Driving away, I activated the Victoria Williams CD I had kept in reserve yesterday. She sang to me sweetly. There was no sense risking the likely pitfalls of oldies FM radio on a fine day like this.
I wound down the window and sped down the dirt road.
It was a good day for a kidnapping.
As I drove into Paddle Lake, I dialed the Taits’ number on the mobile phone. It rang three times before a woman’s voice answered.
“Yes?” It was Sylvie Tait. Hesitant. Suspicious. I imagined it to be a permanent condition—a symptom or manifestation from a life spent shackled to the tempestuous George Tait. I shivered a little inwardly at the thought.
But then we do get to choose our own hell.
“George in?” I affected a gruff, no nonsense bluster.
“No . . . he . . . Greg’s playing at a tennis tournament. George and Chip went over to watch.”
Even in a state of perpetual nervousness, she would remain at her very core a trusting mother living in a well-to-do small town, in a place removed from tabloid violence, so that nameless voices on the telephone were above suspicion, and instantly made privy to everything.
I wondered how George had explained his bruised face to his family. I wondered if they even thought to ask. Perhaps his was the kind of family where the man of the house wasn’t required to explain anything.
“But they should be back real soon,” she added lamely. A defensive untruth. She had no doubt suddenly realized she had no idea to whom she was talking.
Then she said, “Who is this?” Which, by rights, ought to have been the very first words out of her mouth.
“It’s Bill. At the supermarket. The meat counter. George swung by a little earlier. Must have been before the game. He ordered a rib roast. It’s all trimmed and ready. Does he want it delivered or will he pick it up?”
“A rib roast?” She said uncomprehendingly.
“Yup. A real nice one too. We don’t have a driver available right now . . . it being the weekend,” I trailed off.
“George ordered this?” George clearly wasn’t much of an impulse meat shopper.
“Sure did. Picked out the cut himself. Paid for it and everything.”
“Did you serve him?”
“No, ma’am. I believe one of the girls did. You know, it might be easier if you picked it up yourself. The meat, that is. Stays nice and fresh that way. Saves me sticking it in the freezer. A real nice cut of meat.”
“Was it expensive? I mean . . .”
“It’s already paid for, Mrs. Tait. I did mention that, didn’t I?”
I’m sorry. Yes. You did.” She was thinking. There was a short silence. Then she spoke again. “I’ll be right over. It’s really not like him. Are you positive?”
I recited her husband’s name, her address, and her phone number.
“No, that’s us all right. Well. I’ll come over right now. I guess I need a few things. Will you be there?”
“Should be. If I’m not I’ll leave it up front for you. Just ask for it. Thank you, Mrs. Tait. I’m sorry to have bothered you. And real sorry if I ruined George’s surprise.”
I hung up on her quickly, marveling at the impromptu weirdness I had manufactured, how slick a liar I could be, and how willing Sylvie Tait was to believe that her creep of a husband could still do an impulsively nice thing once in a great while.
Love is truly blind. Or at least severely blinkered.
I pulled into the supermarket parking lot and parked behind a white Jeep Cherokee that offered the best available cover. From several angles my own car was close to invisible.
I had spotted the supermarket across the street from the car rental office and I prayed it was the only one in town. I also prayed that the Taits did their shopping there. Both seemed like reasonable possibilities. I did wonder at how much attention Sylvie Tait had paid to my car as her son was drooling over it. She had seemed more concerned with corralling her unruly brood.
But it seemed like a prissy, halfhearted kind of maneuver. I’d now been shot at, I’d given George Tait a bruised face, and I’d delivered one solid whack to the already paper-thin membrane of his psyche.
The cute time was over.
Now I was going to abduct his wife, a flighty housewife, in broad daylight and drive off in a conspicuously expensive car with no clear destination in mind. Perhaps a better plan would present itself. In the meantime I slunk my head down below the dash in the textbook furtive manner, and peered out across the parking lot for the arrival of my prey.
Sylvie Tait arrived ten minutes later.
She pulled into a parking place close to the store and ran inside. Less than five minutes later she was back at the front door, accompanied by a young man sporting a severe haircut and a blindingly white short-sleeved shirt whom I took to be at least the store’s assistant manager. They both gazed out across the lot as they spoke. I hunkered further down, rendering myself, I hoped, all but invisible.
When I looked again the young man was shaking his head and smiling in a comforting manner. Sylvie clearly wasn’t convinced. She spoke to him once more. He continued to shake his head as the smile gradually evaporated.
She didn’t have any shopping bags. The other items she had intended to buy were no doubt forgotten in the unfolding mystery of the missing meat.
Please don’t walk her to her car, I whispered to myself. And he didn’t. But perhaps he offered, because she shook her head a last time and took off across the hot summer concrete. He turned away from her, heading back to his pressing duties inside the store.
I put the key in the ignition and hesitated, as the cruelty of what I was about to do suddenly manifested itself. The woman would be scared half to death. But I didn’t have a better plan, and in the back of my mind was the resounding suspicion that Sylvie Tait was clearly guilty of something.
The engine started.
I drove slowly toward her car. She was ten feet from her car door. She didn’t reach for her keys. The door still had to be unlocked. She turned toward the soft noise of my engine, but the sun shone bright and low and dazzling in the morning sky and the windshield glass was tinted secretively dark and she didn’t register either me or the machine. There were cars parked nearby but thankfully no one was getting in or out. I pulled in beside her as she opened her car door. I climbed out with the engine still running, called her name, reached for her arm, then I pulled her roughly toward me.
She turned. She was a little puzzled at first. Then slowly she grew fearful. Then a series of other emotions that were fleeting, nebulous. Stoic? Accepting? Acquiescent? Even perhaps mildly relieved?
Incredibly, the beauty of her dark hair struck me then, for an idiotic, inopportune split-second.
She was wasted on the strutting moron Tait, I thought to my asinine self.
Maybe I would fall in love with her too.
After all, why should she be any different from any of the other women I had met in the past few days? The emotional link between kidnapper and kidnapped was well documented.
Then I remembered what I was about to do.
My voice was harsh. “Get inside the car now, Mrs. Tait.”
I must have sounded convincing to her. My words were ragged and pitched low. Threatening. As if I meant business. Even if, at that very same moment, I felt wretched and indescribably worthless.
Yet she climbed unaided into the car. I had anticipated some sort of struggle. But she was almost demure, like a young girl on a prom date with a boy she liked. If she’d been wearing a skirt she’d have perhaps primly adjusted the hemline as she gingerly sat down.
She wore cut-off faded jeans, white generic sneakers, and a pale blue T-shirt that mirrored the color of her eyes and advertised a public radio station. She looked around the inside of the car, her eyes never looking directly at me.
“As if my George
would buy a rib roast,” she said simply, a bemused whisper, shaking her head a little as she spoke.
Then she fastened her seat belt, settled into the seat, and we drove out of the parking lot in an enveloping silence that grew to be almost comfortable. As I drove she began to sneak looks at me. But she said nothing for a while.
She broke the silence finally.
“You’re the one who hit my husband, aren’t you?” Her voice was soft, without accusation. “The one playing tennis with Greg the other morning? The one who’s been nosing around?”
I nodded.
“Why have you come for me like this? Why have you come after my family? We can’t help you. What is it that you want from us? I just don’t understand what this is about.”
“I’m looking for my friend.”
“Your friend?”
“Yes. His name is Keith Pringle. He was living on the island. He was on the beach. He was at the Handle. Now he’s missing.”
She changed the subject. “Why did you hit George?”
“He asked for it. Did he tell you I hit him?”
She shook her head. “He’s come home with his face messed up before. People like to hit him. I also know you gave Will a hard time. I thought maybe you did the same with George.”
“I also spoke with Beth Sanders. She says Keith exposed himself to your daughter. Is that what really happened?”
“This isn’t any of your damn business,” she snapped quickly, then relented. “But that’s exactly what did happen. Tammi and Beth both told us the same story, about what he went and did to Tammi. George and Will got real angry when they heard. And they sent your friend packing after that. That’s all I know about it. Now you can go away too.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“No. No I don’t.” She sounded adamant. “He went away. Someplace. He just went away. Please let me go now.”
“I really don’t think Keith did anything to your daughter, Mrs. Tait,” I said then.
But she said nothing more and stared pointedly out the window.
When we were ten miles further out of town, and had the road to ourselves, I turned down an unmarked dirt track for a mile or two, and then turned again, onto what was clearly a bike and hiking trail in the summer, and a ski trail in the winter months.
The path was heavily shaded, still wet and puddled from yesterday’s rain.
I hoped we would have the place to ourselves for a while.
I turned off the engine. And we sat. She tried to smile.
“I’m not scared of you,” she said.
I turned to her. “I could be a vicious killer for all you know. I did abduct you. When I met you outside your house you were quite clearly scared of me. I was curious about that. I still am.”
She looked appraisingly at me. “Yeah. So you abducted me. In this fancy car. And I was scared of you. And you could be evil and mean and be planning to do me all kinds of harm. But I’ve been watching you driving, and thinking about all this, and about what it is that you want from me, and I’ll just bet you’re not any kind of a killer. You’re much too refined for that. Your accent is real pretty. Like I say, I’ve been watching you.”
“I hurt George,” I said.
She snorted at that. “George likes to play tough with people, and it blows up in his face sometimes. It’s happened to him before. I don’t doubt he deserved what you did to him. You might even have been merciful.”
She spoke softly then. “And if nothing else he deserves it for how it’s been for me and the children all these years.”
“Does he abuse you?”
She smiled slowly. “That would be real simple, wouldn’t it? So now you could get my whole sob story of a life. But it would be a lie because he doesn’t abuse me. Not in the sense that you mean. Oh, he’s bad enough in his own way. But we’re not all bruised and beat up like on a TV movie. Not bruised on the outside anyway where it shows, and well-meaning folks can feel all sorry for you. He’s what you’d call a mean man is George Tait. Always has been a mean man. Pissed off royally most of the time at everyone. Especially folks with more fancy stuff than he has. Folks he thinks got their stuff the easy way. Not hard workers like he is, which is a crock, but he still manages to believe it himself, which is truly sad, if you ask me. With men he’ll lash out likely as not. Me and the kids he just bitches and moans at most times. He tries to make us feel small, and the hard thing, especially for the kids, is that he never lets up, like he feels small himself, and figures he has to make us feel the same way. Leveling the playing field. He can’t help himself, I guess. Low self-worth, the shrinks would say. Low self-esteem. Plenty of that old self-loathing in the mental mix too, I’d guess. He’s very tough on the boys. Chip’s never going to amount to much, because his self-esteem is all up and gone, and he’s destined to screw up all the time, and he needn’t have turned out that way. Greg’s real good at tennis. So he has a slim chance. But he’s clearly no prodigy. There’s no fancy scholarship or Nike guy out there with the big bucks, so if that slim chance doesn’t pan out for him, then he’s back to where Chip is already headed. Which is where his dad’s already at. Which is a sad mess heading into a real bad mistake that’s pretty much just waiting to happen. Tammi might just make it because she’s tougher than the rest of us, but she’ll likely screw up too in her own way, because she’s never going to do anything the right way, she’s always taking the short cut. Like I say she might make it, but she might just fall even further by being a cheat. You can easily love my boys soft as they are, but Tammi’s a good ways harder to like.”
As she spoke I wondered why she’d married. Why she still was married. Perhaps in my face she could read the silent questions.
“You’re getting my life story in all its white-trash glory.”
I smiled at her. “That’s okay. You’re going to talk about what I need to know later.”
“I really don’t know what happened to your friend after Will and George saw him.”
“But you do know what he really did that day on the beach.”
And on her face then was an admission. That what I’d just said was the truth. She did know something I needed to know. But I would have to hear her story first. That was understood. That would be the nature of the compromise.
“Do you know Detroit?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
“We lived there after we got married. My folks both worked for Ford in the Dearborn plant. George’s father was Liam Tait, and he owned a tavern in the neighborhood where I grew up, a place full of Polish immigrants, even though the Taits were a solid Irish family. So Liam owned a bar with nothing but dumb Pollacks for customers and no one seemed to care one way or another. “Red Liam,” everyone called him. On the surface, he was a lovely man. The whole neighborhood adored him. But he was a bad bartender and a bad businessman. For all I know, a bad father too. George has never said much, but sometimes I get a hint or two. People did love Liam’s place though. Cabbage and corned beef and wild beer nights and the singing of Irish and Polish songs. His wife, Mary, George’s mother, did most of the cooking and she was a fine woman. George’s dad was also a falling-down drunk, a boozing legend for the greater part of his adult life. Not a mean drunk, or one of these sad drunks, but a truly joyful drunk, one that always drew others to him, made you forget the shambles that his place was, made you even forget that he was an Irishman surrounded by all us stupid Pollacks doing the grunt work for the high-and-mighty Ford family and seeing the best parts of our town vanish before our eyes. Because Detroit was on the way to turning black then. Now it’s a pure black city. The first one in the country. Maybe it’s a bold new experiment. Maybe it’s just a hell of a mess and well on the way to becoming one gigantic ghetto. Maybe the blacks, they deserve a city of their own. I kind of feel that they do, to tell you the truth. But the old neighborhood folks took it real badly. Guys w
ere laid off in the city as businesses, the white businesses that is, went under or moved out to the suburbs. The car plants always needed bodies and, to be fair, didn’t much care what color they were buying cheap. But the tax base in the city went down the toilet as the wealthy folks fled in droves. Our neighborhood struggled on for a while. But poor Liam wasn’t doing the business he was used to, and he took to drinking harder and being less of a joy. Then he up and died. And Mary amazed everyone by telling us she was sick and tired of life in America. So she moved back to Ireland and lived out her last few years there. George and me had gotten married by then and I was pregnant. George had got his big stupid hands on the bar by now and figured to make a go of it on his own. To his credit he did try awfully hard. But his dad was a well-liked kind of a drunk and George was a loud, bullying one, and neither one of them had any idea how to run a business. One day George got an offer from a smart black businessman looking to open a fancy department store in the neighborhood for the black folks that would surely be taking over the place any day now. He was right of course. George was close to going broke, but that didn’t stop us Poles from telling George not to take the offer, which was a very good one. Maybe if they’d voted with their thirst instead of their voices he might have listened, because God knows George sure did like owning that bar, pissing off his customers royally, and drinking his way steadily through his stock.”
“You sold up.”
“Yup. Took the money and ran up north. Came up here and bought the house we’re in now with the money, which turned out to be the best thing we ever did, because we never had any real money to our name again.”
“How do you manage to live?”
“Oh, we live cheaply, by necessity, and George is a master at laying his hands on stuff. People always need work done. George is good at landscaping. He does dry-walling. He likes not to take money in payment but saves up favors and carts off stuff he can use. He likes cars and is actually real good at fixing them up. He takes beaters and works on them. And people always seem to owe George something. He collects favors and cashes them in when he needs something. It’s about the only gift he possesses. I sometimes wonder if he is actually owed anything, or if he just threatens people into giving. I’ve never asked him about it.”
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