Lifeline

by Gerry Boyle

“Basically, yeah,” Donnie said.

  “And you didn’t go to Donna’s?”

  “No way.”

  “And you didn’t fight with her?”

  “Hell, no.”

  “And you didn’t kill her?”

  Donnie looked at me.

  “What do you think I am?” he said. “Stupid? You think I’m gonna throw all this away?”

  I looked at him. He was serious. It was his best defense, and it was a good one. Donnie would not risk losing his Jeep with the CD player. He would not risk losing his boots and his phony tan and his gold chains and rings. He would not risk losing his Angie.

  In that order.

  I looked at him, then out of the window, where the trees were gliding by.

  “Do you feel bad that she’s dead?” I said.

  Donnie shrugged.

  “Sure,” he said. “I mean, yeah. She wasn’t making my life any easier, but what the hell. I didn’t want her dead. I just wanted her out of my hair.”

  “Not to mention the devastating impact on your daughter.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Donnie said. “Hey, they spent a lot of time together.”

  I looked at him, in his pallid attempt to show compassion.

  “There’s a crossover up here,” I said. “Turn this thing around. Before I blow lunch on the leather.”

  Donnie drove back to the dealership, fast. He pulled the Lincoln up at the end of the lot, away from the showroom. I popped the door open.

  “Listen,” he said as I swung my legs out. “Don’t you try to tie me to this, or you’ll—”

  “I’ll what?” I said.

  I swung back into the seat and closed the door.

  Donnie looked at me. His mouth opened. And then it shut.

  I got out of the car and walked away.

  So Donnie was guilty of a lot of things. Of considering women to be accessories. Of being completely bereft of anything resembling paternal feelings toward his pretty little daughter. Of being materialistic and greedy and crass. Of having very bad taste in sport coats.

  But he was not guilty of killing Donna.

  I was convinced of that, and as I drove back into town I thought that maybe I could scratch him off my list. That Jeff had one more strike against him. That the answer isn’t always the obvious one, but sometimes it is.

  And then my mind skipped back to Donna and my story and her innocence in the midst of all this. Talking to me in a parking lot. Trusting me—trusting that I would not hurt her, when she had so little reason to trust anyone.

  I was on top of him. Well, it started with . . . he had me by the shoulders, you know? And he tried to kind of throw me across the room, but I hung on to him and we both landed on the floor and his head was underneath my shoulder and he bit me to get me off him.

  Don’t hurt her, Marcia had said. Don’t you hurt her.

  I owed Donna. I guess I owed Marcia.

  Back in town, I pulled into a mom-and-pop store and bought an Observer off the counter. I flipped through the first section until I found the police log. There I was, but only two paragraphs. The word apparently was used four times. It was reported that Officer Lenny had been unavailable for comment.

  I owed him one too.

  There was a twenty-inch story about some zoning dispute. An interminable piece of gush about an upcoming sidewalk sale sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce. A feature on a woman who had been reunited with her brother after forty-two years, complete with a photo of two middle-aged people hugging.

  Archambault had written that story. He had not written about Donna. If he had skipped a day, maybe things were cooling off. Maybe Marcia had come home.

  I drove across town and out into the subdivided hayfields. When I turned onto Marcia’s road, I slowed. As I approached her house, I slowed some more.

  From a distance, the house looked as deserted as last time. There were no cars or trucks in the driveway, nobody out in the yard. I made one pass and turned around in a driveway up the road. On the second pass, I slowed even more.

  And thought I saw something move.

  It was in one of the front windows. Just a flicker, a movement that could have been imagined. I drove two houses up and turned around again, then came back to Marcia’s house and parked in the street out front. I sat in the car with the motor running and watched. The windows were blank. The house was completely still. I shut off the motor and the car was still too.

  And it moved again.

  It was a shadow, a dark form, and it had passed in front of the same window, the one to the left of the front door. I watched for another minute, then got out of the car and walked slowly to the end of the driveway. I stopped there and stood and watched.

  Nothing.

  I walked up the driveway and then along the flagstones. At the concrete steps, I paused and then walked up and stood in front of the door. The cobwebs were gone. I knocked.

  Nobody answered. I listened.

  There was the sound of cars out on the main road. Crows from a distance. I knocked again.

  Harder.

  Then listened again.

  Harder.

  From somewhere inside came a faint sound. A television? A radio? Voices and then a barely audible sound of laughter.

  This time I pounded. Waited. Pounded again. Waited again. Reached out to pound some more.

  When the door rattled. And opened.

  It was Marcia. Her eyes met mine through the window of the storm door. They were cold and her face was drawn and hard, her skin gray, her makeup unnaturally bright.

  I waited as she fumbled with the catch on the storm door, then pushed it open just far enough to speak through the gap.

  “Marcia. I didn’t want to bother you. I just wanted to—”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she said.

  “Well, I did want to talk to you about—”

  “Haven’t you done enough?” she repeated, her voice flat and distant, the voice of someone exhausted by grief.

  I felt almost stunned. I blamed myself for Donna, but now I realized that somehow I had hoped Marcia wouldn’t blame me. That somehow there would be room for exoneration. She was an unlikely ally, but it was the unlikely ones that I needed.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. I didn’t intend for it to turn out this way.”

  “But it did, McMorrow,” Marcia said wearily.

  Her hand still was on the door latch. The room behind her was dark, the back blinds drawn.

  “How’s Adrianna doing?”

  Marcia flinched. Pulled the door shut.

  “Just go, McMorrow,” she said, her voice muffled by the glass. “Don’t come back.”

  “I didn’t want to upset you. But I felt like I should come by. What would you have thought if I hadn’t? I don’t know. I felt like I should do that. And maybe this isn’t the right time, but I wanted to ask you about that night. I’ve talked to some of the neighbors, and—”

  The door was pushed open.

  “You’ve talked to Donna’s neighbors?”

  “Yeah, and a couple of them were helpful. One woman saw Jeff leaving and sometime after that, Donna was still—”

  “I’m gonna call the cops, McMorrow,” Marcia growled, her voice soft and menacing. “And I’m going to tell them you’re harassing me. And you’re getting in their way. And if you ever come near me again, or come near my little girl, I’ll kill you. If you come near my little girl, I swear to God I’ll kill you.”

  Her eyes fixed on mine, and then both doors closed. First one and then the other.

  I sat in the car and stared, Marcia’s words running through my mind. Her haggard face.

  I was a half mile down the road from her house, pulled into a rutted woods road. I’d gotten that far before I’d had to stop and try to sort this out. It wasn’t sorting.

  There had been no bluster in Marcia’s threat. No anger, either. Just determination and this selfless resolve, like she was a cornered animal. A cornered animal with a baby. />
  If you ever come near my little girl . . .

  But what had I done? I hadn’t killed her sister. Even if she thought my story had indirectly caused Donna’s death, what threat could I be to her or to Adrianna? How could I hurt Adrianna? By mucking up the investigation so that Jeff walked? Maybe. Was Adrianna a witness? If Jeff walked, would he come after Adrianna to silence her? But did she really think I could get in the way to the point that Jeff, or whoever it was, would go free?

  Or whoever it was. I supposed that in Marcia’s mind, there was no need for that caveat. And if that were the case, she wouldn’t want any interference with the police.

  But it was when she’d referred to Adrianna that her threat had been most vehement. “If you ever come near my little girl . . .”

  Her little girl? True, Adrianna was Marcia’s now. Donnie certainly wasn’t going to petition for custody, not if it meant risking his perfect life with his Jeep and Angie. But there was something funny about the way Marcia had said it.

  “My little girl . . .”

  As if her claim to Adrianna were somehow threatened. I remembered that Donna had said how much Marcia wanted children—how Adrianna was a surrogate daughter of some sort, filling that void in Marcia’s life. But if she had really filled it now, how could I foul that up? Unless it was anyone who stood in the way of Jeff’s conviction for Donna’s murder.

  But it wasn’t vengeance that Marcia was ready to kill for. It was to protect Adrianna. From what? Had Adrianna seen it? Was this four-year-old girl the only witness to this murder?

  I sat there for a while, thinking the same thoughts, asking myself the same questions. And underlying all of the questions was the unsettling fact of this death threat, which wasn’t the first, by any means. Over the years, several people had threatened to kill me. A few had been punks. A couple had been nuts. Some might have actually done it. But none of those threats had been uttered with Marcia’s complete and utter conviction.

  She meant it. She’d meant it when she said it. She meant it right now. She’d mean it tomorrow.

  24

  I started the car, but when I pulled out of the woods onto the road, I decided to take the long way back to town, a town that was small and seeming smaller.

  Tanner and Donnie. Leaman and Tate. Archambault and Albert. And now Marcia.

  This town wasn’t big enough for all of us. But who’d budge first?

  I drove back to Kennebec by making a long loop to the north and then to the east. I drove along country roads, passed people working in their gardens, people riding bikes, guys rumbling along in trucks topped with canoes. Their lives seemed so normal, almost pastoral. I looked forward to the time when I’d do those things again. I wondered when that would be.

  When I got back into the downtown it was after noon, but I wasn’t hungry. I could duke it out with Jeff and then blithely go have pizza and beer, but seeing Marcia had thrown me. For the first time since I’d come to Kennebec, I felt there was something I didn’t know. It was something big, and I didn’t know what it was.

  I drove along Main Street, my elbow out the window. Downtown was bustling, which in Kennebec meant a UPS truck double-parked. I’d started to pull around it when a guy stepped from between two parked cars and started to cross.

  He was holding a paper cup of coffee and a newspaper. He looked at me. I looked at him.

  Archambault.

  He gave me an uncomfortable sort of frown and I nodded. I kept driving and he continued along the sidewalk behind me and to my right. When a truck lurched out of a parking space, I pulled in. And got out. And waited.

  I was leaning against the hood of the car, arms folded on my chest, when Archambault approached. He slowed warily, as if I might step out and clock him. I didn’t.

  “We need to talk,” I said.

  He looked surprised and relieved.

  “Okay,” Archambault said. “I mean, what about?”

  “Where’d you get that coffee?”

  “The deli.”

  “Let’s go back there,” I said. “I could use a cup of tea.”

  We walked up the block to the deli, side by side, without speaking. When we got there, I held the door for him. When I stepped up to the counter to get my tea, he sat down at a table by the window and waited. The place was empty, and the woman behind the counter got up from reading a magazine to wait on me.

  I had the tea black because the cream, like most things in this town, was suspect. As I sat down, Archambault took the plastic lid off his cup. He’d laid that day’s New York Times on the table. It was the front of the metro section. The lead was a profile of a drunk driver who had killed four people. I knew the woman who had written it.

  “You’ll learn more from that paper than from anybody in your newsroom,” I said.

  “And I hear you think I have a lot to learn,” Archambault said.

  There was an edge of challenge in his voice, but only a faint one.

  “I think you need an editor. Your writing isn’t bad, and the instincts are there. But you need somebody to tell you when you aren’t asking the right questions. A little ethics wouldn’t hurt, either. Screw people and it catches up with you in the long run.”

  “You think I screwed you?”

  “Yeah, but I’m minor.”

  “Who’s major?”

  “Donna Marchant. You did her a real disservice.”

  “I heard you quit the paper because of my story.”

  “Yup.”

  “What was so bad about it?”

  “You took the word of people who have a vested interest in making Donna look bad. Like Tate. She wants to make Donna look like some drunken slut.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Donna came to the court for help and Tate didn’t do anything for her. Maybe she wants to ease her conscience, if she has one. Maybe she just wants to keep her job.”

  “But these are the official sources,” Archambault said, sipping his coffee.

  I sipped my tea.

  “A good reporter doesn’t take anything at face value, especially the official word on anything. Your guiding principle should be that people often aren’t what they seem. When you try to tie them up in a neat little package, it’s usually not true. Life isn’t neat. Donna Marchant wasn’t a nun, but she wasn’t promiscuous. She drank, but she wasn’t a drunk. She was a woman and a mother and she’d had some bad luck, but she was trying.”

  “But I didn’t have anybody saying that.”

  “You didn’t ask in the right places,” I said.

  Archambault looked at his coffee.

  “You sent me into that apartment with those lowlifes,” he said, looking up. “Was that supposed to be funny?”

  “I owed you one. Were they glad to see you?”

  “One of ’em took my notebook. But there wasn’t anything in it. I thought the guy was gonna take a swing at me.”

  “Why didn’t he?”

  “One of the women reminded him about his probation or something. She was screaming and yelling. Jesus.”

  He paused and stared into his coffee.

  “So what’s with all the free advice?” Archambault said, looking up suddenly. “What are you after?”

  “Information. I want to know if what I’m hearing is the same as what you’re hearing.”

  Archambault thought about that.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because if we’re hearing different things, then maybe my information isn’t as solid as I’d like it to be.”

  “For what? I mean, what is this information for?”

  “You’re getting better,” I said.

  I took a long swallow of tea. It was strong and bitter. Like medicine.

  “You’re not writing for us anymore, are you?” Archambault asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Then who are you writing for?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “What are you hearing for a cause of death?”

  “Read the paper tomorrow,” he said.


  “Give me a preview.”

  It took a few minutes, but little by little Archambault told me what he knew.

  He said the state police had let him glance at the medical examiner’s report. It said Donna was found in her bed. She’d died of asphyxiation, and her blood-alcohol content at the time of death had been 0.21, more than twice the legal limit for driving. There were broken blood vessels in her eyes, a telltale sign of asphyxia. Bruises on her throat, but no broken bones in her neck.

  “Was that seen as unusual?” I asked.

  “A little,” Archambault said. “At least that’s what the cops said. They said they figure somebody started to choke her, then stuck something over her face.”

  “Was she conscious when she died?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I didn’t ask that. I don’t know. This detective, he made it sound like the thing was pretty much wrapped up.”

  “So who was it?”

  “Which detective?”

  “No. Who do they say killed her?”

  “Her boyfriend. Jeff Tanner. Off the record, they told me he admitted to trying to choke her.”

  “Trying?”

  “I guess he says it didn’t kill her all the way. That’s what he said, anyway. The cop, I mean.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’d rather not say,” Archambault said. “It was off the record and all.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not really.”

  “Why haven’t they picked him up?” I asked.

  “I heard they’re going to,” Archambault said. “Tonight or tomorrow morning. I guess they think they know where he is. He’s right here in town.”

  I took a last sip of tea.

  “Hey, McMorrow,” Archambault said, a smirk easing onto his face. “Why is it you can’t find this stuff out? You’re the hotshot, right?”

  “State police won’t talk to me.”

  “Why not?”

  “They say I’m getting in their way,” I said, standing up and putting a dollar on the table.

  “But they talked to me.”

  “Then I guess you’re not,” I said, and I walked to the door and stopped. “You never asked me.”

  “Asked you what?” Archambault said, getting up from his chair.

  “What happened to my face.”