“What was the other part?”
“One of my cousins, from the Maine branch of the Tylers, she was a funny sort and really got a kick out of doing some serious genealogical research. She even flew over to England, to the village where those first settlers came from, and after some digging around in the archives and old court papers, she found out the good Reverend Bonus Tyler had abandoned his pregnant wife before setting out across the Atlantic.”
“That doesn’t sound very saintly,” I said.
“Yeah, especially since the Reverend Tyler came across the Atlantic with a new, younger wife. I wrote up that particular tale and wouldn’t you know it, the historical society suddenly found out that it didn’t have room for my article.”
That garnered another laugh from Maggie and she kicked the wooden filing cabinets one more time. “History. Here in this part of the world, it’s all around us. But beware of what you look for, or what you dig up. You might just be goddamned surprised.”
In the darkness of my bedroom—the television having switched off automatically, just as one housewife tossed a glass of white wine into the heavily made-up and Botoxed face of another—I thought about Maggie, and who she was, and what she sold, and what she had …
History. It often had a violent past, but did Maggie ever dream or even consider that hers might end with a shotgun blast to the face, in the safety and comfort of her own antique shop?
A hand gently caressed my shoulder. Paula.
“Hey,” I whispered.
No reply.
I turned around some, expecting to see her awake, or perhaps dreaming, but when I rolled over, there was the smiling and aware face of my long-dead and long-missing Cissy Manning.
CHAPTER NINE
I froze, just staring, all the memories and thoughts and sensations coming down at me, like I was standing in the middle of the old Boston and Maine railroad tracks, as a train came barreling right at me, unable to move or even lift a hand.
“I … I …”
Cissy smiled. “You’re doing well.”
I think I found my voice. “I’ve done better.”
She kept on smiling, her full red hair on the pillow, lacy straps of something black on her shoulders, freckles prominent, and old sweet melancholy memories of rainy Sunday afternoons spent at her condo in Maryland, playing “freckle hunt” …
“Let it go,” she said.
I tried to speak again but couldn’t. So much to say. I shook my head.
Her smile got wider.
“Let me go,” she said. “Please, my old love.”
I couldn’t say anything.
I woke up. I shivered and shivered and shivered.
The house was here, it was all the same.
I shivered some more.
I wrenched around, a sharp pain driving into me, and Paula was there, sleeping away, her face peaceful and soft.
A pang of guilt joined the earlier pain, making me wince. Paula was here, Paula was loving, Paula was taking care of me.
So why was I dreaming about a past love, a dead love?
Guilt? A memory? A sense of loss of what had once been, what could have been … if not for that training accident in Nevada that had killed her and the others.
I rolled back, shivered again, and stared out into the darkness of the room until I saw the sun rise out over the Atlantic.
Paula breathed easy behind me. The pain in my back lessened a great deal, but the guilt stayed.
Restless, I got up and went to the bathroom, twisted around, and saw it was time once again to empty the bladders. “Work, work, work,” I whispered.
I swung around and got the first one out with a minimum of strain and effort. Well done, although the amount of blood and fluid coming out was the same. At least I got the bladder back into the cloth pocket without any problems.
Then it was number two’s turn, and with the long pliers, I did get it out, sweating some and gritting my teeth. Once it was emptied, measured, and put back in place, I was bone-tired again.
I avoided looking at myself in the mirror when I got back into bed, careful not to wake up Paula.
But about an hour later, she didn’t return the favor when she jostled my feet and pulled away my blankets to wake me up. Still dressed in her sleepwear, she yawned and said, “Up and at ’em, patient Lewis. Time to get your blood sucked away.”
“It’s already been sucked, drained, and measured, you meanie, you.”
Paula yawned again, her ears sticking through her hair. “How? You got a secret nurse stashed away in the attic?”
“Ain’t no attic here, sweetie, and I got them out myself about an hour ago.” I checked the time. “You were in deep sleep and I did it myself.”
That got her more awake. “With what?”
“With blood, toil, tears, sweat, and a pair of very long needle-nosed pliers.”
She sat down on my bed, held my hand. “You could have woken me up.”
“I didn’t want to.”
“Wait … I didn’t take care of you yesterday morning. Right? Is that when you figured it out?”
“I did.”
“Then why didn’t you do it yourself last night.”
“Because I like your touch.”
She leaned over and kissed me. “You keep on doing things for yourself, I’m going to think you don’t want me anymore.”
I kissed her right back.
“Don’t ever think that.”
Paula saw that I was still droopy so she told me to stay in bed, which didn’t take much convincing, and she came up a while later holding a bowl of oatmeal with cut strawberries and brown sugar sprinkled in, along with toast and a mug of tea.
I gave the tray a severe look. “What, no meat products?”
“I know you’re typical Irish and think the major food groups are beer, meat, chips, and sugar, but this is healthier for you, and that’s what counts.”
“If you say so.”
“I do. And eat it up, and don’t let me catch you tossing it out the nearest window.”
I ate while she showered and got dressed, then she took the tray down. She came back up later, purse over one shoulder, her computer bag in her hand.
“Have a good day at work, hon,” I said. “Do you need a dollar for the lunch lady?”
“Not today,” she said, and we engaged in a bit more kissing and cuddling.
“That’ll make me feel better than a meatless day,” I said, and Paula surprised me and made my face turn red with a comment about her suffering through a number of meatless days herself.
Something came to me as she headed out of the bedroom. “Hey,” I said. “Got a moment?”
She checked her watch. “For you, two moments.”
“When Diane Woods left yesterday—”
“And interrupted your Penthouse fantasy,” she pointed out.
“Yeah, that,” I said. “Just before she went out the door, it looked like she said something to you. Anything important?”
Paula smiled. “I guess it was, since it involved you.”
“Me? How?”
Smile still in place, Paula said, “Diane said that she was very happy to see the two of us together, but if I did anything to hurt you, she’d kill me and make it look like an accident.”
When she was gone I flopped back in bed, struggling to fight the onset of an early-morning nap. Too much sleep, too much lying around like a lump of flesh, not being active—it wasn’t part of the road to recovery. Heck, I wasn’t even on the on-ramp to recovery. But when your belly is full and your eyes get heavy, that sweet, sweet surrender of sleep is tempting indeed.
It was approaching noon when I got up for good. I made a phone call to the Lafayette House across the street, and as one o’clock approached, a knock on my door announced—I hoped—that lunch had arrived.
I opened the door, leaning on my borrowed cane, and Mia, the waitress and would-be journalist, was there on my steps, yawning.
“You should think abo
ut getting a doorbell,” she said. “My knuckles get scraped from knocking on the door.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and I gimped my way back into the kitchen. Mia followed, ditching her coat along the way. Again she went through my cabinets and we sat down to lunch, a roast beef sandwich and broth for me, and a lobster roll the size of my forearm for her.
Mia noted my look and said, “Hey, you said I could order anything I wanted from the menu, so I did.”
“And I’m glad you did.”
As we ate, we talked some about the high cost of living on the seacoast and she yawned throughout her meal—“Sorry, didn’t get a wink of sleep last night”—and said that the Porter Herald had accepted a freelance piece about Revolutionary War–era forts for the upcoming Sunday edition.
“I’m pretty happy with the article,” she said. “The problem will be what it looks like once it hits print. Clowns up there delight in inserting typos and spelling errors that weren’t in the original copy.”
“Happens to the best of us,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess so. Hey, the last time I was here, you said you were a magazine writer. Which magazine?”
“Shoreline,” I said.
“Oh,” she said. “I don’t know it. Is it like Yankee magazine?”
“Fewer recipes and B&B ads, more articles about the history and future of the New England seacoast.”
Mia chewed, swallowed. “Cool. Do you know the editor?”
“I do,” I said. “If you have an article query, let me know, and I’ll pass it on to him. Get past the usual crew of gatekeepers who’ve just graduated from Brown or Northeastern and think they know everything.”
“Yeah, lucky bastards,” she said.
After we were finished she helped me clean up and put away the dishes, and I said, “Can I ask you a question?”
“Sure,” she said. “But only if you answer one of mine.”
“Go for it.”
She pointed at the cane. “What horror movie set did you get that from?”
“The one called real life,” I said.
After I paid Mia for the meal and for her time, we went into the living room; she took a chair and I took the couch. “Your aunt,” I said. “The former newspaper lady. Is she still around?”
“Yep,” she said. “Lives up in Rochester, at a so-called retirement community, though I never mention that phrase out loud to her.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gwen Aubrey.”
“And you said she worked around here in newspapers, back thirty or forty years ago.”
Mia laughed. “Oh, God, don’t get her going. She says she’s writing a book about what it was like, being a journalist in the Seacoast years back, and I don’t have the heart to tell her that nobody cares.”
“Wrong,” I said. “I care.”
“What’s that?”
“Your Aunt Gwen. If possible, I’d love to meet her, talk about the old days, about what it was like here back then.”
“You’re not kidding, are you?”
“Not at all,” I said. “But if she can, I’d like to have her visit me. I’m still stuck here.”
Mia reached over to her purse, poked in, and came out with an iPhone or an Android or a Yoda for all I know; she scrolled through and said, “Yep, got her number. I’ll give her a call later.”
“Tell her I’ll compensate her for her time as well.”
Mia eyed me and looked around my cluttered living room and at my baggy clothes and cane, and said, “What, are you rich or something?”
“Or something.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Magazine writers make shit. I know for a fact. So what’s the deal? How did you get this cool place on the beach?”
“Retirement package from the government.”
“Some package.”
“Back then, some government.”
I made a cup of coffee and resolved to stay awake for the afternoon, but that resolution lasted about as long as those made every December 31. When I woke up on the couch, I puttered around and tried to shelve some books.
I reached nine volumes before I was too tired to continue. I looked out the sliding glass doors to my deck. I hadn’t been out on my deck in weeks. I limped forward, balanced the cane against the wall, unlocked the sliding glass door, and pushed.
Oomph.
Pushed again.
Nothing again. Had I really become that weak?
I glanced down at the runners and saw the length of wood I had dropped in a long time ago, to prevent burglars easy access through these sliding glass doors.
I hadn’t become that weak, but maybe I had become that stupid.
I grabbed on to the door’s handle to keep my balance, slowly knelt down, and got in a good position to pull the wood piece out. I grabbed one end and tugged.
And tugged.
And tugged.
Nothing budged.
By now my breathing was labored, and I saw what had happened. Wet weather had dripped in and caused the wood to swell just a bit, enough so it was stuck.
The old Lewis could have popped it out in seconds.
The new and not-so-improved Lewis let it be.
I got back up on my feet without falling, grabbed the cane, and went back to the couch.
Later that afternoon I managed to get hold of Diane Woods, and after an exchange of pleasantries and a promise by her to come for dinner tomorrow, I got right to it.
“Can I see the crime scene photos from Maggie’s barn?”
“What?” she said. “I just thought I heard you ask to see the crime scene photos from Maggie’s place.”
“You did.”
“You know I can’t do that.”
“I know you can’t do that for a normal person during normal times. These are neither.”
“Lewis …”
“You know my methods, you know I can be trusted. And it just might help you out.”
“Might, or will?”
“Might,” I said. “I had a thought I wanted to share with you, but only after I see the photos.”
She waited a few seconds, and I wondered why it was taking her so long. We had done many a favor for each other over the years, so this one more shouldn’t have been causing her pause.
Yet it was.
I didn’t like it.
“Okay,” she said. “Just this once. And I’ll only show you after we eat. These aren’t photos to look at and then keep your appetite.”
“Great,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”
One more power nap to break up the afternoon, and I had a brief flash of excitement: this was the first time since I had come home from the hospital that I spent most of the day on the first floor, and not upstairs in my bed. To celebrate, I grabbed the phone and called to find out when I could expect the pathology results from my surgery, because they were at least two days overdue.
After some navigating of prompts, press one for this, two for that, and saying “agent” a few times in an increasingly loud voice, I finally caught up with a sweet young lady named Rachel.
“All right, sir,” she said. “We just need to verify who you are. Could you give your name and date of birth?”
“I already did that, when I made my first call.”
“I’m sorry, I need to ask you again.”
So I complied.
“Very good, sir,” she said. “And could you verify your membership number?”
“But the fact that I’m in your system, doesn’t that mean I’m a customer of yours?”
“Sir … in order for me to proceed further for you, I need your membership identification number.”
“But that was one of the first things I put into the system.”
“Yes, but now I need to reconfirm it, please.”
“Hold on,” I said, and I got up and went over to that section of kitchen countertop where I toss car keys, various bits of mail that need immediate attention, and I got my wallet.
Which I promptl
y dropped on the floor.
Some swearing and sweating minutes later, I retrieved it from the floor, dug out my membership card, and made it back to the couch. It now felt like two little embers of fire were at play on my back and shoulder.
“All right,” I said. “Here you go.”
After rattling off the numbers, she said, “Very well, Mr. Cole. And could you verify your address for me?”
I rubbed my free hand across my forehead. “Rachel … with no disrespect, please, why do I need to do that? It should be right there in front of you.”
“That’s how our system is set up, Mr. Cole.”
“Why? Because you’re concerned some random criminal folks out there will try to go through all these prompts, armed with some of my personal information, so they can find out the status of my pathology report?”
She didn’t say anything. “Mr. Cole,” she said. “Could you verify your address for me?”
I gritted my teeth. “Physical or mailing?”
“Oh,” she said in a chirpy voice. “Either one will work.”
I gave her my post office box number, there was some more tappity-tap of the keyboard, and she said, “All right, Mr. Cole, how can I help you today?”
I took a breath. “I had major surgery recently. Two tumors were removed from my shoulder and lower back. They were sent out for biopsies, and I’ve not heard back yet.”
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Well you should have heard back by now. Let’s check this out.”
More tappity-tap and she said, “Um, Mr. Cole, can I put you on hold for a moment?”
It felt like ice was gathering around my heart. “Go right ahead.”
So I was put on hold, some elevator music started swooning in my right ear, and I took a breath, looked out at the wide and cold and endless Atlantic. A good place to be, no matter what.
Click.
“Uh, Mr. Cole.”
“Still here.”
“It seems we have a situation concerning your biopsies.”
“Go on.”
“The reports haven’t come back yet.”
“I already know that.”
“It seems that … there was an error.”
“Go on.”
“Uh, the samples were supposed to go to one of our associated testing laboratories in Massachusetts.”
Hard Aground Page 8
