Empire Falls (70 page)

Otto was grateful to hear this possibility given voice. It was the very straw he’d been clinging to.

“I got a bad feeling, though,” the police chief added.

“Me, too, Bill, me, too.”

“Anyway, neither one of them’s here, so why don’t you go on home?”

He nodded, understanding that the only reason Bill Daws had wanted him there at all was in case the boy turned up. “I was thinking I’d go back in to school.”

“Whatever.”

“Did you notice that stake out back?”

“I did.”

“What do you make of it?”

“I’m trying not to think about it,” Daws admitted. “Listen, if this thing turns out bad, like I think it’s going to, we won’t be able to keep it quiet.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to.”

Dusk had fallen completely, and the two men heard the vehicles before the headlights cut through the darkness into the driveway. The first was some sort of police SUV with a German shepherd pacing anxiously in back. The other was Jimmy Minty’s Camaro, and when Zack got out Meyer noticed again that he was limping. His father went over and they exchanged a few words, the boy glancing over at the principal and shaking his head. Then he got back in the Camaro and drove off, back toward town.

“What was all that about?” Bill Daws wanted to know when Jimmy Minty joined them.

“I asked him if he wrote those notes,” Minty explained, looking at Otto. “He didn’t.”

Bill nodded, said nothing.

“How come you people want to blame my boy for everything?”

“What people are those?” Otto said.

“At the school. You. Coach Towne.”

Otto turned and looked Bill Daws in the face. “He wrote the notes.”

“Yeah?” Minty said. “Prove it.”

“All right,” Bill said in a way that made it clear he’d had enough of this. “See if you can get ahold of somebody at Central Maine Power,” he told Minty, effectively dismissing him. “We’ll need some temporary power at this house.”

The officer who’d driven the SUV now had the German shepherd on a leash. “Where do you want to start?” he called over. “Here at the house, I guess,” Daws said, his voice dispirited. “It’s over across the way we’ll find her, though.”

Which meant the police chief had thought of it too, and this relieved Otto’s fears that he might be the only one to whom such a horrible notion had occurred.

CHAPTER 28

J
ANINE GOT THROUGH
her midday step class, after which she was supposed to work the desk, checking members in and making the pain-in-the-ass protein shakes they served in the Fox’s Den, the small lounge of half a dozen tables where the workmen’s comp guys—assholes and scam artists every one—liked to hang out after their physical therapy. Janine hated to look at them even on a good day, which this certainly was not, not anymore, not after going to the bank. She was still wobbly about the knees, truth be told—and not because she’d done her advanced step class on an empty stomach, either. The idea of food, normally a sweet, forbidden fantasy, made her stomach roil—with what, she couldn’t imagine.

“Still no sign of that Voss boy, is there?” Mrs. Neuman, a short woman, had to peer around the cash register to see the TV hung from the ceiling in the Fox’s Den while she waited for Janine to key in her membership number. The noon news broadcast was signing off now, urging viewers to stay tuned for the soap that followed.

It had been five days since the woman’s body had been discovered at the old landfill, though it wasn’t really a body anymore. More of a skeleton, really, according to the newspaper, so little left after six months’ exposure that positive identification would have to await dental records, wherever they might be. Charlotte Owen had outlived not only her friends but also three Empire Falls dentists; the fourth, who apparently had her files, had retired somewhere in Florida. The boy, John Voss, had simply vanished.

“Just goes to show,” Mrs. Neuman intoned, “life is one big secret. You never even know who’s living right next door.” Which was not entirely apropos, Janine almost told her, since the old woman and the Voss boy hadn’t had any neighbors.

And anyway, never mind about not knowing who’s next door. Half the time you don’t even know who you’re marrying until you go to pick up your license and happen to see by pure chance how old the fucker really is. Then—talk about your secrets—just when you think you’ve straightened out the whole age thing and go ahead and marry the old fart anyway, against your better judgment, plus the advice of everybody you know, then you go to the bank and try to write a check on your joint account—and whammo! There you are, wondering all over again, just who
is
this son of a bitch anyway?

Not that Janine would say any of this to Mrs. Neuman. No more than she’d tell this human medicine ball to stop wasting her time and money at the club. Five days a week Mrs. Neuman showed up at one o’clock, a busy time in the exercise room, and did her leisurely stroll on one of the three working treadmills, reading the free magazines and pissing off the members who were interested in real workouts. At the rate Mrs. Neuman walked the goddamn treadmill, she could get as much good out of sitting in a chair and flipping through
TV Guide
.

“Imagine that?” Mrs. Neuman said. “You live to be eighty-some-odd-years old, and one day the good Lord decides you’re all done, and your own grandson takes you out to the dump and leaves you there. I swear to heaven, I just don’t know anymore.”

“Me either, Mrs. Neuman,” Janine said, picking up the phone to dial Amber, who was always looking for extra hours.

“Must’ve just slung that poor old woman over his shoulder,” the woman said, slinging her own workout bag over her own round shoulder, where it slipped off again halfway to the women’s locker room door. “Probably what’ll happen to me if it’s that one grandson of mine that finds me.”

“Not unless he rents a forklift,” Janine muttered, as the door swung shut behind her. “Get here as quick as you can,” she snapped into the phone when Amber agreed to come in and finish Janine’s shift, “before I do something I’ll regret.”

This exact opportunity presented itself the moment she hung up, when the workmen’s comp table called for another round of light beers, which they believed they could drink all afternoon without getting drunk or gaining weight, this despite the fact that they left drunk every afternoon, their heavy beer guts sloshing. The worst of the lot was Randy Danillac, who had been a year ahead of Janine, though he had no recollection of her in high school, though she’d stared at him dreamily for two straight years. She suspected that not one of these goldbricks was actually injured, but most at least had the decency to pretend. Danillac just preferred working two or three days a week instead of the full five, so he collected comp from one Empire Falls contractor and worked off the books for another in Fairhaven. According to medical affidavits, he was supposedly unable to stand up straight, a condition that didn’t prevent him from playing racquetball whenever he could find an opponent who didn’t mind being called names after every point.

“Why, thank you, darlin’,” he said when she delivered their round of light beers. He looked her over good, too, something she normally wouldn’t have minded, then gave her one of his crooked smiles. “Married life seems to agree with you. Nothin’ like gettin’ it regular, is there?”

When he said this, Janine finally glimpsed the appeal of the irony her ex-husband was always trying to get her to appreciate while she was trying to get him to appreciate sex. Irony was one of the many things wrong between them right from the start. Janine simply wasn’t the sort of woman—and she freely admitted this—who benefited from constantly having the concept of irony explained to her. Yet in the present instance the irony of her high school devotion, through her entire sixteenth and seventeenth years, to a man who grew up to become about the worst cheating rat bastard in town—well, it was inescapable. No, that wasn’t ironic. It was the fact that he’d finally noticed her and wanted to screw her that was ironic.

“You know what, Randy?” she said. “You can just eat me, okay?” And she was out the door before it occurred to him to take her up on the offer.

T
HE SAD TRUTH
, Janine had to admit as she drove over to the Empire Grill, was that she’d gone and divorced a man she could talk to and married one she couldn’t. Her need to talk to somebody right this second probably qualified as yet another irony. As was the realization that she missed Miles’s calm, quiet ways. Since the separation she’d grown nostalgic about them, and since marrying Walt, she’d begun to recall her old life with Miles with a wistful fondness, which she had to remind herself was simple lunacy. Sure, Miles had been a good listener, and a listener was exactly what she needed at this particular moment, but what they never told you was that good listeners could be maddening as hell. He had to
weigh
everything you told him, as if making sure that he understood every last nuance was the only thing standing between him and offering a perfect solution. Either that or he’d treat her like she was just talking to hear herself talk, which also drove her batshit. She’d tried explaining all this to her mother once, which was a mistake. For a bartender Bea wasn’t much of a listener, as quick with a diagnosis as Miles was slow. “What you don’t realize,” her mother told her, “is that it’s really
you
driving
yourself
batshit. You can’t ever be content with anything, even for a minute. Miles doesn’t say anything because there isn’t a damn thing
to
say.”

Which was why she was driving over to the Empire Grill instead of to Callahan’s. Better to talk to a man with no answers than a woman with all the wrong ones. Miles was also far less likely to say I-told-you-so, her mother’s favorite words. “Well, for heaven’s sake, Janine,” she could hear her mother say after she’d explained her discovery this morning that the Silver Fox, who was forever rubbing his chin in contemplation of his next move, whose only concern seemed to be timing, didn’t even have enough capital to invest in a week’s vacation out in Arizona, where they had all those good-looking Latino masseurs to rub you down with oil. “Whatever made you think that Walt Comeau
did
have two nickels to rub together?” her mother would ask, pure know-it-all that she was.

At least Miles could be counted on to sympathize with a person, to register surprise at the fact that Walt didn’t even own the building that housed his health club but rented it from that damn Whiting woman who owned the Empire Grill and half the town. Her husband also rented most of the equipment in the exercise room. Hell, there wasn’t a single aspect of the operation that wasn’t leveraged to the hilt. There were even two mortgages on that little piece-of-shit house he was renting out since he’d moved in with her. And if he actually owned that parcel out on Small Pond Road, where he was always thinking out loud they might build a camp one of these days, when the time was right, then Harold DuFresne down at Empire Fidelity didn’t know a damn thing about it—and he would, too, since everything else the Silver Fox “owned” was held by Harold as collateral on the health club. Walt had even borrowed money for the ring and the half-assed weekend honeymoon on the coast, during which it should’ve occurred to her, if she’d had a brain in her head, why Walt liked sex so much. It was free.

How in the world, she wanted to know, had she managed to put herself into a situation where the person she most wanted to unburden her soul to was the man she couldn’t wait to leave so she’d be free to create the mess? These were all ironies, no doubt about it, and she hated every one of the fuckers, even before she turned onto Empire Avenue and saw the Silver Fox’s van parked in front of the restaurant. Which meant she couldn’t very well have her talk with Miles, not with her husband sitting there at the counter. Life
was
secrets, as the horrible Mrs. Neuman said, and for better or worse—stupid words she’d said not once but twice—she was wed to both the Silver Fox and secrets she
had
to keep. He’d known all along, of course, that when Janine found out she’d just have to swallow everything whole. Worse, she knew the time to begin was right now. Just park next to her husband’s van, go inside and pretend that “getting it regular” agreed with her. Stand next to Walt and watch him lose their pennies to Horace at gin, then slip her hand in his trouser pocket and reassure herself of the one thing the dumb son of a bitch did have to offer.