I looked into the wreckage.
“Like her laptop, for example. Photos? Where’s your mom’s laptop?”
He looked the wreckage over, too. “Gone,” Barrett said. “I figured somebody would just try to sell it,”
“Or not,” I said. “You tell the detective there that there’s a laptop missing?”
“Yeah.”
“Why don’t you tell him what that laptop might have contained. Like the company’s books, the taxes or the overpayments.”
“I don’t know if I’m ready for that,” he said.
“Goddamn, Barrett,” I said. “Look around. It’s time to take off the gloves.”
When I left he was talking to Tingley, who looked interested. Maybe he was a real detective after all.
I went down the hallway, let myself out. It was dark and cold and the street was deserted, so my footsteps crackled. I walked past the cruisers, the unmarked Impala, and out onto the bridge. The water was running under the ice somewhere in the darkness below, the gurgle echoing under the bridge. Was it the River Styx that carried souls into Hell? College had been a long time ago, but bits of knowledge, stuck to brain matter like lint, surfaced at times like this. The ferryman Charon taking souls down the river to the afterlife.
I peered over the railing, saw the pale gray ice reflecting the streetlights. Maybe Hell wasn’t an inferno, but a frozen wasteland where people wandered naked and shivering. Did Teak belong there? Maybe not. How could you have all of this horror and mayhem and not hold someone responsible?
Jesus. Just give me a bad guy. Just give me a target, something to chase. Don’t let this stand.
As I pondered it, I took my keys out. Skirted the back of the car and leaned down.
Saw a broken passenger window. The dent in the driver’s door, the print of a boot. The cracked windshield, the glass etched with lines like lightning bolts. The message scrawled on the hood.
go away, asshole
“You bastards,” I said.
I looked closer. The letters were drawn in something thick, like paste. Lipstick. I wondered if Lindy’s makeup bag was accounted for. I turned around, went back inside the building, told my story to Hernandez. She came downstairs, looked the car over, took a few photos with her phone. Called up and asked Tingley to come down.
He did, circled the car.
“So much for random kids,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “Question now is, what are you doing that’s pissing people off?”
“My job,” I said, and I got in the car and drove off, squinting through the cracks. “Go away?” I said. “Fat friggin’ chance.”
20
k
Roxanne wanted to know if the Times would cover the deductible on our insurance. I said I’d ask. She said she needed to get to school with Sophie in the morning. I said the car was drivable, if you looked out between the cracks.
“Is New York filled with reporters’ spouses driving cars with smashed windshields?” she said.
“No,” I said. “In New York they take taxis.”
The next morning she dropped me at the Prosperity Garage on the way to school. Phil, the proprietor, was sitting behind a wooden desk covered with greasy receipts and parts catalogs. He looked up, pushed his hat back, and said, “McMorrow. What is it now?”
I told him I needed a loaner, told him why.
“Rocks,” he said. “Last time it was bullet holes. You drop down to the B league or what?”
He grinned.
“I loan you something, it gonna come back blown all to hell?”
“Kid gloves, Phil,” I said.
He snorted, looked at the wooden board with keys hanging on hooks. “Older F-150 out there. Black. Has brush bars on the front, in case you need to push your way out of trouble.”
“Perfect,” I said.
Phil got up, hitched his trousers, went over and took the key off the hook and tossed it to me.
“Only reason I do this for you, McMorrow, is I need stories for my memoir,” he said.
“Doing my best,” I said, and I saluted and walked out the door.
The truck was at the side of the gravel lot, half plowed in. It was ten years old, maybe more, lifted up over big tires. I climbed the snowbank, popped the door, climbed onto the running board, and hoisted myself in. The truck smelled like cigarettes. There were empty Budweiser cans strewn on the passenger-side floor, most of them crushed. I started the motor and it roared to life through loud exhaust. I put it in four-wheel drive, then in gear. It climbed the snowbank like it was a ripple in the pavement, thumped down on the other side.
There’d be no sneaking up in this thing. It was made for full frontal assault.
“Good,” I said. “Bring it on.”
Clair had a tractor apart in his barn, the small Kubota he used to clean Pokey’s paddock. His plan was to call Louis, maybe stop by with a few beers. I told him I’d be fine, just going to talk to Teak’s family Down East, see if I could find Rod on MDI. I figured the family would want to talk about Teak’s better qualities. The contractor guy would say a few dutiful things about the tragedy, maybe talk about how she was a good person, always eager to help out. Besides, it would be midday, broad daylight. What could happen?
As I drove toward Belfast, I looked around the truck, reached down under the driver’s seat. There was a lug wrench there and a foot-long length of pipe. The Glock under my jacket.
The tools of my trade.
I jumped on Route 1 and headed north, watched the towns tick by. Searsport, Stockton Springs, Prospect. It was a gray day and everything looked drab and ragged under the snow. These weren’t tourist towns, and the efforts to snare the summer folk were halfhearted. Inns that you would only blunder in to. Restaurants where rich New Yorkers would get a long stare from the locals. Gift shops that had been out of business for years, junk gathering dust and dead flies in the storefront windows.
I made time on the flats below Verona, crossed the bridge and looked out at the bay, another advantage of the big truck. There was ice along the shoreline, empty white-capped waters to the south. As I approached Ellsworth, I could feel my game face coming on. I stopped and filled the truck with gas, climbed back in, and rumbled on.
I swung northeast on Route 1 and soon the place began to change, like I’d entered a different, darker, and more serious country. The spruce woods were closer. The vehicles were pickups and tractor-trailer rigs. I passed a marine supply store, then a crumbling ice-cream shop with plywood over the windows, the word closed sprayed in orange paint like a warning.
Teak was from Ledge Harbor, at the tip of one of the peninsulas that made up the coastline from here into Canada. I swung off Route 1, followed the next pickup south. Along the way there were glimpses of coves where the tides had lifted the ice and broken it into silvery plates that were piled on the weed-covered rocks. There were tidal bays, the ice laid out on the mudflats like puzzle pieces. The occasional farmhouse, trucks and cars parked haphazardly, most of them snow-covered.
And then I was on the outskirts of a village, with stacks of lobster traps at most houses, everything looking out on a harbor where the lobster boats were on their moorings, all pointed east, in formation. Piers and floats and small boats turned hull-up, idled lobster boats propped up on metal stands. There was a store with gas pumps, a Budweiser sign glowing, three pickups out front. I pulled in.
I undid my jacket and the holster and put the Glock under the driver’s seat. Grabbed a notebook off the passenger seat, patted my jacket pocket to make sure I had a pen. Swung out and down and walked to the front door and opened it. Stepped in and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dim light.
There were four guys sitting at a counter to the left of the door, a woman behind the counter. She was pouring coffee when she looked up. The four guys turned almost in unison and looked at me
over broad shoulders.
“How you doin’,” I said, in the way that doesn’t require a reply. The guys looked at me, the four of them all red-faced beneath their baseball caps, ruddy streaks along their cheekbones.
One of them nodded, the guy on the end. I walked to the empty stools to his left and sat down, two over. The woman—small and ageless, hair in a gray-blonde ponytail she’d probably worn since high school—held out the pot.
“Coffee?”
“Please,” I said.
The guys had turned forward, then away. They began talking among themselves, and the woman came and put a mug down in front of me, then a paper napkin and a spoon. She poured coffee and I smiled and said, “Thanks.” She reached over and took a bowl of creamers in plastic cups from in front of the four guys and put it closer to me.
I reached for one, peeled the foil off, and poured it into my coffee. Stirred. The guys were talking quietly, something about Canada and government and someone who was a son of a bitch. The woman came back and said, “Anything else?”
“Yes,” I said. “Maybe directions.”
The guys turned my way and waited.
“I’m looking for Teak Barney’s family. I understand they live in the village here.”
She looked at them. They looked at her and then back at me. Their faces were expressionless, all five of them. I smiled at the nearest guy and said, “You all know Teak, right?”
Still no response. I waited. After a long moment, the closest guy, who was bigger and a little older than the others, and seemed to carry some sort of authority, said, “Who’s askin’?”
“I’m Jack McMorrow. I’m a newspaper reporter.”
I could see them harden, around the eyes.
“Don’t know that we need to talk to any reporter,” the guy said.
“You don’t. Only if you want to let people know who Teak is, really,” I said. “Other than an accused murderer.”
The three guys beyond the leader looked away, sipped their coffee. The woman swung away and put the pot down, reached for a rag.
“We know who Teak is,” the guy said.
“The rest of the world doesn’t,” I said.
“Don’t care what other people know or don’t know.”
I sipped my coffee, looked back at him.
“I get that,” I said. “But if there’s a good side to Teak, and I figure there is, then don’t you think people should know that?”
“Why?”
“Out of respect for him. His family. What they’ve been through with his illness. It’s not easy.”
The guy listened.
“Otherwise he’s just a murderer. I know it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
He looked at me, then raised his mug and drank. The woman picked up the pot and topped them off. The pot was empty and she put it back down. There was another full pot on the burner but she didn’t offer any to me.
“Who are you again?” the guy said.
I told him.
“What paper you from?”
“The New York Times.”
He looked at me, then glanced out the window.
“That truck don’t look like it’s from New York,” he said.
“It’s not. I live in Waldo County.”
“Why you writing for some paper in New York, then?” he said.
“More money in it,” I said.
He considered that. The others had turned back and were staring at me hard but with more curiosity than hostility. I was breaking through.
“I’m trying to tell the whole story of Teak,” I said, “not just part of it. TV’ll make him out to be a monster. Local press doesn’t seem to be interested in anything but what the cops say.”
Another long pause. I waited them out. After a minute, the closest guy swiveled his stool toward me.
I took my notebook, said, “Do you mind?”
He shrugged.
“Don’t get all excited,” he said. “Ain’t said nothing yet.”
“And your name is?”
He hesitated, then said, “Pete.”
I held out my hand and he reached over and we shook. He could have broken bones but he didn’t.
“Pete what?”
“Don’t matter.”
The others listened to their spokesman. The proprietor had found something to scrub.
“You don’t know the Barneys,” Pete said.
I shook my head. “Nope. Looking forward to it. Where do I find them?”
“Don’t know that I want to be the person set a reporter on them,” he said.
“I’ll find them eventually,” I said. “Somebody will have some backbone.”
His jaw clenched. His buddies tensed, leaned forward like dogs waiting for the signal, which would be something like, “How ’bout we step outside.”
I pushed away from the counter and slid off the stool. Nodded and said, “You have a good day.”
Nobody nodded back. I walked out the door, across the lot to the truck. I heaved myself up and in and started the motor. It rumbled, the noise echoing off the side of the restaurant. I leaned down and took the wrench out from under the seat and put it on the floor, the sharp end sticking up. I left the Glock where it was. Wrote in my notebook, describing the scene, the guys and their attitude. Their weathered cheeks and broad backs. Waited some more.
And they came out.
Three of the guys headed toward two pickups. Pete got into a third, a big Dodge, silver over black, with bait barrels and fuel tanks in the bed and a sticker in the back window pledging allegiance to Dale Earnhardt, Number 3. The other two trucks backed up, spun their tires as they sped by me and out onto the road. Pete backed the Dodge out slowly, came around to put his driver’s side along mine.
I buzzed the window down. He did the same. When he spoke it was without looking at me.
“Shit has a way of flying around in a town like this,” Pete said.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“If you were to go outta here, take a left, go right at the first fork, half-mile down, you’d see a double-wide. Shit piled up everywhere, a boat and some traps. Look for a silver convertible with a tarp over it. One of Timmy’s projects ain’t ever gonna get done.”
I nodded. “Thanks.”
“Between us, they ain’t the town’s finest. Decent-enough people once, but that was a while ago. Teak may be a murderer, but some might say he’s the best of the bunch.”
I considered it.
“None of that’s for the paper, and I don’t want my name in there nowhere,” Pete said.
“I understand.”
“Your word?” he said.
“My word,” I said.
He nodded. “Good enough,” he said, and he drove away.
The double-wide was light blue, set in a space bulldozed out of the spruce and birch woods. The tarp on the convertible had collapsed under the snow. The car was surrounded by boat trailers, lobster traps piled six high, a couple of four-wheelers, a riding mower with the cowl removed, a couple of chest freezers, a gas grill, tires, rusting bicycles. To the left of the door there was a dumpster overflowing with trash bags with a giant cardboard TV box on top. A pile of sawed-up hardwood was scattered in the gravel and an old Chevy pickup was backed up to the front door.
I drove on, pulled off the road onto the shoulder, waited for a car to pass. I reached under the seat for the Glock, slipped it in the holster, and clipped it fast. Then I made a U-turn, drove back to the house, and pulled in and parked beside the Chevy. Shut off the motor and got out and walked to the front door. Knocked. The aluminum storm door rattled. Dogs barked, more than one, and something crashed into the door from the inside. I waited. A man cursed and said, “Git the fuck back.”
The inner door swung open. A man stared at me, squinting into
the light. He had a gray-brown beard, sunken cheeks, wild eyebrows. He was holding an aluminum cane like a club.
I smiled. He pushed the door open six inches. Dogs were darting around his legs, growling and snapping. He whacked at them with the cane and they backed off. When the barking diminished, I could hear a television playing inside.
“Yeah.”
“Mr. Barney,” I said.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Jack McMorrow. I’m a reporter. I’m writing about Teak.”
He scowled, raised the cane.
“Jesus Christ. Already hung up on Fox. ‘How does it feel to be the father of a murderer?’ How the fuck do you think it feels? How many of you fake-news bastards are there?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. Who else you chased off?”
“That’s it so far.”
Good, I thought. Nobody sniffing around my story up here.
“Where the hell you from?”
“The New York Times.”
“The New York Times?” he said, like it was a particularly egregious insult. “What the hell does the New York Times want to know about Teak?”
The dogs were back, three of them, all mutts. He swung the cane again and one of them yelped.
“It’s an important story,” I said. “About Teak and mental illness and the ways we help or don’t help the people who have it.”
“What makes you think I give a shit about you and your story? My boy’s locked up. He ain’t never coming home.”
“I know. It’s a sad story all around. I want to make sure that Teak is represented fully, not made out to just be some crazy person.”
“Well, he ain’t just that,” Tim Barney said.
“But what he did—”
“Hey, I’m wicked sorry about that lady,” Tim Barney said. “I’ll give you that.”
“Lindy Hines.”
“Right. I mean, she ain’t done nothin’ and she’s gone. Just like that. It’s fucked up. You can tell her folks I said so. I’m sorry this happened to her. To Teak, too. ’Cause he’s done, sure as shit.”
“Right,” I said.
He gathered himself up. I waited.
“Thing is, Teak done this bad thing, but when he was a kid, he was as sane as you and me.”
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