“It’s me, Nora,” I said, then forced myself to add two words that still caused pain. “Mrs. Hamilton? I was at the garage last week—”
Dugger was lowering himself from the cab, a wild expression in his bright eyes. Only when he reached the ground did his breathing finally start to slow. “Missus?”
The nod I gave was a bit frantic itself.
“Something wrong with your car?”
I barked a short laugh. “You could say that.”
He lifted the hood and took a look underneath, coming up with his forehead furrowed, his brows drawn down. “I’ll have to hitch it,” he said.
The announcement seemed to be as much for his benefit as mine.
I waited in the truck while Dugger got to work, slow and patient, the wind yowling around him.
At the garage, he put my car up on a lift, and took out a device that looked something like extra-long pliers, only computerized, trailing wires. The tools of his trade had gone digital. Refinishing wood or walls still required caustic chemicals and the repetitive motion of your own hand, and I was taken aback by a fierce wave of longing.
“Missus?”
I lifted my head from my reverie.
“Engine’s working fine.”
I hadn’t even heard it come to life, but I registered the steady rush now. I started to frown. “You mean … it wasn’t broken?”
Dugger’s face split into a grin. “It was broken. Just wasn’t hard to fix.” He held up a battered metal box. The piece of equipment he’d started with lay abandoned on a stool. “Had to get out my old tools.”
He slammed the hood down.
I felt a frown building; my habitual state when accompanied by Dugger seemed to be one of confusion. “Your old tools? How come?”
From the expression on Dugger’s face, I could tell he wouldn’t be able to explain it to me, whatever had gone wrong, the machinations of which he was capable. And I guessed it didn’t really matter, so long as my car was in working order.
Plus, he looked like he was getting upset, and I didn’t want that. So I hurried to change the subject. “You were right, you know,” I said. “About Brendan skating.”
Dugger gave me a beatific, gleaming smile as he climbed into my car and rode it, door open, one leg hanging out, through the bay to the lot. Then he came back inside, circling over to me. “I know I was, Missus.”
“You used to go with him?” I picked up the thread as if there hadn’t been any interruption. Hungry now, on a hunt for the past, I felt almost as crazed as Dugger had looked when we met by the side of the road.
“Not me, Missus,” Dugger said calmly. “Told you already, I wasn’t allowed out on the ice. But I watched. I always like to watch.”
“Were you there …” My voice trailed off. How far could I push him?
He was watching me with those vivid eyes, no hint of his earlier trouble or distress.
“Were you there the day Red died?” I asked at last. Someone had to have been there, not running or helping or doing much of anything. Someone had taken that horrid picture of Bill.
“Red dead,” he answered in a casual tone. “Red head.”
“He had red hair, you mean?” I said, thinking of the rusty shock topping the little boy in those pictures. “That’s how he got his nickname.”
Dugger lowered his face toward mine, and I had never seen his gaze more limpid, or his voice so clear. “It probably would’ve darkened,” he said. “If he had lived. Most folks do, time they get older, especially when they start out such carrot-tops.”
“Right …” I said pointlessly.
“Not everyone, though,” Dugger went on. “Some folks stay redheads.”
This had been a bad idea. Dugger’s eyes were still placid pools, but I didn’t know what potential lay in their depths. And we weren’t getting anywhere. I couldn’t make sense of his circles. “I’m sorry,” I said. What did it matter if Dugger had been there when Red died? I already knew what had happened. And knowing more about that long-ago day wouldn’t provide any information about the other January twenty-third, the most recent one.
“Red hurts,” Dugger said suddenly, and I looked up. “Lynn lurks—no! That doesn’t work!” He punched himself swiftly in the chest, a hollow, rapping sound.
“Dugger, stop that!” I cried. Then I paused. Who was Lynn? “We don’t have to talk about Red anymore—”
He was fidgeting with something beneath the counter. Then I heard the sound of my own voice, urgent and driven. “Were you there the day Red died?” And Dugger’s airy, disconnected response: Red dead. Red head.
“What is that?” I asked. “Dugger? What are you doing?”
He lifted his hand. In it was clasped a slim silver rectangle, part of its front speckled with dots. An audio recording device. I frowned again.
“You recorded us talking?” I asked. “Dugger? You record people?”
“Be quiet, Missus!” he said, not threateningly. “Talking, walking, balking—”
The crash of a glass door startled me as much as the onset of Dugger’s rhymes.
“Mackenzie!” Al Meter barked. “I can’t figure this thing out.” He seemed to be muttering half to himself. “Can’t fix an engine now without a goddamned computer. It’s lucky I got you to—” Then he broke off, taking a good look at Dugger.
His voice was still rising beside me.
Al peered through rheumy eyes at us both. “Miz Hamilton?”
“Caulking, mocking—no!” Dugger struck the counter with one balled hand. The other still held the recorder. “Stalking—”
“Aw,” Al said. “He’s gone and gotten all upset.”
Al thrust a thick, oil-smeared hand against my chest. I stumbled backward, not sure if I’d just been assaulted or simply shunted aside. Al was scrabbling around in a cabinet that stood near the counter. He came out with an amber medicine bottle. No red dot on that one, I’d bet; Al was used to what he was doing.
As if in confirmation Al grumbled, “Now he’ll be tired out the whole rest of the day.”
“Why?” I said in a whisper. “What’s wrong with him?”
Al hardly looked up. “Don’t matter what fancy name you put on it. But his ma says he’s artistic. He takes one of these when he gets excited and it sets him right.”
Autistic, my brain corrected. That must be what Al meant.
Al got the lid open and shook two tablets out. He held them up to Dugger’s mouth and he gobbled them right out of his boss’s grease-blackened palm, like a beast who’d learned to love his master. I backed away toward the door, letting in a freezing column of air. Neither man seemed to notice when I left.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I stood panting in the lot outside, fresh, new flakes of snow flying at me, and my thoughts in a whirl, too. Why had Dugger recorded us? And why had he shown me that he had?
Not to mention the talk about redheads. More than guilt over upsetting Dugger, or indecision about whether he had anything relevant to say about the past, his strange speech concerning hair stayed uppermost in my mind. Teggie had called Vern presumptuous, trying to tell me what was best. But there was somebody else who suddenly had a whole lot to say to me too, wasn’t there? And the word redhead applied to him as surely as it did to a little boy twenty-five years in the ground.
The entrance to Ned Kramer’s old house near Queek Pond was indicated by a yellow hidden-driveway diamond. The drive was over half a mile long, rutted and buckling from years of freezing and thaw. But the house itself was grand, three stories clad in clapboard and fish scales on a turret that poked up high over the slate roof.
Much of that clapboard was rotting, its paint long since faded, and I could spy at least ten heavy roof tiles ready to fall, all of which clutched at my restorer’s heart.
But none of that was why I had come to Ned’s right now.
I took in his tousle of hair as he opened the door.
“Nora?” he said, a question, although the look of recognition, of
knowing, in his eyes was so strong that I flinched from it. “Are you okay?”
I didn’t answer.
“Come in. You must be cold,” Ned said.
He ushered me past gaping, unfurnished rooms, cluttered with sealed-up boxes, toward the kitchen.
“Coffee?” he offered.
I shook my head, trying to hide a grimace.
“You okay?” Ned asked again.
“A little—queasy,” I began. “It’s been kind of an upsetting morning.”
“Tea,” Ned said, remembering. He filled two mugs with water and stuck them in a microwave. This room looked to be the only really functioning one in the house, on the first floor at least, although it seemed most heavily dependent on a microwave and toaster. The surface of the stove was pristine.
“Upsetting how?” Ned asked, handing me a cup.
I studied him again, then asked abruptly, “Do you know Dugger Mackenzie?”
“Guy who works at the garage?” Ned said. He was straddling the edge of a counter. There was no table or chairs. This space would look good with a built-in island, some stools.
I took a sudden gulp of tea, letting the liquid burn my mouth, stun me a little.
“Why are you asking me about Dugger?”
I raised my gaze to his. “It’s more that he was talking about you. At least, I think he might’ve been. Maybe he wasn’t. Oh, I don’t know!”
Dugger hadn’t used the word Ned in the string of rhymes he’d recorded, and it would’ve fit. Red dead. Red head. What did Dugger call it when a rhyme didn’t work? Cheating. But Ned wouldn’t have been cheating. I began to wonder why I had come here. Because I was trying to answer a question, fill in one of the maddening holes that were causing me to stumble? Or was I after another thing altogether?
“Can you just tell me straight out what Dugger said?”
I barked a laugh; it sounded harsh and unlovely in my ears. But Ned didn’t seem repelled; he continued to stare at me from not quite far enough away. “I don’t know if I’ve talked to anyone straight since Brendan died.” I paused. “And not often before that, either.”
Ned eyed me in a way that made me go on.
“It always seemed easier not to. Only now I’m starting to realize—that the easiness is false. All the stuff you never look at just lays there, rotting, so when you finally start to poke around, it’s even harder to see.” Another pause. “Might be better just to talk straight all along.”
Silence for a moment. “Well,” Ned said at last. “That was a good start.”
A smile tugged at my mouth. Ned set down his mug, contents untouched, on the counter behind him. He did it without looking, gaze still focused on me.
“Someplace we can sit?” I asked weakly.
“Not many,” Ned said, and we both laughed.
He led me to the space that would one day be his living room and threw back a sheet from a couch. The cloth gave off a cloud of plaster dust as it landed.
I glanced down at the black floorboards—paint that probably covered up pumpkin pine, and the equally paint-smothered woodwork, which might be no longer obtainable chestnut underneath—taking a moment’s respite in finding the house’s bones and guts.
“I need to find out more about Dugger,” I said at last. “He seems to know things. Some things at least.”
Ned thought for a second. “I think Dugger sometimes spends time with Dave.”
“Dave Weathers?”
“Right,” Ned said. “Dave’s a nice guy. Not as—remote as the rest. He’s a big hunter, and I remember he said once that Dugger likes to tag along with him. Apparently Dugger will never shoot anything, but he’s a hell of a good tracker.”
I imagined the conversation I might have with the Chief’s brother, and suddenly shivered. Ned’s house was cold, draughty, its furnace unequal to the enormous spaces contained within.
We would have to install a more modern system.
“I think you might be on the wrong track here, though,” Ned said. “If you’re looking to learn more about Brendan.”
I glanced at him, shadows falling between us through the tall, undraped windows.
Ned looked away, and his lips compressed. He had a generous mouth, I realized, used to talking and laughter. But just now it looked tight.
While I was studying him, Ned went on. “You want to know about Brendan’s last days on duty, right?”
I nodded.
“So read the records,” Ned said. “One thing cops do is keep logs. They’d probably share them with you. That’ll at least give you a place to start.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
When I got home, there was a carton on the front porch. I glimpsed it from several yards away. Everything was white, the snow mounded three feet up the walls of my house, so any patch of color appeared like a brazen splash. This was beige, a box similar to the ones all over Ned’s house, only its flaps were unsealed. I picked it up warily—it was light, the contents surely able to have fit into a much smaller container—and brought it inside.
My house was as chilly as Ned’s had been. I cranked up the heat before shedding my outerwear, listening to the rumbles of the furnace while I studied the carton. What are you waiting for? Teggie’s voice demanded. Finally I dropped one hand inside, coming out with a small plastic device, and a note with a single word on it. Missus.
Dugger had left me one of those drives for extra memory. I trudged upstairs to Brendan’s study.
Brendan had had the use of a computer in his patrol car, and since all I’d done was make files for prospective clients and order supplies off the Internet, one machine had been more than enough. One day, if Brendan had lived, perhaps we would’ve needed to get another, and a moment of longing assailed me, for the squabbles and bickering that occurred when a single resource was drawn tight between a couple. I was about to flick on the computer, and insert the drive, when something else grabbed my attention.
Brendan’s yellow flannel box.
Had I brought it down here? I’d looked over the contents with Teggie, and one time afterward, but I had returned the box to its drawer in the dresser. At least, I thought I had.
I seized up the lid—it hitched again on a corner, which I hadn’t ever noticed being a problem before—and began combing through the items. They all appeared to be present and intact. Had Dugger come inside before leaving his offering for me on the porch? Maybe he wanted to make sure I had a computer. But why would he have touched Brendan’s box?
I made a quick search of the rest of the house, glad to find nothing disturbed. The closet door in the bedroom was open, but I might’ve done that myself. Perhaps I’d moved the box without remembering it as well.
It was Dugger’s device that required attention now.
Dozens, then hundreds, of files streamed by on the screen, impossible to make sense of. They were all identified by a single date from a couple of years ago, and hadn’t been given descriptive names, Al Meter talking, Hunting with Dave or anything like that. Instead Dugger had used a single word, many of them abstract, to label each file. Time, said one. Another was called simply River. Window, Petering, Upside down, Hard. The strangest combination of words I had ever seen in one place. Like a poem your Lit professor in college tried to convince you made sense.
And there were so many of them. I stared at the list, extending above and below the section of screen now displayed. The only way to figure out what he wanted me to hear would be to go through all of them, one by one, in a slow, arduous search. And there might not be anything on them that would help me at all.
On the other hand, it wasn’t as if there were a whole lot of things competing for my time right now. Going to the police station could wait. Maybe I’d find something in Dugger’s files that would direct me there, give me some questions to ask.
I sighed, scrolled to the top of the list, and began.
Hours later, I was lost in the entrails of Dugger’s recordings, the scraps and parcels of life he had seen fit to prese
rve. Not because each one was interesting. To the contrary: I found myself listening to the minutiae and mundanities of life. Tools clanging at what must be Al’s garage. Dishes being rattled and the strange birdcalls and cries of mealtime in a diner. I kept listening, concentrating to some degree, because at any moment I might happen across the one key file Dugger had deemed important enough for me to hear. Then why didn’t he identify it, I asked myself, ears buzzing and brain watery from trying to make sense of the sounds, attempting to put a visual overlay to the audio scenes being brought to life here in Brendan’s study. Maybe there was nothing significant on this device at all, just further manifestation of Dugger’s autism, or else him trying in his stumbling way to occupy me somehow, offer me something to do.
Hunger had come gnawing again. Cooking meals was perhaps the least tolerable way of filling my time now; each step and task reminded me of doing the same things with Brendan. But I couldn’t ignore my appetite. Unlike those widows who wasted away in their desolation and their grief, I seemed unable to skip too many meals in a row, much less stop eating altogether.
My fingers were still fiddling with the mouse, scrolling from one file to another. Reserve, Carpeting, Bottled, Nice. Some nonsense words: Oodle and Lade. I clicked on them, but their sounds were even less distinguishable than the others. Barn. I tried that.
Noises that were almost violent filled the recording. Grunts, thumps, a crash or two, then a groan of pure release that confirmed I wasn’t listening to a fight or crime taking place, but instead the illicit sounds of somebody’s overheard lovemaking. I slid the mouse around frantically until the cursor found the little red x. When I finally clicked on it, I was breathing as fast as the people in the recording. And I was wondering, who was Dugger Mackenzie really? How far would he sneak into other people’s lives, and why did he do it?
I knew what it was time for now, what I had better do. Head back outside into the snow that was mummifying Wedeskyull and drive up to the police barracks.
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