They were in the kitchen now, Paul scooping his chicken and broccoli into a plate. It felt only lukewarm when Paul stuck a finger in it but he decided to eat it as-is rather than reheat.
“I went to the police station to see why the town fathers hate us.”
“And?”
He shook his head. “Police Chief Sandy is a reserved but decent enough sort, I gather. Way he explains it, the town’s afraid of turning into the big, bad city if they don’t keep out dangerous characters like us.”
“Sounds illegal,” she said.
“Well, that’s not exactly how he put it.” Though, come to think of it, the chief’s message hadn’t come across a whole lot more guarded or diplomatic than that.
“I guess it makes a little sense. From their perspective, anyway.”
“Very little,” he said, gulping at dinner. “Total strangers willing to pay eight-hundred-thousand dollars for the house just to keep us out?”
“Maybe it’s worth that much.”
“In this economy? And if it is, how’d we get such a great deal in the first place? I’d love to know why the McConlons were so anxious to leave. I wish we’d actually met them. By the way, the cop who yelled at me is the seller’s brother.”
Darby was nibbling at a fingernail. She’d long ago found a way to tame her nail-biting habit by taking such tiny portions that the damage could only be seen under a microscope. “What cop?” she asked.
He washed his lukewarm meal down with milk. He drank more of the stuff than any grown man he knew. “I’d better back up. First thing I see at that Drake Municipal Building downtown is a blood drive. Simple enough, right?”
Darby kept taking her tiny bites from a thumb nail.
“You ever seen cops guarding blood like it’s plutonium? That’s how this was. Weird.”
By the glazed look in his young wife’s eyes, he could tell she was mentally making to-do lists. He couldn’t blame her when he thought about it. You had to be there.
“Anyway, that’s how I met this Marty character. McConlon. The cop. The brother. He almost arrests me for trying to enter the blood drive room, but gets real friendly once he stops PMSing. I can’t figure him out.”
“Uh huh.”
Yep. Definitely mentally composing one of her to-do lists.
Before he lost her altogether, he said, “Forget the blood drive. I’ve got a puzzle for you. If the locals hate strangers so much, why do they have a whole motel full of them at the top of Pleasant Run Avenue?”
Darby sat and folded her hands demurely in her lap, apparently to keep her teeth away from them. “You mean the Sundown Motel? I’ve noticed those men by the pool.”
“A few women and kids, too. I drove through the parking lot on the way home, another reason I was late. The rusted heaps had plates from West Virginia, Tennessee, Ohio—even as far away as Oregon. They’re obviously dirt poor and a lot easier to run off than we are. People like that, if you want to get rid of them, you throw them in jail for flicking cigarette butts from moving vehicles.”
“That’s awful,” Darby said.
“I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s a fact of life. Only, it seems that the good citizens of this town would rather have the likes of them around than us.” He ended it on a note of hurt disbelief that sounded more like priggish petulance than irony.
Darby stared at her slender fingers. “Maybe they’re working on some kind of construction project.”
“Maybe,” he reluctantly agreed. He hadn’t considered that. “But I’ve done a lot of walking and I haven’t noticed anything going up. Have you?”
“Maybe an indoor project. More work in that monstrous municipal building. Whatever.”
Yeah, that could explain it, but Paul hoped it didn’t. A part of him—the bored, unemployed part, no doubt—was enjoying his little mystery.
The hollow two-note chime of the doorbell took them both by surprise. It was the first time he’d heard it since an earlier Savannah Easton visit. Paul found his wife’s eyes and wondered if his were as wide with surprise and vague fear as hers. Even outside of this cold town it was unusual for anyone to get unexpected visitors these days…especially at night.
It was drizzling out, Paul noticed as he watched beads of water dripping down the glass over the front entry hall double doors. He hesitated briefly before cautiously unlocking and turning the knob. He heard Darby hovering in the background.
The door swung open to three old men.
Chapter Fifteen
The three stood facing Paul on the terrazzo stone front porch. The one in the middle, taller and somewhat less elderly than the others, held high a black umbrella under which his friends gathered, framing him tightly like carolers sharing a songbook.
“Good evening, Mr. Highsmith,” said the old man on the right. Like the others, he wore a necktie, his creased with careless disuse. Not much occasion for one in a town like Babylon. He stood the most hunched of the three, looking oddly frail despite his wide shoulders and deep chest. “I wonder if we can come in out of the rain.”
“Of course.”
Paul mumbled a puzzled apology and stepped aside so the three could enter and shake themselves dry in the foyer. Like Tuck after his bath. One umbrella seemed to offer insufficient coverage over three old men. Together, they stomped imaginary mud from their feet and murmured greetings to Darby, behind him.
The tall one said, “We really should have called, but old men have old habits.”
“It used to be,” said the one who’d spoken first, “you wanted to chat, you took a walk, rapped on your neighbor’s door and talked his ear off while his wife put the kids to bed. You folks have a kid, don’t you?”
The abrupt question and the nonchalance with the harsh-sounding “kid” caught Paul by surprise.
“Won’t you come in?” Darby asked.
She led them to a couch in the family room where they plunked themselves down in the same order in which Paul had greeted them at the door, then took an inordinate amount of time settling stiff bones.
“Big house,” said the third guest, a dour-looking man who spoke for the first time. His voice seemed unused to the workout. “Much too big, I’d think, for just the three of you.”
In the uncomfortable silence that followed, the tall umbrella owner chuckled. “John, you always get right to the heart of matters, don’t you? We haven’t even introduced ourselves yet.”
The frail man with the massive upper body chortled an apology. “Sorry. That should have been my job, being the mayor of our little town. I’m Olan Buck. This tall fellow here is Mr. James Chaplin, and the grumpy man simply talking your ear off is John Tolliver.”
The tall one, Chaplin, flapped a hand self-consciously. Tolliver barely nodded. He sat folded compactly upon himself, his features seeming to meet in the middle of his face as his scowl pulled his eyebrows down and lifted the center of his mouth nearly to his nose.
“Well then,” James Chaplin said into yet another awkward silence. “Now that you know us…”
“Can I get you gentlemen something to drink?” Darby asked, springing to her feet. It was obvious that she wouldn’t mind leaving Paul alone with the odd group.
“No thanks.”
“Not a thing.”
Obstinate head shake.
With that, Mssrs. Buck, Chaplin and Tolliver removed any excuse for Darby to abandon him. Paul could hardly contain his smug glee.
Groping for something, anything, to contribute, he finally blurted, “Chaplin’s Department Store,” to the tall man. “And Buck Cement Products,” he added, this time addressing the town’s mayor.
“Very good,” the department store’s namesake said.
“Yes, Buck Cement Products,” the mayor contributed. “You’ve obviously explored the industrial area to the southeast of town.”
“I’ve been everywhere,” Paul said, enjoying, without understanding why, the stir caused by his words. It was as though the three decrepit bulls squirmed their
discomfort in unison.
“Well, it doesn’t take long,” Olan Buck finally offered. “Babylon is so small and uninteresting.” He tittered. “I’m mayor. I shouldn’t be talking like this, should I?”
The department store owner patted Buck’s knee. “I think we all feel the same way, Olan. I’d probably take off for greener pastures myself if I wasn’t trapped by generations of Chaplins. We’ve always lived here and I suppose we always will.”
Mayor Buck murmured his agreement while John Tolliver stared with half-closed eyes at a spot between the two chairs occupied by Paul and Darby.
“My department store, Mr. Highsmith,” the taller old man continued,” is a tradition here, but if you lived twenty miles outside of Babylon you would have never heard of it. That’s what I’m trying to say. For nearly a century, my family’s lives have been intertwined with that store. We’d be useless in the outside world.”
Chaplin leaned back at the same moment the town’s mayor scooted forward. “It’s the same with us, Mr. Highsmith. Buck Cement Products…I hardly even know what the company does, but it’s run by cousins and uncles and I get a quarterly dividend check because I’m family.”
“What these two are trying to say,” grunted John Tolliver from his still corner of the couch, “is that Babylon is an old town—old with family—and that’s the way we like it. It’s home to the Tollivers and the Bucks and the Chaplins and the Drakes and the Cravens and a dozen more names. There’s no place for people like you.”
The dour old man remained motionless, hunched in upon himself, his wizened body almost lost in the couch. The other two smiled serenely as though applying salve to the sting of their friend’s words.
“When you mention the Drake family, that would include Miles Drake, wouldn’t it?” Paul asked casually, his eyes flitting from face to face to face for a reaction truer than words.
“And that would be your little boy, Tuck, wouldn’t it?”
It was only after John Tolliver spoke that Paul heard the faint wailing from up in the nursery and echoing out of the baby monitor in the kitchen. Darby gasped and skipped up the stairs.
“Sorry,” said Mr. Chaplin. “We’ll keep our voices down.”
“Wonderful boy,” John Tolliver said dryly. When he spoke, only his lips moved, and just barely. “Kids, you have to watch them. You think they’re safe in a small town, but that’s not always so.”
The sour old man’s eyes shone with a touch of yellow as they focused on Paul. “Read the papers, Mr. Highsmith—or the Internet, which I guess is the thing these days. Violence, child abuse, missing children. It happens everywhere, not just in Detroit. The only thing we lack here is white collar crime.”
Did a smile crack his dour countenance? Paul couldn’t be sure.
“Wouldn’t it be ironic,” Chaplin said with a pleasant chuckle, “if you leave Detroit for the safety and serenity of little old Babylon, where nothing ever happens, and all hell breaks loose.”
Was that a threat? Paul opened his mouth, but he couldn’t dig words out of his storm of thoughts. He sat stunned, literally speechless, until his attention was grabbed by the sound and fury of his young wife racing down the stairs and sliding across the foyer and into the living room, screeching to a halt before the three startled old men.
“Listen and listen well,” she said, the words escaping her like steam from a hot teapot. “I heard you threaten my child. That’s a fact, so don’t waste my time denying it.” She swept the air with one trim arm. “First, you come into our home and insult me with your story of the good old days when you’d drop by for a chat with the man of the house while the little wife prepared the children for bed. Well, alright. I put up with that anachronistic bullshit from my grandfather, who didn’t know any better and was slightly daffy at the time, so I’ll cut you three the same slack. But don’t ever issue even the most veiled threat against my son. Do you all understand?”
The three men sat with gaping mouths.
James Chaplin recovered first. “Mrs. Highsmith, please don’t think any harm would ever come to your lovely little boy. Not from us. I think Mr. Tolliver here was merely—”
“Mr. Tolliver here,” Darby interrupted, “is a fool and a bully who’s been allowed to get away with too much for too long in the guise of being old and crotchety.”
John Tolliver’s rheumy eyes momentarily sparkled with a heat that would hurt to the touch. “Longer than you can imagine,” he said.
As soon as he’d made his inscrutable comment, the eyes seemed to cool, the lids droop to their half-mast expression of bored disillusionment.
“Now gentlemen,” Darby said, “I want you to leave. Please don’t forget your umbrella because it’s still raining and you’re not coming back for it.”
The three struggled to their feet, pulling at neckties and smoothing the creases from slacks.
At the door, Mayor Buck said, “Mrs. Highsmith, I assure you—”
“No, I assure the three of you,” Darby said evenly, “that I’ll hunt you to hell if anything happens to my son or my husband. Please take that as a promise, and don’t return. Don’t make a new offer on our home or even discuss the matter with our real estate agent.” She smiled engagingly. “And it would be wonderful if you could pretend not to know us if we pass on the street. We’ll do the same.”
As the door closed, Paul’s last sight was of three speechless old men hunched under an inadequate umbrella in a steady drizzle.
Chapter Sixteen
Great, Todd thought Friday morning while standing in front of the crumbling brick and wood and concrete garage. Life just keeps getting better.
“Get back in the car,” D.B. shouted. “I’ll run you back out here on lunch break. He’ll definitely be open by then.”
Todd shook his head with the finality of a man who’d already listened to his fill of reason. He burned with a vague, smoldering anger that found targets in Joy for insisting he come out here to check on the car, but mostly in the hick who ran Zeebe’s Garage for not being open at damn near eight-thirty on a weekday morning. When were working people expected to take in their cars if not before work?
“Thanks,” he managed to get out from between clenched jaws, “but I’m gonna wait around. I’ll walk to work if the Olds isn’t done yet.”
He’d caught Don Brandon on his way out that morning, and been readily granted a ride to the garage. Like most of the men from the Sundown, D.B. worked in one of the six or seven small factories on Sennett Street in the so-called Industrial Parkway.
Zeebe’s was at the very end of Main View Road before it took a ninety-degree turn, exchanged pavement for gravel and became Sennett. Bean fields and gravel roads and rickety factories. A walk would be all of a mile, mile and a half. And he’d have the advantage of gloomy silence rather than D.B.’s sunny chatter.
The ride in the Ford pickup had been filled with country music rattling like broken glass from defective speakers and the driver’s incessant morning cheer. The white sky and early humidity also contributed to Todd’s foul mood.
Now facing an empty building, he wiped his face of the sweat already accumulating and said, loud enough to be heard above the radio twang, “Really, D.B., thanks for the ride but I’m gonna wait around.”
D.B. shrugged. “Guess it don’t matter if you’re late. I’m thinking you gotta sleep with the boss’s wife and drink all his beer to get fired in this town. Just remember, Friday’s payday.”
He rapped his palm against the door of the F-150, some kind of high-energy sign-off, then threw gravel as he shimmied out of the lot.
Todd saw more Sundowners in rattletrap cars and hillbilly trucks. They honked and waved at him as they screeched around the turn onto Sennett. To get out of the worse of the heat, Todd slid behind a crooked row of dead vehicles with missing grills, missing doors, missing tires, missing lights. The patch of dirt and weeds in front of the garage was a rust-flaked graveyard of American metal, unburied corpses with hoods up, engine blocks g
one. Hulks with no seats sitting on cinder. If the property offered any indication of Zeebe’s mechanical skills, Todd already regretted his decision to send the Olds this way.
Of course, it hadn’t actually been his decision in the first place, a recollection that sent him seething. Goddamn cop.
He circled Zeebe’s grounds, sinking into the mud up to his work boot laces. He made his way around the rusted corpses and the seriously leaning building, searching with all the enthusiasm of an earthquake survivor hoping not to find loved ones.
The building sat on a colorless concrete foundation, two closed bay doors in front. Todd tugged at one of the roll-up doors and wasn’t surprised when it didn’t budge.
“Damn,” he said as he took off for the street.
Then he recalled spying a second door, to the side of the building. He turned with another curse, this one for his wife for sending him on this fool’s errand. He jammed a cigarette between his lips and fired it up.
It was unlocked. It opened a crack. Todd looked up and down the road, giving the garage owner one last chance to show up if he wasn’t already here. He took a big drag of good tar poison, stomped the butt underfoot and pushed the door open.
The bright white sky left him squinting in the dark interior. He stood in the doorway until his irises slitted and his vision adjusted enough to pick out six parked vehicles, one of which was his Olds Eighty-Eight. Looking no worse, at least from this view, than when he’d last seen it.
“Hello?” he called out to the shadows.
Nothing.
The cement floor was sleek with engine oil and lubricants, littered with tools that wanted to trip him up as he picked his way as carefully as possible to his car, his T-shirt glued to his back by sweat and anxiety.
The floor wasn’t level—had he really expected otherwise?—and now he heard the door behind whine slowly close, another victim of gravity. Todd turned and nervously watched the sharp white line of natural light disappear. By the time the door nudged up against its jamb, daylight had fled the premises altogether, but by now his eyes had grown accustomed to the shadowy bleakness.
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