‘Dammit, Sam. I can prove he shot him. What about the shell casing?’
‘What about it? Av, look at what you’re asking. You’re asking a D.A. to go after a search warrant to find and impound the Browning – which they may have got rid of already by the way, since you were kind enough to warn ’em – and then run a ballistics test to match the firearm to the shell casing. You’re asking him to issue a subpoena to the boy, then build a case against him and try him in court. All this time, all this work and all this expense for an old mongrel dog you already buried.’
He watched Sam shift uncomfortably in his chair. He thought, not for the first time, that his friend was going to have to get rid of some weight. That his discomfort was not entirely due to what they were talking about. Berry was naturally a big man but since the accident he’d got a lot less exercise. He was losing muscle and gaining fat. There weren’t many of Ludlow’s friends left in Moody Point. He didn’t want to lose Sam to a stroke or a heart attack. But it wasn’t their way to discuss it.
‘Listen,’ the lawyer said. ‘I wish I could say this was going to be easy but I can’t. Still, what I’ll do is I’ll give the sheriff’s office a call and register your complaint with Tom Bridgewater. He’ll pass it on to the D.A.’s office. I figure it might have a little more weight if the complaint comes through me. I’ll have Tom either call you or drop by the house. What you do is you go home and get yourself some rest. Meantime I’ll put a few feelers out, see what I can find out about Michael McCormack and his family. I don’t know if it’ll help any, but what the hell, why not? You said they mentioned another boy?’
‘Somebody named Pete.’
‘And you think he might have been the third one?’
‘They said they were with him all day. Said they drove to Plymouth. Stands to reason.’
‘All right. Pete.’ He wrote it down.
‘Thanks, Sam.’
‘Thank me if we can make something happen here.’ He stared at Ludlow across the desk for a moment. ‘Speak to Alice lately?’
‘Christmas, I guess.’
‘You might want to give her a call, you know. How many daughters have you got, if you get my meaning.’
Sam’s only son had died in childbirth. His wife was gone twenty years now. He was alone.
‘Red was her dog too once, wasn’t he?’ he said.
‘That’s true.’
‘Well then.’
Ludlow stood and they shook hands.
‘You may have to dig him up again, you know,’ he said. ‘If they go for this.’
‘I’ll do what I have to,’ Ludlow said.
‘I didn’t doubt that,’ he said.
Six
He walked in the house through the front door and smelled the familiar scent of burnt wood which never left the fireplace or even the sofa or the easy-chairs. He glanced at the phone on the end table and thought that yes, he would have to call her but not now.
The room had been small to begin with but Ludlow had made it smaller with the heavy sofa and the two overstuffed easychairs and the bookshelves he’d built lining the wallspace so that now the room looked more like a study than it did a living room. There was no television – when its picture died he hadn’t bothered to replace it – only a radio on the table by the phone. He considered turning on the radio but instead went into the kitchen.
In the refrigerator there was a little less than half a roasted chicken which he and Red had eaten most of two nights before, so he took that out and put it on a plate and sat down at the table and began to pick it over with his fingers. The room was very quiet. He could hear himself tear the cold moist flesh of the chicken and break the tendons at the joints. He could hear himself lick his fingers.
When he was finished he threw away the remains and went to the sink to do the breakfast dishes and the greasy plate from the chicken. At the window, moths were already gathering in the dusk, leaning toward the light. By full dark the window would be covered with them, lying wing to wing in some unimaginable desire, downy bellies against the cool smooth glass. The big green-and-white lunas would flutter at the window like bats. In the silence of the kitchen he would sometimes hear them and think of Mary and the days before Adam the cat and the repair work when they would hear real bats in the attic and on these nights, like a sudden shadow falling over him, she would appear again only to leave him there once more alone with Red.
It crossed his mind that here in the house he was surrounded by souls.
At eight o’clock Tom Bridgewater phoned. Ludlow told him what he’d told Sam Berry.
Tom listened quietly and then sighed and said, Jesus, goddamn kids, think they can get away with anything and you know what? Half the time they can. Ludlow knew that Tom had two teenage boys himself and, sheriff’s sons or not, they’d been in trouble now and then, once for stealing copies of Playboy and Penthouse from D. L. Fleury’s drugstore and another time for getting drunk on another kid’s father’s whiskey and driving around the town that way at two in the morning.
Tom said he should hold onto the shell casing. He’d talk to the D.A.’s office first thing tomorrow and see what he could do.
Ludlow hung up the phone with the feeling that, like Sam, Tom was squarely on his side but that, again like Sam, Tom was not at all sure about what the District Attorney would want to do.
He took a beer out of the refrigerator and drank it at the table and then another and sat listening to the night sounds and the summer breeze through the screened window behind him. He fell asleep at the table with his head resting on the backs of his hands and dreamed his daughter Alice Ludlow Palmer was a little girl again and that she was out behind the house playing on the swing, long since fallen, which had hung from the oak tree where he’d buried Red.
Over the ridge in the distance he could see two boys, one about eleven and one older, standing in shadows with their backs to him. But he recognized them even so. He felt a great sadness seeing them standing there. He walked over to call Alice in for dinner but she shook her head, No, not yet, and glanced at the shadowy boys up on the ridge.
The dead are home before us, daddy, she said. But we have work to do.
He woke in sudden alarm and the first thing he noticed was the disturbed swarm of moths and insects fluttering at the window over the sink and then he heard the sounds, something scraping across the house back there, something large enough to cause the sudden stir of wings. He got up and walked to the window, hearing his footsteps loud across the wooden floor, eliminating deer in his mind because deer never came to the house, not when they had the berries out by the oak to feed on, eliminating raccoon as too small and then thinking bear though they were rare around here. And then thinking maybe human.
He kept no firearms in the house as a matter of principle but now he thought he might have been better off having one because neither bears nor humans were invariably friendly.
Outside the window he could see nothing but starless dark.
He walked to the back door and turned on the porchlight and as he did so heard the sound of footfalls in the tall grass by the side of the house. He got to the bedroom window in time to see a tall figure run up the side of the hill and disappear behind the stand of trees by the side of the road.
He walked back into the kitchen. He considered the shell casing which remained visible from outside the house on the counter beside the sink and wondered if its presence there had anything to do with the disturbance at the window.
He put the casing in his pocket.
He looked at the clock on the wall and saw it was after twelve which he felt was much too late to phone his daughter.
He went to the living room and got a book off the shelf about the great Rocky Mountain Coalfield Wars in the early 1900s and took it to bed with him but found it was impossible to concentrate on the National Guard and Mother Jones, nor did the book put him back to sleep again so he lay there with the book open on his lap, the weight of it oddly comforting. And that was how he f
ound himself next morning when the heat of the sun through his bedside window burned away his dreams as it burned the mist off the goldenrod.
Seven
‘They’re hedging,’ Sam said. In Ludlow’s hand the old heavy bakelite telephone felt like something you could easily use for smashing. ‘They want you to come down to the sheriff’s office and sign a statement and they want the shell casing. I asked if that meant they’d be willing to prosecute but all I could get out of ’em was we’ll see. Which I guess is better than no way.’
‘I’ll drive on over soon as I check with Bill at the store.’
‘Fine. Found out a few things about the McCormacks in the meantime. Friend of mine over at the Chamber of Commerce says the father runs with a pretty upscale group these days, though that’s sort of a new development. Portland Country Club, that sort of thing. Made his money like his daddy did, in trucking, which kept him out of the social fast-track for a good long while. His daddy was supposedly a mean son of a bitch. Had an arrest record long as your arm, mostly for drunk and disorderly. No arrests on the son.
‘Likes to play with real estate. Buys a lot of gold. He married well. Wife’s maiden name was Edith Springer. Her family goes back all the way to the Colonies. You happen to see her out there?’
‘No.’
‘Word is she’s a drunk. A fancy drunk, but a drunk. I wouldn’t know.
‘Anyway, all in all there’s plenty of money and political clout there but underneath McCormack’s nothing but redneck, one generation removed. Kind of fancies himself a gentleman farmer nowadays. He owns about a hundred acres of land and a house by the sea up around Cape Elizabeth way, farms fir trees and then horses further inland. All of it’s managed for him.’
‘What’s this land-development business? He damn near made me an offer on the store yesterday.’
‘Mostly a hobby, I guess. He sure doesn’t need the cash. Just seems to like to buy up nice old tracts of land and turn ’em into shopping malls, chain-store complexes, restaurant complexes. All the joys of modern living, you know what I mean? None of ’em in his neighbourhood, of course. He belongs to some Portland-based investors group. They’ve done a lot of things out this way, but also as far north as Bangor. Oh, I also think I found out who your third boy is.’
‘How’d you do that?’
Berry laughed. ‘Name Sally Abbot mean anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you remember once upon a time I used to be one for the ladies. I mean, before I met Sarah. Had two good legs then and Friday, Saturday nights I was a dancin’ fool. One of the ladies I used to spend some time with was Sally. Smart and pretty as they come. If it hadn’t been for Sarah I might have married her. She lived out in Old Orchard Beach at the time. Teaches math now over at Moody Point High, has for twenty years or so. Sally knows both the McCormack kids and says they’ve got a friend named Pete Daoust who’s on the chubby side, so probably he’s your boy.’
‘Daoust. Spell it.’
Berry did.
‘She say anything about them?’
‘Just what you’d expect. The older boy, Danny, was a troublemaker. Nothing major but she said she had her share of problems with him. Graduated a year ago but he still hangs around the school a lot. Fancies himself a heartbreaker with the girls and Sally says maybe he is. The younger boy, Harold, was never in one of her classes but she had the impression he wasn’t nearly as bad as the brother.’
‘What about Daoust?’
He laughed again. ‘Said with a mouth as big as Pete’s and a brain as useless he’d probably run for governor one of these days. Y’know, I’d forgotten how much I liked that woman. I wonder if she still goes dancing now.’
He hung up and dug the phone book out of the drawer and looked up the name Daoust. There was only one listed and the address was Cedar Road. Not nearly as upscale as Northfield, not even close. But it was near Miller’s Bend which might explain how the boys had come to be down by the river that day.
He drove to the store and parked next to Bill Prine’s Ford. They were the only vehicles on the lot. Inside, Bill was unpacking a box of hundred-watt lightbulbs and stacking them into a wire rack. He looked up when the cowbell tinkled over the door and smiled.
‘Hey, Av.’
‘How you doing, Bill?’
Bill kept on working the rack. Ludlow noted that his hands were steady.
By night Bill Prine was a prodigious drinker, some might say he was an alcholic. But by day he was the most reliable man Ludlow’d ever known.
He also thought Bill could probably charm the balls off a snake.
He’d achieved a kind of local fame a few years back when a man from Buxton walked into Ludlow’s store one evening just before closing time and tried to rob him. The man was carrying not one gun but two. He was also very drunk. Bill was alone in there, so he did as he was told and emptied the cash register into a paper sack. Then he looked at one of the guns and said, My god, that’s a beautiful weapon, what is it? A Smith & Wesson? The man nodded and said, Yes, it’s a Smith & Wesson .44 magnum. Bill asked him if he’d like to sell it and after some haggling they agreed upon a price.
Bill paid him out of his pocket and the man set the magnum on the counter.
Then Bill admired the other weapon – a Colt Detective Special. They settled on a somewhat lower price for that and Bill paid him again and then walked to the door and locked it while the man was counting the money in this second transaction and then Bill walked behind the counter and picked up both the weapons and dialed the police.
Ludlow and Prine agreed that the man was probably the stupidest thief in the state of Maine or even in all of America at the time but the incident quickly entered Moody Point history and legend. Bill made the papers and so did Ludlow’s General Store and Ludlow thought he was still getting trade on that, three years later.
Why Bill drank he didn’t know. He’d never elected to tell him. But it never affected his work and his hands were still steady so, as far as Ludlow was concerned, that was that.
‘We get in the Coleman order yet?’
‘Came in just this morning. It’s in the back. You want to go through it or should I?’
‘I’ve got some business to take care of. You mind holding on here alone again today?’
‘Nah. I’ll just steal you blind again, is all.’
‘You do that. Okay, see you later. Around three maybe.’
‘Take your time. I’m fine. You want me to unpack the Coleman?’
‘Go ahead.’
He got back into the car and drove through the hills across rolling farmland and into the dark thick pines to Cedar Hill Road.
Number 118 was a small house much like his own except there were neighbors on both sides a few feet apart under thin tired shadetrees and all three places seemed to share an unwillingness to throw things away. At the Daoust’s it was a washing-machine leaning rusting along one side of the house next to a mattress and box spring and at the house next door it was a pile of tires and an old V-8 engine sitting on a stump like it had grown there.
Crabgrass covered all three yards unbroken like a single moth-eaten cloak.
He walked up the wooden steps and used the buzzer, waited a while and then knocked. He heard a woman’s voice call for somebody named Willie which he guessed would be the W. Daoust in the directory.
The man who appeared at the door and stood behind the screen was a good foot shorter than Ludlow, grey and balding, in his fifties and overweight like his son. He wore wire-rim glasses and a pair of trousers with suspenders over a fresh white teeshirt. If you could judge a man by his shoes then this man was both scruffy and conservative. The shoes were old black lace-ups and they’d been cheap to begin with.
‘Mr Daoust? I’m Avery Ludlow.’
‘I know who you are,’ he said.
‘I guess you’ve talked to Mr McCormack, then.’
‘McCormack don’t talk to any out-of-work carpenter. His boy called my boy.’
<
br /> ‘Danny called him?’
‘Yeah, Danny.’
‘And?’
‘And what? Listen, Ludlow. Pete says they drove to Plymouth. Hung out at a mall there, even bought a couple of CDs there. A goddamn expensive couple of CDs. Didn’t say anything about any shotgun or anybody’s dog.’
‘Maybe they did drive to Plymouth. Before or after. I wouldn’t know about that. But at about four in the afternoon they were at Miller’s Bend and, when they didn’t get the money they wanted from me, Danny McCormack shot my dog and your son stood there with him laughing about it.’
The man looked uncomfortable then and Ludlow thought that maybe Daoust could actually just manage to see Pete doing something like that. Laughing.
‘Look . . .’ he said.
A woman appeared behind him and he guessed the whole family tended to weight because her jeans were too tight for someone her size and so was the horizontal-striped blue-and-white shirt. She carried a dustpan and handbroom and she gestured at him with the broom like a schoolteacher shaking a pencil at an errant student.
‘Mr Ludlow, I’ve heard every word of this,’ she said, ‘and I want to know just what you think you’re doing coming out here like this. If you have a complaint with the McCormacks then you take it up with them. But as I understand it, even if the boys aren’t telling the truth about this – and I’m not saying that, not for a minute – then the one you have a quarrel with is Danny McCormack. So why don’t you just leave us all the hell out of this, okay?’
‘I’m sorry. But if you heard what I said, ma’am, then you heard that your boy was party to an attempted robbery. That he thought it was funny that his friend shot my animal. Why would that kind of thing make me want to leave him out of it?’
‘He didn’t shoot your dog.’
‘He was there. And he saw the boy who did. I want him to say that.’
‘Maybe he’s sorry. Ever think of that?’
‘Excuse me, but how can he be sorry? If he denies it happened?’
The woman looked to her husband and then back at Ludlow and Ludlow knew that at least for the moment, he had them.