by Tom Bouman
“You’re too nice, I always say so.”
“I don’t see why he has to hire these drunks and . . . ruins. Worse, even, now.”
This was unusual talk from Liz, who, in the course of tending to the town’s medical needs, had nursed more than one ruin back to health, including me. She treated everyone just the same and never complained in my hearing. But I could see what it would mean to her if dopey, peaceable Kevin O’Keeffe did turn out to be a killer: if him, then anyone.
“Yeah,” I said, “I don’t know.” I picked up the binoculars and searched again for the waxwing. “One time back in Big Piney I got a call about a guy, an old cowboy turned electrician. His wife was looking for him. She told me he’d always drank, drank whiskey by the handle, you could tell that looking at him. But he’d hurt his shoulder and discovered pills. So she finally got tired of that, and, uh, she kicked him out, I think expecting that he’d clean up and beg to come back. It’d happened that way before. But this time was different. He’d been gone three weeks before his wife called me.
“Then I got word from a landowner at the edge of town who found a tent pitched in a clearing, tire tracks leading up there, an old truck, a new fire ring. Wasn’t any of their neighbors. So up I go, and it’s the guy’s truck, the missing guy. I shake the tent, and there’s a funny smell. I call out. No answer.”
“Oh, God.”
“So I unzip the tent—”
At that moment, Ed’s truck came jouncing up the driveway. She hurried down to the yard, and I never got to finish the story.
Ed parked, opened the driver’s-side door, and stepped barefoot onto the driveway. He reached into the pickup’s bed and swung a case of beer onto his shoulder. He also carried a bottle in a brown paper bag. On his face was a smile of unusual transcendence and fixity. I knew he had been gunning for a contract; a local grocery store owner wanted a luxury post-and-beam outbuilding. Ed had been competing against Milgraham and at least one other crew for the contract. He left the booze on the porch steps and, without going inside, padded down to the pond, stripped to boxers, and jumped in. The kids joined him.
Treading water, Ed rubbed some of the dust off his face and said, “I am anew.”
“Did you get it?” said Liz.
“Yup.” Ed rolled onto his back and spouted like a whale. “Two million.” He laughed. “Two million, wife! Henry, this guy, you may know him, Willard Meagher? He owns supermarkets. He wants me to make him a studio up on a hilltop, to paint in; he’s an abstract painter. The only thing is, he wants it done in a year.”
Liz and I exchanged a glance. Ed was renowned as the best timber framer in the area, and thus one of the best in the mid-Atlantic. But he was also known to agonize and draw a thing out. Everything proper, why hurry.
After a celebratory splash of scotch and a game of croquet, we grilled pork chops from Liz’s uncle’s farm in northern Broome County, which we had with couscous and Swiss chard from their garden, sautéed in oil and garlic. Kevin O’Keeffe didn’t come up again. Nobody wanted to frighten the kids, and Ed was eager to discuss the new project. I could almost see him spending the money in his head. After dinner, while Ed got the kids scrubbed and ready for bed, I leaned on the counter as Liz sunk her arms elbow-deep into a sinkful of dishes. I dried some of them.
When the kids were asleep, we gathered outside around the fire pit and tuned our instruments: Ed on guitar, Liz on clawhammer banjo, and me on the fiddle. It had started as a session among friends, nothing more ambitious. But with scant live music in the area other than blues-rock played by men in hats, we had tapped into a demand. Our late-night ramblings at parties had drawn some attention, as well as some gig offers. We didn’t do it for the money, but the prospect of playing in public for strangers was good encouragement to learn more tunes and get better. We’d struggled over a name. I suggested the Fateful Mornings. In disaster songs, it is always on a fateful morning that you go down into the mine or set out to murder James A. Garfield. But Liz liked the Country Slippers, after the tall rubber boots most of us wore on muddy days, and that’s what stuck.
We worked through some old tunes, “Soldier’s Joy,” “Turkey Buzzard,” at Ed’s insistence Iron Maiden’s “Run to the Hills.” Liz switched to gourd banjo for “Old Groundhog,” such a strange, swooping sound, like riding a bicycle over a jump.
We played our way through the last of the beers and I packed up the fiddle. Ed’s eyelids were sagging and flipping open again as the fire popped. I was too drunk to drive home but I was going to anyway. I walked across the silver lawn, my head back, stargazing. Altair, Vega, Deneb. Ed lumbered up behind me.
“Shit, man, I’m sorry. I almost forgot this.” He handed me a scrap of paper.
I strained to read it:
John Blaine. Owner, Stingy Jack’s.
Bobby Chase, cousin, Endicott
“Dizzy.” Works at Excelsior?
“From you-know-who,” Ed said. “Says he’s through talking to cops, can’t be seen doing it. But he handed me this today, said to give it to you only.”
FIRST THING next morning I put in a call to Dally’s office, asking them to check New York State criminal records for the three names Kevin gave me, which would involve the sheriff calling a friend in the Binghamton PD. Then I set about patrolling my little patch of earth. Nobody seemed to want to do wrong in Wild Thyme, so I took to the road.
Penelope Pellings’s sister Rianne lived in Vestal Center, New York, a tiny town on the banks of Choconut Creek, north of Wild Thyme and just south of the city of Endicott. With nothing better to do until nightfall, I decided to roll by and look for signs of Penny there, maybe ask some questions if it looked like Rianne was home. After some thought I stopped by the station, left my gun belt in the locker, and swapped the patrol truck for my personal pickup.
In Vestal Center, the homes were modest in size and brightly colored, though some were peeling paint or shedding aluminum siding. At the end of Grand Street stood an eggplant-colored two-family house, and the bottom half was where Rianne lived. A car was in the driveway, so I stopped. The young woman who came to the door paled when she saw my uniform shirt. Her hair was dyed blond, and she had none of the frailty of her sister, but her teeth were the same, the way they pushed her lips out of the way. We introduced ourselves.
“I’m here as a favor to Kevin O’Keeffe.”
“Super. If you’re looking for her, she’s not here.”
“And you don’t . . .”
“No.”
“Well . . . can you tell me about her and Kevin? I mean, did they fight, or—”
“What would those two have to fight about? Kevin’s whole life is drinking, and Penny . . .” Rianne looked away into some memory. “She was into her own thing. I don’t love Kev, but I don’t think . . . If she shows up, of course I’ll say something. But I doubt she’ll want to see me. I can’t give her what she wants.”
“I’m sorry, what do you mean?”
She took breath to say more, but all that came out was, “We’re in different worlds now.”
“And what is Penny’s world?” I asked, knowing well. “Does she have any friends?”
“I can’t explain. We’re in different worlds, sorry.”
“So, so you knew she was using again?”
She said nothing.
“How about friends? Does she have any old friends? It could be someone from grade school, even. Anyone she might turn to, or make use of?”
Immediately, Rianne said, “Teri Filippi. She’s called Teri before. They were friends in middle school. We all were.” At this memory, Rianne finally crumbled and broke down crying. “I’m sorry,” she said. “She lives in Port Dickinson, she works as some kind of nurse at the walk-in on the Vestal Parkway.” She looked through her phone and gave me a number and an address.
“Okay, well, thank you,” I said. “So this is your house, you own it? Who lives upstairs, you mind?”
“It’s my uncle’s. You may know him, he was a firefig
hter in Endicott, Ron Chase? Anyway, he’s retired now. He’s lived in Endicott for years. Rents this place to me.”
“And you’re here alone?”
“Supposed to be.” She reddened. “My boyfriend stays here sometimes, but my uncle won’t let him move in until we’re married.”
“Ah. Well, that’s all, I guess.”
I turned to go and she called after me. “Henry? When she turns up, let me know.”
Not coincidentally, my next stop was Ron Chase’s Endicott home. I hoped also to catch Ron’s son Bobby, who still lived there with his father. I crossed the Susquehanna River and into a city whose downtown had emptied out. I saw a lot of it on my way to Ron’s: the vacant shoe factory that had once buoyed the region, the abandoned hospital with its pedestrian bridge suspended over North Street and leading from one empty monolith to another. It wasn’t mere economics that had blighted Endicott, but a toxic spill known locally as the Plume, a filthy watershed of solvents IBM poured into the earth for decades before they packed up and left.
The city still has nice areas, including north of Watson Boulevard, where Ron Chase and his son Bobby lived. I parked one house shy of the address on Oak Hill Avenue and walked up to a plain white single-family home with a big yard. Out this far, on a nice spring day, there was nothing particularly poisonous about the city, just a bustle of birds, a steady murmur of car traffic, and Ron Chase mowing his yard. A large middle-aged man in a sagging sleeveless T-shirt, Chase perched on an antique rider mower, making tighter and tighter circles over his lawn on which, far as I could tell, no weeds of any kind grew. He saw me and raised a finger, and I stood waiting while he finished the area he was on, then bumbled over to the shade of a maple and cut the engine, which expired with a shudder and cough. He dismounted, removed his ear protection, and lurched toward me, as much falling as walking on ruined legs. His niece had said he was retired. I figured him for a disability pension.
“I know who you are,” he said affably, and shook my hand. We compared acquaintances. He knew a lot of old-timers on the Wild Thyme Volunteer Fire Company. There had been three fires in the township big enough that his company had responded, all of them while I was out West, at least two of them possible arson. “So anyway,” he said. “Rianne called. Penny’s got everyone out chasing their ass again.”
“Afraid so. She hasn’t been around, has she?”
“No.”
“Would she come here?”
“No. We get along okay. As long as we’re not asking anything of each other. Once we start asking, we get disappointed, and nobody likes that, so.”
I heard shades of Rianne’s answer in his. “How about Bobby, he here?”
“No.”
“They friendly?”
“Yeah, been friendly since kids. Bobby likes the place off Main, Stingy Jack’s. He got her a bartender job there even, they like pretty girls, I guess, but she got canned. Didn’t stop her haunting the place. I think they might see each other there every now and then, or out in town. Not here at home, she don’t come here much.”
“Not even if she was in trouble?”
“Well, Penny, I’d do anything for her if it came down to it, she knows that. I think so. But it wouldn’t be on her terms, it’d be on mine. And she’s not one to listen to me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, if you see her.”
“I’ll send her home to the puke she lives with, or try. Or if you want to leave a number?”
“Yeah, you mind giving my card to Bobby?”
Ron lifted his glasses and peered at my homemade business card, then back at me. “I will. Listen, we’ve been through it before. I’d be worried, but I washed my hands and started praying a long time ago.”
I drove off. Personally, I don’t know how I escaped bad habits, and by that I mean serious habits. Something to do with Father and Ma, who only ever drank the occasional light beer, in company. And even then, I didn’t know whether they didn’t drink because they didn’t drink, they couldn’t afford it, or they didn’t have the gene, the pull. Probably some of each. It is tempting to credit yourself as an iron man when you look around at other people and their troubles. I’d only say there’s more trouble in us than we know.
I waited in my truck outside a trim little house with window-box flowers on Rochelle Road. The town of Port Dickinson lay along the Chenango River north of Binghamton, a tidy place with sweet homes and nothing particular to distinguish it. Teri Filippi had not answered my knock, so I called the walk-in on the parkway to ask after her; she told me wait where I was, as she’d be done with her shift and home in about forty-five minutes. After we’d hung up I circled the house to find a six-foot fence surrounding the backyard. I almost hoped Penny Pellings would slip out the door and try to shake me loose. But she didn’t, and before long a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle pulled into the drive, and an overweight woman with buzzed hair got out and waved me over.
Filippi’s house was clean inside, the living room aglow with a large aquarium full of tropical fish, and a glass tank containing an iguana named the Overlord. The walls were lined with particle-board bookshelves full of comic books and fat paperback novels. I saw no sign of a life partner, and Teri volunteered that she lived there alone. She offered me water or a soda, but I declined.
“I haven’t seen her,” said Teri. “Not since the winter. I don’t think she’d show up here. Rianne probably told you we were friends. But it’d been years since my phone rang. The whole downtown thing kind of soured us . . . do you know what I’m talking about? Did Rianne tell you? No, okay. I said I wouldn’t, but it seems like I should tell you now. So back in January Penny called me, she said her car’s busted, Kevin won’t drive her anywhere, and can’t or won’t pay to have her car fixed. She’s out of a job. She needs company, she wants to get out. I’m thinking we’ll go to the bookstore, we used to do that. I’ll do something nice for my friend, she’s had hard times, we’ll get a coffee, sit on the floor of the sci-fi section and read like we used to.
“I drove all the way out to Wild Thyme, I knocked on the door. She yells from inside that she’s stuck, the front door key is behind the steps, just open the door and come in. So I did. And nobody’s to be seen. And then I hear a tap-tap, and, ‘Teri?’ She was locked in the bedroom. I let her out. The smell was, oof, but I faked a laugh and I asked her, how do you get locked in your own bedroom? Before we could leave, she was looking through drawers, through cabinets, rooting. I ask what’s it about, she turns, like she’s seeing me for the first time, and smiles, and it’s . . . she’s herself, I think. She’s beautiful. I think so. We got in the car and we left.
“I ask her how she’s been, she says she’s had better days, but she’s on the mend. She’s been reading a lot, writing a little bit. We talked about books, about who we used to be. About my life, mostly, I did most of the talking. We got to the Barnes & Noble, got settled, she’s got a book she likes, some graphic novel. She wanted to buy it, but oh, no, she left her wallet in the car. Can she borrow twenty so she can buy the book, take my keys and go out to the car to get her wallet and pay me back? I say I’ll buy it, my treat. No, no, she says. I’m thinking, I wasn’t born yesterday. But it turns out I was, because I say just leave the damn book, take the keys, and come back with your wallet.”
“Where’d they find your car?”
“Somewhere in Johnson City, two days later. Penny, they found in a shelter downtown, she’d been out and near-freezing. Kev asked me to forgive her, to let them deal with it, try to get Penny straight again, give them a chance to get Eo back. What could I say?”
“To be clear,” I said, “it sounds like she was a prisoner in her home?”
Teri looked uncomfortable. “Yeah. Of sorts. Of her own making, and his. I guess she was trying to kick, and she’d want that, want to be locked up, and then . . . I let Kevin know what I thought of it. But he wouldn’t hurt anybody, not on purpose. To hear him tell it, he felt he had no options left. I do believe that.”
; “Okay. If she turns up,” I said.
“I wish I could say I meant enough to her. I don’t think I do. If I see her, I’ll do what’s best.”
BACK AT MY OFFICE I looked up the general number for Binghamton PD, called it, and was put through to the desk officer.
“This is Henry Farrell,” said I, “Wild Thyme Police.”
After a pause the cop answered, “Oh?”
“Yeah, we’ve got the missing person, Penelope Pellings? Some possible connection to Heffernan, ah, Charles Michael Heffernan?”
“Listen, it’s a big department.”
“Heffernan was pulled out of the river, shot. Tioga County has him. He worked there in town, lived in Johnson City, apparently. Just a courtesy,” I said. “Anyways, you put out an alert on Pellings for us yesterday, she still isn’t back, and I’m headed in town to talk to some people.”
“Okay,” said the officer, as if to ask why he was on the phone with me.
“How about ‘Dizzy’? You got anybody named—”
“Like I said, buddy. I have no idea. I’d love to help.”
“Okay.”
“Have fun. Don’t get into trouble.” He added, “You want somebody to go out with you?”
“Nah, it’ll be easier on my own.”
I called the Holebrook Sheriff’s Department and got Deputy Jackson. After I begged him long enough that he knew I wouldn’t let it go, he agreed to call a friend across the border. I dithered around the office until my fax machine awoke with a start and wheezed out a photograph and a Clinton Street address for a Christian Kostis, aka “Dizzy,” who was nearing the end of a parole term for third-degree assault.
Evening saw me crossing the river once again, this time in my old truck. I wore a plaid shirt and jeans. Though it was hot, I also wore a light jacket to cover the .40 in my shoulder holster. I turned left under a crumbling railroad bridge and onto Clinton Street. Many of our fathers, not the backwoods hermit who raised me, but many of them, used to do what was then called the Clinton Street Run. Back some forty years the whole length was bars, neon lights calling one to the next until you were stupefied, broke, and far from your car. Nowadays Clinton Street is a sort of concrete fairyland where parents tell their children not to end up. Most of the bars have closed, along with the shops that fed the neighborhood during the day, leaving a string of street with a few bars hanging on like granny knots. And trapped between Clinton Street and the wild hills is the First Ward, a residential cluster fighting abandonment and blight.