McMansion

by Justin Scott

  She said, “My job starts tomorrow.”

  Surprised, I asked, “Doing what?” She didn’t seem the job type.

  “I’m in the Northwest Connecticut Landfill Reclamation project.”

  “That’s a great project. The Audubon Society got behind that.”

  It was north of Newbury, up in the woods. I knew it as the Jervis Dump, a swamp that generations of the close-knit, inbred Jervis clan—who traded guns, ecstasy, high-test marijuana, and untaxed booze and cigarettes with their Canadian cousins—had found convenient to make inconvenient things disappear. Audubon would unearth fewer surprises reclaiming the La Brea Tar Pits. “What will you be doing there?”

  She became animated. “I’m in a work study program. From school? I’m studying environmental engineering.”

  “Where?”

  “Montana Tech.”

  “How’d you get to Connecticut from Butte?”

  “I applied for the site characterization study. So we’ll know what we’ll find and how it will influence the economics. Will there be methane? Can we reclaim it? Will there be subsidence when we excavate? How will the contents affect the equipment? Reclaimed waste is abrasive. How much will that abrasiveness shorten the life of excavation equipment?”

  Maybe she was the job type. She suddenly sounded more like an academic than a barn burner. Maybe she hadn’t torched forty SUVs after all. I got her settled and showed her the shower and found her a terry robe. Then I went to my own room and lay awake for quite a while.

  I wondered why couldn’t I answer what was it about Jeff Kimball that made me doubt he had killed Billy Tiller. As for the unlovable, unlamented Billy, I found myself marveling at his meteoric rise. While Billy was not the only ne’er do well in Newbury to inherit a valuable chunk of free land—there was too much in-breeding to prevent that—none I could think of had ever made such a success of it.

  Jennifer had raised an interesting question about the killer having help. Two killers? Maybe his victims had formed a committee. But on the subject of two, was I seeking the wrong sort of “other suspect” for the wrong motivation? Had I gotten stuck in the able-to-drive-a-bulldozer approach, while I should have been asking who—who could drive or hire a bulldozer—who was also capable of spraying Main Street with bullets? Put another way, was Billy Tiller really so thoroughly awful that not one, but two separate individuals would risk a murder conviction for the pleasure of killing him?

  Chapter Twelve

  Trooper Moody telephoned at dawn, sounding uncharacteristically polite. “Ben, I gotta tell you, your Aunt Connie is canning again. You want me to—”

  “I’ll do it, thank you. Thanks for calling.”

  “Half a mile down Seven,” he said and hung up. I jumped off the bed into pants, shirt, and shoes, wasting no time on socks and underwear.

  Ordinarily, a report that one’s elderly great aunt was canning would not raise eyebrows in New England, where many old aunts and grandmothers still put up fruits and vegetables for the long winter, as our ancestors had before the invention of freezers and microwaves. Sadly, this bridge to our past was the not case with Aunt Connie.

  Trooper Moody’s call was the third such in seven and a half months.

  I shot out of my driveway onto Main Street. There were lights in her windows across the street. Not surprising, as she had always been an early riser. When I used to walk to school on dark winter mornings I would often stop in her kitchen for a moment, fill her in on whatever homework I’d done, and maybe ask her a question. I’ve shared afternoon tea with Connie Abbott most of the Tuesday afternoons of my life, including this week.

  Half a mile down Route Seven, I spotted her walking tentatively along the shoulder. There was no mistaking her frail figure. She wore a calf-length dress under a raincoat too light for the morning chill, and steadied herself with her cane. In her free hand she held a black plastic garbage bag. Suddenly she stopped, bent slowly to the ground, and straightened triumphantly with a beer can, which she plopped into the bag.

  I parked the car at a distance and hurried after her.

  “Good morning, Connie.”

  To my great relief, she recognized me instantly. The first time she hadn’t had torn my heart out. But those memory lapses were rare and this morning she acted as if she knew exactly who I was and why I was there.

  “Good morning, Ben. You’re out early.”

  “So are you,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Lovely morning, isn’t it?”

  I agreed that it was a lovely morning, and that the day promised to be a little warmer and dry.

  “About time,” she observed. “This weather has been just ghastly.”

  That was an accurate appraisal, which further relieved me. I decided upon directness, which had always been her way. “Trooper Moody said you were out on the road.”

  “Oh, I saw him. I must say the town gets its money’s worth. Oliver Moody is always on duty.”

  “He was a little concerned, Connie. Worried about you out on the road here.”

  “I’m perfectly fine. Just picking up a little extra money.”

  I looked at her.

  She said, “Deposits.”

  I asked, “Do you really need them?”

  Connie was sole heir to the affluent branch of the Abbotts, which had been raking it in since pirate days and investing shrewdly in whale ships, canals, railroads, insurance, and land. But try and tell her that a wealthy woman—with foundations and charities in place to disperse every penny of her fortune the day she died—did not need beer can deposits.

  “It astonishes me,” she said, “how people will just throw money out the window. Not to mention litter.”

  “Why don’t we go home and get cup of coffee?”

  “Oh, Ben. I just got started.” She shook the bag, which rattled. “Only four.”

  “Four’s a good start.”

  “It’s a good enough start, but hardly a morning’s work.”

  “I need your help with something.”

  “Well, can’t it wait?”

  “No. I’m under the gun.”

  She sighed. “I really wish you could learn to plan ahead. All right. All right. Your place or mine?”

  I thought of the under-age giraffe in my guest room and said, “Yours.”

  I got her belted into the car, turned around, and drove home. As we pulled into her drive she craned her head to stare across the street at my house.

  “Ben, there’s very young person stepping out your door.”

  “A one-night guest.”

  “Well, shouldn’t you offer her breakfast?”

  “She’s rushing off to a new job. She’ll find breakfast on the way.” I hoped Jennifer had enough cash for a take-out coffee. But I wasn’t going to leave Connie to run after her.

  I got Connie out of the car and in her back door into the kitchen. She insisted on brewing the coffee herself. All the while she kept glancing at the mud room where we had deposited the clanking bag of cans, and I could see her thinking hard on what exactly she had been doing.

  While I reflected on the relationship between eccentricity and dementia. I was hoping, I suppose, for a promising connection between them. I told myself that she was the last of a generation with a bred in the bone hatred of waste. Wastefulness had been the worst Puritan sin in harsh New England. I clung to the comforting thought that when Connie Abbott did go round the bend she did not stray far from who she was. She had always been frugal.

  A red watering can stood by the sink, into which she poured the left over half glass anyone else would have dumped down the drain. As a boy I had asked why. She had explained that every glass of water drawn from the faucet required electricity to run the pump that pushed it up from the well, and oil to generate the electricity, while reducing the reserves in the underground aquifer. At the same time, every drop poured down the sink put the septic field to unnecessary use. Maybe that was why I dislike
d the McMansions so much. Their defenders maintained that every generation builds bigger houses, and that they create employment, but all I saw waste of materials, waste of land, waste of scarce resources.

  Connie had always been precise, organized, measured, and intensely civic minded. So how strange was it to wander the highway picking up the cans and bottles slobs threw from their cars? You see people in the cities do it all the time, plodding and bending with huge Santa Claus plastic sacks. People with no home who need the money.

  “I suppose I’ve had another spell,” she said suddenly.

  “Just a brief one.”

  “Ben, I hate this.”

  I’m not as brave as she is. I couldn’t face it directly and I heard myself mouthing platitudes. “It was just a moment. They come and go. Day by day, right?”

  She cast me a look less than grateful and said, “Try not to treat me like a fool when I’m not having a spell.”

  Early last winter she had suffered a series of mini-strokes. Transient ischemic attacks, they’re called. TIA. Doctor Greenan sent her down to Yale and they ran the tests. If there was good news, it was that TIA appeared not to be harbingers of larger strokes. Instead, they worked their way slowly through the brain in tiny bites, like hungry little mice.

  That we knew it was not Alzheimer’s offered some scant solace. One of the Yale doctors, a shrink, sat me down privately to pass on the slightly comforting information that the sort of dementia that stemmed from transient ischemic attack did not usually cause the sorts of personality deterioration suffered by Alzheimer’s patients. “She’ll remain mostly who she is,” he said by way of explanation. “As fastidious, as polite, even as lively, for a while at least. Unless she is a person who hid a personality disorder behind a screen of superior intelligence—I do note that your great-aunt is unusually intelligent.” He waited for my response, which was one of relief.

  “She’s too brave to hide anything. She would deal with it.”

  “I thought so,” he said. “But down the road, remember, memory will continue to fail. Confusion will increase. And confusion breeds fear.”

  Connie was glaring across the kitchen table. I said, “Sorry. It’s upsetting.”

  “I know it’s upsetting. It’s happening to me. You said something about wanting help. Or was that just a ploy to lure the old fool indoors?”

  “You’re not an old fool.”

  “But I am old. Thank you for coming after me, Ben.”

  “Thank Trooper Moody.”

  “I will write him a note. You said you need help?”

  “Yes. I do. What can you tell me about E. Eddie Edwards?”

  “Well I knew his great-grandmother, of course.”

  “Great-grandmother? I didn’t realize they were around here that long.”

  “Before they came here they were down in Easton and Stratford.”

  “I’ve never thought of them as a Newbury family.”

  “Good Lord, Ben, the Edwards are more Yankee than we are. Our people may have come up from Stratford to found Newbury, but that was only after the Edwards founded Stratford. If you want to get technical about it, we’re rather Johnny Come Lately. By comparison. Not that they ever accepted the responsibilities such families should. You’ll not find the Edwards serving anything but themselves. And if you think I’m eccentric, Samantha was an absolute nut case.”

  “Samantha?”

  “E. Eddie’s great-grandmother. She owned half of Easton, though you’d never know it, seeing her dressed like a Polish peasant, right down to the boots. And she had a trick she used. She…she…”

  “What?”

  Connie’s gaze drifted toward the mud room again. Her mouth worked.

  “Boots, you were saying?” I asked.

  She took a deep breath. “Air guitar.”

  “Beg pardon? Did you say, ‘air guitar’?”

  “It just popped in my head. I was trying to remember what I was going to say about her boots and the only word that came to me was air guitar. Phrase, actually, isn’t it?”

  Her jaw set and she waved the missing thought aside like a deer fly. “It will come to me. Or it won’t.”

  I was overwhelmed with admiration. And gratitude. She had banished fear from the room. “You were saying Polish peasant?”

  “I don’t remember. But she was a very clever woman.”

  “But what about E. Eddie?”

  “Just as clever from what I’ve seen. It’s appalling the developments he’s managed to get approved in Newbury. He plays P&Z like a bass fiddle.”

  “He always strikes me as more lawyer than engineer.”

  “That’s his best trick,” said Connie. “And why the builders love him so. He thinks on his feet like a lawyer, but he commands the respect the commissioners give an engineer.”

  “He’s a pretty lousy engineer considering the floods he’s caused.”

  “He engineers the rules, not the hills. He goes by the book—the book that allows him to build the most houses. Don’t get me started on this, Ben. It just appalls me. Why are you asking about Eddie Edwards?”

  “I’ve heard two stories about him lying to protect Billy Tiller.”

  “Oh, the bulldozer. How did you get involved in that?”

  “Ira.”

  “I should have guessed.” She was not a big fan of Ira Roth, whom she considered to be a pale, crass shadow of the civic-minded citizen his father had been.

  “I owe him for Alison’s horse.”

  “I could have told you that would come back to haunt you. Still, Redman is a decent animal, despite his appetite and dubious bloodlines, and Alison’s happy.”

  It was suddenly almost as if the morning hadn’t started with her picking beer cans off the road. She was her usual quick, sharp self. Except when she stole a look toward the mud room where that black plastic bag lay on the floor. But she filled me in a bit more on E. Eddie and Billy, naming a couple of land deals even I hadn’t heard about. She owns quite a bit herself, and the grandees do tend to eye each other.

  “How was your trip to New York?” she asked.

  “A little depressing. I watched the land beside the tracks in a way I never saw it before. I mean places where the river runs in a ditch and you don’t see a single tree or patch of earth not cemented over. It kind of shook me to think that at one time that ground looked just like Newbury.”

  “A very long ago one time.”

  “But isn’t it fragile?”

  “I just remembered about—shoot, there it goes again. Oh, I’m sorry, Ben, I’m getting hopeless.”

  “It will come to you.”

  “Or it won’t…”

  “Anyway, I—”

  “I was reading a mulch bag the other day.”

  Oh dear God, I thought. Here we go again. That had landed out of nowhere, like a silent mortar round. “How,” I asked, “did you happen to be reading a mulch bag?”

  “Have you noticed how the new houses have such mulched borders?”

  My wary “Yes” occupied three or four syllables.

  “Their beds and borders are so neat and crisp.”

  “Yes.”

  “But there aren’t any plants.”

  “Gary at the nursery told me it’s because the people are so overextended buying their house all they have left is twenty bucks for an arborvitae at Home Depot.”

  “Of course,” Connie said briskly. “They are buying as much house as they can afford, which people have always done and is actually quite sensible. Values always rise, in the long run.”

  “What if the bubble bursts in the short run?”

  “Not every gambler wins. But I was wondering why they mulch empty beds where they have no flowers. When I was a girl the gardener used shredded leaves and straw from the stable. These people don’t have stables and precious few leaves with all the trees the builders knock down. So they go and buy all that mulch. At any rate, the explanation is right
there on the bag. The mulch manufacturer tells them they should make neat borders even if they have no flowers.”

  “Ah,” I said with great relief. “That’s why you were reading a mulch bag.”

  “Why,” asked the old lady staving off dementia, “do these people believe the mulch manufacturer?”

  ***

  I drove down to Frenchtown to the Chevalley garage looking for Cousin Pinkerton. Betty, my cousin Renny’s widow, told me that Pink had said he had to see a guy about something, which meant he was most likely hoisting an early eye-opener at the White Birch.

  There’s a six-hour drinking window after which you don’t really want to be in the same bar with Pinkerton Chevalley, and I hoped that this morning’s visit to the White Birch marked the beginning of a party, not the end. I asked if he had looked like he had been to bed last night.

  Betty said it was always hard to tell and asked me to send him back if I found him.

  I drove quickly to the White Birch. The parking lot was mostly empty so early on a weekday morning. I didn’t see Pink’s bike or any of his cars or trucks, but he could have been saving gas “test driving” one of his customer’s vehicles, so I went in.

  There was more tension in the stale beery air than would be expected at eleven a.m. with only two customers in the place. Wide Greg, the owner, was pretending to read his morning newspapers, but he had one cold eye on those customers, my cousins Pinkerton and Sherman Chevalley, who were seated several bar stools apart, hunched over bottles of a discount brand brewed somewhere in Rhode Island. Pink was asking Sherman as I walked in, “What did you say to me?”

  Pink was a very, very large man. The largest Chevalley currently alive. His father had been larger, some said, but he had met an early end before Pink was full grown, so no one knew for sure. He tended to be quiet. When he did speak, people listened. But apparently Sherman was not listening.

  “I said it clear a minute ago,” he replied. “I ain’t repeating myself.”