Quick Pivot

by Brenda Buchanan

  Because my legwork was supposed to be sub rosa, I told him the private nature of our conversation needed to work both ways.

  “You can count on that.” He spat into the dirt. “Until they know for sure if it’s George’s body back there, you need to be careful who you ask about it.”

  “Careful?”

  He shrugged, flicked another glance at the clubhouse. “It’s a touchy topic.”

  I promised to keep him informed, aware I’d stunned him, wanting to make amends. “I’m sorry, Earl. I had no idea you were close to Desmond.”

  “How could you have known?” he said. “You weren’t even born when George went away.”

  We walked in silence up the hill to the front of the clubhouse. Leo Harding was standing on the front porch, a garish plaid cap protecting his enormous bald head and an electric-yellow golf shirt stretched over his big belly.

  “Got your joints oiled up, Early?” Harding was a retired mill executive who had to be in his late sixties, but he wore a smirk worthy of a third-grader. He cut his bulgy eyes my way. “I see they’re letting the riffraff in this morning.”

  I smiled and kept my mouth shut as the other two members of what Earl called the Crew pulled up in a silver golf cart customized to look like a miniature Mercedes-Benz. The driver was the recently retired president of Riverside National Bank. Aside from the tricked-out golf cart, Jay Preble looked like a regular guy in his worn khakis and faded blue shirt, not the philanthropist who underwrote every worthy cause in town.

  Riding shotgun was Ken Coatesworth, the Saccarappa’s CEO when it closed its doors. I’d always assumed that he wasn’t so much the boss as the guy left to clean up the final details. As quiet as Leo Harding was loud, Coatesworth was a big fan of the color tan. Tan pants, neatly creased. Tan V-neck sweater, despite the heat. Tan hair that probably was dyed, but why anyone would go to the trouble of coloring gray hair tan was beyond me.

  Collectively, the Crew knew a hell of a lot about the Saccarappa Mill, but Earl’s caution was fresh in my mind, so I resisted the urge to mention the skeleton behind the bricks. Given their social position, they also probably were on a first-martini basis with the Chronicle’s cop-fearing muckety-mucks. Better to circle back to interview them once the static from Upstairs died down.

  Earl strapped his clubs onto the back of a standard-issue golf cart and hopped behind the wheel. “Let’s go, Leo. Stop standing there like a model for Geezer Golf World.”

  Harding lowered his bulk onto the passenger seat.

  “Which one of you hackers is keeping score today?” he bellowed as the electric vehicle moved toward the first tee.

  Walking back to my car, I considered what I’d learned so far. Earl St. Pierre, solid as an old oak, had known George Desmond like a brother. Like Helena Desmond, he’d had a hard time squaring the notion that Desmond fled town under cover of night with a pile of mill money. If the medical examiner’s detailed exam contradicted what Chief Wyatt claimed were the preliminary findings, I’d have two solid interviews teed up. On the other hand, if my George Desmond speculation was wrong, I’d have reopened the scabbed-over wounds of two good people.

  I spent the next couple of hours in the reading room at the Riverside Historical Society, educating myself about the life and death of the crumbling buildings that hogged so much prime waterfront on the Cascabago. The files were rich with information about the Saccarappa in its heyday. The photographs, in particular, were fascinating. The mill complex ran along the bank of the river, the rush of which powered its giant looms. Before the haphazard additions were added, the compact original section of the mill boasted a handsome clock tower. I wondered if Nate Kimball planned to bring it back.

  Much was written about the good days—the number of spindles run, the yards of cotton cloth produced, the insatiable wartime demand, the creation of overseas markets. The archive held much less on the Saccarappa’s demise. After copying a few articles I headed for the Portland Public Library, where I hoped to verify that nobody outside the Chronicle could match my growing mastery of the Desmond backstory.

  The Chronicle’s online archives would take a person doing online research only as far as 1995, because digitizing old stories cost money the paper didn’t have to spend. That meant the library was the sole research option for my competition. A visit to the PPL reference room confirmed my smug suspicion that while the 1968 newspaper stories about Desmond’s disappearance were available on microfilm, they’d never been converted to electronic form.

  Better yet, there was no index. It would take many hours of headache-inducing work for anyone else to find the stories written at the time of Desmond’s disappearance. Brittle film had to be threaded onto a reading reel then advanced with a switch that had two speeds. The high setting whizzed the black-and-white film past the viewing frame faster than the eye could read. The low speed slowed the images to a nauseating crawl. Secure in my ability to stay ahead of the pack, I jotted a task list for Sunday.

  First: reread Paulie’s coverage about the disappearance of the mill’s finance manager. This time, chart the details. Second: check in on Helena Desmond. When I blurted my theory Friday night I obligated myself to keep the poor woman in the informational loop. Third: find a source in the medical examiner’s office to give me the straight story about the age of the remains. If a quasi-official source confirmed my instincts about Desmond—even off the record—I’d have cover in the newsroom.

  Chapter Eight

  Saturday, July 12, 2014

  Riverside, Maine

  Christie showed up uninvited for dinner, with a bag of groceries in hand and Rufe in tow. It was the first Saturday night I’d been alone in six months and my friends weren’t about to let me lick my wounds in private.

  Christie had been in commiseration overdrive since Megan had left for Cameroon. Instead of waiting for me to order when I dragged my sorry ass into her diner, she brought me what she thought I should eat and tried to keep the pity out of her big dark eyes.

  French toast. Mac and cheese. Meatloaf sandwiches. Apparently she assumed if I ate enough comfort food I’d eventually break down and have a good bawl into my napkin. But tears were not in my repertoire, so I wolfed my food and slunk out the door without so much as a whimper. So when I saw Christie pull into my driveway, I braced myself for more pressure to emote. Then I saw Rufe’s flashy blue plumber’s truck slide in behind her car. Great, I thought. Two on one.

  As is his nature, Rufe was as blunt as Christie was indirect.

  “You can’t work all day and drink all night, at least not by yourself.” Buzzcut and beard still wet from his after-work shower, he carried a bottle of Glenfiddich in his big hand. “We’re here to grieve with you.”

  In the early nineties Rufe had lost several friends to AIDS, a searing experience that transformed him into to a man who could talk about sadness all day and into the night. I admire him for it, maybe even envy him a little, but at that moment I was feeling tag-teamed and almost told them to leave and take their fucking kindness with them. Rufe didn’t give me the chance.

  “It well and truly sucks that sweet Megan is gone,” he said, pouring us each two fingers of scotch. “Here’s to her, and to you surviving the loss of her.”

  His eyes were full when he raised his glass. I clinked mine against his to signal that I would tolerate their presence for a while.

  “I hope you brought steaks,” I said.

  “Yup. Well-marbled steaks. Plenty of booze. Even have a coupla’ cigars in my truck,” Rufe said. “We’re here to help you shorten your miserable fucking life.”

  When he burst out laughing I did too, drawing air deep into my lungs for the first time all day. I knew Rufe also felt some sting when my girlfriend departed for Cameroon. Like me, he’d fallen for Megan right away.

  “If I were straight, you wouldn’t be with Gale,” h
e’d stage-whispered into her ear the night they met. “You’d be the girl for me.” In the months that followed they grew a friendship of their own, hanging out when I was working late, going to the Portland Farmer’s Market on Saturdays when I slept in. I wondered if he’d skipped it that morning, or trudged off to Deering Oaks by himself.

  When Christie headed inside to the kitchen, Rufe saw an opening to make his pitch, lubricating it with another slug of scotch.

  “I’m glad we’ve stayed tight since you moved out,” Rufe said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to miss watching you learning the difference between lust and love.”

  Lou wandered within reach. I leaned over and ruffed the fur on her head until I could trust my voice. “It snuck up on me.”

  “It always does, man. It always does.”

  We studied the backyard for a while.

  “I know you feel like hell, and I won’t insult you with platitudes,” he said. “But you can call me when you need to scream. You don’t have to do this all by yourself.”

  I nodded. “Can we just get drunk tonight?”

  “Absolutely,” he said, leaning back in his deck chair.

  While the charcoal was working its way to the proper temperature to sear the steaks, Christie emerged with tortilla chips and salsa. I asked if Arn Giroux, her longtime but never live-in boyfriend, would be joining us.

  “He’s working. Who knew mid-July was such a busy time for accountants?”

  It was bullshit that Arn couldn’t spare the time to come to a dinner party. I knew it and she knew I knew. But despite our close friendship, we never discuss Arn’s determined anti-sociability. It’s simply a given: Arn doesn’t attend parties. He doesn’t do cookouts. He only likes one-on-one time with Christie, griping even if her son Theo’s around, which was too damn bad because he’s a great kid.

  She steered the conversation back to me.

  “I want the story behind the story about the skeleton over at the mill,” she said. “It’s been the talk of the Rambler all day.”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Rufe snagged a chip. “Don’t be coy. You always know more than us mere mortals. What are the cops telling you?”

  “Worse than nothing. The state police are being as tightlipped as ballplayers testifying about steroids, and Barb Wyatt’s putting out misinformation.”

  “There’s a story there.”

  “You got that right.”

  I did an express rundown on my past thirty-six hours, from the discovery of the bones in the basement of the mill to my conversations with Helena Desmond and Chief Wyatt. Mindful of Earl’s privacy, I left out my conversation at the golf course.

  Christie took a deep sip of red wine. She twisted her long dark hair up off her neck and inserted a jeweled pin to keep it there. “It must be difficult to be the bearer of shocking information.”

  “Goes with the territory. In her voice mail last night, Helena said she hoped it was her brother. That stuck with me all day. If it turns out he was murdered, at least that’ll prove he wasn’t a thief.”

  “If it is Desmond, the cops will have to figure out who had a motive to kill him all those years ago,” Christie said.

  “And whether the killer embezzled all that money from the mill, or if that was a coincidence,” Rufe added.

  “Those will be the questions buzzing around town before you know it. The problem is, the powers that be have made it clear the Chronicle won’t print any Desmond-related speculation. All the information I’ve gathered has to wait till they confirm the remains are his. People with long memories must be putting it together. I’m surprised the local web jockeys haven’t figured it out yet.”

  “My Twitter feed is mostly local gossip,” Rufe said. “But I haven’t seen anything beyond the fact a skeleton was found at the Saccarappa.”

  “Let’s hope it stays that way.”

  Over the course of the evening the conversation moved to other topics. Christie fretted about one of Theo’s new friends, and Rufe talked about his role in the local music theater’s upcoming production of Oklahoma! I nodded and laughed at the right moments, but Megan’s absence felt like a not-yet-scabbed wound.

  Christie stretched at ten-thirty, reminding us her diner opened before dawn. After she left, Rufe and I lounged on the deck. He really did have cigars and we fired them up, which kept the night insects at bay. We didn’t talk. It was almost comforting, to sit and smoke and sip in silence.

  Somewhere between midnight and one he shoved off. Before I went inside I gave Lou a final opportunity to roam the yard. Swaying from foot to foot next to the river, I tried to lock the Megan memory vault and chuck the key into the quiet water.

  “Plenty of room for you in the bed,” I told Lou as we ambled back toward the house. “She’s not coming back to us.”

  * * *

  The ringing phone woke me at 7:01 a.m. My head felt better than it had a right to feel. Earl’s insistent voice was unapologetic.

  “Can you come see me this morning?”

  “Sure. Hour or so?”

  “The sooner the better.” He hung up without saying goodbye.

  Something must have happened overnight. I let Lou out into the fenced section of the yard, scooped my morning Chronicle off the front porch and jogged around the corner to the Rambler. I snagged a seat at the green Formica counter opposite the grill and inspected the headlines, as if there’d be something in there that I didn’t know about already. Three feet away, Christie was simultaneously flipping pancakes, making omelets and bantering with a bunch of guys who call themselves the Old as Dirt Club. She turned to face me without missing a beat, grabbing a coffee pot in mid-pirouette.

  “I didn’t expect to see your face for a couple more hours. You okay this morning?” She leaned over the counter, kissed my cheek and poured my first cup of coffee. Spinning back to her compact cooking station, she buttered toast and used a broad spatula to turn a batch of home fries.

  I called my order over her shoulder—three slices of dry wheat toast, a double order of crisp bacon.

  “Is that your hangover cure?”

  “I’m fine. Just not particularly hungry.”

  With deft movements she cracked somebody else’s eggs into a skillet filled with simmering water, then scooped and flattened a portion of hash onto the hot side of the grill. I glanced down the counter. Mine weren’t the only eyes following her

  Christie moves like a cat, a sleek, dark cat. I enjoyed fevered fantasies about her the entire first year I lived in Riverside, even after Rufe informed me that she had a steady guy. In my fickle world, couples broke up all the time, and I planned to be available when she and Arn hit the skids. But the years have passed and she’s stuck with him, for reasons I can’t understand. This has forced me to put a lid on my imagination, but I never tire of watching her in motion.

  A stream of Riversiders interrupted my breakfast, wanting to know what I knew about the Saccarappa skeleton that hadn’t yet found its way into print. I confined myself to polite, hedgy answers. For the most part I don’t play my informational cards close to my chest—a reporter is only as successful as the sources he can cultivate, and that’s a process that requires fertilizer—but these days it can be tricky to identify the competition. Five years ago, all I had to do was keep my mouth shut when another press-card-carrying reporter was in the vicinity. Now everybody with a smart phone’s a potential competitor for scoops. Maybe it was the intensity of my meeting with Helena, or my friendship with Earl, but if my speculation was on target, I wanted to control the Desmond story.

  After fleeing the curious crew at the Rambler, I drove to the Mill Stream, eager to find out what had Earl so shook up that he called me at home. The moment I turned off the ignition he appeared from behind the boxwood hedge bordering the parking lot.

  “Glad you finally got
here,” he said. “I was about to give up on you.”

  “Do you want to play or just talk?”

  “Talk. Let’s go over to the maintenance barn. We won’t be bothered there.”

  We rode in a golf cart out beyond the sixth tee to a prefabricated metal building with an overhead door wide enough for a tank. Earl gestured me inside, beyond the view of passing golfers. Once I was out of sight, he stood in the middle of the open doorway and began tinkering with a mower engine. I leaned against a workbench in the shadowy interior and left my notebook in my hip pocket, intuiting that he’d hold back if I began taking notes.

  He spoke without looking up at me. “I had a call last night from an old friend. Can’t tell you who, but he has an inside line to the P.D.”

  “Retired cop?”

  “Nope, and I’m not gonna give you any more information except to say he’s a friend and I trust him.”

  “What’d he have to say?”

  “They’re officially reopening the Desmond case.”

  “The cops are telling me the remains are only a few years old.”

  “That’s bull.” Earl loosened a bolt on top of the mower. “The whole point of my friend calling was to ask if I remembered when that brick wall was rebuilt.”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it since we talked yesterday, and while I can’t pinpoint dates—we’re talking more than forty-five years ago—I’m sure it was around the time George disappeared.” He tightened the bolt he’d just loosened.

  “Who supervised the construction?”

  “Construction projects were overseen by Gil Parker. His crew had the skills to do pretty much anything. But an outside contractor was brought in on this job. What stuck in my mind is that the union got all riled up because it didn’t even hear about the outside mason until the work was done.”

  “Union protecting its own?”

  “It was a violation of the contract to hire out work that could be done by our own people. The job involved masonry on a structural wall. If I’m remembering right, the powers that be claimed none of the guys on Gil’s crew had enough experience to do it.”