suggested that Arvo wait here for a while. “Get yourself a coffee or something — unless you want to go ahead without us. I promised Lucy we’d drop in to say hello.”
    “You crazy?” Arvo got out of the hearse to say this. Lucy had been Peterson’s wife for a while, but for the past few years she’d owned a chicken ranch somewhere in this part of the world. “You meant to do this from the start?”
    Peterson looked only a little sheepish. “Lucy could be dangerous if she heard I passed by this close without stopping.”
    Arvo had seen enough of Lucy to know she could be dangerous even at the best of times. But would she even have known that Peterson had passed by so close without stopping? “You could’ve mentioned this before we left home. If they decide to do something else with Martin …”
    Peterson raised both hands to admit his guilt. “Half an hour? Is that too much for a pal to ask?”
    Arvo looked at his watch. “In half an hour I’ll leave, even if I have to go without you.” Then, as the Henry J began to move, he added: “If you’re late I’ll phone the police — The Case of the Chicken Ranch Murder.”
    He was almost serious. He’d once overheard Lucy Peterson threatening to feed Peterson’s privates to her hens. She’d also promised to strangle Herbie Brewer, whom she’d