Hard Aground

by Brendan DuBois

  “What’s going on with the homicide?”

  “The state police and its opioid task force are taking the lead in poor Maggie’s murder, and the Tyler police are grinning and trying to bear it. There’d be a time when the chief would have everyone’s back and put his booted foot down, but not with heroin everywhere. The Tyler selectmen are just as happy to have the state police come in.”

  “Any more news on the case?”

  “Depends. The news is the news, and they’re tracking down whatever leads they might have. And that latest lead is the odd one, finding that little packet of heroin in her shop. I mean, hey, just because heroin was found there, doesn’t mean it was left by the killer. It could have fallen out of someone’s pocket, a week ago or a month ago.”

  “But budgets and resources have to be used where appropriated.”

  She dabbed at a little drop of gravy on her chin. “My, aren’t we being the cynical one.”

  “You started it,” I said.

  The cleanup went faster this time, and we cuddled as best as we could on the couch, with me trying to avoid putting pressure on my bladders—such hot talk—and Paula tapping away on her laptop.

  We watched a British comedy, one of those quirky little films that take place in a small English village, and it made us laugh so much that my sides ached, but not my back and shoulder, which was nice for a change.

  As it got later we went upstairs and she pointed to the bathroom; I walked in without raising a fuss.

  She got my bladders out, measured them, and shook her head as she emptied the measuring cup and washed it. “Sorry. Still on the high end. You’re still going to be tubed up like a Borg or something.”

  “Without the skin condition, I hope.”

  “That’s our next step.”

  I got my clothes off and Paula ran some water into the tub. I stepped in and she did a good wash of me with a hand cloth, and then using a small plastic container, rinsed off the soapy water on my skin. It felt good to be washed, and it felt good to be touched by Paula.

  When she dried me off she gave me a teasing look as she patted the towel in a sensitive place. “Nice to see part of you is still working.”

  “Glad to see you noticed.”

  She helped me into fresh clothes, and feeling pretty refreshed, even with the throbbing aches back there, she helped me into bed and said, “Feel like company?”

  “Always,” I said. “But a lot of the time I get restless. You know that.”

  Paula kissed me. “What, you’re warning me already that you’re going to toss me out of bed?”

  “I just don’t want any surprises.”

  “Lighten up,” she said. “I want some company, too, and if you get too restless, I’ll kick you out and you can go to the couch downstairs.”

  “Deal.”

  Paula turned on the television, lowered the volume, and switched it to one of those reality televisions shows featuring rich housewives who tend to travel in groups, eat at fine restaurants, and yell at each other a lot. It was one of Paula’s guilty pleasures, and who was I to tell her otherwise?

  From the bathroom, water was used and flushed, and then she came back in, wearing an oversize Red Sox T-shirt. When she climbed in next to me, I saw she wasn’t wearing much else.

  “Put your eyes back where they belong,” she said.

  “I’m an invalid. Don’t you have any mercy?”

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  She slid under the blankets and picked up the remote, toggled it so that it would switch off in a half hour, and we kissed some. Then she sighed, stretched out behind me, and said, “Nice to be here with you.”

  “It’ll be nicer when I’m in better shape.”

  She patted my hip. “Slow down, cowboy. One day and then another.”

  “Got it.”

  So we settled in, and on the television screen one housewife was screaming at another for losing a historical piece of jewelry, and that triggered something. “Paula?” I said.

  “You expecting Diane?”

  “Just wanted to make sure you were awake.”

  “For the next several minutes, so make it worth it.”

  I said, “I called the Tyler Historical Society a couple of times today.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And nobody answered.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the voice-mail box was full, not accepting any messages.”

  Paula yawned. “Well, what did you expect?”

  “Sorry?”

  “The Tyler Historical Society,” she said. “Maggie Branch was its president.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Lots of questions just popped up in my head, like a herd of prairie dogs, but they could wait. Paula was drifting off and I didn’t want to wake her up. A few more minutes passed.

  “Oh, Lewis?”

  “Still here.”

  “I think I left the lights on downstairs. You want me to go back down there and switch them off?”

  I reached around and took her hand. “No. Don’t leave.”

  “Okay. Thanks. Because if you had told me to go downstairs, I would have said no.”

  “That’s my girl.”

  She moved some and soon was slumbering behind me. Up on the television more overdressed and undereducated women were throwing drinks at each other.

  I closed my eyes.

  Tried to block out the sounds and memories.

  Failed.

  It had been a few years ago. The local news media was agog when news broke about Maggie Tyler Branch having discovered a printed copy of the Declaration of the Independence at a yard sale in Porter. The copy was later certified as one of the original broadsheets printed in Philadelphia in 1776, and was worth several hundred thousand dollars.

  I let the initial media buzz lighten up and then I made an appointment to see Maggie, on a pleasant early July day that was unexpectedly cool for the season. I parked my Ford Explorer in a dirt patch in front of her large barn, next to a wooden sign painted white and black that read, BORDER ANTIQUES, and swung gently in the breeze.

  As I got out of the car, three black-and-white cats came trotting out. I stood still as they sniffed my feet and lower legs, and then flopped over for a belly rub. I bent down, let them sniff my hands, and I scratched their heads and rubbed their bellies.

  “Hey!”

  I looked up and Maggie Branch was there, smoking a cigarette, a glass of amber-colored fluid in her other hand. She was wearing shapeless blue dungaree pants and a gray sweatshirt. Her hair was white, short and styled, and her hazel eyes had a sweet tingle about them, like she couldn’t believe the life she was now leading.

  I introduced myself and she led me into her barn. The cats followed us in. The floor was made up of wide wooden planks, uneven and gapped, with lots of knotholes. There was a short wide area near the entrance, and around us were shelves upon shelves upon shelves. Up overhead there were rafters and a second floor, also jammed with shelves upon shelves.

  The shelves were crowded with a mass of chaos, and you had to stare at just one at a time to bring everything into focus. That shelf with leather-bound books, that shelf with radio parts and speakers, and another shelf with shoes, and glassware, and Hummel figurines, and so forth and so on into the gloom.

  Maggie stopped when she couldn’t walk anymore. We stood in the middle of four wooden chairs in various stages of repair, an old-fashioned rolltop desk, and a collection of wooden filing cabinets. Another desk was covered with papers, file folders, bowls of cat food, and dishes of water.

  She sat down in a wooden swivel chair, turned around to me, and flicked some ash on the floor. “You’re probably the seventh or eighth reporter I’ve talked to,” she said. “I imagine me finding that damn Declaration will be the first line in my obit, though for Christ’s sake, I hope it’s not for a while.”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “But I hope you’re not offended, your obit won’t run in Shoreline.”

  Maggie cack
led. “I like Shoreline. I got it for my two grandkids. One lives in Oklahoma, another in Idaho. I don’t want them or their young’uns to forget where we all came from, about their history and such.”

  “Thanks for being so supportive.”

  “What, you think those three subscriptions make a difference?”

  “It all makes a difference,” I said, taking out my notebook and pen.

  “You gonna do a story about me?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  She took another drag off her cigarette, flicked some more ash. A cat jumped up on the desk and started eating from its food bowl. Maggie leaned forward, grinned, and said, “I like Shoreline, so I’ll tell you a story. You can use it if you want. But I think it’s funnier than hell.”

  I opened the notebook’s cover. “I’m always open for a funny story. Hit me.”

  I had confused her. “What?”

  “Sorry, tell me your funny story.”

  Maggie nodded with satisfaction. “Okay, then,” she said. “I like to drive around and scour yard sales, or garage sales, or tag sales, or whatever it is that they’re calling them nowadays. Lots of time you get junk, and overpriced junk at that. Shit on a shingle, I’ll see some old G.I. Joe dolls from—”

  “Action figures,” I interrupted.

  “Huh?”

  “The G.I. Joes, they weren’t dolls. They were action figures. Trust me, I know from personal experience.”

  That made her laugh, and her laugh was so loud it made the three black-and-white cats hide for cover. When she was done she said, “Whatever you want to call ’em, I don’t mind, but you’d see these G.I. Joes from the 1960s for sale, and sure, they’re valuable, but they gotta be in good shape. And what can you say to someone who wants to sell a G.I. Joe with a missing arm for a hundred bucks?”

  “But you must find some good things here and there. The Declaration, for example.”

  “Yeah, and that’s the fun of it, though not as much anymore,” she said. “I used to be able to go on these long road trips, just me, a road map, and some Dunkin’ Donuts, and go out to Maine or to upstate New York, but after a while, it just got too hard. My ass and my back couldn’t handle it. That’s why I try to stick around here and there, not too far from Tyler.”

  “What happened in Porter?”

  “Funny thing, purely by accident. I was just puttering around, Saturday morning, just enjoying the sunshine after a nice heavy breakfast. Was feeling drowsy so I thought I’d go home, but in one of the older neighborhoods up in Porter, somebody was having a yard sale. So I stopped right away.”

  “What made you stop?”

  She smiled. “Didn’t you hear me the first time? It was a house in an old neighborhood. You get out to some of the newer homes, when they have yard sales, it’s mostly crap. Stuff from the 1970s—God, what a ghastly decade for fashion and collectables and politics. Anyway, at these older houses, you got nitwits who live there who either moved in, or who took the place over after grandma died. And when they try to clean out, they don’t know what they have.”

  “Did you know it was the Declaration of Independence when you saw it?”

  “Hard not to, with all those big letters at the top.”

  I smiled back at her. “Okay, how did you know it was one of the original prints, that it was rare?”

  “Keep a secret?”

  A quick flashback to my time at the Department of Defense. “Always.”

  She moved the chair from side to side with a sharp squeak. “I didn’t give a shit about the Declaration. I just liked the frame. It was old and ornate. So I picked it up and the sweet young man told me it was for sale at five dollars, and I said I’d give him two, and we settled on four dollars.”

  “You bargained him down like that?”

  “I’m an old Yankee trader, one of the oldest around,” she said with satisfaction. “Then, a couple of months later, I needed the frame, and I took it apart and then, well, I held the damn thing in my hand. Hard to explain, but the texture of the parchment, the scent, looking at the printing … it just … it just whispered to me. That it was much more than a later reproduction. After a couple of appraisals and a visit to a rare bookstore owner in Boston, I knew what I had.”

  “And you didn’t want to keep it?”

  “Hell, no,” she said.

  She moved her chair over and gave a healthy kick to the wooden filing cabinets. “See that? Chock-full of papers from the Tyler family, going way back to some of the original documents from the Reverend Bonus Tyler hisself, one of the founders of our fair community. There’s also lots of other historical papers in here about almost everything to do with Tyler. Do you think it’s fun having the responsibility for holding onto something valuable like that? Christ, no. The same with the Declaration. If I had held on to it, I’d have tourists and noisy bastards—not like you, no offense—lined up all the way to the road to take a look at it.”

  Maggie took a deep drag of her cigarette, dropped the butt on the wooden floor, ground it out with her heel. “This way, I could sell it, use the money for good—like local animal rescue agencies—and people could go away.”

  “But what about those papers?” I asked, pointing to the filing cabinets. “Are you looking to sell those?”

  “Nope,” she said. “I wanna donate them to a place that makes sense, like the historical society or the Tyler library. But those folks, they can’t promise me that they’ll be taken care of. They say they don’t have the space or resources to accept such a gift right now. Maybe one of these days.”

  “Maybe.”

  One of the cats suddenly jumped up on my lap and scared the wits out of me. Maggie laughed again and I stroked his back as he rotated three times before plopping himself down. I scratched his ears and cheeks and he rubbed up against me and purred and purred.

  Maggie looked around her place with a mix of satisfaction and exasperation. “All this … stuff.”

  I lifted my head as well. “Lots of it.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Funny … I know the attraction that comes from stuff like this. You can read history books and old newspapers, and get a feel of what might have happened in the past. But when you pick up an object, like a hat pin, or a pair of lace gloves, or an inkwell, you can hold it in your hands, you can touch it and smell it, and you realize that it’s the things that have changed. The people … not so much. Except for the loonies you get in every society, most people want to live, love, eat, and be happy.”

  “Good point.”

  “Even twenty years ago, or a hundred years ago, or—” She laughed again.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Oh, people. Let’s say you could go back in time, say, the 1930s, and talk to a kid. Could you convince him or her that their Little Orphan Annie doll or book, that they shouldn’t open it, they should put it away for decades, because at some point it would be worth a lot of money? The kids would laugh at you. It would sound crazy. And even now, we can’t predict what will be worth something, what will be of value. For a while baseball cards were the rage, until that market collapsed. Then Beanie Babies. And metal lunchboxes. Who the hell knows what’s next.”

  I looked again to the wooden filing cabinets. “But the papers in there, they must be worth something, to someone.”

  “Hah,” Maggie said, reaching out to kick the cabinets again. “Sure. In there are old documents, papers, invoices, receipts, and such, concerning the history of the Tyler family, the history of the town and its historic and famous buildings, and a lot of other horseshit. You ever see horseshit?”

  “Not lately,” I admitted.

  “Well, when they put down those mounds of turds, sometimes you see these little birds diving in, picking out little seeds of grain. That’s what I got in these cabinets. A humongous pile of turds, and I don’t have the time or inclination to go through and pick out the seeds of information that might be useful. Shit, I have eighty years’ worth of invoices from the Tyler General Store
, back when it existed and was run by my great-granddad. Who the hell wants to go through those? But buried in those invoices might be receipts for back when the place got expanded, and some historian somewhere might want to know that.”

  “And they don’t?”

  “The historical society has no room, the town of Tyler has no room. I’ve tried donating all this crap to various colleges and universities, and there’s no interest.”

  Maybe it was the history geek in me, or my past life as an intelligence research analyst, but part of me wanted to slide by Maggie and just dive right into the files.

  But I resisted the urge. “What’s it like, being a Tyler, living in a town named after your famous ancestor?”

  Maggie patted her jeans pockets and whispered to herself, “Damn it, must’ve left them in the basement.” She looked up at me. “Huh? My famous relatives? Well, when they landed here in 1638, at least they pretended to buy the land from the surviving Native Americans who were wandering around, still dazed after what had happened to them. About a hundred years before the first settlement, this whole coastline of New England had been a series of prosperous settlements and villages. Then the Basque fishermen arrived on-site, and other Europeans, and in those brief meetings, the Indians probably passed on beaver pelts and such, and the Europeans passed on the measles and mumps. That’s why the Pilgrims down south survived that first year. They raided abandoned villages to get at their seed corn.”

  The cat on my lap decided to make a leap for it, digging its untrimmed claws in my thighs. I grimaced, but Maggie kept talking. “The Reverend Bonus Tyler and his congregation, they were supposed to end up in Massachusetts but landed here, and decided enough was enough.” Then she laughed at some memory. “Back during some anniversary event, I was asked by the historical society to write a commemoration about my ancestor, the Reverend Bonus Tyler. The story that had been passed on from generation to generation was that he left England with his congregation to get away from the oppressive government and godless society and discover a new land and life in the New World. Well, that was partially true.”