I drove through the deserted town center, feeling exposed and strangely like I was in some movie I wouldn’t want to watch. I thought of that bobble, knowing that I had caught him in the act of following me. An eerie chill passed through me as I slowly got out of my car.
The diner had a small parking lot. At that hour there were only a couple of cars there. If I’d been fresh from New York City, I would have wondered where the nightlife was in town. But, after months in Bardstown, I knew it would be off on the larger routes, in hotels and motels.
I felt that unmistakable small town feeling as I left the car. The crickets were going full blast and the wind was warm, caressing the deserted streets. I could feel everyone at home watching television with their families or maybe having affairs with someone they might not care about in a few months. The diner was nothing like the City View. Back in Manhattan, a place like this would have been packed full of people who saw dining out as the finest of recreation. This was more reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting, though a little too rural to be like “Nighthawks”.
I felt eyes on me as I walked to a booth in the back. The place was close to empty and the lights were bright and intrusive, but only someone from out of town would get any stares; I didn’t look like I came from anywhere within thirty miles of the place.
The waitress seemed hesitant to come to my table. A couple of minutes went by before she dropped a menu on my table and did her best not to look at me.
“You want coffee?”
“Sure.”
“Okay. I’ll come back and get your order.”
I nodded, watching the street outside. If my friend in the baseball cap had any brains, he wouldn’t simply drive by again and tip me off; he’d walk back to see what I was doing. Of course I was assuming he was smart. I sipped coffee and continued to watch the parking lot.
The waitress came back. She seemed to have softened a bit; maybe I didn’t seem so threatening after all. “You know what you want?”
I had made a point of opening the menu and giving it as much of a look as I could without losing sight of the street. “I’ll have an egg salad on rye and fries.”
She gave me an odd look as though I’d just ordered boiled bat. I guess egg salad and fries weren’t popular in her town. While I pretended to drink coffee and look at nothing, I saw her talking to the owner out of the corner of my eye. Once in a while they’d turn a quick glance in my direction. I supposed I was the most interesting thing they’d seen all day.
She confirmed my suspicions when she came back with the food. “You passing through?” she asked, clearly a bit nervous. Did I look that frightening?
I figured it was best to calm her. “Yes,” I answered smiling. “I just went to the Apple Festival. I’m on my way to meet my sister in Vermont.”
Her face brightened a bit. “Oh! I was there today. My cousin lives in Covington. She works at one of the bed and breakfasts there. The Haven Cottage?”
“I passed it. I suppose bed and breakfasts are big business in that town.”
“You’re from New York City, aren’t you?”
I smiled. “How do you know?”
She dimpled prettily. “I had a boyfriend in college who was from Brooklyn. I can tell the accent and just the way you talk.”
“I can’t get away from it, I guess. Is it so strange to see someone from New York here?”
She blushed. “Oh, no! Well…” She looked back at the owner who was watching us with great interest. “I guess we wonder when someone comes to the ass end of the world to eat. It just seems odd.”
“People pass through the ass end of the world and I was hungry.”
“Okay. Enjoy your food.”
I hadn’t let my eyes leave the parking lot for more than a second. I wasn’t seeing anything out there, but that didn’t mean much. I ate my food slowly; keeping my eyes on the window in a way I hoped would let my pursuer know I was aware of him. At one point I went to the bathroom and made a point of pausing by the window and smiling.
An egg salad sandwich and fries could only buy me so much time before I had to leave. As I paid my bill, I finally got a smile from my waitress who, I suppose, had cleared me of my outsider status. I felt exposed as I walked out to my car. I actually looked in both the front and back windows to see if there was anyone on the floor. Once in the car I let out the breath I’d been holding and took a last look around before starting the car.
In the first few seconds of backing out, I felt wrongness. The car jumped a little, letting me know that the back right tire was flat. I knew what I would find when I knelt next to the tire and I wasn’t disappointed: a flap of rubber where the tire had been cut. I had thought I had a good view of my car while I was in the diner, but now I saw there had been a blind spot where someone could have duck walked from around the front of the diner to where my car was. I stood there for a second and dreaded the reaction from the folks in the diner when they saw me changing a tire; somehow that would just confirm their suspicions that I was trouble.
Why I cared what they thought was beyond me, but at that moment I was pretty low on dignity. I opened the trunk and pulled out the tire and the jack, my eyes flicking toward the window to see if anyone was watching me. It took only fifteen minutes to change the tire and by the time I was done, it occurred to me that I was a major fool. What had I expected when I went looking for two women no one wanted me to find? Maybe it was Moskowitz who was trailing me; it didn’t seem impossible.
As I got back into my car after stashing the tools back in the trunk, I caught sight of the waitress looking at me through the window. For some reason I smiled and waved happily as though that would take some of the sting out of my embarrassment. She raised her hand hesitantly and looked somewhat stricken. Driving away from there was a very pleasant experience.
*
I found a motel about fifty miles away. By that time I was already back in Massachusetts which somehow made me feel better about things; leaving New York State gave me some odd sense of relief. The motel wasn’t much to look at and neither was my room, but it was a place to sleep.
I had just settled in and was watching a movie when the phone rang. Not my cell phone, but the room phone. I stared at the phone and waited through a couple more rings before picking it up. My heart was beating quickly.
“Mike?” the male voice asked.
“Who are you?”
“I’m someone who is looking out for your welfare. You need to go back to the City.”
“Why do I need to do that?” I was trying to sound tough.
“What you’re doing is only going to be unpleasant and I can assure you that you won’t find what you’re looking for. If you have any sense you’ll listen to me.”
I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said one word that I thought would get me a reaction. “Moskowitz.”
There was a pause at the other end. “We know about him. We know about everything there is to know about you. You’re a hero but you‘re out of your league. Go home. Do it tomorrow. We’ll know if you don't.”
We? “I’ll think about it.”
“Be sure you come to the right conclusion.” And then he hung up.
I went through my options. I could go to another motel, but it seemed likely I would be followed. I could go back to Manhattan and regain my old life. That seemed to make sense to me, but I wasn’t really interested in making sense. I lay there feeling like a lost little boy and I asked myself once again if I thought I could really kill someone if I had to. I didn’t quite know the answer.
*
Years ago, when the summer would come, my father would drive us north to Vermont to visit my grandparents. My grandfather had decided to move up to New England after he had retired from the engineering firm he’d started and eventually sold. I’d asked him once why he’d moved so far away and he’d told me it was like living in some timeless part of America, more real in some ways than the manicured lawns of Westchester County.
In the first f
ew years I was too young to see what he’d been talking about, but later I’d get this excited feeling knowing I was going up there. Once we hit route 91 going north from Connecticut, I’d feel like my blood was racing. There was something about seeing the land shift from its normal dull green to a green that was more vibrant than any I’d ever seen. Once those primordial humps and hills began to jut up from the soil, I’d feel like I was in a fairy land. My sister and I would joke, saying, “hump to starboard, hump to port” all the way through the Green Mountains to my grandparent’s house. It drove my parents nuts, but I think they found it amusing.
I felt some of that same throat catching excitement that day as I took the same route, feeling the land rise gently as though I was about to reach the summit of some magical mountain realm. I seemed to gain some strength from seeing the hills jutting up around me, as though I’d come back to a second home. The road was as I remembered it, clean and even, graded better than anything I’d seen back in New York. And there was almost no traffic; it really was like an older America.
I felt optimistic as I left route 91 and took a smaller state route to the town of Selaquechie. So many of the towns in the Green and White Mountains had names that had been left by the natives; many of them sounded funny to English ears. My sister and I had even made up a fictional substance called “quechie” that we decided was on all the trees in the area and that we would avoid at all costs. She would run up to me and rub her hand across my back, declaring that she’d covered me with quechie and I would rot.
I had looked at the map and found that I was no more than twenty miles from where my grandparents had lived. In many ways it looked like the town I remembered them living in, all white clapboard and craft stores. Like Covington, Selaquechie was an artsy little town. But unlike the contrived little confection that I’d found in Covington, Selaquechie achieved the status of real Americana without trying. This was a country town and these really were people who eked a living out of an unstable rural and manufacturing economy right out of the great American novel. The crafts stores were usually in people’s homes and though they weren’t always sophisticated, they were a bit more real than what I’d seen at the Merkison Crafts Festival.
I spent the first two hours there buying a new tire. The prices were a lot better than New York, but things went a little more slowly. I had them take the spare off and mount and balance the new tire. They offered me a special deal on a full set but I wasn’t in the mood.
In some ways The Selaquechie Inn was one of the only jarring elements in the town. In the postcard I’d received, it looked every inch a New England bed and breakfast, but the owners were not true Yankees. I had remembered flatlanders coming up to Vermont and buying inns and hotels and that trend seemed to be flourishing now. The Inn was owned by the proverbial couple who’d packed it in to open a bed and breakfast, leaving behind their professional yuppie roots. This particular couple was from Boston where the husband had been a financial advisor and the wife had run a trendy alternative children’s school. They belonged in Vermont as much as I did. I wondered what the locals thought of them.
My initial impulse had been to stay in a motel nearby. I wanted to be anonymous to the people I questioned and, hopefully, evade anyone who was pursuing me. But a moment’s thought persuaded me otherwise. Anyone following me would know where I went, especially in a town as small as this one. I reasoned, if I was staying at the Inn, seemingly for recreational reasons, the owners would be much more likely to trust me and answer my questions.
All this in mind, I chatted both of them up, hoping that I’d seem a lot more enthusiastic about the Inn than I was about finding a mother and her daughter. We talked about making the transition from professional life to a life in the country. As far as Beth and Bob thought, they fit in just fine in Selaquachie and the neighbors loved them. I had to wonder if the people they’d been talking about were people that they had given some work to.
They gave me a tour of the Inn and I was a bit shocked. First I was asked to take off my shoes which rankled a bit, but I wasn’t about to get on their bad side. Then they took me through several rooms that looked like a cross between an Italian Villa and something Salvador Dali might have come up with. It was all ultramodern and stark and the room they finally put me in seemed more like a museum than anything else.
I weighed questioning Beth and Bob right away against letting them get used to me, at least for a while. My decision was made for me when they told me that I would most likely be the only guest who would be at the Inn that night for dinner.
Beth tended to dry wash her hands a little when she talked and I had to control myself so I wouldn’t stare at her while she did it. “You’re from New York so I know that you’ll appreciate our Inn. Did you know that we continue to find arrowheads in the yard? You wouldn’t believe how many we found while we were building the place.”
“It was a mess,” Bob assured me. “You wouldn’t believe the shape it was in. But the joists are amazing considering how old the place is and how long it’s been since anyone did any serious repairs to the place.” He gestured for me to follow him and soon we were standing in front of an arch that was small and not very impressive. “Can you believe that the former owners had this covered up? When we broke through the wall and saw this wood...”
He let the implications hang in the air.
I nodded my interest. By the time another hour passed, they both seemed ready to stop talking about themselves and their Inn. Beth stopped me as I was walking out the door. “We like to eat with our guests and share with them. That’s what all this is about to me. Do you think you’ll be here?”
She seemed so anxious that I almost felt guilty accepting, knowing that I had ulterior motives; I knew it would give me an opportunity to pump them for information. I decided that wine might help so I walked across the street to a crafts shop called New England Notions to ask where the nearest wine shop was. The woman running it looked at me as if I had two heads. “No shop, mister. There’s a state store at the edge of town.”
“What’s a state store?”
She smiled. “Alcoholic beverages are sold by the state and only by the state.” She gave me directions to the store.
On my way out, I stopped to take a look at the shop, wondering if it was a place that Eileen and Megan might have visited. Unlike some of the other tacky shops I’d seen recently, this one was a whole different universe. There were dolls made from found items. I was used to that type of thing from New York; dolls made of apples, paper clips, rubber cement, etc. But this was different. There were ladybugs made of flecks of jade embedded in some kind of resin. There were snails hand painted on papier-mâché. There were ducks made out of sea glass.
I turned back to the cashier. “Who made these?”
“I did. I’ve been doing it since I was a child.”
“Have you considered selling these on the Internet?”
“I’ve had people tell me I should.” She shrugged her shoulders.
“You could make a ton with these. You should go to New York and find a shop, probably in SoHo. They’d take your work on consignment.”
“I don’t know much about New York. I’ve never been there.”
“Oh. I think it would be worth your while to at least set up a website and do some mail order. I know what this kind of stuff would sell for in New York.”
“I do all right here.”
“I’m sure you do. Well anyway, thanks for the directions.”
In the end I turned back and bought one of the snails. If I ever saw Megan again, it would be hers.
Chapter Eighteen
As I would have expected, Beth and Bob took great pains to make their meals as baroque as the interior of their little empire in Selaquachie. Their culinary enthusiasm led me to believe that they’d hoped they’d get a larger portion of the yuppie travel market from cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia coming to their Inn. I supposed that they hoped I’d pass on the news if they pro
ved to me that they were superior innkeepers.
We started with some pretty decent hard bread dipped in olive oil. The music was sedate; mostly Mozart at a civilized volume. The next course was prosciutto with melon. I pulled out my wines just at what I considered the right moment and I immediately knew it was a mistake. They looked crestfallen and it hit me that they must have chosen wines carefully to fit the meal. I tried to toss it off as a gesture on my part. “You know I didn’t know what you’d be serving, so these are for when you need them,” I told them.
Over the squash soup we got off on a conversation about Beth’s trials while running her upscale children’s school. “It all should have worked. I have a degree in both Child Psychology and Education. I taught for 10 years in the public school system and four in private schools. If they’re going to entrust their children to an expert, they need to let her do the work she was meant to do.”
Bob nodded. “It was as if the parents wanted to run the school themselves. What did they need Beth for?”
Beth grunted her approval. “There was one parent who told me that my methods weren’t flexible enough and that her daughter didn’t feel comfortable being part of a program. I think she said something about running a little fascist dictatorship.”
I nodded sympathetically. “I suppose she must have known what your goals were when you enrolled her daughter,” I said, doing my best to placate her.
“Of course! If she wanted standard “let the chips fall where they may” education for her daughter, she could have easily sent her to public school and saved a lot of money. People pay me good money for something different because most public schools, and most private schools for that matter, are lacking.”
“I know it’s a problem,” I parroted. “My sister has been having a hell of time finding a decent school for her daughter. The girl was a little bit of a discipline problem. She put her in Montessori in New York.” I shrugged my shoulders. “In fact you probably met the little girl. She’s the reason I’m here. She and her mother stayed here."
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