by Sarah Graves
“I only took astronomy,” she said, “so I could bail you out when you got in trouble writing the term paper, and…”
She stopped, went on in another tone. Besides hours when she did little but help Sam with schoolwork, she played endless games of Scrabble and anagrams with him, to help him develop his verbal dexterity.
“Anyway. You owe me a moonlight sail,” she finished.
I disliked seeing her treat him so tactfully; she never used to. It let me know she sensed the ambivalence of his feelings for her. But my son didn’t seem to notice.
“Yeah, yeah,” he replied cheerfully. “Hey, it’s past nineteen hundred hours, we want to get going.” Whereupon they went out to try to get Sam’s car started; I kept insisting he needed a newer one but he was about as quick to spend money as he was to pursue romance. Fortunately the trip to the boat basin was a steep downhill ride.
Back in the dining room I found the pudding and cream eaten, George’s blackberry liqueur bottle nearly emptied, and the party ending. But Harry Markle couldn’t get Prill’s muzzle off his knee.
“Looks like somebody’s fallen in love,” Ellie observed with a glance at me; I’d confided to her my worries about Sam.
Prill sighed, gazing soulfully up at Harry. “Did you have pets in the city?” I asked him, pouring the last of the liqueur into my coffee. What the heck, I was already going to have the mother of all headaches in the morning.
Harry shook his head, fondling Prill’s ear. “Wanted to. But in an apartment…”
He raised his free hand, let it fall. “Too hard on the pet. Besides, with my schedule I didn’t think I could take the right care of one.”
“What schedule would that be?” Roy McCall asked, just making conversation. Beside him, Evert continued to snore softly.
“I was a cop. NYPD, downtown,” Harry replied pleasantly. But not in a way that encouraged further questions about this work.
“Oh, then you must know all my old haunts,” I said. “Ciro’s, on Lombardy Street? And Dorian’s Grill?” In the city I’d gotten in the habit of checking stories. My clients would lie to me about the silliest things, to save face or to keep me from being able to testify about their businesses, later.
Or they would until they got to know me. Harry Markle waded right in. “Yeah. Good old Ciro’s. I know Dorian’s too, but it wasn’t my kind of place.”
Harry rose. Prill, too; stubby tail wagging, her head tipped eagerly as if to say, “Let’s go, boss!”
Harry looked at her, trying to decide whether or not to say something. “You found her?” was what he finally came out with.
“Yes, Harry,” I said. “And we’re stuck with you, aren’t we, Prill? Unless,” I went on slowly, “you want her? She does eat a lot and she needs plenty of exercise,” I added hastily.
It would be awful if he took Prill, then broke her heart by not keeping her. “A dog like this, you have to really be sure…”
“I’m sure,” he said. “I’d meant to get a dog as soon as—”
Suddenly I knew I couldn’t have found Prill a better home if I’d designed it for her myself. I doubted she would ever let him out of her sight from now on, she was so smitten with him.
Even though he was, as I had just determined, a stone liar. “Come on,” he told her, “let’s get you settled in for the night.”
“Wha’?” said Wyatt Evert, raising his head from the table as man and dog exited.
Wade took one of Wyatt’s arms, George took the other, and together they got the drunken man on his feet.
“We’ll get him to his room,” Wade told Fran, who watched tight-lipped before leaving on her own; I’d scarcely heard a word from her all night. Instead she’d cast speculative looks at Roy McCall, who’d returned them in a way I thought might bode interestingly for Fran in the future.
Between the two men Wyatt stumbled in winey befuddlement as from the other side of the house I heard a roar: Sam’s old car starting at last with a bang of backfire and then a clattering of valve-chatter as it headed downtown.
“Thanks,” Harry told me, opening the door with Prill hugging his leg. From the first, she’d positioned herself at his side as if to keep anyone else from getting near him.
Overhead, the stars twinkled with unusual brilliance, their light amplified by the first hints of storm-fueled humidity.
“Don’t mention it,” I said, and was about to say something more. Something on the order of:
Don’t lie to me. I’ve been lied to by the best.
But from down the street I could still hear Sam’s car, its engine howling. The sound, as of somebody trying to go fifty in second gear, was not among those I’d come to think of as normal from the old vehicle.
“Ellie,” I called, pierced by a premonition. “Catch Wade and George.”
Maybe if they got there in time they could stop whatever was happening; hold it off, get in front of it somehow.
But by now they’d have heard it, too, the whole town alerted by that ghastly scream of metal-on-metal protest.
Sam, I thought, standing there frozenly. Maggie.
Then came the crash.
Chapter 3
My fault,” Harry Markle told me in the hospital corridor.
After the sirens. After the ambulance.
After the Jaws of Life.
I wheeled on him. “What’re you talking about? You didn’t have anything to do with it, you weren’t anywhere near…”
But then I stopped, because Harry had a look on his face and I’d seen that look before. The guy wearing it had been sitting in my office making a will, two other guys waiting for him outside. He’d called the two guys in to witness it so I could notarize it.
After that, no one ever saw him again. A favor, it had been, to my guy: letting him make a will. A sign of respect from better times. But times change. And my guy had known it.
Harry, too. “Come on,” he said now with quiet intensity, indicating a sign on the wall near the recovery room: CAFETERIA ->
Sam and Maggie were sleeping off the anesthesia. Sam had a broken clavicle. Maggie needed surgery to find and fix abdominal bleeding. But both kids had been wearing seat belts and both, the surgeon — not Victor — assured me, would be just fine.
At the crash site, things had been different. A vivid mental snapshot of an ambulance technician’s fist rising into the air kept making me feel short of breath. A fist rising and slamming down on Sam’s chest, because his heart had stopped.
“It was an accident,” I said numbly again, pulling a plastic chair from a cafeteria table.
The place was deserted at three in the morning, fluorescents humming overhead but the coffee urn producing only a sour black liquid. “They say Sam’s heart’s fine now, though.”
The surgeon, a pleasant Pakistani gentleman with enough credentials to float a barge from here to his homeland, had told me that broken collarbones healed so readily, you could put the two pieces at opposite sides of a room and they would still knit back together almost immediately. And in a young man Sam’s age, the surgeon had continued kindly, even such a blow to the chest was not a thing to be overly troubled about. All would be well.
“But you lied,” I added to Harry Markle, anger piercing the fog as I swallowed the bitter stuff.
“There’s no Ciro’s on Lombardy Street,” Harry agreed, “and I don’t know of any Dorian’s Grill. But was I supposed to say so right then, let everyone know you were trying to catch me out?”
“Huh.” I stared at my hands cupped around the cup. “It would have been awkward, wouldn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, I do the same thing. Cop habit: you get so you don’t believe anything anybody says. So you check.”
Then he took a deep breath and threw me the curveball, the one I couldn’t have seen coming in a million years.
“Listen. This probably isn’t a good time to say this. But I know about your father.”
I nearly choked on the coffee. “How…�
�
But of course: when Harry Markle became a cop, my dad would have been a fresh entry in New York police lore. Jacob Tiptree, the fumble-fingered moron who blew up a Greenwich Village house while trying to rig an anarchist bomb, was a famous old radical villain.
The blast broke windows for blocks, leveled the town house, killed six co-conspirators plus his young wife, Leonora. The lone survivor was Tiptree’s daughter, Jacobia Lee. It’s how I ended up in hill country being raised by my mom’s relatives.
But sitting there in the hospital cafeteria I didn’t see how any of it could be linked to Sam, as Harry was implying.
The steering column of Sam’s car had broken off on impact. The force of it had stopped his heart, and only the quick-thinking ambulance technician had known how to restart it:
She’d hit him again. Hard, with her fist, while I’d struggled unsuccessfully to make the people at the crash site let me near. He’d flopped like a fish when she slugged him, I saw that much.
I forced my mind from it. “If you’ve got something else to say, Harry, say it. I’m too exhausted to play twenty questions.”
He sighed. “I was going to tell you, anyway. Because if you found out, you’d wonder why I didn’t. Like with the restaurants.”
“Uh-huh.” I gazed at him, dumb with fatigue and the remnants of fear, waiting for the punch line.
But I wasn’t ready for that either. “See, back then I was on the task force trying to catch him.”
The only survivor: me.
“He didn’t,” I said carefully through a throat thickened by sudden emotion, “live. He and my mother and their friends—”
“Yeah,” Harry agreed. “That was the official story, that no one got out except the kid. You. But some thought different.”
He leaned back in the chair. “I was a new young guy, but I’d been top of my class at the Academy. I was getting groomed. So as a rookie I was put on as errand boy to some biggish operations.”
“One of them was to catch my father.” I couldn’t absorb it. So I defaulted back to the situation at hand: “But you still haven’t said what that’s got to do with Sam, with his accident.”
“It’s complicated. Or was.” A look of pain creased his face.
I must have made a sound of impatience.
“Your dad was never found,” he told me. “We spent a long time searching. I even met you again a few years later. Remember?”
I remembered men coming to the house. Strangers; not a good sign in the hills. I didn’t remember Harry. But that didn’t mean anything; by that time a man in a suit, clean-shaven and wearing shoes, might as well’ve been from Jupiter.
A tired-appearing woman in nursing garb came in; my heart lurched, but she wasn’t looking for me. She tried the coffee urn, sighed, settled for hot water and a tea bag before going out again.
“Anyway, the task force finally ended. I’d made detective. And not so long ago I got assigned to another case. A nut job who specialized. The victims were cops’ wives, husbands, or significant others. Remember?”
I nodded. It was the kind of sensational story that got into the news loop, even way up here in Maine, and I recalled it now because it had happened in Manhattan, in my old stomping grounds. I’d followed it in the back pages of the Bangor Daily News.
And then I’d forgotten all about it. “But I don’t—”
“You will, in a minute.” Harry’s eyes said I wouldn’t be happy with it, either. But by now of course I had to hear the rest.
“I also didn’t catch that guy,” he said grimly. “Instead, he caught me. Here.” He pulled a folded newspaper clipping from the breast pocket of his worn leather jacket. “This sums it up.”
The date inked on the clipping said it was three years old but the events popped out of it as if they were only yesterday, the kind of occurrences you imagine only happen in nightmares.
Or you hope so. “Jesus,” I said when I finished. There was a lot more detail in the clip than the News had picked up from the wire stories.
“This guy found out you were after him? He killed your wife and your…”
He winced. “Yeah. I had a girlfriend. I’m not proud of it, but that’s the way it was.”
“And he found out about them, somehow, and he killed her. I mean, killed them both.”
“Right. But there’s more. Final act: the guy suckers me to a rooftop by the river. He’s got a woman up there, he’s holding her hostage at knifepoint. The woman is a hooker, addict, well-known skell. In other words, she’s trash.”
My turn to wince. “I mean,” he said, “from the way they spun it, the tabloids. Not from my point of view. Never from mine.”
He took a deep breath. “So anyway, he’s got a mask on, so I can’t identify him, and he’s got the woman at the edge. Ten-story building. And he’s dancing around up there, daring me to take my shot.”
“And?” Had the News named the cop involved in what it had called a hostage situation gone wrong? I couldn’t remember.
He continued steadily. “This is a guy who has killed people I love, people my friends love. I don’t know why I didn’t charge him, take the three of us off the goddamned roof.”
“But you didn’t. And you didn’t shoot.”
He dropped his gaze. “No. He kept holding her so I’d have to shoot her, to get at him. I’d put in a call for backup and I was waiting. But before they were even in position, he spotted them. It was like he was waiting for them.”
The fluorescent lights set into the ceiling tiles made an insectile hum, flickering just at the edge of my awareness like the light in a bad dream. “Waiting for… ?”
“Witnesses,” Harry said flatly. “Cop witnesses, who’d know how badly I had screwed up, going up there alone. And the reporters who’d heard the radio traffic on the call, so everyone else was going to find out about it, too. Once he had them arranged…”
I caught on. “He was taunting you. You could’ve shot him but he was betting you wouldn’t shoot an innocent woman. Innocent at the time. Beside him, she must’ve looked like an angel.”
Harry Markle’s eyes gazed into the middle distance. “Yeah. Like an angel. But when he pushed her, she couldn’t fly.”
He looked at me. “Didn’t,” he said, “fly.” Suddenly my son in his hospital bed seemed safe as houses.
“He scrambled down a roof door,” Harry recited, “locked it inside, got clean away. And that was the end of my cop career.”
Wade came to the door with a copy of Working Waterfront in one hand. The big front-page story was about an old lobster boat fitted out like an emergency room, to bring health care to island towns even more remote than Eastport.
Wade made an A-OK sign with his thumb and fingers, waited as Harry went on: “I got put on desk duty, finally sent to a shrink, which by that point I needed. I kept seeing the woman’s face.”
“I can imagine,” I sympathized, then wished I hadn’t.
Because I couldn’t imagine. Not really.
“But it was also all they needed, the bosses, to get rid of an embarrassment. Me.”
He looked up. “I traveled. Now I’m here. Decent retirement package, I had my years in. They did what they had to do, get me to go without a big fight. So I buy an old house, get a dog, live a life. Such as it is.”
None of that had been in the papers, of course. “Harry, that is terrible. I’m so sorry. But—”
A grin twitched his lips: not a nice grin.
Not at all. “But you still want to know what all that’s got to do with you, Jacobia? Or with Sam? Think about it.”
So I did, and what I came up with made my stomach do a queasy roll. “Harry, you’re not telling me you believe—”
“Not believe,” he interrupted harshly. “I know.”
Wade came to the table, his grey eyes narrowed protectively. “Harry, are you saying someone did this deliberately to Sam?”
“It had to be an accident,” I insisted. “That old car…”
; But Wade was frowning. “George towed it over to the garage. Sam was awake when he got here, he said the brakes just went out.”
“I heard him say that, too,” Harry put in. “That’s why…”
I shook my head dumbly. “The brakes? You mean completely?”
Wade nodded, his face grim. Another thought struck me as my mind danced away from the notion of someone trying to hurt Sam.
“Harry. You said you’d met me again. After I’d gone to live with my aunt and uncle.”
He smiled almost pityingly. “The first time? I don’t think you’d remember that. The blast blew you out of the house into the yard. A piece of sheet metal landed on top of you. Other wreckage, like bricks and so on, piled on that.”
Dimly, I did remember: not the details, specifically, but a tremendous sound, the smell of the smoke, a soaring sensation and screaming that I later understood must have been sirens.
And me. “A man came,” I recalled slowly. “Dressed in blue. He looked into my eyes. He said everything would be all right.”
It wasn’t, but never mind. “A young cop. He pulled me out.” I looked at Harry. “Was it you?” I whispered. “You saved me?”
Harry nodded slowly, his eyes glistening. He swallowed hard, his throat working before he could speak.
“That was me. And it’s great to see you doing so well, Jake. But I’ve brought something. Someone. I didn’t know…”
His voice broke wretchedly. “I’m sorry, Jacobia. So sorry.”
A tear slid down his cheek.
The next day when my panic over Sam had faded I could sort my thoughts better, but the result didn’t feel like improvement. Harriet Hollingsworth had been murdered; I remained quite sure of that.
But now there was a new wrinkle. The guy living in her house was a blast from my past, and he believed Sam’s accident wasn’t one. That instead it had something to do with him.
“Well,” Ellie said, frowning, “what he told you checks out.”
We’d let the answering machine take phone calls, getting the incoming numbers from the caller ID box and noting them down for later callbacks. Everyone we knew wanted to be told Sam was all right and reporters from the Tides and the Examiner had called, too. But I hadn’t felt like talking to anyone.
