No Way Home (12 page)

Bakinowski tossed an arm along the top of the bench. “What’s it take to get a rise out of you, Chief?”

“Why should you want to?”

“I’m trying to get you to talk. When you’re with me you got little to say and less to offer. That’s aggravating.”

“You have my theory.”

“MacGregor told me all about the thing at the school. The motive doesn’t fit the crime. Even if it did, it wouldn’t wash. This Junior Rayball, he’s slow, right? He doesn’t think complicated. He wanted revenge, he’d go for MacGregor himself, not the girlfriend. Am I making sense to you?” Bakinowski sighed. “I see I’m not. You got the bug up your ass. You want, I’ll grill the Rayballs myself.”

Morgan shook his head hard. “The old man would spit in your face, and Junior would sink into his shell.”

“So what are you telling me?”

“I’ll handle them my own way.”

“What way’s that, Chief? You playing a
High Noon
sort of guy? Let’s say you’re right, I’m wrong. Or let’s say you just plain piss the Rayballs off. They’re like hillbillies, right? Worst scenario is you getting shot up in a bang-bang.”

Morgan’s gaze returned to the rockery, where a butterfly was flaunting its beauty. Pointing, he said, “See those lilies, the batch of creamy white ones. Like fashion models, aren’t they?”

“I’m trying to talk sense, you give me flowers.”

“And those pink lilies. They could be debutantes surging out of their green gowns.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Chief.” Bakinowski rose from the bench and buttoned his suit jacket, which was tailored to accommodate his weapon. “Unlike you, I don’t have pussy on the brain.”

Morgan crossed the green alone, the day’s heat creeping up on him. His car was parked near the library. As he approached it, Orville Farnham, who operated a family insurance agency, greeted him, immediately mentioned the weather, and commented on the state of the economy. Farnham carried a face never at rest, the contours shifting, the creases tightening or widening, and he talked loud as if he did not want his real thoughts heard. Finally he said, “How’s the Lapham case going?”

“We’re expecting a break,” Morgan said.

“Hope it comes soon. Otherwise rumors get out of hand. You hear all kinds of crazy things.”

“You know what rumors are worth, ille.”

“I do, Chief. Worth no more than dog spit on a french fry.” His face grew full with his voice, and abruptly he slapped Morgan’s arm. “I’m with you a hundred percent. We all are.”

Morgan climbed into his car, which the sun had heated. Quite sharply he was aware of his own breathing and the heaviness of his face. Sometimes he wearied of being a cop and of trying to see through people. He wanted things to be as they seemed. From the dash came a crackle and then Meg O’Brien’s voice: “You there, Chief?”

He activated the speaker. “I am.”

“I’ve been trying to reach you.”

“Anything important?”

“Lydia Lapham,” she said.

• • •

Arlene Bowman did not serve tea. She poured sherry and said, “This is to make you relax. You’re stiff as a board.”

“Am I?” Christine Poole said simply and accepted the sherry without protest. She had dressed for the occasion only to find Arlene Bowman looking absolutely stunning in designer jeans. The room they sat in held exquisite things, porcelain, crystal, the finest of furniture, and at the same time conveyed comfort and casualness. A battered book lay open on a window seat. The ghost of a water stain lurked in the gloss of an end table. Christine, deciding on the spot not to play games, said, “Whatever may have been between James Morgan and me is over.”

Arlene Bowman, sitting in a plush love seat with her legs curled beneath her, smiled. “Why do you feel you had to tell me that?”

“It’s why you asked me here, isn’t it?”

“Not entirely. Our husbands know each other quite well. Why shouldn’t we?”

“I don’t know. I’d like you to tell me.”

“For openers, you’re an intelligent woman. I like intelligent women. Bring two together, the world becomes bigger. Do you believe that? I do.”

The sun flared against the high windows, a torch on the glass, but the room was cool. Potted plants thrived. Christine sipped her sherry and set her eyes upon a handsome black-and-white photograph, framed in silver, of two children, a boy and a girl who looked as if they had not been born but dreamed up. Perfect features, pleasing smiles, the boy as beautiful as the girl. “Gorgeous youngsters,” she said. “Obviously yours.”

“And Gerald’s. I give him credit, or blame, as the case may be. They’re now in the turbulence of adolescence. Both are at Phillips, Exeter, not Andover, and for the summer both are in Outward Bound, which Gerald says will straighten them out. Tell me about your children.”

She had two sons from her first marriage, one studying for the bar exam in New York and the other with the Peace Corps in Kenya. She did not mention that her elder son had his father’s features, which put joy in her eyes but a needle in her heart.

“And where are you from originally, Christine?”

New York, she told her. Her father had been a litigation lawyer in one of the city’s larger firms. The sherry was making her voice lazy. “That’s how I met my husband. My first husband. He was Dad’s protege, and Dad brought him home to dinner.”

“From the stuff of that they used to make movies,” Arlene Bowman said. “My father took his life in the comfort of a Cadillac in a closed garage, the motor running.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It was a cowardly thing to do. I was at Wellesley at the time, senior year. I married Gerald soon after graduating. I knew he was going places.”

Christine had a clear image of Gerald Bowman from socials at the country club. His grooming was correct in each particular, his manner whispered privilege and power, his polish was of a boardroom table, and his gestures seemed guided by inside information. She remembered him snapping fingers at a waitress.

Arlene Bowman was on her feet. “I shouldn’t,” Christine said but relinquished her empty glass.

Over a second sherry Arlene Bowman said, “Marriage is a funny business. The woman’s a sponge soaking up her husband’s acrimony and her children’s fussing. I’ve tried to avoid that role.”

“Your view of marriage isn’t exalted, is it?”

“I’ve never believed a man would bring magic into my life. Money, yes. Status, comfort, a certain degree of affection — but magic, no.”

“It depends on the man,” Christine replied, loyal to a memory, to a phase of existence when she had cooked everything in wine and bought coffee by the bean.

“Tell me about him, that first husband of yours.”

The memory burned as old feelings reasserted themselves. Her tongue loosened. “He died after lovemaking. My arms were still around him. I thought he had gone to sleep. Then I knew. I can’t describe what the weight was like. To this day, when Calvin’s on me, I feel like an open grave.”

“Good God,” Arlene Bowman said in a low voice.

“No man since has managed to touch the right chord in me.”

“Not even James Morgan?”

Leaning back in her chair, she was amazed, even appalled, at what she was telling this woman, which did not stop her. “He’s come the closest,” she confided.

“To the chief.” Arlene Bowman spoke with only faint irony in raising her crystal glass, the sherry fluttering. “He’s handsome enough, quite virile, but not really our sort, is he? I wonder why we should have bothered with him.”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean by that.” She was fully aware but unprepared to defend him.

“Then I’ll let it ride.”

She lifted herself from the chair and gave quick tugs to her summery white dress of scaled silk. Her legs were steady; it was her head that worried her. “I really must go.”

“I like the dress.”

“Thank you.”

They walked together to the foyer, where she paused to apply lipstick, the shade long ago popular. Their eyes met in the mirror. “You’re an attractive woman, Christine. You’d be even more attractive if you lost some weight.”

“I know that.”

“Do you play tennis?”

“I’m not in shape for that.”

“Then let’s get you in shape. Are you free tomorrow morning?”

She hesitated. “I’m not sure. Why?”

“Don’t ask,” Arlene Bowman said. “I’ll pick you up at nine.”

She felt her blood run quick when she stepped out into the burn of the afternoon. Day lilies lit the air, a robin flew off and evaporated in the heat. Stepping into her car, she had a vague suspicion that she had been manipulated, entered into a game yet to be explained, the rules negotiable. She drove away with a wary sense of adventure.

• • •

The day before, after landing at Logan, he had rented a car and driven up Route 93 to the town of Andover, the outskirts, where he checked into a motor inn and out of habit used a false name. He spent the greater part of the evening in the bar, where the lonely, the unfaithful, and occasionally the desperate hung out. He sat knee to knee with a woman at a miniscule table that accommodated no more than their drinks and an ashtray. She was naive with men, always sticking her face up to be kissed and deceived. Her mouth hardened into a smile that would last the evening.

Later, in his room, he numbered the lines in her face and found them all beautiful. She admired his tan and asked where he had got it. “The beaches of the world,” he told her with an importance he usually denied himself.

She puzzled over his name. “You don’t look Puerto Rican,” she said.

“I’m gringo,” he told her.

“Are you married?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t wear a ring.”

“No.”

“What’s your wife’s name?”

“Esther,” he said.

With her hand on his chest, she said, “I’m not usually like this.”

In the morning, he phoned room service for breakfast, which awaited her when she emerged from the bathroom with a washed-out look, chaste and convalescent. She opened her purse with a veiny hand and discovered a brand-new hundred dollar bill folded lengthwise.

“What’s this for?”

“For you,” he said.

That was when she went hysterical.

• • •

Outside her parents’ ordinary little house, her house now, Lydia Lapham waited in her car for Chief Morgan. The street was quiet, tree-shaded, property lines marked by friezes of barbered shrubs whose berries drew birds. Next door a curtain twitched: a neighbor was watching. Taking a deep breath, she yearned for the old coherence in her life, when no one infringed upon her unless she allowed it. Finally the chief’s car pulled up behind hers.

They met on the sidewalk. She wore no makeup. Her hair was swept back and tied, which left her face explicit. Her heart beat rapidly inside a body that seemed dead. She said, “I wasn’t sure whether I needed permission.”

“You don’t,” Morgan said, gray eyes resting on her.

“And I didn’t want to go in alone.”

They moved toward the house. On the front door was an Off Limits sign, red letters on white pasteboard, posted by one of Lieutenant Bakinowski’s men. Morgan tore it off. Lydia used her key. The door opened, and Morgan said, “Are you sure?”

She stepped inside, and for a second or so her senses teetered, her mind threatened to tip. She heard from somewhere, perhaps upstairs, an echo of her mother’s warm, plump voice. She threw a look back at Morgan, but he seemed aware only of creakings and hums natural to a vacant house. The little hallway was stuffy.

“You’d better leave the door open,” she said and stepped past dead flowers pluming a vase. Each step was forced, her eye sweeping one room and then another. Nearly all the furniture, prudently selected, dated to the early years of her parents’ marriage. She had grown up with it: the faded brocade of the living room set and the ornate edges of the wall mirror, the massive mahogany of the china closet that seemed too much of a burden for the dining room, the indestructibility of the kitchen table with its old-fashioned cutlery drawer. Her mother could never understand why such drawers had been done away with, and now neither could she. She returned to the hallway, gave another look at Morgan, and said, “Please, wait here.”

Upstairs, she passed by her own bedroom and entered theirs, which was stifling. Quickly she raised a window. The sun streaked her parents’ bed, the same one with which they had begun their marriage. On her mother’s writing table were two pages of notepaper, an unfinished letter in her father’s hand. It was to a man in Michigan, an old war buddy with whom her father had maintained a correspondence through the years but had never managed a reunion. She lifted a page to her cheek as if the warmth of her father’s hand might still be on the paper.

She opened a cedar chest and raised her mother’s wedding gown, like lifting a mist, but against her face it was dry and scratchy. With reverence she replaced it and approached the closet. When she withdrew her mother’s best Sunday dress, a breeze ruffled it, as if the wraith of the woman were in it.

In the bathroom, after dashing her face with water, she peered into the glass and felt anonymous and pure. She dried her face in a thick towel, like a child who has been playing hard. Then she returned to the chief.

“I needed to know if I could stay here by myself. I can.”

He looked doubtful. In the immediate period after his wife’s death, he had avoided his house, entering it only at odd daytime hours and spending most of his time at the station, where he slept in the cell until Meg O’Brien got on his case. “It may be too soon,” he said.

“If I don’t do it now, I might never,” she said, revealing darknesses in her face, also a determination.

He wondered whether she might reassess her feelings about MacGregor, if only to add a voice to the house. He doubted it, sensing in her a strength lacking in him during his greatest grief. He also doubted MacGregor would try to come over. Too much else was pressing on Matt and tightening him up.

“Besides,” she said in a lighter tone, “my aunt and I are starting to get on each other’s nerves. She’s a dear, but she talks to herself on the toilet.”

The chief smiled. “Good a place as any.”

“And Reverend Stottle’s been coming around. I can’t respond to him. He tells me that the same God that invented life invented death. Then in the next breath he says maybe God got life all wrong.”