Authors: Andrew Coburn
“I know, but — ”
Bakinowski smiled. “I’m just trying to rule out some possibilities.”
The lunch crowd at the Blue Bonnet was bigger than normal. With Mitch Brown’s wife, the cashier, helping out at the tables, Mitch, with the smells of clean cooking clinging to him, emerged from the kitchen. His shirt, baker’s white, was scrawled here and there with food stains, like notes to himself.
“Guess what?” his wife said, balancing plates of chicken pot pie. “TV people are doing interviews. They’re supposed to be coming here next.”
He was not interested. Craning his neck, he said, “I still don’t see the chief.”
• • •
When he had been appointed chief, the daily in Lawrence ran a profile on him, blew his picture up big, called him “personable and progressive,” and mentioned his degree from Northeastern, his year in Vietnam, and the death of his wife. A drunken youth from Andover, driving his father’s brand-new Buick with the gas pedal floored, had struck Elizabeth’s Bug broadside. The youth had climbed out with the customary abrasions and contusions. That had been fifteen years ago last month. There were days when it seemed a hundred years ago and nights when it might have been yesterday.
He still lived in the same house, and sometimes, in the dead of an evening, he glimpsed her in another room, but always a shadow instantly carried her off. In the small hours he occasionally woke to find her only a breath away. If he did not move, the darkness held her there until dawn.
Such would have been the case now had he not stirred.
Birds were making themselves heard through the half dark. Once awake, he could not drop back to sleep.
The house, which he had grown up in, was less than a mile from the green. It was more Gothic than Victorian and not in total repair, for he was a lummox with tools. When his mother had moved to Florida the house had become his. Elizabeth had had plans for it, but they died with her. Downstairs the kitchen and dining room were small and dim, with windows of dusty panes and peeling mullions. Floral wallpaper had long lost its bloom. In the living room he had installed a desk salvaged from the town clerk’s office. It matched his one at the police station, which made him feel more there than here.
Upstairs were two bedrooms and a good-sized bath. After Elizabeth’s death he had moved from the large bedroom to the small one, once partially furnished for the child they had never had.
He showered with his eyes closed until the water ran cold. Shaved, he patted his cheeks with witch hazel. Dressed, he watched the sunrise sign in another day while what was left of the night dripped off the trees. His thoughts were not of his wife but of Lydia Lapham. He felt stronger than ever that the bullet that had killed her mother had been meant for her.
When he stepped out the front door the sun was already swimming over the lawn. Clumps of unattended tiger lilies, rearing up foliage but not yet blossoms, cast the aura of a jungle. A robin flew out of its bedroom in a maple. Abruptly he stopped and scanned the street, as if he too were a possible target.
He checked in at the station. Meg O’Brien was the only one there, for the duty officer on the graveyard shift had left. Caught in the act of sneezing, she brought a tissue to her face. “Maybe this isn’t the time to mention it,” she said, wiping her nose, “but Mrs. Bowman rang up yesterday. Should I tell you what she called you?”
“I don’t think so,” he said with a cringe that evoked a memory of Arlene Bowman’s mouth, a dash of violence in the smile. He began checking entries in the night log.
“Why can’t you pick a nice girl,” Meg said, “instead of fooling with those phonies from the Heights?”
“No lectures, Meg, please,” he said and closed the log.
“Your hair’s sticking up in back.”
He groomed it with the flat of his hand. She had more to say, but he did not stay to listen.
He drove to the house of Lydia Lapham’s aunt. Though still early, he knew she and Lydia would be up. The porch light was burning weakly in the sunshine, and the night officer who had spelled Sergeant Avery was dozing in his cruiser.
“You can go now,” Morgan said, startling him.
The young officer snapped on his cap and squared it. “Should I come back tonight?”
“We’ll see.”
In the roses near the porch was a spiderweb in which a powdery moth was fastened like a miniature angel. Morgan thought of rescuing it, but was hesitant to interfere with the balance of life, which he felt was tentative enough. He meandered to the back of the house because he reckoned they would be in the kitchen.
“May I come in?” he said through the screen door.
No tears were in Lydia’s eyes. They were all in her aunt’s. Miss Westerly, her face crinkled lace that had aged overnight, was in her robe and quietly disappeared. Lydia sat at the table, near the raised window, with her hands embracing a cup of coffee that may have gone cold. Morgan doubted she had slept. In her wrinkled white uniform she looked like a private letter someone had tried unsuccessfully to steam open. The remote quality of her voice put a distance between them. “My parents are dead, Chief. Can you tell me why?”
“Not yet,” he said quietly, wishing his presence was less bruising. He should have worn a suit and tie instead of a casual shirt and chinos. He should have worn real shoes instead of loafers.
“Can you tell me who?”
His jaw, taut with intention a moment ago, was loose. His feelings stretched to her.
“What am I going to do without them?” she said in a way her voice was never meant to sound. It could have come from a metal drum.
“You have your aunt. You have Matt.”
“Don’t tell me what I have,” she said with increased tension. “I know what I have, Chief.”
“Please,” he said, “call me James. I might be the police chief, but I’m also your friend. Yours and Matt’s.”
“Mine and Matt’s. That’s nice, James. You couple us as if we were married. We’re not.” She pushed her hair back. “There’s coffee on the stove if you want it.”
He poured half a cup and dribbled milk from a pitcher. “It may not have been an accident,” he said.
She chose not to hear, or not to understand. Her eyes slanted past him. “I froze, you know, when it happened. Maybe I could have saved one or the other. One might still be here.”
“Nothing you could have done,” he tried to reassure her.
“You don’t know that. You’re not a medical man.”
She spoke in anger, and he felt her attention slip away, well beyond his jurisdiction. Standing tall, he drank his coffee in the silence that rose between them. When he tried to break it, she stopped him with the pure blaze of her eyes.
“I can’t answer any of your questions, James. Not now. I have too many of my own.”
Miss Westerly reappeared in one of her better housedresses. Her bright lipstick, hurriedly applied, was a red claw over her grief. “Can’t this wait, Chief? She’s in no condition.”
“Yes, of course. Naturally.” He rinsed his cup out in the sink and left it there. Lydia surprised him by rising from the table and moving with him to the screen door. She even stepped outside with him. Clouds had taken some of the sun away, and the air was a shade cooler. They heard thunder, loud enough to give her a start.
“My father used to say that’s God pocketing his change,” she said distractedly. “As a little girl I believed it.”
“You need some sleep,” Morgan said. “Let me call Dr. Skinner to give you something.”
“Was the bullet meant for me?”
“I don’t know.”
She smiled. “I wish I could remember the moment before my birth. That’s what I wish the most.”
“Why the moment before?” he asked. “Why not the moment itself?”
“I think the moment before would answer questions.”
“What questions?”
“The ones I don’t know to ask,” she said.
• • •
When Morgan returned to his car, he found Matt MacGregor sitting in it. MacGregor was in uniform, though not on duty, and his cap was in his lap. He had not shaved and, like Lydia, probably had not slept, which distressed Morgan, who wanted him presentable, clear-headed, effective, not only for the investigation but for Lydia as well. MacGregor’s voice was shaky. “Did you talk to her?”
Morgan settled in. “A little.”
“She doesn’t seem to want me with her,” MacGregor said, raking his fingers through his short hair.
“She’s in shock.”
“Time like this you’d think she’d need me most.”
“Time like this all rules are thrown out.”
Morgan ran the car onto the road and drove slowly, avoiding the town center. From the distance came rumbles of thunder but no sight of rain. Sitting rigidly, MacGregor fixed his stare as he might have a bayonet.
“You had somebody sitting shotgun. Why?”
“Probably unnecessarily. But why take a chance?”
“You could’ve asked me to do it.”
“You might’ve shot anybody in sight,” Morgan said and turned left onto a street vaulted by maple trees. Mailboxes stood on posts meshed in ivy. MacGregor stared through the windshield with violent concentration.
“Where are we going?”
“Nowhere,” Morgan said and went left at a fork. The road narrowed and curved past the Girl Scout camp and straightened as it approached Paget’s Pond, which lay flat and undisturbed some five miles from the center of town. It was where he and his wife used to take winter walks with their dog, a shepherd Elizabeth swore was wolf. Certainly the size of the animal and the blunt shape of the nose were lupine, but the rest was gentleness. Morgan slowed, swerved, and parked near the pond.
“You’re right, this is nowhere,” MacGregor said, which irked Morgan, but only for a moment.
They left the car, followed a path, and sat opposite each other at a weathered picnic bench in sight of a No Swimming sign. The air tasted of new needles on the pines. A haze blurred half the pond, which Morgan fancied as the juncture between now and then. He said, “I thought you might’ve come up with something by now.”
“You mean something I done could’ve pissed somebody off?” MacGregor crimped his brow. “Nothing big. Only little things.”
“Tell me about ‘em.”
MacGregor’s voice was an official drone. He had dispersed nighttime gatherings of youths drinking beer behind Pearson Grammar School, rousted couples making out in the cemetery, busted the Barnes boy for possession of marijuana, threw a hammerlock on Lester Winn, who was beating on his wife again, and just the other day … “You listening, Chief?”
Morgan was watching two squirrels, one pursuing the other. A breeze loosened the cooler air roosting in the pines and brought down stray needles. “Just the other day what?”
“I ticketed Thurman Wetherfield for speeding. If he hadn’t given me lip, he’d have got only a warning.”
Wetherfield was a firefighter feigning disability and cheating his estranged wife out of proper child support. For a mere second Morgan considered the duplicity of the man’s character, its two thin sides. Then he watched the sun return and spread a net over the pond. As a boy he had skimmed stones here. No Swimming the sign said, but he had swum. “Anything else?” he asked.
“Yeah, but it was more than a month ago — that hot day in late April, remember, got to be eighty.”
“Broke a record,” Morgan said, remembering the day well, especially the afternoon in the prideful home of the Bowmans, where casement windows overlooked a swimming pool and Arlene Bowman’s terry robe opened on two estimable legs certain to coerce him into a state. He had suspected she was trouble, but at the time it hadn’t mattered. “Tell me about that thing with Junior Ray ball.”
“Hell, that was more than a month ago. I told you about it.”
“Tell me again.”
“I responded to a call from the high school,” MacGregor said with elbows planted on the table. He gave Morgan a picture of girls in sweaty T-shirts competing on the playing field, kicking a ball from one end to the other, their school letters undulating across their young chests and the sun shimmering off their healthy legs. The snake in the grass was Junior Ray ball, undersized and unemployable, who had been warned in the past. Teachers had shooed him away. “This time he had his pants off,” MacGregor said. “He was in the weeds on the sidelines, thought he couldn’t be seen.”
“You chased him.”
“Ran him down,” MacGregor said, giving Morgan an image of Junior flopping breathlessly on the ground like a caught fish gulping air when it wanted water. “Grabbed him by the scruff and gave the girls a laugh. Marched him bare-ass back to his pants while he kept his hand over his dicky.”
“You didn’t bring him in.”
“Didn’t see the sense. Figured he learned his lesson.”
“Still think that?”
“I know what you’re getting at, Chief, but I think you’re stretching. Where would a poor little bastard like Junior Rayball get an F-l sniper’s rifle? And where would he get the guts?” An expression of pain, frustration, and relief passed simultaneously over MacGregor’s face. “I’ve got to be honest with you, I’m not at all convinced the shooting has anything to do with me.”
“Nor am I,” said Morgan, gazing at pine tops glued into the sky. A pink spider no bigger than a pinhead, the sort that occupies lilies, was crawling on the picnic table. MacGregor spotted it and was about to squash it with a finger. “Let it live,” Morgan said.
He drove MacGregor back to Miss Westerly’s house, where for a single second they glimpsed Lydia’s face in a window. It could have been a length of bone. MacGregor flinched as if the shadow of a hand had passed over him. “I feel like I’m losing her,” he said without inflection.
“I want you to stay with her, Matt. You’re the best one to get her through this.”
“What if she says no?”
“Tell her you’re under orders.”
“She looks through me, Chief. Honest to God, like I’m not there.”
“I know, Matt. I’m worried too.”
MacGregor slid out of the car like a man on a mission, but took only a couple of steps and looked back. “What are you going to do, Chief?”
Morgan put a scrambling hand into his hair and scratched a nonexistent itch. “I don’t know. Maybe just drive around and think.”
• • •