A Fine Line (10 page)

Henry was lying there with his chin on his paws watching us. His eyes snapped back and forth to our faces as we talked.

I handed his leash to Julie. She clipped it onto his collar
and stood up. Henry pushed himself to his feet, arched his back, then waddled over to me.

“You’re with Julie,” I said to him. “She’s the boss now. Please behave yourself. You’re going to a loving home. You’ll have a great time.”

He looked up at me and wagged his tail.

I reached down to pat his head. He licked my hand.

“Look,” I said to him. “It’s just for the weekend, okay?”

“Maybe this is a bad idea,” said Julie.

“Go,” I said. “Now. Please.”

Julie started for the door. “Come on,” she said to Henry.

He cocked his head and looked at me.

“For God’s sake, just go,” I told him.

After they left, I sat down on my sofa, put my feet up on the coffee table, and lit a cigarette. Free at last, Lord. A glorious weekend ahead of me. No responsibility, no obligation, no dog whining at me.

I called Evie at her office and asked her if she’d decided whether she wanted to come fishing with me tomorrow. She said she’d made a plan with her friend Mary. They were going to meet at the Arnold Arboretum, stroll around looking at the trees and shrubs, then have an early dinner at one of the sidewalk cafes on Newbury Street before Mary headed back home. Evie said she intended to come to my place for a Saturday-night sleepover afterward, if that was okay by me.

That was terrific by me. I told her to let herself in and make herself at home if I wasn’t there. I was going to be off fishing, and she might get there first.

After I hung up with Evie, I called Charlie McDevitt. He
couldn’t go fishing, either. One of his kids was in a weekend soccer tournament in Connecticut, and Charlie had volunteered to be one of the chaperones.

I tried Doc Adams, but he and Mary were heading off to their place on the Cape.

Well, the hell with my friends. They were tied down with kids and wives. Me, I didn’t even have a dog to tie me down. I could go fishing any time I wanted. I didn’t mind going alone. I thought I’d head for the Squannacook River out in Townsend. It was a nice little trout stream, and I hadn’t fished there for a couple of years. It was only a little more than an hour’s drive from the city. I could fish ’til dark and still have my Saturday night with Evie.

The best of all possible worlds.

I got to Remington’s a little before six-thirty and found an empty booth near the bar. Ben Frye ambled in a few minutes later. He slid in across from me and slapped a manila envelope down on the table.

“The letters?” I said.

He nodded. “Now you got ’em. Now they can stop harassing me. But I’m still pissed at you.”

“So are they authentic?” I said.

Frye shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to test the ink and paper. That’s very delicate work, not something I do in my office. I go to a lab for that. I didn’t even take the letters out of their plastic sleeve. I heard about Duffy before I got around to that, decided I better just give ’em back to you. But the handwriting, the syntax, the sketch, it all looks like Meriwether Lewis to me. They could be forgeries, but I don’t think they are. Anyway, they’re yours now.”

The waiter appeared. I ordered a gin-and-tonic. Ben asked for scotch. “So what happened to Duffy?” he said after the waiter left.

“What I told you on the phone,” I said. “He fractured his skull. I found him out in his patio. He was unconscious when I got there. They tried to operate, but he died on the table.”

“You
found him?”

I nodded. “He asked me to come over. Said he had something he wanted to talk about. When I got there, he was lying on the bricks.”

“So what’d he want to talk about?”

“He didn’t say.”

Ben shook his head. “You never know, huh?”

I nodded.

Ben looked up. Our waiter put our drinks in front of us and asked us if we were ready to order.

Ben glanced at his watch and nodded. “I’ve only got about an hour. Gotta get back to the office.”

“On a Friday night?” I said.

He shrugged. “You do business when you can. I got a guy coming in at eight.”

I ordered the 14-ounce Porterhouse with a baked potato, hold the sour cream, and Ben had a Greek salad. I’d forgotten that he was a vegetarian.

After the waiter left, Ben said, “That accident out at Quabbin changed Duffy. It pretty much destroyed his life.”

I nodded.

“The man goes everywhere, does everything,” he said. “Then the next thing you know, he’s paralyzed, can’t leave his house. And now he falls down and dies in his own backyard?” He shook his head. “Life is full of ironies, isn’t it?”

Walt had been murdered, of course. But Detective Mendoza had forbidden me to tell anybody.

When our food came, I told Ben that I’d have to get Walt’s collection appraised in order to settle his estate and was wondering if he’d do it. Ben, with no false modesty, reminded me that he’d traveled all over the country to appraise estates, that he was considered an expert on books, manuscripts and artwork pertaining to nature and wildlife in general and birds in particular, and that it would take him at least a week, so I should give him ample notice.

I told him that until Ethan showed up, there was nothing much to do, but I’d keep in touch with him.

After we finished eating, Ben looked at his watch and said, “I hate to eat and run, but . . .”

“No coffee? No dessert?”

“I’ve really got to get back.”

He took out his wallet, but I held up my hand. “I got it. I’ll charge it against Walt’s account.”

“Well, okay. I guess he can spare it now.”

I held out my hand to Ben. “We’ll be in touch,” I said.

He shook my hand, then turned and shambled out of the restaurant.

I had a slab of lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee, then walked home through the city.

When I got there, I watched the end of the ball game, then the news, which did not report on Walt’s death. That left me feeling vaguely sad.

After the news, I went to bed and called Evie. We exchanged stories about our days and tried to talk dirty, but my heart wasn’t in it, which Evie instantly picked up on. She said she loved me anyway.

I read a chapter of
Moby Dick
, turned out the light, and smoked the day’s last cigarette in the dark.

I had to admit it. My place had been feeling empty lately. But without Henry sleeping on the floor beside me, it felt even emptier.

T
he ringing of the phone dragged me out of a deep black sleep. Ethan, I thought. I fumbled around in the dark, found the receiver on the table beside my bed, put it to my ear, and said, “Ethan? Is that you?”

A growly, muffled male voice said something that sounded like, “Boomer pierce ever.”

“Huh?” I said. “Who’s this?”

There was a hesitation. Then a click. Then nothing.

I sighed and put the phone back. The alarm clock on my bedside table read 3:50. The darkest hour. If it wasn’t a dog waking me up, it was some crank phone call mumbling nonsense in my ear.

I lay there and smoked a cigarette in the dark. Two days had passed since Walt Duffy was murdered, and I still hadn’t heard from Ethan. What the hell was going on?

I was sipping my coffee out on my balcony overlooking the harbor at eight o’clock the next morning, watching the gulls
and terns wheeling over the water and the Saturday-morning fishing and pleasure craft cutting white wakes through it when I remembered that phone call, which, in turn, reminded me of the hangups I’d found on my voicemail the night before.

I went inside, picked up the telephone, and dialed star-69.

The mechanical voice said, “The number you are trying to call cannot be reached by this method.”

Oh, well. Some drunk on a cell phone, probably. He’d mumbled his words. They made no sense. He—or she, maybe—had sounded like he was talking through a wet sock.

I refilled my coffee mug and went back out to the balcony. The day had dawned cloudy and still. The air tasted salty and felt damp on my face. It smelled like rain. I thought about bagging my plan to go trout fishing and spending a quiet Saturday at home. I could catch up on all the weekend paperwork Julie had stuffed into my briefcase, watch the ball game, maybe start that new Nick Lyons book and take a nap while I waited for Evie to show up. If Henry were here, we’d go for a few walks. Maybe I’d try to teach him something new. He wasn’t that old.

The truth was, Walt Duffy’s murder and Ethan’s disappearance felt, somehow, like my responsibility. A day of fishing struck me as frivolous. It seemed as if I should do something more useful with my time than wading in a trout stream.

In the end, of course, I decided I better go fishing. The gods don’t give a man a completely empty Saturday in June very often, and to squander it would surely offend them.

I got to the Squannacook a little before eleven. The river more or less followed Route 119 in Townsend, but there were several stretches where it bent away from the road.
These were places that most fishermen considered too inaccessible to bother with. They were the places I liked, for that very reason.

I parked in a little pull-off on a side road near the state forest. As I’d hoped, no other cars were parked there. I quickly tugged on my waders and strung up my rod. Then I set off through the woods, guided by the gurgling sound of water flowing around rocks and over gravel.

When I reached the riverbank, I sat on a log, lit a cigarette, and watched the currents glide past me.

Pocket water. This section of the stream was studded with boulders, and it ran quick and relatively shallow. Up close, a discerning angler such as I could identify the little eddies and holes and slicks and riffles—the pockets where trout liked to lurk.

A few yellowish mayflies fluttered over the water. Mosquitoes and blackflies, too. I rubbed some insect repellent on my arms, face and neck.

I sat there looking for feeding fish. In that quick-moving, broken water, the rings of their rises dissipated instantly. You needed to see the splash or the trout’s little nose when it poked through the surface.

I forced myself to stay seated for the length of time it took me to finish my cigarette, even though I spotted two or three spurty little rises against the far bank. Then I tied on a bushy white-winged dry fly, stepped into the water, and began casting. I picked my targets—the little chute between two boulders where the current quickened, the riffly place that spilled into deeper water, the slick, shadowy, slow-moving current under the hemlocks against the bank . . . and almost instantly my mind was absolutely focused on studying the water, locating my targets, dropping my fly onto them, and watching
it bob along on the currents, and all thoughts of Walt Duffy’s murder, of Ethan’s disappearance, of Henry and Ben Frye, of Julie and Evie, of my sons and my ex-wife and my old girlfriends, of my clients and my cases, of taxes and mortgages, of debtors and creditors, of friends and relatives living and dead, of the time and the season and the year, of hunger and thirst, of age and illness—all of those earthly preoccupations were entirely gone.

I was fishing.

Non-fishing friends sometimes tell me, “Oh, I’d like to try fly-fishing sometime. It looks like fun. I just don’t think I have the patience for it.”

In fact, patience is no virtue for the serious angler. Concentration, intensity, focus, imagination. That’s what fly-fishing for stream trout requires. But I don’t tell my friends that. I just nod and say, “Oh, yes. You’ve got to have plenty of patience.” There are too damn many fishermen cluttering up the prettiest parts of the world already.

Sometime toward the end of the afternoon a misty rain began to filter down, and a short time later small olive-colored mayflies appeared on the water, and trout began to sip them. I tied on the right fly, as the fish quickly told me, and for an hour or so I caught and released trout more or less continually. They weren’t particularly large, and I knew that most of them had been born in a cement trough at a state fish hatchery, but still, they were trout and they demanded a fly that looked and behaved like the real ones they’d decided to eat, and by the time the hatch petered out I felt happy and triumphant and replete.

I’d fished my way a couple of miles upstream when I decided it was time to quit. It was a long wet walk through the woods back to my car, and by the time I got there it was
nearly dark and the misty rain had turned into a drizzle.

My mind was still full of trout and mayflies and those subtle sippy little strikes that had made my fly disappear in a bubble, and it wasn’t until I was in my car with the windshield wipers going that I started looking forward to seeing Evie.

I hoped her day with her friend at the Arboretum hadn’t been ruined by the rain.

And then my mind turned to Walt and Ethan, and I felt guilty for not thinking about them while I’d been fishing.

By the time I got back to the city, a steady rain was falling, and my apartment was dark and empty and altogether gloomy. Nine o’clock, and no Evie. Not even a dog to greet me at the door.

I checked my answering machine. No messages, from Ethan or from Evie or from one of my sons or from some mumbling drunk. No messages from anybody.

I shucked off my wet clothes, took a long steamy shower, and pulled on a clean T-shirt and a pair of jeans, and just about the time I’d settled myself on the sofa with a glass of Rebel Yell in one hand and the TV remote in the other, I heard a key scratching in the door.

I got there in time to help Evie slip off her raincoat. She bent her head forward and pulled her hair to the side so I could kiss the back of her neck. That, she’d taught me, was a special place. Then she turned in my arms, pressed against me, kissed me hard on the mouth, and grabbed my hand. She led me directly to the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed, and reached out to unbuckle my belt.

I started to protest that I’d just gotten dressed, but I figured that would not deter her.

Sometime later I got up, found my drink where I’d left it on the coffee table and brought it back to the bedroom, and Evie and I passed it back and forth and exchanged stories of our days. I thought mine had been a lot more eventful than hers. She hadn’t caught a single trout all day.