RandomActNEWpub

by Random Act (retail) (epub)

  “Oh my God, no,” she said. “I mean, until now. He just goes off on missions. To protect people from evil or whatever.”

  The guys nodded.

  “Goes on patrol,” Arthur said.

  “With an ax?” I said.

  “Smaller,” Dolph said. “More like a hatchet.”

  “But he never did anything like this before,” Harriet said.

  “He isn’t normally violent?” I said.

  “Gets in your face,” Arthur said, as Dolph nodded. “Punched Doogie in the ear. Wicked hard. Miss H. had to call the cops.”

  “If I can’t calm him down,” Harriet said. “He’s just fine most of the time.”

  “One time he told the cops he couldn’t be killed by bullets,” Dolph said.

  “How’d that work out?” I said.

  “They pepper-sprayed the shit out of him,” Arthur said.

  “Three of them had to sit on him,” Dolph said.

  “Strong?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Arthur said. “One time I seen him pick this guy up and throw him over—”

  “Listen, guys,” Harriet said. “I don’t think he needs to hear all that. Jack—it’s Jack, right?—let’s go in the office and talk.”

  Arthur and Dolph looked disappointed for two guys who didn’t want to be in the paper.

  Harriet took me by the arm and guided me back out around the counter and off to the left side of the main room. There were cots lined up and we slipped between them, then up a flight of stairs, where the walls were marred and dented. When we emerged on the second floor, there were more cots. Some parts of the room were partitioned with sheets hung from a steel cable.

  “We get a lot of families now,” Harriet said, repeating a practiced line. “It’s the economy. People get evicted, or there’s domestic abuse and they have to flee the home. It’s not just guys like Arthur and Dolph.”

  She led the way to a door that she opened with a key from a pink coiled key ring that was looped around her wrist. Harriet stepped in and I followed. There were piles of stuff and a desk and two metal folding chairs. I took one and Harriet took the other. I had my notebook on my lap. She sat with her legs splayed, her high tops flat on the floor, like a basketball player on the bench.

  “So what happened?” she said. “I didn’t want to get the guys all riled up.”

  I recounted it for her. She listened, closed her eyes when I came to the killing part.

  “One of the workers there said it was like he was splitting wood,” I said.

  “Oh my God,” Harriet said, putting both hands over her face. “That poor woman.”

  “Yeah. By all accounts she was a nice person.”

  She shook her head. “I just can’t believe it. Teak. What was he thinking?”

  I hesitated.

  “I don’t know. But I think you may have known her. The victim.”

  Harriet froze. “How would I—was she a client of—”

  “I’m told she’d started to volunteer here. Maybe the administrative side? Her name was Lindy Hines.”

  Harriet gasped like someone had squeezed the air out of her. Notebook in hand, I waited for her to start breathing again.

  9

  k

  “But I just met her a couple of weeks ago, at our administrative office,” Harriet said, like that would make the murder less likely. “She was going to come and help out at the shelter, do our books. She was an accountant. Are you sure? A very pretty lady? Sort of small? She said she just moved here from—”

  “MDI?” I said. “Yeah. Tell me about her.”

  Harriet shifted in her chair, looked away. “I don’t know much. I mean, we just talked at the office a couple of times. And not for long. One of our board members knew her. Said she moved to town, was looking for a place to volunteer. And she was good with money and books.”

  “Had she started yet?”

  “No. I mean, sort of. I gave her some stuff when we met. She looked at it and said there were better ways to keep track of our donations, with spreadsheets and all that. She took the stuff with her and I never heard back. She hadn’t come to the shelter yet.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “A couple of weeks. Maybe a little more. She was very nice. I mean, I can’t believe it.”

  She looked back at me.

  “Where is he now?”

  “County jail,” I said. “So he had problems here?”

  “Sure,” Harriet said. “I mean, some of our clients—no, actually many of them—have some kind of mental illness.”

  “What’s his diagnosis?”

  Harriet looked away from me, said, “I’m really not supposed to—”

  “Background. I won’t say it came from you. I really need to put a name on it. It tells people that it’s a real illness. So they can’t just dismiss him as nuts.”

  That seemed to make sense to her, the stigma part.

  “Okay. It’s something called schizo—schizo something. Affected? Anyway, it’s a disorder. That’s what the lady from the State said.”

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “With Teak? Manic. Just wired. You’ve got to understand, when he’s on a mission for this Hakata, it’s all very real to him. One time I tried to say it was all made up and he got right in my face.”

  “That thing with the cops. Was that here?”

  “We couldn’t calm him down so we had to call. He wouldn’t settle down for them, either. Like I said, that was a bad day for him. Maybe the worst I’ve seen.”

  “How long ago?”

  “I don’t know. Six months? But most of the time he’s fine. Better than fine. I mean, he’s a huge help around here. He can do anything, like the guys said. He put in a new light receptacle for me. Built the back stairs himself. He’s happiest when he has a job to do.”

  Still scrawling, I said, “Where’s he from?”

  “Somewhere Down East—Ledge Harbor, maybe? I think his father is a lobsterman.”

  “Single?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, I don’t think Teak could maintain a relationship.”

  “But he had one with you,” I said.

  She looked at me sharply.

  “A working one, I mean. He was your Mister Fix-It.”

  “Yeah, but that’s different from living with somebody.”

  “These comic-book delusions. Did he talk to you about that stuff?”

  Harriet smiled.

  “He tried to. This god and that god. It had something to do with Sweden or Norway or something. I couldn’t figure it all out. Who’s fighting who, which prince is related to which princess, this bad guy from some other planet who was banished by somebody a thousand years ago. It’s complicated, like the Bible or something”

  “And he invented it all himself?”

  “Yeah, but he really thinks it’s real. For him, it isn’t just something made up. He thinks this world is out there someplace.”

  Harriet waved toward the ceiling, like there was this other world beyond the stained ceiling tiles. I wrote in the notebook, catching up. Harriet waited, saying, “Oh, Lindy Hines. This is unbelievable.”

  I finished and looked up, said, “So nothing told you Teak was capable of doing something like this?”

  “My God, no. Like I said, he works here with me. I mean, he comes in here and I give him a to-do list. He comes back with everything checked off. Literally. With a pencil. Never a pen, for some reason. But last time I saw him, he was fine.”

  “Who makes sure people like him are taking their meds?”

  “State has case managers. They come here. But they go out and find the people, too. It’s called the Community Action Team. CAT. They pick the people up, take them to the clinic. If they can find them.”

  “Where does Teak live? When he isn’t h
ere?”

  “He has a room. Somewhere on the hill up past the courthouse. But somebody like Teak, he’d just decide he wanted to roam. He’d be gone for a month, come back and I’d say, ‘Where you been?’ He’d say, ‘Here and there, Miss H.’ And he’d give me this sort of cagey smile. Sometimes he’d say something about being on an assignment. I’m like, ‘Glad you’re back, Teak.’ He’d go, ‘Whatcha got for me to do?’ ”

  Harriet smiled. The good old days, before this morning.

  “Does he have anyone here he’s especially close to?”

  She thought, shook her head. I wondered if she did her hair herself, how long it had been blue. Was the idea to fit in with the clientele, position herself somewhere on the fringe?

  “No, not really. You have to see the way things work here. The ones with more serious mental illnesses, they interact but not like you’re interacting with me. They kind of have this parallel thing going, you know?”

  “Teak did that?”

  “Yeah, but Teak’s different. He kind of sits back and observes. Like he knows what’s really going on and the rest of us are just, I don’t know—”

  “Mere mortals?” I said.

  “Yeah, and he’s been sent here to keep us from getting into too much trouble.”

  “Huh.”

  We both sat for a moment in silence. I was wondering what role Lindy Hines had played in the movie in Teak’s head. An impostor? An evil sorcerer disguised as a fifty-year-old woman?

  “Did Teak ever go to these other offices, the administrative place?” I said.

  Harriet shook her head.

  “It’s just one office, really. A reception space. A room where the board meets,” she said. “I mean, he’d have no reason. There are no clients, no beds, no food. Nothing to fix.”

  “And Lindy Hines, she never came here,” I said.

  “No,” Harriet said. “She never had a chance.”

  I sat in the truck out front. It was spitting snow, the showers that come with the squalls on the tail end of a storm front. Dolph and Arthur banged out of the side door of the shelter and trudged out to the sidewalk, then past my truck. They walked slowly and stared at me as they passed. I nodded. They looked away.

  Tapping my phone, I looked up “schizo affected disorder.” The web sent me to schizoaffective disorder. The medical websites said it’s a combo of schizophrenia and a mood disorder, like mania and depression. Hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking, depression, and manic behavior. Treatment is meds and therapy. People who have it should be monitored closely, the online experts said, as the symptoms can be severe.

  Got that right.

  I called the Times and Vanessa was just getting out of a meeting. I waited, adjusted the rearview mirror so I could watch Dolph and Arthur as they walked up the street. They were twenty feet apart now, Dolph taking point.

  Vanessa came on and I told her the story. She was silent until I got to the part about Lindy Hines volunteering to sort out the shelter’s finances.

  “There it is,” Vanessa said. “Good Samaritan killed by the very people she was trying to help.”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “I can pitch it for section front,” she said. “When will you have it?”

  “Say, late afternoon tomorrow.”

  “Who else is on it?”

  “Locals, but mostly they’re just following the cops’ lead. I’m two steps ahead.”

  “Fifteen hundred words?”

  “Give or take,” I said.

  She waited. After five years as my editor, Vanessa could sense that there was something else coming.

  “What’s the matter, Jack?”

  I hesitated.

  “I don’t know. This one has gotten to me. So totally random and bizarre. I feel like I have to at least explain the delusion, the cause of it. Maybe then, in some weird way it won’t be quite so senseless.”

  “People die randomly all the time, Jack,” Vanessa said. “Wars. Floods. Earthquakes. All the murders you’ve covered. That kid in Bed-Stuy who stopped to let the guy in the wheelchair cross the street.”

  “And got hit in the head by a stray bullet fired from a block away, I know. But in some way it’s getting harder and harder for me to accept that life is nothing but a friggin’ crapshoot.”

  I heard Lindy’s voice: Aren’t we the early birds?

  Early enough to die a violent, meaningless death.

  “I want to tell the whole story of this one. If this was the last domino, I want to trace it back to the first one.”

  Another few moments of newsroom murmur and then Vanessa said, “Give me two hundred for the New England digest by two or so.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And I don’t know why I still bother to say this, but you be careful. And don’t get me into trouble.”

  “As always.”

  “Try to do better than that, Jack,” she said.

  The snow had covered the windshield as we talked, and I sat in the half-darkness for a minute, the story running through my mind, the places I had to go. The office of these case managers, to ask about Teak and his meds. Jail, if I could persuade Teak to talk to me, and get past his lawyer. Lindy Hines’s son. The contractor on Mount Desert. The forensic psych people—get a sense of whether Teak would stand trial at all. His family Down East. Other homeless, like Dolph and Arthur.

  I looked in the side mirror. The two guys were sitting in the park on separate benches in front of a big monument. There was someone on a third bench with a shopping cart full of belongings, and a fourth person, a woman in a camo parka, talking to the guy with the cart.

  I’d grabbed my notebook and was reaching for the door when my phone buzzed. I looked at it. A text. Roxanne.

  —you ok?

  yes. you get my message?

  —yeah. It’s on the broadcast website. you coming home soon?

  pretty soon. Why?

  —louis is here. he brought his girlfriend. she says she wanted to meet me, needs some girl time, what with all these macho men.

  I sighed, put my notebook on the passenger seat.

  on my way.

  I made it home to Prosperity in fifty-three minutes, driving south to Unity and then across and up to the ridge through the swirling snow, down the other side to home. Louis’s Jeep was parked beside Roxanne’s Subaru. I pulled in and hurried inside, heard Sophie saying, “Sit, Friendy, sit.”

  It was early release at Prosperity Primary, something about state testing, and the younger kids and ed techs got sent home. Sophie was feeding the dog bits of cheese from a chunk of orange cheddar. Marta and Louis were sitting at the kitchen table, and Roxanne was pouring Marta another cup of coffee. The zucchini bread was half gone.

  “Daddy,” Sophie said. “Friend’s almost as big as Pokey. I think we should get Pokey’s old saddle and see if I can ride him.”

  “I don’t think dogs like to be ridden,” I said. “Maybe we could get him to pull you in your sled.”

  “A sled dog, like the Eskimos.”

  Sophie ran out of the room. Friend trotted after her and I looked to the company. Marta had her hair pulled back and was wearing a cream-colored fisherman’s knit sweater under a bright green down vest. That and the jeans and Bean boots.

  “Hey,” I said.

  I moved to the table and Marta got half out of her chair. I leaned down and she clasped my shoulder and did the Euro double-kiss thing. Her lipstick was blood red and looked like it had been applied with a paintbrush.

  “Welcome to Prosperity, Maine,” I said. “Sorry I was held up.”

  “We heard,” Marta said. “What on earth happened?”

  Sophie was out of the room, a brief window. I went to the counter, reached for a tea bag. Barry’s. Poured a cup and came back to the table and gave them the thirty-second ve
rsion. Lindy Hines. The ax. Teak. The police.

  “How horrible,” Marta said, her hand on her chest as if to still her heart.

  “Awful,” Roxanne said. “I wonder whether his caseworker dropped the ball. I mean, the people I knew, they didn’t snap in an instant, or even a day. It took time to build.”

  Marta looked at her.

  “I worked for the State—Child Protective Services,” Roxanne said. “Before I started working at the school. With the state, sometimes it was abuse. Sometimes it was neglect. Sometimes all of it was because a parent wasn’t mentally stable.”

  I dabbed the tea bag, listened to the voice of experience.

  “It’s a cycle,” Roxanne said. “If you know somebody who’s sick, you can usually see it coming. Sometimes we did home visits, watched to see how the adults were doing. Were they stable? Showing signs of anxiety?”

  “Nobody saw this guy coming,” I said.

  “Then somebody wasn’t paying attention. Do you think they knew each other?” Roxanne said.

  I shook my head. “It looks like wrong place, very wrong time. Just totally random. Just executed her, like ISIS or something.”

  “America, it’s so violent now,” Marta said. “Crime in BVI, what little there is, is almost always economic. Burglaries, the occasional tourist held up for their iPhone. Things like what happened to Nigel were unheard of. Never anything like this.”

  I turned to Roxanne and said, “I told you about Marta’s partner.”

  “Marta,” Roxanne said. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “You know, you can read about this sort of thing every day online, but it’s like it’s always in some other world, you know?” Marta said. “You don’t ever think one of those stories could be you.”

  “And they have no idea who did it?” Roxanne said.

  Marta shook her head. “You have to remember: It’s a small island with not much for police. And there are all these other islands with boats and private planes. In three hours you could be just about anywhere. Mexico City, Miami—next flight out, you’re gone.”

  “Do they know you’re in Maine?” I said.

  Marta looked at me.

  “Who?”

  “The investigators. Anybody,” I said.