Wicked Fix (41 page)

With a grin, the pilot started the engine. Have I

mentioned that he was approximately fourteen years

old? Anyway, it only coughed two or three times before

catching and running evenly, which meant only

about ten seconds when I was so terrified that I had no

discernible vital functions whatsoever, if you didn't

count all the ones I thought I might lose control of any

minute.

The plane was a three-seater: me and the pilot up

front, Ellie strapped in the rear. Her expression was

glowingly radiant, the look of a little kid with an all

day pass to the carnival.

Seeing her face, I realized suddenly that if the plane

did crash, there was little that I could do about it. Possibly

this thought was the result of all the neurochemicals

pouring into my system, like the ones that

supposedly make you feel cool as a cucumber while

you're about to be devoured by a tiger, although I

don't see how anyone could really know that.

Slowly my fists unclenched. The waves looked like

crumpled aluminum foil. A boat bobbed, the size of my

little fingernail. Far to the west, over Nova Scotia, the

remnants of last night's storm loomed darkly like an

evil kingdom towering into the sky.

"So," I said, "tell me again why we are going here.

What's she want to talk to us about?"

"I don't know," Ellie replied. "Harriet wouldn't

say. We'll find out when we get there."

Strapped in or not, I was about to pop her one, but

then we were landing, a process whose details--

especially the part about dropping to earth way more

rapidly than I thought could possibly be normal--

captured me utterly until it was over.

Ten minutes later we were climbing the steps to

Olde Bayview Nursing Home, a short walk from the

airfield.

"So this is Boxy's mother, who lives here, and she's

seventy years old," I said, trying to get straight in my

head what Ellie had been saying to me while the runway

pavement was coming up at us so damned fast.

"Seventy isn't old enough for a nursing home," I

added.

"It is for Harriet. She started failing when Boxy

died. Not long after that," Ellie went on, "she gave up

her house and came here to live. Since then she's been

going downhill. Her mental functions. Sleeps most of

the time, doesn't speak at all, that sort of thing."

She pressed the doorbell on the low, white-painted

concrete block structure. What the place lacked in

snazziness it more than made up for in regular maintenance:

clipped hedges, a lawn like a putting green, riotous

flower beds. A very old man with a very humped

back was scattering bonemeal lovingly around the feet

of some perfect rosebushes.

Someone inside buzzed us in. "I knew she lived

here," Ellie went on, "but she's been completely uncommunicative

for so long, I never even thought of

mentioning her to you. What I didn't know was that

she's not out of it anymore. She's woken up, George's

cousin says."

In the foyer, a golden retriever got up and greeted

us with wags and tongue lolling. From behind the reception

desk, a woman smiled and offered the visitors'

book. The place smelled of soap and fresh floor wax.

Ellie signed the book, and we were directed down a

hardwood-floored hallway so shiny that I could see the

soles of my shoes in it, yet somehow it wasn't slippery.

I made a mental note to ask someone there how

they managed the trick, since my floors could certainly

use an application of the miracle substance. I knew of

only two possible conditions for old wood floors: gritty

or whoops!

"It should be one of these rooms," Ellie murmured.

The cleanliness here was stunning: windows

glittering like diamonds, woodwork so unsmudged

that it seemed to have been painted--glossy enamel, in

a fresh, springlike shade of mint green--that very

morning. A faint hint of something medicinally camphorated

hung in the air, mingled with the smell of a

cake baking.

"George's cousin works here," Ellie added, "did I

mention that? The one," she added, "who called last

night. And Harriet's doctor says her mental trouble

started with a stroke."

At which I finally got it: so that was how the

cousin hooked into it. In Eastport, the maze of social,

work, and family connections was mind-boggling, and

it was mostly Greek to me.

Only not to Ellie. "But if you ask me," she went

on, "Harriet's breakdown was on account of a broken

heart." We came to the door of a large common room:

braided rugs, crocheted afghans, a large yellow cat ensconced

in a sunny window.

"Then the other day someone told her Reuben was

dead," Ellie finished. "She's been bright as a new

penny, since."

"I still don't see, though," I objected, "why she

wants to talk to us."

"I don't," said a shaky old voice at my elbow. "I

want you to talk to me."

Harriet Thorogood was a small, fragile woman

with thin white hair, tiny bones, and the dark, sharp

eyes of a bird. Wearing a flowered dress with a white

lace collar, rolled stockings, and orthopedic shoes, she

sat alertly in an upholstered armchair that seemed big

enough to swallow her up.

"Someone said you found him after someone cut

him, hung him to bleed. I want," she demanded avidly,

"to know how he looked."

Ellie and I glanced at each other. Neither of us

wanted to relive finding Reuben or to report the gory

details. But she was Boxy's mother.

So we sat down together and told her.

Rather, Ellie did. While she talked, I kept seeing

Harriet Thorogood as she'd been twenty years earlier:

not fragile, still vigorous, with a ten-year-old son.

I saw her come to the door with a cigarette in her

hand. A drink, maybe, poured on the kitchen counter

while she finished the dishes. There was a radio playing

show tunes behind her, and when they told her what

had happened I felt her eyes going wildly from one to

another of their faces.

Searching for the one that would tell her it was not

true.

But none of them had.

When Ellie had finished, Harriet sighed and looked

away, satisfied.

"Mrs. Thorogood," I said, "didn't Boxy ever ask

anyone for help about Reuben? You, or any adult? He

was in the church group, for example. Didn't he ask

for help from Reverend Sondergard?"

Slowly she dragged her gaze back. Some of the

brightness had already gone from her expression, as if

now with this last thing finished, she had little reason

for remaining alert.

"No," she quavered regretfully. "He never. I

wished he had of, I'd o' skinned that Tate bastard"--

bahstid-- "alive. And he mustn't have asked the reverend

for any help, or the reverend would've helped him.

Wouldn't he?" she demanded.

Her cloudy eyes were full of a last appeal: surely

her son hadn't asked for help against Reuben Tate,

only to be refused.

"Of course he would have," I told her, with more

confidence than I felt. "I'm sure he'd have done anything

he could, if he had known."

"Well, then," she muttered. "There's an end to it. I

thank both you girls very kindly." With this her head

drooped, her tiny fingers plucking unaware at the cotton

fabric of her dress.

So: no new, revelatory information, nothing illuminating

to add to another sad old story. Just an old

woman who wanted some punctuation for the end of

her tragedy.

And one other thing.

Back at the airfield, I climbed into the aircraft with

no assistance, settling in the front cockpit seat and

strapping the safety harness over my chest. Swinging

around, we hurtled down the narrow runway and, it

felt like, straight off a cliff.

Air punched up under the plane, lifting it, and we

climbed suddenly, bouncing a little in the crossways air

currents around the island. I didn't care.

"You're gung-ho all of a sudden," Ellie said,

watching me carefully. "I'm sorry nothing useful came

of this."

But it had. "I understand," I said. My voice flew

away on the engine noise. "The part of it that I hadn't

been getting."

We banked hard right, arrowing toward Moose Island,

on it the town of Eastport, the causeway ribboning

east across more blue water, and finally the forested

coastal plain, a vast swath of autumn reds, yellows,

and evergreens rising to the mountains.

"What I didn't get was the physical act," I said.

"Putting the blade to his throat and cutting it. Because

... well, how? I mean, how could anyone do

it? How could any human being actually do a thing

like that?"

History, of course, suggested that lots of them

could. Were, probably, right this very minute. And

yet ...

The nightmare memory of Reuben hanging in the

graveyard still came to me at odd, awful moments. But

this time, what I had imagined of Boxy's mother came,

also:

How she had felt. My mind tried to put Sam in

Boxy's place, but I wouldn't let it. That far I couldn't--

wouldn't--go.

And didn't need to. Sunlight glinted suddenly on

the plane's front window, turning it into a mirror.

There was another crucial task to accomplish

that morning, and by the time I got

home it was the hour when normal people

might actually be in their offices. So, although

it was not what I wanted to be doing--

--Ellie was sitting at the table reading Terence's

diaries, and the faces she was making as she did so

made me want to start hashing them over with her

immediately--

--I began making phone calls.

When I was finished, it was several hours later, and

I'd kept Victor's trauma center from becoming a dead

issue for one more day. Bankers, builders, real estate

salespeople, medical regulators, prospective investors:

I promised them all that Victor's arrest had been a

terrible error, the kind of thing that happened in your