Tom sighed. ‘Listen, Av. I’m not trying to stonewall you. You know I wouldn’t do that. We’ve been friends a damn long time. I’ll be driving out there personally later this afternoon to have a talk with them. I’d be out now but there’s a four-car wreck on 91, goddamn tanker involved, so we’re pretty shorthanded here at the moment All I’m saying is right now we haven’t got much to work with. If I could, I’d bring ’em in here one by one and run at them as hard and as long as it takes. But Jackman’s already said no to that. No probable cause. So unless one of ’em confesses, gets drunk, says something, does something stupid that I can use, I mean unless one of them slips up somehow . . .’
He spread his hands. Ludlow looked at him a moment and nodded. He got up out of his chair.
‘Okay, Tom. You be in touch with me if you get anything, all right?’
‘Av, please stay out of this. That’s a warning, friend to a friend. For your own good I’m warning you. If you’re right about this, which god knows you probably are, then these folks are playing hardball. If you’re not, they can sue your butt into the ground.’
‘Sure, Tom. I understand.’
‘I mean it.’
‘What’s the book these days?’
‘The book?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh. Elmore Leonard. Hombre. Great.’
‘Yeah. I read that one. You take care, Tom.’
‘Remember what I said, Av.’
‘I will.’
He left the office, stepping out into the cool morning air.
He drove to Northfield, past the McCormack place, noting that there were lights on inside in the den. He pulled into a driveway up the road and turned around and drove by again more slowly this time. He saw no cars in the driveway nor any activity outside or in. He parked the truck a block down and walked back to the house and up the path to the stairs. The grass was freshly mown again. The smell of it was a pleasure he could not deny himself nor did he try.
He walked up the stairs and used the horseshoe knocker. The young black maid with the withered hand opened the door and looked at him, puzzled, frowning.
‘It’s Carla, I believe, isn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember me?’
‘’Course I do, Mr Ludlow.’
Her voice was soft and deep. Half purr, half growl. Ludlow thought the voice suited her well. He thought she was a very pretty woman, the withered hand be damned. Her face was fine-boned and petite, almond-shaped, with high pronounced cheekbones and wide dark eyes, her skin the color of black coffee and free of any blemish he could see.
‘Could I talk to you a moment?’ he said.
She looked around him at the street left and right. Her good hand fluttered nervously on the doorknob. The street was quiet.
‘Is anybody home?’
‘No,’ she said.
‘Then do you think I could come in a moment? Just a moment’
‘You’re gonna get me some trouble, Mr Ludlow.’
‘Are they due back any time soon?’
She shook her head. ‘Not till tomorrow.’
‘Then nobody will ever know. I surely won’t tell them. And my truck’s parked a block away. I don’t think anybody’s going to connect it up with my being here.’
She hesitated, looked around again, and then motioned him inside. She shut the door behind him. He smelled a light strawberry-scented perfume. He thought that suited her too. She turned and faced him.
‘Do you live here full-time, Carla?’
‘Yessir. Small room at the top of the stairs there.’
‘You were home last night?’
‘Yessir, I was.’
‘Anybody else?’
‘Just me. Everybody else’s up at the farm. For the party. Mr Harold’s birthday party.’
‘And nobody came back last night? All night long?’
She shook her head. ‘No. Nobody.’
It was what he’d expected to hear and what he’d been afraid he’d hear. He guessed she could see that.
‘I already talked to the police, y’know,’ she said. ‘Called me early this morning. They asked me pretty much what you been asking. I’m sorry about your store, Mr Ludlow. I truly am. It’s a terrible thing.’
‘Thank you.’
He didn’t know anything more to ask her. She looked down toward the polished wooden floor, clutching the forearm above her crippled pale white hand with her good hand and then looked back at him again.
‘Can I say something to you, Mr Ludlow?’
‘Sure. Call me Av, though, will you. Mr father’s Mr Ludlow.’
She smiled. She was one of those people who smiled with their entire faces and not just with their mouths. He almost managed to smile back at her. Then she looked serious again.
‘It’s not my place to say, but I think you should know that this is a home, I mean a family, with a whole lot of bad troubles in it. I think Miss Edith tries her best, but . . . well, you know, Mr McCormack’s a pretty hard man. And the boys’ve got their problems too. I wish I knew how deep they run in those boys. I wish I did.’
She shook her head and he could see her honest concern, as though against all reason she might bear some responsibility for this herself, share some complicity, as though over time she had seen and heard what she would not have wished ever to see or hear yet wanted somehow to set it right anyway, against all pròbability and with almost no real power to do so. He felt suddenly sorry for her. He thought that he was talking to a good young woman here. They were not her problems by a long shot but out of loyalty or character or affection she had taken them on anyway in her fashion.
He wished he could reassure her. But he couldn’t.
‘Believe me, Carla,’ he said, ‘in the older boy at least, the problem runs deep. I’m sorry.’
‘He did what they say he did, then. Shot your dog.’
‘Yes. He did.’
She nodded sadly. ‘I wish I could say you were surprising me. You know, I been here going on six years now. I’ve been tempted to leave, many times. I stay on I guess ’cause I figure Mrs McCormack needs me. I know she sure needs somebody. But I wonder sometimes if it’s worth it. Mr McCormack and Daniel, I take a lot from those two. More than I sure need to. Mr Harold too, sometimes. And there’s some not so nice folks coming through here now and then. I could get other jobs, other places.’
She held up her withered hand, the fingers like pale thin claws, the wrist mottled brown and white. He saw that she was unashamed of the hand and liked her even more for it.
‘This don’t hold me back. It’s not like having two good hands to work with but it’s not like having just one hand either. And you know, I manage fine. My mother taught me that nothing should hold a person back and I believed her. But sometimes I don’t know whether to stay or go, go or stay.’
He nodded. ‘I can’t tell you what to do, Carla.’
‘I know. I guess I’ll just wait a while, see what happens.’
He turned to leave. ‘Thanks, Carla. Thanks for your time, thanks for talking to me.’
At the landing he turned back again just as she was about to shut the door.
‘Those not so nice people you mentioned coming through here, you seen any lately?’
She laughed. ‘I see ’em all the time,’ she said. ‘I see ’em and I don’t see ’em, if you know what I mean. I figure it’s better that way, don’t you? But not last night, if that’s what you mean. And not the last day or so, no. ‘Course, I don’t hear every phone call everybody made out of this house, either.’
He thanked her again and walked back to the truck and drove to the Daoust place on Cedar Hill Road. He felt like a honey bee buzzing some dark dead garden of flowers. He parked in front this time and got out of the truck and noticed that the mattress and box spring were gone from the side of the house though the rusted washer remained. There was a brand new power-mower in their place, the kind you sit on, and the scruffy grass had been cut
and seeded recently. He remembered that the buzzer hadn’t worked last time but he tried it anyway. This time it did.
The inner door opened and as before Daoust stood behind the screen, a grey man-shape against the dark interior. As before, he wore a teeshirt and suspenders clamped to dark shapeless slacks, his drab uniform.
‘You again,’ he said.
‘Is Peter around, Mr Daoust?’
‘No. He’s up the Cape. Why?’
‘Went up for the party last night, did he?’
‘For the party, yeah. Why?’
‘I guess you didn’t hear. My store burned down last night. Somebody set fire to it.’
‘I hope you’re not saying what I think you’re saying, Ludlow. Because Pete was up there all night long with the McCormacks and dozens of other people. My boy didn’t have anything to do with it. Couldn’t have.’
‘He stays with them pretty often up there? The boys being such good friends and all?’
Daoust shook his head. ‘No. First time.’ Like he was insulted, still carrying a grudge against McCormack money and power. ‘First time they invited him,’ he said. ‘Special, for the party. Why? So what?’
He was tiring of this surly fat man and his whys. He was also seeing clearly what was going on here. The invitation to Pete was to cover him just as the party’d been conveniently set to cover the rest of them. There was no way of proving it, of course. No way in hell. As Carla’d indicated, all McCormack would need was to make a couple of phone calls. To somebody who was not going to be at the party.
‘I see you’ve been making a few home improvements,’ he said.
He glanced toward the mower. Daoust looked at him blankly. He pressed the buzzer and heard it go off inside.
The man looked uncomfortable, shifting behind the screen.
‘Yeah. Well, it was about time. You know.’
‘Sure. I know. Only I was wondering, mower like that doesn’t come cheap. And what I’d heard was, you were out of work these days.’
‘Oh yeah? Well, you heard damn wrong.’
Daoust was angry now, all puffed up with himself and guilty too. The guilt was easy to read. But he wasn’t the sort of man to let conscience eat at him for long. Not when there was cash involved. Ludlow would have liked to put his fist right through the screen, right into his face.
‘Don’t tell me,’ he said. ‘McCormack put you onto something, gave you a job, didn’t he? And maybe a little on the side as well.’
‘Fuck you, Ludlow,’ he said. He slammed the door.
Ludlow went back to his truck. He felt helpless again and angry. He thought that the burnt store didn’t matter. The burnt store was just a way to get at him and one that hadn’t worked.
What mattered was all the rest of it, what he’d seen in the fire the night before, and finally it was the dog that mattered and how the dog had died. He knew what he needed to do, it was perhaps what some part of him needed to do all along. If it might seem to others to have no reason to it, he saw the reason clear as day.
And what reason had the boy needed. Or his father.
He got into his truck and drove on home.
Part Three
RED
Twenty-four
He walked to the base of the tree with the spade in his hand and the blankets under his arm.
He dropped the blankets and began to dig.
The earth was still soft where he’d turned it. In a short time he came to the body of the dog. He dropped the spade and squatted to clear away the dirt with gloved hands. The smell of the dog was high with a terrible sweetness which stunned the scent of fresh-turned earth.
In decay the dog had shrunken its skin. Grub worms had found the body along the burst stomach and ribcage and he brushed them off the muddy red fur as best he could. His shirt still shrouded the ruined head but even the shirt seemed thinner to him and less substantial. It was as though all that had happened by the river that day had happened to them years ago and this was what was left, a carcass almost strange to him from which the dog inside had long since fled.
He spread the blankets and lifted him from the hole and laid him down. The earth the dog had been lying in inside the hole was wet and black and teemed with insects furiously feeding. He wrapped the dog in the blankets and then picked up the spade and threw earth back into the hole, enough to cover the sight of it which was somehow too much to think of or to look upon. He carried the dog down the hill. His back ached with the effort of digging.
When he came to the truck he saw Emma Siddon’s shaggy black mongrel bitch staring at him from across the road like some mournful harbinger or witness. He watched her scent the air. Ludlow wondered what idea she had of what lay beneath the blankets he carried. It was clear she had some notion for at any other time she would have approached him looking for Red or even a scratch behind the ear. But here the scent of death was on them, he thought. Death kept her rooted at a distance. He wondered if the bitch knew whose death and supposed she didn’t, yet it was impossible to say what call of blood to blood truly might be heard.
He lay the dog down in the bed of the truck.
The black bitch stood and whined. He thought Emma was feeding her too much these days or else she missed her chases with Red. He wondered who would chase her now. He got into the truck and started the engine and watched her slink away into the tall brown grass by the side of the road and then turn and glance at him with her brow furrowed and liquid eyes and then move further into the grass until she disappeared.
He drove his truck down the mountain.
Twenty-five
On the highway he passed the Home Depot complex McCormack said he’d built, a three-quarter circle of buildings behind a vast macadam parking-lot with the Depot one quarter of the circle and the rest composed of a K-Mart, an IGA, two restaurants, a dry-cleaner, travel agency, beauty parlor, Pac Mail and fitness club. He felt curiously dated by all of them, even by the enormous parking-lot, as though he were stepped out of some simpler age and seeing all these things for the first time and did not know what to make of them.
Turning off into the quiet tree-lined streets of Cape Elizabeth Town he drove and turned around and drove and turned again until he felt it had become clear to him by style and decor which of the few restaurants there McCormack would be most likely to frequent. He parked the truck in front of it and went inside.
It was not yet lunchtime. He ordered a beer at the bar and paid for it and asked the bartender if the manager was around. The bartender pointed him toward a door in back.
He knocked at the door and a voice said, Come on in. The manager sat at a cluttered desk in a cluttered room with bulletin boards on two sides filled with posted scraps of paper, a trim middle-aged man with a narrow tanned face and his tie undone. He looked at Ludlow and smiled.
‘What can I do for you?’ he said.
Ludlow told him he was a friend of the McCormack family and that he’d been on his way to the Cape house coming down from Portland and had almost got to town when he realized that he’d left his directions and Mike’s phone number lying on his kitchen sink. But then he remembered Mike saying he ate here at The Captain’s Table fairly often. He thought that maybe somebody here might help him.
‘Sure,’ said the man, ‘the McCormacks are good customers’ and he gave Ludlow directions. Ludlow shook his hand and thanked him and walked back through the bar and outside to his truck.
A mile out of town, he turned and drove up along a narrow road that led first along a high jagged coastline with the blue-black of the sea to the right of him and houses perched on cliffs above it and then through a forest dense with fir and pine trees and stands of birch and finally through farmland where he could see horses grazing. The paved road gave way to hard-packed dirt as the manager had said it would. He disappeared into forest again.
He crested a hill and the house lay beyond a bend in the road. It was white clapboard, three stories high, with black shutters newly painted. Beyond the weathered wooden f
ence and mailbox the long wide lawn was neatly kept.
He parked at the gate and waited.
Nobody came out to greet him.
He got out of the truck and walked around back and lifted the dog out of the bed of the truck. Once again the dog’s lack of weight surprised him. He thought of his father’s diminished weight getting off the porch swing.
He remembered that before Mary died the dog had slept on a throw-rug at the foot of the bed but then after she was gone, he’d come up to sleep on the bed beside him. The dog farted in his sleep but Ludlow didn’t mind. Sometimes he’d get to running, chasing cats or rabbits through his dreams, he guessed. Or perhaps running next to Mary or Tim. And that Ludlow did mind because it would wake him and many nights sleep was hard to come by. The dog certainly felt substantial then. He remembered the dog yawning, tossing, his troubled movements on the bed much like Ludlow’s own.
He remembered nights holding him, his face pressed into the thick red fur at the back of his neck and that the dog would sometimes turn to lick the salt wash of tears off his face. But then other times he would only he very still waiting for Ludlow to finish, as though in some secret shared knowledge that finally this was necessary. Even the dog’s musky unwashed smell was solace to him.
He walked toward the house.
The wind blew the scent of evergreen through the trees. It bore the smell of death away from him. He carried the dog up the hill not knowing exactly what he would do once he got there but knowing that he needed them to see.
He heard his own footsteps on the wooden steps, an old man’s shuffling.
He saw a lace curtain flutter at the window to his left. He was two steps from the wide grey landing when the door opened behind an ornate scrolled screen door and then that opened too.
He stopped. The woman stood in the doorway. Her long hair was tied back into a bun. She wore jeans and a denim shirt rolled at the sleeves and she was wiping her hands with a hand towel as though she’d been cleaning. He saw the frightened look in her eyes, the same one he’d seen on the stairway that day only it was puzzled now as well.