Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “It’s only the beginning,” warned the planning board chairman, whose sentiments were echoed by the building inspector, who feared Andover would become a bedroom town of Boston. In reality, it already was.

  The houses in varying stages of construction were garrisons, Georgian colonials, redwood contemporaries, flung-out ranches and splits, handsome Capes, outsize gambrels and saltboxes, and what the reporter called “California wingdingers with glass fronts, cedar ceilings, and ominous overhangs.” There seemed nowhere in the town’s sprawling thirty-two square miles that something wasn’t going up.

  Acreage off River Road, which included the old Henderson farm, was being parceled into thirty-eight lots. The site contained peach trees, Scotch pines, fields of loosestrife, and patches of sugar-fine sand and overlooked Wood Hill, which itself was under development, several of the houses already erected and landscaped. Atop the hill, Paige Gately pointed out to a prospective buyer that on a clear day one could see the Prudential Tower in Boston, some twenty miles away. The customer, put off by her aloof good looks and icy smile, eventually went to another broker and bought a place on Reservation Road, where the houses were being built in a strikingly modern manner under the confines of cluster zoning.

  The planning board chairman was an avid proponent of such zoning, which arranged house lots like pieces of pie around a delicacy of groomed grass, flowering shrubs, and ornamental trees. “A tiny park, so to speak,” the chairman said at a public hearing. “All you have to do is travel to a few sites to see that it works.”

  The building inspector was less enthusiastic about such zoning but praised the cul-de-sacs that went along with it — “nonthroughways traveled only by the mailman and the residents themselves.” One such cul-de-sac, in a choice part of town near the academy, was Southwick Lane, where a ranking Raytheon executive hired an architect to design a brick-front colonial along manorial lines. Four years later, when he went to work for the Nixon administration in Washington, the executive sold the property to Alfred Bauer, who, among other ventures, had a hidden interest in a string of health clubs under investigation by Boston vice squad detectives.

  Another area of construction, dramatic in its variety of houses, was the land around Wild Rose Drive, which included Strawberry Hill Drive, once the site of the biggest berry farm in the county. It was here, competing hotly with other brokers, that Paige Gately sold her first house, to an engineer for a Texas-based corporation that had transferred him into the area.

  Many in town damned the developers, but some expressed admiration for their ingenuity. On what became Oriole Drive, a contractor drove his equipment over pure ledge and, to the building inspector’s amazement, succeeded in digging and dividing the rock and grading it into lots, on which he interspersed colonials with ranches — the East with the West.

  Over on North Street, in order to use a scrap of back land, another contractor built a house that squatted in Andover but faced the tiny and deprived city of Lawrence, which for some complicated reason, provided the utilities. Andover, however, collected the taxes.

  Regulars in Lem’s Coffee Shop noted, without surprise, that no development, not yet at least, was taking place in the vast tract that meandered off Woburn Street and spread beyond Ballardvale Road. This was the so-called Tea Coupon land, which had hundreds of owners of lots within lots — dating back some seventy-five years when the Grand Union Tea Company promoted itself with coupons redeemable in parcels of plots the size of postage stamps.

  Nearby, however, houses were going up on the hundred-acre triangle that once had been the Anderson poultry farm; and in the town’s south section, underground utilities and storm sewers were installed in a lush development off Wildwood Road, where Paige Gately brokered a number of houses, some a few times over, angering other agents because she worked on a commission two or three points below the prevailing rate and would shave another point to save a sale.

  Farther south, a contractor was developing prime land off Gould Road bordering Harold Parker State Forest and Field’s Pond, where the high honk of Canadian geese was a haunting sound. A banker friend of hers steered a well-heeled client her way for one of the grander properties and later, out of earshot of the client, placed a soft white thumb against her cheek and whispered, “I still think about you.”

  This was also the neighborhood where, many years later, Rita Gardella O’Dea bought the custom contemporary, cash on the barrelhead, though by this time Paige Gately was no longer a broker. She did, however, receive a finder’s fee, which also was in cash. Attorney William Rollins discreetly laid down an envelope and murmured, “A token of Mrs. O’Dea’s appreciation.”

  She got out of the business during the Carter administration, when inflation and high mortgage rates froze the home-building industry and chilled the real estate market, which she could have weathered if her dying husband’s medical bills had not forced her to dip into her clients’ escrow accounts. Her banker friend, Ed Fellows, shuddered when she revealed the problem. “I’m not asking for help, just time,” she said, for her notes at his bank were overdue. His eyes turned suspicious and his voice jealous.

  “Who’s bailing you out?”

  “Alfred Bauer,” she replied readily and watched him flinch. “I also need a small favor,” she went on quietly.

  “Have I ever said no to you?”

  A month later Ed Fellows appeared before the planning board and vigorously endorsed proposals by Bauer Associates to build a motel in one part of town and a hundred houses in another.

  • • •

  As Andover’s population grew, so did its industrial base. Raytheon, Hewlett Packard, Gillette, and Digital Equipment all erected modern plants on the fringes of the town, where vast farmlands continued giving way to tree-shrouded industrial parks and office complexes. New companies coming in were usually in the high-tech field, though oldtime residents were scarcely aware of their existence. Their upper-echelon employees sought housing in the town, but the rank and file were anonymous commuters swerving off interstate highways in the morning and lurching right back on again at day’s end. “That’s the way we like it,” boasted one of the selectmen at a Chamber of Commerce dinner.

  Not all the companies, however, were desirable. A plastics manufacturer was suspected of pouring poisonous waste into the Shawsheen River, and a maker of polyurethane foam for cushions and mattresses went broke and left behind a hundred or so barrels of deadly chemicals, which worried the fire chief because some of the chemicals were explosive. But on the whole, few voices protested the town’s economic development, which stabilized the tax rate while ballooning property values celestial to begin with. “You don’t argue with affluence,” joked the selectman at the Chamber dinner, to which Alfred Bauer responded, “Hear, hear.” He was a recent resident of the town, but, through the efforts of Paige Gately and Attorney Rollins, he already seemed to know everybody who mattered.

  From his home on Southwick Lane, Bauer rang up a Boston number, heard Rita O’Dea’s heavy voice on the other end, and said, “Let me speak to your brother. Something to tell him.”

  “Tony’s busy. Tell me.”

  “I’m living in Andover.”

  “So?”

  “It’s where you plant money and watch it grow.”

  Three

  After William Rollins locked up his Mercedes for the night, a ghost followed him up the steps, through the door, and into the dark of his townhouse. He switched on a dull light, removed his coat, and stared into space. “I feel you more strongly than ever,” he said clearly and soberly, despite quivers in his legs, as if the floor were bending under him.

  He entered the deep shadows of the front room and made his way to the liquor cabinet with no need for a light. He knew where everything was. He poured a bourbon and tossed it down, then dried his lips with the edge of a finger. For a sweet second or so, he felt an emptiness of mind and a softness of mood. He poured himself another drink, larger, meant to last, and in the near-dark he took two s
teps toward his favorite chair and then stopped short, his breath catching.

  “What the hell are you doing in my house?”

  The shape in the chair stirred, and moonlight from the window gave the angular face a small glow. The voice that floated up was Sergeant Dawson’s: “Waiting for you.”

  “You have no right.”

  “I agree.”

  Rollins’s legs quivered again, but he quickly steadied them and licked away the droplets of bourbon that had slopped onto his wrist. “How did you get in?”

  Dawson raised a hand and with a jingle displayed a pouch of keys. “I took a chance one might fit.”

  “Is your key there as well, Sergeant?”

  Their voices were dry and muted, without tone. Dawson, though he did not show it, was suffering a headache of hammerstrokes proportion. He said, “She’s dead, Counselor. What do you think of that?”

  “I’m in shock. Paige Gately told the Bauers, who immediately got in touch with me. I’ve informed Mrs. O’Dea.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “We all had affection for Melody.”

  “Except yours was less obvious.”

  “Yes, different from yours.” Rollins sank into an overstuffed chair, one he usually avoided, and became a shadow. “Do you want a drink, Sergeant? I think you could use one. Please, help yourself.”

  Dawson rose, rested solidly on his feet until he got his balance, and made his way stiffly to the liquor cabinet, where he clanked bottles. “I can’t see,” he complained, and Rollins, with a slow movement, illuminated a table lamp.

  “Better?”

  Dawson treated himself to a taste of rye, his face drawn, as if in a melancholy. He stayed beside the cabinet, a hand resting on the top. “Would you like to talk about her?”

  “In memoriam?”

  “It seems appropriate.”

  Rollins smoothed back the hair at his temples. His bourbon glass was under the lamp. Wearily he removed his tinted spectacles. Without them, his face was stark and disconcerting, arch at the mouth. “A fascinating young woman. She taught me a lot.”

  “I’m sure she did.”

  “Doesn’t that bother you, Sergeant?”

  “I’ll let you know when it does.”

  “She said I used good body English in bed.”

  “Congratulations.”

  There was a pause as Rollins’s face seemed to push out, grow bigger. “I’m lying.”

  “I figured.”

  “I suspect you know more about me than you should.”

  “Probably. I apologize.”

  An acute silence followed. Dawson finished his rye, and Rollins nursed his bourbon, the vague threat of a curse on his lips. “What do you want, Sergeant? Why are you really here?”

  “Tell the Bauers I want to question their son. It doesn’t have to be at the station. It can be anywhere. Their house. Mine. Yours. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “They have until five tomorrow evening, no later.”

  Rollins smiled unbecomingly, and his voice gave an ominous coating to each word. “War of nerves. It won’t work.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “They’ll crush you.”

  Dawson began wending his way out of the room, a faint drag to his step. At the last moment he stopped and looked back. “Who was it you spoke to? Melody?” He smiled bleakly, without expecting a reply.

  “My mother.”

  Dawson kneaded his hot brow. “I should’ve guessed.”

  • • •

  Police and Fire were under the same roof in a brick building of colonial design, located on Main Street below Elm Square. Dawson got aspirin from the desk sergeant, who said, “Go home.” Instead he went into the fire station, borrowed bedding, and slept restlessly on a spare cot. He woke in the early morning with what felt like a cold footprint on his heart. A fireman said to him, “A tough one, huh, Sonny?” He cleaned his jaws with an electric shaver, showered, and returned to the same clothes, straightening with care the weakened lapels of his check jacket. The same fireman, offering him coffee, said, “Who was she? Anyone we know?”

  Another fireman said, “Chute’s looking for you.”

  A couple of hours later Dawson sat squarely behind his undersized desk in a basement cubicle of the police station. He smoothed his hair with his hand and cleared his throat. Before him was a brief statement typewritten on Town of Andover stationery. He had prepared it, and the Essex County district attorney’s office, through Chief Chute, had approved it. Clipped to his shirt was a button of a microphone and zeroed in on him was a hand-held camera from one of Boston’s lesser television channels. The Boston Herald, which sought sensation, had dispatched a reporter, but the Globe had not. A reporter and photographer were there from the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, but no one was present from the town’s weekly tab, which was going to press that day and would wait a week to report the murder.

  In a clear, inflectionless voice, Dawson read the statement. He gave the place, estimated time, and probable cause of death. The victim’s identity, he said, had not yet been positively established, but she was eighteen to twenty years old, her hair dark reddish brown, her height medium. The body showed evidence of a beating, homicide suspected. An autopsy was being performed at Lawrence General Hospital. He looked up from the statement and said, “That’s all I’m prepared to say for now, except that we don’t believe she was a resident of the town.”

  The reporter from the Herald, whose large features jammed his small face, said, “That doesn’t tell us much, Sarge. What was she doing in the motel?”

  Dawson ignored the question.

  The reporter said, “I heard something about a car being towed. Mazda. Hers?”

  “We’re checking.”

  “Any leads?”

  “None I can talk about.”

  “An arrest expected?”

  “That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Dawson freed himself of the microphone and was on his feet, slipping an arm into the wrinkled sleeve of a tan topcoat that was unlined and in danger of losing a button. He dodged the video camera, but the Herald reporter got a snatch of his sleeve.

  “Was she shacked up with somebody? I mean, she must’ve been, right?”

  Dawson said gently, “Let me be the detective.”

  “How come the DA’s got you in charge?”

  “I was on top of it. And he has confidence in me.”

  The reporter threw him an off-center smile. “Can I quote you on that?”

  “Please.”

  Ten minutes later, after a brisk uphill walk through Elm Square, the November wind pulling at him, he entered Lem’s Coffee Shop. It was past the early breakfast rush, with most of the regulars gone, but Fran Lovell was there. Her hand came out of a booth. “Sit with me, Sonny.” They had known each other since high school, where she had been a superachiever, salutatorian of her class. Now she was an officer at Citizens Bank, with a line from a dead marriage etched into her forehead. Dawson shook off his coat, and she shortened her voice. “If you were mine, I’d dress you better.”

  The waitress delivered coffee, a steaming cup for him, a refill for Fran, who immediately reached for the sugar, the gesture compulsive, as if it produced the only sweetness in her life. She said, “I heard there was a murder.”

  “How’d you hear?”

  “Billy Lord came in for a doughnut. He said it was a young woman.”

  Dawson glanced away. On the wall behind the luncheon counter, above individual-size boxes of Kellogg’s cereals, was a large oil painting of downtown done by a local artist nearly three decades ago. Smoke from cooking and grease from the grill had long since calmed the colors and infused the scene with an eerie quaintness. It was a time when the town’s population was less than fifteen thousand. Now it was twice that. He said, “Do you remember a couple of months ago I brought a girl to your desk? She opened a savings account. Melody Haines.”

  “I loved th
e name. Was it her, Sonny?”

  He nodded.

  She began to cry.

  “Don’t.”

  She grabbed a napkin. “Why am I doing this? I hardly knew her.”

  “Is the account still open?”

  “She closed it soon after. She came to me because she knew I’d remember her. How do you forget a face like that?” The sugar shaker was between them. She moved it. “It was your money, wasn’t it?”

  The edges of his face seemed to sharpen. “What makes you think so?”

  “You let yourself in for stuff. You always have.”

  He returned his gaze to the painting. Despite the countless times he had stared at it through the years, it never failed to nudge him, for fleeting seconds, into a mellower time, when no sorrow lasted long, when every hurt healed within the week, sometimes the hour. “I was trying to help her,” he said.

  “You don’t have to explain, Sonny. Certainly not to me.”

  “Fran, can I count on you?”

  “For what? Discretion? Of course.” She lit a cigarette and tipped her head back. She wore her hair long, but it lacked style and care, as if she no longer valued her appearance. “It must be difficult for you,” she said.

  “A little.”

  “Did you kill her?”

  After a lapse, he said, “Is that a serious question?”

  “No. I’m sorry.” Her hand started toward his, then crept back. “Who was she? What was she?”

  “Not now, Fran. OK?”

  “Sure, I understand. I always do.” She drew hard on the cigarette and smiled faintly through a hot haze of smoke. “Do you ever flip through the old yearbook, Sonny? All the pictures?”

  “Lent the book out,” he said absently, “never got it back.”

  “Christ, I was sweet. And you were something yourself. Girls went for you, did you know that? Of course you knew. You had your pick — and you weren’t even on the damn football team. Jocks hated you.” She gestured carelessly. “Remind me, Sonny, how many times did we date? A dozen? More?”