“Yes. I suppose it must be.”
“I found a couple of the landlords who were around then. I also talked to a cop who used to work the area. And I located a woman who used to be with the group, with all those people in the flop. About eight of them, there were. You know, with others coming and going. I got Felicity Stuart’s employment record from the board of education.”
He pointed to one of the papers he had placed on the table. “She was teaching school while she was living in that place. They finally canned her when she came to class stoned one too many times. She got married—that’s in there, too. I guess you knew. Anyway, man, he was a real creep. His hangup was overthrowing Franco and death to the Fascists, the real Fascists, and all that jive. Up with the Basques. But he was also part of that whole peace-creep, blow-up-America scene. She had just been kinda living on the outer edge of it, but he dragged her right into the toilet. Booze, drugs, throwing shit at cops, worse. He got killed, finally, wasted up in Canada during all that terrorism crap in 1970. She stayed around here for a year, then split for California.”
Showers ran his hand over his eyes, hoping Joyce would not see why.
“Look, man, I’m sorry,” Joyce said. “I could have just laid a few addresses and employment dates on you and asked for a bunch of money to track her down on the Coast. But this was a real bad scene, and I thought you ought to know. Even if I won’t get to go to the Coast now.”
Showers stared at Felicity’s name on the photocopy of the arrest record.
“So do you want to call it off?” Joyce asked.
Showers took another deep breath, then paused. “Mr. Joyce. Do you think we can find her?”
Joyce shrugged. “More than ten years, man.”
He had neglected to call Marie-Claire to tell her he was going to New York. He waved to the waitress for the check. “Mr. Joyce, we are now going to leave here and have dinner at my favorite restaurant in New York, the Oak Room at the Plaza. Then I am going to book rooms for us for the night. After that, I am going to obtain a large bottle of Scotch and go to my room and get very drunk. You may do what you want, but be prepared to leave very early in the morning.”
“Do you want to go back to Washington?”
“No. We’re going to rent a car and drive up to Westchester, very early in the morning.”
“But, Mr. Showers, she’s not there. She went to California.”
Showers smiled, at an irony Joyce doubtless missed, at a truth.
“Does this mean you want me to stay on the case?”
“That, Mr. Joyce, is what I want to go to Westchester to decide.”
To Joyce’s amazement, Showers meant what he had said. He awakened Joyce with a call at 5:00 A.M. At 5:30 A.M., he was at the hotel’s side entrance, where the doorman had the rental car Showers had ordered, a Mercedes-Benz sedan. At 6:16 A.M., by Joyce’s watch, they came off Interstate 684, pulling to a stop before a green highway sign indicating a town called Bedford to the east and Mount Kisco to the west. It had been one of the wildest automobile rides Joyce had ever taken. Showers explained that he had recently gone through a State Department antiterrorist driving course. The skill showed, though he had obviously been drinking late into the night, and was drinking again, pouring small amounts of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch into a plastic cup he kept on the transmission console and sipping from it casually, no matter what the speed.
He turned left toward Mount Kisco, through a rich countryside of rolling wooded hills and huge old white houses with outbuildings and vast lawns. The greenery was as lush as a tropical rain forest, but for the massive granite boulders and rock outcroppings, almost reminding Joyce of Vietnam. Yet this was white American rich folks’ country, Dennis Showers’ home turf. Joyce felt very uncomfortable.
“You’ve had nothing to drink,” Showers said. “Please. There’s another cup in the glove compartment.”
There was more than a cup. There was another bottle.
“I don’t want to spend the rest of the day in some high-class drunk tank.”
“No, no. Don’t worry about that. No one will bother us this early in the morning. If they do, I know back roads the police don’t even know about. At least they didn’t when I was growing up here.”
Joyce impulsively filled the other cup, a little sloppily. If he was going to have to deal with this weird scene, he might as well get a little weird himself. “You still haven’t explained why we’re here so damn early.”
“Yes I did. I said it was because no people would be about.”
“Right. To watch us drink.”
“It doesn’t change much up here, Mr. Joyce,” Showers said, taking another sip of whiskey as they slowed at the outskirts of Mount Kisco. “I was last here five years ago, when my mother suffered a stroke. Nothing had changed much from the 1950s, don’t you know. Some new shopping centers. A few more houses. The interstate we drove up on. Otherwise, I found it exactly the same, just as it is now.”
They followed a business street downhill past a few bright modern store buildings and a number of tired old ones.
“That first night back in Braddock Wells, after leaving my mother in the hospital, I walked around the village green, all by myself. It was winter, and very late at night, very cold and dark. Very still. My footsteps were quite loud. I remember that. I walked slowly around the green, drinking whiskey like this, looking at all the house windows. There were no lights on anywhere. Just the streetlamps. White houses and black windows. The snow and houses were white. The roads and the trees and the windows and the sky were black.”
Joyce was going to enjoy telling Lucianne about this one. He took a big mouthful of Scotch.
“I kept looking at all the windows, thinking about all the people I knew who had lived in those houses, and how so many of them were gone. So many of them dead, as I knew my mother might soon be dead. But the houses were exactly as they had always been. The house I grew up in was built in 1806, Mr. Joyce. The Braddock Wells courthouse was built in 1787. The cemetery has been there since 1681. The names on some of the tombstones have been worn smooth. Some of those people, no one knows who they were. They might just as well have never existed.”
Joyce had grown up in a small brick house in East Baltimore that his mother had said had been built during the Civil War. That had been very impressive to Joyce, not because of the years but because the Civil War had been such a good thing—all those white folks getting themselves killed for the sake of black folks. The only time that had ever happened in America.
“We make a mistake to treat time as a continuum,” Showers said, turning left into a side street that led uphill. “Time is important to houses. It ought to be irrelevant to us. The delightful moment in 1959 ought to be still delightful. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Joyce?”
“Nope.”
“Mr. Joyce, I wanted to come here this early in the morning because, with no one about, it would be the same. It might as well be 1959. Felicity could still be up here, walking down the street.”
But she won’t be, Joyce thought, and if she were, man, you wouldn’t like what you saw. He was beginning to feel a little guilty about taking this man’s money.
Showers came to a stop at the top of the hill, by an old, dark-brick school building. Its lower windows were boarded up. Joyce thought of East Baltimore.
“This is Mount Kisco High School, or was,” he said. “We used to come here when my high school played them in basketball games. Felicity was a cheerleader. One night, we slipped away and went down to the basement. We … well, I have a very romantic memory from this place.”
He lifted his cup in toast to the weary old empty building, then drove on.
“How come you didn’t go to private school?” Joyce said.
“You mean prep school. Most of the kids in Braddock Wells went to prep school. It’s a great class divider, prep school. I went to private school when I was very young, but not when it counted. My father made a lot of money, Mr. Joyce, but he spent a lot more
than he made. And there wasn’t much left for things like prep school. We drove Cadillacs and Lincolns, but we owed money on them. We had a three-story house and thirty-five acres, but we rented it. In the end, there wasn’t money for college. I only have two years of college.”
Joyce’s mother had worked two jobs so he could go to law school.
They drove on through the rest of Mount Kisco. As they went by the railroad station, they passed a police car, which made a U-turn and began to follow them.
“We got John Law,” Joyce said, lowering his plastic cup.
“It’s because of you. There still aren’t many black people up in this part of Westchester. But don’t worry. He’ll drop off once we get out of town.”
They passed a small traffic circle with a statue of an Indian in it, and then were free of the town, heading north. As Showers promised, the police car turned back. The road remained empty for several miles until they came up behind a farmer’s pickup truck, which Showers swiftly passed. Joyce looked back as it receded in the distance. There was a blue car behind the truck, but it was not a police vehicle, and it didn’t pass the truck.
“This is Bedford Hills,” Showers said, as they came into another town. “Next, we’ll come to Katonah and then Braddock Heights. A few miles east of there is Braddock Wells.”
“Where we’ll do what?”
“Decide, Mr. Joyce, decide. I’m wallowing in my past, Mr. Joyce. I’m trying to reconcile it with my present. I want to see if I can bring them together, if I want to bring them together. Have some more whiskey, Mr. Joyce.”
He proceeded to carry on like a tour bus driver, pointing out the houses of friends, places where funny things had happened, places where not so funny things had happened. Showers slowed once to indicate a roadside ditch where a girl had been found murdered. There wasn’t a stone wall, crossroads, house, or old tree that wasn’t memorable or significant to the man, and every time he insisted upon explaining why. Finally, Joyce realized that Showers was only talking to himself, and that he didn’t have to participate. All he had to do was drink, and hope that Showers didn’t run them up the side of some memorable tree. He wasn’t feeling guilty any more about taking the man’s money.
At length, descending a hill by twisting curves, they came along the boundary of a big horse farm and, after that, swept into the quiet, empty village that was Braddock Wells. Except for a brick building housing a movie theater, restaurant, and a few shops and apartments, it was a picture-perfect little town of historic-looking white buildings and old white houses set around an oval green, a colonial replica like Williamsburg, only, as Showers said, everything was original.
Showers let the car roll slowly along past the closed shops, then abruptly stopped.
“There’s the last place I saw Felicity Stuart,” he said. “There, by the old courthouse. It was in 1961.”
Joyce remembered the girl in the photograph, Bermuda shorts and sweater, smiling on a lawn. Certainly nice, but nothing to warrant all this. Maybe it was just the Scotch, but, amazingly, Showers didn’t seem drunk. Just weird.
They drove on, once around the green, very slowly, then headed east out of town on another road, and off again onto a side road that climbed back into the hills. At a summit, he slowed, as they came to a gray house set off in the trees. He passed one of its driveways and kept going until they reached a second. The Mercedes rolled to a stop in deep gravel. Joyce guessed the house was worth maybe four hundred thousand or more. It was three stories high in the center, with two long one-story wings.
“That was my room, on the end,” Showers said, pouring all but a few lingering drops of whiskey into the cup. “My mother hung on here another year before they made her leave. She rented a little cottage near the village.”
Joyce thought Showers was going to toss the empty bottle onto the lawn. Instead, very, very slowly, he turned the car and began driving back to Braddock Wells. He made only one other stop. At a stone bridge just before they reached the highway, he left the car in the middle of the road and set the empty bottle carefully on the stonework.
“It’s a monument,” he said. “A monument to me.”
From that point on, there was no more slow driving.
“There’s another bottle of scotch in the glove compartment, Mr. Joyce. Break it out. Don’t worry. We’ll go back by way of Cross River and Bedford. There won’t be any police.”
For all the drink and slurred speech, Showers still drove competently, taking the endless curves faster then he should have, faster than Joyce would have even stone cold sober in his Jaguar, but never losing control. A few miles past Cross River, coming south on a Highway 121, as a restaurant flashed by on the right, Showers put the accelerator to the floor.
“We used to have something called the ‘Hundred Mile an Hour Club,’” Showers said. “A select group. As you can see, Mr. Joyce, it’s virtually impossible to get a car up to a hundred miles an hour on these roads. Couple kids were killed trying.”
The trees became a blur; the pounding of the tires on the concrete became an almost continuous sound. The speedometer was over eighty. They were still going around curves, shallow curves.
“You and I are going to do it now, Mr. Joyce,” Showers said, raising his voice above the wind roar. “I first tried this when I was sixteen!”
The road straightened, stretching across a short, flat valley and running straight up a long hill. As they hurtled toward it, Joyce ran through his mind the infinite number of very bad things that could be waiting at the top of that hill: a car pulling out of a driveway, a small child on a bicycle, a large dog. Even a rock in the wrong place could kill them at that speed.
“Ninety miles an hour, Mr. Joyce!”
Joyce couldn’t handle the forward view a second longer. He turned in his seat. A car was following them, far behind them, but keeping pace, traveling at the same ridiculous speed.
“There’s someone behind us!” he said. “It could be a cop!”
“One hundred miles an hour, Mr. Joyce!”
They seemed to fly over the top of the hill, the weight of the car completely lifted from the wheels, the tires barely skimming over the pavement. Joyce sang a thousand happy hymns to himself to find the roadway on the other side empty.
The other car had vanished behind them, kept from view by the hill. The middle-aged Showers, acting the sixteen-year-old, suddenly slammed on the brakes, hard, fighting to keep the Mercedes under control, swerving briefly into the empty oncoming lane but preventing a skid, slowing, slowing, then at once sluing the automobile off onto a side road Joyce hadn’t noticed. Again Showers slammed hard on the brakes, lurching to a halt just past a driveway that curved back into the trees. Jamming the car into reverse, he retreated into this sanctuary with screeching, smoking tires just as the other car flashed by, a blue sedan, the grating roar of its engine leaving a lingering echo as it disappeared down the road into Bedford. Joyce was able to catch just a glimpse of the driver, a man in a sports shirt.
Showers began laughing, a little hysterically. He found his plastic cup on the floor and refilled it from the next bottle.
“I said I tried this at sixteen,” he said. “I didn’t make it then. I never made it. This was the first time.”
“That wasn’t a cop.”
“I kept using my father’s Lincoln back then. It was just too damn heavy. It wasn’t my driving, it was the damned car. I once set a land speed record for New York to Boston, you know. Three hours and fifteen minutes. My friend Jack Spencer was with us on that one. Now I’ve finally done this, but no one knows about it. No one but you.”
“And the dude in that car,” Joyce said.
Showers took a deep breath, then relaxed completely, his head falling back against the top of the seat. Birds were calling throughout the trees and the morning sun, still low, had become very bright.
“That blue car,” Joyce said. “It was behind us coming out of Mount Kisco.”
“Yes it was. And in Katonah and Br
addock Heights.” Showers tapped the dashboard with his forefinger. “How fortunate that I was able to rent a Mercedes. Speedometers in American cars these days don’t go beyond eighty-five.”
“That dude’s been following us all morning.”
“Yes, I rather wonder what to make of that,” Showers said.
He snapped open the door and, plastic cup in hand, got out.
“I want you to drive us back to New York, Mr. Joyce. I’m afraid I’m too drunk.”
Joyce swore, emptying his own cup out the open window and shifting across the seat to take the wheel. Showers, moving clumsily, came around to the passenger seat, closing the door too hard behind him. He slouched down, holding his cup between his knees with both hands.
“Go left,” he said. “If you’re worried about that car, we can take a back way out of Bedford. There’s a road into Connecticut. We’ll take the Merritt Parkway to La Guardia and leave the car there.”
Driving cautiously at first, then increasing his speed as he quickly became used to the Mercedes’ sure, smooth handling, Joyce got them the hell out of upper Westchester County, New York, a place from which he was oh so happy to be gone. Once on the Parkway, he turned on the radio, searching for a jazz station.
“I want you to go to California, Mr. Joyce,” said Showers, closing his eyes. “I want you to find Felicity Stuart. I’ll pay whatever it costs.”
9
Akvik had taken careful note of the passage of the days. Sure now that it was the appointed day and close to the appointed hour, he left his concrete hut, crossed the wide space that amounted to the main street of his village, and passed beyond to cross the field of boggy tundra until he reached the rock of the headland that sheltered the village harbor. Climbing to the top, he stood still a long moment, shading his trained eyes against the summer sun as he searched the silvery watery horizon for the promised silhouette.
It was there. The submarine was there. As promised; where promised. Excited, he skipped and clambered down the stony slope, running across the spongy tundra and shouting as he reentered the village, motioning to two men standing in the street to follow him to the landing.
Northern Exposure Page 10