“I don’t believe that’d happen, Vicki. The church is far more liberal in those matters than in the past. But I’ve got a very nice nondenominational chapel right here in the building that I can put at your disposal if you’d like.”
They went to look at the chapel. Vicki thought it was very nice.
“Excuse me for asking, Vicki, but were you thinking of cremation or a cemetery burial?”
Vicki didn’t like the idea of cremation. It seemed so violent. And if Nina was buried in Brewster Cemetery, then Vicki could always put flowers on her grave and even, perhaps, be buried at her side, though it was much too soon to think of that. So they went to the display room to inspect the caskets.
“Did you have a price range in mind?” asked Brantley. “I understand how hard this is.”
Well, Vicki didn’t want anything too pricey. It wasn’t like she had lots of money.
“So you’re looking for something fairly cheap?”
Inexpensive had been the word Vicki was considering, and she felt that between the words inexpensive and cheap there lay a wide expanse.
The poplar wood casket cost $1,800; with its highly polished surface, it offered a rich yet subdued presentation. It was the least expensive except for a pine casket often used in cremations. Eco-friendly cardboard was also available. On the other hand, a more Christian-oriented poplar casket had antiqued hardware, hand-cast Last Supper lugs, and pietà corners. This cost $3,200. There was also a mahogany casket made of inch-and-a-half-thick boards with a fully adjustable bed and hand-tailored velvet bedding. This was $4,200. Vicki soon learned that tasteful and subdued were synonymous with cheap. She settled on a $4,000 mahogany casket in a Florentine design with an Eterna-rest adjustable bedding system in champagne velvet with matching pillow and throw, and a split and double-locking lid. The bottom half would be kept closed during the wake (“because of the condition of poor Nina’s feet”). It also had silver handles along the sides. Vicki wanted Nina’s high school friends to be pallbearers, at least some of them. They’d be boys. Hammy said he had never seen girl pallbearers before, though probably it had been done, like in California.
There were a number of other expenses—use of the chapel, the wake, ushers, flowers, et cetera—and by the time Vicki finished she had also signed up for an “immortality online option”: a website with photographs, drawings, testimonials, greetings, best wishes, favorite songs, and short narratives by Nina’s friends and relatives.
Through the entire process, Hammy was courteous and patient, gently guiding her without being pushy, though later she realized she had agreed to pay far more than she’d meant to. Perhaps Harold could cough up half, the cheapskate. Still to come was the grave itself, the cemetery vault, and the tombstone. Ham said he had friends in those areas and could get, he promised, the best price. Vicki felt sure that Hammy had improved for the better, even though, at the beginning and end of her visit, she had felt squeamish at shaking his hand. Its plump softness suggested the hereafter.
• • •
Helen Greene lived by herself on Bucklin Street in a white colonial with blue shutters, which, she often said, was much too large for her. She was seventy years old, a retired grade school teacher and a widow. Maurice, her husband, died four years before. He had taught history and had been assistant principal at Brewster High School. Her two children, a boy and a girl, were grown up. The boy was a dentist in Providence; the girl a social worker in Pawtucket. So Helen Greene was on her own, or almost.
In her parlor, Helen had six cages of songbirds: finches and canaries. These, as well as reading, formed her main entertainment. Of course, she had many friends nearby, and, having begun to teach at Bailey Elementary School forty years earlier, many of her former pupils lived in town. Both Vicki Lefebvre and Hamilton Brantley had been her students, as had Ronnie McBride and acting chief Bonaldo.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Helen was in college in Connecticut, she liked to take the train to New York and visit Greenwich Village, where she’d go to plays and browse used bookstores. She envied what she saw as the bohemian life. Once she even heard Charles Mingus play in a small club; she found it noisy but exhilarating. She had hoped to move to the Village after graduation and become a bohemian herself, but instead she had married Maurice. Still, though not a bohemian, she liked to wear bright colors and peasant jewelry with colorful beads. She liked long skirts and blouses with decorative stitching. It was probably this that got her in trouble.
Around ten o’clock Tuesday night, a car pulled up in front of her house, and two men ran across her lawn and threw several stones through the windows of her parlor. One stone hit a canary cage, knocking it over and terrifying the birds. One man shouted, “Get fucked, bitch!”; then the men ran back to the car and, with a screeching of tires, disappeared into the night.
But they’d made a mistake. Although Helen Greene dressed somewhat like Sister Asherah, she was not a Wiccan. She was a Methodist.
THIRTEEN
MABEL SUMMERS, Peggy’s mother, called the Brewster police station early Wednesday morning. After a lifetime of smoking, her speaking voice had been reduced to a gargle. “My baby’s disappeared. She’s not in her room.” It took another minute to figure out that Mabel was talking about Peggy, who was seventeen.
“No, I don’t know when it happened. I peeked in her room around five minutes ago and she was gone.”
Patrolman Malone had taken the call. He contacted acting chief Bonaldo, who was home eating scrambled eggs and bacon. Whole-Hog Hopper had been watching Peggy’s house. No telling what’d happened to him, though Bonaldo could make an educated guess. He called the troopers as well as half a dozen of his own officers. Then he wiped a bit of raspberry jam off his lower lip and got dressed. He felt he carried the weight of the entire town on his shoulders.
Ten minutes later he drove over to the Summers’s house, where he met one of his detectives, Brendan Gazzola, and two patrolmen. Gazzola, at fifty, was tall, thin, and a chain-smoker, with yellow fingers, gray skin, and a cough as loud as a quiet Harley. At the moment, he was munching on a handful of Nicorettes.
Mabel Summers stood in the front door wearing a lavender housecoat. The rain had stopped in the night, the sun was low in the sky, and everything was shiny and clean. Whole-Hog Hopper sat in his patrol car across the street with a hangdog expression and eating something. He gave a little wave to Bonaldo; Bonaldo didn’t wave back.
“She was up in her room last night, watching her little TV. I asked her to turn it down because Ralph was trying to sleep. She turned it down, then turned it up again. She’s always been a brat, I don’t know who she gets it from. Not that she can’t be nice now and then.”
Mabel took Bonaldo and Gazzola up to Peggy’s room. Ralph was at the kitchen table eating pancakes. When he saw the acting chief, he said, “Baldy Bonaldo!” Then he went back to his pancakes. A drop of syrup clung to one of the oxygen tubes inserted in his nose.
Peggy’s room was a mess, with clothes and shoes on the floor. Bonaldo stepped delicately over a pink thong. Like Nina’s room, the walls were covered with posters of singers: Justin Timberlake, Beyoncé, Jay-Z, a poster advertising the album I Am . . . Sasha Fierce, and—strangely, Fred Bonaldo thought—a poster of Mount Fuji at sunrise.
“Can you tell if anything’s missing?” asked Gazzola.
Mabel lit another cigarette. She wasn’t supposed to smoke in Peggy’s room and took spiteful pleasure in lighting up. “It’s hard to tell. Her backpack’s gone, I’m pretty sure of that. She usually keeps it right there on that chair.” She pointed to a straight chair by a small desk.
“What about a jacket or sweater?” asked Bonaldo.
Mabel poked around on the floor with a foot. “Her green jacket’s not here, and I didn’t see it downstairs. And her blue-and-yellow sweater’s missing, ’less it’s in the wash. Maybe some shirts are missing, a pair of jeans with the knees cut out. She sliced up a perfectly good pair of jeans, can you believe it?
Her iPod’s not here.”
“What color’s the backpack?” asked Gazzola.
“Blue. It’s a big one. Kinda ratty.”
By the time they left, Bonaldo and Gazzola had a list of Peggy’s friends, most being names the police had gotten before. It also seemed that if Peggy had disappeared, she had done it by choice, rather than being abducted. That didn’t mean she wasn’t in danger. Soon troopers all over the state as well as in Connecticut and Massachusetts had her photograph and description. She didn’t have a car, and there were no buses out of Brewster. The Amtrak stopped in Kingston and Westerly. It was impossible to tell when she had left. Her mother had seen her in her room at eleven o’clock last night, so it could have been any time after that. The only time Peggy had gone out of the house since she had returned from the hospital had been the previous evening, when she’d driven with her mother to CVS. She’d worn a hat and dark glasses because “she didn’t want to answer a lot of questions from a lot of assholes.”
“You’d think she’d be ashamed,” said her mother, “but she didn’t act it. I know I’d be ashamed, if it was me.”
Whole-Hog Hopper was no help. He’d had a large pepperoni, sausage, and cheese around midnight and conked out.
• • •
Woody Potter got the call about Peggy at home. He’d been asleep, having been up late because of the rocks thrown through Helen Greene’s windows. A man walking his black Lab had said the two men had been in a blue Chevrolet Malibu, maybe four years old. “They were driving like they didn’t care if they hit anybody or not,” he told Woody. Two others had also seen the car, though they didn’t know it was a Malibu. One said the car had a bumper sticker on the back, but he couldn’t see what it was.
Woody decided he could leave Peggy and the Malibu to acting chief Bonaldo for the time being. Instead, he had breakfast with Jill over in Wakefield—or Historic Wakefield, as it liked to be called. They met at a Friendly’s on Main Street. Jill brought Luke. He was out of school that day because of some sort of teachers’ meeting.
“Who are you?” asked Luke.
“I’m Woody Potter. I’m a new friend of your mother’s.”
Luke looked at him skeptically, as if he didn’t see why his mother needed any friends. He looked away and began drawing on his place mat with a crayon. He was in first grade.
“I already told you who he was, honey,” said Jill. She glanced at Woody and glanced at her son. She hoped it wasn’t going to be one of those mornings.
“Can I have pancakes?” asked Luke. “And hot chocolate with whipped cream?”
Jill didn’t normally let Luke have both pancakes and hot chocolate—too much sugar—but she knew he was offering her a deal: feed him right and he’d behave. “We’ll see,” said Jill.
“‘We’ll see’ means ‘No,’” said Luke.
Jill again glanced at Woody, this time with the beginnings of embarrassment.
“You like dogs?” asked Woody. “I got a dog in my truck.”
“Does he bite?”
“Only if you shove your fingers down his throat.”
“What kinda dog?”
“A golden retriever. He likes thrown sticks almost more than anything.”
“I’m not a very good thrower.”
“Gotta learn sometime, right?”
The waitress took their order. Luke got his pancakes and hot chocolate. Woody ordered the same. Woody asked Luke if he wanted strawberries on his pancakes. He did. So they both had strawberries. Jill ordered a vegetable omelet. She looked at Woody and her son with mild exasperation. Actually, she was feeling pretty good. Luke was telling Woody that his grandparents wouldn’t let a dog in the house. “They say they have germs. Does your dog have germs?”
“I’ve never seen any. Maybe a tick now and then.”
“What’s your dog’s name?”
“Ajax. He’s named after a hero who was the tallest, strongest, and one of the dumbest of the Greek heroes.”
“Is your dog dumb?”
“I tried to teach him to read all summer, but he still doesn’t get it. Can you read?”
“I’m getting there. My mom helps me.”
Their food came. Luke counted his strawberries and saw he had three more than Woody. He was torn between giving one to Woody and eating them himself. He gave the three extra to his mother. As they ate, Luke shot quick looks at Woody. If he thought Woody and his mother were talking too much, he’d ask a question—Do you think people live in outer space?—or show her something neat—like how he could make a tower of ten jelly packets. Woody taught him how to hang a spoon from his nose. Spoons clattered noisily onto plates and people gave them irritated looks.
After breakfast, Luke met Ajax in the restaurant parking lot. Woody had to hold the dog back to keep him from licking Luke’s face.
“He’s big,” said Luke.
“Yup, I bet he outweighs you by twenty pounds.”
“Can I ride him?”
“They don’t like that. It hurts their backs. Is it okay with you to sit with him in the backseat when we drive to the beach?”
“Is he going to lick my face?”
“You just push him away and say ‘No.’ He’s just being friendly.”
“Why’s he have so much hair?”
“He’s getting his winter coat.”
They drove over to Narragansett Beach. Woody parked and put Ajax on a leash. They walked down to the tide line. Like the bass harmony of a song, Woody’s anxiety about the events in Brewster was always in his ears.
“Brewster’s got a great beach,” said Woody. “Sometimes it seems I can see all the way to France.”
Luke was torn between keeping an eye on his mother and running as fast as he could. “What’s France?”
“It’s a country. There’s a little poem about it. ‘I see London, I see France; I see Mommy’s underpants.’”
“Did you have to tell him that?” said Jill, laughing.
“Cool,” said Luke. “D’you know any others?”
“Sure. ‘Hasten, Jason, bring the basin. Urrp, slop, bring the mop.’”
“You’re a very dangerous man,” Jill told him. Then, to Luke, “Okay, honey, go run.”
Woody let Ajax off the leash. He and Luke raced down the beach.
“He likes you,” said Jill.
“He likes the dog. I just come with the dog.”
“Do you find it hard to take compliments?”
“Yup.”
Jill was interested in why Woody’s fiancée had dumped him two weeks earlier. She didn’t want to be picked up on the rebound. Instead of asking him about Susie, she mentioned Luke’s father. “His main ambition was to tend bar and be a ski bum. In that, he was very successful.”
When it was Woody’s turn, he said, “She didn’t like I was a cop; she didn’t like the odd hours; she was afraid I’d get shot by some nutcase on 95; she didn’t like that I didn’t talk about my feelings; she didn’t like living in the boondocks; she wanted to get a Ph.D. in social work and didn’t want to do it at URI; she wanted to have a baby. Other than that she was great, pretty much. Oh, yeah, she didn’t like to cook, and sometimes I thought she didn’t like Ajax. She was a cat person, but when she moved out, she left the cat.” Woody laughed.
“So why’d you stay with her so long?”
“Sometimes you hang on to something because it’s better than having nothing.”
He talked about his ex-wife, Cheryl. They’d been divorced more than a dozen years. “We were kids and I was drinking a lot. I was drinking a whole lot. I’d just come back from Iraq and was pretty fucked up without knowing I was fucked up. Like I thought nearly everything was lousy. That seemed smart thinking. And when someone yelled at me for thinking everything was lousy, then I thought they were lousy. That went on for a long time. Then I met Bobby Anderson. He yelled at me for thinking everything was lousy and I didn’t mind it. So we became best friends. Then he told me to get a dog and I did.” Woody laughed. “Maybe
all that time when everything was lousy I only needed a dog.”
• • •
Late Wednesday afternoon Bobby Anderson learned that Carl Krause’s psychiatrist, Sheldon Frank, had moved from Brewster in early May to join a practice with two other doctors in Belmont, Massachusetts. And where did that leave Carl? Bobby had asked himself.
With the help of the Belmont police, Bobby managed to get Dr. Frank’s home phone. He called him Wednesday morning.
“I arranged with Carl to see a psychiatrist in Wakefield before I left—Dr. Maddox. I thought Carl would like him.”
“And did Carl see him?”
“I’m afraid I’ve no idea. I rather lost track of him when I moved to Belmont.”
“Rather?”
“Okay, I lost track of him.”
“So how’d you describe Carl?”
“Oh, he’s fine if he’s on his meds. Without them, he’s a little, well, fragile. I really can’t say any more because of privacy. . . .”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Bobby, ending the conversation.
So Bobby contacted Dr. Timothy Maddox in Wakefield.
“Carl Krause? No, I don’t have any patient by that name. I remember Dr. Frank contacting me about someone in April, but I never heard any more about it. It’s difficult to keep track of these matters. I could ask my secretary. . . .”
“That’s okay.” Bobby ended that call as well.
Next Bobby drove over to the craftsman bungalow on Hope Street. Harriet answered the door and said Carl was at work. He could pretty much make his own hours. She thought he was over at Brantley’s Funeral Home.
“Has Carl been taking his pills?” Bobby had been about to say “funny pills” but thought better of it.
“I believe so. I know he’s been seeing his doctor in Wakefield.”
“Dr. Maddox?” They were standing on the front porch. Through the door, Bobby saw Lucy sitting on the floor and shaking her finger at a doll with yellow hair.
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