Cutter's Run

by William G. Tapply

  She nodded. “Say you own an engineering firm in Bangor. You hire me, I snoop around the state legislature, Capitol Hill in D.C., hear some talk about building a bypass on the Maine Turnpike. I call you, tell you about it, and if you want it, I help you get the job. Then you pay me a lot of money.” She smiled. “I’m a freelance facilitator, you might say. I help people get what they want, that’s all. And you? You’re a lawyer, right?”

  “Yes. I help people, too.”

  “What kind of law?”

  “Some of this, some of that. Estate, divorce, tax, contract. A bit of litigation now and then. I have a one-lawyer practice, just a few clients. Most of them keep me on retainer for whatever comes up. As much as anything, I’m an adviser, I guess you’d say.”

  “You and I would make a good team,” she said. “My clients can always use legal advice. I work with lawyers a lot.”

  “Alex wants me to bag my Boston practice, hang out a shingle up here.”

  She smiled. “You’d be busy enough. But you’d probably have to, um, adjust your expectations.”

  I laughed. “I’d go broke, you mean.”

  “It’s all relative,” she said. “You know, my father could use a lawyer like you.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said, “there are very few people who can’t use a lawyer these days. Does he have a problem?”

  “Maybe.” She turned and tilted her head toward me. “He needs advice, and he won’t listen to me. He’s only sixty-three, but he’s talking about selling everything and retiring to North Carolina.”

  At that point Paul slid open the glass doors. “Excuse me,” he said, “but Alex wants to know how the coals are coming along.”

  I went over and took a look. “Tell her I’ll throw the fish on in about ten minutes.”

  Paul relayed my message, then came outside. He put his hand on Susannah’s shoulder. She reached up, patted his hand, then shrugged. He removed his hand and sat up on the railing, facing us.

  “You mentioned Noah’s retiring,” I said to Susannah. “Is there a problem?”

  “Oh, the retirement part is fine,” she said. “It’d be good for him. He’s worked hard all his life. Barely keeps his head above water with the orchard. He had a little stroke last year, and that’s slowed him down a lot. Sure, he ought to retire. But he’s got no head for business. He’d take the first offer that came along. He owns nearly seven hundred acres up here. Been in the family for four generations. I keep telling him to be patient. Property values in this part of Maine are going to triple or quadruple in the next ten years.” She smiled. “People think old Mainers like my father are shrewd, but—”

  “Noah’s hardly shrewd,” said Paul. “He’s just tight with a dollar.” He leaned toward me. “Keeps his money in the bank, if you can believe it. His idea of a sound investment is putting new tires on a broken-down tractor.”

  Susannah shot Paul a look that, if I wasn’t mistaken, meant: “I can say things like that about my father, but you can’t.”

  Paul glanced at me, gave a little shrug, and rolled his eyes.

  “Well,” I said to Susannah, “of course I’ll talk to him, if he wants.”

  I went inside, fetched the salmon steaks from the refrigerator, and brushed them with olive oil. Then I brought them out and slapped them onto the grill. “Do you folks know Charlotte Gillespie?” I said.

  Paul shrugged. “I live in Portland. I don’t really know anybody here in Garrison except for Susannah and Noah.”

  “Never met her,” said Susannah. “Alex mentioned that you’d given her and her sick dog a ride to the vet’s last weekend. She’s the woman renting the cabin off County Road, right?”

  I nodded.

  “That’s Arnold Hood’s property,” she said. “Right across the river from ours.”

  “How long has she been living there, do you know?”

  “She moved in sometime last spring, I think.” Susannah hugged herself. “I wouldn’t want to live there.”

  “I’ve been up there,” I said. “It’s a pretty spot.”

  “Perfect for a couple, I guess,” she said. She glanced at Paul, who was gazing off into the dark woods. “Plenty of privacy, that’s for sure. Too isolated for my taste.”

  Susannah, I understood, did not consider herself to be part of a couple.

  Over dinner, Noah, Susannah, and Paul insisted I tell them all about driving Charlotte to the vet with her sick dog, and about seeing the swastika on her No Trespassing sign. I told them that the dog had died, apparently poisoned, and that somebody had fetched the body for Charlotte. I announced that I’d become the proud owner of my own brand-new swastika on my old Wrangler.

  Noah, who had declined the wine in favor of another glass of gin, said he was sorry about my car, but it didn’t surprise him. “These damn kids,” he said. “They see something on TV, the next thing you know…”

  “Suppose it’s not kids?” I said.

  “Nobody around here’d do that,” said Noah.

  Susannah was shaking her head. “That’s not true,” she said quietly. “There’s a lot of anger and frustration these days. Nobody feels secure. People with twenty-five years in the company get fired, just like that, no reason. Up here, a lot of people barely scrape by.”

  “Sure,” said Paul. “It’s like Germany in the thirties. Everybody’s scared and frustrated. They’re looking for somebody to blame. They’ll listen to anyone who’ll give them easy answers to complicated questions. These neo-Nazi groups are springing up everywhere.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Susannah.

  “Well,” I said, “someone around here is making swastikas, and Charlotte’s dog was probably poisoned, and she might be missing, and I don’t like it.”

  “Kids,” said Noah. “Kids’ve always done things like that. Hell, when I was a kid…”

  They left promptly at nine. Noah shook my hand heartily and invited me to visit his orchard. Susannah and I exchanged chaste kisses. Paul shook my hand with both of his. Susannah led Noah out to Paul’s Lexus. He leaned heavily on her, and it was obvious we’d given him too much gin. Alex and I stood at the doorway, waving to them as they got into the car and pulled away.

  After the headlights disappeared, Alex pulled my face down to hers and gave me a long deep kiss. When she pulled back, she exhaled loudly. “Whew!” she said. “That was nice.”

  “The visit?”

  “The kiss, dummy.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The kiss was very nice. Might I infer that I am forgiven for buying myself a new car?”

  “You don’t get off that easy, buster.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.” She hugged me. “So are you ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “To clear the table and load the dishwasher, what else?”

  “What else, indeed,” I said.

  CHAPTER 7

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I went for my paper, Leon’s wife, Pauline, was behind the counter. She was a big-hipped pear-shaped woman with short iron-gray hair, steely blue eyes, and a perpetually sour disposition. She took my money for the fat Sunday Globe with an impatient nod.

  “Where’s Leon this morning?” I said.

  “Sleepin’ it off, like usual on a Sunday mornin’.”

  “Well, say hello for me.” I turned to leave.

  “Mr. Coyne,” said Pauline.

  I stopped. “Yes?”

  “I see you got a decoration on your four-wheel out there.” The trace of a smirk showed at the corners of her mouth.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve got to get it repainted. Who can do that around here?”

  She shrugged. “If it was Leon, he’d slap a coat of house paint on it, call it better’n new. That’s how he does most things. Half-assed. I hear that colored lady got one of them decorations, too.”

  “That’s right. I’d like to know who’s doing it.”

  “Could be anyone,” she said. “Too bad about your car, but she oughta know better.”
r />   “Oh, really?” I said. “Better than what?”

  She shrugged. “I guess you know what I’m talkin’ about, Mr. Coyne.”

  I felt the anger rise in my throat, but I bit my tongue and got the hell out of there before I said something that might make life unpleasant for Alex. There’s satisfaction sometimes in finding clever ways to tell people that they’re ignorant and bigoted and hateful. But saying clever things to ignorant, bigoted, hateful people, I have found, is generally a waste of time.

  I was reading the sports page out on Alex’s deck when I heard a car pull into the driveway. I got up and walked around to the front just as a man in khaki pants and a matching shirt was climbing out of a dark green Ford Explorer with a county sheriff logo on the side panel and a light bar on the roof.

  He saw me and nodded. “You Mr. Coyne?”

  “Yes. You’re a sheriff’s deputy?”

  He came over to me, removed his sunglasses, and held out his hand. “Name’s Dickman,” he said. “Actually, I’m the sheriff himself.” He was, I guessed, somewhere in his fifties—short and bald with an open, sunbaked face, burly shoulders, and barrel chest.

  I shook his hand. “I guess I didn’t expect to see you.”

  “You’re the man with the swastika?”

  I nodded.

  “Swastikas interest me,” he said. He looked around, spotted my Wrangler parked between Alex’s Volkswagen and my new BMW, and went over to look at it.

  I followed him. “Your dispatcher seemed mainly interested in having me put a dollar value on the property damage.”

  “She’s not a Jew,” he said. He looked up at me. “What can you tell me about it?”

  I told him about the swastika on Charlotte Gillespie’s No Trespassing sign and how her dog had been poisoned. “I went up to see her yesterday,” I said. “She was missing.”

  “Missing?”

  I shrugged. “She wasn’t there. She uses a bike to get around. It was there, but she wasn’t.”

  “‘Missing’ is a strong word, Mr. Coyne.”

  “It just felt—I don’t know. Like something was wrong.”

  “I never mistrust feelings,” said the sheriff. “Unfortunately, you can’t take feelings to court. Tell me about your swastika.”

  I told him how I had come to be the proud owner of my own red swastika when I parked my Jeep at the end of Charlotte’s roadway, and about the local consensus that it was the work of ignorant kids.

  “Kids, maybe,” he said. “If so, I’d sure like to know who put ’em up to it.” He cocked his head and peered at me. “What about you? Got any enemies around here?”

  “Not that I know of. I only come up on weekends. My, um—my friend—lives here.”

  “That’d be Miss Shaw,” he said. “Your friend.”

  I shrugged. “We don’t exactly know how to refer to each other.”

  “Virtual spouse?”

  “Yes, that’s good.” I smiled. “Anyway, I don’t think I’ve been up here enough to make any enemies. Certainly not long enough to make friends.”

  He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “These country people don’t care much for weekenders, Mr. Coyne. They make friends slowly, anyhow. But,” he said with a nod, “they make enemies quick enough. You sure you haven’t offended somebody?”

  “I probably have. It’s something I do easily. But I suspect Charlotte Gillespie is more likely to have an enemy than me.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, for one thing she’s African-American.”

  Dickman’s mouth tightened. “There are some who would consider that ample justification for painting swastikas and poisoning dogs. Could be enough to drive a person right out of town.”

  I nodded. “I thought of that. She might’ve just decided she’d had enough. Although I think she’s got a lot of backbone. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who’d run away from anything.”

  “Everybody’s got their limit,” said the sheriff. He reached into his hip pocket, withdrew his wallet, and took out a business card. “I tell you what,” he said. “If you hear anything about swastikas, or if you get anything new on Ms. Gillespie, or if you want to share a name with me, give me a call direct.” He handed me the card. It read: “Marshall Dickman, High Sheriff, York County, Maine.” There was an address in Alfred and two phone numbers on the bottom.

  I put the card into my shirt pocket. “She sent me a note last week. Said she needed to see me. I’m a lawyer.”

  “What’s she need a lawyer for?”

  “She didn’t tell me that. But when I talked with her earlier, I got the feeling that she had something on her mind.”

  “A feeling,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “You can’t take feelings to court. The vet wanted to do an autopsy on her dog. At first Charlotte said no. Then on the note she sent me, she said she’d decided to do it. Then she sent somebody to pick up the dog’s body.” I shrugged. “Seems like more than feelings to me.”

  “You think something happened to her.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

  He ran the palm of his hand over his bald head and gazed out toward the meadow behind the house. “I was a cop in Philadelphia,” he said. “Nineteen years on those streets. When I got the chance to come up here, I jumped at it. Went to the university in Orono. Always hoped I could come back. But you know what, Mr. Coyne?”

  I shook my head.

  “People’re the same everywhere,” he said. “You can’t get away from it. Stupidity, greed, hatred, bigotry.” He shrugged. “It’s prettier up here, anyhow. And most of the time, the air smells better.” He shook his head. “Swastikas. I don’t like that smell.” He lifted his hand in a quick wave, turned, and climbed into his truck. “If you hear anything,” he said through the window, “you let me know. About swastikas, about poisoned dogs, about Ms. Gillespie.”

  “And you’ll do the same?” I said.

  He nodded. “Sure.”

  I watched him drive away, then went inside. I bent over Alex’s partition and said, “The sheriff was here.”

  “Mm,” she murmured. Her glasses were perched down at the tip of her nose, and she held her head tilted slightly back so she could peer at her computer monitor through them. “That’s interesting.” She bent forward suddenly and hit a couple of keys. “Nice,” she mumbled.

  “I’ll tell you about it later,” I said.

  “That’s great.”

  I left her with her non sequiturs. Her powers of concentration were awesome when she was writing, and I doubted if anything I’d said had penetrated all the way to her brain.

  I found one of her yellow pads and wrote: “Went to see Charlotte. Hope the work’s going well. Be back for lunch.” I signed it “Your virtual spouse,” added a few X’s and O’s, and left it on the kitchen table. Then I went outside, climbed into my Wrangler, and headed for Charlotte’s place.

  As I bumped over the dirt roads, I couldn’t avoid noticing the big red swastika on the hood in front of me. The Wrangler was ten years old, with assorted rust spots, dings, and scratches. I’d bought it from a kid in Limerick who was off to the Marines. The new Beemer was my Massachusetts lawyer car, and the Wrangler was my Maine wood-splitter car. It was in good mechanical condition, but the kid had driven it hard, and it showed. It wasn’t worth repainting. On the other hand, I did not like driving a Nazi advertisement. Maybe Leon had the right idea. Slap on a coat of house paint and call it done.

  I pulled onto Charlotte’s old rutted woods road and decided to keep going at least far enough to hide my Jeep from anyone passing by. It already had enough decorations. I slipped it into four-wheel drive and inched my way a hundred yards or so down the curving slope until I came to the dried-up boulder-strewn streambed. I parked there and walked the rest of the way in.

  I hoped I’d see smoke curling up from the stovepipe and Charlotte in the yard weeding her flower garden or holding a cat in her arms or sipping coffee on her front steps.
>
  But it looked the same as it had the previous day. It felt the same, too. Desolate. Abandoned. Her mountain bike leaned against the side of the little house in precisely the same place. No smoke curled from the chimney, and Charlotte was not in the yard.

  I went to the front door and knocked loudly. There was no answer, no sound from within.

  No sign of life whatsoever.

  “Charlotte,” I called, loud enough to be heard from inside or from the woods out back. “It’s Brady Coyne. Are you there?”

  I turned away from the front door, lit a cigarette, and scanned the meadow. I saw nothing. I went to a window and looked inside. The tall pines behind the house left it in morning shade. By holding my hands around my eyes, I could make out the shapes and shadows of furniture. I was looking into her living room, which held a sofa, several bookcases, a woodstove, and a couple of big rocking chairs. A braided rug sat in the middle, and no cat or dog was curled up on it.

  I didn’t know Charlotte’s habits, of course. Perhaps she was one of those compulsive walkers who was never home and who I always seemed to come upon striding along back roads when I was out exploring in my Wrangler. And maybe her cats lived in the woods, and Jack had been her only house pet.

  But I didn’t like it.

  I peeked around the side of the house to her vegetable garden, but she wasn’t there. Then I went back to the door and knocked again, with no expectation that it would be answered. While I waited, I glanced down and saw the corner of a piece of paper sticking out from the crack under the door. I bent and pulled it out.

  It was my business card with the note I had written to her the previous day, exactly where I had left it.

  Okay, maybe she just hadn’t noticed it. Or maybe she was away for the weekend. Maybe the swastika and Jack’s sudden death had spooked her, and she’d decided to go stay with a sister somewhere.

  There were plenty of explanations for Charlotte Gillespie’s absence.

  But she’d sent a note asking to see me. If she had wanted to talk to me, as her note had said, then why wasn’t she here? Why hadn’t she called or written another note, either telling me where I could find her or else letting me know that she no longer wanted to talk to me?