“So?” He plucked at the barbed wire, lifting the top strand, letting it spring back into place again. “Welcome to Massachusetts. These forty acres probably cost as much as your ten thousand acres back in Kansas. Farmette?” He looked at me and grinned. A bead of sweat dripped off his chin. “I wouldn’t go saying that out loud around here.”
“No, wouldn’t want to hurt the feelings of a farmetter.”
“Or his wifette.”
“I was actually thinking of a woman farmer.”
“Oh, then, her husbandette.”
“See? It is not easy to turn words connoting maleness into diminutives. In the English language, it’s really only possible to diminish women. Don’t ask me to prove this theory.”
“I’d never do that.”
“But you accept it ipso facto as true.”
“You bet. Well, I bet. You betette.”
He stepped on the bottom wire, then held up the one right above it, patiently waiting for me to finish chortling. “This is why we’re still married,” I said between snorts. “Even after all this time, you can still make me laugh like a hyena.”
“Yes, and that’s so attractive, too.” He gestured like a gentleman with his free hand, indicating the space between the wires that he was suggesting that I clamber through. “Ladies first?”
“But that’s trespassing, and you’re a cop.”
He feigned a somber mien, still carefully holding the strands of barbed wire apart. “Madam, I am here on official business to question the owners of this property, and there is no other way for me to attempt to find them than to climb through the fence and go looking for them.”
“So we’re just going to walk up and knock on the door?”
“Right, and if nobody answers, we’ll walk around to the back door, just happening to glance in the windows as we do. And if nobody’s there in the house, we’ll mosey on over to the barn and—”
“Mosey on over?”
“That was for you midwestern girls,” he said. “I’m getting real tired of holding this, Jenny. Y’all comin’?”
“Yankee! That was an improper use of y’all. It’s always plural, don’t you city boys know anything?”
“I meant it plural.” He reached out to grab one of my wrists and tug me toward the fence. “I was talking to you and your shadow.”
“You are my shadow.”
I threaded myself through the prickly hole, then performed the same favor of holding the wires for him from the other side. When we stood together in the field, he grabbed me in a sweaty embrace and said, “Stuck to you.”
“It’s tempting, isn’t it?”
“Right here in the field, under the sun, in front of God and everybody?” He faked an expression of Puritan dismay before turning it into a leer. “What a great idea …”
But the word everybody inspired a sudden thought that chilled my sun-drenched lust. “Does it occur to you that David might be watching us? If he’s leading us … ?”
Geof parted from me. We walked sedately, sweaty hand in sweaty hand, over the dirt and grass of the pasture toward the farmhouse. The horses showed no curiosity in us at all.
As no one answered our knocks at any of the doors and as one of the curtains of the house was open, we took the invitation and peered in, our faces to the glass, our hands held up to shade our view from the glare of the sun.
“This is it,” was Geof’s immediate comment. “We’ve found it.”
“Yes! White walls. White-painted wood floor. This is where they made the confession tapes!”
“Looks like it.”
The house was mostly living room: One big room ran almost the entire length and all the width of it; the remaining portion seemed to be a kitchen with possibly a bathroom.
“Anything else look familiar?” I asked him.
“Yes, the way the furniture’s laid out. All the couches and chairs are up against the wall …”
“Just like at Ron and Judy’s house. It wasn’t that way at his parents’ house, was it?”
“Not in any room that I saw. But Lee said it was arranged that way at Ron and Judy’s house for ease of access for her wheelchair.”
“But she could be wrong, Geof, because why would they still have it arranged like this, even after Judy’s death?”
“Beats me. Look at that television, Jenny.”
“Big sucker,” I agreed. “Try to imagine the scene: The whole family, all five brothers, their wives and children, the grandparents, all seated in there against the walls, all watching that television together.”
“It’s what makes this country great,” Geof drawled.
“If they’d known,” I said, “do you think they would have bothered?”
“Known? If who had known what?”
“The Founding Fathers. If they’d known about television.”
Geof laughed, his face still pressed to the glass, as was mine, too. “Are you kidding? Ben Franklin would have loved ‘Star Trek.’”
“I suppose. Did you know he left separate trust funds for the states of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts? Each one was worth a thousand pounds sterling. And now they’re worth several million dollars apiece. I’m telling you, if you leave your money to my foundation, you can be another Ben Franklin.”
He glanced through his fingers at me. “You’ll turn anything into a sales pitch for charity.”
I laughed. “What do you think they watch on that monster?”
“How about home videotapes?”
I imagined how it would look: a distraught face—like Judy’s or Dennis Clemmons’s—projected to giant size on that screen and an emotional confession blasting from the speakers. I backed away from the window and leaned up against the house, my back against it, my arms crossed over my chest. “That’s a very sick image.”
“These may be very odd people.”
“We’re not getting anywhere, are we? We’re making associations, connections, but we’re not proving anything. We’re not solving anything. We’re not changing anything.”
He backed away from the window, too.
“Welcome to most of the work I do, Jen.”
The sun was in my eyes as I looked at him. “How can you stand it?”
He strode past me, avoiding my glance, heading in the direction of the outbuildings. “Who says I can?”
I heard that, but it took a moment for it to register, and then I wasn’t sure he meant it the way it sounded, so I went trotting after him to find out. “Yo! Geoffrey! What do you mean? I could have sworn that one of the reasons we’re staying in Port Frederick is that you enjoy your job. Am I wrong?”
“Some days, I eat the job …” he said.
I smiled, having caught up to him. “And some days the job eats you.”
The garage was used for machinery storage, which could be seen through its windows.
The shed was locked with no windows to peek in.
“I want to know what’s in there,” Geof muttered.
“Can you pick a lock?”
“I think you have me confused with the Visiting Team. I’m the Home Team, remember? I do warrants; I don’t, as a rule, do burglaries.”
“Are you coming back with a warrant?”
“Not without due cause, I’m not.” He shook his head, looking as hot, tired, and frustrated as I felt. We seemed to have run out of jokes. “Come on, let’s get out of here; I’ve had enough of country life for one day, haven’t you?”
“So what does David want us to see out here?”
Geof shrugged. “Maybe I’m wrong about him leading us.”
I certainly hoped so.
This time I held up and pushed down the strands of barbed wire to help him through. We got back into his car, only this time with me behind the wheel, because he was tired of driving. The phrase “turnabout’s fair play” popped into my head, and I said, “You’re supporting me while I look for new work. Maybe when I find it, when I’m making money again, it should be your turn.”
“For what?”
“For taking time off. Thinking about what you want to do—”
“When I grow up?”
“You should do that if you want to.”
“Grow up?”
“Oh, stop it. You know what I mean: take a sabbatical.”
“Or quit?”
“Or quit. Whatever you want to do, it’ll be your turn.”
He didn’t say anything for the next couple of miles, and I kept quiet, too, not wanting to break in on his thoughts.
“It’s a possibility,” he said finally.
“Right.”
He turned and smiled at me. “You’d do that for me?”
“Of course. I’m insulted that you feel you have to ask.”
“Well. Thank you.”
“Ah, shucks, what’s a wife for anyway if not to help her husband now and then?”
“Wifette.”
I swerved the Jeep violently back and forth on the dirt road, throwing him back and forth in his seat by way of reply to that.
“Jenny,” he said suddenly, and he placed a hand on my right arm. “Stop the car a minute.” We were still on the dirt side road that led to the farmhouse, so I could do as he asked without blocking any traffic. Something in his tone and his abrupt movement gave me the shivers, which increased as I saw him turning around in his seat to look over his shoulder. “There’s a car parked back there with somebody in it. Back up, will you, Jenny? I want to see who it is.”
I put the Jeep in reverse and slowly retraced our tracks.
In my side mirror I finally saw what he meant: a white Lincoln town car parked down another side road, its nose pointed in our direction. As I backed closer to it, I saw a tall white-haired man get out of the driver’s side and stand beside it, shading his eyes to stare at us.
“Okay,” Geof said when I was perpendicular to that road. “Stop.” He put his hand on his door handle. “Why don’t you stay here, and I’ll go talk to him.”
“Do you know who that man is, Geof?”
“Oh, yes.” He smiled slightly. “That’s Ron’s father, David’s grandfather.”
No, he’s not David’s grandfather, I thought as I watched Geof stride down the road toward the older man. Your father is.
Dust kicked up behind Geof’s heels, but it stilled when the two men stood face-to-face in the road with the sun shining down a mirage around them: They looked as if they were standing in a pool of shimmering silver water. I heard a movement of leaves, and when I looked up, I saw an oriole flap into the air from the top of a fence post. Whatever the men said to one another only took about five minutes by the count I was keeping on the clock in the Jeep. Soon, Geof gave a little wave to Mr. Mayer, who got back into his white Lincoln. Geof walked out of the mirage and came on back down the road toward me. Behind him, the car started, then rolled carefully past him and then turned into the road I was on in the same direction the Jeep was pointed. I got a glimpse of a handsome, elderly man staring up at me with an intense curiosity that matched my own before he went on by, leaving his own dust trail.
Geof came up to my side of the car.
“Did he ask how we know about this place and what we’re doing here?”
“He didn’t even ask.”
I rolled my eyes; the things these people didn’t seem to want to know!
“He did ask me if I had seen the farm, and I told him yes, that you and I had walked up there, looking for anybody who was home. He volunteered that’s where they hold their services every week, and he invited us to attend next Monday night.”
“He did? Really?”
Geof nodded, looking like the cat that had swallowed the oriole. “I told him I would be happy to but that I couldn’t speak for you.”
“Oh, go ahead, speak for me.”
He raised his voice an octave. “Why, yes, thank you, Mr. Mayer, I’d love to. There are just so many things I could confess if you only knew!”
I batted a hand at him, but he jumped out of my way.
When he got back into the car, I said, “I wonder what they want with us.”
“I can tell you that,” Geof said as he settled back in. “He said he’d like someone to see they’re not some sort of strange cult practicing bizarre rituals out here. He said he’d like to be able to show somebody that David grew up in the bosom of a perfectly normal and healthy family, and that’s what they hope he will come home to.”
“You believe that?”
“Uh-huh. And rats have wings.”
“So I wonder what they really want with us.”
We were going to have to wait nearly a week to find out.
23
WE SLEPT THAT NIGHT WITH THE AIR CONDITIONER on again and the windows and doors locked against … we didn’t know what or even if such precautions were necessary. The next morning, we awoke, anticipating …
“What?” I asked Geof. “What is it we’re waiting for?”
“Something else to happen, I suppose, since we can’t seem to make it happen.”
“Whatever it is.”
“Right”
“So what do we do now?”
He shrugged. “I’m going back to work.”
“And?”
“And I suppose we’ll keep an eye out for David, and you’ll stay away from here unless I’m here, too.”
“He’s not after me, Geof.”
“He? He may not be after anybody.”
“So what are we afraid of?”
“I’m not afraid of anything, Jenny. Things are just a little strange, that’s all.”
The word denial came to mind, but for once I buttoned my lip.
“Things” certainly did continue to feel “a little strange” that morning, but at Geof’s insistence they kept getting more and more normal as the week wore into Friday. Even the heat wave broke a bit on Friday night, admitting a hint of crisp New England autumn into our evenings, if not yet into our days. No more little corpses appeared on our doorsteps. No one else died who was related to David Mayer, at least not that we heard. It couldn’t be proved, thus far, that Dennis Clemmons died any way but accidentally. Even with further searching, nobody found any police record either of the beating he gave or the one he received, which Geof thought odd, but which I didn’t have an opinion about at all.
“No opinion?” he exclaimed in jest. “You?”
“I can’t hold onto opinions in this heat,” I retorted. It was high noon at the time we were having this conversation. “They’re too slippery.”
While I was working on my foundation business, one mystery was cleared up on Thursday when Geof got into conversation over lunch at the Buoy downtown with an old friend he’d gone to high school with, a man who’d also known Ron and Judy. Not to put too fine a point on it, like Geof, this man had known Ron and “known” Judy, and Geof got him talking about his memory of her. The man laughed and said the irony was, the experience was bad for his ego.
“How could that be?” Geof asked him.
“Because all she talked about, even while we were doing it, was Ron and how much she wanted to marry him and how she hoped someday she could live in a big house like his. Didn’t she do that to you?”
“I don’t remember,” Geof confessed, “I probably had other things on my mind. But maybe that explains something. Remember where Ron’s parents live, over on that culde-sac? I was at their house the other day, and it felt familiar, but I’m sure I was there only once, maybe twice, when we were kids. You think it felt more familiar because Judy talked about it?”
“Talked about it?” Geof’s old friend laughed and shook his head at the memory. “She was obsessed with it! Hell, I could probably still tell you the kind of furniture … French Provincial?”
“They’ve changed it.”
“But I was right, wasn’t I? That’s what it was back then. Judy talked about it, about the house and the Mayers and Ron, incessantly. Don’t you remember how the girls used to make fun of her for doing it? Well, they made fun of her for
other reasons, too, like we all did …” The man, Geof’s old friend, had the grace to trail off, to glance at Geof, and to look ashamed. In a more subdued voice, he continued: “I’ll swear, she could tell you the name of their silver patterns and their china patterns and what kind of furniture they had and how the drapes hung and what color the rugs were. My wife and I used to joke about it for years”—he’d married a girl from their graduating class—“whenever one of us forgot something around the house, like if I was supposed to get toilet paper, and I got the wrong color to go with our bathrooms, my wife would say, ‘Well, if you were Judy Baker, you’d remember!’
“My wife says Judy had one of those—what do you call them?—hope chests! that she talked about all the time, and she had pictures of all the stuff in it and pictures of Ron’s house …”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, really, she was always taking photographs, like from way back when we were still in grade school. It was like her hobby. And she had these big albums over at her mom’s house that she was always taking out and showing everybody, and we were all in them. Maybe you didn’t hang out there?”
Geof shook his head. This man had obviously known Judy better and for a longer time than he had.
“Yeah, well, you lived over with the rich folks.” The man, who had parlayed his loquacious nature into becoming a prosperous insurance agent, smiled. “I lived in Judy’s neighborhood, just down the block, so I was over there a lot. It was a great place to go when we were kids, ’cause her mom let us get by with anything. We could go in Judy’s room and close the door and blast the stereo up loud and do anything we wanted to”—he waggled his eyebrows in an intimidating way—“and Mrs. Baker never said boo about it. She was a number herself.” The man paused, shook his head, and grinned. “Annabelle. For a mom, she was a babe. My folks didn’t approve of Annabelle, which just made her seem more glamorous to me. You know how that goes. But, anyway, in high school, maybe it was even junior high, Judy started carrying around pictures of Ron—like a lot of girls had pictures of their boyfriends, remember?—but she had pictures of that house, too. I remember looking at them and all I could think about was how was I going to get her to put down the pictures and lift up her skirt? God, poor girl, she could be so boring.” His grin held both shame and lasciviousness. “But she was so easy. Back then, I could put up with a lot of dumb chatter if that was the price for some pussy.”