On the Loose

by Andrew Coburn

  RAVE REVIEWS FOR ANDREW COBURN!

  "Natural storytellers are not too common, but Mr. Coburn is one."

  -The New York Times

  "There is a Hitchcockian flavor to Andrew Coburn's thrillers. He has a good eye and a great ear and his people ring true."

  -The Boston Globe

  "For cold-blooded menace, Coburn goes from strength to strength." -

  -The London Observer

  Coburn's "dialogue is perfect, sometimes acidic, and ~, , ~, always intelligent."

  -Chicago Tribune

  "Coburn's tough as Dashiell Hammett and plots and writes with the skill of Graham Greene."

  -Newsday

  Coburn's "characterizations are pitch-perfect, something out of Larry McMurtry."

  -St. Louis Post-Dispatch

  ONLY A MATTER OF TIME

  Sherwood, considered state of the art, was a youth detention center situated well west of Boston. Bobby Sawhill entered it in July, which distressed Chief Morgan. "My fault," Morgan said, dropping wearily into a chair near Meg O'Brien's desk. "A double murder charge, he'd have been tried as an adult, no question about it. Now he'll walk when he turns twenty-one."

  "Foolish to blame yourself, Meg said.

  He knew no one else to blame. He'd been suspicious about Mrs. Bullard's death but had never followed up. A better policeman would have, he told himself.

  "You don't know for sure;' Meg said.

  Morgan said, "Yes, I do. In my gut. What I don't know is why. Why Eve Bullard? Why Claudia?" His voice was thin, clinical, without skin.

  "Don't drive yourself crazy," she said.

  He smiled. "You know what I also know, like it's written on a blackboard?"

  She knew and didn't want to be told. "You could be wrong:'

  "No, Meg. Sure as I'm sitting here, he'll kill again."

  ON THE

  LOOSE

  ON THE

  LOOSE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Mrs. Bullard's white hair was wild. A free spirit all her life, she wore a bra top and skimpy shorts and stood on stiletto heels amid her late husband's rose bushes. She was probably the tallest woman the boy had ever seen. More than six feet in her prime, Mrs. Bullard had shrunk scarcely an inch in old age. Bones jutting sharply at uncommon angles made her body look feral. Despite her eighty years, she considered herself a woman to be reckoned with and a match for any man. The boy was an intruder in her garden.

  "Bobby," he said when she asked his name. She didn't need to be told he was a Sawhill. Sawhills had been in the town when the flag had thirteen stars. His grandfather, whom she might have married had she not chosen a Bullard, had once told her she had the warmest backside of any woman he knew.

  "How old are you, Bobby?"

  "Twelve," he said, which would have been hard to guess. He was big for his age and had a crew cut that squared his head and extended the fullness of his face, which remained a baby's.

  "What are you doing here?" she asked, and he claimed the gate had been left open, a fib she let pass. "You're a long way from your neighborhood. Don't you have friends to play with?"

  "I don't have any."

  "That's hard to believe," she said kindly and falsely. She suspected he was vulnerable and knew he was motherless, his father an alcoholic for whom sobriety was a strain after a week and an impossibility after two. She said, "I knew your grandfather."

  He gazed off at a finch feeding on thistle. His grandfather, dead before he was born, obviously did not interest him. Abruptly his voice sprang at her. "Did you know my mother?"

  She conjured up an image of a woman with eyes bluer than most blues, the only visible link to the boy, who in other respects was a Sawhill, from the smooth swell of his brow to the tight set of his feet. "Not really, Bobby. Your mother wasn't from Bensington."

  "She was young," he said aggressively.

  "Yes. Your father, like your grandfather, married late but chose young."

  "You're old."

  "No getting around that," Mrs. Bullard said with a wistfulness that almost amused her. "Would you like to help me weed?"

  Without warning, shocking her, he plucked a rose and scattered the petals. Her husband had nursed the roses from season to season, feeding them in autumn, protecting them in winter.

  "If you want to be welcome here, you won't do that again," she said, trembling. Her husband had died nearly seven years ago, but in her mind it could have been yesterday. In her dreams the dead mingled with the living and carried on in a world beyond death, proof enough of an articulation between this life and the next. "Did you hear me?"

  He nodded absently while watching the finch fly away. He was a Sawhill, but he lacked his grandfather's manners and charm.

  "When I talk to someone," she said sharply, "I expect to see the front of a face, not the side."

  Suddenly facing her, he mocked her with his eyes, in the blue of which his childhood seemed compressed, squeezed of its essence. For an unsettling moment she felt they were on equal footing.

  "You'd better go now," she said.

  " ?" y•

  "Because I say so," she said, her patience gone. She had never had a child of her own, only a niece. A daughter would have pleased her, but she'd always had doubts about a son.

  "Can I come back?" he asked.

  She didn't want the bother. Besides, much about him looked untrue, unreasonable, as if like his father he were a Sawhill in weak ways. "There's no point."

  He turned without argument, shuffled beyond the roses and paused near the pink radiance of phlox. Looking back, he said, "I just saw a snake."

  "Good," she said. "Snakes eat bugs. Bugs bother flowers."

  Alone, wearing garden gloves, she weeded for only a few minutes. Crouching disturbed her spine and cramped her long legs. The sun cooked her. She craved the cool of her house. The house was gingerbread, more or less Victorian, painted pale blue. In slight disrepair, over the front door, was a small cantilevered balcony from which potted plants trailed vines.

  Inside, she took a needed breath, her age sometimes a burden, her memories an added weight. She moved slowly through a sitting room and past a cabinet, where photograph albums embalmed her girlhood and her long married life. Occasionally she thumbed through them, fascinated and dismayed by the way the camera had recorded with such exactitude the fading of her beauty and the decline of her husband's health.

  In the kitchen she dropped her gloves on the bare table and savored breezes from the ceiling fan. After slaking her thirst with tap water, she slipped off her hot tennis shoes and left humid prints on the parquet. In the bathroom she counted her toes and came up short. Her eyes were not focusing well. She recounted and came up over, aggravating for someone who had spent the greater part of her life teaching high school math.

  A shower only half refreshed her. In need of a nap, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom and stretched out on the bed, where she and her husband had enjoyed reading together, she with her mysteries, he with his Dickens. Or his Fielding. He had loved the old masters. She adored Agatha.

  Sleep came easily. A vivid dream reunited her with her husband, though shortness of sight kept her from recognizing him until they drew close. They were on a hill, where daytime suddenly transmuted into night. She gazed at stars while he, his back to her, took an urgent leak. "Where have you been?" she asked, and he replied, "Nowhere in particular."

  She was unsure how long she had napped, perhaps an hour at the most. Wearing a robe, her feet still bare, she descended the stairs and felt a draft from the cellar door, which stood wide open. From the tail of her eye she glimpsed roses on the kitchen table, a great bouquet of the brightest red from the garden, the thorns enormous on the slashed stems. Behind her came a voice.

  "They're for
you."

  She pivoted. "What are you doing in my house, Bobby?"

  Head bent, Trish Becker mounted a bathroom scale as if it were a plinth. Numbers shot crazily from side to side and finally settled. Hands on her bare hips, she gave a backward look into the dim bedroom, where shades were pulled against the late afternoon heat. She said, "You'd tell me if I was too fat, wouldn't you?"

  Harry Sawhill, sipping a vodka tonic, smiled from the propped pillows of the bed. "Of course."

  She rejoined him on the bed with a drink of her own. She was a close friend and a frequent visitor. Comfortable with her company, he dropped a hand on the marked moon of her abdomen. She was blond, buxom, and jolly. Much in life had become a joke to her, even orgasms. Some women cried after the throes. She laughed.

  "Are you going to marry me, Harry?"

  "Ask me when I've had a couple more drinks. I'll probably say yes."

  Neither was serious. Neither wanted the fulltime responsibility of the other. Each had the air of a convalescent. His hand traced over ridges from a caesarean, an appendectomy, a gall bladder removal. Her map of Massachusetts, she had once quipped.

  She said, "Let's go to Montreal this weekend."

  "Why?" he asked without interest. The thought of travel tired him. At fifty-two, he had a gray look, like late November.

  "For the hell of it, Harry. We can do what we want, can't we?"

  Each had financial freedom. Trish lived off a generous divorce settlement, and he shared family money with his brother, who, though younger, was his adviser, his mentor, occasionally his savior.

  He said, "Get me another drink."

  "Take mine, I've had enough." He was the drunk, she was the sport. A sound from downstairs startled her. "What's that?"

  "Bobby's home."

  "Damn," she said.

  "He won't come up. He knows you're here."

  Unconvinced, she tossed her legs over the bed's edge and sought her clothing. Dressed, she took out her lipstick and drew a new mouth without looking in a mirror. Her voice had a fullness.

  "Why doesn't he like me, Harry?"

  "You're not his mother."

  His mother had dressed him in yellow and called him a butterball. He was blue eyes squirting out of a face good enough to eat, that was what she told him. Her kisses were nibbles.

  He was four years old when she went into the hospital for tests. Though she was gone only three days, her absence tore at him. Her second stay in the hospital stretched to a week, which he saw as a betrayal, for she had promised never to leave him again. The third time she went away she did not return. His father said she had gone to a better place and took him to a large white house, into the cloying scent of cut flowers, where he saw her lying in what seemed a huge basket. He thought she was alive and, overjoyed, tried to climb in. The hands grappling with him belonged to his father and his uncle. His strength surprised them.

  "You never should have brought him," his uncle said.

  He went to stay with his uncle, whose wife carried the smell of babies. She had twin girls who, despite the help of a nanny, consumed much of her time, leaving little for him. He ate sweets on the sly, which rounded his face. Occasionally he watched the babies being changed. With their legs open, they looked broken, an observation that went uncorrected by the young nanny, who spoke with an accent and may not have understood him.

  For his birthday his uncle gave him a singing canary, white with a gray crest, and hung the cage from a kitchen rafter where the cat couldn't get at it. Had he been taller and braver, he'd have freed the bird. Evenings, his uncle usually took him places, to Wenson's Ice Cream Stand, to Burger King, once to a band concert on the green, where he was introduced to the police chief, who was dressed like everyone else, wore no badge, and carried no gun. Patting his head, the chief said, "Anybody gives you trouble, you call me."

  "My uncle won't let me go home," he said.

  He went home at the end of the month with the caged canary and the full expectation of seeing his mother. He thought he heard her footsteps, but they came from an elderly woman brought in to look after him during the day. His father, liquor on his breath and grief in his eyes, said, "Welcome back."

  The woman said, "I like the little birdie. What's his name?"

  He placed the cage on a table. "He doesn't have a name. He wants to be free." Then he asked when his mother was coming home, whether she was back at the hospital or still in that big white house.

  The woman looked at his father for guidance. His father, who had been staring into space, suddenly stepped to the cage, opened the little wire door, and reached inside.

  "Do you know what dead is, Bobby?" He caught the fluttering canary and crushed it in his hand. "That's what dead is."

  Mrs. Bullard was dead. Her body, long limbs askew, lay at the foot of the cellar stairs like a toy to be spun. A single rose lay in the spill of blood. Sergeant Eugene Avery, a veteran of the Bennington Police Department, had a problem staying calm. The sight of unnatural death invariably unsettled his stomach.

  "She was a nice lady," he said.

  Chief James Morgan, careful of where he stepped, was at the bottom of the stairs. Sergeant Avery remained at the top. Years ago he and the chief had been students of Mrs. Bullard's at the regional high school, where she had been a hard marker but had done her best to pass everyone, though she nearly excluded him. He pricked an ear.

  "Did you say something, Chief?"

  "Talking to myself." Chief Morgan was a lean shadow in the light of a bare bulb. "What's one rose doing down here? The rest are on the table."

  Sergeant Avery thought for a moment. "Maybe she was wearing it in her hair."

  "I'm thinking out loud, Eugene."

  "I know, but I feel I should-answer.-

  "Looks as if she came down headfirst. With force. Almost as if she were pushed."

  Sergeant Avery stared down in disbelief. "No signs of a burglary or anything, Chief. You don't think Amy White ... ?"

  "No, that doesn't fly."

  Amy White, a friend of Sergeant Avery's sister, looked in on her aunt each evening. Her call to the station had been hysterical. The ambulance that came for her aunt took her away instead.

  The chief, who had a woman waiting for him, glanced at his watch. "You got your camera with you? We at least ought to take some pictures."

  Dreading the moment, Sergeant Avery descended the stairs with care. Poised over the remains of his former teacher, he felt an inner jolt. Something coming up. He held it back. The chief gave him a quick look and asked if he was all right. Voiceless, tasting himself, he nodded and began working the camera.

  "Do you know what bothers me the most, Eugene? That damn rose."

  The town's weekly, The Crier, which went to press on Wednesday and came out on Thursday, reported that Eve (Perkins) Bullard, 80, a lifelong resident, died Tuesday of injuries from an apparent fall at her home on Grove Street. Arrangements were to be announced by Drinkwater Funeral Home.

  Chief Morgan discreetly questioned neighbors and came up dry. A partial autopsy was performed at the general hospital in nearby Lawrence. Mrs. Bullard had succumbed to head trauma, presumably from a fall.

  The Bensington Garden Club, of which Mrs. Bullard had been a longtime member and a past president, arranged the flowers at the wake. The Reverend Mr. Austin Stottle of First Congregational Church said prayers.

  There was no burial. Mrs. Bullard had willed her body to University Hospital in Boston.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The days sobered into autumn, and soon it was November, like March a mongrel month, unloved, unloving. The sky was skeletal, schematic, plucked by a crow. The gray in the air only lightly colored Chief Morgan's mood. The chief, whose wife had died young, the victim of a car crash, had learned long ago to take each day at a time and to seek no meaning in the incoherence of grief. As the days shortened, he geared himself to face another winter without a woman. The one he'd been seeing was breaking off with him.

  He s
pent considerable time at a window table in the Blue Bonnet restaurant, which was neatly nestled between the town hall and the library. The window table overlooked the green and all the little shops on the far side. At the flanks were Pearl's Pharmacy and Tuck's General Store. More and more of Tuck's was taking on the look of a superette, displeasing to Morgan. He remembered the waning days of a cracker barrel and penny candy. At Pearl's he remembered when condoms were called prophylactics and never openly displayed.

  His tablemate at breakfast was usually Chub Tuttle from the fire station or Fred Fossey, the parttime veterans agent, whose greatest joy was raising and lowering the flag on the green, Boy Scouts in partial uniform snapping off salutes. At lunch he was frequently joined by Reverend Stottle, who held the private opinion that when God made the human race he got it wrong but won't admit his mistake. The chief, though not a churchgoer, was among those with whom the reverend shared confidences, which included his weakness for unapproachable women in his congregation, those hefty in the thigh and overblown with goodness.

  Crossing the green with the reverend, Morgan bumped into Amy White, who said she was putting her aunt's house on the market. Positioning her back to the wind, which had teeth, she said she couldn't bear to step foot through that door again. The chief told her it was a tough time to sell and advised her to wait until spring.

  "We've priced it to move," she said and gave Reverend Stottle a haggard look. "I can still see her lying at the foot of those cellar stairs. Do you think she's at peace?"

  "Death," said Reverend Stottle, "is winter without storms."

  Harry Sawhill needed a nip in the morning to get him going and another at noon to keep him smiling. At night the drinking turned serious and put him to sleep. Trish Becker, who saw him two or three times a week, said, "You can't go on this way."