“Maybe she didn’t kill her in Canton. Maybe she drew her out to a meeting place.”
“I’ll buy that someone drew her out. Carrie just doesn’t fit. I’m not saying she couldn’t kill—she could. But it’s the dumping of the body that bothers me. It’s too cool. It’s too methodical.”
Angie leaned back in her chair, lifted the phone off the cradle, and hit speed dial.
“Hey,” she said into the phone, “I don’t have Patriots tickets to trade, but can you answer me one question?”
She listened as Devin said something back.
“No, nothing like that. The woman they just pulled out of the Mystic, what was the cause of death?” She nodded. “To the back of the head? Okay. Why’d she come to the surface so fast?” She nodded again, several times. “Thanks. Huh? I’ll ask Patrick on that one and get back to you.” She smiled, looked at me. “Yes, Dev, we’re back together.” She put her hand over the phone, said to me, “He wants to know for how long.”
“At least till prom,” I said.
“At least till prom. Aren’t I lucky?” she told him. “Talk to you soon.”
She hung up. “Siobhan was found with a rope dangling from her waist. The operating theory is she was tied to something heavy and dropped to the bottom, where something ate through the rope and part of her hip. She wasn’t supposed to come up.”
I banged my chair back as I stood and went to the window, looked down at the avenue.
“Whatever his move is, he’s going to make it soon.”
“Yet we’re agreed he couldn’t have killed her.”
“But he’s behind it,” I said. “Fucker’s behind everything.”
We left the belfry and went across to my apartment, entered the living room to a ringing phone. Just as I had that early evening on City Hall Plaza, I knew it was him before I picked up the receiver.
“That was pretty funny,” he said, “getting me suspended from my job. Ha, Patrick! Ha ha!”
“Doesn’t feel good, does it?”
“Getting suspended?”
“Knowing someone’s fucking with you and might not let up for a while.”
“I can appreciate the irony, just so you know. Someday, I’m sure, I’ll look back on this and just laugh and laugh and laugh.”
“Or maybe you won’t.”
“Whatever,” he said calmly. “Look, let’s say we’re square now. Okay? You go your way, I’ll go mine.”
“Sure, Scott,” I said. “Okay.”
For a minute he didn’t say anything.
“You still there?” I asked.
“Yeah. Honestly, Patrick, I’m surprised. Are you serious, or are you fucking with me?”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I’m losing money here, and you can’t get to the Dawes’ money anymore, so I’d say it’s a draw.”
“If that was the case, why’d you shoot up my apartment, buddy? Why’d you steal my truck?”
“To make sure I drove the point home.”
He chuckled. “You did. You certainly did. Outstanding, sir. Outstanding. Let me ask you—am I going to blow up the next time I start my car?” He laughed.
I laughed with him. “Why would you think that, Scott?”
“Well,” he said happily, “you went after my home, then my job, I figure the next logical step would have been my car.”
“It won’t blow up when you start it, Scott.”
“No?”
“No. But, then, I’m pretty sure it’ll never start again.”
His laugh boomed. “You fucked up my car?”
“Hate to break the news to you, but yeah.”
“Oh, Jesus!” His laughter grew louder for about a minute, then decreased until it was a barely connected string of soft chuckles. “Sugar in the gas tank, acid in the engine?” he asked. “That sort of thing?”
“Sugar, yeah. Acid, no.”
“Then what was it, huh?” I could hear his frozen smile. “I figure you for the inventive type.”
“Chocolate syrup,” I said, “and about a pound of unconverted rice.”
He roared with glee. “In the engine?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Did you run it for a while, you wacky bastard?”
“It was running when I left it,” I said. “Didn’t sound real good, but it was running.”
“Whoo!” he shouted. “So, so, Patrick, you’re saying you totaled out an engine that took me years to rebuild. And…and…you destroyed my gas tank, the filters, I mean, everything really but the interior.”
“Yeah, Scott.”
“I could…” He giggled. “I could just kill you about now, buddy. I mean, with my own bare hands.”
“I kind of figured. Scott?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not done with the Dawes, are you?”
“Fucked up my car,” he said softly.
“Are you?”
“I’m going to go now, Patrick.”
“What’s the fallback plan?” I asked.
“I’m willing to forgive the suspension and even the destruction to my loft, but the car’s going to take some time. I’ll let you know what I decide.”
“What do you have on them?” I said.
“What’s that?”
“On the Dawes,” I said. “What do you have on them, Scott?”
“I thought we agreed to leave each other be, Patrick. That’s how I was hoping to end this call—knowing you and I will never see each other again.”
“Under the stipulation that you leave the Dawes alone.”
“Oh. Right.”
“But you can’t do that, can you, Scott?”
He let out a light, airy sigh. “You sound like you might be a half-decent chess player, Patrick. Am I right?”
“Nope. I just never got the hang of the game.”
“Why not?”
“A friend of mine says I’m good with general tactics, but I suffer from an inability to see the whole board.”
“Huh,” Scott Pearse said. “That would have been my guess, too.”
And he hung up.
I looked at Angie as I put the receiver back in the cradle.
“Patrick,” she said with a slow shake of her head.
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t answer the phone for a while.”
We decided to leave Nelson on watch at Scott Pearse’s place, and Angie and I drove over to the Dawes’, watched their house from a half block down.
We sat on it into the night, well after their interior lights had gone out and their exterior security lights had gone on.
Back in my apartment, I lay back on the bed to wait for Angie to come out of the shower, and tried to push back the tug of sleep, the ache and muscle-tightening of too many days and nights spent sitting in cars or up on roofs, the niggle of dread in the back of my skull that told me I’d overlooked something, that Pearse was thinking a few moves ahead of me.
My eyelids drooped closed and I snapped them open, heard the shower running, imagined Angie’s body under the spray. I decided to get up off the bed. Forget imagining what I could experience instead.
But my body didn’t move, and my eyes drooped again, and the bed seemed to gently undulate under me as if I lay on a raft, floated on a glassy lake.
I never heard the shower shut off. I never heard Angie settle into bed beside me and turn off the light.
It’s this way,” my son says, and takes my hand, tugs at me as we walk out of the city. Clarence trots beside us, chugging, panting softly. It’s just before sunrise, and the city is a deep, metallic blue. We step off a curb, my son’s hand in mine, and the world turns red and fills with mist.
We are in the cranberry bog, and for a moment—aware that I’m dreaming—I know that it’s impossible to step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, but then I think, It’s a dream, and these things happen in dreams. You don’t have a son, yet he’s here, tugging your hand, and Clarence is dead, yet he’s not.
So I go with i
t. The morning fog is dense and white, and Clarence barks from somewhere ahead of us, lost to the fog as my son and I step off the soft embankment and onto the wooden cross. Our footsteps echo off the planks as we walk through the thick white, and I can see the outline of the equipment shed gradually take on definition as each step leads us toward it.
Clarence barks again, but we’ve lost him in the fog.
My son says, “It should be loud.”
“What?”
“It’s big,” he says. “Four plus two plus eight equals fourteen.”
“It does.”
Our steps should be bringing us closer to the equipment shed, but they don’t. It sits twenty yards away in the mist, and we walk quickly, yet it remains in the distance.
“Fourteen is heavy,” my son says. “It’s loud. You’d hear it. Especially out here.”
“Yeah.”
“You’d hear it. So why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
My son hands me a map book. It’s open to this place, a dot of a cranberry bog surrounded by forest on all sides except the one I’d driven up through.
I drop the map into the fog. I understand something, but then I forget immediately what it is.
My son says, “I like dental floss. I like the feel of it when you slide it between your teeth.”
“That’s good,” I tell him as I feel a rumble on the planks ahead of us. It’s moving fast through the fog, approaching. “You’ll have fine teeth.”
“He can’t talk with his tongue cut out,” he says.
“No,” I agree. “That would be hard.”
The rumbling grows louder. The shed is swallowed by the white fog. I can’t see the planks under my feet. I can’t see my feet.
“She said ‘they.’”
“Who?”
He shakes his head at me. “Not ‘him,’ but ‘they.’”
“Right. Sure.”
“Mom’s not in the shed, is she?”
“No. Mom’s too smart for that.”
I squint at the fog as it engulfs us. I want to see what’s rumbling.
“Fourteen,” my son says, and when I look back down at him, Scott Pearse’s head sits atop his small body. He leers up at me in the mist. “Fourteen should be awfully loud, you dumb shit.”
The rumble is close now, almost upon me, and I squint into the fog and see a dark shape as it vaults airborne, arms outstretched, streaking through the cotton-candy fog toward me.
“I’m smarter than you,” the Scott Pearse/my son thing says.
And a snarling face bursts through the fog at a hundred miles an hour—snarling and smiling and gasping, teeth bared.
It’s Karen Nichols’s face, and then it’s Angie’s attached to Vanessa Moore’s naked body, and then it’s Siobhan with dead skin and dead eyes, and finally it’s Clarence, and he hits me in the chest with all four paws and knocks me onto my back, and I should land on the planks of wood, but they’re gone, and I fall into the fog, start to suffocate in it.
I sat up in bed.
“Go back to sleep,” Angie mumbled, her face pressed into the pillow.
“Pearse didn’t drive to the cranberry bog,” I said.
“He didn’t drive,” she said into the pillow. “’Kay.”
“He walked,” I said. “From his house.”
“Still dreaming,” she said.
“No. I’m up now.”
She raised her head slightly off the pillow, looked up at me through blurry eyes. “Can it wait till morning?”
“Sure.”
She plopped back to the pillow, closed her eyes.
“He has a house,” I said softly to the night, “in Plymouth.”
34
“We’re driving to Plymouth,” Angie said as we turned onto Route 3 at the Braintree split, “because your son spoke to you in a dream?”
“Well, he’s not my son. I mean, in the dream he is, but in the dream Clarence is alive, and we both know Clarence is dead, and besides, you can’t step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, and even if you could—”
“Enough.” She held up a hand. “I get it. So this kid who’s your son but not your son, he babbled on about four plus two plus eight equaling fourteen and—”
“He didn’t babble,” I said.
“—this told you what again?”
“Four-two-eight,” I said. “The Shelby engine.”
“Oh, dear Jesus!” she shrieked. “We’re back to the friggin’ car? It’s a car, Patrick. Do you get that part? It can’t kiss you, cook for you, tuck you in, or hold your hand.”
“Yes, Sister Angela the Grounded. I understand that. A four-two-eight engine was the most powerful engine of its time. It could blow anything else off the road, and—”
“I don’t see what—”
“—and it makes one hell of a lot of noise when you turn it over. You think this Porsche rumbles? The four-two-eight sounds like a bomb by comparison.”
She banged the heels of her palms off my dashboard. “So?”
“So,” I said, “did you hear anything in the cranberry bog that night that sounded like an engine? A really goddamned big engine? Come on. I looked at the map before we followed Lovell. There was one way in—ours. The nearest access road on Pearse’s side was two full miles through woods.”
“So he walked it.”
“In the dark?”
“Sure.”
“Why?” I said. “He couldn’t have guessed we’d be tailing Lovell at that point. Why not just be parked in the clearing where we were? And even if he was suspicious, there was an access road four hundred feet to the east. So why’d he go north?”
“Because he liked the walk? I don’t know.”
“Because he lives there.”
She propped her bare feet up on the dash, slapped a palm over her forehead and eyes. “This is the dumbest hunch you’ve ever had.”
“Sure,” I said. “Bitch. That helps.”
“And you’ve had some monumentally dumb hunches.”
“Would you prefer wine or beer with your crow?”
She buried her head between her knees. “If you’re wrong, screw the crow, you’ll be eating shit till the millennium.”
“Thank God it’s approaching fast,” I said.
A map took up most of the east wall in the Plymouth Tax Assessor’s Office. The clerk behind the counter, far from being the dweeby, bespectacled, balding type one would expect to meet in a tax assessor’s office, was tall, well built, blond, and judging by Angie’s furtive glances at him, something of a male babe.
Himbos, I swear. There ought to be a law that keeps them from ever leaving the beach.
It took me a few minutes to zero in on the bog we’d followed Lovell to. Plymouth is absolutely rotten with cranberry bogs. Bad news if for some reason you don’t dig the smell of cranberries. Good news if you cultivate them.
By the time I found the correct bog, I’d counted four separate times I’d caught Himbo the Tax Stud checking out the places where the frays of Angie’s cutoff jeans exposed more than merely the backs of her upper thighs.
“Prick,” I said under my breath.
“What?” Angie said.
“I said, ‘Look.’” I pointed at the map. Due north of the center of the bog, about a quarter of a mile, I estimated, sat something marked PARCEL #865.
Angie turned from the map, spoke to Himbo. “We’re interested in purchasing parcel eight-sixty-five. Could you tell us who owns it?”
Himbo gave her a brilliant smile of the whitest teeth I’d seen on a man this side of David Hasselhoff. Caps, I decided. Bet the bastard wears caps.
“Sure.” His fingers zipped over his computer keyboard. “That was eight-sixty-five. Correct?”
“You got it,” Angie said.
I peered up at the parcel. Nothing around it. No eight-six-six or eight-six-four. Nothing for at least twenty acres, maybe more.
“Spooky Land,” Himbo said softly, his eyes on the computer screen. r />
“What’s that?”
He looked up, startled to realize, I think, that he’d spoken aloud. “Oh, well…” He gave us an embarrassed smile. “When we were kids, we used to call that area Spooky Land. We’d dare each other to walk through it.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.” He looked down at his keyboard. “See, no one’s supposed to know…”
“But…?” Angie leaned into the counter.
Himbo shrugged. “Hey, it’s been over thirty years. Heck, I wasn’t even born then.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thirty years.”
He leaned into the counter, lowered his voice, and his eyes glinted like a born gossip about to dish some dirt. “Back in the fifties, the army supposedly kept a kinda research facility there. Nothing big, my parents said, just a few stories tall, but real hush-hush.”
“What kind of research?”
“People.” He stifled a nervous laugh with his fist. “Supposedly mental patients and the retarded. See, that’s what scared us as kids—you know, that the ghosts running around Spooky Land were the ghosts of lunatics.” He held up his hands, took one step back. “It could all have been a ghost story used by our parents to keep us away from the bog.”
Angie gave him her most lascivious smile. “But you know different, don’t you?”
His ivory skin flushed. “Well, I did do some checking once.”
“And?”
“And there was a structure on that land until 1964, when it was either razed or burned, and the land was owned by the government until ’95, when it sold at auction.”
“To?” I asked.
He looked at the computer screen. “Bourne is the owner of record of parcel eight-sixty-five. Diane Bourne.”
The Plymouth Library had an aerial map of the entire town. It was relatively current, too, the photo taken just a year ago on a cloudless day. We spread the map across a large table in the reference room, used a magnifying glass we’d bummed from the librarian, and after about ten minutes, we found the cranberry bog, then moved a tenth of an inch to the right across the map.