Authors: Stephen Dobyns
“He’s got a Jeep Wrangler,” Jessica told him, “it’s one of his toys. He thinks he can go anywhere. He’ll be there all right.”
“You don’t seem to be looking forward to it.”
“I hate him,” Jessica answered perfectly calmly. “I wish he was dead. But at least I might see my brother. If it weren’t for Jason, I wouldn’t be going home at all.”
“Is that what’s been bothering you?”
“Partly. Have you ever felt that you really deserved to be punished?”
“For what sort of thing?”
“I don’t want to say, but it’s about the worst thing in the world.”
“Does it concern your stepfather?”
“Sure, but it concerns me a lot more.”
Hawthorne had spoken with Jessica’s stepfather over the phone, although he had never met him. Peter Tremblay had the genial and articulate manner of a professional speaker—a lawyer well-practiced in boardrooms and courtrooms. In this way, he reminded Hawthorne of Hamilton Burke. Hawthorne wondered how such people were when they became sad or wistful or sentimental, when they expressed anything other than authority and hearty assurance.
“What about your mother?” Hawthorne asked.
“Dolly’s too scared of Tremblay to complain. But they’re going to be flying to Las Vegas right after Christmas. Tremblay loves to gamble but he’s not very good at it. And Dolly loves to drink. He’s hired a baby-sitter from an agency to take care of me and Jason, which surprised me.”
“Why should it surprise you?”
Jessica didn’t answer right away. “Tremblay doesn’t like to leave us together. He thinks we conspire against him.”
“And do you?”
“Of course.”
From the bus station, Hawthorne drove Jessica to a diner called Main Street Station, across from Plymouth State College. He parked and they waded through the snow to the diner, which had a bright yellow front, a green metal awning, and two green pillars. Inside were red booths trimmed with dark maple and thirteen red-topped stools along a marble counter. They took a booth by a window that looked out from about six feet above the sidewalk. Cars and pickups were crawling along with their lights on and there was the jingle of snow chains. Across the street and up the hill beyond the parking lot, the four-story Rounds Hall was barely visible, its clock tower a blur in the blowing snow. Four students passed on cross-country skis right down the middle of the street.
Jessica ordered a half-pound monster burger with guacamole, jalapeño peppers, and sautéed mushrooms, and a strawberry frappe. Hawthorne got the turkey club, French fries, and a cup of coffee. The young waitress smiled as if she thought Jessica was his daughter. At the counter, four men were drinking coffee, each with a puddle of melting snow beneath his stool.
“So,” said Hawthorne, wanting to continue the conversation they had had in the car, “what’s this thing that’s the worst thing in the world?”
Jessica’s hair hung in two braids. She had unzipped her down jacket and underneath she wore her blue University of New Hampshire sweatshirt. “I don’t know, it’s not that big a deal. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Does it have to do with what happened before you came to Bishop’s Hill?”
“Partly.”
“And what else?”
“Just a lot of bullshit.” Jessica seemed no longer interested in talking. She sipped her water, then set her glass back on the table. She stared out the window and didn’t look at Hawthorne. Each window had a border of red stained glass running across the top. “I miss my brother,” she said at last.
“You’ll be seeing him tomorrow, won’t you?”
“I guess so.” Jessica tore open a packet of sugar, poured it into her hand, and licked it slowly. Her tongue was pointed and very pink.
“So it’s more than that, isn’t it?”
Jessica crumpled up the empty sugar packet. “You can probably figure it out.” She again seemed to be deflecting his questions.
“What do you mean?”
“Your wife and kid were killed, right? Well, my father was killed.”
Hawthorne remembered that Jessica’s father had died in an accident in which he had been flying his own plane “You think about your dad a lot?”
“He was my best friend. He protected me.”
“I’d like to be a friend as well,” said Hawthorne. “I want you to believe that you can trust me.”
Jessica’s voice hardened. “You don’t replace best friends as easily as that.”
Hawthorne winced and Jessica resumed staring out the window. All at once he saw her sit up as if someone had jabbed her with a needle. Glancing out the window, he looked down on a familiar figure bundled up against the weather. He recognized the green hunting jacket before he recognized the man. It was LeBrun, with someone whom Hawthorne didn’t think he knew, though from where he was, above them, he couldn’t see their faces. They were talking. The other man wore a red ski cap and seemed older. Then they disappeared.
“Frank LeBrun,” said Hawthorne. “Who was the other fellow?”
“I’m not sure,” said Jessica.
Her tone seemed purposely vague. She began tearing open another packet of sugar. The father in Hawthorne wanted to tell her that it was bad for her teeth or would ruin her lunch or would give her pimples. He was impressed that LeBrun had driven into Plymouth in such weather. But LeBrun had been born and bred in New Hampshire. This was probably nothing to him.
“Frank’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?” said Hawthorne.
Jessica crumpled the empty packet and dropped it in the ashtray. “Not particularly.” There was a tension in her face that hadn’t been there before. She looked scared.
“I thought you liked visiting him in the kitchen.”
“He frightens me.”
“How?”
Jessica didn’t say anything to that.
“It was LeBrun who gave you the tequila, wasn’t it?” said Hawthorne, leaning forward. It wasn’t really a question. “Who was the man with him?”
Jessica turned to him sharply. “Leave me alone, will you? What’d you do, bring me here to grill me? I can walk back to school, you know.”
“It’s twenty miles,” said Hawthorne, trying not to smile.
“I don’t give a fuck.” She straightened her jacket as if she meant to zip it up, then she began to pick at the patch of duct tape on the front.
The waitress brought their lunches. “Isn’t it a shame how it always snows on a Saturday instead of on a school day,” she said, beaming at Jessica. Above the table was a hanging light with a red glass shade. It swayed slightly as she set down the plates. The French fries were awesome, she told them.
Jessica continued to look out the window as if the waitress weren’t there. After the young woman left, Jessica began poking at the bun of her sandwich with her index finger, making deep indentations and causing the guacamole to ooze out at the sides.
Hawthorne started to say something, then took a bite of his own sandwich instead. He supposed it was impossible not to feel paternal with a fifteen-year-old. He thought of LeBrun. The cook had said he’d be leaving for Christmas and he wasn’t sure if he’d be back. Although he liked his job, he had a lot that he needed to do. “I got business all over the place,” LeBrun had said. Hawthorne hadn’t asked what sort of business.
After Jessica had eaten half of her hamburger, Hawthorne said, “Frank told me he hardly knew who Scott was, then later he said that Scott was in the kitchen all the time. He said that he and Scott were always telling jokes to each other, that he hadn’t wanted to tell me the truth earlier because he was afraid of the police.” Hawthorne let the sentence hang and returned to his sandwich. It was cut into quarters and each quarter had been pierced with a toothpick ending in a red frazzle. There was also a pickle and a small cupful of coleslaw.
“You don’t know LeBrun,” said Jessica. “You don’t know the stuff he can do.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Like you don’t know he was the one who wrecked Evings’s office. You don’t know shit.”
“Why did he wreck Mr. Evings’s office?”
“Find out for yourself.”
“How does that make you feel, not to tell me?”
Jessica pushed away her hamburger. “Don’t give me that ‘feel’ shit. I’ve already been down that road. All I’m saying is that you got to watch out. I’m not saying more than that.”
“It scared you seeing LeBrun with that man, didn’t it?”
Jessica said nothing. She had turned away and had begun to free her hair from the two braids. Then she said, “Have you ever done something so bad that when something bad happens to you you think you must have deserved it?”
“Maybe.” Hawthorne watched her carefully. It seemed obvious she was talking about herself and not him. “It digs at you, doesn’t it?”
“It makes me think that I’ve got to put up with stuff.”
“You don’t have to put up with anything.”
She ran her fingers through her hair, then shook her head so the hair swung free. It made her look older. “If you were bad enough, you do.”
“Is this the thing that’s the worst thing in the world?”
Jessica was looking at an old man at the counter who was putting on his overcoat. After another minute, Hawthorne said, “You need to trust me. You have to believe I’m on your side.”
Jessica turned abruptly, knocking the glass with her strawberry frappe so that, if Hawthorne hadn’t caught it, the sticky pink liquid would have spilled across the table.
“You’re just like those men at the club,” said Jessica in an angry whisper. “‘Trust me, believe me.’ All you want to do is get in my pants.”
“That’s absurd,” said Hawthorne.
“You’re sorry you didn’t fuck me when I was drunk. That’s what everyone thought anyway, right? So now you’re sorry you didn’t do it when you could. Don’t tell me you’re on my side.”
Hawthorne wasn’t sure whether to laugh or be angry, but it also seemed that she wanted to distract him from talking about LeBrun.
“So who was the man with Frank?”
Abruptly, Jessica slid out of the booth and stood up. “All right, Dr. Smart Guy, you had your chance. I’m walking.” She began to zip up her jacket.
Hawthorne thought how quickly she could lapse into what he imagined to be the tone, if not the language, of the strip clubs. “That’s okay, I won’t say any more. We’ll have a hard enough time getting back to Bishop’s Hill as it is.”
“Well, better you than LeBrun,” said Jessica.
—
Detective Leo Flynn hated driving in the snow. The back wheels of his Ford Escort slid a little to the left, then to the right, no matter what he did. He hadn’t expected it to be this bad. In Boston it had been raining. Between Routes 128 and 495 there was sleet. Since crossing the New Hampshire border on 93, he had felt as if he were driving deep into the interior of a snowman. Cars slid off the highway into the median or into ditches. Flynn watched them do it, half dismayed, half in awe. They had a silent grace, like dancers in a ballet. A tractor-trailer had overturned near Salem.
Every time Flynn crept by a car stuck up to its fenders he crossed himself. What a foolish way to spend his day off, he thought. If he didn’t go today, however, the whole business would have to be conducted over computers and the telephone. Nothing face-to-face, what Leo Flynn thought of as police work handled the old-fashioned way. A boy had been found dead in a swimming pool near Brewster. An autopsy had shown that he had been murdered just like Sal Procopio, Buddy Roussel, Mike Ritchie, and probably some other guys. The man sought for questioning was Larry Gaudette. And Flynn knew that name. Gaudette was the cousin of Francis LaBrecque and it had occurred to Flynn that maybe ice pick murders were a family business or one of those inherited skills like playing the piano or juggling five apples at once. Anyway, Flynn was driving up to Brewster to surprise the local coppers with his information about the other killings. So what that he was ignoring protocol; Leo Flynn was an old-fashioned guy. But if Jack Coughlin, the homicide captain, had wanted to slow him up, he couldn’t have done better than throwing this snowstorm in his face.
As for catching Gaudette, Flynn could help with that as well. He had talked to Gaudette’s friends and family in Manchester; he had talked to a couple of the guys whom Gaudette had worked for. Everyone liked him, which didn’t mean much—Flynn had met murderers who’d been the most popular guys on their blocks. And serial killers were often charmers—fellows who could talk their way into your living room. Still, Flynn hadn’t figured Gaudette for a killer and he wondered if these yokels had heard of Francis LaBrecque, because that’s what interested Flynn most: just where LaBrecque was hanging his hat and what sort of tricks he was up to.
Flynn had left home at eleven and it was now one-thirty and he’d only just passed Concord—normally a one-hour drive. Soon it would be getting dark, although all the cars had their headlights on already. The only pleasure was in watching the big sport utility vehicles whipping past him—the Explorers and Broncos and Wagoneers—then seeing them stuck in a ditch a few miles farther up the road with their owners staring at them stupidly, as if a portion of the true cross had turned out to be plastic. The salt trucks were out, of course, and the plows, but it was snowing so hard that the road got covered again in no time: two inches, four inches, six inches. And it occurred to Leo Flynn that the smart thing would be to pull off as soon as he could and buy some chains.
Three hours later, Flynn was still driving north. By now it was dark and the fat flakes seemed to fling the brilliance of his headlights back into his face. Through the snow-blanketed silence he could just hear the clink-clink of the chains he had bought south of Laconia. They had cost an arm and a leg, but they were cheaper than having his car towed out of a ditch or dealing with the ulcer that throbbed every time his car skidded, spun, slipped, or swerved. Now, though he was still creeping along, he was doing it in relative safety. Also, as far as he could figure from the radio, the snow would keep up all night and through Sunday, and at some point Flynn would have to drive home. “Major New England storm” was how the deejays described it with pride.
At the Brewster exit, Flynn slowed to a crawl and crept down the off-ramp. He hadn’t phoned the police station, because he wanted his arrival to be a surprise, but now he was thinking that everything he had done that day had been stupid. He should have called. He should have stayed in Boston. He should have done what he could do on the computers, which meant telling one of the nerds what he needed, since the only thing Leo Flynn knew how to do on a computer was play solitaire. He passed a Sunoco station just off the exit—a yellow glow in the murk. The orange revolving light of a plow eased past and he could see the sparks from where its great blade scraped the pavement. Only a few other cars were on the road, a few Jeeps and four-by-fours. He could hear the other guys on his homicide team saying to him on Monday, “You nuts? You did what?” Well, if he learned nothing new, then he’d keep his mouth shut. No reason to let others know that he had been this foolish.