No Way Home (7 page)

“A bargain, Mrs. Bowman, believe me.” Roberta’s eagle eye attacked from all angles. “No alterations needed. Amazing.”

Arlene Bowman looked over her shoulder as Christine prepared to leave. “We must get together soon and talk about our friend.”

Christine stiffened. “Why would we want to do that?”

“I think it would be fun.”

• • •

The pathologist from the hospital in Lawrence phoned in the autopsy report. No surprises. Flo Lapham, remarkably healthy for a woman her age, had died from a single gunshot wound that had shattered an artery. Earl Lapham had a diseased heart. The coronary, as suspected, had been massive. “Devastating” was the word the doctor used. Chief Morgan thanked him and clicked off. Moments later he left the station.

He drove slowly away from the green and down one of the older streets, shady and melancholy, bound by the past. Children had played there, grown up, and departed, leaving behind aging parents who talked of selling but probably never would. A woman in curlers, May Hutchins, hurried to the mailbox and returned the chief’s passing wave with some embarrassment. The largest house was at the end of the street, Drinkwater’s Funeral Home, distinguished by a veranda with trellised rose vines. This was where the remains of Flo and Earl Lapham would be delivered, rear entrance.

He turned left and a few minutes later pulled up in front of Miss Westerly’s little gingerbread house, where the porch light still burned. He was winding his way toward the back door when a voice startled him. “We’re here.”

Lydia Lapham spoke from a wooden lawn chair next to one occupied by her aunt. Lydia leaned forward and scratched both shins, leaving chalk marks. Morgan said, “I presume you’ve had a visitor.”

“Yes. He asked questions that were irrelevant, pointless.”

“But you know what he was getting at.”

She was slow to answer, and the flat moment of silence spread. Her eyes cast an unnatural light. Finally she said, “It was not Matt.”

“Who do you think it could’ve been?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice had a skeletal quality. Rising from the chair, she looked coldly pure and inviolate. For a confounding moment Morgan suspected that were she to walk away, she would leave no footprints, no traces whatsoever. “But it couldn’t have been Matt,” she said. “He loves me.”

“And do you love him?” Morgan asked and felt himself flinch. It was not a question he had intended to ask. He watched her take a breath, which drew her face closer to the bone.

“I have strong feelings for Matt, but they don’t include marriage.”

“And you told Matt that?”

“Matt hears what he wants to hear. In many ways he’s a boy.”

Miss Westerly, who had not stirred, seemed to have grown smaller in the chair. She gazed up as a polite child would. “Maybe I should let you two talk in private.”

“It’s all right, Auntie.” Lydia’s eyes, which were enormous, shifted back to Morgan. “Are you busy, Chief? Could we go for a little drive? I need to get away for a bit.” Her eyes flew to her aunt. “Do you mind?”

“I think it would do you good, dear.”

In the car, Lydia cranked the window down on her side and asked Morgan whether he would mind driving out of town. She did not want people looking at her. She wanted the anonymity of a highway. He drove toward Route 495 while she sat erect with her eyes on the white stripe, as if it were the single thing holding the road together. On Route 495 she dropped her head back, and he drove in silence faster than usual, well beyond the speed limit. They skirted little cities known for what they had lost: Lawrence its mills, Haverhill its shoe shops, Amesbury its hat factory. When the highway, nearing its limit, began swerving toward Interstate 93, he slowed dramatically and took the first exit ramp. From there he sought a back road for the return drive. He thought she was asleep, but her eyes fluttered open.

“You seem to have a nice life, James.”

“I don’t know about that,” he said, his eye out his window. “It’s not the greatest thing, a man my age still running around.”

“Your wife died young. Car accident, wasn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about it. About you.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

They were on a narrow road now that followed the meandering of the Merrimack River, along which the sun had fastened itself. “When my wife died,” he said, “I almost left town for good. I wanted to go to another part of the world where it was already tomorrow.”

“But you stayed.”

“I stayed.”

“Why?”

He swerved slightly to avoid cyclists on the road. “I don’t know,” he said with a vision of Elizabeth as a bride, a civil ceremony, a romantic elopement. She was not from the town. A college buddy had fixed them up. She was a blind date who became the love of his life and took to Bensington as if she had been born there. “I’ll never know,” he said.

A breeze carried the fresh smell of lumber with the essence of the tree still in it. People with money were having a large, rambling house built on a rise above the river. Lydia said, “I remember your wife was beautiful.”

“Yes, I would agree with you.”

“How long did it take for the pain to pass?”

“It never does, but you learn to live with it.”

“I’ve heard that said.” Irony corrupted the tone of her voice and the posture of her body. Then she tossed her hair back. “I had a little crush on you when I was a teenager. A lot of us girls did.”

“Is that so?”

“You telling me you didn’t know?”

“Maybe a little,” he said, dramatically slowing the car where the view was ideal. “It’s a great river.”

“As long as you don’t jump into it.”

He gave her a fast look. “That’s not on your mind, is it?”

“No,” she said. “That would be as senseless as what happened to my parents.”

Gradually the riverbank went high with brush, then turned woody. A groundhog fed boldly near the side of the road where the weeds were greenest. Morgan scratched an earlobe. “Matt mentioned he was trying to call you about the time of the shooting. Do you know what he wanted?”

“Did you ask him?”

“I meant to.”

“It could’ve been anything.” She was smiling in the wrong places, from nerves. “Why are you harping on this?”

That was a question he was asking himself. Perhaps he was trying to be totally objective and professional. “Lieutenant Bakinowski mentioned a doctor you dated.”

Her chin went up. “They weren’t dates. He’s a friend.”

“What’s his name?”

“Do you need to know?”

“Probably not.”

“Then I won’t tell you.” Her smile was back, inappropriately and without meaning. Then it died.

Morgan said, “I’ll shut up if you like.”

The sun slanted into her side of the car and ate into her face. Her eyes narrowed to nothing. “I’ve thought about it,” she said. “I’ve thought about nothing else. It had to have been a cruel accident. A criminally careless thing.” Her eyes came open, painfully, like moths fluttering to the light. “Unless you know something I don’t.”

“That’s the trouble,” he said. “I don’t.”

They passed an isolated weatherboard house, where a pleasant-looking woman — someone Morgan imagined would put out seed for birds — was watering the grass. Then the trees thickened into heavy maples and oaks. Eventually they approached the metal drawbridge that spanned the river and led back to Bensington. Lydia stirred. “Can we stop? Walk for a bit?”

He pulled over into weeds growing through the gravel. She climbed out and hurried dark glasses onto her face against the sun’s wrath. The metal work of the bridge looked like the prototype of a medieval war machine. With a swift stride she moved well ahead of him, her legs stalks of light below the cut of her skirt. He caught up with her halfway across the bridge, where she had stopped to peer over the plated railing. The river was high, the current strong, from a previous week of rain.

“Something magical about water,” she said, peering down. “Full of secrets, like people.”

He was staring at her. A thrilling dash of sun was in her hair. Two buttons undone gave a hint of a fine woman. He could understand Matt MacGregor’s feelings for her.

With her eyes still on the water, she said, “If I hadn’t frozen, maybe I could have saved one of them. Possibly both.”

“No,” he said. “There was no hope. They were gone.”

Her eyes turned on him. “You’re not a doctor.”

“I read the medical report.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

All at once she wanted to return to the car, but her step now was slow, full of fatigue. A delivery truck gunned by them on the bridge, then a sports car overloaded with catcalling youths. At the end of the bridge they moved into the shade and trampled weeds. Morgan stepped on a puffball and exploded a world, some of it powdering his shoe.

She said, “May I drive?”

“It may not look it,” he said, “but this is an official car.”

“Since when did you follow the rules?”

She drove reasonably, in silence, across the bridge. Bug stains spotted the windshield, which the wash from the wipers merely scummed. When they crossed the line into Bensington, she lifted her nose. A skunk lay dead on the road near the dirt drive where a sign on a tree said
bikes repaired
and the mailbox read
rayball
. The stink stretched relentlessly, death exalting itself. Morgan silently reckoned the animal would lie in state overnight and give itself to crows that would come at the crack of dawn and pick it to pieces.

A few heads turned when they rumbled down a neighborhood street, for the car was familiar to many. Lydia peered straight ahead through dark glasses, which she removed when they reached her aunt’s house. Instead of switching off the motor, she turned to him with a stark expression.

“Do you think it might’ve been Matt?”

“No,” he said.

“Why did I have to ask that?”

Morgan stared hard, aware of the slew of browns in her hair, some gone golden. “To get it out of the way,” he said.

• • •

The house, which stood not far from the green on Chestnut Street, was pre-Revolutionary and harbored unused servant quarters, fireplaces in the bedrooms, and a still serviceable Dutch oven in the kitchen. Ceiling-high windows, which once let in mammoth drafts, were now true in their frames. Much of the house had been restored or redone after Randolph Jackson sold the virgin woodland that became known as Oakcrest Heights. The most distinctive sound in the house was the jingle-jangle of the front doorbell, an ingenious brass device created by a reputed apprentice of Paul Revere.

The doorbell sounded now.

The caller was Lieutenant Bakinowski, whom Jackson seated in his study, where a sun ray teemed with dust. Through it Bakinowski said, “I thought it best we talk.”

“Of course, certainly. I want to be kept up to date on everything.” Jackson plunked himself into a club chair and scratched his fingers through his sandy hair, reassurance that the bare spot on the crown was covered. The years had put more of the Yankee into his looks but offered less stamina to his attentiveness. He fingered his lower lip.

“It’s about your police chief,” Bakinowski said.

“I’ve known Jim for years. Fine fellow.”

“I don’t doubt that, sir, but not strictly a professional, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I appointed him. Board votes the way I do, you see. And I can tell you this, he does his job.”

“Yes sir, I’m sure he does, but we have a tricky situation here.”

Jackson’s gaze strayed to the family Bible, which solemnized the hand-carved pedestal on which it rested. One of his lesser forebears had made a marvelous living selling Bibles door to door. Illiterates had bought the book just to have it in the house. This was family lore with which he might have amused Bakinowski had the visit been of a lighter nature.

“The suspect, sir, is one of the chief’s officers.”

Jackson’s unkempt brows shot up. “Christ, who? He doesn’t have many.”

“Matthew MacGregor.”

“What?” The words took time to sink in. “For God’s sake, you can’t mean Matt. He and the Lapham girl are engaged, or almost.”

Bakinowski put forth his suspicions and posited motives of rejection and jealousy. His voice was unmodulated and official-sounding, as if he were testifying in a courtroom, no notes needed. “MacGregor meant to hit the daughter, not the mother.”

“I can’t believe this,” Jackson said, his day tainted. He had not meant to end it with heavy things on his mind. “I’m sure Matt can account for his whereabouts.”

“Not adequately, sir. I’ve just finished talking to him. Some people don’t ring true. Officer MacGregor is one of them.”

With an air of discomfort, Jackson said, “What do you want from me?”

“Ordinarily I wouldn’t ask for help, but Morgan is uncooperative. At best, he’s protecting his officer. At worst, he’s impeding an investigation.”

“Jim wouldn’t do that.”

“We have a homicide on our hands. Since his authority comes from you, sir, I’d like his cues to come from you.”

“Cues? What cues can I give him?”

“I’d take it upon myself to advise you.”

Jackson glimpsed his wife’s shadow in the doorway and suspected she had been listening for some time. In the next instant she swept into the room on fine large feet plugged into dainty shoes, introduced herself in a bright voice to Bakinowski, and instructed him to sit down when he half rose. “Would either of you gentlemen care for a refreshment?” she asked.

Bakinowski politely declined, and Jackson, casting devoted eyes on her, mouthed a silent no. Delighted that she was in the room, he swung a leg confidently over the other and settled more comfortably into his chair. “The lieutenant is a state police detective.”

“How exciting.” A perennial ingenue in her late forties, Suzy Jackson was ungainly in a paradoxically graceful way, amusing when she was of a mind, and difficult when it suited her. “You must have many adventures, Lieutenant.”

“A few, Mrs. Jackson.”

She took up a position behind her husband and laid a wifely hand on his shoulder, a gesture that always pleased him. He felt claimed. To Bakinowski she said, “Too much violence in the world, don’t you agree?”