Blunt Darts (8 page)

Miss Pitts’s face softened, and she sat back down. “Stephen is just such a dear, dear boy.”

We covered the intersections of Miss Pitts’s and Stephen’s lives during the prior six months. Nothing from that sounded helpful. I decided that a quiet interlude was appropriate before we returned to tougher ground.

“What can you tell me about Telford Kinnington, the judge’s brother?”

Miss Pitts gave a bittersweet smile. “Ah, Telford Kinnington. He was three years younger than Willard, and enough unlike him to have been bought from the Gypsies. The judge, who went to public school here, too, was a plodder. Everything seemed to come easily to Telford, though. A gifted student, a fine athlete at Harvard, and a true patriot, Mr. Cuddy. Telford didn’t just talk about this country, he died fighting for it. Only a few months after he’d been home on leave, too. In fact, I still have the newspaper account of his last battle. Just a minute.”

Miss Pitts bustled over to a stuffed, floor-to-ceiling case and levered out a scrapbook. I feared a lengthy, unproductive tangent coming on. I thought about telling her to forget it but decided I was talking to her on borrowed time as it was.

“Let … me … see,” she said, turning pages with agonizing slowness. “Yes. Yes, here it is.” Miss Pitts passed me the open volume.

There were two accounts, one from the
Banner,
a local paper, and one from the
Boston Globe.
Both were dated April 11, 1969. According to the local paper, Captain Telford Kinnington had led his company in a counterattack from an American position against a much larger Vietcong force that was engaging a separate sector of the position. Telford and nearly a quarter of his company (about 40 of 160) were killed or wounded, but the VC had been annihilated. The medal he’d received, however, was, in my experience, not a very substantial award for a heroic charge.

The
Globe
article implied between the lines that Telford Kinnington’s action had been unnecessary and reckless. It also indicated that he’d entered the service as a second lieutenant five years earlier and had only recently been promoted to captain—a long time to wait for his second bar in those casualty-ridden late sixties. I noted the part of the war zone involved and remembered that I knew someone from Military Intelligence who’d served there after I’d come home.

I then swung the conversation as delicately as I could back to the judge’s late wife. Miss Pitts was reluctant at first, but once I emphasized the importance of my knowing Stephen’s earlier life, our hostess lapsed into the nearly universal enthusiasm with which people discuss those who appear big but turn out to be little.

“Diane Kinnington was a terror, Mr. Cuddy, a demon from hell. The judge met her when he was in law school. At first she was an enchanting girl, and I served with her on several town committees just after their marriage. Diane continued to be active in town matters far into her pregnancy with Stephen. But for a while before he was born, she began acting … well, strangely. She appeared at committee meetings with alcohol on her breath. The woman walked past people she knew on the street as though she never saw them. Diane began wearing sunglasses even into the evening, and, despite two servants at the big house, she sometimes slipped into Carver’s, the small grocery store in Meade Center, to buy odd items. Then, one September night, something happened. I’ve never talked with anybody who knew just what. But Diane was hospitalized, and Stephen was born to her a few hours later, two months premature.”

“Miss Pitts, can you tell me who would know what happened that night?”

She frowned. “Yes, for all the good it would do. Her obstetrician couldn’t be reached in time, and Dr. Ketchum, who was the family’s doctor, rushed down and delivered her of Stephen. Doc Ketchum wouldn’t talk about it, and he died a few months later. The Kinnington house servants, a woman and her husband, were let go within a week, I suspected because they were supposed to be keeping an eye on Diane and somehow failed. They headed south somewhere. No one else that I know of was involved.”

“How did Mrs. Kinnington get to the hospital?”

“Her husband.”

“But surely, if she was admitted, there’d be records of what her trouble was.”

“Oh, she was admitted, all right, but into a private facility, if you get me.”

“A sanatorium?” I decided to use the “old parlance.”

“Yes, out in the Berkshires.”

Coincidence? “Does the name Willow Wood ring any bells?”

“What?”

“The name Willow Wood. Was that the sanatorium Diane Kinnington was in?”

Miss Pitts shook her head. “I don’t know. Though I think it was the same one Stephen stayed in.”

“What do you know about the night Diane died?”

A deep sigh. “Even less, I’m afraid. Just the newspaper stories, and I didn’t keep them. After Stephen was born, Diane seemed to rally back in spirit. Then, a few years later, she began to decline again. By the time Stephen reached my class, Diane had declined frighteningly. If her earlier conduct was strange, this later behavior was wicked. Drunkenness, rowdiness, and … well …”

“Miss Pitts, I know this must be difficult—”

“Oh, you know nothing, young man, nothing!” she snapped. “You ‘know’ I’m relatively old and therefore you ‘know’ that I’m patriotic and narrow-minded and a prude. Well, we may have felt strongly about some things when I was young, like love of country and order and respect. But perhaps we felt differently about other things than you think we did. And while we didn’t go around talking about those things, we nevertheless knew how to enjoy ourselves. But what we didn’t do was what Diane welcomed with every male who could unzip his trousers.”

“Message received and understood, Miss Pitts,” I said. She calmed down a bit, and Valerie gave me an approving smile. “What about Stephen thereafter?”

Miss Pitts sighed again. “He’d been so obviously affected by his mother’s behavior. He had become erratic in school, and then Diane showed up roaring drunk for a student-teacher conference, with a … a man waiting for her in the car. But, things must have been twice as bad at home. The day after Diane’s accident, the judge whisked Stephen away to the sanatorium. The school records don’t show it, but I’m sure that poor boy suffered a complete nervous breakdown. He returned to school the next year. Stephen had lost a year, but he seemed to be doing so well until now.”

“Do you remember anything else that might help us?” I asked.

“I’m afraid not. Although …”

“Yes?” prompted Valerie.

“Well,” she looked from Valerie to me, “there was a reporter named Thomas Doucette on the
Banner
at the time Diane Kinnington died. The rumor was that Thom had been assigned to the story and, well, covered it a little too well. Anyway, no article by him on the incident appeared in the paper, and he quit the
Banner
a few weeks later, though most people figured he was fired. Just as well actually. I fear Thom was the least gifted boy in my class of ’61, and certainly not destined for the Pulitzer Prize.”

“Does Mr. Doucette still live here?” I asked.

“In Meade? No, he’s somewhere in Boston now. At least that’s what I remember from his uncle’s funeral, which must have been, oh, two years ago. You might try his parents, though. They’re retired, too. Moody Street.”

I had run out of topics, so I decided to ask what was on my mind.

“One last point, Miss Pitts. What did Mrs. Kinnington say when you told her about seeing Gerry Blakey with Stephen?”

To my great surprise, she blushed and saddened. “Well, what could Eleanor say? She’d suspected as much, but had hoped against hope that her intuition was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?”

Miss Pitts suddenly stabbed several times at a box of tissues on the table next to her.

“Mr. Cuddy, Gerald Blakey is thirty years old and has never been seen in this town in the company of a woman. Isn’t that enough to be wrong about?”

She hurried from the room, crying.

“I
GUESS YOU DON’T
feel much like a picnic anymore, do you?”

Valerie and I were back in the car, and hers were the first words spoken since we’d left Miss Pitts.

“Actually, I’d love a picnic,” I said. Valerie beamed. “So long as the conversation level is low enough to give me some time to sort things out.”

“Terrific!” she said, and shook her hair down onto her shoulders.

“But first,” I said, “let’s be sure we can reach this Thomas Doucette character, class of ’61.”

Stopping at a gas station, I called Boston information. No Thomas Doucette nor T. Doucette. Then I tried the elder Doucettes. Again, no listing in Meade. Valerie suggested we stop at Moody Street and, with luck, see the Doucettes on our way to the beach.

She directed me up/down and left/right through semi-rural, increasingly narrow roads. If there was a poorer section of Meade, we’d found it. I pulled onto Moody Street and up to a small and old, but neatly kept, ranch house to which someone had added a little greenhouse. The mailbox had “Doucette” in paste-on letters. There were three or four similar homes on the street, but no sense of development or planning. It was as though the distance between houses was less a function of privacy or exclusivity and more a reaction to the undesirability of the intervening and uneven scrub-pine land.

A small, four-door American subcompact sat in the driveway, and a petite woman behind a screen door. We left our car and started up the path toward her.

She had watched us leave the car and approach her. Then she stepped outside, light blue hair and a troubled expression. “May I help you?”

“Yes,” said Valerie. “Are you Mrs. Doucette?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Doucette, I’m Valerie Jacobs. I teach eighth grade at the Lincoln Drive School. This is a friend of mine, John Cuddy. We’d like to contact your son, Thomas.”

By the time Valerie had finished, we were nearly to Mrs. Doucette. At the mention of her son’s name, however, mother stiffened, eyeing us both warily.

“Thomas doesn’t live here anymore,” she said carefully.

I felt I should “walk point” on this one. “We know.”

“He also likes his privacy,” Mrs. Doucette continued.

“Something everyone’s entitled to enjoy.”

Before I could continue, Valerie broke in. “Mrs. Doucette, we simply need to speak with him about a news story he covered years ago. A child’s safety is at stake.”

Mrs. Doucette’s eyebrows shot up. “The Kinnington boy?”

“That’s right,” said Valerie, flashing an ingratiating smile.

“Goddamn him!” Mrs. Doucette bit off the words in lieu of her tongue. “Goddamn him and his whole family!” She stormed into the house, slamming the screen door behind her. Mrs. Doucette then whirled. “And Goddamn
you
for reminding me of them!” She slammed the inner door.

“What the … ?” Valerie’s voice quavering.

“Val, you might not be cut out for this kind of work.”

I was back in the car and had it started by the time a frowning, frustrated Valerie Jacobs tired of knocking at the Doucettes’ door and began walking down to me.

She’d gotten over my teasing by the time we reached the parking lot of Meade’s swimming beach. We respectively entered a rustic, large cabin, “Men” on one side and “Women” on the other.

Coming out of the women’s side of the locker building, Val’s legs looked a little thicker than they had in the other outfits I’d seen her wear to date. The rest of her looked triple A, however. I got a slight flush when she flickered an appraising eye over my new physique. This was the first time I’d worn a pair of trunks in quite a while, and I decided I liked sporting the results that jogging, etc., had produced. We angled toward the water.

The long, man-made swimming beach edged into trees and picnic tables at one end and into a second parking lot at the other. The beach itself was nearly empty, most people being under the trees at the tables. Owning no sandals, I toughed out the blistering sand in bare feet. We finally pitched our blanket at what looked like a quiet spot about fifty feet to the left of a perfectly tanned elderly couple sitting and reading in half-legged sand chairs.

We talked around Eleanor Kinnington for a while before I brought the woman up.

“You know, Val, I’m on the verge of leaving this case.”

Her face was stricken. “Oh, please, John—please don’t!”

I rearranged my legs Indian-style on the blanket. “Look, I won’t be violating any confidence by telling you that my client did not mention word-one about Miss Pitts nor the scene with Stephen and Blakey. Those could be important links in the chain of her grandson’s disappearance, and if Mrs. Kinnington knew about them, she should have told me.”

Valerie faked a casual reaction by stretching out on her stomach, longways to the just-past-zenith sun. “Is the reason Stephen left really that important to your finding him?”

I leaned back. “Possibly, yes; probably, not, if he’s gone voluntarily.”

“But Mrs. Kinnington said she told you that the things he packed were only things he’d know to take.”

I closed my eyes. “Yeah, but that suggests only that Stephen decided—voluntarily—to leave. It doesn’t address what might have happened twenty feet from the Kinningtons’ back door.”

Valerie came up to her knees with a start. “Do you really believe something happened to him?”

“That’s just the problem. I’m not being helped by anybody in this case, or even permitted to gather the facts I could use to reach a decision like that.”

She put her hand on my right forearm and squeezed, a bit too long and a bit too hard. “John, you know that—”

The moment was broken by a loud and worthy curse from the elderly man next to us. Three boyish bruisers, built like college-football players, were laughing at him and his wife. He rose from his chair and shook a book-clutching fist at a sign I could barely read while he and his wife brushed sand off themselves.

“The goddamned sign says no goddamned ball-playing on the beach!” he yelled.

The biggest of the three, cradling the ball professionally in the crook of his arm, replied, “Fuck you, grandpa.”

“We’ll get the cops!” yelled the old man.