Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

“They talked to me.”

  “Do they think her boyfriend did it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They didn’t tell me. I think a couple of them would like to think I did it.”

  “My God.”

  “But that’s only their little pipe dream.”

  “I hope so,” Roxanne said. “So do you think it was the boyfriend? It had to be, right?”

  “We’ll find out,” I said.

  There was a long silence.

  “What do you mean, we?” Roxanne said.

  I paused.

  “We. All of us. Us guys. Opposite of they.”

  “I don’t think you meant that, Jack.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Jack, you can’t beat on yourself for this. And you can’t think that you can do something the police can’t. Not with this.”

  “So I just go on and find my next victim?” I said. “Business as usual?”

  “If that’s what you consider your business.”

  “I can’t do that. I’ve got to finish this.”

  “The police will finish it for you,” Roxanne said, urgency creeping into her voice.

  “And what if they don’t? What if they can’t? What if they can’t get a conviction? What if they can’t make an arrest?”

  “Then you’ll have to accept that.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I started this. I’m part of it. I may be the one who got her killed.”

  “You have to let it be, Jack. You have to.”

  “Can’t do it.”

  “Goddamn it, Jack McMorrow. Just do it. I do it. I do it every day. I spend every day scratching the surface of this mess. I can’t save the whole world. And it’s only because I can accept that that I can have any hope of saving my little piece of it. I can help fifty people a little. Or burn up for one kid, one family.”

  “But you’re more rational than me. More disciplined. You were raised by those scientists.”

  “They were research biologists,” Roxanne said. “Your dad studied bugs. It’s the same.”

  “Then how did we turn out so different?”

  “We’re not different,” she said. “You just don’t know when to quit.”

  “Yes I do. And in this case, it’s not time yet.”

  “I’ll be up this week,” Roxanne said.

  “Stay down there.”

  “Nope.”

  “I don’t want you here right now,” I said.

  “You can’t always get what you want,” she said.

  “But you get what you need? Thank you, Mick.”

  “Jack. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.”

  “Jack. Be serious.”

  “Roxanne,” I said. “I am serious. I’ve never, ever been more serious.”

  “I’m afraid you’re going to get hurt this time. Your luck’s going to run out.”

  “Like Donna’s? She had to be in court that day. She had to be the only interesting case on the docket. She had to be nice enough to talk to me. She had to—”

  “Jack, stop it. It’s part of your job. Think of all the people you’ve helped over the years. What are you going to do? Just quit? Report nothing so that nobody will get hurt? It goes with the territory. You know that.”

  I thought for a moment.

  “One time in New York, I interviewed this gang kid. This was years ago, when gangs were just starting to take off. Wouldn’t be news at all today. So I talk to this kid and about a week later they find him in a playground with a bullet in the back of his head. Nice kid. Very charming. Very handsome.”

  I paused.

  “And you know why they killed him?”

  Roxanne didn’t answer.

  “Because they thought I was a cop. Somebody saw him talking to me and they thought I was a cop and he was a rat.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I took a day off.”

  “And then what?”

  “I came back, and when the cops arrested two kids for killing him, I wrote about that.”

  “So get back on the horse this time too, Jack,” Roxanne said.

  “Yup.”

  “You have to.”

  “I know. I will. But this time nobody was mistaking me for a cop.”

  “Jack.”

  “I know.”

  “I love you,” Roxanne said.

  “Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow. Take care of yourself. Take good care of yourself.”

  “You do the same.”

  “Always do,” I said. “Goes with the job.”

  “Jack,” she said, but I hung up the phone.

  I didn’t sleep well that night. I had dreams of Donna and Roxanne and they were talking and they knew each other. And then Donna was trying to kiss me and Roxanne was watching and I was immobile, like a bug in amber, unable to cry out or resist.

  And then I woke up. At quarter of three. Four thirty. Six fifteen.

  “Hey, Bones. Out of the sack. Day’s half shot.”

  I peered up at the ceiling.

  “I’ve gotta get you outta bed too?” Clair said. “Need a goddamn servant in this place, but then you’d both sleep like goddamn woodchucks in January. They could hear you snoring at the Knox store.”

  The layers peeled away. The dreams. Donna. Donna dead.

  “It’s Monday,” I called, pulling myself to the edge of the bed. “Were we supposed to cut Monday?”

  “We are now. You got other plans?”

  I couldn’t think of any. I couldn’t think of anything.

  “Then let’s go. Haul your skinny city-slicker butt out of that bed and put some clothes on. The truck’s running.”

  So I did. Then I groggily descended the loft stairs.

  Clair handed me my boots.

  “Let’s go. I’ve got coffee in the truck. Mary made lunch. There’s trees waiting.”

  I pulled on my boots, brushed my teeth, and picked up my rifle. My saw and gas and oil went in the back of the big Ford. The rifle went in the rack. Right under Clair’s.

  “Varmint hunting?” I asked, sitting back in the seat.

  “You never know when they’re gonna pop up,” Clair said.

  So that’s how Clair accomplished what Roxanne hadn’t. Distracted me from Donna. Kept my hands busy and my mind idle. We cut all morning, loading the trailer over and over and hauling it out to the tote road with Clair’s tractor. We ate at ten, sitting on a log and wolfing down tuna and cheese on big thick slices of Mary’s homemade whole wheat. Clair didn’t mention Donna, and I didn’t either. We listened to the birds. Talked about deer and the Red Sox. Clair said he hoped his grandkids would be Red Sox fans, even though they wouldn’t be raised in New England.

  And when the talk and work didn’t distract, the blackflies did.

  The morning passed quickly, in the rasp of saws, the fountains of fleshy wood chips. We cut oak and beech and stacked it in four-foot lengths in the yard. The stack got bigger as I worked faster to keep the demons at bay. Finally, at midafternoon, I pushed too hard and hung up an oak that was a foot in diameter. When I tried to free it, cutting at head level, the tree sagged and clamped the saw blade in the cut, hard and fast. I shut off the motor. Cursed the tree. The saw. The bugs. The woods.

  And myself. Loudest of all.

  Clair appeared behind me.

  “You’re too emotional,” he said quietly.

  “To cut wood?”

  “Yup. And to do what I think you’re going to do.”

  “Which is?”

  “Get involved in this thing with this girl.”

  “Hard not to get emotional about a woman getting killed,” I said.

  “There’s a time for emotions, and this isn’t one of them. If you’re going to push it.”

  “I am,” I said.

  “Then get ahold of yourself. No emotion. Just intellect and execution. Emotion gets in the way of both.”

  “That what you told your Marines?”

  “Y
essir,” Clair said, reaching up and tugging at my dangling saw.

  “Did it work?”

  “Increased the odds.”

  “Of what?”

  “Accomplishing your objective. Coming home alive.”

  I waved blackflies away from my face.

  “But this isn’t Vietnam,” I said.

  Clair fiddled with his chain saw.

  “You’ve got one casualty already,” he said.

  “Maybe more?”

  “Why not? Whoever it is has killed one person. After that, it gets easier. What’s one more?”

  It was still in the woods. The air had stopped moving.

  “So what’s your advice?”

  “Go slow,” Clair said.

  “And?”

  “Identify your objective. Know what you want to accomplish before you go running off.”

  “I want to see that whoever killed Donna gets caught,” I said.

  “So do a lot of other people,” Clair said.

  “Their motivation is different.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.

  Clair reached for the pull cord on his saw.

  “But if you get in over your head, you tell me. It isn’t easy to fight a war alone.”

  I nodded.

  “Stand back now,” he said, starting his saw and stepping up to the overhanging limb. “When this thing comes loose, you don’t want to be in the way.”

  “I never am,” I murmured, the words drowned out by the roar of the Husqvarna. “Goes with the job.”

  We finished at three, with no more talk. I was hot and sweaty and smelled like chain-saw exhaust. When I got home, I peeled off my socks and jeans and T-shirt and got in the shower. The rifle leaned against the sink, went with me when I went upstairs to get dressed. When I came back down, I paused. I felt as if I’d forgotten something. It was Monday. Court was Tuesday. I didn’t write for the paper today.

  The paper.

  I was dressed and in the car in under a minute. Parked in front of the Knox General Store in seven.

  It was the lead of the paper, six columns across the top of page one. There was a photo of Donna’s building, with an arrow pointing to her front window. Inset into the copy was a head shot of Donna that could have come from her high school yearbook. She wasn’t as thin. Her blonde hair was done in long wavy curls. Even the eyes were different: big and wide, as I knew them, but more hopeful.

  Sitting behind the wheel, I started to read the story.

  “That son of a bitch,” I said.

  Archambault had the basics up high. Donna had been found by her sister, Marcia Dickey of Kennebec. Police weren’t releasing the cause of death, the position of the body, or any other information that might hamper their investigation. They wouldn’t say whether they had any suspects.

  That out of the way, Archambault had keyed on Donna as a past victim of an allegedly abusive boyfriend. He’d backed that up by noting her court appearance, and had quoted from the statement Donna had given when she had gone in for her protection order.

  He punched me and shoved me and this was in front of my daughter, which I don’t think is right. And then he knocked me down and jumped on me and hurt my wrist and when I ended up on top of him, he bit me on the stomach to get me off of him and it broke the skin. I don’t think this is proper for my daughter to see, her mother bitten on the stomach and being assaulted and screamed at. He also was very drunk and on drugs.

  Archambault quoted a state police spokesman as declining to comment on whether Jeffrey Tanner was considered a suspect in the slaying.

  And then there was this kicker.

  Marchant was recently featured in an Observer Fourth District Court report by Jack McMorrow, a part-time reporter recently hired by the newspaper. McMorrow reported on Marchant’s appearance in court last week, when the Kennebec woman, according to police, removed her shirt in the courtroom to show alleged bite marks on her abdomen.

  Sources close to the investigation said McMorrow continued to associate with Marchant after the story was published. One source said police questioned McMorrow Sunday about the slaying. Police declined to say whether McMorrow could shed any light on the circumstances leading to the murder, nor did they say whether it is believed that the newspaper story led to Marchant’s death.

  McMorrow, contacted at the murder scene Sunday, declined comment, saying, “I don’t want to be a part of it any more than I already am.”

  That little bastard. That little son of a bitch. That little weaselly son of a bitch.

  I scanned the story for anything libelous. There wasn’t anything flagrant, just a lot of little things, all pushing toward the legal limit.

  “Nor did they say whether it is believed that the newspaper story led to Marchant’s death.”

  It was the oldest trick in the world. Insert a statement in a story by bringing it up yourself and having it denied. Nor did they say whether McMorrow is a suspected serial killer from Mississippi. Or was recently released from a New York State penitentiary, where he served nine years for second-degree murder for the killing of his third wife.

  And using my off-the-record comment? Well, I should have known better. Archambault never agreed that my statements would be off the record. Even if he had, it would be my word against his. Tough luck, McMorrow. Next time keep your mouth shut.

  I tossed the paper on the seat. Picked it up and tossed it down again. That little bastard. This was his revenge. A story that, solely by implication, left the impression that, while I wasn’t a suspect, I was entangled in this murder somehow. At best, my story had caused it.

  Worst of all, it wasn’t far from the truth.

  What I had feared was now public fact. What I had been haunted by in the dark of night was now broadcast to the public in broad daylight.

  That little bastard.

  I drove back home, feeling as if I should slide lower in my seat. Had Clair read this before he roused me? Did he come get me because he didn’t want me to read it? Was he trying to tell me that he was still with me, that he was still on my side?

  If so, that made two of us.

  When I got back, the answering machine was blinking. I grabbed it, hoping it was Roxanne, but it was Albert, sounding gruff, asking me to call him back. The second call was from a young woman who eagerly identified herself as Janet McCall of Channel 3 News in Bangor. She asked me to call back too.

  I didn’t.

  But I did call Albert. Charlene answered in the newsroom, turning cold when she realized it was me. She said Albert was in a meeting, but she was sure he’d want to talk to me.

  I waited. He did.

  “McMorrow,” Albert said.

  “Albert,” I said.

  “I thought I told you I didn’t want stories about my reporters.”

  “You did. But I guess you didn’t tell your other reporters.”

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. I wrote about a woman who was being abused,” I said. “Now she’s a woman who was murdered. It’s a common progression.”

  “Fine, but how’d you get mixed up in it? Cops questioning you and all that. What the hell kind of representation is that for this newspaper?”

  “I knew her, briefly. I saw her the day she was killed. In the morning. Briefly. The cops are talking to anybody who might know anything about it, you know? If she’d seen the milkman, they’d be talking to him, too.”

  “And by the sounds of it, I know what she’d be doing with the milkman,” Albert said.

  “Now, that’s not true. She’d been with two men in six years. It wasn’t her fault they were both slime.”

  “The story only talked about one. Two, counting you.”

  “So talk to the reporter.”

  “But you were in there pretty prominently.”

  “Talk to your reporter about that, too,” I said.

  “Well, I don’t think we’ll be able to use you anymore, McMorrow,” Albert said.

&
nbsp; “Why not?”

  “I don’t see how you can report on the courts when you’re in the cases.”

  “I’m not in the cases. I had information about a woman who was killed. I called the cops. I mean, come on. I went to them. The only reason I knew her was because I was doing my job. Covering the court the way it should be covered.”

  Albert paused.

  “But do you think your story got her killed?”

  It was my turn to pause. I wondered if Albert had been talking to his lawyer.

  “I have no way of knowing that,” I said. “I just know there’s no reason to bump me off this beat.”

  “I’m talking about bumping you entirely.”

  “I know that too.”

  He hesitated.

  “All right, but we’ll take it day by day,” Albert said.

  “You and me both,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything.

  The rest of the afternoon I took hour by hour. I left the answering machine on and sat on the back deck with the rifle and a six-pack of Ballantine. After each can of ale, I went in and called directory assistance to see if Roxanne’s phone had been installed. It hadn’t. Not at four, or five, or six. By eight the bugs were out, and I stayed out with them. Later, the stars came out and I stayed out with them too, wondering where Donna was, whether she was anywhere, whether my parents were out there somewhere too. And then I fell asleep under the stars, numbed by the ale, stretched out on a chaise lounge with a chamois shirt wrapped around me. I awoke at four, chilled and damp with dew, staring up at a starless cloudy sky. I staggered inside and saw the red light blinking in the dark. I hit it.

  “Jack, it’s me. It’s eleven thirty. Where are you? They didn’t put in the phone. I’m calling from a friend’s. I’m going home and . . . and I just want you to know that I love you and I’m worried about you. I’ll call you from work tomorrow. Baby, I’m praying that you’re okay.”

  Roxanne was praying for me. Things were getting serious.

  16

  The courthouse smoking area was packed Tuesday morning. I walked through, in the doors, stopped at the middle of the room, and looked around.

  “McMorrow,” a voice boomed.

  I turned around. So did anybody who had read Monday’s paper. I was a walking, breathing literacy test.

  It was Tate, standing in the door of her outer office.