Bloodline (20 page)

Poole smiled. Parker didn't. I got an uneasy feeling.

“The patrol guys had a bad accident to cover in Montville a little before that,” Poole said. “Nobody would have been available. But listen, what makes you think it was Kenny's truck?”

“The sound of the exhaust, I guess. They all have a different rumble. You know these big four-wheel-drives.”

“Could it have been some other truck?” Poole asked.

“Sure. I guess. But, you know—because of the problem we'd already had, I thought it was pretty likely that it was Kenny. Not some random rock-thrower.”

“So you couldn't say in court that it was him,” Parker said.

His voice was flat and noncommittal.

“Nope. Couldn't say it here, for certain.”

Parker looked unimpressed. He shifted on his feet and looked at Poole, who glanced back, almost knowingly.

“Let's go out and look at your truck, Mr. McMorrow,” Poole said, and the two of them turned and started for the door, leaving me to follow.

They looked at the truck, the rock all shiny wet in the bed. If they were impressed with my repair job, they didn't say so.

Probably jealous.

We stood there in the rain for a few minutes and then Poole suggested we go back inside. We did, and they went back to their places at the counter again, leaving wet footprints between the kitchen and the door. This time, Parker did most of the talking, asking me to tell him again about hearing the truck outside. I did, and he asked me to tell him about my run-in with Kenny. Parker said to take my time, so I did.

But I was beginning to wonder why I was getting this special treatment.

I went over the story a couple of times. I talked about the girls and the story and Kenny saying I was a narc. Poole had heard it before, but he seemed to listen closely. Parker took a small notebook out of the inside of his jacket and took notes as I spoke.

The pit. The shotgun blast through the window. And back to the rock.

Parker wanted to hear again about the rock.

I told him, and this time I told them about Clair coming down, though I didn't mention his shotgun. They perked up for that part, and Parker wanted to know more about Clair, his last name and how I knew him. I was beginning to think that these were the most thorough cops west of Scotland Yard.

They seemed to be in no hurry to leave, so I offered them a cup of coffee again. Poole said no, but Parker said yes, please. I put the water on the stove and glanced at the clock on the wall above it.

“Is there something we're keeping you from, Mr. McMorrow?” Parker said.

“No, not really. I have to meet somebody in Portland at four. But I've got a little time before I have to get ready. No problem.”

“What, you got an interview?” Parker asked.

He seemed to expect an answer. Poole was waiting, too.

“Yeah,” I said, a little uneasily. “A woman for the same story that got me hooked up with the three girls and Kenny and the rest of this.”

“What woman is that?” Parker asked.

I looked at him and wondered what that had to do with a broken window in my truck.

“What's her name, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

He seemed to have taken over from Poole, who seemed to be watching me with freshened interest.

“Her name?” I said.

I felt like saying it was none of their business but I didn't.

“Yeah,” Parker said.

“Her name's Hewett,” I said, as the kettle on the stove began to hiss. “Missy Hewett.”

“And you're supposed to talk to her?”

“Yeah. At four. Four-thirty, actually.”

“You've met her before?” Parker asked.

“Once. In Portland. She goes to USM. She's from here. Still has family—”

Parker broke in.

“Mr. McMorrow. We should tell you something.”

He looked serious. Poole's face had hardened.

“Missy Hewett's dead, Mr. McMorrow,” Parker said. “They found her this morning.”

19

T
hey said they found her at dawn alongside the road on Forest Avenue, not far from the doughnut shop where we were to meet. She was wearing shorts and running shoes, and it was thought that she could have been hit by a car while jogging at night. They hauled her away to do a postmortem, but before that they found my name and phone number on a piece of paper in her pocket.

Poole and Parker wanted to hear the story again from the beginning. We sat at the kitchen table and they had coffee and I had tea. I told them about the three girls in the truck, that one of them had blurted out Missy Hewett's name when I'd asked about babies.

I thought it was Belinda, but I wasn't absolutely sure.

They listened as I talked about tracking Missy down through the college. I told them about my conversation with Missy at her apartment, my impression of her then. At some point, Parker started taking notes. I told them about talking to Missy's mother, that I didn't think they were close. I told them I didn't know the name of the father of the baby, but I didn't think Missy was close to him, either.

“So would you say she was something of a loner type?” Parker asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of quiet. Not real happy. But tough enough to be on her own.”

I told them about Missy's phone call. That she wanted to meet me, that she was going to tell “them” she wanted her baby back. I said I didn't know if “them” meant the parents who had adopted the child or an agency or what. They wanted to know what Missy's mental state seemed like on the phone, where we were supposed to meet. I told them about her saying somebody was waiting to use the phone, that Missy had said the guy was practically climbing in the phone booth with her.

And then I told it all again.

This time Parker had questions. Poole got up and watched from the counter.

“Did she seem frightened when she called you?” Parker asked.

“Not frightened of anybody—like somebody was out to get her,” I said. “Maybe frightened like she was setting out on something she knew wasn't going to be easy.”

“Getting this baby back, you mean.”

“Yeah. It was like she knew it was going to be a battle.”

“But she didn't say with who?”

“No. The conversation was just a minute or two. I presume that's what we were going to talk about when we met. No, she never told me where her baby went, or how. She just said the baby was better off where she was.”

“It was a girl?”

“Yeah. I think her mother referred to the kid as a girl, too, but I'm not as sure.”

“The mother's some kind of lush, right?” Parker asked.

“Appeared that way.”

“Did Missy drink that you know of?”

“No,” I said. “She wasn't the type. I don't know. She just seemed driven to reach her goal, which was to go to college and be a nurse and not end up like her mother.”

“Good plan,” Parker said.

“I thought so. The people at the high school here seemed to think so, too. Her mother blamed the guidance counselor. Janice Genest is her name. I got the impression she gave Missy a lot of advice.”

“About the baby stuff?”

“I don't know for sure, but that would be my guess.”

Parker scribbled some more in his notebook, then shut it and put it back inside his jacket. He shoved the chair back with a scraping sound and heaved his big bulk into a standing position. I got up, too. The three of us moved toward the door.

“So you think it might not have been an accident?” I asked.

“The autopsy will tell us that,” Parker said. “Probably.”

“Wouldn't tell you if somebody ran her over on purpose, would it?”

“Not necessarily,” Parker said.

The three of us stood by the door and didn't say anything for a moment. Poole reached for the door and opened it. Outside it was still raining. Parker paused and turned back to me.

“Mr. McMorrow,” he said slowly. “I don't mean to pry, but what exactly is it that you do?”

I looked at Poole.

“Why don't you ask him?” I said.

So she was dead. Erased, just like that. The Waldo High success story. The little dour girl with the grim determination. The thorn in
her drunken mother's side. The kid who didn't quite fit in. The kid who had a kid.

She wouldn't be asking for her baby back now.

I almost didn't want to think it, but the coincidence kept shoving itself back in my face.

Missy Hewett tells me she wants to get her baby back, and less than twenty-four hours later, she's dead. Who else did she tell? Who else did she call from the pay phone? And where was her baby now?

Of course, the coincidence could be just that. She could have been hit by a car. Her untimely death could be the adoptive parents' gain. But would they know? Was the baby somehow included when they notified the next of kin? When they listed Missy Hewett's survivors, would they include a baby girl, name unknown?

Sitting there at the table, I fielded the questions as they came. Really. Where was the baby? Would the adoptive parents even know? Who would tell them? Who was the “they” Missy was going to talk to? What had made her change her mind, which had been set in such relentless resolve? And what was I going to write about now?

I couldn't write the same story now—not unless I ignored Missy Hewett completely, excised her from my notes and my mind, and went on as if she'd never happened. But I couldn't do that. I wouldn't.

Even at that moment, with the news of Missy's death still unreal, I knew I couldn't just abandon her. There was something about her. Her face peering out from behind the security chain on her apartment door. Her gritty bid to make something of herself. Her fighting the good fight alone, like some little Joan of Arc marching off to do battle, armed with nothing but a pile of books.

She was a brave kid. Whatever had happened, she didn't deserve it. There was no fairness in her death; maybe not in her life, either.
Missy didn't deserve to die, but she did deserve justice. Funny. Sometimes the dead are the most deserving.

It's strange how life goes on after death, relentless as the tides. We pause for the dead only momentarily and then get on with our business. An entire industry, one of funeral homes and big black cars, has been invented to make us think this isn't so, but it is. The big black cars are gone the next day. We get on with it. Missy or no Missy.

In my case, the business was a rear window for my truck. The guy at the junkyard in Waterville made me wait while he tapped in enough numbers on a computer keyboard to program navigation for the space shuttle. The mainframe at junkyard central told him he had one and it was thirty-five bucks. I called the second place, in Searsmont, and a woman answered the phone. I told her what I needed and she said. “We got any back windows for Chevy pickups? Older ones?”

A man's voice said, “Hell yes,” and she asked him how much.

“I don't know,” he said. “Twenty-dollar bill.”

Searsmont was about ten miles to the south, across Route 3, the pipeline for out-of-staters headed for Belfast and points downeast. When I pulled up to Route 3 on the Thompson Ridge Road, the cars were hustling up and down the highway, but mostly headed west toward home in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania. They were summer people, up for the foliage. After one last gulp of Maine coast, it was back to the offices where they would earn enough money to come back.

I sat there at the intersection in my beat-up truck an extra minute or two and watched them rush past. It reminded me of just how much on the sideline I now was. And I was glad. For the most part.

When a car pulled up behind me, I turned right and drove along Route 3 until the next crossroad. I pulled off and drove at a leisurely, lazy pace down into the little forgotten village of Searsmont, invisible to the legions that marched up and down the highway just a couple of miles away. Past the village, I followed the woman's directions, which were to stay to the right up on to Appleton Ridge. I did, and soon was loafing along the ridge under the white-gray afternoon sky, on a road right out of West Virginia. I passed old sagging farmsteads, with apple trees bravely bearing fruit in grown-up pastures. Trailers with toys scattered in their yards like brightly colored birdseed. Trucks like mine, sitting alongside barns, their dismantled motors slung on tripods of tree trunks, monuments to the blind optimism it takes to get by poor in the woods.

The junkyard was off the Appleton Ridge at Pitmans Corner, a dirt road to the right. I pulled in and parked in front of a trailer surrounded by old cars and trucks. It was hard to tell whether this was customer parking or an overflow of stock.

I got out and walked past the trailer to the tipsy wooden fence that surrounded the yard itself. There was a truck-size gap, and I went through and saw a hand-built shack sort of building. It had a couple of windows and a door, and the door was open. I stepped in and a cat slipped by my legs and out. Country western music was playing, and a woman said, “You must be the guy for the window,” before I could even say hello.