Nervous Water (19 page)

I got home a little after five that afternoon. As soon as I opened the front door, I was assailed by the aroma of fresh-baked bread. I followed my nose into the kitchen. Two loaves were cooling on wire racks on the counter. So was a blueberry pie.

I peeked out the window. Evie was slouched in one of our Adirondack chairs. She was wearing shorts and T-shirt. Bare feet. Her perfect legs were splayed out and her head was tilted back to the sun and her eyes were closed. Henry was lying beside her, directly beneath Evie's hand, which dangled over the side of the chair.

I made a couple of gin and tonics and took them outside. I kissed Evie's cheek. It was warm from the sun, and soft, and smelled faintly of damp loam and crushed herbs.

Her eyes fluttered open and looked at me unfocused for a moment. Then she smiled. “Hi, sweetie.”

“Smells great in there. You've been busy.”

“Made the bread from scratch,” she said. “Excellent therapy.”

“Excellent eating, too.” I sat beside her. “You feeling like you need therapy?”

She shrugged. “How's your uncle?”

I told her, and that was it for the subject of therapy.

 

At around seven thirty on Monday morning I was sitting out in the back garden working on my second mug of coffee when Evie came out. She was wearing a pale blue business suit—narrow knee-length skirt, matching jacket, silk blouse. Her hair was up in a bun and her sneakers were on her feet.

She bent down to kiss me. I reached up, hooked my arm around her neck, and brought her down so I could kiss her properly.

“Careful of the hair,” she said.

“You're leaving early again. What's up?”

“Nothing. Work, work, work. Another damn meeting.”

 

About twenty minutes after Evie left there was a knock on the wooden door in the brick wall that opened from our garden to the back alley.

“It's unlocked,” I called.

The door opened and Roger Horowitz came in.

“Uh-oh,” I said.

He came over and sat at the picnic table. “Got some coffee?”

I went into the kitchen, poured a mug of coffee, brought it out, and set it beside Horowitz's elbow. A manila file folder lay in front of him.

I sat across from him. “What's up?”

“Grantham Webster,” he said. “The dead guy. How's your dog?”

“He's okay. A little lame. You gonna ask about my head?”

He shrugged. “Looks fine to me.”

“So what about Webster?”

“Wednesday?” he said. “The first time you met with him in his office? I want you to go over everything that happened.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I already—”

“Humor me, Coyne.”

So I recounted what I could remember about my visit with Grannie Webster. Horowitz was particularly interested in the phone call he'd received while I was there, and he queried me closely about Webster's reaction to it, but I couldn't remember anything more or different from what I'd told him already.

“He said it was his ex-wife?”

“Yes. Asked me to step out of the office, give him some privacy, which I did, though I could hear his voice through the door. When I went back in he said it was his ex-wife. From what I overheard, he seemed angry, annoyed, upset.”

Horowitz nodded. “That's funny.”

“Why?”

“Because Webster was never married. Didn't have any ex-wife.”

I shrugged. “So he lied to me. So what? It was none of my business.”

“If it wasn't some ex-wife,” said Horowitz, “who was it?”

I nodded. “That's obviously the question. The answer is, I have no idea who it was.”

“That call came on his cell phone, you said?”

I nodded.

“Now that phone's gone. Along with the CDs from his computer.”

I smiled at Horowitz. “He was killed the next day. Thursday. I've got a suspicion that you didn't take the weekend off, go down to the Cape, lie around the beach.”

He smiled sourly. “Not fucking hardly.”

“You gonna share with me?”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Because,” I said, “you wouldn't be here if you didn't want something from me. Quid pro quo, Roger. What've you found out?”

He gave me a sour grin. “Not enough. Webster was shot twice in the chest with a thirty-eight from about three feet away.”

“Thirty-eight?” I said. “That's—”

“Right.” He nodded. “The gun your friend Hurley reported missing was a thirty-eight. Millions of thirty-eights around. But, yeah, we're checking that angle.”

I spread out my hands. “Seems pretty compelling to me.”

“Compelling and evidence ain't the same thing,” he said. “Near as we can figure, the shooter was probably standing on the other side of Webster's desk. Even if you're a crack shot, you can't hit a damn thing with one of those thirty-eight handguns from much farther. Forensics got some fibers and smudged prints and other shit that'll probably turn out to be useless.”

“A lot of probablies there,” I said.

He nodded and took a sip of his coffee. “More like maybes than probablies, actually. We'd really like to talk to your cousin.

“You think Cassie stole Hurley's gun and—?”

“I don't think nothing,” he said. “I just want to talk to her.”

“Well,” I said, “you'd have to stand in line, except nobody seems to know where she is. She's missing. She may not be alive.”

“Maybe Webster knew.”

I looked at him. “I see where you're going with this.”

He shook his head. “Glad you do. I don't. Nothing fits. I'm thinking she's the key, that's all. What happened to your uncle, what happened to Webster. Cassandra Crandall is the common thread.”

“Her husband, the dentist, he's a common thread, too.”

“Of course he is,” Horowitz said. “Hurley says he was filling teeth all day.”

“You can verify that?”

He shrugged. “We're working on it. We got a good idea of when Webster was shot. If the dentist took a long lunch hour that day, or left the office early…”

“I can't stop thinking he killed Cassie,” I said. “She's missing two weeks and he doesn't report it?”

“Yeah,” said Horowitz, “it's always the spouse. Except we got no body, no witness, no nothing. Far as we know, we got no crime there. No case to investigate. That's why we're talking about Grantham Webster. Him, we definitely got a crime.”

I shrugged. “I wish I could help you.”

“Me, too,” he said. He opened the manila folder, flipped through a stack of papers, removed two of them, and put them on the table. “Forensics took that computer he had in his office, plus a laptop from his apartment. So far, they haven't found anything interesting. We got the phone records from his house and his office phones. It's gonna take a while to track down the records from his cell phone.” He arched his eyebrows at me.

“What?” I arched my eyebrows right back at him.

“What did you do yesterday on a pretty Sunday in July?”

“I visited my uncle in the hospital,” I said. “Had a few gin and tonics. Ate Evie's fresh-baked bread. Why?”

“Me and Marcia,” said Horowitz, “we spent the day riding herd on forensics and ballistics, checking out witnesses, running down phone numbers.”

“You should've been a lawyer,” I said, “take Sundays off.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Like you.”

“Any luck with witnesses?”

He shook his head. “The college is between summer sessions. No students or teachers around. Most of the administration offices were empty, too. We found a groundskeeper who was mowing the lawn that afternoon. He says he didn't see or hear anything. Those mowers are so loud, he wouldn't hear a bomb exploding, never mind a gunshot from somewhere inside a building. So far, that's it.”

“What about the phone records?”

He pushed the two sheets of paper at me. “Incoming calls,” he said. “Webster's office and home phone, the past month.”

Each sheet had two columns of dates and phone numbers. Five of them on the sheet from Webster's home phone and six on the office-phone sheet had circles around them. They were all the same number with a 207 area code. Eleven calls, and all of them had been made during the two weeks leading up to the day that Webster was killed.

“What do you see, Coyne?”

“I see that you've drawn circles around one of these numbers that keeps coming up. It's a 207 area code, which is Maine. This number appears to interest you.” I looked up at him. “You haven't seen Webster's cell-phone records?”

He shook his head. “Not yet. Cell-phone records are harder to get at.” He pointed at the papers in front of me. “See anything else?”

I studied them. “I see that all these 207 calls you've circled were all made after Cassie went missing. I see that all of the calls to Webster's office phone were made on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays between two and four in the afternoon, which was when he held office hours. Whoever made these calls knew his schedule.” I looked up at him. “Whose number is this?”

He shrugged. “These calls were made from a convenience store in West Canterbury called Roy's It's not a pay phone. It's a private phone that's out on the porch for people to use. The store sells phone cards to the locals. A lot of them are too poor to have their own phone.”

“I've been everywhere in Maine,” I said. “Never heard of West Canterbury.”

“Nobody's heard of it,” said Horowitz. “Population about two hundred, not counting the goats and chickens. Mostly swamp and woods and run-down farms and dirt roads. That convenience store is about it for commerce in West Canterbury.”

“You called and talked to them?”

He rolled his eyes. “That's pretty much what we mean by running down phone numbers. It's how Benetti and I spent the damn weekend.”

I jabbed my finger at the sheets of paper. “So who's making these calls?”

He grinned quickly. “That's the question, huh?”

“Where in Maine did you say West Canterbury was?” I said.

“Didn't say,” he said. “Turns out it's just two towns to the north and west of Moulton.”

I looked at him. “No shit.”

He nodded. “No shit.”

“You can't go up there,” I said.

“I can go up there,” he said. “But I can't do business.”

“Jurisdiction.”

He nodded.

“You being from Massachusetts, this place being across the border in Maine.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That's what we're usually getting at when we talk about jurisdiction.”

“I assume you got the West Canterbury cops on the case.”

He smiled. “There are no cops in West Canterbury.”

“The county sheriff, then.”

He shrugged. “We got a call in to his office. I'm not holding my breath.” Horowitz glanced at his watch, then reached over and tapped the two lists of phone numbers with his forefinger. “You done with these?”

I took another look at the 207 number, then nodded.

He picked up the lists, shoved them into his manila folder, and stood up. “Gotta go.”

“Thanks for dropping by, sharing this with me.”

He shrugged. “Courtesy call. Just filling you in. Since you found that body and took a whack on the head for your trouble, I figure you've got an interest in the case. Thanks for the coffee.”

He left the way he'd come in—through the garden gate. I guessed he'd parked in the alley out back, so as not to draw my neighbors' attention to the fact that I was being visited by a state police officer.

Or maybe he just couldn't find a parking space on the street out front.

His visit wasn't a courtesy call, of course. Horowitz had no interest in courtesy.

He wanted me to check out Roy's convenience store in West Canterbury, Maine, see if I could figure out who had made all those calls to Grantham Webster.

He couldn't come out and ask me, a mere layperson, to help him. Cops didn't work that way.

Whatever I chose to do on my own, though, wasn't Roger Horowitz's responsibility.

He thought he knew me pretty well.

He was right.

As soon as he left, I wrote down that 207 number in West Canterbury before I forgot it.

After Horowitz left, I called Julie and told her I'd be gone for the afternoon and would be spending the morning working at home. She gave me a list of phone calls I should make and said she hoped I caught lots of fish.

I told her I wasn't going fishing, but it was pretty clear that she didn't believe me.

Next I dialed the 207 number for the convenience store in West Canterbury, Maine.

It rang five or six times, and then a man's cheerful voice said, “Hay-lo.”

“Is this Roy's store?”

“Ayuh. You lookin' for Roy?”

“It's UPS,” I said. “I got a delivery for Roy's in West Canterbury. I'm not sure where you're located.”

“This ain't Roy,” said the man. “Roy ain't here. He went bass fishin'. Dot's inside. You wanna talk to Dot?”

“I bet you can help me,” I said. “I just need directions to the store.”

“Where at you comin' from?”

“Kittery.”

He laughed. “You cain't get here from there.”

“That's a pretty old joke,” I said.

“Pretty much true, though.”

“Maybe you better put me on with Dot,” I said.

“Nah,” he said. “I kin tell you good as her. Comin' from Kitt'ry, you want to head west and git onto 202. Then you start looking for the West Canterbury sign. Mile or so after that, you come to a fork where 202 hooks around to the right? Take that left fork. You'll find Roy's a mile or so down there on your left. If you come to the bridge goes over the river, turn around, 'cause you went too far. You got all that, Mr. UPS man?”

“Got it,” I said. “Thank you, sir.”

 

I worked at my desk for a couple of hours, and around eleven I went upstairs and changed into my comfortable old jeans and a T-shirt and sneakers. I wanted to leave by noon so I could get there by two. I figured it wouldn't take more than an hour and a half to find Roy's, but I didn't want to be late.

I intended to stay until four. That's when the phone calls to Grannie Webster's office were made. Between two and four in the afternoon on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays.

When I came down, Henry took one look at me and ambled over to the front door. Sneakers and blue jeans meant I was going somewhere more interesting than my office. He sat there on full alert with his ears perked up expectantly.

“Sorry, pal,” I said.

His ears drooped. He glared at me for a moment, and when I didn't relent, he crawled onto the sofa, curled up in the corner, tucked his nose under his paws, and pretended to go to sleep. He was sulking.

He understood the word “sorry,” and he didn't like hearing it.

Roy's was typical of the mom-and-pop stores that serve small villages all across Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. It looked like an old-fashioned New England farmhouse—which it may originally have been. An open porch spanned the front. The big window beside the door was plastered with hand-printed signs—Sandwiches to Go, Crawlers and Live Bait, New Videos, Ammo, Homemade Ice Cream, Fresh Vegetables. There were two dormers on the roof with curtains in the windows, indicating an upstairs apartment where the proprietor probably lived.

I got there a little after one thirty—early as usual. I backed into a space between a newish Ford pickup truck and a battered old Toyota Corolla in the crushed-stone parking area that bordered some woods beside the store. I got out, walked over to the front, and climbed the three porch steps. On the porch were two weathered wooden rocking chairs on either side of a low plastic table. An old-fashioned black telephone with a rotary dial—the phone I was looking for, I assumed—sat on the table, along with a red plastic ashtray brimming with butts and two Diet Coke cans.

I went into the store. A plump sixtyish woman with a long gray braid and round rimless glasses was sitting on a stool behind the counter just inside the door. She was looking down at a magazine that was open on her lap.

I said hello, and she looked up and smiled at me.

I wandered the narrow aisles between the free-standing shelves that were stacked with canned goods. In the back I found a cooler and picked up a bottle of orange juice and a tuna sandwich. The sandwich was wrapped in waxed paper and secured with masking tape. I didn't know they even made waxed paper anymore.

I took my juice and sandwich up front and put them on the counter. “Nice day,” I said to the woman.

“Could use some rain,” she said. “That's a buck twenty-five for the juice, three ninety-five for the sandwich.” She rang them up. “Five twenty.”

I took out a five-dollar bill from my wallet, found two dimes in my pocket, and put the money into her hand. “Wonder if you might help me out,” I said.

She shrugged. “Might. Depends.”

“I have a cousin, haven't seen her in years. I seem to recall she was living in West Canterbury. Her name's Cassandra Crandall.”

The woman's eyes flicked up to the ceiling, then came back. “Cassandra, huh? Nope. Don't know no Cassandra.”

I'd remembered to bring the photo that Uncle Moze gave me. I took it from my pocket and put in on the counter. “This is Cassandra. Everyone calls her Cassie. That's my uncle with her. It was taken a few years ago.”

The woman glanced down at the photo. “Never laid eyes on either one of 'em,” she said.

I smiled. “I bet you know everybody around here.”

“Just about, I guess.”

“I must be remembering wrong, then,” I said. “Thanks anyway.” I hesitated and pretended to look around. “Say, you don't have a pay phone, do you?”

“Out there.” She jutted her chin toward the porch. “It ain't exactly a pay phone. You can make a local call, no charge. Otherwise you gotta use one of them company cards, or I can sell you a phone card.”

I thanked her, went out to the porch, sat in one of the rocking chairs, and used my MCI card to call Evie's cell phone. I figured, having asked about the phone, if I didn't use it the woman would be suspicious. The fewer suspicions I aroused, the better.

Evie didn't answer, so I left her a message. “Hi, honey,” I said. “It's around two o'clock. I'm in Maine looking for my cousin. I should be home for dinner. If it doesn't look like I'll make it, I'll let you know. Hope you're having a good day.”

I took my sandwich and juice to my car and got in behind the wheel. From where I was sitting I could watch the front porch of the store. Although I was somewhat hidden by the truck and the Corolla on either side of me, I knew my BMW was not exactly inconspicuous, but I didn't know what to do about it.

I took my bird-watching binoculars out of the glove compartment and put them on the seat beside me.

I sat there, ate my lunch, and watched the front of the store.

Now and then a car or a truck with Maine plates pulled into the lot. Somebody got out, went inside, came out ten minutes later carrying a plastic bag or a six-pack of Coke, and drove away. None of them was Cassie, or anybody else that I recognized.

Around three a pair of teenage girls went in. A few minutes later they came out with Popsicles and sat in the rocking chairs to lick them.

While they were there, a man on a motorcycle stopped out front and used the phone.

By quarter past three the urge to urinate dominated my thoughts. Gordon Cahill, my friend the PI, once told me that he never brought anything to drink on a stakeout. I'd remembered this important piece of wisdom too late.

I slipped out of my car, ducked into the woods, and pissed against a big pine tree. When I got back, it didn't appear that I'd missed any excitement.

I kept checking my watch. The hands were moving very slowly.

At 3:52 a woman pedaled a bicycle up to the front of the store, got off, leaned the bike against the porch rail, and looked around.

I sat forward. Strands of black hair straggled out from under her blue baseball cap. Under the visor, she was wearing sunglasses. She wore baggy sweatpants, a man's shirt with the tails flapping, and sneakers. From the distance between us, I might have mistaken her for a man.

But I knew I was not mistaken. She moved with the grace and sway of a woman, and even under her loose-fitting clothes, you couldn't mistake the shape of a woman's body.

Cassie. It had to be.

I picked up my binoculars, put them to my eyes, got them focused, studied her face.

I recognized her from the photo. She had the sharp Crandall nose, the high, elegant cheekbones, the slightly pointed chin, the large expressive mouth—every feature that I'd seen in every photo of her on Uncle Moze's television from the time she was a toddler.

She could have been Moze's flesh and blood, but, of course, she wasn't. She was his niece, his sister Mary's daughter.

I slouched in my seat behind the wheel of my car, though I didn't think she could see me through the glare on my windshield. I felt sneaky and vaguely unclean, spying on her.

But that didn't stop me from doing it.

She went up onto the porch and sat in one of the rockers by the telephone. A young guy—he looked like a high-school boy—came out of the store. He stopped and said something to her. She took off her sunglasses, looked up at him, smiled and shook her head. They talked for a minute, and then he shrugged and waved and headed for his car.

Cassie watched him until he drove away. Then she picked up the telephone. She dialed a number, put the receiver to her ear, looked up at the sky, and listened. Then she shook her head and replaced the receiver on its cradle.

She sat there for a minute, rocking in the chair. Then she picked up the phone again, dialed a number, listened, frowned, and hung up.

She made a fist and punched the palm of her hand. Then she puffed her cheeks, blew out a breath, put her sunglasses back on, stood up, and went into the store.

I'd found her, but I hadn't figured out what to do next. I thought about getting out of my car, walking up to the store, and saying hello to her. It was the logical, straightforward thing to do.

But Cassie's body language made me hesitate. I read alertness, apprehension, caution, maybe even fear in it. She was hiding out. She wouldn't be happy to know she'd been found. I couldn't predict what she might do when she realized it.

So I sat there and pondered my next move.

When I was a kid, I used to drive my old man nuts. He'd say, “Brady, my boy, would you prefer to mow the lawn or wash the car today?” and when I'd pause to weigh the pros and cons of those distasteful options, he'd look at me, shake his head, and say, “That's right, Mr. Hamlet. Don't just do something. Sit there.”

I was still sitting there considering my choices when Cassie emerged from the store with a plastic bag dangling from her hand. She descended the front steps, put the bag into the basket on the handlebars of her bike, then hesitated. She turned around slowly, pulled the visor of her cap low, and looked directly at my car. It seemed as if she was staring straight into my eyes from behind her sunglasses. There was no expression that I could decipher on her face.

I suspected that the woman at the cash register had told her that some guy with a Boston accent had been in a few hours ago. This stranger had shown her Cassie's photo, asked if she knew her, inquired about the telephone.

The woman, of course, had denied recognizing Cassandra Crandall's name or picture. Local folks watch out for each other. They respect each other's privacy. They mistrust people they don't know.

The woman had probably noticed the car the stranger was driving—it was a noticeable vehicle, an expensive-looking green foreign job with a sunroof and Massachusetts plates—and pointed it out to Cassie.

Or maybe I was imagining all that.

Cassie got on her bike, turned it around, looked in my direction again, then pedaled away. Maybe I was wrong, but I read that look as an invitation. Or maybe it was a challenge. “Come on. Follow me. I dare you.”

She was riding one of those old one-speed bikes with fat tires and a crossbar. A boy's bike. Girls' bikes didn't have those unladylike crossbars that would interfere with their skirts.

I wondered if they still made girls' bikes.

She turned left out of the parking lot and pedaled south along the side of the winding two-lane roadway until she disappeared around the bend. I gave her another few minutes, then started up my car, pulled onto the road, and turned in the direction Cassie had taken.

I drove slowly. For a mile or so the road twisted through woods and fields. Cassie had put enough distance between us that she was always out of sight around the bend or over the hill ahead of me. I kept my eye out for places where she might turn in, but there were no side roads, no old overgrown woods roads, even, so I was pretty sure she was still somewhere in front of me.

After a while the road climbed a long gentle hill, and I imagined Cassie standing on her pedals as she pumped up it. Where it crested and sloped away, she would coast down with the wind in her face.