Granite Harbor, page 5
“I honestly don’t know yet.”
“What was the witchcraft stuff?”
“Isabel, I can’t talk about it.”
She opened the door, and he walked past her. Before he could turn on the granite step outside to face her, he heard the door shut behind him.
In his car, he looked at his phone and tried to focus his thoughts. Mark had texted Kathy McKinnon’s number. Jared would be in school, but the kids would be getting out early. He’d spoken with Jodie Decker, the principal. He called Kathy. No answer, he left a message.
He looked up at Isabel’s house through the windshield. A stab of self-loathing.
He pushed it aside as he drove back to the station.
The TV vans were already there.
9
Billie Raintree was the first local Alex got to know by sight in Granite Harbor, years ago, just after they’d moved from London, stamping his initial impressions of the town, the state of Maine, and its inhabitants. One of the tough natives, he presumed, whose ancestors had adapted to granite moraines, impenetrable forests, icy waterways, a climate more brutal than now, and bent all these to their will to arrive at their own notion of home.
A short, powerful-looking woman of indeterminate middle age, tanned, deeply creased face, thick salt-and-pepper hair cut short, sprouting straight up and back from an off-center cowlick. Already coming down the trail in the predawn dark, a chocolate Lab in front of her, as he passed her going up Mount Meguntic on his first early morning runs. She and the dog would step aside as Alex jogged past.
She always gave him a firm “Good morning.” The verbal equivalent of a strong handshake.
“Good morning,” Alex replied.
Occasionally, he saw her bench-pressing a sandwich of weights—more than he’d dream of trying—at the Y: a squat LEGO physique in shorts and T-shirt. If their eyes met, they acknowledged each other with nods.
They were not formally introduced until his interview at the police department, when Granite Harbor Police Chief Belinda—“Billie”—Raintree sat behind her desk wearing a creased uniform shirt and badge. Citations, diplomas, awards hung on the wall behind her. She looked bulletproof. Alex sat facing her across the desk.
“You’re a book writer,” said Chief Raintree.
“Yes, Chief. I’ve been a professor of creative writing here and there. But those were temporary positions. I’m not writing much now.”
“You going to jump ship when the inspiration hits?”
With piercing accuracy, Chief Raintree had shot straight to the heart of his career plan. This, he hoped, would be a day job to tide him over until writing could support him again.
“Writing’s really a part-time thing for me. So’s the teaching. I want a full-time job.” Alex wondered if the chief heard the lie.
“Why policeman? You want to write mysteries?”
Because it’s the only job I can find in this small town for an otherwise unskilled creative type? He had prepared a better answer, most of it true. “I have a child, I need a more reliable income. I want to do what I can here in Granite Harbor, be a more active member of the community. Perhaps make a difference to the place where my daughter is growing up.”
“Fair enough. You’re certainly a different kind of applicant.” Raintree glanced down at Alex’s application on the desk in front of her. “Oxford University—that’ll take care of the high school diploma or equivalent requirement.” She looked back across the desk at Alex. “Book writing. I’m not sure what’s needed for that, but I’d guess some kind of thoughtfulness. Observation. Different frame of reference, maybe. Could be useful around here. Granite Harbor’s a broad mix. Local folk, people from away, creative types—people like you—techies, entrepreneurs. You could be a good fit. Glad to have you aboard.” The chief reached her hand across the desk. “Good luck, Alex.”
* * *
He went back to school: the eighteen-week police training course at the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro. He’d been apprehensive about Firearms Training and Tactics—he’d never fired a gun—and he thought he’d be bored by the five-hour Note Taking and Report Writing class, for which he didn’t believe he needed any further instruction. But he’d been surprised to find himself engaged by the program.
“Details,” said Officer Evans, the Note Taking instructor. A man with a blinking tic, as if he were doing a double take at everything. “You don’t know what you’re looking at when you get to a crime scene, when you talk to a witness, so make a note of everything. Not just what people say. What’s right in front of your eyes? What jumps out? What are your impressions of the people you’re talking to?”
As if for emphasis, Officer Evans blinked twice and stared at the recruits in the front row of the lecture hall. “Write it all down. Go over it later. You might start putting things together. Details tell a story.”
Alex couldn’t have put it better in a fiction writing class. Many of the courses of the Basic Law Enforcement Training Curriculum might have been creative writing seminars: Ethics, Moral Issues, and Discretion; Dealing with the Vulnerable; Family Dynamics; Admissions and Confessions.
He was riveted.
Police training depicted a panoply of human misbehavior, malfeasance, perversion, tawdriness, and pathos that suggested stories he would never have imagined—a world he would supposedly be introduced to at the end of his training program.
Could any of this, he wondered, really be going on beneath the surface of genteel and pretty Granite Harbor? He’d been unaware of wrongdoing around town. His divorce from Morgana and the time spent with his lawyer had brought him into the Calder County Courthouse, where he’d glimpsed some unhappy and bruised people sitting on benches waiting to be called into a courtroom, cases involving traffic violations or domestic abuse. He couldn’t imagine worse behind the facade of attractive houses, the harbor full of expensive yachts, well-heeled summer visitors, cheerful college students waiting tables at the Wharf Bar & Grill.
Two years of car theft, bike theft, boat theft, breaking-and-entering, drunk-and-disorderlies, auto crashes, noise complaints, minor drug arrests, missing children (all of whom had turned up), one suspected explosive device (a misplaced high school robotic experiment), had only confirmed the relatively benign personality of the town.
When Jack Yatsevitch, the department’s only detective investigator, was about to retire, Chief Raintree asked Alex if he’d like to apply for the position.
“I’ve read your books, Alex,” said Chief Raintree. “I think it might suit you.”
He couldn’t quite believe this—Billie Raintree reading about the Cargills and the Alkers of Salford? What had she made of Granddad, naughty Sheila, Bent Ben, and the Corporation Street bomb?
“Really? You read one of them?”
“I read both of them. You think I’d hire you without reading your books? Barbara gave them to me.”
“Barbara?”
“My wife, Barbara. I think you know her. Body and Soul.”
“Oh … yes.” Of course he knew Barbara Goldman. The thin, egret-like woman was the owner of Body and Soul Bookstore, the town’s time-warp emporium of secondhand books on Bayview Street. A labyrinthine establishment on two floors, half a block deep. Barbara knew his tastes, had met Sophie, had steered him through the dark bookcases built by shipwrights on the upper floor where he’d found many cloth-bound treasures.
Then Alex remembered he’d seen Chief Raintree and Barbara standing together at the store’s table during library book sales. And sitting together in the Grand movie theater.
All this in a second as Chief Raintree continued over his embarrassment: “Yes, Barbara and I like to say that between us we take care of the town’s body and soul, law enforcement and literature. She made me aware of your books and reputation. If Mark Beltz and Frank Duggan and young Becky Watrous wrote books, you can believe I’d read them. I want to know who I’ve got working for me. You’ve got an understanding of life and characters, and that’s why I think you might be good in the job.”
“Thank you, Chief. What about the others for detective? Like Mark?”
“They’re not interested. Or I’m not interested. And I don’t want to look outside the department. I want someone who knows the town, someone I know.”
So Alex had returned to the Academy for further training in Police Investigative Procedures. He took and passed the LEIE, the Law Enforcement Investigator Examination. He was happier back in his own rumpled clothes. He’d felt like an imposter in his blue-black police uniform. He’d almost forgotten the eager young man from Manchester, who’d made it to Oxford, the promising novelist, as if, in a Twilight Zone episode, those identities were a dream from which he’d awoken into his true identity: small-town American lawman. He would no more have imagined himself an astronaut on Mars.
But he felt more himself back in jeans and a Gore-Tex jacket, Blundstone boots. He stopped shaving daily. He exchanged the too big .45 caliber department-issue Heckler & Koch HK45 pistol he’d carried on his belt as a uniformed cop for a slimmer, subcompact Glock 26 9mm that weighed almost half a pound less and was more concealable in the shoulder holster he adopted after getting back into his own clothes. The little Glock almost disappeared beneath a down vest or his old tweed jacket. Except for mandatory shooting practice at various indoor and outdoor ranges, and regular cleaning, he never touched his pistol. Except to keep it in a safe when at home, whether Sophie was there or not—she might drop in. It was only noticeable if someone—Sophie, say—hugged him. But no one had for years.
“Maybe your storyteller instincts will be of use to you as a detective,” Chief Billie Raintree said at the conclusion of his LEIE training, when she presented Alex with his Granite Harbor Police Detective badge, which he would carry with him but tucked away out of sight like his gun. “There’s no such thing as random, senseless crime. Behind every sad, sorry, dumbass crime is a story.”
* * *
“A frog?” Chief Raintree said now, looking up when Alex came into her office. His first printed report lay on her desk. With photographs from the site, the Settlement, Shane hanging from the makeshift frame.
Through the chief’s closed window he heard the whine of generators. MPBN and the Bangor and Portland network television news crews were setting up in front of the William P. Merrill Station, the single-story complex of two modern brick buildings that housed the town’s fire station and police department. Alex and Chief Raintree would be giving a short news conference at noon.
“Yes. I’m planning to look up any local connection to witchcraft—”
“I doubt it,” said Chief Raintree, shaking her head dismissively. “This isn’t witchcraft, or Wicca, goblin worship, anything like that. That’s all women with candles, the Witches of Eastwick, herbs and elderberry wine. They’re like book groups. This is not that. What about Shane’s friends?”
Alex explained what he’d learned of the relationship between Shane Carter, Ethan Dorr, and Jared McKinnon. All three boys had been born in the same week at Midcoast Medical Center. They’d grown up together. Isabel Dorr and Kathy McKinnon were now single parents. Doreen Wisner’s situation, the location of the family’s house way out on Cobb Road, and Shane’s room in the basement, meant that he had spent a lot of time in the Dorr and McKinnon households. Isabel now worked at the Settlement, Kathy taught yoga. He’d interviewed Ethan and Isabel. He was trying to get ahold of Kathy—
“Alex, I’ve requested FBI assistance from Boston. They’re sending up one of their agents tomorrow.”
“Oh. Because this is my first murder?”
“Not at all. I’m not enthusiastic about bringing in the Bureau. They’re into profiling, which is no better than astrology in my book. But this is not a local argument, petty theft, burglary. The MO”—she tapped the photographs—“suggests the killer may have acted before, maybe outside of Maine, so it could be a federal crime, in which case we would have to call in the FBI. They’ve got a big database, they’ll turn up anything similar. So you’ll work with their agent, Harris, who’s coming up today or tomorrow, but you report to me. It’s your case, the agent cooperates with our department.”
“I understand.”
“Have you talked to Kevin Regis?”
Kevin Regis was a software developer and computer technician who ran a computer repair service out on West Street. An independent civilian contractor, Kevin, who looked more like a sandy-haired high school football coach, was the Granite Harbor Police IT department.
“Yes. He’s looking for information on Derek Carter, the boy’s biological father. And we’re exploring all locally registered pedophiles and sex offenders—there was no sign of interference or violation, but I’m waiting for the autopsy, and that’s tomorrow morning. Somebody took Shane somewhere. What they did required private space, a kill location, so I’m thinking probably someone local.”
“Agreed. Someone everyone knows, who does a good job of blending in. Maybe someone Shane knew. Someone he was happy to get into a car with.”
Judy Waite, short, round, gray-blond, knocked at the open doorway. “Chief, they’re ready for you both outside. They’re broadcasting live.”
“Thank you, Judy.” Chief Raintree stood up behind her desk. “We’ll keep it short. I’ll start. Our thoughts are with the family, and hand it over to you. No frog, no details, of course.”
“Right.”
He followed Chief Raintree outside into the press of reporters, an eruption of questions, cameras, flashes—
Eye of newt and toe of frog—half-remembered fragments tumbled into Alex’s brain. Never hung poison on a fouler toad … poisonous bunch-backed toad … Shakespeare was full of such invocations—late sixteenth, early seventeenth century—the time when the settlers sailed from England to the now abandoned site north of Granite Harbor. What did those people who rejected home, family, the whole of the known world, for a chance simply not to perish on a wild and distant shore—what did they believe of frogs and newts and toads?
“Thank you for coming,” Chief Billie Raintree announced to the small crowd waving microphones, cameras, cell phones. “Our thoughts go first to the family.…”
10
Morgana Claymore didn’t like waiting in line at school. It wasn’t her thing, taking her daughter to school, or the pickup crawl, sitting in her truck behind other parents’ cars, going nowhere. Sophie took the school bus. It picked her up on Bayview Street, a block from Belleport, Morgana’s house on Chestnut. After school, she got the bus back into town, or rides with friends, went to the library to do her homework, or to a friend’s house, and came home before supper. An arrangement that suited them both: they had their afternoons to themselves. Or she went home to her father’s house.
On the few occasions when she had driven to school for 3:30 P.M. pickup—some project, sports equipment, whatever, that Sophie needed to bring home—she didn’t remember it being this crowded. But the news was out. Morgana saw it in the shocked faces of the other parents, mostly mothers, in the other cars, looking at one another in collective dismay, wide-eyed, shaking heads. All of them had rushed to school to physically lay their hands on their children as soon as possible.
The car in front of her rolled ahead a few feet. Morgana didn’t move, allowing the space between the vehicles to open up. In the door’s side mirror she saw the car behind her trying to nudge her forward, all but disappearing from view under the tailgate of her truck. Go ahead, make my day. At over nineteen feet, Morgana’s Crew Cab Ford F-150 King Ranch truck was five feet longer than a Subaru Outback and half again as high. She had an urge to get out of this ridiculous crawl, drive forward, and double-park near the buses, but it was more fun to take her time and let the fleet of muddy Subarus and Toyotas try to maneuver around her.
Don’t fence me in.
She switched from Willie’s Roadhouse on Sirius to Maine Public Radio, and caught the crunchy station’s latest report update on the story:
“—learned that the identity of the victim is Granite Harbor High School student Shane Carter, sixteen years of age. The body was discovered this morning at the historic Granite Harbor Settlement site. No further details are being released at this time, according to Granite Harbor Police Detective Alex Brangwen, who spoke with Maine Public’s reporter Kelly Jones a little while ago—”
Morgana barked involuntarily. Alex Brangwen, Detective. Another invention! She long ago realized that she’d invented the man she married. She’d imagined the great writer. But it had been there in front of her all along—if she’d bothered to look: the self-indulgent melancholy, the narcissism. So wrapped up in his tortured self-involved writing, unhappy, frustrated, complaining, like some baby trying to open a package that was beyond him. How could she not have seen it? She’d thought he was going to be a major writer—and make some money. She’d read his novel, the one he was known for, and accepted that it must be good from all the rave blurbs on the back, but it took her a while to realize she hadn’t liked it at all. That claustrophobic street of depressed, complaining characters. What had impressed her were the newspaper articles about Alex Brangwen: The books on my bedside table for the Sunday Times. Shortlisted for a prize. The fancy dinner in some famous library, with his publisher, who looked like a middle-aged Harry Potter, and all those clever literary people. They all loved him! How smart and clever her husband was!
She’d imagined them together. The house with her beautiful antiques and paintings. The great writer, the smart, beautiful people they would know. It still embarrassed her when she thought about how she’d fallen for all that literary horseshit.
As soon as she learned she was pregnant, the scales fell from her eyes. The idea of being saddled with this narcissistic baby-man—for life. And London—so dark and dreary. She couldn’t get out of England fast enough.
Back home in the States, she really saw him. That English charm and humor didn’t travel well.
