Act of God (12 page)

“How’s Mr. Houle taking it?”

“Her death? Oh, very hard. Very, very hard. They were so much in love, you see.”

Thinking about his supposed affair with Darbra Proft, I said only, “I haven’t met him.”

Thorson looked off. “Roger was at our house. We were having a barbecue. Nothing elaborate, just a few of the neighbors. This has been a very … stable neighborhood, Mr. Cuddy. Most of us have been here four generations, five in my case. But that afternoon, we were all in the back, on our patio. My husband was taking drink orders before we started the coals, and I was videotaping everybody—for Christmas, my husband bought me one of those wonderful zoom kind that you can play in your own VCR? I’ve been having such fun with it ever since.”

“Mrs. Thorson?”

“My husband was at the barbecue, and I was videotaping, and Roger had his cellular phone with him, because he and Caroline always called the other when one was traveling, and he didn’t want to miss the drinks after he’d worked so hard all afternoon. Well, he was sitting there, we were all talking and joking and listening to WCDJ—that marvelous jazz station?—and suddenly the news announcer broke in with a bulletin about a plane crash, and we realized it was Caroline’s flight, and Roger, he … his face just … crumbled.”

Thorson went back to her hankie. I gave her a minute, then said, “I’m really sorry to intrude at a time like this, but it’s important that I speak to Mr. Houle. Do you know where he is?”

She finished with the hankie. “The last time I saw her, I’ll never forget it. Roger had come over to borrow a tool, and we were at my front door there. The taxi was pulling away to take Caroline to the airport, and behind the window she gave me her wave, a very gay wave—in the traditional sense of that word, Mr. Cuddy. That’s the kind of person she was, on her way to revisit a tragedy, and she could think only of letting me know she was all right.”

I gave the woman another minute, then said, “Mrs. Thorson?”

Something behind her eyes seemed to register that she’d been out of the conversation. “I’m sorry, yes?”

“Excuse me for pressing on this, but I really need to see Mr. Houle about another matter. Can you tell me where he is now?”

“Where he is?”

“Yes.”

“The same place he’s been since he got back from Washington. We’ve picked up his newspaper from the sidewalk and his mail from the box. My husband and I even talked about cutting the lawn, but that would seem somehow … macabre, with Roger sitting there.”

“Sitting where, Mrs. Thorson?”

“In the back.” She gestured with her hand. “Staring at Caroline’s garden.”

Stopping at the corner of his house, I watched him for a while. From the rear, Roger Houle was a teddy bear of a man, even slumped in a redwood lounge chair. Almost bald, brown hair in a fringe around the ears and back, matted and sticking up above the neck of his T-shirt and on the thick forearms. The arm of the chair was wide enough to hold a drink, but there was no glass or bottle on it or in either hand.

He seemed to be staring at the garden in front of him, a kaleidoscope of blooming flowers and plants with vases and pots in front of the rock-studded border. To his right was a half-finished shed, the vertical posts sunk into concrete footings, the lean-to roof framed but not yet planked, only a couple of boards nailed at the bottom as the beginning of its walls. Outside the shed were big, empty plastic bags that might have held peat moss; long-handled shovels; half-hoes; and small trowels. The variety of sizes suggested that Caroline Houle had been a meticulous gardener.

As I moved closer, I could see that one of the vases by the rocks was less a flower pot and more an urn, its cover sitting on top of it. “Mr. Houle?”

No reaction.

I moved closer still, now only about ten feet away, and spoke a little louder. “Mr. Houle?”

The head moved, but if I hadn’t spoken I wouldn’t have taken it as a response.

“Mr. Houle, I’m sorry to disturb you, but I need to talk about something with you.”

This time he turned to face me, a growth of stubble on his cheeks and throat like a prospector three days out of town. The eyes didn’t have any spark to them, and the lips parted only enough to say, “What do you want?”

Sometimes the best way to explain things to someone in shock is simple, declarative sentences. “My name’s John Cuddy, and I’m a private investigator from Boston.”

“Boston.”

“Yes. I’ve been hired to find someone by her brother, and I’m hoping you can help.”

“Help.”

I wasn’t sure he was really following me or just repeating the last thing he’d heard each time. “Would it be all right if I sat down?”

There was a second lounge chair closer to the shed. He waved at it, and I pulled it over so that I faced him from a three-quarters angle instead of head-on. “Mr. Houle, your neighbor told me about your wife. I’m really sorry.”

He looked at me, the empty eyes. “You can’t begin to know.”

“Actually I can. I lost my wife, young, to cancer.”

Something moved behind his eyes, as with Mrs. Thorson out on her driveway. “Cancer. So, it took a while?”

An odd question, but I wanted to bring him out if I could. “Yes. Months.”

“Well, it didn’t take months for me. Took a second. Or minutes, I guess, they’re not real clear about that.” He looked at me, through me. “You know how they do it?”

“Do what, Mr. Houle?”

“Handle the identification of the body.”

“No, I don’t.”

“They tell you how sorry they are, and then they fly you down there. They say they’d be happy to arrange for any kind of transportation you want, but how the hell else are you supposed to … So they fly you down, free, of course, and then somebody from a government agency meets you and tells you how sorry he is, too. Then they take you into a room. Not
the
room, not the … morgue place. No, this is a room with just another guy from the government and a video monitor and a table and some chairs in case you keel … And they stand on either side of you, and they tell you it won’t take long and are you ready. And when you say you are, you know you’re not, really, but what can you say, it has to be done. And then they kind of hold on to your arms, just a little, like they’re ready to catch you. And the camera comes on, or the screen, I guess. And there are some guys in green smocks and masks, like an operating room, only they’re around this white slab with a green sheet over it. Then they pull back the sheet and you see … You see her face, and one side of it’s gone like a burnt-out tube from an old TV, just collapsed and black, and the other side looks just like her, just like she’s sleeping next to you on the other pillow. And they say, ‘Can you—,’ Only you don’t let them finish the sentence, you just say, ‘It’s her,’ and they say, ‘Thank you,’ like you’re saving them a lot of time and trouble. And then the one government guy leads you out, and there’s somebody else waiting there, outside the door. Somebody else who had someone on the plane, waiting to go in and watch the show.”

Houle closed his eyes.

I watched him tell it, and I felt him tell it. There was no faking this, no act. I’d lost the person I thought I’d spend the rest of my life with, and you can’t fake that or act through it.

A grasshopper or cricket started chirling in the garden, and Houle opened his eyes. “Sorry. I guess I kind of zoned out on you there.”

“Forget it. When did you get back from Washington?”

“When? Sunday … Sunday sometime, I think. They flew me back after … after I arranged things down there. Why?”

“Do you know that Darbra Proft is missing?”

“Missing?”

“She went away on vacation, maybe to New Jersey, but it looks like right after she came back, she disappeared.”

Houle held my eyes for a while, as though he were trying to follow me again, then shook his head and looked back at the garden. “I haven’t. … The last time I saw Darbra was when we broke up.”

“I know this is difficult for you, Mr. Houle.”

“Difficult. Actually, talking about Darbra is easier than thinking … about all this.”

I took it that I could continue. “How did you meet?”

“What, Darbra and me?”

“Yes.”

“It was maybe a year ago. She was in the market for a condo. Her mother’d died a while back, and she—Darbra—got some insurance from it. Had to split it with her brother, which irked her some.”

“Irked her?”

“Yeah. She and Wee Willie didn’t exactly get along.”

“Wee Willie.”

“Her nickname for the guy.”

“Any idea why they didn’t get along?”

“No. She told me she really hated him, though.”

I filed that. “You sold her a place?”

“No. No, when she found out how expensive things still were, she decided to rent. But we’d spent half a day or so together, and we … Well, it sounds so stupid, so fucking stupid now, but she came on to me, and I … responded. She was … Darbra’s beautiful, but she’s also … beguiling?”

“You began seeing her?”

“Seeing her. Yeah, I guess you could call it that. I’d take her out for dinner here and there, up to Rockport, down to Plymouth, far enough to be … safe. But mostly we’d just … I’d go to her apartment, and we’d … make love.”

Houle brought his hand to his face, rubbing.

I said, “You saw her regularly, then?”

“Regularly. Yeah, once a week, once every two, if I was traveling or Caroline and I had … things to do, you know, conflicts in scheduling.”

“Your wife worked, too?”

“Caroline? No, she had a … bad leg. Polio. Just a limp, but she never worked. Told me I didn’t have to, for that matter, all the money she got from her father. She never had to split anything with
her
brother, either. Poor guy, got killed in Vietnam a long time ago, before her father died. That’s where she was going when …”

I’d gotten that from Mrs. Thorson, and I didn’t want Houle drifting too much on me. “When’s the last time you saw Darbra?”

“The last time? When we broke up—what, three, four weeks ago?”

“How did that happen?”

A lost look. “You tell me. I still don’t understand it. She’d been acting distant for a while, kind of … distracted, maybe. We were expecting to go out that night, but she said she had to work late, could we have dinner at this restaurant by where she worked. I said sure, it was … safe, you know?”

“As a place for you to see her?”

“Right, right. It was down in the Leather District, and I didn’t know anybody from the store.”

“So you met her for dinner where?”

“This place called Grgo’s. Funny name, but I’ll never forget it.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know, like I said. We’re having dinner, and Darbra’s acting real … distant. Kind of … I don’t know, playacting? Then she picks a fight with me.”

“About what?”

“About nothing. That’s what I mean. She said I made so many demands on her time, when we were seeing each other just the same as we always did, the weekly sort of thing. Then she gets mad, and it still seems kind of like she’s onstage. I mean Darbra was seething, and she throws a glass of wine in my face, and looked like she was thinking of overturning the table, except the owner, this guy ‘Grgo,’ he comes over and kind of breaks it up, and she storms out of there.”

“And what did you do?”

Houle exhaled. “I went to the men’s room, tried to clean the wine off my shirt, couldn’t. Then I came home.”

“And that was your last contact with Darbra?”

“Yeah—No, wait a minute. Not the last contact, no.”

“What do you mean?”

“I called her, at work once after that.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t understand what happened, I wanted to see if I could patch things up or at least leave them on a better basis than the restaurant thing.”

“What did Darbra say?”

“Not much. Just that I’d already embarrassed her enough with her job, like I was the one who threw the wine.”

“With her job?”

“Yeah, turns out somebody from work was there that night.”

“In the restaurant?”

“Right.”

“Do you know who?”

“No. I mean, I didn’t know anybody from the store by sight, and she sure didn’t introduce anybody to me over dinner.”

“Do you remember her exact words?”

“I don’t get you.”

“When Darbra told you about somebody from work seeing the fight.”

“Oh. Let’s see. … Just, ‘And this woman from work had to be there, too.’ ”

“That’s all?”

“I think so.”

“Any indication of which woman it was?”

Houle shook his head. “No, but I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to that part of the conversation, and she hung up on me right after she said it.”

“And you didn’t have any further contact?”

“No.” Houle let his gaze move to the covered urn. “No. In fact, after that, I took the scene in the restaurant as kind of an omen.”

“Omen?”

“Yeah. I mean, the whole time I was seeing Darbra, Caroline never found out. I paid all the bills, so she never even knew about the telephone calls, you know? I figured that maybe the fight was an omen, that it was time to break up with Darbra anyway before she broke up my marriage. But then …”

“Mr. Houle—”

“You know, they won’t even let me spread the ashes here.”

I stopped.

He looked from the urn back to me. “When I … after they finished with … Caroline, I … they cremated her at this place down in Washington, and I carried her back with me. But they told me it’s against the law to scatter her ashes on a garden in a ‘residential area.’ ”

Houle’s hand rubbed at his eyes again. “She lost her brother to a war, and her life to a plane crash, and she can’t even become part of the one thing … this garden here.”

I said, “Mr. Houle?”

Without looking up, he said, “Yeah?”

“Did you know about any of the other men in Darbra’s life?”

The head snapped toward me. “The what?”

“The other men Darbra was seeing?”

“What are you talking about?”

He seemed genuinely confused. I said, “I’m told she has a boyfriend, a musician named Rush Teagle.”

“No.”

Houle’s response seemed more like “No, she doesn’t have a boyfriend,” rather than “No, I don’t know him.”