“Coincidence?” Mason rubbed his chin with the palm of his hand. “Yeah, I guess it could be at that. That’s more’n likely what it is. A big coincidence. Fact is, coincidence explains most things. Listen, I ain’t saying it wasn’t some nutcake done it. But you’re forgetting the most obvious thing, and you should never forget the obvious thing.”
“What’s the obvious thing?” I said.
Mason looked at me over the tops of his glasses. “Hunting accident, Mr. Coyne.”
“Oh, for Christ sake.”
He shrugged. “Don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions, there,” he said. “Listen. It’s turkey season, right this very minute. This part of the state, we get a lot of gunshot wounds in turkey season. Last couple years, no fatalities, thank God. But accidents, you know? Those ridges up there by the Palmer place are prime for gobblers, and everybody around here knows it. The boys get out there way before dawn, hunker against a tree trunk in their camouflage jumpsuits with their tight-choked twelve gauges, and they work on their calls and they wait, and when they see one they let loose. Even if they don’t see one, after a while they sometimes think they see one. Pretty nerve-racking, turkey hunting. You sit and you sit, morning after morning, just waiting. Imagination starts workin’ on you. Little movement in the bushes?” Mason flapped his hand. “A charge of number-four shot hits a twig, it deflects, and the head of a gobbler’s just about belt-high on a man…” He shrugged as if it was self-evident.
“They sounded like rifle shots to me,” I said.
“You were inside when you heard them?”
I nodded.
“They came from out in the woods, right?”
“Yes. But a rifle sounds a lot different from a shotgun.”
“It’s illegal to hunt turkeys with a rifle, Mr. Coyne.”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s my point.”
“Sure.” He smiled. “Good point.”
“Well,” I said, “I assume you intend to investigate it.
He nodded. “Why, sure. Have to investigate a gunshot accident. Law requires it. Accidents happen. But we can’t have folks running away when they shoot somebody. It’s like a hit and run. We don’t put up with that.”
“A hit and run?” said Diana.
“Same idea, miss.”
She shook her head. “Hardly,” she mumbled.
“You’re planning to talk to Wally, aren’t you?” I said.
Mason shrugged and said nothing. I caught his meaning. He’d talk to Wally if Wally didn’t die.
“Somebody tried to kill him,” said Diana quietly.
“Maybe so, miss,” said Mason. “We’ll go up to the Palmer place and have us a look, all right. And we’ll inquire around, see who might’ve been hunting those ridges this morning. Maybe one of em’ll admit to firing those shots. Maybe one of the boys saw something. Any vehicle parked by the roadside, they’d notice. Don’t you worry. Lets just hope Mr. Kinnick comes out of it okay.”
He stood up and arched his back with a small groan. “You folks take care, now,” he said. “Maybe we’ll talk again. Meantime, we’ll all be prayin’ for Mr. Kinnick.”
Diana looked up at him. “Thank you,” she said.
He started to walk away, then stopped and said, “He didn’t happen to save that tape, did he?”
“Tape?” I said.
“On the answering machine. The threatening message.”
I shook my head. “No.”
Mason shrugged, then left the room.
Diana sighed heavily. “What do you think, Brady?”
“I think he really believes it was a hunting accident. I guess gunshot wounds are pretty common in these parts. So Sheriff Mason’s had a lot of experience with men being dragged out of the woods bleeding with bullets in them. The big crime, from his point of view, isn’t the shooting. It’s that the shooter ran away. He thinks we’re paranoid because probably everybody gets paranoid if they or their friends get shot.”
“But the phone calls…?”
“This is the country, Diana. It’s not Cambridge. Everyone out here hunts and owns guns. Most of them probably belong to SAFE. Maybe Mason himself is a member. He wouldn’t believe that anybody from SAFE would do this. He’s got his mind made up, and I don’t think he’s likely to pursue a sophisticated investigation. Far as he’s concerned, it was a hunting accident.”
“What about the slate police, or the FBI, or something?”
I touched her arm. “It’s the sheriff’s case,” I said. “Those others won’t be involved in it.”
What I meant was that they wouldn’t be involved if Wally recovered. If he died, it would become a homicide case. Then everybody would be involved.
I decided not to explain that to Diana just then.
14
AFTER ANOTHER HOUR OR so I got up and went back to the emergency admitting area. I found the same gray-haired nurse seated at a computer monitor. “Excuse me…” I began.
She looked up at me and shook her head. “He’s still in surgery,” she said. “I’ll be sure you know when there’s any news.”
“He’s been in there a long time.”
She shrugged. It meant he hadn’t died yet.
Diana had been slumped in her chair with her eyes closed since Sheriff Mason had left. When I returned to the waiting room, I touched her arm and said, “How about something to eat?”
She opened her eyes and looked at me. “No. I feel like I’m going to throw up as it is.”
“They told me he’s still in surgery.”
Her eyes closed. “He’s going to die.”
I didn’t say anything.
Sometime after three o’clock in the afternoon the gray-haired nurse appeared in the waiting room. A young doctor wearing hospital greens stood beside her. She caught my eye, turned to the doctor and spoke to him, then left. The doctor approached me and Diana. We both stood up.
“We can talk better outside,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the corridor. Diana and I followed him.
I guessed he wasn’t yet thirty, but deep creases had already etched themselves into his forehead. His eyes were bloodshot. He needed a shave. “You’re with Mr. Kinnick,” he said.
“Yes. Is he—?”
“I’m Dr. Frankel. We’ve got him patched up. He’s stable.”
Diana slumped against me. I put my arm around her.
“Stable?” I said.
The doctor sighed. “I won’t try to fool you. It was messy. It nicked his liver and intestine. He lost a lot of blood. But it could have been a lot worse. His vital signs are good. We got him cleaned out and sewn up. He’s a strong, healthy man.”
“Will he be okay?” asked Diana.
“The worry is always infection with something like this.” he said. “We’ve got him on antibiotics. I think he’ll be fine.”
“Thank God,” she whispered. “Can we see him?”
“Come back tomorrow, miss,” he said. “He’s in ICU, and he’s heavily sedated. You’ve got to go and give the desk some information.” He touched her shoulder and smiled wearily. “Okay?”
“I’d just like to see him.”
“You’re his wife?”
“No. His—friend.”
He nodded. “Talk to the nurse at the desk. Maybe she’ll sneak you in for a peek.”
We followed the doctor back into the admitting area. Diana answered some questions for the gray-haired nurse at the computer, then the nurse came out from behind her counter.
“You want to come. Brady?” said Diana.
I shook my head. “I’ll wait for you here.”
I had no desire to see Wally lying unconscious on a hospital bed with plastic tubes coming out of his nose and legs and arms and penis, with monitors ticking his heartbeat and measuring his blood pressure. Seeing him that way wouldn’t do Wally any good, or me, either.
Diana was back in ten minutes. Her face was streaked with tears. “He looks so—so shrunken,” she said.
I put m
y arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go home,” I said.
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve got to feed Corky.”
I found a head of lettuce in the refrigerator. I tore it into a big wooden bowl, added half a jar of ripe olives, dumped a can of tuna fish onto it, and drenched it with Italian dressing. I tossed it with wooden salad forks until the tuna was all shredded and sticking to the lettuce. Then I took it out onto the porch and placed it ceremoniously on the table beside Diana.
She had been silting there gazing out over the meadow since we returned from the hospital. Corky was lying beside her, and she was absentmindedly scratching his cars. I had poured her a glass of Zinfandel. It sat untouched beside her.
She looked up at me and tried a smile. It worked for just a moment. “Oh, nice,” she said.
“I’ll be right back.” I went inside, found two salad bowls, forks, napkins, and my own wineglass. I carried everything out to the porch and filled Diana’s bowl with lettuce, tuna, and olives.
I handed it to her. “Eat,” I said. “This is my specialty. I call it Brady’s Special Italian Salad Minus the Anchovies, Sweet Peppers, Tomatoes, and Bermuda Onion. We could also use a big loaf of hot garlic bread, actually. But I’ll be offended if you don’t love it.”
She took a small bite. “It’s great. I do. I love it.” She put her fork down.
“Eat it. You haven’t eaten since breakfast. You’ve got to eat.”
“I’m really not that hungry, Brady. But this is delicious.”
“It’s not going to help Wally, you getting sick.”
“I know. You’re right.” She picked up her fork and took another bite. She chewed thoughtfully, then looked at me. “Brady, remember the man whose rod Walter broke?”
“It was only yesterday, Diana.”
She smiled softly. “Yes. It seems like a long time ago.”
“You think he’s the one who shot Willy?”
She shrugged. “He was pretty mad.”
“I’ll mention it to Mason when I see him. He was driving a green Volvo wagon with Vermont plates. Maybe somebody noticed a Volvo somewhere near here this morning.” I hesitated for a moment, then said, “There was something else we didn’t mention to the sheriff.”
She looked up at me.
“Your husband,” I said gently.
Diana frowned, then shook her head. “Howard isn’t the type at all.”
“You heard some of those threatening messages.”
She nodded. “None of them was Howard.”
“Wally played one for me when you were out with Corky yesterday. After we got back from fishing.”
“I didn’t hear that one,” she said. “Too bad he didn’t save it. I would certainly recognize Howard’s voice on an answering machine.”
“Too late for that.”
“Well, you can mention Howard to that sheriff if you think you should. But it wasn’t him. No way.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s pretty obvious who it was.”
“Turkey hunters,” she said, and we both smiled.
The sun had fallen behind the mountains and shadows blanketed the meadow. Diana and I sat there picking at our salads and gazing into those shadows. Suddenly she sat forward and whispered, “Look!”
My first thought was that she had spotted a man with a gun.
Then I saw the shape, and then three other shapes, and I realized that four wild turkeys had tiptoed into Wally’s meadow. I had never seen a wild turkey before. Just paintings of Pilgrims with blunderbusses and photographs in Field & Stream. Ben Franklin believed the turkey, not the bald eagle, should have been the national bird. When I was growing up in the Commonwealth, there were no wild turkeys. The Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife began to reintroduce them into the state in the 1970s, and the birds had, from all I’d read, done well. They reproduced and eventually established themselves securely enough that they could be hunted.
Turkeys are the wariest of all wild creatures, the most worthy quarry for a human hunter.
It’s a lot easier to stalk a man than a turkey.
These four were all hens. Gobblers travel alone, at least in the spring mating season when they’re staking out their territory and trying to lure in hens that they can seduce.
I’ve always been fascinated with nature’s various rituals of love and lust. Many of them are at once ceremonious and comical, violent and tender. Males strut, sing, and fight each other. Females flirt and blush and play hard-to-get and wait for the biggest toughest guy in the neighborhood to assert his dominance. It reminds me that people are creatures of nature, too, although a lot of us don’t like to admit it.
As we watched the four hen turkeys, they abruptly ducked their absurd heads and scuttled back into the woods.
It was hard to imagine how a hunter could mistake a six-foot-three-inch man with a black beard for a turkey.
I turned to Diana. “That was—”
I stopped. Her head was bowed. She was crying.
I touched her shoulder. “What is it?”
“I feel like it’s my fault,” she said softly. “It’s my punishment for trying to be happy. Sometimes I think—I don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve Walter, I don’t deserve—anything. Sometimes when we’re together I’m just happy all over, and it scares me. It makes me think that something’s going to happen, because you can’t just be happy. It never lasts. Something always happens.”
I nodded. Diana was right. Something always happens. “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I could sure use a hug.”
She turned to me and tried to smile. “I could use one, too.” She stood up, and I did, too. She leaned against me. I put both of my arms around her. She snuffled, then began to shudder. She sobbed loudly. I stood there holding her for a long time, while the shadows darkened in the meadow.
15
A KNOCK ON MY bedroom door woke me up. “Come in,” I mumbled.
Diana pushed open the door. “Are you decent?”
“Many people don’t think so,” I said.
She laughed and put a mug of steaming coffee on the table beside my bed. “I’m going to the hospital,” she said.
“What time is it?”
“Seven. I’m leaving now. If you want to come…”
“I think I should hang around in case the sheriff shows up. Maybe later.”
She bent down and kissed my forehead. “Thank you, Brady Coyne. I’m awfully glad you’re here. I don’t know what I would’ve done…”
“I’ll come along later. If there’s any news, call me.”
She looked solemnly at me and nodded.
After I drank my coffee, showered, and dressed, I whistled for Corky and we went outside. Dark clouds hung over the mountains. I could smell rain in the air. I pushed through the dense woods until I came to the little clearing where we had found Wally. I knelt down and found some dark splotches on the leaves where he had bled. I looked around. Surrounding the clearing was thick undergrowth. A mixture of birch saplings and alders and hemlocks and knee-high weeds separated the clearing from the forest. An assassin could hide himself nicely in that undergrowth. I supposed it was also the kind of place a turkey hunter might hide.
I stood up and pushed my way through the close-growing vegetation and began to look around. I didn’t know what I expected to see—a footprint, a cigarette butt, anything—but I kept my eyes on the ground and tried to do it in an orderly way, studying every square foot. Corky snorted and snuffled here and there, hunting like a Springer spaniel is supposed to.
The woods were damp and dark and quiet, the way it gets when all the wild creatures know a storm is coming.
After what seemed like a long time I was aware that it had begun to rain. I heard the drops pattering softly on the leafy canopy over my head.
Soon the natural umbrella overhead would become saturated, and then the rain would begin to dribble down. But for now I was dry. I continued my search. I found ferns and mushrooms, clusters of tiny blue flowers, wild
strawberries just breaking into blossom, a single pink lady slipper. But no footprints. No sign of an assassin.
Corky hadn’t caught any interesting scents, either.
I had turned to go back to the cabin when something caught my eye, a dull metallic glitter. I knelt down. It was a rifle cartridge, an empty bronze-colored cylinder, half hidden under the leaves. I picked it up and held it in my palm. It was about an inch long, with a narrowed-down neck. The legend .223 REM was engraved on its round end.
I looked back in the direction of the clearing where Wally had fallen. It was about a hundred feet away. There was a small opening in the thick growth, no more than a foot in diameter, and about waist-high on a tall man. Through it I could see the place where Wally would have been standing.
I imagined a man kneeling here, training his rifle on that opening, patient, figuring that sooner or later his quarry would appear.
This was where the assassin had waited.
I prowled the area on hands and knees. The canopy over my head had become saturated. Rain came dripping down onto me, and I soon became drenched. I found no boot prints or cigar butts or matchbooks or driver’s licenses. But I did find two more spent cartridges in the leaves, identical to the first one. These I picked up on the end of a twig and wrapped in my handkerchief. Maybe the shooter had left his fingerprints on them.
I knew I should turn the cartridges over to Sheriff Mason. I also knew I wouldn’t do that. He’d smudge them and drop them into his pocket, and that would be the end of them. As long as Wally lived, it was simply a local incident. The man in charge had decided it was a hunting accident. He had neither the resources nor the inclination to consider other scenarios.
When I got back to Boston I’d call Horowitz. He’d know what to do.
I had changed into dry clothes and poured myself a fresh mug of coffee when the obvious thought hit me.
Any assassin who wanted to kill Wally probably wouldn’t reject an opportunity to kill me.
And he probably wouldn’t pass up the chance to take a shot at Diana, either. A crackpot with a rifle would undoubtedly subscribe to the theory of guilt by association.
Seventh Enemy Page 9
