The Map of True Places (32 page)

T
HAT AFTERNOON THEY HAD
closed the job site early. It was the Thursday before the long weekend, and Roy was leaving for Weirs Beach the next day and needed to cash his paycheck. He had asked Lilly to go with him, but she couldn't get away. He couldn't get over the feeling that she was messing with him, trying to fuck him up. She was clearly trying to end things—she had told him that—but there was no way. If anyone was going to end things it would be him, and he would be the one to say how and when. Not that it was such a bad thing. Lately she'd been crying a lot. And guilty about what she'd been doing to her kids and to the man she had started to call “Sweet William,” which bugged the shit out of Roy. Sweet William was just some rich fuck who'd been lucky enough to snag one of the prettiest girls in town and now couldn't keep her in his bed.

Roy's construction crew had done some work at her house. Well, not his crew, really—it was owned by a general contractor, another rich fuck, but a working guy, so he wasn't so bad. And he let Roy run the show, stopping by only to do the bids and pick up the checks. When they worked on the Braedon house, they never saw the husband. They just dealt with Lilly, and she did things like make lemonade for the crew if it was a really hot day, or maybe some cookies, even. All the crew got a
little crazy when she walked through the house, though Hawk hadn't been part of the crew then, but the other guys just went wild for her. When Roy had finally nailed her, they'd made him talk about it for a week, and they were coming in their pants just hearing him tell how wild she got the first time out, taking her clothes off in his truck in broad daylight down by the Marblehead Lobster Company and doing him right there.

“Psycho Pussy” was the best. He'd heard someone say that once. They were right, too, at least at first. For a while he thought she was the best time he'd ever had. It wasn't so good lately, though. And it definitely wasn't good since she'd started to give her husband the name Sweet William and talk about her kids all the time. Talk about losing wood.

All year he'd been seeing a new woman in New Hampshire. Lilly didn't know it, and nobody had better tell her either. It wasn't serious, just some biker chick he'd met last June. A bleached blonde with stand-up tits bought for her by the guy on the bike she rode in on. She'd had a catfight right there on the boardwalk with some girl who'd been flirting with the biker. Roy hadn't seen it, but everyone was talking. From what he heard, she left the other girl with four stitches across her right cheek, and he didn't mean her face cheek either. She walked out on the biker after that, and when Roy met her, she was in the bar at the end of the boardwalk, and she was looking to make the guy jealous, so she took up with him. Left the guy there, too, taking off in Roy's truck—or really the company truck, a good one, though, top of the line, a Ford F-350 with four-wheel drive and an extended cab.

The next time he came up, she told him to make sure he brought drugs with him, the good kind that came in on the boats, not the kind that left you with a headache and a bloody nose, which was pretty much all you could get around here, especially now that she'd left her biker, who was her only good connection. She was class in that department,
didn't do crank the way he'd heard some of the biker chicks did. She didn't want to rot her teeth, she said. And she didn't smoke crack either, just liked the good stuff the old-fashioned way. Anything smooth, that you can snort through a straw, was what she told him when he asked what she liked. She wore a twenty-four-karat cross around her neck that hung low into her best assets and had a straw built into its stem. When he told her how clever he thought it was, disguising the coke straw that way, she got mad and told him she was a Christian, too, and never to assume otherwise. Then she sat on his lap and undid his fly and hopped onto him right there in the truck, which was a little too much like what had happened with Lilly, though he wasn't complaining, not at all. He just hoped he hadn't picked another psycho.

It made him really angry when he thought about Lilly, even angrier when he heard about Lilly and Hawk.

It had happened the afternoon he'd gone to get the check cashed. She'd come into the Rip Tide, looking for Roy. She'd been wearing a T-shirt, one of the guys on the crew got some great pleasure telling him, and it was wet because of the rain, and you could see everything. And she didn't even seem to notice. But the rest of the crew noticed. Especially Hawk.

Hawk bought her steak tips. He didn't know why the guy told him that part, except to lead to the next. That Lilly had left with him. The guy had gone out to have a smoke, and he saw her go into Hawk's apartment with him. Stupid shit.

He already had an issue with the guy. Adam Mohawk. What kind of name was that? That he called himself “Hawk” pissed Roy off. He hated these college types who worked construction. They weren't good at it, and they were always complaining.

They'd had a lot of trouble that summer with crews. Hawk was hired by Roy's boss and sent over to do some finish carpentry at the Braedons'. Roy hated him on sight. Not because of anything he did—
his work was good enough—but because Lilly had taken a liking to him. She wouldn't admit it to Roy, but everyone could see it. Roy had recently had to fire a couple of people and was dangerously close to being understaffed, or he would have found a way to get rid of Hawk. When Roy's hammer disappeared on the job site, he had accused Hawk of stealing it. Actually, it wasn't Hawk, it was another guy, someone Roy had already let go, but he needed someone to blame. As payback, Roy took Hawk's hammer, which was a twin to his.

“You should write your name on your tools,” he heard one of the other guys say to Hawk.

“This isn't the first time,” another said.

The next day the hammer was gone from Roy's box. He went over and grabbed it from Hawk, who pointed to his name and phone number scratched on the side.

Stupid shit.

 

R
OY HAD BEEN WAITING FOR
Hawk that Sunday night after he heard about Lilly. Sitting in the alleyway in the truck, lights off, just waiting. Hit him in the side of the head with one of those hammer staplers he'd stolen from the job site. College boy deserved what he got. Hawk never even saw it coming. Wasn't back on the job site for almost a week. And when he came back, he had a line of stitches down his right cheek, and this time it
was
the face cheek he was talking about.

H
AWK HAD DRIVEN
Z
EE'S
Volvo the back way out of town, heading up Elm Street and cutting down Green Street to West Shore Drive. Even if Roy was following them, Hawk had managed to lose him.

“I don't mean to scare you,” he said. “But Roy is a pretty dangerous guy.”

“I'm aware of that,” she said.

“Plus, one of my buddies told me they're laying off some of the crews. After the job he's working on is finished, Roy will be out of work. So his anger level is pretty high.”

“He doesn't know that I'm in Salem,” she said.

“Who does know?”

“Just Mattei. And Michael.”

“You need to call them. I'd tell you to get a restraining order, but then he'd find out where you are. Not to mention that they don't always work.”

Before Hawk's mother had moved back home to Marblehead, to the house on Salem Harbor where she'd grown up, there had been several restraining orders. Not only had they not helped, but they seemed to simply challenge the man she was living with after her divorce, a
man who was not Hawk's father. Thank God that Hawk's grandfather had taken them in when he did. In Hawk's opinion restraining orders weren't worth the paper they were written on.

“Make sure you stay out of Marblehead for a while. The good news is that I hear he's planning to move to New Hampshire,” Hawk said.

“Why is he so angry with
you
?” Zee asked.

Hawk didn't answer at first. He was trying to figure out how to tell her the story he'd been attempting to tell her all along, and now he didn't know where to start.

As they passed Waterside Cemetery, where Lilly was buried, she stopped him. “You were sleeping with her.” She'd heard Lilly's stories about Adam in almost as much detail as she'd heard Maureen's stories. Now it made her sick to think about what Lilly had described.

“We were friends,” he said. “I can't tell you I didn't think about it. When I first met her…But no. I never slept with her.”

They drove in silence for a moment.

Then she remembered contacting the police. “Mattei and I called the police in Marblehead to file a report. Because Lilly told me that a man named Adam had threatened her.”

Hawk finally understood why the police kept driving by his house, why the cop had acted so strangely the last time he was in town. After Roy had jumped him that day, Hawk had beaten him up. They were on the job site when it happened. Everyone on the crew thought it was payback for Roy's attack, but it wasn't. It was about Lilly. The cops talked to both of them, then talked to some of the other guys on the crew. They decided that it had been a jealousy thing and let it go. But the police had started watching him after that, which was one of the reasons he left when he did. “What did the cops tell you about me?”

“Only that you had left town. And that you weren't the only guy that Lilly was involved with.”

He'd seen what Roy had done to Lilly when he got her to run away with him and then dumped her back on her doorstep three days later. The whole crew was talking about it.

“Next time you want to hit somebody,” Hawk told him right before he threw the first punch, “don't pick on a woman.”

The guys had just watched as he hit Roy. No one helped. No one came to Roy's defense or to Hawk's either, though he didn't really need it. It wasn't a long fight. But it was brutal. And it went all the way back to childhood. Every punch he'd wanted to deliver then on his mother's boyfriend, he delivered that day on Roy.

Hawk left his job after that. Roy had been there for years and was the foreman, though no one liked him very much. And hell, Hawk was glad to get away. Lilly had taken to sitting on his doorstep sometimes when he got home. It wasn't safe. He didn't mean not safe for him. He meant for her.

The truth was, he was angry at Lilly. Though he'd never met her husband, he'd gotten to know her kids while working at their house, and they were great. He didn't understand why she would risk everything, especially for someone like Roy. It was too close to what he'd seen growing up.

But he could also see how frightened she was. There wasn't anyone else she could talk to about this, she said. She felt safe only when she was with him. “I'm afraid he's going to do something terrible,” she said.

“Has he threatened you?”

He couldn't tell if she was lying when she said no, or if she was just backing away because she knew he would take it to the next level, either to Roy himself or to the police.

In the end, feeling bad for her, Hawk gave her his cell number. He promised he'd come get her if she got into trouble, but he told her to go back to her husband and children, not to go near Roy again.

“You think I
want
to go near him?” She was crying.

The last time he saw her, she was in his apartment. He wasn't certain, even now, how she had broken in. He was living on his boat, and the place was empty. He'd come home one afternoon to find her there. She was wearing one of his T-shirts, and her hair was wet as if she'd just gotten out of the shower. From the look of things, she'd been there for a while.

“What's going on?” he said.

“I'm leaving William,” she said. “I want to live with you.”

Hawk was taken by surprise. He'd known for a while that something had shifted, that she had somehow transferred any feelings she'd had for Roy to him, but he didn't want that. Not that he didn't have feelings for her, too. Hawk had always been a sucker for a woman in trouble, especially a beautiful woman like Lilly. But he wasn't about to break up a family. He'd had too much experience with that as a kid. And he'd also begun to realize just how much was wrong with her. He was happy after that when she called and told him she was seeing her therapist again, and she called him a lot. Too much, really, because the guys on the
Friendship
had started to tease him about the number of calls and texts he got from her.

“I'm sorry if I gave you the wrong idea,” he'd said. “That was never what I intended.”

“I'm afraid,” she'd said.

“Go home to your husband,” Hawk said. “Tell him what happened between you and Roy. Then go to the police.”

“I can't do that,” she said.

 

T
HE LAST DAY SHE CALLED,
when she told him she was going to jump, he'd gone after her. Tried to talk her out of it, to get her to meet him somewhere, but she was already headed to the bridge. He'd gotten her to pull over for a while, into the McDonald's parking lot on the Lynnway. He'd told her to wait for him there, that he was on his way.
She tearfully agreed. But then she got scared. Said she couldn't wait. Someone was after her, she said. There was nothing anyone could do.

He drove so fast. He would have called the cops, but he didn't want to get off the phone with her.

When she jumped, he was only six cars behind her.

“I can see you,” he said. “Pull over and I'll pick you up.”

She did pull over, but she didn't look back. When she went up and over the side, he was still on the phone with her. He could see the phone fly out of her hands as she went down. It all happened so fast.

He wondered every day what he could have done differently. He went over it and over it in his mind. It bothered him so much he had considered seeing someone to talk it through. But then he met Zee, and everything seemed different. The fact that she felt as guilty as he did about Lilly's death had actually helped him feel a bit better. She hadn't
told
him how she felt, of course—she was far too professional for that. But he knew.

 

H
AWK TOLD
Z
EE THE WHOLE
story. At the end of it, she told him what she'd told the Marblehead police.

Hawk's blood chilled. He didn't move. Lilly had been troubled, he'd always known that. But her jump up and over the railing had begun to make sense to him in a way it hadn't before. He knew that Roy was a dangerous guy, an abusive guy, and he also knew that the most dangerous time for a victim is when she tries to break up with her abuser. He'd read an article about it in the Salem paper just last week, something that the local shelter had put out, or maybe it was that woman on Yellow Dog Island, May Whitney. He couldn't remember.

Hawk sat very still. He looked directly at Zee in a way that made sure she wouldn't look away. He didn't reach out to her, just said as calmly as he could, “I never slept with Lilly Braedon…. And I sure as hell never threatened her. I was trying to do the same thing you were,” he said. “I was trying to save her.”

He's not who you think he is
. Ann Chase's words came quickly back to Zee.

 

T
HEY DROVE THE REST OF
the way to Salem in silence. Hawk pulled Zee's Volvo into Finch's driveway and shut off the engine. He turned to her. “I need you to believe me.”

No one spoke for a long time.

“I do believe you,” she finally said. “But I can't see you anymore.”