"On a day when the high is supposed to go all the way up to ten degrees," she said. "In a State car with a bad heater."
"Ayuh, but I have my thermals on," he said modestly.
"Don't you have your own car, Mr. Ramsey?"
"I do, I do," he said, as if this had never occurred to him until now. "Come sit down, Mrs. Anderson. No need to lurk in the corner. I'm too old to bite."
"No, the coffee will be ready in a minute," she said. She was afraid of this old man. Bob should have been afraid of him, too, but of course Bob was now beyond fear. "In the meantime, perhaps you can tell me what you wanted to talk about with my husband."
"Well, you won't believe this, Mrs. Anderson--"
"Call me Darcy, why don't you?"
"Darcy!" He looked delighted. "Isn't that the nicest, old-fashioned name!"
"Thank you. Do you take cream?"
"Black as my hat, that's how I take it. Only I like to think of myself as one of the white-hats, actually. Well, I would, wouldn't I? Chasing down criminals and such. That's how I got this bad leg, you know. High-speed car chase, way back in '89. Fellow killed his wife and both of his children. Now a crime like that is usually an act of passion, committed by a man who's either drunk or drugged or not quite right in the head." Ramsey tapped his fuzz with a finger arthritis had twisted out of true. "Not this guy. This guy did it for the insurance. Tried to make it look like a whatchacallit, home invasion. I won't go into all the details, but I sniffed around and sniffed around. For three years I sniffed around. And finally I felt I had enough to arrest him. Probably not enough to convict him, but there was no need to tell him that, was there?"
"I suppose not," Darcy said. The coffee was hot, and she poured. She decided to take hers black, too. And to drink it as fast as possible. That way the caffeine would hit her all at once and turn on her lights.
"Thanks," he said when she brought it to the table. "Thanks very much. You're kindness itself. Hot coffee on a cold day--what could be better? Mulled cider, maybe; I can't think of anything else. Anyway, where was I? Oh, I know. Dwight Cheminoux. Way up in The County, this was. Just south of the Hainesville Woods."
Darcy worked on her coffee. She looked at Ramsey over the rim of her cup and suddenly it was like being married again--a long marriage, in many ways a good marriage (but not in all ways), the kind that was like a joke: she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew. That kind of relationship was like looking into a mirror and seeing another mirror, a hall of them going down into infinity. The only real question here was what he was going to do about what he knew. What he could do.
"Well," Ramsey said, setting down his coffee cup and unconsciously beginning to rub his sore leg, "the simple fact is I was hoping to provoke that fella. I mean, he had the blood of a woman and two kiddies on his hands, so I felt justified in playing a little dirty. And it worked. He ran, and I chased him right into the Hainesville Woods, where the song says there's a tombstone every mile. And there we both crashed on Wickett's Curve--him into a tree and me into him. Which is where I got this leg, not to mention the steel rod in my neck."
"I'm sorry. And the fellow you were chasing? What did he get?"
Ramsey's mouth curved upward at the corners in a dry-lipped smile of singular coldness. His young eyes sparkled. "He got death, Darcy. Saved the state forty or fifty years of room and board in Shawshank."
"You're quite the hound of heaven, aren't you, Mr. Ramsey?"
Instead of looking puzzled, he placed his misshapen hands beside his face, palms out, and recited in a singsong schoolboy's voice: "'I fled Him down the nights and down the days, I fled Him down the arches of the years, I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways... ' And so on."
"You learned that in school?"
"No ma'am, in Methodist Youth Fellowship. Lo these many years ago. Won a Bible, which I lost at summer camp a year later. Only I didn't lose it; it was stolen. Can you imagine someone low enough to steal a Bible?"
"Yes," Darcy said.
He laughed. "Darcy, you go on and call me Holt. Please. All my friends do."
Are you my friend? Are you?
She didn't know, but of one thing she was sure: he wouldn't have been Bob's friend.
"Is that the only poem you have by heart? Holt?"
"Well, I used to know 'The Death of the Hired Man,'" he said, "but now I only remember the part about how home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It's a true thing, wouldn't you say?"
"Absolutely."
His eyes--they were a light hazel--searched hers. The intimacy of that gaze was indecent, as if he were looking at her with her clothes off. And pleasant, for perhaps the same reason.
"What did you want to ask my husband, Holt?"
"Well, I already talked to him once, you know, although I'm not sure he'd remember if he was still alive. A long time ago, that was. We were both a lot younger, and you must've been just a child yourself, given how young and pretty you are now."
She gave him a chilly spare-me smile, then got up to pour herself a fresh cup of coffee. The first one was already gone.
"You probably know about the Beadie murders," he said.
"The man who kills women and then sends their ID to the police?" She came back to the table, her coffee cup perfectly steady in her hand. "The newspapers dine out on that one."
He pointed at her--Bob's finger-gun gesture--and tipped her a wink. "Got that right. Yessir. 'If it bleeds, it leads,' that's their motto. I happened to work the case a little. I wasn't retired then, but getting on to it. I had kind of a reputation as a fellow who could sometimes get results by sniffing around... following my whatdoyoucallums..."
"Instincts?"
Once more with the finger-gun. Once more with the wink. As if there were a secret, and they were both in on it. "Anyway, they send me out to work on my own, you know--old limping Holt shows his pictures around, asks his questions, and kind've... you know... just sniffs. Because I've always had a nose for this kind of work, Darcy, and never really lost it. This was in the fall of 1997, not too long after a woman named Stacey Moore was killed. Name ring a bell?"
"I don't think so," Darcy said.
"You'd remember if you'd seen the crime scene photos. Terrible murder--how that woman must have suffered. But of course, this fellow who calls himself Beadie had stopped for a long time, over fifteen years, and he must have had a lot of steam built up in his boiler, just waiting to blow. And it was her that got scalded.
"Anyway, the fella who was SAG back then put me on it. 'Let old Holt take a shot,' he says, 'he's not doing anything else, and it'll keep him out from underfoot.' Even then old Holt was what they called me. Because of the limp, I should imagine. I talked to her friends, her relatives, her neighbors out there on Route 106, and the people she worked with in Waterville. Oh, I talked to them plenty. She was a waitress at a place called the Sunnyside Restaurant there in town. Lots of transients stop in, because the turnpike's just down the road, but I was more interested in her regular customers. Her regular male customers."
"Of course you would be," she murmured.
"One of them turned out to be a presentable, well-turned-out fella in his mid or early forties. Came in every three or four weeks, always took one of Stacey's booths. Now, probably I shouldn't say this, since the fella turned out to be your late husband--speaking ill of the dead, but since they're both dead, I kind've figure that cancels itself out, if you see what I mean..." Ramsey ceased, looking confused.
"You're getting all tangled up," Darcy said, amused in spite of herself. Maybe he wanted her to be amused. She couldn't tell. "Do yourself a favor and just say it, I'm a big girl. She flirted with him? Is that what it comes down to? She wouldn't be the first waitress to flirt with a man on the road, even if the man had a wedding ring on his finger."
"No, that wasn't quite it. According to what the other waitstaff told me--and of course you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they all liked her--it was him
that flirted with her. And according to them, she didn't like it much. She said the guy gave her the creeps."
"That doesn't sound like my husband." Or what Bob had told her, for that matter .
"No, but it probably was. Your husband, I mean. And a wife doesn't always know what a hubby does on the road, although she may think she does. Anyway, one of the waitresses told me this fella drove a Toyota 4Runner. She knew because she had one just like it. And do you know what? A number of the Moore woman's neighbors had seen a 4Runner like that out and about in the area of the family farmstand just days before the woman was murdered. Once only a day before the killing took place."
"But not on the day."
"No, but of course a fella as careful as this Beadie would look out for a thing like that. Wouldn't he?"
"I suppose."
"Well, I had a description and I canvassed the area around the restaurant. I had nothing better to do. For a week all I got was blisters and a few cups of mercy-coffee--none as good as yours, though!--and I was about to give up. Then I happened to stop at a place downtown. Mickleson's Coins. Does that name ring a bell?"
"Of course. My husband was a numismatist and Mickleson's was one of the three or four best buy-and-sell shops in the state. It's gone now. Old Mr. Mickleson died and his son closed the business."
"Yep. Well, you know what the song says, time takes it all in the end--your eyes, the spring in your step, even your friggin jump shot, pardon my French. But George Mickleson was alive then--"
"Upright and sniffin the air," Darcy murmured.
Holt Ramsey smiled. "Just as you say. Anyway, he recognized the description. 'Why, that sounds like Bob Anderson,' he says. And guess what? He drove a Toyota 4Runner."
"Oh, but he traded that in a long time ago," Darcy said. "For a--"
"Chevrolet Suburban, wasn't it?" Ramsey pronounced the company name Shivvalay.
"Yes." Darcy folded her hands and looked at Ramsey calmly. They were almost down to it. The only question was which partner in the now-dissolved Anderson marriage this sharp-eyed old man was more interested in.
"Don't suppose you still have that Suburban, do you?"
"No. I sold it about a month after my husband died. I put an ad in Uncle Henry's swap guide, and someone snapped it right up. I thought I'd have problems, with the high mileage and gas being so expensive, but I didn't. Of course I didn't get much."
And two days before the man who'd bought it came to pick it up, she had searched it carefully, from stem to stern, not neglecting to pull out the carpet in the cargo compartment. She found nothing, but still paid fifty dollars to have it washed on the outside (which she didn't care about) and steam-cleaned on the inside (which she did).
"Ah. Good old Uncle Henry's. I sold my late wife's Ford the same way."
"Mr. Ramsey--"
"Holt."
"Holt, were you able to positively identify my husband as the man who used to flirt with Stacey Moore?"
"Well, when I talked to Mr. Anderson, he admitted he'd been in the Sunnyside from time to time--admitted it freely--but he claimed he never noticed any of the waitresses in particular. Claimed he usually had his head buried in paperwork. But of course I showed his picture--from his driver's license, you understand--and the staff allowed as how it was him."
"Did my husband know you had a... a particular interest in him?"
"No. Far as he was concerned, I was just old Limpin' Lennie looking for witnesses who might have seen something. No one fears an old duck like me, you know."
I fear you plenty.
"It's not much of a case," she said. "Assuming you were trying to make one."
"No case at all!" He laughed cheerily, but his hazel eyes were cold. "If I could have made a case, me and Mr. Anderson wouldn't have had our little conversation in his office, Darcy. We would have had it in my office. Where you don't get to leave until I say you can. Or until a lawyer springs you, of course."
"Maybe it's time you stopped dancing, Holt."
"All right," he agreed, "why not? Because even a box-step hurts me like hell these days. Damn that old Dwight Cheminoux, anyway! And I don't want to take your whole morning, so let's speed this up. I was able to confirm a Toyota 4Runner at or near the scene of two of the earlier murders--what we call Beadie's first cycle. Not the same one; a different color. But I was also able to confirm that your husband owned another 4Runner in the seventies."
"That's right. He liked it, so he traded for the same kind."
"Yep, men will do that. And the 4Runner's a popular vehicle in places where it snows half the damn year. But after the Moore murder--and after I talked to him--he traded for a Suburban."
"Not immediately," Darcy said with a smile. "He had that 4Runner of his well after the turn of the century."
"I know. He traded in 2004, not long before Andrea Honeycutt was murdered down Nashua way. Blue and gray Suburban; year of manufacture 2002. A Suburban of that approximate year and those exact colors was seen quite often in Mrs. Honeycutt's neighborhood during the month or so before she was murdered. But here's the funny thing." He leaned forward. "I found one witness who said that Suburban had a Vermont plate, and another--a little old lady of the type who sits in her living room window and watches all the neighborhood doins from first light to last, on account of having nothing better to do--said the one she saw had a New York plate."
"Bob's had Maine plates," Darcy said. "As you very well know."
"Acourse, acourse, but plates can be stolen, you know."
"What about the Shaverstone murders, Holt? Was a blue and gray Suburban seen in Helen Shaverstone's neighborhood?"
"I see you've been following the Beadie case a little more closely than most people. A little more closely than you first let on, too."
"Was it?"
"No," Ramsey said. "As a matter of fact, no. But a gray-over-blue Suburban was seen near the creek in Amesbury where the bodies were dumped." He smiled again while his cold eyes studied her. "Dumped like garbage."
She sighed. "I know."
"No one could tell me about the license plate of the Suburban seen in Amesbury, but if they had, I imagine it would have been Massachusetts. Or Pennsylvania. Or anything but Maine."
He leaned forward.
"This Beadie sent us notes with his victims' identification. Taunting us, you know--daring us to catch him. P'raps part of him even wanted to be caught."
"Perhaps so," Darcy said, although she doubted it.
"The notes were printed in block letters. Now people who do that think such printing can't be identified, but most times it can. The similarities show up. I don't suppose you have any of your husband's files, do you?"
"The ones that haven't gone back to his firm have been destroyed. But I imagine they'd have plenty of samples. Accountants never throw out anything."
He sighed. "Yuh, but a firm like that, it'd take a court order to get anything loose, and to get one I'd have to show probable cause. Which I just don't have. I've got a number of coincidences--although they're not coincidences in my mind. And I've got a number of... well... propinquities, I guess you might call them, but nowhere near enough of them to qualify as circumstantial evidence. So I came to you, Darcy. I thought I'd probably be out on my ear by now, but you've been very kind."
She said nothing.
He leaned forward even further, almost hunching over the table now. Like a bird of prey. But hiding not quite out of sight behind the coldness in his eyes was something else. She thought it might be kindness. She prayed it was.
"Darcy, was your husband Beadie?"
She was aware that he might be recording this conversation; it was certainly not outside the realm of possibility. Instead of speaking, she raised one hand from the table, showing him her pink palm.
"For a long time you never knew, did you?"
She said nothing. Only looked at him. Looked into him, the way you looked into people you knew well. Only you had to be careful when you did that, because you weren't always see
ing what you thought you were seeing. She knew that now.
"And then you did? One day you did?"
"Would you like another cup of coffee, Holt?"
"Half a cup," he said. He sat back up and folded his arms over his thin chest. "More'd give me acid indigestion, and I forgot to take my Zantac pill this morning."
"I think there's some Prilosec in the upstairs medicine cabinet," she said. "It was Bob's. Would you like me to get it?"
"I wouldn't take anything of his even if I was burning up inside."
"All right," she said mildly, and poured him a little more coffee.
"Sorry," he said. "Sometimes my emotions get the better of me. Those women... all those women... and the boy, with his whole life ahead of him. That's worst of all."
"Yes," she said, passing him the cup. She noticed how his hand trembled, and thought this was probably his last rodeo, no matter how smart he was... and he was fearsomely smart.
"A woman who found out what her husband was very late in the game would be in a hard place," Ramsey said.
"Yes, I imagine she would be," Darcy said.
"Who'd believe she could live with a man all those years and never know what he was? Why, she'd be like a whatdoyoucallit, the bird that lives in a crocodile's mouth."
"According to the story," Darcy said, "the crocodile lets that bird live there because it keeps the crocodile's teeth clean. Eats the grain right out from between them." She made pecking motions with the fingers of her right hand. "It's probably not true... but it is true that I used to drive Bobby to the dentist. Left to himself, he'd accidentally-on-purpose forget his appointments. He was such a baby about pain." Her eyes filled unexpectedly with tears. She wiped them away with the heels of her hands, cursing them. This man would not respect tears shed on Robert Anderson's account.