Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (19 page)

I pulled onto Jut Road thinking of the piers that held the shack up. They were off just a little, wrong somehow. They were what I’d come back to look at. Had McCord spotted them, too? Were they the reason he’d gone all cagey with the kids-and-looters bullshit?

No Charger in sight. Good: McCord hadn’t doubled back.

But you never knew with him, so my priority was speed. I pulled my F-150 right to the shack, killed it, dumped my wallet and cell on the seat in case I got wet, and stepped out.

The riverbank dropped away fast, easily a forty-five-degree angle. It was a six-foot drop from where I stood to the river’s surface, and there was no path. I spotted a place where the wild grass and scrub elm looked beat up, figured that was the best way down.

There was no sense being pretty about it: If I tried to walk down I’d probably fall on my ass anyway. So I sat and slid, using my hands as brakes.

I gasped when my boots hit the water. Even on a hot day, the White Mountains runoff was ice freaking cold. Now the wading boots in Phigg’s trunk really made sense.

I got my footing and stood ankle-deep in the river. I couldn’t believe how soon and how much my feet hurt. This was bad cold. The flow was quick as hell, too, a stout current trying to pull me to my right.

I realized I hadn’t put any thought into getting back up the riverbank. Turned and looked. “Shit,” I said out loud. “Make it quick.”

I faced the river again and looked at the nearest pier, the one that supported the shack’s northwest corner. It was only eight feet away, but that eight feet felt like a big deal all of a sudden. I stepped toward it.

And thought
Fuck me
as my boot came down on nothing and I went under.

*   *   *

Under.

My heart stopped.

My mouth opened.

I sucked in a lungful of Souhegan, kicked, sank, felt the current pull me, opened my eyes, saw only black. I thrashed, boots and arms flailing. I was drowning three feet from a riverbank. A corner of my brain felt embarrassed. I hoped they’d find me downriver in deep water. Maybe they’d think I died doing something worthwhile.

I flailed, kicked, my heart banging away now, lungs confused, sucking, getting only more water.

My left hand hit something. Very thin rope, some sort of cord maybe. Thank God. I grabbed it with both hands. I pulled. And again. And more, pulling upriver, fighting current.

My head hit something hard. I felt with one hand. A pier. I hugged it with arms and legs, shinnied, pictured a koala going up a tree.

And felt air on my head, then my face. My lungs went insane, coughing out water, trying to gulp air at the same time, racking me so bad I nearly lost my grip. I locked my right hand around my left wrist, hooked my right ankle across my left, hung the hell on.

Soon I heaved up one last mouthful of water and breathed. Breathed, breathed, breathed. I looked around. I was clinging to the northeast pier, the upriver one. I said out loud, “Did that the hard way.” It came out a croak.

Now I had a fresh problem: I had to make that eight feet back to the riverbank, and from the waist down I was still underwater, numb as hell.

I remembered the cord I’d managed to grab, the cord that had saved my life, and looked down. It was underwater, had somehow gotten wrapped around my right thigh. I had to see what it was before I tried for that eight feet. I reached.

It was too thin for clothesline. I snaked it away from my thigh, pulled. Jesus, whatever was at the end of that line was heavy.

I finally lifted it from the river and stared at it—a mesh bag. The top of the bag formed a drawstring that had been looped around the pier and knotted.

Inside the bag were a pry bar, a carpenter’s hammer, and a pointed trowel. They had plenty of surface rust but were basically sound tools, newish even.

I might have smiled.

I couldn’t feel my legs at all, had to get out of the water quick. But I leaned back and looked at the pier. I’d been right: This wasn’t a hundred-year-old hack job that could drop any minute. This was sound work. The pier was made of old brick that probably wrapped a cinder-block-and-concrete core. Somebody had put some time and effort into building these piers, then had beaten them up to make them look as old as the rest of the shack.

Somebody’d made damn sure this pump house wouldn’t fall into the Souhegan. Why?

It was time to go.

I took three big breaths while I angled myself toward the riverbank. Then I jumped backward like a swimmer starting a backstroke race.

But my numb, waterlogged legs pushed me barely three feet, and my boots were heavy as hell. My legs dropped, pulling me down. When my lips got to water level, deep panic grabbed me and I thrashed, willed my legs to kick, felt like each foot was a bowling ball.

I angled in and flailed and whipped and thrashed. Felt like a month, but it was probably fifteen seconds later that I finally grabbed an inch-thick tree root. I didn’t wait, couldn’t, all energy fading fast. Hands and knees up the bank, shivering, chattering, filthy by the time I clawed to the top of the rise.

I shivered to the F-150, aimed it south, and cranked the heat.

*   *   *

When the worst of the shivering was over, I called Trey at my house. “You speak with that
Globe
reporter yet?” I said.

“We’ve been playing phone tag. Why?”

I said I’d explain later, clicked off, dug Patty Marx’s business card from my wallet. She’d crossed out the cell number on the card and written in a new one.

She picked up on one ring and said her name.

“This is Conway Sax,” I said. “Remember me?”

“Of course.”

“Want to talk about Tander Phigg?”

“Of course.”

I was coming up on an exit I knew. “Take 495 North to 62 West,” I said. “In about a mile there’s a farm stand on your right.”

*   *   *

Patty Marx walked toward my shaded picnic table in flat shoes, designer jeans, and a turquoise tank top with thin little straps that didn’t cover her bra straps. The bra was black. She wore hoop earrings the diameter of a soda can. She was very pretty. As she sat, she glanced at the apple pie I was eating. “A whole pie?”

“They don’t sell slices,” I said, and handed her a plastic fork.

She hesitated, then took it and stabbed a piece of crust. “Why are you dripping wet?”

I ignored that. “How long you been at
The Globe
?”

“About a year and a half.” She laughed. “Just in time for the industry collapse.”

I didn’t know what she meant. But I did know it was about then Phigg ran into hard times. I said, “How’d you meet Tander Phigg?”

“When I got to Boston I worked general assignment for three months, waiting for a beat to open up. I pitched my editor a feature on hard times in old mill towns. The long-gone manufacturing jobs, the vanishing tax base, the friction between townies and immigrants, et cetera.” She waved a hand. “An evergreen, of course, you’ve read it a thousand times. But my editor bought it.” She forked a bigger piece of pie and shrugged while she ate it. “Once I began researching Fitchburg, it didn’t take long to catch on to Phigg Paper Products, hence Tander Phigg Junior.”

“What was your take on him?”

Patty Marx hesitated a beat too long, looking at her white plastic fork, and I wondered what she was holding back. “He was his own worst enemy,” she finally said. “His own harshest critic, too. That’s a bad combination.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s nothing wrong with having a rich daddy, okay?”

“You’re asking the wrong guy.”

She smiled. “Push a pencil, smile nice at the board meetings, and say a little prayer every time you cash a trust-fund check. What’s wrong with that?”

“It’s not enough,” I said.

“For a lot of people it is.”

“Not for … a real man,” I said, and felt myself go red. I stared at a knot in the picnic table, waiting for her to laugh at me.

But when I looked up, Patty was nodding. “Precisely. Now imagine you’re man enough to
know
you’re not acting like a real man, but not quite man enough to
do
anything about it.”

I thought about Tander Phigg, Jr. and nodded. A man like that would puff himself up, make himself out to be a big deal.

We ate pie and said nothing for a while.

Finally Patty shook her head and said, “He was dying to show me the big river house he was building himself. That’s why I say he was his own worst enemy.”

“What do you mean?”

“In a piece like the one I was doing, Tander Phigg Junior had
fall guy
tattooed on his forehead. And he should have known it.”

“Why?”

She stuck her fork in the piecrust and ticked off reasons on her fingers. “The paper company’s shut down, right? Tander Senior, the daddy who built the empire, is revered by all, the benefactor who employed the whole town for thirty years. Now that town is collecting welfare, food stamps. The men are crooks or drunks or both, the girls are knocked up by the time they’re fourteen. The only player who’s doing okay is Tander Phigg Junior, and what did
he
ever accomplish? He was daddy’s boy, the company collapsed on his watch, and he’s sitting on a fortune.”

She built momentum as she said it and gave the table a good fist-thump when she finished. I wondered again what she wasn’t telling me.

“Point being?” I said.

“The point is if he had a whiff of common sense, he would’ve seen he was destined to be the bad guy in my piece. He either wouldn’t have talked with me at all, or he would have spun his story like crazy. He could have earned himself at least a little sympathy by telling me how awful he felt for the laid-off workers, for Fitchburg, for the region. Get it?”

“I guess.”

“Instead, he showed me around the million-dollar timber-frame home he was building on the Souhegan! So into the piece it went.”

“So you made him look like a jerk in your article.”

“He made himself look like a jerk,” she said. “I took pity and tried to soft-pedal him for his own good, but my editor knew I’d struck gold. Tander Phigg Junior, showing a reporter around his mansion-to-be while Fitchburg went in the toilet, was the lead anecdote when the story ran.”

“How’d he react?”

“The way pissed-off sources always react.”

I ate pie. Patty watched me. After a while she said, “What was
your
deal with Tander?”

“Friend.”

“In pretty deep for a friend.”

I told her a little about the Barnburners, about what I do. She listened with hard eyes, maybe buying it, maybe not. My story sounded weak even to me. I didn’t like being on the defensive. Decided to go blunt, try to surprise her. “There’s something heavy you’re not telling me,” I said. “What is it?”

“Thank you for the pie.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A hundred minutes later I pulled off my still-wet boots and socks on Charlene’s front landing. I stepped inside, headed for the kitchen, and plopped two Walmart bags on the table.

Staring at me from great room sofas were Charlene, Sophie, and my father. He held a bottle of cream soda, his favorite from way back. Charlene didn’t keep any in the house. Who does? She’d bought it special.

Charlene said, “What on earth happened to you?”

“Greeter at Walmart asked the same thing,” I said. I patted one of the bags and looked at Fred. “Boots, socks, underpants, T-shirts, a button-down, jeans. Wranglers. Junior’s brand. Thought you’d appreciate that.”

He said, “Junior who?”

“Dale Earnhardt Junior.”

“Earnhardt has a kid?”

Oh boy.

Sophie giggled. She knows her NASCAR. Charlene shushed her. Fred looked lost.

But as I headed upstairs to shower he perked up and started telling the gals about the time he raced against Dale Earnhardt’s father, Ralph. I was pretty sure the story was bullshit. He’d been telling it since I was a kid, and the details changed every time. Let him tell it often enough, he’d have himself winning the Daytona 500 with a last-lap pass.

I smiled as I thought it, squelching upstairs to the shower.

*   *   *

As I stepped from the bathroom, towel-wrapped, my cell rang. I grabbed it from Charlene’s dresser, saw it was Randall. I picked up and said, “The hell you been?”

“I spent the weekend reposing on Cape Cod. At the lovely and exclusive Chatham Bars Inn, specifically.” Big fake sigh. “Tennis, window-shopping, oysters on the beach. You know how it goes.”

“’Bout time you got laid.”

“Philistine. Cad. Masher.” Long pause. “Yeah, it was about time.”

I shoulder-jammed the phone to my ear while I pulled on underpants and jeans. “Who’s the lucky gal?” I said. “Anybody I know?”