Speak Ill of the Living

by Mark Arsenault

  Bobbi sounded happily drunk with the memory. Eddie pictured her beaming and twirling a finger in a lock of hair.

  She whispered, “I try to remember if I loved him before I knew he was innocent, or did I start loving him after I figured it out.”

  “Might have happened at the same time.”

  “As good a theory as any.”

  “When did Henry tell you that he didn’t do it?”

  “He never told me.”

  Eddie sprang to his feet. “Never?” he asked.

  She was calm. “He didn’t do it.”

  “Right, sure, I know—but he never told you that he didn’t?”

  Bobbi, still calm, spoke slowly. “Your brother did not kill those people.”

  Eddie sat down. He heard Bobbi’s breath. The enormity of her faith in Henry struck Eddie as he listened to her. She was the living proof that Henry was not a monster, for a monster cannot be loved. He smiled, marveling at this logic. Then Eddie’s thoughts turned inward. If there was no monster, then Eddie Bourque could not share any monster’s blood.

  They finished with small talk about downtown restaurants and the forecast for sticky weather the rest of the week. Eddie promised to call as soon as he knew whether he had discovered a worthwhile lead. They hung up.

  The General paced restlessly, sniffing table legs and chairs—things a million times sniffed.

  Eddie scooped up the cat. “You bored, too? How about a movie?” He set the General on the coffee table, and then flipped through his video collection. “I got Casablanca and I got one of your tapes, MouseHouse, Part Two. Which one do you want?”

  The General waited quietly on the table.

  “You’re right,” Eddie said. “We’ve seen Casablanca a hundred times.” Eddie pushed a tape into the machine, then refilled his coffee and reclined on the sofa.

  On the screen, white mice zipped around, burrowing under cedar chips, squeaking, sniffing, rolling around on top of each other. They hid part-way in paper towel tubes so that just their fat little butts and wavering tails stuck out, then they disappeared into the tubes entirely, and tender pink twitchy noses appeared at the other end.

  General VonKatz was enthralled. He shrank into a compact mass of muscle on a hair trigger. Occasionally he quivered and chattered at the on-screen villains. “What’s the plot?” Eddie asked. “This is the problem with sequels—I missed the original MouseHouse, so now part two doesn’t make any sense.”

  He checked the clock and sighed. Around twenty-two hours before the deed registry opened for business.

  Chapter 18

  Colonial-era fieldstone walls, speckled with dry moss, marked the property line of the old Whistle farm in both directions, broken only for the driveway. Eddie checked the plot map he had copied from the deed registry. Yeah, this was the place. He had spent most of the day chasing paper on the farm. It had once belonged to Jimmy’s parents, Ivan and Beatrice—that much had been easy to figure out, and Eddie had been shocked to learn that the forty-acre property still existed intact.

  Its history over the past thirty years was muddled in divorce, three lawsuits, a probate fight over a disputed will, and two bankruptcies. The owner-of-record was a real estate holding company in Indiana, which bought the place at tax sale ten years ago, and had since undergone two reorganizations.

  As far as Eddie could tell from the public record, the place had been vacant and untouched for a decade.

  To find it, Eddie had driven deep into tiny Dunstable, Mass., north of Lowell near the New Hampshire line. The area was still rural, and the potholed street that led to the farm cut through woods thick with hundreds of sugar maples that bore the black scars from where they had been tapped for their sap. The floor of the forest was clogged with underbrush, dry leaves and downed trees, the softened wood rotting into soil to begin again the journey back into a living tree.

  Eddie looked down the farm’s long driveway—two parallel tracks of packed gray stonedust, a swathe of knee-high weeds between them. The entrance had been blocked long ago with three great sloping boulders, each now wearing a skirt of tall grass. The boulders would stop a tank, but not a motorcycle. Eddie eased The Late Chuckie’s rat bike between the stones. He saw a shallow gully to his left, and steered the bike into it. From the road, the bike would be hidden and would not invite an investigation by any police patrol with nothing to do on a summer evening in the country.

  Eddie hesitated a moment before he killed the bike’s engine. If he had to leave in a hurry, would the bike cooperate? It never cooperated. Well, he couldn’t just leave it idling. He shut down the machine.

  The forest instantly tried to swallow him in silence.

  He walked slowly down the driveway. The sound of his shoes crunching on the gravel seemed big enough to fill the whole farm. He caught a sweet whiff of Concord grapes, and paused. The grape vines were hugging a dying red oak. Eddie ran his hand along the vine, a stiff, ruddy-colored rope that shed papery little slivers. He tugged on it and startled a crow that cursed and fluttered off.

  The driveway bent steadily to the left, then broadened into a teardrop-shaped hayfield cut from the woods. Golden wheat lay flat against the land. Three ramshackle buildings slouched in a line at the far end of the field. They had long ago been painted white, though the paint was now flaking off, exposing the weathered gray clapboard. The small building to the far left was a one-car garage, with a single swinging double-door, and a rusted weathervane on the roof. It sagged more dangerously than the other buildings, and looked like one hard shove would knock it over.

  The building in the center was the farmhouse—a two-story cube with a fieldstone foundation, a wraparound porch and a dozen broken windows. A tattered yellow curtain on the second floor waved lazily in the breeze.

  To the right was a monstrous barn of wide wooden planks, in better shape than the house and the garage. Newer maybe? The barn was two and a half stories tall, with a massive sliding door on the ground level and an opening on the second floor for loading by winch. Two swallows sailed into the opening, and immediately three sailed out.

  There were no signs that anyone had been here in years. No tire tracks, no footprints. How long would footprints last in the packed stonedust? Not long; his own were barely visible. Eddie pictured Henry striding across the wheat field, shining with sweat after an afternoon of pitching hay bales onto a flatbed truck.

  “Henry? Now that the hay’s in, these logs gotta be split to quarter rails, but I can’t tell you where I put my husband’s ax.”

  “Maybe he took it when he ran off, Mrs. Whistle.”

  “If that’s the case, I don’t want you finding that son-of-a-bitch and bringing him back here.”

  “No ma’am, I won’t look too hard.”

  Eddie shook off the daydream. He had three buildings to search in only two hours of daylight. For a moment, he considered turning around. He could come back in the morning—with Detective Orr and a dozen of her well-armed friends. No, he decided, what happened here thirty years ago couldn’t hurt him now.

  Eddie started with the garage. Striding toward it, he came upon a ring of fieldstones, ten feet across, like the fire barrier around a big campfire. The stones marked the opening of a deep-water well. The shaft was smooth cobblestones. It sunk ten feet before it hit the waterline, and then kept going for at least another ten. The water was still and clear.

  Stepping carefully away from the well, Eddie kicked something in the tall grass with a bang and startled himself. He searched the grass and found an old bucket of galvanized steel, on a long rusted chain. Had somebody been fetching water? Am I not alone?

  Eddie whirled and looked into every window of the old farmhouse. He saw nobody. He spun in a circle and scanned the woods. His instincts insisted someone would be there, watching him, and Eddie was surprised to see no one. The wind cooled his brow like the touch of an old ghost. Eddie rubbed his arms.

  This is stupid. There’s nobody here.


  He walked to the garage. The windows were coated with dust on the inside. Through the dust, Eddie could make out a tractor-sized vehicle under a canvas tarp. A padlock seized with rust fastened the door. There was no way into the garage short of cutting off the lock.

  Eddie moved to the house. The mortar between the basement stones was disintegrating into coarse gray crumbs. Dry rot infested the clapboard. Squirrels had packed dried leaves in a hole in the eves. Eddie stepped onto the porch, heard the crack of rotted wood, and decided to check the barn.

  The sliding barn door had rusted shut, but Eddie slipped easily into an opening in a wall where a plank was missing. The barn was strewn with antique hand tools: shovels, rakes, a pick, a wedged maul for splitting logs, a two-man saw with two-inch teeth. On a workbench Eddie found a kerosene lantern. It was an old-fashioned design, but seemed in good shape, the little mesh mantle intact within the glass. He shook it gently, heard fuel sloshing inside. He unlocked the lantern’s fuel pump with a twist, and withdrew the short brass rod to be pushed in and out to pressurize the fuel. The pump was well oiled and slid easily. The rusted hand tools in the barn could have been untouched for thirty years. But not the lantern; it had been used recently. How recently? Eddie couldn’t tell.

  He put the lantern back, left the barn and explored the house.

  The rotted porch was like a poorly camouflaged pit trap, but the floors inside the house seemed sound. The wind blew through the building like living breath, and the whole place creaked and moaned like an old man getting up in the morning.

  The house held an abandoned collection of junk left to slowly disintegrate in the elements. Eddie searched the place, trying to picture the house as Henry would have seen it thirty years ago. Eddie imagined rooms full of Shaker style furniture, shelves lined with knick-knacks, milk cans stuffed with cut sunflowers, the smell of hot cardamom bread.

  “Henry?”

  “Yes, Mrs. Whistle?”

  “I put chipped ice in the pitcher for you, little sugar in there with it. Take it outside and draw some water from the well for yourself.”

  “I’ll get to it, ma’am.”

  “Don’t you ma’am me. You need to drink if you expect to finish splittin’ those rails in this heat.”

  “Amen to that, ma’am.”

  Eddie tugged open a door and discovered stairs leading down to a black hole. He didn’t want to go down there, but the basement was the last place he hadn’t looked. He couldn’t go down there without light.

  Hmmmm…

  Eddie hustled from the house, back to The Late Chuckie’s rat bike. Rummaging through the saddlebags he found a book of matches—from the “Rump and Grind” gentlemen’s club.

  Chuckie, you horny dog.

  He trotted to the barn and grabbed the lantern. With a glance to the setting sun melting over the treetops, he ducked back into the house, to the basement stairs. Kneeling with the lantern, Eddie pressurized the fuel with a dozen pumps. He struck a match and put the flame to the mantel. It lit with a gasp and then hissed steadily. The bright white light hurt to look at, and just a moment’s glance at the flame left floating green spots before Eddie’s eyes.

  The wooden stairs groaned in surprise under Eddie’s weight. Downstairs, the basement floor was made of poured concrete. The walls were fieldstone, like those in the pictures of Roger Lime that the kidnappers had taken.

  Eddie lifted the lantern to one of the walls.

  This could be the one from the picture.

  Any of them could have been.

  The old house creaked above him. Eddie held the lantern at arm’s length and followed it around the basement. He felt its heat and listened to its hiss; it seemed like a living thing and it made Eddie feel less alone.

  The basement seemed to be a rectangle, with a plank-and-beam ceiling about six feet high. Eddie had to duck his head as he explored. There were scattered cobwebs between the ceiling posts. A fine white dust covered the floor. Eddie lowered the lantern. He saw footprints in the dust—the knobby pattern of a workboot, and another pair with no tread at all, from a sock maybe? Eddie’s face flushed. He compared the footprints with his own. His fresh footprints were sharper.

  These are old prints.

  Relieved, he looked around some more. He discovered that the basement was not a rectangle as he had first thought—it was L-shaped, with a wing off the far side. Eddie walked the lantern around the corner, into the wing, inspecting the stone walls closely. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. A secret door? A message written in blood?

  On the floor, near the base of the wall, he noticed a small dark spot, a perfect square, about two inches across. He knelt with the lantern. The square was a faint impression in the dust, nothing more. He noticed another nearby, and another.

  Five in all.

  Eddie stood back and connected the spots in his mind.

  They made a pentagon.

  Eddie’s imagination superimposed an image of Henry’s five-sided table over the marks in the dust. It seemed right—he imagined the table legs leaving the squares, like the marks pressed into a carpet by a heavy piece of furniture.

  “Split logs all day and spend all night in the workshop? What kind of life you living, Henry?”

  “It doesn’t look like much now, but it’s gonna be a table.”

  “Hush up! It’s wonderful. I wish my boy Jimmy had a talent with wood like that.”

  “Maybe when it’s done you can keep it here, Mrs. Whistle.”

  By the marks on the floor, it seemed possible that Henry’s table had been left in this basement long ago, and then taken away more recently, but the evidence was hardly conclusive. Eddie needed more. He crouched with the lantern and swept the light inches from the floor, studying the dust that filled the little cracks in the concrete.

  He duckwalked with the light, looking for…what the hell was he looking for?

  He had gone only a few steps when he noticed a patch of concrete that seemed different from the floor around it—it was a slightly lighter shade of gray and a little bumpier, though Eddie would never had noticed had he not been looking so intently. The patch was roughly oval, maybe six by three feet. He stomped on it, listened to the thud, then stomped next to the patch, to compare the sounds.

  Was it his imagination that the patch sounded thinner? Hollow, maybe?

  Options…options…

  He could get Detective Orr, bring her back here tomorrow. Or he could come back alone in the morning, look around some more, maybe search the woods around the property for a telling clue.

  It was a stupid argument because he knew what he was going to do.

  Eddie hefted the lantern, felt the fuel swirling around—there was plenty, plenty of light left in it.

  He ran for the stairs.

  Outside, the sun was gone except for the fading pink underbelly of a distant cloud. As Eddie hurried to the barn he was surprised to feel the call of a big news story. How long had it been since he had uncovered a real scoop? He couldn’t remember, but he was too excited to care. Eddie lifted the lantern to illuminate a jumble of old tools.

  He grabbed a ten-pound pick.

  ***

  The first blow seemed loud enough to shake down the house, but it barely dented the concrete. The low ceiling made it impossible for Eddie to swing the pick over his head. He widened his stance, bent his knees and gripped the pick at the end of its handle to increase his leverage. He swung again. A satisfying clump of concrete dust sprayed over the floor.

  Wham. Wham. Wham.

  Eddie’s ears were ringing. He was breathing hard and sweat gathered on his back. He pulled off his shirt, threw it on the floor near the lantern, wiped his brow on the back of his hand, and then attacked the concrete again.

  He wasn’t sure what he hoped to find. There might not be anything under there. But Eddie was sure that the floor had been patched at least once before, some time after the original floor had been poure
d. He was certain he was not the first person to chip away at the concrete at this spot. He wondered if the last person to dig here had used the same pick.

  Yellow sparks and chunks of concrete the size of ice cubes shot out from under the point of the pick. Eddie’s arms burned. He stopped, leaned on the pick and panted. The old house creaked again, three times, as if some heavy spirit was walking across the floor above. He shuddered and listened, but heard only the angry hiss of the lantern.

  No wonder people go mad living alone in big old houses.

  The handle was damp with his sweat. He swung the pick again. Concrete splashed.

  Wham. Wham. Wham.

  Eddie couldn’t help thinking that he was digging a tunnel for a prison break.

  He wanted to write a news story that cleared his brother’s name. As he worked the pick against the floor, he allowed his imagination to explore the future. A writer freeing his own brother would be a story itself. The Daily Empire would want to write about it. If the new management at the Empire was smart, they’d have one of Eddie’s old colleagues call him for the interview.

  To free a brother after thirty years would be a nationwide story. Time and Newsweek would scratch each other’s eyes out over who got the first interview with Eddie Bourque. Eddie smiled over the daydream. It was an excellent fantasy, but not the one he wanted the most. He imagined Henry visiting Eddie’s shack in Pawtucketville for the first time. He could see Henry reaching down, snapping his fingers to coax General VonKatz to come over. The brothers would split a six-pack of Rolling Rock, and then Eddie would set up the chessboard. Henry would play the white pieces—Eddie would know without asking what side Henry liked to play. It was the kind of detail brothers knew about each other.

  Wham! The pick broke through the concrete and buried itself to the handle.