“It was my share,” Marta said. “Nine years of my life with Nigel. I figure I must’ve earned at least three hundred thousand a year for being treated like shit. You know he made me weigh myself in front of him? He said he didn’t want me to turn out like my mother.”
“I thought your mother died when you were a child.”
“I had a picture, from my uncle. She was heavy.”
I waited for the rest.
“I had to make sure the coffee was ready. Make it myself if the cook was off. Steam the milk. Bring it to him in bed. If it wasn’t right he handed it back and said one word. ‘Again.’ Sometimes he didn’t even look up.”
“Why didn’t you leave?”
“He said if I took off he had a list of guys who could find me, bring me back. ‘Like bounty hunters,’ he said.”
“A good relationship is built on trust,” I said.
“Ha. Right. But I told myself, Pretend to take it. Know where the money is. When the opportunity comes, girl, you go.”
“And it came?”
“When they came charging in and I ended up in the hidey-hole, saw the cash, I knew it was time.”
“What was he—a money launderer? Most people don’t turn investment profits into bundles of hundreds.”
“Nigel wasn’t most people. He thought that underneath it all, the world was still a war zone. ‘There are times when you can’t use credit cards,’ he used to tell me. ‘Yemen. Somalia. Nigeria. Nothing like American dollars.’ ”
“How’d you get it off the island?”
“Cash opens all the doors. Hire a boat. Charter a plane. Rent a car. Before you know it, you’re in the middle of nowhere, Maine.”
“A lot of money for a rainy day.”
“Not really. You’d be amazed at how fast a million disappears. Flows through your hands like water.”
I waited. She moved a half-step closer.
“So now what? You know all my secrets. Almost.”
“I don’t think I know the half of it,” I said.
“Sometimes it’s dangerous to know too much,” Marta said. “Let me tell you.”
“Sounds like Nigel learned that lesson the hard way.”
“There’s a whole world of people who play very rough.”
“We can play rough, too.”
“I know that. Why do you think I’m here?”
“I’m beginning to get it,” I said.
Marta looked around the clearing. The skidder roared and the noise moved closer, blue smoke rising over the treetops. Crows hurried past over our heads, flapping toward some crow destination. I wondered what had happened to the dog.
“What do we do now?” Marta said.
“With the dead man’s money?”
“You kidding me? I earned every penny. His sisters treated me like some slutty whore. His snooty parents, Lord and Lady Tight-Ass, ordered me around like I was the help.”
“Is somebody looking for it?”
“No. My guess is they’re diving deep, trying to cover their tracks,” she said.
“Not worth coming all the way to backwoods Maine for a couple of million?”
“Probably not. Chump change, as they say. And if I’m wrong, I’ve got Louis.”
“I wouldn’t want him to survive Iraq and Afghanistan and get killed over a trunk load of dirty money,” I said.
“It’ll be fine. Really. I do care for him, Jack; I really do. When I said I loved him, I meant it.”
“He know about this?”
“Of course. There are no secrets between us.”
I laughed. She stared at me and waited. I stopped laughing and stared back.
“So what do you want?” she said. “Other than me leaving the way I came.”
I didn’t answer. She smiled.
“That ain’t gonna happen, Jack. Problem for you guys is that Louis loves me back. He always did.”
We worked until 11:30, the piles of shorn trees growing in the yard. It was all going to a firewood processor named Rupert who would send in a log truck, haul the trees to his yard in Freedom, run it through a machine that cut and split the wood. Our time and equipment was donated. Mrs. Hodding used the money to pay her husband’s nursing home bill.
In this neck of Waldo County, Maine, it was how you rolled.
Louis and I sometimes talked about Mrs. Hodding as we worked—the changes she’d seen in the ninety years she’d lived in this very beautiful place. One time I made the mistake of calling the area “undiscovered,” and she looked at me—silver hair tied back, wrinkled skin pulled taut—and said, “What are we here? Some aboriginal tribe?”
But Louis and I didn’t talk that day. When I approached, he turned his back and went to find his next tree. When he was limbing, he seemed to always be on the far side of the trunk. Finally, Clair gave a wave, signaling this was the last load, our signal that it was time for dinner. We hurried back to the woodyard, and Louis stayed fifty feet ahead.
By the time I got to the truck, he was loading his saw into the back of the Audi, tossing his toolbox in behind it. The Audi was running. Marta was in the driver’s seat, the dog in the back.
“I’m gonna have to bail a little early,” Louis said. “Marta’s getting cold. She’s got this circulation thing with her hands. Once they get blue, she can’t get them warmed back up.”
“Sorry to hear that,” I said.
“Yeah, well, what can you do. Wasn’t a problem where she was before.”
He reached up and pulled the hatch closed. I moved closer, stood between him and the passenger side of the car. He started to move around me and I stepped in front of him.
“Louis,” I said.
He looked toward the woods. The skidder came over the rise, chains clanking, the blue diesel plume trailing behind it. Clair was half-turned in the seat, looking back at the load, logs grinding and snapping.
“There’s two million in cash in the trunk,” I said.
“I know that,” Louis said. “What do you think? I don’t know how to reconnoiter?”
“This thing on the island; these are dangerous people. If they come up here to hunt down the only witness—”
He looked away, didn’t answer. We watched the approaching skidder as Clair dragged the load into place, backed up to put slack in the cable, shut off the motor.
“You sure this is your fight?” I said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“Hell of a lot more than Iraq was.”
“I know you and Marta go way back. I just don’t want you to get hurt. Or played.”
“Nobody’s playing me, Jack.”
He turned to me and smiled in that dark, melancholy, Louis-spiraling-downward way.
“I’m getting her out of a jam,” he said, nodding toward the idling Audi. “And remember, they taped a guy to a chair and killed him slowly. For money. I’d kinda like them to come up here. Give me a chance to add a few more marks on the right side of the ledger.”
He gave me a last look, then turned away and climbed into the car. Marta backed out, gave me a smile and a wave. Her fingers looked fine to me.
Clair had the cable unhitched and was back in the seat. He restarted the motor, wound the cable back onto the spool at the back of the skidder. Then he climbed back down, said, “We lose our help?”
I told him about Marta’s fingers.
“She’s got him wrapped around one of them,” Clair said, and he walked to the truck and climbed in. I followed, climbed in beside him. He turned on the motor and the heat and we opened our lunchboxes. Mine had a note from Sophie, one for Clair, too, his name in careful cursive. I handed it to him.
He put down his sandwich and opened the paper. I did the same. Mine was a picture of our family, me and Roxanne, Sophie in the middle. She’d written “My Family” over our circle-shaped heads.<
br />
Clair showed his to me: it was Clair and Pokey, with Sophie in the saddle. It was entitled, “Pokey’s Best Friends.”
“Girl’s got talent,” Clair said. “Gets it from her mother.”
We gave our pictures another glance, folded them and tucked them back in our lunch pails. We started to eat bites of sandwich, poured coffee and tea from our thermoses. The windshield was starting to fog when I said, “She’s got two million in cash in the back of that car.”
Clair chewed slowly and swallowed. Took another sip of coffee. Swallowed.
“Not surprised,” he said.
My turn to bite and chew and sip.
“I just can’t believe these bad guys would let her get away with that,” I said.
Clair took another bite, turned on the defroster. Portholes began to appear at the base of the windshield. Through them we could see the dark trees, standing like a wooden army against the snow.
We finished our sandwiches and dug into the pails to see what to have next. I took out a bag of homemade granola. Clair polished an apple on the sleeve of his jacket. He took a bite and chewed and swallowed, then said, “I’m not worried that she stole that money. I’m more worried that she didn’t.”
“Her cut?” I said, picking out M&Ms and eating them.
“For setting the whole thing up,” Clair said.
“Knowing what was going to happen to him?” I said. “She’d have to be a serious psycho. Or maybe not, if this was after years of being abused.”
Clair took another bite of apple, turned it in his big hand and took another. I was waiting for his reply when my phone buzzed in my jacket pocket. I dug it out, saw a Maine number I didn’t recognize.
“McMorrow.”
“This the reporter?” a man’s voice said.
Raspy. Smoker.
“Could be.”
“Dude,” he said. “We gotta friggin’ talk.”
15
k
There were voices in the background. Men and women. The guy on the phone said, “Shut the fuck up,” and they quieted.
“Who is this?” I said.
“I’m a friend of Teak’s.”
He coughed, cleared his throat. Spat.
“What do you want to talk about?” I said.
“Teak, what else? Can you come over?”
“Over where?”
“Center Street.”
“In Riverport?”
“Yeah,” he said, like, where else would he be?
“What’s your name?”
“Mutt. Like the dog.”
Someone shouted in the background. Mutt said, “I ain’t gonna tell you again.”
I put the phone on speaker.
“I’m not in Riverport.”
“When can you get here?”
“I don’t know. I was planning on tomorrow morning.”
“That’s too late,” Mutt said.
“Why? You have a busy schedule?”
“A few of us won’t be here then.”
“Where are you going?” I said.
“One guy has a warrant, has to turn himself in. Another guy has a warrant, he has to beat feet. This other guy, his old lady gets her check. He’ll be all fucked up by then.”
“Which one are you?”
“Don’t matter. But we’re all here now. Can you be here, like, in an hour?”
“An hour? No.”
“Okay, how ’bout two?”
I looked at Clair.
He opened the window and tossed the apple core out. Nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “What number Center Street?”
There was a clatter and I heard him say, “This shithole got a number?”
A clamor of muffled voices and then Mutt was back. “The number fell off. It’s this house on the corner of Spring Street. It’s green. There’s a door on the back side, down the hill. Used to have a window but it got busted out and now it’s plywood. We’ll keep an eye out for ya.”
And he was gone. I rang off, looked at Clair.
“Friends of the guy who killed the lady with the hatchet,” I said. “They want to talk.”
“How many?” Clair said.
“I don’t know. Sounded like a bunch.”
Clair looked at me, closed his lunch pail.
“Haven’t been to Riverport in a coon’s age,” he said.
16
k
Center Street was a couple of blocks up the hill from the public library, which was convenient for people like Teak, especially in the winter. We drove past the library and took a right, found the house in question. It was a three-decker tenement with pale green siding that was peeling off, like a giant animal had tried to claw through the walls. There were porches on the front, toys and trash on the porches, junked cars on what had been a lawn.
We rolled past once, Clair in the passenger seat. We came back and I slowed, looked for the plywood window. It wasn’t visible so I pulled around the corner and parked. We got out and I called Mutt’s number, the phone in my lap, on speaker. It went to voice mail, a woman’s voice saying, “Iggy ain’t here to take your call.”
I was about to leave a message when a guy came around the corner from the back of the building. He saw us, hesitated, then waved, turned back around the building and disappeared.
“Cleared to cross the perimeter,” Clair said, and we walked down the sidewalk to a path trampled in the snow. We followed it single file, me first, following the path around the corner of the building. It led to the door with the plywood. There was graffiti and trash, plastic vodka jugs and beer cans, syringes and Nyquil bottles. The door had a hasp and padlock but the hasp had been ripped off the side of the house. I poked a finger into the crack at the doorjamb and pulled the door open. Stepped in.
It was a sort of walk-in basement, a dirt floor and more trash. Crushed beer cans, broken syringes, dirty squares of cellophane. Light showed from another doorway twenty feet in, and we crossed the room, stepped inside. A work lamp hung just inside the door from an orange extension cord. Our eyes adjusted and beyond the glare we saw two guys sitting on a plaid couch, three standing by a workbench. The two guys on the couch were drinking 40s. Colt 45. There were two more guys along the wall to our right. Arthur and Dolph.
Dolph nodded.
“Which one of you is Mutt?” I said.
Both of the guys on the couch put their beers on the floor and stood. One stepped forward. He was tall and stoop-shouldered, six-four before he hunched. His hair was wiry and going gray, his nose broken over a scruffy grown-out goatee. His army fatigue jacket was open, showing a stained Patriots sweatshirt underneath. He held out his hand. I could see crude tattoos on his wrist, like what you’d see carved on a restroom door.
“I’m Mutt,” he said.
We shook and I could feel something hard and out of place, like an old broken bone.
“I’m Jack. This is Clair.”
“Don’t trust us? Had to bring your dad?” Mutt said.
He chuckled. Clair smiled.
“Clair works with me,” I said.
“What? He take pictures?” Mutt said.
“No,” I said. “He doesn’t.”
He looked Clair over again and stopped laughing. I took a quick glance around the room, felt Clair do the same. They were of varying sizes and shapes, all guys except for a woman in a hoodie in the back corner sitting in a lawn chair. A lanky kid at the workbench caught my eye, probably strong and nimble enough to do damage. Clair moved a couple of feet in his direction.
Reaching into my pocket, I slipped out a notebook and pen. Opened the notebook to a blank page.
“Whatcha got?” I said.
He looked at the notebook, then back at me.
“Teak,” he said. “He ain’t no murde
rer.”
“A whole bunch of witnesses say otherwise.”
“I mean, he ain’t killed nobody before.”
“No one’s saying he’s a serial killer.”
“Right. But here’s the fucking problem,” Mutt said.
There was a challenge in his tone, like the problem was of my making.
“Teak, he worked at the shelter sometimes.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“And we all go there on and off. Sleep it off. Get out of the fucking cold. Miss H. is a wicked good shit.”
There were grunts of affirmation around the room.
“Seems like it,” I said.
“She said you came to talk to her. But she didn’t kill nobody, you know what I’m saying?”
“Right.”
“So I’m saying, lay off Miss H. and the shelter,” Mutt said.
“Yeah, leave her the fuck alone,” the young guy at the workbench said. “Fucking media, making shit up.”
I waited long enough to seem to have considered it, then said, “I talk to a lot of people for a story. I’ll talk to Teak’s family. I’ll talk to the cops. I’ll talk to the family of the woman who got killed, who, by the way, was helping with the shelter’s books. Connection number two. And I’m talking to you.”
“They’ll shut Loaves and Fishes down, you put some shit in the paper like Teak flipped out ’cause the shelter didn’t give him his meds.”
Interesting. I wrote that down.
“What are you doing?” Mutt said.
“Taking notes. It’s what reporters do.”
“I didn’t say you could do that,” he said.
“Then why did you ask me to meet you?”
“So’s we could talk. I’m giving you a fucking message.”
“From whom?” I said.
“From whom?” Mutt said, stretching the second word out so that somebody snickered. “From me. But I don’t want to be in the fucking newspaper.”
“You’re saying this conversation is off the record?”
“Right. So stop writing and start listening.”
“I can do both,” I said, and I scribbled on the pad. “What’s your real name?”
“None of your fucking business.”
“Fuck off,” the chubby guy said.
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