"D'you wanna come for a drink with us?” the first boy asks. His breath is thick with beer and vomit.
"I think you've had enough already, don't you?” Carol says.
The other boys laugh. “Boz is getting his arse kicked by a girl!" the second boy says.
Boz. Carol memorises the name.
Boz leans so close that she can't see her novel when she looks down at it. His hair gel smells of coconut oil. His hooded jacket is open, showing off his six-pack. This is not a boy you want to humiliate, she tells herself. He's vain, and vanity does not forgive criticism.
"D'you wanna bevvy or what?"
"No,” she says, pleased that her voice is so steady. “Thanks."
The second boy sobs theatrically. “She's breaking his heart!"
Boz grabs his crotch. “I might shag it, but I'm not in love with it.” He lets his eyes drift to the top of her legs, the crease of her trousers. “You a natural blond?” he asks.
The skin on her scalp tingles and her heart flutters in her chest like a trapped bird. The man in the suit is reading his paper. Is he deaf? she wonders. Can't he hear what's going on?
Boz blows in her face and she flinches as if he has hit her. “Look at me when I'm talking to you, bitch."
He is smirking, enjoying her humiliation, and a tiny spark of anger flares in her gut. “Sod off,” she says, but too tentatively.
He mimics her; he's a good mimic, he captures her accent, her voice, the note of fear she cannot hide.
"I mean it,” Carol says. “Back off or I'll call the guard."
His eyebrows lift. “Yeah? How you gonna do that? ESP?"
The emergency cord is six feet away, above the door. It might as well be six miles. She glances around the carriage for security cameras, but can't see any.
She stands. The boy stands with her. She moves left. He mirrors the movement.
The man in the suit is still reading his paper. Bastard.
"Excuse me,” she says; her voice is weak, frightened. The man doesn't respond and the boy's eyes flicker greedily over her body. His sickly-sweet breath in her nostrils is an intrusion, a violation.
Why are you being so bloody polite?
"Hey!” she shouts.
Boz jerks back, startled.
The anger feels good. “HEY, YOU!” she shouts again, louder this time.
The man flicks down a corner of his newspaper. He seems irritated.
"Are you going to help me?” The way she asks, it's a clear accusation.
The boys watch, curious to see what he will do.
She sees a muscle jump in the man's jaw, then he exhales through his nose as if he has been asked to perform some irksome task.
He folds his paper neatly and places it on the seat beside him. The train slows and the recorded announcement tells them they are approaching Cressington. Thank God—her stop.
"That's us, Boz.” The youngest boy has appeared suddenly by the door. He sounds troubled, unhappy.
The man stands in a smooth, easy movement. He's taller than they expected, more athletic, and the boy says again, the tremor in his voice accentuated by the rattle of the train, “Our stop, man."
Boz keeps his eyes on Carol, but she notices the tension in his shoulders, the bunching of his fists. He gives her one last disparaging look. “What—did you think it was grab-a-granny night?” He jabs a thumb towards the youngest boy, standing anxiously in the doorway. “I wouldn't even touch you with his dick."
The doors open and they're off, onto the platform, whooping and laughing, making barking noises at her. They swarm up the steep stone steps; she hears their footsteps echoing all the way through the Victorian station house. She looks at the man and he raises a shoulder, a slight smile on his face—embarrassment or amusement? She can't tell. Doesn't care.
Her stop. She steps out onto the platform. Seized by dread certainty, she stares wide-eyed at the stairwell. What if they're waiting for her outside the station? The narrow muddy shortcut she usually takes to Broughton Drive is dark and poorly lit, and even on the roadway there are places they might hide: behind skips outside the house refurbs, in the shop doorways on the main road. To hell with it, she'll go on to Garston, get a taxi home.
The warning buzzer sounds that the doors are about to close. She wheels round as they begin sliding shut, jumps back on the train. One of the doors slams into her shoulder and she is caught off-balance. She grabs the handrail and steadies herself. The man in the suit is watching her.
He sighs and smiles in resignation and welcome. He smells the fear on her. Exciting, raw, unrestrained. It smells of warmth. Of woman. Of pain. Of sex.
Copyright © 2006 Margaret Murphy
[Back to Table of Contents]
THE RIGHT CALL by Brendan DuBois
A new Brendan DuBois novel, Primary Storm (St. Martin's), an entry in the Lewis Cole series, is due out in September. A former research analyst for the Department of Defense, Cole gets involved in cases that have a touch of thriller to them. Mr. DuBois's new story for us is about a newspaper reporter—a job he himself held for years.
On the first Tuesday of this particular month, I was at my desk in the tiny Boston Falls bureau office of the Granite Times, writing a story on deadline on a computer that was considered old when a certain President promised us a kinder, gentler government, when a phone call came in from a self-confessed mass murderer.
Rita Cloutier looked up from her phone at the front and said, “Call for you, Jack. Sounds like the phantom, yet again."
I kept on looking at the screen, trying to decide if I could spell Contoocook River without having to look it up, and I called out, “See if he'd be so kind as to call back after deadline. Most mass murderers have some courtesy, don't they?"
Rita giggled, like the seventeen-year-old schoolgirl she was thirty years ago. I looked over at her and my surroundings. We were in a tiny storefront with a waist-high counter where people came in to place their classified ads or complain about missed newspapers. Rita sat right by the doorway, and between the two of us was an empty desk that belonged to Monty Hughes, the local circulation manager. My desk was up against the window, which I thought was a privilege reserved for the sole reporter in this news bureau, until the first heavy rains came and the damn thing leaked and soaked my desk. Some privilege.
I leaned back in my chair and tried to admire the view from the window, which was tough to do. The window overlooked a seldom-used rail spur for the leather mill upstream, and the rail spur was next to an overgrown, sluggish canal that spawned mosquitoes in the summer and not much else. For a moment I recalled the office I had in Manchester, at the main offices of the Granite Times. A door of my own. A parking space. A company cafeteria. I sighed. That's what happens when you get too trusting with a news source, Jack. Exiled to the farthest reaches of the Granite Times empire.
"Jack?” Rita's voice queried.
Still leaning back in the chair, I reached over and picked up the phone. “Hello,” I said.
"Jack Spooner?” came the familiar voice.
"The same,” I said. “What do you have for me today?"
A heavy sigh. “I killed them all, you know. All twenty-four of them. But I had to. What else could I have done?"
"Oh, I don't know,” I said, leaning forward so I could wrap up the news story I was working on. Three-car accident on Route 302. Minor injuries. Would probably end up as a news brief but it had been a slow news day. “You could have short-sheeted their beds when they weren't looking. Wouldn't that have been easier?"
A petulant tone. “You're not taking me serious."
There. Finished. I sent the story along the fiberoptic cables to my editor a hundred miles south, and returned to my mysterious caller. “Wrong,” I said. “You're the one who's not taking me seriously."
With my free hand I opened up my cluttered center desk drawer and pulled out a sheet of paper. “Let's see,” I said, looking over the phone log that I had started with this character more than four
months ago, “you've called me more than a dozen times. Each time you say something similar. That some years ago you killed twenty-four people. It happened on a Tuesday. That it wasn't your fault. Period. The End. How am I supposed to take you seriously if you don't give me more than that?"
The petulant tone was still there. “I thought reporters were more open-minded than this."
"Bad reporters are, not good reporters. Look, I've got real work to do. Anything else you want to say before I hang up?"
"I ... I did it near here. On Shay's Meadow, by the Graham River."
I was so eager to take this down that I dropped the pen on the floor. “Hello? Say again?"
I was talking into a dead phone. My mystery caller had hung up.
I returned the favor, then picked up my pen and quickly scribbled down what he had just said.
* * * *
I'd been working for the Granite Times for almost two years, after spending some time at a weekly near Conway, by the Maine border. I started out at their Manchester headquarters, and would have gladly stayed there as I established my burgeoning newspaper career, except for an unfortunate incident on my part where I didn't dot all the i's and cross all the t's while doing a silly little feature story. The mistakes associated with the story might have ended a career at any other newspaper. The Granite Times not being that kind of newspaper—and desperate to hold on to reporters during a tight labor market—I got exiled instead of fired.
I looked over the log sheet that I had started that first Tuesday, when my phantom caller had rung me up. I had taken a lot of notes, thinking that I had a key to a great story that would get me back into the good graces of my editors down south. I still remember that day, a clean and empty desk before me, a nearly empty reporter's notebook at my elbow, when the phone rang and Rita picked it up and said, “Oh. Hold on."
Then the caller started, as he would so many times later: “Jack? Jack Spooner?"
I had said yes and then the confession began, one that ended too soon.
I passed him off as a nut when he called the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that. I asked Rita and Monty, the circulation guy, if the previous reporter, Mindy Williams—who now worked at the copy desk down in Manchester and whom I envied and hated in about equal measure for grabbing such a cushy job—had pursued a story based on anonymous phone calls and they both said no.
So. Any other reporter probably would have given up on the phantom and forgotten about it.
But not me. Like I said, I'm not like other reporters. And I still wanted that key to get out of Boston Falls. It was a perfectly nice town, but I knew I didn't belong here. I felt like a person invited to a wedding reception where everyone else is family and friends, and you're trying to find a way to make a graceful exit.
* * * *
The rest of the morning was spent doing a feature for the Sunday edition about a woodworking business on the other side of town that had thrived by doing knockoffs—oops, excuse me, artistic interpretations—of famous Shaker furniture. That was another depressing aspect of my exile here to this little town. Back in Manchester—New Hampshire's largest city—I'd focused on crime stories, with an occasional feature piece to relax my brain. Here, it was exactly the opposite, with most of my stories being features and small-town stories, with only the occasional crime (usually an outburst of teenage vandalism on a warm summer night) to break the monotony. After you've done ride-alongs with Manchester cops, breaking into crack houses right behind the TAC cops, doing a lengthy feature on a guy who makes boxes and rocking chairs is torture.
The purpose of the exile, I suppose.
Just before lunch, I went into the rear storage area and pulled down a bound copy of the Granite Times from 1978, looking for a particular story. I figured that if my mysterious caller was telling the truth—a stretch, I admit—I might find something in the back issues to match what he was claiming. Both Rita and Monty said they had no idea what the caller was talking about, but after my bad experience in Manchester, I was determined to look into it myself. I had spent weeks scanning past years’ issues, every Tuesday edition of the newspaper, until I realized my stupidity and began glancing through the Wednesday issues as well.
It would have been easier to check microfilm but the nearest large library was in Purmort, about an hour away.
So before the appointed noon hour, I spent awhile back in 1978, back when a peanut farmer was President and the biggest news around Boston Falls was whether or not the leather mill would close.
The peanut farmer now builds furniture and makes life miserable for his successors, and the debate over the leather mill continues. When my stomach grumbles increased, I wrapped up 1978 and went out to have lunch.
* * * *
Lunch on this particular Tuesday was with the police chief, detective, patrol officer, and juvenile officer for the town of Boston Falls, and involved takeout submarine sandwiches from Dot's Place, about three doors up from our bureau office. We met in the police department's tiny basement office in the town hall, on the other side of the town common. The entire police force, in the person of Connie Simpson, looked up at me as I came in bearing lunch. Her skin looked freshly tanned and I could tell that her dark blond hair had also recently been trimmed.
"Mmm,” she said. She wiggled her nose. “Smells like fat and grease and meat. How yummy."
I sat down across from her as she cleared her desk. Connie wore the dark blue uniform of the Boston Falls police department, and in my humble opinion, she wears it pretty well. I passed over her sandwich—steak, cheese, peppers, onions, tomatoes, and whatever else was handy—and opened up my own, just steak and cheese. In some areas I remain a puritan, including food preparation.
When we got into the cleanup phase and were piling up the greasy napkins, I said, “Two questions, Chief."
"Go right ahead.” Connie's a few years older than me, though she refuses to get specific.
"Ever hear of a place called Shay's Meadow, near the Graham River?"
She wiped her delicate lips with a white paper napkin. “Sure. Go up Timberswamp Road, take the second right after the bridge. Dirt road leads out to a gravel pit. Just beyond that is Shay's Meadow."
"And the owner is...?"
"The town of Boston Falls,” she said. “Conservation land, donated to the town back in the nineteen forties, if I remember correctly. Which is why that particular lot can be a real pain in the ass."
"Why's that?"
She leaned back in her chair and tossed the napkin into a trash can, while I tried not to stare too hard at how she filled out her uniform shirt. “It's a popular place for kids to raise hell. Make a bonfire, drink beer, shoot off fireworks. Every couple of weeks I get a call to go up there and roust them out."
"Anything in particular happen out there?"
She grinned and took a sip of her Diet Coke. “What kind of particular?"
"Homicide,” I said. “Some time ago, in that location."
Connie put the can down on her clean desk. “Let me guess. It's Tuesday. Must have been your mystery caller."
"Well,” I said a bit defensively, “you could take it seriously, Chief. A confessed mass murderer and all that. You could put a tap on that phone line, or get phone company records, find out where the call is coming from. Would be a pretty good chit for your record, right?"
Though Connie was still smiling at me, the look had gotten distinctively chilly. “Jack, do you know how many unsolved murders the entire state of New Hampshire—from Canada to the Massachusetts border—currently has?"
"I have no idea, though I'm sure you're about to tell me."
"Twelve. For the entire state. Going back more than a decade. And I'll clue you in to something yet again. None of those unsolved crimes took place in and around Boston Falls. The only homicide we've had here took place about thirty years ago, involved a high-school boy who broke into an old man's house. Period. Plus, don't you think the attorney general's office might be aware of a crime
involving more than twenty deaths?"
The day was becoming a bust and I decided to wrap this part up. “Okay, all I know is that I keep on getting phone calls from some guy, saying he's killed twenty-four people. But today he told me that it took place on Shay's Meadow. That's why I'm asking."
Connie shook her head. “Poor Jack, still looking for that big story to spring you out of here, right?"
I ignored her and said, “All right, time for my second question."
She laughed. “Hold on, you've asked me more than just two. What's going on here?"
"Only the first question counted. The others were just follow-ups. And here's the second question. How about dinner this Saturday night, over in Compton? Then we can catch the fireworks show up on Lake Montcalm."
She shook her head. “Sorry, Jack. You know the answer. No can do."
"Why not? We get along, we're about the same age, we have jobs that bring us into contact every day. We certainly won't lack for interesting conversation."
The head shake again, slower. “Sorry, Jack. Lunch is fine. Lunch is wonderful. But that's it for now."
"Still worried about the gossipers ruining your reputation?"
"If I had one to ruin, I'd worry about it. Sorry, let's just leave it. All right?"
Oh well. Shot down in flames yet again. I said, “Okay, but just one more question before I leave."
"Go ahead."
"Nice tan. Where did you go?"
"Oh, I spent a few days with my sister. She rented a condo near Hampton Beach."
"Never heard of it,” I said. “Anywhere near Tyler Beach?"
"Beats me, all those beaches look the same to me,” Connie said. “Now it's time for my question. When are you going to tell me what you did that got you exiled out here?"
I got up from her desk. “You'll find out the night we have dinner together."
"Then I guess we're both in for a long wait,” she said, her smile no longer so frosty.
"I guess so."
* * * *
About twenty minutes later I was in knee-high grass, insects whirling about me, as I strode down near the Graham River. The police chief's directions were perfect and I had parked my car near the gravel pit, which had some old charred wood and piles of empty beer cans in the center. Shay's Meadow was a large field, bordered on three sides by lines of maples and birches. It sloped down gradually to the river, which was one of the cleanest in the state. Until it went through Boston Falls and its leather mill, of course.
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