Hard Aground

by Brendan DuBois

  “Why ‘they’? What makes you think there was more than one?”

  I knew why, from what Felix had told me, but I wasn’t going there quite yet. I said, “I don’t know. Just made some sense to me. Intruder number one with a shotgun, intruder number two talking to Maggie, going through the filing cabinets.”

  “Not bad,” she said.

  “Speaking of shotgun, any forensic evidence from that?”

  Diane shook her head. “Always a pisser, trying to do that where there’s a scene involving a shotgun. We’ve got a number of shotgun pellets recovered from Maggie and the rear wall and a painting that was hanging up there, but you know the rule. It’s not like recovering a bullet with the barrel marks and scrapes so you can match it to another bullet or a pistol barrel. With shotguns, no joy.”

  I focused on the filing cabinet. “The intruders were in a hurry,” I said. “They wanted what was in that cabinet. Maggie either didn’t have the key or couldn’t get to it in time. So they took a hammer or something, pounded on the cabinet, broke the lock, dug out the files.”

  “It was a crowbar,” Diane said. “No prints, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Did you determine if anything was taken from the cabinet?”

  “Who could tell,” she said.

  “What was in there?”

  “A lot of nothing,” she said.

  “Diane …”

  She sat back against the couch. “A mess. One file folder had planning board minutes from twenty years ago. Another had a collection of blueprints for old homes and town buildings from a hundred years ago. Then a collection of letters to the water precinct commissioner from businesses on Fourth Street at the beach from 1952. Stuff like that.”

  “Any chance there was another copy of the Declaration of Independence stuffed back there?”

  “That’s what we first thought, a robbery gone bad, but you’ve been there, seen the mess the place is. She could have Martha Washington’s recipe for apple pie in her own handwriting, and how would we know it was missing?”

  “Then you have the packet of heroin left on the floor.”

  “Yeah, funny thing, that. Another theory is that robbers came in, looking for a quick score—gold coins, jewelry, stuff like that—and when it went bad on them, with Maggie telling them to go to hell, she was shot.”

  “But that doesn’t explain one opened filing cabinet, filled with old papers. Or …”

  I glanced back at the crime scene photo, at Maggie’s bloody and stiff remains, and I looked away.

  “Give it up. Or what?”

  “Maggie was in her chair. Why was she in her chair? If she was being robbed, and maybe executed, would you shoot a woman in the face while she’s looking right at you? Or would you shoot her from behind? It’s like … she was placed there. Like the robber or robbers were having a conversation with her, one that ended badly.”

  We sat there in silence for a few seconds, and Diane said, “We done here?”

  “Huh? Sure. I don’t need to see the photos anymore.”

  “Good.” Diane closed out the photo viewing program, and her laptop went back to a screensaver shot of Tyler Harbor. “I know you and others have a vision of me, Diane the ice princess who can go anywhere, investigate anything, and do so without feelings …”

  I reached over, gave her hand a squeeze. “Thanks for coming over. And you’re no ice princess.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Maybe a frost queen, but definitely not an ice princess.”

  And that got me a kick in the shin.

  A few minutes later I walked her to my door and I said, “Had a little power outage here last night, gave me a few sleepless moments.”

  “Why’s that?”

  I sensed she was running behind so I didn’t want to get into a lengthy discussion of my late-night visitors. “It’s okay when the lights go off,” I said. “But if you’re sleeping when the lights come back on, well, the smoke detectors here are hardwired so they set off an unholy screech when they come back on, as well as all the lights you forgot to switch off.”

  “Yeah, I saw something about that in this morning’s police log. Looked like vandalism.”

  “Somebody cut the power line to my house?” I asked.

  “Nothing as simple as that,” Diane said. “I don’t know what you know about power lines, but up on the street, there’s something called a step-down transformer, which leads to a cable heading to your house. Somebody took a pot shot at the transformer, blew it out of service, and then cast you back into the nineteenth century.”

  I took that in and she said, “Hey, you got any enemies out there?”

  “More than I can recall.”

  “Yeah, well, be careful.”

  “Always,” I said.

  Just as she got through the open door, I said, “Hey, when you ran into Paula the other day, did you really say that if she did anything to hurt me, that you’d kill her and make it look like an accident?”

  Diane kissed me on the cheek. “Silly girl, she must have misheard what I said. I told her that I was thrilled for her, and that seeing you with a woman like her was a happy accident. That’s all.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The rest of my afternoon just dribbled away, with another long time spent in phone purgatory, pressing numbers here and there, only to find out that my biopsies were still lost somewhere in California. I removed eight books from a cardboard box, which I declared a major victory before celebrating with a late-afternoon nap.

  The ringing phone got me up twice. The first call was from Mia Harrison, who told me she’d gotten hold of her aunt, the ex-newspaper reporter.

  “Oh, thanks,” I said, reclining on my couch, looking at the late-afternoon light play against some of the clouds out there above the Atlantic. “How is she?”

  “Nutso and full of opinions as always,” Mia said. I could hear the sound of a busy kitchen in the background, plates and pots and pans rattling around, voices raised. “She said you’re lucky, that she’s bored as crap, and she’d welcome a chance to come back and check out her old stomping grounds.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it.”

  “Would eleven A.M. tomorrow work for you?”

  “Lucky for us both, my schedule is wide open,” I said.

  “She just had one question.”

  “What’s that?”

  Mia laughed. “Like I said, she’s a bit nutso. She wants to know if you’re single or not.”

  Funny question. “Legally, yes. Technically, no.”

  “Fair warning, she’ll take that as a challenge,” Mia said.

  “Did you tell her I just got out of the hospital?”

  “Yeah, and she said that was just fine by her. She said most men she’s seeing nowadays are either going in or coming out of a medical facility. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I think.”

  Later in the day Paula Quinn checked in, and we made a dinner date—surprise, at my house. I asked her to pick up some groceries on the way over. She said yes but I detected a lack of enthusiasm, and I couldn’t blame her. Being the assistant editor of a struggling daily newspaper, being shorthanded and covering a homicide, that was enough to fill anyone’s plate, but asking her to also be a home health-care aide was like filling up the buffet table.

  When she arrived and came in, I helped her with one of the plastic grocery bags, and I said, “All right, go settle down.”

  “What?”

  “Have a seat on the couch, put up your feet, and relax,” I said. “My turn to make dinner.”

  “Lewis …”

  “Go on, young lady, mind your manners, and your elders.”

  She gave me a quick kiss, sat on the couch, kicked off her shoes, and put her feet up on the coffee table. Then she laughed as she picked up the remote.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “I should have known something was up,” Paula said, turning the television on and going to the local ABC affilia
te, Channel 9 out of Manchester. “You had me pick up some veggies. You and veggies? As if.”

  I went through the plastic grocery bags, found a bottle of Bass Phillip pinot noir from Australia, struggled some to get it open, and then I poured a glass for Paula and limped over. She took a satisfying sip and asked, “What’s for dinner, then?”

  “Ham and cheese omelet for me,” I said. “Stir-fried veggie omelet for you.”

  “With ham and cheese,” she asked.

  “Got it.”

  I went back to the kitchen, dug out two frying pans, and got to work. Pretty soon my kitchen was filled with satisfying cooking aromas and I got dinner up and served in less than thirty minutes.

  Paula came back to the kitchen and we started eating. “Tastes good,” she said.

  “It should,” I said. “Every meal tastes better when you don’t have to make it, am I right?”

  She giggled at that and we kept on eating.

  After dinner and the dishes, we cuddled up on the couch, and blundered our way through Jeopardy! She put her head on my shoulder. “How was your day, dear?” I asked.

  Paula sighed. “Oh, the usual. Board meetings, police logs, trying to get the latest on Maggie Branch’s murder.”

  “What do you have?”

  “What, and give you a scoop before reading tomorrow’s paper? How in heck do you think the Chronicle will survive if you don’t pay for it?”

  “I do pay for it,” I said. “I have an online subscription, and when I’ve been on my feet, I’ve bought the print edition as well.”

  “Okay, then,” she said. “The Tyler cops are still shoved aside, and the state police and the task force are trying to squeeze her murder into the opioid crisis, but I don’t think it’s going to fit.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because there was just one packet of heroin found in her place of business, there were no opioids found in her system, and come on, can we believe that Maggie had anything to do with the heroin trade?”

  “But there’s a chance she was murdered by somebody looking for cash or gold to buy heroin, right?”

  “Right,” she said. “But that means a robbery that turned into a homicide. Not anything to do with heroin.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Thanks for that criminal update. How about the break-in at the paper? Anything new on that?”

  Paula snuggled in closer. “One of Tyler’s finest is working on it, helping out Detective Sergeant Woods while she plays with the state police. So far, nothing untoward has been found. No fingerprints on the door, no apparent break-in. And it still looks like the silver sludge was taken.”

  “But didn’t you say that some filing cabinets and bound back issues were disturbed?”

  “Yeah, disturbed like tossed all over the place. Who knows. Maybe they got in the mood of wrecking things while hauling out the sludge.”

  “And how’s the assistant editor’s job coming along?”

  She laughed. “Well, not much more of a bump in pay, and a hell of a lot more responsibilities, but it’s a step forward. I’m beginning to like the editing process, especially with the freelancers we have working for us. Lots of dedication, lots of enthusiasm, not much in the way of grammar and style.”

  We sat there for a while longer, then she said, “All right, fess up. Have you heard anything about your biopsies?”

  I told her about my traveling tissues. She groaned and swore in all the right places, then asked, “Feel like being the subject of a story?”

  “About that?”

  “Why not? Our health-care system is one big screw-up from one end to the other. Why not publicize it?”

  “Well … tell you what. When I get my results back, if it’s benign, you got it. If it’s not, I’ll have more important things to worry about.”

  “I can see. You get any writing done lately?”

  “Um—no.”

  “I thought Shoreline gave you your job back.”

  “In a manner of speaking, they did.”

  She squirmed around so she was looking up at me. “That’s some kind of speaking. Do tell me more.”

  “The guy who runs the magazine told me, quote, ‘We’ll run something under your name for now, in the meantime, get your ass better.’ Unquote.”

  “But it’s not your ass that’s a problem.”

  “Thanks for noticing.”

  On the television there was now a network program airing, something ridiculous going on about some single guy with bright teeth—said number of teeth approaching his IQ level—and a group of tanned, taut, and trimmed women who were competing for his attention. I didn’t have the mood or energy to change the channel. At this point, ridiculous was just fine.

  “You miss the writing?” she asked.

  “At the moment, no.”

  “Really?”

  “I know there’s probably a bolt of lightning up there coming down from the spirits of Morrow and Halberstam, but I’m not that much of a writer. I’m more of a snoop. I like finding things out, historical things, events and people from the past.”

  “Once a spook, always a spook?”

  “Probably.”

  On the television screen a group of women and the dopey single guy were in a hot tub. The old phrase came to me: Youth is wasted on the young.

  “Tell me more about what you did at the Pentagon.”

  “I thought I already did that.”

  She squirmed around some more, so one arm was loosely draped over my lap. “Bits. Here and there. Give me a typical day.”

  “No such thing.”

  “Then make it up.”

  I wondered what it would be like to be in a hot tub with five drop-dead gorgeous women, all of whom were pretending to be interested in me. It would be a challenge, but I think at some point I’d be up to it.

  “You get in early,” I said. “No reason for it, because the world and the DoD operates on a 24/7 basis. And this was pre-Internet, so stuff was sent around as reports or memos. We’d read what was called the O-S-R, the Overnight Status Report, one-paragraph summaries of what happened during the previous twelve hours in all the world hot spots. A quiet week would mean those reports would be one page, two pages maximum. A busy week meant eight, nine, ten pages.”

  “Wow, all those secrets.”

  “Not so much,” I said. “They just glossed over what was really going on. If you needed more information, you had to dig deeper past the synopsis.”

  “Mmm, what then?”

  “Then we’d do our jobs,” I said. “Our unofficial title was the Marginal Issues Section, meaning that all the quirky requests or questions that the big boys and girls didn’t want to handle came to us. Then we’d be asked to research them and get back to the requestor. More often than not, by the time our reports went up the food chain, the issue had been resolved or forgotten.”

  “Sounds incredibly dull.”

  I said it before I could catch myself. “Before the end, it was the best job I’ve ever had.”

  Paula squeezed me. “Oh, do go on. Why’s that?”

  I hesitated. Oh, the secrets I was revealing … but so what. It was all history, now.

  “It was a different time, different place. The world wasn’t as fragmented, or filled with pure anarchy and hate. There were fuzzy boundaries and rules, but they existed. And all of us felt that we were in a fight … not both sides tossing ICBMs at each other, but a fight between one sloppy but relatively free way of life and another system that was sending poets and writers to the gulag. No doubt too basic and too clichéd for some. We were in a fight, and we were dedicated to it. Now … I’m dedicated to getting better so I can woo you better.”

  “Woo you? What, you learned fifties-speak back there at the Pentagon?”

  “Learned lots of things.”

  Paula squeezed me, laughed, and said, “There was a woman back there, wasn’t there.”

  “Yes.”

  “You told me she was dead.”

  “I told you r
ight.”

  “You miss her?” Paula asked.

  I tried not to hesitate as I slipped an untruth past her. “Sometimes.”

  It was warm and fine and the meal was settling in. “You know, I could spend the rest of the night here on this couch,” Paula said. As I was about to answer that it sounded like a good idea, her phone rang.

  Paula said something so vile and obscene for someone so pretty and slender, and grabbed her cell phone out of her leather bag. She answered it with, “Quinn,” and I bit my lip not to add “medicine woman” to her sentence.

  “Uh-huh,” she said. “Uh-huh. Hold on.”

  One more rummage trip through the bag, coming out with a Bic pen she uncapped with her teeth, and looking for something on my coffee table; she found a subscription card to The New York Times and started scribbling.

  “Okay, okay,” she said. “Got it.”

  She got off the phone, muttered yet another fantastic expletive, and said, “Two-car crash over in Bretton. Tractor-trailer truck and SUV, tractor-trailer on its side, SUV flipped over three or four times, ended up in some birch trees. Route 101 from here to the middle of the state blocked off. Med flight coming in. One hell of a mess. I gotta go.”

  I got up and saw her to the door, got a brief kiss, and she said, “Look, not sure when I’m coming back.”

  “I understand.”

  “And when I’m done, I’ll probably end up back at my condo. Quicker to get to bed.”

  “Understand that, too.”

  Then she was out the door, and I was there by my lonesome, like it had been planned or something.

  Karma, maybe, or the spirits Up There who were having fun sending parts of me around the West Coast were responsible.

  Back to my couch I went.

  The sloggy routine continued, with a bit more of television downstairs, and then my usual routine of emptying out the blood and fluid upstairs. Measuring the blood—a slight improvement, but still not enough to get the drains taken out—and then, filled with a burst of optimism and energy, I decided to take a shower.

  It took some doing, but I got my top and bottoms off, and turned on the water, letting it run nice and hot. I did the best I could, ducking my head in, washing my hair, trying not to get my midsection bandages wet, the ones next to my drains. The angry-looking stitchwork wasn’t as angry-looking anymore, more disgruntled-looking. I flipped around and washed my other leg and arm; it took a long time and I got water splashed all around the place and on the tile floor, but damn, it felt good.