Once Burned

by Gerry Boyle

  Roxanne started to reply, stopped. Looked at me, then said, “Maybe we could talk. On the phone or something.”

  Beth smiled. She’d just won.

  “Great,” she said. “I’ll just keep checking in.”

  “Sure,” Roxanne said.

  “Hear about your beautiful little girl,” Beth said.

  “We’ll see,” Roxanne said.

  “With her pretty curls and her pony. And the pictures on the refrigerator. Maybe I could have a picture of her. I’ll put it on my fridge. Maybe the three of us could go out for ice cream or something. The playground at McDonald’s.”

  Roxanne didn’t answer.

  “Well,” Beth said. “I should get going. The nice trooper here said he’d drive me to get some gas.”

  “We’ll get you back on the road, ma’am,” Foley said.

  Beth turned toward the cruiser.

  “I have a question,” I said.

  Beth turned back.

  “Yeah, Jack?” she said.

  She said my name like we were old friends.

  “Where’s Alphonse?” I said.

  “I have no idea,” she said. “Halfway to Florida? Like I told the trooper here, we didn’t keep up after he went away.”

  “Should we be worried?” I said.

  “Probably not,” Beth said. “But on the other hand, you’re the only ones I know with anything to lose.”

  13

  Sophie was asleep. It had taken all of her stuffed-animal friends, much reassurance that Pokey wasn’t lonely, a glass of water, an exhaustive search for a painful splinter in her left big toe. Or was it the right?

  Roxanne came downstairs, found me on the deck. I was watching the bats silhouetted against gray clouds, darkening from the west.

  “Storm coming,” I said.

  “Up there or down here?” Roxanne said.

  “I don’t think you should let her back in,” I said.

  “I know, but it’s hard. I spent a year telling her how to make a better life.”

  “They paid you to do that. They’re not paying you now.”

  “I was the only one who cared.”

  We stood, close but not touching. There was a rumble of thunder in the distance, so faint you thought you might have imagined it.

  “I know you think you can still fix her. But I worry that she’s just worming her way in,” I said.

  “An occasional phone call,” Roxanne said. “That’s not worming.”

  “It opens the door.”

  “I won’t let that happen.”

  “I don’t trust her,” I said.

  “Jack, she just lost her son. And . . .” She paused.

  “And if you’re nice to her, she won’t sue you?” I said.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’d rather see her in court.”

  “Than me talking to her on the phone once a week?”

  “It won’t be once a week, Roxanne,” I said. “It won’t be once a day.”

  “I can control that. I don’t have to answer the phone.”

  “So then she shows up.”

  “She won’t.”

  “She already has. Twice.”

  “But she’s trying to get better,” Roxanne said. “You heard her. So she can see her son again.”

  “I know, and my heart goes out to her. It really does. But she’s nuts. Or at least manipulative. It’s a junkie’s survival skill.”

  “You don’t have to tell me. I spent ten years working with these people.”

  Another rumble, this one closer, black clouds billowing up from behind the tree line to the west.

  “I think Dave’s strategy—disarm and conquer, or whatever the hell it is—is too risky. For you. For Sophie.”

  “You don’t want to make enemies of these people, Jack,” Roxanne said.

  “Why not? Tell her you can’t see her. You’re not allowed to. If she comes back, get a protection order.”

  “Jack, she just lost her little boy. She’s got a lot of problems, but underneath it all she’s still a mom.”

  “And three days ago she was blaming you for it. Now she wants to come over and have tea?”

  “She’s always been erratic.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  “Jack, please.”

  “I’m sorry. But I don’t trust her.”

  “You don’t know her.”

  “And that’s just fine. It’s your thing, playing shrink to these lowlifes.”

  I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth.

  Roxanne didn’t answer. I could feel her tense. There was a flicker of lightning in the distance, blue light reflecting off the clouds.

  “I wasn’t playing anything.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.”

  “A lawsuit could absolutely sink us, Jack,” Roxanne said. “Win or lose. I mean, we’re barely making it as it is.”

  “I know, honey. I just don’t like it.”

  “I don’t either. But if a few phone conversations can save us from financial ruin . . .”

  We were quiet for a moment. The bats had disappeared into the darkness. The thunder was moving closer, rolling east like an approaching army. Lightning, a shimmering flash. A two-count and a peal of thunder.

  “And her boyfriend—”

  “He’s long gone.”

  “If he comes around here I’ll blow his head off.”

  Roxanne was quiet. A puff of wind ruffled her hair.

  “You or Clair,” she said.

  “Me or Clair,” I said.

  I reached out and took her hand and squeezed. I waited, and finally Roxanne squeezed back.

  We woke to see that Sophie had joined us, chased into our bed when the storm blew through.

  It was a little after six, the night’s rain still dripping from the trees but sunlight filling the room. Roxanne reached over Sophie and touched my shoulder. We lay there and listened. The birds: redstarts, a veery, then a loon calling as it flew over, chased from one of the ponds by the storm. The loon’s call faded into the distance and then I could hear Sophie breathing—quick, shallow breaths. A delicate creature.

  I touched my hand to Roxanne’s and eased out of bed. I was halfway down the stairs when the phone rang. I trotted to the kitchen and answered it.

  “Mr. McMorrow.”

  “Yes.”

  “Trooper Foley. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “No,” I said. “I was up.”

  “I thought you might be.”

  “So,” I said.

  “So I thought you’d like to know. Alphonse.”

  “You got him?”

  “No, sir. But we think we know where he’s headed.”

  “Here?”

  I heard Roxanne start down the stairs.

  “No, sir,” Foley said. “It seems Alphonse made arrangements to be picked up.”

  “By whom?”

  “What, Jack?” Roxanne said.

  “Where do you think he is?”

  “Sister of one of his cellmates. Young woman from Lawrence, Massachusetts. It appears she picked him up on Route 201 in Gardiner, Maine.”

  “And went where?”

  “We have video of them going through the Kittery tolls. Headed south.”

  I turned to Roxanne, wide-eyed beside me, covered the receiver. “He hooked up with some woman, last seen headed south in Kittery.”

  I took my hand off the receiver, returned to Foley. “When?”

  “Three a.m.,” Foley said.

  “Headed for Lawrence?”

  “That’s our best guess. PD there is looking for her car. Of course, she may just drop him off. He’ll go to ground.”

  “A lot of rat holes in Lawrence to hide in,” I said.

  “They’ll pick him up,” Foley said.

  “Or they could just shoot him,” I said.

  There was no reply and then the trooper said, “I understand you’re upset, Mr. McMorrow, but be careful what you say.”

 
; “I’m not upset,” I said.

  Another pause. I could hear traffic in the background, a truck horn blasting.

  “Well,” Foley said. “I thought you’d like to know. You and Ms. Masterson and your friend.”

  “Clair. Alphonse shows up here, he’ll . . .” I held it back.

  Another long pause, and then Foley said he’d keep us posted. I told him I appreciated that. He hung up and I put the phone down.

  Roxanne, arms folded across her chest, said, “Lawrence, Massachusetts?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And you said he’s got a big mouth. He’ll blab to somebody and then he’ll be back inside, doing another three to five.”

  “Don’t say that just to make me feel better,” Roxanne said. “Give me the honest answer.”

  “They haven’t caught him, so he could be anywhere.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” Jack,” she said. “Not about this.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “And keep the rifle loaded.”

  Sophie was out of our bed at seven. I made her blueberry waffles, her favorite. She was chopping the waffle into quarter-inch cubes when the phone rang again. Roxanne looked at me, went to the phone, and picked it up from the holder. She went through the room to the doors to the deck, slid them open, and stepped outside. Sophie was lining up the waffle cubes in the shape of an S. Roxanne walked back in, held out the phone.

  “For you,” she said.

  “Who?” I said.

  Roxanne shrugged, an odd look on her face.

  I took the phone, said hello.

  “Jack.”

  A woman’s voice, husky and sultry. A little slurry.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Lasha, Jack.”

  “Hey,” I said. “How are you?”

  “Not so good. Tired. Been up all night.”

  “Can’t sleep?”

  Roxanne was watching me, brow furrowed.

  “No. Serious stress levels.” A pause. “Was that your wife?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She sounded suspicious. Like she thinks you’re screwing around.”

  A swallow, the clunk of a bottle being set down. Lasha was drunk.

  “No,” I said. “She wouldn’t think that.”

  “Why not?” Lasha said.

  “Because I don’t.”

  “Must be nice,” Lasha said, “to be so virtuous.”

  Another pause, another clunk.

  “The reason I called you,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This town.”

  “What about it?”

  “This hick town. This fucking pretentious place. How can a hick town be pretentious? This one has managed to do it.”

  I waited.

  “This town is fucking imploding,” Lasha said.

  “The fires.”

  “The fires. The whole place turning on itself. We’re eating our young, Jack.”

  I waited a moment while she drank.

  “How so?”

  “I’ll be your Deep Throat, Jack,” Lasha said. “Not like the porn movie; your little wifey doesn’t have to worry. I’ll just feed you the scoops. Like . . . like whatever it was.”

  “Watergate,” I said. “Listen, Lasha, I’ve got to go.”

  “But I haven’t told you,” she said.

  “Told me what?” I said.

  “About the kid. Woodrow. The Goth kid.”

  “What about him?”

  “They beat the crap out of him, Jack.”

  “When?”

  “Last night sometime. But they just found him. My friend, Maggie. She heard it on the scanner.”

  “Where?”

  “Horseback Road. In the woods.”

  “How bad?”

  “My friend said it sounded really bad. Like he might die, even.”

  “They still there?”

  “I think so. I just heard a siren go by.”

  A pause for Lasha to drink. Roxanne was listening from the kitchen, the sun streaming in.

  “So you coming to town?” Lasha said.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Stop by, Jack,” she said. “I’ll stay up.”

  When I left, Clair was having coffee in the kitchen while Roxanne helped Sophie pull on her riding boots. Sophie was chattering away, telling her mom not to forget the carrots, did horses only eat sugar in cubes, why didn’t ponies grow up to be horses, did Pokey know all of our names? Clair was wearing a denim shirt, untucked, the bulge of a Glock at the small of his back.

  I gathered up my recorder, police scanner, notebooks, and phone, stuffed them in a small backpack. Turned as Roxanne stood up, Sophie headed for the door, Clair behind her.

  “So you’ll be there with her,” I said.

  “Yeah. I’ll bring my phone,” she said.

  “Three hours,” I said. “Kerry will want this followed up.”

  “Go,” Roxanne said. “Come home before we wear out our welcome.”

  “Can’t be done,” Clair said.

  Our eyes met. He nodded.

  “We’ll hold down the fort,” Clair said.

  He would.

  I banged the truck down the back roads, speeding through Montville and Liberty, passing guys in pickups moseying their way to the dump. The sky was pure blue, the blurring tree line a shimmering green. It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood, and I found myself mouthing the words to Fred Rogers’ ditty, picturing Sophie kneeling on the floor in front of the TV. In Mr. Rogers’ neighborhood, nobody was beaten into a coma.

  I crossed Route 17, wound my way south past Cape Cod houses and organic farms, signs hand-painted with pictures of flowers and goats. The scanner was on, a trooper calling someone in CID, asking for their ETA.

  So Lasha’s info had been good. CID was homicide. Woodrow had either died, or there was a good chance he wasn’t going to make it. I pictured the angry kid, a frustrated child in a man’s body, exploding when I’d told him what people had said, his emotions amplified by Asperger’s or whatever it was that was his burden. I tried not to picture him on the ground, kicked and stomped, but I couldn’t help it. I scowled and drove, trying to outrun the guilt.

  Horseback Road was west of the river, a couple of miles from where I’d talked to Woodrow. The road was several miles long and I’d come in at an intersection, after the bridge. I was wondering whether to turn north or south when I saw the Life Flight helicopter crossing ahead and to my right, just above the trees, headed west. My guess was the trauma center in Lewiston.

  “Hang in there, Woodrow,” I said.

  I crossed the river, saw kayakers from the bridge, their boats red, yellow, and blue. They were paddling gracefully, riding the current to the bay. I slid through the stop sign at the far end of the bridge, took a left, sped on.

  A mile down the road, a dark Chevy sedan appeared in my rearview, blue lights flashing in the grille. I eased over and a detective passed, a guy wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap. I pulled back out, let him lead me to the scene.

  There was a sheriff’s office cruiser on the side of the road, blue strobes flashing, a deputy standing alongside. The deputy pointed to a dirt road leading into the trees and the detective turned in. An oncoming car slowed and stopped and the deputy walked across the road to talk to the driver.

  As he turned away, I took the right, followed the detective in, the truck bumping over the ruts. The road crested a rise, then veered to the left and down. I could see flashing lights through the trees to the right, then cars and trucks parked alongside in the brush. I pulled in behind the last truck and parked. The pickup had a Sanctuary Fire Department placard above its license plate, the next one the same.

  Different scene, same cast.

  I walked up and into a wood yard, an open area cut for loggers to stack and load wood. The ground was torn, littered with bark slash and crushed spruce branches, like some gigantic monster had stomped through. At the far side there was an ambulance and a State Police cruiser parked and
running, and beyond them yellow crime-scene tape stretched across the far end of the yard. Past the tape was a muddied pickup with a fuel tank in the back, the name of a logging company on the side. A yellow log skidder with big chained tires. One side of the metal engine housing was scorched black.

  Just inside the tape was the detective—a short, chunky guy with dark thinning hair thick with product. Blue polo shirt, hand next to the gun on his hip. He was talking to two cops, one state, one county. The trooper was a tall, slim woman with red hair pushing out from beneath her broad-brimmed hat. The deputy was the same guy from the fire at Don Barbier’s barn, the one with the iPhone. In their midst was Chief Frederick.

  I stopped, raised the phone, fired off a few shots.

  Frederick looked up and saw me. Shook his head.

  Then the detective was talking and Frederick turned to him. I moved closer, shot a few more: the cops, the logging equipment, the yellow tape. I tucked the phone back into my pocket, eased up to the group, stopped six feet away. Listened.

  “So the loggers get here to start work, find the kid on the ground,” the detective was saying.

  “Right,” the trooper said. “Called it in. Covered him with a blanket, checked his pulse. One of them was ex-military. Knew not to move him.”

  “Kid hasn’t regained consciousness yet?” the detective said.

  “No,” the deputy said. “Serious head trauma.”

  “And you were the first responder, Chief?”

  “Just on the other side of the bridge when I heard the call. I knew where they meant, ’cause I’d seen where these boys was cutting.”

  “And you knew the victim?”

  “Knew who he was. Small town. He kinda stands out.”

  He paused.

  “Actually went by the clothes, mostly. His face was pretty stove up.”

  Frederick looked up at me again, took a step toward me and held up his hand.

  “This is a crime scene. No press.”

  “What paper?” the detective said.

  “New York Times.”

  “Word travels far and fast,” he said.

  “I live twenty miles from here,” I said. “When I heard it was Woodrow I drove right over.”

  The detective ducked under the yellow tape and stepped up. He had a red fleshy nose with distended pores, a scar on his forehead shaped in a V. His eyes were small and close-set. He held out his hand and we shook. It was a small hand. No macho death grip.