by Gerry Boyle
I put the rifle on the table and went to the answering machine on the counter. The red light was flashing and I pushed the button. There was a whir and then a beep.
Archambault had called but didn’t say when.
A woman from the Observer had called and asked if I wanted her to mail my check or did I want to come in and pick it up. Right. And talk over old times with the troops.
Roxanne had called and said she’d be late. She was calling from the office, and I could hear voices in the background.
“Hey, Rox, this guy Skip called,” a woman was saying. “Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were on the—”
Skip called. I needed a beer.
I looked out the window at the backyard. It was quiet and still and green. For a minute I scanned the edge of the woods, but there was nothing and nobody moving. I went upstairs and stuck my head under the bed. Nothing moving there, either.
Back downstairs, I went to the bathroom and washed my face and hands of road grit and any residue from the porno booth. I brushed my teeth, too, for good measure, and then I took my rifle and went out the door, through the field, and up onto the Varneys’ back steps. I unloaded the gun before I brought it inside.
Table manners.
We had our beers in the kitchen. Mary Varney was washing radishes from the garden and Clair was helping her.
“In the bowl, not your mouth,” Mary said.
“Yes, dear.”
Mary’s hands were brown and lithe and strong, rounding the knife over the radishes. Clair’s hands were big and blunt, like paws.
“Jack, you could wash the asparagus,” Mary said.
I took the bundle of stems from the counter and put it in the big slate sink and ran the water.
“How’s the crop?” I said.
“Not bad,” Clair said. “It’d be fuller if we’d had more rain earlier in the spring. But asparagus is dependable. It’s a vegetable with strong character. You have to admire asparagus.”
“I admire asparagus on my plate.”
“You should respect and be thankful for something like asparagus. This country has lost the quality of reverence. I always think of American Indians, giving thanks for everything,” said Clair.
“I’d thank you to not eat all the radishes,” Mary said.
“Like I said, we’ve lost the quality of reverence. A wife’s reverence for her husband . . .”
“A husband’s reverence for the wife who puts up with him,” Mary said. “If you eat one more radish, I’ll show you some reverence.”
She picked up the colander and came over to the sink. I took the asparagus out of the sink and put it on a towel on the counter. Mary ran water on the radishes, then put them in a wooden bowl with lettuce and spinach. I lopped the bottom half inch off the asparagus and dropped them in a pan of boiling water.
“Careful with that knife,” Mary said. “It’s sharp. And how’s your face, anyway?”
“Better,” I said. “I could take the bandage off, but I don’t want to scare small children.”
“That’s a shame. You should see somebody about that scar.”
I shrugged and smiled.
Mary took a paper-wrapped package from the refrigerator and brought it to the counter. She unfolded the paper and lifted out two rosy salmon fillets. The white wine in the pan was starting to simmer. She laid one fillet in and it hissed.
“How late did Roxanne say she’d be?” Clair asked, getting up from the table.
“She didn’t.”
“I’ll wait on the second piece of fish,” Mary said. “And I’ll save some asparagus. When she gets here, we can cook everything up fresh for her.”
“I hope she won’t be too late,” I said. I thought of Skip and winced.
“You two can set the table and pour me a glass of wine,” Mary said, prodding the fish with a fork. “Not necessarily in that order.”
So we set the big oak-plank table for four. Clair poured Mary’s wine, which was some kind of a sauterne, and in a minute or two everything was ready. Mary pulled a tray of rolls from the oven and put them in a bowl, and we sat and loaded our plates with pink and green. Then Clair raised his beer glass and gave thanks for radishes, asparagus, and salmon. I raised my glass too, but something reminded me of Donna and I felt momentarily ashamed, as if I shouldn’t be giving thanks for anything.
Not yet.
After initial bites, we pronounced everything delicious. Clair put butter on his roll, but Mary did not. I ate the salad and asparagus, sipped my beer. Mary asked me how Roxanne liked her job in Portland, and I said she did, that she liked to help kids and there was a lot of help needed. Clair asked when I was going to get my truck back from the state police and I said I didn’t know.
“What’s going on with all of that?” Mary asked, cutting a piece of asparagus.
“They’re probably going to arrest her boyfriend,” I said.
“Well, that’s some compensation, I guess,” Mary said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
Mary, direct and strong and smart, looked across the table at me.
“Why don’t you?” she said.
“Because I don’t think he did it.”
“Well, why not?”
“Because I asked him and he said he didn’t do it, and he said it in a believable way. I mean, I believe him.”
“Could they convict him?” Mary asked.
“Probably. He grabbed her by the throat. There were bruises on her throat and she died of suffocation at about that time.”
Mary ate a piece of fish. I did too.
“So he tried to kill her?”
“He says no.”
“Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”
“Yeah, but he admits everything else. And this old lady next door, she says she heard the fighting, saw him leave, and then heard dishes clinking in the apartment like everything was normal. Or at least Donna was alive.”
“Unless it was the little girl doing the dishes,” Clair said suddenly. “Maybe she thought her mother was asleep. Decided to clean up.”
I remembered my stoned buddy from the apartment across the alley. He’d said Adrianna washed the dishes. Would she, if she thought her mother was asleep? Had it been Adrianna rattling the plates?
Mary sipped her wine.
“Of course, if this man is wrongly convicted of this, someone else will have gotten away with it,” she said. “Who might that be?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Her ex-husband hated her, but he says he didn’t do it, that it wouldn’t have solved his problem with her, which was child support.”
“You believe him too?” Mary said.
“I think so.”
“Maybe you’re too trusting,” she said, her fork sliding under her fish.
“But I’m not. That’s the problem.”
Mary was warming to this and I was warming to her. It was the kind of conversation I could have had with Roxanne, if Roxanne had been here. I wished Roxanne would come.
“But it’s very obvious, don’t you think?” Mary said. “The little girl was there, wasn’t she? She must have seen it happen. She must know who was there. What did she tell the police?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “The people in the building saw her leaving with the sister earlier.”
“Depends on when it happened,” Mary said.
“Maybe she was asleep,” Clair put in. “What was it, nine, ten o’clock at night? Normally, a four-year-old kid would be zonked right out.”
“But if there had been all this ruckus, she’d be wide awake, wouldn’t she?” Mary said. “The things kids have to live through. How is she?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t seen her. She’s with her aunt, and her aunt is pretty protective. She calls her ‘my little girl.’ She said if I tried to come near her or hurt her, she’d kill me.”
Mary’s eyebrows rose over her wineglass.
“Does she have children of her own?”
“No
. Always wanted them but couldn’t have any, I guess. Her husband works a million hours a week at the mill in Kennebec. They probably have a couple hundred thousand in the bank. But no kids.”
“They do now,” Mary said.
The words floated there for a moment, hovering over the table. I had my glass raised and it stopped. Clair looked at his wife, then at me. Mary sipped her wine, then put the glass back down and reached for her fork.
“Stranger things have happened,” she said quietly. “You know that, Jack. With the things you’ve seen.”
Marcia?
It wasn’t possible—that she could be that twisted, that is. Did she want a child of her own—did she want Adrianna so badly that she would kill her own sister?
“I don’t think. . . . I mean, I can’t imagine that she’d . . .”
Would she think that she was saving Adrianna from something? Could there have been an argument between the two sisters? Over Adrianna, maybe. What if Marcia had laid into Donna about the way she was living? What if Marcia had come to the apartment and found the place messed up, Donna drunk, Adrianna uncared for? What if they’d fought somehow and things had gotten out of hand and Marcia had strangled her? In a moment of rage? Was it possible?
“What’s she like, this Marcia?” Mary asked.
“Tough,” I said. “Efficient. She’s in accounting or something. Self-made type. Married this steady Eddie kind of guy, I guess. Very protective of her sister, who was sort of a screw-up by comparison. Or just unlucky. Donna’s husband was abusive. A real jerk. They had this girl, but he couldn’t care less about Adrianna. That’s the little girl. Boyfriend is a bar brawler. Beat her up. When she got up the courage to kick him out, he hounded her. If Jeff turned up dead, I’d bet on Marcia in a second.”
“But this sister had the one thing Marcia couldn’t have.”
“A child?” I said. “Yeah. She was sort of a surrogate mother, though. When things got rough, Adrianna went to Marcia’s.”
“Maybe she decided that things were too rough for the girl,” Mary said.
I thought some more. Clair got up and went and got another beer. He poured half in my glass, half in his.
“I don’t mean to be cheap, but I don’t think this is the time to let your guard down entirely,” he said.
“Probably not,” I said. “Probably not.”
We finished dinner slowly. The asparagus was perfect, the salmon moist and sweet. I was distracted.
It hadn’t occurred to me. Not once. Was that the explanation for her reaction when I came to her house? Was she protecting Adrianna, or was she protecting herself?
I helped clear the table and Clair made coffee. Mary served slices of pound cake with fresh strawberries and Clair poured. I had a small piece of cake and my coffee black. Outside, dusk had fallen and it was growing dark. I wondered about Marcia. I worried about Roxanne.
The rest of the talk was about the Varneys’ daughters, their two grandchildren. Mary talked about how different their daughters were from each other, how much of our character is determined by our genetic imprint. It was an interesting topic, and Mary had read magazine articles on it. Another time I would have listened more closely.
But I was only half there.
It was after nine when we picked up the cups and brought them out to the kitchen. Clair said maybe I’d better call and see if Roxanne was still home. Mary looked worried.
“Maybe she called your house and left another message,” Mary said, rinsing the cups at the sink. “I used to worry about the girls, driving up here at night. If you have car troubles, you can be stuck out in the middle of absolutely nowhere. That’s why I think these car phones are a good idea.”
“I told you I’d get you the antenna,” Clair said. “I don’t need one. I don’t go anywhere. But these young women, driving alone at night. And you know what kind of people are out there these days. Jack’s certainly run into his share lately. It’s scary.”
And I was beginning to get a little scared.
We finished putting the food away and Mary said she was going to go make up the guest room. I walked outside with Clair and we stood in the backyard in the dark and listened to the drone of birds and bugs.
“I’m going to walk down and check the machine,” I said.
“I’ll go with you,” Clair said. “Hang on.”
He walked to the back door, opened it, and reached in and took out his Mauser. Holding it up to the light from the kitchen window, he slid the bolt open and then closed.
“Be prepared, as the scouts say,” Clair said. “I still don’t like the sound of this jailbird pal of yours. I don’t like a man who’s got nothing to lose.”
We walked behind the row of cedars that shielded Clair’s yard from the road. It was cool and hazy clouds had moved in, putting a gauzy mask over the moon. We’d gone fifty feet, no more, when we both stopped. Then trotted ahead and stopped again.
“Oh, Jesus,” Clair said. “Take this.”
He shoved the rifle into my hands and turned and ran toward my house, fast. I ran too.
The smoke was an odor and then stronger, and then, when I came out of the field and around the end of the shed, it was billowing out the door like steam.
I stopped ten feet from the mudroom door and heard a rushing, crackling sound from inside. As I stood there, flames flashed along the wall where the mudroom connected to the house. The flames disappeared, then flashed again and crept up the wall. I ran past the front of the house to the outside faucet. The hose was in the shed. I ran back to the shed, and now the flames had climbed the wall to the roof and the crackling had turned to a soft roar.
I ran around the end of the shed to the glass door to the deck. The door was locked, but I punched a hole in the window with the rifle butt and reached in and opened the door. The inside of the house was dark and smoke was moving along the ceiling. I leaned the rifle on the deck and ran through the room and up the loft stairs and yanked open the top drawer of the bureau. Papers. Records. Photographs. My arms full, I tumbled down the stairs and back outside, dumping the stuff on the ground thirty feet from the house.
Back inside, I loaded up again.
More papers. A small box of stuff from childhood. Pictures of my parents. What to take? What to leave?
Clair came through the back door, a bandanna over his mouth.
“What else?” he called, his voice muffled, his figure hazy in the smoke.
“Money. In the freezer. Blue plastic container behind the ice cubes. The stereo. Records and tapes and CDs.”
He ran to the refrigerator and opened the door and the light went on, showing the smoke to be thick and dense. I ran back up the stairs and yanked the bureau drawers out and dropped them over the railing. They landed with a crash, and I ran down and grabbed them and heaved them out the door, one by one.
Back up the stairs, I went to the wardrobe and grabbed an armload of shirts. Those went out the door too, and then I went to the bookcase and started pulling. My bird books. Books from my father.
The smoke was gagging me and I was getting dizzy. Clair came and leaned down beside me and yanked books and ran to the back door. Over and over. When the bookcase was nearly empty he came back again, but this time grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back. A burst of flame came through the wall to the shed and we both ran out the back door and into the cool night air, stumbling on books and clothes and the cord to the tape deck. I sprawled on the ground and looked back, and the flames were running along the ridgepole near the shed.
“The car,” Clair said, and we ran around to the front of the house. The shed was blazing and there were bursts of bright, hissing flame as paint and varnish ignited. I opened the door and rammed the key in the ignition; it started, and I put it in reverse and tromped on the accelerator.
On the road I could see a truck approaching, slamming hard over the ruts. Then more headlights and more after that. The pickups had small red flashing lights on their dashboards and grills, and the truc
ks skidded as they stopped on the gravel road.
Guys got out and pulled on raincoats and boots and hats, and the red flashing lights of a fire truck came off the dump road, sirens blaring. I recognized some of the guys from the store and the post office, and they nodded as they jumped on the truck, grabbing axes, unhooking hoses. In a few minutes, there were twenty or thirty men around the house and a plume of water was cascading toward the flames.
I stood helplessly and Clair appeared beside me. The firemen nodded to me and gave a terse “Hey, Clair” to him.
“Your rifle,” I said suddenly.
“I got it,” Clair said, and then we watched the house, the flames licking and caressing and the smoke billowing up, a gray cloud against the sky.
Mary came down and we watched grimly. All three of us were standing there when a silver-haired guy with the word CHIEF on his helmet trotted up.
“Your house?” he said, shouting against the roar of motors, the snarl of radios.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You home when it started?”
“Nope. I was up the road. At the Varneys’.”
He looked to Clair.
“Eating supper,” Clair said.
“Well, the place was torched,” the fire chief said. “I’d say gas was poured all over the inside of that shed, along the wall. Who’d want to do that?”
I looked at the flames and smoke.
“They’d have to take a number and get in line,” I said.
“You in law enforcement or something?”
“No,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”
He looked at me curiously and then a ball of flame burst through the roof and the firefighters were shouting and then another voice was calling and I turned.
“Jack,” Roxanne said, running toward me.
She grabbed me and held me, her left arm around my chest.
“Your tardiness was fortuitous,” I said.
“But I saw them. I followed them. It had to be. They were throwing clothes out of the car. And boots.”
“What?”
“A car. I was turning into the road and this old car came out and just about hit me and I saw these two guys and something didn’t seem right. I mean, they didn’t belong here, and they looked really wound up.”
