Dead Winter

by William G. Tapply

  I played “Shave and a Haircut, Two Bits” on Des’s back door with my knuckle, and he called, “Come on in.” I opened the door. Barney, the basset, waddled up to me, sniffed my cuffs, and finding no interesting dog urine smells, went back to curl under Des’s legs.

  He and Marc were sitting across from each other at the breakfast table. As near as I could tell, Des was reading the front of a giant-sized Cheerios box and Marc was reading the back.

  “Grab some coffee, pull up a chair,” said Des with what seemed to me forced joviality. “What’re you doing in this neck of the woods at this hour?”

  “I’m taking your daughter to Vermont with me. We may never return.” I found a mug in the cabinet over the sink, filled it with coffee from the electric pot on the counter, and straddled a chair backwards. “I’m early, thought I’d stop in and see how you guys are doing.”

  “Andy’s dead,” said Marc.

  “I heard.”

  “Al shot her.”

  “What I heard, they haven’t proved that yet.”

  “Oh, shit, right. A lawyer. Innocent until proven guilty. Reasonable doubt. Burden of proof. Garrett keeps telling me that stuff, supposed to make me feel better.”

  I turned my head and looked hard at Marc. “You got something you want to say?” I said.

  He returned my stare. “No,” he said finally.

  “Now, look,” I said. “I wasn’t the one who—” I stopped myself. Des was watching the two of us, his head swiveling rhythmically as if Marc and I were whacking a shuttlecock back and forth between us. I sipped my coffee. Then I lit a cigarette. “How’re you making out, Des?” I said finally.

  He shrugged. “I used to distribute solace to my parishioners like jellybeans. It’s a little harder when it’s close to home.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” said Marc. “You shouldn’t worry. Zerk’s handling everything.”

  “Oh, it’s not just you,” said Des. “It’s poor Maggie, too, and you, of course. And Kat. I worry about her, all alone. And, and…”

  Connie, I thought. She was never far from his consciousness.

  “Let’s go fishing,” I said to Des.

  He nodded distractedly. “That’d be fun.”

  “I mean it. Let’s make a date.”

  “Sure. We will. I’d like that.”

  I left it there. Des did not appear eager. I drained my mug, doused my cigarette butt under the faucet, and tossed it into the wastebasket. “Thanks for the java,” I said.

  Des did not get up. He waved vaguely at me. “Take care, Brady.”

  Marc followed me out the door to my car. “Look,” he said.

  “Forget it.”

  “I was out of line. It was me who—”

  “It was Al, okay? It wasn’t you and it wasn’t me.” I recalled the lecture Zerk had given me when I willingly assumed guilt for Andy’s death. Now, as I repeated it to Marc, I understood it.

  Marc shrugged. “I know you’re right. It doesn’t make me feel better.”

  “I don’t feel great about it, either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forget it,” I repeated.

  He held out his hand. I shook it. Then I got into my car. Marc rested his hands on the roof and leaned toward the open window. “Zerk says even without Andy we’re in good shape.”

  I switched on the ignition.

  “It’s not that easy,” he said.

  I shifted into reverse, then peered up at him.

  “I lost Maggie, I lost Andy. What’d I do to deserve that? Huh?”

  I reached through the window and gripped his forearm. “It doesn’t work that way, pal. Ask your father for some theology on it. He’ll tell you.”

  “He could use some theology himself.” Marc straightened up. “Say hi to my sister for me.”

  I nodded and backed out of the driveway.

  Kat was wearing a pair of tight jeans, faded almost white, and an orange polo shirt minus the alligator over the breast pocket. She wore sneakers with no socks. “Should I be more dressed up?” she said after greeting me at her door and inviting me in.

  “You look terrific.”

  “But you—”

  I was wearing chino pants, a plaid cotton shirt, and a lightweight sport jacket, no tie. “I am not exactly spiffed up,” I said. “I’ve got to talk to some people. I’m trying to avoid looking like too much of a bum.”

  “Not that easy for you,” she said. She picked up a shoulder bag and a sweatshirt and said, “I’m ready.”

  We took 495 south through the outskirts of Haverhill and Lawrence, old Massachusetts mill cities gone badly to seed. In Methuen we picked up Route 93 north. A little over half an hour later, in Concord, New Hampshire, we turned onto 89, heading west through pretty foothills and meadowland to the Vermont line, where we exited onto 91 north, paralleling the Connecticut River. In Vermont the mountains seemed taller and greener, the air cleaner, the farms more prosperous, the landscape more photogenic, the rivers more trouty.

  Along the way I told Kat about my trip to North Carolina and my interview with Lanie Horton, and how I had visited the Night Owl and tracked down Maggie’s parents in Bradford, Vermont.

  “You’re a regular Sherlock Holmes,” said Kat.

  “You’re mocking me.”

  “Not really. What I don’t get is why you’re doing all this? I mean, Mr. Garrett is defending Marc, and you didn’t even know this Greenberg or Andrea Pavelich.”

  “It gives me an excuse to play hooky from the office for a day and take a beautiful woman on a drive into the Vermont countryside.”

  “You’re patronizing me.”

  “Not really, Kat. It’s as close to the truth as I can make it.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m glad. It’s good to get away. And to tell the truth, all these murders so close to home…”

  “Upsetting.”

  She shivered. “Putting it mildly. I didn’t know the other two. But Maggie. She was a pretty good kid. And this Andrea Pavelich. Young gal. Couple little kids at home.”

  “She was Marc’s friend,” I said.

  “I know. Doesn’t mean she deserved to die.”

  We pulled into the little community of Bradford, Vermont, around noon. It consisted of a main street with a typical assortment of enterprises housed in well-kept brick buildings: hardware, groceries, real estate, bank, books and stationery, professionals, barber, gifts. We picked one of the three restaurants for lunch, and after we ordered I went to the pay phone and checked the phone book. I found the number for Peter C. Borowski. His address was South Road.

  Our waitress, a middle-aged woman with a thick waist and thin neck, insisted we try the homemade mince pie. When she brought it, along with coffee, I got directions for South Road, which turned out to be a class-two road off a side road off the main road three or four miles north of town. I asked her if she knew Peter Borowski.

  “Sure,” she said. “Him and his wife come in here sometimes. They got a farm up there on South Road. You’ll recognize it. Barn’s been recently painted. Nice red, as if they were making it ready for people to come take pictures of. The house is white and could use some paint itself. They raise a few cows, some chickens, couple goats. They’re more or less retired, I guess. Farm’s kinda rundown, tell you the truth. ’Cept for the barn. They don’t have much to say. Stick to themselves. Not big tippers.”

  I left a full twenty percent for our waitress, lest I be tagged a poor tipper.

  “Did you call them?” said Kat.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? What if they’re not home?”

  I shrugged. “I didn’t feel like telling them their only child is dead over the telephone. I didn’t want to ask them if they minded my paying them a visit, because they might’ve said they minded. And if they’re not home we’ll go look for a trout river.”

  “Seems dumb,” mumbled Kat, “not calling.”

  A Vermont class-two road is unpaved. The difference between a class
-two and a class-three road is that the latter is not plowed in the winter.

  During mud season, which lasts several weeks during the spring thaw, roads of both classes tend to be impassable to all vehicles save tractors, a situation that Vermonters accept with more equanimity than out-of-staters trying to reach secret trout holes.

  South Road, three or four miles out of town according to our waitress, turned out to be nearly ten. That’s the difference between country and city scale. It was unmarked, of course. Several winding miles later we came upon a crimson barn behind a flaking white farmhouse. I pulled my BMW behind a vintage Ford pickup. Half a dozen Rhode Island Reds were pecking gravel in the driveway.

  Kat and I got out and chunked the doors shut to announce our arrival. From somewhere inside or behind the barn came the muffled moo of a cow. Otherwise, we received no greeting.

  We climbed the porch steps. I rapped on the screen door. The heavy front door behind it opened almost instantly, suggesting that our arrival had already been noticed, if not acknowledged.

  The woman’s face was crinkled and ridged like a contour map. She wore round wire-rimmed glasses low on her nose. Her lips were thin and pale and lifeless. Only a fine straight nose and lively brown eyes hinted at the beauty of earlier years, the beauty that Maggie had inherited from her.

  She held the door half opened and peered at us through the screen. “We ain’t sellin’,” she said. “We changed our minds. We’ve told the real estate folks a million times, they insist on sendin’ folks over anyways. I’m real sorry if you had to drive all the way from Hartford or New York or whatever, but we just changed our minds about it, and it ain’t the money, because we got some good offers.”

  I gave her my best smile. “We’re not interested in real estate, Mrs. Borowski. We came to talk to you and your husband.”

  She cocked her head for a moment, then shrugged. “What about?”

  “Your daughter.”

  “We ain’t got a daughter.”

  “Margaret Gallatin Borowski? Isn’t she your daughter?”

  She squinted at me, then looked at Kat, then back at me. “Who’re you?”

  “My name is Brady Coyne. I’m a lawyer from Boston. This is Katherine Winter. Maggie’s sister-in-law. You are Mrs. Borowski, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your husband is Peter?”

  She nodded.

  “And you don’t have a daughter named Margaret?”

  She pulled the door all the way open. “You may as well come on in,” she said.

  Kat and I followed her into the front parlor. It smelled faintly of propane gas, with an undertone of applesauce. A faded braided rug, dark upholstered sofa, wingback chair in a floral print, four matching wooden chairs, and a large television set. Mrs. Borowski took one of the wooden chairs. Kat and I sat side by side on the sofa.

  “Peter’s gone to the lumber yard. It’s where he hangs around most afternoons. If he was here, I wouldn’t have let you in. He’s the one who says we ain’t got a daughter.” She looked from me to Kat. “You know Margaret?”

  Kat nodded. “She was married to my brother.”

  “Was? Didn’t last, huh? Figures.”

  “Mrs. Borowski,” I said, “Maggie died recently.”

  She stared at me over the rims of her glasses. The corner of her mouth twitched, as if she were stifling a smile. Then she looked away. She shook her head slowly from side to side. “Peter says she’s been dead for near twenty years,” she said, talking not to me or Kat but to the dark corner of the room. “Twenty years, I haven’t been allowed to mention her. All her stuff. Gone to the landfill. No letters.” She flapped her hands randomly in front of her. “Dead? It don’t mean nothing to me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  She rotated her head slowly to look at me. “Are you?” she said. “Are you really?”

  “I liked her.”

  “Oh, she was a devil.” She pronounced it “divil.” Her eyes crinkled, although her mouth didn’t join the smile. “Always figured one day she’d drive up in one of them fancy red sports cars. Liked nice things, Margaret. Always did. Wanted to keep up with the children in town. Oh, I never gave up on her. Not really. Tried to, but I couldn’t. I never could talk to Peter about it. Can’t talk to Peter about much of anything, truth to tell. Never could. When Margaret run away, though, it was like somethin’ in him run away, too. Like they both was dead, and me stuck here with this empty corpse of a man and this memory of my little girl. Even her pictures he took from me. Every blessed one of ’em. Oh, she was a pretty one, all right, and too growed up for her own good. But I never figured she’d run off. Fifteen years old. Just a baby, though God knows she didn’t look like no baby.”

  Kat leaned forward and touched the old woman’s knee. “Mrs. Borowski, why did Maggie leave?”

  “Why?” She compressed her lips. “You tell me, miss. You must be about Margaret’s age. When you was fifteen, would you’ve wanted to get up with the sun to gather eggs before the school bus come bouncin’ over this old dirt road for you? Would you’ve wanted to wear clothes that smelled like manure? I told him. I said we can’t confine the girl. She’s got too much spunk and too much savvy.” She shrugged. “It was in the fall. One afternoon she wasn’t on the bus. Last I seen her, she was gettin’ on the bus that mornin’, books under her arm, straw stickin’ out of her hair. She waved at me and smiled like she always did. And that was the last I ever seen of my girl.”

  “Didn’t you try to find her?” said Kat.

  She bowed her head and snatched the glasses from her nose. She rubbed her forehead with her hand. When she looked up, tears glistened in her eyes. “Course we did. Peter didn’t want to at first. He likes to keep personal things personal. But after she was gone a couple days, a fella from the school called, askin’ if Maggie was sick. I just started bawlin’, told him no, she was gone. So then the police come out, askin’ a lot of questions I couldn’t answer.” She shrugged. “They never come back, though. I called a few times, but they said they hadn’t heard nothin’. I never gave up. But after a while…”

  Kat reached to her and touched the old woman’s hand.

  “So why’re you here?” Maggie’s mother said to me.

  “To tell you about your daughter,” I said softly. “It took us a while to figure out how to reach you.”

  “How did it happen?”

  I hesitated. She narrowed her eyes and thrust her chin at me. “She was murdered,” I finally said.

  “Who done it to her?”

  “We don’t know yet.”

  “They gonna catch him?”

  I nodded. “Yes, I expect they will.”

  “I s’pose it don’t matter that much, now.”

  “Mrs. Borowski,” I said, “I have to ask you a difficult question. May I?”

  She gave a short, ironic snort. “You come and tell me my girl’s been murdered. You think there’s something worse’n that?”

  “Was Maggie pregnant when she left?”

  She nodded once. “I figure.”

  “You think she was?”

  She shrugged. “It’s why farm girls run away, ain’t it? It’s what I figured. It’s why Peter wanted to keep it to ourselves. I figured Margaret’d be back. Go have a baby, maybe get married, maybe not. Maybe she give it up for adoption. I figured, few months, year at most, she’d be back. After a while, I give her a couple years. I kept makin’ up stories so’s she’d be comin’ back pretty soon. Even now, near twenty years later, I still got ways of figurin’ it so’s Margaret’d be comin’ back.”

  “But you don’t know if she was pregnant or not?” I said.

  “No.”

  “And you never heard from her?”

  “Never did.”

  “Thank you,” I said. I stood up. “I am very sorry about this news.”

  Josephine Borowski stood and walked Kat and me to the door. She held it open for us. “You killed off my dream, Mr. Coyne. Do you know what that me
ans?”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I repeated helplessly.

  She stood at the door. Kat and I went out.

  “I ain’t going to tell Peter,” she said, standing behind the screen door. “He’s got it all worked out for himself so’s he can live with it.”

  “Be well, Mrs. Borowski,” said Kat gently.

  “I should’ve offered you lemonade,” said Josephine Borowski to us as we went down the porch steps.

  15

  WE RETRACED OUR ROUTE along the class-three and class-two roads to the paved numbered route that led back to Bradford. Kat sat beside me, huddled against the door, staring out the side window.

  “You okay?” I said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she answered without conviction.

  “That wasn’t much fun.”

  “No.”

  It took me a few minutes to figure it out. Josephine Borowski’s daughter had run away. Kat Winter’s mother had run away. It had been stupid, I realized, to invite Kat along for this trip, selfish of me to put my desire for her company on the long drive above her feelings.

  Instead of getting back onto the interstate south of Bradford, I angled onto a secondary road, heading more west than south. The verdant pastures and hills were sprinkled with grazing cows and well-kept farms. The meadows glittered with masses of black-eyed susans and Queen Anne’s lace. Every eight or ten miles we passed through a village. Each had its post office, a neat little white-framed structure topped by an American flag, its general store, with gas pumps out front, and a Protestant church, with a few no-nonsense wood frame houses clustered nearby. Generally a trout stream ran under a bridge just outside of town.

  We drove without talking. I played a Telemann tape softly and allowed my mind to drift on the good ancient rhythms.

  In midafternoon we came upon a crossroads. I stopped at the self-serve pumps in front of a village store, got out, and filled the tank of my BMW. Then I leaned into the car. “Want to come in?” I said to Kat.

  “No. Go ahead.”