Borderline: A Jack McMorrow Mystery, page 8
“I wanted to see if he really meant it,” I said.
“Did he?”
“Well, I don’t know. He didn’t chase me away. I talked to him a little outside in the driveway. He didn’t say much.”
“Never has,” Bell said scrunched down in front of me.
“But he didn’t run away, either. I think he was pretty surprised to see me standing there.”
“I know the feeling.”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
She turned and smiled.
“Just kidding. Go on.”
“Well, Rob-ann called him and he went inside. He was heading off somewhere on his bike and he stopped. So I sort of followed him up the stairs—”
Bell turned again. There was a smudge of soil on her forehead.
“Sort of followed him?”
“Followed him.”
“You are pushy, aren’t you? Is that what it takes to make it as a big-city reporter?”
“That times a hundred. I’ve mellowed.”
“No kidding.”
A car went by and the driver, a young woman, beeped. From the ground, Bell raised her trowel in a wave. Then she listened to the speaker on her belt, and troweled some more.
“So this is what happened. I walked into the apartment—I really just wanted to get a look at it—and they were standing there, talking about a grocery list or something, and they looked at me and, I don’t know, they seemed a little panicky. She was immediately on the defensive. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’ That sort of thing. And then all of a sudden these two guys came up the stairs and came in.”
“What’d they look like?”
“Thirties, the taller one. His name was Howard. Beard. Kind of scroungy. Shorter one was younger. Maybe mid-twenties. Long hair and a hat on backward. Probably saw it on TV.”
“No doubt,” Bell murmured.
“So these two guys, especially the older one, they just go berserk. ‘What’s he doing in here? Get outta here.’ Older guy tried to grab my notebook. We’re in this tug-of-war and the younger guy is trying to jump in on it and it’s just chaos. Screaming and yelling.”
Bell had stopped and was turned toward me, listening, sitting on her haunches.
“So finally Robie grabbed the shorter guy and I kind of ran over the taller guy and got out of there. And, oh, yeah, Rob-ann is screaming at the taller guy when he’s on the floor, I mean, right in his face, ‘You want the cops here again?’ ”
Bell stood up. The speaker at her waist gave a little murmur. She listened but after that it just hissed.
“That was me.” she said. “I stopped and talked to them.”
“How were they?”
“Nervous.”
“More than usual?”
“I’d say so. But they have good days and bad days. They’re kind of hard to figure.”
“Who would these guys have been?” I asked.
She was moving toward the driveway.
“Oh, I’d say Howard and Damian. They’re cousins. I mean, they’re brothers, but they’re cousins to Robie and Rob-ann.”
“What kind of family is this?”
Bell smiled.
“I don’t know. I suppose you could call it a family. Robie and Rob-ann get checks. SSI or something. The rest of the crew sponges off them. Bunch of dirtbags, mostly. Howard and Damian are in jail one year out of three. Damian’s been to Windham. Howard, I think, has done mostly county time. They’re thieves. Drunks. Damian has a couple of gross sexual misconducts. Underage girls. I don’t know about Howard for that sort of thing. But Robie and Rob-ann are their golden geese. Guaranteed money, first of the month.”
“So they leech off them?”
“Sure. Borrow twenty bucks. More if they can get it. Go get drunk. That’s how we know about it. The cousins get any kind of cash and you can bet they’re going to get picked up for something. Get tossed out of a bar. Get in a fight. We say, ‘Where’d you get the money?’ They say, ‘Robie and Rob-ann gave it to us,’ like it’s somehow Robie and Rob-ann’s fault. They’re bad news, those two. Yup. Howard and Damian. Some nasty assaults, back when they were dealing drugs. Howard almost gouged a guy’s eye out once. They’re the kind who, once you’re down, keep on stomping.”
“Nice,” I said.
We stood at the end of the driveway. The speaker murmured again.
“She’s waking up,” Bell said.
My exit cue. I hurried.
“Well, what about Robie and Rob-ann? What happened to them?”
Bell took a step toward the house, turned back to me.
“No father. Mother was a drunk. I think Robie has some sort of mental disability. Maybe some learning thing. The sister’s a little better but something’s still not right. Maybe just their upbringing. They were behind me in school, but I remember the two of them there. She was older. Picked on like you wouldn’t believe. Sort of stuck together. Kids used to say they were, you know, jokes about incest. And then they stopped going to school much, finally stopped altogether. I don’t think Robie can read.”
“So what did they do, if they didn’t go to school?”
“Took care of Mom,” Bell said. “What was her name? Rolene. She’s dead, but they used to stay home and keep house, make the meals for each other, wipe up the vomit, and other stuff, I guess. Toward the end, I heard Rob-ann used to impersonate her mother on the phone when her mother was too drunk to talk.”
“God,” I said.
“Yeah,” Bell said, inching toward the house. “They didn’t really have a childhood. Just them and Mom and then her liver went and she died and it was just them. Except they never learned to be grownups. And they never learned to be just kids, either. Stuck in never-never land. Kinda sad.”
“And they’ve got these hangers-on who come around?”
“First of the month,” Bell said.
“But it’s July seventeenth,” I said. “What were they there for today?”
She stopped. Looked like she was thinking about it.
“I don’t know, McMorrow. That’s a good question.”
Her speaker started to cry. She tossed the trowel on the lawn.
“And what about all that today? How did they know about me? And why did they get so wound up about it?”
Bell was walking away.
“Those are good questions, too,” she said.
“And who was Rob-ann talking to on the phone?”
“Could’ve been the Tooth Fairy.”
I took two steps after her.
“But I don’t think so,” I said. “You know what I think?”
She turned.
“Yeah, I do.”
“I think the bus man is in there.”
Bell sighed. The baby was screeching.
“Can you get a warrant?”
“Based on what? Your intuition?”
“Based on their odd behavior.”
“Robie and Rob-ann? You’ve got to be kidding,” Bell said.
“Odd, even for them.”
“Yeah, right. The chief is really gonna like that one. I’ll tell him it was the reporter’s idea.”
“What about the bad check?”
Bell’s hand was on the doorknob.
“I don’t know. I’ll see. I’ll be back Wednesday. If the guy’s there, and I don’t know why on earth he would be, he’ll still be there.”
“What if he isn’t?” I said.
“God, McMorrow,” Bell said, going through the doorway toward the baby’s cries. “You sure know how to ruin a day off.”
9
A day off? I didn’t want one.
For reasons I couldn’t quite identify, I was driven. From Bell’s neat little house, I proceeded directly to Robie and Rob-ann’s. I drove by once, slowly, and saw that the bike was gone. Circling the block, I parked three houses away and watched. Nothing stirred. Not the warm, still air. Not the street. Not the dreary house. Not the tattered shades in its windows.
I waited and watched. Sitting there in the truck, I felt like I was the only living thing in sight. After fifteen minutes in the hot, noonday sun, I started the truck and left, looking up at the second-floor windows as I passed.
What if he was in there? If he was, what was he doing? Why?
As I drove, the questions floated in front of me, like mist on the windshield. Distracted, I drove through the side streets until I ran into Route 201, then turned north. A mile up the road, I pulled into a supermarket and went in to buy something for lunch. I gathered two apples, two oranges, a bag of pretzels, and a quart of orange juice.
As I stood in the checkout line, I wondered why he would be there. Who was he? What could the connection be?
“Paper or plastic?” the checkout girl said.
If there was one, I thought.
“Sir?” the girl said.
I ate in the truck, parked in the shade of an oak at the back of the parking lot. On the seat next to me were a detailed state atlas called the Maine Atlas & Gazetteer, notebooks, the tape recorder, and a book about Benedict Arnold that had a map that showed his route in little dots, like bread left behind by Hansel and Gretel. I shook Robie and Rob-ann from my mind and traced his path.
Arnold and his men went straight up the river until they were just below what is now the village of Caratunk, thirty-five miles to the north. There they went overland, catching rides on three small ponds, stopping to build a hospital—not a good sign. The men then dragged their boats across Bigelow Mountain and became desperately mired in a boggy marsh east of what is now Flagstaff Lake. The lake is a wide, shallow backwater held back by a small hydroelectric dam. The historic tourers could drive this part of the route, crossing a causeway at the lake’s southwest tip. They could picture Arnold’s struggles, his plight as he and his troops were mired in this Maine morass. It would take some imagination. For me, with Robie and the rest of them tugging at me, it was taking less and less.
But Robie didn’t pay bills, at least not yet, so the apple cores and the orange juice carton went through the sliding window into the bed of the truck. I headed west, past old farms cut into house lots, former pastures where used cars now were lined up under plastic pennants. The road slipped through the little town of Norridgewock, where a French missionary was massacred by the English along with most of his Abenaki congregation. They made shoes in Norridgewock now.
And then it was on to Madison, where they made magazine paper, and the mill, with its steam-cloud flag, dwarfed the game little downtown. From there, it was across a bridge and the Kennebec, and then the river stayed on the right, looping around low, wooded islands. I drove slowly and chatted with my tape recorder past the tiny town of Embden across the river at Solon.
Researching away, I continued north. I noted a sign that said, “Moose next 35 miles,” or, en français, “Moose sur soixante kilometres.” English or French, I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do for the next thirty-five miles. Perhaps they should have put a sign up where the moose were not.
The road was a straight shot to the next town, Bingham, ten miles away, but to the west, the mountains could be seen beyond the tree-covered hills, as if heaving themselves up onto their elbows. There was just a hint of wildness here, something that told you that you would soon be in territory that was, if not hostile, at least ambivalent.
The only other traffic was log trucks, which popped up over the crest of approaching hills like locomotives. Headed south, they were loaded, tree-length logs piled fifteen feet high, secured with winched chains that seemed like threads as the trucks thundered by.
Like programmed missiles, they couldn’t stop. It was like a building passing, missing my truck by five feet. It was a near miss, a dodging of instant death, and I covered my ears and winced as the log trucks passed in a gust of grit. My truck began to feel very small.
But I made it to Bingham, where there were white clapboard houses, a post office, and a sign that said I was halfway between the equator and the North Pole. Maybe Santa stopped here to gas up.
It was in Bingham that I saw the first of the whitewater outfitter buses, which hauled rafters to the river. The rafters rode the rapids after the power company opened its dam. Tourists had a good time on this giant water slide, and more importantly, they spent money, which in this country of woods and rugged hills, was sorely needed. Only so many people could be depended upon to come here to hunt bear.
So today’s adventurers rode down the river in rubber rafts, shrieking with glee. In 1775, Arnold’s army went up the river in leaky wooden boats. A few of them may have shrieked, but it would have been in pain. The rafters stayed in lodges with restaurants and bars with karaoke music. Arnold’s men slept on the ground in wet clothes in the cold. They didn’t have much to eat, and many of them were very sick. I’d just read about one guy who was left behind because he was dying of dysentery and was “covered with vermin.”
With Robie and Rob-ann, they crept back into my thoughts as I drove. What would excite them enough to light into me like that? Money. Booze. Maybe cocaine. Stuff they could sell for money to buy booze and cocaine. Was it just that they saw me as some sort of threat to Robie and Rob-ann? But if they were just a source of cash on check day, how could I get in the way? The cousins had to be seeing them as something more than that. What had changed? Who was in those rooms with the closed doors?
I drifted, then pulled myself back. Just outside of Bingham there was a rest area, and a marker that said “Arnold Trail.” I pulled in and saw that there was a billboard sort of thing that showed Arnold’s route. I got out and read it, standing there in the hot sun. It said the trip took six weeks, that it included “great hardship and extremely difficult travel.” I guessed the sign people didn’t want to come right out and say the men were reduced to eating candles and their shoes.
But I would, because that was the story. These woodsmen and farmers and fishermen who risked their lives for what they thought was a just cause. Life and liberty, and being able to tell the king to go scratch. I thought about this as I drove north. It was a different time then, with so many people ready to die for what they thought was right. Nothing gets Americans that fired up anymore. That’s what we’ve got the army for, right? If somebody’s bothering us, they’ll take—
“Whoa,” I said.
Above Bingham, the road swerved sharply up and to the left, with a rock wall on my right. A loaded log truck was just there, coming at me, three feet over the center line. I jerked the wheel.
“God almighty,” I said as the truck’s roar subsided. I told myself I’d better warn the historic tourers about this one. Gawk at your own risk.
There was plenty to gawk at. Above the town of Moscow, the Kennebec was dammed. Above the dam, the river was called Wyman Lake. In the sun, the water was a shimmering deep blue, against steep walls of trees that melded into green wooded hills and ridges. I glanced out as I followed the still-twisting road, then up at the mirror.
A log truck was gaining.
I sped up a little, but the Toyota was short and high and seemed to lean on the corners. The tractor-trailer behind me kept gaining until I could just see the grille, windshield, the word “Freightliner,” and a Québec plate. I tried to go faster but the truck stayed just off my bumper.
To my right was sheer rock wall. To the left was the other lane, a guardrail, then a steep pitch down to the water. An oncoming truck roared by and I swerved and slowed. Now the mirror showed just grille, no windshield.
“What’s your problem?” I shouted.
There was no place to pull over. What did he want?
I hung on and drove, eyes locked on the road, hands gripping the wheel. Through another set of S-turns, braking to keep from swinging too wide. The truck downshifted and accelerated and then the road suddenly dropped and turned to the left. The river was slipping by in blue-black flashes but I couldn’t look. Another oncoming truck, coming, coming. Blasting by, a wind-tunnel whoosh, logs wavering in the wind. I looked for a turnoff, a logging road, a clearing in the woods, a break in the rocks.
Nothing.
An Arnold sign flashed by. For what? It was somewhere along here that the army had left the river and headed east. I looked in the mirror and saw more grille, heard the diesel skip as the driver downshifted.
It was a straight stretch now, coming into Caratunk. The river on the left, a few camp cottages high on the right. I put on my turn indicator. The truck drew closer. I put on my flashers. He still didn’t back off. I turned the flashers off, left the right turn signal on, and turned hard onto the gravel shoulder in front of a camp.
He went by in a cloud of dust and smoke. I slid to a stop.
“Son of a bitch,” I said.
The gray-haired history buffs would love this one. What was the hurry? Did he want to get back to get another load? To have an ale? Next time I’d bring a bazooka. Maybe a couple of water balloons.
But that was what this North Country was like, in some ways. Unforgiving. Unsentimental. You still could die up here, if you got lost in the wrong place, at the wrong time of year. Freeze to death just like Arnold’s men. In the deep woods, you still could trip and break your ankle or your leg, and then bet your life on how far you can crawl.
I didn’t get into the deep woods that day. I did drive the twisting turns back to Bingham, and then cross the timber bridge over the Kennebec. The gravel logging road on the west side ran north along the river for six or seven miles before it swung away toward the carry ponds that Arnold used. I drove to Middle Carry, through an unlocked paper company gate. And then I hiked a mile through the woods to a spot that showed on the map as Arnold’s Point.
It was a small pond, a mile across, surrounded by spruce hills. The trail was part of the Appalachian Trail, tiny red dots on the map, like a line of ants. In real life, it was a narrow path with orange blazes on the tree trunks. It led to a hut, and perhaps because it was a Monday, I was the only one there. I walked out on Arnold’s Point, and stood and looked at the pond and the hills, with the sun starting to fall in the west. I saw an osprey fly over, a great blue heron. I thought I heard the whine of a Canada jay, but it might have been a catbird.
