by Linda Barnes
“She was real cute. She get sick?”
“Oh no, hon. It was one of them accidents. Boatin’ accidents. There’s gonna be an article about it in the Tab, you watch for it.”
She was still in touch with the police department.
“Won’t that make you feel bad?” I asked. “Somebody raking up the past like that?”
“No, hon. You of all people should know that’s one thing people never get straight. I talked to the priest about it, got me so riled. The minute you lose a child, people, even friends, figure it’s like you never had her, never watched her grow up, never miss her. I know it’s just they don’t know what to say, but it’s hard to credit. They don’t mention her in your hearing anymore. Makes you nuts. You feel like you dreamed the whole thing, like maybe you never had a girl. That’s why I keep Heather’s picture right there. So everybody knows I don’t forget.”
“Does it still hurt as much?” I asked. “I know that’s real personal, but I guess I’m trying to figure if I’ll still miss my Wendy so much after years have past.”
“Oh, hon, forgive me. When did she die?”
“It’s been two years and six months. Leukemia, they said, the very worst kind. I put all her stuff in a box and I still haven’t opened it.”
“You will,” Edith said imperturbably.
“And, you know, you’re right. Nobody ever talks about her with me. Makes me lonely.”
“You can talk about her with me,” Edie said.
“You said you lost your girl twenty years ago?” I switched topics quickly. I didn’t think I could conjure a realistic version of made-up Wendy’s final days, not in front of Heather’s mom.
“More than twenty, and then my husband left three weeks later, right after we thought they’d pulled her body out of the sea. I thought I’d about die myself. And then I was relieved, you know. I could bury her, and know where she was, know she’s in the graveyard behind the church, bring her flowers in the springtime.”
“That’s a comfort,” I agreed. “I bring Wendy lilies-of-the-valley.”
“But it wasn’t her,” Edie continued. “My husband said the body was so swole up, he couldn’t rightly tell, and some other folks had the dental records or something like that to prove it was their baby and not mine. Heather never ever came back to me, but I still go to the churchyard. We put a memorial stone, and I pretend she’s there. Doesn’t do no harm.”
I nodded solemnly.
“It’s hard to believe your husband just left like that. He write you a note or anything?”
“Did yours?” she asked.
“Well,” I confided, “I guess he didn’t need to. He was messing around with my best friend, and I found out and all.”
“No kidding?”
“He wanted me to take him back,” I lied, “but I got my pride.”
“Good for you, gal.”
I recited something I’ve never believed, mentally attributing it to one of the faceless, nameless church-women at Saint A’s.
“Well, you know what they say, when God closes a door he opens a window.”
She gazed at me with none of the scorn I felt my remark should have earned, but with a questioning look, as if she was trying to remember which window the Lord had opened for her.
“You know, I just about told a lie back when I said all my luck went with my husband and my girl.”
“Really.”
“I mean, he left town, and she drowned, that’s plenty of bad luck right there, a whole lifetime’s worth, but the good luck was with my boys. Two of ’em were in pretty big trouble then, gonna do jail time, it seemed. And that just melted away. Charges got dropped.”
“Your husband leave you any money for child support?”
Surely she’d kick me out, refuse to answer such a personal inquiry from a total stranger.
“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully, “he was real decent about that too, didn’t clean out our accounts like I’d expected, so I guess I shouldn’t complain. Have some of this cake. It looks so good.”
She shoveled a huge slice onto a too-small plate. It quivered and threatened to slip over the side. I nibbled a mouthful of air. I wanted to shout questions at her. Had a cop named MacAvoy spoken to her husband before he’d left town? Had strange men in fancy suits come by? But I’d gone and lied my way into a sticky situation and I was just going to have to sit out the visit, listening and complaining in an alien voice.
I glared at a cat as it tried to take a swipe of cream cake.
I’d extricate myself somehow, plead church work, an incipient headache. Faint, if I had to. Stop by the police station on my way home. Check the Foley boys to see if they had current records or sealed juvie files. Ask if anybody remembered the exact charges they’d faced twenty-four years ago, and why the threat of jail had suddenly evaporated into thin air.
I wondered where Mr. Harold Foley, Heather’s father—who’d misidentified his daughter’s body—had gone, whether he might be a very rich man, like MacAvoy used to be.
Or perhaps a very dead man, like MacAvoy was now.
47
The Swampscott force was not as gullible, not as trusting as Edith Foley. I should have brought them cookies, doughnuts. The gossipy public relations cop was not on duty and the small force didn’t have time to spare on ancient dropped charges, even if they did involve the numerous and often troublesome Foley clan. Charges were made and dropped all the time. Hadn’t I read Miranda?
Well, yes, I had, but I’d wanted something a little more concrete, names and places, and dates. Dates, foremost.
It was dark by the time I quit waiting for a friendly cop with time to spare and ventured home. I hesitated, holding my keys, decided to try the back door. I wanted to see whether it had been fixed. I’d given Roz instructions and cash. If the two-by-fours were still holding the door in place, I’d take great pleasure in kicking the whole shebang down.
Maybe if I vented my anger in door-kicking, I wouldn’t charge into Donovan’s house, tell him precisely what I thought of his stupid overly protective gesture, hiring a gumshoe to guard same. I could almost hear his rationalization: You’d never have let me if I’d told you. Right. But that didn’t make secrecy the answer. A secret bodyguard was worse than no bodyguard. A secret bodyguard could get killed. Mistaken for a mythical mob hit man.
Instead of kicking the door I almost tripped over the tiny girl as she ran from under my back porch. She’d been hiding near the garbage bins. She smelled like she might have dined from one.
“Pix?”
“Yeah. I need to talk to you.”
“Talk.”
“There’s somebody at the shack needs you.”
“The shack burned down,” I said.
“Near the shack, on the beach.”
“Alonso?”
“Can you come?”
“Is it guarded?”
“Not now. Can you come?”
“Yeah.”
“Now? It has to be right now.”
“Get in the car and crank down the window.”
“Food?” she asked.
“We’ll stop on the way.”
The door had been repaired. Pleasantly surprised, I rang the bell three times, then another three till Roz opened up.
“What?” she said indignantly. “You forgot your damned key?”
“I’m in a hurry. Messages.”
“Thanks for getting the door fixed, Roz. And Paolina called.”
“Whoa. She’s not allowed to use the phone at camp.”
“She said a counselor drove her into town to pick something up. I don’t know.”
“What did she want?”
“I guess she’s not having that great a time. Wanted to know if you could come out and get her.”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah.”
No telling when Pix might decide to take it on the lam again.
I said, “Can’t tonight. If she calls again, tell her I’ll make it soon. Isn’t Friday the
last day? See if she can hold out five more days.”
“Will do.”
“And, Roz?”
“Yeah?”
“Get my thirty-eight out of the closet.”
“Is it loaded?”
“I hope so. It’s more useful that way.”
Roz, for all her skills, doesn’t like guns and doesn’t drive. I could have asked her to track down one of her boyfriends who did, drive up to New Hampshire in the middle of the night, but the way Roz looks, let alone the way most of her guys look, would any camp counselor release a girl of Paolina’s tender years into her care?
Tender years.
The years hadn’t been tender to Pix. Nor had the brief time since I’d seen her. She’d acquired a nasty bruise on one cheek, a split lip. She wasn’t talking about how they’d happened. At a Route 1 McDonald’s, she squeezed two Big Macs and a large order of fries into her tiny frame, slurped a chocolate shake so gelatinous the straw made sucking sounds like a swamp.
I drove, listening to tapes I’d jammed into the boom box. Trying to soothe myself with timeless blues.
“Got a mortgage on my body, lease taken on my soul,” sang Robert Johnson, dead at twenty-eight.
I couldn’t get my mind off Woodrow MacAvoy. What would they write on his tombstone? What verse of Scripture had Edith Foley chosen for her daughter’s memorial?
“Leave your car here,” Pix said, as we passed a small realty office with an unlit parking nook. I remembered passing it before. It was about half a mile from Marblehead Neck, off Ocean Avenue.
“Why?”
“It’s safer.”
“Alonso can stop running. I know a cop who’ll make sure he’s treated well.”
“I can’t bring anybody but you.”
“I promise.”
“You can’t bring a car.”
“Pix, are you trying to set me up?”
“You fed me,” she said. “I don’t set up anybody gives me money, drugs, or hamburgers.”
I believed her.
We walked the causeway side by side. Her legs had to work hard to keep up with my stride.
“Is any of the shack still standing?”
“Not much. Use the steps from the lane. Did you bring a flashlight?”
“Yeah.”
“You left your gun in your car?”
I’d left the forty locked in the glove compartment.
“Am I going to need one?” I asked.
“No. I promise.”
She didn’t seem to expect my promise in return. I withheld it. The .38, my old Chief’s Special, felt fine in its waist clip.
The ground around the burned shack was churned with footprints, gouged with the spray from heavy hoses. I had to watch my footing on the uneven approach. Smoke no longer rose from the scattered boards, but the smell of fire was strong, acrid. A throat-closing stench. Yellow “Do Not Cross” tape marked the shack as a crime scene.
I heard a noise, the faint, throat-clearing announcement of another human presence. I spun to face it.
The woman seated on a nearby rock wore a wide-brimmed hat. For a moment I had the foolish urge to ask Pix if this was the “real woman” with whom Alonso was currently sleeping.
Too old, I thought dismissively.
I studied her more closely. Dear God, it seemed like I’d known her all my life. I’d seen two versions of her face, aged and thin, aged and fat.
It was her eyes I recognized. Only her eyes.
“Pix,” I said.
“I didn’t lie.”
“What about Alonso?”
“She wants to help. I believe her. I told her about you. Did I do right?”
“Yeah, Pix. Go over and sit on the steps now. Okay? Warn us if you see anybody coming.”
“You think Alonso will be back?”
When I didn’t answer, she walked away.
48
She sat like a woman carved from rock. A hundred questions burned my throat, but I kept silent, ceding her the opening, letting her begin, so I’d get some idea where her thoughts were headed. Part of me was afraid she might fade into mist. I fought off the impulse to touch her, to feel solid flesh.
Slowly, she removed her hat. Her hair was gray, steel to Beryl’s yellowed white. No one would have confused the two sisters now, one bloated with medication, the other … merely average. Unremarkable.
All that was unique and beautiful in Thea, she’d made deliberately plain. Either that, or she’d changed so completely that her reckless beauty had evaporated. Her hair, vaguely curly, was an unstyled clump too heavy for her thin neck and sharp features. Tortoiseshell glasses hid the angle of her brow. She held her head low. Her chin seemed less pointed, less remarkably small. If she’d had plastic surgery she couldn’t have looked more different, and yet her features were the same. Under a short-sleeved khaki jacket, her breasts swelled, camouflaged but large for her small-boned body. All fire and color drained from her, Dorothy Cameron seemed plain as salt.
“Hello,” she said, glancing around as if she’d expected a larger audience. “You must be the detective. Carlyle.”
Her calm words floated on the mist and I shivered. It was the dampness of my clothes, I told myself, not the flicker of dread, not the sensation of hearing the voice of someone returned from a watery grave.
“You know who I am … who I was.” There was no lift at the end of the sentence. No question.
“Yes,” I said, when it seemed nothing else would follow unless I replied.
“I understand the police are holding my son.”
Mooney must have gotten the word out quickly.
“Alonso,” I said.
“Yes. I’m willing to deal: My freedom for his.”
I said, “The police want him for murder. I doubt they’ll find your offer attractive. Running away isn’t in the same league.”
“Oh, they’ll want me,” she said.
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because I killed Andrew Manley.” She nodded at the police tape. “Here. Friday night.”
“How long after he phoned me?” I asked.
“Don’t try to trip me up. I can answer all your niggling questions,” she said scornfully.
“Give it a try. Before we go to the police. Listen, Thea—”
She closed her eyes. “Call me Susan. Susan Gordon. I’ve been Susan Gordon most of my life.”
“Why did you kill Andrew Manley, Susan Gordon?”
“Because he never listened to me. He never believed in me. He didn’t trust my talent, because of Beryl. He assumed I was unstable, because of her. He should have seen through all that, though all the—” She came to an abrupt halt.
“Why kill him now?”
She sucked in a deep breath, regained control. “Because revenge is a dish best eaten cold,” she said.
“You’ve come back for revenge,” I echoed.
“And to make sure nothing happens to my son.”
“You ran away from Avon Hill because you were pregnant?”
“Oh no.” She shook her head, smiled crookedly. “What a foolish girl you must think I was.”
“I don’t think you were foolish.”
“Then grant me good reason for what I’ve done,” she said with the first hint of anger I’d heard in her voice. “I disappeared. I did it well. Because I had no other choice.”
I swallowed. I found her simple presence astonishing. Carved from rock. Edges worn away by the sea.
“You named your son for a gardener who disappeared,” I said, “disappeared the same day you did.”
“It’s not unusual to name a boy for his father.” I thought she smiled but it might have been a trick of the light. “Since I’d killed the man, it seemed the least I could do.”
If she’d killed the gardener, that would have been worth the payoffs, worth turning MacAvoy, worth using Heather Foley’s timely disaster.
Waves broke on the rocky shore, retreated into mist. She murmured, “‘Silenced for what th
ey did to you, worse, far worse than caged for acts of rage.’” She shook her head, alarmed, as though she’d just realized she’d spoken out loud. “Excuse me. Susan has no poetry. Susan speaks plainly.”
Does Susan speak the truth?
“Do you have a key to the house?” I asked.
“No.”
“Do you know a way in?”
“Why?”
I didn’t want her sitting on a rock by the sea. I’d already lost one life to the Atlantic.
“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said. “I paid for his death with my gift. I paid.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking about Manley or about Alonso Nueves, gardener. Alonso, the Cuban day-jobber at Avon Hill, the romantic dreamboy of the Weston Psychiatric Institute. The man in Beryl’s cherished photo. Her lover, too, perhaps.
What would a man of Franklin Cameron’s stature have thought? Have done? His precious daughters and the gardener?
“Let’s talk about it in the big house,” I said gently. “Aren’t you cold?”
“Cold? No.” She folded her arms, rubbing them with her hands, her motion negating her denial. “I won’t go into that house.”
“Why?”
“Why should I? Don’t you trust me?” The shadowy smile again.
“With what?”
“With my life, with my life, with my life.”
I was starting to get angry with her verbal tricks. I said, “You’re playing for Alonso’s life, aren’t you? Your son’s life.”
“Can you arrest me?”
“I can make a citizen’s arrest, take you to the nearest station house. I can advise you to see a lawyer. I hope you have your details straight about Manley’s death. I hope you have an eyewitness.”
“Why?”
“Because your boy was seen on this stretch of beach. His motorbike was in the shed.”
“Circumstantial,” she said dismissively.
“But convincing,” I said. “And I hope you have proof about Alonso Nueves, too. Because I know the cop who’s handling this, and he’s going to want more than your sacred word of honor that friend Alonso didn’t take a hike that day.”
