The Why of Things: A Novel (12 page)

Anders looks at Dave blankly.

“This weekend. Quarry. Tow truck.”

“Oh,” Anders says, recognizing him now as one of the two divers who came to pull the pickup from the bottom of the quarry. “Of course. I’m not great with faces, I’m sorry.”

“I shaved,” Dave says, drawing his fingers across his cheeks, pinching his chin. “I had some serious scruff going.” He squints in Anders’ direction. “Your first name is?”

“Anders.”

“Anders. Nice to remeet you.” He tilts his head and winks. “It may not be East Timor, but you’ve actually got some interesting diving right in your backyard. Literally.”

*  *  *

J
OAN
is in the garage folding the tarps that have covered the porch furniture all year when the oil- and gas-removal people arrive. She stands in the open garage door and watches as a small caravan of vehicles pulls up the driveway: first a flatbed truck, then a utility vehicle with a trailer, and finally a pickup with its own trailer, on which sits a blue, rectangular structure about the size of a gas pump.

The driver of the flatbed truck gets out, leaving the engine running.

“Goodness,” Joan says as he approaches, overwhelmed by all the equipment.

“Ma’am,” the driver acknowledges, nodding.

“Joan Jacobs,” Joan says, extending her hand.

“Roscoe McWilliams,” he says. “We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes. Nice to meet you.”

Roscoe McWilliams gestures toward the quarry. “Mind if I take a look before we get started?”

“Of course not.” Joan leads him around the quarry to its far side, where James Favazza’s truck went in, and points to the shiny rainbow slick, which covers no more than a hundred square feet. “It’s just that,” she says. “Just what leaked from a car. Pickup, rather.”

Roscoe McWilliams looks at the water, nodding. He turns, then, whistles loudly, and beckons the other vehicles over. The trucks make their way across the lawn. In their wake is a wiry gray dog, sniffing across the grass, its collar tinkling with every step.

“What you’ve got,” Roscoe McWilliams says, “is a gasoline sheen. Much harder to remove than heavy oil.”

“So what do you do?” Joan asks.

“Gotta pump the oily water out into that,” he says, pointing
toward the rectangular blue structure. “A water-oil separator. Does exactly what it sounds like. Then we give you your clear water back.”

Joan nods.

“But what we’re gonna do first,” Roscoe says, “is set up a boom to contain the sheen.” He gestures toward the trailer, where another man is slowly unwinding a large reel of yellow neoprene. “Compactible boom. Very simple, very durable, highly buoyant.”

Joan nods.

Roscoe shrugs. “Should just be a couple days.”

He crosses his arms, watches the men work. One runs the hydraulics on the trailer, feeding the boom out, and another guides the boom into the water. A third has tied a rope to the end of the boom and stands on the other side of the quarry, pulling the boom across. The dog runs excitedly back and forth along the quarry’s edge, marking the boom’s progress across the water.

“If you don’t mind me asking,” Roscoe says, “how’d you end up with a pickup in your quarry?”

Joan sighs and shakes her head. “Ehh,” she says. “I don’t really know. I mean,” she shrugs, “somebody drove in.”

Roscoe looks at her in surprise. “There was someone in it? He get out in time?”

Joan shakes her head, thinking to say that that probably wasn’t quite the point. “No,” she says quietly instead.

Roscoe McWilliams does not reply, and they watch the men in silence. After a minute, the dog leaves its post at the edge of the quarry and approaches the spot where they are standing. Roscoe McWilliams crouches down to greet it. The man on the far side of the quarry gives a shout, signaling to the man by the trailer, and then there is a loud hissing sound as the boom inflates. Roscoe looks up and says something Joan can’t hear over the noise.

“Sorry?” she asks.

“The dog,” he calls, and then the hissing sound suddenly stops. He clears his throat. “The dog,” he repeats, in his normal voice. “What’s his name?”

Joan shakes her head in surprise. “I don’t know,” she says. “I thought he belonged to you.”

“Nope,” Roscoe stands, brushes his hands together. “Cute little fellow, though.”

Joan and Roscoe watch together as the dog sniffs its way toward the woods, following whatever scent it’s on into the trees.

*  *  *

E
VE’S
legs feel like rubber by the time she gets to Georgetown around midday. Inland, it is much hotter than it was on the coast; the air is heavy with humidity. She knew before she came that she was unfamiliar with Georgetown, but she thought she must have driven through at least once or twice before with her parents on their way to someplace else. When she arrives, though, she doesn’t recognize a thing, and she begins to question whether she’s ever actually been here at all.

There’s not much to the town: a hardware store shares a lot with a pharmacy, across from which is a medium-size grocery store. A single-story strip of stores a little farther down the road houses a pizzeria, a bar, and a barbershop. Two of the units in this strip are empty, their windows papered over. Across the street is a small fire station, and a gas station and minimart.

L. Stephens lives at 16 Pine Street. Eve suddenly realizes that she has no idea where this is, and she feels a flash of irritation at herself that this had not occurred to her earlier. She’s not sure what she was thinking—or maybe she just wasn’t thinking at all. She supposes she’d expected Georgetown to be a neat grid of streets that she could bike up and down until she found Pine.
But in actuality the streets branch off haphazardly from the center of town, and smaller streets branch off of these, and Eve understands that it could take hours before she happens to stumble upon the street she’s looking for.

She decides to ask at the gas station for directions and pulls into the parking lot. She props her bike against a Dumpster off to the side of the store, where a cat sits delicately licking its haunches. It stops at the sound of Eve’s bike clanking against the Dumpster’s metal and looks at her almost accusingly, annoyed at the interruption. Eve looks back. “Resume,” she says, and in a moment the cat does.

The convenience store smells like stale cigarette smoke and bleach, but it is blissfully cool. Eve pauses just inside the door and lets the air-conditioning wash over her, feeling as if she has just climbed out of a stew, and realizing suddenly how thirsty she is. She crosses the room and gets a large bottle of water from the refrigerator, which she guzzles immediately, stopping only to gasp for air and to wince at the sudden blinding stab of cold pain behind her eyes.

“Thirsty?”

Eve looks toward the counter, where a man sits partially obscured from view by a large lottery ticket dispenser.

“Yeah,” Eve says, wiping her mouth. “Very.” She screws the cap back onto the bottle and brings it to the counter to pay, noticing the World Cup game playing on the small TV behind the man. “Who’s playing?” she asks, though she realizes she only cares because Sophie would have.

“Spain-U.K. Scoreless.” The man gestures toward her water. “Anything else?” he asks.

Eve shakes her head. “That’s all,” she says. “Except I’m wondering if you can tell me where Pine Street is.”

“Pine?” He takes her money. “You’re close to it. Head north out of town, it’s the third street on your right. Come to an intersection you’ve gone too far.”

It doesn’t take Eve long to find it. Pine is a narrow, rutted street that leads through tall trees, among which nestles the occasional ranch-style house. Eve lets her bike coast down the street’s slight incline, peering at each house she passes, looking for number 16. In the yard of one house, a couple of kids stare at her from a swing set. An old man sleeps in his rocker on the porch of another. Off in the trees, Eve can see some fortlike structure that strikes her as somehow ominous, less a child’s play place than somewhere dead bodies might be stored.

Not four hundred yards from where it begins, Pine Street dead-ends at a lake, and here she finds number 16. She sits on her bike and surveys the place, one foot on the ground. The house is a rickety-looking structure sitting up on wooden stilts. Underneath it is a wheelbarrow covered with plastic sheeting, a basketball hoop lying on its side, a few metal garbage cans, a canoe filled with cobwebs and dead, soggy leaves. There are rusted barrels in the yard, and a tattered American flag hangs from the rafters of the porch. Beyond the house, the lake meets the yard with reedy graduality, cattails and canary grass marching up from the water like a small army. An old blue Camaro, which she recognizes because her Aunt Sam drives one, is parked out front, with a Red Sox bumper sticker—like the one on James Favazza’s truck—and New Hampshire license plates, which still depict the state’s famous man in the mountain, even though the overhang that formed his profile was in real life destroyed. Eve has often wondered if they’ll ever change the license plates and the state’s centennial quarter; evidently no one’s gotten around to it yet.

Eve surveys her surroundings with interest, wondering whether James Favazza might have hung out here. She imagines
his pickup parked beside the Camaro, James and L. sitting drinking beer as they sat out in the porch’s rocking chairs, enjoying a summer evening. It’s possible, she thinks, eyeing the chairs and the lopsided table between them.

Suddenly, the screen door opens and a man steps out onto the porch, a cigarette between his fingers. He is wearing a short-sleeved plaid button-down shirt with a pair of swim trunks, as if he had been about to replace either the button-down with a T-shirt or the swim trunks with a pair of khakis when he noticed Eve out at the edge of his yard. The screen door slowly swings shut behind him, hitting the frame in a diminishing series of whaps before finally coming to rest. He takes a long drag of his cigarette.

“Can I help you?” he asks then, exhaling. He is maybe thirty-five or forty, and Eve notices when he steps out from the shadows of the porch that he has a large, deep scar running from his eye several inches down the left side of his face.

Eve swallows. “Mr. Stephens?”

“Who’s that?”

“Does a Mr. Stephens live here?”

“I’m Larry Stephens. I mean who are you?”

Eve unstraddles her bike and balances it against her thigh, begins to untie the cooler from the rack where she’s strapped it down, her hands shaking. She realizes in panic—again too late—that she isn’t sure exactly what she’d planned to say to L. Stephens when she saw him. “Um, I’m Eve. I just”—she fumbles with the strap—“I think I have something that belongs to you.”

Larry Stephens comes slowly down the porch stairs. He takes a final drag of his cigarette and flicks the butt onto the ground.

Eve drops her bike onto the grass and squats beside it so that she can better work the cooler bag free, eyeing the smoldering butt with distracted disapproval; it is only one among many that have been strewn and flattened on the grass. “It’s, well . . .” She
finally gets the bag free and stands up. “I think this is your cooler bag.” She takes a step toward Larry Stephens, holding the bag out before her.

Larry Stephens frowns, eyeing the bag, which Eve suddenly sees for what it is: stained and smelly, the shoulder strap frayed.

“It has your name on it,” Eve explains, desperate to fill the silence. “Is it yours?”

Larry raises his eyebrows and shrugs, flashing his palms. “I guess it is,” he says. “If it has my name on it.” But he makes no move to take it.

“I thought you might want it back,” Eve says. “I—I found it.”

Larry takes the cooler bag from her hands. “Thanks,” he says, and nods at her.

But Eve is not yet ready to turn away, determined to elicit more of a reaction; she stands her ground, staring at Larry Stephens. He gives her a bemused half smile.

“I found it,” Eve says, “in our quarry.” She speaks slowly, carefully enunciating each word. She clears her throat. “In Lanesville.” She gives Larry Stephens a somber look, waiting for a flash of recognition, but he only looks at her evenly.

“Thanks,” he says again.

Eve takes a breath. “The quarry where they found James Favazza’s body,” she says finally, playing her final card. “Your bag was in his truck.”

Larry Stephens bunches his brow. “Who?” Eve can’t tell whether he’s pretending or not.

“James Favazza.” Again, Eve speaks slowly, with emphasis, as dramatically as she can.

Larry Stephens shakes his head. “Don’t know him.”

Eve blinks at him, bewildered. “You don’t?”

Again, Larry Stephens shakes his head. “Nope. Not even sure this is even my bag, tell you the truth.”

“But—” Eve swallows hard; this seems impossible to her. “Oh,” she finally manages. “Then how—” she breaks off, frowning.

Larry Stephens holds the cooler bag up in the air. “But hey, kid, thanks for this, anyway,” he says, turning away.

Eve watches him climb back up the porch stairs and disappear inside. She doesn’t even move to protest. The door whaps behind him. Somewhere in the trees overhead, a crow calls out, and hot bugs buzz. Eve bats at the mosquitoes around her ears, whose murmur she knows she will continue to hear long after she has left this place.

*  *  *

A
FTER
Roscoe McWilliams and his crew have left, Joan goes into town to drop the painting off at the framer’s and stop by the liquor store before picking up Eloise from camp. She finishes her errands with half an hour to go until camp has ended, and in the time she has to kill she finds herself turning once again onto Magnolia Street. She peers out the car window at the numbers on the houses, and when she reaches 932 Magnolia Street, she brings the car to a stop. It’s an off-white, two-story house with vinyl siding, and like most of the houses on the street, it comes up flush to the sidewalk, which slopes steeply enough that the exposed brick foundation is a foot taller on the right side of the house than on the left. Three small steps lead down to the sidewalk from the front door; above the stoop is an aluminum awning, from which a set of wind chimes hangs.