Cover Story

by Brenda Buchanan

  What was terrible was the oncoming train that was my deadline. I needed to find a computer, and fast. Cohen’s office would have been the logical answer if he and Emma weren’t on their way to East Machias.

  I remembered the quartet of public access computers at the library. “Do you know what time the library closes tonight?”

  “On Mondays it’s open until eight o’clock.”

  “I need to go over there and file my story. Then I’ll come see you and we’ll talk about this some more.”

  I pulled on my parka and ran, skidding on the fast-freezing sidewalk as I rounded a corner near the courthouse parking lot. At the library I found two of the four public computers unoccupied. After scrawling my name on the sign-up sheet at the front desk, I plunked myself in front of one of them and set to work. I texted Leah to let her know I was going to miss my deadline, but not by much. My hands flew over the keyboard, describing the day’s testimony about the two faces of Frank O’Rourke. At the end I predicted Mansfield would rest his case by Tuesday noon. After a quick proofread I clicked onto the internet and used my web-based email account to transmit the story to the newsroom. My watch said six fourteen.

  I called Leah from the library’s foyer. She was pissed about the tardiness of my story but eased up when I told her about the theft of my computer.

  “I don’t know that it’s the same person who chased me last week, it could be a coincidence.”

  “That’s bullshit and you know it,” she said. “Call the cops and make a report. Maybe they wouldn’t have believed you about the car chase, or the phone calls, but a missing computer is pretty tangible. So file a police report, then go back to your room, and stay there, with the deadbolt engaged.”

  I headed out into the night, remembering as I crossed the street that Jackson Harrison hadn’t been in the courtroom at the end of the day. Maybe the inn owner had interrogated her staff by now and someone had seen him in the building during the afternoon.

  My eyes were focused on the slippery sidewalk when the blow came out of the darkness, so stealthy I never sensed it coming. Something heavy and hard caught me on the right side of my head behind my ear, then bounced down to my shoulder, knocking me to the sidewalk. My bare hands slammed into the ice-covered pavement, breaking my fall in an agonizing kind of way. Sour breath overlaid with a spicy scent hit my nostrils as rough hands reached down and yanked my hat down over my eyes.

  I tried to roll away, but my attacker kicked me in the gut with what felt like a steel-toed boot. I was gasping for breath on the sidewalk, legs curled up to protect myself. He must have wound up like a punter for the next kick, because I skidded ten feet until my back collided with something hard, which turned out to be a recently shoveled-out fire hydrant.

  * * *

  A little girl out walking her dog found me there, crumpled on the sidewalk, dipping in and out of consciousness. Her big black Lab was licking my face when the girl made a cautious approach. For a moment I thought the dog was Lou, then I realized I was lying on an icy sidewalk feeling like I was going to throw up from the pain. My eyes couldn’t focus on the girl’s face, and my voice didn’t work very well, but I was able to get the idea across that someone had kicked the shit out of me. She ran home and came back with her dad, and they sat with me until a Machias cop—a town cop, not one of the brown-uniformed sheriff’s deputies—showed up. I’d crawled more or less to a sitting position by then and was explaining who I was when an ambulance arrived.

  Emma and Cohen, returning from the charade visit to the Boothby property, heard the sirens, and a cop at the intersection told Cohen he needed to detour to reach his house because there’d been an assault. Cohen parked in the first place he could find and he and Emma ran to the cordoned-off street, arriving in time to see my face illuminated by strobing blue and red lights.

  I urged Cohen to tell the cops that I didn’t need to go to the hospital, but he stepped out of the way when the paramedics lifted me on a folding gurney into the back of the ambulance. The hospital was a few blocks away, and the ER doctor on duty turned out to be Cohen’s sister, Jane, who wore half-glasses and a stern expression.

  Before the technicians wheeled me off to X-ray, I asked Emma to call Christie because I didn’t want her to wonder why I didn’t call. “I’d appreciate it if you’d downplay the whole thing.” I gave her the phone number. “She’s got enough to worry about without adding me to the mix.”

  I was sure my cell phone, which I hoped to hell was still in the inside pocket of my confiscated jacket, held multiple text messages from Leah. If the cops on the scene identified me as the victim, my name had been broadcast to every kitchen scanner in two counties, and the news hounds in the Maine Twitterverse probably were already speculating about who jumped me. When I mumbled something about calling my editor, Emma volunteered to make that call, too. I hoped Leah wouldn’t go ballistic, but my head hurt too much to do it myself.

  The next couple of hours were taken up with a battery of tests, including a CT scan to make sure there was no bleeding inside my head. When the result came back negative, Dr. Jane went out into the waiting room and came back with her brother and Emma in tow.

  “Good news. I’m going to live,” I said.

  Cohen smiled. “Yeah, but you should get out of this town while the getting’s good.”

  “Leah said the same thing,” Emma said. “I told her I wasn’t sure you’d be able to call her yourself until tomorrow.”

  Dr. Jane interrupted with a little lecture about concussions and the warning signs that should prompt a return visit to the hospital. The cops wanted to see me, but Dr. Jane asked the nurse to run interference for five minutes, allowing me to tell Emma and Cohen what I remembered about the evening, which was pretty much everything up to the second kick. They briefed me on their trip to East Machias where they saw Jackson Harrison himself pulling out of his driveway behind the wheel of a Chevrolet pickup.

  “Damn,” I said. “I was sure you were going to see a big dark Ford in his dooryard.”

  “It doesn’t take him out of the mix,” Cohen said. “It only means if he’s the guy who ran you off the road, he was driving a different truck.”

  When Dr. Jane gave the signal, the cops trooped in. A no-nonsense detective named Rose MacVane was in charge. She asked me twenty questions ten different ways. I described everything I could remember, but the truth was, I didn’t remember hearing or seeing anything before being slammed to the sidewalk. When MacVane asked if I had any enemies, I told her about the stolen laptop, and at Emma and Cohen’s urging, recounted the Black Woods Road chase and the phone threats, too.

  But I’m not a reporter for nothing, so I made her tell me what evidence the cops had found at the scene. There wasn’t much. Footprints in the snow showed my assailant hid behind a six-foot wooden fence next to the courthouse before the ambush. The fence ran along the sidewalk, which allowed him to blindside me as I walked past. MacVane said the footprints showed my attacker left the way he came, ducking back behind the fence to the courthouse parking lot, where his trail disappeared. They weren’t sure what he hit me with. A sliver of wood was found stuck to my hat, which would have made me think baseball bat, but this being Machias, MacVane speculated that it was an oar.

  “An oar?” I said, touching the back of my head with tentative fingers.

  “There’s a lot of ’em around here,” she said. “Pretty much everyone has a pair or two in the back of their pickup, or at least in their shed.”

  Dr. Jane said the bruises on the back of my head, neck and right shoulder told her it was a hard but glancing blow. “You must have moved your head to the left as it was coming at you. If you hadn’t done that, and he’d hit you square, you wouldn’t be sitting up talking.”

  On that cheery note I left the hospital under my own steam a few minutes past 11:00 p.m. In addition to a very tender lump on my hea
d, an abrasion behind my ear, and two broken ribs, I also had considerable bruising on my abdomen and in the middle of my back from the kicks and my collision with the hydrant. Before waving us out of her ER, Dr. Jane gave me some samples of souped-up Tylenol to carry me until the pharmacy opened in the morning.

  One part of me wanted to huddle with Emma and Cohen and continue trying to figure out what the hell was going on, but we all were beat and I really needed to swallow some pain pills, so by mutual agreement we called it a night. Cohen drove us back to the inn by way of his house, telling us his wife wanted to be sure we didn’t go to bed without supper. He ran inside for a moment and returned with an oversized thermos and a paper sack, then took us to the Easterly where we said good-night, agreeing to meet at his office at seven in the morning when our heads would be clearer.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Tuesday, January 13, 2015

  Emma spent the night in my room, but it wasn’t the sort of romantic night I’d been imagining. More of a private duty nurse thing. She’d taken to heart Dr. Jane’s admonitions about potential complications of a concussion and was determined not to let me out of her sight. The thermos from Cohen’s wife turned out to hold fish chowder and the bag, four thick slices of homemade bread. I had little appetite, so she ate all of the chowder and most of the bread.

  It was a fitful night. I dozed off and woke up groaning a couple of times to find Emma awake in the armchair, her feet sprawled onto the hassock. She asked if I was okay. I said yeah. Allowed her to bring me a drink of water. Then slid back to sleep.

  When my aching head dragged me into full consciousness at ten till three, the reading lamp was on. Emma was curled up in the chair, absorbed in the E.B. White essays.

  “Hey,” I said. “What are you doing awake?”

  She looked up from the book with a tired smile. “I tried to conk out for a while there, but my busy brain kept me up.”

  She helped me sit up and swallow a pain pill, then adjusted the pillows before I lay back down.

  “You thinking about the case?”

  “Sure. And Corrine. Wondering if after all of this, her father will be convicted anyway.”

  “I hope to hell not, but that’s the risk with a jury trial. Even if the judge thinks there’s no way Danny was the killer, she’s not the decision-maker.”

  “At least some of the jurors have got to be seeing the holes in the state’s case.”

  “It’s folly to assume how a jury will vote.”

  I listened to the wind rattle the shutters. My groggy mind transported me to Christie’s house in Riverside. I wondered what she’d done to mark her first evening in more than a decade as a single woman. Made a special dinner? Had a glass of wine? Taken a long bath?

  I tried to remember how long she’d been with Arn. Twelve years, maybe thirteen? When I’d moved to town in 2004 they definitely were an established couple. Theo was an enthusiastic first-grader, and even then it was obvious how little interest Arn had in the boy. I’d transformed myself from diner customer to friend by my steady willingness to hang out with Theo—hiking, swimming and hurling a basketball at a crooked hoop during thousands of games of HORSE in the driveway. My reward was that I got to gaze at Christie, eat at her table, enjoy a hug now and then.

  At first I wanted more—much more—but eventually it dawned on me that even if Arn were to fall off the face of the earth, taking up with Christie would be complicated on many levels. She had four years on me, and a canyon of life experience lay between us when I was a horny pup of twenty-two and she was the single mother of a six-year-old.

  Feeling sleep creeping up on the heels of the kicking-in pain med, I wondered if that were still true, now that I was thirty-two, she was on the other side of thirty-five, and Theo would be out of the house in a couple of years.

  * * *

  I woke for good at six o’clock. Emma went back to her room for a shower and a change of clothes after I convinced her that I was capable of doing the same without assistance. She acquiesced once I promised to lock my door. After closing it behind her, I shuffled into the bathroom and looked into the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot, and the dressing on my head made me look like a Civil War soldier bandaged by a butterfingered field hospital recruit.

  I’d lied to Emma about being ready to shower on my own, but there was no way in hell I was going to ask her for help. Stepping into the stall, I grabbed the bar intended for disabled people, realizing I fit that description. I hung on and let the hot water run over the bruises on my torso, soaping up with one hand. The dressing part of the operation went fine except for my socks because my fractured ribs made it impossible to bend over. I sat in the armchair until Emma returned, bare feet on the hassock, rethinking my various theories about who killed Frank O’Rourke.

  My mind jumped back to the townie bar, when the bodybuilder guy jammed me against the wall with his beefy shoulder as I was leaving the men’s room. The same kind of instantaneous jolt of adrenaline had run through my body the previous night when I was attacked. Then the penny dropped.

  Cologne. The guy who bashed my head with an oar smelled like the bodybuilder who mouthed off at me in the bar. Some kind of lousy spicy cologne, the kind a kid might use before a high school dance to cover up the smell of his anxiety. At Emma’s soft knock I jumped up so fast I felt dizzy, but hobbled over and unlocked the door before she knocked again. She pushed me back into the chair when she got a look at me.

  “You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  “I just remembered something important,” I said. “His smell. The guy who whacked me last night smelled like the stoned guy with the mohawk who hassled me when I was hanging out in that townie bar last week.”

  As she helped me with my socks and boots, I described the guy in the bar and the stench of his cologne.

  “I caught a whiff last night. Same stuff,” I said. “I hope Willow’s downstairs this morning. She’ll know the goon’s name.”

  The aroma of coffee permeated the hallway, and if I could have, I would have run in that direction. But my cracked ribs and aching back forced me to go slow, so I was several steps behind Emma reaching the breakfast room, where Willow, my opinionated, well-connected friend, was setting up the buffet.

  “Hey! We need to talk.”

  “What the hell happened to you?” Willow set down a basket of muffins and motioned me toward a chair.

  I waved her off. “The guy in the bar, the night I hung out there with you, who was he?”

  “What guy? Billy?”

  “No, the guy who yelled at me a little while before I left, who tried to pick a fight with me when I was leaving the men’s room. Who was that?”

  Her face was blank for a moment. “You mean Mick? Big guy, bodybuilder?”

  “Yeah, that’s him. Mick who?”

  “Mick LeClair.” Her face wrinkled as though she’d sniffed a carton of milk and found it sour. “Danny’s brother-in-law.”

  Emma handed me a cup of coffee. I ignored it.

  “Let me get this straight. The jerk who told me the bar was a private club and I should leave because I wasn’t a member. He’s Danny’s brother-in-law?”

  “Right. Karen’s kid brother. Why?”

  “That night in the bar, I almost gagged when he slammed his shoulder into me. He stank like dope and cheap cologne. Last night somebody came up behind me and clocked me good on the head, then kicked me with steel-toed boots. He got close enough for me to smell him, and it was the same. The same cologne.”

  “Don’t tell me you were the reason for all the damn sirens last night?”

  “Yup. Someone hit me from behind, pulled my hat down over my face and kicked the shit out of me. And he smelled like Mick LeClair.”

  Willow ran her hand over her face. “Let me tell you about Mick. He’s trouble. Always h
as been. He’s my age—twenty-five—so I’ve known him all my life. In elementary school, he was the kind of kid who’d trip you on the playground so he could laugh when you cried. All through school it was that way. A mean little shit, so most kids steered clear of him.”

  She reached for the coffeepot, poured herself a cup. “His mother, saint that she is, always stuck up for him, said he had a learning disorder and it made him act out. But I think he’s got a personality disorder.”

  “Claude told me he had a son, but he called him Michael,” I said. “What do you know about him? Who’s he hang around with? Does he work?”

  Willow looked up at the clock, calculating how much time she had to talk before other people came down for breakfast. “Come into the kitchen. I’ve got to scramble some eggs.”

  We grabbed our coffee and followed her through the swinging door. She pulled a big stainless steel bowl from the shelf and a whisk from an open tray of kitchen tools.

  “Mick sometimes runs with some guys from Calais who are into some bad shit.” She lowered her voice and pulled a dozen eggs out of the refrigerator. “Smuggling. Drugs and guns, over the border into Canada. Talk is that the Calais guys put up with him because he’s big and violent. They’re the brains, and he’s the brawn.”

  I recounted my conversation with Claude LeClair the day of my haircut. “He said his son had been in trouble but was back living at home and keeping his nose clean.”

  Willow hooted. “Yeah, he’s back living at home all right. I believe it was a condition of his probation.” She cracked eggs into the bowl. “If he’s reformed, then I’m Julia Friggin’ Child.”

  “Why the hell would he be after me?”

  “Maybe someone hired him.” She began whisking the eggs with vigor. “I wouldn’t put it past him to take a little gig like that. Or maybe he’s got a hair across his ass. If you’re as smart as you look, you’ll steer clear.”