• • •
Meg O’Brien stayed at the station past her shift to help answer telephones that did not stop ringing. As soon as she put her phone down it would jangle in her hand, the sound vibrating into her arm. There had not been this much excitement since two youths from out of town had held up the Sunoco station, shot the owner in the leg, pistol-whipped the attendant, and were apprehended in the woods two miles from where their car broke down. That night the chief took her and Eugene Avery to a restaurant in Lawrence, where they ate scampi and drank wine, and the waiter, his fly not properly zipped, sang a little song in Italian.
On the lighted steps of the town hall, overlooking the green, Lieutenant Bakinowski fielded questions from the media, including reporters from Boston’s three major television stations. In Boston, scarcely twenty miles away, a killing was simply part of a count that rose each year, but in a hamlet like Bensington it was an event. Unremarkable in their sockets, Bakinowski’s eyes emerged electric for the cameras. The eyes of the man beside him stirred soupy blue under brows in need of a trim. Randolph Jackson, his family Bensington’s oldest, was chairman of the selectmen and a former state legislator. He was losing some of his sandy hair, one sizable bite on the crown, and with a freckled hand he smoothed strands over the spot. Sotto voce, he said, “Where’s the chief?”
“Who the hell knows?” Bakinowski whispered back. Then the same query was posed by a reporter from the Lawrence paper, whose circulation included Bensington. “Probably having his supper,” Bakinowski offered in his public voice and went on to the next question.
Sergeant Avery, on the chief’s orders, sat in a cruiser outside a white frame house flanked by lilacs with a scent that pervaded the growing dark. Beside him was a twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun and the wrapping from a sandwich he had consumed. On the dash was a can of root beer. An empty mayonnaise jar awaited his need to relieve his bladder. His head was tipped and his eyes focused on the porch light, which was collecting moths at a rapid rate. The house belonged to Lydia Lapham’s unmarried aunt. Lydia was spending the night there, perhaps many nights.
Matthew MacGregor stood with Chief Morgan in the half-lit parking lot of the library, which had closed at eight. Morgan’s car was unmarked except for the town seal on each side and a noticeable scrape that had defaced one of the seals. MacGregor said, “It must’ve happened when I was trying to call her. I wanted to catch her before she left for work. Christ, Chief, I should’ve gone there instead.”
Ten years his senior, Morgan regarded him somewhat paternally. With certain expressions MacGregor looked like a schoolboy fitted into a policeman’s uniform. The sidearm he carried could have been a heavy toy. A pug nose caricatured wholesome looks, and a muscular build evoked days he played three sports at the regional high school, a letter earned in each.
“She saw them drop.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that, they were gone!” He snapped his fingers again, so hard they must have hurt. “Like that!”
“Take it easy,” Morgan said with a strong sense of connection. Each had lost his father young. MacGregor was ten when, without warning, without even an explanation, his father abandoned the family, simply walked out the door with a packed bag, and was never heard from again.
“I know what she’s going through, Chief.”
“I know you do.”
“I want the son of a bitch who did it.”
A mosquito whined between, and both batted it away, MacGregor with the faster hand. Morgan spoke quietly. “I’ve been mulling over what Lydia told us. I don’t think her mother was the target. I think she got in the way.”
MacGregor’s face faltered, and the boy in it vanished. “You’re saying Lydia.”
“Makes more sense, doesn’t it?”
MacGregor agreed without speaking, without moving a muscle. Then he disagreed. “Makes no sense at all. Who’d want to hurt her? Christ, no one. At the hospital she puts doctors in their place, but they respect her. Patients love her, everybody loves her. I love her, Chief. She’s the world to me.”
“Exactly,” Morgan said in a slow voice meant to drive home the meaning, which MacGregor resisted.
“I don’t know what you’re telling me.”
“Yes, you do.”
“Then say it plain.”
“It’s like I always said. Somebody wants to hurt a cop, he goes after the family.” Morgan averted his head and sneezed. Oaks and birches were disseminating their pollen. “Or a person just as close,” he added.
• • •
The driver stopped, idled the motor, and squinted through the windshield. Pitched high, the headlights burned a tunnel through the dark of the steel bridge spanning the Merrimack River, which was muscular from recent rains. The driver dimmed the lights and squeezed a smile he did not know was there. His breathing, like the motor, ran rough. “Give it here,” he said, and the sleek pieces of a dismantled rifle tumbled weightily into his hands. The stink of the shot was still in the barrel. Then he pushed open his door.
The night air was rife with the taste and smell of the river, and from everywhere came the racket of peepers. Walking along the rail to the middle of the bridge, he reassembled the weapon with amazing dexterity and speed. He wanted to see it whole again. A fearsome piece of workmanship, it had proved a rewarding instrument of business.
He pricked an ear when he thought he heard the sound of a car coming, but it was merely the rumble of the river, which brought up more of its taste and a deeper odor. For a moment he was struck by the thought that the river had a voice and was saying things to him. But he had no time to listen. Stepping back, he gripped the rifle by the barrel and with a whirl threw it over the rail.
The splash was insignificant.
2
The morning broke bright over the town, which had wakened early. Crows scavenged residential streets to feast on the remains of unlucky woodlot animals. A boy on a bicycle slung yesterday’s news over lawns still moist from the night. Here and there front doors opened tentatively. A woman in a robe rushed to pick up her paper, and across the street a man in an undershirt retrieved his. A bread truck, on its way to Tuck’s General Store, rumbled around the green, where a few souls had already gathered as if expecting a show. They trained their eyes on the police sign protruding from the far side of the town hall.
The Blue Bonnet restaurant opened at seven and filled by quarter-past. The breakfast menu, chalked on a blackboard screwed into a wall of knotty pine, offered muffins straight from the baking tins, doughnuts hot from the oven, and eggs fresh from Tish Hopkins’s chickens. A communal table of regulars ate with their eyes aimed out the windows. Mitch Brown, preparing a dozen orders at once, turned from the grill and scanned the faces at every table. “I don’t see the chief,” he declared.
The chief, usually there, was not, which surprised no one.
At an hour when most men were leaving for work, a number of wives made their husbands stay home. The school bus ran half empty. At eight-fifteen Fred Fossey, commander of the local VFW, lowered the flag at the town hall to half mast. He and Earl Lapham had fought in the Korean War, and Flo Lapham, nee Westerly, on whom he had had a crush since childhood, was a third or fourth cousin. Entering the town hall, where he held the part-time position of veterans affairs officer, he bumped into the Congregational minister and grabbed the man’s upper arm. “Something we have to ask ourselves, Reverend. Is God always on duty?”
Meg O’Brien, with little sleep, was back in the station, with a mug of coffee at her elbow. Sergeant Avery, arriving late, peeked into the chief’s office, which was vacant. “Not in yet?” he asked.
“Been and gone,” Meg O’Brien said.
“Say where?”
“You want him, you can reach him on the radio. You want him?”
Sergeant Avery shook his head, poured coffee from the Silex, and had an unwanted memory of Chief Morgan gently draping a blanket over Flo Lapham’s body. For a stunning moment he had thought the chief, for the comfort of each,
might shift her closer to her husband. His voice went small. “Doesn’t make sense, does it, Meg?”
“World sort of made sense once, but I was a kid then,” said Meg, who had suffered her own losses.
At nine o’clock, Lieutenant Bakinowski assigned troopers to requestion neighbors of the Laphams’. Hours leading to the shooting, had they noticed anything unusual, no matter how insignificant? Think hard. Some, desperate to help, made up things, citing strangers on the street and noises in the yard, figures fleeing in the woods beyond.
Near noon, Bakinowski spoke with Randolph Jackson in the front seat of Jackson’s Audi, a replacement for one cracked up a month before. “You must have a few hunters in this town,” Bakinowski said, and Jackson immediately challenged the inference.
“What would a hunter have been doing in that little woodlot?”
“He could’ve been testing his weapon. Could’ve fired it accidentally.” Bakinowski’s eyes came forward. “Let me remind you of something, sir. Fellows who hunt animals, who are big for blood sport, aren’t like you and me. They’re a shade less.”
“I know, but — ”
Bakinowski smiled. “I’m just trying to rule out some possibilities.”
The lunch crowd at the Blue Bonnet was bigger than normal. With Mitch Brown’s wife, the cashier, helping out at the tables, Mitch, with the smells of clean cooking clinging to him, emerged from the kitchen. His shirt, baker’s white, was scrawled here and there with food stains, like notes to himself.
“Guess what?” his wife said, balancing plates of chicken pot pie. “TV people are doing interviews. They’re supposed to be coming here next.”
He was not interested. Craning his neck, he said, “I still don’t see the chief.”
• • •
When he had been appointed chief, the daily in Lawrence ran a profile on him, blew his picture up big, called him “personable and progressive,” and mentioned his degree from Northeastern, his year in Vietnam, and the death of his wife. A drunken youth from Andover, driving his father’s brand-new Buick with the gas pedal floored, had struck Elizabeth’s Bug broadside. The youth had climbed out with the customary abrasions and contusions. That had been fifteen years ago last month. There were days when it seemed a hundred years ago and nights when it might have been yesterday.
He still lived in the same house, and sometimes, in the dead of an evening, he glimpsed her in another room, but always a shadow instantly carried her off. In the small hours he occasionally woke to find her only a breath away. If he did not move, the darkness held her there until dawn.
Such would have been the case now had he not stirred.
Birds were making themselves heard through the half dark. Once awake, he could not drop back to sleep.
The house, which he had grown up in, was less than a mile from the green. It was more Gothic than Victorian and not in total repair, for he was a lummox with tools. When his mother had moved to Florida the house had become his. Elizabeth had had plans for it, but they died with her. Downstairs the kitchen and dining room were small and dim, with windows of dusty panes and peeling mullions. Floral wallpaper had long lost its bloom. In the living room he had installed a desk salvaged from the town clerk’s office. It matched his one at the police station, which made him feel more there than here.
Upstairs were two bedrooms and a good-sized bath. After Elizabeth’s death he had moved from the large bedroom to the small one, once partially furnished for the child they had never had.
He showered with his eyes closed until the water ran cold. Shaved, he patted his cheeks with witch hazel. Dressed, he watched the sunrise sign in another day while what was left of the night dripped off the trees. His thoughts were not of his wife but of Lydia Lapham. He felt stronger than ever that the bullet that had killed her mother had been meant for her.
When he stepped out the front door the sun was already swimming over the lawn. Clumps of unattended tiger lilies, rearing up foliage but not yet blossoms, cast the aura of a jungle. A robin flew out of its bedroom in a maple. Abruptly he stopped and scanned the street, as if he too were a possible target.
He checked in at the station. Meg O’Brien was the only one there, for the duty officer on the graveyard shift had left. Caught in the act of sneezing, she brought a tissue to her face. “Maybe this isn’t the time to mention it,” she said, wiping her nose, “but Mrs. Bowman rang up yesterday. Should I tell you what she called you?”
“I don’t think so,” he said with a cringe that evoked a memory of Arlene Bowman’s mouth, a dash of violence in the smile. He began checking entries in the night log.
“Why can’t you pick a nice girl,” Meg said, “instead of fooling with those phonies from the Heights?”
“No lectures, Meg, please,” he said and closed the log.
“Your hair’s sticking up in back.”
He groomed it with the flat of his hand. She had more to say, but he did not stay to listen.
He drove to the house of Lydia Lapham’s aunt. Though still early, he knew she and Lydia would be up. The porch light was burning weakly in the sunshine, and the night officer who had spelled Sergeant Avery was dozing in his cruiser.
“You can go now,” Morgan said, startling him.
The young officer snapped on his cap and squared it. “Should I come back tonight?”
“We’ll see.”
In the roses near the porch was a spiderweb in which a powdery moth was fastened like a miniature angel. Morgan thought of rescuing it, but was hesitant to interfere with the balance of life, which he felt was tentative enough. He meandered to the back of the house because he reckoned they would be in the kitchen.
“May I come in?” he said through the screen door.
No tears were in Lydia’s eyes. They were all in her aunt’s. Miss Westerly, her face crinkled lace that had aged overnight, was in her robe and quietly disappeared. Lydia sat at the table, near the raised window, with her hands embracing a cup of coffee that may have gone cold. Morgan doubted she had slept. In her wrinkled white uniform she looked like a private letter someone had tried unsuccessfully to steam open. The remote quality of her voice put a distance between them. “My parents are dead, Chief. Can you tell me why?”
“Not yet,” he said quietly, wishing his presence was less bruising. He should have worn a suit and tie instead of a casual shirt and chinos. He should have worn real shoes instead of loafers.
“Can you tell me who?”
His jaw, taut with intention a moment ago, was loose. His feelings stretched to her.
“What am I going to do without them?” she said in a way her voice was never meant to sound. It could have come from a metal drum.
“You have your aunt. You have Matt.”
“Don’t tell me what I have,” she said with increased tension. “I know what I have, Chief.”
“Please,” he said, “call me James. I might be the police chief, but I’m also your friend. Yours and Matt’s.”
“Mine and Matt’s. That’s nice, James. You couple us as if we were married. We’re not.” She pushed her hair back. “There’s coffee on the stove if you want it.”
He poured half a cup and dribbled milk from a pitcher. “It may not have been an accident,” he said.
She chose not to hear, or not to understand. Her eyes slanted past him. “I froze, you know, when it happened. Maybe I could have saved one or the other. One might still be here.”
“Nothing you could have done,” he tried to reassure her.
“You don’t know that. You’re not a medical man.”
She spoke in anger, and he felt her attention slip away, well beyond his jurisdiction. Standing tall, he drank his coffee in the silence that rose between them. When he tried to break it, she stopped him with the pure blaze of her eyes.
“I can’t answer any of your questions, James. Not now. I have too many of my own.”
Miss Westerly reappeared in one of her better housedresses. Her bright lipstick, hurriedly appli
ed, was a red claw over her grief. “Can’t this wait, Chief? She’s in no condition.”
“Yes, of course. Naturally.” He rinsed his cup out in the sink and left it there. Lydia surprised him by rising from the table and moving with him to the screen door. She even stepped outside with him. Clouds had taken some of the sun away, and the air was a shade cooler. They heard thunder, loud enough to give her a start.
“My father used to say that’s God pocketing his change,” she said distractedly. “As a little girl I believed it.”
“You need some sleep,” Morgan said. “Let me call Dr. Skinner to give you something.”
“Was the bullet meant for me?”
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “I wish I could remember the moment before my birth. That’s what I wish the most.”
“Why the moment before?” he asked. “Why not the moment itself?”
“I think the moment before would answer questions.”
“What questions?”
“The ones I don’t know to ask,” she said.
• • •
When Morgan returned to his car, he found Matt MacGregor sitting in it. MacGregor was in uniform, though not on duty, and his cap was in his lap. He had not shaved and, like Lydia, probably had not slept, which distressed Morgan, who wanted him presentable, clear-headed, effective, not only for the investigation but for Lydia as well. MacGregor’s voice was shaky. “Did you talk to her?”
Morgan settled in. “A little.”
“She doesn’t seem to want me with her,” MacGregor said, raking his fingers through his short hair.
“She’s in shock.”
“Time like this you’d think she’d need me most.”
“Time like this all rules are thrown out.”
Morgan ran the car onto the road and drove slowly, avoiding the town center. From the distance came rumbles of thunder but no sight of rain. Sitting rigidly, MacGregor fixed his stare as he might have a bayonet.
“You had somebody sitting shotgun. Why?”
“Probably unnecessarily. But why take a chance?”
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