Bag of Bones (39 page)

“Eat more than three and you're hooked for life,” Mattie said, and chomped heartily into her own.

“Tell us about the depo,” John said, and while they ate, I talked. When I finished, I picked up my own sandwich and played a little catch-up. I'd forgotten how good an Italian can be—sweet, sour, and oily all at the same time. Of course nothing that tastes that good can be healthy; that's a given. I suppose one could formulate a similar postulate about full-body hugs from young girls in legal trouble.

“Very interesting,” John said. “Very interesting indeed.” He took a mozzarella stick from its grease-stained bag, broke it open, and looked with a kind of fascinated horror at the clotted white gunk inside. “People up here eat this?” he asked.

“People in New York eat fish-bladders,” I said. “Raw.”

“Touché.” He dipped a piece into the plastic container of spaghetti sauce (in this context it is called “cheese-dip” in western Maine), then ate it.

“Well?” I asked.

“Not bad. They ought to be a lot hotter, though.”

Yes, he was right about that. Eating cold mozzarella sticks is a little like eating cold snot, an observation I thought I would keep to myself on this beautiful midsummer Friday.

“If Durgin had the tape, why wouldn't he play it?” Mattie asked. “I don't understand.”

John stretched his arms out, cracked his knuckles, and looked at her benignly. “We'll probably never know for sure,” he said.

He thought Devore was going to drop the suit—it was in every line of his body-language and every inflection of his voice. That was hopeful, but it would be good if Mattie didn't allow herself to become
too
hopeful. John Storrow wasn't as young as he looked, and probably not as guileless, either (or so I fervently hoped), but he
was
young. And neither he nor Mattie knew the story of Scooter Larribee's sled. Or had seen Bill Dean's face when he told it.

“Want to hear some possibilities?”

“Sure,” I said.

John put down his sandwich, wiped his fingers, and then began to tick off points. “First,
he
made the call. Taped conversations have a highly dubious value under those circumstances. Second, he didn't exactly come off like Captain Kangaroo, did he?”

“No.”

“Third, your fabrication impugns
you,
Mike, but not really very much, and it doesn't impugn Mattie at all. And by the way, that thing about Mattie pushing bubbles in Kyra's face, I love that. If that's the best they can do, they better give it up right now. Last—and this is where the truth probably lies—I think Devore's got Nixon's Disease.”

“Nixon's Disease?” Mattie asked.

“The tape Durgin had isn't the only tape. Can't be. And your father-in-law is afraid that if he introduces one tape made by whatever system he's got in Warrington's, we might subpoena all of them. And I'd damn well try.”

She looked bewildered. “What could be on them? And if it's bad, why not just destroy them?”

“Maybe he can't,” I said. “Maybe he needs them for other reasons.”

“It doesn't really matter,” John said. “Durgin was bluffing, and
that's
what matters.” He hit the heel of his hand lightly against the picnic table. “I think he's going to drop it. I really do.”

“It's too early to start thinking like that,” I said at once, but I could tell by Mattie's face—shining more brightly than ever—that the damage was done.

“Fill him in on what else you've been doing,” Mattie told John. “Then I've got to get to the library.”

“Where do you send Kyra on your workdays?” I asked.

“Mrs. Cullum's. She lives two miles up the Wasp Hill Road. Also in July there's V.B.S. from ten until three. That's Vacation Bible School. Ki loves it, especially the singing and the flannel-board stories about Noah and Moses. The bus drops her off at Arlene's, and I pick her up around quarter of nine.” She smiled a little wistfully. “By then she's usually fast asleep on the couch.”

John held forth for the next ten minutes or so. He hadn't been on the case long, but had already started a lot of balls rolling. A fellow in California was gathering facts about Roger Devore and Morris Ridding (“gathering facts” sounded so much better than “snooping”). John was particularly interested in learning about the quality of Roger Devore's relations with his father, and if Roger was on record concerning his little niece from Maine. John had also mapped out a campaign to learn as much as possible about Max
Devore's movements and activities since he'd come back to TR-90. To that end he had the name of a private investigator, one recommended by Romeo Bissonette, my rent-a-lawyer.

As he spoke, paging rapidly through a little notebook he drew from the inside pocket of his suitcoat, I remembered what he'd said about Lady Justice during our telephone conversation:
Slap some handcuffs on that broad's wrists and some tape over her mouth to go along with the blindfold, rape her and roll her in the mud.
That was maybe a bit too strong for what we were doing, but I thought at the very least we were shoving her around a little. I imagined poor Roger Devore up on the stand, having flown three thousand miles in order to be questioned about his sexual preferences. I had to keep reminding myself that his father had put him in that position, not Mattie or me or John Storrow.

“Have you gotten any closer to a meeting with Devore and his chief legal advisor?” I asked.

“Don't know for sure. The line is in the water, the offer is on the table, the puck's on the ice, pick your favorite metaphor, mix em and match em if you desire.”

“Got your irons in the fire,” Mattie said.

“Your checkers on the board,” I added.

We looked at each other and laughed. John regarded us sadly, then sighed, picked up his sandwich, and began to eat again.

“You really have to meet him with his lawyer more or less dancing attendance?” I asked.

“Would you like to win this thing, then discover Devore can do it all again based on unethical behavior by Mary Devore's legal resource?” John returned.

“Don't even joke about it!” Mattie cried.

“I wasn't joking,” John said. “It has to be with his lawyer, yes. I don't think it's going to happen, not on this trip. I haven't even got a look at the old
cockuh,
and I have to tell you my curiosity is killing me.”

“If that's all it takes to make you happy, show up behind the backstop at the softball field next Tuesday evening,” Mattie said. “He'll be there in his fancy wheelchair, laughing and clapping and sucking his damned old oxygen every fifteen minutes or so.”

“Not a bad idea,” John said. “I have to go back to New York for the weekend—I'm leaving
après
Osgood—but maybe I'll show up on Tuesday. I might even bring my glove.” He began clearing up our litter, and once again I thought he looked both prissy and endearing at the same time, like Stan Laurel wearing an apron. Mattie eased him aside and took over.

“No one ate any Twinkies,” she said, a little sadly.

“Take them home to your daughter,” John said.

“No way. I don't let her eat stuff like this. What kind of mother do you think I am?”

She saw our expressions, replayed what she'd just said, then burst out laughing. We joined her.

*   *   *

Mattie's old Scout was parked in one of the slant spaces behind the war memorial, which in Castle Rock is a World War I soldier with a generous helping of birdshit on his pie-dish helmet. A brand-new Taurus with a Hertz decal above the inspection sticker was parked next to it. John tossed his brief-case—reassuringly thin and not very ostentatious—into the back seat.

“If I can make it back on Tuesday, I'll call you,” he told Mattie. “If I'm able to get an appointment with your father-in-law through this man Osgood, I will also call you.”

“I'll buy the Italian sandwiches,” Mattie said.

He smiled, then grasped her arm in one hand and mine in the other. He looked like a newly ordained minister getting ready to marry his first couple.

“You two talk on the telephone if you need to,” he said, “always remembering that one or both lines may be tapped. Meet in the market if you happen to. Mike, you might feel a need to drop by the local library and check out a book.”

“Not until you renew your card, though,” Mattie said, giving me a demure glance.

“But no more visits to Mattie's trailer. Is that understood?”

I said yes; she said yes; John Storrow looked unconvinced. It made me wonder if he was seeing something in our faces or bodies that shouldn't be there.

“They are committed to a line of attack which probably isn't going to work,” he said. “We can't risk giving them the chance to change course. That means innuendos about the two of you; it also means innuendos about Mike and Kyra.”

Mattie's shocked expression made her look twelve again. “Mike and Kyra! What are you talking about?”

“Allegations of child molestation thrown up by people so desperate they'll try anything.”

“That's ridiculous,” she said. “And if my father-in-law wanted to sling that kind of mud—”

John nodded. “Yes, we'd be obligated to sling it right back. Newspaper coverage from coast to coast would follow, maybe even Court TV, God bless and save us. We want none of that if we can avoid it. It's not good for the grownups, and it's not good for the child. Now or later.”

He bent and kissed Mattie's cheek.

“I'm sorry about all this,” he said, and he did sound genuinely sorry. “Custody's just this way.”

“I think you warned me. It's just that . . . the idea someone might make a thing like that up just because there was no other way for them to win . . .”

“Let me warn you again,” he said. His face came as close to grim as its young and good-natured features would probably allow. “What we have is a very rich man with a very shaky case. The combination could be like working with old dynamite.”

I turned to Mattie. “Are you still worried about Ki? Still feel she's in danger?”

I saw her think about hedging her response—out of plain old Yankee reserve, quite likely—and then deciding not to. Deciding, perhaps, that hedging was a luxury she couldn't afford.

“Yes. But it's just a feeling, you know.”

John was frowning. I supposed the idea that Devore might resort to extralegal means of obtaining what he wanted had occurred to him, as well. “Keep your eye on her as much as you can,” he said. “I respect intuition. Is yours based on anything concrete?”

“No,” Mattie answered, and her quick glance in my direction asked me to keep my mouth shut. “Not really.” She opened the Scout's door and tossed in the
little brown bag with the Twinkies in it—she had decided to keep them after all. Then she turned to John and me with an expression that was close to anger. “I'm not sure how to follow that advice, anyway. I work five days a week, and in August, when we do the microfiche update, it'll be six. Right now Ki gets her lunch at Vacation Bible School and her dinner from Arlene Cullum. I see her in the mornings. The rest of the time . . .” I knew what she was going to say before she said it; the expression was an old one. “. . . she's on the TR.”

“I could help you find an
au pair,
” I said, thinking it would be a hell of a lot cheaper than John Storrow.

“No,” they said in such perfect unison that they glanced at each other and laughed. But even while she was laughing, Mattie looked tense and unhappy.

“We're not going to leave a paper trail for Durgin or Devore's custody team to exploit,” John said. “Who pays me is one thing. Who pays Mattie's child-care help is another.”

“Besides, I've taken enough from you,” Mattie said. “More than I can sleep easy on. I'm not going to get in any deeper just because I've been having megrims.” She climbed into the Scout and closed the door.

I rested my hands on her open window. Now we were on the same level, and the eye-contact was so strong it was disconcerting. “Mattie, I don't have anything else to spend it on. Really.”

“When it comes to John's fee, I accept that. Because John's fee is about Ki.” She put her hand
over mine and squeezed briefly. “This other is about me. All right?”

“Yeah. But you need to tell your babysitter and the people who run this Bible thing that you've got a custody case on your hands, a potentially bitter one, and Kyra's not to go anywhere with anyone, even someone they know, without your say-so.”

She smiled. “It's already been done. On John's advice. Stay in touch, Mike.” She lifted my hand, gave it a hearty smack, and drove away.

“What do you think?” I asked John as we watched the Scout blow oil on its way to the new Prouty Bridge, which spans Castle Street and spills outbound traffic onto Highway 68.

“I think it's grand she has a well-heeled benefactor and a smart lawyer,” John said. He paused, then added: “But I'll tell you something—she somehow doesn't feel lucky to me at all. There's a feeling I get . . . I don't know . . .”

“That there's a cloud around her you can't quite see.”

“Maybe. Maybe that's it.” He raked his hands through the restless mass of his red hair. “I just know it's something sad.”

I knew exactly what he meant . . . except for me there was more. I wanted to be in bed with her, sad or not, right or not. I wanted to feel her hands on me, tugging and pressing, patting and stroking. I wanted to be able to smell her skin and taste her hair. I wanted to have her lips against my ear, her breath tickling the fine hairs within its cup as she told me to do what I wanted, whatever I wanted.

*   *   *

I got back to Sara Laughs shortly before two o'clock and let myself in, thinking about nothing but my study and the IBM with the Courier ball. I was writing again—
writing.
I could still hardly believe it. I'd work (not that it felt much like work after a four-year layoff) until maybe six o'clock, swim, then go down to the Village Cafe for one of Buddy's cholesterol-rich specialties.