Dead Down East (7 page)

Handley stood on the right-hand side of the
road, so Cynthia opened her window as I pulled alongside. He
greeted Cynthia first, “Hello, ma’am, I’m with the Federal Bureau
of Investigation. My name is Officer Edward Handley.”

“Very polite,” I thought. “That’s standard
operating procedure for softening up a witness.” I stiffened just a
bit and braced myself for the upcoming dialogue.

“Hello, officer,” Cynthia replied. Her voice
was comfortably strong, which was an immediate relief.

Handley then looked past Cynthia and spoke to
me, “Mr. Thorpe, we ran a quick background check on you after you
drove through a while back. We see that you are a licensed private
investigator.”

As a singer in a band I have learned to
control the sound of my voice. That facility is handy in highly
charged situations, like meeting exotic women or talking to the
FBI. “That’s right,” I replied, delighted to hear my voice hadn’t
cracked in the least. On the other hand, I was not at all delighted
that the FBI was investigating me.

“Are you involved professionally at this
time?” Handley asked.

“I wish,” I replied. “I haven’t had a client
in months.”

Both statements held shreds of truth. I
always wish I’d have a client, and, technically speaking, Cynthia
and I had not yet signed a contract. I took some small comfort in
this verbal deception. Handley paused for a moment to consider my
response.

I tried to get a read on his inner thought
processes, but like most of the agents that come out of FBI school,
he was a professional stoic. Surely they had assigned their top
stoics to this case. I surmised that if you put Handley on a
polygraph, ask him a direct question, and have him give three
separate answers—“Yes,” “No,” and “I don’t know,”—the needle would
respond the same for all three. In fact, it seemed likely that the
machine would not even register a pulse.

Across the intersection, a few cars were
entering the island heading south, and two somewhat younger
officers stepped forward on the far side of the road to interview
the drivers. Handley was probably the senior officer on duty. He
appeared to be the eldest of the group, perhaps in his early 50’s.
I dubbed him “Stoic-in-Chief.”

“Ma’am,” he said, “I’d like to ask you a few
questions.”

“By all means,” Cynthia replied in a
confident, professional tone.

After the preliminaries of getting her name
and personal information, he asked, “How long have you been on
Sebascodegan Island?”

“I arrived on Friday evening for a weekend
visit,” Cynthia replied. “A friend of mine dropped me off, and
Jesse has just come to take me home.”

“Where did you stay?”

“About a mile down the road, at 92 Cundys
Harbor Road, next to the Cranberryhorn Cemetery.”

“Do you own that house?”

“Oh, no,” Cynthia replied. “The house belongs
to friends of our family. The Smiths are away for a few weeks and
offered their home to me as a getaway. I decided to take a little
time off from work.”

“Could you please tell me where you were last
night at 10:30 PM?” he asked, finally getting down to brass
tacks.

“Well, I went to bed around 10:00 PM and fell
asleep right away.”

“Did you see or hear anything unusual?”

“Not a thing, officer,” Cynthia replied. “I’m
a very sound sleeper.”

Handley gave his partner some time to record
what she said, and Cynthia seized the moment to add, “When I turned
on the news this morning, I heard what happened to Governor
Lavoilette last night. It’s a total shock. Just a mile or so from
where I was staying! I can’t believe it.” Cynthia paused a second
and continued, “I’m sorry I can’t be more help, Officer Handley. I
appreciate the work you are doing here.”

“We’re just doing our job, ma’am,” came the
reply.

Officer Handley looked past Cynthia to me and
said, “Mr. Thorpe, you and Ms. Dumais are free to go.” He pointed
to my left and added, “Please take the south exit, make a sharp
right back onto Highway 24 and return the way you arrived. Drive
carefully. As you can see, the traffic is beginning to pick
up.”

Indeed, I had noticed the traffic was picking
up. In fact, I was delighted to see it. This offered some hope that
the file entries bearing our names would drown in an undertow of
information.

I eased away from our interview, bore left at
the triangular intersection, and then made a sharp right onto
Highway 24. I drove slowly through the roadblock. In about a
minute, we made our escape over the small concrete bridge to the
mainland.

“That was easy,” I said, with half of my
tongue buried in my cheek.

“Thank God!” Cynthia replied.

We were silent for the next couple of miles.
Cynthia focused straight ahead, breathing deeply. As we passed
through a shopping complex, her head turned to the right, and then
she said simply, “That’s where we saw
Lincoln
last
night.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Who’s Lincoln?”

“The movie. William and I saw the movie,
Lincoln
,” she replied.

I was curious about what had happened, of
course, but resisted the urge to begin my own interrogation. I felt
sure Cynthia was too tired to give me the full story, and I wanted
to get her something to eat and let her rest. There would be plenty
of time for details later.

“You must be starving,” I suggested. “Would
you like to stop for something to eat?”

“Yes, but could we make it a drive through? I
don’t want to be out in public.”

“There’s a Wild Willie’s Bakery on Maine
Street,” I suggested. “I can get some take out. They have good
sandwiches and salads.”

“A sandwich will be fine,” she said.
“Something hearty…turkey, or chicken. Thank you so much,
Jesse.”

Highway 24 turns left onto Bath Road and runs
into the heart of Brunswick. It then curves right onto Maine
Street. A quarter mile down the road I pulled off and found a
parking place in front of Wild Willie’s. The restaurant was
packed.

Cynthia stayed in the car, and I went inside. There
was a long line at the counter. It was 1:30 PM, on a Sunday
afternoon, a time when lots of people are hungry. As the line
inched forward, I eavesdropped on the surrounding conversations.
Everyone was talking about the governor’s murder. Reactions were
agitated and extreme, ranging from sadness to outrage. The late
governor obviously was a favorite among the local clientele.

Finally I got to the front of the line and
ordered two sandwiches, one turkey and one chicken. Ten minutes
later I was back at the car.

Cynthia had reclined her seat back and was
resting with her right arm draped over her face. She was either
taking a nap or hiding out. “Probably both,” I thought. “I have one
turkey and one chicken sandwich,” I said. “Which would you
like?”

“Turkey, please,” she replied, without moving
her arm. “If it’s alright, can we keep driving and eat along the
way? I’ll feel safer once we are on the interstate.”

“Sure,” I said. “It’s just a few miles from
here.”

We passed over Route 1, where they drop the
e
from
Maine St
and make it
Main St
, a very
subtle distinction, I thought, and one that would be hard to detect
when receiving verbal directions.

We crossed the Androscoggin River, and in
about five minutes we were on the interstate headed toward
Augusta.

Cynthia finished half of her sandwich and
curled up intent on sleeping.

“Before you nod off, Cynthia, I’d like to
share something with you,” I said. “I was very impressed by how
composed you were when talking to Agent Handley.”

“Thanks,” she said.

I added, “I also see you have mastered the
two conversational devices for disarming adversaries in dicey
situations.”

“You mean
apologies
and
compliments
?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied, amused that she knew what
the hell I was talking about.

“When I was taking classes to get my real
estate license, the second thing they taught us was: ‘Whenever
possible and appropriate, apologize to the client and top it off
with a compliment,’” she said.

“Really? That’s the second thing they taught
us in PI school,” I replied. “What was the first thing they taught
you?”

“How to secure your commission,” she
answered, smiling. “What’s the first thing they taught you?”

“A Bee Gees song,” I said.

“Huh?”

“The Bee Gees song…
Stayin’ Alive
,” I
said. After she groaned I added, “It’s worked fairly well…so
far.”

That ended our conversation. Cynthia closed
her eyes. In less than a minute, she was fast asleep. She was
either the sweetest young woman I’ve met in a long while, or a
cold-blooded killer.

• • •

I munched my way north along 295. Quite a bit
had happened in the nine hours since I rolled out of bed and onto
Great Pond at 5:00 AM. The quiet drive home stirred memories of my
childhood until a peculiar phrase began running through my
mind.

“I used to be different. Now, I’m the
same.”

That’s what my Uncle Frank used to say when I was a
kid growing up in Waterville. I liked Frank, in a curious sort of
way, even though I didn’t understand a word that came out of his
mouth.

Whenever Frank came by, three things always happened:
My dad would tell the truth, Frank would make things up as he went
along, and I’d be stuck in the middle trying to figure it out.
After twenty or thirty minutes of loopy dialogue, I’d be as antsy
as a sidewalk crack.

Over time, however, I learned to take control of my
situation. I’d say something like, “Dad, can I go to my room and do
some homework?” or “Dad, I really have to pee.” That’s when he’d
say, “Hold on, Jesse, your uncle is just about to leave,” which
always came as news to Frank. But he knew enough to take his
cue.

He’d get up slowly, fake a serious
look on his face for my benefit, and punctuate his visit with,
“Jesse…you know…I used to be different, but now I’m the
same.”

Before I returned Cynthia Dumais’ phone call earlier
that morning, everything was pretty much normal. Frank might have
called it “the same.” After that, everything became completely
different
.

If I could travel back in time, Frank’s two-line quip
would finally make some sense.

• • •

The sky had darkened in the early afternoon,
and a gentle rain was falling. By the time we passed the Gardiner
exit at Lewiston Road, it was pouring. The Nor’easter that had been
predicted all week was arriving on schedule. It was 2:20 when we
turned off Foster Road and up the driveway to my home. I was happy
to see that no one was there to greet us.

When I stopped the car, Cynthia came to life.
We grabbed our suitcases and dashed through the rain to the porch.
Once inside, I showed Cynthia to her room and left her there to
settle in. She hadn’t seen a bathroom since yesterday evening, and
I was sure they wanted to get acquainted.

I dropped my bags in my bedroom and headed
straight to the living room and the TV to see if there was any
progress in the murder investigation. I scrolled to CNN. Wolf
Blitzer was covering the “Assassination of Governor William
Lavoilette.”

In a couple of minutes, Cynthia joined me. We
watched anxiously to see if there were any new developments. They
had some footage of the crime scene taken in the wee hours of the
morning, at precisely the spot where we had encountered the
roadblock. Wolf read the details that were available. The only real
news—for me, at least—was that there had been a pair of witnesses.
A couple lived across and down the road a few hundred feet from the
intersection. They hadn’t seen the murder, but they had heard a
single gunshot.

The exact spot where the murder took place is
not visible from their home. A stand of trees blocks their view of
the intersection. When the shot was fired, the man of the house
turned on his porch light and walked down his driveway to see what
was going on. At this point in the investigation, however, the
authorities were not releasing any more information that the man
may have provided.

CNN also noted that the governor’s wife, Rebecca, was
in Africa at the time of the murder. She was wrapping up a ten-day
trip to parts of Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and
Somalia. All three countries had been ravaged by wars in recent
years, and there were significant numbers of immigrants and
refugees from these three countries living in the Portland area.
The trip was intended to create better awareness of the problems
facing these immigrants as they struggle to eke out a life away
from their homeland.

Rebecca was now on a flight from Mogadishu to
Boston.

The report about the assassination droned on
in the usual, repetitious way, when there is nothing new to report.
CNN filled the time slot with clips of the governor, reviews of his
tenure, and some very thin speculation about what might have
transpired the night before.

Cynthia watched for about ten minutes and
then said that she needed to get some serious sleep. She looked a
bit wobbly, but was holding up reasonably well. I stood up as she
was about to leave the room. Unexpectedly, she stepped forward and
hugged me close. Before letting go she said, “Thank you so much,
Jesse. Right now I’m dazed and spinning. I’ll tell you everything
as soon as I have some rest.”

“Take all the time you need, Cynthia,” I
said.

She then made her way to my spare bedroom and closed
the door behind her.

I was a bit wobbly myself. A week’s worth of
adrenaline had flushed its way through my system since breakfast.
There was little to do but wait for Cynthia, so I went to my room
to take a nap. I figured that it would be a good idea to stay in
sync with my client. Before getting onto the bed, however, I went
to my dresser to check on Rhonda. She’d been hibernating since last
winter. It now seemed entirely possible that she might get some
exercise.