Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (28 page)

As I climbed from the truck I said, “Jeez, are we going to church?”

Trey blushed. “The attire was not my idea.”

Inside, Trey escorted me into the living room, where snacks and drinks had been laid out, and barked over his shoulder at Kieu. She trundled Tuan from the room.

Trey stood before me like a brand-new Bible salesman who’d finally talked his way into some lady’s home and wasn’t sure what came next. He gestured at the coffee table. “Would you like a drink? A soft drink?”

“Trey,” I said, “are you going to sell me some Amway?”

“What’s Amway?”

“Never mind. Whatever it is, get to it.”

“Your kindness to myself and my family has been overwhelming, and so I find it nerve-racking to ask another favor. But I understand it’s your intention to sell this home in the near future, is that correct?”

“Sure.”

“Kieu and I spent some time researching prices of comparable homes in the neighborhood,” he said, pulling and unfolding a sheet of notebook paper. “As you may know, prices have been falling steadily here for the past—”

“Jesus Christ, are you looking to
buy
this place?”

“Well … yes, actually. We could use most of my father’s cash for a significant down payment, and by renting the apartment upstairs, we’re quite—”

“Sold,” I said, standing. “Now go change into some real clothes. We’re going to sand the joints in the office. It’s dirty work.”

*   *   *

It took Trey a while to change—once he told Kieu the house was theirs, they spent some time being giddy. When he did join me, Trey explained there were more Vietnamese in downtown Framingham than I’d known. Kieu had discovered this little community and made a few friends, and she wanted to stay put. Trey told her this wasn’t much of a neighborhood, especially for Tuan, but she wouldn’t budge.

We got the windows open and a fan running. I showed Trey how to use a sanding pole so he wouldn’t have to climb up and down stepladders, and he pitched right in.

*   *   *

We were about done when my cell rang. It was Randall. I slapped dust off myself and picked up.

“The case of Patty Marx,” he said, “grows curiouser and curiouser.”

I waited.

“These reporters fret about their bylines like seventh-grade girls, did you know that?”

“You mean their names?”

“Their names as they appear in the paper,” Randall said. “I guess those bylines are about all they’ve got, so they want them to pop. It’s understandable. Who wants to be John Smith of the
Fresno Fishwrap
?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“It just made her a bit trickier to back-trace,” he said. “She went by D.P.R. Marx for quite a while. I suppose she thought the three initials in a row added some heft to her byline.” I could feel him savoring something. “Or maybe she wanted readers to think she was a man, thought she’d be taken more seriously.”

“Where is she?”

“Her first job out of Clemson was at a weekly in Swainsboro, Georgia. Sewer-commission meetings and flower shows. But she worked her way north pretty quickly, and the papers got bigger. A black woman, you know, that’s a prize employee these days.”

I said nothing, figured that was the best way to move him along.

“From Swainsboro she moved to a decent-size paper near Nashville,” he said. “Then
The Columbus Dispatch,
then the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
then
The
by-God
Boston Globe
.”

I said nothing.

“You’re lucky I’m observant as hell,” Randall said. “Because this all comes down to a single word. You know those bylines I mentioned?”

“Yeah?”

“Until about six months ago, hers read ‘Patty Marx,
Globe
Staff.’ Then she became ‘Patty Marx,
Globe
Correspondent.’”

“What’s that, a promotion?”

“Hell no,” he said. “It means she went freelance.”

“She’s still passing out
Globe
business cards.”

“Of course she is. They probably gave her a thousand of them. Right before they laid her off.”

I was thinking it through. “The cell number on the card was crossed off, changed.”

“Because they took away her company cell.” Randall was enjoying this. He’d probably predicted my objections in his head—in order. He’s smart that way.

“But the e-mail address was still there.”

“A courtesy,” he said, “for laid-off hacks while they scramble for their next job.”

“You seem pretty sure about all this.”

“I called Patty Marx’s former editor,” he said, and I could feel him breaking into a smile.

“She definitely got laid off six months ago?”

“Most definitely. And that’s not the best part.”

“Chrissake, can you get to it?”

But you can’t hurry Randall, can’t make him do anything any way but his, and he was slow-playing the story.

“I got the editor on the phone, a very nice woman,” he said. “I teased all this info out of her. Said I ran an antiques newsletter in the Berkshires, and Patty Marx had written three pieces for me, and I was damned if I could find her address.”

“That was pretty clever.”

“Obviously this editor wasn’t supposed to give out the address, but she felt rotten about all the layoffs, and who wants to hold up a starving freelancer’s check?”

“The address, Randall. What was the address?”

“How about the Alta Vista Inn?” he said.

“Where’s that?”

“Rourke, New Hampshire.”

*   *   *

So many ideas, so many facts to click through. As I pulled into Charlene’s driveway, I tried to push away ugly thoughts I was having about Patty Marx—living in Rourke on the sly, it looked like. And her car-to-car meet with Phigg just before he turned up dead. I needed to talk with Ollie, too. I needed to move.

Randall and I had decided to hit Rourke first because it was closer. Then maybe a run to Enosburg Falls. I just wanted to shower off wallboard dust before we split.

As I stepped in the front door, though, I heard footsteps, saw Charlene step away from a dining-room window. She narrowed her eyes. “Where’s Fred?”

I stopped cold. “I left him here. Why?”

“Your note.”

“What note?”

Charlene’s eyes went wide. She turned and fast-walked to the kitchen, then returned with a blue Post-it stuck to her fingertip. “I came home to catch up on spreadsheets,” she said, holding the note up, “and found this. I thought you wrote it.”

WERE AT F
’
HAM HOUSE
,
HOME BY DINNER
. Block printed, it just about could have been written by me.

But it hadn’t been.

Our eyes met. We sprinted upstairs, flew into Jesse’s room.

The bed was made.

The curtains were pulled back just so.

The windows were both open eight inches.

All the clothes I’d bought Fred, which he’d kept atop Jesse’s dresser rather than mess up her drawers, were gone.

My father had taken off.

CHAPTER TWENTY

We spent the next ninety minutes in a full-court press, trying to find Fred before he got far. I had Charlene check the family luggage stash, which she kept in the attic. It was all there. “What does that matter, anyway?”

“A man with a rolling suitcase,” I said, “is a whole ’nother thing than a man lugging his gear in a green trash bag.”

She said I was right about that.

Charlene called the four cab companies that worked Shrewsbury while I dialed the local cops. Said my dad had slipped from the yard, might be confused, could be wandering down the main drag. Had anybody reported seeing him?

No dice.

Then I called the state police, Framingham barracks, got through to the detectives, and asked for Vic Lacross. “Ha!” said a nasally man’s voice. “Year too late, friend. Long gone, good riddance.” Click.

“What was that about?” Charlene said.

“Cop I used to know,” I said. “I guess he’s not a cop anymore. How about the taxis?”

She made a thumbs down.

We sat. Charlene drummed long fingernails on the telephone receiver. “An old man, no longer unkempt but hardly genteel-looking, carrying a Hefty trash bag. Such a man is not invisible in this town. How is he getting around, Conway?”

“He’s got a ride,” I said. “He must.”

“Unless…”

Then we were both up, flashing down basement stairs to the garage beneath the kitchen. Two years ago, when Charlene bought her Volvo SUV, she decided to hang on to her old white Accord rather than trade it in. It would be a great first car for Jesse, if Jesse ever bothered to get her driver’s license.

It was easy to picture: Fred, with the house to himself for a few days, poking around, finding the Accord, digging for its keys in the kitchen junk drawer.…

But when I shouldered into the garage, there sat the car, dusty and buried in junk.

“So he got a ride when he left,” Charlene said. “Who from?”

As we crossed the basement, I remembered Charlene’s booze, Fred’s first day here. My stomach sank. I froze.

“What?” she said.

I stepped to the shelf where I’d stashed the booze, pulled away painting supplies.

Fred had taken it all. Every bottle.

I leaned on the wall and explained it to Charlene.

She put her head in her hands.

*   *   *

Ninety minutes later, Randall and I eased past a carved-wood sign that said
ALTA VISTA INN
. Beneath it hung two smaller signs:
OFF
-
SEASON RATES
and
WEDDINGS WELCOME
.

“Must have nice views up there,” Randall said, craning his neck to look at the huge brown Victorian. To get here we’d taken a hard right off Main Street, not far from Mechanic Street. Then we’d spooled slowly upward on back roads for a mile and a half. The Alta Vista Inn sat on what had to be the highest lot for miles, centered in a three-acre clearing.

“Probably started out as an industrialist’s house,” Randall said as I pointed my truck back toward town. “Back when this town was something.”

“Weird place for a city reporter to live,” I said. “Unless…”

He looked at me.

“Unless she was working there, and a bed came with the job.”

“Why would a gal like her change sheets at a B and B?”

“First, it kept her close to Tander Phigg,” I said. “Also, she was black.”

“So?”

I swept an arm at the main street. “Town like this, can you think of a better place for a black girl to fit in?”

Randall tapped an index finger to his cheek. “Sad but true,” he finally said. “So what’s her deal? Did Patty Marx get laid off, then move up here to stalk poor Tander Phigg?”

I shrugged. “Stalking him, or maybe stalking his money.”

He thought a few seconds. “She didn’t strike me that way.”

I shrugged again. “First order of business, let’s see what we can learn from the inn.”

I backtracked out of town to an off-brand gas station specializing in diesel for a freight company next door. Drove past the station, swung into the freight-company lot.

Randall said, “You can’t just pull up to the pay phone?”

“Security cams. Learned about them the hard way.”

I fished under Randall’s side of the bench seat, came up with a blue baseball cap that said FLATOUT in orange letters, passed it to him. “Pull it low. And, ah, try to sound black.”

“The indignity of it all.” He closed the door and jogged to the gas station pay phone. As I watched him trot, I shook my head: You’d never guess he had a strap-on foot.

He was back in three minutes. “Nice lady,” he said, stuffing the cap beneath the seat. “She used to work in the financial district in Boston, hubby was a lawyer, they both took buyouts, wouldn’t trade this life for anything.”

“You got all that in three minutes?”

“Well, there wasn’t much she could tell me about Patty Marx,” he said. “Patty replied to an ad around Thanksgiving. Ski season was coming up, so they hired her more or less over the phone. She did nice work, maid and breakfast service. Never spoke except for small talk. The lady just about dropped the phone when I told her Marx used to be a
Globe
reporter. She kept to herself, hung out with her boyfriend on Mondays, which were her only days off during ski season. A few weeks ago she was just plain gone one morning. They’re holding her last paycheck. The lady and her husband figured Patty got itchy when warm weather hit and took off. Happens all the time, she said.”