The Midcoast, page 14
He went back to the truck and texted Allie: At Lincoln. You need a ride? and then he waited, killing time by listening to country music and wiping dust off his dashboard. The Silverado had leather seats, all heated, plenty of cup holders. It belonged to the Pound, technically.
Finally she texted back: Sorry, went to Subway after practice. Can get ride no problem. See you at home! xoxox.
* * *
—
When Ed came into the living room that night, he found Allie holding, instead of a softball mitt, a lacrosse stick. She was on the sofa, her body just another cushion, watching a show about girls in a big city who get internships and complain about their bosses.
“What’s that?” he said, pointing at the stick.
“A lacrosse stick.”
“Whose is it?”
“Mine.”
“What happened to softball?”
“Lacrosse looked more fun.”
He picked up the stick, weighed it in his hands, swung it like a baseball bat. “How do you play?”
“I don’t know—you try to get the ball in the goal.”
“Bet there’s more to it than that.” He thrust the stick at her like a sword.
“Yeah, we’ll see,” she said.
Ed went upstairs, carrying the stick, and entered Steph’s office. The overhead light was off, the glow of Steph’s laptop reflecting off her glasses.
“You hear about this lacrosse idea?” he asked her.
“Sound travels through the vents, so yeah,” Steph said.
“What should we do?”
Steph leaned back from the computer and squeezed her nose beneath her glasses. “I don’t know, Ed. This house is too small. I’m getting nothing done.”
“What about lacrosse though?”
“What about it?”
“Should we let her play?”
“Of course we should let her play!” Steph said. “Why wouldn’t we?”
“I don’t know. Just never seen it before.”
“How is that a factor?”
“Wouldn’t know how to watch it.”
“You just stand there and watch it. Sit in the bleachers or get a folding chair. It’s not that hard.”
The phone rang. There was a receiver on Steph’s desk, but she didn’t make a move to answer. It rang again.
“Allie, can you get that?” Ed yelled downstairs.
“I’m watching TV!” Allie yelled back.
“I’m gonna blow a gasket,” Steph said. “I need some help, Ed. Please.”
So he went to their bedroom and picked up the phone. EJ’s girlfriend Brittany Dodwell was on the line, calling from her apartment in Orono. EJ was away again, Brittany said.
“Away?” Ed asked.
“Hasn’t been back to our apartment in like three days.”
“He’ll be back,” Ed said.
“Maybe four days,” she said. “I called Jason but he didn’t pick up.”
“Jason Page?”
“Yeah.”
“Goddammit, EJ.”
“You think they’re out hunting?” Brittany asked.
“Something like that,” Ed said.
“Well, he didn’t say nothing. It’s weird.”
Ed said he would let Brittany know if he heard anything, hung up, and went back downstairs. He had thought EJ’s association with Jason Page would be over by now. Jason worked for Ed, ran one of the boats up to Canada and back. He had a younger brother named Dougie, also a fuck-up. Dougie was only fifteen, but, with no other talents or prospects, he was sure to follow after his brother and work on one of Ed’s boats someday. He was the type of kid who was always lurking in the background. In more than one photograph from the party on Southport, he’d been the only non–family member facing the camera, his eyes locked on Allie and whatever she was doing.
Ed stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Thought for a second. Now he had a plan.
“All right,” Ed said, back in the living room, both hands atop Allie’s stick, leaning on it like a staff. “We’re making a deal.”
“What kind of deal?” she said, eyes on the television, an ad for maxi pads.
“You get to play lacrosse this spring,” he said, “but you stop talking to Dougie Page.”
“Hang on—what?”
“Take it or leave it.”
“You can’t be serious,” she said, propping herself up on her elbows. “I don’t need permission for either of those things.”
“Let’s face it: Dougie’s a loser.”
“Yeah, no shit. Everyone knows that.”
“Good. Then we got a deal. Watch your language.”
“But if I wanted to talk to Dougie Page,” she said, “you couldn’t stop me.”
“You can do better, Allie. That’s all I’m saying. He’s from down this way, and—”
“I’m from down this way!”
“You know we love you, Allie-cat,” he said. “But that don’t mean you can do whatever the hell you want.”
“Oh my God,” she said, dropping back into the couch, “do you have any idea how unfair it is when you say the worst things ever and then say ‘I love you’ after, as if that’s supposed to make whatever you said totally fine?”
Ed laid the stick against the couch and scratched his beard.
“We good here?” he asked.
“No!”
He went to the kitchen, grabbed a beer from the fridge, then stepped outside, into the cold.
He texted Chuck: You seen EJ? Brittany says he’s missing. Better not be doing something stupid.
He waited but received no answer, so he put the phone away and stood on the front step, surveying his small property. The only thing he and Steph had brought from the old trailer—over a decade ago now—was the pink-and-yellow pot buoy, which hung by the door, just to Ed’s left. The Thatches was written in white across the yellow paint, the colors faded. It needed a fresh coat. Ed could do that. He would enjoy doing that. So he removed the buoy from its hook and threw it in the back of the Silverado, next to his toolbox, planning to bring it down to the Pound, where he still had plenty of the old paint.
* * *
—
Once Allie committed to lacrosse, Ed committed to being a lacrosse dad with born-again devotion, attending every one of the girls’ games in a black Lincoln hoodie knifed open at the neck. He’d pace the far sideline, eyes on Allie, only Allie, watching her run, or stand, even when she didn’t have the ball. During a game against North Yarmouth Academy, a private school close to Portland, one of the first games Allie ever played, Ed saw right away that Allie couldn’t catch or throw, but what she could do—if ever she succeeded in securing the yellow rubber ball in her stick—was turn on the jets and blow past her opponents, leaning forward, protective goggles pointing the way, cheeks red, jaw tight, mouth guard in, gloves on, black leggings pumping up the field, her brown ponytail barely keeping up. Her best runs came after she scooped the ball off the turf, or after the referee had called play dead and Allie could place the ball in her stick with her hand. By the second half against NYA, she was already looking like a natural. At one point she emerged from an improvised spin and found herself out in the open, one-on-one with the goalie, and sure, okay, the opportunity surprised her, and she tried to shoot too late, and by then an opponent had crowded her and the ball had fallen out of Allie’s stick and started rolling backwards harmlessly, but still—what a move! Even Ed could appreciate it. It should have been a goal.
“Come on, Stripes!” Ed hollered at the official. “Call something!”
The play was already moving back in the other direction. “Allie, back-check!” Ed yelled, using a term that applies to hockey but not lacrosse.
Lincoln lost the game 17–2.
“Not bad,” Ed said to Allie after the game, standing in the middle of the field.
She leaned down and removed black rubber pellets, the artificial turf’s artificial soil, from her socks. “Except we sucked,” she said.
“You played good.”
“That’s nice of you, Dad, but you’ve never seen lacrosse before.”
“Seen other sports.”
“It’s no use anyway. NYA’s been practicing outside for a month.”
“How come they get to practice outside?”
“Because they have a field that’s not an icy swamp?”
Ed looked around, then down, at all the fake blades of grass. He had never seen anything like it. So this was how the private schools got ahead.
“It’s a level playing field,” Allie said.
“No, it ain’t.”
“No, I mean, it’s like, literally a level playing field. It doesn’t have bumps and ditches. I was making a joke.”
* * *
—
In addition to their twin daughters—around Jack’s age—Cammie and Colin have border collies, so occasionally we join their family to go cross-country skiing as the dogs dash up and down the trails, belly deep in the snow, and as our children trudge forward on their own stubby skis or get towed behind me in a sled. One day this past winter, Colin was skiing in the lead, laying the tracks, and Maeve was following him, and Cammie and I were farther behind, making sure the kids and dogs didn’t get lost in the powder. Cammie’s become a serious triathlete (not a pursuit I have any interest in; I sink when I swim) so could answer my questions about Ed and Steph without having to stop and catch her breath. I had asked her about Ben’s funeral. She had worked at Main Street Antiques when she was in high school and credited Ben, along with a few others, with encouraging her interest in the arts.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Weird day.”
“Weird how?”
“Just the vibe of it.” Her back was to me and she was gliding forward along the trail, but I could see her words taking the form of frozen clouds every time she spoke. “You got the sense that nobody at the funeral really knew Ben. Or at least the ones who knew him best didn’t want to be honest about him. Ed’s dad said a few things. Steph’s dad, too, but he only knew Ben from the Schooner, as a regular.”
“Did you talk to Ed?”
“I did, actually,” she said. “I talked to him and Steph. We had just moved back to Maine, and I ran into Steph right after the service, so we were catching up. We had come to their party the summer before—the one where we met you guys—but I hadn’t really had the chance to talk to her much.”
One of the border collies was nipping at my hamstrings. I shooed him away and turned back to make sure the children were still in our tracks, which they were.
“You guys good?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Jane said.
“Just let me know if you want to hop in the sled.”
It was dragging behind me, empty, but I hoped they wouldn’t take me up on the offer. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with the others if I had to tow the extra freight, even after losing a couple pounds over the summer and fall—all those afternoon runs around the salt bay.
“Anyway,” Cammie said, “I don’t think I fully understood how powerful Steph had become. I mean, ‘powerful’ seems like an insane thing to say when we’re talking about Damariscotta, but you know what I mean.”
I did.
“I guess I was just surprised to find her giving me advice,” Cammie said. “Plus, it was more than advice. It was like, ‘Do this if you know what’s best for you, if you wanna get what you want.’ ”
“What did you want?”
“Oh, sorry, yeah—I wanted to find a space for the art gallery. I had been looking all up and down Bristol Road. I thought maybe I could rent a garage or something.”
“So it was her idea to take over Ben’s space?”
“Yeah. Or no, actually. It was Ed’s.” She was silent for a moment, thinking back, her skis continuing to swish along the tracks. “He came over to where we were standing, and Steph filled him in on the conversation. Steph was excited about the idea of Damariscotta getting an art gallery, but I could tell by the look on Ed’s face that he thought it was the last thing the town needed. Or maybe he was just indifferent. Not that I would have expected him to give a rat’s ass. But then suddenly he leans forward and grips my shoulder. Hard. And he goes, ‘You’re moving into Ben’s old store.’ It wasn’t a question. It sounded like an order. And I said, ‘I am?’ I thought it was a joke. And he goes, ‘Yuh. I’m the executor,’ only he pronounced it like exe-cute-er. He meant of Ben’s estate.” She stopped skiing for a moment, turned back. “I couldn’t get over that I was standing there, talking to Ed Thatch and Steph LeClair, and they were telling me how to make all my dreams come true.”
She faced forward and started skiing again. “But this is the best part,” she said over her shoulder, “Ed said he’d give me a great deal on the lease, which was good, because I didn’t think I could afford a place on Main Street, but then he goes, ‘All you have to do is support Steph.’ I thought for sure it was another joke. I asked what he meant. And he said that I had to go to every town meeting, and anything Steph proposed, I had to get behind it. I remember glancing at Steph, hoping she’d be rolling her eyes, hoping she’d be giving me some sign that Ed was kidding. And I guess she kind of was, but she was also looking at me like, Take the deal, Cammie.”
“Did you?’
“Of course I did! Are you kidding me? I have the best lease in town. And what do I care what Steph proposes? I pretty much agree with her anyway.”
The next morning, when I checked my email, I found the following note in my inbox, subject: One more thing…
Andrew,
Thought of something else you might be interested in. Sorry it didn’t come to me before. It happened by the cars, after the funeral (maybe that’s why I forgot to mention it??) Ed was talking to EJ. I remember thinking EJ looked a little silly because he was wearing the same beige suit he had worn to Ed and Steph’s party (everyone else was in gray or black). Ed was straightening EJ’s tie, even though EJ was obviously a grown man by then. He looked angry but wasn’t saying much. Ed was talking to him, very animated, setting his son straight or something, gripping him by the shoulder, jabbing his finger in his chest…. I have no idea why, just thought you might be able to make sense of it.
Anyway, fun skiing yesterday! The dogs are all tuckered out. See you guys soon.
Best,
Cammie
I stood from my computer, went into the kitchen, poured a cup of coffee, studied the rooster weathervane atop my neighbor’s roof for a minute or two, then circled back to the office. I read the note again. This time it reminded me of something I had learned about the case—but I couldn’t remember what it was. I went digging through my stack of notes, looking for the timelines I had assembled for each family member. The timelines documented all the Thatches’ whereabouts and activities, anything I had deemed significant or potentially significant. I found EJ’s timeline and gave it another look. According to court documents and interviews with members of Ed’s crew, EJ had been going out on the boats with Jason Page for over two years by the time of the funeral. This, I’m sure, was why he would disappear for days on end without telling his girlfriend or his parents where he was going. The funeral was on May 5th, 2014. Before that date were several trips to Canada. EJ’s presence had been confirmed on each one. But after the funeral, there were no more trips to Canada, not for EJ. Ed must have found out. This may have been the source of the argument Cammie witnessed. Yes. It had to be. I ran my finger down Ed’s timeline until I arrived at May 5: Ben’s funeral. On EJ’s timeline was the same notation. But there was something else, just below the funeral, something I had made note of but never thought much about:
May 6: EJ applies to the Damariscotta PD.
EJ would no longer be pursuing a degree in parks, recreation, and tourism. He’d be getting a job. Ed was bringing him all the way in.
* * *
—
A week after Ben’s funeral, Ed went to his cousin’s old house, just to make sure everything was in working order and nobody had tried to break in or vandalize the place. A real estate sign was already stuck in the grass at the top of Ben’s driveway, by the main road. The broker had told him not to expect much action until the summer people arrived, but it was always possible that someone might show up sooner than expected, and if they did, Ed wanted the home to be ready. He parked the Silverado between the farmhouse and the barn. He stepped onto the dirt driveway and looked at the property. On this side of the dock, the meadow was already getting wild. It needed a mow. Something Ed could do himself. He looped around the farmhouse, found a ride-on lawnmower in a shed, and brought it outside. He drove into the meadow and cut a swath straight down the middle—a long stripe connecting house to river. It took him three minutes just to get from the top of the hill to the shoreline. Then he pivoted and steered the lawnmower back up the incline.
Trimming the meadow took an hour and a half, and when Ed was done, he swept the mulch off his legs and admired the big lawn and the long parallel lines he had drawn. It felt good to accomplish something. The grass was so clean, so neat, it almost looked fake.
Then he stepped inside the house, which was empty of all Ben’s furniture. Ed was thirsty, so he turned on the faucet and let it run to cold. He drank from his cupped hands. It was a simple house with neat, box-shaped rooms and plenty of them. Musty though. He should crack the windows, air the place out. The only item Ed hadn’t removed, the only piece of furniture, was Ben’s workbench, which sat in the middle of the living room. Everything else, including the contents of the old barn, had been sold at auction. Ed leaned back against the countertop and gazed through the house, through the small windows, to the river. There were advantages to living up here, right by town, Ed thought. The house was closer to Lincoln. Closer to Main Street. Anyone who lived here could seek office in Damariscotta. The faucet was still running, so he turned around and shut it off. It kept dripping though. Not good. He tried cranking on the handle again, but all that did was turn the drip into a steady trickle.
