Snake Eater

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by William G. Tapply


  “Monadnock’s not a climb,” I said. “It’s a stroll up a long hill.”

  “I know a trail up the back side. I mean, you don’t need ropes, but there are some rocks. Okay, so it’s not a climb. It’s not a stroll, either. Call it a hike.”

  My head was killing me. The last thing on earth I felt like doing was climbing a mountain. Which was a very good reason to do it. “Okay,” I said. “Climbing Monadnock will give my life some metaphorical significance.”

  “Whatever that’s supposed to mean. Hang on. Debbie wants to say hello.”

  I took the opportunity to light a cigarette. It did not help my head.

  “Hey, Brady?”

  Debbie was a junior in high school, a year behind Joey. They’d been together for a year and a half—longer than I’d lasted with Terri, and longer, in fact, than any exclusive relationship I’d managed to sustain with any woman during the decade since Gloria and I were divorced. I wasn’t sure how that was significant, but I believed it was. When Joey introduced me to Debbie, she’d called me Mr. Coyne. About the third time the two of them came to my apartment to eat chili and play cards, Debbie had started calling me Brady. I liked it better than Mr. Coyne.

  “Hi, kiddo.”

  “You gonna come with us I hope?”

  “Sure.”

  “Bringing Terri?”

  “Nope. She dumped me.”

  “Aw. That sucks. Want me to fix you up with a friend of mine?”

  “What, some high-school junior?”

  “No. An older woman.” Debbie giggled. “A senior.”

  “Tempting. But not today, honey. Don’t tell Joey, but I’m a wee bit overhung this morning.”

  “Mountain air’ll cure that. Well, see you soon, then. Here’s Joe.”

  “We’ll come get you in an hour,” he said. “I got the lunches and everything. Don’t forget to bring some extra layers and foul-weather gear. This is November. Mountaintops get chilly.”

  “For Chrissake, son. You’re the kid, remember?”

  “Gets confusing sometimes, doesn’t it, Pop?”

  “Not to me,” I growled.

  It wasn’t until after I hung up that I wondered how it happened that Debbie and Joey were together at seven on a Saturday morning. And Terri and I weren’t.

  The sun shone brilliantly in a transparent November sky. The air carried a chilly bite. It was a perfect day to climb a mountain, figuratively as well as literally. Within fifteen minutes the mountain breeze blew my head clear. It felt good to stretch the hamstrings. Joey’s trail offered its challenges. It was erratically marked by an occasional splash of white paint on a rock or tree trunk, and we strayed from it a few times. In several places we had to clamber over rocks. Joey went first, then Debbie. He helped her from above and I had the pleasure of boosting her up from underneath. Then they both reached down to haul me up.

  When we got to the top Joey unpacked his knapsack and we ate the salami and extra-sharp cheddar sandwiches Debbie had made. Southern New Hampshire lay spread out around us in its muted November colors, and from up there you couldn’t see the shopping malls and high-tech office complexes and condominium developments that had invaded the once-rural landscape. Just trees and meadows, hills and distant mountains, meandering country roadways and rivers, the way it had always been. A man or an automobile would have been a speck, impossible to identify. That was the perspective from the mountaintop. From that distance, the details were indistinct. The big picture came into focus.

  It was important, I realized, to climb atop a mountain once in a while.

  I mentioned these thoughts to Joey and Debbie as we sat there munching our sandwiches. Debbie nodded. Joey told me I should quit with the metaphors.

  He was probably right.

  We sat up there drinking coffee with our backs against a rock, sheltered from the hard persistent wind, until clouds obliterated the sun. Joey cocked his head at the sky. “We better head back,” he said.

  Billy, my older boy, is irresponsible and lazy, a dreamer and risk-taker, sometimes a hell-raiser. He’d switched his major about six times at UMass already, and he’d just begun his junior year. Lately, he was talking of quitting altogether and heading west to become a fly-fishing guide, a career I sometimes aspired to myself. He always seemed to have three or four simultaneous girlfriends, who all knew and liked each other and adored Billy.

  Joey’s the practical one. He got his homework done ahead of time, mowed his mother’s lawn—sometimes without even being reminded—and had, as well as I could tell, remained faithful to Debbie for what amounted to a significant chunk of his young postpubescent life. He kept his room reasonably neat and won prizes at science fairs and sent thank-you notes. He always finished what he started.

  It was as if I had been divided in half and a whole man was constructed from each contradictory part.

  I loved them both equally and without reservation.

  So it was Joey who had to remind his father that we ought to get back down the mountain ahead of the storm. Billy would have wanted to experience a November blizzard on a mountaintop.

  The snow came quickly on a hard northeast wind, catching us exposed before we had descended into the tree-line. It blew at an acute angle, tiny hard pellets of frozen mist. The three of us hastily donned all the layers we had brought with us and plowed downhill. The rocks grew slippery. Joey again went first, and then the two of us helped Debbie down, and once she lost her footing and if I hadn’t been gripping her wrist she would have fallen. When we reached the tree line, the trail leveled off a little and the snow became rain, and the three of us turtled our necks into our jackets and slogged through the dripping woods.

  The descent seemed to take much longer than the climb. I mentioned this to Joey. He accused me of looking for metaphors again.

  We stopped at a coffee shop in Jaffrey for hamburgers and hot tea, and it was after eight in the evening when Joey and Debbie dropped me off. I invited them up, but there was a party in Wellesley that required their presence. I thanked them for inviting me along. They shrugged as if there was nothing strange about a couple of high-school kids wanting a parent to join them for a Saturday outing.

  I figured I must have done something right.

  I began shucking layers the moment I closed the door to my apartment behind me, and I left a soggy trail of clothes all the way to the bathroom. I got the shower steaming and stood under it until the final vestiges of chill were driven from my bones.

  I slipped on a sweatshirt and jeans, made myself a watered-down Jack Daniel’s, and it was only when I went into the living room to catch the third period of the Bruins game that I noticed the red light of my answering machine winking at me. Blink-blink, pause. Blink-blink, pause. Two messages.

  And that reminded me of Daniel McCloud, and the eight names he had posthumously left for me, and the warnings from Charlie and Horowitz, and Cammie and Oakley, and all the rest of it, and it occurred to me that I had, for one day on Mount Monadnock, not thought about any of it.

  I depressed the button on the machine.

  “Brady, it’s Terri” came the familiar voice. “It’s, um, about three Saturday afternoon. I was just—I don’t know why I called, actually.” She laughed quickly. “Melissa’s at Mother’s, and it’s pretty gloomy outside. I had WBUR on and they were playing Mendelssohn and I was remembering how we… Ah, I’m sorry. I guess I just wanted to hear your voice, for some reason. Anyway, hope all’s well with you, Brady Coyne.” There was a long pause. “Well, ’bye,” she said softly before the machine clicked.

  Then came another voice. “Mr. Coyne? This is Bonnie Coleman. Al’s wife, remember? It’s around five Saturday. Will you give me a call, please?” She left a number with an 802 area code. Vermont.

  I hastily jotted down the number while my machine rewound itself.

  Daniel’s book, I thought. She’d found Daniel’s book.

  What was she doing in Vermont?

  I lit a cigarette, then pecked out th
e number she had given me. A man answered. His voice was cultured, elderly, cautious. “Yes?” he said.

  “May I speak with Bonnie Coleman please?”

  “Who shall I say is calling?”

  “My name is Brady Coyne. I’m returning Bonnie’s call.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  I puffed my Winston and took a sip from my glass of Jack Daniel’s. The ice had melted in it.

  “Mr. Coyne?”

  “Hi, Bonnie. Let’s make it Brady.”

  “Thanks for getting back to me,” she said. “I, uh, have some information I’d like to share with you.”

  “Great. Let’s have it.”

  “It really doesn’t lend itself to the telephone. Something I’d like to show you.”

  “Have you found the book?”

  She hesitated. “Not exactly. Look, I’m staying with the Colemans for a while.”

  “Al’s parents?”

  “Yes. We’re leaning on each other.”

  “So let’s get together, then.”

  “Good. How’s tomorrow?”

  “That would work. Where are you?”

  “Dorset. Know where it is?”

  “Sure. North of Manchester, which is the home of Orvis and the Fly-fishing Museum, on the banks of the fabled and overrated Battenkill River.”

  “It’s a beautiful river.”

  “It’s the trout fishing that’s overrated. Where shall we meet?”

  She described a coffee shop on the Ethan Allen Highway, known to Vermonters as Historic Route 7A, just north of Manchester Center. We agreed to meet there at noon. I inferred that either she didn’t want Al’s bereaved parents to see her with another man so soon after their son’s death or she wanted to insulate them from the information she had for me.

  In either case I found myself intrigued.

  Maybe it was a breakthrough. Maybe finally I’d learn something that would connect the dots—the missing manuscript, the list of eight mysterious names, Daniel’s murder, as well as Al’s, and the strange protective reactions of Charlie and Horowitz to my inquiries.

  I tried to conjure up Bonnie Coleman’s image from our days in New Haven. I remembered blond hair, a flirtatious smile, long slender legs. But that was more than twenty years ago.

  She’d undoubtedly aged. Hadn’t we all?

  21

  I SPRAWLED ON THE sofa and flicked on the Bruins game. It was tied at two-all midway through the third period and remained that way through the five-minute overtime. Everything was happening between the blue lines. The puck bounced and dribbled from team to team, the players kept trying to knock each other down, and they all seemed less interested in winning than in preventing defeat. Another insight into the human condition. I’d had a productive day at such insights, although any useful applications for them had so far eluded me.

  When the game mercifully ended, I clicked off the set and dialed Daniel McCloud’s number. Cammie answered with a cautious “Hello?”

  “It’s Brady.”

  “Oh, gee. How are you?” I heard Bonnie Raitt in the background.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I was just wondering—”

  “Brady, can you hold on for a sec? I can’t hear you very well.” She put the phone down, and when she came back on a minute or two later I no longer could hear the music. “You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “That’s better. What’s up?”

  “I was mainly just wondering if our friend Sergeant Oakley is behaving himself.”

  “Oh, yes. Since you did whatever you did, I haven’t seen him.”

  “That’s good,” I said. “Cammie, remember those names?”

  “Names?”

  “Daniel’s photos.”

  “Oh. Yes, I guess so.”

  “Have you thought about them?”

  “Truthfully, no. I mean, I didn’t recognize any of them. They didn’t mean anything to me. Just names. You know?”

  “Listen. I’m going to read them to you again. I’ve learned a few things about them. I want you to write them down, think about them some more, maybe rummage around among Daniel’s stuff, see if you can come up with anything.”

  “Do you think this is going to get us anywhere?”

  “I don’t know. It’s all I can think of. Fusco—the state cop—he’s apparently given up on the case. Charlie McDevitt and my friend Horowitz are practically ordering me to stop poking around in it. So I can’t think of anything else to do.”

  “You want me to write them down?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hang on. Lemme get a pencil and paper.”

  A minute or so later she came back on the phone and said, “Okay. Read ’em to me.”

  I read the eight names to Cammie. I told her what I had learned about each of them. How they all had either died or disappeared. Murder, suicide, accident. Dates. Connections. I went slowly, and several times Cammie asked me to repeat what I had said. When I finished, I said, “And I’m willing to bet that Daniel and Al Coleman—he’s the one I sent the manuscript to—that they belong on that list, too.”

  “Jesus, Brady.”

  “Any bells chiming for you, Cammie?”

  She let out a long breath. “Afraid not.”

  “You sure?”

  She hesitated. “Brady, what are you trying to say?”

  “Nothing. I guess I had hoped that with the information that goes along with the names, maybe something would click for you.”

  “You sound as if you had an idea. A suspicion or something.”

  “No,” I said. “I hoped you did.”

  “I’m sorry.” A pause. “Hey, Brady?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you come visit me tomorrow? I’ll cook something, we can take a walk down by the river.”

  “It’s tempting, Cammie. But I can’t. I’m going to meet the widow of Daniel’s agent. She might have some information for me.”

  She laughed softly. “You’re incredible.”

  “Me?”

  “You have all these people trying to scare you off the case, and it only makes you poke deeper.”

  “Somebody’s got to.”

  “And it might as well be you, huh?”

  “It might as well,” I said.

  “Well, will you come see me sometime?”

  “Yes. Soon. I promise.”

  I stared up into the darkness of my bedroom hearing a Tennessee mountain stream in Cammie’s soft chuckle and remembering how she looked standing by her easel silhouetted against the floor-to-ceiling glass in her studio, a paintbrush clenched in her mouth, her honey-colored back smooth and bare, her legs long and sleek, how she turned and came to me, the firm slope of her stomach, the high lifting curve of her breasts, and it became a dream, and in the dream I did not grasp her wrists to stop her from undressing me, and when I was completely undressed and she was, too, Cammie had somehow become Terri and I abruptly woke up.

  Terri.

  I hadn’t returned her call.

  I drifted back to sleep thinking about it.

  I was halfway down the elevator before I realized I was clutching my briefcase. I cursed Julie. Every afternoon she stuffs the thing full of paperwork—my homework, she calls it. She’s gotten me into the habit of lugging it back and forth to the office. The habit of opening it every evening has thus far mercifully eluded me. Usually I drop it inside the doorway of my apartment when I get home and pick it up the next morning on my way out.

  So now, on a Sunday morning on my way to Vermont, I was carrying my briefcase for my meeting with Bonnie Coleman.

  I tossed it onto the backseat of my car and headed out.

  The sky was high and pale and the air was brittle on Sunday morning. Calendar winter was still a month away. But in the shaded spots along Route 2, hoarfrost whitened the ground like snow and skim ice glittered in the puddles from Saturday’s rain.

  I turned north on Interstate 91, then west on Route 9 in Brattleboro, heading across
the narrow southernmost width of Vermont. I ascended, then descended the Green Mountain spine, found Route 7A just north of Bennington, and pulled into the peastone lot in front of Dave’s Café north of Manchester a few minutes before noon.

  There were half a dozen cars already parked there. One of them was a burgundy Honda Accord with New York plates.

  I went inside. To the left of the lobby was a small bar, apparently closed. To the right lay a dining room. A sign by the entryway said, “Please Seat Yourself.” I went in. Some mounted brown trout and deer antlers and framed Currier and Ives prints hung from the knotty pine walls. High-backed booths lined the front and side by the windows. Tables were scattered across the floor. None of the tables was occupied. Everyone wanted a window view of the highway.

  I stood there for a moment. Then I saw a hand and a glimpse of blond hair. I went over and said, “Bonnie?”

  She nodded. “I thought that was you. Thanks for coming.”

  I never would have recognized her on the street, but knowing who she was, I remembered her. Aside from three parallel vertical creases between her eyebrows and a barely noticeable thickening of the flesh on her throat, she still looked pretty much as I remembered her at twenty, although I knew she was at least twice that.

  I slid into the booth across from her.

  She smiled at me. Her eyes were the same color as the Vermont sky. “I remember you,” she said. “You and your friend Charlie. You guys were wild.”

  I nodded. “We still are.”

  “I bet. Want some coffee?” She gestured to an earthenware urn and two matching mugs that sat on the table.

  “Coffee would be great.”

  Bonnie poured the two mugs full.

  I picked up the one she pushed toward me and sipped. “How are you doing?” I said.

  She shrugged. “I’m doing okay. It’s hard, but I’m getting there. Al’s parents are like big solid slabs of Vermont granite. They’ve been great. I lean on them and they hold me up. We weren’t especially close when—when Al was alive. The kids aren’t handling it that well.” She shook her head. “It takes time, I guess.”

  I nodded. “I’m really sorry. Anything I can do…”

 

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