The Wolf in Winter (7 page)

CHAPTER

X

Jude died without enough money to pay for his own funeral, so he was buried by the city at taxpayers’ expense. It cost fifteen hundred dollars, give or take, but there were those who resented spending even that much to give a decent burial to a man who seemed to them to have been nothing but a burden on the city for most of his life. The only consolation they could derive was that Jude was unlikely to trouble them for a handout again.

He was interred in an unmarked grave at Forest City Cemetery, in South Portland, when the medical examiner had finished with his body. A funeral director recited a psalm as the coffin was lowered into the ground, but, unlike most city cases, Jude did not go to his rest unmourned. Alongside the cemetery workers stood a dozen of Portland’s homeless, men and women both, as well as representatives of the local shelters and help centers who had known Jude. I was there too. The least that I could do was acknowledge his passing. A single bouquet of flowers was laid on the ground above him once the grave had been filled in. Nobody lingered. Nobody spoke.

The medical examiner’s opinion was that Jude’s injuries were consistent with asphyxiation, with no indication of a suspicious death. The investigation was ongoing, though, and the police and the attorney general were under no obligation to accept the ME’s opinion
as gospel. Still, in this case it was unlikely that the Portland PD would reject it. When a homeless man died at the hands of another, it was usually in a brutal manner, and there was little mystery to it. Jude, despite the care that he took with his appearance, was a troubled man. He suffered from depression. He lived from meal to meal, and handout to handout. There were more likely candidates for suicide, but not many.

If there was anything unusual about this case, it was that the medical examiner had found no trace of drugs or alcohol in Jude’s system. He was clean and sober when he died. It was a minor detail, but one worthy of notice. Those who choose to take their own lives often need help with the final step. Either they set out with the intention of killing themselves, and find something to relax them in those last hours and minutes, or the mood induced by alcohol or narcotics is the trigger for the act. Suicide isn’t easy. Neither, whatever the song might say, is it painless. Jude would have learned that as he kicked at the air from the end of a rope. I don’t know how much help booze might have been under the circumstances, but it couldn’t have made his situation any worse.

To be honest, I let Jude slip from my mind after the funeral. I’d like to say that I was better than everybody else, but I wasn’t. He didn’t matter. He was gone.

LUCAS MORLAND PULLED UP
in front of Hayley Conyer’s home on Griffin Road. It wasn’t the biggest house in Prosperous, not by a long shot, but it was one of the oldest, and, being partly built of stone, conveyed a certain authority. Most of it dated from the end of the eighteenth century, and by rights it should probably have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but neither generations of Conyers nor the citizens of Prosperous had seen fit to nominate the house. The town didn’t need that kind of attention. The old church
presented them with enough problems as it was. Anyway, the Conyer house wasn’t particularly noteworthy in terms of its situation or its design, and had no interesting historical associations. It was just old, or at least old by the standards of the state. The leading citizens of Prosperous, cognizant of their heritage, of their links to a far more ancient history back in England, took a more nuanced view of such matters.

Hayley Conyer’s Country Squire station wagon stood in the drive. There seemed to be even more bumper stickers on it than Morland remembered: “Obama/Biden”; a “No Tar Sands in Maine” protest badge; “Maine Supports Gay Rights” over a rainbow flag; and a reminder that sixty-one percent of the electorate had not voted for the current governor of the state. (Blame the state’s Democrats for that, thought Morland; trust them to split their own vote and then act surprised when it came back to bite them on the ass. Jesus, monkeys could have handled the nomination process better.) The station wagon was so ancient that it was probably held together by those stickers. He’d heard Hayley arguing with Thomas Souleby about the car, Souleby opining that the old gas-guzzler was causing more environmental pollution than a nuclear meltdown, and Hayley responding that it was still more environmentally friendly that investing in a new car and scrapping the old one.

Morland’s own Crown Vic had been acquired from the Prosperous Police Department back in 2010, while it was still in perfect running order. By then, Ford had announced that it would cease production of the Police Interceptors in 2011, and Morland decided to secure one of the department’s Crown Vics for himself before his officers drove the fleet into the ground. The Crown Vic had two tons of rear-wheel drive, and a V8 engine under the hood. If you crashed in a Crown Vic, you had a better chance of walking away alive than you did in a lighter patrol car, like the increasingly popular Chevy Caprice. The car was also spacious, and that meant a lot to a big man like Morland. The sacrifice was getting only thirteen miles to the gallon, but Morland
reckoned the town could afford that small gesture on his behalf.

Hayley appeared on her porch as Morland sat musing on his car. She was still a striking woman, even as she left seventy behind. The chief could remember her in her prime, when men had circled like insects, flitting around her as she went about her business and did her best to ignore them or, if they grew too persistent, swatted them away with a flick of her hand. He had no idea why she had never married. That rainbow bumper sticker on her car might have caused some folk to suggest an explanation, but Hayley Conyer was no lesbian. She was, if anything, entirely asexual. She had committed herself to the town: it was hers to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She had inherited her duty to it, for more members of the Conyer family than any other in Prosperous had served on the board. Hayley herself had been the first selectman for more than four decades now. There were those who whispered that she was irreplaceable, but Morland knew better. Nobody was irreplaceable. If that were true, Prosperous would never have thrived for so long.

But in the dark corners of his mind Morland was starting to feel that it might be for the best if Hayley Conyer made way for another. It would take her death to do it, for she would never relinquish control while there was breath in her body, but it was time that the Conyer reign came to a close. There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one’s nature. Morland himself was still a work-in-progress after two decades of marriage, but he liked to think that his wife might be as well. Hayley Conyer, on the other hand, simply grew more resolute in her self-belief, more intransigent in her views, and more ready to embrace the use of diktats to get her way. She was helped by the rules of the board, which gave the first selectman the equivalent of two votes. It meant that, even if the board was evenly divided on an issue, Hayley’s side would triumph, and she could force a stalemate with only one other selectman on her side. It was also a
simple fact that the rest of the board combined had less testosterone than she did. It was increasingly left to Morland to try to deal with Hayley, and to encourage her to moderate her behavior, but he had been having less and less success in recent months. A body left hanging in a Portland basement was testament to that.

“I was just admiring your car,” said Morland.

“You going to tell me that I need to replace it too?” she said.

“Not unless pieces of it start coming off on the highway and injuring folk, although that’s starting to seem increasingly likely.”

She folded her arms over her chest, the way she did at meetings when she wanted to let people know that she had done listening to their arguments and her decision was made. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, and her breasts hung low beneath her shirt. With her flowered skirt and her sandaled feet, and her long gray hair held back by a scarf, she came across as the typical earth mother, all bean sprouts and wheatgrass and organic milk. It wasn’t entirely inapt, even if it didn’t hint at the hardness beneath.

“It’s mine,” she said, “and I like it.”

“You’re only holding on to it because the Thomas Soulebys of this world keep telling you to get rid of it,” he said. “If they started stroking it and admiring it, you’d sell it for scrap in a heartbeat.”

Her scowl softened. Morland had a way of disarming her that few others could lay claim to. His father had enjoyed the same gift. Daniel Morland’s relationship with Hayley Conyer had been almost flirtatious, at least when his wife wasn’t around. Whether Hayley chose to embrace sexual activity or not, she was an attractive woman, and Alina Morland wasn’t about to stand by and let her husband play patty-cake with her just to ensure the smooth running of the town. Neither had Alina been concerned by the power that Hayley wielded as chief selectman, because that was all politics and this was about a wife and her husband. The town could have decided to make Hayley Conyer its official queen, and Alina would have knocked her crown
off for stirring even the slightest of sexual feelings in her husband.

This demonstrated one of the curious truths about Prosperous: in most things it ran pretty much like any other town of similar size. It had its rivalries, its intrigues. Men cheated on their wives, and wives cheated on their husbands. Hugo Reed didn’t talk to Elder Collingwood, and never would, all because of an incident with a tractor and a garden gate some forty years earlier. Ramett Huntley and Milisent Rawlin, although superficially polite to each other, were obsessed with their bloodlines, and both had made regular pilgrimages back to the northeast of England over the years in an effort to trace their lineages to royalty. So far neither had been successful, but the search went on. In Prosperous, business as usual was the order of the day. The town differed in only one crucial way from the rest, and even that had become a version of normal over the centuries. It was surprising what folk could accustom themselves to, as long as they were rewarded for it in the end.

“You want some tea, Lucas?” said Hayley.

“Tea would be good.”

In Prosperous, you were more likely to be offered tea than coffee. It was a hangover from the Old Country. Ben Pearson was probably the only store owner for fifty miles who regularly ran out of loose-leaf Earl Grey and English Breakfast, and Yorkshire Tea teabags. And, damn, was there trouble when he did.

Inside, Hayley’s home resembled a Victorian house museum: dark-wood antique furniture, Persian rugs, lace tablecloths, overstuffed chairs, and wall upon wall of books. The chandeliers were late-nineteenth-century reproductions by Osler & Faraday of Birmingham, based on classic eighteenth-century Georgian design. Morland thought them excessively ornate, and ill suited to the house, but he kept that opinion to himself. Still, sitting at Hayley’s dining table always made him feel as if he were preparing for a séance.

Hayley boiled some water and set the tea to brew. The teapot was sterling silver, but the tea would be served in mismatched mugs.
China would have been too much of an affectation. She poured milk into each of the mugs, not bothering to ask Morland how much he wanted, or whether he might prefer to do it himself. By now she knew his habits and preferences almost as well as his wife did. She added the tea, then found some shortbread biscuits and emptied four onto a plate. Biscuits, not cookies; it said so on the packaging, which was also decorated with Highland cattle, tartans, and ancient ruins.

They sipped their tea, nibbled the shortbread, and spoke of the weather and the repairs that would have to be made to the town office once winter was gone, before moving on to the real business of the afternoon.

“I hear they buried that hobo,” said Hayley.

Morland wasn’t sure that the man named Jude had been a hobo, strictly speaking. As far as he knew, hobos were migratory workers. Technically, Jude had been a bum.

“Apparently so,” said Morland.

“Has there been any fuss?”

“Not that I’ve heard.”

“I told you there wouldn’t be. I had to listen to all that bitching and moaning for nothing.”

Morland didn’t dispute the point. He had done all his arguing when the board’s decision was communicated to him, but by then it was too late. He’d tried to talk Hayley around, but on that occasion she had proved immune to his charms.

“It would have been preferable if he’d just disappeared,” said Morland.

“That would have cost more—a lot more. Books have to be balanced.”

“It might have been worth it. I don’t think anyone would have come looking for a missing homeless man, and it’s hard to prove the commission of a crime without a body.”

“Nobody’s trying to prove that a crime was committed. A hobo hanged himself, and that’s the end of it.”

Not quite, thought Morland. Hayley was thinking like a selectman,
Morland like a lawman.

“The problem, as I see it, is that we now have two dead bodies to no good end,” said Morland.

“Ben told me that he had no choice but to shoot the girl. You agreed.”

Yet I didn’t agree to the killing of her father, Morland was about to say, but he stilled the words before they reached his tongue.

“This town has survived, and flourished, by being careful,” he said.

“You don’t have to tell me that!” said Hayley. A little blood found its way into her pale cheeks. “What do you think I’ve been doing all these years? Every decision I’ve made has been with the best interests of the town at heart.”

I’ve
made, he noticed, not
we’ve
made. He wondered if this was how all despots began. At some point, someone had to speak truth to power. Then again, those who did frequently ended up with their heads on stakes.

“I’m not questioning your commitment to the town, Hayley. Nobody is. But two dead from the same family could attract attention.”