A Matter of Mercy

by Lynne Hugo

  Rid started to say something, then stopped himself. He inched the truck down the driveway, his beams on high. Halfway down, he swung sharply to the right and then to the left, angling the truck to put his beams directly on the back door of the house.

  He pulled forward, Caroline perched and hunched so as to get as close to the windshield as she could. He heard her intake of breath then the upset, “Oh my God, my God.”

  “Rid, they’re gone. The stuff is gone. I swear it was there. Please believe me. It was all there. And listen, on Christmas morning, too, I found a teddy bear in a bag on the back step. That’s still inside the house. I was stupid and I touched it, but I thought it was from one of my mother’s friends, because I’d told them the night before but then they all brought presents to Noelle’s, so I know—”

  “Calm down,” he said, “it’s okay. Nothing to be scared of.”

  “No, it’s not nothing, you’ve got to bel—” she had started to cry again as she interrupted.

  He broke in, touching her arm, trying to stop her panic. “I mean the teddy bear. That was from me. I’m sorry. I should have left a note.”

  “From you?” She looked at him intently.

  “Yeah, but nothing else, nothing else. You hear me? There was nothing else around then, and what I put here was the teddy bear in a bag. Period. It was Christmas Eve, and I intended to hand it to you, see, and when you weren’t here, I thought as long as the bag was wide open and you could see what it was, you’d know it was fine.”

  “Oh.” She paused, trying to take it in and still think about the missing notes and toast on the back steps. “It’s a beautiful bear.” Still upset, and remembering to be polite.

  “You stay in the truck.” Rid reached under his seat and brought out a big flashlight. He left the truck running so the heat would be on and tried to keep jumping into Caroline’s tire tracks while he looked for footprints. Ahead he saw the marks where she’d driven up over the yard and walk. She really had been too scared to get out. Seeing this manifestation of her fear made him realize it differently as he jumped over some of the unbroken snow crust into CiCi’s tire prints where they paralleled the side of the house. The yard security lights were still on, as was the porch light. His truck beams lit the place like a prison yard, too. He played his flashlight along the ground and the steps. Could he make out faint outlines of where the notes had been or the toast? Not enough to call the police.

  Rid gestured to Caroline to come. She got out of the truck tentatively. “Nothing here now,” he called. “Let’s get your stuff.”

  Anxiety pinching her face, she unlocked the door. “Rid, please believe me, there was….” Then she just didn’t go on. She looked freezing again. The coat she was wearing, either it didn’t fit her or she was just colder than the weather.

  Rid put her hood up, tightened the drawstring under her chin, letting his hand linger on her shoulder as they turned to go inside. “How come you’re so cold? I left the heat on,” he said as they went inside her kitchen and shut the door.

  “I’m just completely freaked out. I should have gone ahead and called the police this morning. I don’t have a cell phone, and I was afraid to go inside. But I should have just driven to the police station instead of all over the lower Cape and sitting in your driveway. Now it’s all gone, and I just don’t do anything right. But I didn’t think he'd come back in the daylight. Maybe he didn’t. It’s dark again now. I just don’t know.” Tears were breaking out again. “I’m losing my mind is what’s happening.”

  Rid put his arms around her, which had the feel of trying to reassure a board wrapped in a quilt at first, and he almost gave up. But then she gave way and let her weight go against him. He took a step back, bracing himself against a wall, to be steady for her, while he stroked her back and soothed her. “It’s okay. I’ll help you,” he said, just as if his own plate weren’t already hopelessly overloaded with the damn lawsuit. “The wind could have taken the notes. Gulls most likely took the toast.” It was possible. More likely, Rid thought, whoever put it there and come back and removed it to play with her mind or to make her look crazy again with the police. He saw no point in saying that to CiCi, though.

  “Go get whatever you need,” he said when she seemed to be straightening up. While she went into the downstairs bedroom, he checked around the kitchen and living room (so different without the hospital bed and equipment) and noticed the teddy bear bag on the kitchen counter. When she emerged from the bedroom with a plastic bag, he put the bear in her arms. “An extra friend to bring along,” he said.

  “He’s so soft,” she said, bringing the bear to her cheek. “I love him. And I want to show you the things Mom’s friends gave the baby for Christmas, too. It’s all in my car. They actually went out on Christmas Eve night, after I’d told them at dinner, and brought all this stuff to Noelle’s to surprise me on Christmas Day,” Caroline said as they went out and locked the door again. She went ahead of him to the truck, still talking, while Rid continued to play his flashlight around the steps. “Noelle had figured it out on her own. She’d already made a crib quilt. By hand.”

  Along the very edge of the foundation behind the shrubbery, where there was no snow thanks to the overhang of the roof, Rid saw it might be possible to walk without leaving tracks. From there, of course, a determined person could round the corner and get to the side of the house that was mostly wild, a thicket of overgrown beach plums, wild roses, rose hips, and scrub pine. Recent experience had taught him about getting through that stuff, but it had also taught him it could be done. Too dark now to investigate if there were signs of disturbance there, but he could come back tomorrow and have a look-see.

  Chapter 22

  Lizzie roused Rid at five fifty-six in the morning, nuzzling his neck and ear, nudging his shoulder with her insistent muzzle. If he didn’t get up, she’d start licking his face, guaranteed to get him moving. Beyond the small incandescent glow of the clock numerals near his face, the darkness and silence were equal, complete, heavy. The house felt freezing, the bed just right. The cost of oil was killing him. He’d need to build a fire in both the wood stove and the fireplace tonight and try not to use the furnace so much.

  “You know, you could let me sleep in. We can’t cut firewood until it’s light, or haven’t you noticed?” he muttered, caressing the Lab’s chest as she stood over him on the bed. Sometimes if he rubbed her chest and stomach, she’d let him put off getting up to feed her another twenty minutes. Lizzie collapsed next to him and rolled onto her back, bought off.

  The upstairs toilet flushed, right next to his room, and Lizzie was on the floor barking up a frenzy. Rid was out of bed, his bare feet on the freezing floor, feeling the end of the bed, the chair, for anything he could put on as he stumbled toward the door, confused, Lizzie in his way, even though it was best to let her take the lead. What kind of intruder flushes a toilet? Too late. He’d opened his bedroom door and Lizzie was all over Caroline, but it was her joy dance and a French kiss. Caroline staggered, laughing.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you,” she said.

  “No, no, not at all—Lizzie gets up earlier than this. I’ve been trying to hold off feeding her. I wanted you to sleep,” he lied. He’d not found anything to put on, so was self-conscious about the fly of his pajamas and shifted the bottom around so it was off to the side. “The house is colder than I thought. Hope you were warm enough, I’ll get some heat up right away, soon’s I feed Liz,” he said, not waiting for an answer and passing Caroline in the hall, giving her wide berth. Contracting muscles, refusing to let her see him shiver.

  Downstairs, the kitchen floor stung the bottoms of his feet like dry ice. He turned up the thermostat. Then he let Lizzie out, got out a coat to serve as a robe, and pulled a pair of twice-worn wool socks out of his yard boots into which he immediately stuffed his feet

  Lizzie came back in and wolfed her food while Rid made a fire in the woodstove. “She’s got to stay here while we’re gone, girl. Gotta get
this house warm. Geez, I hope the quilt on her bed is that heavy one. Think so. Maybe not. It’s wicked cold. Better check. We gotta remember she’s here—can’t be runnin’ outta the shower naked, now can we?” He talked on to the dog as he always did, noticing after the sentence had come and gone that he was expecting that she’d be there a while and he didn’t seem to be objecting to it even though he’d turned up the furnace.

  There was just the one bathroom upstairs. A bit awkward, but he took his jeans and flannel shirt in there, showered, and dressed fully before he emerged. He needn’t have bothered. He found Caroline downstairs, having evidently used the bathroom down there, already dressed and with coffee brewing. She had eggs and bread out on the counter and was just pulling out the fry pan when he made it into the kitchen.

  “How do you like your eggs?” Her hair was wet, combed and tucked behind her ears. She must have taken the world’s fastest shower. His sister used to stay in the shower so long their father would go in the other bathroom and start flushing the toilet every twenty seconds until she got out, wet hen flappin’ mad.

  “Huh?”

  “I can fix them however you like,” she said. She had on a red sweater, which was too big everywhere except her belly. It looked good, though, maybe because her cheeks were ruddy. Probably from being cold.

  “You don’t have to do that. I usually just—”

  “Eat out or grab coffee.”

  “Yeah.” Had he told her that?

  “I can earn my keep,” she said with a laugh. “I really appreciate your letting me stay here last night.”

  Last night? He hadn’t said anything about her not staying longer. But should he let it go? “Listen, I’m about to head over to your place. After breakfast, I mean. I’m going to look around in daylight, see if there’s—something. ”

  “I should go with you,” she said, the skin between her eyebrows bunching together.

  “You should stay here.” He meant more than this morning. Surely she could figure that out.

  * * * *

  After they ate—she made good eggs, with pepper and something else sprinkled on them—he beat back her protests and left her there. More winter Cape, dank, a wet cold, more snow than usual, and his truck splattered with grimy road salt. The seat next to him was cavernous and abandoned as the ocean side beach. CiCi had asked if Lizzie could stay with her. He’d automatically started to say she always rides with me, then even while she was interrupting to say oh, of course, sorry, Rid realized maybe she was scared to be alone and being worked up might be bad for the baby.

  Caroline’s driveway looked as it had the night before. He tried to drive in his own tracks, might have widened them slightly, but came close. His tires bit and crunched the snow like celery when he backed up in the three point turn and ate into unbroken snow behind him. This time it was his own footsteps he stayed in going to the back stoop. Nothing.

  He inspected the area under the eaves. It looked to him as if the snow, less in that protected area, might have been disturbed, though it was difficult to tell because of drifting. It wasn’t clear enough to track. He walked there himself now, edging along the house toward the back, the side that had been left to the wild.

  When he reached the corner, he scanned behind the house. In spite of the lack of sunshine, the snow was hard to read beyond his own boots and a few feet ahead. Still, something about the thicket itself looked wrong. Rid waded away from the cedar shake siding of the house—there was hardly any space—to inspect the overgrown maze of beach plum and wild rose. A broken branch. Two more, deeper in. He backed out, scratching his face as he did. Touching the sting with his glove, he went back to the corner and tried walking into the snow between Eleanor’s studio and the wild area, where there was a narrow swath of yard. He went slowly, looking up and down, trying to see into the thicket. Even so, he almost missed it, damp and folded on itself as it was.

  A small yellow piece of paper caught on a branch of rose hip like a bedraggled flag. Beach trash is all it seemed. Only the faded lemon color made him look twice. He had a struggle retrieving it. He took it to his truck to open so he could take his gloves off, lay it flat. The thing had been soaked more than once as best he could tell, which made sense given the weather.

  aRE.

  So she’d been right. Not that he’d doubted her. He’d seen the rock through the window after all, but CiCi was so freaked out now that anything was possible.

  Rid started the engine to heat up the cab. His first impulse had been to use his cell to call the police. Maybe he’d messed up any footprints, but he could tell the story, show them the broken branches and this paper and then he could be there when they talked to CiCi. He knew those guys, locals every one. He could back her up. But he studied the sticky note, belatedly remembering there might be fingerprints on it, then handling it like a hot cookie, gingerly, at its very edge.

  It could be Mario’s writing: this was his style, mixing capital and lower case letters, none of which exactly stood up like soldiers. Rid tried to argue with himself. You can’t tell by three letters, which he knew was both logical and true. This was also how someone would disguise his writing, or how someone who had done about as well in school as Mario might write.

  The longer he sat, the sicker he felt. They had a meeting at one this afternoon at Lorenz’s office. If Mario was out of the mix, what would happen to their defense? He couldn’t call the police yet. He put the slip of yellow paper in his glove compartment and sat another ten minutes staring at Caroline’s house. Took it back out and turned his cell phone on. Sat some more, the paper withered and beaten-appearing as a dried flower on the passenger side now. As it dried, its surface looked curdled, the generic blue ballpoint ink another degree of faded. Anybody coulda done that, he told himself. No proof.

  Finally, he put it back and completed the turn to leave Caroline’s driveway. Leaving, he still tried to stay in his own tracks though he didn’t know why and shook his head to try to clear his mind.

  Back at his house, he avoided Caroline’s eyes by heading straight for the closet when he came in. That way, he could say, “Snow under the eaves looked like it might have been disturbed there but it was drifted over, no footprints, nothing that could be tracked, couple broken branches behind the house, but, y’know, police would probably say it’s deer,” and it was all the truth.

  “That’s what I was afraid of,” she said. Her hair was dry now, but her cheeks were still red.

  “You cold?” he asked, picking up her hand as if all he wanted was to check if her skin was warm, but she said she was fine, and he felt silly telling her no she wasn’t, that her fingers felt icy and he could rub them. Still, she squeezed his hand before he let go.

  He spent the rest of the morning building cages. CiCi made a fresh pot of coffee. “I saw a coffee cake in the freezer. How about I hack off a couple of slices and warm them up for us? I can put the rest back in the freezer,” she said when she carried the warm mug to his basement work area.

  “You can do that?”

  “Sure. It’s easier if you cut it ahead and freeze slices, but this works too. I’ll rewrap the rest in plastic.”

  “Yeah. Okay, good. Mom sent that back with me after Christmas.”

  She stayed when she came back with the cake and a refill, watching him cut a rigid piece of plastic that was laid out on a pattern with a sheet rock knife. Mesh screening and wire ties were already cut and laid out on another table. Caroline was quiet, intent, bending over to watch what he was doing.

  “Everything about this has to be perfect, see?” Rid said, filling the silence. “One tiny hole, a crab gets in, and well, you can’t believe how one crab can go through a whole nursery tray of your three millimeter babies, wipe out every damn one. So I’m a nutcase about my trays when I build ’em or fix ’em.” A few minutes later, he finished with one and said, “I got a meeting this afternoon at one, at the lawyer’s, y’know, about the lawsuit. I’ll see him, the partner I told you about. I’ll talk
to him and find out.”

  “Will he tell you the truth?”

  “Not necessarily. But he’s a bad liar. I’ll know.”

  “What time do you have to leave?”

  “A little after twelve.”

  At eleven-fifteen, Caroline went upstairs. Ten minutes later, she called down to him that she had lunch ready anytime he wanted it.

  Five minutes later his feet were heavy on the wooden stairs. “You don’t need to do this,” he said gruffly, turning out the basement light behind him. “I mean, it’s nice, but I don’t expect….”

  “I’m glad to do it. I appreciate the help you’re giving me,” she said simply. “Anyway, you’re working right now. I have nothing else to do.” She blew her hair off her forehead by sticking her bottom lip out. His mother and sister both did that, too, and it made CiCi look oddly familiar.

  Something on the stove smelled good. “What’d you make?”

  I doctored some canned soup you had—you know, added fresh vegetables and seasonings. It’s an old trick. And there’s a sandwich on the table. What would you like to drink?”

  “I’ll get it.” She was making it hard. Do the right thing, his mother used to say. She made it sound like it was easy to know what the right thing was. Wasn’t it as good as calling the police if he handled Mario himself? So long as the job got done it was.

  * * * *

  Rid had turned down Tomas’s offer of a ride to Barnstable with a lie about collecting on two overdue accounts along the way. He’d hoped to corner Mario before the meeting, but Mario was late. They waited for him for twelve minutes, lawyer expense time ticking and Tomas burning like coal, until Mario came in complaining about the on-Cape traffic returning from his vacation, but not appearing as though he’d run from wherever he’d parked or up the stairs, which was a serious error in judgment. If Tomas had been packing a weapon, Mario would have been dead.