by John Farrow
A joyous self. He’s impudent now. Different.
Joy is both ruthless and awkward in his life. A midnight strangler with a chokehold on him now.
As always, Professor Toomey delays. A familiar digression given his long-term marriage to routine.
First, he needs to complete a morning chore.
He carries a sandwich with him. Chicken, one he’s roasted himself, with a celery-nut mixture. A small can of V8 for starters, as a nod to good health, then he scatters his best intentions with a Diet Coke to quaff it all down. The former came from home and is warm although he doesn’t mind, the latter cool, plucked from a vending machine on his way out. He eludes the rain under a porch overhang and while it isn’t anywhere near noon proceeds to consume his meal.
Nourishment and energy for the rambunctious task ahead.
Then the sprint to his Bimmer.
Toomey drives through the avenues that wind between the school and the Connecticut River before parking along a road in a favored spot. He’s out in the rain again getting soaked along a wooded hiking trail, then reverses direction onto a modest civic lane to the cemetery. He looks around once he’s through the gates, as if for a gravestone, as if he’s here to pay his respects, all of which is both subterfuge and old habit. An exercise that’s futile today. The grounds and trails are usually well traveled with lovers and baby strollers, with loners and groups of students taking the air. Not a single soul today, not under this endless cloudburst, not even a manic jogger. A lightning flash startles him, and moments later a thunderclap is deafening. He’s in an alcove of trees, dangerous turf in these conditions, and prefers not to linger. The former spy strides past a young tree that an accident of nature has shaped to resemble a snake charmer’s viper rising to a flute’s hypnotic tune, at least in his imagination, and three trees along is the shaggy-bark hickory. Again he glances around but this time makes it look as though he’s dropped something. Mere ploy. Futile, still. Even if he’s not alone, no one will be able to discern his movements through the sheets of rain.
He’s so wet he could swim home.
Another lightning strike makes him bounce.
Drenched, he’s reminded of slippery sexual contortions that will go on all afternoon. Toomey slides a page from the inside of his coat pocket that will mean nothing to anyone save for a rare few. Innocuous drivel, essentially, but imbedded in the text are a few lines that count, the critical, coded thoughts he means to communicate, primarily to see if his correspondent can work through the code. Leaning over to afford the paper protection from the rain, he folds it in half. Priority green. In half again. Priority blue. Then to a quarter its initial size. Priority red. He surreptitiously guides the folded page through a gap of the shaggy bark that gives the tree its name and into a plastic pouch that’s wholly sheltered from the elements, then reaches higher and extracts a similar sheet in the same slick motion. The deft moves are tempered in such a way that anyone observing him with only a casual interest will be unlikely to perceive that he has exchanged papers with a tree trunk. The casual observer will see only that he leaned against the trunk briefly while with his free hand he scratched an itch at the back of his thigh. He then returns to the lane, then a walking trail again, and picks up the pace back to his car. He drops the new communication into an outer pocket of his bag on the passenger seat, and proceeds toward his rendezvous with love.
Or, as goes the general drift to his thinking today, with lust. His hair is flattened, his toes feel squishy in his leaking shoes, while his heart joyfully thumps with the anticipation of his pending carnal privilege.
Toomey drives off campus then out of Holyoake. Once on the freeway his speed never climbs above thirty-five miles an hour. Even at that rate, as he passes a pair of transport trucks the backsplash from their wheels is blinding. After that he stays a safe distance behind a big pickup—close enough to glimpse its taillights, far enough back that the torrent coming off its wheels doesn’t add to the deluge from the skies. As he crosses the bridge over the Connecticut River, traffic slows to a crawl into Vermont on the other side.
All anybody wants is to get off the highway.
The route into White River Junction is circuitous and not remotely intuitive. Toomey knows it well and anticipates each freeway turn and circle despite the diminished visibility. A good thing on a day like today. The darkness is shocking for the hour, then lightning reflects off a rock outcropping for an instant and the sudden brightness is disorienting. Once he’s heading downhill from the outlying industrial district of hotels, diners, and gas stations into the old town, he knows he’ll be all right. The town’s heyday lies in its distant past, when the railroad ruled and the forest and mill industries flourished. That’s no longer the case, and being situated off the highways keeps the old town depressed and showing its age.
Which helps project an indigent charm.
He sails on by the Calvin Coolidge Hotel, which has been modestly spruced up through time, although the establishment next door projects a large, simple sign to entice a portion of the proud hotel’s clientele—ROOM WITH BATH—as though rooms without baths might still persist in the modern age. An arrow points to the entrance up the block. If travelers harbor further qualms as to the quality of the digs, a second large sign at the building’s opposite end reassures the doubtful by announcing the availability of both cold and hot water. Right with the times.
Across the railway tracks, homes display their poverty, and on the edge of this neighborhood, Professor Toomey parks his BMW. It’s not that he doesn’t want his car to be left on the sketchy streets—it’s no safer where it is—he doesn’t want anyone to know his precise whereabouts at this time of day. Even in walking to Malory’s place, he will follow a route similar to a figure-eight highway ramp. Any man intent on following him might suddenly discover him at his back.
Toomey makes a point to never exit the car promptly, in case others are on his tail. Routine technique, and the baseline of spy craft is to be obsessed with technique. Situated in the car, he’s secretly a keen observer of his surroundings, although visibility is highly restricted today. All the more reason to go slow.
Killing time, he checks the note extracted from the hickory’s bark.
Folded to a quarter its size: priority red.
Interesting.
He unfolds the paper, reads, and the whole of his body goes still. He feels himself thrust back into another time and place, when danger lurked in the very air he breathed.
Typed, an imperative:
Breached
Run!
Only that. He sits there, stunned a moment, constantly rereading.
The words never change no matter how often he scans them.
Breached
Written without a period, as though in haste.
Run!
Emphasized by an adolescent exclamation mark.
Despite the command, Toomey does not know what to do. Run? He can’t run. And why? He has to know why first. He’s not involved in anything serious enough to warrant this edict. Or is that not true? He thinks about starting up the car again and going straight back to the hickory tree, retrieving the note he’d left, substituting another, and asking questions. But no, if there is a problem at his confederate’s end, even if it’s a mistake, their drop might be compromised.
Run! What does anyone mean by that?
Where to? How far? From what?
He looks up. The neighborhood waits in its familiar disposition, only wet. Normally, he might see kids on bicycles. The infirm whiling away their time on a stone fence, yapping, are a common sight, too. He’d expect a few cars to come and go, though not today. Everything looks the same and yet everything is different and that difference is accentuated by the darkness of midday and by the rhythmic thump of his heartbeat. And by this new urgency. Run! He’s been in tight spots before, but doesn’t know if this constitutes a tight spot. Likely, the message is merely an overreaction. A misunderstanding. What he has to do now is precisely not r
un. Running is nothing but careless and possibly dangerous and against his better instincts not to mention against his training, experience, and expertise. He’s probably been alerted by an inexperienced young man in a panic. If this is a game, it’s a facile test. If it’s something ominous, the author of the message is probably overwrought. No. He’ll not run. He’ll carry on with his day. Obliterate himself in Malory’s passionate mournful intensity and emerge with the reminder that he is now merely a professor, a quiet academic, he is no longer risking his life out in the field. He’s fled that world and is living in comfort beyond the range of enemy fire. His correspondent is probably feeling nothing more than the risk of friendly fire. He himself no longer gets mired in such weary internecine battles. Oh, he keeps a hand in, but nothing more. Breached? If somebody panics due to a lack of experience or a lapse in judgment, then such a reaction remains to be accessed in the fullness of time. As for himself, he’s off to make love to his woman. Nothing more matters right now.
Run? Hardly.
In his favor, when he climbs out of the car again, the rain is merely steady, nothing severe.
Walking, his habit is to constantly create confusion by making his movements obscure and unpredictable, even if, ultimately, they’re routine. A learned discipline, one he maintains to keep his skills up.
He’s had reason to maintain his foray as secret.
For some, that he’s white and she’s black is a barrier for them to be accepted as a couple, even in this day and age, although it goes beyond that. She is black and poor, while he is white and prosperous, which for many makes it less acceptable. Moreover, he is white, prosperous, and a professor at Dowbiggin, while she is black, poor, and a member of the custodial staff at the same institution. She cleans toilets and waxes floors. He’s as clean as a whistle while she smokes dope. He hobnobs with political, corporate, and academic elites while she hangs with the few blacks in the region, who happen to be older jazz musicians who suffer from serious arthritis. Society’s acceptance of them as a couple in small-town New England—northern New England, in white New Hampshire—is questionable, and surely it’ll be trouble, possibly nasty trouble, at school.
Yet, doesn’t that make it all the more fun? All the more, in a way, miraculous? The adventure is grand.
He mulls over the note as he walks his twisty route. What was meant by breached? By run? The words were generated by a computer’s printer. The author, then, was not in such a mad scramble that he resorted to a quick handwritten scribble. But no. Think! Computer-generated means that the handwriting can never be traced, that this tip, if that’s what it is, once delivered, remains anonymous forever. That’s why it’s not handwritten—but why no further information? Because nothing more is known? Only that something has been breached—their method of communication, perhaps, in the cemetery? Or something more sinister? For his correspondent, the initial reaction is flight. And to command that he run himself when, usually, running is the worst possible strategy. He will not until he knows more, or until someone gives him valid reason.
Or scares him into it.
That hasn’t happened yet.
Toomey intentionally heads the wrong way to circle around. Shrinking concentric rings. He keeps up a sweat-popping pace in the ridiculously humid air. The current street has a rare attribute for the area as it’s one-way to traffic, an advantage for the moment. Drivers are less observant of people when passing them from behind, and in the rain he’s not invisible but he’s virtually unidentifiable. No one who bothers to take note of him will be able to validate a description later.
He usually takes this much care every time he crosses the river for sex. Part of the excitement, perhaps. Certainly, part of the game.
Finally, he’s close to Malory’s flat.
The exterior is an eyesore with peeling, cracked blue paint. The walls of the house look scabby and shorn. Around the downstairs porch stands an intricate, rusting wrought-iron filigree, which speaks to a time when the modest home possessed a notion of flair. Other homes on the block exhibit a higher level of attention, although the tiny one next door is a tossed salad of yellow and orange, green and various reds. Malory’s resembles a shipwreck cast upon a derelict shore. As a tenant, she lives upstairs. The window high above her entrance is shaded by an awning, the fabric disintegrating from sunlight although presently it admits the rain. An edge of the screen on the exterior door is curling, flies slip inside on warm sunny days, while the inner is patched, discolored, and dog-clawed ages ago. Toomey doesn’t bother to ring. What’s the point? He knows she’s home, ready to admit him. He can count on her to be waiting for him.
In a pose, perhaps, to solicit love.
This constitutes the major change in his life, that suddenly he can depend on what he cannot fathom. A woman’s love for him.
Or lust.
He goes up the shabby dark stairs and through the top door to find the woman he adores lying on the living room sofa. She’s been shot through the head, and that’s not the first horror he sees.
EIGHT
Before Émile Cinq-Mars reaches his car with a pair of detectives on his heels, Caroline, his niece, has assumed the worst. Why would these men be racing over to talk to her if not to inquire after her friend? Émile expects her to stay in the vehicle, instead she staggers through the rain toward him, saying, “No, Uncle Émile. No.” She wants to punch him, to beat his chest, to combat whatever he has to say. They clasp each other and that’s when she knows for sure, without a word being spoken, that one of her dear friends is dead.
“Let’s go inside,” Cinq-Mars suggests while remaining in her tight embrace. They come apart awkwardly, and Caroline clutches her belly.
“No,” she recites. “Uncle Émile? It can’t be. Not Addie. No.”
The two policemen come up, and Émile keeps an arm around her as they guide them both back toward the library entrance.
“We’ll sit a while, okay, then these two gentlemen will jot down some information. You’ll have to be strong now, sweetie. This won’t be easy.”
“I can’t believe it. I can’t believe this is happening. Why Addie?”
“These men will try to find that out.”
“Did she fall?”
“No, sweetie. She didn’t fall.”
“Can I see her?”
“Absolutely not. Even if one of these men suggests it, you are not to see her. Do you understand? You are not to see her.”
She may or may not understand, but Caroline nods in agreement. If he can, she wants her uncle to help her through this, and she wants a sudden, twisting hurt to go away. She clutches herself suddenly, and appears to suffer a spasm that strikes along her stomach and lungs. Caroline gasps. Émile holds her more tightly, and the police chief, in sympathy to her shock and torment, speeds up his gait to get ahead and hold open the door.
Inside, they seat themselves on a bench away from anyone else, a place where students commonly converse. The other officer with them, a state trooper, fetches water in a pointy paper cup. Émile pleads for time. Caroline accepts that idea at first, only to argue against it a minute later. She downs the water in a single gulp. “Let them ask questions.” She insists on it, and Émile inquires if he can stay. As a family member. As a former cop. The two officers consent to that.
The trooper qualifies, “For the time being.”
The first questions are the right ones, easing the witness into talking freely and easily. What is Caroline’s full name and where is she from, where does she go to school? A stupid question in this instance, but necessary. Confirm the basics. Where is Addie from? How long has she known her? When did she last see her? What was she wearing?
“She’s always in jeans.”
The chief asks if she owns a white dress.
“Dress?” Caroline responds, curiously. “What kind of white dress?”
The cop does his best to describe it.
Caroline is puzzled. “She doesn’t own anything like that. If she did, she didn’t
have any reason to wear it. Not that I know of. Not last night.”
“Did she wear nylons?”
“What do you mean nylons? You mean pantyhose? Sure, she wears pantyhose.”
The trooper keeps his voice gentle. “I mean hosiery. Nylons, you know, with a garter belt and like that.”
Rather than answer, Caroline asks Émile, “Are you sure the girl is Addie?”
“I can show you a picture,” Chief Till lets her know.