by Brad Smith
‘Where to?’ Rufus asked as they drove out of the lot.
‘Rose City,’ Carl said.
They parked a block away from St Michael’s and walked over. When Carl told the receptionist that he was there to see Frances Rourke she immediately got on the phone and five minutes later a man approached, wearing scrubs. He said his name was Dr John Harkness.
‘What’s this about?’ he asked.
Carl indicated the receptionist. ‘She told you what it’s about.’
‘You want to see Frances Rourke?’
‘That’s it.’
‘And what is your connection to her?’
‘She’s my wife.’
Harkness hesitated. ‘Her chart says she’s single.’
‘They’ve been together for years,’ Rufus said. ‘Don’t be obtuse, man.’
The doctor turned an arrogant eye on the little lawyer before glancing back at Carl. ‘You realize she’s unconscious.’
Carl nodded.
‘I might need to clear this with the police.’
‘Then do it. Please.’
Harkness moved off to an office down a corridor. After a couple of minutes he appeared in the doorway. Talking into a cell phone, he described Carl to the person on the other end, mentioning the heavy wrap on Carl’s left shoulder. Then he walked over to hand the phone to Carl. ‘Detective Dunbar wants to talk to you.’
‘Yeah?’ Carl said into the phone.
‘OK,’ Dunbar said. ‘I wanted to make sure. I didn’t realize you’d been released.’
‘Half an hour ago.’
‘How are you feeling?’
‘I’m OK.’
‘Did you remember anything else?’
‘No.’
‘OK then. Put the doctor back on.’
Harkness listened on the phone for a bit, then hung up. ‘OK,’ he said.
Frances was in a room on the third floor of the hospital. Rufus remained in the hallway with the doctor and Carl went in alone. She was on her back, her arms straight down at her sides. Other than the purplish bruise along the right side of her face she appeared normal, as if she was merely asleep. Carl watched her for a time, then knelt close and spoke to her. He watched closely, hoping for a sign that she’d heard him. A change in her breathing, a flutter of an eyelid. The familiar smile.
He thought about her that night in the house, staring down the man with the tattoo. Inside she had to be scared but she wouldn’t show it to him. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. And Carl knew she would also be thinking of Stacy, of how frightened she had to be, how young she was. Frances would want to show her there was nothing to be afraid of, even though Frances knew there was. Carl, on the floor, had been of no use to either of them. He couldn’t stop thinking about that. He couldn’t stop wondering how things would be if he had handled things differently. He wished he could talk to her about it, about how sorry he was. But it wouldn’t happen today, it seemed.
When he left Frances, he found Harkness and asked about her condition.
‘She has what we call a brain bruise,’ he said. ‘It is exactly what it sounds like. There’s some swelling, which we expect will go down fairly quickly. When the bruise has healed, we can re-evaluate.’
‘Why isn’t she awake?’
‘Frankly, we don’t know,’ Harkness said. ‘There is no reason for it. The brain is a complicated organ. The good news is that she could wake up at any moment.’
‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ Carl told him, and left.
‘Now where?’ Rufus asked when they were in the Volvo again.
‘The farm,’ Carl said.
Rufus drove a while in silence. He was a particularly bad driver, hunched forward over the wheel, constantly speeding up and slowing down for no reason. ‘You do know that the house is no longer there.’
‘I want to see it,’ Carl said.
The police had encircled the wreckage with yellow tape and sometime after that the insurance company had erected a temporary chain link fence around the perimeter. Rufus stood by the car while Carl walked around the ruins. It was a cold day and Rufus shivered in the wind. Carl wore just a jacket – the same coat he’d been wearing when he walked in on the thugs – but didn’t seem to notice the cold. At the rear of the building he stood for a long while, looking at the storm door that had been his escape hatch. Their escape hatch. It had rained in the past couple of days and the smell of the wet soot hung heavily on the air.
Continuing the circle, he walked over to his truck, parked by the garage alongside Frances’s SUV and the hatchback that Stacy had driven. Carl’s keys were in the ignition. Since moving out to the farm he had never bothered to remove them. He had always considered the place to be immune from any criminal activity. Not that crime didn’t exist in the rural areas, but it was just that the farm felt as if it was of a different era. A more innocent time. Well, he had learned the folly of that.
Walking back toward Rufus, he glanced down the hill to the warehouse. There were no vehicles in the parking lot out front.
‘Where’s Norah?’ he asked.
‘Who?’
‘There’s nobody at the warehouse,’ Carl said. ‘Who’s running things?’
‘I would assume,’ Rufus said slowly, ‘that things have been shut down these past days, given the circumstances.’
Carl nodded. ‘I’ll call her. Thanks for the ride, Rufus.’
‘What will you do?’ Rufus asked.
‘Get things up and running, first of all,’ Carl said. ‘Frances will want things to keep moving.’
‘Where will you stay?’
Carl looked around, as if considering the question for the first time. ‘I’ll figure that out later.’
‘Why don’t you come home with me?’ Rufus said. ‘We have a spare room. You can stay as long as you like.’
‘Thanks, but I need to stay here.’
‘But where?’
‘Thanks for the ride, Rufus.’
He called Norah from the warehouse. She’d been watching the news and right away she asked Carl about Frances. He told her what he knew, which wasn’t a hell of a lot. She didn’t ask about Stacy and Carl had to assume she’d heard. They had been close. She probably didn’t need to hear what she already knew. It would be hard enough just knowing it.
It took some talking on Carl’s part to persuade her to come back to work. He finally half convinced her that it was safe, even though he had no right to say that. He had thought it was safe there before and he couldn’t have been more wrong. But he didn’t think that the three men would be returning. On the one hand, he hoped that they had crawled back into their holes. On the other, he wished for them to be out and about, someplace where the cops would track them down.
Norah reluctantly said she’d come in the next day. Carl didn’t want to press her, but he didn’t know what else to do. Other than Norah, the only people who knew how the business end operated were Frances and Stacy.
When he got off the phone Carl sat in the warehouse by himself for an hour, staring out the window to the farm, and the bush lot in the distance. He thought back to when it had happened, the day he’d spent the afternoon back in the bush, cutting down the ancient white oak. By the time he came back to the house, things were already in motion. Past the point of no return. What if he hadn’t decided to cut the tree that day? What if he’d found something else to do, something closer to home? Things might have turned out differently. He thought of Stacy, all alone with the three men. She was just a kid. She would have been terrified. She had probably clung to the hope that Carl would return before things got out of hand. Well, Carl had returned – and he did nothing to save her life.
He got to his feet and walked outside. He stood there for a time, looking at the burned remains of the house. The building was a hundred and twenty-two years old. And gone in a flash. The last time Carl had seen Stacy she’d been playing in the yard with the pup. The dog that could fly. Carl had told her to keep the pup there, that the ani
mal might have gotten hurt back in the bush. And they had shot the dog dead on the lawn. Carl wondered if Stacy had heard the shot. It didn’t matter now, whether she did or not. Carl needed to stop thinking about it. He didn’t know what to do next but he knew he had to do something. His head was going bad.
He walked to the garage and got into his pickup. He drove into Talbotville, to a place on the north side that sold house trailers and RVs and accessories. The business was owned by a man Carl had known for twenty-five years or more. They had once worked construction together. He knew what had happened at the farm – the bare details anyway – and he let Carl have a thirty-foot motorhome on credit and arranged to have it delivered the following morning. Carl slept that night in the warehouse, on a blanket atop some folded cardboard boxes used for shipping produce. With his arm incapacitated and the makeshift mattress, he had a fitful night. At two in the morning he finally swallowed two of the painkillers the surgeon had given him and fell asleep.
In the morning he was making coffee in the office when he heard a vehicle pull into the parking lot. Carl looked out the window to see Norah getting out of the passenger side of a Chevy Tahoe. Her father was behind the wheel and now he got out as well. Carl had met him a couple of times in the past; he was a mechanic at a garage in Talbotville and he had to be pushing seventy. He was short and squat, built like a Mack truck. From his expression Carl was pretty sure that he was there to tell Carl that Norah would not be working there anymore. Carl couldn’t say he blamed the man. Norah and Stacy had become friends. They went out together on the weekends sometimes and once did a weekend trip to New York City.
‘Hi, Norah,’ Carl said when they walked in. ‘Ben.’
Ben looked at the heavy wrap on Carl’s left shoulder. ‘Goddamn,’ he said.
To Carl’s surprise, Norah went to her computer, removed her jacket and logged on. Carl glanced from her to her father.
‘You go on about your day,’ Ben said.
‘What are you going to do?’ Carl asked.
‘I’m going to hang around here.’
‘What about work?’
‘I retired two months ago,’ Ben told him. ‘Been bored to tears ever since.’ He gestured around the office space. ‘I’ll keep myself busy. I’m not much for computers but I can answer a phone and change a light bulb.’
‘I appreciate it,’ Carl told him.
‘You go on and do whatever you got to do,’ Ben said. ‘That coffee fresh?’
Carl said that it was. He turned to Norah.
‘Thanks for coming in.’
She was looking at the screen, typing something. ‘I want to put something on the website about Stacy.’
‘That’s a nice idea,’ Carl said.
‘OK, I’ll write something and then show it to you before I post it.’
Carl shook his head. ‘You write it the way you want and put it on.’
‘OK.’
Carl started to leave and then came back.
‘They’re delivering a motorhome here this morning,’ he told Ben. ‘I was going to wait around, but if you’re going to be here—’
‘No problem.’
‘Ask them to leave it in the yard behind the garage,’ Carl said. ‘I’ll do the water and hydro hookup when I get back.’
Pouring the coffee, Ben nodded.
On the drive to Rose City, Carl realized he should have called ahead. He drove to the police station anyway and asked for Dunbar. He wasn’t there but the other detective – Pulford – was. Carl would have preferred to talk to Dunbar. The woman seemed somewhat negative in her approach and even her attitude, as if she was skeptical of Carl in general. She came down to the front desk directly. She was wearing jeans again, with a department hoodie this time, and had her glasses pushed up into her thick hair.
‘Carl,’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Came to look at those pictures you mentioned.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I tried to get in touch with you. I talked to somebody named Norah out at the warehouse earlier. She said you’d just left. You don’t have a cell phone?’
‘No.’
Carl sat in a windowless room for an hour, looking at mug shots Pulford had put together based on the descriptions Carl had given her. None were familiar. He wondered just how dependable his memory was regarding that night. He’d only had a quick glance at the two men, and even that was after having his brains rattled from the beating he’d taken. Everything was somewhat fuzzy. The men in the photos he was looking at were all of a kind – unkempt, unshaven, mean. Some had teardrop tattoos, like the big man at the house. But none was that man. Carl was certain of that. As for the other man, the one with the lank blond hair, Carl had just seen him briefly but he remembered him. He didn’t come across a photo resembling him either.
‘Mug shots are always iffy,’ Pulford told him. ‘Some of these are fifteen, even twenty years old. You might have seen a younger version of the big guy, before he got the tattoos. People change over time, especially people who abuse themselves, which might very well be the case with these men.’
‘What have you found out?’
‘Not much,’ Pulford admitted. ‘We went through Frances’s laptop and her cell phone and couldn’t find anything that would suggest she’d had a problem with anyone. Nothing in her e-mails. You don’t use e-mail?’
‘No.’
‘I didn’t think so,’ Pulford said. ‘There were none from you.’
‘Where’s the phone?’
‘In my office,’ Pulford said. ‘Why?’
‘I’ll take it if you’re done with it.’
‘Actually, that’s a good idea. We can use it to contact you.’
‘Frances is going to need it.’
‘Oh – is she awake?’
‘Not yet. But she will be.’
Pulford made no response to that.
‘What else are you doing?’ Carl asked.
‘Right now we’re watching for the money. Close to fifty thousand – these guys will be spending it is my guess, and possibly indiscriminately. They could be addicts, which means they’ll be buying drugs. We have informants out there.’
‘What about the white pickup?’
‘We’ll watch for it, but all we have is what your neighbor said,’ Pulford told him. ‘You said yourself it was probably a fisherman.’
Carl got to his feet. ‘If I can get that phone, I’ll be going.’
‘Of course.’
Carl went from the police station to the hospital. There was no change in Frances’s condition. He sat with her for half an hour. He told her that Norah was back to work and that her father was helping out. He didn’t mention Stacy. There would be a time for that later. As he was leaving a nurse came into the room. Carl asked if Frances had responded at all and the nurse said she had not.
‘We have her clothes here,’ the nurse said then, indicating a locker along the wall. ‘Would you like to take them?’
‘She’ll need them,’ Carl said.
‘We thought you might want to have them cleaned,’ the nurse said. ‘They smell of smoke.’ When Carl agreed to take them, the nurse handed him a bundle wrapped in plastic.
On his way back from the city Carl stopped to see Rufus Canfield in Talbotville. Rufus was in his office on Maple Street, drinking coffee and eating a bulbous donut filled with jelly. If he was working, he was hiding it well. Carl didn’t sit when Rufus asked him to.
‘The police say they’re watching the local druggies in Rose City, to see who might be spending lots of cash.’
‘I’m not so sure about that line of thinking,’ Rufus said.
‘Why not?’
Rufus took a moment. ‘You said they were after a hundred grand. Typical addict is only after whatever he can get his hands on. Twenty dollars, fifty, a hundred. This seemed very specific. Why a hundred grand? Why that much?’
‘I don’t know,’ Carl admitted. ‘But then the one guy said that maybe fifty was enough. What was t
hat?’
‘Very puzzling,’ Rufus admitted.
‘Do you know the two cops?’ Carl asked.
‘I know Dunbar. He’s been around forever. I would have thought he’d be retired by now. Who’s the other one?’
‘A woman named Pulford.’
Rufus shook his head. ‘I have never heard that name. But Dunbar is a good man. An avuncular type, as opposed to some of the Neanderthals the job attracts. I’d say he’s a plodder.’
‘A plodder?’
‘Yes, and that’s a good thing,’ Rufus said. ‘You have concerns?’
‘Not sure about the woman,’ Carl said. ‘She’s said a couple of things – maybe suggesting they won’t find the guys who did it. That was after she suggested that it could have been somebody I did time with.’
‘Really?’ Rufus said. ‘She must be imagining an In Cold Blood situation.’
‘She mentioned that.’
Rufus considered the notion. ‘Well, if nothing else, that means she’s thinking. And you say they’re monitoring the Rose City lowlife population? Looking for leads on the money?’
Carl nodded. ‘What about Talbotville? These guys might have been local. They knew how to find the farm.’
‘They did at that,’ Rufus said. ‘Keep in mind the farm had been shown on TV a few days earlier.’
‘You must know a few of these guys. Or at least you’ve been around them. You spend a lot of time at the courthouse.’
‘I do.’ Rufus gave it some thought. ‘I see where you’re going. There’s a bar over by the river called Cork’s. Popular with those types. I’m still not convinced that these men are your typical druggies but I could make a point of stopping in and asking some questions. I have been known to partake in happy hour there so I can be relatively inconspicuous. A man can sometimes buy a lot of information with a free round or two.’
‘Let’s go right now.’
‘First of all, it’s not happy hour,’ Rufus said. ‘I’m working here. And second, we aren’t going anywhere. The people who did this know you by sight. If you walk in the front door, they walk out the back.’
