Hard Aground

by Brendan DuBois

  HARD AGROUND

  A LEWIS COLE MYSTERY

  BRENDAN DUBOIS

  This novel is dedicated to my older brother

  Neil DuBois

  Raconteur, bon vivant, entrepreneur, and deep ocean sailor

  May you always have fair winds and following seas.

  CHAPTER ONE

  From the vantage point of my bed, I looked out the near window to a cluster of rocks and boulders, which had been tossed and turned over the years by storms and long-ago glaciers. The view had been the same for nearly two centuries and for the past two hours. I gritted my teeth and rolled over, wincing from the pain of my recent surgeries.

  From this side, the view was quite different, as I looked through a glass door that led to a small second-floor deck facing the Atlantic Ocean. Not a bad view—and one that’s been with me since I moved some years ago into this house on Tyler Beach after being pensioned off from my short and not-so-brilliant career in the Department of Defense. The ocean was always just there in the background, something to look at while getting up in the morning or preparing to go to bed at night.

  Since coming home from the hospital a few days ago pretty much bedridden, with another couple of dreary weeks of recovery waiting ahead for me, this view had become my new best friend. I had to lie mostly on my left side, trying to breathe easy, because my right shoulder and back were a mess, with scores of stitches and two drains coming out of my cut-up skin. Even lying on my back to stare up at the ceiling wasn’t an option.

  So what to do? I love to read, but the pain and discomfort of what was going on with my back and shoulder made it hard to focus on the printed page, and, what’s more, it was hard even to hold a book or newspaper in my weak hands. I know there are e-book readers out there, but I’m terribly old-fashioned and can only read the real deal, with real paper and cardboard.

  My friend Felix Tinios had brought in a television set that now dominated the corner of my bedroom, but there were only so many movies and History Channel programs one could watch before becoming bored to death. (And when did reality programs about lumberjacks and hunting Bigfoot equal history?) My taste in music was about twenty years off, and listening to what passes for talk radio made me wish we were still governed by the British Crown.

  That left the ocean. In the two weeks since my surgeries, I had grown to like watching the way the light played upon the moving waters, seeing the boats working out there, the different types of birds that floated in and out of view. Most days, the view helped pass the time.

  But not today. I was facing two problems—one immediate, and one not so immediate.

  The immediate issue was the status of the two drains in my back, intended to drain out blood and fluid into little plastic bladders. They were held in place by an elastic bandage wrapped around my upper torso, and they needed to be emptied twice a day, with the output measured so my doctors would know to remove them when the output dropped far enough.

  But there was something wrong. I could feel it. There was a cool moistness on my skin that didn’t belong.

  That meant I had to get off the bed and go to the bathroom. It was only about twenty feet away, but for the past few days that twenty feet had seemed as challenging as twenty miles.

  I shifted some in the bed and, damn, now it felt as if I was sopping wet back there. If I didn’t do something soon, I was going to soak the bedding, and at this rate it wouldn’t be long before the leak soaked right through to the mattress.

  If I had been at the hospital, I would have just needed to press the call button. If I had a health aide at home, I could have just called out. But the hospital, insurance company, and the home health aide company were currently feuding over who was supposed to pay what and for what services, so I was home alone. Nice name for a cute movie, but not so cute when I was the one alone, my back and shoulder wounds ready to burst with blood and fluid.

  “Okay, partner,” I whispered to myself. “Time to man up. Let’s do this thing.”

  I scooted to the side of my bed, took a deep breath, and swung my legs out and—

  I nearly screamed as pain rippled up and down my back. But at least my feet were on the wooden floor. I took a series of deep breaths, but it felt like a blowtorch set on low was sweeping along my back and right shoulder. Two weeks ago, Paula Quinn, assistant editor of the Tyler Chronicle and now an intimate friend, had been giving me a back rub when she found a lump near my right shoulder blade. The lump turned out to be the latest souvenir of my time in the Department of Defense, and when the surgeons at Mass General started cutting to take it out, they found two more tumors down closer to my spine. A number of years ago I was a research analyst for an obscure intelligence group within the DoD, and one day my little group was out in the Nevada high desert on a training mission. During the mission, we stumbled into a highly secret and highly illegal biowarfare experiment that killed everyone—including a woman I loved—save for me.

  Many times over the years, as the biowarfare exposure caused an occasional tumor to appear, I was told how lucky I was that I was still alive.

  Yeah. Lucky me.

  I was still waiting to hear the report on whether or not the tumors were malignant. Several times in the past, after similar surgeries, I’ve lucked out and gotten the report that they were benign.

  I guess that should have cheered me up, but I also remembered the hard and fast rule of gambling: at some point, the house always wins.

  I stood up in bare feet, wobbled some, and then started making my way to the open door. On the second floor of my home, there’s a bedroom, a large office, and a bathroom. When I got home two weeks ago, I had been tempted to sack out downstairs, with the comforts of the kitchen, living room, and fireplace, but my bathroom needs banished me upstairs.

  One step, two steps … I was doing fine.

  I finally reached the bedroom door. Beyond and to the left was my office, with boxes of books and pieces of unbuilt bookshelves. To the right was the bathroom; I wobbled my way in. I tried not to stare too hard at my face. I turned and glanced at my back.

  Damn.

  Two brown splotches about the size of a baby’s hand had soaked through my extra-large white T-shirt. My drains were leaking somewhere.

  Double damn.

  I pulled up my T-shirt, grunted at the pain, and examined the yellow bandage wrapped around my upper back and chest. Two plastic tubes were running out of my upper back—kept in place with tiny black stitches—and went into plastic bladders tucked into little cloth pockets. Both bladders were full, with blood oozing out of their plastic tops.

  On my new bathroom counter were a plastic measuring cup and a notebook, where I kept track of the output. If the daily output fell below a certain number of milliliters, then the drains could get removed. Based on what I was seeing back there, that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

  I bent some, then reached back with my left hand and grabbed ahold of the near bladder. I pulled it out and was able to lower it to my side. I slid the tube out, emptied the bladder into the measuring cup, and then wrote down “12 oz.” in my little notebook. Replacing the empty bladder was a chore. Since it was now flaccid, it took some twisting and pushing to get it back into the cloth pocket.

  All right.

  One more to go.

  I reached over again and—

  Missed.

  All right.

  Tried again.

  I grimaced and reached back further, and it was like a hot fire poker was being driven into my back and shoulder. I had tried a real heavy-duty painkiller the first day I got back home and the hallucinations and gastric distress made me give them up. I was regretting that decision now.

  “All right,” I whispered to the scary-looking man in the mirror. “T
hird time will be the charm.”

  I gritted my teeth and heaved my left arm across. My fingers grasped the top of the bladder, and I tugged and tugged and—

  The damn thing popped out like some freak alien egg, and the top of the hose pulled free from the bladder. Within seconds, blood was spraying around the bathroom as if it were a scene in some deranged slasher flick. When I moved and tried to get ahold of the spurting bladder, my bare feet slipped on the bloody tile floor and I fell, striking my head against the wooden vanity.

  I must have passed out because when I woke up, the blood had already started to cake on my hand. It was everywhere. I sat up against the vanity, looking at the mess I had made.

  I tried to get up, but I was too tired and I hurt too much.

  But I was also cold.

  I reached up with my left hand and snagged a dark blue bath towel. I pulled it down and covered myself. And then I waited.

  Eventually I made out the sound of a key rattling around in the downstairs door, followed by the sound of the door opening and closing. There was the thump of someone dropping her purse and coat on the floor.

  I waited.

  The sound of someone coming up the stairs was now audible, and when her fine blonde hair became visible, I saw that it was my Paula Quinn, who stopped with a hand on the railing and said, “For the love of—”

  “How was your day, dear?” I asked.

  “Shit,” she said, as she came into the bathroom and got to work. Even in the midst of this, I took a moment to take her in. Paula’s younger than I am, and over the past few years we’ve been friends, then lovers, then friends, and now lovers again. She was wearing tight blue jeans that hugged her bottom and a pink low-cut buttoned blouse with the sleeves rolled up. I admired her pert nose and the cute ears that poke through her hair, which she hates, and which I find adorable.

  “What happened?” she asked, picking up a face cloth, running water over it, then scrubbing my hands and face.

  “My drains were leaking,” I said. “I got to the bathroom and tried to get them drained. I did fine with drain number one. Number two proved to be a hell of a challenge.”

  “I guess so,” she said. “Your T-shirt and pajama bottoms are a mess. Let me get a clean set.”

  Paula went out to my bedroom, where there was the sound of a closet door opening and closing before she came back in. “Sorry I’m late. Some news broke and—”

  “Please, no apologies,” I said. “I’m grateful for everything you’re doing and have done.”

  She put the new clothes—another oversize white T-shirt and a gray pair of pajama bottoms—on a clean part of the vanity and said, “Time to get you up on your feet.”

  “Got it.”

  She pulled on my left arm while I pushed myself off the floor with my right, and then I was standing, resting both hands on the bathroom vanity. Off came the soiled T-shirt and bottoms, and she helped wash my back, returned the second bladder to its proper place, and dressed me.

  “Here, this is for you.” She gave me a sweet kiss, which I received with thanks, and then she said, “Time for you to go to bed.”

  “Ma’am, I love the way you talk.”

  That earned me a swat on my tired bottom. “You’re out of service for the foreseeable future, Mr. Cole, until I get a note from your doctor. So in the meantime, behave.”

  Back in the bedroom, she tidied up the sheets and pillows, and I slid back to my regular position on the bed. This time I patted her on the bottom as she went back to the bathroom, which got me a soft laugh, and soon enough, the clothes washer was running.

  Paula came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “You eat today?”

  I nodded to the tray on the nightstand. “I did. Thanks for leaving me lunch.”

  “Good. Now, I’m sorry to do this, but I’m going to have to leave you dinner. Something broke this afternoon, and I’ve got to get back to the story.”

  “What’s the story?”

  “Homicide.”

  I was stunned. “In Tyler?”

  “Yep,” she said. “Our little New Hampshire town. Maggie Tyler Branch, who ran Border Antiques on the Exonia Road. Got murdered sometime last night.”

  “Holy shit. I knew her. I even wrote a couple of columns about her for Shoreline.”

  “Of course you knew her,” Paula said. “Practically everyone in town knew her. Hold on, let me go downstairs, get something together for dinner.”

  Paula went downstairs and I listened to her work in the kitchen, heard the refrigerator door open and close, the microwave start whirring. I blinked and looked out at the ocean again. Maggie Tyler Branch, whose middle name marked her as one of the descendants of the Reverend Bonus Tyler, who settled this strip of New Hampshire seacoast more than 350 years ago. Widowed, no kids, she owned a large farmhouse on the main road leading to Exonia. She sold antiques and gave out sharp opinions for a living. In my years here in Tyler, I had done two columns about her. The first was just a feel-good piece about her being descended from one of the first settlers, but the second was a newsier story. It was about how she had purchased a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence at a yard sale up in Porter, and later found out the reproduction was one of the very few printed in Philadelphia back in 1776, and worth a lot of money.

  I still remembered talking to her in her cluttered and dusty barn. Smoking a Marlboro—and nearly a half-million dollars richer—she had shrugged and said, “You get old enough, and eventually instead of being shat upon, a unicorn will drop by and crap out gold coins in your lap. It was just my turn, that’s all.”

  I heard Paula trot up the stairs, go into my bathroom, and put my clothes into the dryer. She went back down before I could ask her anything.

  Maggie Tyler Branch.

  Damn.

  Some long minutes slid by until Paula brought up a covered plate on a tray, with a salad bowl nearby. “All right, favorite patient, best I can do. Hot steak and cheese melt, on French bread, with a side of salad and some healthy potato chips, if such a thing could exist.”

  She put the tray down on the empty nightstand, where she knew I could reach it with no difficulty. “Any questions?”

  “A couple,” I said. “How did she get murdered, and any word from the police on who did it? Or why?”

  Paula stood up, brushed her hands together. “No suspect, so far as I know. As for a motive … you’ve got an elderly woman living alone with lots of pricey antiques and jewelry kicking around, plus whatever spare cash she might have gotten from that Declaration of Independence sale back in the day. Plus she’s located about five minutes from I-95. In these troubled times … Lewis, our fair state is now number one in the country, per capita, for opioid deaths. For someone needing cash to score a good supply of heroin, Maggie’s place would be a good place to start.”

  She checked her watch. “All right, time to go back to the cop shop,” she said. “I’ll see what I can pry from your best pal, Detective Sergeant Woods.”

  “Tell her I said hello.”

  “Will do.”

  Paula leaned down, giving me a nice look at her cleavage—I hoped it was a deliberate move on her part—and gave me a nice long kiss. She stood up and said, “Leave the laundry alone. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”

  She had made it to the door leading out of my bedroom when I called out, “Hey! That other question. How did Maggie get murdered?”

  Paula turned, grimaced. “Yeah. A bloody mess. Somebody blew off her head with a shotgun.”

  Later that night, after eating my dinner and pushing the tray back on the nightstand, I turned on the television, and I lucked out with HBO rerunning its Band of Brothers series. I watched for three hours, enjoying the great actors and well-written, realistic scenes of the invasion of Normandy, as well as the moral clarity of a time when enemies controlled a state and, most of the time, wore uniforms.

  When episode three, “Carentan,” wrapped up, I yawned and switched the television off. I swu
ng from the bed again and made it to the bathroom to do my evening business. I checked the dryer and saw that my clothes were dry. I dragged them out, winced again at the pain, but managed to fold the T-shirt, underwear, and pajama bottoms, and leave them on top of the machine.

  I knew Paula had told me to leave the clothes, but I wanted to prove to her—all right, to myself—that I wasn’t totally helpless.

  Back to the bedroom I walked, and then got into bed, switched off the lights, and looked out the window to the Atlantic. It was dark, with no lights out there, and I managed to fall asleep.

  I woke up about an hour later, when my second problem of the day made itself known.

  The house was quiet, with only the sound of the waves’ endless march, until I heard the noise of the front door gently opening.

  I cleared my throat. “Paula?”

  No answer.

  I shifted some in my bed, checked the time. It was 1:16 in the morning.

  “Hello?”

  The door gently closed.

  I shut my eyes.

  My second problem of the day. It had happened several times in the weeks since I came back home from the hospital. At various points during the night, I would hear someone enter my house. Twice I had called my friend Felix Tinios, and once I had called the Tyler Police Department, but each time Felix or the police arrived, they didn’t find anything. The door had still been locked, and there had been no sign that anybody had been in the house.

  “Hello?” I called out.

  No answer. But now I heard what seemed to be cabinet doors opening and closing.

  I remembered the patient yet quizzical looks on Felix and the nice policewoman who had responded earlier, both no doubt thinking poor recovering Lewis Cole was hallucinating.

  I reached under the mattress, wincing, and took out my 9mm Beretta.

  So my night continued, and so did my second continuing problem.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I woke with a man looking down at me, and, half-asleep, I reached for my Beretta—but it was missing.