“Hard to believe.”
After I hung up from Julie, I called Kate Burrows in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. When she answered, I said, “Do you work all day on Sundays?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s Brady Coyne again.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Well, the answer is, our paper hits the newsstands on Tuesdays, so Sunday is a busy day for me. But that’s not why you called. Do you have anything for me?”
“Possibly.”
“Good. Shoot.”
“Questions, really,” I said. “First, a teenage boy committed suicide in Carlisle in 1987. It might be interesting to know who that boy was. Second, Owen Ransom’s parents died in a boating accident in August of 1990. I’m wondering if there was anything suspicious about it. Third, a doctor named Winston St. Croix. He’s the one Ransom came here to Cortland to see.”
Kate Burrows laughed. “You want me to do some research for you, is that it?”
“There might be a story in it for you,” I said.
“I’ll see what I can find out. I suppose you want me to call you.”
“I’d appreciate it.” I gave her the motel number. “If I’ve checked out, try my office.” I gave her that number, too.
I took what I hadn’t yet read of the Sunday paper to the diner. My arrival stopped no conversations, nor did it even raise any eyebrows, that I noticed.
I was getting to be a fixture in the place.
A waitress I hadn’t seen before took my order. I splurged on the sirloin tips, medium rare, with french fries and fresh broccoli and a slab of blueberry pie for dessert.
Back at the motel, I watched Mel Gibson and Danny Glover smash up cars, shoot people, and bleed a lot. When the movie was over, I took a shower and crawled into bed.
I lay awake for a long time. Usually I read Moby Dick after I go to bed. I’ve been reading that book for years. I’ve learned a lot about the whaling industry, and Melville’s stolid prose usually takes my mind off whatever it’s been on and puts me to sleep.
Without Moby Dick, I tend to stare up at the ceiling at bedtime. I’m not sure if that would gratify Melville.
So I stared at the ceiling, my mind churning around Owen Ransom posing as a pediatrician, boating accidents and suicides in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Larry Scott following Evie down to the Cape, and I thought about all the folks I’d met in Cortland, and, of course, I thought about Evie, how the previous night she’d come creeping into my room, how nice it would be if she decided to do it again, and how easy it always was to fall asleep with Evie’s head on my shoulder.
But she didn’t come creeping into my room.
Eventually, I fell asleep anyway.
When the phone woke me up, there was no light sifting in around the curtains. I fumbled for it in the dark, got it pressed to my ear, and mumbled, “Hello?”
“Hi, honey. Sorry to wake you up.” It was Evie.
I pushed my pillow up and wormed my way into a half-sitting position. “Where are you? What time is it?”
“It’s a few minutes after three, and I’m still here in Larry’s little room in the barn.”
“I wish you were here.”
“Yes,” she said. “Me too. But it’s not safe.”
“I miss you.”
“I know.”
I found my cigarettes and got one lit. “What’s up, honey?”
“I found out some things.”
“About Larry?”
“Yes.”
“First,” I said, “say something sweet.”
She laughed softly. “I do wish I was there with you.”
“Me too.”
“Sleeping in your arms.”
“Yes.”
“It was nice last night,” she said.
“It sure was.”
“I’m sorry you got dragged into this mess.”
“I didn’t get dragged,” I said. “It was my choice.”
She cleared her throat. “Brady, listen,” she said. “I’ve been on the Internet on Larry’s computer. I don’t quite know what to make of it, but it all seems to involve Winston St. Croix.”
“Are you okay, honey?” I said.
“Oh, sure,” she said.
“Those cops—Detective Vanderweigh and Sergeant Dwyer—they came prowling around the barn when I was there this afternoon. I was worried they’d find you.”
She laughed quietly. “They didn’t.”
“Dwyer was a friend of Larry’s,” I said. “I was afraid he might know about your little hideout.”
“Well, if he checked it out, he wouldn’t’ve found me or any sign of me there. I was out in the woods.”
I took a drag off my cigarette and blew it up at the ceiling. “So what about St. Croix?” I said. “Or did you call because you miss me?”
“No,” she said. “I do miss you, but that’s not why I called.” She paused for a moment. “Remember that teenage suicide in 1987? His name was Edgar Ransom.”
“Aha,” I said. “A relative of Owen Ransom, no doubt.”
“His brother. He was two years older than Owen.”
“You sure? How’d you learn that?”
“I went on Larry’s computer and checked the obituaries from Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for November 1987,” she said. “The name Edgar Ransom jumped right out at me. The obit didn’t mention the cause of death. It just said ‘suddenly.’ It listed his surviving relatives. Two parents—Margaret and Robert—and a brother, Owen.”
“The obits,” I said. “That’s brilliant.” I thought for a minute. “So Owen Ransom’s brother Edgar commits suicide in 1987 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and in 1990 their parents drown, and then eleven years later Owen, a hardware-store clerk, comes to Cortland. Owen’s using a false name and posing as a doctor who wants to buy Winston St. Croix’s pediatric practice, and next thing you know, he gets his throat cut in back of a motel. It’s pretty interesting, but I don’t get the connection.”
“Well,” she said, “I found one other thing that might shed some light on the subject.” She hesitated. “I checked the obits for Margaret and Robert Ransom, who died in that boating accident in 1990. According to the paper, they had moved to Carlisle in 1984. Guess where they lived before that?”
“Come on, honey. It’s three A.M. I just woke up, and I haven’t had any coffee. I’m not good at guessing.”
She chuckled. “Sorry. I should know better.” She cleared her throat. “Before the Ransom family moved to Pennsylvania, Robert Ransom was a schoolteacher at a regional high school in Gorham, Minnesota.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That’s where Winston St. Croix had his medical practice before he came to Cortland, right?”
“Bingo.”
“So,” I said, “it’s likely that the Ransoms and Dr. St. Croix knew each other.”
“In fact,” said Evie, “it’s likely that both Edgar and Owen Ransom were Winston St. Croix’s patients. Their ages would be about right.”
“I talked with St. Croix this afternoon after I saw you,” I said. “He didn’t seem to recognize the name Ransom.”
“It was a long time ago,” she said. “He’s had thousands of patients.”
“So what does all this have to do with Larry Scott?”
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “I’m still working on it. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Larry knew all of this. And maybe more.”
“You’re thinking about those printouts you found, and that newspaper article. They were Larry’s.”
“Yes,” she said. “He’d bookmarked the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Web address on his computer. He probably found out more than I have so far.”
“Like what?”
“Well, obviously I don’t know yet. But I’m not done. I’ll let you know if I find out anything else.”
“Let me know if you don’t, too.”
“Sure.” She paused. “Maybe.”
“Or just let me know that you’re okay,” I said. “I worry about you.”
“I know. That�
�s sweet. But please don’t try to see me again or contact me. Okay?”
“Listen, honey—”
“I mean it, Brady. It’s dangerous for both of us.”
“Okay. I guess you’re right.”
“I wish you’d just go back to Boston,” she said.
“When I’m ready.”
“I worry about you, too, you know.”
“I know.”
She hesitated. “There’s something else,” she said slowly. “I don’t know what to make out of it.”
“What is it?”
“I remembered one time Larry mentioning that he had a secret place where he hid his special treasures. He called it his safe. I—I was worried that he might be keeping some, um, personal things in it.”
I wondered what Larry might’ve had besides those photographs taped beside his bed that would worry Evie. “So,” I said, “did you find Larry’s hidey-hole?”
“Yes. There’s a loose floorboard under the cot here in this room. He had a lot of money in there.”
“What’s a lot?”
“Exactly thirty thousand dollars. All in hundred-dollar bills. They were in a plastic bag in a shoebox.”
I thought for a minute. “Remember that night down the Cape?” I said. “He said something about money.”
“Yes,” she said. “He said he had money. Larry never had money, which gave him a gigantic inferiority complex. He only made minimum wage at the medical center. He thought a hundred dollars was a fortune. The Scotts were always dirtpoor. Mary never got any help from her ex-husband. She’s always struggled to make ends meet.”
“So what are you thinking?” I said. “Was Larry stealing money or something?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess he might have been. He was certainly capable of it. No matter what I told him, he was always convinced that I stopped seeing him because he was poor, and that I went out with Win because he was rich. Maybe he thought if he had money I’d be more …” She let her voice trail off.
“Speaking for myself,” I said, “I’d lie, cheat, and steal if I thought it would win your heart.”
“No you wouldn’t. But Larry certainly might.” She paused. “Anyway, I don’t know what Larry’s money has got to do with anything.”
“Me neither.”
“Brady?” she said after a moment.
“What, honey?”
“I’m going to try to sleep now.”
“Okay.”
“You sleep, too.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I hope this is all over soon.”
“So do I. I miss you.”
“Yes,” she said. “Me too. But I meant what I said this afternoon.”
“What was that?”
“I’m not good for you.”
“Now, listen to me—”
“Sleep tight, dear man,” she said. Then she hung up.
SIXTEEN
I lay there in the darkness for a long time mulling over what Evie had told me. My poor, sleep-deprived, middle-of-the-night brain refused to operate logically. All sorts of wild and random scenarios ricocheted around up there, and after a while they morphed into a series of wild and random dreams that made no sense, either.
I woke up in a tangle of wet sheets. My heart was drumming, and sweat drenched my body, and even as I lay there in my little motel room with my eyes open, the weird terror of my dream was still palpable.
I’d been naked, trapped in a dark cavernous room that was vaguely Mary Scott’s barn, except ten times bigger. Evie was stalking me with a knife, except it wasn’t Evie. She wore a man’s felt hat and sunglasses and a long auburn braid, and in my dream I knew that she was some stranger disguised in Evie’s body. She’d backed me into a corner, and the rough plank walls were puncturing and shredding my bare skin. Billy and Joey, my two sons, were hunched over a workbench way over on the other side of the big room. A single lightbulb over their heads lit them up like a spotlight in the darkness. They were poking through a pile of body parts—hunks of wet flesh, shiny organs, bloody fingers and toes. One of my boys would pick up something slimy and drippy, hold it up to the light, and both of them would laugh. I kept trying to scream to them to help me. My throat ached from the effort, but no words came out of my mouth.
I sat up in bed, took several deep breaths, and finally managed to blink away the awful, vivid reality of my dream.
Sunlight was streaming in around the shades. I checked my wristwatch. It was nearly nine in the morning.
I stumbled into the shower and waited for it to wash away the lingering fragments of my dream. Then I got dressed, went out to my car, and headed for the diner.
As I drove, I pondered what Evie had told me. The person most likely to be able to fill in the blanks was Winston St. Croix. It was a Monday morning, and I figured he’d probably be seeing patients. I decided to get some coffee circulating in my system, have a leisurely breakfast, then go sit in the doctor’s waiting room until he had time to talk to me.
I found an empty stool in the diner, and a minute later Ruth set a mug of coffee in front of me. I looked up at her. “Good morning,” I said.
“Is it?” she said. “You look like you rassled sheep all night. You’re just supposed to count ’em, you know.”
“That bad, huh?” I smiled. “There were way too many of them to count, and they all had horns.”
I ordered a mushroom omelette with home fries, Canadian bacon, wheat toast, and orange juice, then spotted a newspaper on the seat of an empty booth. I snagged it, took it back to my stool, and skimmed through the sports section while I sipped my coffee.
My omelette arrived before I finished my first mug of coffee, and I’d just about cleaned my plate when four men came stomping into the diner. All four of them looked to be somewhere in their thirties. They were wearing calf-high black rubber boots, blue jeans, and T-shirts. Their faces and arms and shirts were smudged and stained with what looked like a combination of sweat and soot. They were all talking and gesturing and laughing at the same time, full of adrenaline, or testosterone, as if they’d just played a big ball game. Their eyes were red, and none of them had shaved.
They settled into an empty booth, and although I couldn’t make out their words, I caught the tone of jazzed-up excitement in their voices.
A couple of people got up from where they were sitting and went over to talk to the four guys, and then a few others joined them, and pretty soon a crowd had gathered around their booth.
When Ruth came over to clear away my plate and refill my coffee mug, I jerked my head in the direction of the four men and said, “What’s all the excitement about?”
“Oh,” she said, “those boys are volunteer firemen. They’re comin’ from a big one.”
“A fire?”
She rolled her eyes. “No, they won the lottery.”
I smiled. “Sorry. I’ve only had one cup of coffee today.”
“Barn fire,” said Ruth. “Them old barns, you know? Dried timbers, full of hay.” She made an exploding motion with her hands. “They just go up.”
“They couldn’t save it?”
She shrugged. “Nobody hurt, no livestock to worry about, and they saved the house. They did their job.”
“Where was the fire?”
She gestured vaguely. “North of town. Mary Scott’s place.”
“Oh, shit,” I said. I dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the counter and got the hell out of there.
If there had been a cop on my tail, he’d have pulled me over for speeding. But I didn’t care. I drove fast.
Evie had been in that barn.
When I got to Mary Scott’s place, there was a Cortland PD cruiser in the driveway and a red Subaru wagon out front. I recognized the Subaru. Charlotte Matley, Evie’s lawyer, drove it. I pulled up in front of the Subaru, got out, and walked halfway down the driveway.
Out back beyond the house, I could see what was left of the barn. The front wall was still standing, but most of the roof had ei
ther burned or been torn off, leaving the charred beams and rafters of the old building’s skeleton exposed. Slabs of black wood lay scattered around the backyard. It smelled like a campfire that someone had pissed on.
As I started toward the front porch, the screen door opened and Sergeant John Dwyer stepped out. He paused there on the steps, looking back inside and talking to somebody on the other side of the door. Then he glanced my way, lifted his chin at me, waved at the person on the porch, and came over to where I was standing.
“This a social call, Mr. Coyne?” he said.
“I heard about the fire,” I said. “Wanted to be sure everybody was okay.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s right neighborly of you. Old Mel got himself some burns, trying to salvage his junk. Mrs. Scott just got herself scared. That’s about the extent of it. Of course, between the smoke and the fire and the water, everything in that old barn was ruined.”
“There was nobody in there, then?”
“Mel and Mrs. Scott were sleeping when it went up.”
“The firemen looked all through it?”
“Sure. Of course.”
I let out a little breath of relief. “When did it happen?”
“Mrs. Scott called it in sometime after five.” He shrugged. “Guess by then it was going pretty good. The firemen left about an hour ago.”
“Any idea what started it?”
He shook his head. “Big old wood barn full of hay and paint cans, oily rags, gasoline and turpentine, and who-knows-what-else. Mel and Larry did the wiring themselves, never got it inspected. Mrs. Scott’s going to have herself a time collecting insurance on it, I suspect. Damn shame is what it is.”
“I was wondering about arson.”
Dwyer smiled. “Why would you wonder that?”
“Well,” I said, “somebody killed Larry. Maybe they have a grudge against the family or something.”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “Cortland isn’t exactly Boston, you know. We’ve got an all-volunteer fire department. They’re pretty damn good at putting out fires, but not a one of ’em’s any kind of arson expert. Nothing valuable in there, nobody hurt. It’s just an old barn.” He shrugged. “Maybe they’ll call in one of the state fire marshals, I don’t know.”
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