by Tinnean
XIII
“MR. VINCENT!” I went on the alert. Something had disturbed my usually unflappable secretary. “You have an urgent message! It was routed through Huntingdon’s New England headquarters.”
That was what was bothering her. It was on the record that I worked for Huntingdon. Anyone trying to reach me would have their phone call routed through the Boston office. She handed me the slip of paper with a phone number on it. The area code was for southeastern Massachusetts; it was a Fall River telephone number. I pulled out my cell phone and was punching in the digits as I started for my office.
“I’ll hold your calls, sir.”
“Yeah, thanks.” I entered and shut the door and listened to the ringing at the other end of the line. The words of an old song began to run through my mind about Mr. Andrew Borden, his daughter, Lizzie, and what happened in the town of Fall River.
“Vincent residence.” A woman’s voice.
My mouth was so dry I could spit cotton balls. “Steven Vincent, please. I’m returning his call.” I took a deep breath. “This is his nephew.”
XIV
AFTER I disconnected the call, I spoke to The Boss, then shut down my computer and grabbed my jacket out of the closet. Ms. Parker glanced at me, her expression blank. “Charter me a flight from Logan to Barnstable on Cape Cod. See a rental car is waiting in Barnstable. I’ll be away for a few days, Ms. Parker. Mr. Wallace is aware. Matheson has his assignment. If he has to reach me, he’s got my cell number. Anything else comes up”—I thought briefly of Josephson—“turf it to Bradicich.” Deputy Director of Ordnance; his office was on the sixth floor. He was a good guy and didn’t tend to give me grief. “If it’s the end of the world as we know it, call me. Otherwise….”
All Ms. Parker said was, “Yes, sir.”
I’d done this too many times, left town on the spur of the moment, although never before for this reason. After all this time, my old lady had finally kicked the bucket. She was finally dead.
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Vincent.”
How did she—the grapevine. No matter what the agency, there was always a grapevine.
“Thanks.” It was no loss, though. Not to me.
I drove to Alexandria, feeling absurdly relieved that I wouldn’t see Quinn before I left. At the same time I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to have dinner with him.
I began to shake. What was I thinking? He was CIA, and I’d allowed him to fuck me, to get closer to me than anyone.
I was seriously fucked.
No, I wasn’t. This trip to Fall River would give me the perfect excuse to put some space between us. I’d leave Quinn a note explaining I’d be away and telling him that when I came back, I’d be moving out. After the funeral, I’d drive over to Cape Cod for a few days and sort out this… whatever it was. I knew of a little bed-and-breakfast that was about a quarter of a mile from the beach. When I got up there, I’d call and make sure they had a room available.
I put the duffel on the bed and opened the closet. “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!” I’d forgotten about all my clothes. They’d never fit in a single duffel. What the fuck was I supposed to do with them?
Okay, no time to worry about that now. I had to write Quinn a note anyway; I didn’t want him to wait, thinking I was working late again. I’d tell him it was over and that he should send my stuff to Sweetcheeks’s.
That would work. I thought about it a little more. Yeah, it would.
I packed what I’d need for about five days, just to be on the safe side, and grabbed my shaving kit from the bathroom.
It killed me to leave that sword behind, but fuck it. I could trust Quinn enough not to get vindictive about my leaving and keep it or give it away. Couldn’t I?
Okay, now the note.
I tapped the pen against my teeth, then wrote. I’ve been called out of town…. No, that was no good. I wanted him to think I’d left because it had been fun, but now it was over. I tore it up, tried again, and stared at the results in disgust. How the fuck could I misspell “touch”? Hasta la vista, baby? Fuck it, was I channeling Arnold Schwarzenegger now? After three tries I still wasn’t happy with it, but I had a shuttle I needed to catch, and I was shit out of time. I scribbled down something without giving it any more thought and left the note where he would see it, propped on his pillow.
Leaving his house key next to the note had to give him a clue that I wouldn’t be staying with him when I returned.
I made sure the alarm was reset, pulled the door shut behind me, and jogged down the walk to my car.
XV
FUNERAL homes all seemed to smell the same: refrigerated air, the cloying scent of flowers at war with each other, and underlying it all, the telltale odor of death.
Only one of the four rooms was in use, and I approached it stiffly, hating that I had to be there. Rather than enter immediately, I read the small placard above the door.
Virginia Vincent. Viewing 2-5 and 7-9
Final prayers and closing of the casket scheduled for tomorrow morning at 9:45 a.m.
Interment to follow at Fall River Memorial Park
It was a little after five. The place appeared to be empty, but there were tissues on the floor as well as a plastic doll and a toy telephone. Whoever had been there had already gone to dinner.
It was a very small room. A couple of plush, Queen Anne-style chairs faced the coffin. Behind them were three rows of folding chairs. A small table stood nearby, conveniently holding a box of tissues. There was a blanket of flowers on the lower portion of the plain coffin, fat white chrysanthemums, carnations, and sprigs of baby’s breath. Normally the ribbon would have said “Beloved Wife” or “Dearly Loved Mother,” but there was nothing; she was neither.
I stood looking down at the woman who had given me life and nothing else. Although her hair was neatly coifed, it was streaked with gray. Face powder toned down the yellow tinge of a ruined liver. Deep grooves bracketed her mouth, but her lips were not in the thin line of discontent that I remembered. She actually looked… peaceful. Fucking bitch.
Someone came into the room behind me. I was reaching for my Glock before I could make myself relax.
“Did you know Ginny? I’m afraid she had so many men friends that I couldn’t keep track of them all. You’re the only one to show up. So far.”
I glared at the idiot who had almost gotten his head blown off, and then my gaze sharpened. He was in his middle fifties, about my height, with prominent ears. His eyes were the same hazel as mine.
He studied me, his expression puzzled. “You’re too young to be one of Ginny’s men.”
“Am I? Do you have any idea of the age of the men she’d bring home?”
“I’m sorry, do I know you?”
“Uncle Steve.” I hadn’t realized it when I was little, but he had to have been only about sixteen when I was born.
His eyes widened. “Short stuff?” He was the only one who had called me that.
“Not so short anymore!” I thought for a moment he would pull me into a bear hug. When he didn’t, I was uncertain if I was disappointed or not. “Why are you burying her?”
“She’s still a Vincent. She never divorced your father, and then after he died, she never remarried.”
“What?”
“She never—”
“I heard what you said. What I want to know is why would she have to divorce him if she’d been a widow since 1970?”
“Your Dad died in ’75. We were notified—your grandparents were still alive then.”
“Really?” Jesus, I had no memory of them.
“I was sure Ginny was notified as well, since they were still married. Didn’t she tell you?”
“Obviously not.”
He swallowed and backed up a step.
I shook my head. She couldn’t have told me because I was finally away from her. One of her men had been with her long enough to see what was going on; he’d sent me to the military academy in Oakdale.
But even if I’d still been at home, she couldn’t have told me, not after what had happened five years before. I’d sassed her once too often, and when she’d backhanded me across the face, I’d threatened to run away and go live with my father. “The bastard’s dead!” she’d spat at me, and why would I have doubted her? The beating that followed momentarily scared her sober because it almost put me in the hospital for a second time.
Maybe the doctors bought her story that I’d been playing Butch and Sundance with my friends and I’d fallen out of a tree into the street and gotten hit by a car. All I knew was that after I’d healed enough to go home, I went home with her.
“Where did my father go, Steve? If he died in ’75, where was he until then?”
“He was drafted in ’67.”
That made sense. It was the time of the Vietnam War. “But he was married and had a kid.”
Steve shrugged. “I know. We could never figure it out.” And apparently they hadn’t cared enough to question it.
“Was she drinking then?”
“Not when we saw her, but then that wasn’t too frequently. Why?”
I hunched a shoulder. Maybe he had wanted to get away from her. “You were saying?”
“He went MIA in ’68.”
“Just a minute. If he was MIA, how did you find out he’d been killed?”
“It’s not a very straightforward story. Mark—”
“Yeah? I’m not going anywhere.”
“Your dad.” He shook his head and smiled. “He contacted us a couple of years later, told us he’d been a POW in some camp in the ass end of North Vietnam. He’d managed to escape with two other men, and after his injuries were treated, he was discharged. But his head had been screwed up, he said, and he thought it was best if he didn’t come home until he got it straightened out.”
“Did he? Get it straightened out?”
“I don’t know. He never came home. We received a message from the government that he’d been killed in Germany.”
“What was he doing in Germany? And killed how?” That didn’t make any sense.
“They didn’t say. We always assumed it was an accident, possibly on the autobahn. Well—Germany. Mark always did love speed. Not the drug—at least not while we knew him.”
That sounded all kinds of wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on why. “Did he… did he ask about me?”
“No. I’m sorry; we had such a short amount of time to talk—”
I turned back to look at the body in the coffin. “Thanks for the explanation.”
“It’s good to see you, short—” He chuckled. “Mark. I called you that so we wouldn’t get you confused with your dad.” Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as he fidgeted with his wedding ring. “I… uh… wasn’t sure if you would come.”
“I didn’t come for her.” I waited to see if he’d ask why I had come.
He didn’t. “I… I tried to follow your career with… with Huntingdon. It hasn’t been easy learning anything. We’re proud of you,” he hastened to add.
“We?”
“I married around the time Ginny took off with you. I have children of my own now.” His eyes veered away from mine.
Fuck. He was uncomfortable. This sounded like acquaintances trying to rediscover what had brought them together in the first place. Thomas Wolfe wasn’t fucking around when he said you can’t go home again.
“They’re… uh… they range in age from thirty-five to twenty-two. I’m a grandfather, Mark.” His laughter sounded forced. “Can you believe that?”
That meant he’d been about twenty-one. Why the fuck had he left me with her? Why hadn’t he—
It didn’t matter. What was, was.
“When did you find out I worked for Huntingdon?” I’d known about him. Even before I’d made the transfer to DC, I’d had the resources to trace my family—odd that nothing about my father had ever come up. I’d look into that when I got back to DC. As for my uncle, once I had found him, had learned he was settled and happy, I’d been reluctant to burst in on his life. And… it wouldn’t have been safe.
“Oh, a couple of… five or six…. Thirteen years ago, Mark.”
“You never got in touch.”
“I didn’t know how you would feel about seeing us again. After all, we let Ginny take you away.”
“Is that what you told yourself so you could sleep nights?”
“Steven? Who is this?” The woman who joined us was tall and slender, with rich auburn hair. She wore a black, faux-fur jacket and slim black slacks. A trio of gold chains dangled from her ears. She examined me coolly.
“Honey, this is Mark, my nephew. You’ve heard me speak of him. Mark, this is your Aunt Lilly.”
“Mark.”
“Lilly.” Steve didn’t look happy. I didn’t know what he’d expected. I wasn’t a child to call his wife aunt. “I’m surprised to see anyone here. She—” I nodded toward the coffin. “—was a hard woman to live with, especially when she’d had a few.”
“I’m sorry for your loss, Mark,” she said.
“Don’t be.”
“We were about to leave for dinner when one of our grandchildren realized she’d left her Barbie behind.” Had Steve always been this fidgety? If he twisted his wedding ring much more he was going to wrench off his finger. “We saw your car in the lot. I’m sure the rest of the family will want to meet you.”
“I’m sure.”
His eyes flickered toward mine and then away.
“Dad, did you find Becky’s—”
“Ah, here they are now.” Relief was evident in his voice. He gestured toward the four men who entered the room. They stared at the three of us, curious as to who I was and what I was doing there.
I was starting to feel as if I was suffocating, was what I was doing.
He introduced his sons and their wives and girlfriends. What appeared to be a horde of rug rats descended on us, chasing in and out of the room. One of them latched onto my pants leg and tugged on it persistently until I looked down at him.
“Who you?” Hazel eyes stared up at me.
“I’m your—” Worst nightmare, kid. “—cousin. You want to let go of the suit?”
“No!” Fortunately the kid’s mother grabbed his arm and yanked him away.
“Dad, the kids are getting restless.” Like this was late-breaking news.
“Look, Mark. We were just about to get something to eat. Why don’t you come with us? There’s a family-style restaurant just down the road. We don’t even have to take the cars; we can walk.”
I had to eat. “All right.” I touched my uncle’s sleeve to let him know I wanted a word with him.
He waved his wife on ahead. “We’ll be right along, Lil.”
I waited until they had left. “Tell me something, Steve. Why get in touch with me now?”
“Mark!” He seemed truly shocked. “Your mother passed away!”
“So?”
He frowned. “You can’t be that cold!” Couldn’t I? He had no idea. He looked as if he wanted to say something else, then shook his head and hurried after his family.
I paused to look at the figure lying in the coffin. “Y’know, old woman, I could have been having dinner with a really sexy guy,” I told her, conveniently overlooking the fact that I’d been relieved to have an excuse to avoid Quinn. “Yeah, your pride and joy likes guys. What do you think of that?” She had nothing to say about that. “If this meal turns out as badly as I think it will, you’re going to be really thankful you’re already dead!”
XVI
THE ambiance of the restaurant tried to suggest the nostalgia of an earlier, more innocent time, when girls tied their ponytails with gauzy scarves and wore poodle skirts and saddle shoes, and boys who wanted to look tough styled their hair with the sides combed back to resemble a duck’s ass. It was dimly lit and seemed even darker because of the paneling covering the walls. The management didn’t seem too disturbed by all the kids who were with us.
“I
called ahead to let them know,” Uncle Steve said, striving for jovial. “We’ve quite a brood.”
“Yeah.”
It was Monday and not at all crowded, so they just seated us in a corner of the restaurant that put some distance between their other patrons and us.
I lingered behind and spoke quietly to the hostess. “I get the check. Is that understood?” I smiled at her.
She swallowed. “Yes, sir. No problem.”
“Good.” I took a seat that afforded a good view of the entire place and observed as the hostess spoke with one of her staff. His eyes slid my way uneasily, and then he approached us.
“Hi, guys!” The young man, with a nametag on his breast pocket that read Bubbles, opened a pad. “My name is Ben, and I’ll be your waiter for the evening. Can I get you guys, and… uh… you, sir, something to drink?”
I ordered the one Sam Adams I would allow myself. The men took advantage of happy hour and ordered beers, while the women ordered wine. It took forever for the kids to decide if they wanted soda, shakes, or raspberry lemonade.
“We want cheesy fries, Dad!” one of the older grandkids demanded.
“And potato skins!”
“And chicken wings!”
I nodded at Ben.
“Yes, sir. I’ll put in the order for your appetizers, then bring your beverages.”
When he returned with the drinks, he took our dinner orders and vanished into the kitchen.
“Is that a good idea, Mark?” Uncle Steve asked, nodding toward the bottle of Sam Adams I tilted toward my lips.
“You mean because my old lady was an abusive, falling-down-drunk lush? Don’t worry about me; I know my limitations.”
His mouth tightened, but before he could say anything, one of the women, maybe a wife, maybe a girlfriend—okay, yeah, I knew who she was, but why the fuck should I care?—spoke up. “We understand you work for the Huntingdon Corporation in Boston, Mark. What do you do there?”
“I troubleshoot for Huntingdon.”