Hard Aground

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Hard Aground Page 10

by Brendan DuBois


  My flashlight was a good one, not one of those five-buck jobs you pick up at a gas station or hardware store. It lit up half of the front of the house, the door, and the man and woman attempting to break in.

  Dave Hudson and his wife, Marjorie, amateur genealogists from Albany, and now attempted burglars.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They were shocked, both standing up, mouths open, and I took advantage of that by yelling, “I’m armed! So point your flashlights on the ground and stay put!”

  Their arms moved as ordered; I switched my light off and moved a few feet, just in case one of them was armed as well. We were all struggling to see after my flashlight went out, but as our night vision recovered, being able to see their own lights would give me an advantage.

  “Hey, Mr. Cole,” Dave started, and I said, “Shut it, right now.”

  I settled myself in another position among the jumble of rocks and boulders, and as my vision improved, it was easy to make out the shapes of Dave and Marjorie. “Just for the benefit of you two folks from away, you’re trespassing on private property. Police departments and juries in this state tend to take a very dim look at that, so whatever happens, I’ve got the locals and the law on my side. Clear?”

  Dave didn’t answer, but his discouraged wife did. “We understand,” she said, her voice sullen.

  “Outstanding,” I said. “So what the hell are the two of you doing on my property?”

  “We were concerned about you,” Dave said.

  “Say again?”

  “We were worried about you,” he said. “We’ve been staying up at the Lafayette House while we’ve been doing our research, and we were going to take a drive into Porter to see a movie, and then we saw the lights go out at your house.”

  “Just a couple of good Samaritans, right?”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “We saw the lights go off, and then we went back to the Lafayette House, found out what utility provides power for you, and then we put in a call. Then I told Marjorie we should just come down and check on you, to make sure you were all right.”

  “Did you pass any unicorns along the way?”

  “What?”

  “You really think I’ll believe that nonsense?”

  Marjorie said something sharp and nasty, and her husband sounded hurt. “Mr. Cole … I know we’ve been pressuring you, and I’m sorry. I tend to let these things control me. But we know you’ve been in the hospital. We know you’ve had some serious surgeries, and when we saw you lost all your power, we wanted to make sure you were okay. Honest. That’s all we were doing.”

  I was beginning to feel less comfortable. “And when nobody answered the door, you decided to break in?”

  “No, nothing like that,” he protested. “There were no lights on at your house. No lanterns. No candles. After we knocked a few times, Marjorie was worried that maybe you had fallen, that you had hurt yourself.”

  “And how were you going to get in?”

  He kept silent for a moment and said, “Not proud … but when I was a juvie, back in New York, I did some time for breaking and entering. My uncle … a locksmith. He taught me some things.”

  I was going to ask him if he was so concerned about my safety, why didn’t he just call the police? But I was getting cold, tired, and I wasn’t having fun anymore, and this interrogation wasn’t going where I expected.

  “Go away, then, all right?”

  “Why are you over there in the rocks?”

  “They looked lonely,” I said. “Now, please. Go away.”

  He whispered to his wife, she whispered something louder back to him, and he turned back to me. “You know, it would only take a few minutes and—”

  “Dave, don’t push it,” I said. “Don’t.”

  His wife grabbed him by the arm and hauled him off my steps; they started back up the driveway, and he called out, “We were just trying to help! That’s all! Just trying to help!”

  Back in my house, I didn’t feel like doing much of anything, but the drains demanded release. I got upstairs and into the bathroom, and managed to spray around only a little blood before I got things squared away. The blood was cleaned up pretty easily from all the practice I’d had. I worked with the flashlight on the counter, pointed at the mirror, and when I was done, I said to the odd man looking back at me, “I’m so sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

  Then I went to bed, but not before putting my pistol down on the nightstand.

  Two hours and one minute later according to my watch, the power in my house came back on. I turned the little clock around so I wouldn’t see the flashing red numerals, and I knew that lights were on downstairs, but I didn’t care. I rolled over and went back to sleep, and kept on sleeping until a beautiful woman appeared in my bedroom.

  And this one was real.

  Paula looked down at me and said, “Rough night?”

  “You know it,” I said, sitting up. She sat at the foot of the bed and passed over a plate with a Dunkin’ Donuts breakfast sandwich on it.

  “Me, too,” she said. “Damn selectmen went on yapping until past midnight. Then I got to work this morning and found out that one of my freelancers who’s supposed to cover a criminal trial over at the county courthouse in Bretton called in sick. So that’s why we’re feasting on takeout this morning.”

  “I don’t mind, not at all,” I said, and we went through our sandwiches, Paula beating me with her impressive appetite. Then she helped me get up and get washed, and emptied my morning output, which was still too high.

  “Where now, sport?” she asked.

  “Back to bed for a while,” I said. “And why did you stay until the bitter end for the selectmen? Usually you bail out at around eleven or so, make a follow-up phone call the next day to see what you’ve missed.”

  “Yeah, well, this particular board is getting sneaky,” she said, helping me into bed, pulling the blankets up. “They like to sneak in things at the last minute, or adjourn the meeting and sit around and have a coffee break, where, oops, some town business gets discussed with nobody else in the room.”

  “Tricky.”

  “Yeah, well I’m one trickster who won’t let that nonsense get by.” Paula smoothed out the blankets and sheet and said, “I may be getting older, and the First Amendment’s getting creaky and well-worn, but at least in Tyler, I won’t let journalism die.”

  She stroked my face, sat down next to me on the bed. “What kept you up last night?”

  “Power outage. Lasted a few hours. And then when the lights popped back on, well, that woke me up and kept me up for a bit.”

  “I see,” she said. “And what else?”

  I didn’t want Paula to worry but I also didn’t want to dance around what had been going on. For all she had been doing for me, she deserved at least that.

  “Had two visitors with flashlights stop by,” I said. “Knocking at the door.”

  That caused her concern. “Mormons are usually too polite to pull off stunts like that, and Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t go out at night. And I don’t think it’s Girl Scout cookie time, though I may be wrong.”

  “They were amateur genealogists.”

  She made a face. “Ugh. The worst. What the heck were they doing at your house?”

  So I spent a few minutes explaining who Dave Hudson was, and his apparently supportive yet embarrassed wife. When I was finished, Paula said, “Good for you. This place has history, but it’s still your place. I’d tell them to go to hell and not come back.”

  “Well, I told them that when I felt better, I’d let them in.”

  Paula got off the bed, kissed me. “Not so fast, buddy o’ mine.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that when you feel better, I intend to take a day or two off, and make meals for you, and give you a nice bath in your tub, and wash every inch of you, and when you’re nice and dry, I intend to give you a nice, close, thorough examination by visiting nurse Paula Quinn.”

  A
grumpy part of me wanted to say that the last time that had happened, she had found a lump on my back, but by God I wasn’t going to say that. “Will you wear one of those sexy nurse costumes you see at Halloween?”

  She kissed me again. “Who says I’ll be wearing anything?”

  I slept some more and then found my way downstairs to get the lights off. After I spent an exhausting ten minutes or so restocking books, Diane Woods came by, with lunch in one hand and her large soft leather briefcase in the other. She looked tired but she also looked good. There were still scars on her face, but I had seen her for weeks in a bed at a rehab center, when she had looked much worse.

  Seeing her like this, mobile and in better health, was always good.

  We set up at the kitchen counter, and soon enough we were dining on lobster stew, Caesar salad, and warm French rolls.

  As we ate and talked, I kept looking at her innocent-looking briefcase, which I knew contained her laptop, whose chips and circuitry held a series of ones and zeros, the crime scene photos of a dead woman who didn’t deserve to die from a violent crime in her home.

  “What have you been up to?” she said.

  “Oh, you know, jogging and weight lifting, trying to get back my girlish figure.”

  Diane made a serious point of leaning over to look at my baggy T-shirt, sweats, and overall flabby appearance. “Hate to tell you, Lewis, but you’ve got a hell of a ways to go.”

  “Gee, ya think?”

  Diane buttered another roll. “No dancing, then. Have you gotten your biopsy work back yet?”

  “Not really.”

  “Lewis, it’s an either/or. What the hell does ‘not really’ mean?”

  “It means my tissue samples were removed and sent to a testing facility.”

  “All right.”

  “But the testing facility is in California.”

  “How the …”

  “Human error. And to make it more fun, it’s been lost in transit, even with a tracking number attached to it.”

  She stopped buttering her roll. “You seem to be holding up pretty well.”

  I took a spoon of the lobster stew. It was hot, sweet, and filling. “Not much else I can do. Panicking and swearing and all that—what would it get me?”

  “I’d tell you what it’d get me. I’d be down at the doctor’s office and I’d raise some hell.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “To make them upset and make me happy.” She took a healthy bite of her roll. “Some days, that’s a good combination. Even if you can’t get an answer to what you’re looking for, making people miserable for making you miserable is a reasonable payoff.”

  After another spoonful of stew, I asked, “What’s up with Maggie’s investigation?”

  “The state police’s investigation, overseen by Assistant Attorney General Martin and assisted by the Tyler police, don’t forget that.”

  “With you bitching about it all the time, how can I?”

  She laughed and said, “It’s going. The net is widening. The state police have gotten surveillance camera footage from the tollbooths on I-95, to run the license plates, see if anybody suspicious came off and on the exits during that night. We’ve also done another canvass of the neighborhood, and the only bit of info is one of the neighbors saw a car parked deep into some woods off the road … no license plate, no make or model.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning how the hell do we know? It was parked near a neighboring house of Maggie’s. First thought was maybe the car was keeping an eye on the road, the house, who knows what …”

  I kept my face as bland as possible, knowing the car belonged to the man hired by Felix to keep surveillance on the house.

  “Yeah,” I said. “And the AG?”

  “The honorable Camden Martin? He’s still up front, still running the show. The guy will probably be governor one of these days, you know? Lots of excess energy and smarts that have to go somewhere.”

  “He still thinks it was something to do with heroin?”

  Diane rubbed at her chin. “Well … the autopsy shows nothing in Maggie’s system except for some THC.”

  “THC? Maggie was smoking dope?”

  “Her personal doc said she had bad arthritis. But there was no sign of any opioid in her system, no track marks on her arms, thighs, or between her toes. Pretty clean. But still … there was that packet of heroin on the floor.”

  “The bluebird,” I said. “Your sign of drug quality. Anything from the Massachusetts end?”

  “Nope,” she said. “Massachusetts State Police—in a shocking development—is cooperating with us and the staties. Heroin doesn’t know state borders. And the local cops in Lowell and Lawrence, they’ve been helpful, too. But there’s something funny going on with that gang …”

  Her voice dribbled off.

  I had a queasy thought of where this was going, but I decided to take it there anyway. “What’s the funny thing?”

  “The gang members, they’ve scattered, gone to the wind. Two days ago, there was a firefight and two of them were wounded at a tenement building in Lawrence. They’ve been keeping their mouths shut about what happened, who did the shooting, or why it happened in the first place. But whatever happened, it scared the shit out of them. It’s hard tracking them down.”

  “Maybe Maggie’s pain was getting too much. Maybe—”

  Diane shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense. If her pain was getting too much, why go the illegal route? Her doc would have prescribed something to take the edge off.”

  We changed the subject and spent some time talking about Diane’s upcoming wedding. I remembered that she was considering applying for the deputy chief’s job, but I didn’t want to bring it up, and it seemed like neither did she. When trash was disposed of and dishes were washed and put away—and I actually had the energy to do the bulk of the dishes this time—Diane wiped her hands dry and said, “I guess it’s time.”

  “I guess so, too.”

  “Where do you want to do it?”

  I thought about the kitchen counter but no, I’d be cursing this area for the rest of the time I’d be here, seeing those death photos over and over again. “Let’s go to the couch,” I said.

  “Fine.”

  We sat down on the couch. Diane dragged the coffee table over, pushed over a pile of magazines—Smithsonian and Astronomy—then took out her laptop, put it down, and switched it on. The computer made its usual bloops and bleeps, and as Diane worked the buttons, she said, “Just a reminder that I’m going out on a limb here.”

  “I appreciate the reminder,” I said. “I promise not to come along with a saw.”

  “That’s nice,” she said. “Okay, here we go. What are you looking for?”

  “Where she was found.”

  A little grunt—of acceptance, concern?—and then she double-clicked an icon, and up came a photo. I grimaced and forced myself to keep looking.

  “From the entrance to her office area,” Diane said. “Wide shot.”

  “Okay.”

  I took my time, just looking around the edges, trying to get used to what was there in front of me on the screen, in all its bloody and colorful horror. The shelves of books and antiques and other knickknacks were crowded on either side of the area that had been cleared for use as Maggie’s office.

  There was a shape at the center of the photo. I glanced, looked away, glanced again.

  It was the shape of a human, sitting in a chair I also recognized, wearing baggy jeans and what was once a light blue sweatshirt. I could only tell it was once light blue because of the end of the sleeves. The rest of it was smeared and stained with blood and other fluids.

  The only tiny saving grace was that Maggie’s body had been thrust backward by the force of the shotgun blast. There was just a mound of bone, blood, tissue, and brain barely visible between her shoulders. Her legs were splayed and a portion of the jeans were stained from where the body’s internal fluids had let loose.
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br />   I could sense Diane sitting next to me, smell a fresh soap scent, hear her breathing.

  I looked away from the body. Papers and file folders were strewn across the wide planks on the floor.

  “Well?” Diane asked.

  “Give me a minute more.”

  “As long as you want,” she said.

  To the left were the rows of wooden filing cabinets, and I could make out that at least two drawers were open.

  “Okay,” I said. “Do you have a photo that focuses on the left here, where the filing cabinets are?”

  “Hold on.”

  She reached forward, picked up the laptop, and went to work. I saw one close-up photo pop up on her screen of Maggie’s shattered head, and I looked away and stared at my dark and quiet fireplace. More boxes of books around the side of the fireplace. One of these days, these books would be removed, lovingly examined, and put up on shelves. And one of these days, my dear friend would leave my house with these horrible photos.

  “Okay,” she said. “How about this?”

  “This” seemed to fit the bill. It was a photo of the wooden filing cabinets that were to the left, and three drawers in one cabinet were pulled open. I looked closer and there was splintered wood in the upper right corner. A lock there had been smashed open.

  “Any others in this area?”

  “Thought you’d ask,” Diane said. “Give it back.”

  We flipped back and forth and yes, this new photo was aimed toward the floor, where again, papers and file folders had been strewn around. Blood was splattered over the paper and cardboard, and there were pink and gray pieces of tissue that I recognized came from Maggie’s brain matter.

  I swallowed.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “How’s that?”

  “The papers and folders here on the floor, they have blood spatter and tissue on them. Meaning that Maggie was shot after the papers were pulled out.”

  “Good point,” Diane said.

  “Maybe she was shot because they had found what they had been looking for, or she had been shot because they didn’t find what they were looking for.”

 

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