Nervous Water

by William G. Tapply

  “I’m glad to help if I can.”

  She flashed me a terrific smile. Charlene Staples had green eyes, I noticed, and the corners crinkled when she smiled, as if she spent a lot of time squinting into the sun. “I’ll be back in a minute,” she said.

  It was actually closer to fifteen minutes. I was getting pretty sick of that little hospital waiting room.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  As we walked out of the hospital, she said, “I just talked to your uncle. He told me it was Cassie.”

  “You asked him who hit him?”

  She nodded. “I said to him, I said, ‘Mr. Crandall, I’m a police officer and I need to know who did this to you.’ He was pretty out of it. I had to put my ear close to his mouth to hear him. But it was quite clear, what he said. He said, ‘It was Cassie.’ Like that.”

  I shrugged.

  “That’s what he said to you, too, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But—”

  “So we’ve got an assault,” she said, “and Cassie’s our suspect. You tell me they’re estranged. That probably means she’s angry with him about something. That suggests a motive, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “So what’s her motive?” she said.

  “I don’t know.”

  We were in the parking lot. “Where are you parked?” she said.

  I pointed to my car in the visitors’ lot.

  She smiled. “From a long black Cadillac to a sleek green BMW, huh? So now you’re the big-shot Boston attorney.” She pointed to an area beside the emergency room entrance where a cruiser with Moulton PD painted on the door was parked. “Follow me.”

  “I’m not that big of a shot,” I said as she turned and headed for her cruiser.

  She looked back over her shoulder and smiled.

  Sergeant Charlene Staples exited the turnpike in Ogunquit and led me over some hilly two-lane back roads through Berwick, and we pulled into Moze’s sandy driveway in Moulton a little less than an hour after we’d left the hospital in Portland.

  She parked her cruiser in the shade of one of the big maple trees beside the house. I pulled up beside her.

  As we walked up to the front door, she said, “Don’t touch anything inside.” She had one of those foot-long cop flashlights in her hand.

  I nodded. “I’ve done this before.”

  She looked at me out of the sides of her eyes. “What kind of lawyer did you say you were?”

  “Family law, mostly. Some litigation. I’ve been getting into divorce mediation lately. I sort of specialize in helping people.”

  “But you’ve been at crime scenes.”

  I smiled. “Oh, sure. Plenty of times.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I won’t ask.” She paused at the door and handed me a plastic envelope containing a pair of latex gloves. “You know what these are for, then.”

  I blew into them and slipped them on, and she wiggled her fingers into a pair, too.

  Moze’s front door was unlocked. Charlene turned the knob and pushed it open. We stepped directly into the living room. She put her hand on my arm, and I stopped. “Just look around,” she said. “Tell me what you see.”

  The thin cotton curtains were pulled shut over all the windows, and the room was shadowy and musty. It felt unlived in, even though Moze had been found there only that morning. “It looks about the way it looked when I was here the other day,” I said. “Kind of messy.”

  “Anything missing, out of place?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not noticing anything.”

  “According to the EMTs, he was lying there.” She flicked on her flashlight and shone it on the floor in the middle of the room, where the carpet was bunched up.

  “In his pajamas,” I said. “Could they give you any estimate of what time it happened?”

  She turned off the flashlight. “They thought it would’ve been about an hour, maybe an hour and a half, before they treated him. They figured he would’ve died if they’d gotten here much later than that.”

  “And that was…?”

  “A little before seven this morning.”

  “So this must’ve happened around five thirty or six,” I said. “Moze is sleeping in his bedroom. He hears something, gets up, it’s just starting to get light outside so he doesn’t bother turning on any lights. He comes here, into the living room, still half asleep, and somebody punches him. He falls backward. Has a heart attack. Maybe it was the punch. Maybe it was the surprise, the shock, the fright.”

  She nodded. “That’s about how I figure it.”

  “It was probably still too dark for him to see anything more than shadows,” I said.

  “She might’ve said something. They might’ve had a conversation.”

  “She,” I said. “Meaning Cassie.”

  Charlene shrugged. “She, he. If it was Cassie, and if she did speak, Mr. Crandall would’ve recognized her voice, whether or not he got a good look at her.”

  “It could’ve just been some random burglar.”

  “Sure,” she said. “We’ve been known to have random burglars here in Moulton. Kids, more often than not. Mr. Crandall says it was Cassie, but okay, sure. Unreliable witness. It could’ve been anybody. Maybe a female burgler that he mistook for Cassie. That’s why I want you to look carefully, see if you notice anything missing. We’ll start with this room. Then we’ll move on to the others. Take your time.”

  I looked around slowly, consulting my mental picture of the place, trying to be methodical, taking each section of the room separately. When I finished, my eyes went back to the big console television in the corner.

  “Okay,” I said. “I got it.”

  “Got what?”

  “Something missing.” I pointed. “There were about a dozen framed photos on top of that TV. They were mostly of Cassie.”

  Now the top of the television was bare.

  “Okay,” she said. “Good. That’s good. Anything else?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “You sure?”

  I nodded.

  “Were you in any of the other rooms?”

  “No,” I said. “We came in here, I sat over there, on the sofa. Moze went to the kitchen for beers a couple times. I stayed in here.”

  “You didn’t go into the kitchen with him, use the bathroom, poke your head in the bedrooms?”

  “No. The only thing I did was go over to the TV and look at the photos.”

  “Which are now gone,” she said. She went over to the TV and shone her flashlight around behind it. “No, they’re not. Come over here. Take a look.”

  I moved beside her, and I saw a jumble of bent frames and torn photographs and broken glass strewn on the floor in the corner behind the television set.

  “Look at this.” She pointed with her latex-covered forefinger. There were dents and scratches and gouges in the wallpaper behind the TV.

  “Somebody threw these photos against the wall,” I said. “Threw ’em hard, too, judging by the size of some of those gouges.”

  Charlene looked at me. “Threw ’em with great anger, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Great emotion, anyway,” I said. “You’re thinking about Cassie, aren’t you?”

  “She’s so angry at him she hasn’t talked to him in a year and a half, you said.”

  “That’s a different kind of anger from smashing her father’s photographs and punching him in the chest hard enough to give him a heart attack.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “I’m just having trouble,” I said, “thinking his own daughter could do this to him.”

  “I’ve seen way worse.” She touched my elbow. “Come on.” She steered me outside. “Why don’t you wait out here.”

  “Wait for what?”

  “I’ve got some work to do.” She went over to her cruiser, opened the trunk, and came back with a camera. “I’ll only be a few minutes.” She went inside.

  I sat on
the front steps and looked at my watch. It was a little after five o’clock. I fished my cell phone out of my pocket and called Evie’s office. After a few rings, the voicemail came on and Gina’s recorded voice invited me to leave a message. I declined.

  I tried our home number and got voice mail there, too. I told Evie I was still up in Maine, that Uncle Moze had had a heart attack and was in the ICU, that he was holding his own, that I wasn’t sure when I’d be home, that I loved her.

  I put my phone back into my pocket, and when I looked up, I saw an elderly woman shambling up the driveway toward me.

  I stood up, and when she came near, she said, “Who are you?”

  I smiled at her. “I’m Brady Coyne.”

  She nodded as if she already knew that. “I’m Helen Meadows. We spoke this morning. Do you have any news about Moze? I called the hospital but they wouldn’t tell me a thing.”

  “I saw him a little while ago,” I said. “He had a heart attack, but he’s doing okay.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “A heart attack.” She was wearing overalls over a man’s blue shirt, with red sneakers. She had white hair, cut short, and sharp blue eyes behind her thick glasses. “I was afraid it was something like that.”

  I pointed at the front steps. “Do you want to sit down?”

  “Certainly not,” she said.

  I smiled. “The doctor says you saved his life,” I said. “If you hadn’t gone over when you did, called 911 right away…”

  “That was our deal,” she said. “We watch out for each other, Moze and me. I don’t guess we ever really expected something like this would happen. Me, I just like the old cuss, enjoy havin’ him as a regular part of my life, even if it don’t amount to more than talkin’ with him on the phone most of the time.” She cleared her throat. “He don’t have much to say, you know. Taciturn old coot. So he’s going to be all right?”

  “He’ll be in the hospital for a while. But they expect him to recover just fine.”

  “You ain’t patronizing an old lady, are you?”

  “No, ma’am,” I said. “I know better than that. I’ll let you know if anything changes, okay?”

  “That would be lovely,” she said. She turned to leave.

  “Mrs. Meadows?” I said.

  She stopped. “It’s Miss Meadows, young man. But you should call me Helen.”

  “Helen,” I said, “I’d like to tell the rest of Moze’s family about what happened.”

  “Jake and Faith,” she said. “His brother and sister. That’s about it, except for Cassie.”

  “Do you know how I could reach them?”

  “Well, Jacob, he lives right in town here. He’s got that real estate business, you know. Hangs out in the office most of the time, now that Millie—that was his wife—since she’s been gone.” She shrugged. “I suppose he’d want to know.”

  “You suppose?”

  “Moze and Jake, they didn’t have much to do with each other. Actually,” said Helen, “the two of them weren’t speaking to each other. Haven’t been for years. There was some old grudge between ’em. Both of ’em, stubborn as mules.”

  I thought about Cassie and Moze, holding out, neither willing to give in to the other for all that time. “Any idea what the grudge was about?” I said.

  “All I know is, it goes back a long ways. Moze never wanted to talk about Jake. Moze only talks about what he wants to talk about, if you follow me.”

  I nodded. “So what do you know about my aunt Faith?”

  “Faith Thurlow’s her name now,” she said. She looked up at the sky. “Faith’s gettin’ on. She’s a few years older than us. Me and Moze, I mean. Married a Greek fellow from Kittery right after high school. Name you couldn’t pronounce, ended in ‘opoulos’ I seem to recall. He was a salesman of some kind. Harry. I think his name was Harry. They lived right here in town until Harry retired. Lord, that was twelve or fifteen years ago, I guess. Harry and Faith moved down to Florida, and before too long, Harry died. Next thing you know, Faith has found herself another man, this time a fellow named Thurlow who was somewhat younger than her. Faith always did have a way with men. So she married this Thurlow fellow and they settled in Rhode Island, of all places.”

  “Was Moze in touch with Faith?”

  Helen Meadows shrugged. “He didn’t say nothing about her one way or the other that I can recall. I didn’t have the impression that they were on the outs the way it was with him and Jake, but I don’t think they were especially close, either.”

  “So it’s Faith Thurlow,” I said, “and she lives in Rhode Island.”

  “Last I heard,” she said. She held out her hand. “I’ve got to get back to my cats.”

  I stood up and took her hand. “I’ll let you know what I hear about Moze,” I said.

  “I appreciate that.” Helen Meadows nodded once, then turned and walked down the driveway. I watched her go. I was prepared to wave to her, but she never turned back.

  A couple of minutes later Charlene Staples came out of the house with her camera hanging from her neck. She peeled off her latex gloves, stuffed them in her hip pocket, and sat on the steps beside me.

  “What’d you learn?” I said.

  “There’s an old rolltop desk in his bedroom,” she said. “The top was up. A bunch of bills and junk mail all jumbled up in there. A couple drawers were hanging half open.”

  “You think whoever hit Moze was looking for something?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe your uncle was just disorganized.”

  “Judging by the living room,” I said, “I’d vote for that.”

  “I found about two hundred dollars in fives and tens and twenties in the top drawer of his bureau,” she said. “There was a box of woman’s jewelry, must’ve been his wife’s, in another drawer. A lot of heavy old gold stuff. Some of it’s pretty valuable, I’d say. His watch and his wallet and the keys to his truck were sitting right there in plain sight on the table beside his bed.”

  “So this wasn’t a burglary, you’re saying.”

  “Not a very competent one, anyway,” she said. “Of course, your burglar could’ve panicked when she—or he—hit your uncle, but it doesn’t look like anything was stolen.”

  “Just those smashed photos.”

  She nodded.

  “Helen Meadows just dropped by,” I said.

  “Who?”

  “Moze’s friend. She’s the one who called 911.”

  Charlene nodded. “Oh, right. She’s on my list. Did she have any idea who might’ve done this?”

  “No. I didn’t exactly interrogate her. She was pretty shaken up. I had the feeling that Moze is her only friend in the world.”

  Charlene nodded. “I’ll have to talk to her.” She jerked her head back at Moze’s house. “The second bedroom in there,” she said. “You didn’t see it?”

  “No.”

  “Pink bedspread. Ruffled curtains. Stuffed animals. Posters tacked all over the walls. Janis Joplin. Gracie Slick. Billie Jean King. The daughters from the Bill Cosby show. Sports trophies. Cassette tapes. Nancy Drew mysteries.”

  “Cassie’s room,” I said.

  She nodded. “It looks like a shrine.”

  “Poor old Moze,” I said. “She’s always been the main thing in his life.”

  We sat there for a couple of minutes. Then I turned to Charlene and said, “So what happens now?”

  She shrugged. “Until I can talk with Mr. Crandall, we don’t really know what we’re dealing with. I’ll ask around, keep my ear to the ground, see what I can learn. Assuming your uncle makes it, all we’ve got is an old-fashioned breaking and entering and a simple assault. But if…” She waved her hand in the air.

  “If he dies,” I said, “we’ve got a homicide.”

  She nodded.

  “And you’d consider Cassie a suspect.”

  “Cassie is a suspect,” she said. She looked at her watch, then pushed herself to her feet. “Well, I’m outta here. Long day.”


  I stood up, and we walked over to our vehicles.

  “Why don’t you give me one of your cards,” she said.

  I gave her one. “You’ll keep me informed?”

  “Why not.” She handed me one of her cards. “You do the same, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Charlene Staples got into her cruiser, wiggled her fingers at me, and drove out the driveway.

  I slid into the front seat of my car and took out my cell phone. I figured I’d try one more time to reach Evie before I headed home.

  She didn’t answer at the house, and I didn’t bother leaving another message. She didn’t answer her cell, either.

  I stuck the phone in my pocket and started up my car, and that’s when the sleek red Buick sedan turned into Uncle Moze’s driveway.

  Seven

  The red Buick pulled up behind my BMW and stopped right there, as if the purpose was to prevent my escape.

  I stepped out of my car just as the guy got out of the Buick. He appeared to be in his late sixties, early seventies. He had a round, red face and a dramatic shock of thick snow-white hair. The stub of an unlit cigar was jammed into the side of his mouth. He reminded me of Santa Claus, minus the jolliness.

  He strutted over, plucked the cigar from his mouth, and pushed his face close to mine. “Who the hell are you?” he said. He was quite a bit shorter than I, so he had to look up to glare into my eyes, which pretty much neutralized the aggressiveness he seemed to be going for.

  “My name’s Brady Coyne,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”

  He blinked at me as if it was unthinkable that I didn’t know who he was. “I don’t know any Coyne.” He moved closer to me, so that his chest was nearly touching mine. “Whaddya want, anyway? What’re you doin’ here?”

  I put my hand on his chest and took a step backward. His intrusion into my personal space felt like an attack. “This is my uncle’s house,” I said. “You didn’t answer my question. Who the hell are you?”

  “Yeah, well, this is my brother’s house, smart guy.” He paused, frowned, and looked me up and down. “Moses is your uncle? That what you said?”

  I nodded. “Which means you are, too. Uncle Jake? Is that you?