Outwitting Trolls

by William G. Tapply

  I remembered Josh Neuman, the persistent young Herald reporter. I was a big believer in the free press, and an informed public, and the inalienable right to express opinions without fear—but no way was Sharon going to talk with this guy, or any other reporter. It could do her no good and possibly a lot of harm.

  It was early in the afternoon, and I was in my backyard raking last fall’s leaves out from under the bushes and packing them in big plastic trash bags—not my idea of a fun way to spend a Sunday in April, but it had to be done. Anyway, the sun was warm on the back of my neck, and the Red Sox were playing the Orioles on my portable radio, and I had a half-empty bottle of chilled Sam Adams lager sitting on the picnic table, so it wasn’t so bad.

  I was taking a break, sitting at the table sipping my Sam, when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

  It was Sharon Nichols.

  “How are you doing today?” I asked.

  “Not that great,” she said. “I think I had some kind of delayed reaction. When I got home last night, I thought I was fine. I called Ellen, woke her up, and I started telling her how her father was, um, was dead, how he’d been…murdered, and suddenly I started shaking, and my throat got all tight, and I was seeing all that blood, remembering how it smelled in that room, and poor Ellen on the other end of the line, she kept saying, ‘Mother? Are you all right? Mother? What’s the matter?’ Like that. Anyway, she came over, and we stayed up until after the sun rose, drinking wine and crying and reminiscing, and eventually, talking with Ellen, I started to get it together again. I’m better now. Still kinda shaky, I guess. But better. I just woke up, can you believe it? I mean, it’s after one in the afternoon.”

  “This is all to be expected,” I said. “You held it together for a long time last night. You did very well. That was all pretty traumatic.”

  “Yes, it was.” She was silent for a minute. “So how are you?”

  “Me?” I asked. “Oh, I’m good. I’ve been through things like this before.”

  “Murders, you mean. Dead bodies. Blood. Hysterical women.”

  “Yes. All of the above.”

  “I’m so sorry for…for messing up your weekend.”

  “I’d say your weekend was messed up worse than mine,” I said.

  “Mm.” She chuckled softly. There wasn’t any humor in it. “Well, the reason I called…last night you said if I needed anything?”

  “Sure,” I said. “What can I do?”

  “Well,” she said, “like I said, Ellen came over, so she knows about it. What happened to Ken. I haven’t been able to reach Wayne yet, but I’ll keep trying. It’s Ken’s father that I’m worried about.”

  “Ken’s father’s still alive?”

  “Yes. He has outlived his only child. Isn’t that sad?”

  “It is,” I said. I thought of my sons, Billy and Joey. I hoped I wouldn’t outlive either of them. “So you want to tell him, is that it?”

  “I think I should,” Sharon said. “Before somebody says something or he hears about it on the news.” She hesitated. “His name is Charles. Charles Nichols. He’s in an assisted living facility. It’s a really nice, um, very expensive place out in Ashby. Charles is quite frail, and he’s been fading for the past year or so. Probably doesn’t have a lot of time left. He’s somewhere in his mideighties. Eighty-five or -six. He’s got congestive heart failure and diabetes among other problems, and I’m afraid this news could, you know…”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  “Oh, I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “You didn’t,” I said. “It was my idea.”

  She laughed softly. “Well, of course, it is why I called you. Really, though, it’s a Sunday afternoon. You must have plans. I honestly don’t want you to—”

  “No plans,” I said. “I’ll go with you. It’s what we lawyers do.”

  She laughed softly. “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “It’s what this lawyer does,” I said.

  “Would you? Thank you, Brady. I could really use some moral support. It’ll make me feel much better if you’re with me. I don’t know how Charles will handle it. He and Ken had their issues, and I don’t think Ken visited him very often, but still, Ken was an only child, and Charles’s wife is gone, so Ken was all he had left.”

  “Aside from you and his grandchildren, you mean,” I said.

  “Well,” said Sharon, “Charles and I always got along just fine, but I’m not family. Not now, anyway, not after the divorce. I haven’t seen him for a long time. But still. I think I’m the one who should tell him what happened.”

  “You want to do this today?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The sooner the better, don’t you think?”

  “I do,” I said. “I’ll pick you up in about an hour. How’s that?”

  “You’re my hero,” she said.

  Eight

  When they ran their veterinary clinic and kennels in Wellesley, Ken and Sharon Nichols lived with their two kids in a gorgeous old Victorian on five or six acres abutting some conservation land off a country road on the west side of town.

  Now Sharon was living in a third-floor condo unit in a boxy brick building on Route 2A in Acton about a mile west of the Concord prison. A different lifestyle, usually a less lavish one, was the price of freedom, and more often than not, both parties in a divorce ended up paying it.

  Condominium buildings had popped up like mushrooms along 2A in Acton during the real estate boom of the late seventies and early eighties. Speculators bought six or eight units at a time, and sometimes entire buildings, with the intention of renting them out while the market continued to grow and then flipping them for big profits. Then pretty soon the boom busted, and a lot of smart investors were suddenly stupid and ended up stuck with big mortgages and depressed rents and scarce tenants and high maintenance fees and no buyers.

  I parked in the lot behind Sharon’s building, told Henry to wait in the car, went to the back door, and pressed the button beside her number.

  A minute later her voice came to me from a speaker beside the door. “Brady? Is that you?”

  I leaned to the speaker and said, “I’m here.”

  “I’ll be right down,” she said.

  “Take your time,” I said.

  I went over to my car and let Henry out. He proceeded to investigate the weeds that grew amid the trash along the chain-link fence that bordered the parking lot, and he was still at it when Sharon emerged from the back door about five minutes later.

  She waved at me and came over to where I was leaning against my car. She was wearing a pair of snug-fitting jeans and a red-and-white-striped long-sleeved jersey. Her blond hair was artfully tousled, and she’d done some neat tricks with makeup to hide evidence of the previous night, when she’d found the murdered body of her former husband, answered the hard questions of suspicious police officers, and then drunk wine and cried and stayed up till after sunrise with her daughter.

  She looked, in other words, spectacular.

  She put her hand on my shoulder, tiptoed up, kissed my cheek, and gave me a quick one-armed hug.

  I returned the hug but not the kiss. “You look nice,” I said.

  She smiled. “Thank you.” She had the jacket I’d loaned her folded over her arm. She handed it to me. “For this, too. Again. It was very gallant of you.”

  “Gallant,” I said. “That’s me, all right.” I whistled to Henry, who came trotting over. “This is Henry,” I said to Sharon.

  “Hey, Henry,” she said. She bent over and scratched the special place on his forehead, and her ease with Henry reminded me that she used to work with Ken at their veterinary hospital. She obviously understood and liked animals.

  “That’s his G-spot,” I said. “Right there in the middle of his forehead.”

  Sharon straightened up and smiled. “Everybody’s got one, even dogs.”

  I opened the back door for Henry, and he jumped in. Then I went around and held the passenger door open for Sharo
n.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said as she slid in. “Gallant, as always.” She pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable, making it the French word. “Chivalry is not dead.”

  “My mother again,” I said, “reminding me to hold the door for the lady.” I shut her door, went around to the driver’s side, and got in. “Ashby,” I said. “I assume you know how to find the place?”

  “It’s not that far from here,” she said. “I feel terribly guilty that I haven’t visited Charles more often since he’s been there. I mean, Ashby is only about an hour up the road from Acton. He’s been there four or five years now, and I can count the times I’ve visited him on one hand, mostly the first couple of years he was there, to bring him Christmas presents. Good dutiful Ellen came with me each time. Ellen still visits him once in a while. I’m ashamed to say, I don’t. Charles never did make me feel overly welcome, but that’s no excuse.”

  “He’s not your father,” I said.

  “No,” she said, “and he’s never been a very loving—or lovable—father-in-law. Still, he is my children’s grandfather, and he helped Ken and me out when we were getting started.”

  “With money, you mean?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “We couldn’t have done what we did without Charles’s help. Buying the house and the land, building the kennels and the hospital, getting the business up and running. We all pretended it was a loan, and maybe we would’ve eventually paid him back, but then we got divorced and money was a different kind of issue, and I’m sure Ken didn’t give Charles a penny of what we owed him. Not that he needs it.”

  The village of Ashby, Massachusetts, was a straight shot north-westerly on Route 119 from Sharon’s place in Acton. Ashby was the last town before the New Hampshire border, and it had the feel of a rural New Hampshire village.

  Charles Nichols’s assisted living place was a big rambling two-story redbrick structure at the end of a long country road. It sat on the edge of a meadow that sloped up to a woody hillside. To the north a range of round-topped mountains pushed into the sky. A pretty little rocky stream meandered alongside the building, and there were paved walkways and patios along its banks so that wheelchair-bound residents could sit out there and listen to the water music and bask in the sunshine.

  The stream looked like it would hold trout, and seeing it reminded me that springtime had come to New England, and soon the trout would be rising to mayflies, and that reminded me once again that it was time to call Charlie McDevitt and J. W. Jackson and Doc Adams and make some fishing plans.

  A sign directed us to the visitors’ parking area, and from there another sign pointed to the entrance.

  A fortyish woman sat behind a desk in the foyer. When we walked in, she looked up, smiled, and said, “May I help you?” She wore a plastic nameplate over her left breast. Her name was Joan Porter. Her smile was well practiced and automatic.

  “We’re here for Charles Nichols,” Sharon said. “I’m his daughter-in-law.”

  Joan Porter looked Sharon up and down, glanced at me, then turned back to Sharon and gave her that professional smile. “Charles is in the dayroom. Do you know where it is?”

  Sharon shook her head.

  “Down that corridor and around the corner on your right,” she said with a vague wave of her hand. “They’re watching the Red Sox game.”

  “How is he?” Sharon asked.

  “Charles is a lovely gentleman,” said Joan Porter, “and he rarely complains. He’s recovering from his accident.”

  “Accident?” asked Sharon.

  “You didn’t know?”

  Sharon shook her head.

  “He fell and broke his wrist a couple of weeks ago,” said Joan Porter. “He’s been having some pain, not sleeping well, and of course a man his age, he heals slowly.”

  “Why did he fall?” asked Sharon.

  Joan Porter frowned. “Excuse me?”

  “I meant, how did it happen?”

  “He was alone in his room. People Charles’s age, they tend to lose their balance.”

  “Nobody was with him when it happened?” asked Sharon.

  Joan Porter shook her head. “It was in the evening. He was alone. In his own room. In the independent living wing.”

  Sharon nodded. “This is my friend Brady Coyne, by the way,” she said. “He’s a lawyer.”

  Joan Porter held out her hand and smiled. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  I gripped her hand.

  “Please don’t sue me,” she said.

  I smiled quickly.

  “Oh,” she said. “I bet everybody says that to you.”

  “Just about everybody,” I said.

  “Down this corridor, is it?” asked Sharon.

  Joan Porter nodded. “Before you jump to conclusions,” she said, “you should talk to Charles’s physician.”

  Sharon turned and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re his daughter-in-law?”

  Sharon nodded, although technically she was the old guy’s ex-daughter-in-law.

  “Do you know about Charles’s…condition?”

  “Condition?”

  “Well,” Joan Porter said, “I know Charles’s son has been informed, and I believe Charles himself told his granddaughter. She was here a week or so ago. Neither of them has shared the news with you?”

  Sharon shook her head.

  Joan Porter hesitated, then said, “Mr. Nichols—Charles—he has recently been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.”

  Sharon blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear. What will they…?”

  “There’s apparently nothing they can do for him.”

  “No operation?”

  “Evidently not. You might want to talk with his physician, get a professional opinion, but as I understand it, a man Charles’s age, with all his other infirmities…”

  “That’s why he fell, Ms. Porter?” Sharon asked. “The brain aneurysm? He passed out or got dizzy or something?”

  Joan Porter shrugged. “That’s what the doctor thinks. Charles doesn’t really remember what happened. It may never happen again. There’s no telling with aneurysms.”

  “It could, um, burst anytime?” asked Sharon.

  “As I understand it.”

  “Which would kill him.”

  “Oh, my, yes,” said Joan Porter.

  “Can he continue living here?”

  “Certainly,” Joan Porter said. “This is his home. If he falls and hurts himself again, we’ll have to think about moving him to the assisted living side. Charles would hate it, of course. We’re hoping we won’t have to go that route.”

  Sharon looked at Joan Porter for a moment, then said, “Well, thank you for telling me. Thank you for your candor.” She held out her hand.

  Joan Porter took Sharon’s hand in both of hers, and I read genuine kindness in the woman’s eyes. “You’re one of his relatives,” she said. “You have a right to know. Knowing Charles, I’m not sure he would tell you.”

  Sharon hooked her arm through mine. We started down the wide corridor, turned a corner, and came to a big open area furnished with comfortable chairs and sofas and a giant wide-screen television showing a baseball game. A few white-haired people were sitting on the furniture, and some others were parked in wheelchairs, facing the TV, where a pitcher in a Blue Jays uniform was peering in to get the sign from his catcher, and a Red Sox runner was taking his lead from first base.

  Sharon stopped and looked around for a minute. Then she said, “There he is.”

  I followed her over to a man sitting in a wheelchair in the back of the room. He had wispy white hair and a little white mustache and transparent skin. A cast covered his right arm from his fingertips up past his elbow. It hung from a sling around his neck. His lap and legs were covered with a brown blanket. He was wearing a green cardigan sweater over a white dress shirt that was buttoned to his throat.

  As we approached him, I heard him say quite loudly, “Try a bunt, for
Christ’s sake. They never bunt. What’s wrong with a bunt now and then?” Nobody else in the room was paying any attention to him. He seemed to be addressing the television set. “It’s a perfect spot for a bunt. God damn prima donnas. Nobody makes them practice the fundamentals. They don’t get those big contracts for laying down a nice bunt. Ha. Come on. Play the game right.”

  Nine

  Sharon walked up beside Charles Nichols, put a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Charles?”

  His head snapped around. He looked up at Sharon and frowned. “What do you want?”

  “Charles, it’s me. It’s Sharon.”

  He blinked at her. Then he said, “Oh. Sure. What are you doing here?”

  “I came to visit with you,” she said. She bent down and kissed his cheek.

  He neither resisted her kiss nor reciprocated it. He returned his attention to the television.

  “This is my friend Brady Coyne,” Sharon said. “Brady, Charles Nichols.”

  I stepped up and held out my hand.

  Charles looked at it and shrugged. “I can’t shake hands.” He tapped the cast on his right arm with his left hand. “I can’t cut my food or hold a newspaper or get dressed. I can’t even unzip my fly and take a leak. Whaddya think about that?”

  I patted his shoulder. “I’m sorry. When do you get the cast off?”

  He frowned at me. “Who’re you, the boyfriend? She dumped my son for you, is that it?”

  “I didn’t dump Ken,” said Sharon. “It was…mutual. Anyway, that was ten years ago.”

  “Actually,” Charles said, “I don’t care. If you dumped him, I wouldn’t blame you. So how come you picked today to visit me after all this time?”

  “Is there someplace more private where we can talk?” Sharon asked.

  “Why talk?” Charles asked. “Let’s watch the ball game.”

  “We’ve got to talk,” Sharon said, “whether you want to or not.” She grabbed the handles of Charles’s wheelchair, released the brakes, and pushed him out of the room. I followed along behind.