"Ah, Stephen, Stephen. What an unfortunate story. Oh, one of today's wicked novelists would have a field day with his sad life. But the brightest boy, the absolute brightest I've ever seen. No one, not even in the class of 1959 could touch him."
"Actually, Miss Pitts," I broke in, setting my cup, saucer, and goodies on the floor, "what I'm interested in is whether anyone has touched him. In the unfriendly sense, I mean."
"Uh, quite," said Miss Pitts, a bit miffed, I thought. "Well, as I told Miss Jacobs this morning, two weeks ago, on the twelfth, I was taking my evening exercise. I used to call it my constitutional, but after the way some groups have twisted one meaning of that word, I have ceased to use it at all. In any case, while I was walking down Ballard Street, I saw Stephen ahead of me, carrying his books. No doubt he was so late in heading home—it was nearly five-thirty, you see—because he had visited the library after school. Well, seeing him I was about to call to him, when a black sedan screeched to a halt on the street beside him. He took one look at the driver and was gone."
"Did the driver go after him?" I asked.
"Hah, not likely. Stephen is as springy and quick as an antelope. That Gerry Blakey couldn't have caught him on horseback, assuming a horse could bear him any better than this town can."
"What happened then?"
"Well, Blakey, who'd gotten half out of the driver's side, muttered something, slid back in, and drove off."
I leaned back. Miss Pitts's eyes might be getting a little weak, but she wouldn't be likely to mistake Stephen, and no one could mistake Blakey.
"Why didn't you report this to the police?" I asked.
She gave me a sour look. "The police? Hmph. Will Smollett is a fool who can't even control the teenage hoodlums in this town, much less be its chief investigative officer. Besides, he's in the judge's pocket. Everyone knows that. And if Blakey was chasing Stephen, the judge was likely connected with Stephen's leaving. That's why I decided to tell Eleanor."
"You mean Valerie."
She determinedly set down her teacup and rose.
"Young man, you are smug, and you are rude. If I were to say 'Valerie' I would mean Miss Jacobs. When I say 'Eleanor,' I mean Eleanor Kinnington. I'm afraid this interview is over."
I glanced to my right. Valerie seemed as stunned at the reference to Mrs. Kinnington as I was.
I stood politely and looked at our hostess. "Miss Pitts, please accept my apology. I was rude, and I assumed you were a meandering old woman who might confuse things. I was wrong. But I've been retained to try to find a probably terrified fourteen-year-old child, and you're the first bright spot I've come across. Can we please talk a while longer?"
Miss Pitts's face softened, and she sat back down.
"He is such a dear, dear boy."
We covered the intersections of Miss Pitts's and Stephen's lives during the prior six months. Nothing was produced that sounded helpful. I decided that a quiet interlude was appropriate before we moved back to tougher ground.
"What can you tell me about Telford Kinnington, the judge's brother?"
Miss Pitts gave a bittersweet smile. "Ah, Telford Kinnington. He was three years younger than the judge, and enough unlike him to have been bought from the Gypsies. The judge, who went to public school here too, was a plodder. Everything seemed to come easily to Telford, though. A gifted student, a fine athlete at Harvard, and a true patriot, Mr. Cuddy.
Telford didn't just talk about this country, he died lighting for it. Only a few months after he'd been, home on leave, too. In fact, I still have the newspaper account of his last battle. Just a minute."
She bustled over to a stuffed bookcase and levered out a scrapbook. I feared a lengthy, unproductive tangent coming on. I thought about telling her to forget it but decided I was talking to her on borrowed time as it was.
"Let me see," she said, turning pages with agonizing slowness. "Yes, yes, here it is." She passed me the open book.
There were two accounts, one from the Banner, a local paper, and one from the Globe. Both were dated April 11, 1969. According to the local paper, Captain Telford Kinnington had led his company in a counter-attack from an American position against a much larger Vietcong force that was engaging a separate sector of the position. He and nearly a quarter of his company (about 40 of 160) were killed or wounded, but the VC had been annihilated. The medal he'd received, however, was, in my experience, not a very substantial award for a heroic charge.
The Globe article, written a bit more tongue in cheek, implied ever so gently that his action had been unnecessary and reckless. It also indicated that he'd entered the service as a second lieutenant five years earlier and had only recently been promoted to captain—a long time to wait for his second bar in those casualty-ridden late sixties. I noted the part of the war zone involved and remembered that I knew someone from Intelligence who'd served there after I'd come home.
I then swung the conversation as delicately as I could back to the judge's late wife. Miss Pitts was reluctant at first, but once I emphasized the importance of my knowing Stephen's earlier life, our hostess lapsed into the nearly universal enthusiasm with which people discuss those who appear big but turn out to be little.
"Diane Kinnington was a terror, Mr. Cuddy, a demon from hell. The judge met her when he was in law school. At iirst she was an enchanting girl, and I served with her on several town committees just after their marriage. Diane continued to be active in town matters far into her pregnancy with Stephen. But for a while before he was bom, she began acting . . . well, strange. She appeared at committee meetings with alcohol on her breath. She walked past people she knew on the street as though she never saw them. She began wearing sunglasses even into the evening, and despite two servants at the big house, she sometimes slipped into Carver's, the small grocery store in Meade Center, to buy odd items. Then one September night something happened. I've never talked with anybody who knew just what. But Diane was hospitalized, and Stephen was born a few hours later, two months premature."
"Miss Pitts, can you tell me who would know what happened that night?"
She frowned. "Yes, for all the good it would do. Her obstetrician couldn't be reached in time, and Dr. Ketchum, who was the family's doctor, rushed down and delivered her of Stephen. He wouldn't talk about it, and he died a few months later. Both servants, a woman and her husband, were let go within a week, I suspected because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on her and somehow failed. They headed south somewhere. No one else that I know of was invo1ved."
"How did she get to the doctor's office?"
"Her husband."
"But surely, if she was hospitalized, there'd be records of what her trouble was."
"Oh, she was hospitalized, all right, but in a private place, if you get me."
"A sanatorium?" I decided to use the "old parlance."
"Yes, out in the Berkshires."
Coincidence? "Does the name Willow Wood ring any bells?"
"What?"
"The name Willow Wood. Was that the sanatorium Diane Kinnington was in?"
She shook her head. "I don't know. I think it was the same one Stephen stayed in."
"What do you know about the night Diane died?"
She sighed. "Even less, I'm afraid. Just the newspaper stories, and I didn't keep them. After Stephen was born, Diane seemed to . . . well, rally back in spirit. Then, a few years later, she began to decline again. By the time Stephen reached my class, she had declined frighteningly. If her earlier conduct was strange, her later behavior was wicked. Drunkenness, rowdiness, and...well..."
"Miss Pitts, I know this must be difficult—"
"Oh, you know nothing, young man, nothing!" she snapped. "You know I'm relatively old and therefore you 'know' that I'm patriotic and narrow-minded and a prude. Well, we may have felt strongly about some things when I was young, like love of country and order and respect. But maybe we felt differently about other things than you think we did. And maybe while we didn't go around talking
about things, we nevertheless knew how to enjoy ourselves. But what we didn't do was what she did with every male that she could."
"Message received and understood, Miss Pitts," I said. She calmed down a bit, and Valerie gave me an approving smile. "What about Stephen thereafter?"
She sighed again. "He'd been so obviously affected by his mother's behavior. He had become erratic in school, and then his mother showed up roaring drunk for a student-teacher conference, with a . . . a man waiting for her in the car. Well, things must have been twice as bad at home. The day after Diane's accident, the judge whisked Stephen away to the sanatorium. The school records don't show it, but I'm sure that poor boy suffered a complete nervous breakdown. He returned to school the next year. He had lost a year, but he seemed to be doing so well until now."
"Do you remember anything else that might help us?" I asked.
"I'm afraid not. Although . . ."
"Yes?" prompted Valerie.
"Well," she looked from Valerie to me, "there was a reporter named Thomas Doucette on the Banner at the time Diane died. The rumor was that he'd been assigned to the story and, well, covered it a little too well. Anyway, no article by him appeared in the paper, and he quit the Banner a few weeks later, though most people figured he was tired. Just as well actually. He was the least gifted boy in the class of '61, and certainly not destined for the Pulitzer Prize."
"Does he still live in Meade?" I asked.
"No. No, he lives somewhere in Boston now. At least that's what I remember from his uncle's funeral, and that was, oh, two years ago. You might try his parents, though. They're retired, too, and live on Moody Street."
I had run out of topics, so I decided there was nothing to be lost by asking what was on my mind.
"One last thing, Miss Pitts. What did Eleanor Kinnington say when you told her about seeing Blakey with Stephen?"
Miss Pitts, to my great surprise, blushed and her look saddened. "Well, what could she say? She said she had suspected as much but had hoped against hope that she was wrong."
"Wrong about what?"
Miss Pitts suddenly stabbed several times at a box of tissues on the table next to her.
"Gerald Blakey is thirty years old and has never been seen in this town in the company of a woman, Mr. Cuddy. Isn't that enough to be wrong about?"
She hurried from the room, crying.
THIRTEENTH
-♦-
"I guess you don't feel like a picnic anymore, do you?"
We were back in the car, and Valerie's were the first words spoken since we'd left Miss Pitts.
"Actually, I'd love a picnic," I said; she smiled broadly. "As long as the conversation level is low enough to give me some time to sort things out."
"Terrific!" she said, and shook her hair down onto her shoulders.
"But first," I said, "let's be sure we can reach this Thomas Doucette character, class of '61."
We stopped at a gas station and I called Boston information. No Thomas Doucette nor T. Doucette. Then I tried the elder Doucettes. Again, no listing in Meade. We decided to stop at Moody Street and see the Doucettes on the way to the beach.
Valerie directed me up and down and left and right through semi-rural, increasingly narrow roads. If there was a poorer section of Meade, this was it. We pulled onto Moody Street and up to a small and old, but neatly kept, ranch house to which someone had added a little greenhouse. The mailbox had "Doucette" in paste-on letters. There were three or four similar homes on the street, but no sense of development or planning. It was as though the distance between houses was less a function of privacy or exclusivity and more a reaction to the undesirability of the intervening and uneven scrub-pine land.
A small, four-door American subcompact sat in the driveway, and a small woman stood at the screen door. We left our car and started up the path toward her.
She had been watching us leave the car and approach her. She stepped outside and looked around. She had light blue hair and a troubled expression.
"May I help you?"
"Yes," said Valerie. "Are you Mrs. Doucette?"
"Yes."
"Mrs. Doucette, I'm Valerie Jacobs. I teach eighth grade at the Lincoln Drive School. This is a friend of mine, John Cuddy. We'd like to contact your son Thomas."
By the time Valerie had finished, we were nearly to her. At the mention of Thomas, Mrs. Doucette stiffened and eyed us both very carefully.
"Thomas doesn't live here anymore," she said carefully.
"We know," I said.
"He also likes his privacy," she continued.
"And he's entitled to enjoy it," I said.
Before I could continue, Valerie broke in. "Mrs. Doucette, we simply need to speak with him about a news story he covered years ago. A young boy's safety is at stake."
Mrs. Doucette's eyebrows shot up. "The Kinnington boy?"
"That's right," said Valerie, flashing her most ingratiating smile.
"Goddamn him!" Mrs. Doucette bit off her words.
"Goddamn him and his whole family!" She stormed into the house, slamming the screen door behind her. She whirled. "And you! Goddamn you for reminding me of them!" She slammed the inner door.
"What the . . ." began Valerie.
"Face it, Val. You blew it. You're just not cut out for this kind of work."
I was back in the car and had it started by the time a frowning, frustrated Valerie tired of knocking at the Doucettes' door and began walking down to me. Valerie had gotten over my teasing by the time we reached the parking lot of the swimming beach. We respectively entered a rustic, large cabin, "Men" on one side and "Women" on the other.
Coming out of the women's side of the locker building, Val's legs looked a little thicker than they had in the other outfits I'd seen her wear to date. The rest of her looked triple A, however. I got a slight flush when she flickered an appraising eye over my new physique. This was the first time I'd worn a pair of trunks in quite a while, and I decided I liked sporting the results my conditioning had produced. We walked toward the water.
The long, manmade swimming beach edged into trees and picnic tables at one end and into a parking lot at the other. The beach was nearly empty, most people being under the trees at the tables. Owning no sandals, I toughed out the blistering sand in bare feet. We finally pitched our blanket at what looked like a quiet spot about fifty feet to the left of a perfectly tanned elderly couple sitting and reading in half-legged sand chairs.
We talked around Mrs. Kinnington for a while before I brought her up.
"You know, Val, I'm on the verge of leaving this case."
Her face was stricken. "Oh, please, John—please don't!"
I rearranged my legs Indian-style on the blanket.
"Look, I won't be violating any confidence by telling you that my client did not mention word one about Miss Pitts and the scene with Stephen and Blakey. That could be an important link in the chain of Stephen's disappearance, and if Mrs. Kinnington knew about it, she should have told me."
She faked casualness by stretching out on her stomach, longways to the just-past-zenith sun. "Is the reason he left really that important to your finding him?"
I leaned back. "Possibly, yes; probably not, if he's gone voluntarily."
"But Mrs. Kinnington said she told you that the things he took were only things he'd know to take."
I closed my eyes. "Yeah, but that suggests only that he voluntarily decided to leave. It doesn't go far in suggesting what might have happened twenty feet from his back door."
She came up to her knees with a start. "Do you really believe something happened to him?"
"That's just the problem, Val. I'm not being helped by anybody in this case, or even permitted to gather the facts I could use to reach a decision like that."
She put her hand on my right forearm and squeezed, a little too long and a little too hard. "John,
you know that—"
The moment was broken by a loud and worthy curse from the elderly man next to
us. Three boyish bruisers, built like college football players, were laughing at him and his wife. He rose from his chair and shook a book-clutching list at a sign I could barely read while he and his wife brushed sand off themselves.
"The goddamned sign says no goddamned ball playing on the beach!" he yelled.
The biggest of the three, cradling the ball professionally in the crook of his arm, replied, "Fuck you."
"We'll get the cops!" yelled the old man.
"And the lifeguard!" yelled the old woman.
"The fuckin' cops are off drinking and the fuckin' lifeguard knows I'll kick his ass if he lets his shadow fall on me." The other kids laughed, and they continued their running and passing drills up the beach. The big boy had the right moves; the other two were barely adequate. The old man sat down sputtering.
"Nice kid," I said to Val.
"Craig Mann," she said disgustedly. "His father's a selectman, so nobody will do anything about him. He was a real high school star, tight end, I think. Last fall the local paper was full of his gridiron heroics at U Mass/Amherst."
"Why wouldn't the local paper have been full of Stephen's disappearance?"
She frowned. "Judge Kinnington probably owns most of it."
I leaned back down. "A few more questions, then some fuel and reflection," I said. I felt her settle her bottom on the blanket like a witness on the stand. I also felt a stirring in my trunks that I hadn't expected.
"Did you ever have reason to believe that Stephen was involved with Blakey in any way, with or without consent?"
"No. I mean Stephen is not exactly average, but he's not abnormal. At least, not that way. I don't mean I think that . . . that that is abnormal, you know, if that's what an adult, two adults, I mean, decide to do, but . . ."
"Okay. Assuming Stephen left involuntarily, he could have been taken to a place none of us would ever guess or stumble on. So let's assume that Stephen's on his own. We don't know where he went, but we have to start somewhere. So how would he get where he's going?"
"Hitchhiking," said Val as she squeaked open the Styrofoam chest. "John, I'm sorry, but I'm starving. Can we start just a little bit early?" I didn't like her voice when it wheedled.
Blunt Darts - Jeremiah Healy Page 6
