Unhinged (6 page)

Roy nodded, getting it. Fishing and logging and so on were how people made their livings around here, and they didn’t like know-it-all strangers—people from away, the locals called them—coming around telling them they ought to quit. Or worse, that they should be
made
to quit.

“Wyatt’s fat-cat clients could dump arsenic in the water supply and he wouldn’t say boo, as long as they kept paying him,” George said, coming in to fetch cups and dessert plates.

We were having a berry pudding with fresh whipped cream and coffee with a blackberry brandy that George had distilled three autumns earlier, after Ellie and I had picked the blackberries.

George made a face. “‘You mean I can’t get today’s
New York Times
today?’ ” he mimicked Wyatt’s nature-watching customers.

“Wyatt arranges the whole thing for his clients,” I told Roy. “Books the rooms, has the drinks and meals catered, plans the nature-watching, and gives lectures. On eagles, for instance.”

Roy got dessert spoons from the silverware drawer without being asked to. I already thought that as a houseguest he was the cat’s pajamas, so easy to get along with, you’d have thought he’d been living here forever. And just before dinner when he took me aside to pay for his room, he’d ignored the sum I asked for when we made the arrangement.

Instead he’d estimated what the same room would cost in Los Angeles and added thirty percent. “For the inconvenience,” he’d said charmingly.

“Water’s deep in that marsh right after the snowmelt,” I went on. “And from what got reported in the
Tides,
it seems like one of the group got separated from the rest.”

Ellie took up the story. “By the time they thought to look for the poor man he’d been missing for a couple of hours.”

Sam and Maggie harmonized, “. . .
the water was deep and the waves they were steep; the captain and crew started drinking . . .
”

“They found him in the marsh?” Roy McCall’s face was still.

I nodded, getting out the electric mixer. “They think maybe he slipped, stepped in a hole where the water was over his head. And at this time of year that water’s cold.”

“. . . but booze on the lake is an awful mistake and especially when you are sinking!”

“Brr.” McCall shivered. A moment of silence:
sinking!

“Hey, Mom?” Sam came in as I finished whipping the cream. “Maggie and I are going to skip dessert. She wants to take the boat out, see if she can navigate by the stars.” He cuffed her sturdy shoulder as she appeared in the doorway behind him.

With wisps of dark hair escaping her thick braid and her costume as usual a medley of denim, flannel, and double-knit, Maggie seemed the opposite of the polished, blade-slim Fran Hanson. “Kid takes an astronomy course and all of a sudden she’s Bosco Diorama,” Sam added teasingly.

Maggie cuffed him back. “That’s Vasco da Gama, you booby.” Sam had a disorder that had turned out to be different from and worse than dyslexia. He played it for laughs, mostly.

“I only took astronomy,” she said, “so I could bail you out when
you
got in trouble writing the term paper, and . . .”

She stopped, went on in another tone. Besides hours when she did little but help Sam with schoolwork, she played endless games of Scrabble and anagrams with him, to help him develop his verbal dexterity.

“Anyway. You owe me a moonlight sail,” she finished.

I disliked seeing her treat him so tactfully; she never used to. It let me know she sensed the ambivalence of his feelings for her. But my son didn’t seem to notice.

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied cheerfully. “Hey, it’s past nineteen hundred hours, we want to get going.” Whereupon they went out to try to get Sam’s car started; I kept insisting he needed a newer one but he was about as quick to spend money as he was to pursue romance. Fortunately the trip to the boat basin was a steep downhill ride.

Back in the dining room I found the pudding and cream eaten, George’s blackberry liqueur bottle nearly emptied, and the party ending. But Harry Markle couldn’t get Prill’s muzzle off his knee.

“Looks like
somebody’s
fallen in love,” Ellie observed with a glance at me; I’d confided to her my worries about Sam.

Prill sighed, gazing soulfully up at Harry. “Did you have pets in the city?” I asked him, pouring the last of the liqueur into my coffee. What the heck, I was already going to have the mother of all headaches in the morning.

Harry shook his head, fondling Prill’s ear. “Wanted to. But in an apartment . . .”

He raised his free hand, let it fall. “Too hard on the pet. Besides, with my schedule I didn’t think I could take the right care of one.”

“What schedule would that be?” Roy McCall asked, just making conversation. Beside him, Evert continued to snore softly.

“I was a cop. NYPD, downtown,” Harry replied pleasantly. But not in a way that encouraged further questions about this work.

“Oh, then you must know all my old haunts,” I said. “Ciro’s, on Lombardy Street? And Dorian’s Grill?” In the city I’d gotten in the habit of checking stories. My clients would lie to me about the silliest things, to save face or to keep me from being able to testify about their businesses, later.

Or they would until they got to know me. Harry Markle waded right in. “Yeah. Good old Ciro’s. I know Dorian’s too, but it wasn’t my kind of place.”

Harry rose. Prill, too; stubby tail wagging, her head tipped eagerly as if to say, “Let’s go, boss!”

Harry looked at her, trying to decide whether or not to say something. “You found her?” was what he finally came out with.

“Yes, Harry,” I said. “And we’re stuck with you, aren’t we, Prill? Unless,” I went on slowly, “you want her? She does eat a lot and she needs plenty of exercise,” I added hastily.

It would be awful if he took Prill, then broke her heart by not keeping her. “A dog like this, you have to really be sure . . .”

“I’m sure,” he said. “I’d meant to get a dog as soon as—”

Suddenly I knew I couldn’t have found Prill a better home if I’d designed it for her myself. I doubted she would ever let him out of her sight from now on, she was so smitten with him.

Even though he was, as I had just determined, a stone liar. “Come on,” he told her, “let’s get you settled in for the night.”

“Wha’?” said Wyatt Evert, raising his head from the table as man and dog exited.

Wade took one of Wyatt’s arms, George took the other, and together they got the drunken man on his feet.

“We’ll get him to his room,” Wade told Fran, who watched tight-lipped before leaving on her own; I’d scarcely heard a word from her all night. Instead she’d cast speculative looks at Roy McCall, who’d returned them in a way I thought might bode interestingly for Fran in the future.

Between the two men Wyatt stumbled in winey befuddlement as from the other side of the house I heard a roar: Sam’s old car starting at last with a bang of backfire and then a clattering of valve-chatter as it headed downtown.

“Thanks,” Harry told me, opening the door with Prill hugging his leg. From the first, she’d positioned herself at his side as if to keep anyone else from getting near him.

Overhead, the stars twinkled with unusual brilliance, their light amplified by the first hints of storm-fueled humidity.

“Don’t mention it,” I said, and was about to say something more. Something on the order of:

Don’t lie to me. I’ve been lied to by the best.

But from down the street I could still hear Sam’s car, its engine howling. The sound, as of somebody trying to go fifty in second gear, was not among those I’d come to think of as normal from the old vehicle.

“Ellie,” I called, pierced by a premonition. “Catch Wade and George.”

Maybe if they got there in time they could stop whatever was happening; hold it off, get in front of it somehow.

But by now they’d have heard it, too, the whole town alerted by that ghastly scream of metal-on-metal protest.

Sam,
I thought, standing there frozenly.
Maggie
.

Then came the crash.

“My fault,” Harry Markle told me in the hospital
corridor.

After the sirens. After the ambulance.

After the Jaws of Life.

I wheeled on him. “What’re you talking about? You didn’t have anything to do with it, you weren’t anywhere
near
. . .”

But then I stopped, because Harry had a look on his face and I’d seen that look before. The guy wearing it had been sitting in my office making a will, two other guys waiting for him outside. He’d called the two guys in to witness it so I could notarize it.

After that, no one ever saw him again. A favor, it had been, to my guy: letting him make a will. A sign of respect from better times. But times change. And my guy had known it.

Harry, too. “Come on,” he said now with quiet intensity, indicating a sign on the wall near the recovery room:
CAFETERIA ->

Sam and Maggie were sleeping off the anesthesia. Sam had a broken clavicle. Maggie needed surgery to find and fix abdominal bleeding. But both kids had been wearing seat belts and both, the surgeon—not Victor—assured me, would be just fine.

At the crash site, things had been different. A vivid mental snapshot of an ambulance technician’s fist rising into the air kept making me feel short of breath. A fist rising and slamming down on Sam’s chest, because his heart had stopped.

“It was an accident,” I said numbly again, pulling a plastic chair from a cafeteria table.

The place was deserted at three in the morning, fluorescents humming overhead but the coffee urn producing only a sour black liquid. “They say Sam’s heart’s fine now, though.”

The surgeon, a pleasant Pakistani gentleman with enough credentials to float a barge from here to his homeland, had told me that broken collarbones healed so readily, you could put the two pieces at opposite sides of a room and they would still knit back together almost immediately. And in a young man Sam’s age, the surgeon had continued kindly, even such a blow to the chest was not a thing to be overly troubled about. All would be well.

“But you lied,” I added to Harry Markle, anger piercing the fog as I swallowed the bitter stuff.

“There’s no Ciro’s on Lombardy Street,” Harry agreed, “and I don’t know of any Dorian’s Grill. But was I supposed to say so right then, let everyone know you were trying to catch me out?”

“Huh.” I stared at my hands cupped around the cup. “It would have been awkward, wouldn’t it?”

He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, I do the same thing. Cop habit: you get so you don’t believe anything anybody says. So you check.”

Then he took a deep breath and threw me the curveball, the one I couldn’t have seen coming in a million years.

“Listen. This probably isn’t a good time to say this. But I know about your father.”

I nearly choked on the coffee. “How . . .”

But of course: when Harry Markle became a cop, my dad would have been a fresh entry in New York police lore. Jacob Tiptree, the fumble-fingered moron who blew up a Greenwich Village house while trying to rig an anarchist bomb, was a famous old radical villain.

The blast broke windows for blocks, leveled the town house, killed six co-conspirators plus his young wife, Leonora. The lone survivor was Tiptree’s daughter, Jacobia Lee. It’s how I ended up in hill country being raised by my mom’s relatives.

But sitting there in the hospital cafeteria I didn’t see how any of it could be linked to Sam, as Harry was implying.

The steering column of Sam’s car had broken off on impact. The force of it had stopped his heart, and only the quick-thinking ambulance technician had known how to restart it:

She’d hit him again. Hard, with her fist, while I’d struggled unsuccessfully to make the people at the crash site let me near. He’d flopped like a fish when she slugged him, I saw that much.

I forced my mind from it. “If you’ve got something else to say, Harry, say it. I’m too exhausted to play twenty questions.”

He sighed. “I was going to tell you, anyway. Because if you found out, you’d wonder why I didn’t. Like with the restaurants.”

“Uh-huh.” I gazed at him, dumb with fatigue and the remnants of fear, waiting for the punch line.

But I wasn’t ready for that either. “See, back then I was on the task force trying to catch him.”

The
only
survivor: me.

“He didn’t,” I said carefully through a throat thickened by sudden emotion, “live. He and my mother and their friends—”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed. “That was the official story, that no one got out except the kid. You. But some thought different.”

He leaned back in the chair. “I was a new young guy, but I’d been top of my class at the Academy. I was getting groomed. So as a rookie I was put on as errand boy to some biggish operations.”

“One of them was to catch my father.” I couldn’t absorb it. So I defaulted back to the situation at hand: “But you still haven’t said what that’s got to do with Sam, with his accident.”

“It’s complicated. Or was.” A look of pain creased his face.

I must have made a sound of impatience.

“Your dad was never found,” he told me. “We spent a long time searching. I even met you again a few years later. Remember?”

I remembered men coming to the house. Strangers; not a good sign in the hills. I didn’t remember Harry. But that didn’t mean anything; by that time a man in a suit, clean-shaven and wearing shoes, might as well’ve been from Jupiter.

A tired-appearing woman in nursing garb came in; my heart lurched, but she wasn’t looking for me. She tried the coffee urn, sighed, settled for hot water and a tea bag before going out again.

“Anyway, the task force finally ended. I’d made detective. And not so long ago I got assigned to another case. A nut job who specialized. The victims were cops’ wives, husbands, or significant others. Remember?”

I nodded. It was the kind of sensational story that got into the news loop, even way up here in Maine, and I recalled it now because it had happened in Manhattan, in my old stomping grounds. I’d followed it in the back pages of the
Bangor Daily News.