He looked at me, his mouth open.
“Get off this property,” Blaine said.
I shut my notebook, slipped it into the back pocket of my new jeans.
“Out,” he said, and pointed toward the door to the driveway. “And if one word of this conversation appears in print, my lawyer will be on you so fast it’ll make your head spin.”
“Looking forward to it,” I said. “Good luck with your deal.”
Two guys came into the room, tool belts clinking. They looked at Blaine, then at me, and one said to him, “Everything all right here?”
“Just escort this guy outta here,” Blaine said. “He’s trespassing on private property.”
They turned to me.
“Put him in his vehicle,” Blaine said. “See him up to the road.”
One of the guys reached for me.
“You heard him,” he said.
“Back off,” I said, and shrugged his hand away.
“You’re gone, buddy,” the other guy said, stepping in to grab me, hoist me up. I brought my arm down hard, the point of the elbow banging his forearm hard.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said, holding his arm to his belly, reaching for the hammer on his belt. Thought better.
“Remember what I said,” Blaine said.
“Every word,” I said.
They watched as I climbed up into the big Ford, started the motor. I assumed they were still there as I drove up the drive to the main road. But I’d moved on—was wondering why Lindy Hines was dead and somebody like Rod Blaine skated.
Time to take a stand.
24
k
I was somewhere above Stockton Springs when my phone beeped for the tenth time since MDI. Email. I pulled over, picked up my phone.
Vanessa at the Times: How is it going with the homeless guy murder? Let me know. Photos?
Newsletter from Prosperity Primary School: The Parents Group will meet Monday at seven p.m. The agenda includes organizing of volunteers to build the new playground.
Google Alert: Lindy Hines, Riverport, Maine, murder: the Riverport PD will hold a press conference at nine a.m. at the Police Department to announce resolution of the murder of Linda “Lindy” Hines.
Resolution? I didn’t think so.
I tossed the phone onto the seat, pulled the truck back out onto the highway. The exhaust blared and the tires rumbled. I stewed all the way to Belfast where I rolled over the bridge, looked out from high above the harbor. The bay was gray ice water, deadly as burning oil. The harbor was empty but for a couple of lobster boats, bows pointed into the offshore wind. The view brought me no comfort, no soothing calm at the sight of the island of Islesboro, Castine somewhere in the haze on the far shore.
The tourists could turn the Maine coast into a fantasy. Thanks to Teak’s dad and brother Jason, and drugged-out Tawny, I knew better. Thanks to Rod Blaine, the phony, self-centered coward, I saw through it. On this day, for me the Maine coast was a rockbound place of drug-addict scuffles and shameless shiny greed.
Sell your soul for a slag of meth or the prospect of a new Range Rover. Trample the good folks in your desperate need for either. And who were the good ones?
Maybe Teak, before he got sick. Eager to please. Put me in, Coach; I’m ready.
Certainly Lindy Hines, kind and gentle, blindsided by her husband’s ambition and lust, then bludgeoned by bad luck.
I turned west at Belfast, drove up into the hills, thinking that was the story, even if nobody wanted me to tell it. Screw them.
Clair’s news loomed like black clouds drifting in from the west. The light falling with the sun, I came down the ridge into Prosperity, passed the Dump Road, drove another three miles, and turned off to come in from the other side. I did, and slowed as I passed Clair’s big house, slowed more as I passed the drive up to the barn. There was no sign of Marta’s Audi or Louis’s Jeep.
Change of plan?
I drove up the road, pulled into the dooryard, and parked by the shed. I put the Glock under the seat in its holster, locked the truck. Roxanne’s Subaru was there, the window still broken, the boot-shaped dent in the door. As I walked into the house I wondered how she’d explained that to Sophie.
There are bad people in the world. Your daddy hates their guts, and the feeling is mutual.
When I walked in, I heard Sophie and Roxanne in the kitchen. I came around the corner, saw Sophie standing on a stool, wearing an apron.
“Hey, Dad,” she said, and she hopped down and came over and gave me a hug. Her mouth was rimmed with cookie dough.
“We’re making cookies. They’re for school, but Mom says you can have a couple.”
“Great,” I said. “Perfect with my tea.”
“We’ll have them with juice, but Mrs. P. will have coffee. She drinks coffee all day long.”
“That’s not good for you,” I said.
“Jonathan told her that, and she said she had to go somehow.”
“True,” I said. A caffeine overdose beat a hatchet to the head.
I crossed the room, gave Roxanne a kiss on the cheek. She was stirring batter with a wooden spoon and her face was flushed from exertion and the wood fire.
Sophie came back and hopped up on her stool and started stirring again.
I smiled. Kissed her again. She turned to Sophie, said, “Let’s start rolling it into balls.”
A conversation postponed.
I asked Roxanne how her day was and she said it was fine. She’d been tutoring a kid named Brant who was six and didn’t know all his letters. “We can’t all be geniuses,” I said.
“He doesn’t know his colors, either,” she said.
“What does he know?”
“The F-word,” Roxanne said.
“Ah,” I said. “That will come in very handy.”
She and Sophie rolled the dough into balls and lined them up on a cookie sheet. Sophie’s were smaller and misshapen. They’d taste the same.
“Any visitors today?” I said, taking a Ballantine out of the refrigerator.
“Not since we’ve been home. Who were you expecting?”
I took a swallow of ale and said, “Nobody in particular.”
That got a sideways glance, and then the cookies were headed for the oven. I opened the door, stepped aside. Said, “I’ll be right back. Have to check something with Clair.”
I brought the beer with me, walked down the path to Clair’s barn. Dusk was deepening and the woods were dark on both sides. Something fluttered in the cherry trees; a roosting winter robin? Then a scurry and the snap of a branch. I stopped. Listened. Peered into the gloom. Felt for the Glock but it wasn’t there.
I continued on, wondering why I was jumpy here on my home turf, which I knew by heart. The answer was easy: The woman who was supposed to arrive, who I didn’t know at all.
With a last listen, I kept walking, my boots crunching in the crusty snow. Forty yards on, I saw the lights in Clair’s barn, smelled smoke from the stove. I kept going, opened the workshop door and stepped in. Music was playing—Vivaldi, Schubert, Beethoven?—and I called out. Clair didn’t answer.
I walked down the passage to Pokey’s stall and he turned and snorted, came over to the gate. I patted his head, and he looked at me with his big wise eyes, snuffled my hand to see if I had a treat. I didn’t, and he turned away. I walked out the way I had come, crossed the dooryard to the house.
The Audi was parked alongside the back door, out of sight of the road.
I climbed the steps, knocked once, and opened the door and stepped in. I smelled roast chicken and heard voices. Walked into the kitchen and saw Marta leaning against the kitchen table, holding a glass of wine. Mary was at the stove, lifting a pan out and up. Clair was quietly setting the table.
“Jack,” Marta said. “I’m glad you came by. I
was afraid I’d miss you.”
She took three steps, gave me a quick Euro cheek rub. There was a muscular leanness to her, something lithe and feral.
“Nice to see you, too,” I said.
“Marta came to get a little bit of civilization,” Mary said. “Sometimes the woods can get to you. Don’t I know.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Even if you come a long way to find them.”
I looked at Marta.
“Maybe I’m losing it, but I just started to get the willies, hearing things,” Marta said. “I know I was driving Louis crazy, tagging after him.”
“Oh, I understand, dear,” Mary said. “These two, off on their adventures, who knows where. We have seventy acres out back and that butts onto somebody else’s hundred. You’re lucky you have Louis’s big dog. I’ve been telling Clair we need another dog, but he’s still grieving for Lady, our dear old beagle, twenty years later.”
Clair smiled. “Which is a respectable mourning period for a good dog,” he said.
He glanced at Marta, who had gone somber, perhaps thinking of Nigel, duct-taped to a chair.
“Jack, are you eating?” Mary said.
“Thanks, but I’m dining with my girls,” I said.
I drank more of the Ballantine, said I really should be going—just wanted to say hi. Marta mustered a disappointed smile as Mary told me to give Sophie a big hug for her and an extra good-night kiss. I turned and stepped outside.
Listened. Heard Clair say something about potatoes. I went down the steps, walked to the Audi, felt the hood. It was cold. Marta had been visiting a while. I walked to the back of the car, reached for the latch. The hatch popped open. With a glance at the door, I lifted the door, leaned in and pulled the cargo lid.
It was unlocked. The compartment was empty.
“If you need a loan, just say so,” Marta said, standing ten feet behind me, in the dooryard.
“I didn’t hear you,” I said.
“Hey, I can see how you’d be curious.”
“Like to know what’s being brought into my backyard.”
She was beside me now, sidling up. There was something physically familiar about her, like she wanted to be close to get you under her control.
“It’s not your backyard,” Marta said.
“Close enough,” I said. “My pony, my daughter, my wife.”
“I think Roxanne and I, we could be friends. Why not you and me?”
“Nothing personal. You’re just a very unknown quantity with a disturbing back story.”
She smiled, exhaled into the air, her breath turning to vapor in the cold air.
“I Googled you,” she said. “It’s a trail of bodies in your stories. So don’t get all sanctimonious on me, Jack McMorrow.”
I turned to look at her. She was pretty and hard, like a jewel.
“Where’s the money now?” I said.
“I put it in the bank. A savings account. Two percent.”
I laughed.
“Because somebody’s coming for it?”
“Because it made me nervous, all that cash. And you know what?”
“What?” I said.
“If I told you where it was, I’d have to kill you.”
I didn’t answer.
“It’s a joke, Jack,” Marta said.
“I know jokes,” I said.
“Tell me one.”
“Knock, knock.”
“Who’s there?”
“On the run from,” I said.
“On the run from who?”
“Russians? Cops? Maybe both. I haven’t figured it out.”
She smiled.
“Good one,” she said. She raised the glass of wine to her lips. I drank from the can of Ballantine. The night was suddenly very quiet, the air chill.
“I’m a survivor, Jack. It’s what I do.”
“Nice work if you can get it.”
“It’s not by choice,” Marta said. “My parents, my uncle. Nigel, the way he turned out to be. I didn’t ask for any of that, but I play the cards I’m given.”
“Evidently,” I said.
She tipped the glass up and drained the wine like it was vodka and we were in her old country. She moved a step closer and our eyes locked.
“I like you, Jack,” she said, “so I’m going to tell you this. This is my big chance, to start my own life. So I get that you don’t like me. Whatever. But don’t get in my way. I guarantee it wouldn’t end well.”
With that she turned and walked away. The real Marta Kovac.
25
k
When I got back to the house, they’d started without me—homemade vegetable soup and a baguette.
“We were hungry,” Sophie said. “You were dawdling.” She lifted her spoon to her mouth and slurped.
“Sophie,” Roxanne said. “That’s bad manners.”
Sophie took a silent sip, swallowed, and said, “Do you think Louis and Marta will get married?”
“Depends on if they fall in love,” I said.
“How will they know?” Sophie said.
“They’ll know if one day they realize there’s nobody else on the entire planet Earth they want to be with,” Roxanne said.
“Like you and Daddy?”
“Yes,” I said.
“But what if the other person doesn’t love you back?”
Then somebody ties you to a chair and cuts you with a knife, I thought, and your girlfriend takes off with the money.
“You find somebody else,” I said.
After dinner was tub time. The cookies were in the oven, and Roxanne called down for me to check them. I did, decided they looked done. I took out the cookie sheet and laid it on top of the stove, took a cookie from the center, and blew on it to help it cool. I poured a glass of milk and went to the study and opened my laptop. I typed in the search box: “Who hunts for international fugitives in the US?”
The list filtered in. At the top: US Marshals Service.
I scrolled and read. But did they hunt for suspects? Persons of interest? Missing witnesses? What was Marta, anyway?
As Sophie clattered down the stairs, I closed the browser. She came into the study in her zebra-print pajamas and said, “How are they?”
I took a bite.
“Delicious. Best ever.”
She said, “Don’t eat any more.” Ran to the kitchen, where she was rummaging through the drawer of bags and wrappers when Roxanne came down to help. The cookies went on a plate, two saved out. Sophie ate hers with milk, too, said she was going upstairs to read her book. Pippi Longstocking.
I had a smart daughter. Took after her mother.
After five minutes, Roxanne came into the study with her rationed cookie and a mug of coffee for her, tea for me. She put the mug down on the edge of my desk and sat down on the couch. Taking a bite, she sipped the coffee and chewed.
“Marta is at the Varneys’,” I said. “She said Louis’s place was giving her the willies. The woods, the dark.”
“The dark house and dark Louis,” Roxanne said.
She took a bite of cookie, took another sip of coffee. There was melted chocolate on her lip.
“Where’s he?” she said.
“At the compound? He’s not there. And the money isn’t in her car.”
“Where do you think she put it?”
“Told me she put it in the bank. But hidden in the woods would be my guess.Where she can get it fast.”
Roxanne sipped and then said, “Does that mean she thinks somebody is coming for it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She told me she’s a survivor, that this is her big chance for a new life. She warned me not to get in her way.”
Roxanne finished her cookie, washed it down with coffee.
“Too lat
e,” she said, and she turned and went back upstairs to Sophie.
I went outside and got the Glock from the truck, the magazines, too. I was strapping the holster on when I heard a swoosh of a branch behind me, the thump of falling snow. I whirled, hand on the gun butt. Clair was standing there in the spruces to the side of the dooryard, the bough he’d plucked still swaying.
“We on red alert?” he said.
“More like yellow,” I said.
“Who? The street kids from Riverport?”
“Your houseguest. She bugs me. Something about her.”
“Serious bugging, a Glock forty.”
“Marta’s serious,” I said.
I told her what she’d said about not getting in her way, the money gone from the back of the car. Clair had no comment, so we just stood in the cold, stared up at the sky. The clouds had thinned and Venus was flickering like a candle behind a gauzy curtain.
Still looking up, I said, “You ought to be honest with Louis. His girlfriend is trouble. Have you talked to him?”
“A couple of hours ago.”
“And?”
“He just said she was getting cabin fever.”
“Could have gone to New York or Chicago or LA,” I said. “She has a couple of million bucks.”
Clair didn’t answer. We stood and stared skyward for another minute. Finally he said, in a quiet voice, “You have to remember, he’s a Marine. He’d die for me.”
“And you have to remember, last time she left someplace in a hurry, somebody was taped to a chair with his blood draining out onto the floor.”
Clair took a deep breath, touched the bill of his John Deere hat, and left the way he’d come.
Roxanne was in bed, Sophie in the middle, snoring softly. I crossed the room, put the Glock on the top shelf in the closet. Roxanne watched me over her book, then looked back down. I sat on the edge of the bed, pulled my shirt over my head, unlaced my boots, and took off my jeans and socks. Then I slid under the covers, felt Sophie’s skinny arms, her feet coming to my thighs. I was listening to her breathing when I fell asleep.
I woke up to the tire drum of a passing car, headed east. I looked at my watch. It was 4:08. Early even for the locals.
The regulars began at a little after 4:30. A guy down the road who drove a milk truck, picked his rig up in Albion at 5:00. A couple who worked at the hospital in Riverport. Every other week, three twelves, six to six. A kid who was a welder at Bath Iron Works and drove a big Chevy pickup with loud exhaust, 4:48 every morning. You could set your watch.
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