Death Benefits (33 page)

“What’s up?” he whispered. “Did she signal?”

“I just saw a man in the second-floor window. He was a cop.”

“Damn,” whispered Stillman. “They’re staking this place out too.”

“Yeah,” Walker hissed. “But how? We didn’t know who the second man was. We never told them there was a second man.”

Even in the dim light, Walker could see Stillman’s eyes narrow. “Get Serena to her car. It’s time to get out.”

37

Walker made his way across the yard behind Gerald Bowles’s house, staying close to the rear wall so that a policeman at an upper window would have to lean out in order to see him.

He did not hear a window opening, so he moved to the next yard. It was a colonial house, but the back had been opened up a bit to accommodate a pair of French doors leading onto the patio. He could see into a dining room that had been decorated in an eighteenth-century style, with bright red walls and framed pictures in rows that went from just below the fourteen-foot ceiling nearly to knee level, a table with gracefully curved legs, and a huge sideboard. At the far end of the room he could see a narrow doorway that led down a corridor into the kitchen. There was a young woman in a green sweater, her shining blond hair pulled tight into a short ponytail. She turned to a counter, lowered her eyes, and poured two cans of cola into glasses. Walker slipped across the French doors and into the darkness beyond.

The next three houses had lighted windows too, but they were all smaller and higher, so he was able to crouch and move under them without slowing his pace. The fifth house was dark, so he turned and trotted down its driveway to Maple Street. He glanced back up toward Gerald Bowles’s house, but he could see no sign of the policemen inside, and the angle had become oblique enough so that the upper windows were less threatening. He hurried to a spot where the shadows on the pavement were deep, and rushed across to the other side.

He moved to the bush where he had last seen Mary, but she was not there. He whirled, staring frantically to all sides, then heard a low, breathy whistle, and followed it to the next house. She was up on the front porch, crouching behind the balustrade. He moved toward her, and she came down to meet him. He took her arm and hurried her toward the far side of the house, leaning close to whisper, “There are cops inside the house.”

She whispered back, “That’s a relief. I saw Stillman come out of a yard a block away and leave, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Walker kept scanning the street, now and then glancing back at the Bowles house to reassure himself that he was not taking Mary into a spot that was easily visible from the upper windows. When they had gone around the house to the back yard, he stopped and pointed. “The next street this way is Constitution. We’ve been up and down it a couple of times without seeing anybody.”

Mary moved across the next few back yards with him until they emerged beside one that faced Constitution Avenue. Walker stepped out onto the driveway and stood still for a moment, staring up the street toward the police station, then down toward the river. There seemed to be no cars out this late on the residential streets, and it had been at least two hours since he had seen his last pedestrian. He beckoned to Mary, then waited for her on the sidewalk.

When they had walked in silence for a block, he said quietly, “We don’t know what’s going on. We knew the police were putting a team at Scully’s house, but not this one.”

Mary looked at him in amazement. “You talked to the police, and then decided to pull a burglary?”

“It’s not what we had planned,” said Walker. “I guess that’s what’s been wrong since the beginning. We don’t have a strategy. We just react. Something bad happens, and we fall all over ourselves to get into the middle of it as fast as we can.”

He walked on a few paces. “We saw two men here, going into the coffee shop on Main. They were the same two who cornered us in an alley in Pasadena. We figured—or Stillman did—that they must be here for the same reason we were: to look for evidence that would connect them to Scully and the other dead man, who turned out to be Bowles. So we tried to get the police to arrest them. When the cops tried and the two men didn’t turn up right away, Stillman mentioned that they were here to break into Scully’s house. The police chief said he’d put cops there to catch them at it.”

“It seems as though you don’t have much to complain about,” she said. “They’re doing more than you asked them to.”

“That’s the problem,” Walker said. “We didn’t know about Bowles until you told us. How did they?”

They were coming up to Grant Street. Walker moved ahead, looked to the left, then the right, and froze. A man was turning off Main Street onto the sidewalk on Grant. As he moved away from the bright lights, he broke into a run. He was coming toward them.

Walker said quietly, “Try to look normal. If he’s okay, he’ll go past us on Grant. If he’s not, run for your car.”

He stepped off the curb to cross the street, his arm around Mary’s waist as though they were simply a couple out walking on a summer night, but Walker kept the man in the corner of his eye.

Mary said, “If I run, what are you going to do?”

Walker didn’t answer. He took a couple of deep breaths and looked at the next hundred feet of Constitution Avenue to pick the best spot to turn and fight, then looked back at Grant Street.

The man passed under the street lamp at the intersection, and Mary said, “Stillman.”

They stopped and Stillman trotted up to them, breathing heavily. “Glad I caught up with you,” he said. “The Explorer’s gone.”

“Gone? How can it be?” said Mary. “It was there when I drove into town. That can’t have been a half hour ago.”

Stillman’s breathing was already slowing. “Well, it’s sure as hell gone now. This would have been a hard place to steal a car today, so I’d say it’s been towed. I’d call the cops and ask, but my cell phone was locked in the glove compartment.”

“I don’t remember any ‘No Parking’ signs,” said Mary. “I remember looking, because I was going to—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Stillman interrupted. “We’ll just use your car and get out of here.” But Walker could tell that Stillman had concluded that it did matter.

They walked more quickly for the next block. Stillman was silent, but he seemed to be much more cautious than he had been earlier, and his face was grim. He would halt the others long before each intersection, then slowly move ahead while they waited. When he was still partially hidden by the corner house or its hedges, he would survey the cross street, peer up it toward Main, and then hurry across, not pausing to let Walker and Mary catch up until he was on the next dim stretch of sidewalk.

The second time he did it, Mary said to him, “When you went to the police station, whom did you talk to?”

“There were two rank-and-file cops and the chief of police,” said Stillman. “Look, don’t let your imagination run away with you. The cops in a town this size could hardly not know a guy like Scully, and probably anybody who would hang out with him. If they heard he was killed, they would naturally look for the other guy.”

“So why didn’t they tell us?” asked Walker.

“Why should they?” said Stillman.

Mary said, “Did you pick up any of their names?”

“Who?”

“The cops.”

Stillman was distracted, concentrating on the sights around him and the sounds on Main Street. “Uh . . . Raines. That was the chief.”

Walker said, “Another one was called Elton. And Carlyle. I remember hearing the name and wondering if he was related to the people who own the clothing store on Main.”

“Great,” Mary whispered to herself. “Just great.”

“What?” asked Walker.

She shook her head. “It’s nothing. This place is just giving me the creeps.”

Stillman turned to look into her eyes. “Anything I don’t know about?”

“It’s probably just me,” she said. “I spent a whole day in Concord reading old records and having Jonathan Tooker’s tall tales rattling around in my brain.” She walked on. “When I was doing Scully’s family tree, Myra kept bringing me all the papers she could find that came from Coulter. About twenty names kept popping up over and over. Coulter was a family name. And there were Scully, Holbrooke, Bowles, Ames, Derby, Perkins, Griggs, Starke, Fairweather, Gates . . . ” Her voice subsided.

“And?”

“Elton, Carlyle, and Raines,” she said reluctantly. “They’re all related to each other in six or seven ways by now. For all I know, if we did a blood test on the police chief, his DNA would be closer to Scully’s than Bowles’s is.”

“Let’s not scare ourselves,” said Stillman. “You could probably say the same in any small town east of the Appalachians. And in small towns, the police know who a man’s friends are. That’s probably the reason they knew enough to check Bowles’s house. Anyway, they’re doing it, so there’s nothing more we can do here except get into trouble.”

They were all silent as they reached Adams Street. Walker noticed that Stillman was making his precautions even more elaborate now. He did not cross Adams until he had stood and watched for at least thirty seconds.

When they caught up with him again, he was waiting beside a tree on the lawn of a dark house. Walker whispered, “Did you see something?”

“Not see,” said Stillman. “Feel. Maybe it’s just listening to Serena. What do you say we cut through a couple of back yards and pop out beside the car?”

“Sounds good to me,” said Walker. They moved to the space between two houses and turned to go across the back. The houses closer to the river seemed to be older, and the spaces between them larger. They moved through the next three yards; then Walker caught a glimpse of the street and recognized the spot. He said, “I’ve got the keys. Wait for me. When you hear the car engine start, you’ll know it’s okay.”

He slipped silently along the grassy side of the house. He could see a few of the lights in the windows of the Old Mill Restaurant across the river, and now he picked up faint voices floating across from its parking lot. It seemed terribly distant and unreachable, like a place in a painting. He moved closer to Washington Street, and now he could tell that the voices weren’t coming from the restaurant. They seemed nearer. He reached the corner of the last house, bent low, and moved forward to get a view of Washington Street. Mary’s car was gone.

38

Stillman and Mary followed Walker along the side of the house toward the front and looked out onto Washington Street. They could see the lighted windows of the Old Mill Restaurant across the river. Stillman slowly, cautiously sidestepped farther out, his back still to the clapboard siding, and peered up the street and along the banks of the river to the south.

Mary moved up beside Walker. “Why would they tow my car?”

But Stillman said, “Look at that.” He pointed and they looked to see the men walking along the riverbed. “Five lights,” he said. There were two wide-beamed spotlights that shone ahead of the men on the pebbly shoreline, two that played along the opposite bank, and one that swept methodically back and forth on the surface of the water. The lights on the ground ahead made the men’s dark silhouettes stand out clearly. There were six walking abreast, and each carried what appeared to be a short-barreled pump shotgun like the ones police used.

Stillman leaned out farther and craned his neck, then pulled back to let the others see. There were lights from a second group of men about the same size moving away from them in the opposite direction. Stillman stepped back along the side of the house a few feet and leaned close to whisper.

“That’s probably why they towed the car,” he said. “They seem to think those fellows are hiding along the river. They may even think it’s their car. It’s possible somebody saw the two of us down there and called the cops.”

“Wait,” said Walker. He was staring over Stillman’s shoulder at the Old Mill Restaurant. A dark blue van had pulled over the bridge and into the parking lot. Two uniformed policemen climbed out and walked into the restaurant.

Behind the windows, they could see that there was some kind of commotion going on. People were standing up from their tables. Others passed quickly across a window, as though they were getting out of the way. A police patrol car crossed the bridge and parked at an angle by the van, and two more cops hurried inside.

After a few minutes, the door of the restaurant swung open, and people began to appear. There were a pair of policemen, then a waiter, who pushed through the door and held it open. The two cops went to the van. One slid the side door open while the other climbed up into the driver’s seat.

The next one out was a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt wearing handcuffs that kept his arms behind him and made walking awkward. Behind him was a policeman gripping his biceps. Walker said, “He’s not one of them. They got the wrong guy. He’s just a tourist. I saw him at lunch today with his wife and kids.”

The next one out was the wife, and she was handcuffed too. Walker waited in dread. When he had seen them earlier, they’d had two children with them. But none of the next three prisoners were children. There was an elderly couple, and a man who had a fishing hat that looked as though it had been placed on his head by somebody else.

Walker waited for the two children to appear, but the waiter who had been holding the door open went back into the restaurant and swung it shut behind him. Walker didn’t quite dare feel relief. The five prisoners were moving their heads and opening their mouths as though they were talking loudly, but Walker could not hear what they were saying. The young mother appeared to be the most angry. As the policemen pushed the others into the van, she pivoted to face one of the cops. She stood straight with her shoulders back, and Walker could see from the way she held her head up to look down her nose at the cop that what she was saying was not calculated to make him happy.

The cop finished guiding the older man into the opening of the van, then turned to reach for the woman’s arm, as he had done with the others. She twisted her body angrily to pull the arm out of his reach, but the cop seemed to have been waiting for this. He extended his reach, spun her body around, and gripped her hair from behind. He jerked her head back and dragged her to the van. Instead of stopping at the side door as he had done before, he stepped up into the van without letting her go. Walker could see her legs working quickly to keep up with him, then to push herself up into the van to stop the pain. The feet slid inward on the floor, and one of the cops from the patrol car pushed the door shut and banged the side of the van twice before he went back to join his partner.

The van pulled forward, swung around in a wide circle and out of the parking lot, crossed the bridge onto Main Street with the patrol car behind it, then was lost to sight behind the buildings.

Walker whispered, “They’re tourists. How can the police think they have anything to do with this?”

Mary said softly, “What if they’re looking for us?”

“We’re just witnesses. I don’t think they’d look this hard for witnesses,” Stillman said. “Besides, they’ve seen us. Two of us, anyway. They know what we look like. Nobody’s going to mistake that girl down there for Max Stillman.”

“Then what are they doing?” asked Mary.

“Probably something happened in the restaurant,” said Stillman. “A fight in the bar or something. If you’re looking for two men, you don’t arrest four and throw in a girl for equal-opportunity purposes.”

“You mind if we get away from the river?” said Walker. “Everything seems to be going on down here.”

“Hold on a little longer,” Stillman said. “If you’re not where everything’s going on, you won’t know what it is.”

They crouched between the two houses, watching. After the disturbance at the Old Mill, the night subsided into quiet again. Walker could hear frogs peeping somewhere in the shallows on the other side of the river. The men who had been walking the banks with flashlights had long ago moved beyond his sight, and had not returned. Time passed, and its passage was soothing, making the shock and alarm of the scene outside the restaurant slowly diminish. He sat down beside Mary near the back of the house, and after a time she leaned on his chest and burrowed to place his arm over her shoulder. She whispered, “Walker, are you scared?”

The question should not have surprised him, but it did. It was what he had asked Stillman once. He had no answer at first. The word didn’t seem to describe what he felt tonight. He was aware that there was danger out there in the riverbed and maybe even on the streets in this neighborhood, but he had begun to feel that he knew how to stay away from it for the moment. He searched for another term, but each seemed to be unsatisfactory because it complicated the feeling rather than elucidating it.

“I think it’s probably not as bad as it feels right now,” he said. “Seeing the cop grab that woman by the hair, that was horrible, upsetting. Maybe we’ll get to testify for her when she sues the town.”

“If they can get a jury around here that isn’t related to the cop,” said Mary. She sat up in sudden frustration and looked toward the front of the house. “What’s keeping him?” Her body became very still, and she slowly rose to her feet, not taking her eyes away from the slice of clear space between the houses. As she took a step forward, Walker heard her mutter to herself, “What now?”

Walker was on his feet, moving past her to Stillman’s side at the front of the house. Beyond the river and the Old Mill, far across the open fields where the road cut between the hills, there were headlights. He saw lights moving into the woods where the loop in the river brought it back and the covered bridge crossed it. The lights came out of the woods toward the empty fields, past the two old barns. He counted eight sets of lights, then ten, then fourteen. The first of them made the final turn and the headlights swung and settled, aiming along the straight stretch so the brightness seemed to build and the glow cast shadows of trees on the walls of the old buildings on this side of the river.

“Have you figured out what it is?” asked Walker.

“It’s not our two burglars,” Stillman answered. He pointed at the parking lot beside the Old Mill. “They seem to be expected.”

There were police cars in the lot again, this time four of them. There were a couple of policemen out of their cars and standing by the entrance to the lot. When the headlights of the first car to arrive shone on them, the cops waved the driver into the lot, and kept waving. As each car after it came within range, the cops waved it in toward the row of parking spaces at the wall of the building near the front door. “It looks to me like the party of forty they were getting ready for this afternoon has arrived,” said Stillman.

As each car parked, the occupants opened their doors and got out. They all seemed to be men, most of them in pairs, but some in threes or fours. There were cops near the door of the restaurant who moved along the row of cars, shaking hands with the newcomers, talking, gesturing. A few of the men went into the restaurant, but most of them walked around in the lot, talking with men from other cars. As more cars arrived, the drivers and passengers gathered into an amorphous crowd.

They did not look to Walker as though they had come for a party—at any rate, not the same party. Some of them wore jeans, some pressed pants and sport coats, and a few wore ties. One of the police cars started and made a wide turn, throwing its headlights on the row of parked cars. “The cars all look new,” said Walker.

The police car pulled to one end of the row and stopped, and another pulled up at the other end. Stillman said, “Now, why do you suppose the police would come to the party?”

Something else was going on now. The men were moving, forming themselves into two ragged lines near the two police cars. Policemen opened the trunks of their cars, and the lines began to inch forward. As each man arrived at the back bumper of a police car, the cop leaning into it handed him a short-barreled pump shotgun. The man would move around the car and stop at the hood, where there was a big cardboard carton. He reached in and took a box of shells out of it, stood apart a few yards, filled his pockets with shells, and handed the rest of the box to the man nearest him, who would do the same. Others would stop to push a few shells into their shotguns’ magazines before they did anything else.

“Looks like reinforcements,” said Walker. “Maybe cops from other towns?”

Mary tapped Stillman and Walker both on their shoulders. “Can we please go now?”

“I’d like to see which direction they’re going first,” said Stillman. “When you see a man with a shotgun, it’s better to be behind him than in front.”

Almost all the men were carrying their shotguns differently now, with the muzzle upward, so Walker could tell that they were loaded. The men began climbing back into their cars. There was a discussion between one of the cops and the driver of the lead car, and then they began to move. The first one came up over the bridge, turned right onto Washington Street, and stopped to wait for the others, only fifty or sixty feet from their hiding place.

Stillman said, “Now we can go.” He hurried back the way they had come. When he reached Mary, he pulled her along with him. They moved through the yards they had crossed on the way to the river. When they reached the first cross street, Stillman stopped and looked both ways, then ran across, and kept running up the sidewalk on Constitution Avenue. It was several blocks before he decreased his pace.

“What is it?” asked Mary. “What are they doing?”

“They’re getting ready to make a sweep,” said Stillman. “It’s not a good time to be outdoors. We’d better head for the church.”

Mary said, “The church?”

But Stillman set off again at a run. Mary let out a sigh and set off after him. Walker kept his eyes on Mary as they ran, but he sensed that she was not having trouble keeping up. He knew that she was frightened and confused, but she seemed to have made a decision to hold those feelings apart for now and concentrate on the need to run. After a few more blocks, Walker could tell that Stillman was beginning to feel the strain of the long hours and the running, but Mary looked like any young woman out for a jog on a summer night. She ran with her fists clenched and her head up, her knees rising high. He found himself wishing she had a dog, or a pair of earphones over her ears, instead of two male companions.

When they reached the back of the church, they stopped in the shadowy space behind the building to let their breathing slow and their hearts stop pounding. Walker said, “I’ll go around and see if it’s still open.”

Mary’s hand came up and pressed against his chest. “I’ll go. They haven’t seen me.” She slipped around the building toward the front. Walker and Stillman followed as far as the front corner, staying close to the wall to avoid straying into the lights from Main Street. Walker waited a few seconds, but found waiting unbearable. He stepped around the corner and saw her leaning hard to push open the heavy front door, and hurried across the facade and up the steps with Stillman’s breaths huffing in his ear. When they were inside and the big door closed behind them, it was too dark to see anything.

Mary whispered, “I’ve still got the little flashlight.”

“It’ll show through the windows,” said Stillman. “Let your eyes get used to the dark.” His voice told Walker he was slowly edging toward the doorway of the cloak room.

Walker took Mary’s hand. “Come away from the entrance.” They found the wall and the doorway by touch. When they were in the cloak room, she slipped her hand out of his. “This isn’t a great hiding place.”

Walker said, “The steeple is above us, and there’s a belfry at the top. We’ve been up there.” He lifted her hand and set it on one of the varnished slats attached to the wall. “This is the ladder.”

She was silent for a few seconds. “I think I see it. That square way up there?”

Walker asked, “Are you afraid of heights?”

“Of course I’m afraid of heights,” she snapped.

“Stillman can go up first, and then you,” said Walker. “I’ll be under you, and if anything . . .  happens, I’ll catch you.”

Stillman’s voice came out of the dark. “He’s easily dumb enough to do it, you know.” Stillman set his toe on the lowest wooden slat and began to climb.

Mary said to him, “If you fall, don’t expect me to catch you.”

“I’ll use extra caution.” He kept climbing, and soon they heard him lift the cover off the hatch. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so they saw his legs grow shorter and disappear into the deeper darkness above.