“That’s too bad,” I said.
“Her first husband—he wasn’t much use, either,” Harriet said. “Wicked bad drunk. Anyway, I just try to help out. Give them some more family.”
“They seem close to you.”
“Oh, they are,” she said.
Another pause, and I said, “I saw Teak this morning.”
That stopped her.
“Oh, my goodness. Did they let him out?”
“No, he was in court. His initial appearance. They read the charges. It’s the first thing that happens—in public, I mean.”
“Oh, God. It’s all so horrible.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing good about it.”
“How was he? In court, I mean. Is he feeling better? Are they giving him his meds? I had to remind him all the time, ‘Teak, did you take your pills?’ I kept some at the shelter for him. I could tell when he was going off.”
“That’s good of you, Harriet. So it’s more than handing out blankets.”
“We like to say we shelter the whole person,” Harriet said. “He’s a good man. They all are. They’re just sick.”
She smiled benevolently, the shepherd of a ragged flock.
“So was he okay?” she asked.
“Not really, no. He was pretty out there. Talking his superhero stuff to the judge.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah. But he actually seemed pretty cheerful. I think he truly believes he did the right thing.”
Harriet seemed to consider that for a moment.
“That’s the thing about Teak,” she said. “He really means well. He’s always trying to help. Even when we had problems at the shelter with him, it was usually because he was defending someone or taking offense at someone for picking on somebody. A client would swear in front of a child or something, or push their way into line in front of a family.”
“But that was when he was doing well?” I said.
“Right.”
“And when he wasn’t?”
“He usually wouldn’t stay. When he was feeling symptoms, he seemed to need to be alone. That’s when he’d go to the woods or wherever he was camping out. He’d just take off. Walk for twenty miles.”
We sat for a moment. The place smelled of laundry detergent. The donated sheets and towels.
“When he goes off his meds, how long does it take to start to show?”
“Oh, gee. I’m not sure. A couple of days, maybe? Not long. I can tell when he isn’t doing well. You can see something in his eyes.”
“And the last time you saw him?”
“I’ve been thinking about that, since it all happened. I mean, I thought he was okay.”
“So you actually keep some meds for him at the shelter?”
“Well, yeah. Sometimes he forgets. Or loses track of time.”
“Had he forgotten lately?”
“I didn’t think so. But it had been two or three days. He was off someplace. Like I said.”
I considered it. Teak off by himself, his illness kicking in big-time.
“Funny thing is, he seems to be doing okay now. In court, he seemed pretty pleased with himself, but calm, too. Talking about this Hakata, but he wasn’t raving. It was like he wanted to educate the judge on all of it.”
“The meds kicking in, maybe,” Harriet said. “Or he just got over it. Afterwards it’s like he’s just floating along.”
“How long does that take to happen?”
“Depends,” she said. “Sometimes he peaks and just crashes. When he’s going on about the Hakata stuff, that’s usually on the way up or the way down.”
“You know that Hakata means ‘hack’ in Finnish.”
“I knew it was ‘chop’ or something.”
“And the ax has special powers.”
“Right,” she said.
“But I was told that Hakata only fights bad guys. And he does it on the field of honor. Not sneaking up and whacking them.”
“In Teak’s head, Lindy Hines must have been an evil person or a demon or whatever,” Harriet said.
“But had he ever threatened anyone with an ax before, that you know of?”
“No, not the ax. I mean, he would get in people’s faces, punch somebody. Once he knocked this guy’s teeth out. The guy made an inappropriate comment to a girl.”
“But not an ax or a stabbing or a gun?”
“No, nothing like this. It’s like something inside him snapped.”
I wrote that down, looked around the cramped room with its family pictures and shelter supplies. I felt like there was something just out of reach, but maybe I was mistaken to think Harriet was the one who held the answer. She wasn’t a shrink; she just handed out blankets and beef stew.
I glanced at the pictures of the niece and nephew, smiling like they were models on a fashion shoot. And I said, “Speaking of parents and kids—”
Harriet wiped her nose with a tissue that she produced from somewhere in her sleeve, like a magician.
“Barrett Hines, Lindy’s son.”
“Right. He’s good-looking; she showed me a picture.”
He’s dead,” I said.
Harriet’s face froze in a weird half-smile.
“What? But that can’t be—”
“Somebody knocked on his door early this morning and stabbed him, stuck him in the neck.”
“Oh my God,” Harriet said, gasping. “Oh my God.”
“Yeah. Pretty horrible. His husband found him.”
She was looking at me like she was hearing things.
“But he was fine. I talked to him,” Harriet said. “Yesterday.”
“You did?”
“He called. I said how sorry I was about his mom. He said it hadn’t sunk in.”
“What did he want?”
“He said his mom had a box of papers from the shelter. They were from when she was helping us out. They were in her car.”
“Which he had,” I said.
“Yes. He said the police had returned it to him.”
She replayed the conversation.
“He said he’d drop the box off. I said, ‘Oh, God, don’t worry about that—with all you have to deal with.’ He said he had to go to town anyway. Talk to a funeral home about a service. I said, ‘Really, this is not important.’ ”
“What was in the carton?” I said.
“Just a lot of paperwork. Forms we have to file with the federal government showing how many clients we’ve served, what we did for them. Forms for donations, so people can get their deduction. All of our expenses, which we have to declare. It can take longer to fill out the paperwork than it does to actually help people.”
“Do you need all that?”
“Not right away,” Harriet said. “I mean, it’s not like I’m keeping track of all this stuff very well anyway. I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Do what you have to do. Think of yourself.’ ”
She paused.
“She was really close to him—Lindy. I mean, when we met, she said, ‘I’m going to have dinner with my son.’ She was excited about it. She said one of the good things about moving to Riverport was that she’d see her son more often. I mean, it’s like me and Shane and Nikki. It just makes my day, even if it’s just for a few minutes.”
“I guess having been close to your mom isn’t much of a defense when somebody with a knife shows up at your front door.”
“But why? And after Lindy?”
She wrung her hands, shook her head.
“That was the whole family,” I said. “There’s the ex-husband, but he wasn’t Barrett’s dad. It’s like somebody wiped out the last of the Hineses.”
She was dabbing the tissue at her lips like she expected tears to run from her mouth.
“What’s happening to this world, Mr. Mc
Morrow?”
“Nothing good,” I said.
“It’s like things don’t make sense anymore,” Harriet said. “All these shootings—killing people in churches and stores, and that concert in Las Vegas where that guy just mowed people down. And we have Teak doing this awful thing, and he’s a nice guy. Otherwise, I mean. Now this, to Lindy’s son.”
She paused, looked unseeingly at the mounds of clutter, then back at me.
“But if Teak is in jail.”
Harriet trailed off, her mind starting down the trail.
“Why would somebody else kill somebody from the same family? Especially if Teak, he didn’t really know what he was doing. It’s not like he even knew who she was. I mean, who she really was. Not whatever he was thinking she was.”
“An alien,” I said. “Who had taken over a woman’s body.”
“Jeezum,” Harriet said.
“Yes. Jeezum.”
Harriet had her hands clenched on her lap, the tissue protruding from her right fist. She was staring in the direction of the pictures of Shane and Nikki, but seeing nothing.
“I’m sorry to bring bad news,” I said.
She looked at me.
“What if . . . ,” Harriet began, then faltered. “What if it was the shelter? What if Teak saw Lindy Hines at the admin office somehow? I don’t know that he ever went there, but what if he did? And what if somehow that got tangled up in his mind? And then he saw her at Home Department, and all that tangled-up stuff went even more haywire.”
“Something did,” I said.
“But if she hadn’t tried to help us, would she be alive today? And her son. What if . . .”
She trailed off again. I stood.
“They’ll figure it out,” I said. “You can’t just walk up to somebody’s front door in Riverport, Maine, and stab them to death and get away with it. They’re working their butts off as we speak.”
“I hope they find the person,” Harriet said. “The homeless population, they’ll bear the brunt of this, you know. There’s a saying: One goes astray, the rest pay.”
Astray? That meant a cow jumping a fence, not someone getting their head split open.
I turned to leave. Harriet got up and followed me, wiping her nose. To the left of the door there was another photo of Nikki and Shane. They were with Harriet at Disney World. Nikki, Shane, Harriet, and Mickey Mouse. Left to right.
I turned back to Harriet and said, “You’re the fun aunt.”
“I’m the only aunt,” she said. “I have no choice.”
I smiled, put my hand on the latch of the storm door.
“I’m going to ask Teak if he knew Barrett,” I said. “I think he’ll tell me. I don’t think he really knows how to lie.”
She was close beside me. I could smell mint, like toothpaste. She dabbed at her nose with the tissue. Her hands were red and gnarled, like she worked on a farm or a fishing boat. Scrubbing dishes at the shelter.
“How can you talk to him?” she said. “Isn’t he in jail?”
“Doesn’t matter. They can’t hold him incommunicado. It’s his decision. Lawyer, when he gets a permanent one, will tell him not to, but I don’t think Teak likes being told what to do.”
“No,” Harriet said.
“Do you want me to say hello for you?”
She didn’t answer for a moment, then turned to me.
“Sorry. This cold has me all fogged up. But sure. Tell him Harriet sends her best. Tell him even with all this, I’m still with him. Every step of the way.”
30
k
I drove through the city, the drab streets lined with nondescript houses, boulevards of businesses that were either doomed or deceased. It was all bleak, and I felt my mood plummeting.
I’d seen so much death over the years, people killed for money, for power, for someone else’s survival. But it was the random killings, the lives taken for no reason at all, that bothered me most.
We aren’t flies to be swatted, mosquitoes to be slapped. We all deserve a fighting chance. Goodness shouldn’t be its only reward.
I ran through the conversation, starting with Nikki and Shane, oblivious and spoiled rotten. Life was a party paid for by their maiden aunt, who makes her living helping the least fortunate.
And was generous to a fault. If cleaving somebody’s skull didn’t bump you out of Harriet’s inner circle, what did?
I drove south, past the casino, the used-car lots, the snow plowed into dirty piles. I followed the river south, then turned off. The road passed driveways slashed into the woods, houses huddling in the distance like army camps, everyone hiding behind walls, guns cocked and ready.
And then I swung onto the cul-de-sac, saw that some of the cops had left, but the TV trucks had taken their places. There were only two other houses on the circle and there were reporters at the doors of both of them, a young woman and a young guy holding microphones to the neighbors’ faces. Did you know Barrett Hines? . . . Just to say hello to. . . . Do you know why anyone would want to kill him? . . . No, he seemed like a nice man . . . Talk to him much? No, but him and his friend, they always waved. . . . How does this make you feel? . . . I never thought this would happen here. I guess we’ll start locking our doors.
I parked just past Barrett’s house and got out. The door was closed and the ambulance was gone, which meant the body had been hauled off for autopsy. I skirted the crime tape and walked past the front of the house, turned at the other side of the driveway. I was trudging along the path in the snow when Bates and Tingley ducked under the half-open garage door and stepped out.
They looked up and Bates shook her head. I stopped, waited for them to come to me.
“Any comment comes from the spokesman,” Bates said. She brushed by. Tingley stopped. We waited for her to get in their car.
“I came to give you something,” I said. “About Barrett.”
Tingley backtracked, stopped under the eaves of the garage. Brushed snow out of his hair.
“Shoot,” he said.
“I was just talking to Harriet, who runs the shelter. She said Barrett called her, said he wanted to bring back a box of stuff. Records that his mom was looking at.”
“In the back of the car,” Tingley said.
“Right.”
“But he never did,” I said. “If the stuff’s still in the car.”
“Okay,” Tingley said, waiting for more.
“Seems weird that he’d care about that two days after his mother is murdered. Who cares if there’s junk in a car, one that he’ll probably never bring himself to drive? Why is he cleaning up loose ends like papers from a place his mother barely worked. Why does he care?”
“I don’t know,” Bates said. “Trying to stay busy, take his mind off the tragedy or whatever. It happens. I remember telling this guy his wife had been killed in a car accident. What’s he do? Doesn’t say a word. Just walks over to the woodpile, starts splitting wood. Musta gone through half a cord while I was standing there.”
“I still think it’s odd,” I said.
We stood. It wasn’t much of an eave and a puff of wind spattered us with snowflakes. Tingley brushed them off the shoulder of his jacket like dandruff.
“You’re right,” he said.
“Happens,” I said.
“Scalabrini said you’re a nuisance but you’ve got good instincts.”
“Should I blush?”
He smiled.
“Okay, one for you, McMorrow,” Tingley said. “SP case, like I said, so don’t say you heard it from us.”
I nodded.
“Heard toxicology came back on our friend Teak,” he said.
I waited.
“He’d been taking his meds, all right. Head full of methamphetamine.”
“Whoa.”
“Yup. Would ram
p his symptoms up to a whole new level.”
“Would explain why he’d suddenly take an ax to somebody,” I said.
“In broad daylight,” Tingley said. “In front of the Christmas wreaths.”
“Delusions would have been in technicolor.”
“I guess. Ever try wrestling with a tweaker?”
As a matter of fact, I had.
“One for you,” I said. “Teak’s brother Down East, Jason, is a serious meth head. Teak’s ex, Tawny, too.”
“Would give him access,” Tingley said.
“Brother has a new truck. New to him. When I went up there I saw indications of an influx of cash. TV. Furniture.”
“Maybe Teak was dealing for him.”
I pictured Mutt and friends.
“Or just gave Jason an in, access to a new market?”
We mulled it. The snow fell. At the street, Bates was sitting in the car, bathed in the blue-gray glow from her laptop. She was talking on the phone. I took mine out, searched for effects of meth.
“Delirium, panic, psychosis,” I said. “For a guy who already has hallucinations and delusions and is manic.”
“Just what the doctor ordered,” Tingley said.
Bates flashed the headlights. Tingley gave me a last nod, and a tap on the shoulder. Said, “We’ll talk.” We were best friends.
I rolled out of the cul-de-sac, the truck rumbling and crunching. They were in the Malibu, Bates on the phone. At the house across the street, an older guy was talking to Trevor from the News. The real story wasn’t idle chatter from the neighbors.
Teak on meth. He’d be a loaded gun with a hair trigger. Who knows what he would have been seeing as he followed Lindy Hines into the Christmas department. His comic-book world come to life. A middle-aged woman clearly possessed by the devil.
But did a tweaker kill Barrett Hines? Had Teak somehow passed on his delusions to someone over a meth pipe? The mother was the devil. The son was her spawn.
I pulled out onto the main road, running through the other possibilities. Was his stepfather capable of it? Had the police talked to Rod? His ex-wife murdered, saving him a bundle of money, and now his stepson gone. A potential rat erased.
And so it went, out of Orrington and south along the river, which was what they told lost explorers to do. Follow the river and it will lead you out of the wilderness. I sure as hell hoped so.
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