The Unquiet-CP-6 (6 page)

Chapter III

I sat at Rebecca Clay’s kitchen table, watching as she cleaned the broken glass from the sink with a brush and pan. There was still blood on the windowpane. She had notified the cops immediately after calling me, and a South Portland cruiser had arrived shortly before I did. I had identified myself to the patrolman and listened as Rebecca gave her statement, but otherwise I had not interfered in any way. Her daughter, Jenna, sat on a sofa in the living room, clutching a china doll that looked like it might once have belonged to her mother. The doll had red hair and wore a blue dress. It was obvious that it was an old and cherished possession. The mere fact that the girl was seeking comfort from it at this time attested to its value. She did not seem as shaken as her mother, appearing more puzzled than disturbed. She also struck me as both older and younger than her years: older in appearance yet younger in her demeanor, and I wondered if perhaps her mother sheltered and protected her a little too much. There was another woman sitting with Jenna. Rebecca introduced her as April, a friend who lived nearby. She shook my hand and said that, since I was there and Jenna seemed okay, she’d go home so that she wouldn’t be in the way. Rebecca kissed her on the cheek, and they hugged, then April leaned back and held Rebecca at arm’s length. A look passed between them, one that spoke of shared knowledge, of years of friendship and loyalty.

“You call me,” said April. “Anytime.”

“I will. Thanks, hon.”

April kissed Jenna good-bye, then left.

I watched Jenna while Rebecca walked the cop around the outside of the house, pointing out the place where the stranger had stood. The child would grow up to be a very beautiful young woman. There was something of her mother in her, but it was rendered more striking by a slim, aquiline grace that came from elsewhere. I thought I saw something of her grandfather in her as well.

“You doing okay?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“When something like this happens, it can be kind of scary,” I continued. “It’s happened to me, and I was scared.”

“I wasn’t scared,” she said, and her tone was so matter-of-fact that I knew she wasn’t lying.

“Why not?”

“The man didn’t want to hurt us. He’s just sad.”

“How do you know that?”

She just smiled and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know that he doesn’t mean you harm?”

She looked away, that almost beatific smile still on her face. The conversation was clearly over. Her mother came back inside with the cop, and Jenna told her that she was going back to bed. Rebecca hugged her and told her that she’d check on her later. Jenna said good-bye to the cop and me, then went upstairs to her room.

Rebecca Clay lived in an area known as Willard. Her house, a compact but impressive nineteenth-century structure in which she had grown up, and to which she had returned after her father’s disappearance, stood on Willard Haven Park, a dead end that ran perpendicular to Willard Beach, a few steps across Willard Haven Road. When the cop eventually left, promising that a detective would call either later that night or the next morning, I took a look around, walking in his footsteps, but it was clear that the man who had broken the glass was long gone. I followed a trail of blood to Deake Street, which ran parallel to Willard Haven Park on the right, then lost it where he had climbed into a car and driven away. I called Rebecca Clay from the sidewalk, and she gave me the names of some of the neighbors who lived within sight of where the car had been parked. Only one of them, a middle-aged woman named Lisa Hulmer, who sported the kind of look that suggested she might consider the description “whorish” a compliment, had seen anything, and even that wasn’t much help to me. She remembered a dark red car parked across the street, but she couldn’t tell me the make or the tag number. She did invite me into her home, though, and suggested that I might like to join her for a drink. I had clearly disturbed her in the act of consuming a jug of something fruity and alcoholic. When she closed the front door behind me, it reminded me uncomfortably of a cell slamming shut on a condemned man.

“It’s a little early for me,” I said.

“But it’s after ten-thirty!”

“I’m a late sleeper.”

“Me too.” She grinned and arced an eyebrow in what would only have passed for a suggestive manner if you were especially susceptible to suggestion, like a dog or a small child. “Once you get me into bed you just can’t get me out of it.”

“That’s…nice,” I said, for want of a better word.

“You’re nice,” she said. She swayed a little and fiddled with a seashell chain that hung between her breasts, but by then I had opened the door and was backing out of the house before she shot me with a dart and chained me to a wall in her basement.

“Did you find out anything?” Rebecca Clay asked me when I got back to her house.

“Not much, apart from the fact that one of your neighbors is in heat.”

“Lisa?” She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived. “She’s always in heat. She even propositioned me once.”

“You’re making me feel less special,” I said.

“I suppose I should have warned you about her, but—” She waved a hand at the broken window.

“Well, she was the only one who saw anything. She said there was a red car parked outside her house for a while, but the lighting isn’t so good there. She could be mistaken.”

Rebecca threw the last of the glass in her trash can and put the brush and pan in a closet. She then called a glazier, who promised to be out to her first thing in the morning. I helped her to tape some plastic over the damaged pane and, when all of that was done, she made a pot of coffee and poured each of us a cup. We both stayed standing while we drank.

“I don’t trust the police to do anything about this,” she said.

“Can I ask why?”

“They haven’t been able to do anything about him so far. Why should this time be any different?”

“This time he busted through a window. That’s criminal damage. It’s escalating. There’s blood, and the blood could be useful to the cops.”

“How? So they can use it to identify him if he kills me? By then it may be a little late for me. This man isn’t scared of the police. I was thinking about what you told me when we first met, about how this man might have to be forced to leave me alone. I want you to do that. I don’t care how much it costs. I have some money. I can afford to pay you to do it, and whomever else you want to hire to help you. Look at what he did here. He’s not going to go away, not unless someone makes him. I’m afraid for myself, and I’m afraid for Jenna.”

“Jenna seems like a very self-possessed girl,” I said, hoping to distract her from the subject until she had calmed down.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that she didn’t seem particularly frightened or shaken by what happened.”

Rebecca frowned. “I guess she’s always been that way. I’ll talk to her later, though. I don’t want her bottling something up just because she doesn’t want to upset me.”

“Can I ask where her father is?”

“Her father’s dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s okay. He never had much to do with her anyway, and we weren’t married. But I meant what I said: I want this man stopped, whatever it takes.”

I didn’t reply. She was angry and frightened. Her hands were still shaking from the shock of the incident. There would be time to talk in the morning. I told her that I’d stay if it made her feel better. She thanked me and made up the sofa bed in her living room.

“Do you carry a gun?” she asked as she prepared to head up the stairs to her bedroom.

“Yes.”

“Good. If he comes back, use it to kill him.”

“That’ll cost extra.”

She looked at me and for a moment I could tell that she was wondering if I was serious. Worryingly, I thought that she might even have been willing to pay.

The glazier arrived shortly after seven to replace the broken pane. He took a look at the sleeper couch, the busted window, and me, and clearly decided that he was entering the aftermath of a domestic dispute.

“It happens,” he whispered to me conspiratorially. “They throw stuff, but they don’t mean it to hit you, not really. Still, always pays to duck.”

I thanked him. It was probably good advice in any case. He nodded pleasantly to Rebecca and went about his work.

When he was done, I followed Rebecca’s Hyundai as she drove Jenna to school, then kept behind her all the way to her office. She worked a stone’s throw from where she lived, at Willard Square, just by the junction of Pillsbury and Preble. She had told me that she planned to be in the office until lunchtime, then had properties to visit in the afternoon. I watched her go inside. I had tried to keep a discreet distance from her while she drove. I hadn’t yet seen any sign of the man who was following her, but I didn’t want him to spot me with her, not yet. I wanted him to try to get close to her again, so that this time I could be waiting. If he was good, though, he’d pick me out easily, and I had already resigned myself to the fact that I would need to bring in more bodies if this thing was to be done right.

While Rebecca worked in her office, I drove back to Scarborough, walked and fed Walter, then showered and changed my clothes. I switched cars, substituting the Mustang for a green Saturn coupe, bought coffee and a Danish in Foley’s Bakery on Route 1, and headed back to Willard. Willie Brew’s auto shop in Queens had sourced the coupe for me and sold it on for what seemed like less than it must have cost to buy the tires. It was useful as a backup at times like this, but driving it made me feel like a rube.

“Somebody die in it?” I had asked Willie when he had first presented it to me as a possible second car.

Willie had made a show of sniffing the interior.

“I think it’s damp,” he had answered. “Probably. Maybe. Anyway, at what I’m asking for it, the corpse could be stuck to the seat and it would still be a bargain.”

He was right, but it remained kind of embarrassing to drive. Then again, it was hard to be inconspicuous in a 1969 Mustang Boss 302. Even the dumbest criminal is likely to look in his rearview at some point, and think, I wonder is that the same ’69 Mustang with go-faster stripes that was behind me earlier? Hey, maybe I’m being followed!

I checked in with Rebecca by phone, then took a walk around Willard to clear my head a little more and to pass some time. Sleeping on a couch with a cold wind whistling through a broken window wasn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. Even after my shower, I still felt out of sync. People across the water in Portland tended to look down some on South Portland. It had been a city for only a hundred years or so, which made it a baby by Maine standards. The building of the Million Dollar Bridge, the construction of Interstate 295, and the opening of the Maine Mall had taken away some of its charm by forcing local businesses to close, but it still had a character all its own. The area in which Rebecca Clay lived used to be called Point Village, but that was way back in the 1800s and by the time South Portland became a separate entity from Cape Elizabeth in 1895 it had become known simply as Willard. It was home to ships’ captains and fishermen, descendants of whom still lived in the area to this day. During the last century, a man named Daniel Cobb used to own a lot of the land around here. He grew tobacco and apples and celery. It was also said that he was the first person to grow iceberg lettuce in the East. I walked down Willard Street to the beach. The tide was out, and the sand changed color dramatically from white to dark brown where the sea’s advance had halted. To the left, the beach stretched in a half-moon, ending at the Spring Point Ledge Light which marked the dangerous ledge on the west side of the main shipping channel into Portland Harbor. Beyond lay Cushing Island and Peaks Island, and the rust-streaked façade of Fort Gorges. To the right, a set of concrete steps led up to a pathway along the promontory that ended in a small park. A trolley line used to run down Willard Street to the beach in summer. Even after the trolley stopped running, an old refreshment stand remained near what used to be the end of the line. It dated back to the 1930s, and it was still selling food as late as the 1970s, when it was called the

“Dory” and the Carmody family passed out hot dogs and fries through its window to the beachgoers. My grandfather sometimes brought me there as a child, and he told me that the stand had once been part of the empire of Sam Silverman, who was kind of a legend in his time. It was said that he kept a monkey and a bear in a cage in order to attract people to his businesses, including the Willard Beach Bath House and Sam’s Lunch. The Carmodys’ hot dogs had been pretty good, but they couldn’t really match up to a bear in a cage. After we had spent a little time on the beach, my grandfather would always take me over to Mr. and Mrs. B’s store, the Bathras Market, on Preble Street, where he would order some Italian sandwiches to bring home for supper and Mr. B would carefully record the sale on my grandfather’s tab. The Bathras family had the most famous tab in South Portland, so that it seemed like every customer settled bills there on a weekly or biweekly basis, with cash rarely changing hands for small items. I wondered if it was nostalgia that caused me to reflect warmly on something as simple as a grocery store or an old refreshment stand. That was part of it, I supposed. My grandfather had shared these places with me, but now both he and they were gone, and I would not have the opportunity to share them with another. Still, there were other places and other people. Jennifer, my first child, had never been given the chance to see them, not really. She was too young when she and her mother came up here with me, and before she was old enough to appreciate what she was encountering she was dead. But there was still Sam. Her life was just beginning. If I could keep her safe from harm, then, in time, she might be able to join me on a stretch of sand, or on a quiet street along which trolleys used to rumble, or by a river or on a mountain path. I could pass on some of these secrets to her, and she could hold them to herself and know that the past and the present were speckled with brightness, and that there was light as well as shade in the honeycomb world.