The Lost Highway (46 page)

The message to her dad was the last. September 1. The real trouble was, she knew something was wrong—a certain dread she felt.

By September 2 she knew exactly what it was. Why didn’t she tell her mom?

This would all have to come out in the report now being handled in Moncton.

“Who would have ever known?” Bauer said now, insinuating Markus into his own lack of understanding.

“Random,” Markus said, glancing at him, “totally random, my man.” And he closed the notebook for good.

—

“M
RS
. H
ANSON COOKED THEM A CHICKEN AND A POTATO
salad and a cheesecake,” Bourque said at two on that afternoon of September 2. “It’s really nice of her—” Then he said this: “The thing about Minnie, which in effect is a balm to us, and allows a certain healthy healing to take place, is she is a good woman—not a dazzling woman like some of the trappers’ wives I know, those insinuating little backstabbers who would wear a coyote and say it was a fox—but all in all a kindly woman, who as you know—what a body on her when she got her growth at about eighteen, do you remember? I am talking body, sweet, how do you say it, it melted when you hugged her, which I was lucky to do once at her wedding.”

“Unfortunately I have never hugged her,” Alex said. “I was too, too shy.”

“Then you have missed a certain—charm.” Bourque smiled. “For, you see, she gave in to a hug—a hug allowed her a certain predisposed submitting she had no control over.”

“Shut up about her.”

“Oh well. You should have been at the wedding. You should have been at my wedding.”

“I missed it because of ecclesiastical duty.”

“I know that,” Bourque said, almost in timidity.

“Shut up about her or I will talk about your wife in the arms of you know who.” And he looked up at Bourque with a calm and almost Jesuitical hatred.

“Anyway—Mrs. Hanson is already on her way—so we could go over now and do it—what do you think? This is when she is left alone up there—no one around at all—and Rory, that Rory—why he never visits her anymore!”

Alex shrugged.

They sat in the sullen cabin until almost quarter past four, not looking at each other perhaps like those about to witness an execution. For one whole hour or more they did not speak. Then Bourque, who was wearing commando pants, went out for a little while. Then he came back.

The day had gone on. Bourque had come in to tell Alex that Amy was already there, at the house.

“But she is very smart,” Bourque said. “She took the old woman for her walk when Mrs. Hanson was still there. You see, all summer on the lane she was only one call away from help. But today it is different.” Here he broke out grinning in spite of himself. “I was so close beside her as she walked by me, I could have put the clothesline about her there and then.” He was a little too energized, as if he wanted to instill a kind of excitement in the prospect.

“The clothesline—what clothesline?” Alex asked.

“Oh, don’t you worry—I have a piece of clothesline if we have to tie her up.” And Bourque reached into his pocket and brought out about three feet of line.

“But if we have to tie her up it will look like she didn’t really commit suicide—for how in the world would she tie herself up?”

“It could be done—it is quite possible—and in fact it might show her ingenuity, coupled with her fierce determination to go through with it. If she ties her hands, she will have less ability to stop what she herself puts in process?”

“I will not go for tying her up. I don’t want to scare her. I realize she has to go for whatever chance we have—still and all!”

“I am only saying that if there are certain other measures that have to be taken, just till we get her to the pond—but I couldn’t put the clothesline around her because Mrs. Hanson was still there. She is looking at the puddle too.”

“What do you mean, she is looking at the puddle?”

“Simply this: she is looking at the puddle, in the yard, for I have snuck back and forth and disturbed it. And though she has not seen me, she knows this—that is, that the puddle is disturbed. She is no one’s fool, Minnie’s little girl.” He said this as a reprimand to Alex and in appreciation for people like him and Minnie. “And there is something sweet about her, she smells of wash and clean air—I like that about her!”

Alex was suddenly appalled at Bourque even suggesting Amy’s body as appealing. But perhaps that is not what Bourque had meant. Perhaps he had only meant that her body was more sacred than he had thought.

“But I am trying to ask, what has that got to do with anything?” Alex said, trying to sound severe.

Bourque did not answer this. He stroked his mustache and nodded, deep in his own thoughts.

“Killing her will solve nothing,” Alex said now. “If they impound the truck, which is what Markus is about, if they do so, we will be incarcerated no matter if we kill her or not. This is the fundamental flaw in our design and will work against us in the end.”

“She is the key witness, and I believe that over the last two weeks she has figured it out. I am sure she saw Poppy and finally she knows she has, so we have no more time. As Elvis says, its now or never!”

Bourque did not know how right he was as far as the timeline went, and that over the last two weeks Amy had done just that, realized fully what she must have seen, and had been on the verge of telling her mother before her mother left to go out west. Was on the verge of telling her father in an email but realized once the email was sent how final it would all be.

Alex was silent. He, Alex, however, was no fool—he realized this. All of the crime so far had been committed by Bourque, really—the knifing and the tricking John Proud. He could go tonight and turn them both in, and perhaps, just perhaps be free of it all. But could he do this?

“Bourque is terribly right wing,” he could say. “Not like me!”

Again Alex asked what it would benefit to harm Amy.

Bourque, drinking from a bottle of hermit wine, stared at him. “No man, no problem,” he said.

This splashed on Alex like scalding water and he sat forward, suddenly, angrily. “Why did you say that?” he asked.

“Say what?”

“What you just said, why did you say it?”

“I dunno.”

“Then don’t say it again!”

“What did I say?”

“No man, no problem!”

“Seems like the thing to say.”

“You stole it from Stalin!”

“I did no such thing.”

“And that’s not the first thing you stole—his mustache, his eyes—I’ve been watching you!”

“Are you nuts? Who is Stalin?”

—

M
ARKUS MISSED
A
MY’S CALL BY A HALF AN HOUR THAT DAY
. In fact, his procrastinating made his departure for Richabucto late enough that he did not get back to the office and therefore was not told of the call until the following day. He reprimanded himself for this, but he was still sure they wouldn’t have told him about this call, coming from the child. Because Bauer had had so many calls about the criminality of Johnny Proud.

The little girl had asked for Markus Paul, and only managed: “I know what is wrong with me. I saw a truck that night, about ten o’clock—”

The call came after one o’clock in the afternoon. She phoned from her house, because Fanny had no phone. When she hung up she realized that Mrs. Hanson had already gone, and she was alone on the sad old lane with the elderly woman.

—

M
ARKUS NOW WALKED TO THE TRUCK, WHICH HAD BEEN
taken apart, piece by piece. It was the afternoon of September 23.

Blood under the seat belonged to Poppy. The smell of kerosene was prevalent, everywhere. Luminol showed passive blood drops on the carpet that had come from Bourque’s cut hand. There was fiber from Alex, and most likely his DNA. There was nothing in the truck belonging even remotely to John Proud.

The tires, though scorched, matched what little marks they had, and the sandal prints matched Alex Chapman’s. It was so easy, wasn’t it, now that it was all over? A red-winged blackbird flew.

“Random.” Markus smiled.

—

T
HAT HAD BEEN
B
OURQUE’S IDEA, TO GET RID OF THE TRUCK
by burning it, down in Chapman’s lot, before dark. They could say, since the truck was old, that it was electrical, he maintained, a fire sparked by some short in the electrical harness under the dash. And he, Bourque, knew how to do it. He had done it for Cid Fouy before for insurance with the Corvette.

That would nullify the truck as a witness against them, he said.

He said, “It is our only chance, my big cheese.”

“Well, when should we do it?”

“Now,” Bourque said, looking out the window, “because it is starting to spit rain again—and that will stop the fire from spreading. We do it in the lower junkyard, behind all the rebar, so no one will see it from the highway.”

“But couldn’t they say that this is indication of some conniving guilt, as much as me going to buy new tires?”

“Oh sure, but then again the truck itself will be gone, the tires—we will burn them as well—”

“So we are in it this deep now—we burn the tires and we go kill Amy—is this what has become of my journey?”

“What journey?”

“The journey I started on the day my mother died, the journey that was set in stone, to defend my mother, as I must, from all who had harmed her. That is who I thought I was right up until last month!”

Bourque simply shrugged.

“So what happened to that fellow, the fellow I thought I knew?” Alex asked.

“What has to be must be,” Bourque said kindly. And he added, not plaintively but philosophically, that when he was a child, crying out in the dooryard because his dad had hit his mom, little did he know that the knee of the man he was sitting on, Poppy Bourque, who made him toffee in a little bowl on winter days, he would later stab, and that would set off a chain of events that would make him prone to drowning children.

“But,” he said, “it must be done now! Or give it all up. That is what we discussed throughout the late summer, when I could have been out fishing salmon. I was in that hole of a room with you, deciding what to do about her. I did not intend it and neither have you. But there is something else you must, must know.”

“What?”

“Something that will burn your socks!”

“What—tell me, what!”

“He knows about it.”

“Who knows about what?” Alex said, starting to tremble.

“Markus Paul has figured out it is about a lotto ticket.”

“How in God’s name could he ever figure that out?”

“It puzzles me as well,” Bourque said, “but he came to my house and spoke of what he would buy if he won the lotto—and that he would buy a Porsche, just like I said I would. That scares me just a little bitty bit!”

Alex looked at him as if he had just suffered the deepest of betrayals.

“I knew it—I knew that would come back to haunt you!” he roared.

“Nothing will ever come back to haunt us if we stick together,” Bourque said. “Keep your little chin up!”

But Alex now knew that was a lie, and that he must extricate himself if he had any chance to live.

—

T
HEY STARTED OUT IN THE PULPY AFTERNOON, THE WEEDS
gone yellow and the grasses trampled down, the trees themselves all tinted by the cold and the bay water seemingly empty of summer life, and now again the rain spitting down on them, as they moved solitarily across the trampled garden. What was even worse, I suppose, is that both sighted Markus Paul’s squad car at Burton’s. But they kept silent about this, even to each other.

They both of them smelled the wind, and smoke from chimney fires, and both realized the noble feelings associated with this smell, the men who worked in the woods to keep their families going, and all the thousands of winter storms fought, the children protected, the mothers’ sacrifice unto death.

Alex was quiet. They took the keys again and started the truck, and drove it down the back hunting path to the old kiln where Alex had tried at one time to forge out of his entrails his essence as an artist and human being. He looked at it, as if wondering what had become of this wunderkind, this boy who had been so amazed at life, so willing to debate it, and before that so willing, so terribly willing, to love it.

“Gone,” he whispered.

“What?” Bourque asked.

Alex lifted his hand, and said nothing more. He looked at Bourque as the rain hit the windshield.

“She’ll be having that chicken now, and all the things Minnie made for them too,” Bourque advised. “You see how nice Minnie is—she was up so early making sure of everything before she left for just a few days, making pies and chicken, and a blueberry cheesecake—that’s who nice Minnie Mouse is, and you, the big cheese, didn’t know it. You did not love her for who she was.”

“Did so.”

“Did not—you wanted to love her behind glass, so you missed her completely, and will never get to fuck her.”

“Well I’m not going to talk about it then.”

“Well shut up about it then.”

And both did.

This is tragedy, Alex thought, this is real tragedy, but then again the tragedy of whose life? Certainly not of little Amy’s—but of Bourque’s and mine? He didn’t know. He would have to wash his hands of it.

Of course, what he pleaded about was this insistence that he now have to think of God and godly men, of the Virgin and of godliness. For this is what the last few weeks had opportuned. He knew now that one rarely thought of this, until they themselves were broken asunder by some calamity or crime, and then they must think of it too. Who doesn’t pray until a maelstrom? This in fact was the absolute proof positive of God working in mysterious ways. Alex had thought of nothing in the last three weeks but of all that he had left behind when he set off to find the truth.

But what would happen if he was captured and said, “I have begun to think of Christ again, as being the one prophet in our lives. I scorned him too, too long!”

They would scorn him. No one would believe him, no matter how true it was. No one would think that this defrocked priest, as he liked to call himself, who had just murdered an old man short of his seventy-fifth birthday, and who then silenced a child by drowning her, was having any sort of self-debate about the nature of goodness.

“If only Christ had treated me with a little more respect,” Bourque said suddenly, as if to foil what Alex was thinking, so ingrained to each other had their thinking now become. “Then I could have been different. It’s probably a few weeks past the deadline now!”

After they drove the truck down, Bourque got out and made for the small dark kiln. And Alex saw him in a sad way, a small shadow against the forgotten machines of old Jim Chapman’s life, wearing his woolen jacket and riffling through what in fact was the legacy of the old man, as their own life was coming to twilight, without the least qualm.

“For our lives are coming to a twilight one way or the other,” Alex said, as his partner tried to strike the dash wires so they would go up.

After ten minutes of this he said, “The electrical fire will do nothing.”

“There is some kerosene here by the kiln,” Alex told him.

Bourque looked over, passively but with enough power in his passivity to cause a clammy sweat to break out on Alex’s forehead. There was a moment when both smiled at each other nervously.