Open Season (Joe Gunther Mysteries)

by Archer Mayor

  Her mouth opened and shut. “I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that?”

  “I didn’t tell you. Only Frank and Brandt knew about it. There was no harm done.”

  “Ski Mask saved your life?”

  “Maybe. We don’t know. I thought so at first. That’s what he said; that someone was trying to derail the investigation into the Harris thing by killing me and making it look like an accident. Frank thought that was all baloney—that Ski Mask was just trying to stoke up our interest and keep us off balance. Makes sense.”

  “So you think Ski Mask ran you off the road.”

  “Who else?” I shut my eyes again. The effort of keeping them open was wearing me out.

  “Isn’t it possible he was telling the truth?”

  “Why would anyone involved in the original murder stir every thing up when the best thing would be to lay low? It’s just too farfetched. That’s why we figured the attempt on me was just Ski Mask throwing out red herrings. There couldn’t be anyone except him out there.”

  “That may have been true then; it’s hardly true now. Why would Ski Mask kill the two people most helpful to him? And why would he try to destroy the very evidence that might reopen the case? It seems to me there probably is somebody else, trying to hush the whole thing up. And they almost succeeded.”

  I pushed against my temples with my fingers. This conversation wasn’t helping things. “Frank was starting to think that Ski Mask killed Kimberly and was daring us to catch him. That he was playing a kind of help-us-here, hinder-us-there game. That might explain driving us off the road. He was convinced Ski Mask had followed us to Connecticut. Jesus, this thing is such a mess.”

  Gail wouldn’t let it go. “I think Frank was right, at least partly. Ski Mask probably did follow you, saw the other people force you off the road, and anonymously called in the accident.”

  It was bad enough having one loony in a mask; now we were staring at a whole separate bunch of them. And nobody knew what the hell any of them wanted, or why this whole bloody mess had been started in the first place. “Jesus, Gail. I don’t know.” I put my head back on the pillow and looked up at the brown spot.

  Gail put her cool hand on my forehead. “Why don’t you take a nap?”

  I didn’t answer. She pushed the button on the control box and lowered the bed. She bent over and kissed me again. “I love you, Joe. I know you miss Frank, but I’m happy you’re alive.”

  I lifted my hand and touched her breast with the backs of my fingers. My head weighed a ton. “I love you too. I wish I could get you into this bed right now. How long have you been here?”

  “From the start. The hospital’s not too full, so I took the room next door.”

  That made me smile sleepily. “Must be costing you a fortune.”

  “It ain’t cheap. I’ll send you the bill when you’re feeling better.”

  She stayed by my side, rubbing my forehead until I went back to sleep.

  I did stay two more days. In fact, it took me that long to feel halfway solid on my feet again. Gail would help me walk around the room and later down the hall, and then I’d pile back into bed as if I’d spent the entire day doing push-ups. Most of the time I just lay there, reading, talking with Gail, seeing visitors—mainly cops—and watching television. I never got to see it, but Gail told me that right after the accident I’d been a feature on the local news, complete with a file photo that made me look twenty years younger. Katz, of course, had gone wild, running a story each day on the goings-on at the police department; Gail showed me the back issues. He didn’t have anything new, of course, but on his daily visits, Brandt let me know the publicity was making for some pretty frayed nerves among Tom Wilson and the selectmen. It was typical of Gail that she never commented on what was happening at the board meetings.

  On the morning of the seventh day, Levin—the doctor with the hip dialogue—told me to “take a hike.” The release was provisional, however. I had to spend at least two additional days away from the office and, as he put it, eyeing Gail, “any sexual temptations.” In other words, home to Mother.

  Gail had contacted her and my brother the same night I’d been brought in, and I had phoned them as soon as I was able. Leo had volunteered to drive them both down, but I’d told them to stay put. My mother’s traveling days, whether she admitted it or not, were over, and I knew Leo would be nervous leaving her behind. Besides, I saw little point in disrupting their lives just so they could see me lying in bed.

  I did, however, promise to visit as soon as I could, and by Levin’s stern look, that time was apparently now. I went to my apartment, packed enough clothes for two days, and was driven north by Gail, again under doctor’s orders. As it turned out, he knew his patient well. As soon as we were on the interstate, I went into hibernation for the duration of the trip.

  The family farm is no more. The house remains by the side of a dirt road branching off from the main drag between Thetford Center and Thetford Hill, but a row of trees now stands between the home I knew as a kid and the fields Leo and I and my father used to till long ago. The land was sold after Father’s death, clearing his few debts and setting Mother up with a nest egg that had served her adequately ever since. Romantic notions aside, I don’t think any one of us ever missed those fields.

  The degree of Mother’s comfort, of course, wasn’t guaranteed by the money. We had Leo to thank for that. For reasons none of us had ever discussed, and probably never would, Leo had decided to stay at home. He worked as a butcher at the grocery store in Thetford Center, tooled around in an ever-changing menagerie of exotic and impractical cars, chased as many women as he could simultaneously and took tender loving care of our mother. He was, as far as I had ever been able or willing to probe, as happy as he could possibly imagine.

  Mother was not as easily read. Her life since early youth had been a series of roles imposed by circumstance and other people’s needs. The only girl in a large family of boys, she had filled her mother’s shoes at age nine when that exhausted woman had been done in by her eleventh childbirth. She cooked and cleaned and mended and nursed and virtually carried her small male army as far as she could take it, and on her eighteenth birthday she ran away with the only man she was ever to know in bed.

  I’m sure it was her decision. My father was not a passionate man. Older than she by a good twenty years, he had walked behind his plow alone for as long as anyone could remember. When my mother’s family discovered what she had done, it never crossed their collective mind to blame my father, and I don’t doubt they were right.

  As far as Leo or I could tell, marriage and fatherhood never had the slightest effect on the old man. He continued doing what he had done all along, and treated us with the same solid neutrality he handed out to the occasionally hired day laborers. I have often thought that it was in an effort to reflect his stolidity that Leo had never married and I had evolved the way I had. It hadn’t worked for either of us, of course. Certainly, as I came to realize following Ellen’s death, I had aimed for the image of a man untouched by events all around him and instead had ended up like a fish in a sea of complexities. I became so immersed in seeing at least some value in every viewpoint that I began to wonder if my father’s aloofness hadn’t perhaps been rooted in some less-than-human brain dysfunction.

  I never saw my parents touch. I sensed a mutual respect, but I could never tell if that was based only partly on the fact that they both did their jobs to perfection. For even in the gloom of the Depression, life didn’t vary at home. Our farm marched ahead at my father’s steady pace, good times or bad, reflecting as much of reality as he did. Had Leo and I not left the house to go to school and grow up, I think the Depression, World War II, the atomic bomb, McCarthy, and all the rest would have passed us by without notice. And through it all, Mother did as she had done before, only now the children were her own and far fewer in number.

  That, of course, was the crucial distinction, and one she had set out to create by choo
sing my father. Because despite his machinelike lack of emotion, ours was a happy home, made partially so by his stolid ability to make every new year as predictable as the last. Her role was to make those years pleasant and fulfilling, and as Leo’s caring for her now testified, she’d made it a success. When the phrase “earth mother” cropped up in the sixties, my picture of Mother was forever titled.

  Of course, the problem with earth mothers, I have since found out, is that they’re so good at handing out goodwill, they all but stop being three-dimensional human beings. They don’t volunteer what’s in their hearts, and few people bother to find out. After my father’s death and my departure from home, Mother buried herself for years in community activities until finally, one day, old and on walking sticks, she quit—totally.

  She lived in a wheelchair now, her world restricted to the downstairs of the house. She was surrounded by books, magazines, crossword puzzles, a radio, a television set, and two cats. Outwardly, she remained pleasant and good-natured, but I always sensed a tiredness there, as if she’d been asked to smile for the camera just one shot beyond her tolerance. Leo always said I was full of it, and maybe I was. I had to believe, after all, that if anyone knew what really made her tick, he did—unless he was too close to see.

  Gail stopped the car in front of the house but left the engine running. I stopped halfway out the door and looked back at her. “Not coming in?”

  “I don’t think so, Joe. Despite all the reassurances I gave her on the phone, your Mom knows how close you came to dying. I think she’d like to see you alone. Tell her I love her, though, okay?”

  I leaned back inside and kissed her. “Okay.”

  “Give me a call when you want a ride back.”

  I pulled my bag out of the backseat and waved goodbye, watching her car until it disappeared over the rise.

  16

  SHE WAS IN THE LIVING ROOM, surrounded by three small tables, her daily pastimes piled around her like the borders of a nest. But her hands were motionless in her lap. She was watching a soap opera, something I’d rarely seen happen before. She was an avid radio listener, but daytime TV was a sign of things amiss.

  She caught my movement and turned suddenly toward me. For a split second, I saw the face of a woman with no reserves left—blank, hollow-eyed, sagging from the lack of life. It was gone so fast, it was more of an impression than a real image, but it left me shocked. In its place was an older version of what had welcomed me into this house as far back as I could recall.

  She gathered me in for a hug. “What foolishness have you been up to?”

  I kissed her warm wrinkled cheek. “I wish I knew.”

  She held my face out at arm’s length. “And Frank?”

  I could only shrug.

  “Where’s Gail?”

  “She went back. I think she felt awkward.”

  “She’s a good girl.”

  I straightened and glanced at the television. Mother hit the remote-control button by her side and killed the picture.

  “Stories without end. Not like life at all.”

  I had to smile. “I can’t argue with that.”

  She was watching me closely, her eyes bright and sharp. She had one of those faces in which every line followed her mood. She smiled, and hundreds of wrinkles smiled; she frowned, and they were all sad. “How do you feel, Joe?”

  “A little detached.” I walked over to the bay window and sat on the bench sill. This had been my favorite reading spot at night as a kid, surrounded by the cold wind on three sides, and yet warm and safe.

  “It sounds like after Korea.”

  “I suppose so. I hadn’t thought of that. God, you have a long memory.”

  “A mother’s memory. For you, that was just a phase. For me, it was the death of my child—it robbed me of something special. It’s not a time I will ever forget.”

  “I ended up going to college, at least for a while.”

  She shook her head. “The price was too high.”

  I smiled. She was right. I had been the one to break the cocoon holding this house and its inhabitants. That had changed things for ever, and no achievement of mine would ever justify it.

  “How long are you going to stay?”

  “Just a couple of days—until I get my legs back.”

  “You were hit very hard, weren’t you?” The softness in her voice made the answer superfluous, but I didn’t want her to retreat to what I had seen when I’d entered.

  “Not hard enough, I guess. I’ll be okay in a couple of days. But I’ve got to go back to wrap this thing up. I can’t leave it hanging.”

  “Did you stop by to see Leo on the way up?”

  “No, I came straight here.”

  “Go down and see him. He’d like that.”

  “What about you?”

  She gestured at her piled-up pastimes. “I’ve got my projects. Go.”

  I kissed her again and went outside. As I closed the door behind me, I heard the television start up. The stories without end had acquired a certain appeal, and I found that sad.

  I crossed over the icy snow to the barn and swung back its big double doors. The blank, gray light fell on a semicircle of eight dusty, mummified cars, all looking like alien pods wrapped in canvas. This was Leo’s pleasure palace—his other obsession besides women. Under each tarp was an automobile loved for its own special virtue, whether it was looks, engine, popular appeal, or merely that it had been around for so long. None of them were in mint condition. Leo kept them covered, but only because the barn was so dusty. Their paint jobs were dull, and they were dented here and there; on the street they attracted attention for their quaintness, not their gleam.

  But while their shells were weather-beaten, their innards were immaculate. Each car ran with the smoothness of its first mile.

  I uncovered the one nearest me, hoping it wasn’t the pale green T-bird, and found the ’49 Cadillac—the first car he’d ever collected. I knew there was a Mustang somewhere, probably the most practical choice given the time of year, but I didn’t have the energy to dig it out. I got the key off the wall. The Cadillac would have to do.

  It was only about three miles to Thetford Center and the grocery store where Leo worked—a nice walk if you were up to it. Not that the reasons for such a stroll were compelling. The town didn’t boast of much beyond the grocery and, at fifty miles an hour, it could be missed entirely during a good sneeze.

  Leo was actually part-owner of the store, having tacked a full-fledged butcher shop onto its back to save it from bankruptcy. He had been operating in Hanover, New Hampshire, about twelve miles south and across the river, catering to the blue-blood barnacles attached to Dartmouth College. There, over the years, as head of the meat department at the town’s trendiest “food emporium,” he’d become the Walter Cronkite of viands—the area’s most trusted butcher. But he remained an employee. When he heard of the plight of the grocery store in Thetford Center, he took the chance that his clientele wouldn’t begrudge him the extra fifteen-minute commute. Apparently, they hadn’t—much to his, and the grocery store’s, profit.

  But the thing that struck me wasn’t his uncanny marketing, but that he was now less than two minutes from our house. At this rate, in fifteen years he’d have his profession, his hobby, and his home all under one roof. I thought of our mother sitting in a single room surrounded by all her possessions. Maybe the two of them were more compatible than I’d thought.

  He must have seen me from the window, because he came running out of the store in his blood-smeared apron and pounded me on the back, patting my chest with the other hand at the same time—a true meat lover. “Joey—Jesus, I’m glad to see you. You look lousy. How do you feel?” He looked over my shoulder. “The Caddy—good choice. How’s Mom?”

  I muttered something to his back as he trotted ahead to open the door and usher me in.

  He gave me a fleeting, sorrowful look. “I was sorry to hear about Frank, Joey. A lot of people felt the loss up here. He
was a real favorite.” He closed the door and the subject with an expansive wave of his arm. “Look at this. Dynamite, huh?”

  I had been here less than a month ago—I was never allowed home without visiting the store—and the place had been so stuffed with Christmas greenery, it had looked like Sherwood Forest. Now, it was Danish modern: blond wooden chairs, white counters, butcher block everywhere. I could still smell the sawdust and new paint.

  “Christ, Leo, it looks like a furniture store.”

  “Great, huh? I even have a play area for kids. Now the mothers can take their time.” He laughed. “And spend more.”

  This last was addressed directly to several of those mothers, clustered in front of his meat display counter. They giggled like groupies. He dragged me around to the other side of the counter and shoved an apron at me. “This is my big brother, ladies. He comes to help me out sometimes for therapy—he’s a cop, you understand.”

  He pointed me at the meat grinder and went to take care of his customers. Leo, in short doses, was good for the soul. How my mother put up with him, I could never guess.

  We spent the afternoon back there, I making hamburger meat, cutting fat, or wrapping pieces in plastic for display, Leo hustling the trade, making the fancy cuts and keeping up a running patter of conversation. This had become a traditional part of my visits, both here and when he’d worked in Hanover. He was right. In a way, it was therapeutic. Our father had taught us to butcher, and to go through the memorized patterns of an earlier age was a relief from having to think.

  Leo knew that. Beneath his marathon conversational style, he was a keen watcher and a champion depression squasher, acutely attuned to getting other people out of their slumps. I don’t know how much else he had on the ball, but he was a hell of a friend. Over the hours, I noticed him glancing at me occasionally, making sure I was all right.

  At closing time, he looped his arm over my shoulders. “So, do the docs say you can booze it up?”