The Fixer (21 page)

R
ick returned to the bed-and-breakfast in Kenmore Square, packed up his suitcase, and checked out. He drove maybe half a mile to a DoubleTree on Soldiers Field Road and booked a room. After checking in, he went online and looked up the Donegall Charitable Trust and found nothing.

Then he pulled out the Rolodex card Joan had given him and looked at Paul Clarke’s phone number in area code 603. Was it still a valid number? For some reason he imagined that people in rural areas—and Paul Clarke’s house was in a rural part of New Hampshire, that was for sure—moved around less often than people in large cities.

He thought about Clarke. He remembered a tall man in faded blue jeans and a barn coat, a man with silver hair and dark eyebrows. He remembered liking the man. He recalled the continual look of slight amusement on Clarke’s face, as though talking to you was like watching a mildly amusing sitcom. Clarke seemed somehow too elegant to be a maple syrup farmer. He seemed out of place in the old farmhouse.

Rick had no idea how old Clarke was, just that he’d been around the same age as Len. To a kid, thirty-five and fifty all look the same. Would he still be alive? If he was approximately Lenny’s age, he’d be anywhere from seventy-five to eighty-five. He might well still be alive.

If Lenny had driven up to New Hampshire to see Paul Clarke the week before his stroke, maybe he really had confided in him what he was worried about. Maybe Clarke would know something useful.

Rick took a breath and called the number.

It didn’t even ring. A recorded message came right on, a woman’s voice: “
You have reached a number that is no longer in service. Please check the number and try again.
”

So maybe the man had died. He went to his laptop and Googled Paul Clarke, looking for an obituary. Nothing came up. He tried ZabaSearch, typing in “Paul Clarke” and specifying New Hampshire on the pulldown menu. A result came right up:

Found 1 record for Paul Clarke

Paul Wayne Clarke
, 82, Redding, NH

That indicated that Paul Clarke was probably still alive. The town was right. He called directory assistance in New Hampshire. A robot voice said, “
Say the name or type of business.
” When he said Clarke’s name, the robot said, “
Let me transfer you to an operator
.”

An operator came on a few seconds later. “Yes, in New Hampshire, how may I help you?”

“In Redding, can I have the number of Paul Clarke?”

The operator clicked away at her keyboard. “I’m finding a Paul Clarke, but the number is unpublished.”

“But there is a number.”

“Unpublished, sir.”

He hung up. Then he called his sister’s cell number. She answered right away. She was in some noisy place, probably the back of the vegan restaurant her partner ran. “Do you remember Paul Clarke?”

“Who?”

“Clarke. Paul Clarke.”

“Isn’t that a friend of dad’s, lives out in the boonies someplace?”

“That’s the guy.”

“The maple syrup guy! He used to scoop up snow from the ground and put maple syrup on it and make us eat it?”

“He didn’t make us eat it. We couldn’t get enough of it.”

“Maple syrup on snow. That’s like the most disgusting thing ever, so why were we so into it?”

“We were kids.”

“He and Dad used to go off and have these deep talks and we weren’t allowed to interrupt them, right? And he had this pencil trick he used to do that we couldn’t figure out?”

“Oh yeah. But he eventually taught me how. Anyway, I’m trying to reach the guy.”

“What for?”

“I’ll tell you about it sometime. Soon. For now, I’m just wondering whether you know where Dad might have put his phone number.”

“Did you ask Joan?”

“The number she has is disconnected.”

“Probably in his study someplace.”

“Which is empty now. They’re redoing some of the plaster work and repainting.”

“I have no idea.” In a mournful tone, she said, “I guess you can’t ask Dad.”

“Not exactly. Though he’s making progress.” He told her about the transcranial magnetic stimulation and how it seemed to be working. He didn’t tell her about Lenny’s “I want to die” message.

“What? You’re kidding me! Amazing. Do they think he’ll be able to talk eventually?”

“They don’t know. It’s all pretty experimental, and it’s early. Don’t get your hopes up.”

A few minutes later he hung up and decided to take a drive to New Hampshire.

H
e took precautions.

It had become almost second nature to him now. He’d traded in the Zipcar—after removing the GPS tracker from the rear left wheel well and sticking it on a nearby car—for a Suburban from Avis. When he returned to Boston, he’d check out of the DoubleTree and find some other place, maybe in one of the towns outside Boston, like Newton.

But he had to keep moving, had to avoid comfortable habits and routines, until . . .

Until he’d found out who was going after him and why.

He welcomed the long drive up 93 North to New Hampshire as an opportunity at long last to think. The driving was repetitive and dull, and his mind wandered; he couldn’t help falling into a reverie.

He found himself thinking about what Joan Breslin had revealed, that Pappas had been taking care of Lenny all these years. For what possible reason? It couldn’t be out of the goodness of Pappas’s heart.

And he found himself wondering what Joan was hiding. She’d never volunteered Pappas’s name when Rick had asked who “P” might be. That couldn’t have been an oversight. She was covering something up, he felt sure. He wondered if she, like Lenny, was afraid of Pappas.

Such payments could be made to buy silence. Maybe hers had been bought. Then why pay off Lenny, who couldn’t talk anyway?

After about an hour and a half of driving, the expressway cut a swath through the White Mountain National Forest, dense with pitch pines and red oak and cinnamon fern. It reminded him of the woods on Paul Clarke’s property, which must have been twenty or thirty acres at least. The sugar maples, when they visited one winter weekend years ago, all had spouts dug into their trunks, dripping clear sap into tin buckets. Mr. Clarke, tall and silver-haired and distinguished-looking, showed them how the full buckets of sap were collected.

Rick remembered walking into the sugar house where the sap was boiled down in the giant evaporator over a roaring fire, the sensation and the aroma of being hit by the wall of steam heavy with the sweet smell of maple syrup. It took forty gallons of sap, Clarke had said, to make a gallon of maple syrup.

Paul Clarke had seemed oddly hip and handsome for a friend of Dad’s. He looked, in his barn coat, more like a senator running for reelection than a farmer. They’d gone out for dinner at the only pizza place in town. Over pizza, Mr. Clarke showed Rick a trick with a pencil. He started with his hands together as if in prayer, a pencil grasped under both thumbs. Then somehow he swiveled his hands around and suddenly the thumbs pointed down, the pencil underneath his hands. It looked simple, but it was impossible to do. Wendy and Rick tried repeatedly. They asked him to do it slowly. No matter how many times he did it, they were unable to replicate it. Naturally they kept nagging him to show them how he did it.

“What’s the trick?” Rick had demanded.

“There’s no trick,” Mr. Clarke had replied with a poker face. Only later did Rick come to understand. It looked like a trick, but it wasn’t a trick at all. It was all about technique. Nothing was hidden. What you saw was what you got. No trick.

He remembered his father and Mr. Clarke going off for long conversations in Mr. Clarke’s book-choked study. Rick and Wendy and their mother were left to read or hike in the woods. Rick, budding investigative journalist at age eight, got curious and stood outside the study door, listening, unable to make sense of their low voices. Rick woke early the next morning and found Mr. Clarke in the sugar shack, hard at work with the buckets of sap. At breakfast he finally persuaded Mr. Clarke to show him how to do the pencil trick, and he went around the house crowing to his younger sister, “I know the trick! I know the trick!”

But to this day he had no idea who Mr. Clarke was, this man who was one of his father’s closest friends. With the typical obliviousness of kids, Rick and his sister couldn’t be bothered to learn how Dad and Mr. Clarke were connected. Classmates? Colleagues? Was he an old client? What, exactly? They had no idea and never asked. For some reason Lenny had stayed in touch with Paul Clarke, had even gone to see him the week before his stroke. Rick wondered why.

When Interstate 93 emerged from the White Mountain National Forest, he drove past Franconia, then exited at Littleton and took 116 northeast along the curves of the Ammonoosuc River until he reached the town of Redding, New Hampshire.

All he knew was that Paul Clarke lived in Redding. He didn’t know where. He had nothing more than a post office box. But as he drove through the town, he began to recognize landmarks. They’d visited Clarke a few times, long ago, but it had been often enough that Rick remembered the town, in a sketchy sort of way.

He drove past a book barn that looked familiar, and next to it a general store. He remembered his mother and father browsing in the book barn for what seemed like hours while he and Wendy had gone to the general store nearby and shopped for candy and comic books. Then came the strip of storefronts, the art gallery, a children’s clothing store, a coffee shop, a place offering web and graphic design services.

He stopped into the coffee shop, called Town Grounds, bought a cup of Sumatra—fancy artisanal coffee, even in rural New Hampshire!—and asked the young woman at the counter if she knew where Paul Clarke’s house was. She smiled apologetically and said she had no idea. When he came out of the coffee shop he saw, across the street, Town Pizza. It looked like the same one where they used to go for dinner when they visited Clarke, who was a bachelor and didn’t cook much.

He crossed the street and entered the pizza parlor. Behind the counter, a middle-aged bald guy was sliding a pizza into an oven with a wooden peel. He looked as if he might be the owner.

“Do you know Paul Clarke?”

“Paul? Sure.”

“Do you know where he lives? I’m an old friend.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea,” he said, and he drew a map on a paper place mat.

Rick got back into the Suburban, drove past a white-steepled church, then a small town hall building, then an off-brand gas station. There he turned left and continued on straight for a mile or so until he dead-ended at Chiswick Road. He turned right and drove along a tree-lined road with modest wooden houses set back from the street, every quarter mile or so. Then he came to a big, unpainted aluminum mailbox that said
CLARKE
in large stick-on letters.

The mailbox stood at the mouth of a narrow unpaved road that disappeared into thick coniferous forest. But there were also plenty of maple trees, he knew. He saw the ruts of large tires in the dirt that looked fairly recent.

After only a moment’s hesitation, he turned into the private road, which twisted through woods for what seemed close to half a mile and then opened out into a gravel drive bordering a scrubby lawn and then a sprawling white farmhouse. Stones popped under the Suburban’s big tires as he drove over gravel. A couple of well-worn vehicles were parked side by side, a Ford F-150 truck and a Subaru Outback.

If nothing had changed in the years since the family had last visited, Clarke lived here alone. So the odds were good that he was at home.

He parked and got out of the car.

Suddenly he heard a gunshot, and a tree trunk just a few feet away exploded. Startled, he ducked. “What the hell?” he said aloud, realizing in a moment that a bullet had come close to hitting him.

He rose slowly, hands up in the air. “I’m here to see Paul Clarke!” he shouted.

A man was standing in front of the house, holding a shotgun pointed directly at him. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Rick Hoffman. Lenny’s son.”

“Oh, Jesus.” The man lowered the shotgun. He approached Rick. He was wearing a green-and-black plaid woolen shirt. “We’ve got a serious home invasion problem around here. Some meth heads live down the road, and they’ve got a black Suburban just like yours. Can’t be too careful. The downside of living way out in the boonies is nobody can hear you scream.”

R
ick took a few steps and shook the old man’s hand.

“Rick Hoffman. I know I should have called first, but I couldn’t find your phone number.”

“Paul Clarke,” the old man said. “It’s been years, right? How’s Pop? Is he—?”

“He’s okay,” Rick said. “You know he had a stroke, right?”

Clarke nodded. “I can’t really visit him. I don’t know if your dad ever explained.”

Rick shook his head. “I need to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Come on in.”

*   *   *

Clarke’s house was low-ceilinged and looked very old, with small windows and wide-board plank floors. It was dark and warrenlike and smelled everywhere of wood smoke. Clarke took him through a few sparsely furnished rooms to a room with a large fireplace and a couple of mismatched sofas and chairs, which looked like the place where Clarke spent most of his time. Rick remembered this room, the crackling fire, the comfortable sofas where they’d curl up and read while Clarke and his father talked in Clarke’s study.

“Did you drive up from Boston?” Clarke asked as he knelt by the fireplace, balling up old newspaper.

“I did. I had no way of reaching you first. Dad’s unable to speak, you might have heard—”

Clarke turned around, nodded. “Awful thing.”

“And the phone number he had from twenty years ago didn’t work.”

“I understand. I’m not easy to find, and that’s no accident.”

Clarke seemed to be implying something, but Rick didn’t probe. In a few minutes, Clarke had lit the newspaper, and the kindling had caught fire, and before long a fire was roaring.

“What can I get you to drink?” Clarke said. “Coffee? Tea? Scotch?”

“Scotch would be good.” He wanted Clarke lubricated and voluble.

Clarke nodded and left the room, and then Rick heard the sound of water running from the nearby kitchen. He returned with two freshly washed tumblers of Scotch over ice. Clarke handed one to Rick. “I should have asked, you prefer it neat?”

“This is fine, thanks.” It was not long after noon. He’d have to drive back this afternoon, which would now entail stopping at the Town Grounds and getting a couple of hits of caffeine to help him through the drive home. “I have some good memories of visiting you here when Dad took us. Do you still make maple syrup?”

“Oh, yes. Still a sugar maker. I’ve still got the old sugar shack. It’s gotten a little fancier than it was when you kids used to come here, I’m sure—tubing and reverse osmosis and such. I only have about fifty acres here, so I’m a small-time producer. But it pays the bills, which aren’t big.”

Rick sat at one end of a sofa, and Clarke sat in an overstuffed armchair next to the sofa. The chair’s upholstery was shabby and threadbare, and tufts of white stuffing stuck out of the holes in the arms. Clarke had taken off his green plaid overshirt. He was wearing green wide-wale corduroy pants and a muted brown plaid flannel shirt, and his silver hair looked freshly barbered.

“Were you aiming at me?” Rick said as he took a sip of Scotch.

“If I were aiming at you, Rick, I would have hit you. No, I was aiming for just over your head and a few inches to the right. Close enough to put the fear of God into you. And again, I’m sorry about that. I was too impulsive.”

Rick smiled. “My fault for showing up unannounced. But I need to talk to you. You were, I think, one of Dad’s closest friends. Maybe the closest. And I know he came to see you the week before his stroke.”

Clarke nodded. Joan had called him “one of the scruffy people,” but he could hardly have been less scruffy. He could have been a country gentleman in a Ralph Lauren magazine ad.

“His doctors now think he was hit—beaten, badly. They suspect his stroke was likely brought on by traumatic brain injury.”

Clarke winced, ducked his head, then put a hand over his eyes. “Oh, dear. I’m not surprised. I’m just surprised they let him live. He expected to be killed.”

“He did? Why?”

“Because your father had had a crisis of conscience. He wanted out of the life he’d fallen into. He couldn’t go on anymore.”

You didn’t play by the rules
 . . .

“Why not?”

“Something disturbed him deeply. Something he was told to do.”

“What was that?”

Clarke shook his head slowly. “He wanted to protect me. Keep me ignorant of the details. He thought the less I knew, the safer I’d be. He was a thoughtful man, your father was. All he’d say was that some people had been killed and he’d been ordered to cover something up about their deaths.”

Rick thought of the little girl at the piano recital and knew his father had been moved as much as he had. Lenny had been told to pay off the surviving family members. It must have been part of a cover-up.

“Why did he drive up here? Did he come to talk it over with you, was that why he came?”

“I think that was part of it, yes. But I think it was mostly to get my help.”

“In what?”

“He wanted my help in doing what he helped me do, back in the day.” Clarke gave him an intent look.

Rick shook his head. “To do what?”

“He never told you . . . about me?”

“What about you?”

“Oh, Lordy. He wanted to disappear. Same way I did.”