by Greg Ahlgren
“So, what’s the next move?” Lewis asked. “Gimme’ that ratchet set.”
“Next move is we pinpoint a time to go back.”
“Got one in mind?”
Paul shook his head. “Not really. We need someone who knows a lot of the details. Someone who has access to the real stuff, the history, the primary sources. We can’t afford to hit the wrong time.”
“Like a professor,” Lewis said. “Watch your feet.” Paul lifted his feet and Lewis rolled under the car to work on a brake line. “Ratchet,” he called out, extending his hand.
Paul handed him the ratchet set. “Know anyone?”
“Maybe,” Lewis said. “There’s a new associate professor of 20th Century American who joined the faculty this month. Published extensively on the Kennedys and Lindsay, and from what I’ve heard through my contacts, spouts off anti-Soviet.”
“Who doesn’t?” Paul asked, taking some greasy piece of metal from Lewis and placing it on the workbench beside him. “That establishes his I.Q. at 80-plus. What’s his name?”
“Her’s. Nigel said he was thinking of asking her out, evidently she’s a decent little number. Her name’s Hatch, I think. Amanda Hatch.”
Paul kicked over Lewis’ beer.
“Hey, what the hell, man?” Lewis asked as beer trickled under his coaster.
“You…Amanda Hutch?”
“Hutch, that’s it, yeah. What’s wrong?”
“Oh nothing,” Paul exhaled. “She and I went out in grad school is all. At Cornell. She’s at MIT now?”
Lewis rolled out and sat up, grinning. “And Nigel’s asking her out? She’s probably desperate for a real man, Paul.”
“I have got to start reading those faculty circulars.”
“How well do you know her? Not in the Biblical sense, I mean.”
Paul shook his head. “She’s anti-Sov, that’s for sure. Or at least she was. And she was the top student in her department, she knows her stuff.”
Lewis reached over and turned the tape player up. “If she’s at MIT she knows her stuff. Could you work with her?”
“I don’t…I could ask her.”
“Over drinks?”
Paul shook his head. “I’m a happily married man, Lewis.”
Lewis looked at Paul. “Correction. You’re a married man.” He lay back down and rolled under the car again. “You ought to get out a bit more often, Paul. Rattle Valerie’s cage some. Be up to something with a hot history prof. Maybe she’ll notice and realize it’s worth her time to treat you a little better.”
“It would hurt Grace too much,” Paul said quietly. “She’d pick up on it. But you could ask her out. Take one for the team.”
Amanda Hutch.
Lewis sighed. “I don’t believe in mixing work and pleasure like that. Besides, she’s Ivy League, right?”
“We were at Cornell together, yeah. So?”
“So let’s just say the only blacks she probably interacted with growing up were wearing coveralls. Call me paranoid, but that’s my experience. Ain’t nobody alive more afraid of and more patronizing to successful blacks than liberal Ivy League white girls.”
“Maybe she’d like to find out if what they say about black men is true,” Paul said mischievously.
“Phillips.” Lewis took the proffered Phillips screwdriver. “It is.”
“I could tell her Grace is doing a history project and ask her to identify a tipping point. There must be an event which could flip the balance of power the other way.”
“Yeah, you could. Or you could take her out for drinks, confide in her that underneath your mild-mannered scientist exterior you’re really James Bond bent on destroying the Evil Empire and would she like to discuss a few items of great interest in bed.”
Paul laughed. “Do I hear the voice of experience, Lew?”
“Not me. Wire cutters. Hey, I already got Sox tickets for next year, did I tell you? You gotta’ buy ‘em a year in advance now.”
Paul let his mind wander. Amanda Hutch. Why hadn’t they gotten married? They’d dated all through grad school and spent almost all their free time together, which was to say one evening a week they’d get Chinese and rent a silly old movie. They rarely saw the end of the movies. They’d either be in bed or Amanda would have remembered something she had to do.
“… so I said all right, I’ll take the lower deck. Paul, I have always–always–had season tickets along the third base line.” Lewis paused. “Earth to deVere, Earth to deVere, come in Space Cadet deVere.”
Paul snapped back in. Lewis was staring at him from under the chassis. Paul replayed the tape in his mind that had been collecting since he’d decided to turn his brain to other things. It was a skill of his, honed from many years of marriage. She’d been charmed by his intense preoccupation with his fascinating work when they were dating, but irritated that his head was always in the clouds rather than listening to her after they were married.
“The third-base seats were gone. So whatja’ do?”
Lewis rolled out halfway and grinned. “Well, I notice the ticket clerk was a rather attractive lady so I turned on the groove. In about three minutes she was agreeing to discuss this little ticket matter over drinks.”
“And?”
“And I’d hate to have to go through a whole season in the upper deck, y’know?”
“I take it you don’t have to, after your evening over drinks.”
“Better seats, even.”
Paul shook his head. “What’s with hustling ticket clerks? Weren’t you seeing some lady from Springfield last I knew?”
“Rachel,” Ginter said, rolling back under the car.
“Yeah, Rachel. What happened to her?” Paul asked.
Ginter laughed. “Remember in April when you and I had that four day conference in Worcester?”
“Yeah,” Paul said cautiously.
“Well, she called on that Thursday and said that she was going to visit her girlfriend, Margarita, in Boston that weekend so I asked her to stop by on her way in the next afternoon. She gave me some vague thing about her car needing new tires and she didn’t know when she could pick it up from the dealership on Friday but she’d call me. I got the impression she was trying to avoid seeing me. Then, Friday afternoon she called and said that the dealership had to put her old, bald, unsafe tires back on because they didn’t have the right ones in stock and wouldn’t be able to get them until Monday and they had told her not to drive it so she was going to take a bus into town and Margarita would pick her up so we couldn’t get together. She was sorry, that type of thing.”
“Yeah, so?” Paul asked, perplexed.
“Paul, have you ever seen them work in a dealership repair bay? The most important thing in their billing is lift time. No dealership is going to get a car up on a lift, take off the wheels, and then strip the tires off the rims unless they have the new tires right there next to the lift before they begin. Her story about the dealership remounting her old tires was total bullshit.”
“You broke up with a girl because you didn’t believe her story about tires?” Paul asked incredulously. He could hear Lewis tugging on bolts.
“No, not just that,” Ginter said. “On that Sunday she sent me a G-mail describing her weekend in Boston while I was in Worcester getting bored out of my mind. She told me how she had gotten into South Station at around six and she and Margarita had gone out to eat in the North End, had walked around Newbury Street shopping on Saturday afternoon, and then she had caught the 1:00 bus back to Springfield on Sunday.”
“I still don’t get it,” Paul said, slightly confused.
“I figure she must have taken the bus rather than drive for some other reason. I told her that her tire story was crap, and then she changed it and admitted that the dealership had put on new tires but that they were the wrong size and they hadn’t balanced them, which made even less sense. When I told her I didn’t believe that story she changed it again to say that she took the bus because it was too col
d to drive to Boston.”
“Huh? Too cold?” Paul asked, now clearly intrigued. “To drive a car? So, what was she up to?”
“That’s what I couldn’t figure out at first,” Ginter said. “Then I remembered that her ex-boyfriend was this older guy who was into aroma therapy or some other alternative mental health hokum and that he had moved to New York a few years ago when he couldn’t make it around here. I checked the connections from South Station to New York and the return times on Sunday and guess what?”
“Did she admit it?” Paul asked.
“Never did. But I never mentioned New York to her either. She stuck with her too-cold story and then a couple of weeks later she told me that she and Margarita were going up to Prince Edward Island in Canada for a week so that Margarita could do some amateur photography up there. To put me at ease she said I could call her on her cell all week.”
“When was this?”
“End of April.”
“And?” Paul asked.
“I called her a couple of times on her cell and she’d answer during the day but never at night, and she called me a few times and would say that she and Margarita were in the car driving here or there to take photos. But the connection never sounded like it does when someone is on a cell in a car, you know what I mean?”
Paul nodded.
“It also wasn’t the conversation you have when someone is sitting right next to you either,” Ginter continued. “Once when I called she said that they were at the motel and that Margarita was in the bathroom.”
Paul was laughing now. “You’re a suspicious bastard,” he said. “Did you confront her?”
“Nah, never had to. I called her on my cell and then called the cell company-we have the same one-and asked if they had towers on Prince Edward Island and they don’t. Then I asked for the location of the receiving tower for the cell call I had placed.”
“And?”
“Manhattan,” Ginter answered, giving an especially tough bolt a final tug.
“That’s great!” Paul said, laughing. “But how could she call you from the old guy’s apartment? Wouldn’t he have minded?”
“I figure he was at work hawking aroma bottles during the day and at night she just turned her cell off.”
Paul shook his head. “Where’d you learn to be so damn clever, the army?”
“Hey, I was in the army, I wasn’t a cop,” Ginter said. “I just figure it pays to be always thinking, if you know what I mean. Never trust anyone. There are too many pathological liars out there.”
Paul continued to chuckle. “So anyway, when do the Newark Yankees come to town next year?” he asked.
“Middle of May. You cool to go?”
“I’ll have to check. You’re talking next year for crying out loud.”
“’Cause I got a favor to pay off, y’know?”
“The ticket agent wants to see the Yankees?” Paul guessed.
“Ever since they moved to Newark they’ve been her team.”
“Pencil me in. Promise her for later in the season, she’ll forget all about you by then. That’s a whole year away.”
“So how’s wild, wonderful Concord? Can you hand me that oil pan now? The barbecue was nice.”
Paul got up and took what he assumed was the pan from the bench and put it in Lewis’ outstretched hand. “No different from the last time you asked. No different from the first time you asked. No different from when the last Redcoat left, except for the increased traffic and strip malls.”
“Man, you’re suffocating there. Nice house and all, but still.”
“I’m sure not in the Cambridge bachelor pad anymore.”
Lewis nodded. “That Agency apartment in my building’s still empty.” He tapped a few times with the screwdriver and smacked his palm on the fender as he stood up. “Good to go.”
“The tall blond guy with the crew cut? When did he clear out?”
“When his plane went down over Chile.”
“Ah.”
“I snagged the barbecue. They’ll never notice.”
“You robbed the dead?”
“No, I robbed the next guy. He never used it. He wasn’t there too long either. Have another beer, Paul.” Lewis held out a can.
“Stays on my breath,” Paul said. “Valerie’d kill me.”
Lewis shook his head. “How’s Grace?”
“Grace is Grace. She’s first in her class, and her project on Robert Kennedy made all-Northeast District.”
“Smart kid. Good thing she’s got her mother’s looks, too.”
Paul chuckled before turning serious. “You know that Grace is adopted, don’t you?” he asked.
Lewis nodded.
“She actually does have her mother’s looks,” Paul continued. “And she has both her parents’ brains. They were good people, both of them.”
“You knew them?” Lewis asked. “I don’t think I knew that.”
“Chuck was with me at Cornell. It was always Chuck and Beth, me and Amanda. I guess we thought we’d always be.” His voice trailed off.
“They got married?” Lewis asked softly.
Paul nodded. “A few years later. By then Amanda had moved on and Val and I were married. When Chuck and Beth got pregnant Val and I had been married about four years with no kids. Didn’t look like we were ever going to have them,” he added ruefully.
“What happened?”
Paul shrugged. “They were so excited when they got pregnant. Beth was older, mid-thirties, and they had been trying for a while. During a routine ultrasound they found cancer. They told her that she could have chemo but it would have meant...”
Lewis nodded. “Yeah, I know. What happened to Chuck?”
Paul snorted. “About three weeks before Grace was born Chuck just dropped dead. No warning, nothing. A brain aneurism-a congenital time bomb that finally went off. Nothing could have been done. That sort of thing. Beth couldn’t even leave the hospital to go to the funeral. She called me to Albany, where he had been teaching. She asked us to adopt Grace at birth. She knew she didn’t have much time.”
“How much time?” Lewis asked.
Paul swore. “She died when Grace was less than two months old. They released her for hospice care and we took them both back with us.”
“You and Val?”
Paul nodded. “I picked them up at the hospital in Albany. Beth was pretty weak but she got to spend her final days with Grace.”
“And Valerie was O.K. with that?” Ginter asked carefully.
Paul took another sip of his beer. When he finished he let out a soft burp. “Grace was born in March. I was teaching three classes that semester. This was before you got here but there was a hiring freeze back in 2010. Mai Johansson was the department chair, remember her?”
Ginter nodded.
“A real witch in some ways,” Paul said. “I told her I couldn’t finish the semester because I was going to do hospice care for a friend. She nearly had a stroke. She threatened to fire me on the spot, told me she’d make sure MIT sued to get my whole salary back. Said I was all done. I figured I was.”
“What happened?” Ginter asked.
Paul laughed. “I told her I didn’t give a shit. I guess back then I still didn’t.”
Paul took another sip. “Anyway, it all worked out. Wolfe covered one of my classes. Would have covered all three if her schedule had allowed it. She’s a good egg. Then, after taking my head off, Johansson covered a second one. She grumped like hell and I limped through the third class until the end of the semester. By then Beth was gone.”
Paul turned to Lewis. “When I look at Grace I can see Beth so clearly. It’s scary how much she looks like her mother. I guess she’s the last link I have to Ithaca. Amanda and I didn’t make it and Chuck and Beth are dead. Grace is what I’ve got left. Things don’t work out like you think they’re going to when you’re 25.”