by Jen Blood
I added another note to my timeline:
October, 1989—I leave Payson Isle.
I stared at the entry for a few seconds, then added one more word:
Why?
I tossed that question around without any major revelations until one o’clock that morning, when Diggs knocked on my door.
“Come on—we’re going home.”
“I’ll be there in a while. Go on without me.”
He didn’t budge. I looked up to find him standing with his arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the wall. My back and neck were tight, and my eyes stung from staring at a computer screen for far too long. Einstein was still peeved at having been left at home during my trek to Augusta earlier that day; being imprisoned in my tiny office for the remainder of the day hadn’t done much to get me back in his good graces.
I stretched, yawned, and closed my laptop.
“Did you have dinner?” I asked.
“We’ll make something when we get home,” he said, showing the first trace of a smile I’d seen since the night before. “Come on. Play your cards right, and you can have beer and chocolate for dessert.”
Diggs has always known the way to my heart.
◊◊◊◊◊
Juarez’s car wasn’t in the driveway when we pulled in that night.
“Matt took a turn for the worst this morning,” Diggs told me. “Jack said they were taking him back to Togus for a while.” The Maine veteran’s hospital. “Juarez’ll probably stay there tonight.”
I thought of how Old Man Perkins had looked in the woods the night before, stalking me and muttering psychotic epithets. Juarez might only be there overnight, but I was hoping they’d keep the constable under lock and key for a while.
“So we’ve got the house to ourselves?”
He nodded. “You want a burger?”
“A burger burger, or a veggie burger?”
“I’ve got cow, I’ve got chicken, I’ve got eggplant.”
I went to the cupboard and got a couple of plates for the table. “Cow, please. You should have some, too. You look pale.”
“Thanks. I’m pale because I never see daylight anymore, not because I don’t eat cows. One of the dangers of working the desk.”
Once the food was cooking, he opened a beer for me and a sparkling water for himself, and leaned against the counter. Einstein sat at attention, veggie and cow burgers sizzling in separate fry pans on the stove.
“Sergeant Flint was great today—thanks for setting that up. He did everything but write the story.”
“Did you get an honorary pin?” he asked.
“How’d you know?”
“It’s because you’re cute. I never get a pin.”
“You’re cute,” I said.
“I’m pretty sure I’m not Flint’s type.”
“Fair enough. I got notes from the original investigation. All the old files. Photos.”
“Any leads?”
“Can’t tell yet.”
We talked while he cooked, careful to keep things light. Once the food was done, we sat and ate in what was becoming an increasingly uncomfortable silence. The day was catching up to both of us. Halfway through the meal, I found it hard to keep my eyes open. I caught Diggs looking at me and sat up straighter.
“I’m more tired than I thought.”
“I noticed.” He hesitated. I had the feeling there was something he wanted to bring up, but wasn’t. I waited him out.
“I was thinking about the people you want to talk to—the families of the victims. I think that’s a good approach.”
“Thanks.” I took a bite of burger and wiped my mouth. And waited some more.
“It would probably be good to talk to somebody else, though. Someone who was actually, I don’t know, there. Someone who knew Isaac Payson and your father fairly well.”
“I’m not calling her, Diggs.”
“Why the hell not? She was there, Sol. She might not have talked to you about it before, but it’s been a long time.”
The clock on the microwave read quarter past two. I got up and took my plate to the sink, drinking the last of my beer on the way. Diggs followed.
“You don’t have to do it as her daughter—do it as a reporter. Any other story and this would be your lead interview.”
“My mother won’t be able to make the distinction, trust me. I’m not calling her. She wouldn’t answer my questions when I was a teenager, she wouldn’t say a word about any of it after Dad died, and now that she knows I’m writing a book on the subject, I’m pretty sure her response will be exactly the same: ‘No comment.’ ”
“What if you told her what you’ve found out? Tell her about the pictures you found. For Christ’s sake, tell her what you told me about the morning of the fire with Adam. Then maybe she’ll understand what you’ve been so obse—”
I stared at him for a long few seconds of silence. “You can say the word. It’s not like I haven’t heard it before.”
“Obsessed.” He said it quietly, without accusation. I was standing at the sink, Diggs’ body close enough that I could feel his heat. Diggs is tall—I forget how tall sometimes, but standing there in my bare feet in his kitchen, he seemed very big. And very male. He has broad shoulders and a mean right hook and I remembered, suddenly, what it was like to kiss him all those years ago. Our eyes held for a breath, maybe two.
“You should get to bed. I’ll clean up here,” he said.
“You’re sure?”
He nodded, but he didn’t look all that sure to me. “Yeah. Go on—I’ll see you in the morning.”
I left him to his cleaning and retired to my room alone. Again.
Chapter Eight
The next day, I was at the office by ten with Einstein in tow, ready to tackle the list of contacts Diggs had given me the day before. The first half-dozen calls I made went straight to voicemail. I left a message, though it was unlikely that anyone in their right mind would call back, and contented myself with the knowledge that at least that first contact had been made.
The eighth call was to a man named Jed Colby, whose sister-in-law Cynthia had been a member of the Payson Church. She’d been quiet, self-contained, but I remembered her laugh and her smile; remembered that she’d worked with my father and me in the greenhouse. She’d had a son a little older than me—Will. I hated to think ill of the dead, but I remembered Will Colby as a mean little prick who’d taunted me and the rest of the kids on the island relentlessly while I was there.
Cynthia had been nice, though.
Jed answered on the second ring, with “Colby’s Garage.”
“Mr. Colby, my name is Erin Solomon. I’m doing a—”
“I know who you are,” he interrupted. “You wanna talk about the fire.” His voice was hard, his Maine accent thick even by Littlehope standards.
“Partially, yes—I actually have some questions about the last few weeks leading up to the fire. I know it might be tough to talk about, but it would be a big help.”
“Come on over,” he said, much to my surprise. “Gracie’s making sandwiches at eleven-thirty. You can come for lunch. You know where we are?”
I got directions, then spent the rest of the morning taking notes and making more calls. At eleven, I popped my head in to ask Diggs to keep an eye on Einstein while I was gone, left my car in the lot, and struck out on foot for Colby’s Garage.
It was a foggy day, the landscape painted in muted shades of gray. Half a dozen lobster boats were still moored in the harbor. The rest were hard at work, the drone of diesel engines an undercurrent to my thoughts as I walked. It was a half-mile along East Shore Ave—a ribbon of a road skirting the coastline—to get to Jed Colby’s place. The tulips were in bloom. New leaves were coming in on the elms and maples, crabapples and birches that lined the way. It was my first spring in Littlehope since I was a teenager, but walking the road that day it felt as though I’d never left.
Colby’s Garage was painted bright red, set back from
an overgrown lawn with several cars parked on the grass and three pickups and a tow truck in the driveway. The cars on the lawn had seen better days, sporting mashed-in bumpers and missing doors, tireless rims and popped hoods with no engines to speak of.
A man was buried under the hood of one of the pickups, a greasy baseball cap tucked in the back pocket of his overalls. The Kinks were singing out L-O-L-A on the tinny speakers of an old boom box sitting beside the left tire, the man’s foot tapping in time to the music. A Basset hound lifted its head to blink red-rimmed eyes at me from his perch by the garage steps, but didn’t bother to move or even offer a halfhearted ‘woof.’
“Excuse me.”
The man eased himself out from under the hood like he’d known I was there all along. “Erin Solomon?”
“That’s right.”
“I’m Jed. Nice to meet you.” He wiped his hands on a soiled rag hanging over the side of the truck and shook my hand. “You hungry? Gracie’s got egg salad and fresh coffee inside. Come on in.”
The house was a single-story modular set back even farther on the lot, away from the garage. The lawn around the house was well-manicured, flowers just coming up along the front walk. The Basset got up on its short legs and waddled after us. Jed pulled a tricycle out of the driveway and set it up on the lawn, then kicked a couple of toy cars out of the way.
“I’m always telling them to keep their junk out of the way. Last week I run over my youngest’s favorite stuffed dog—she cried for two days. You’d think they’d learn, but half them Matchboxes are hers.”
I did some quick math. Jed had dark hair and a closely trimmed beard, with wrinkles at his pretty brown eyes. I knew Cynthia had been young when she had Will, but if she’d survived, she still would have been in her fifties Jed smiled at me once we were at the front door, as though reading my mind.
“My brother—Cindy’s husband—was older than me by about fifteen years. I kinda caught my folks by surprise.”
He opened the door for me and stood by politely when I entered the house. The Basset ambled in after me. The house had that neatly-lived-in feel that comes with stay-at-home moms and a lot of home cooking. We walked through the living room into a sunny kitchen, where a slim blonde woman was setting out plates.
“This is Erin, Gracie.”
The woman turned. She looked familiar, though it took a minute to place her. She wiped her hands on her jeans, then reached over and shook my hand.
“Grace Colby—used to be Simmons. I was a year behind you in school. We had Spanish together.”
My memory wasn’t as specific as that, but I did remember her—a quiet girl who kept to herself, not popular, not unpopular. A ghost, like so many of us back in high school. She nodded toward a chair.
“Have a seat. You want coffee?”
Once coffee and sandwiches were on the table, the three of us sat down. We exchanged pleasantries, talked about the town and what I’d been up to and what Diggs—apparently mutual friend to everyone in Littlehope—was up to, before I finally got down to business. I got my notes out and explained what I was looking for. Things had been going smoothly up until then, but they looked like natives confronted with demon technology the second the red light on my recorder came on.
“No one will hear this tape but me. I just like to use these things so I know I got the story right,” I explained. “If you think of something later, or there’s something you’d rather not include, you can always let me know.”
Jed scratched his neck, eyeing the recorder uneasily. “There’s not all that much to tell. Cindy didn’t have no family of her own, and I never knew her all that well. My folks would’ve been better to talk to, but they passed on a couple years back. I have another sister—she was closer to Cindy than me. She moved out to South Carolina last winter, but I can get you her number.”
“That would be great,” I said. “In the meantime, maybe I could just ask a couple of questions, see if it jogs any memories.”
He nodded, but before I could ask anything, he stood and walked over to a wall of photos in the living room.
“You remember them?” he asked. I had the feeling he’d been waiting a while to ask that question.
“I do,” I said. I joined him in the other room. There were a series of framed photos of Cynthia and Will with a man I didn’t recognize, most of them studio portraits like the ones people used to have done at Sears.
“Your brother died?” I asked.
“Urchin diving,” Jed said. “Will and Cindy were never the same after that. Will was eight when it happened—he took it hard. Cindy took it worse. She sold the house, sold the boat.” He looked at me, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. “Isaac Payson started sniffing around not long after. He’d come to the mainland, bring them stuff. I don’t think Will ever liked the guy much, but Cindy…” He shook his head.
“So, you met Isaac?”
“What did you think of him?” he asked me, before I could ask him the same question.
“I didn’t hate him,” I said, after a little consideration. “And my father loved him. He never…” I searched for the words. “…Scared me, I guess, the way you might think somebody like that would. Being out there, part of the church, was never as horrible as people made it out to be afterward.”
Jed nodded after a while. His eyes looked wet, though no tears fell. “That’s what Cindy always said—well, mostly what she said. Will was a tough case, hard to reach—something was wrong there, even before his dad died. But I think Cindy felt like Payson was making an effort.”
“You said, ‘mostly what she said,’” I prompted. “When did she say otherwise?”
He thought about it for a few seconds. “It was about two weeks before the fire.” He took a deep breath. I had the sense that whatever he was about to tell me had weighed on his mind for a long time. “Her and Will came back to Littlehope on a Friday afternoon. We had a picnic out to the lighthouse.”
“And she said something changed?”
“She didn’t say anything—that was the thing. I said something about how maybe I’d been wrong, maybe her being out there with Will was a good thing after all. Maybe Payson wasn’t such a bad guy.”
“And she said…”
“Not a damned thing. All she could talk about was something about a doll, some puppet that Will didn’t get. Or Payson took.”
I looked at him. “An angel?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what the problem was. Something happened, though. Isaac took his doll back. The kid was twelve years old, I don’t know what in hell he was doing playing with dolls, anyway.”
“It was a marionette,” I explained. “The Paysons made marionettes and sold them on the mainland.”
“I’ve seen them,” Gracie said. “They did a spread on them one time in Down East.”
“Yeah—that’s right,” I said. “There were actually two different kinds of angels, though. The ones they sold had black eyes. But every kid who was part of the church had their own angel—Isaac painted them himself. Those angels had blue eyes.”
“And he took Will’s angel?” Jed asked.
“I don’t know anything about it,” I said. “My father never mentioned it to me, but…” I didn’t want to say anything against Will, but my mind was already spinning. So much of my time on the island was a blur, but I remembered vaguely that Isaac hadn’t had the most patience when it came to the kids. Even Jed admitted that Will was a pain in the ass. Still, I couldn’t remember the preacher ever taking one of his precious Payson Angels back.
“Well, whatever happened, Cindy wasn’t happy about it,” Jed said. “I should’ve seen it then. For the four years she’d been there before that, all she did was sing this guy’s praises. She couldn’t say enough about what he did for the congregation—what a friggin’ Eden that island was, how much she loved everybody out there… Then, all of a sudden when I’m finally ready to admit that maybe she’s got a point, she changes her tune.”
He shook hi
s head. Grace came over and took his hand, leading him back to the table. I followed suit. Jed sat back down and picked up his sandwich before he finished his thought.
“Two weeks later, they were both dead.”
“You couldn’t have known,” I said. “Nobody could have.”
“I wish to god I’d gotten her off that island then and there. You don’t know how many times I’ve gone over that day, thought about how I should’ve done something.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He studied me, his head tilted to one side, then offered a sad smile.
“She loved your dad, you know.” I looked at him in surprise. “Not in that way, of course,” he said quickly. “But she talked about him a lot. The things he taught her out in the garden, the time she spent with you out there. I know my nephew was a prick from the word go, but all you had to do was whisper the name Erin Solomon in his ear and he’d blush like a fool.”
He looked down at his coffee cup. I couldn’t tell if it was because he was trying to keep his own emotions in check, or just giving me a minute to do the same.
“I’m sorry about what happened to your dad,” he said. “He was a good man. He didn’t deserve that. Neither of you did.”
“None of us did,” I said. I stood before things got completely maudlin. “I should get going, let you finish your meal. But this has been good… Helpful, I mean.”
Jed shook my hand. “I’ll be curious to read what you finally find out about all this. It’s been a sore spot for me—for this family, for a lot of years. It would mean a lot to understand how they wound up like that in the end.”
“For me, too,” I agreed.
We said our goodbyes. Just before I left, Grace gave me an impulsive hug—this quiet girl I couldn’t really remember, from an adolescence I’d just as soon forget. I returned the embrace, then got out the door as fast as I could, already turning over this new piece of the Payson puzzle.
July 26, 1990
Her son has a smile now that Rebecca hasn’t seen since he was a toddler. He stands tall in front of the congregation, his shoulders back, his dark eyes staring straight ahead. Others in the church have commented on the startling resemblance between mother and child. His hair is thick, raven’s-wing-black, and his complexion is smooth and dark—a clear indication of the Passamaquoddy tribe that runs strong in her blood. In almost every way, physically Zion is a replica of his mother. She imagines, sometimes, that there was no father at all… An immaculate conception, though she is certainly no virgin.