Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “Let’s talk about it.”

  The boy’s face was full of alarm, sweat on his nose, more on his upper lip. His bottom lip trembled.

  “Everybody still wants to help you. Dr. Stickney. Myself. You trust me, don’t you?” A bell rang in the room, throughout the school, startling them both. The stampede of feet was ubiquitous, endless rolls of thunder. “The business with Mrs. Medwick. I didn’t do you wrong there, did I?”

  He chose not to listen.

  “I helped you.”

  He gave Dawson a wild look. He was backing away, pushing the hair from his forehead, his eyes not truly in sync. Neither was his step. “I don’t have to talk to you ‘less I have a lawyer.”

  “I know you were at the Silver Bell. I know you made the call. Why’d you do that, Wally? You must’ve known I’d know.”

  “You can’t prove it.”

  “I don’t have to. You’ll tell me.”

  He stumbled, groped for the door, fumbled for the knob. Dawson did not try to stop him. He had the door open, one foot out. “Do you hate me?”

  It was a question Dawson could not answer.

  • • •

  Officer Billy Lord entered Lem’s Coffee Shop with a copy of the Herald furled under his arm. It was the lunch hour, no stool for him at the counter and no table vacant. He forged his way to the back, where Fran Lovell had a booth to herself and only a cup of coffee in front of her. “Don’t mind, do you?” He settled in opposite her, a knee bumping hers.

  “Would it matter?” she said with a tinge of asperity. He shifted the knee. “Don’t shake the table,” she said.

  “Ain’t you eating?”

  “Worry about yourself.”

  He opened a thumb-worn menu and meditated while a waitress stood with a poised pencil. He orderd a chicken salad on wheat. “Don’t toast it.” He flattened the newspaper and opened it. “And dessert. Let you know what when I decide.”

  He rattled pages to the gossip column, but his attention went to the article beneath it. Batting away smoke from Fran Lovell’s cigarette, he read swiftly. “You gotta show this to Ed Fellows,” he said with a laugh and pressed the paper partly toward her. “Banks in Boston are giving special service to the rich. Ordinary customers gotta stand in line to cash checks, but a guy with big bucks gets the red carpet. They usher him into posh privacy, give him a chair to sit in, and treat him to a glass of wine. If the guy’s wife’s with him, she can look at the latest Cosmo. Or, if she wants, she can use the private powder room. They probably got a little bell on the toilet. She rings it, some assistant vice-president charges in to tear the paper.”

  “Billy, shut up.”

  His sandwich arrived, a pickle and potato chips on the side. He nodded at the chips. “Have some.” She shook her head and lit a fresh cigarette.

  “I was there.”

  He gave her a blank look.

  “The cemetery,” she said.

  “The girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “A little.”

  “Sonny’s got the case. It’s in good hands.” He lowered his head to eat. She smoked, and he turned a page, continued to read, chewing with gusto. “Listen to this, Fran. A scientist experimenting with the genes of fruit flies made some with four wings instead of two and some with legs sticking out of their heads. I don’t think they should fiddle with things like that, never on people. You know, you could say that guy’s got a lot of balls and hurt his feelings. He might have twenty.”

  “You keep that up, I’ll throw coffee in your face.”

  He shrugged. “You got none left in your cup.”

  “Tell me about the case,” she said, and he returned to his sandwich, picked up the pickle.

  “Can’t talk about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Police business.”

  “That’s never stopped you before.”

  “Sonny’s orders.”

  She butted out her cigarette. “You think Sonny’s special. He’s not.”

  Billy Lord gathered up the chips and ate all of them, then used a napkin. “Let me tell you something I read yesterday in the Globe, about a doctor in Brookline.”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Just hear me out. Honest to God, it’s good.”

  With a whip of the wrist, she flashed the coffee cup at him, nothing in it but grounds, which spattered the arm of his padded police jacket. She was gone when the waitress came over and asked whether he had decided yet on dessert.

  “Cheesecake with strawberries,” he said.

  When he finished, he groped his way to the cashier, who took his check, rang it up, and said, “What was the matter with Fran?”

  “I was making her laugh.”

  “Couldn’t have, Billy. She was crying.”

  • • •

  The clerk at Macartney’s said, “Good fit, Sonny. Gives you the ivy league look. People will think you teach at Phillips.” The jacket was a gray herringbone with leather buttons and suede patches on the elbows. Dawson straightened his shoulders in the three-way glass, and the clerk gave his back a brush. “ ’Course the pants don’t go with it.”

  “How about tan corduroys? I’ve got a couple of pairs at home.”

  “Sure, Sonny, they’ll go.”

  He tugged the lapels. “I’ll wear it.” He stepped away from the mirrors and picked up his topcoat.

  “I’ll give you a hanger for the old one.”

  “Might as well heave it.”

  The clerk did not argue.

  On his way out he paused to glance at neckties, then at sweaters of varying hues, his fingers grazing the wool, his eyes narrowing at the prices. A voice behind him said, “Remember me, Sergeant?”

  For a second Dawson did not. The man’s face was long and ordinary and lacking something. He stood immobile, tense, waiting to be recognized and greeted.

  “How do you do, Mr. McCleaf.”

  He touched the top of his mouth. “No mustache.”

  “So I see.”

  “My wife thinks I should grow it back.”

  “She may have something there.”

  “I saw you come in. I waited.” He lowered his voice considerably. “I was afraid you might call my house.”

  “Why would I do that, Mr. McCleaf?”

  “You know. That girl.” He tried to take an easeful stance and failed. “When I read she’d been …” He pulled at his coat, as if his blood had run cold. “I was in New York that day, computerware exhibit. Two other fellows from Lee-Rudd were with me every minute.”

  “Did they know her too, Mr. McCleaf?”

  “No, God, no. What I meant was … if you want to verify …”

  “Is that what you want me to do?”

  He reddened. “No, I meant only if you … I only saw her that one time, Sergeant, so help me. And I appreciate what you did for me. If there’s ever anything I …” He stopped talking, expended verbally and emotionally, and sank back as if pushed by an invisible hand, Dawson’s.

  They left the store together.

  “Do you want to buy me lunch, Mr. McCleaf?”

  He deliberated with pain. “I …”

  “I guess you’d better not,” Dawson said. “We’d both gag.”

  • • •

  Wally Bauer cut his last class and drove away from the school in the white Mustang his father had given him the day after he had got his driver’s license. He passed two cars on Lowell Street and nearly sideswiped a pickup truck on North Main. The driver blasted his horn at him. When he pulled himself out of the Mustang in the lot of a McDonald’s, he blinked his eyes as if he had crawled out of the darkest cave.

  He ordered a Big Mac, French fries, a Coke. It was not till he had unsnapped his athletic jacket and settled at a table that the sight and smell of the food repelled him. He forced himself to pick up the bun, lettuce dripping out, and wrapped his mouth around the top of it, his stomach co
ntracting. A few minutes later, a napkin lying destroyed in his lap and another balled in his fist, he tried to take refuge behind a careless smile and the baby-fine hair falling into his face. At the next table a woman stared with birdseed eyes and spoke to him with a small, pointed mouth. “Don’t eat any more. Please.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  Verging on incoherence, he said, “We were sitting there.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Where you are.”

  “You’d best go home, young man.”

  Back in the Mustang, he sat behind the wheel with the door open, afraid he might be sick. His stomach stayed hot, but his face cooled in the brisk air. His heart bumped. Eventually the woman who had spoken to him came out of the restaurant. She noticed him at once and approached him with concern. Her voice smashed softly against him.

  “Can you drive?”

  “Yes,” he said, conscious of the highlights of her face and then of the long, vivid nails of her fingers.

  “I have two sons, so I know what you’re going through.”

  He let her words ripple over him. He did not hear them, he felt them. Her manner evoked better days, warmer weather, quieter times.

  “Whatever you’re on, get off it. You have your whole life ahead of you.”

  He looked at her yearningly and wished she would climb into the car, as if together they might mint ideas for a golden future. She was, all at once, miraculously, his mother, Melody, and Mrs. Medwick.

  “Drive carefully,” she said and shut his door hard. Then she was gone.

  Senses jarred, he drove up the hill to Elm Square, waited in line at the lights, and glanced over at the library, which he associated with shame. He had once been caught with a book under his sweater and had never returned. As he passed haltingly through downtown, he thought he glimpsed Sergeant Dawson’s rangy figure in front of Macartney’s, which gave him the shivers. He kept an eye in the rearview mirror the rest of the way home, fearing he was being tracked.

  No cars were in the garage, which meant he had the house to himself, a blessing. In the bath adjoining his bedroom, he turned on the tap over the oval sink, dashed his hands under the water, and slicked back his hair without looking at himself, instead expelling his breath against the mirror. Cramps put him on the toilet, and for fifteen minutes a fear of the runs kept him glued to the seat. When he rose, all that he flushed away was a single black marble of the sort a cat might eliminate when cornered and terrorized.

  In his bedroom he swayed in silence. He did not feel well at all. His head burned, and his throat was intractably sore. He looked at his bed and began shedding his clothes. Tucked up, cozy and private in the covers, safe from the world, he could lie on the tender edge of sleep and dream in spurts, the events in the dreams more vivid than those on the outside.

  Before pulling back the covers, he stepped to his cluttered desk, rummaged in a drawer, and drew out the diary he had never written in. His fingers grappled with the blank pages till he came to the right date. I didn’t do it, he wrote in a quick hand and left the diary where his mother would surely see it.

  • • •

  Dr. David Stickney had offices on North Main Street, in a small red wooden building with white trim. The small sign outside identified him as a licensed psychologist. A boxed advertisement, which Sergeant Dawson had torn from the Yellow Pages, listed services that included treatment for adult and adolescent sexual problems, all health insurance accepted. The waiting room was sedate. Framed documents pertaining to the doctor’s credentials adorned a wall. A woman wearing oversized spectacles said, “You may go in.”

  Dawson expected a leather couch but saw only chintz easy chairs, cream-colored drapes, more documents in frames, these of membership in professional societies. No desk. Dr. Stickney sat behind a small polished table that held only a tape recorder. He did not rise, and Dawson did not sit down.

  “I hope you don’t plan to turn that thing on.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.” The doctor displayed a small set of crowded teeth through a neat dark beard. He was tightly tailored in a plaid suit, the cuffs of his shirt fully exposed. The shirt was sky blue, the silk tie lavender. Dawson had the impression of a spider lurking in a flower.

  “You live on Sunset Rock Road. Nice houses there.”

  “I have a comfortable practice.”

  “I feel I know you quite well, Doctor.”

  “I feel the same about you. Nearly forty years old, they still call you Sonny.”

  “Some things stick.”

  “Rags of childhood. They cling to us all.” His tone was cool and ironic, yet professionally pleasant. “Now that we have that out of the way, why don’t you sit down?”

  Dawson chose a chair that drew him deeper into it than he expected. He undid his coat. He took out his pocket notebook and flipped a page or two, then searched for his pen.

  “You’re not really going to write in that, are you?”

  “I might.”

  “My father’s in a nursing home, Sergeant. When he was eight or nine, he buried a bag of pennies in the garden behind the three-decker he grew up in. Now he’s seventy-six years old and wondering if the pennies are still there. And brooding over the probability the garden is gone. I suppose you’re wondering what my point is.”

  “I’m simply waiting for you to make it.”

  “Melody Haines is gone. You can’t dig her up.”

  “What was she to you?”

  “My patient. I treated her.”

  “Yes, you treated her. A quid-pro-quo arrangement. You sent male patients to her at the Silver Bell for so-called therapy.”

  “She confided in you almost as much as she did in me. I was her doctor. What were you, Sergeant?” He stroked his beard. “You don’t have to answer that.”

  “You sent the Bauer boy to her.”

  “If I did, Sergeant, it was with his mother’s permission.”

  “Maybe even her suggestion.”

  “You’re treading into a doctor-patient relationship.”

  Dawson fluttered pages of his notebook. “What do you think, did he kill Melody?”

  “Was he capable? My opinion, Sergeant, is Wally Bauer would’ve killed his mother first. Not Melody. Melody was his angel.”

  “Yours too, right, Doctor?”

  He replied calmly. “I’m only human, Sergeant. Same as you.”

  Dawson’s face was set in a recalcitrant frown, and his hands lay as stones in his lap. “What you say about the kid, I don’t buy it. I think he killed her. He was at the motel. He nearly ran somebody down tearing away in that car of his. Later he made an anonymous call to the station.”

  “That’s information I didn’t know. But my opinion still holds. He’s not violent.”

  “He sure as hell scared the schoolteacher, didn’t he, Doctor?”

  “With what, Sergeant? Words. That’s the extent of his aggression.”

  “You mentioned his mother.”

  “Ironically.”

  “He’s a big boy, lot of muscle to him. Would you want him mad at you?”

  “He has been. A couple of times.” Dr. Stickney smiled dryly. “His parents put that body on him. He never knew how to use it, what to do with it. He hides in it. Lives in a world of his own, which isn’t necessarily bad.”

  “It is if you want to talk to him.” Dawson lifted a hand with effort, tucked away the notebook. “How long have you been in Andover? Four, five years?”

  “Nearly seven. Lovely community. I have a daughter at Phillips. Perhaps you saw her picture in The Townsman. She won a poetry prize.”

  “Did you know Alfred Bauer before coming here?”

  “A curious question. Why do you ask?”

  “I think you have a history of using hookers as therapists. I think Bauer supplied them when you practiced in Boston, and he’s obviously done it for you here.” Dawson gripped the arms of the chair and drew himself to his feet. “And I think you�
�re doing your best to protect his kid.”

  Dr. Stickney’s small teeth glittered inside his beard. “I don’t think it’s Wally Bauer you came here to talk about. You’ve already made up your mind about him.”

  “Then why am I here, Doctor?”

  “Melody. You want to know whether she had a death wish. Alfred Bauer told you she did, and I’ll confirm it for you. Yes, she wanted to die.”

  Dawson buttoned his coat. “Sorry. That’s something else from you I don’t buy.”

  “Only because you don’t want to.” Dr. Stickney rose from the table and ran a smoothing hand down his lavender tie. “She had a lot of disappointments in life, Sergeant. You were the final one.”

  • • •

  The room, lit only by the pale afternoon sun, had a chill to it. Harriet Bauer drew the covers from her son’s head and said, “What are you doing in bed?” His head was deep in a pillow, his eyes closed. “Answer me. I know you’re not asleep.” She pulled the covers from his shoulders.

  “Don’t, Mom.”

  “Are you sick?”

  “I hurt.”

  “Where?”

  “Everywhere.”

  She clamped a hand over his forehead. “Here?”

  “Yes.”

  She touched his smooth pink chest, coddling him in a game as if he were still a child, scarcely more than a baby, in dire need of her indulgence.

  “There too,” he said.

  She drove a tender hand under the sheet. “And your tummy?”

  “Yes.”

  She went into his bathroom and returned with a thermometer, which she coaxed into his mouth, under his tongue. “Be quiet,” she ordered and waited the proper time before withdrawing it, an endless thread of saliva trailing it like a ghost of the cord that once bound them. She squinted. He was running a slight temperature. “Get up,” she said. “We’ll sweat it out.”

  He tried to return the covers to his shoulders but was thwarted. “I’m scared.”

  “Not my boy. Come on, a few laps in the pool. Together.” She forced him out of bed, and he stood shivering, his legs posted awkwardly behind the bulbous pouch of his tangerine briefs. He seemed afraid to breathe, as if something alien would whisk him away.

  “Is it over?” he asked with a wheeze.