Black Tide

by Brendan DuBois

  Within two weeks, everyone in this room --- except for me --- would be dead.

  When I got back upstairs, Paula Quinn was there, sitting at her desk and typing on her Digital computer terminal. Her blond hair was curled back from the front in a sort of half-flip, and she had on a short denim skirt and a plain black T-shirt that had a pocket over the left side. The desks at the Chronicle are a collection of wooden and metal antiques, and about the only modern things in the office were the Digital computers, with terminal cables leading up to the ceiling. The computers looked out of place in an office where holes in the carpet had been repaired with gray duct tape, but Paula had confided in me one night that the only reason management had purchased the computers was that it allowed them to fire a staff of typesetters and to save money on wages and future retirement benefits.

  I sat in a folding chair next to her desk that had "Property of Spenser Funeral Home" stenciled on the back. She looked up at me, gave me a quick smile, and said, "It's a busy morning, Lewis."

  "I'm sure it is. What are you working on? Our headless and handless diver?"

  "Nope," she said, eyes staring ahead at the glowing screen of her terminal, her hands click-clicking on the keyboard. "State liquor store got robbed about an hour ago, out on 1-95."

  "Got a minute to talk?" I asked.

  She was quiet, not saying anything, just typing along, so I reached up to the rear of the Digital terminal and found the power switch and clicked it off. Her hands froze in mid-motion and then she looked up at me, her eyes fixed and unyielding. Then she turned and yelled out at Rollie, "I'm taking a five-minute break, Rollie. I'll be back time for deadline."

  She reached behind her, pulled out her leather handbag and swung it around, and then stormed out of the office. I followed her and looked over at Rollie, who was popping another breath mint into his mouth and rolling his eyes.

  When we got outside we walked in silence for a moment or so heading to the Tyler Town Common, which was adjacent to the office building that contained the Chronicle. Park benches were set up under the birches and near some flowerbeds maintained by the Tyler Garden Club. We sat on one of the green benches, which faced out to downtown Tyler and Route 1.

  She folded her arms and said, "Well, if you wanted to get my attention, Lewis, you certainly succeeded."

  "Thanks," I said. "Seems like I haven't been able to do that the past few weeks."

  "Hunh," she said, staring out at the traffic going by, lost summer people no doubt, knowing that they were in Tyler but surprised at not finding the beach in the downtown area.

  "Suppose you think I owe you an apology."

  "Maybe so," I said. "Or maybe some words, Paula, about what's going on here."

  She attempted a laugh and refolded her arms and said, '”Well, since we both make a living in words, I suppose this should be easy to do. Here's the condensed recap, Lewis. One day in June, you and a prominent citizen of this resort town enter the marshes near Falconer. You come out and they find this citizen dead with a slashed throat. Story comes out, linking our prominent person to a couple of murders. You give me some great background info about what happened, and I probably write the best series of stories I've ever done. Then I come over to your place, to celebrate and thank you and, I guess, to see how you were doing."

  I started to speak and she held up a hand. "Please, let me go on. So I spend the night, Lewis, and yes, it was quite enjoyable. In my own little heart, I'm thinking, well, maybe this is the start of something. Not talking commitment or marriage or any of that crap. Maybe it's just the start of something that I haven't had in a long while. Well, that particular thought lasts a few hours, when I get woken up by you cursing and yelling at some guy named George who isn't even there. You won't tell me shit about what's happening and so I leave a nice warm bed and some nice warm fantasies behind, and the next thing I learn --- and not from you, but from Diane Woods, which gives me pause --- is that you're in the hospital. I get not one word from you about what put you there, or why you're there. Not a word. And you begrudge me the cards I send you. Not bad, Lewis. Maybe I didn't do so hot, but you weren't exactly too forthcoming."

  We sat for a while, not saying anything, while a robin scampered along the grass, cocking its head, until finally it struck and something squirming and alive was in its beak, and it swooped up, triumphant in its kill.

  She said, "So while all that crap is going on, I put together a package of my very best stories about the murders here and such, and I start mailing them out to newspapers that have more weight and more money than the poor little Chronicle. And even though Rollie has the heart of a true newspaperman --- 'What you did yesterday was great, honey, but what do you have for me today?' --- and even though I'm doing stories about third-graders going on field trips to Boston, I'm giggling inside 'cause I know that pretty soon the replies are going to be rolling in, and that I'll spend this summer somewhere else than Tyler. Doing real stories, stories that I can spend a couple of days working on. And I then move away and start forgetting about a certain night with you, Lewis."

  I reached over and put my hand on top of hers, and I sensed small victory, with her not pulling away. "No replies, right?" I asked.

  "Oh no, there were a lot of replies, and they all said the same thing. Nothing. No jobs, no openings, no chance of future openings. Here I am, working on my second newspaper job, trying to climb that damn career ladder. But someone's up on top, pulling away from me. You understand?"

  A boxy gray Chevrolet had pulled up near us, with Massachusetts license plates and a couple in the front seat. The back seat was filled with three or four kids -- it was hard to tell --- and one young boy was leaning out the window, dumping potato chips on the ground. The driver's-side door opened and a heavy-set man wearing bright yellow shorts and a T-shirt that said "Professional Muff Diver" ambled out, carrying a road map in his thick hands. He started walking over to us until I nailed him with look that made him glance down at the map and head over to the Common Grill & Grill.

  I said, "Labor Day's only a month away, Paula, and you're not looking forward to doing another bunch of back-to-school stories."

  She moved her hand against mine. "Right. By now I thought I’d be in a new office, in Boston or Hartford or maybe New York, learning the names of my co-workers, and instead I got Rollie chewing on me about not getting the school bus schedules in on time."

  I squeezed her hand. "I came back from the hospital, hoping to find you on my rear deck sporting a string bikini, and instead, my home smells like a gas station and I feel like you're about ready to slip a knife into my ribs."

  For a moment she giggled and she said, "Your imagination's too much, Lewis." Then her voice softened and she said, "This hasn't been the best of summers, and it started going downhill right in June, right after that night. I thought I was the best then, being with you and scooping every news organization in the region about the murders here, and then in a couple of weeks, I was doing a story about Miss Tyler Beach and wondering what in hell had happened to you. And you haven't been much help, being the secretive guy you are. Still won't tell me who George is --- or was.”

  Somewhere hundreds of miles away from this sunny spot was an office with a filing cabinet and in that cabinet was a signed agreement that allowed me to be here, to live in relative comfort and in silence. It wasn't an arrangement that I particularly liked but it was the only arrangement available.

  I said, "George was my boss, once. He did something stupid that ended up, well, it ended up hurting me. And when I found out that night that I was sick again, his was the first name that came to mind. His stupidity was a curse, one that's always going to be with me, Paula. And I'm sorry, but I can't say any more."

  “I know," she said, moving her hand to the safety of her lap. ''And I also know that I want things right, and I want them back to where they were. I'm going to have to buck up and do what it takes to stay at the Chronicle, even if it means having a smile on my face when Rollie asks me to
rewrite the school lunch menus for the week.”

  I turned to her and said, ''And you want things back to where they were with us, before June."

  She nodded. "For now, Lewis. For now. Give me some time to get things back and we'll see. But in the meantime, well, I'm going to consider your house a dangerous place to be. For a while, other neutral spots are okay, and I hope you understand, Lewis. It just has to be this way."

  I didn’t want to get into a fight or a quarrel or a discussion that was laden with words such as "commitments" or "feelings" or whatever, so instead I touched her hand again and I said, "You should probably get back in, do that story about the liquor store robbery, Paula. Rollie's no doubt wondering if any of his favorite brands were taken."

  I was rewarded with a smile and she said, "You're probably right.'

  "I am right. And I'm sorry about shutting your terminal off.”

  She shrugged. "That's all right. I was only into the second sentence." She got up, started to turn and said quietly, ''And I'm sorry I didn't visit you, Lewis. As mad as I was, I should have visited you when you were sick."

  As she started to walk across the closely trimmed grass, I called out to her. She turned and I said, "I read your story the other day, about the diver. You know, there's not one mention in there about how his body was recovered."

  "Yeah, I know," she said, her hands in the front pockets of short denim skirt. "I wrote it that way on purpose."

  "Thanks," I said. "I like my privacy."

  "So I've noticed." She smiled and went back to her office. I sat on the park bench and looked over at the gray Chevrolet with the woman and three or four screaming kids. I guessed I was doing better than most. I sat out in the sun, not feeling particularly or sad, just feeling all right, in knowing what was going on. A holdover from my old job. I hated secrets. And I remembered what I had learned down in the basement of the Chronicle, and I whispered, "Felix, I got you."

  But I was in no hurry to move. I liked the feeling of the sun on my face, though I had one more place to visit before the day was over.

  Chapter Six

  In New Hampshire there are only a handful of communities large enough to be called cities, which is nice if you like to live in a state that's holding on-hand and fist-to its rural traditions and backgrounds, but which isn't so nice if you like to live in a state that's on the cutting edge. Which isn't to say that New Hampshire relies on horses to deliver its rural mail or doesn't have its share of the latest high-tech industries: it's just that some of our newest immigrants get a shock when they arrive here and find out that in many towns the agricultural fair is the biggest cultural event of the year. These people do one of two things: they move back to where they came from, or they move to one of the few cities in the state and try to adjust the best way they know how.

  New Hampshire's largest city is Manchester, which was named --- like so many of the places in the state --- after a town in Old England. To get to Manchester from Tyler takes about an hour, going west on Route 51, which then transforms itself into Route 101 just outside of Exonia, the county seat. The road is two-lane for most of the way and is quite dangerous, with accidents on it every week and a fatality or two at least once a month. The road is twisting and the speed limit is fifty miles per hour and almost everyone traveling on the road exceeds the limit by about ten miles.

  Manchester was built up around the banks of the Merrimack River, and like most of the few cities in state, its life started as a mill town, with tall red brick buildings along the riverbanks, the flow spinning the turbines that milled cotton into cloth, and which also powered the machinery for making leather hides into shoes. From 1838 to 1846, when the mills arrived the town's population went from less than 100 to more than 10,000. There is still a large French-Canadian population in Manchester, made up of the descendants of many of those first workers in the city's mills, who came here from southern Canada or the towns in the northern part of the state, such as Berlin. In some of the city's bars and taverns, the term "Canuck" still guarantees the start of a brawl.

  While the French-Canadians sweated and bled in the mills, a number of families became quite rich, and the smart ones spread their wealth around into shipping and timber and banking. The not so smart ones suffered and crashed when the mills closed during the first part of this century, when the competition from Southern mills proved to be just too much. An old story, one that's still being written today in places such as Juarez and Guadalajara. One family which prospered was the Scribner family, and one of their foundations set up the Scribner Museum of Art, located only a few minutes away from the downtown of Manchester. While the downtown has some high-rise buildings --- high for New Hampshire --- it's only a matter of a few blocks in either direction before you come to residential neighborhoods, and it was in one such neighborhood that I located the Scribner Museum of Art this late Wednesday morning.

  I parked my Range Rover across the street from the museum and walked over. There was hardly any traffic and the day was hot, with a heavy haze in the air. I wore shiny new brown loafers, a short-sleeved white shirt and pressed chinos, and there was a tan reporter's notebook sticking out of my back pocket. The Scribner Museum was two stories high and made of stone and exposed brickwork. The grounds were landscaped with some trees and shrubbery and crushed-stone paths. There were long Roman-type columns at the front entrance to the museum. On each side of a pair of great wooden doors at the entrance was a stone mosaic showing medieval knights, swords in their hands, the points aiming downward to the soil.

  Inside the Scribner Museum was a coffee-table-sized box of glass and wood that had a sign asking for donations, and I slipped a five-dollar bill into an opening at the top. I was about fifteen minutes early for my appointment, so I made a quick walk through the two floors of the building, and even though I felt the museum was probably just an attempt by the Scribner family to resolve its guilt over how they had treated their mill workers, I was fairly impressed at what I saw.

  While there wasn't much space to be offered on its two floors, the museum did give a quick read of some major artists and epochs. There was a room of French Impressionists, including two Monets and a Matisse, and there was also a gallery on the second floor devoted to early New England furniture, from Chippendale chairs to some massive hutches and clothes chests. Another room showed early American portraits of stiff-necked men and women who lived in this state at the turn of the nineteenth century. One long display of silver showed some items from Paul Revere and his descendants, and there was even a wing of modern art and sculpture, with two Picassos and a portrait by Georgia O'Keefe and a small mobile by Calder.

  I'm sure that anyone with a passing interest in art who's been to Paris or New York or even to Boston would have a fit of giggles about spending some time in the Scribner Museum, but in a state with a single major daily newspaper and only one commercial statewide television station, I thought it did a fairly respectable job of giving a brief overview of what art had to offer. The museum this day held a mixed bag of visitors: a few elderly ladies walking through and spending ten minutes in front of each painting, earnest young art students dressed in clothing and sharp haircuts and a couple of young mothers and their children, perhaps spending a day away from the heat, perhaps even spending a day here to see what was out in the world besides tabloid newspapers and tabloid television.

  When I had passed through my fifteen minutes, I went downstairs past the gift shop to a small office that had a sign over the door that said ''Administrative-Private.'' The office was carpeted and there were two desks and a woman who looked to be a few years older than me sitting behind one of them, typing away at an IBM clone. She swiveled in her chair and gave me a big smile as I walked in. Her desk was fairly neat with the usual Rolodex and appointment calendar and a few open files, and near her telephone was a vase with a single rose and a miniature statue of Michelangelo's David. The nameplate on the desk said Cassie Fuller.

  I gave her my business card and said,
"I have an appointment with Justin Dix."

  She looked at the card. "So you do. Hold on for a moment and I'll see if he's free."

  Instead of picking up the phone, she smiled again, got up from her desk and walked to another office door, at the other end f the small room. She had a thick mane of hair, tousled back down to her shoulders, and she was wearing a tight black dress that was a few inches above her knees and which was kept together by a couple of metallic zippers. It looked like something from San Francisco, definitely not from Manchester or even Boston. Her legs were enclosed in clear nylons, and she wore red high heels. It looked like the dress was a size too small as she walked away, and somehow, from the smile she gave me, it didn't seem she minded that one bit.

  She leaned into the doorway, said something quietly, then turned her head and said, "He'll see you now, Mr. Cole." As I walked across the office she lowered her head and gave me a "I may be working at a stodgy museum but I'm something else out of work" look. I wondered if she practiced her moves and her hooded-eye gaze at home in front of a mirror.

  Her perfume tickled at me as I walked into Justin Dix's office, past the open door that said "Security" on a metal plate, and I had to remind myself to get into my role as I reached over to shake his hand. Justin was in his forties, edging closer to being fifty, and he was about twenty pounds or so overweight. He had on a blue blazer, gray slacks and white shirt with a striped tie that probably belonged to some New England prep school, but his handshake was firm and had nothing preppy about it. His ears were a bit too large for his head, a double chin was developing, and there were faint acne scars along both cheekbones. With the -rimmed eyeglasses and the thick brown-and-gray hair combed to one side, he looked like a mortgage officer at a bank, ready to ask you why you were ten days late in making a MasterCard payment nine years ago.

  But he seemed gracious enough as he pointed out a chair for me to sit in, before his desk, which was neat and uncluttered. "You know, just before we start, I went to the trouble of verifying who you were, even though I only had a couple of hours since your call this morning."