“Coyne,” he muttered. “Coyne…” Then he suddenly grinned. “Hope’s boy, right?”
“Right.” I held out my hand.
He looked at it, then grabbed it and gave it a quick, limp shake. “Last time I saw you, you were just a kid,” he said. “So what brings you back to this neck of the woods?”
“Uncle Moze is in the hospital.”
Jake nodded. “I heard something about an ambulance. Figured I’d drop by, see what was up.”
“He’s in the hospital. Maine Medical in Portland. Had a heart attack.”
“He gonna be all right?”
“I don’t know.”
“Heart attack,” he muttered. “That’s what the old coot gets for haulin’ pots at his age.”
“He’d probably appreciate it if you paid him a visit,” I said.
“Doubt it,” said Jake.
“Uncle Jake,” I said, “do you know anything about Cassie?”
“Cassandra? Mary’s girl?”
I nodded.
“Ain’t seen her for years,” he said. “Since she was in high school. Couldn’t tell you what become of her.”
“I thought maybe Uncle Moze might’ve mentioned something about her to you.”
“To me?” He shook his head. “Not likely. Me and Moses, we don’t mention much of anything to each other no more.”
“Why not? What happened?”
He looked at me. “That’s none of your damn business.”
“Your brother came very close to dying this morning,” I said. “Maybe it’s time to bury the hatchet, before it’s too late.”
“You don’t know nothing,” he said.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t. What about your sister? Aunt Faith? Are you talking to her?”
“Not much.”
“Do you know how to reach her?”
He nodded. “She’s down there in Rhode Island with her new husband. Fellow named Thurlow.”
“Where in Rhode Island?”
“Tiverton, I believe. They got a place on the water.”
“Have you been there?”
“Ain’t been invited.”
“But you’ve talked to her.”
“Couple times.”
“You should tell her about Uncle Moze.”
“I should, huh?”
“Somebody should. She’d want to know, don’t you think?”
He shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m trying to catch up with Cassie. If you hear anything or think of anything, let me know, will you?”
“What makes you think I’d know something about her?”
I flapped my hand. “I don’t know. But if you do…”
“Sure. Why not?”
I gave him one of my cards. “My numbers are there.”
He looked at it, then looked at me. “Lawyer, huh?”
I nodded.
“Your old man was a lawyer. Hope thought she was hot shit, marrying a lawyer.”
“Did she?”
“Drivin’ around in that big Caddy. Him, all full of himself.”
“They were my parents,” I said. “They’re both dead now.”
“Meaning I ain’t supposed to say the truth about them?”
“What’s the truth, Uncle Jake? That you were jealous of them, of their success?”
“Nothin’ to be jealous of,” he said. “Me, I own my own company. I’m doin’ good. I got plenty of money. Did it all on my own, too. I ain’t jealous of nobody.”
“Okay,” I said. “Whatever.” I looked at my watch, then held out my hand. “I’ve got to head home. It was good to see you again, Uncle Jake.”
He shook my hand quickly. “Sure. You, too.”
“You’ll talk to Aunt Faith?”
“Don’t worry about her,” he said.
“Go visit Moses,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, “we’ll see about that.” He turned and started back to his car.
“Hey, Uncle,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me.
“I just figured out who you remind me of.”
“Yeah? Who’s that?”
“Gram.”
“Huh?”
“My grandmother. Your mother. You look like the way I remember her.”
He frowned and shook his head.
“Except,” I said, “she was a lot more pleasant.”
Uncle Jake Crandall rolled his eyes, then got into his red Buick and backed out of Moze’s driveway.
As I drove home, I kept thinking about Cassie. Two days ago Uncle Moze had asked me to see if I could put him back in touch with her. I didn’t know it at the time, but his sudden urgency was the result of learning that he had an aortic aneurysm, that he could die any minute. That was a good reason to want desperately to reconcile with his daughter.
Now he’d been punched in the chest and had a heart attack, and finding Cassie struck me as urgent, too.
Sergeant Charlene Staples thought Cassie was the one who’d punched him. Broke into his house at night and punched him and smashed all the pictures of her he kept on top of his television console.
Cassie, full of rage? Cassie, bubbling with hatred for the man whom she knew as her father, who brought her up, who fed her and clothed her, who taught her about the sea?
Maybe. Moze, in his druggy stupor, said she was the one who punched him.
But I wasn’t prepared to believe it.
The next morning, Tuesday, a little after nine, I called Maine Medical in Portland, got connected to the ICU, told the nurse I was Moses Crandall’s nephew, the one who’d visited him yesterday, and I wanted to know how he was doing.
“Stable,” she said.
“Can you tell me any more than that?” I said.
“Not really. He’s unchanged.”
“Still basically unconscious, all drugged up?”
“Basically.”
“You are not exactly brimming with information,” I said.
“I’m telling you everything I know, sir,” she said. “Mr. Crandall is resting comfortably. He is taking some nourishment intravenously. His vital signs are, um, stable. Like I said.”
“Can you tell me if he’s had any visitors?”
“I could tell you, yes.”
I sighed. “Okay. Will you tell me, please?”
“Since you were here, Mr. Coyne, his only visitor was Sergeant Charlene Staples of the Moulton police.”
“No others.”
“No.”
After I hung up from that informative call, I called Julie at the office.
“How’s your uncle?” was the first thing she said.
“Stable, quote unquote. Look, I’ve got to do a few things this morning. What’ve we got?”
“The Sanborn mediation’s at two,” she said. “Want me to reschedule.”
“No, no. I’ll be there.”
“Do what you have to do,” she said. “I hope your uncle’s going to be okay.”
I told Henry to guard the house, then walked down to the parking garage on Charles Street and fetched my car. I drove out to Madison, and it was a little after ten when I turned onto Church Street. It was a drizzly summer morning, and the trees that lined the narrow street arched overhead. They hung heavy with moisture and formed a dripping green tunnel. I drove slowly past the school on the right and then Howard Litchfield’s house on the left, and when Hurley’s house came into sight, I saw, as I’d expected, that the Lexus SUV was gone. So were the Dodge pickup and the Chevy with the carseat.
Cassie’s red Saab was still there, exactly where it had been two days earlier.
Hurley, I assumed, had driven to his dental office to inflict pain and poverty upon his patients. His son and daughter and grandchild had apparently returned to wherever they lived.
If Cassie had been away for the weekend, she’d be back now. I had no particular expectation that Hurley would give her my message, but even if he had, it wasn’t a sure bet that she’d bother retur
ning my call.
I didn’t want to leave a telephone message with Hurley about Uncle Moze being in the hospital. I wanted to tell Cassie about it face-to-face, just the two of us.
If she was home now, she was home alone.
I pulled in beside the Saab. The soft rain dripping off the trees streaked the yellow pollen on the red car.
I sat there for a minute, looking for some sign of life from inside the house. When I saw none, I got out, walked up to the front door, and rang the bell.
I heard it chime hollowly inside. After a couple of minutes I tried again.
Nobody home.
I stood there at the front door and looked around. I could make out the roofline of Howard Litchfield’s house next door through the screen of maple trees that separated the two properties. A thick stand of hardwoods and evergreens lined the other side of Hurley’s property. Across the street, the soccer fields were mud-puddled and empty of players.
I felt sneaky and tricky and ready for action, the way I used to feel when I was a kid emerging from a darkened movie theater on a Saturday afternoon after a double bill of western gunslinging and World War II combat. Kid Coyne, fastest gun in Durango. Sergeant Coyne, sharpshooting jungle sniper.
I didn’t know about the Madison cops. Maybe if they cruised down Church Street on this Monday morning and saw a strange BMW parked in Hurley’s driveway, they’d stop and investigate. If so, I’d tell them the essential truth. I was Cassie’s cousin, wondering if she was home. That was her car in the driveway, wasn’t it?
I tried the front-door knob. It was locked, of course. I made a slow circuit of the house. There were two side doors, two sets of sliders off the back and side decks, a cellar door, and the garage doors. All were locked.
I shaded my eyes, peeked in several windows, and saw nothing but abstract paintings on the walls and modern furniture on the floors. It didn’t look that comfortable.
I was prepared to slip inside and take my chances with an alarm system if one of the doors was unlocked. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I did want to look. I thought I’d know it when I saw it. Some clue to Cassie’s whereabouts.
If the police came, I figured I could talk my way out of an entering charge.
But I wasn’t about to break in. I was pretty sure I couldn’t talk my way out of both breaking and entering.
I ended up back in the driveway. I walked slowly around the Saab. I saw no red blinking light under the dashboard or any decal on the window indicating that it was equipped with a car alarm, so I tried the door handle. It was unlocked. I guessed folks didn’t bother locking their cars in Madison, where an out-of-towner going the wrong way on Church Street constituted a crime wave.
I pulled open the Saab’s door and slipped into the passenger seat. There was no briefcase, no address book, no folder containing important documents, no homemade audiotapes. Nothing that might tell me about her, tell me where she was.
I did find some plastic CD cases in a pocket on the driver’s side door. Fleetwood Mac, Neil Diamond, Dolly Parton, the Bee Gees. Music from her formative years.
The glove compartment held the registration—the Saab was registered to Cassandra Crandall, not Hurley—and a few road maps. I opened the maps on my lap but saw no circles or routes outlined on them that might’ve struck me as clues to her whereabouts.
In the center console under a purse-sized pack of paper tissues, I found a cell phone. I hoped—and assumed—it was Cassie’s, the one with the full mailbox. I hesitated barely one second before I slipped it into my pocket.
I found nothing else in Cassie’s car. But the cell phone was an excellent start, I thought.
I got out of the Saab and closed the door, and when I turned to get into my own car, I saw Howard Litchfield with his Mutt-and-Jeff dogs standing in the street at the end of the driveway. He was wearing a yellow slicker with the hood over his head. The dogs were sitting patiently on the wet pavement.
Litchfield was looking at me with no expression that I could read—not curiosity, not disapproval, not amusement, not even interest, really.
I lifted my hand to him. He waved at me.
I went out to the end of the driveway. “I’m glad I ran into you,” I said.
“Pretty hard not to,” he said. “Since I retired, this is where I am, what I do, most of the time, rain or shine. Walking my dogs up and down the street.”
I smiled.
“So you’re back looking for Mrs. Hurley, huh?”
“That’s right,” I said. “I hoped I might find her at home this morning.”
“I was thinking about what you said the other day,” he said. He gazed up at the sky for a minute. “My wife was pretty good friends with the, um, the previous Mrs. Hurley. The new one, though, we haven’t really gotten to know her.”
“The previous Mrs. Hurley?”
He nodded. “Ellen was her name. God bless her. She died a few years ago. Lovely, quiet woman. She was sick much of the time. Asthma. That’s what she ended up dying of, I understand. Poor woman had her hands full, raising those two children of his, never mind taking care of him.”
“His children?” I said.
He frowned. “Pardon?”
“You said ‘those two children of his.’ They weren’t hers?”
“No, no,” he said, “that’s right. A boy and a girl. Rebecca and James. They were with his first wife. The one before Ellen. She died, also.”
“I met Rebecca and James,” I said. “They don’t live here with him, do they?”
“No, no. Not anymore. Rebecca, she’s married, has a baby, and James moved out recently. They come to visit now and then.” He looked at me. “You said you were interested in the, um, the third Mrs. Hurley. The present one. She’s your cousin, you said.”
I nodded. “I haven’t seen her in a long time. Heard she’d gotten married and moved to Madison recently, and I thought I’d look her up. That’s all. I happened to be back in the neighborhood this morning, so I thought…”
He arched his eyebrows. “Back in the neighborhood, eh?”
I smiled. “More or less.” I lowered my voice conspiratorially. “It’s very important that I talk with Cassie, Mr. Litchfield. If you have any idea at all…”
He looked up and down the street, then leaned his head toward me. “It’s impossible not to hear the two of them,” he said. “Her, especially.”
“They argue?”
Howard Litchfield rolled his eyes. “She’s got a mouth on her, that one. When they’re going at it, my wife runs into the bathroom, turns on the ceiling fan, and shuts the door. She goes to church, my wife does.”
“What do they argue about?”
He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you. I hear the tone of their voices, the occasional vulgarity out of her, that’s about it.”
“You wouldn’t have picked up anything that might help me to track her down, would you?”
He shrugged. “I’m not one for gossip.”
“Anything at all, Mr. Litchfield,” I said. “It’s really important.”
“Well,” he said, “there was something…”
“Whatever it is,” I said, “it’s strictly between you and me. I promise.”
“This wasn’t anything I overheard, exactly.”
I smiled. “What happened?”
“Well, okay,” he said. “It was two weeks ago last Saturday night, as I recall. Sometime after midnight. We always sleep with the windows open, and I heard voices and car doors opening and closing from next door. They weren’t loud noises, mind you. My wife didn’t even stir. More like voices that didn’t want to be heard, and doors clicked shut, not slammed, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded.
He smiled quickly. “Now, okay, I can’t help it, but I’m interested in things. Call me nosy. My wife does. So I got out of bed and peeked out the window.” He pointed up through the trees toward the roofline of his house, and I could make out the gray sky reflecting off some windows through the fo
liage.
“So you could see what was going on over here?” I said.
“Not clearly. There was a moon, but through the leaves all I could make out were shadows and now and then the movement of a light.”
“A light,” I said. “Like a flashlight?”
He nodded. “Maybe two flashlights. They kept turning them on and off.”
“The shadows,” I said. “They were people?”
“Two of them, I think,” he said. “They were going in and out of the house. They were talking in soft voices. Not whispering exactly. Mumbling. As if they didn’t want to be heard. Not like when the two of them are having one of their yelling contests. At one point it looked like they were lugging something out of the house, and after a minute or so, the vehicle drove away, and then everything was quiet again.”
“Cassie and Hurley?” I said. “Is that who it was?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t think so at the time, for some reason. It was how they seemed to be sneaking around, I guess.”
“You didn’t recognize the people?” I said.
He shook his head. “It was dark. Through the trees. Just shapes.”
“Or their voices?”
“Like I said, they were whispering. I suppose it could’ve been Mr. Hurley and his wife. But I didn’t think so at the time.”
“You said they were lugging something out of the house?”
He nodded. “That’s what it looked like. Something heavy. Took two of ’em to carry it. You could hear them grunting.”
“Could you tell what it was?”
“It was hard to see. I wouldn’t dare make a guess.”
The thought hit me: a dead body. Cassie’s body. Hurley and his son, James, maybe, lugging Cassie’s body out to the car.
Whoa, I thought. Slow down, Coyne.
“These people,” I said. “Their voices? Men, women?”
He shook his head. “Couldn’t tell.”
“What about the vehicle? Did you get a look at it?”
“Not clearly. I just saw the headlights flash on and then it backed out of the driveway.”
“Dr. Hurley drives a Lexus SUV. Cassie drives that Saab. Was it either of them?”
He shrugged. “I really couldn’t tell you.”
“So what do you make out of what you saw, Mr. Litchfield?”
He blew out a breath and shook his head. “Dr. Hurley’s kids visit sometimes. The daughter—Rebecca—she’s over there a lot, especially since she had her baby. At the time I just thought it was them, leaving late, trying to be quiet so as not to wake the neighbors. Which is probably exactly what it was, though it did strike me as”—he looked up at the sky for a moment—“furtive, I guess. Sneaky. I don’t know what to make out of it.” He peered at me. “Now that I think of it, though, I don’t recall seeing or hearing Mrs. Hurley since that night.”
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