Unhinged
Page 13
“Story I got,” Bob said, “Harry was in a bad spot. Wife an invalid, had been for years. Bedridden in a nursing home. Harry stuck by her. Living alone and doing for himself. Pretty much all he did was visit her, and work.”
Work on trying to find my father, for instance. And on not turning innocent bystanders into collateral damage.
“But then,” Bob said, “something happened. Harry met a gal who was on the job, like he was. Someone he could talk to. And—”
“Yeah. And. So she was the girlfriend?”
In the parlor, Sam had discovered Night of the Living Dead on Turner Classics. From the sound of it, a passel of zombies had just broken down a door.
“Bob, what are you getting at? What difference does it make if Harry had a girlfriend?”
I had a long day ahead. And then there would be the evening; for an instant I wished I had the big Doberman back from Harry. Prill was a cream puff, but just the sight of her would turn back zombies.
“The difference is,” Bob answered, “it was worse than whatever Harry told you. Whoever the guy is who was doing this stuff, he didn’t just want to kill people. He wanted to hurt them. So what he did was, over a period of weeks he photographed Harry with his girlfriend, on the sly. Then he killed the girlfriend.”
“Right, I know that part. But what does that have to do with what he — Oh.” Screams from the television. “Photographs.”
Bob nodded somberly. “The wife was a physical wreck, but she could see and hear. She could understand. And until then, she did not know there was anybody else. So this son of a bitch” — his voice hardened at the thought — “he sneaks into the nursing home.”
A sick feeling invaded my stomach. “You’re kidding. He shows her pictures of Harry and another woman, before he kills her?”
Bob looked at the floor. “Ayuh. Left the photos, so that’s what they figured.”
It was so fiendish, neither of us could speak for a minute after that. Then:
“Jake?” Bob stared pointedly at my sweater pocket. The sag didn’t look like anything but what it was: a cannon.
And Bob disapproved of my going around with it. As he said, it doesn’t matter what targets you shoot. If you’ve never faced down a person with your weapon, you can’t know what you’ll do.
“Yeah,” I confirmed, bracing for the lecture. But it didn’t come; I got the feeling I could have set up rocket launchers in the windows and he wouldn’t have made a peep.
Which meant Bob was convinced too, now, that Harry’s paranoia wasn’t mere smoke and moonbeams. But:
“Told the state cops all this,” he said. “But they’re not exactly speed demons, you know. Their job is finding things they can prove in court.”
Meaning it could be some while before they had answers: on Harriet’s death, or Samantha’s murder. The state police worked on lab results and sworn testimony, evidentiary links that took time and legwork to assemble. And time was a thing I was starting to worry we might not have.
“I guess you’ll be around here the rest of the day?” Bob said, gesturing at the hall.
The stripper on the varnish had bubbled up loathsomely. All it needed were demons scampering over it with pitchforks to make it resemble one of the more disgusting departments of hell.
“Yep.” I moved with him toward the door. Outside, his squad idled, so I knew better than to detain him with more questions.
And I didn’t want to bring Wyatt Evert into it just yet. His threats of a lawsuit were still viable and I was reluctant to put George and Ellie at even the slightest risk.
“Got to talk to some reporters,” Bob said. Roy’s interviews had alerted the other major media to our trouble, I guessed. “And to the coroner.”
The one handling Samantha’s death and Harriet’s. Bob hustled down the steps as I went back in, musing over his visit. He was in a rush, but he had stopped by anyway to give me a message, the only bulletin he thought I needed.
If I hadn’t already gotten the Bisley out, he’d have suggested it.
Unwilling to leave Sam, I spent the afternoon on my hands and knees, scraping up chemical goo and the varnish the goo had lifted. And as usual, old-house fix-up freed my brain to go off on its own, to ruminate.
Chewing over the details of recent events didn’t nourish any brilliant ideas, though. I slid the scraper under another glob of stripper and lifted it up, wiping it on a rag. The exposed wood beneath, smeared with remnants of varnish, resembled a face, but I couldn’t make out whose.
All I did know was that three other strangers had come to town when Harry had: Wyatt Evert, who perhaps didn’t qualify as a complete stranger but was still plenty strange; his assistant, Fran Hanson, whose smart city looks didn’t jibe with her silent passivity; and my guest Roy McCall, whose sweet, youthful buddy act I was beginning to think had a couple of cracks in it.
On TV the night before he’d actually shed tears, but he couldn’t quite hide his gratification at being in the spotlight. Me, his eyes had shone legibly. They’re looking at me!
But what link had any of them had to Harriet Hollingsworth or Harry Markle? And what might some tourist’s boots have to do with it? Maybe someone else also belonged on my list of interesting people. Or maybe…
But that second “maybe” I shoved savagely to the back of my mind, just as I’d been doing since Harry Markle first brought it up, the night of Sam’s crash. I know about your father…
Pushing the scraper under a stubborn lump of gunk, I went on scraping the smelly stuff messily off the floor. Physical labor, the more mindless the better, was a refuge I’d learned to escape into deliberately since moving to an old house. And I’m not sure if it was the hard work or the faintly dizzying effect of fume remnants rising off the floor, but by about three-thirty when the telephone rang, my mood had improved.
In the next moment it improved even more. “Your ex-husband,” Wade announced cheerfully, “is a power-mad weasel with a Napoleon complex.”
I laughed aloud. It felt wonderful, and so did hearing Wade’s voice without a sedative blur in it; my own pains had gone down to minor-annoyance status, only the purpling around my eye reminding me that I’d been injured. I attributed the persistent ringing in my ears to the aftereffects of the floor chemicals.
“So you’re not coming home today?” I’d been putting off the trip until I knew; if Wade was going to be here, there was no reason to go there.
“A power-mad, vindictive little weasel,” he emphasized.
A load of worry slid off my shoulders. “I feel fine,” Wade confirmed. “But Victor says I need to stay here a little longer. He says he needs to observe me.”
Personally I thought another night in the hospital was wise, much as I wished the opposite. That neck wound had looked wicked.
“But what’s he going to observe?” Wade complained. “Suppose he’s still trying to figure out how to be a human being?”
“If he is,” I replied warmly, “he couldn’t have any better role model. But one more night isn’t so terrible.”
Wade spent lots of nights away, harbor-piloting. So we were used to it. “Yeah. Too foggy to drive anyway,” he conceded.
Route 1 in a fog is so bad that you don’t dare go too fast because you can’t see, and you don’t dare go too slow because the eighteen-wheeler roaring up behind can’t see either, and he might put his hood ornament up your tailpipe.
“Right.” For his trip home tomorrow, Wade asked for clean clothes, his own razor, and his belt with the big silver anchor buckle on it, all of which reassured me even more; when he feels well, he is particular about his dress and grooming.
Then we hung up and I finished the floor, a job that took me right up until it was time to take a shower and make supper. Sam and I ate on trays in front of the TV, and after I’d stacked the dishes we sat together watching The Blair Witch Project.
“Mom,” my son said quietly after a while. “I am still going, you know. To the demolition seminar.”
&nb
sp; He pretended to be watching the screen. I suppose he thought if he confronted me too hard, I might confront back. “I know.”
But I’d been thinking about this, too. “I imagined you would. And if you think it’s important, you should go.”
It was the one thing Victor ever told me that turned out to be worthwhile: I’d been dithering about the training wheels on Sam’s bike, insisting they should stay on. And I can still feel Victor’s hands on my shoulders as Sam pedaled wobblingly away.
“Let him go, Jake. You’ve got to let him go.”
Besides, setting bombs off underwater was starting to look safer than hanging around here. Now, with a possible contretemps averted, Sam settled into his nest of pillows on the sofa. His new wristwatch said it was 2030 hours.
After a while: “Sam,” I ventured. “About Maggie.”
I wanted to tell him to look over his shoulder, that someone was gaining on him; if not Tim Rutherford, then someone else. But if things turned out wrong, I didn’t want it to be on account of my meddling. So all I said was, “She’s not going to be happy playing word games forever, you know.”
“Yeah.” Eyes on screen, avoiding mine. He knew the gist of my thought if not the details; we’d talked about this before. “I know, Mom. And it’s not that I don’t love her.”
On the TV, a crew of youngsters sallied forth into a haunted woods. “But every time I get close, it’s like it’s too close, and then I’ve got to push her away, sort of.”
The youngsters had video cameras, their generation’s method of keeping things under control. That the control was illusory they had yet to learn; thus the plot of The Blair Witch Project.
“Or?” I probed. On the TV screen, a girl told the rest that she knew the way through the forest. Famous last words.
“Dad says don’t give yourself away,” Sam responded. “You might want yourself back.”
Sudden fury at my ex-husband threatened to consume me, turn me to ash right there in my chair. But I controlled it; Victor is Sam’s father and Sam has worked to keep, as Sam puts it, a decent scene going with him.
“I see,” I replied carefully. Back when I was married to Victor, I used to believe there was a magic word, and if I could only think of it and say it, everything would be all right. I guess in the end the other thing Victor taught me is that there is no magic word.
And I guess I have never forgiven him for it. “Sam. I’m not trying to rush you. Maybe Maggie just isn’t the one for you. And you’re young, you don’t need to—”
His eyes glazed; I was turning into Lecture-Mom. On the TV, tiny stick figures dangled hideously from haunted tree branches, and looking at Sam’s face I knew just how the stick figures felt: dry and vaguely threatening. Still, I had to say it.
“But if when you’re ready, you make your choice wisely,” I finished, “then not being able to get yourself back is what you want to have happen.” Like George and Ellie. Or Wade and me, as different from one another as floor varnish is from floors, and in all the important ways as near-inseparable.
A beat, while Sam absorbed this. “Yeah, huh?” Then:
“Mom? Do you hate him? I mean, after everything that happened between you and Dad, do you, like, wish he was dead?”
“Sometimes,” I replied jokingly. But then I stopped, because the answer to his question was no joke. Not to me:
When Sam was a toddler, he fell and smashed his forehead on the corner of a coffee table. Blood was everywhere and he was howling as if his eye had been put out. And of course I couldn’t see that his eye hadn’t been put out, because blood was…
Well, you get the idea. Victor scooped him up, thrust his head under running water, snapped out a diagnosis — scalp wound, superficial — and had Sam’s head shaved, the split closed with butterfly bandages, and a big smile back on the kid’s face before I could even finish having my acute nervous breakdown.
The next night, Victor took a surgical nurse to a ball game at Yankee Stadium. Bottom of the fifth, two on and two out, I was watching it on TV when I saw them sitting behind home plate. I threw the coffee table off our balcony. Fortunately, I didn’t kill anyone in the courtyard of our apartment building.
“No, Sam,” I answered now. “I don’t hate your dad. And I don’t wish him dead, either. That’s in the past.”
“And the past is provolone,” he murmured drowsily.
He meant prologue. It’s the dyslexia-thing; when he’s tired, sick, or stressed, it pops out in his speech.
On the TV an ancient curse came back to life, wanting new victims. “Provolone,” I agreed softly. It was better than the alternative and anyway, he was asleep.
Outside fog billowed morosely, mounds of it lumbering like huge animals in the dark, empty streets. Ellie called to see that I was all right, and Wade called again.
But finally I was alone, Monday snoring while the TV showed Mars Attacks! I turned the sound down, oddly comforted by the special-effects TV aliens with their jerky, aggressive movements and ridiculously exaggerated facial features. At least on TV, you could see right away who the villains were.
But when you’ve seen one alien’s day-glo head explode you’ve seen them all. So at length I went to the back parlor and sat at Sam’s computer. There in the bluish glimmer of the screen, with the Bisley in my sweater pocket, I fired up the e-mail software and tried to think of what to say to my old friend, Jemmy Wechsler.
I had no notion of Jemmy’s location, nor did anyone else; it was why somewhere he sat at his computer tonight, too, instead of reposing in an oil drum at the bottom of the East River. To me he was just a collection of pixels, now, my memories of him—
—snatching me off the street when the numbers-running gig turned into a death trap due to a feud between two hard guys with me as the stalking goat; getting me into the dormitory, safe and quiet, of a Dominican girls’ school, and later into the school itself—
—by turns funny and sad. Jemmy made those killers look like a collection of B-movie extras; he was the real thing, which was how he had survived. Even I couldn’t have found him, which was well-known and why no one showed up to put bull’s-eyes on my kneecaps about it.
But I had an e-mail drop for him. Now I waited for high-tech relays to bounce my message to him via the equivalent of some mad scientist’s Rube Goldberg apparatus, so the message and his reply couldn’t be traced. The latter arrived quickly.
Although when I read it there was a moment when I profoundly wished it hadn’t arrived. Short and sweet, it made no specific reference to the names I’d listed: Harry Markle, Roy McCall, Fran Hanson, and Wyatt Evert. Instead, it said:
“If you think there’s a target on your back there probably is.”
Outside, the foghorns’ honking grew louder as the wee hours approached. I read the message again, my thoughts wandering to the scrapbook I’d kept for a while on my parents’ deaths: tabloid newspaper clips, mostly. Among the many details about my father, my mother seemed to disappear. But he was the one who had vanished: blown to bits, his body consumed by the fire.
Or so the investigators said when I’d tried to learn exactly what happened. Over the years, though: a few unsigned cards, each mailed from a different city. A hundred bucks in an envelope once when I was living on ketchup soup.
Nothing more. But now I knew the investigators had been lying in case I was in touch with him and might tip him off.
Are you alive? I wondered again as I pondered Jemmy’s note. Are you? But to that message, there came no reply at all.
I got up to check again that the house doors were locked. Trust Jemmy to come out swinging the big anxiety stick. He used to say nerves were God’s way of putting eyes in the back of your head. Maybe that was why I saw it. Something…
Gripping the Bisley, I rushed to the kitchen in time to catch another glimpse of someone’s hasty departure. The screen door slammed behind it as Monday scrambled in, barking. A shape darted past the window, vanished in the fog as I snapped the light on.
On the table lay a knife clotted with red. Under it was a sheet of paper. Two words were scrawled crimsonly on it: HA HA.
When the sound came from the porch I was in firing stance in a heartbeat: feet braced, body relaxed, my head full of the clear unshakable notion that this had better not be a midnight-riding contingent of religious persons bent on converting me. I was about to convert something too: to smithereens. “Sam, back away.”
When you opened that porch door from inside, as the intruder had in order to exit, the lock stayed open until it was locked deliberately again. So it was open now. And in about two seconds, I was going to turn whatever came through it into so many pieces that even Victor wouldn’t be able to reassemble them.
But I didn’t, because it was Harry Markle.
I lowered the gun, let my breath out as he spread his hands helplessly. I had to give him credit; at the sight of the Bisley he hadn’t even flinched.
“Harry, what the hell are you doing here?”
“Couldn’t sleep. Thinking. Decided to take a walk, clear my head,” he said.
“And?” Even in Eastport, people out on walks don’t generally just stroll in my back door at two A.M.
“I saw someone. From the corner I saw someone come out and run around behind your house. It looked suspicious. So I ran too, trying to head them off.”
Monday sniffed him interestedly. Harry said, “Whoever it was got away in the fog. Chased ’em to the corner but after that, it was no good. You can’t see ten feet.”
I sighed and dropped the Bisley back in my sweater pocket. Like Harry, Sam hadn’t turned a hair at the sight of the weapon, which made me think my thumbs weren’t the only ones prickling tonight.
“That stuff.” I waved at the knife and the red-smeared missive on the table. “If we slide it into a plastic bag we can preserve whatever might be on it, give it to Bob Arnold in the morning.”