I walked faster.
The door was open.
I walked in.
The room was empty.
I stood there, not moving, my first thoughts being that perhaps she had been taken out for an X-ray or MRI or some other procedure, but no, the room was clean, there were no balloons, cards, or flowers on the window counter, and the bed was neat and well made.
A male nurse came by, and I said, “Excuse me, do you have a moment?”
“Sure,” he said, stopping. He held a clipboard in his hand and wore multi-colored scrubs and white shoes.
“Could . . . could you tell me where Detective Woods is? The woman who was here?”
“Oh,” he said. “She’s gone. I’m sorry. Didn’t you know?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
There was a roaring in my ears and my legs quivered. Gone. Just like that. While I was being kept in prison. Gone. All that fighting and shooting and tears and pain and lies . . . and for what?
She was gone. The nurse started to walk away and I managed to move my tongue. It seemed suddenly thick in the back of my throat. “Wait,” I said, hating how weak my voice sounded. “Wait just a second.”
He came back to me. “Yes?”
“Can . . . can you tell me any more? About which funeral home she was taken to? For services?”
He looked at me blankly, and then gave me an embarrassed smile. “Sir, sorry, I should have been more clear. When I said she was gone, I meant she’s been discharged. She’s been transferred up to the Porter Rehab and Extended Care Center. You know where that is?”
The thought of asking directions never came to me. My first thought was of taking my cane and wrapping it around his young, empty head.
“I’ll find out.”
The Porter Rehab and Extended Care Center was in an office park adjacent to the Porter Hospital, about a half-hour north of Exonia. It was two stories and made of brick, and I limped in with no problem, taking an elevator to the second floor. Felix and Angela and Felix’s associate stayed back in the limousine, which took up three parking spaces. As before, Felix begged off going in with me, saying he was going to try to teach Angela some English phrases while I was away.
I eyed him as I got out of the limo. “Need some tips on what to say about heavenly bodies?”
I got a knowing smile from him as the door closed behind me.
On the second floor of the rehab center, the hallways were wide and had waist-high wooden railings for the benefit of its patients. I passed a large room which had exercise equipment and a mock-up of a dining room and kitchen, where patients were at work trying to recover from a host of injuries.
Diane Woods was in Room 209, and there was a Tyler police officer named Milan, whom I knew, sitting outside. He was leafing through USA Today and just nodded at me as I passed by. I quietly walked in, seeing Kara Miles curled up on a settee, fast asleep. I paused and took in Diane.
She was on her back, head propped up on a pillow. There was a feeding tube going into her nose, taped in place. The bruises and marks on her face had improved, meaning she was looking at least somewhat like the Diane I knew. Monitoring devices were hooked up to her wrists and hands. I stepped in closer. Her eyes were closed, and her mouth was sagging open, and her lips were cracked and dry.
She was breathing on her own, but it was a labored, rasping noise.
The windows overlooked a field, and in the distance, Air Force aircraft were landing and taking off from the nearby McIntosh Air Force Base, over in Lewington. Kara kept on sleeping. On the sill by the windows, get-well cards were crowded in a long row.
I came in even closer. It was Diane, no doubt about it, but the spark, the light, the life I knew, wasn’t there.
Maybe it was gone, maybe it was hidden, but it wasn’t there.
I kissed her forehead and slowly walked out.
“Where to now?” Felix asked when I got back into the limousine.
“Tyler Beach.”
“You sure?”
“No doubt.”
About forty minutes later, we were on Route 1-A, hugging the New Hampshire coastline, the winds coming up, the surf breaking harshly against the rocks. The fine homes of Wallis and North Tyler were lit up with golden lamps, and then we came upon a number of motels and restaurants, and then a long stretch of rocks and boulders the size of small cars. Up ahead was the Lafayette House, and the limousine made a left turn into its parking lot.
It stopped before the dirt driveway leading down to my home. I got out and Felix joined me. Without asking, he took my arm, helped me down the rough dirt road. With each step, my insides felt heavier and heavier. I didn’t say anything, just kept on looking, observing, evaluating, until I reached the front of my home, with its small, scraggly lawn.
The smell of burnt and wet wood was still strong. To the right was a jumble of broken beams, shingles, and burnt planks that used to be a small outbuilding that served as a garage. From inside the destroyed garage, my Ford Explorer was a charred mess, resting on burnt and melted tires. Close by was my two-story house, which was now mostly one-story. Most of the roof to the right had collapsed where my office and bedroom had been. The area had been covered with a blue tarp that rattled as the wind came up. The whole area was still surrounded by yellow crime-scene tape, which flapped and twisted from the sea breeze. The waves crashed in behind my house. Chunks of burnt wood and shingles were piled up in front and to the side of my house.
My legs were shaking. I just looked and looked.
Felix still held on to my arm. He said: “Did I ever tell you the story of my Uncle Vincent? He had a place outside of the North End. One day the place blew up because of a natural gas leak, but he was one suspicious bastard and started a one-man gang war.”
“No, you’ve never told me that story.”
“You want to hear it?”
“No, I don’t.”
I broke away from his grasp, went to a point in the yard where there was a chunk of concrete and bricks back from when this place had been a lifeboat station during the late 1800s. I clumsily knelt down, wincing from the pain in my thigh, reached under the brick, and took out a small lockbox, which I opened. I took out a key, limped past Felix, ducked under the crime-scene tape, and unlocked the door. I had to bump my hip twice against the door to open it up. There was no power, of course, so I couldn’t switch on any lights that might be working, but what I saw stunned me.
Save for chunks of plaster and pieces of burnt lumber that I could make out, the place was empty. No furniture. No rugs. No books, no bookshelves.
Had I been robbed?
“Lewis?” said Felix.
I turned. “You,” I said. “What did you do?”
He shrugged. “What do you think? I’m an expert at salvaging things, picking up stuff that fell off a truck. When the smoke had cleared, I hired a crew, got in and took everything out that was still in reasonable shape. Books, rugs, some furniture. It’s all spread out in a large storage facility over on Route One in North Tyler. A guy I know is doing his best trying to get the smoke out of your stuff. Sorry, your computer was a loss. Along with a hell of a lot of books.”
“That’s okay,” I said, still not believing what I had seen. “I always do backups of my computers. Books can eventually be replaced.”
Felix came to me, also ducking under the tape. “So there you go. Did what I could.”
I reached over, grasped his shoulder. “More than I could have imagined.”
Back at the parking lot, Felix said, “Welcome to crash at my pad, long as you want.”
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “I’ll stay at the Lafayette to start, until my bank account gets drained.”
“What are you going to do tomorrow?”
“I’ll figure it out then,” I said.
For the next few days, I got into a routine of sorts. I would sleep soundly but without waking particularly refreshed, go downstairs to have an overpriced and over-caloried breakfast in the Lafayette
House’s dining room, and then putter around in the morning on a variety of errands and cleanup. On the first day, I rented a Honda Pilot that had great legroom, so I was able to drive around even with my injured leg, which meant I could visit Diane every day. Kara was so happy to see me that at first she burst into tears.
“I can’t help it,” she said, as we stood next to Diane’s quiet form. “She’s breathing on her own, and sometimes her eyes open up, but she really isn’t responding. And if I don’t put more hours in at work, I’m going to get fired. So maybe you could sit with her some, so I can catch up on work. And . . . Jesus, Lewis, what happened to you?”
“Bee sting,” I said. “Bad reaction.”
“Lewis. . . .”
“Let’s just leave it like that for now. Look, what can I do?”
She wiped at her eyes. “Just sit with her, okay? Like you said, even in the deepest of comas, patients can hear what’s going on. So talk to her, or read to her.”
“I’ll run out of things to say in a while,” I said. “What kind of books does she like?”
“Classic mystery books. Like Agatha Christie. I always teased her about that, that she was bringing her work home with her when she cracked open one of those books. But she said she just enjoyed the plots and the detectives, except for that Belgian one.”
“Hercule Poirot.”
“Yeah,” Kara said. “Diane called him ‘that insufferable Belgian twit.’ So don’t pick up any of those.”
“I won’t.”
Before I left, I kissed Diane again on the forehead, and said, “Kara, by the way, you won’t need that Tyler cop sitting outside anymore.”
Her face looked puzzled. “What happened?”
“Time passed, that’s what.”
“Does that have something to do with your leg?”
I slowly walked toward the door. “Everything. Something. Nothing. Diane’s safe, that’s all that counts.”
So on the second day, I spent some time with Diane, just reading from Ten Little Indians, and about the second hour, I was startled when her head rolled to me and her eyes opened up. I dropped the book and stood over her, and her eyes rolled around, unfocused, and then she closed them.
I picked up the book and having lost my place, started reading again from the previous chapter.
I knew it didn’t make any difference, but I wished it had.
The day after that, I went to the Tyler Museum, a tiny wooden building set off a large oval lawn that was the Tyler Town Common, the place where its militia drilled back in the sixteen and seventeen hundreds, and what was now a nice park. The building is only open a few hours a week, and I was lucky in getting to one of those special hours when I arrived.
Larry Cannon, a retired shipworker from the Porter Naval Shipyard up the coast and the museum’s sole curator and volunteer, met me in the main room, which had a series of glass display cases that showed interesting bits and artifacts from Tyler and its beach from the early years right up to the time when Tyler was named an Official Bicentennial Community back in 1976.
Larry was in his late sixties, and even though he didn’t have to, he dressed up each time he was at the museum, with a dress shirt, bow tie, and gray slacks. He had a gray moustache and beard and wore reading glasses perched at the end of his nose. Besides running the museum, his other work consisted of traveling hither and yon, taking spectacular photographs of lighthouses.
He shook my hand as I got past the doors and said, “Damn, so sorry to hear about your house. I hear it was arson? True?”
“Unfortunately, very true.”
“Damn. Any idea who might have caused it?”
“A literary critic who doesn’t like my columns, I guess. The investigation is still continuing, according to the State Fire Marshal’s office.”
Larry folded his large leathery hands and leaned on a glass counter that held old coins and bills from the Revolutionary War period. “It was a hell of a shame, not only about your home, but about the history before it was converted into a house.”
“Which is why I’m here, Larry,” I said. “A couple of years back, we had a chat at the Tyler Town Days. You said that somewhere in the archives, you had some original blueprints and plans for my home, covering at least fifty years. I was hoping I could see them at some point.”
“You plan on rebuilding?”
“You know it,” I said.
Larry rubbed at his bristly beard. “I know we’ve got the plans. It’ll take some digging, but I can get them for you. But I got something else that might interest you. My brother-in-law Gavin, he’s in the home contractor business and specializes in old homes, old barns, stuff like that.”
“Go on.”
“Thing is, I know he keeps lumber he don’t use, and he’s got a christly big barn in Tyler Falls that’s full of planks and timbers that are up to a hundred years old. Some even older. It’ll be pricier than hell, but if you were wanting to do your remodeling job right, I could hook you up with him.”
I smiled. “That’s fantastic.”
Larry shook his head. “Again, I’ll warn you. It’ll be a right pricey job, to do it right.”
I headed for the door. “Pricey is fine. I want to do it right, and then some.”
On the third day after my return home, pricey was no longer fine.
Adrian Zimmerman was an eager young man with fine black slacks, long leather coat and leather briefcase, and a small digital camera that he used to take photos of my house and what was left of my Ford Explorer. His hair was light blond and he shook his head a lot while walking around the rubble, and he looked like he had bought his first razor blade a month ago. He was a claims agent for the insurance company that covered both my home and car, and when he was done, we went back up to his Buick, where he breathed on his hands and rubbed them together.
“Mister Cole, it’s obvious you’ve suffered a tremendous loss, but I’m afraid we can’t do anything for you at the present time.”
I kept a pleasant smile on my face that didn’t match my words. “And why the hell not?”
“It’s out of my hands, really, and the local office. Your case has been bumped up to regional. You see, preliminary investigation here is that your home fire began as an arson. Then, from police and news media reports, we also know that you were a suspect in a similar arson, just a few days later, up in Osgood.”
“All those charges were dropped.”
His smile was still wide and sincere. “Perhaps they were, but it still raises a number of questions, so regional plans to take its time answering before proceeding on any claim.”
“That’s not fair, and you know it,” I said. “I’ve been a customer for years, never once late for a payment, not once ever filing a claim.”
“Fair has nothing to do with it, I’m afraid. In these troubled times, Mister Cole, with your connection to two arsons, there will have to be a very thorough investigation before my company will assume liability and issue a payment.”
“Look, I just want to get things going here. Don’t you understand?”
“Of course I understand, Mister Cole, but look, even if a settlement is reached in another several months or so, my recommendation is that the residence be razed and a new structure be built in its place.”
“It’s been here for more than a hundred years!”
He shrugged. “A hundred or a thousand, it’s still nearly burned to the ground.”
There were a few more words exchanged, with him getting calmer and cooler as I got angrier and hotter, but after a while I just gave up and he drove off, still smiling and in a good mood, in his company car, which I no doubt had had a hand in buying for him.
Another day, this time with drinks at the Lafayette House bar with Felix in attendance. We both had Sam Adams beers and overpriced appetizers, and after munching through scallops wrapped in bacon and some jumbo shrimp, he said, “Confession time. Let it out.”
“All right,” I said. “For the first time in my adult life
, I didn’t vote in the presidential election. Couldn’t get an absentee ballot at the Grafton County Jail.”
“Not much of a confession. What do you think of the results?”
“The American people have spoken. Who am I to disagree?”
“Even with one bum leg, you’re dancing pretty good. So. Confession time. Let it out.”
I got another Sam Adams, another round of jumbo shrimp, and I let it all out. From the time I left Manchester in Felix’s borrowed pickup truck, to my surveillances in Osgood, to the encounter with the pheasant hunters, my later encounter with Professor Knowlton, and my raid of the house, the shootings, my wounding, the arrival of the Gurkha soldier, and the subsequent fire.
Felix said nothing, but grunted at some high points—or low points, depending on one’s point of view—and then he seemed quite impressed with what had happened to my aborted transfer from the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Hospital to the Grafton County Jail.
When I was through and took another long swallow of beer, he asked, “Feel better now?”
“Just a bit.”
A manicured thumbnail of his worked the edge of the Sam Adams label. “From the two hitmen receiving orders not to bag you and tag you, and the fact that all the evidence connecting you to the fire in Osgood has disappeared, it seems to me that I sense the cool clammy hand of the federal government at work.”
“Or at least a dedicated retiree.”
“True enough. I guess the Gurkha’s arrival with three heads impressed him enough that he went out of his way to help you.”
I lifted my nearly empty bottle of beer. “Here’s to federal retirees.”
Felix clinked my bottle’s neck with his own. “Why not?”
After he took a swallow and put the bottle down, he said, “Speaking of retirees, what are you up to now?”
I kept my mouth shut for a minute or so and then leaned over the table. “Don’t rightly know. I’m at the proverbial loose ends. I have no job. My savings are being drained on a daily basis with my room here and my car rental. Plus I’ve also dropped a hefty deposit on some nineteenth-century lumber that I’m going to use to rebuild the house, and my contractor is pushing me to start work right away, before the first snows come.”
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