The Sweet Goodbye, page 14
In twenty minutes Lee turned onto Anderson Side Road, a gravel road that ran through old homesteading land, mailboxes marking the eastern edge of the hundred-acre land grants people were once given, the mailboxes perfectly spaced every hundred yards. There was a near-full moon and I was able to travel with my headlights turned off once I lost the cargo van. I followed Lee’s taillights until he turned off the road and headed down a long laneway.
The headlights dipped and rose and then shone on a white clapboard farmhouse before being turned off. I pulled to the side of the road, waited five minutes and phoned Flanagan.
“Where is he?”
“Some farmhouse out in Bustard County.”
That’s Pearl Lafontaine’s house.”
“I was wondering about that.”
“You’ve been gone two hours.”
“He went driving. I followed him to the Starlight but he never went in. Then he went up the river to Farrelton and back. I don’t know why he did that. Now he’s at this farmhouse. I’m parked on the Anderson Side Road.”
Flanagan started laughing. “Do you believe this fuckin’ guy? He reports his wife missing. Then he drives over to his girlfriend’s house. He must have a pair of brass ones.”
“Or he’s not thinking clearly. I’m pretty sure he was drinking while he was driving.”
“Is that right? You could have had a cop pull him over if you thought he was a danger.”
“Wasn’t dangerous at all. Hard-core-drunk cautious.”
“That’s our boy. Do you think he’s there for the night?”
“Looks that way.”
“I’ll have Kowalski send someone out to relieve you. Don’t talk to anyone when they get there. Just drive off. How far are you from the house?”
“Quarter mile south. My lights are off. I’m pulled over near a silo.”
* * *
—
I STARED AT the light coming from the farmhouse. A rectangle of mustard yellow light shining through the blackness, like something foreign, like a light hovering above a great abyss.
Shadows passed through the light from time to time. Pearl Lafontaine’s shadow mostly. Travis Lee appeared only occasionally and then just his head, leaning in from the left side of the light. He was leaning across a table. They were probably sitting in a kitchen.
I thought about Amanda Lee and what would have made her run. She didn’t seem like the running type, but her life was falling apart, about to make the transition from gradually falling apart to suddenly falling apart, and maybe she decided to run.
Or maybe there was a body waiting to be found in the woods around Birmingham.
I looked at the light framed in the darkness, the shadows of Travis Lee and Pearl Lafontaine stretching and distorting, and before long, I knew—with a conviction that startled me—that the rest of this story was being decided right then inside that farmhouse. It had become their story in a way. The rest of us were just watching. Waiting for our scenes to begin.
THE SWEET GOODBYE
She sat at the kitchen table, a Formica table from the fifties with the thick chrome edging and steel legs, blue swirling lines atop that resembled a topographical map. The sort of table that used to get blown up in nuclear-safety movies, along with the wooden-cabinet television, the top-entry washing machine and the crash-test dummy wearing the kitchen apron.
Most of the furniture in the house was furniture she had grown up with. Some of the cabinets and hutches were more than a hundred years old, same for some of the dishware, and there was a grandfather clock in the parlor that was probably older than that, one that chimed every fifteen minutes, and every time that happened, he looked surprised.
“Do you like the chimes?”
“You know what? I don’t think I do,” he answered.
“You never had a grandfather clock in that little ol’ mansion you grew up in?”
“Not that I ever heard.”
“I thought every mansion had to have a grandfather clock. Like it was a rule or something. I love those old chimes.”
She said it quickly, without thinking, and the silence that followed soon became awkward. How could she not know that about him? It seemed fundamental to her for some reason, character defining in some way—do you like grandfather clocks? Yes or no? How could she not know that about the man she’d been sleeping with for thirty years?
“How’s your drink, hon? Can I freshen it?”
“Please.”
She went to the pantry and took out a bottle of Ballantine’s, brought it to the table. “May as well leave it here,” she said, and went to the fridge, came back with a red plastic ice tray. She broke cubes into a mixing bowl and slid the bowl across the table. He shook his head no. After she added cubes to her drink, she sat down and he asked if he could have some ice.
“You’re not thinking too well, hon. You’re missing her, aren’t you?”
“I’d be surprised if that were the case. Don’t know what I’m feeling.”
“It’s missing her. Live with anyone long enough and you’re going to miss them. Whether they treated you good or bad, you’re going to miss them.”
He looked at her, not believing that. “Do you know this is the first time I’ve been inside your house?”
“I do know that.”
“You’ve lived in this house a long time. You never wanted to live anyplace else?”
“Never. This is my home.”
“You’ve owned it since you were how old?”
“Sixteen.”
“How in the world did that work? You’ve never told me.”
“Not much to tell. My dad took off and I ended up with the house. Want some more ice.”
“Please.”
She went to get the ice tray. Took her time. While she was standing there with the fridge door open, the clock chimed.
* * *
—
Her father was a bad drunk who never had any time for her until she turned fourteen and then he found himself living with a teenage daughter blossoming in the upstairs bedroom like some exotic forbidden fruit. Just the two of them living in the house by then.
Problem was, her father never forbade himself much. She was far from the only girl in Bustard County who had to deal with a situation like that. She knew some girls in high school who’d changed in a day, become sullen and withdrawn after they’d been the skip-rope kind of girl their whole lives. Suddenly they started losing weight. Showing up at school with bruises on their forearms. It wasn’t hard to tell what girls it was happening to.
A girl named Susan Petrie, two grades younger than her, hanged herself one morning in her barn right after doing morning chores. She was one of those girls. Most got through it though, and you’d see them around town from time to time. They looked sad and lost to Pearl, every last one she knew about.
She didn’t know what to do about her father, so she went to the police station one day after school and tried to report him. She got in to speak to a detective, who asked her, while leering at her chest most of the time, if she’d had any trouble with her father recently. Had he grounded her for some reason? Not liked one of her boyfriends?
She walked out of the police detachment without filing a complaint. She told Beau about it soon afterward, not sure what he might do, if anything, but knowing he didn’t like her father, and at the very least, he would believe her.
Nothing happened for nearly a year and she figured Beau was going to be just like the cops. She was waiting for high school to finish so she could get out of Birmingham, was thinking of moving to Portland, take some community college courses, just hadn’t figured out which ones, when one night, just before midnight, she heard a vehicle coming up the gravel laneway.
Her father was drinking in the kitchen and she heard him bump into some chairs before turning on the porch light. The vehicle stopped with its headlights turned on at the front of the house. Her father was probably shielding his eyes when he opened the door and screamed, “Who the fuck’s there?”
There was no answer. A few seconds after that came the sound of footsteps on the porch and she knew her father had stepped outside. “Will you turn off the fuckin’ lights, whoever the fuck you are!”
“Get away from the house,” she heard Beau say. “Come over here, Jean.”
She could have gone to her bedroom window and watched, but she didn’t. She wondered about that over the years, if she was being cowardly for doing that, but she didn’t think so. She had stood wide-eyed and straight in front of things that were almost as bad. She figured she knew what was going to happen as soon as she heard that vehicle coming down the laneway and that’s why she didn’t look. She didn’t need to. Everything after knowing was a detail.
“What the fuck are you doing?” her father screamed as he came down the steps of the front porch. “What the fuck . . . ?”
She heard the punch, so it must have been quite a punch. Then there was another punch. And what sounded like a kick. There was a loud thump and she knew her father had fallen to the ground. Then there was a scraping sort of noise, like rubbing a knife over gristle stuck to a plate, and she knew her father was being dragged away.
“Wake up, girl,” he screamed. “There’s some shit going on out here and you gotta—” But then came another punch and he didn’t say anything after that. Car doors were opened and shut. The headlights backed away from the house. A minute later she was alone, listening to the sound of water running through a pipe somewhere, a wind that had picked up and was hitting the shutters on her bedroom window.
Two days later Beau phoned and told her to go to a lawyer’s office in downtown Birmingham the next day at ten a.m. He said they were expecting her. When she got there, she was ushered into a large conference room where a woman wearing a dress Pearl thought you wore only to the Starlight on a Saturday night served her coffee from what looked like a silver pot. When the woman was gone, two men came into the room, carrying thick file folders.
The men shook Pearl’s hand, opened their files and, ten minutes later, had covered the “pith and substance” of what they needed to tell her. One lawyer used that phrase all the time. “Pith and substance.” He was the lawyer who seemed most in a hurry.
Her father had given her the farm, plus all the machinery and equipment. He had given her his truck and the contents of both his checking and savings accounts, total: $1,241. Pearl was also being named beneficiary for the twenty-thousand-dollar insurance policy that came with the small pension her father received from the Maine-Sherbrooke Railway Company.
The lawyers showed her where she needed to sign, where she needed to initial, and then they put a stack of paper in front of her. Pearl was halfway through the job, flipping through the paper and looking for the plastic tabs, when she asked, “So where is my father?”
“In California,” said the pith-and-substance lawyer. “I gather there was an estrangement?”
Funny word. Anytime it’s used, a funny word. Could have said “broken,” “twisted,” “split,” but everyone wants to use the word that rolls off the tongue and sounds almost sweet. Estrangement. Sure, let’s call it that.
“That’s right.”
“It appears your father wanted to make amends. As you can see, he cares for you more deeply than you suspect.”
“Yes, I see that.”
“His nephew made most of the arrangements. I have never actually met your father, but he is a generous man. It’s quite a birthday gift.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Your birthday. It was two weeks ago, correct? You’re sixteen now? You can’t legally own property in Maine until you’re sixteen. Your father must have known that.”
She nodded. Yes, he must have known that.
* * *
—
The grandfather clock was still bothering her. How could she not have known a thing like that? It made her feel silly. The way the waitresses at the Red Bird made her feel sometimes when they saw Travis waiting for her in the parking lot.
Beau said she was obsessed with him, and maybe she was. Most people said more or less the same thing. Although she thought obsession was only obsession if you didn’t know about it. If you knew, it was something else.
What had happened to Amanda? Likely that girl had run. She knew enough men with second homes and pieds-à-terre far from Birmingham, and she’d probably bailed. It’s what Amanda would do. Or maybe she’d done something stupid like contacted an old lover, someone who lived deep in the North Maine Woods, to ask him what the hell was going on and how worried she should be. Would Amanda have been that stupid?
It was a waning moon and she could barely see the cedar break behind her farmhouse. There must have been high clouds in the sky as well. She stared out the window a few more minutes before giving him a shake. He didn’t move and she gave him another, harder this time.
“What’s wrong?” he mumbled.
“I’ve been thinking, hon. I don’t think you should go home today. Might not be safe. I think you should stay here for a little while.”
“What do you mean, it might not be safe?”
“It’s just a feeling I have. Will you trust me on it?”
“I’m in trouble?”
“Don’t you think you’re in trouble?”
He didn’t answer. She threw off her bedsheets and looked around the floor for her jeans.
“What are you doing?”
“Having a shower, getting dressed and then I’m leaving.”
“Where in the world are you going at this hour?”
“Not going to tell you. But, hon, you really gotta stay here. All right?”
* * *
—
She put her car in neutral and pushed it down the driveway behind the cedar break and onto the road. She started the engine and drove away, waiting a half mile before turning on the headlights.
She hoped to make it as far as Little Creek Camp and she came within two miles before the Honda couldn’t go any farther, the ruts on the logging road now too deep for the undercarriage clearance of her car.
She drove the car off the road and covered it with cedar boughs, marked the spot by notching an X in a tree. At Little Creek Camp, she got some catcalls—“You get tossed out of a plane, darlin’?” “Look at this—a fallen fuckin’ angel!”—but it didn’t take long for a young driver with sandy hair and a badly pocked face to say he’d run her up to Paradise Lake.
Those were the words he used, “run you up,” although he was talking about a hundred-twenty-mile drive through the North Maine Woods, at what would have been an average speed of about twenty miles an hour.
It was late morning when they headed out, the sun sitting just a few feet above the tree line and long shadows cast across the road. The driver’s name was Josh Peters and he had been driving a logging truck for a little more than a year, getting trained at a Manpower office in Portland after losing his job at New England Kitchen Cabinets when it had gone bankrupt two years ago.
“Do you get up here much?” he asked when they had been driving a while.
“Haven’t been up here in a long time.”
“So Beau Lafontaine is your cousin?”
“That’s right.”
“Shit, you must have stories to tell. He’s a Malee, isn’t he?”
“He is. And I do have stories. Want to hear any?”
“Fuck no.” And the boy laughed. She waited for him to make a pass at her but it never came. Maybe the boy had set out with that as a possibility, then changed his mind. She was too old for him. She was a Lafontaine, and maybe it was wise to keep your distance from anyone with that surname. Maybe he was never planning on doing it at all, just wanted to help someone stranded on the logging road outside Little Creek Camp. The more they talked, the more she thought it was the latter. A good kid who had been brought up to help people whenever he had the chance.
She wished it had been an older driver behind the wheel, someone who would have made a pass. She was using the boy, and it would feel better if he were trying to use her as well. Given what might be waiting for them at Paradise Lake, it would be better if this boy were tainted.
* * *
—
They drove down the logging road, lurching up and down on the ruts, the boy shifting his low gears in quick succession, making good time with the bed of the truck empty. For several hours they drove through a mixed forest of oak and maple, spruce and pine, until the hardwood and the scrub trees started to thin and then it was just pine. The giant trunks looked like windowless buildings, no branches for the first twenty feet, a canopy of branches after that so thick you couldn’t see the sky.
It was dark inside that forest and the boy had to put on his headlights. Turn up the heater as well. Two miles south of Paradise Lake, he rounded a corner and slammed on his brakes. The air hissed out fast and shrill and someone must have trained the boy well down in Portland because he shifted his gears down fast and hard, in a way that looked like it must have hurt his hands. The truck slid sideways for about fifty feet before it caught a rut and straightened out. When he finally brought the truck to a stop, the boy stared at the sight in front of them.
Parked sideways across the logging road was a truck that looked like his: a forty-foot Peterbilt with welded-in rails and a forty-foot flatbed. But there were no logs on the truck. Just three men sitting there drinking beer and smoking cigarettes, all with long, dark hair and bulky jackets, heavy boots and pants of stiff brown canvas. The men stared at the truck that had careened to a stop in front of them. None of them moved for a few seconds. Then one man pulled a walkie-talkie from the pocket of his coat and spoke into it, while the other two men jumped off the bed of the truck. The boy turned to Lafontaine and said, “Are you sure we’re allowed up here?”
