John Finn

by Vincent McCaffrey

  He paused. I suppose the question for him was how confidential the information was. He understood how I felt about it without being told.

  “I’ll tell you. But you keep it in your hat. Don’t get stupid over it. There’s no reason for you to go telling the wrong people. I’ll tell you if you promise to back off and give me a chance to do my job.” He paused. Maybe he was waiting for me to promise. But I said nothing. I suppose that was a silent acceptance of the terms in any case. He said, “She broke it off back in Texas. It started over again here in Boston. This past summer. He found out she was in Boston when she applied for the job at Carey, Frost and Theil. Mr. Adams’s company apartment was already here. He came looking for her. You might not want to know it, but I think it’s just a matter of his not getting over his feelings for her. And maybe that goes for her too. This all might be your fault, you know. She might have run off just to get away from the two of you.”

  15. Under my hat

  ​I have a couple of things on my mind at that point.

  Detective Wise said, ‘Keep it in your hat.’ My father always said, ‘Keep it under your hat.’ Same thing, I suppose. But I have something in my head that I don’t want there. I was happier before I knew it, and I wasn’t very happy then.

  ​It’s a nice little cap. It’s a Donegal tweed my daughters gave me a while back. Des took it off my head more than once and wore it when we were out in the cold. It was too big for her and gave her the look of an old-time newsboy. She looked damn good in it. I was going to buy her one for Christmas.

  ​I figured the thing for me to do now was try and get all of this out of my head, but I didn’t know how. I tried going down to the Historical Society for that. I hadn’t been there since I’d gone to work for Connie because it wasn’t as convenient now that I didn’t work in the Pru anymore, but it was time to get back to it. I had to track down Izaak Andrews.

  ​There are plenty of catalogues and indexes of letters in the various libraries. There is the James Stark book, Loyalists of Massachusetts. I had bought an original copy of that for a bargain of sixty bucks over the summer from an on-line dealer in Chicago. There was the Walter Barrell accounting of the removal of the Loyalists from Boston to Halifax in March of 1776. A lot of this stuff is on-line now. You can access the Haldimand papers up in Canada in the comfort of a chair at home. The problem is that beyond the reference to an ‘Izaak Andrews and family,’ with the number of persons listed as ‘6,’ as having been taken aboard at Boston Harbor during General Howe’s evacuation, and the letters Becky had previously found which were written by Andrews’s wife when they were looking for their lost daughter, there wasn’t much to go on.

  ​Soon after April 19, 1775, Izaak Andrews moved into Boston for safety. He had evidently sold his tavern in Menotomy as well as his house and taken up residence in one of the homes at the bottom of Beacon Hill nearer Barton’s Point, on the Charles River side of Boston. Many of these buildings were abandoned by rebels who had left Boston before the siege began. I had found a reference to an ‘Isaak’ Andrews who sold provisions to the British Troops the following summer, but there was no certainty that it was the same man. The next appearance of the name is as one of over a thousand refugees who boarded British ships soon after Washington had taken command of Dorchester Heights.

  ​The destination of the ship in question was Halifax, but there were no records on-line for the tavern-keeper there. This was not surprising. As in the James Stark history, which included key Loyalist biographies, only the notables were accounted for. From Stark and other sources, I gathered that many of the Loyalists soon moved out of this small fishing port in Nova Scotia for the cold comfort of unoccupied land near St. Johns in what would become New Brunswick. There was nothing more about Andrews or his family that I had yet found.

  At the Historical Society, there were copies of a few letters from those who had left, many of them asking for help from friends and family who stayed behind. ‘Mercy’ was a common request. Most of them had lost everything in the sudden turn of fortunes. They had assumed that the British General Howe would stand his ground against the ‘rabble.’ Unfortunately for them, Howe had been outwitted by a Virginia planter and a Boston bookseller—George Washington and Henry Knox. The discouragement in the letters was great.

  I had found once again that tracking people was harder back in the old days before electronic records. Ledgers seldom recorded whole names. There was nothing at all kept by way of a paper trail for most people beyond the purchase and sale of property, births, deaths, and marriages. Izaak Andrews was somewhere at the middle of this ladder. His second wife, Lydie, had no maiden name given. Perhaps she had been born in England. After Izaak left his house in Menotomy, he barely existed. Clearly, his daughter Mary had ranked a few rungs below that for the historical record.

  But this put other thoughts in my head.

  After a few hours at the Historical Society, during one afternoon, I wander down to the same bar where I had gotten the four pigeon feathers back in August. It was just a chance. I had to give it a try.

  I can tell that the bartender recognizes me right off, but he gives me only one look when I sit down. He makes me wait awhile before he moves my way. With his sleeves rolled, he has more hair visible on his arms than on his head. He doesn’t ask what I want. After awhile, he just sort of stands there between me and the television.

  I say, “Tell me something. I could use a Sam Adams. I see you’ve got the Autumn Lager on tap. I’d like that. But tell me, why did you get so upset over those feathers?”

  He doesn’t respond to the question right off. He thinks it over. His face doesn’t show this. It’s in the way he stands there, I think. I know the price of a beer isn’t worth the extra trouble. It’s a matter of whether there is something more there to begin with.

  He finally says, “Why don’t you go someplace else.”

  Now I’m really interested.

  “Because I need to know. You don’t know me. There’s no reason for you to be on my case except for the fact that I wouldn’t give you back those feathers. It was you who gave them to me in the first place. Right? So, something is going on. For me, it’s more than curiosity.”

  He thinks about this. Then he goes over and pulls my beer and sets it down in front of me, but he doesn’t say a word.

  The next time it gets quiet, he comes back.

  He says, “That was my mistake. That’s a fact. She used to come in here every week. I got used to it. I liked talking to her. Something I looked forward to.” He shrugs. “I mean, it’s been what? Three months. Friday nights, I still look for her to come through the door.”

  That fits.

  “You haven’t seen her since?”

  “No. Once. On the street. Around lunch time one day when I was on my way to work. I saw her over in Copley Square. I asked her if she ever got her feathers back. She said yes. She seemed pretty pleased about it. But she never came back in.” He paused to look up the bar at the others faces, and then turned back at me. “You met her. You gave back the feathers, right? So, you know what I’m talking about. She was good to see.”

  Now I could work this around the long way or go head on. I don’t have the patience for the long way. Never did.

  I ask, “What did you talk about when she used to come in?”

  He shrugs again, “This and that.”

  I say, “What? Places? Sports? What?”

  He says, “That’s right. Mostly places. She’d been all over. She talked about Texas. She liked Texas. But I don’t think she was from there. And California. She didn’t like California so much. And she’d spent some time in Europe. I think she wanted to go back.”

  I say, “Back where?”

  I see the crease suddenly cut right across his forehead.

  “Why do you want to know?”

  I was moving too fast. So now it was my turn.

  “Because she’s missing.”

  The crease on his forehead gets deeper. “What d
o you mean, she’s missing? Like disappeared?” He tilts his head at me. “Are you a cop?”

  I look him in the eye to make sure he can see what I’m saying. “No. Just a guy. I got to know her. And now she’s gone. Disappeared. I’m trying to find out what happened.”

  He gives one short laugh at that, without a smile. He says, “Now you know how I feel.”

  I say, “No. Worse. I got real serious over it.” I can see he understands that pretty quick. I say. “Now, I’m worried something has happened to her. I don’t know what. She didn’t show up to work one morning. She didn’t go home. She hasn’t contacted anyone. She hasn’t even called her mother. So, I’m just wondering if you remember her talking about where she wanted to go back to?”

  He thinks about this for a minute. He pulls a beer for someone else. He set up some glasses. Then he comes back.

  “She talked about some place in Portugal. But that wasn’t it. She wanted to go back to a ‘little house.’ Somewhere. Her ‘little house,’ she called it. Some place she’d lived in for a while. She talked about it more than once. But I don’t know where it was.”

  I appreciate the fact that he was not going to be a hardass. But I had to take it one step further.

  “Look. There’s a police detective who’s working on this. His name is Bill Wise. If I send him over, will you tell him about it?”

  He nods at me. “I guess I will. Sure.”

  I tap the bar with the palm of my hand. “Something else. . . ” Now this is the actual reason I had decided to come in. Detective Wise told me he had no way to track her, and this was the only link I could think of. I say, “Did she always pay cash when she came in, or did she ever use a credit card?”

  “Cash.” He pauses to glance at his register. “Except once. On the Fourth of July, she came in before the fireworks. She was on her way over to the Esplanade by herself. I told her I’d close the place up and go with her if she wanted me to. She laughed like I was joking, but I wasn’t. Anyway, she looked in her bag and she didn’t have any cash. She used her card that day. I remember because I saw the name on the card and it wasn’t the same one she’d told me. I asked her about it.”

  “Margaret?”

  “No. The card said Judy.”

  So, the night I was flirting with Rebecca Sawyer on the other side of the Charles River, Desiree had been watching those same fireworks as well.

  “Do you remember the last name?

  He shakes his head at me. “Not right off. But I could find the receipt easily enough.”

  “But you asked her about the first name?”

  “Yeah. She said it was her mother’s name. She didn’t like to use it. I got the impression she didn’t like her mother at all.”

  That sounded right. Only her mother’s name wasn’t Judy. Or at least it wasn’t the name her mother was using now.

  The other thing I started doing was keeping an eye on Mr. Higgins. Not every night. Mostly on my days off and here and there when time permitted.

  He lives on Beacon Hill, up near the top of Pinckney. It’s a condo in one of the ancient bricks that used to be single family homes. He has a sticker and parks his car on the street, but he doesn’t use it often. He can walk to work in under ten minutes.

  This duty would be as boring as sitting in a lobby somewhere checking I.D.s—maybe a little bit colder—if it wasn’t for vicarious entertainment. The street is close and the leaves are almost off the scrawny trees they’ve planted to soften the monotony of continuous brick. Brick walls. Brick sidewalks. And you can see in about a dozen windows on any given night. It is amazing what people will do in front of a window with the curtain open.

  Higgins lives on the third floor. I can see his shadow on the ceiling at times.

  On the nights I couldn’t sleep, I try to keep an eye on him.

  One morning I’m up before dawn and on the road. By the time I reach Connecticut, I’m running out of gas in more ways than one. I asked a well-fed guy at a gas station in New London where the best breakfast is and he points me to a place almost across the street. I figure he eats there because it’s convenient, but I’m wrong. They’ve got biscuits and gravy as good as anything in Louisville, Kentucky. The coffee is as good as my own.

  There is a ferry that goes over to Long Island from New London. I take the first one available and I’m in Greenport before noon.

  Nice place. Not like the Eastern Shore. These are small houses. Most of them still have a little of the modesty that was common a hundred years ago. Hometown USA. The water is only a few blocks away on all sides. I can see myself living in a place like this pretty easily. I could get myself a little boat. Do a little fishing.

  Mrs. Betty Arnold lives in a plain square two-story house, beige with green trim, with a porch side to side at the front. Several chairs are tucked to one end of the porch with the cushions removed for the winter. All of this is surrounded by a low white picket fence. Withered beach-rose bushes are thick behind the white slats of the fence. I could easily imagine the mess of blossoms that would fill the narrow yard in summer. There is a ten-year-old green Buick in the driveway.

  She answers the door as if she were expecting me. She says, “You’re John Finn? Well. I didn’t guess correctly at all from your voice. Every man I’ve ever met with a deep voice is shorter than I am.”

  I could have said something of the same thing for her. I expected someone closer to Des in height. Maybe five six. Betty Arnold was close to six feet tall. She hasn’t colored the gray in her hair. No stoop. Thin. Much too thin by any standard of mine. Not much in the way of a build, but then I figure her to be about 65 or 70 years old. Some curves evaporate with age. That was the way it was with my own mother.

  I’m still standing at the door. All I’d said was “Hello.” We stood that way for maybe half a minute, with me wondering how she’d guessed who I was, but I added, “Is it possible I could talk with you about your daughter?”

  She says, “I suppose, if you’ve come all this way from Boston.” She shrugs a little without moving. “But I can’t tell you as much about Maggie as I should. She left home when she was seventeen, you know. She never lived with me after that, and I’ve only seen her a few times over the years since.”

  She opens the door wider then and smiles uncomfortably. Perhaps it was a matter of letting a stranger into her house.

  To the left was a neat living room of unexceptional furniture. A rather lean-looking sofa. Scandinavian style, I think. To the right is a dining room that smells of lemon-scented polish. Windsor chairs and the like. The windows were curtained in different colors for each room. There was nothing distasteful or garish. She stood blocking the way to the dining room, so I ended up in the other direction.

  The funny thing is, at that first moment, I had the feeling she was flirting with me. More than a feeling. The smile seemed a bit nervous. Embarrassed. Like a girl on a first date. And the very idea of that was absurd. What was I missing?

  She’s a handsome woman, but my guess is, never as pretty as her daughter. She’s smart. That comes out fairly soon. Her diction is precise. She’s neatly dressed in a skirt and blouse and shoes. Most women work, of course, but, half the women you run into these days at home are still in their pajamas and slippers at noon and the TV is rattling in the background. I could hear music coming from a radio. It sounded like Doris Day.

  Early in our conversation she asks if I’d like tea, but I wave it off with an apology for the amount of coffee I drank at the diner before I caught the ferry.

  I ask, “Does your husband work here in Greenport?”

  She nods, “He did. He had a small marina. He used to own the Sea Blue Motel down on the water, but we sold that a few years ago. When he knew he was sick. He died last Spring.”

  That was a fact I should have known. I might have asked Wise about it when I called early that morning to let him know I was going down to Greenport, but he didn’t answer, and I’d only left a message.

  What I knew was th
at Mrs. Arnold had married twice after the death of Des’s father, but I had not written down any other names. I just assumed the last one was named Arnold.

  I say, “I’m sorry. You’ve had your share of tragedy then. Your first husband died unexpectedly as well.”

  She closes her eyes on her words as if weary of the thought and shakes her head.

  “That was the drinking. Not really unexpected either. Maggie’s father was just a cowboy out of his element. He should never have left Texas, and I should never have married him. Charles was an alcoholic. He would have killed himself one way or the other eventually. But poor Patrick,” she shook her head once more on an extra breath, “he was just unlucky. He died of cancer. It took awhile so he had time to take care of his business affairs. I think I even said it to you on the phone: I’ve been unlucky in love.”

  I asked then, “I hope your second husband is still okay.” I think I was trying to be funny; it was not a bright question.

  She actually smiles briefly then. I suppose there is in fact some dark humor to it. She says, “Probably. I have no idea. Stan and I were divorced over fifteen years ago. He was a stupid fellow. The kind of man who’s full of promises but can’t get out of bed in the morning. That was my second mistake. But you’re here to find out about Maggie, aren’t you?”

  I have my cap in my hand because I’d taken it off when she came to the door, and I find myself fidgeting with it as I speak. I don’t usually put it down. I’ve lost too many hats that way. But now I see that she’s watching my hands, so I put it on the seat of the couch beside me. I say, “Sure. Maybe I’m just looking for some motivation that might make her suddenly run away.”

  Mrs. Arnold shakes her head at me this time, “She needed no motivation. She had the will power to do whatever she wanted, whenever she wanted. I’ve often thought, if I was born a few years later and had half of Maggie’s determination, I would have owned the world.”

  I should not be guessing at so much of this. What is the history? This is not in a book or the odd letter or a piece of microfilm. All I have to do is ask. For this I just need to know the right questions.