Coldwater Revenge

by James A Ross

  “You said you had a point,” Dolan interrupted, visibly uncomfortable with being on the receiving end of an interrogation.

  “And I think you get it,” said Gauss. “Priest or attorney: a file like the one you just drooled through is about what you’d expect of a professional who’s been working with troubled minds for thirty years.”

  The young lawyer looked away.

  “Look,” Gauss pressed, “I hope you find the misfits you’re after. They’re there, and they’re probably more of them than the Bishop wants to know about. But there should be some integrity to the process, don’t you think? There aren’t many of us left in the vineyard, and we’re getting old. Harassing old plow horses on their way to the glue factory isn’t just wrong, it’s pointless. If you’ve done more than a few of these investigations, you must know that by now.”

  The young attorney’s expression had not changed, but Gauss could sense that his point had at least grazed the untested armor.

  “And how would you go about finding these… misfits?” Dolan sniffed.

  “I’d start with Bishop Mczynski,” said Gauss. “There’s a first-class mind behind all that glad handing and baby kissing. Not much gets by him, and he’s the one who keeps the report cards around here.”

  “I’ve spoken with His Eminence. He’s the one who directed me to you.”

  Gauss’s mind paused, but his tongue kept moving. “Then if I were you, and investigation was my specialty… then I might ask myself why?” Dolan pressed his fingers together as if he were about to respond, and touched them to his mouth as if to signal himself not to. “Have you been to the seminary yet?” Gauss pressed. “Have you talked to some of the delicate young men they’re taking in there these days?”

  Dolan shook his head. Gauss’ eyes shone like Paul’s on the road to Damascus. “Ha! I get it. The seminary’s off limits, isn’t it?” When the lawyer still said nothing, Gauss took it as an admission. “Then your investigation is a fraud, Counselor. It’s not going anywhere, and it’s not meant to.”

  Dolan’s lips buckled at the corners. “I wouldn’t count on that, Father Gauss.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Joe made it home in time for dessert, then apologized that he had to leave again. The girls pleaded for him to stay. “We’re practicing for a play! You have to hear our lines.”

  “Your father’s got a job to do,” said Mary.

  Bonnie stood to clear the table.

  “Sorry girls. I’ll be back before bedtime.” Joe motioned for Tom to join him outside, where the sound of dishes crashing like percussion instruments was muffled. “Did you find out where that priest friend of yours was on Saturday night? Or where he says he was?”

  “Quote ‘On my knees praying for skirt chasers in Smokey the Bear hats’ unquote. That would be Bonnie’s skirt, right? PDA in the back pew?”

  “Knock it off, Tommy. He wouldn’t say where he was?”

  “I don’t know about wouldn’t. He didn’t and I didn’t press. He pulled me up short with that skirt chaser line. Is everything okay with you and Bonnie? I’m sensing a certain tension.”

  Joe sighed. “Bonnie’s pissed about the no help, no time off drill, that’s all. I’ve got to get back to the Grange Hall to deal with the troopers from DuBois who want in on the Billy Pearce investigation.”

  “Good. You need help.”

  “Don’t be naive, Tommy. They don’t want to help. They want to take over. No one in Coldwater is going to talk to an outsider. They know that. But they’ve got Paulie Grogan, my former deputy, with them now and they think that’s going to make a difference.”

  “Joe…”

  “Tommy, I’ve got to go. Don’t worry about the skirt chaser crack. People say all sorts of things to priests just to stir the pot.”

  * * *

  Tom escaped in Joe’s truck after everyone had gone to bed, intending to unwind from an eventful day by revisiting the watering holes of his youth. Instead, and within minutes, he found himself idling at the columned gates of the private drive leading to the Pearce estate. The question that buzzed in his head was one of those that are answered just by being asked. “What are you doing here?”

  The main house was a three story, double winged Adirondack chateau with acres of slate roof, miles of copper gutter and sweeping lawns that undulated in triple terraces down to the edge of Coldwater Lake. How many times had Tom driven his clapped-out VW Beetle up that long, tree-lined driveway, never entirely certain if the rickety car would make it to the top? On summer weekends, the house would be ablaze with lights, like a small European hotel at holiday time. Music would drift gently from the piano room, and guests would stroll the lawns amidst the sounds of tennis balls being thwacked smartly under outdoor illumination. Weekdays, there would be a glow from the kitchen wing when Tom brought Susan home from their date, or if Dr. Pearce were up late, a single shaded lamp glowing from behind the six-paned glass of his study.

  Tonight the house was dark. Tom leaned out the truck window to look for signs of occupancy. But all he saw was darkness and all he heard were crickets. Leaving the truck in front of the house, he followed a brick path through the hemlocks and around the kitchen wing to the back. No lights shown from the upstairs windows. Both wings and all three floors were pitch. Below the sweeping lawn, Coldwater Lake glistened like polished pewter under pale moonlight.

  Making his way by a remembered path to a stone bench at the end of the upper terrace, Tom’s eye found Pocket Island, a dark mushroom cap on silvery liquid a mile offshore. His mind conjured memories of summer afternoons where he and Susan would tie a canoe to the branches of centuries old beech trees and swim in the privacy of the narrow inlet that gave the island its name. Surprised and embarrassed at the unexpected surge of nostalgia, he pulled himself short: Okay, Tommy. The woman is smart, sexy and she’s been keeping tabs on you. But you let each other go a long time ago because neither would follow the other, and she says she’s happy with the path she chose.

  A wobbling flicker of light at the water’s edge disappeared into a shaft of moonbeam, reappearing for an instant before disappearing into the boathouse. Leaving the bench, he picked his way across the dewy lawn, his heart racing as it always had when he approached this place in darkness. Though in the past it had been with passion, not apprehension. A light most certainly meant that someone was in the boathouse—someone who had heard the truck, or spotted Tom’s silhouette when he came around the back of the house.

  Placing his hand on a cold metal knob, wet with evening dew, he eased the door open. Moonlight shone through the arched boat entrance and reflected off the water of the empty boat slip. Above it, an old mahogany runabout hung cradled in canvas straps, and an equally ancient cedar canoe lay covered in dust against the far wall. Tom moved toward the stairs that led to the loft overhead. Old boards squeaked a greeting. Or warning.

  A door that had not been there years ago, blocked the top of the wooden steps. Opening it and confronting what lay beyond was arguably imprudent. As was being there at all. But as the pugilistic philosopher, Billy Conn, once opined, “what’s the point of being Irish, if you can’t be stupid?” Tom turned the handle, opened the door and stepped into the darkness.

  “AWK! AWK! AWK!”

  A tattoo of pointed blows peppered the crown of Tom’s head. A deafening thut, thut, thut, pounded above him like an unbalanced ceiling fan.

  “AWK! AWK! AWK!”

  Milling his arms, as much in confusion as defense, Tom felt one of them connect with something solid. “Shit!”

  As if to a password, a lamp flickered on. A large, white bird landed on a headboard beside it. Pressed against the headboard, covered to the neck in a bright, patchwork quilt, was a vision he might have expected.

  “Tom!”

  Motionless, speechless, and for the moment without a coherent thought, he put his hand to the top of his head and removed it covered with blood.

  Susan threw off the quilt and hurried to him. His attention au
tomatically shifted from his hand to the short, green nightshirt that was the only thing between them.

  “I saw the headlights coming up the driveway,” she said. “I didn’t want to see anybody, so I came down here.”

  He watched her walk to the small half-bath and return with a handful of tissues. He felt lightheaded.

  “Sit,” she ordered, taking his hand and leading him to the bed.

  “AWK! AWK! AWK!”

  Tom threw his arms in the air and covered his head. “Shush! Roger!” Susan hissed. Tom tried to laugh, but it came out a groan. She sat him down on the bed. “You remember Roger?”

  How could he forget? The sly Dr. Pearce had given each of his children a large, white cockatoo as a high school graduation present. As Tom and others had quickly discovered, cockatoos are unshakably loyal and fiercely protective. No one came into Susan’s dorm room unless Roger was safely in his cage. He learned the hard way never to touch, much less crawl into bed with, Susan without putting a heavy cloth cover over Roger’s cage. Even then, the bird would often go batshit in there. He had often thought that the worldly Dr. Pearce knew exactly what he was doing with that unlikely gift. The damned things could live eighty years.

  While Susan worked on his scalp, Tom tried to keep his head still and his view unobstructed.

  Susan laughed. “Look, if you must. But there’s no cage down here for Roger.” She pulled his head forward so that she could apply tissues to the back of his skull. Her breasts massaged his forehead. The ripple went straight down his spine.

  “This isn’t going to work.” She sat back and surveyed his bloody scalp. “You’re going to need stitches.”

  He placed a hand on her thigh to steady himself.

  “AWK! AWK! AWK!”

  Throwing his hands in the air, he gasped and swiveled his head. “Billy had one of these things, too, didn’t he? Where is it?”

  Susan climbed from his lap. “I haven’t seen Ruby since Friday. I don’t know where she is. Let me take Roger to the house and get some gauze and disinfectant. I’ll be back.”

  Tom held the bloody tissues to his head and watched Susan leave, thoughts and feelings hopelessly fragmented. A small voice in the back of his mind whispered caution.

  He tried to bring order to jumbled impressions by taking mental inventory of the loft’s contents: a queen sized bed, a kitchen table that served as some sort of work desk, an elaborate video and music system, one large, overstuffed chair and a small, cramped bathroom. On the narrow porch on the other side of a sliding glass door, a pair of beach chairs faced the water.

  Susan was away long enough for the wounds on his scalp to begin to throb and for the brain beneath it to demand an answer to the question it had posed when he first turned into the Pearces’ driveway. “Why are you here?” The possibilities were finite, but what he knew for sure was that he didn’t want to leave.

  When Susan finally returned, it was with gauze, disinfectant, a thermos of hot cocoa and several disappointing layers of clothing. She handed him the disinfectant and sat across the room in the overstuffed chair, looking away. An awkward silence filled the space between them until she broke it. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  He didn’t need to ask: ‘Can’t what’?

  “It’s too late,” she whispered.

  He closed his eyes and poured disinfectant on his scalp, pressing a wad of gauze into the wet mess.

  Susan squared her shoulders and held her hands in her lap. “I just can’t get involved with you again, Tom. I won’t do that to myself.”

  “You don’t owe me an explanation.” Though he was at a loss to provide one himself. A grown woman in a flimsy nightshirt does not usually allow herself to straddle a man to whom she is not, at least momentarily, attracted. That much he knew, even before the Ivy League education.

  “No, I don’t. But I don’t want to mislead you, either. Or lose you as a friend now that we’ve reconnected.”

  The word “friend” stung as much as the gouges on his head and arms.

  “I’m still attracted to you,” she blurted. “I always have been.”

  Nor did he need a degree in English grammar to know that the next word was going to be “but.”

  “But I’m getting uncomfortably close to forty. All the smart men I meet are geeks. The hunks are intimidated by my intelligence, and I can’t spend the next couple of years…” She let the sentence trail away unfinished.

  He kept his features expressionless.

  “Say something!” she demanded.

  He waited.

  “Then I’ll say it. I’d love to pick up where we left off… spend the next few years with you rutting like rabbits. But I refuse to spend forever with someone who is basically unhappy.”

  He didn’t know what he’d expected to hear. But it wasn’t that.

  The silence lasted a long, painful minute. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  “No. But I have a hunch that you’re going to tell me. And that it involves more brain science.”

  Her mouth formed a smile and then a frown. “Do you know what makes people attracted to each other?”

  “Blond hair, green eyes and soft curves. Not necessarily in that order.”

  “Non-overlapping immune system markers.”

  He felt a groan and suppressed it.

  “Opposites attract,” she explained. “—genetically speaking. Do you know what turns them off?”

  He spread his hands.

  “Opposing energy levels.”

  “Meaning what?” It was an expression of wounded pride more than confusion, but she chose to treat it as the latter.

  “Meaning people don’t change. The best predictor of how someone is going to be ten years from now, is how they were ten years ago. You weren’t happy when I met you. You’re not happy now. That means the probabilities are high that you won’t be happy ten years from now. And, regardless of how good he might have been in bed when he was younger, I’m not looking to spend the rest of my life with someone who is basically unhappy.”

  Clouds of confusion escaped with shortened breath. “Susan! The time I spent with you was the happiest I’ve ever been.”

  “Me, too.” Her voice was sad and soothing. “And I think we might have a good time again, for a few years. But highs and lows aren’t permanent. The base we return to is what counts in the long run. Mine’s high. Yours—unless you’ve got your clothes off—is low. We’re not compatible over the long haul.”

  How had they gotten here so fast from where they had been just minutes ago? Defensive and stubborn, he asked another one of those questions which answers itself. “This is where I’m supposed to say you’re wrong and fight for you, isn’t it?”

  Her voice was the hard side of weary. “But we both know that you won’t.”

  And they both knew she was right.

  CHAPTER 12

  Tom got back to the cabin just as the household was beginning to stir. Joe stumbled into the kitchen, winked at Tom and asked him how he had slept. Bonnie came in next, said nothing, and started making pancakes. Luke and the girls drifted in once the aromas were airborne, and then the phone rang.

  Bonnie glared at the wall clock. It was six thirty a.m. Tom answered the phone. “Morgan residence.”

  “Tom? This is Tanner Hartwell.” Hartwell was the senior managing partner at Tom’s law firm. The sound of Hartwell’s name blew away whatever fog remained from Tom’s sleepless night. “Sorry to disturb your family at this hour, Tom. But your cell has been off for two days, did you know that?”

  It’s called vacation.

  The voice didn’t wait for an answer. “I’m afraid we have a problem that requires your attention.”

  Fatigue swept Tom’s body. “Is it the thing Stu Bailey called about the other day?”

  “That’s right. We need you to look at some old documents and walk us through what they mean. It’s not something we can do over the phone.”

  Tom felt suddenly like he was
in one of those childhood dreams where you get caught cheating on the big test and get kicked out of school. There’s nothing you can do. “When do you need me there?”

  “Today.”

  Five pairs of eyes watched him replace the phone. “I’ve got to go.” The girls groaned. Luke slunk from the room.

  “Oh, Tommy,” said Mary. “Why don’t you tell them to go stuff themselves?”

  “Will you be able to come back?” asked Bonnie.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me drive you,” said Joe. “If we leave now, we can be there by late afternoon. You take care of what you have to, and we can be back here before sun up tomorrow.

  “That’s too much trouble, Joe. I’ll just fly.”

  “Look, Tommy, I called that guy whose card the NeuroGene owner gave us—the one who used to be his partner and lives in Manhattan. He’s willing to meet as long as he can bring his lawyer. I was going to make him come up here. But if he can do it today, we might as well make it a road trip.”

  Bonnie and Mary looked at him pleadingly.

  “Alright brother. But keep it under 90 miles an hour, okay. My stomach’s churning already.”

  As soon they turned onto the Northway, Joe started. “You’re pissing me off with this Super Uncle shit. Secret languages, monster fish… Next thing I know, you’ll be getting him laid.”

  Tom glanced at a speedometer fanning clockwise as if it were measuring the driver’s blood pressure instead of the car’s speed. “Afraid he’ll beat your record?”

  “Don’t be funny. I’m serious.”

  “Then be serious. You don’t have time to be a dad. No Coldwater Sheriff in living memory has. MadDog wasn’t around when we were kids. You and I had each other. But all Luke’s got is two older sisters. It’s not the same, and it’s not enough.”

  “You’re setting the bar too high, Tommy.”

  “By taking the kid fishing and playing an old family word game? Come on. He’s dying for some guy time, that’s all. Put a couple of fishing poles in the trunk of the patrol car and take him on your rounds, if that’s all you’ve got time for. It doesn’t matter what you do. The kid just needs to hang with men every once in a while, preferably his dad.”