Outwitting Trolls (10 page)

Gwen allowed Billy to tug her to the front door. He yanked it open, and as they walked out, she looked at me over her shoulder and mouthed the words, “I'm sorry.”

I got up and hurried over to them. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Don't—”

“We're outta here,” Billy said. He slammed the door behind him, and they were gone.

I stood there for a minute. Then I went back to the sofa and sat down. I picked up my coffee mug and took a sip. It was cold.

“Did you see that?” I asked Henry. “Did you see how I screwed that up?”

Henry, who'd followed Billy and Gwen to the door and was sitting there as if he expected them to come right back, got up and came over and put his chin on my leg.

I patted his head. “If I talked to you like a lawyer, butted into your personal business, questioned your judgment, would you still love me?”

Henry rolled his eyes up at me, gave his stubby little tail a couple of wags, and licked my hand.

“So why can't people be more like dogs?” I asked.

Henry shrugged.

After a few minutes, I got up, went to the kitchen, cleared off the table, and loaded up the dishwasher. Then I wandered through the house straightening out the furniture and in general banging around, cursing myself for my stupidity.

Not that I didn't think I was right. If Billy and Gwen did what they planned to do with no written agreement, they'd be awfully lucky not to run into problems at some point.

Billy was right about one thing. It's one of the jobs of lawyers to anticipate problems and to plan for them. That's why I almost always suggest prenuptial agreements. It's one of the reasons people don't like lawyers. We raise subjects that they don't want to think about.

Billy's reaction to my suggestions was predictable. Not many couples like to talk about potential or hypothetical problems. They believe in love forever and ever—in Billy's and Gwen's
case, friendship forever—and they can't imagine anything ever changing.

When it does, as it does more often than not, it's usually too late.

Henry and I caught the last three innings of the Red Sox game, and then I let him out back. While I was standing there on the deck looking up at the stars, searching idly for Alex's constellations, the phone in the kitchen rang.

Billy, was my first thought. Calling to apologize.

Nope. Not likely. Billy didn't cool off that quickly. Who else? Alex? It was a little early for her to call. Maybe it was Wayne Nichols, returning my call after all.

I hurried inside, picked up the phone, and said, “Brady Coyne.”

I heard a soft chuckle on the other end. “Gloria Coyne,” she said.

Gloria. My ex-wife. Billy's mother. I couldn't remember the last time she'd called me.

“Hey,” I said. “Hi.”

“You're all out of breath,” she said.

I sat on a kitchen chair. “I was out back pondering my sins.”

“Like pissing off your number-one son?”

“He went running to Mommy?”

“He and Gwen are staying here,” Gloria said. “William came banging in like a thunderstorm a few minutes ago. I asked him what was the matter, and he said you went all lawyer on him.”

“I offered advice to those two kids,” I said. “It was stupid of me.”

“Yes, no doubt,” she said. “I imagine you had good advice, but you know how he can be.”

“I guess I'd forgotten,” I said. “I just talked to them as if they
were sensible adults. I did have good advice. They're headed for trouble.”

“Well,” Gloria said, “there's your mistake right there. I think they both realize deep down that they're flying without a parachute. They're scared and insecure and full of doubts and questions. The last thing they need is to be reminded of it. Especially by a parent.”

“You trying to make me feel better?”

“Why would I ever want to do that?” She chuckled. “You screwed up, no doubt about it, and if you were more tuned in to people's feelings, you wouldn't have done what you did. Who knows? Maybe William would've come to you for advice.”

“That'd be a first.”

Gloria laughed softly.

“Anyway,” I said, “that's certainly not going to happen now.”

“Probably not,” she said, “but maybe they'll go to somebody else. Unless I'm mistaken, you put some doubts into their heads. If you hadn't, William wouldn't be so upset now.”

“Small consolation,” I said. “I'd much rather we'd just had a pleasant evening and talked about nothing significant whatsoever. I should've just said, ‘That's grand. You're having a baby. Congratulations. I hope the three of you have a swell life.' But no. Not bigmouth Coyne. Now my son's not talking to me.”

“He'll get over it,” Gloria said. “I think Gwen's a pretty down-to-earth girl. She'll straighten him out.”

“Well, thanks for the optimism.”

“I know how you are. You've been beating yourself up, right?”

“Kinda. I deserve it.”

“You were just being you,” she said, “and you really aren't such a terrible person.”

“Not that bad, huh?”

“William probably wouldn't agree with me right now,” Gloria said, “but he'll come around. You've just got to be patient.”

“Okay.”

“Everything else all right?”

“Sure,” I said. “Everything's good.”

“Evie's gone, though, huh?”

“Long gone and hard to find,” I said. “That's an old story.”

“Well, Brady,” Gloria said, “be happy, okay?”

“Sure,” I said. “You, too.”

“Oh,” she said, “don't worry about me. I've been working on it for a long time.”

I called my office phone on Wednesday morning while I was sipping the day's first mug of coffee out in the backyard. It was early enough that Julie wouldn't be there to answer, which was the whole point. That way, I could leave her a message without having to listen to her disapproval. “I know I have no appointments today,” I said. “Don't make any. I'm taking the day to attend to some business connected to the Nichols case. I'll try to check in sometime in the afternoon, and I'll definitely be there tomorrow. Take a long lunch and close up early, why don't you.”

I disconnected, put the phone on the picnic table, and blew out a breath. That wasn't so bad. Julie
would
disapprove, of course. A day without billable hours was a lost day, as far as she was concerned, and my mumbo-jumbo about the Nichols case wouldn't fool her. I had no intention of billing Sharon for the hours it would take me to drive to and from Webster State College in southwestern New Hampshire in search of her son.

I debated slipping into a comfortable pair of blue jeans and a flannel shirt and sneakers, but my better judgment told me that wearing one of my lawyer pinstripes might help with the day's
quest. I didn't know how hard it would be to track down Wayne or, assuming that I succeeded with that, how cooperative he would be when I asked him some challenging questions, as I intended to do. Sometimes the gravitas of my being an attorney—and looking the part—helped convince people that they ought to cooperate with me.

Sometimes, of course, it had the opposite effect.

Henry and I had a discussion about whether he could come along with me. I'm not sure I entirely convinced him that he'd be happier lounging around the backyard than spending the day cooped up in the car. He did love road trips. I gave him a bully stick to gnaw on, though, and when I patted his head and said good-bye to him a little after nine that morning, he was lying on the back deck with the stick propped up between his front paws, and he barely glanced at me.

Dogs love you, no doubt about it, but they love food best of all.

Websterville, New Hampshire, was tucked into the southwestern corner of New Hampshire near the Vermont and Massachusetts borders. The little town had just one claim to fame. It was the home of Webster State College, formerly Webster State Teachers College, and before that Webster Normal School. I'd driven through the town many times. It straddled the two-lane east-west state highway through southern New Hampshire that was the most direct route from Boston to a lot of good trout fishing in southern Vermont. I didn't remember ever actually stopping in Websterville or having any kind of business to transact there, but I did remember the classic nineteenth-century brick buildings and the lovely Victorian houses that lined the street, along with the college's sterile brick-and-glass dormitories and classroom buildings and its manicured playing fields.

It took a little over two hours to drive from my parking
garage on Charles Street in Boston to Main Street in Websterville, where I stopped at a coffee shop. It was the fish-shaped wooden sign over the door reading daniel webster's trout that caught my eye. Daniel Webster, for whom, I assumed, Websterville was named, had no interest in dictionaries. That was another Webster. Daniel was a famous and influential New England politician in the first half of the nineteenth century, a native of New Hampshire who served as a United States congressman, a senator, and a secretary of state, and who probably deserved to be president.

He was once offered the position of vice president, which he turned down, saying, “I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.”

Webster was even more famous in some circles for the fourteen-and-a-half-pound brook trout he caught on a fly rod from the Carman River on Long Island one Sunday morning in the spring of 1827 when he skipped out of church in the middle of the sermon.

Some spoilsports dispute the story of Daniel Webster's monster trout. They call it apocryphal or, even worse, just a damn fish story. Whether it's true or not doesn't interest me. If it's a damn fish story, it's a damn good one.

I could hardly resist a place called Daniel Webster's Trout, and I was overdue for a caffeine fix, so I slipped into a parking slot directly in front. The narrow coffee shop was wedged between a women's clothing boutique and an art gallery. Across the street were a Cambodian restaurant, a movie house with a marquee advertising a Bergman festival, and a sporting-goods store that, judging from the window display, specialized in mountain biking, cross-country skiing, and whitewater kayaking.

Websterville, in other words, appeared to be a typical New England college town.

Inside Daniel Webster's Trout I sat at a round metal table against the wall, and when the waitress, a slender young blonde who I guessed was a student at the college, came over, I asked for a mug of the “house blend,” which she said was “just sort of your basic coffee” and which I figured was my best chance of avoiding something that tasted more like candy than coffee.

When she came back a few minutes later, I asked her if she could tell me how to find Chesterfield Road.

“Sure,” she said. “Easy.” She pointed out the window. “You go that way maybe a hundred yards to the blinking light. Turn right there. You'll go past the field house and the soccer field, and when you come to the stop sign, that's Chesterfield Road. If you turn left, it takes you to some freshman dorms and the physics and chem labs and the administration building. On the right, it's off campus. Mostly student apartments and some faculty housing.”

I thanked her, and when I finished my coffee, I left an extra-generous tip.

I followed the waitress's directions to Chesterfield Road. The address I had for Wayne was number 188. I guessed he didn't live in a freshman dorm, since he hadn't been a freshman for a couple of years, and I was fairly confident that he wasn't living in a science lab or the administration building, so I turned right onto Chesterfield Road.

Number 188 turned out to be what would've been called a triple-decker if it had been located in South Boston instead of Websterville. It was a square three-story wood-frame building with porches spanning the front of each level. The only thing missing was underwear and diapers flapping from clotheslines.

Triple-deckers flanked number 188, and up and down this stretch of Chesterfield Road were what appeared to be other apartment buildings. There were duplexes, more triple-deckers,
and some big rambling farm houses and old Victorians that had been converted into apartments.

Both sides of the street were lined with vehicles, and more cars were parked in the driveways that separated the buildings. They were mostly aging Hondas and Toyotas, along with some battered old pickup trucks and Jeeps, but there were also a few new-looking BMWs and Porsches and Audis and Lexuses, too. Webster State evidently boasted a heterogeneous mixture of student demographics.

I tucked my car into an empty space on the side of the road, turned off the ignition, and took out my cell phone. I tried Wayne Nichols's number. It rang half a dozen times, and then the now-familiar recorded greeting came on.

I closed my phone without leaving a message, got out of my car, and climbed the half-dozen steps onto the front porch of 188 Chesterfield Road.

On the outside door frame there were three doorbells, and taped over each bell was a list of two or three names written in ink. None of the names belonged to Wayne Nichols.

I looked through the glass on the front door into a small, dark foyer. There was a bank of locked mailboxes and two inside doors. Some magazines and envelopes had spilled onto the tiled floor.

I pressed the bell for apartment 1 and waited, and when no one came to the door, I tried apartment 2. After a minute or two, I heard the echo of feet clomping down some inside stairs, and then one of the inside doors opened.

A young woman with tangly brown hair blinked at me through the window of the front door. She was wearing a wrinkled blue T-shirt and gray sweatpants.

I smiled at her through the glass and said, “I'm looking for Wayne Nichols.”

She frowned and cupped her ear with her hand.

“Does Wayne Nichols live here?” I asked more loudly.

She shrugged and opened the door. “Who're you?” she asked.

“I'm a lawyer from Boston,” I said. “My name is Brady Coyne. I have business with Wayne Nichols. I believe he lives at this address.” I fished my card out of my pocket and handed it to her.

She was standing in the half-opened doorway. She squinted at my card, then at me. “I'm Judith,” she said.

I smiled. “Nice to meet you.”

“You're a lawyer?”

“Yes, that's right.”

“You got business with Wayne Nichols, huh?”

I nodded.

“I bet,” she said.

I smiled at her. “What do you mean?”

“I mean old Wayne probably could use a lawyer.”

“You know him?”

“Sure,” she said. “Webster State's a small school. Everybody pretty much knows everybody. Wayne Nichols doesn't live here anymore.”

“Can you tell me where he does live?”

She shook her head. “Nope. He used to have the first floor with a couple other degenerates. I wasn't what you'd call close with any of them. They all moved out at the end of last term, for which I thank God, and I don't know where they went, though I do see one or the other of them around campus once in a while.”

“Do you have roommates who might help me find Wayne?”

“I have roommates,” she said, “but I doubt they could help you. We kind of avoided Wayne and his buddies when they were living here. We travel in different circles, you might say.”

“What circles does Wayne travel in?”

“Just not mine,” she said. “Let's leave it at that. I can't tell you how happy I was when he moved out of this building.”

“No idea how I could find him, huh?” I asked.

“Nope. Sorry.” She glanced meaningfully at her wristwatch. “I gotta go get ready for classes now,” she said. “Sorry I couldn't help you.”

I smiled at her. “I appreciate your talking with me.”

She waved her hand at me, flashed a quick, shy smile, and stepped back into the foyer. The front-door latch clicked loudly behind her, and then she turned and opened the inside door and climbed back up the stairs to her apartment.

I went out to my car, turned around, and headed back the way I'd come on Chesterfield Road. On the other side of the intersection I passed a couple of brick dormitories, and then I came to a large square building with a sign out front that read
WEBSTER STATE COLLEGE ADMINISTRATION
.

I left my car in a section marked visitors in the side parking lot and went into the building. In the lobby a sign indicated that the registrar's office was in suite 206, so I climbed a flight of stairs, found the door with 206 painted on it, and went in.

I was faced with a room-length waist-high counter with four or five people standing on the other side, not unlike bank tellers. There was a line of two or three people—students, I guessed—in front of each of the tellers. I stood at the end of one of the lines, feeling profoundly out of place in my lawyer pinstripe amid these young people in their ripped jeans, baseball caps, and rock-band T-shirts.

After about ten minutes, it was my turn. A young man who appeared to be a student himself faced me on the other side of the counter. “How can I help you, sir?” he asked. A nameplate on the counter indicated that his name was Matthew Trowbridge and he was an admissions intern.

“I'm trying to catch up with one of the students,” I said. “The address I have for him appears to be out of date.”

Matthew Trowbridge said, “Are you on the faculty or staff here?”

“No. I'm a lawyer. I drove up from Boston today.”

“I'm not allowed to divulge personal information about our students,” he said. “I'm sorry.”

“How personal is an address?”

He shrugged.

“So who is?”

He frowned. “Excuse me?”

“Who is allowed to divulge information such as where a student is presently living?”

“I can talk to Mrs. Allen, if you want,” he said. “She's the assistant registrar.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Who is it you're looking for?”

“His name is Wayne Nichols,” I said. “I'm Brady Coyne.” I gave him one of my business cards.

He glanced at the card, then said, “Hang on. I'll see if Mrs. Allen's available.” He turned, walked down to the end of the room, opened a door, and went into another room.

Matthew Trowbridge was back about five minutes later. “Mrs. Allen can talk with you,” he said. “Just go down there.” He pointed. “It's the second door on the left.”

I followed his directions and came to a room with a plaque on the door that read
CHARLOTTE ALLEN, ASSISTANT REGISTRAR
.

I rapped on the door, and it opened a moment later. Standing there was a woman—early, maybe middle thirties—wearing what I guessed, judging by how perfectly they fit her slender body, were expensive designer jeans. Several of the top buttons on her bone white silk blouse were opened.

She had pale blue eyes and straw-colored hair and a generous mouth, and she was smiling at me as though I were just the person she'd been hoping to see.

“Mr. Coyne,” she said. “Come on in. Let's sit.”

Her office walls were lined with bookshelves full of books. A window that spanned the back wall looked out over a baseball diamond. On one side of the room sat a big oak desk with nothing on it except a telephone and a computer, and the other side served as a cozy sitting area, with four comfortable-looking chairs arranged around a square glass-topped coffee table.

Charlotte Allen pointed to one of those chairs and then sat in one herself. I saw that she had my business card in her hand. “Matthew said you were interested in Wayne Nichols,” she said.