The Charlie Parker Collection 1

  She arched an eyebrow, and I confessed.

  ‘Well, maybe just a little. Although not from you.’

  The eyebrow moved up another notch. I wondered if it was possible to burst a blood vessel from embarrassment.

  ‘I saw you reading something today,’ she said, taking the stool across from me. She was wearing a long, dark wool dress that hugged her body like a sheath and she smelt of flowers: body lotion, I later learned. She rarely wore perfume. ‘What was it?’

  I was still a little embarrassed, I guess. I had been reading Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. I’d picked it up thinking it was something other than what it was: an examination of a series of characters who were unfaithful to one another in their various ways. In the end, as our relationship developed, it came to seem more like a textbook than a novel.

  ‘It’s Ford Madox Ford. Have you read him?’

  ‘No, I just know the name. Should I?’

  ‘I guess.’ This didn’t seem like a particularly hearty recommendation and, as literary criticism, it left a lot to be desired, so I pressed on. ‘If you want to read about weak men and bad marriages.’

  She winced a little at that and, although I knew almost nothing about her, not then, a little piece of my world fell off and bounced across the floor amid the cigarette butts and the peanut shells. I figured if I dug a hole halfway to China and pulled the earth down on top of me, then I might be far enough underground to hide my discomfort. I had hurt her in some way, but I wasn’t sure how.

  ‘Really?’ she said at last. ‘Maybe you might let me borrow it sometime.’

  We talked a little more, about the office, about my grandfather, before she stood to leave. As she did so, she moved her hand across the material of her dress, above the knee, rubbing at a tiny piece of white lint that had caught in the fabric. It made the material stretch and tighten further against her thighs, revealing the shape of her almost to her knees. And then she looked at me curiously, her head to one side, and there was a light in her eyes that I had never seen until then. No one had ever looked at me that way before. No one, I thought, would ever look at me that way again. She touched my arm gently, and the touch burned.

  ‘Don’t forget that book,’ she said.

  Then she left.

  That was how it began, I suppose. I gave her the book to read and, somehow, it gave me a strange pleasure to know that her hands were touching my book, her fingers caressing the pages gently. I left the job a week later. More accurately, I was fired after an argument with the office manager in the course of which he called me a lazy sonofabitch and I told him he was a cocksucker, which he was. My grandfather was kind of angry at first that I had lost the job, although he was secretly pleased that I had called the office manager a cocksucker. My grandfather thought he was a cocksucker too.

  It was another week before I worked up the courage to call Lorna. We met for coffee in a little place near the Veterans Memorial Bridge. She said she had loved The Good Soldier, although it had made her sad. She had brought the book back to give to me but I told her to keep it. I think I wanted to believe that she might be thinking of me as she looked at it. That’s what infatuation does to a person, I suppose, although the infatuation soon became something more.

  We left the coffee shop and I offered her a ride home in the MG my grandfather had bought for me as a graduation present, one of the American-built models made before British Leyland bought the company and screwed it up. It was kind of a chick car, but I liked the way it moved. She declined.

  ‘I have to meet Rand,’ she said. I think the hurt must have shown in my face, because she leaned forward and kissed me softly on the cheek.

  ‘Don’t leave it so long the next time,’ she said. I didn’t.

  We met often after that day but it was a warm July night when we kissed properly for the first time. We had been to see some lousy movie and we were walking to our separate cars. Rand didn’t like the movies, lousy or not. She didn’t tell Rand that she was going to a movie with me and she asked me if I thought that was okay. I said that I guessed it was, although it probably wasn’t. Certainly Rand didn’t see it that way, when things started to come apart at the end.

  ‘You know, I don’t want to stop you from meeting some nice girl,’ she said. She didn’t look at me when she said it.

  ‘I won’t,’ I lied.

  ‘Because I don’t let us come between me and Rand,’ she lied back.

  ‘That’s fine then,’ I lied again.

  We were at the cars by that point and she stood with her keys in her hand, staring ahead, her eyes on the sky. Then, still holding her keys, she put her hands in her pockets and bowed her head.

  ‘Come here,’ I said. ‘Just for a moment.’

  And she did.

  The first time we made love was in my bedroom, one Friday afternoon when Rand had gone to Boston to attend a funeral. My grandfather was in town with some of his old cop buddies, remembering old times and catching up on the obituaries. The house was quiet.

  She walked from her home. Even though we had agreed that she would come, I was still surprised when I saw her standing there, dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with a white T-shirt underneath. She didn’t say anything as I led her to my room. We kissed awkwardly at first, her shirt still buttoned, then harder. My stomach danced with nerves. I was acutely conscious of her presence, of her scent, of the feel of her breasts beneath her shirt, of my own inexperience, of my desire for her, of, even then, I think, my love for her. She stepped back and unbuttoned her shirt, then pulled off her T-shirt. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her breasts rose slightly with the movement. Then I was beside her, fumbling at her jeans as she pulled at my shirt, my tongue slipping and coiling around her own, my hips hard against her.

  And in the dappled sunlight of a July afternoon, I lost myself in the warmth of her kiss and the soft yielding of her flesh as I entered her.

  I think we had four months together before Rand found out about us. I would meet her when she could get away. I was working by then as a waiter, which meant my afternoons were pretty much free, and two or three nights as well if I decided I didn’t want to work flat out. We made love where we could and when we could, and communicated mostly by letter and snatched phone conversations. We made love on Higgins Beach once, which kind of made up for my lack of success with the Berube girl, and we made love when my letter of acceptance came through from New York, although I could feel her regret even as we moved together.

  My time with Lorna was different from any of the previous relationships I had had. They were short, abortive things blighted by the small-town environment of Scarborough where guys would come up to you and tell you how many ways they had screwed your girl when she was with them, and how good she was with her mouth. Lorna seemed beyond those things, although she had been touched by them in another way, evident in the gradual, insidious corrosion of a marriage between high-school sweethearts.

  It ended when some friend of Rand’s spotted us in a coffee shop, holding hands across a table covered with doughnut sugar and creamer stains. It was that mundane. They fought and Rand offered to give her the child she had wanted for so long. In the end, she decided not to throw away seven years of marriage on a boy. She was probably right, although the pain she caused me tore through me for two years after and stayed as a lingering ache for longer than that. I didn’t call or see her again. She was not among the mourners at my grandfather’s funeral, although she had been his neighbour for almost a decade. It turned out that she and Rand had left Scarborough, but I didn’t bother trying to find out where they might have gone.

  There is a kind of postscript to this. About one month after our relationship ended I was drinking in a bar off Fore Street, catching up with a few people who had stayed on in Portland while the rest moved on to college, or out-of-state jobs, or marriage. I went to the men’s room and was washing my hands when the door opened behind me. I looked in the mirror to see Rand Jennings standing there, out of uniform,
and behind him a fat, burly guy who leaned back against the door to hold it closed.

  I nodded at him in the mirror; after all, there wasn’t a whole lot else I could do. I dried my hands on the towel, turned and took his fist in the pit of my stomach. It was a hard blow, with the full force of his body behind it, and it expelled every breath of air from my lungs. I fell to my knees, clutching at my midriff, and he kicked me hard in the ribs. And then, as I lay there on the filth and piss of the floor, he kicked me again and again and again: on my thighs, my buttocks, my arms, my back. He stayed away from my head until the end, when he lifted it up by the hair and slapped me hard across the face. Throughout the whole beating he never said a word, and he left me there, bleeding on the floor, for my friends to find. I was lucky, I suppose, although I didn’t believe it then. Worse things happened to people who messed with a cop’s wife.

  And now, in this small town on the edge of the wilderness, the years tumbled away and she was before me again. Her eyes were a little older, the lines streaking away from them more pronounced. There were tiny striations around her mouth too, as if she had spent too long with her lips pinched closed. Yet, when she smiled cautiously, there was that same look in her eyes and I knew that she was still beautiful and that a man could fall in love with her all over again, if he wasn’t careful.

  ‘It is you, isn’t it?’ she said, and I nodded in reply. ‘What in the Lord’s name are you doing in the Hollow?’

  ‘Looking for someone,’ I replied, and I could see in her eyes that, for one brief moment, she thought it might be her. ‘You want to get a cup of coffee?’

  She appeared doubtful for a moment, looked around as if to make sure that Rand wasn’t watching from somewhere, then smiled again. ‘Sure, I’d like that.’

  Inside, we found an empty booth away from the window and ordered mugs of steaming coffee. I had some toast and bacon, which she nibbled at in spite of herself. For those few seconds, ten years fell away and we were back in a coffee shop in South Portland, talking about a future that would never be and stealing touches across the table.

  ‘How’ve you been?’ I asked.

  ‘Okay, I guess. It’s a nice place to live; a little isolated, maybe, but a nice place.’

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘In eighty-eight. Things weren’t going so well for us in Portland. Rand couldn’t get his detective’s badge, so he took a post up here. He’s chief now.’

  Heading up to the edge of nowhere to save your marriage seemed like a dumb thing to do, but I kept my mouth closed. They’d stayed together this long, so I figured that they knew what they were doing.

  I figured wrong, of course.

  ‘So you two are still together?’

  For the first time, something flickered across her face: regret or anger, maybe, or a recognition that this was true yet with no idea why it should be so. Or it may simply have been my own memories of that time transferred on to her, like recollecting an ancient injury and wincing at the recall.

  ‘Yeah, we’re together.’

  ‘Kids?’

  ‘No.’ She looked flustered, and pain flashed across her face. I recalled Rand’s promise to her when he was trying to win her back, but I said nothing. She took a sip of her coffee, and when she spoke again the pain was hidden, put back in whatever box she used to hide it away. ‘I’m sorry. I heard about what happened to your own family, back in New York.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Someone paid for it, didn’t they?’

  It was a curious way of putting it. ‘A lot of people paid.’

  She nodded, then looked at me with her head to one side for a time. ‘You’ve changed. You look . . . older, harder somehow. It’s strange seeing you this way.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s been a long time. A lot of things have happened since I saw you last.’

  We moved on to talk of other things: about life in Dark Hollow, about her job teaching part-time in Dover-Foxcroft, about my return to Scarborough. To anyone passing by, we must have looked like old friends relaxing together, catching up, but there was a tension between us that was only partly to do with our past together. Maybe I was wrong, but I sensed a need within Lorna, something unsettled and unfocused looking for somewhere to alight.

  She drained the last of her coffee in a single mouthful. When she put the mug down, her hand was shaking a little. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘after it ended between us, I still thought about you. I’d listen for snatches of information about you, about what you were doing. I spoke to your gramps about you. Did he tell you that?’

  ‘No, he never said.’

  ‘I asked him not to. I was afraid, I guess, afraid that you might take it the wrong way.’

  ‘And what way would that be?’

  I meant it lightly, but she didn’t take it that way. Instead, her lips tightened and she held my gaze with a look half of pain, half of anger. ‘You know, I used to stand at the edge of the cliffs out at the Neck and pray that a wave would come, one of the big twenty-footers, and wash me away. There were times when I’d think of you and Rand and the whole sad fucking business and dream about losing myself beneath the ocean. Do you know what that kind of pain is like?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, I do.’

  She stood then, and buttoned her coat, and gave me a little half smile before she left. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I guess you do. It was good seeing you, Charlie.’

  ‘And you.’

  The door closed behind her with a single, soft slap. I watched her through the windows, looking left and right, running a little as she crossed the street, her hands deep in her pockets, her head low.

  And I thought of her standing at the edge of the black cliffs at Prouts Neck, the wind blowing her hair, the taste of salt on her lips: a woman dark against the evening sky, waiting for the sea to call her name.

  Meade Payne lived in a red, wooden house overlooking Ragged Lake. A long, poorly-kept driveway wound up to the yard, where a Dodge pickup was parked, old and partially eaten by rust. The house was quiet and no dog barked as I drew the Mustang up alongside the truck, icy snow crunching beneath the tyres.

  I knocked on the door, but no one answered. I was about to go to the back of the house when the door opened and a man peered out. He was in his late twenties or early thirties, I guessed, with dark hair and sallow, windblown skin. There was a hardness about him, and his hands were tough and pitted with scars across the backs of the fingers. He wore no rings, no watch and his clothes looked like they didn’t fit him quite as well as they should. His shirt was a little too tight on his shoulders and chest, his jeans a little too short, revealing heavy wool socks above black, steel-toed shoes.

  ‘Help you?’ he said, in a tone of voice that indicated that, even if he could, he’d prefer not to.

  ‘I’m looking for Meade Payne.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to talk to him about a boy he fostered once. Is Mr Payne around?’

  ‘I don’t know you,’ he said. For no reason, his tone was becoming belligerent.

  I kept my temper. ‘I’m not from around these parts. I’ve come from Portland. It’s important that I talk to him.’

  The young man considered what I had said, then left me to wait in the snow as he closed the door behind him. A few minutes later, an elderly man appeared from the side of the house. He was slightly bent over and walked slowly, shuffling a little as if the joints in his knees hurt him, but I guessed that he might once have been close to my own height, maybe even six feet. He wore a pair of dungarees over a red check shirt and dirty white sneakers. A Chicago Bears cap was pulled down low on his head and wisps of grey hair tried to escape from beneath the rim. His eyes were bright blue and very clear. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked me over, his head slightly to one side, as if trying to place me from somewhere.

  ‘I’m Meade Payne. What can I do for you?’

  ‘My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator out of Portland. It’s about a boy
you fostered some years back: Billy Purdue.’

  His eyes widened a little as I said the name and he waved me in the direction of a pair of old rocking chairs at the end of the porch. Before I sat down, he took a rag from his pocket and carefully cleaned the seat. ‘Sorry, but I don’t get many visitors. Always tried to discourage them, mostly for the sake of the boys.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand.’

  He indicated the house with a movement of his chin. His skin was still quite taut, its colour a reddish brown. ‘Some of the boys I fostered down the years, they were troublesome types. They needed a firm hand to guide them and they needed to be kept away from temptations. Out here’ – He waved a hand towards the lake and the trees – ‘only temptations are hunting rabbits and jacking off. I don’t know how kindly the Lord takes to either, but I don’t reckon they count for much in the great scheme of things.’

  ‘When did you stop fostering?’

  ‘Back a ways,’ he said, but added nothing more. Instead, he reached out a hand and rapped a long finger on the arm of my chair. ‘Now, Mr. Parker, you tell me: is Billy in some kind of trouble?’

  I told him as much as I felt I could: that his wife and child had been killed; that he was a suspect in the killings but that I didn’t believe he was responsible; that certain people outside the law believed that he might have stolen some money belonging to them and they would hurt him to get it back. The old man listened silently to all that I said. The hostile young man leaned on the frame of the open door, watching us.

  ‘Do you know where Billy might be now?’ he asked.

  ‘I was hoping you might have some idea.’

  ‘I ain’t seen him, if that’s what you’re asking,’ he said. ‘And if he comes to me, I can’t say as I’ll hand him over to anyone, ‘less I’m sure he’ll get a fair hearing.’

  Out on the lake, a motor boat was moving through the waters. Birds flew from its path, but they were too far away to identify.

  ‘There may be something more to this,’ I said, weighing carefully what I was going to say next. ‘You remember Cheryl Lansing?’