No Way Home

by Andrew Coburn

  “Is that so?”

  “You telling me you didn’t know?”

  “Maybe a little,” he said, dramatically slowing the car where the view was ideal. “It’s a great river.”

  “As long as you don’t jump into it.”

  He gave her a fast look. “That’s not on your mind, is it?”

  “No,” she said. “That would be as senseless as what happened to my parents.”

  Gradually the riverbank went high with brush, then turned woody. A groundhog fed boldly near the side of the road where the weeds were greenest. Morgan scratched an earlobe. “Matt mentioned he was trying to call you about the time of the shooting. Do you know what he wanted?”

  “Did you ask him?”

  “I meant to.”

  “It could’ve been anything.” She was smiling in the wrong places, from nerves. “Why are you harping on this?”

  That was a question he was asking himself. Perhaps he was trying to be totally objective and professional. “Lieutenant Bakinowski mentioned a doctor you dated.”

  Her chin went up. “They weren’t dates. He’s a friend.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Do you need to know?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Then I won’t tell you.” Her smile was back, inappropriately and without meaning. Then it died.

  Morgan said, “I’ll shut up if you like.”

  The sun slanted into her side of the car and ate into her face. Her eyes narrowed to nothing. “I’ve thought about it,” she said. “I’ve thought about nothing else. It had to have been a cruel accident. A criminally careless thing.” Her eyes came open, painfully, like moths fluttering to the light. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

  “That’s the trouble,” he said. “I don’t.”

  They passed an isolated weatherboard house, where a pleasant-looking woman — someone Morgan imagined would put out seed for birds — was watering the grass. Then the trees thickened into heavy maples and oaks. Eventually they approached the metal drawbridge that spanned the river and led back to Bensington. Lydia stirred. “Can we stop? Walk for a bit?”

  He pulled over into weeds growing through the gravel. She climbed out and hurried dark glasses onto her face against the sun’s wrath. The metal work of the bridge looked like the prototype of a medieval war machine. With a swift stride she moved well ahead of him, her legs stalks of light below the cut of her skirt. He caught up with her halfway across the bridge, where she had stopped to peer over the plated railing. The river was high, the current strong, from a previous week of rain.

  “Something magical about water,” she said, peering down. “Full of secrets, like people.”

  He was staring at her. A thrilling dash of sun was in her hair. Two buttons undone gave a hint of a fine woman. He could understand Matt MacGregor’s feelings for her.

  With her eyes still on the water, she said, “If I hadn’t frozen, maybe I could have saved one of them. Possibly both.”

  “No,” he said. “There was no hope. They were gone.”

  Her eyes turned on him. “You’re not a doctor.”

  “I read the medical report.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  All at once she wanted to return to the car, but her step now was slow, full of fatigue. A delivery truck gunned by them on the bridge, then a sports car overloaded with catcalling youths. At the end of the bridge they moved into the shade and trampled weeds. Morgan stepped on a puffball and exploded a world, some of it powdering his shoe.

  She said, “May I drive?”

  “It may not look it,” he said, “but this is an official car.”

  “Since when did you follow the rules?”

  She drove reasonably, in silence, across the bridge. Bug stains spotted the windshield, which the wash from the wipers merely scummed. When they crossed the line into Bensington, she lifted her nose. A skunk lay dead on the road near the dirt drive where a sign on a tree said bikes repaired and the mailbox read rayball. The stink stretched relentlessly, death exalting itself. Morgan silently reckoned the animal would lie in state overnight and give itself to crows that would come at the crack of dawn and pick it to pieces.

  A few heads turned when they rumbled down a neighborhood street, for the car was familiar to many. Lydia peered straight ahead through dark glasses, which she removed when they reached her aunt’s house. Instead of switching off the motor, she turned to him with a stark expression.

  “Do you think it might’ve been Matt?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Why did I have to ask that?”

  Morgan stared hard, aware of the slew of browns in her hair, some gone golden. “To get it out of the way,” he said.

  • • •

  The house, which stood not far from the green on Chestnut Street, was pre-Revolutionary and harbored unused servant quarters, fireplaces in the bedrooms, and a still serviceable Dutch oven in the kitchen. Ceiling-high windows, which once let in mammoth drafts, were now true in their frames. Much of the house had been restored or redone after Randolph Jackson sold the virgin woodland that became known as Oakcrest Heights. The most distinctive sound in the house was the jingle-jangle of the front doorbell, an ingenious brass device created by a reputed apprentice of Paul Revere.

  The doorbell sounded now.

  The caller was Lieutenant Bakinowski, whom Jackson seated in his study, where a sun ray teemed with dust. Through it Bakinowski said, “I thought it best we talk.”

  “Of course, certainly. I want to be kept up to date on everything.” Jackson plunked himself into a club chair and scratched his fingers through his sandy hair, reassurance that the bare spot on the crown was covered. The years had put more of the Yankee into his looks but offered less stamina to his attentiveness. He fingered his lower lip.

  “It’s about your police chief,” Bakinowski said.

  “I’ve known Jim for years. Fine fellow.”

  “I don’t doubt that, sir, but not strictly a professional, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “I appointed him. Board votes the way I do, you see. And I can tell you this, he does his job.”

  “Yes sir, I’m sure he does, but we have a tricky situation here.”

  Jackson’s gaze strayed to the family Bible, which solemnized the hand-carved pedestal on which it rested. One of his lesser forebears had made a marvelous living selling Bibles door to door. Illiterates had bought the book just to have it in the house. This was family lore with which he might have amused Bakinowski had the visit been of a lighter nature.

  “The suspect, sir, is one of the chief’s officers.”

  Jackson’s unkempt brows shot up. “Christ, who? He doesn’t have many.”

  “Matthew MacGregor.”

  “What?” The words took time to sink in. “For God’s sake, you can’t mean Matt. He and the Lapham girl are engaged, or almost.”

  Bakinowski put forth his suspicions and posited motives of rejection and jealousy. His voice was unmodulated and official-sounding, as if he were testifying in a courtroom, no notes needed. “MacGregor meant to hit the daughter, not the mother.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Jackson said, his day tainted. He had not meant to end it with heavy things on his mind. “I’m sure Matt can account for his whereabouts.”

  “Not adequately, sir. I’ve just finished talking to him. Some people don’t ring true. Officer MacGregor is one of them.”

  With an air of discomfort, Jackson said, “What do you want from me?”

  “Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask for help, but Morgan is uncooperative. At best, he’s protecting his officer. At worst, he’s impeding an investigation.”

  “Jim wouldn’t do that.”

  “We have a homicide on our hands. Since his authority comes from you, sir, I’d like his cues to come from you.”

  “Cues? What cues can I give him?”

  “I’d take it upon myself to advise you.”

  Jackson glimpsed his wife’s shadow
in the doorway and suspected she had been listening for some time. In the next instant she swept into the room on fine large feet plugged into dainty shoes, introduced herself in a bright voice to Bakinowski, and instructed him to sit down when he half rose. “Would either of you gentlemen care for a refreshment?” she asked.

  Bakinowski politely declined, and Jackson, casting devoted eyes on her, mouthed a silent no. Delighted that she was in the room, he swung a leg confidently over the other and settled more comfortably into his chair. “The lieutenant is a state police detective.”

  “How exciting.” A perennial ingenue in her late forties, Suzy Jackson was ungainly in a paradoxically graceful way, amusing when she was of a mind, and difficult when it suited her. “You must have many adventures, Lieutenant.”

  “A few, Mrs. Jackson.”

  She took up a position behind her husband and laid a wifely hand on his shoulder, a gesture that always pleased him. He felt claimed. To Bakinowski she said, “Too much violence in the world, don’t you agree?”

  “No one will ever discourage man from violence, Mrs. Jackson, for it’s the easiest reaction. If we could commit murder by simply willing it, people would be falling dead all over the world, which would be depopulated within a year.”

  “Goodness, I’d better not argue with a professional policeman,” she said and idly rumpled her husband’s hair, exposing the bald spot. “But I can tell you one thing right here and now, Lieutenant. Matthew MacGregor’s not your man.”

  Bakinowski’s eyes strayed in their deep sockets. “How do you know that?”

  She smiled. “A woman knows.”

  • • •

  Sitting at his desk, James Morgan perused an old report, one he knew almost word for word, and after all these years the words still gnawed at him. The victim was a twenty-three-year-old woman whose marriage had eviscerated her emotionally and spiritually. Morgan knew this because his predecessor, Chief Carr, had found her diary hidden in a box of sanitary napkins, the only place her husband might not have looked. The diary was confiscated for evidence but no longer existed, destroyed perhaps when the old chief was cleaning out his desk. Morgan slipped the report back into its dog-eared and discolored folder. The typewritten name on the tab was Rayball.

  The year he had become a policeman was the year Eunice Rayball died under questionable circumstances. The morning Papa reported her missing he said he didn’t want her back, good riddance to her, and ranted about infidelities, which were figments of his mind, rabid with jealousy from the day he married her. Morgan and Eugene Avery, wearing rubbers over their police shoes, found her facedown in a foot of murky swamp water, where she had lain three nights and three days no more than fifty yards from the house.

  Everybody suspected foul play, but nobody could prove it. Chief Carr, questioning Papa relentlessly, got nowhere and called in the top investigator from the district attorney’s office to take over the interrogation. The investigator, a former federal agent, sat on a corner of Chief Carr’s desk and activated a tape recorder. Papa sat righteous and close-mouthed in a wooden chair.

  “Said she was goin’ for a walk, that’s all I know.”

  “Good God, Mr. Rayball, at that hour of the night?”

  “She wanted the air.”

  “And you say your sons were asleep at the time.”

  “The young one might not be mine.”

  “I’ve met him, Mr. Rayball. The little tyke certainly looks like you.”

  “That don’t mean nothin’. Some of my jism might’ve got mixed in with the other fella’s.”

  “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “I know how it works.”

  “What did you think when your wife didn’t come back?”

  “Figured she met somebody on the road.”

  “But she didn’t go onto the road. She went into the swamp.”

  “How was I to know that?”

  “Give me the names of some of these other fellows.”

  “I don’t know no names. She was too careful for that.”

  “Look at me, Mr. Rayball. Look at me closely and listen. It’s been pretty well established you were the only man in her life.”

  “I know better.”

  “Why are you smiling, Mr. Rayball? Is this a game to you?”

  “It ain’t nothin’ to me.”

  An hour later they let him go and watched him strut arrogantly out of the chief’s office. The investigator, with a grimace, switched off the tape recorder. “The guy stands five-foot-five and talks six-foot-eight.”

  Chief Carr said, “He’s not a whole dollar.”

  “One thing’s for sure, he’s got a twisted thing about women.”

  “No bruises on the body except what you’d expect from a fall,” Chief Carr said, mostly to himself.

  The investigator shot a look at Morgan, who stood obediently near the door with his cap in his hand. “What are your thoughts, Officer?”

  “He killed her,” Morgan said without hesitation.

  Chief Carr settled in deeper behind his desk. “We all know that, Jimmy.”

  The reluctant ruling, convincing no one, was that Eunice Rayball, perhaps distraught, left her home in the night, traversed uncertain ground, tripped and fell, and died by accidental drowning.

  Morgan never forgot the look of her when he raised her from the water, and he never forgot the weight of her hair when it slopped over his sleeve. Nor did he forget how he and Eugene Avery, after averting their heads, argued over who would stay with the body while the other radioed the station.

  “Why does anyone have to stay?” Eugene asked.

  “She’s been alone here enough,” Morgan replied.

  Eugene, whose seniority was greater by a month, left him standing there. He remembered how the sun shot rays through the sharp angles of a swamp maple and irradiated Eunice Ray ball’s remains.

  Later, when Chief Carr was battling cancer and planning to retire, he said to Morgan, “It’s not your triumphs you remember, Jimmy, but your failures. Not the rights you did, but the wrongs. That’s the way it goes for most of us. Life’s final injustice.”

  “I don’t know any wrongs you did, Chief.”

  “I did a big wrong, Jimmy. I let Rayball walk.”

  “You didn’t have a choice.”

  “If I was a different kind of fella, I’d have taken him into the woods and beaten the truth out of him.”

  • • •

  Arlene Bowman lay supine on the padded table, and the masseur, a huge, unsmiling bald man with remarkable hands, took the stress from her shoulders but not the edge from her mood. Her dark eyes half shut, she said, “Take the towel off, Pierre, and tell me what you think of my ass.”

  “I’ve seen it before, Mrs. Bowman. It’s OK.”

  “Don’t you want to see it again?”

  “I see posteriors all day, especially ones that aren’t OK.”

  “Mostly women’s?”

  “Half and half,” he said, his sure fingers working the cords in the back of her slender neck.

  “Do you know the Pooles?”

  “I do Mr. Poole at the club. I’ve never met Mrs. Poole.”

  “She could use you. Though of course you know, Pierre, it’s illegal in this state for a masseur to do a woman.”

  “We won’t tell, will we, Mrs. Bowman?”

  “Probably not, but I should warn you that I’m a terribly vengeful sort. My husband is even worse.”

  His fingers rode up her nape, into her black hair where the curl began. “Your husband has complete trust in me. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I?” With knowing thumbs he kneaded the bone behind each ear.

  “Christ, that’s good,” she murmured. “Do other women confide in you, reveal their fantasies, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty in bed with them at the same time?”

  “Usually they just relax and enjoy. You don’t ever relax, Mrs. Bowman.”

  “That’s because I don’t want my juices ever to ebb, my skin to sag. I don�
�t want ever to die.”

  “You can delay practically anything, Mrs. Bowman, but death has the edge. It has time on its side.” With outstretched fingers, his hands swept down on her shapely back and found the right muscles to move. “How’s this?”

  “Wonderful,” she whispered, luxuriating under his care. Then she lifted her head and glanced over the curve of her shoulder. “Impossible to tell your age, you don’t have a line in your face. How old are you?”

  “Sixty-four.”

  “And what’s your real name? It can’t be Pierre.”

  “Dennis,” he said. He removed the towel from her and stepped back.

  “Well?”

  “You’re in perfect shape, Mrs. Bowman.”

  • • •

  Ignoring the perfume of skunk, Chief Morgan reached furtively out of the car window and opened the mailbox. Among a few flyers was a thick ordinary envelope addressed to Papa Rayball, with an extra stamp to carry the weight. The envelope looked as if it had been worn in someone’s back pocket before being mailed. No return address was given, but the postmark, partially blurred, read Florida, which told Morgan who the sender was.

  He drove around the corpse of the skunk and turned sharply. The car clawed its way over ruts in the gravel drive and came to a rest beside Papa’s battered pickup. The air rang with insects. The sun struck the pines and seemed to give each needle individuality. Climbing out, Morgan looked toward the house, but Papa’s voice echoed from another direction.

  “You want somethin’?”

  Papa was working beside the shed on an old three-speed bicycle, his tools scattered near his feet. The bicycle was upside down. He spun a wheel. Approaching him, Morgan said, “I brought your mail.”

  Papa’s arms hung short, and his face went small, to the point that he looked like a bird of prey. “Against the law to go into the box.”

  “Thought I was doing you a favor.”

  “You ain’t never done my family no favors and ain’t likely you will.” He took the mail without looking at it and jammed it into a back pocket of his rumpled pants, which once may have been part of a suit, though Morgan could not remember ever seeing him in one, not even at Eunice Rayball’s funeral long ago. “You here about the old thing, or is it somethin’ new?”