Close to the Bone

by William G. Tapply

  “Awfully hot morning to walk,” I said.

  “I don’t have a car. Ride my bike, usually. I couldn’t carry Jack on the bike.”

  “I’m Brady Coyne,” I said.

  “Charlotte,” she said. “Charlotte Gillespie.”

  “I haven’t seen you around.”

  “I try to keep to myself.” She dipped her head and murmured something to Jack. Then she looked up at me and gave me a quick smile. “What about you, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Me?”

  “I haven’t seen you around, either.”

  “Oh, I’m staying a few miles back down the road,” I said. “Actually, my lady friend, Alexandria Shaw—maybe you know her?—it’s her place. I come up to visit on weekends. Been doing it for about a year now.”

  “Oh, yes. Alexandria Shaw. Of course.” When I glanced over, she was again bent over the dog in her lap, stroking his head and whispering to him.

  Charlotte Gillespie showed no inclination to engage in further conversation, and I didn’t push it. We emerged from the woods and passed Leonard Potter’s dairy farm. A few dozen Holsteins grazed in the lumpy field behind Potter’s aluminum-roofed barn. I stopped at the crossroads, where the Garrison post office shared space in the old Victorian that served as town hall, then turned right onto the two-lane blacktop, Route 160, the only numbered state highway that led into and out of Garrison. We passed Hadley’s Feed and Grain, MaryLou’s Grill, and then, across the street from the cemetery, the white clapboard Congregational church, whose pastor, a middle-aged woman named Gretchen Carroll, lived alone in the farmhouse next door. She was also Garrison’s only notary public and, if you believed the rumors and cared about such things, the town’s only lesbian.

  Then we were in the country again. The road wound past farmland long abandoned and now thick with second-growth hardwood, past Perch Pond, where the local kids fished and swam and worried about snapping turtles biting their privates, and past Mason’s lumberyard, where the aroma of fresh-cut pine sweetened the air.

  At the top of the hill, I pulled into a parking area beside a rambling one-story building. The sign in front said “Garrison Veterinary Hospital and Kennels.” When I got out and slammed the car door, it set off a chorus of barks, howls, and growls from out back.

  I opened the door for Charlotte. Jack lay limp in her arms. “Let me carry him,” I said.

  She smiled quickly and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Thank you.”

  So I steadied her elbow as she climbed out, then helped her up the steps onto the porch, held the door for her, and followed her inside.

  A gray-haired woman was seated at a desk behind the counter. Her back was to us, and she was working at a computer. “Excuse me,” I said to her. “Is the vet available?”

  She swiveled around in her chair. She wore half-glasses down toward the tip of her nose, and she ducked her chin to look up at us over them. “I’m the vet,” she said. She was probably around sixty, and when she pushed back her chair and stood up, I saw that she was tall and lanky and rawboned. “Dr. Spear,” she said. “Laura Spear.” She came to the counter, and when she saw Jack cradled in Charlotte’s arms, she murmured, “Oh, dear.”

  She opened a hinged door in the counter. “Bring him on in,” she said to Charlotte.

  Charlotte lugged Jack through the office area, and they disappeared through a doorway. Neither woman looked back at me, so I went out on the porch for a cigarette.

  I’d smoked two of them before Charlotte came out. She was not carrying Jack. I arched my eyebrows at her, and she shrugged. “He’s very sick,” she said.

  “Did she say—?”

  “She wasn’t sure what it was.” I saw that her eyes looked smudged, and I figured she’d been crying. “She gave him a shot, and that seemed to perk him up a little. She wants to keep him. I guess she can take care of him better than me.” She gave a soft, wry laugh. “I guess I haven’t done a very good job of it.”

  “Animals get sick,” I said stupidly.

  She smiled quickly and nodded. I told her I’d drive her home. She said she could walk, she was in no hurry. I told her that I was just killing time while Alex worked, so she shrugged and got into the Jeep.

  I headed back to where I had seen her beside the road. Charlotte stared out the side window, and I didn’t try to make conversation. As we approached the place where I’d picked her up, she said, “There’s a road on the left about half a mile up ahead. I can get off there.”

  It was another dirt road, this one narrower than the one we were on. As I turned in, I said, “I’ll take you all the way. It’s too hot to walk.”

  “It’s a bad road,” she said.

  “I’ve got four-wheel drive. That’s why I got this old thing. For bad roads. I love to drive bad roads.”

  She shrugged, which I took for an affirmative, so I kept going.

  Her road climbed a steep hill, then fell sharply on the other side, and halfway down I had to edge around a jumble of large boulders along the side. At the bottom of the hill, a narrow wooden bridge with no rails spanned a little brook that ran through a rocky streambed. An ancient stone wall paralleled both sides of the roadway. Alders and scrubby pines overhung the edges, and it was deeply rutted and potholed.

  Navigating it on a bicycle would be a challenge.

  “You can pull in here,” Charlotte said after we had climbed halfway up the hill beyond the brook.

  A pair of ruts disappeared through a break in the stone wall into the pine woods. When I turned in and stopped, I noticed that a big slab of plywood had been nailed onto a tree trunk. On it someone had painted in big black capital letters the words NO TRESPASSING, NO HUNTING, NO SHOOTING.

  I also noticed that someone had spray-painted a big ugly red swastika over those words.

  “I just want privacy, Mr. Coyne,” Charlotte said. “That’s why I live here. It doesn’t seem like too much to ask.”

  “Do you know who—?”

  “That swastika?” She shrugged. “You can’t get away from them. I know exactly what they want. But it’s not going to work. They don’t scare me.” She opened the door and slipped out of the car. She started down the rutted road into the woods, then stopped, turned, hesitated, and came back to the car. She put her hands on the rag top and bent to my window. “I forget my manners,” she said. “You were very kind. Thank you.”

  “I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” I said. “I hope Jack gets better.”

  She reached in and touched my arm, smiled quickly, then stepped back. She narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something. Then she shook her head. She lifted her hand. “Good-bye,” she said. Then she turned and trudged down the roadway.

  As I watched, an orange cat popped out of the bushes. Charlotte bent to it and scooped it into her arms. Then a black cat with a white blaze on its chest appeared, and then a tiger cat, and then another orange one, and as she disappeared into the woods, more cats joined the parade behind her.

  CHAPTER 2

  FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I pulled into Alex’s peastone driveway. The yard had been neglected when she’d moved in a year earlier, but now geraniums spilled out of window boxes and the boxwood shrubs were trimmed and the lawn was green. Alex spent mornings at her computer and afternoons puttering around the yard. “Decompressing,” she called it. She had a pretty view from up there on her hilltop. Out back facing west, a meadow sloped down to a brook, then rose to a hillside planted in corn. On a clear day you could sometimes see the round-topped purple-and-green New Hampshire hills humping up on the horizon.

  I took my newspaper inside, careful not to let the door slam, and poured a mug of coffee. Alex had set up her office at one end of the open downstairs, partitioning it off with chest-high bookcases. There she worked at her big flat-topped desk with her computer, her files, her telephone and fax machine, and her tape recorders.

  I heard the soft buzz of voices coming from behind the partition and guessed she was listening to tap
es of her interviews.

  Alex’s publisher had given her a nice advance for her book, which was to be an elaboration of a series she’d written for the Boston Globe. She was calling it The Legacy of Abuse. Her thesis, as I understood it, was that spouse abuse was symbiotic, that abusers and victims sought each other out, that both abusers and their victims tended to come from abusive families, and that abusive parents provided models for their children: Boys tended to emulate their abusive fathers, and girls sought out boys who behaved just like their daddies, the way their mothers had.

  It wasn’t, she said, a particularly original idea. Sociologists and psychologists had explored it thoroughly. But Alex’s publisher believed that her powerful case studies would “popularize” it, and that her book would be a big seller.

  She’d been working on it for almost a year. She’d moved to Garrison the previous Labor Day. The Globe had given her a two-year leave of absence, and she figured she could live that long on her advance, so two years was the deadline she’d set for herself to finish her book.

  She’d given up her apartment on Marlborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay, and she’d given up our nightly sleep-overs at my place overlooking the harbor. For almost a year I’d been driving up to Garrison, Maine, on Friday afternoons.

  “Brady? That you?”

  I peered over the bookcases. She was staring at her computer monitor through her big round glasses.

  “I’m back,” I said.

  “Cool,” she mumbled, still peering at the screen. “Have fun?”

  I smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it when you’re done.”

  “Absolutely. Right.”

  Alex had the remarkable ability to write and talk at the same time, a talent she’d picked up in the Globe newsroom. But her conversations didn’t always make much sense, and afterward she never remembered a thing we’d said to each other.

  I took my coffee and newspaper out onto the deck that spanned the back of the house, sat in a rocking chair, and admired my woodpile. In the fall, we’d had three cords of hardwood dumped in the back. Got them cheap because they were green logs twelve feet long. It took me all winter with the chain saw to cut them into sixteen-inch woodstove lengths, and when I finished that, I’d begun splitting and stacking them. Now I was about half done.

  Splitting and stacking wood was engrossing and rewarding work. I imagined that my shoulders and back had grown bulky and knotty with new muscles from the repeated, rhythmic lifting of the heavy splitting maul. I liked studying the grain on a chunk of cordwood, deciding where to hit it, then dropping the maul precisely there with just enough force to send the two halves flying. And I enjoyed stacking it, adjusting the split pieces of wood so they fit together, and watching my woodpile grow. It was like building a sturdy old New England stone wall that would withstand a hundred winters of frost heaves without toppling. It was good, healthy, old-fashioned Robert Frost New England work, a welcome relief from writing separation agreements and probating wills.

  Splitting and stacking firewood was hypnotic and relaxing. It demanded my full attention on one level while allowing my mind to wander on another, and I didn’t mind the backache that always followed. It gave me an excuse to drink a beer, take a hot leisurely shower, and afterward sprawl naked on the bed while Alex straddled me and gave me a long, languid backrub that usually ended with both of us under the sheets.

  I would split no wood today. It was too damn hot. I sat on the deck on the shaded back side of the house, rocking and sipping my coffee and reading my Globe back to front. About the time I had turned to page two, I felt Alex’s hand on my neck.

  I reached up and steered her face down to mine.

  She kissed my cheek. “Hi, babe,” she said.

  “Done for the day?”

  “I’ve got a little transcribing I want to finish up.” She plopped into the rocker beside me and put her heels on the deck rail. Her legs were smooth and tanned and shapely. She was wearing gray gym shorts and a dark blue sleeveless T-shirt. Her work clothes. Alex claimed that the best thing about holing up in a house in Maine to write a book was that she didn’t have to wear panty hose or bras or high heels or makeup.

  “Thought I’d take a coffee break,” she said.

  I lit a cigarette and offered her one.

  She waved it away with the back of her hand. “How was your morning?” she said.

  “I took a sick dog to the vet. Met a friend of yours.”

  “Oh?”

  “The lady with the sick dog. Charlotte Gillespie.”

  Alex shrugged. “I don’t know her.”

  “Well, she seemed to know you.”

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m a famous journalist.”

  “And soon you will be a famous author,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “She’s an African-American woman,” I said. “Forty, maybe. Very attractive.”

  She shrugged. “I haven’t met any African-American women up here. Attractive, eh?”

  “Yes. She reminded me of Lena Horne. She keeps a lot of pets, and she’s got a No Trespassing sign by the woods road that leads to her house.” I hesitated. “Somebody spray-painted a swastika on it.”

  “Huh?” said Alex. “A swastika?”

  “Yes. A big hateful red one.”

  “Jesus,” she murmured. “What a world.”

  Alex and I slept in the next morning. I made Canadian bacon and French toast for breakfast, which we drowned in real Maine maple syrup and ate on the deck. We lingered there sipping coffee, smoking, and watching a little flock of early-migrating warblers. We admired the way the slanting morning sunlight painted the countryside in vivid colors, and it was after nine by the time I climbed into my Jeep to fetch my Sunday Globe at Leon’s.

  I remembered Jack, Charlotte’s dog, and decided to swing around to the animal hospital. When I went in, Dr. Spear was talking to a teenaged girl and a man in overalls who I assumed was the girl’s father. A shrouded birdcage sat on the counter.

  Dr. Spear glanced at me, lifted her chin in greeting, then turned back to her conversation.

  A minute or two later, the girl picked up the birdcage and they left. Dr. Spear took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, put her elbows on the countertop, and shook her head.

  “The dog?” I said.

  She nodded. “He died. He only lasted a few hours after she brought him in. Didn’t surprise me. He was in bad shape. There was nothing I could do.”

  I let out a long breath. “That’s a damn shame,” I said. “Charlotte will be devastated. She really seemed to love that dog.”

  Dr. Spear shrugged. “Of course she did.”

  “What was it? Distemper or something?”

  She leaned toward me. “Mr.—I don’t know your name.”

  “Coyne. Brady Coyne.”

  She nodded. “Mr. Coyne, I’m not sure what killed that dog. She told me he was fine the day before she brought him in. He got sick and died within twenty-four hours. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, and I don’t know as I’ve ever seen an animal disease that works like that.”

  “So…?”

  “Poison,” she said. “That dog got into some kind of poison.”

  I remembered the swastika on Charlotte’s No Trespassing sign. “Or someone poisoned him,” I said.

  She nodded. “That’s certainly possible.”

  “Jesus,” I mumbled. “Who’d do something like that?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Dr. Spear.

  “It was a rhetorical question,” I said. “I assume you’ll report it.”

  “To whom? Report what? That I think the dog swallowed something poisonous, or maybe somebody fed it to him? Where do we go with that?”

  “I don’t know. What about running some toxicology tests on the animal?”

  “I’d like to,” said Dr. Spear. “If it was poison, it’s not anything I’ve ever seen before.” She shook her head. “I’d have to do an autopsy, and I’d need the owner’s p
ermission—if she can pay for it. I can’t autopsy dead animals unless the owners give their okay, even when we don’t know why they died. Pet owners can be pretty sensitive about things like that. What we normally do, Mr. Coyne, is, we offer to cremate the animals. Many people prefer to take the body back and bury it themselves.”

  “What does Charlotte say?”

  Dr. Spear shrugged. “I don’t know how to get hold of her. She left no address or phone number. I tried looking her up, but she’s not listed. I don’t even know where to send the bill.”

  “I’d like to know what killed him,” I said.

  “Oh, so would I. If somebody did poison the poor creature, you can bet I’d like to string him up.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “I’d be willing to pay for the autopsy.”

  “I’d still need her permission.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a long breath. “When you see Ms. Gillespie, you might ask her.”

  “I’m not sure I will see her,” I said. “I don’t really know her. I just saw her carrying that dog, so I gave her a ride.”

  “Well,” she said, “I can’t keep the dog forever. If she doesn’t tell me what to do, I’ll have to incinerate it.”

  “I’ll drop by her place,” I said. “Try to get an answer for you.”

  “That would be a big help, Mr. Coyne.”

  “Look,” I said. “I’d like to take care of the bill.”

  She smiled, and I realized it was the first time I’d seen her smile. “That’s very nice of you.”

  I handed her my Visa card and signed the stub after she’d run it through her machine. Eighty-five dollars.

  “A lot of people bring in sick animals and never come back for them,” she said.

  “And never pay their bills.”

  She shrugged.

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  I picked up my paper at Leon’s store, then drove over the dirt roads that led to the plywood sign with the evil spray-painted swastika.

  I left my Jeep under the sign and began walking down the narrow rutted roadway where I had seen the cats come out of the woods and trail behind Charlotte. It followed a curving stone wall, crossed a dried-up streambed, climbed uphill through a stand of second-growth poplar and alder mixed with juniper and old apple, and ended about a mile into the woods at a rolling meadow on a knoll.