Chat

by Archer Mayor

  Joe’s mother looked at her son. “I’m freezing. You’re heating the whole state.” Then she smiled brightly at their unexpected guest and shook hands. “He’s still in training. I’m happy to meet you.”

  Joe removed his fingers from the knob as if it had been electrified. Like most locals, he was usually compulsive about open doors and drafts. He reached out and gently steered Lyn across the threshold. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Come into the living room,” his mother said, preceding them. “We have a fire going in the woodstove. Where are you from, Miss Silva?”

  “Brattleboro now,” Lyn told her, entering the cluttered, homey living room, adding, “Oh, I love this room. When was the house built?”

  “Eighteen-thirties,” Joe told her, bringing up the rear. “And we haven’t done much to it since, except for the modern amenities.”

  He studied the back of their guest as if she might suddenly pull a gun. He kept retrieving fragments of the one time they’d met, and coming up with only good memories. She was a single mother of a then twenty-year-old girl, a bookkeeper by day and a bartender at night, and at the time, at least, she’d been genuine, smart, sexy, and remarkably appealing—just as she appeared today.

  But what was she doing here? When they last parted, he’d felt they had forged a definite connection, one that he would have pursued in Gail’s absence. He’d even thought of locating her after his breakup, but had been stalled by both geography and a general emotional inertia.

  On that level, therefore, he was astonished and pleased to see her again. But at his core he remained a cop and, as such, wary and watchful. Once the social niceties were dealt with and he found a quiet moment, he planned to inquire about the details behind this visit.

  His mother parked her chair in her docking station of tables before asking, “What brought you to Brattleboro? And did I overhear that you came from Gloucester?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Lyn answered. “I was a barkeep there, and I just bought a bar in Brattleboro—I found it through the Internet, if you can believe that.”

  “And how did you two meet? Have a seat in that armchair.”

  Joe glanced up at that question, trying to read between the lines. His mother’s face was cheery and her eyes bright, but he knew her well and had clearly heard the interrogator’s edge in her voice.

  Lyn sat carefully in the old leather armchair. “Your son came to Gloucester to investigate a murder—a man who lived over the bar where I worked.” She looked over at Joe with a smile. “He sat at the end of my bar drinking Cokes for a couple of nights before he said anything, just watching the crowd. It was fun seeing him study people.” Again she reddened slightly, adding, “Including me. He’s quite an observer. And when we finally did talk, he had me remembering things I didn’t know I could.” She touched her forehead with her fingertips. “You had me close my eyes and slowly redraw the scene in my head, detail by detail, until I could see that guy you were after—the one with the scar on his hand. Did you ever catch him?”

  Joe nodded. “We did, thanks to you. It was a good description.”

  With her reminiscence, he, too, was recalling that trip, and how he’d spent those many hours, in part surveilling the crowd she served—and in part admiring her.

  “That must have been fascinating,” his mother interjected. “I’ve never actually seen Joe at work. But what are you doing way up here? Brattleboro’s a long drive.”

  Lyn laughed. “I know. That must seem a little weird. No, I promise, I had to be up here anyhow, to get some supplies for the bar—I’m totally renovating it—and like I said, the newspaper was full of what happened. I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone.”

  “But how did you find the farm?” Joe asked.

  Her expression brightened. “That was good, huh? I knew the accident happened near here; I figured you must live nearby, so I asked around. I felt a little like Dorothy asking directions to Oz—‘Could you tell me where the Gunthers live?’ Good thing your last name isn’t that common. The young woman at the Mobil station knew all about you. Is your brother named Leo? The paper just said he was your brother.”

  Both her companions burst out laughing.

  “Sorry,” Joe explained. “Leo’s pretty popular with the local ladies.”

  “Especially those who are supposedly interested in cars,” his mother added.

  Lyn nodded in comprehension. “She did seem to know him pretty well.”

  “He’s also the local butcher,” Joe continued, “which adds to his appeal. Not,” he said quickly, catching a warning glance from across the room, “that he isn’t also a very skilled and professional guy. I don’t want him to sound like a stud or anything.”

  The source of the glance explained, “The two of them have this running gag about Leo and his women. I can attest to his being more of a braggart than a practitioner. Either Joe doesn’t know or won’t admit it, but his little brother is a virtual homebody.”

  “How is he doing, by the way?” Lyn asked. “The paper said you were both in serious condition.”

  “Mom was in a deep sleep for a couple of days,” Joe told her. “But she woke up good as new. Leo’s pretty beaten up. He’s conscious and can talk, but he’s in the ICU. He’s getting better, though.”

  This part of the conversation created an awkward silence, which prompted their hostess to push away from her tables and offer, “Anyone for tea or coffee?”

  Both Lyn and Joe asked for the latter, allowing the old woman to escape to the kitchen and her own thoughts.

  In her absence, the two of them remained silent, not looking at each other, groping for something to say. In Joe’s case, the inhibition was compounded by a wary curiosity struggling with his pleasure.

  Lyn spoke first. “I’m sorry I barged in like I did. I didn’t really expect anyone to be here. I just sort of yielded to impulse.” She finally looked up at him. “When you opened the door, I couldn’t believe my luck, but your mom being home just makes me embarrassed. This is not when I should be here.”

  “Not true,” he said candidly. “I’m sorry I was such a dope at the door. I figured I’d never see you again.”

  She nodded silently, back to studying the rug.

  “Not that I didn’t want to,” he added.

  That brought her head up. “Really?”

  He thought back to one of the few short conversations they’d shared in Gloucester, when, prompted by his observations of her at work behind the bar, she’d admitted to being at once forthright and shy with others, especially men.

  “The reason we met may have been a little offbeat,” he understated, “but it left a lasting impression. A really good one.”

  He was tempted to expand but resisted.

  She smiled slightly, more with her eyes than with her mouth. “Yeah,” she said. “For me, too.”

  SNOWGIRL: how old r u?

  THUMPER: 18. U?

  SNOWGIRL: 14. feel lik 100

  THUMPER: im sorry. Bad day?

  SNOWGIRL: bad life

  THUMPER: me 2

  SNOWGIRL: y?

  THUMPER: sister died. Luvd her a lot

  SNOWGIRL: so sorry

  THUMPER: U?

  SNOWGIRL: sucky mom, pissy x-bf

  THUMPER: He brok up with u? Y?

  SNOWGIRL: same ol, same ol

  THUMPER: Guys dont get it

  SNOWGIRL: u do?

  THUMPER: U want a hug, he wants sex. Rite?

  SNOWGIRL: ya

  THUMPER: I get it.

  SNOWGIRL: ur cool

  Chapter 7

  Steve’s Garage, unsurprisingly, wasn’t far from where Leo had his butcher shop in East Thetford. Suitably for a small village, the garage, unlike Mitch’s car-corralled, straightforward cinder-block house of wrecks, was of evolutionary design, having begun life as a small barn. That said, it still wasn’t quaint or neat. Rather, like so many of its brethren across this pragmatically minded state, it was a
place where labor overruled aesthetics and where, if you needed to place an engine block temporarily in the dooryard, on top of two truck tires, you did just that.

  Joe arrived as a passenger in Rob Barrows’s cruiser, playing a role somewhere between investigator and representative of the injured party. They’d agreed beforehand that Barrows would do the talking, although, as a strategy, that would have been considered less than a fig leaf by any competent lawyer. But such were the agreements occasionally made by rural cops sniffing around the edges of barely definable cases.

  The ambivalent tone was about right for Joe, who was beginning to feel that limbo had become a near permanent state. His mother’s advancing years and frailty, his brother’s precarious physical condition, Gail’s proximity and yet distance—she’d called that morning to get a report—and now the reappearance of the very appealing, previously unavailable Lyn Silva, had all helped to make him feel totally easy about trespassing into an investigation based on a lost nut and involving two relatives.

  Not that he minded Lyn resurfacing. She’d departed for Brattleboro shortly after finishing her coffee, but what she left behind—which Joe even heard in his mother’s voice afterward—was a suggestion of positive intrigue. Not a bad thing, all other things considered.

  The two men swung out of the car and eyed the garage’s bland frontage, buttoned up tight against the cold.

  “D’you call ahead?” Joe asked.

  Barrows stayed watching the building. “I thought we’d surprise ’em.”

  It didn’t take long. In most rural areas, it is less a door knock or a ringing bell that draws attention from inside a building—simply showing up usually does the trick. Sure enough, moments later the wooden door under a hand-lettered sign reading “Office” opened, and a small, narrow man in a soiled baseball cap and a T-shirt stepped partway out.

  “Rob,” he said neutrally.

  Barrows didn’t move. “Barrie,” he answered loudly enough to carry across the distance.

  “How’re ya doin’?”

  “Good. You?”

  “Great.”

  Barrie looked from one of them to the other. Barrows allowed the silence to stretch out, forcing the mechanic to ask, “So, what’s up?”

  Only then did the deputy approach the building, Gunther in tow. Rob smiled as he drew near, sticking his hand out in greeting, abruptly offsetting his slightly threatening initial tone. Joe took note of the tactic and didn’t offer to shake.

  Rob jerked his thumb in his direction. “Barrie McNeil, this is Joe, from the Vermont Bureau of Investigation.” He and Rob had agreed beforehand to use his last name discreetly, if at all.

  For a split second, McNeil froze. Enough time had elapsed since the Bureau’s inception for the initials “VBI” to carry an ominous meaning among those who might have reasons to care.

  McNeil forced a small smile. “Just keeping the deputy company?”

  Joe looked him straight in the eyes. “No.”

  Rob picked up the cue. “So, Barrie, we were wondering. There was a car crash a few days ago—the Subaru on Route Five?”

  Barrie was already nodding. “Leo’s car. He all right?”

  “He’s a mess. In the hospital. Intensive care.”

  “Damn.”

  “Yeah.” Rob pointed at the doorway Barrie was filling with his slight frame. “You want to let us in?”

  McNeil bobbed his head and stepped backward awkwardly. “Oh, yeah. Sure. Come on in.”

  They entered a waiting room of sorts, certainly a room with three mismatched office chairs lining a wall, facing a card table with a pile of ancient and bedraggled magazines strewn across its surface. There were posters hanging about advertising young, semi-clad women holding automotive products, and rows of shelves sagging under stacks of oil filters, brake pads, boxed sparkplugs, and the like. It was all beyond a restorative cleaning, aside from the gleaming spare parts themselves, and all illuminated from a single slightly flickering fluorescent light overhead, whose plastic enclosure showed off the shadows of generations of dead insects. An open door to the side revealed the garage proper and a car with no wheels, perched high atop a lift.

  The entire place was uncomfortably hot, explaining how the T-shirted Barrie had so easily loitered within the open doorway without complaint.

  “Barrie,” Rob began, strolling around the room, looking at the posters, “tell us about tie rod nuts.”

  Barrie hesitated, again nervously switching his attention from one of them to the other.

  “They hold the tie rods together?” he guessed.

  “Just like that? You screw ’em on and they hold on tight?”

  “Pretty much . . . There’s a cotter pin.”

  Rob turned to face him, as if responding to a poke in the ribs. “A cotter pin? Why?”

  “So it don’t back off. Is that what happened to Leo’s car?”

  Rob tilted his head to one side. “Is it?”

  Barrie pursed his lips, clearly not wanting to flunk whatever test this was.

  “Probably, if it failed. That happens,” he said tentatively.

  “A lot?”

  “No . . . Sometimes.”

  “What about Leo’s car?”

  McNeil scrunched up his face in confusion. “Jesus, Rob. That’s what I just asked.”

  “And what did you come up with, Barrie? Could the nut have come loose in Leo’s car?”

  McNeil snatched his baseball cap off and passed his palm across the top of his head several times. “No . . . I mean, it could have, but I don’t see why. This is all fucked up, Rob. What do you want?”

  Rob leaned forward at the waist for emphasis. “I want to know about Leo’s tie rod, Barrie. Talk to me.”

  Barrie slapped his hat back on and extended his arms out to both sides, saying loudly, “I don’t know about his fucking tie rod, Rob. I never touched it.”

  Barrows let a slow count of five tick by before he stepped back and said pleasantly, “Geez. You seem awfully worked up about something you never touched.”

  Barrie didn’t answer, but he’d gone paler in the process.

  “Okay. Cool,” Rob resumed. “Let me take a look at Leo’s service records on that car. Maybe we can clear this whole thing up here and now.”

  But it didn’t work. Barrie’s face shut down. “No can do. Not without a court order. Boss’s orders. That computer is, like, sacred.”

  “Griffis?” Joe asked, unable to stop himself.

  McNeil looked at him as if he’d just stepped into the room. “Yeah. I let you do that, I’m outta here. Like that.” He snapped his fingers. “That’s, like, his biggest rule.”

  Rob looked vaguely offended. “You’re shitting me. Why would the old man get all cranked up about a bunch of car repair records?”

  But now it was Barrie’s turn to turn the tables. “I’m not talkin’ about E. T.,” he said. “Dan’s the boss.”

  Once more, Joe couldn’t stop himself. “Dan owns the garage?”

  “Yeah, for a coupla years. Old E. T. gave him a bunch of stuff. Passing the light.”

  “Torch,” Rob said sourly.

  Barrie stared at him, back on firmer ground. “Whatever.”

  Joe asked, “Why did Dan slam the door on the records? You guys get sued or something?”

  Barrie shook his head. “Nope. He just came in after he made boss, and said there was gonna be some tightening up around here, and that’s when he gave the order.”

  “What else did he change?” Rob asked, looking around at the decor to see if he’d missed some subtle improvement.

  “That was it.”

  Rob glanced at Joe, received a barely perceptible shrug, and told Barrie, “Okay. No problem going the legal route. In fact, even better. Keeps things clean. We’ll get a warrant.”

  “Does Dan use the computer much?” Joe asked.

  “All the time.”

  Rob moved toward the door to leave, but Joe paused to add a final recommendation: “You probab
ly heard on TV how once data’s entered into a computer, it never really disappears, right?”

  Barrie clearly had no idea what he was talking about. “Yeah,” he said without conviction.

  “You want to think about that. Something happens to this one, we’ll come looking for you to find out why, regardless of who monkeys with it.”

  The two cops left the building and walked back to Rob’s cruiser.

  “Nice, with the computer,” Rob said as they settled inside. “Maybe he won’t squeal to his boss.”

  Joe grunted. “Could be. If I were him, I’d solve the problem by throwing the damn thing into the river. Not that it matters. We’ll never find a judge to allow us into it, anyhow.”

  Rob nodded without comment.

  “Too bad we can’t find that nut,” Joe mused.

  His companion glanced at him inquiringly.

  Joe explained further, “It might have tool marks on it—something we could match to a wrench or something in there.” He pointed his chin toward the garage. “Enough PC for a search warrant, given that Barrie said he never touched the nut.”

  Rob’s expression began to lighten. “But that’s possible. I mean, it’s a reach. But it is possible.”

  “What? Find the nut?” Joe was incredulous. “There’s two feet of snow out there. And who knows where it fell off?”

  “Could be right near the crash site,” Barrows said. “That’s how it works sometimes—the nut falls off and the rod follows, slam-bam. There’s no waiting. Not often, but when it does, it’s immediate. The nut could be within a hundred feet of where they went off the road. Closer, even, if we’re really lucky.”

  Joe was catching a fragment of his colleague’s enthusiasm, but he still couldn’t ignore the odds. “Be more likely to find a fresh flower in all that snow.”

  Rob smiled. “Can’t find a flower with a metal detector, and the sheriff’s got two of them. Plus,” he added, holding up a finger, “a small crowd of teenage wannabe cops from the high school who love doing police work—our official Explorers troop, complete with uniforms. It wouldn’t cost the department a dime to set them to sniffing around.”