Whom Dog Hath Joined (30 page)

I glanced to the side. Rick was moving forward
carefully, his weapon still holstered, and still too far away to get a good
shot.

“So you didn’t hit him yourself?” I asked, to
keep Eben talking, keep his mind focused on the past.

“Why would I hit him? I just wanted to see
where he went. I had a few bucks, and if he wasn’t a narc I was going to buy
some dope from him. When he fell, I went right over to him, to make sure he was
still breathing.”

He waved the rifle. “Yeah, I stole the dope.
And all the cash he had on him. But then I hung around in the shadows and
waited to make sure he woke up. I wasn’t going to just leave him there.”

I didn’t think that was the whole story, but
at least Eben had demonstrated enough human feeling not to leave an injured man
alone in the woods. “What happened when he did wake up?” I asked. “Did you two
argue?”

Eben shook his head. “I thought he’d make a
fuss when he found out he’d been robbed, that he might go for the police and
accuse us dirty hippies. So I followed him as he  wandered through the woods
for a while, until he found his way to the Meeting House.”

Traffic began to move more slowly on Main
Street. I wondered if the drivers had noticed the armed man standing in front
of the café, and I prayed that none of them would try to interfere – or that
someone impatient at the back of the line would start honking and disturb our
tentative equilibrium.

Eben stopped talking to rub his eyes, and the
shotgun waved madly. “It was the middle of the night by then, and I was tired. I
went on back to where we were camping and went to sleep, and I didn’t think no
more about it for a few days. But then I got kinda curious. What was that boy
doing sneaking around the Meeting House in the dead of night? I knew this
Quaker girl, Debbie, so I asked her if she knew him.”

“Debbie Allen?”

He nodded. “She told me, all in confidence,
she said, that he was a draft dodger supposed to be on his way to Canada. But
he had changed his mind at night and gone back home instead.”

He wiped his brow with the hand that wasn’t
holding the rifle. “I didn’t see how he had gone anywhere when I’d taken all
his money. I started to worry about him. What if he’d gone back into the woods
after I left him, and passed out again? I combed every inch of those woods and
couldn’t find a trace of him.”

With relief, I realized that Rick was only a
few feet away, barely beyond the reach of the café’s awnings. I released my
grip on my gun – but I held onto the dog.

“We can talk about this at the station, Mr.
Hosford,” Rick said. “Now please, put down the shotgun.”

But Eben was still too lost in the past to
stop. “I started going to the Meetings with Debbie,” Eben said. “I had to know
what happened to that boy. It was like a sickness inside me.”

I looked through the window into the café.
Gail was standing behind the cash counter, ready to duck at any minute. Mark
was frozen next to me. Rochester kept growling, a low sound that rose at the
base of his throat and was more menacing than anything I’d ever heard from him.

Behind Hosford, I saw a Stewart’s Crossing
police car stop at the intersection of Main and Ferry, beneath the traffic
light, directing cars away from us.

I couldn’t help myself. “You didn’t know about
the false wall?” I asked.

“Not back then. But after a week that boy
started to smell. Everyone else said it was a raccoon or possum, but I knew
better. One night I broke into the Meeting House and followed my nose.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone then?” I asked.

“I knew they’d blame it on me.” He began to
shake. “We just wanted to be left alone to smoke our dope, I tell you. But the
pigs hated us and people in town used to shy away whenever they saw us. I knew
no one would believe me. I broke a couple of parts off the heater so that no
one else would go inside the Meeting. By the time they got it fixed the smell
was gone.”

He pulled the shotgun up and racked it. “I’m
not going to prison. You can’t lock me up. I’d rather die.”

Keep waving that shotgun, I thought, and
you’ll get your wish. From Rick, I knew the term “suicide by cop,” when
somebody who doesn’t have the courage to end his own life does something to
convince the police to do it for him. I hoped that wasn’t the way this day was
going to end.

Another squad car pulled up beside the first,
and two officers jumped out, guns ready, approaching quietly down the middle of
Main Street. A woman with a small boy by the hand stepped out of the front door
of the drugstore, saw the cops, and hurried back inside.

The sun’s last rays flared against the windows
of the old bank building. In the distance I heard a train’s whistle. I thought
for a moment about Lili. She was going to be really pissed off if I got killed,
just as we were moving our relationship to the next level. I wouldn’t be too
happy about it, either.

“I’ve lived for forty-some years worrying
about what happened to that boy,” Hosford said. “I tell you, I’ve done my
time.”

Once again, I couldn’t help myself. I had to
jump in. “There’s a statute of limitations for theft,” I said. “If that’s all
you did, then the time to prosecute you has long since expired.”

“Shut up, Steve,” Rick said.

“It’s true, though, isn’t it?” I twisted my
head to look at him, with my hand still on Rochester’s collar. “His story
matches the one you heard from Peter Bobeaux.” I’d been a bit of a jailhouse
lawyer when I was incarcerated, helping my fellow inmates understand the law. “There’s
nothing you can charge him with that would stick. You and I both know there’s
no way Eben could have knocked Don Lamprey dead and then gotten his body back
into that narrow space without Peter Bobeaux knowing about it. Don had to get
back in there himself, which means he was alive when Eben saw him last.”

The two cops behind Hosford continued their
slow movement toward us. A cool breeze swept down the street and shook loose a
couple of dead leaves from the maple above us.

I looked back at Hosford. “That boy’s family
would like to know what happened to him. You owe him that much. Help us put
together a story for them.”

“Is that true?” Hosford asked Rick, still
holding his shotgun, though I noticed he’d taken his finger off the trigger.
“You can’t arrest me for anything?”

“I can arrest you, and I will, for waving a
shotgun in the middle of Main Street,” Rick said. “But Steve’s right. The
statute of limitations for theft is long since expired, and you could plead out
to a misdemeanor for the gun offense and get off with a fine.”

I let go of my dog and stood up. Rochester
stopped growling but he looked poised to jump at any moment. “Please, Eben,” I
said. “Put the shotgun down, and tell your story to Rick. That’s the only way
you’re ever going to put this behind you.”

He dropped the shotgun to the ground and began
to weep. I kicked the gun away from him, and Rochester lunged forward, intent
on staying by my side. I grabbed his collar once again.

Rick strode up with a pair of handcuffs. “Eben
Hosford, in accordance with the provisions of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Title 18, Chapter 61, I’m taking you into custody for displaying a firearm in a
manner dangerous to public safety.”

The two cops hurried up, and one of them
grabbed the shotgun from the ground. “Careful with that,” Hosford grumbled. “It’s
an antique.”

The cop sniffed the barrel. “But one that’s
been fired recently,” he said. “I can see the gunpowder residue.”

 Rick began to read the old man his rights as
he led him down the sidewalk toward the police station. The two uniformed
officers headed back toward where they’d left their squad car, beneath the
traffic light.

My brain was still buzzing, though. If
Hosford’s gun had been fired recently, did that mean he was the one who’d shot
at me the night before? And why? The only thing I’d done to attract his
attention was walk my dog past his house.

Did that mean there was someone else out there
who had a grudge against me?

37 – Nasty, Brutish and Short>

The cops moved their car, and traffic began to
pass by again on Main Street. I looked over at Mark Figueroa, who appeared
shell-shocked. “You okay?” I asked.

“That guy could have killed you,” he said. “Or
me. Or even your dog.”

I didn’t want to tell Mark that I’d mourn
Rochester a lot more than I’d mourn him. Though it was the truth, it wasn’t the
kind of thing you say to another human being.

“I took a gamble,” I said. “I knew there had
to be a reasonable solution to the question of how that boy died, and I guessed
that Eben had it. And despite the fact that he’s creepy and cranky, I didn’t
see him as a murderer.”

“You can’t tell that,” Mark said. “When I was
in college, I went on a summer study program in England, and a girl I was
friendly with started to date this bartender at the local pub. A bunch of us
used to hang out with him, play darts, drink pints, talk. When the summer was
over I went back to college and she stayed in Cambridge with him. A couple of
months later he got angry at her and broke her neck.”

“That’s awful,” I said.

“And all that time my friends and I spent with
him, none of us had any idea he could do something like that.” He shook his
head. “You’re crazy, Steve. Do you have some kind of death wish?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I just get an idea and
I have to see it through.”

That sounded eerily like my justification for
hacking, and all of a sudden the aftereffect of all the adrenaline hit me, and
I sunk back in my chair. Why did I keep doing things that put me in danger? It
wasn’t a death wish. I wanted to live too much for that. But it was the same
kind of insatiable curiosity that had gotten me into trouble in the past.

I’d escaped this situation without harm. But
what about the night before, when someone had shot at me on Ferry Road? It had
to have been Eben. Why else did it seem like his Mossberg had been recently
fired? Had Rick asked Peter Bobeaux if he’d shot at me? Surely he’d have
mentioned it if he had, and if Bobeaux had admitted then Rick wouldn’t have let
him go.

I’d have to get Rick to ask Eben where he’d
been the night before, and if the cartridges the crime scene team had found
matched Eben’s gun. If they did? Then despite what I’d said to him about
prosecution from the past, I’d see that he was arrested for attempted murder.
Nobody shot at me and got away with it.

The realization hit me, and I shuddered. Suppose
he’d hit me, killed me? Lili would have been devastated, and I would have put
Rochester through the same thing he’d gone through with Caroline.

He sat up on his haunches and rested his head
against my knee. I loved that familiar pressure, that physical sense of
connection with him. We were bonded. How could I have risked that for something
so stupid as a cowboy challenge to Hosford?

 Could I even have shot the man if it looked
like he was going to shoot me, or anyone with me? I thought I could. I
remembered the feel of my hand on the gun’s butt, the heaviness of the metal,
the sense of power that holding it gave me.

I’d met some stone cold killers when I was in
prison, even got friendly with one of them, a Mexican-American named Balbino. I
never asked if that was his first or last name, but I spent a lot of time with
him in the prison library, researching other cases like his. He told me that
every person he’d killed had taken a little something out of him, to the point
where he wasn’t sure what was left.

That was the case with Eben, it seemed. There
were plenty of old hippies around; I’d seen them in New York, Silicon Valley,
and Bucks County. Some of them had been addled by drugs, while some simply
loved the lifestyle they had found way back then. But what was wrong with Eben
was more than just the passage of time, or being left behind by a culture that
hadn’t survived. The death of Don Lamprey, whether it was his fault or not, had
taken something out of him.

Mark was still lost in his own thoughts as Gail
came out of the café. “What was that all about?” she asked. She sat between us
and set her cell phone on the table. “I couldn’t hear inside the café but when
I saw that shotgun come out of his bag I completely froze.”

Mark explained to her, frequently stopping to
complain about my actions. By the time he finished I felt even worse. Rush hour
traffic on Main Street crept past, all those commuters and soccer moms having
no idea what had just happened, probably complaining about traffic and how
their kids wasted too much time online, and what were they going to have for
dinner that night?

“He seemed like such a nice old man,” Gail
said. “I’ve bought candles and soap from him in the past but I didn’t need
anything today.”

“You’re probably the only person in town who thinks
he’s nice,” I said. “Most people think he’s a crank. Even the Quakers don’t
like him, and they’re supposed to be nice to everybody.”

“Even more reason why you should have avoided
him,” Mark said. “When I first moved here, I thought Stewart’s Crossing was
this charming little town where nothing bad happened.”