Authors: Cynthia Riggs
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Cozy
Bugs swiveled on his heels and stalked a few paces away from the four, then swung back again.
“You know you go to jail for kidnapping. And they throw away the key. Did you think of that? Did you?”
Mack started to say something, but Bugs continued. “Prehistoric Neanderthals with undeveloped brains. Roaring around country roads on motorcycles, raping and pillaging. A bunch of assholes, that’s what you are.” He stopped for breath.
“Nobody was raping nobody,” said the redhead, sullenly staring at the ground.
“You look at me!” Bugs rasped.
He looked up.
“First the cute little race with the cops.”
“That wasn’t us,” said the smaller man.
Bugs swung around to face him, and the redhead leaned back against the picnic table.
Bugs turned on Mack again. “And now this, one hell of a lot more serious than playing tag with local cops. Personal, eh? Nobody else’s business, eh? In the next five minutes, you tell me what you had in mind, before I turn you over to that same local cop you thought was so cute. You’ll see how cute she is. Talk.” Without taking his eyes off them, Bugs reached over for one of the white resin chairs, pulled it under him and sat. He folded both arms over his chest.
Mack darted a glance at the other three, who were trying their best to look unconcerned.
Bugs glanced at his watch. “Four and one-half minutes.”
“Burkhardt had stuff on his computer,” Mack blurted out.
“Obviously,” Bugs said. “So what?”
Mack started to stand up.
“Sit!” Bugs pointed to the bench, and Mack sat again.
“His will and stuff.”
“What’s his will got to do with you?”
Mack was silent. A chickadee landed on a pine branch above them, showering the picnic table with brown needles. The bird called its mournful late summer
pee-wee.
“Four minutes,” Bugs rasped.
“I’ve been seeing his niece.”
Bugs stood abruptly. “That goddamned two-timing bitch…”
“No, no,” Mack said. “Not Harley, Linda.”
Bugs thumped back into his chair, speechless.
“I been seeing Linda. She didn’t want her uncle to know she was dating a biker. Her uncle was leaving his place to her because of Harley dating a biker, and all?”
Bugs’s face reddened.
“She thought her uncle found out about her and me, you know?”
“So she killed him.” It was a statement.
Mack shook his head vigorously. “She didn’t kill him. She wouldn’t have killed anyone.”
Bugs’s eyes were fixed on Mack. “Well?”
“She wanted to find out what was on his computer, that’s all. If he changed his will again.”
“Money.” Bugs turned partway in the chair, faced away from the four on the picnic bench with a look of disgust.
“He was always changing his will, she said.”
Bugs stared at the others, who avoided his eyes. “Why the rest of you? Why’d you let him euchre you into this?”
The redhead said, “We didn’t know what it was all about.”
Bugs turned on him. “You didn’t, eh? You got black hoods, a getaway car, and a hideaway cabin at the end of a two-mile-long dirt road, and you thought this was fun and games?”
“We didn’t know we was going to take the old lady,” the redhead said.
Bugs stood again. He whacked the side of his head with his hand. He paced away from the four at the picnic table into the field of golden and white and purple flowers, and yellow butterflies. He paced back, passed the table, strode into the shadowy grove of pines, and stopped at the Indian pipes. Half of the waxy translucent plants had turned black.
“Corpse plants. You know that’s what they call them, corpse plants.” He laughed silently. “You got to take your medicine, all of you.” He came back to the white resin chair, and, still standing, put his hand on its back. “First of all, we go to see Mrs. Trumbull. You guys better take one huge bouquet of flowers. And apologize until the cows come home. Understand?” He stared at them and they looked away. “Get down on your knees and beg her pardon, understand? Grovel.”
The girl played with the strap on her helmet. The redhead chewed and stared steadily at Bugs. The smaller man took out a soiled handkerchief and blew his nose. Mack started to stand, apparently thought better of it, and settled back on the bench.
“Then you are going with me to the police chief, that local cop you think is so cute, and throw yourself on her mercy. You tell her everything, understand? I hope to hell she throws you in jail until you rot.” He put on his helmet and fastened the strap under his chin. “Get on your bikes, and follow me.”
The day after her uncle died, Linda had gone to his house on the Great Pond with Mack, riding on the back of his Harley. Linda had a feeling of relief she couldn’t account for. Perhaps it was the brilliant day, the way sunlight flickered on the pond, the luminous golden light that took away some vague sinister quality of the house. Uncle Jube was dead. Should she feel sorry? When she got off the bike, she stretched her arms out wide and breathed the bright air in as deeply as she could.
“Nice spot,” Mack said.
“When I was little, it was like paradise,” she said. “But when I was twelve, the place began to seem creepy.” She shuddered.
“Someone walking on your grave?” Mack asked.
She smiled weakly. This was a day to exorcise evil spirits. The blue sky, the puffy white clouds, the green trees across the pond, the yellow barrier bar. The breeze, so soft it felt moist, the cry of gulls. The sound of water lapping sleepily on the shore.
“I might as well go inside,” she said. “See what the place looks like now.”
“You need me, I’m working on my bike,” Mack had said.
And then it happened.
When she stepped onto the sun-warmed granite stone outside the back entry, when she opened the door and the familiar smells of mildew and old rubber boots and oilskins washed over her, when she put her foot on the familiar worn linoleum, which crunched with a sound she remembered from childhood, when she saw the same kayak paddle, the fishing rods, the same oilskins, the same boots with moldy laces, it flooded back to her, that last summer. She could still hear her mother’s raised voice, shouting at Uncle Jube. She could still feel the caned seat of the rocking chair sticking to the back
of her bare legs in her sister’s attic room. She could see her sister’s scared face over the book she’d been reading to her. She remembered how the sky outside her sister’s window was full of fluffy white clouds, like today, lamb clouds, she and her sister had called them, dazzling white and clean in a dazzling summer sky.
The smothering blanket of time suddenly lifted. She hadn’t wanted to see what had been hidden for so long. But it flooded back anyway.
She rushed out of the entry, stumbled over the granite stone, and fell on her knees in the brittle grass, her arms straight in front of her, head down.
“Hey, girl, what’s with you?” Mack had been in the barn, crouched over his Harley, wiping it gently with an oily rag. He stood.
Linda’s mouth was open, her face twisted, her blue eyes wide and hazy.
“Hey, cool it! What happened in there?”
She couldn’t talk at first. She was shivering.
Mack stood with the oily rag in his hands, his booted feet apart, wiping his hands on the cloth. His face was a mixture of puzzlement and concern.
“It’s come back,” she said finally.
He finished wiping his hands, and put the rag in the saddlebag.
“What’s come back, hey?”
“I killed him.” Linda’s eyes focused on something beyond him.
Mack looked over his shoulder, then back at Linda. She continued to shiver.
“Let’s get outta here.” He had taken his leather coat off the hook in the barn where he had left it, and wrapped it around her. He wheeled the bike out of the barn, led her to it, helped her aboard, and fastened his extra helmet under her chin. He roared out of Uncle Jube’s place as if something was after them. Down bumpy dirt roads, down thinly paved tar roads, along the up-to-specs state road. White stripes whizzed below their feet. Linda had not seen the cars they passed.
When they reached the other side of the Island, ten miles away, he turned onto a narrow asphalt road that bordered the Sound, slowed
going up a hill, stopped at the East Chop lighthouse gate, parked his bike beside the turnstile, and helped Linda off. She stumbled.
“Can you walk okay?” he asked.
She nodded.
He led her to a bench at the foot of the white lighthouse. In front of the bench, a grassy slope ended in a fringe of wild rosebushes at the top of a high bluff. Nobody was around. He perched beside her, watching her. She unfastened her helmet and laid it on the bench between them.
Mack looked down. “You skinned your knees,” he said. “I should’ve made you wear long pants.” He stood. “I’ll be right back with the first aid kit.”
“Don’t leave me,” she said.
Mack sat again.
The Sound spread out below them, dotted with fishing boats trailing long wakes and clouds of gulls. Sailboats heeled in the breeze. A cluster of small boats was drifting near the shoal, where a froth of fish broke water.
After a while, Linda spoke. “I’d buried it forever.”
“Meaning what?” Mack said.
She took a deep breath. “When my sister and I were growing up, my mother took a long vacation every summer, and we stayed with Uncle Jube. He had a rowboat, and my sister and I used to row out on the pond and just sit there, you know? Watching clouds and trailing our hands in the water. Uncle Jube didn’t have electricity, not until years later.”
“Yeah?” Mack shifted the helmet that lay between them and put his arm around her.
She was quiet for a long time.
“Yeah,” Mack said finally. He stroked her shoulder through her leather jacket.
“In the evening we used to sit around the table reading by the light of the kerosene lamp, all four of us. Uncle Jube was like our father. He’d play with us and tickle us like puppy dogs, and we’d roll in the grass laughing until my mother made him stop.”
“The funny uncle,” Mack said.
Linda shuddered once and looked up at him. “Yeah.”
Below them, the ferry whistled. They watched it round the point, pass in front of them, and become a white dot trailing a comet tail of wake.
“So, go on,” Mack said.
“Uncle Jube went from being warm and friendly to being scary, and I didn’t know how to stop him or what to do because it was my fault I had let him go so far and I couldn’t tell my mother because, after all, I’d let him, and…” Linda sucked in her breath with an asthmatic wheeze.
“Bastard,” Mack said. “And your goddamned mother, she should’ve known.”
Linda took a long breath and went on. “One night my mother came into my room to say good night, and that’s when she found out about Uncle Jube.”
“And you heard them fight, and that was the last time you were on the Island.”
“I hated him. I didn’t know why until…”
“You went into that house.”
“I came back to kill him.”
A breeze riffled the grass in front of them, bringing the scent of pine. A seagull flew over, heading for the Sound. A string of motorcycles roared by on the road behind the lighthouse.
“Somebody beat you to it.”
She shook her head. “I hate that house.”
“Can’t say as I blame you, girl.”
Linda turned on him. “Don’t call me ‘girl.’ I hate that!” She pounded her fist on his thigh.
He grabbed her fist. “Okay, okay, Linda. Sorry.”
“Everything about that house is rotten, from the floors to the roof. And all that garbage. I couldn’t stand being in it, even fixed up.”
“Cool it, Linda. There’s nothing you can do about the past. He’s gone.”
“That house, it’s not worth saving,” she said.
“I don’t know. It’s a real old house. Historical. Worth one hell of a lot of money.”
“Not to me, it isn’t.”
“Come on, Linda. When you get it cleaned up, all that shit can go
in the rubbish. You can sell it to someone who never knew your uncle.”
“You’re not hearing me.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m going to kill that house. Like I killed him.”
“Don’t talk nonsense.”
“Do you love me, Mack?”
He tightened his arm around her.
“You said once you’d do anything for me.”
“I’ll say it again. I would. I’d do anything in the world for you, Linda.”
“I want to kill everything about that house.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Purify it. Burn it to the ground.”
Mack removed his arm from her shoulder and stood up. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not? It’s my place. Practically. I can do whatever I want with it.”
“That’s arson. You don’t torch a place because you don’t like it.”
“Will you help me or not?” Linda’s eyes were wide and as bright as the sky. “There are other guys, plenty of other guys, who’d be happy to help me. Especially knowing it’s my property. Especially knowing what it’s worth.”
He walked to the edge of the bluff, plucked off a bright red rose hip, tossed it toward the Sound, and returned to her. Linda sat huddled and fragile, small and vulnerable in his big leather coat. She watched him with her innocent blue eyes.
“Linda, whatever you want. I’ll do whatever you want.”
From the study, where she sat at her computer the next morning, Elizabeth could look out the small-paned window at the Norway maple at the end of the driveway. Its branches hung low, almost hiding the pile of stacked firewood and the compost heap beyond. The tree had a faint tinge of yellow. Summer was almost gone.
When she heard Howland’s distinctive footsteps on the stairway, she glanced up.
“I’ll hook up my ZIP drive to your computer,” he said. “Then you can print out what we need.”
“I don’t know what a ZIP drive is.”
“It lets you copy a lot of data onto a small space in a short time. I’ll show you how. Without it, I’d have taken days to copy what’s on Burkhardt’s hard drive.”
Elizabeth gave him her seat. A short time later, she heard her grandmother’s shoes squeak on the painted stairs.