A Matter of Mercy

by Lynne Hugo

  Rid did an exact reverse course. This had to be one of the most purely stupid things he’d ever done in his life, and he’d done plenty of things that rang the bell at the top of the stupid meter. How was he going to retrieve his truck and get the hell out of here? Not the way he came in, that was for sure. He had to stay off the roads.

  Panting, Rid made it back to the horseshoe beach by sneaking onto one of CiCi’s neighbor’s beach paths, and hunching as low to the ground as he could, doing an awkward run. “Oh, this is peachy, just peachy,” he muttered to himself as he jogged, trying to keep his head down. “In Caroline Marcum’s neighborhood at the exact same time one of her windows gets busted. What kind of moron are you, Ridley Neal? You’ve done made Mario look like a frigging genius tonight.” Then breath was too hard to suck in to waste any on words, and he just kept moving on the shoulder where the beach grass and low dunes started, figuring he’d blend into the darkness best there. When he reached the access road, he got over the shoulder and, even though it was clumsy, blind-going, slow and miserable, Rid got down and went through wet-footed mucky beach grass, intending to approach the front of his truck by coming up from the wetland. He had a much better chance of avoiding detection.

  Cold and wet, he half-crept, half-crawled toward the front of his truck from the marsh side, praying that Lizzie wouldn’t put up a major stink. Usually she knew when it was Rid, and didn’t make a sound unless he’d left her too long. Then the barking was a warm up for her joy dance or her reproach because she’d been holding her pee. Once the truck was in his sight line, he stopped and lay on his stomach in the dark, to get a fix on whether anyone was around the truck or a squad car might be parked behind it. Nothing he could see.

  Trying to be noiseless, he centered the weight of his backpack again and, staying low, made it to the road. There, he straightened up and tried to look unhurried. He opened the truck bed and shifted some crates in it, pulling a sandy rake and a crate half-full of steamers forward, so that if caught he could say he had been picking in the wild. Kind of far-fetched when he was this close to his own grant, but maybe not to the police. He opened one of the extra two liter bottles of water he kept in the back for Lizzie and wet the clams down, so they’d look just picked. He pulled off the backpack, got out the tuna sandwich and started eating it, to back up his own story. The tide was too far in, there was the darkness problem, and this wasn’t a designated area for picking. “More holes’n Swiss cheese,” he said aloud. He put on his miner’s hat, so it would look like he could have been using a headlight. He tried to look casual, all the while his hands were hurrying, and the sound of his heart pounding was like surf in his ears. Keeping the thermos with him, he unlocked the driver’s side where Lizzie was already at attention in the passenger seat.

  Clamping his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering, Rid quickly climbed into the truck, and even while Lizzie was licking his right ear, he was starting it, no motor gun, and then as quietly as he could doing a three point turn and driving back out to Indian Neck Road, and on out on Cove toward Route 6 at a calm speed that denied his every instinct. As he reached the junction of Indian Neck and Cove Road, he saw flashing blue and red lights approaching. He signaled and veered off onto Pilgrim Spring Road well before the police car passed.

  It wasn’t until much later when he was at home in his recliner with a beer, and the police still hadn’t shown up at his door with a warrant (but who knows how long it took to get a judge to sign one of those?) that he started to look at what had happened through a different lens. The television was on, but only to have things look normal—whatever that meant—if they showed up. He couldn’t have named the program. What he saw was that CiCi hadn’t lied. Someone was terrorizing her. She thought it was Rid, but so far hadn’t pointed him out to the police. Why not? Second, it had taken the cops at least twenty minutes to respond to her call. Maybe more like thirty. He couldn’t really tell how long it had taken him to get from her yard to his truck, but it was a fair distance and he hadn’t taken a quick or easy route. They weren’t taking her calls seriously. Or they were protecting someone else.

  Chapter 19

  December 23. The morning after he’d tried to stake out CiCi’s house, Lizzie woke Rid at six-thirty. “Tide’s not till ten-forty. Go back to sleep,” he tried, knowing full well she wouldn’t until he’d let her out and fed her. She leaked out a little whine and nuzzled him softly. “All right, girl. I know,” he said. “I’m coming.”

  By the time Rid himself had peed and was back in bed, Lizzie three minutes behind him with her morning gratitude kisses, the whole mess of CiCi and Pissario barged back into his consciousness and immediately got tangled up in his mind like the wreck of a grant after a terrible blow. He lay sleepless in the dark, aware of how alone he was. Then this unwelcome thought—if I feel alone, how must CiCi feel? Afraid, pregnant, her mother newly dead.

  He’d call and offer to help, but that would tip his hand, that he’d been there last night. He stewed in the bed another fifteen minutes, overthinking every angle. Finally, he sighed, and extracted his thigh from beneath the sleeping Lab who’d been using it as a pillow. His feet touched the cold hardwood for the second time that morning. He really needed to get himself a pair of those fur-lined slippers. But he’d been saying that for at least three years, maybe five.

  An hour later, he was at The Oyster, happy he’d bothered to wear his rubber shoes because the sandy parking lot was full of frozen-top puddles from the overnight rain. A skin of ice silvered all the beach grass and branches. Likely it would be gone by the time he came out.

  “Hey Billy,” he forced the greeting out nicely with something near a smile, even though Billy was wearing a dangle earring that looked like a barber pole, and some weird shirt with a cutout around his arm tattoo—Rid never had been able to read more than the first two letters, EL. The outfit was topped with a doo rag covered with tiny Santas.

  “Hey yourself. What’ll it be?” Billy said leaning over the counter.

  “Look, man, your earring is nice, but could you give me some air space? Just—”

  “No problem,” Billy interrupted, straightening. “It’s a candy cane,” he said, flipping his earring. For Christmas. You know, with my last name being Cane—sort of a joke?”

  “I thought something was going on, sorta over the top.”

  Billy’s face fell a bit. “Anyway, what would you like for breakfast? If I can get The Lord of the Grill to cook something and actually ring the little bell when it’s ready.” As he spoke, he unnecessarily re-wiped the bar in front of Rid before sliding silverware and a napkin in place. Normally Rid would have taken a table, but again, today, he wanted Billy’s chatter so he was enduring the preliminaries, masking his impatience.

  “Two eggs over easy, a side of extra crisp bacon, got any blueberry muffins today? And, yeah, hash browns.” He slid the menu back toward Billy, not having looked at it.

  “Somebody’s got an appetite today,” Billy said suggestively.

  “Listen, Candy, lay off. Go put my order in and then come back and catch me up on local gossip. I’ve been down on the grant all the time, trying to button it down, hardly seen anyone at all.” He’d known the invitation would light Billy up, but he needed to get what he needed to get, and then he could stop playing this game. Not that he didn’t like Billy.

  “You got it.” Billy flourished through the swinging kitchen doors. All the locals let their guard down in the off-season. But this was way more than Rid remembered from last year, or maybe Billy had been warming up to it for years, like a snake shedding skins.

  The doors swung back momentarily, Billy carrying two mugs of coffee. He plunked one in front of Rid and took a sip of the other himself. “Slow morning,” he said, swiveling his head around the bar as if to show Rid there were no other customers for him to attend to. Rid had counted on it. There were a smattering in the restaurant side, but those weren’t Billy’s problem. The pretty brunette married to Clint, whose grant was n
ext to Barb’s—was handling the restaurant side along with Jannie who was doing double duty, as usual.

  “So gossip central is now open,” Billy said. “Who is it you wish to dish?” Playing it to the hilt.

  “Nobody in particular, everybody in general. What’s the latest around town?” Ease into it, he cautioned himself. Don’t act too interested in any one thing.

  “Well, let’s see. You heard about Barb’s daughter, didn’t you? Oh, she’s such a doll, the prettiest girl too, don’t you know? Couldn’t have happened to anyone nicer. Seems she won the prize for ….” Billy went on and on, jumping from person to person, while Rid pretended to listen, drinking his coffee, trying to keep his eyes somewhere close to Billy’s face.

  “Oh, you wouldn’t wanna know anything about Mr. Pissario now, would you?”

  “Is there something to know?”

  “Might be.” Teasing.

  Be patient. Keep your hands off his throat. Rid grinned at Billy. “Okay, Candy, spill it.”

  Just then, Chuck’s baritone from the kitchen. “Billy-Boy, you have an order. Would you care to pick it up, or shall I call a courier service?”

  Billy’s face turned dark. “This is what I put up with.” Then, calling to the kitchen, in another tone entirely, this one light and fake-cheery, “I’m coming, Chuck. Thank you.”

  When the kitchen doors slapped behind him on his return back into the bar, Billy put Rid’s breakfast down—already a bit cooled off, Rid noted, without mentioning it—and continued where he’d left off on the subject of Pissario. “Maybe he reported that his car, a Lexus don’t you know, was keyed in the Stop & Shop parking lot. I heard it on the scanner. I know this breaks your heart, you and him being so close.”

  “Oh yeah. I’m weeping. Any idea who did it?”

  “Nobody’s been mentioned, or more importantly, picked up for questioning.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, that’s a good thing.”

  “You know anything about it? Not that I’d tell.”

  Rid made a point of looking Billy square in the eye and holding the contact while he answered. “I’m not about to mess up a court case by doing one illegal thing, and that’s the truth.” The last thing he needed was gossip getting started that he was behind this and just too clever to get caught.

  “So anything else interesting on the scanner? Any good breaking and entering? How about grand theft? Any murders in town? Gotta be some decent auto theft, at least.” He forked some bacon and eggs into his mouth, took a swig of coffee, raised his eyebrows expectantly as he chewed and waited for Billy to come up with an answer.

  Billy put on a show of trying to remember. “Damn. There was a bunch of that stuff, but a lot of it just escapes my memory. I’m just so busy here all the time, you know, slaving to wait on the hordes of winter customers. Sorry.”

  “You are at risk of being a boring guy in a boring town,” Rid said. “Don’t tell me the peeping Tom retired, too.” Now, finally, what he was after.

  “Nope, but if he’s a pervert, he froze his little dick off last night, because he also threw a rock through that lady’s window. That was on the scanner, too.”

  “You’re kidding. Man, that’s bad. Do you know who she is?”

  “I think they said Caroline somebody. Over off Indian Neck Road, one of the lanes that look like ladder rungs down to the beach.”

  “Caroline Marcum? Geez. I know her. An old friend from high school.” Might as well get a witness established as to how and when he heard about what happened and that he told somebody he was going to call and see if he could help. Might help if she accused him later. “She told me this was happening, and it sounded kinda far-fetched. So it’s true. I wish I’d asked you about it before.” Another bite of bacon and eggs.

  “Didn’t sound like anybody much did believe her.”

  “Her mother just died a bit ago. I went to the service. Our dads used to play poker way back when.”

  “Ya don’t say.”

  “I went out with her back in September once.” Rid kept eating, which gave him a reason not to look at Billy directly.

  Billy’s eyebrows went up. “She a nut job?”

  “No more’n you.”

  Billy rolled his eyes. “Possibly she wouldn’t find that description complimentary.”

  Rid took a long drink of coffee, then elaborately set his mug down. In a long deadpan, he slowly wiped his mouth with his napkin, then looked up at Billy, back at his plate, picked up his muffin, buttered it, and just before opening his mouth, paused to look at him again to say, “Possibly not,” before he grinned and took a big bite.

  Billy chuckled.

  “Anyway,” Rid continued, “I feel bad for her. I’ll give her a call and see if she needs some help.” He thought of telling Billy that she was pregnant, and then thought better of it. The only thing Billy liked better than gossip was sexual innuendo.

  “Yeah,” Billy said. The morning sun was on his face, side lit by window light from the restaurant side, and he looked older than his years. “Somebody oughta.”

  “You got my check? I gotta run to my grant. Almost time for the tide.”

  “Sure.” Billy tore it off his pad and slid it face down across the bar. Rid pulled his wallet from his back pocket and turned it over, it was blank. He looked up at Billy, a question on his face.

  “It’s on me. I like talking to you.”

  “Hey, man, that’s not necessary.” He stopped short of saying I like talking to you, too, although sometimes he did. “Thanks a lot.”

  “My pleasure.” Billy grinned and picked up the dirty plate, silverware and mug. “See you soon.”

  “Hey, Billy—I’m still leaving you a tip,” Rid called as Billy backed through the swinging kitchen doors.

  “Not necessary.”

  “Better pick it up,” Rid called into the empty space between the doors as they still made their small slapping noises, and put a ten dollar bill under the salt shaker.

  When he left The Oyster, he checked the shellfish shack where the warden’s office was, across the street. No yellow flag flying over it. Good enough. Harbor open. Still legal to pick today.

  * * * *

  He did run out to his grant. He had a standing quahog order, and he could still dig. He’d left some legal size oysters in, too, hadn’t pulled them out yet to put in the pit in his yard. The more he could sell while the temperature was above freezing, the more cash he could raise for the lawsuit defense. He couldn’t harvest a frozen animal out of the water; that wasn’t legal because when it thawed it would be dead and have no shelf life. This was a bit of a risky game he was playing. The safest thing now was to pull all the rest of his oysters and get them buried for the winter. That way he wasn’t chancing ice damage if a sudden hard freeze came. December was early for it, but you never knew. Tomorrow. He promised himself that every day.

  Probably as much as anything, though, he’d come to the grant to think. The bay was home, even in this unforgiving season when his toil and loyalty were what earned his truest claim. Pissario might be still coming out an occasional weekend now, but once Christmas was over, he’d disappear entirely until about May fifteenth. All the weekenders did.

  But that wasn’t what he’d come to think about as he picked oysters from the big rack in the front of his grant. He’d come to think about how to approach CiCi. Every time he said a word to her, it ended up stuck all over his face, like bubblegum gone wrong. He had to go down to his sister’s for Christmas. Laura could live without him for sure, but he wasn’t into hearing about how he’d broken his mother’s heart again. Did CiCi have someplace to go for Christmas, though? He couldn’t see her left alone, scared, waiting for the next stealth rock through a window, or worse. But surely one of her mother’s friends. Or maybe she’d made some friends of her own by now. What was she telling people? Or had she had an abortion after all? Rid sighed and shook his head as he carried a crate to the open gate of his truck. “Goddamn,” he said out loud.

/>   * * * *

  His delivery completed, Rid went home and played Frisbee hard with Lizzie under a sky that looked entirely scribbled over in heavy lead pencil. He’d picked up some groceries in Orleans, and, delaying, came in and fried a steak with some onions, peppers and mushrooms while the microwave nuked a potato. He’d killed a beer before he ate, and knocked off another with dinner. Watched the TV news. Rummaged for dessert, cursed himself for forgetting to buy ice cream. Found some Rocky Road in the basement freezer and scooped a big bowl. Watched Jeopardy, challenging Lizzie for the house championship. Was pleased he was able to beat her and retain his title from the night before last. Washed the dishes. Considered whether he could proceed to do laundry. Called himself a goddamn wussy boy. Picked up the phone. Put it back. Picked it up again. Walked a circle around his living room. Lizzie perked an eye and ear at him. “All right, already. Goddamn, I know, I know. I’m doing it.” Dialed Caroline’s number.

  “Caroline? Please don’t hang up. This is Rid Neal. Listen, the barkeep at The Oyster, you know, Billy Cane? He always has the police scanner on, and I was there for breakfast this morning. Anyway, he told me that somebody threw a rock through your window last night. I’m … I’m calling to see if you’re all right. I mean, I thought you might need some help.”