by April Smith
“That would be difficult,” I say. “He’s riding a horse.”
Because there, in the heaviest torpor of the day, when stubborn fever becalms the air and the stringed vibration of the bees hits an even riper pitch, Sterling McCord is riding slowly down the sun-soaked lane on a bay, leading the white foal on a halter rope.
It’s the bay mare who rescued me, loaded up with the same silver-encrusted western saddle, but this time walking leisurely at loose rein with head low, flicking her ears at the flies. McCord’s posture is identical to when they were at full gallop, head tipped forward and shoulders relaxed, as if he is half-asleep.
He is wearing the high red-tooled boots and spurs, jeans, a clean white shirt, and the Stetson with the vintage cowboy crease. As the lazy clomping of horseshoes passes below me, I can see the tight copper bracelet on one strong wrist, a braided leather one on the other, and I have a clean downward angle of vision on the squarish hands with wide finger pads resting on the horn of the saddle—manly and competent hands you would entrust to complete the mission.
Whatever the mission might be.
I stay silent until he passes. Does he know without looking that I am here—the way Dick Stone knew when I first arrived?
“There’s something about this guy,” I tell Donnato. “He’s not who he appears to be.”
“What name does he use?”
“Sterling McCord.”
“We’ll check him out.”
I cannot tell if my partner of twelve years is telling the truth.
That is what I mean by paranoid.
Megan and Sara have gathered around the horseman in the shaded driveway.
“Look at that sweet thing,” Megan says, crooning over the foal. “You’re our new baby.”
McCord tips his hat. “Good afternoon, ladies.”
His eyes remain hidden in the shadow of the brim, but his skin seems to have acquired a darker tan, with deeper leathery lines, and the blond sideburns have grown long and rough. It occurs to me that in his outdoor life, he, too, is a creature of transforming elements, same as the eroding granite outcrop; unlike city folks, he wouldn’t try to put the brakes on aging, and he wears it well. He’s dropped the reins and the horse dozes beneath him. I like this touch: a knife in a leather sheath buckled to his thigh.
The foal has gained weight. Its sculpted head is up and alert, the bristly mane long enough to flop over, and the small pinkish hooves strike the dirt inquisitively. But the dark violet eyes are empty as mirrors.
“Does he have a name?” Megan asks.
“Geronimo.”
“You are cute as the dickens!” she tells the foal, and actually kisses it on the nose.
“Sara,” McCord calls from the saddle, “look at your boy.”
“He’s not mine.”
She is wearing skintight jeans that hit below her slack hipbones, and a gingham top somewhere between a bra and a bib.
The foal’s dark muzzle has shrunk to normal size, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, which it explores with eager lips.
“Sorry, big guy.” I laugh. “I don’t have anything for you.”
“He wants to suck,” Megan explains plaintively.
McCord’s attention is still on Sara. “What do you think?”
“He looks all right.”
“He is all right,” McCord replies, cheery.
Megan: “Will he ever get his sight back?”
“Afraid not, Miss Tewksbury. The vet says it’s difficult to determine exactly the cause of the blindness, but the corneas are permanently scarred.”
“Poor sweetheart.”
“He’ll do fine with the right care. You’d have to keep his environment consistent, in a corral where he always knows where’s his water and feed. But his other senses will become more accurate, and he’ll be able to get around, maybe as a companion animal to another horse.”
“Like Sirocco?” Megan gazes up at McCord with the expectant look of a wife who really wants that washing machine.
“That’s what I was thinking. How long since she lost her baby?”
“She had that accident on the track and came to us…maybe three months ago?”
“Then she could still lactate.”
“Really? Nurse Geronimo?”
“It’s possible.”
He slides off his horse.
“So, Sara, do you like him?” he asks.
She shrugs. “He’s cute.”
“Like to keep him?”
“Keep him?”
“Look after him awhile, you and Sirocco, help him along. He needs a lot of TLC, and Dave Owens’s barn is full.”
Sara blushes. Her shoulders collapse with doubt. “Me?”
“You’re the one who found him. In my book, that gives you claim.”
McCord offers the rope.
Lifelong skepticism does not allow me to believe that Sterling McCord has traveled down the road this dusty summer afternoon simply to give Sara Campbell exactly what she needs, but as he patiently holds the lead out to her, whatever dark possibilities I conjure just don’t seem to hold. Whether McCord is an FBI agent on my tail or a cowboy doing a job, he is offering the girl what has been missing from her life.
Something to love.
Sara reaches out and her fingers close around the rope. The blind foal’s head comes up to her chest and his spindly legs match hers. She tentatively strokes his neck and fingers the fluff hanging off his chin.
“Let’s take him to Sirocco,” Megan says hopefully. “See if she’ll nurse.”
We walk in procession toward the barn—McCord leading his horse, Sara and the herky-jerky foal, Megan and I—passing the white cat, the ducks, and the wire cage, now empty.
Someone has stolen all the rabbits.
“We’re having a party,” Megan tells McCord. “A midsummer festival. Please come. I’d like to buy you a drink for taking care of Geronimo.”
“Not necessary but much appreciated. Especially if this lovely young lady’s gonna be there.”
He is talking about Sara.
Sirocco is standing placidly in the pasture when Megan leads the foal inside. She unsnaps the lead rope and withdraws, latching the gate. They approach and sniff each other. Sirocco dodges away. The baby chases her, and she wheels in the dust. He follows, absolutely desperate, but she won’t let him near, making little nips and kicks. Abruptly, when she’s ready, she just stops, and after a moment, he finds the teats.
Megan, leaning on the fence, quietly thumbs the tears from her eyes.
The gun that killed Sergeant Mackee is a single-shot bolt-action sniper rifle about fifty inches long, weighing between fourteen and eighteen pounds. Not the kind of thing you can hide in a sugar bowl.
Every day, with quiet urgency, I search another part of the house. Every night, lying in bed, I perform a mental inventory of the rooms, noting anything missing or out of place. I visualize the porch. Grasses have grown tall around the rusted sink. Thick stands of lavender and wild daisies remain unbroken around the crawl space underneath the steps, and the basement windows show an untouched glaze of dust, meaning nobody’s been creeping around down there, hiding weapons. The narrow windows at ground level look in on Dick Stone’s workshop, which is always locked, and I have never rubbed the dirt away to spy inside. Stone is likely checking his own inventory every day.
The front hall is a staging area of floating possessions—jackets, umbrellas, junk mail, Slammer’s skateboard—but there is also a closet jammed with vacuum cleaner parts, tennis rackets, rain gear, and brooms, at the back of which is a latched door. Hurried inspection with a flashlight reveals the door and latch have been thickly painted over. Probably leads to a crawl space beneath the stairs.
The kitchen, to the left of the entryway, is a public space that would be hard to use for hiding contraband. The living room is a challenge. There are so many collections of tiny things, it is a perplexing game of Memory to place every piece of Depression glassware and each china ca
t. I have moved them just to see if Megan will move them back. She does.
In the living room, the TV is always playing, even in the daytime semi-darkness. At night, we assemble on the caved-in couch grooved with body imprints, like any other cobbled-together American family, placing our heels on the coffee table precisely in the spaces between the old wine bottles and bowls of dried-up guacamole, watching cop shows or a movie from Dick Stone’s collection of tapes. He has become obsessed with Apocalypse Now.
Also, he has begun to get in shape.
Stone is jogging ten miles in the mornings, a major change, which gets my attention. Offenders have rituals. They will alter their looks, get high, call Mom, or rob a store before they’re ready to go out and execute a major crime.
Like the Big One.
Along with a dedicated running schedule, he has been screening this movie regularly—once or twice a week—all of us saying the dialogue out loud like a gospel choir. Stone is as fussy about his tapes as Megan is about the candy dishes—he always keeps Apocalypse Now on the fourth bookshelf, at eye level, between The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver.
One day, I noticed his favorite cassette was missing. It stayed missing for seventy-two hours; then it was back in the same place. Had he lent it? Is he playing with my head?
The sewing room is a drafty screened-in porch with tilting bamboo shades and bolts of discount cloth infested with earwigs. I call it the “Room of Unfinished Dreams.” An old Singer sewing machine is the island in the storm, black lace panties caught in its teeth, as Sara comes in here to sew her samples of lingerie—original designs that she claims she’ll sell one day to big department stores. There’s a dressing table with a big round mirror, drawers stuffed with Megan’s bags of yarn. The white cat likes the rattan love seat in the morning sun.
Lying in bed at night, I float inside my head like a dreamer to the upper limits of the sewing room, recollecting that the dropped ceiling tile showed no signs of removal (for illicit storage in the space above); then my inner eye travels up the stairs, past the German wall clock, to Stone and Megan’s bedroom, and the mondo mess of pills and herbal remedies in the master bath—including the heavy-duty antipsychotics Mellaril and Haldol, and benzodiazepines for anxiety, Ativan and Librium. It would be excellent to trace the doctor who wrote the prescriptions, but they are all generic, from Mexico. Megan, who did a stint as an aide in a psychiatric facility, has apparently been playing amateur shrink with Dick Stone’s brain.
Every day, I inspect Slammer’s room, the outbuildings, and of course the attic, and in every night’s review so far, this aging Victorian dame of a farmhouse has convinced me that she has herself in order—nothing wanton, nothing to hide.
The only place I have yet to search is Dick Stone’s locked workshop.
I was in there only once, on the pretext of going down to the basement to get laundry detergent.
Megan had been working on her quilt. A Christian station played on the radio. Megan likes that because it reminds her of her childhood. She was the eldest of five, growing up in an austere minister’s home in snowy northern Michigan. All the other siblings took up charitable work. One of her sisters was killed on a mission to Africa, but Megan doesn’t say how.
The large frame that holds the quilt barely leaves enough space for a couple of hanging bicycles and metal shelves with household supplies—canned food and bleach. In an L-shaped room beyond, they have installed an industrial stove for the seasonal chore of making hazelnut brittle.
It was damp in the basement and Megan was wearing a plum red shawl over an Indian blouse with fringes at the hem, a peaceful look on her face as she sewed patches on the quilt. I noticed a glass and half-empty bottle of wine on the floor. The door to Stone’s shop was open, yellow light spilling out. It was almost romantic to imagine them on winter nights, pursuing their rustic hobbies side by side.
I filled the canister from a bin of laundry detergent, then wandered over to the woodworking shop, where Stone was applying lacquer to a cross section of tree trunk perched on a pair of sawhorses.
“What are you making?”
“A table.”
“What kind of wood is that?”
“Douglas fir.”
“It looks like marble.”
Quickly, I advanced through the doorway, sucking in the details like an alien invader: Table saw. Drill press. High window at ground level. Built-in cabinets, home-improvement clutter.
“Thirty coats of varnish. That’s how I get it to look like marble.”
Jars, tiny drawers of screws and nails; pliers, drills, drill bits, chisels. A pair of steel storage cabinets with a padlock.
“The grain is beautiful. How do you know where to cut it?”
“You have to read the wood.” He dragged a blackened fingertip across the polished slab. “See that darkness? That’s when the tree began to die.”
I saw a black cloud, like a squirt of ink, spreading V-like through the amber rings of growth.
“That’s death. You’re looking at it,” Dick Stone said.
He keeps the guns in the locked cabinets.
At that moment, in the workshop fragrant with cedar dust and hard work, he could almost pass for exactly what he seemed: a hazelnut farmer with eager, skilled hands, awed by the inevitability of nature.
But then I saw the videocassette of Apocalypse Now on the workbench. I was certain I had just seen it, moments before, upstairs.
“You must really like that video to have two copies.”
Dick Stone said briefly, “It’s the greatest movie ever made.”
I cannot get into the workshop again until one rare morning when they’ve all gone into town and Dick Stone has left for a run. I wait fifteen minutes after he’s gone, and then hustle down the basement steps, clutching the set of lock picks delivered earlier by an FBI agent posing as a U.S. postal worker. In undercover school at Quantico, we ran time tests for defeating dead bolts; Stone’s workout has handed me at least an hour.
It takes only five minutes to blow Operation Wildcat sky-high.
Twenty-three
Inserting a tension wrench into the keyhole of the cylinder and then alternating several picks, I finally find the one with the right angle to lift each pin. The plug rotates and the lock opens.
The door to Dick Stone’s woodshop swings wide. I hesitate, as if someone is waiting in ambush. Sterling McCord, maybe. He has a way of appearing when you least expect him. But there is nothing. Dead air. I pull out a penlight and aim it at the floor.
As the light passes the legs of the sawhorse that holds the fir table, a wastebasket flips, and brown mice scatter. The scent of orange peel rises from the garbage. I right the wastebasket. My heart is racing and I have to pee. The smell of resin and lacquer in the enclosed space is dizzying.
I seriously hope there are no more mice.
The cone of light walks up the tall steel cabinet and stops at the padlock that secures the handles. This one is a common tumbler lock, using wafers instead of pins, and can be picked the same way. I’m getting good at this. The tumbler clicks and the hasp slides open.
Alone at the bottom of the quiet house, I insert the penlight between my teeth and open the cabinet doors, anxious to reveal Stone’s secret arsenal—expecting to find the sniper rifle, automatic weapons, Tovex explosives.
Instead, I am looking at a four-split television monitor.
In each corner of the screen is a different view of the empty house: living room, kitchen, sewing room, stairs.
It is an arsenal all right: a sophisticated wireless surveillance system, including a high-sensitivity receiver, whip antenna, and down converter.
Before I can begin to think of a way to cover up this horrendous breach of Stone’s security system, I notice the cassette of Apocalypse Now is resting on the upper shelf of the cabinet. I know he loves the movie, but why hide it in here?
The moment I pick it up, the quadrants on the TV monitor flip to four different views—driveway, bathroo
m, attic, inside the cabinet—and there is Special Agent Ana Grey, staring into the camera like a bonehead tourist. As I move the cassette, my image on the split screen moves accordingly.
Stone has hidden a tiny camera in the spine of Apocalypse Now. He kept the camera aimed from the shelf in the living room, but he must have switched it for the real videotape when I noticed there were two. He has the whole place under constant surveillance. I can see from the monitor there is even a covert camera inside the German wall clock, keeping watch on who’s going up the stairs. And who’s been searching the house.
The apocalypse is looking at me now, through the pinhole of a live camera, less than an eighth of an inch in diameter.
My nose, on the screen, is as big as the snout of a moose.
That night at 1:00 a.m., a flashlight shines in my face.
“Get up,” says Stone.
I am already up, speed-dialing a thousand explanations. I have avoided him all day.
“You broke into my shop.”
“What are you talking about?”
I swing out of bed, but he pushes me down, his hand squarely on my chest.
“You broke into my workroom and my personal cabinets.”
“Why would I do that? It’s the dumbest thing in the world.”
“It’s all on tape, Darcy.”
I say nothing.
Neither affirm nor deny.
“Yeah.” He nods, reading my face. “That’s right. You’re toast.”
I notice Sara is not in her bed. He has me alone. He has set the stage for—what?
“All right!” I shout, and surprise him by lunging for the wall switch, defiantly flicking on the light, making him squint.
“I did break into your shop, and I’ll tell you why I—”
“Is that so?”
He sits beside me and the mattress sinks. Again, that scent of male, and the threat of two hundred pounds of leaned-out muscle and bone. He’s wearing a loose rayon shirt and jeans, long, hairy toes blackened with sawdust gripping the shower thongs that pass for slippers. He must have just come from the basement, checking his daily surveillance tapes.
“Everything around this place is a huge big secret,” I rant on. “I’ve been here weeks, and you still don’t trust me? Now I find out you’re spying on us? Your own people, who live in your house?”