“My theory is he got caught poaching someone’s girl and now he’s holed up someplace till his wounds heal,” Sonny said.
“Any rumors floating about who he might have crossed?”
Sonny shook his head. “Nothing in particular. I just wouldn’t be surprised if that’s what’s happened.”
Earl gave Sonny a look that made it plain he thought his friend was full of shit.
“You’re still pissed that he dated that girl you didn’t have the nerve to ask out.” Earl drained his mug. “George likes women, but who doesn’t? He’ll turn up and this will blow over.”
Paulie waited until Sonny took a trip to the men’s room to bring up the embezzlement rumor. He turned in his chair to look at Earl head-on.
“You hear anything about money disappearing along with your buddy George?”
The loom mechanic sat up straight in his chair, squaring his big shoulders.
“Whoever told you that didn’t know George Desmond. We weren’t brothers, but we might as well have been. George wouldn’t take a dime if a blind man dropped it on his shoe.”
“I’m not trying to throw mud at the guy, but people in the know are saying the mill’s books show some financial irregularities.”
“You’d be wise to question whoever’s talking to you pretty close. If money’s missing, it doesn’t mean George stole it.” He pushed back from the table when Sonny emerged from the john. “It’d be a damn shame if George comes back from an innocent romantic jaunt and finds his name has been sullied by someone who wanted a scoop more than he cared about the truth.”
Earl’s voice was calm, but as he headed for the door, Paulie saw that his fists were clenched.
Chapter Four
Friday, July 11, 2014
Peaks Island, Maine
The tide was high when I boarded the three-fifteen ferry to Peaks Island, joining scores of vacationers looking for a cool breeze. As the ferry thrust itself into the Fore River, I found a quiet spot at the stern and called my friend Christie Pappas, owner of the Riverside Rambler, the diner where I eat at least once a day. She picked up on the third ring.
“It’s your faithful correspondent, calling from the deck of the Peaks Island ferry.”
“What are you doing on the ferry? I figured you were chasing whatever story seems to be unfolding over at the Saccarappa.”
“What’s blowing in the Riverside breeze about that?”
“Very little. Everybody in town saw the cop cars and the crime scene wagon over there this morning. A little while later the smart-phone crowd was flashing screens around, saying the Chronicle was reporting human remains were found, but nobody knew the details.”
“I was there when the bones were discovered.”
“Do tell.”
“You’ll keep it confidential?”
“Don’t I always keep your secrets?”
“In the middle of a demolition job some guys unearthed what appeared to be the skeleton of somebody who’d been dead a long time. I was getting the grand tour from Nate Kimball when the skull popped out from behind the wall.”
“My God. What was that like?”
“Creepy, yet riveting.”
“If the story’s here, why are you on your way to Peaks?”
“I’m heading to the island on a hunch and I hope your cousin Jimmy can help me. Do you have his cell number?”
She rattled off seven digits. “If he’s painting, he won’t answer.”
“If he ignores my text I’ll figure something out.”
There was a pause on Christie’s end. I knew she was trying to figure out how to shift the conversation to Megan. My stomach churned at the prospect.
A trauma nurse with a penchant for rambling the globe, Megan had warned me on the sleety January night we met six months earlier that she was in Maine only until her next Doctors Without Borders stint could be arranged. I think she actually called it a fix. With the end of our romance visible from the beginning, I’d dropped my armor for the first time since 1997, when Cindy Waldemier stomped all over my fifteen-year-old heart. It wasn’t until Megan began packing her bags for Cameroon that I’d come to appreciate my exquisite stupidity.
My friends had been circling for a week, trying to figure out how to buck me up. I didn’t want to talk with any of them about how awful I felt.
Perhaps intuiting my mood, Christie opted for the indirect approach.
“You okay otherwise?”
“Fine.”
After ten seconds of silence she got the message and segued to the safe subject of my dog Louisa, a gracefully aging mutt with a lot of Border Collie in her.
“Need me or Theo to check in on Lou?”
“That’d be great.”
“One of us will swing by and take her out for a walk,” she said. “If you reach Jimmy, give him my love.”
* * *
Jimmy B. Jones is a Peaks Island painter with a big reputation. His work is a bit eccentric for my taste, but museums and collectors love it. He’s also a busybody, especially when it comes to island gossip. If there’s a buzz on Peaks Island, it’s a good bet Jimmy either caused it or is promoting it.
I dashed off a text saying I needed to talk to him because a hot story was breaking with a Peaks connection. Thirty seconds later my cell rang, bait swallowed whole.
“Jimmy B. Jones, wanting the scoop.”
“I’m working a story and need your help. Can you keep your mouth shut?”
“Discretion isn’t my forte.”
“Well then I’ll stop at the island market and ask complete strangers to help me find the person I’m looking for.”
He sighed. “Who?”
“First off, where’s Sprucewood Road?”
“Why?”
“I’m sure the guy at the meat counter will give me directions.”
“Okay, be that way.” He was silent for several seconds. I kept my mouth shut too. “It’s a dead-end dirt road in the middle of the island,” he said finally. “Are you on the boat now?”
“Yup.”
“If you tell me who you’re looking for, I’ll meet you at the top of the hill and drive you there.”
“Helena Desmond. Know her?”
“An extremely private woman who happens to be one of my best pals. You’ll need me at your side so she won’t slam the door in your face.”
Ten minutes later I legged it up Welch Street from the ferry dock, dodging tourists with strollers and islanders pedaling one-speed bicycles. As promised, Jimmy was sitting at the top of the hill in his rusty truck. Six foot three and burly, with more black hair on his face than on his head, Jimmy looked like a younger, swarthier version of Santa Claus, if St. Nick wore black-framed glasses held together by electrical tape. He leaned over and opened the truck’s passenger door from the inside, a necessity since the exterior handle was missing. I climbed in and shook his paint-speckled paw, thanking him for dropping his brush on a moment’s notice to chauffeur me to Helena Desmond’s place.
“No problem, man.” His lips were barely visible behind the beard. “Helena’s good people—what do you want with her?”
“Scouts’ honor you’ll keep this quiet till I break the story?”
“The Scouts wouldn’t have me, but yeah, I get it. My lips will stay zipped till you say talk.”
A big spring was biting my ass. I shifted toward the door. “Helena had a brother. She ever mention him?”
Jimmy appeared to be pondering the question as he eased the truck into the intense five-minute traffic jam generated by people hustling to and from the ferry. “I don’t think she’s ever said anything about her family. We tend to talk about art and island gossip.”
“According to the Chronicle’s files, Helena’s the younger sister of a guy
named George Desmond who worked in the finance department at the Saccarappa Mill in Riverside in the mid-sixties. He dropped off the face of the earth in the spring of 1968. Not long after he disappeared, a big discrepancy was discovered in the mill’s books. Everyone assumed he took the money and ran.”
“You writing one of those bullshit unsolved crime stories?”
The front right tire hit a pothole that rattled the truck’s every bolt.
“Human remains were found inside the mill today. If it’s George Desmond, he never ran anywhere.”
Jimmy nosed the truck into a grassy driveway leading to the compact house I recognized from the city’s tax assessing website.
“Sensitive stuff,” he said while the engine coughed itself out. His dark eyes found mine before we stepped out of the truck’s cab. “Go easy, Joe. She looks strong, but she’s not.”
Helena Desmond was working in an expansive tiered flower garden that ran along the southwest side of her house. A slender woman in baggy shorts and a faded Red Sox cap, she waved when she saw Jimmy.
“You’re just in time to help me move my rain barrel.” She pulled off her gardening gloves and stepped into Jimmy’s embrace. He hugged her so hard the hat tumbled off her head. Few strands of dark hair remained amid the gray. That and the elaborate web of lines around her eyes suggested she was seventy, give or take a couple of years.
A metal bucket full of weeds sat between us. Helena moved it with one easy motion and put out her hand to me. Her smile faded a bit when Jimmy told her I was a Chronicle reporter.
“I’m not the one to ask about the news on Peaks Island,” she said. “I’m always the last to know whatever it is people are griping about.”
Until that second, I hadn’t second-guessed my decision to track Helena down. But my stomach tightened when I looked into her soft face. What if my guess about the identity of the skeleton was wrong? I took a deep breath.
“I’m not writing about Peaks today. I’m doing some background on a story that might touch you personally. Jimmy was kind enough to come along and introduce me.”
Before I finished the sentence, her eyes were shiny with tears. A warbler sang from a nearby tree.
Zoo-zee. Zoo-zoo-zee.
“Does this have to do with my brother George?” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“Yes, ma’am. At least I think it might.”
“Have they found him?”
“Possibly. I thought the police might have called you by now.”
“Why would they call me?”
“Human remains were found inside the Saccarappa Mill this morning. Buried behind a brick wall.”
Tears were running down Helena’s face. Jimmy put his huge arm around her. We walked around to the front of the house and climbed four stairs to a deep porch.
He eased her into a rocking chair. “I’ll get you a glass of water.”
She shook her head. “Bring me the whisky.”
* * *
Paulie’s lessons about handling shell-shocked interviewees were running through my head.
Don’t push fragile people, even if you’re in a rush.
Family members want the world to know the person behind the headline.
Be patient and they’ll talk.
In as gentle a voice as I could muster I told her what I’d seen, that the cops were making noise about the body being a homeless person, but it looked to me like a burial site. I explained how I connected the discovery to her brother’s disappearance.
We sat listening to the warbler for a full minute. Jimmy took his eyes off her a couple of times to raise his brows in my direction. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so far out on a professional limb.
Helena broke the silence. “If I talk with you about my brother, will you put it in the newspaper?”
“It’d be premature for me to write anything. The police are a long way from confirming that the remains found this morning were your brother’s.” My shirt was stuck to the back of the chair, every sweat gland in overdrive.
Helena was moving her head from side to side in a metronome-like cadence. “I never believed he ran away. Never believed he stole all that money. Never believed any of it.”
I sat still, wary of pushing her over the edge. Jimmy took over, gently asking what happened in 1968.
“One Monday—it was the springtime—George didn’t show up at work. About noon his secretary called me to ask if he was ill. I hadn’t seen or heard from him since Friday evening when he’d come to my apartment for supper. As soon as I got off work, I went by his house.”
She trailed off, lost in the remembering. I sat still while she struggled to swallow tears.
“I had a key, so I went in. He wasn’t there and his car wasn’t in the garage. To me, the house looked normal. He usually let me know before he left town, so I assumed he was around, just preoccupied with something.”
Jimmy glanced up, asking with his eyes if it was okay for him to continue to lead the conversation. I nodded that it was.
“Was he single?”
“Divorced. When he was in his mid-twenties he married a woman from Boston, someone he’d known in college, but it didn’t last. She thought Maine was a backwater, and he wasn’t interested in leaving. I think they had different opinions about children too, whether to have any. They divorced after a couple of years. He lived an active bachelor’s life after that.”
“Meaning he had women friends?”
Helena almost smiled. “Let’s just say he never lacked for a female companion when he wanted one.”
She poured herself an oversized shot and gulped down half of it, set the bottle on the floor. “I didn’t know what to think. Another day went by and no one at work heard from him, and he hadn’t called me. The police got involved. They noticed things I’d not thought to check.”
“Like what?”
“Empty hangers in the closet. His sock and underwear drawers were almost empty.”
She swallowed the rest of the whisky. We listened to the warbler. Eventually I cleared my throat.
“His disappearance must have been a shock.”
“I couldn’t understand why he’d leave like that, drop out of sight. When they found money missing from the mill’s bank accounts, I couldn’t accept that he took it. Never did accept it. My brother George may not have been a perfect man, but he was no thief.”
She reached down, retrieved the bottle and poured herself another shot. Before she raised it to her lips, she looked me in the eye.
“Now forty-six years later you show up in my dooryard and tell me he may have been right there all along, in the damned mill.”
She gulped the whisky but didn’t set down the bottle.
“It’s time for you to go.” She looked from my face to Jimmy’s. “A lady never gets drunk in public.”
Chapter Five
Friday, July 11, 2014
Portland, Maine
The cool Casco Bay air was wasted on me as the six o’clock ferry glided back toward Portland. Slouched in the stern, I kicked myself black-and-blue. I’d primed a potential source all right. But if the bones weren’t her brother’s and Helena Desmond had a breakdown, I’d be responsible. I couldn’t stop picturing the look on Helena’s face when I told her why I was there, the instantaneous tears in her eyes. This was a woman who’d been on edge for more than four decades. An hour with me and she was sucking whisky straight from the bottle.
I hadn’t felt so much like a rookie in the ten years since I graduated from Bowdoin and realized I wouldn’t be sauntering off to grad school with the other history majors. When I first showed up on the Chronicle’s doorstep, the junior editor who interviewed me must have been impressed by my willingness to work in a moribund industry for shitty pay, because I had zero journalism experience.
But I did have the necessary traits to be a reporter—curious mind, confident manner, solid writing ability. I also was terrific at maintaining distance in high-emotion situations.
It was a skill I’d honed at my father’s knee. The high school kids he taught called him Mr. Bloodless. He wasn’t, but his impassive manner fooled people. My mother died in a car accident when he was twenty-seven years old, leaving him with a six-month-old kid and no idea what to do. He buttoned up his grief and terror so I wouldn’t see it, but like a sweet tooth, his stoic manner became a difficult habit to break. I was the only one who knew his tender, human side. My youthful takeaway: feelings were something to be spent only on those dearest to you.
Unsurprisingly, by the time I was twenty-two I was skilled at erecting walls between myself and others, which naturally extended to the people and events I covered. Paulie had taken approving note at first. He’d seen too many young reporters over-identify with the subjects of their stories. But when my dispassionate manner began to get in my way, he set about teaching me that empathy was an essential tool in a reporter’s kit.
You need to give a shit about what people are going through. If they sense you don’t, they’ll clam up quick.
At first, I’d had to force myself to engage with people who were full of fury, pain or self-righteous indignation. I never knew where the boundary was between doing my job and exploiting them. Over time I got better, but never developed the instinct Paulie had for treading that fine line. I worried that I’d crossed it when I spit out my theory to Helena Desmond.
When I walked into the newsroom, Leah was nowhere in evidence but Gene Pelletier was waiting for me in front of the police radios. A gangly runner with a gap-toothed smile, Pelletier was a combination walking Rolodex and local history archive. Want the mayor’s cell phone number? Gene could recite it off the top of his head. Need to know which county deputy was fired for drunk driving in 1996? Ask Gene.
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