Cutter's Run (4 page)

And when I did get out of the car, she’d clamp her arms around my neck and press herself against me. Then she’d grab my hand, lead me out back to the deck, and instruct me to sit there and relax. She’d disappear inside and emerge a few minutes later with beers in frosted mugs, a bowl of crackers, and a wedge of extra-sharp Maine cheddar on a platter. We’d sit there smoking and munching and sipping beer and telling amusing stories about what had happened to us during the week, and when she got up to get more beer, I’d follow her inside. Generally we ended up having our second round in the bedroom.

On this particular Friday afternoon, I had an appointment with Franny Halloran at the BMW dealership in Lynnfield. My old Beemer had close to two hundred thousand miles on her. Commuting from Boston to Garrison, Maine, every weekend piled them on fast. It was time for a new car.

When I started driving BMWs nearly twenty years ago, they didn’t symbolize anything. They were just well-made, responsive automobiles that tolerated considerable abuse and were fun to drive. Then someone decided they were status symbols. Anyone who drove one had to be a yuppie.

I’m not quite sure what a yuppie really is. But I’m pretty sure it’s not anything I aspire to become.

I’d thought about switching to a Volvo or a Saab or even a Ford, just because I hate facile labels and status symbols. But people can make every car into a symbol of something, even the banged-up old Wrangler I got for exploring the old woods roads around Garrison. So I said the hell with it and decided to get myself another Beemer.

I’d ordered a dark green sedan with a sunroof, a CD player, and top-of-the-line speakers. Franny had called on Wednesday to say it had come in. All the paperwork would be done by Friday afternoon, in time for me to pick it up on my way to Maine.

I hadn’t told Alex about it. It would be a fun little surprise for her. When I got there, maybe we’d take a spin through the countryside. I knew she’d love listening to a Beethoven CD and having the breeze from the open sunroof blow through her hair.

I called her from the office a little after noontime. “I might be a little late,” I said.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ve just got a bunch of stuff to clean up here at the office, that’s all.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Well, okay.” Another pause. “Are you all right, Brady?”

“Sure. A little hassled, that’s all.”

“Well, take your time. Don’t get a speeding ticket.”

I got to the BMW place around three, but it turned out that there’d been some confusion with the insurance company and they hadn’t run the papers over to the Registry yet. Franny was full of apologies and said I could come back on Monday.

I decided to wait. I wanted that car.

So I didn’t get started to Maine until after five, and then I hit the Friday-afternoon rush-hour traffic heading north on Route 95. It took twenty minutes to creep through the tollbooth at Hampton, and it was after eight by the time I pulled into Alex’s driveway.

She was not waiting on the front steps, nor did she come bounding out of the house when I slammed the door of my shiny new BMW.

I found her in a rocking chair on the deck out back. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt—not a dress—and she was holding an empty beer bottle on her lap.

I leaned down and kissed her forehead. “Hey, babe,” I said.

“Hi,” she mumbled without looking up.

“You wouldn’t believe the traffic,” I said. “The Hampton tollbooth was—”

“Don’t,” she said.

“Don’t what?”

“Just don’t.”

“Were you worried,” I said, “or were you jealous? Or maybe both?”

“That’s not fair,” she said.

“I’m sorry. You’re right.”

“I had a dress on,” she said softly. “The one with the scoop neck you like. I even put on lipstick, for Christ’s sake. And perfume on my throat and—and inside my thighs, and…”

“Listen,” I said. “I’ve got—”

“After a while,” she said quickly, “I said, Fuck him, and I washed my throat and legs and wiped off the lipstick and put my jeans back on. And then I sat out here sucking on a beer bottle and wondering if you were coming at all. And I’m thinking, He just doesn’t give a shit, and at the same time I’m also thinking, Oh, God, he smashed into a bridge abutment on Route 95.”

I took her hand. “Come on,” I said. “I’ve got something to show you.”

She allowed me to help her up from the chair. I kept hold of her hand and led her down off the deck and around to the front of the house, where my sleek forest-green BMW sat.

I put my arm around her shoulder. “How about that?” I said.

She hesitated for a minute. Then she said, “It’s nice, Brady.”

“Nice? Hell, it’s got a CD player, Bose speakers, sunroof…”

I stopped. Alex had slipped away from my arm and was standing there, staring off into the woods.

“Don’t you like it?” I said.

“Sure. It’s fine.”

I sighed. “What’s the matter?”

She turned to face me. “Has it got four-wheel drive?”

“Well, no.”

“How is it on ice, in the snow?”

“Terrible. You know how Beemers are. Remember the trouble I had getting up your driveway last winter…?”

“Exactly.”

Then I got it. A BMW was not a Maine car. A man who’d buy a new BMW did not care whether he could make it over poorly plowed winter roads and up icy driveways. A man who lived in Boston and bought a new BMW was not fully committed to a relationship with a woman who lived in Garrison, Maine.

It wasn’t the car. It was the thought—or the lack of thought—behind it.

“I’ll be here every weekend,” I said to Alex.

“Let’s hope for a mild winter.”

“Look—”

“Don’t worry about it, Brady.”

“You’re reading way too much into this,” I said.

“Am I?”

“Yes,” I said. But I realized that, in a way, Alex was right. When I’d decided to turn in my old Beemer for a new one, I had never once thought about driving to Maine in the winter. That was probably more significant than I was willing to admit.

We stood there in uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Then Alex said, “How about a beer?”

“Sure.”

We went back to the deck. Alex sat in one of the rockers and I fetched two bottles of Pete’s Wicked from the refrigerator.

I handed one to her and sat beside her. “Look,” I said. “About the car.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it.”

“Okay,” I said.

So we watched the night birds swoop against the sky and sipped our beers. “I meant to tell you,” said Alex after a few minutes. “I invited Noah Hollingsworth and Susannah and Paul over for supper tomorrow night.”

“Yeah, okay.”

“You’ll like them,” she said. “They’re eager to meet you.”

“Me,” I said. “Your hero.”

She reached over and touched my arm. “You are.” She sighed in the darkness. “I just wish…”

“What do you wish, honey?”

“I guess I wish I were your heroine.”

“You are.”

“Sure I am.” She laughed quickly. “I bought T-bones,” she said. “Feel like grilling them?”

“Absolutely,” I said with what was supposed to sound like cheerful enthusiasm. “I’m starved.”

I was standing guard by the charcoal grill a half hour later when Alex came out onto the deck. She handed me an envelope. “This came in the mail yesterday.”

It was addressed to me, handwritten in green ink. A fountain pen, it looked like. Elegant penmanship. Mr. Brady Coyne, c/o Alexandria Shaw, Garrison, Maine, postmarked Garrison, no return address on the envelope.

I opened it and took out a folded sheet of expensive stationery that matched the envelope. The writing was in the same green ink. “Dear Mr. Coyne,” it read. “Thank you so much for all your kindnesses. I have decided to have those tests done on Jack. I’d like to talk with you as soon as possible.” It was signed, “Sincerely, Charlotte Gillespie.”

I showed it to Alex.

“Sounds important,” she said.

I nodded.

“What’s she want to talk about?”

“I don’t know. When I visited her, she hinted that something was on her mind. She said she wasn’t ready to talk about it. I guess now she is.”

“Didn’t you say she refused to okay an autopsy on her dog?”

“She didn’t exactly refuse,” I said. “But she was reluctant. I guess she changed her mind.”

“Or something changed her mind for her.”

“Swastikas,” I said.

L
EON’S STORE SOLD GASOLINE
and diesel fuel from the three pumps out front and just about everything else inside, from beer to panty hose to
Penthouse
magazines to night crawlers. In the back, four stuffed chairs bracketed an old-fashioned potbellied stove, and most mornings you’d find a few locals sitting around it drinking coffee and gossiping.

Leon’s was, literally, an old-time Maine mom-and-pop store. Leon and Pauline Staples, a pair of Garrison natives straight out of a Grant Wood painting, had inherited the place from Leon’s father back in the sixties and had been running it ever since. They opened at six every morning and closed at eight at night—except during deer season, when they opened for coffee and doughnuts and 30/30 cartridges at four-thirty.

It was a little after nine on Saturday morning when I pulled up beside Leon’s ancient silver-colored four-wheel-drive Dodge van in the gravel parking area out front. I got out of my Wrangler, climbed the three wooden steps to the porch, and went in. The bell over the door jangled when I pushed it open. The boys at the woodstove in the back glanced up at me, then resumed their conversation. I took a skinny Saturday
Globe
from the rack and brought it to the cash register. Leon was sitting on a stool behind the counter eating a doughnut.

“Mornin’, Mr. Coyne,” he said.

“How’s it going, Leon?”

He shrugged. “Same as always,” he said. “Nothin’ much changes, don’t you know.” Leon Staples had a weathered, ageless face and a shock of unruly black hair, with pale penetrating eyes and shaggy black eyebrows. He was a big, lanky man, with sloping shoulders and strong, gnarly hands. He looked to be somewhere in his early fifties, although I could’ve been off by ten years on either side.

I leaned across the counter to him. “Leon,” I said quietly, “do you know anything about somebody around here who likes to paint swastikas on other people’s property?”

He blinked and jerked his head back. “Swastikas?”

“You know, the Nazi—”

“Hell’s bells, I know what a swastika is. I had two uncles got killed at Normandy.” He shook his head. “Swastikas,” he mumbled. “Why you askin’ about swastikas?”

“Someone spray-painted one on the No Trespassing sign at the end of Charlotte Gillespie’s roadway.”

“She ain’t a Jew, is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Would that make a difference?”

“Not to me, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “That ain’t why I asked.” He shrugged. “Goddam ignorant kids, more’n likely. Never seen a colored person before. Or maybe it’s just their way of sayin’ they’re pissed off she posted her property.”

“Her dog was poisoned,” I said.

“Poisoned, huh?” Leon shook his head. “You mean it got into something.”

“Maybe.”

“You think that swastika, and her dog…”

“I don’t know, Leon. What do you think? You know everything that goes on in this town.”

“Well, I don’t know nothin’ about swastikas or poisoned dogs, Mr. Coyne. But I tell you what. I’ll keep my ears open. Let you know if I hear anything. We don’t need no goddam swastikas in this town. And anyone who’d poison a dog…”

After I left Leon’s store, I swung by the Garrison Veterinary Hospital and Kennels. I found the waiting room empty. I stood there for a minute or two before I noticed a bell on the counter, the kind that summons a bellboy at an old hotel. I tapped it with my forefinger, and a moment later Dr. Spear emerged from the back room, drying her hands on a towel. When she saw me, she smiled and said, “Oh, hello, Mr. Coyne.” She tossed the towel onto a chair and leaned her elbows on the counter. “To answer your question, yes, the dog’s all taken care of.”

“Have you got the results yet?”

She frowned. “Pardon?”

“From the autopsy.”

She shook her head. “There was no autopsy.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ms. Gillespie took back her puppy.”

“Oh,” I said. Charlotte’s note had indicated she wanted the autopsy done. “What did Charlotte say when she picked him up?” I said.

“Oh, she didn’t come for him. Not Ms. Gillespie herself. She sent somebody for him.”

“Really,” I said.

Dr. Spear arched her eyebrows. “You seem surprised.”

I told her about the note Charlotte had sent me.

“Well,” said the vet, “I guess she changed her mind. Her dog, I’m sure, received a nice burial.”

“This person who picked up Jack,” I said. “Did you get a name?”

Dr. Spear cocked her head. “Now why would you ask me that?”

I shrugged. “I guess I just thought Charlotte didn’t have any friends, that’s all. Living out there in the woods like that, no phone or anything. Seemed like she just wanted to be alone.”

She nodded. “He didn’t give us a name, Mr. Coyne, and we didn’t ask. He knew the dog’s name and Ms. Gillespie’s name, and who else would want a dead dog?” She frowned. “Is there a problem?”

I shook my head and smiled. “No, I’m sure there’s no problem. But it was a man? What did he look like, do you remember?”

“I never saw him. We were really busy. I was working on an animal in one of the examining rooms, and one of the girls came back, said someone was asking for the pup. I told her I wanted to speak to Ms. Gillespie, ask her to wait for a minute. I was hoping I might talk her into okaying the tests. But my girl said it wasn’t her, it was some man, and he was in a hurry. That seemed reasonable to me, so I had her take the pup out the rear entrance. Don’t like to bring dead animals out through the waiting area, you know.”

“Maybe when you see that girl, you can ask her if she remembers the man.”

She nodded. “Sure can. I hope I haven’t done something wrong.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was a cool Saturday morning near the end of August. On the ride over to Charlotte’s, I noticed that the swamp maples had begun to show flashes of crimson, and the smell of autumn was in the air. A long Maine winter was not far behind. I thought of Charlotte up there in her little isolated house with neither telephone nor electricity, snowbound and alone.