Love Nest

by Andrew Coburn

  “No need for that, sir. Your wife will be here soon with the bondsman.”

  “She’s a good woman, Sergeant. Keeps her area clean.” With a trembling hand he pawed into the flap pocket of his damp fitted shirt, white hairs steaming through the spaces between the buttons. “Mind if I smoke?”

  Dawson sheltered a flame for the man’s unfiltered cigarette and used the opportunity to look into his deep-set eyes. The pupils were enormous. “What kind of medication are you on, sir?”

  “Couldn’t tell you. Pills are all laid out for me three times a day. Big buggers, some of ’em.” He coughed, his face ghostly. “Whole world’s on medication, so I don’t feel different.”

  “You don’t look good. You want water or something?”

  “I’m fine.” His loaded eyes heaved forth. “You should wear your uniform, Sergeant. You got the leanness for it. Twenty-six years I was in, had every color woman in the world. That’s what I miss the most. The whores. Some you wouldn’t give two cents for, but some, Sergeant, you never forget.” His shoulders quivered as if he were having a small epiphany.

  “I’ll get you water,” Dawson said to him, but he held up a hand.

  “There was one, Sergeant, so sweet and special and young, fourteen at the most, I wanted to adopt her. But the wife wouldn’t hear of it.” The air went out of him. “Got any like that around here?”

  Dawson took an extra breath. “Not in this town, sir. We don’t allow it.”

  • • •

  Done for the day, he did not go home. Instead he drove through the swelter of the town, the sun hanging low, the heat sticking in, and got onto Interstate 495, where he saw flashes of heat lightning. In less than a half hour he crossed the New Hampshire line and fifteen minutes later reached the coast, a beach in Rye, and wedged his car into an unlikely space off the hot road. The beach, which numbered among the smaller ones, was a bivouac of bright umbrellas, with a youthful crowd swarming the water’s edge and a speedboat frothing over distant waves. An ocean breeze drifted up.

  He stripped to his chinos, rolling the legs up to his knees, and stashed his weapon and wallet in the trunk of the car. Halfway down the beach, he paused to relish the breeze against his chest. A man in a fisherman’s cap and swim trunks, his face and body pleasantly old, smiled with strong teeth and said, “Careful you don’t burn.”

  “Sun’s low.”

  “Don’t matter.”

  He strode closer to the surf along a path between masses of cast-up pebbles as smooth as bird eggs. The sun blistered behind a plodding cloud. A woman with drawn-apart breasts running loose under her zebra-striped bathing suit asked him the time. He was not wearing his watch, but he gave her a good guess. “I didn’t think it was so late,” she said, gazing at his relative paleness. Her eyes crinkled with concern. “The sun’s still strong.”

  “Yes, I’ve been warned.”

  Somewhere on the beach kids were smoking dope. He could smell it, for the breeze had shifted. She sniffed it too. “You can’t stop them,” she said with careless resignation. “They all do it, my daughter included. If not here, then somewhere else.”

  She moved off smartly, the stripes of her suit apportioning her body with a vibrancy it did not quite deserve. She took shelter under an umbrella, and he wandered farther down the surf, fewer bathers, a multitude of sea birds, and goosestepped into the water, which was not as warm as he expected. A cold current sliced through his legs and soaked his chinos, outlining his loose change and the keys to his car. When a wave wet him everywhere, he came out and lay on pebbles to dry off, his face to the sun.

  He fell asleep for at least ten minutes, though no more than fifteen. He woke with a start and sat up with an ache. Bright voices of girls surrounded him, a bevy of nymphets in the scantest of suits, chattering away as if he were not there. At times their language was offensive, downright vulgar. Somebody they did not like was a fucking asshole. Somebody’s mean mother was a cunt. Suddenly a hand swept at him like a hot ray.

  “You’re burning,” said the woman in the zebra stripes, which were now providing her soft belly swell with an illusionary rippling of muscles. Her hand, which had never actually touched him, floated away. “Mostly your chest,” she informed him gravely. He looked down at himself, and when he looked back up she was gone.

  The girls had drifted closer to the surf, and some were venturing into it. Some were talking to a lifeguard, a husky towheaded youth who idly reached deep into his trunks and shifted his genitals. One girl had dropped onto the sand and was lying on a propped elbow with her salt-scaled legs angled into an attitude of running. Dawson, though he sensed somebody approaching him from behind, could not take his eyes off her. She looked nothing like Melody in the face, but the dark auburn of her luxuriant hair was the same, and the long loping line of her body was similar. A voice thudded down at him.

  “Look at ’em long enough, they’ll drive you crazy.” It was the man in the fisherman’s cap. “They’ll also put you in jail if you’re not careful.”

  Dawson rose to his feet, his chinos soggy and clumsy. He stood taller than the man but only because he was on a higher rise of pebbles.

  “Rule of thumb is pick on somebody your own age. Gets you in less trouble.” The man smiled with his strong teeth. “Name’s Paul,” he said and stuck out a hand.

  Dawson shook it. “Sonny.”

  “Cop, ain’t you?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I was watching when you drove up. I saw what you put in your trunk. I used to carry one myself, thirty-two years, town of Rye. In fact, I was chief. Guess I know about everybody in town, including the summer crowd. That girl lying down there in the bitty bathing suit, her family’s been coming here since she was four. She’s fifteen now, do you believe it? They bloom fast nowadays.”

  “Too fast.”

  “Glad you realize that.”

  Dawson felt a weary give to his shoulders and a guilt he did not expect. “You’re reading me wrong.”

  “I just don’t want you to get yourself in trouble. One cop to another.”

  With no desire to argue or defend himself, Dawson said, “I’ll be leaving now.”

  “Yes, Sonny. A damn good idea.”

  • • •

  No lights were visible in his house, but her little car was in the drive, which surprised him. Her place in Boston, she had told him, had air-conditioning; his did not. He moved quietly out of his car into the dark air, which was breathless and clammy. It was worse inside the house, for the heat of the day had collected. In the kitchen he switched on a light and called her name and heard only insects ticking away outside the window. Stiffly he climbed the stairs and peered past the open door into the room that had become hers. The little night lamp was unlit. He took one step in and stopped. Moonlight shredding in through a tree patterned her. Clad only in her brief underwear, she lay on the bed in the same attitude as the girl on the beach.

  “Where were you?” Her tone was accusatory. He took another forward step. The stuffiness of the room was oppressive.

  “How can you stand it in here?”

  “I waited and waited,” she said. “I even worried.”

  A kind of scowl clenched his face out of proportion. “Are you on something?”

  “I swear I’m not. I don’t pop anything. I’m clean in every way.” One foot was snarled in a sheet that had been kicked away. Stirring, she freed the foot. “Can’t you come closer? I can’t see your eyes.”

  He sat on the edge of the bed, his partially dry chinos stiff with sea salt. “This can’t go on,” he said, and she shivered as if from fever.

  “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She eased over, onto her back, and propped her head against pillows. “The sound of your steps on the stairs told me.”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I would never betray him, Sonny. I would never betray anybody.”

  He spoke hoarsely. “They used you, the both of them. They even made you avai
lable to their son. That was sick.”

  “I’ve told you too much, Sonny. Now you’re throwing it up at me.”

  He sat rigidly with his hands on his thighs, his loose and wrinkled shirt mostly unbuttoned. When the air changed subtly, his burnt chest felt it and then his nose detected it. “I don’t mean to,” he said.

  “But you are. I don’t see any of them anymore, not even the shrink.” She lifted herself slightly, her face framed in her spread of hair. “I’m independent of them all.”

  “For that you need a job.”

  “I’ll get one.”

  “A real one.”

  “I promise.”

  “Promise yourself, not me,” he said. He knew that a breeze was gently kicking up by the changing pattern of moonlight on her tight stomach. The foot she had freed shifted closer to him.

  “I’m independent of everyone, except you.”

  “You’re nineteen,” he said. “At that age you’ve got a hundred options. I should be the least of them.”

  “I don’t see it that way.” A breeze blew in strong, and leaves outside the window swirled as if to music. There was lightning but no thunder. “It’s going to rain, Sonny. Like it did that first time.”

  He felt the shock of her foot against him almost as if it were a knife. He gripped the slim, hard ankle from the back as the curtain billowed and the first serious drops of rain struck the screen. He meant to cast her foot aside, but instead he gathered it up and traced a thumb over the instep.

  “I want it to happen,” she said. “More important, we both do.”

  He folded his hand over her toes. “You’re a child.”

  “A woman, Sonny.”

  “No. When you’re a woman I’ll be an old fart. I felt like one today.”

  “I’m a woman now, Sonny. Have been for years.”

  “Then I’m the child.”

  • • •

  The rain came down in earnest, soaking the curtains and flooding the floor. She lay level now, her head no longer in the pillows but her foot still in his grasp, the heel pressed into his lap. “You can have part of me or all of me. Whatever you want.”

  He took all of her.

  The rain continued through the night, intermittent downpours, lulls of drizzle and mist, occasional lightning, some thunder. The sun rose behind a cloud cover but soon burst clear, with Dawson there to see it from his backyard. The tree near the house gave out its sharpest green and cast a vast shadow. A random breeze pushing through the sodden leaves sounded like people shaking their umbrellas.

  Phlox grown too tall nodded to him as if in deference. He had planted them. When he lifted his eyes toward the house he knew she was out of bed and tidying up. Sounds carried. He heard the snap of a clean sheet.

  He stepped into the garden shed his father had built and began idly poking about. Among the usable things were a short wooden ladder missing a rung, an apple basket rotted out at the bottom, and a rusted shovel lacking a grip. He was not really looking for anything. He simply did not want her to see him just yet.

  In fifteen minutes or so she came out with a pair of scissors and crouched over marigolds and mums in full bloom. She made a bouquet. He approached her slowly, dusting his hands as if he had been working. She said, “I didn’t hear you get up.”

  “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  Each was oddly self-conscious. She rose with the bouquet and dropped a mum. He bent double to pick it up. She pushed the bouquet at him. “For you.”

  “I should have picked them for you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Why are you so quiet?”

  “I’m always quiet in the morning.”

  “No you’re not.”

  She was dressed in a loose T-shirt, one of his, nothing beneath. Later, in the house, he asked her to put something else on. “Why?” she asked. “Are we going somewhere?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She did not want to go to the bank with him, but he insisted. While she waited in the car, he went into one bank, Andover Savings, and drew out money, asking for it in cash and taking it in fifties and hundreds inside a buff envelope. “Hold this for me,” he said, back in the car. Then they went to another bank, Andover Citizens, where he softened his footstep, guided her to the desk of someone he knew, and started an account for her. “It’s money I won’t miss,” he told her after it was done, the passbook in her pocket, the sun in their eyes outside the bank. Her lips, pinched together, came apart.

  “You’re getting rid of me.”

  “It’s money for you to fall back on if you’re ever in need.”

  “Meaning you don’t want me to fall back on you. Is that it?” She lowered her eyes and monitored every step they took back to the car, which she entered docilely. “You didn’t even ask me if I wanted it,” she said as they pulled out of the lot. “You’re kissing me off. Why?”

  He ran a red light. “It’s no longer a professional relationship.”

  “It never was.”

  He turned clumsy and nearly struck a mail truck emerging onto Main Street. It was hot in the car, and he mopped his face with his sleeve. She looked away, out her window, then back at him.

  “You’ll never find anyone like me again.”

  “I know that,” he said, and his heart turned over.

  “You love me, Sonny. If you say you don’t, you’re lying. To me. To yourself. But I don’t fit in this town of yours, so how the hell can I fit into your life. Right?”

  He looked at her. Her eyes were full.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “I’m not the kind to cry.”

  He sped along South Main Street and then slowed for the turn onto Ballardvale Road, where the scented dust of summer drifted in on them. When he angled into the drive and coasted to a stop beside her little car, she extended a fist, something inside it.

  “Here,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Your key.”

  Twelve

  Sergeant Dawson emerged from Lem’s Coffee Shop and spotted the slight spruce figure of Dr. Stickney. Braving a sweep of bruising wind under the unbroken blue of an enormous December sky, he hustled across the street and followed the doctor through the busy sidewalk crowd past Nazarian’s Jewelry Store and Thompson’s Stationery. Then he trailed him into Citizens Bank, where the doctor proceeded briskly to one of the island counters. When he began preparing a deposit slip, Dawson edged up and said, “Don’t you bother to return calls?”

  He glanced up casually, dapper in his snug overcoat and confident behind the gloss of his close beard. “I’ve been busy. Patients come first.”

  “You must be doing well.”

  “Extremely. I’m shifting into straight marriage counseling. Very lucrative. So many Andover women are unhappy with their high-powered husbands, and so many of these fellows are coming apart. You know their worst nightmare, Sergeant? One day they’ll walk into work, Raytheon, Digital, one of those classy places, and find they’re no longer wanted. If that happens, it’s not themselves they won’t want to face. It’s their neighbors.”

  “It’s hard for me to work up sympathy.”

  “Not for me, Sergeant. It’s my livelihood.” He returned his attention to the deposit slip, but the pen, dangling a loose chain, quit writing. He tried again, scratching hard, but it had gone dry. “Do you have a pen?”

  “Pencil.”

  “That’ll do.”

  Dawson gave him a stub, and the doctor completed the task in an impeccable hand, the figures neat, tight, and small, like his teeth. Dawson said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Tell you what? Whatever it was, I probably didn’t want to overload your brain. Sorry, Sergeant. Just a joke. What didn’t I tell you?”

  “It wasn’t suicide.”

  Dr. Stickney deliberated before responding, then gave himself added time. “Are we talking about the Bauer boy?”

  “Nobody else.”

  “You say it wasn’t suicide. What was it?”

&nb
sp; “An accident.”

  “Very good, Sergeant. Are you brilliant, or did somebody put a bug in your ear?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters very much since the medical examiner ruled suicide.”

  “Such accidents usually are.”

  “Yes,” said Stickney with a measure of distant formality. “Usually through ignorance or a wish to spare the family.” He looked around at the queues leading to the teller windows. “But this is a matter best discussed in camera.”

  “Nobody can hear us.”

  After a lapse, Stickney said, “Yes, it could’ve been an accident, but I don’t know that. I didn’t see the body.”

  “But you knew his history, his habits. You knew his bent behavior.” Dawson’s voice jabbed at him like a knife that had been held in secret. “That couldn’t have been the first time he twisted something around his neck.”

  “Everybody has psychological tics, Sergeant. His happened to be pathological and involved risk to himself.”

  “The less oxygen, the greater the orgasm.”

  “I see you’ve been briefed. Ultimate high, sin of Onan. The trick of course is not to hang yourself doing it.” Stickney undid the dark buttons of his coat, his manner infinitely calm. “You’d be surprised at the number of teenage boys found dangling in the shower. Not that the practice is rampant, but it’s not all that rare among troubled males sexually confident only with themselves.”

  “Did his parents know he was into this?”

  “Let’s put it this way, Sergeant. His father didn’t.”

  Dawson looked deeper into the bank, beyond a rail to busy desks. He glimpsed Fran Lovell, but she did not see him. She was preoccupied with a customer and her desktop computer. Her lips, he noticed, were not set in a pretty way.

  “Really, Sergeant, does it matter which way he died?”

  He glimpsed Ed Fellows chatting deep in the lobby with a dowager of the town, who was perched plump and heavy under a crown of pastel hair, the hues pinkish and blue. Stickney returned the pencil stub.

  “Does it change anything?”

  “Everything,” Dawson said.

  “Then I’ll give you a theory,” Stickney said, still with the utmost calm. “I think he went into his closet for a double purpose. To please himself … and, Sergeant, to kill himself.”