Fled

by Jason McIntyre

  “Really,” Chrissy said. “Her hubby’s a guy named Walt. That ain’t Walt.”

  “Then who’s he?” Charlie said, hitching a thumb at the door to the deck.

  Chrissy smiled. She was relishing this. “Chief Birkhead,” she said. “The chief of police.”

  3.

  Charlie hadn’t even finished one bucket at the range with his new father-in-law when an employee came trotting out to the cages. “Problem back at your hotel, sir,” he said, out of breath. “Chief Birkhead’s there.”

  Worried, Charlie said, “Should I come back to the clubhouse?” When he blinked he saw an image of Denny Munn approaching in the half-light of a partial moon on the cove. He had a black hole in his forehead and a dumb, mute look in his eyes.

  “No, sir,” the caddy said. “Chief hung up but he said you should cut your round and come back to the room.”

  “Go,” his father-in-law said from behind. “You should go. I’ll hold down the fort here.” He gestured to the other members of their party—business partners, it turned out. This whole game had been an ambush. “We’ll talk about my offer when you get that sorted out.”

  Charlie bagged his driver and trotted out of the cage to join the caddy in a walk back to the small rental office. Charlie wore a look of disgust, not worry.

  “Didn’t want to mention it in front of Mr. Banatyne—”

  “—What?” Charlie said. It came out in more of a snap than he intended.

  “It’s your wife sir,” the caddy said. Charlie’s disgust eroded and he started to sweat in the breeze as they walked.

  4.

  Charlie bounded up the creaking hardwood stairs and came around the corner to find his door’s suite wide open. Breathing heavy and doused in a thin layer of his own sweat, he put his hands on his knees and leaned forward, as if to vomit.

  In a moment, he recovered and looked up through the doorway.

  On the edge of the bed sat Chrissy. She had her head in her hands and her shoulders jerked up and down with messy, noisy sobs. Beside her, the woman who’d served their breakfast had her arm around Chrissy. From his new bride, Charlie’s eyes went to Chief Birkhead who stood with legs shoulder-width apart. He was dressed in his uniform and looked unmistakably like the authority figure he certainly was on the island.

  Charlie instantly saw an image of the chief’s office on Main Street six years ago when Denny Munn had quietly driven them past in his gold Caddy. A fresh wave of sweat hit him between his pectorals and down his shoulder blades.

  Chief was tapping his pen’s heel on the face of a notebook and re-reading what he’d written. Seated at the desk chair beside him was Zeke, the old man with the damaged thinker who’d gotten the Scobies settled last night. Old feller hung his head. The weirdest part—for Charlie’s money—was that the head case wasn’t wearing a shirt. His old man boobs hung to pointed, leathery nipples. His chest had wispy curls of white the same as the scant hair on his head. He didn’t look up at Charlie.

  Birkhead said, “Husband’s here. We’ll leave you two alone.” He made quick, firm eye contact with Charlie and that brought a chill to Charlie. He slipped his notebook and pen into his chest pocket. “Come on Zeke,” he said and reached for him. “You really done it this time, ol feller.”

  He got Zeke up from his chair and led him to the door of the suite. Charlie moved aside for them, dumb with silence and feeling the red rise in his face. What was going on here?

  Zeke looked up at Charlie and pleaded with tears in his shocked, red eyes, “I ain’t never mean no harm, mister Sobie. I ain’t never. I’s just fixin the tap in the tub. Sure-shootin, I was. Sure-sure-shootin.”

  Led by the chief, he moved past Charlie through the doorway in a pathetic gait. Then he turned back and whispered in a hiss. “There was a man in here, Mister Sobie. A man.”

  Chief tugged on him with force. “We have to go down to Main, Zeke. You know the drill. Ma’am’ll decide if she’s pressing charges. Meantime, your da’ll have to come and get you. He ain’t gonna like this, I’m afraid.”

  Chief shook his head, not with anger, but with disappointment. Charlie let out a breath and blew his hair off his hot forehead. Chief in a place like this knew everyone in town if he was halfway good at his job. Knew all their secrets too. And it sounded like Zeke had seen a few problems.

  The dark-skinned breakfast helper got up. She avoided eye contact with Charlie and skirted him timidly to get out of the room. Behind him, the door clicked shut and he knew she was gone. He turned, locked it, then came back around to stare down upon Chrissy.

  She had finished her crying and was wiping her face with a delicate lace hanky.

  Furtively, she looked up at her husband. Her eyes were blood red and puffy.

  Forcing himself to come across as calm, Charlie said, “Care to tell me what went on here. And whether I should be mad?”

  She blew her nose into the lace. “Oh, Charles,” she said. “It was nothing. I realize now, it wasn’t as big a deal. It’s just—”

  “Just what?” Charlie said. He took a step forward. His face was flushed and he was sweating like he’d just done twenty minutes in the sauna at his downtown Portland club.

  “I came back to the room to have a nap, and well, there was this man, he was in the bathroom. I think he was, well, he was just peeking at me through the bathroom door, cracked just enough. I—”

  She fiddled with the lace but didn’t look up at him. He stood in silence, waiting for more.

  “When I got undressed, I lay down and, well, I just saw this eye peeping out.” She finally looked up at her husband. “It scared the bejeezus out of me, Charles!”

  “I’m sure it did,” Charlie said. He turned and sat next to her on the foot of the bed, making the springs squeak. He put his arm around her.

  She started to sob again. Fresh tears dotted the corners of her eyes and started to run down her red cheeks. She leaned into him and he squeezed her in a there-there way that she liked but that also made her cry harder. “Before I realized it, I was screaming. Oh Charles, it was so embarrassing. Here I was in my brassiere wailing like a little girl. That nice Mexican, she come-a running and I let her in. By then, that old retard, he’d opened up the door and I saw he’s half naked and dripping wet in there. I started screaming to beat the band, even louder, I tell you. And he’s trying to calm me down, he’s saying ‘ssshhhh, shhhhh, Miss-a Sobie,’ like that.

  “And then, well, the Mexican calls down and the Chief, he was just on his way back into town. He came up and, well, I got myself calmed down some.

  “It wasn’t until just a minute or two ago that I remembered.”

  “Remembered what, sweetheart?”

  “Remembered that, just after breakfast, I mentioned that leaky faucet to the Mexican. That, uh, that Zeke, he’s the handyman. He probably was just fixing the tap. I don’t know, Charles. Maybe he got wet while he was doing it.”

  She looked over at her husband and smiled weakly.

  “Oh poop. I feel like an idiot. I should call the chief and tell him it was all a big misunderstanding. I certainly won’t be pressing charges, I just felt so weird. With his eyes on me in my bra, you know?”

  “I know,” Charlie said, stroking her shoulder. His anger had been rising. His flushed face hadn’t gone down a degree but had possibly grown deeper as she’d told her tale.

  “Thing is, sweetie,” he said still forcing his tone to remain even against his hammering heart. “You don’t nap. Never have.”

  She looked at him, blinking dumbly.

  “And the odd time you have, you’ve never gotten undressed for it. Have you, now?”

  “I—” She stammered.

  “Now, I don’t think much of that old handyman there. Scared the shit out of both of us last night when we come tromping through the front bush there in the dark. But on his way outa here he said something that piqued my curiosity…”

  Chrissy swallowed. “What?”

  “He said there was an
other man in here.”

  5.

  “Oh Charles,” Chrissy said and playfully swatted his arm. She got up and went to the desk where Zeke had waited for the police chief to haul him up and take him away.

  She pulled two tissues from a box and threw down her sodden lace hanky. She blew her nose and as she did, she talked from underneath. It was a habit that made Charlie’s stomach turn.

  “You’re being silly,” she said. “You expect that old fool knows what’s real and what’s not? His brain is two sizes too small. He might be able to fix a tap but he doesn’t have a clue about what he thought he saw.” She put her hands down on the desk and leaned out as if she was making the most obvious statement in the world. Just delivering the evening news straight to the viewing audience at home in their living rooms.

  “There was no man in here.”

  Charlie got up and went over to his luggage lying open on one big chair. He started pawing through it to make sure nothing was missing. His cufflinks were there. A side pouch with an envelope of traveller’s checks was untouched. Finally, he took a breath and turned to her with a smile. He’d lost a half-dozen shades of red by then and he said, “Old fool. He probably hits the sauce well before noon too. Did you smell him? B.O. beyond belief. And those eyes were redder’n yours, I’ll tell you that much.”

  He took his chequebook out of the suitcase pouch where it had shared a spot with the traveler’s checks and went back over to her. He smiled warmly and took her up in his arms. “There,” he said as she relaxed into him. “You’re alright. A touchy experience, no doubt. But it’s all in the past. I’m sorry it happened. They need some sort of sign or some sort of notice when things are out of order. So no one steps into their suite and thinks they’re alone—when they’re clearly not.”

  She hugged him back and went back over to the bed to begin straightening the sheets. He leaned down and opened up the chequebook. She looked back. “What are you doing, hon?” she asked.

  “Your dad,” he said. “The driving range was an ambush. Did you know about this?”

  She shook her head, no, and widened her eyes as if to say, No idea, but enlighten me.

  “It wasn’t his buddies we were playing with. It was some sort of...consortium. They want investors for their power plant or something. He wants seed money. Says it’s a sound investment. I’m just not sure—”

  He cut off as he looked down into the book, leaning over it on the desk. A check had been quickly torn out and the fray of its leaving showed. He’d signed a trio of blank cheques and told Chrissy where they were. “For emergencies,” he had instructed her. Now, there were only two left. Check number 271 was the one torn out. 270 had gone to the hall for their reception. He flipped to the register and saw his own scrawl.

  270 - wedding hall, May 1 ’73.

  In an instant, the fury had returned. It bubbled to the surface and boiled over.

  He grabbed his wife’s wrist as she worked at the corners of their bed and he shouted into her face. “You want to tell me who was here and why you wrote them a check?”

  6.

  The bawling and the shouting lasted for at least an hour and it went in both directions. The sun hung low over the cove and its rays played through the trees and painted the Scobies in orange through their third storey window as they fought. It took that long for Mrs. Christine Scobie nee Banatyne to finally admit the truth. Zeke had not been stupidly wrong—or drunk or delusional.

  And the news had come as a downright shock to her husband, Charles S. Scobie.

  “I swear to you,” she said, sobbing on her knees on the carpet at the foot of the hotel bed.

  “You do, do you?” he said, again holding her pink wrist as if he would snap it off. He hadn’t struck her, not like his old bastard of a father had done to Charlie’s mother time and again—when he wasn’t occupying his fists with strikes against Charlie and his big brother.

  “I do. I do. He was here. And he said if I didn’t give him what he wanted, you’d suffer. Those were his words. ‘You’d hate for Charlie to suffer.’ That’s what he said to me.” For confirmation, she said it again. You’d hate for Charlie to suffer.

  “And he told you his name?”

  “He did. I had to make out the cheque to him. Called it a wedding present. In reverse.”

  Spitting, angry words from him: “What did you write on the check? Who’d you make it out to?”

  She took a breath and wiped at her face. He let her arm go and she used both hands to wipe at her cheeks and neck. “I’m sorry,” she said looking up at him in the orange light that played on his face. “I’m so, so, so sorry. He came to me a few days ago, in Portland. He made me tell him where we’d be. He made me. He needed money and I don’t have any. Not from my parents, not yet. He’s smart, isn’t he? He knew I’d have a chance to get at your money after the wedding but not before. Oh Charles. I didn’t want him to do anything to you. I know you two didn’t get along in the last—”

  He bit into her with his words, hating to repeat himself. “Who’d you make it out to?”

  She swallowed and hitched her breath but got out the name. “Kelly Scobie,” she said.

  7.

  Charlie headed out for a walk on the beach. He went in the same direction as he did last night and he took a bottle like he did last night. Echoing in his brain were the words of that redheaded man.

  Best make sure a man’s dead before you up and run.

  “Back to drinking?”

  A voice from behind him, back in the direction of the bed and breakfast. Strident against the simple sounds of the water and the empty evening, it easily fought the sound of the waves. Startled, Charlie turned. He wasn’t that surprised to find his older brother, Kelly, slowly traipsing down the beach to him. He was ten paces away.

  “Brother,” Kelly said. “You called your bank.” He held out his arms as if to embrace, but it was a sardonic gesture. The brothers hadn’t hugged in years. They hadn’t even laid eyes on each other in six.

  “Damn right I did,” Charlie said and took another swig from the bottle he’d taken from the kitchen. It was a similar kind of champagne to the bottle he’d drank out here last night, just before he’d seen the ghost of Denny Munn coming from the outcropping of heavy rock and stone. It was the beach’s elbow jutting out to become the long, natural seawall where, at a dimming distance, the island’s lighthouse stood in foreboding silence.

  “Cancelled your wife’s cheque, didja?” Kelly said. “Tried to cash it. No go.”

  “Wasn’t my wife’s. It was my cheque, Kel. Mine. I worked for that money.” Charlie wagged his finger out at his older brother as if he was Dad giving one of them a lecture. “Now I don’t know what kind of sinkhole you’ve dug for yourself but I—”

  “You’da never made a dime—or your new prosperity, brother, not one dime. Not without my help. I got you back on your feet.”

  Charlie let out a laugh. “‘Got me back on my feet?’ You forgave a pittance and nearly put me in prison. You know how close I was to getting caught—?”

  Kelly narrowed the space between them. He looked older. Less hair, more lines in his face. He’d aged, for certain he had. “But you didn’t. I have to say, it was a genius move, taking the guy’s Caddy and selling it off. Simple but smart. The best ideas are.” Kelly pulled something out of his breast pocket and looked down at it lovingly, like someone might do with a picture of their sweetheart or their child. He showed it to his brother. It was the Polaroid of Dennis Munn, now badly faded, the colour tinted. But the small black hole in his forehead over his left eye was unmistakable. Charlie had snapped that shot himself with his folding camera by only the light of a heavy, bright moon and the reflection of all that new snow.

  And when he’d returned to Portland, he’d given it as proof to his creditor: his big brother, Kelly Scobie, one of a handful of backroom-dealing, gambling racketeers that had made names for themselves. Medium-sized fish to those smaller ones like Charlie.

 
“You did it all right, kid,” Kelly said, like a proud father. “And after your debts were squared, you kept the luck rolling. The luck you made. You had a little something to get yourself started. It was the car. Simple but smart. Munn disappeared. Up and vanished like smoke on the water. Not even his car turned up. It was—I gotta tell you, kid—genius. Now, I didn’t come around after that—I couldn’t—but I was proud of you—”

  But Charlie spat at his brother. The loogie arced and landed on Kelly’s pant leg. Turning his lips up at their corners, Kelly bent down and wiped at the spot. “So,” he said calmly. “What? You’re pissed? At me?”

  “Damn right,” Charlie said, the sunlight reflecting in his glossy eyes. “Why’d you go to my wife? Huh? You bully her like you bullied me? Can’t leave me alone on my honeymoon? My goddamn honeymoon. Gotta bust in here and put tension between me and my new wife?”

  Kelly looked out at the water on the cove. The sun was going down and they were bathed in the yellows, pinks, and oranges of the settling sky. It was beautiful. He seemed to gain some composure. “I came to her a few days back, after I saw the wedding announcement. I know you pretty well, kid. You’d never help me. But I begged her to. Thing is, everybody owes something to someone...and I got me some troubles now. Just like you had. I knew what kind of family she’d come from. Said she didn’t get any of her dough until she turns twenty-five. Dunno if that was a tale spun from straw or not but, fair enough, I thought. I’ll just come once you two tie the knot and she’ll have paws on yours.” Then he lightened his tone. “That’s the bitch of gettin’ hitched. Nothing’s your own anymore. No cash moola. Not even secrets. They’re all shared assets now.”