“We'll put some resources into it. Chief Delcastro will handle it.”
“That's what Michelle's stepfather said when he told me he didn't need me.”
“Well, the fact is, my attorney knows the senior partners at his firm. I had him talk to them, to convince Mr. Jensen it was a matter better handled here. He wanted discretion, and frankly so does Standish. I told the police I could add some resources.”
A thought occurred to me. “Is that what you and Delcastro were talking about the other night?” At his questioning look, I said, “I saw you in the alley across from the gas station.”
I thought he grimaced, but if so, it was only for an instant and then gone. “Whatever we need to do to find the girl,” he declared, “we will. When we get ashore, we'll make a plan.”
“I'm ready to go.”
“Tarry awhile. This'll clear our heads.” He rolled onto his back and floated, gazing up. With the clouds billowing in from the horizon, the sky seemed as deep and dark as the ocean around us. I didn't feel that calm and kept treading water. Off to the right, in the distance, I saw a sweep of bright light, which I took to be the lighthouse where I'd met with Jillian. Farther off, in the other direction, was a dark hump with winking lights atop it. It was the Pilgrim nuclear power plant, as John Carvalho and Red Dog had pointed out to me. Even so, I was disoriented and was huffing a little from the effort of keeping afloat.
“Rand,” I called.
With his ears submerged, he didn't hear me. I splashed a little water his way. He raised his head. “Ready?” I said.
His hair was pasted to his head like a gleaming white helmet. Our hands collided briefly as we trod water. Our breathing fell into rhythm, mine more labored than his. “I like deep water,” he said. “It's mysterious. It must be like that being a private detective. Right below us, under the surface, there could be all kinds of things going on that we never realize.”
I didn't try to one-line or second-guess him. I was conserving breath.
“Well done,” he said. “Let's go.”
I set out for shore. The water was smooth, undulating in slow swells. After I'd swum awhile, I paused and caught my breath. We were halfway back, a hundred or so yards to go. Rand drew alongside. As I set out again, something cracked against my skull. Lights sparked in my vision. I turned and he was on me, climbing me like a tree, driving me under. I tried to wrestle him off, but he held on. Strength is reversed in the water. Mine worked against me, my efforts pushing me deeper. Desperately, I thrust my chin up and gobbled air. His face was a foot from my own, his eyes fixed and strange, then I went under again. He got something around my neck, a cord of some kind, and I realized it was a long frond of kelp, the rock anchor of which he'd used to whack me.
He held on, twisting the tough seaweed rope. I tried to tug it free, but I needed my hands to get my head above water. I could
hear his harsh breathing. I could smell the faint aroma of iodine. Then sound faded. My vision grew smoky, and far back in my brain lights flickered, like sparks from the cutting torch in Waxy Mandino's garage, then they, too, began to fade.
I saw one chance. It was an outside shot with long odds that wouldn't allow a replay. I willed myself to go limp and began to sink. Rand came with me, still holding the kelp, and I realized I'd blown it and he was going to make sure. Too dizzy to struggle, I went down. Then, abruptly, he let go.
Cold currents brought me around. I opened my eyes. Darkness. No Rand. I heard my final breath wobble to the surface in a string of bubbles. Clawing loose the cord around my throat, I kicked and followed them.
I broke surface and gulped water and sweet air. I had a sudden panic, sure that Rand was waiting for me. But the sea rolled dark and empty on all sides. My stomach already churned with water, but my lungs couldn't get enough of the air. They filled with it, again and again, and I bobbed there under the night sky in my exultation. I was alive. After a few minutes, I labored toward the shore, which seemed impossibly far away. I was an exhausted but happy man when I got my feet down onto the rough bottom again.
Rand's clothes were gone. I gathered up mine; then, shivering, on wobbly legs, I went up to the beach house. The Lincoln was gone, too. I got my jacket and my .38 from the car. I wanted to kill
him. I went inside and put on lights. Maybe Delcastro should have been my first call, but I called Ed St. Onge. He wasn't in; no, the clerk didn't know where he was. I left no message. I poured a knock from the bottle in the cupboard and drank it down, then I climbed into a hot shower, but it was a long while before I got the chill out of my bones. The fear in my mind didn't fade at all.
I dressed and put on coffee. As I was about to call Delcastro, there was a knock on the front door. I shoved my gun into the waistband of my slacks and moved on stealthy feet. I left off the outside light. Leaning back, I peered through one of the sidelight windows. A woman stood out there. She had turned to look away, so her back was to me, and for an instant I thought it was Paula, but then she turned back, and I recognized Iva Rand. I saw no one else, though it was pretty dark out there. Deciding that she and Rand were an unlikely duo, I opened the door.
“You're getting to be a bad habit,” she said. “Do you know that?”
“Whose?”
“Okay, I came to you this time. Sue me.”
“Are you alone?”
“Yeah, like Greta Garbo.”
I invited her in. I turned on a table lamp in the living room. She saw the butt of the .38 in my belt and frowned. I put it away in the counter drawer. “Do you want coffee?”
“God, no.”
She didn't want to sit either, but I sat and reluctantly she did, too. She got a cigarette and had it lit before I could find a match. Her eyes were tired, and I had the thought that she was waiting for me to offer her a drink, but I didn't. I still recollected the image that Van Owen had given me, of the decent person she could be when she wasn't half-pickled.
“I've been doing some thinking,” she began. “I don't like to, but you've forced it on me. Anyway ⦠maybe I contributed to TJ's depression when I sent him a letter telling him about the Carvalho girl.” She pondered, her forehead wrinkling. “I wrote him the truth, okay? The harsh, naked truth. A wife knows.”
“A wife.”
“Right you are, Mr. Detective. Are you sniffing out the clues now, putting the puzzle pieces together finally? I did.”
“Wait ⦠you're talking about your husband?”
“Hurrah for you. Do you want to go get your big gun now?”
“My head's slow today. I don'tâ”
“Well, let me be less abstract. In Teddy's military absence, old Randy was doing his patriotic part, too. We were living two doors down from here at the time.” She meant the place where her mother-in-law was housed now. “One day I felt restless, so I took a ride out to our house on Shawmut Point. I saw our little aluminum skiff pulled up by the house. We usually kept it here. Maybe that alerted me to something. I went into the house quietly, andâ” She broke off, her face drawing inward, as if in self-protection. After a moment she went on. “I came upon them together, going at it like a pair of dogs in rut in the upstairs bedroom, our old brass bed clanging away. They didn't see or hear meâor care, obviously.”
Even now, all these years later, the pain of her discovery seemed to etch itself into her words, like acid on copperplate. Her look was stricken. I was searching for clarity. I didn't know if it was my near drowning or the lingering cranial vibrations of the beating I'd taken, but my brain was processing sluggishly. “What did you do?”
“I didn't hang around to listen to sweet nothings over postcoital cigarettes, I can damn sure tell you that.” She looked around. “Have you got something to drink?”
“No,” I lied.
She knocked ashes into a clamshell ashtray on the coffee table. “Randy used to keep an old army forty-five out there, for shooting rats. I went and got it. I'd never held a gun in my life, but it felt right ⦠heavy and self-assured, no doubts about itself. You must know all about that, Mr. Detective. I held it and thought about everything ⦠or tried to. My head was full of confusion. And then ⦔ Her face tightened around her cigarette, and I saw once more the attractive woman she had been, and probably never would be again. She whiffed smoke to one side. “I put the stupid, lying gun back and got the hell out of there. It's what you should do, too.”
“Did you ever confront him?”
“With what? Do you think he'd care? A girl more than half his age must've felt like quite a trophy. Did you hear me?”
“Did they continue the affair?”
“How should I know?”
“I thought a wife did.”
She sighed. “For a while. Then it stopped, I think. I don't know why. I just sensed it did. She must've been the one to end it. Though, maybe it dawned on him he was only the second string.”
Something dawned on me now, too. “So you wrote to Teddy and told him what you knew.”
She turned back. Red-rimmed, her dark eyes burned like coals. I could feel their bitter heat. “He was across the world,” I said, “and you told him his father was bedding his girlfriend, shacking up with his prom queen?”
She picked up the ashtray, and I thought she was going to throw it at me, but she ground out her cigarette. “Let me tell you something, mister. When you're going down in deep water, you don't start wondering about anyone else.
Any
on
e
!”
“No,” I said, gripped by her choice of metaphor. “You don't.”
“You bastard.”
I didn't bother to explain I wasn't being judgmental, because suddenly things were clearer. I knew why Ginny Carvalho had to drown. And perhaps understood why Teddy Rand had grown reckless. As a gesture of kindnessâor maybe perversityâI got the bottle of Beefeater and poured her some. She didn't call me on my lie. She got rid of the drink fast. “Later, I was in a way to see how the girl was a victim in her own fashion. She hung around town, kind of aimless. I heard she decided she wanted to become a fashion model, took some mail-order course. She may have gotten hooked on diet pills. I'd see her walking around town, looking lost.”
“How long after you'd found them together was this?”
“Four or five months, I don't know. And now, I'm tired.” She rose. She was wobbly on the wedge heels of her espadrilles.
“Can I give you a lift?”
“Why?” She looked defiant. “I'm going to go over and see my mother-in-law. I owe her a visit. She'll tell me about her kidney stone for the hundredth time and play her foggy memories of her
important son and her lost grandson, and we'll both fall asleep to reruns on the television.”
I walked her outside. The weatherman had called it right. A drizzle was falling, making a nimbus around the streetlights on the dead-end stretch of road. The sea was in the air. “Thank you for coming,” I told her.
“I don't envy you,” she said evenly.
I nodded. As she was walking away, something else occurred to me. “Mrs. Rand. You said your husband was looking at the Surf ballroom. Did he say why?”
“I couldn't care less. Maybe he wants to twist the night away with teenyboppers.” She started to turn, then stopped. “I do hope you find the girl. Good luck.”
“You, too. You know, it's none of my business, but all your stories don't have to come from
Photoplay
and a bottle.”
“What's that mean?”
I shook my head. “I saw a picture of youâa pretty woman with a son she loved and wanted to protect. I could be all wetâhell, I amâbut maybe he could still use some of that.”
She held my gaze a moment and then turned and trudged toward her destination. Doc Rasmussen, Mother's little helper. Don't take my word for it, ask Paula Jensen. I went inside, shut off the coffee maker, and got a flashlight, my jacket, and my gun.
Saltwater and freshwater don't really mix. Nantasket Avenue was mostly deserted in the rain. I saw a few cars parked along the seawall with men behind the wheel, reading the
Herald
or checking scratch tickets, finding reasons not to go home. The rain wasn't much, just enough to dampen the hot pavement, stirring old smells, quickening some part of me that was always in childhood, running barefoot as the first drops fell. It would have been a nice place to be now. I drove a short distance past the old Surf ballroom to an unlighted stretch of the road and stopped. I shut off the Blazer and sat, letting myself become part of the landscape. Diagonally across Nantasket Avenue was a rooming house where a potbellied old man in Bermuda shorts and an undershirt sat in a chair under the overhang, playing solitaire on a lap tray. For some reason, I thought of Grady Stinson and the Ritz Manor. It was the kind of place where people went to die, and it reminded me that I was getting older. I didn't have a retirement nest at the beach, or anyplace else, for that matter. But I couldn't dwell on it now. I was working for a day wage, and so far I was only partway toward earning it. Assuring myself that no one else was around, I got out and locked the Chevy. I climbed over
the seawall, dropped to the damp sand, and started back toward the past.
Along with the small flashlight and my gun, I had a screwdriver in the pocket of my jacket. I thought of officer Ferry, with the welter of paraphernalia on his belt, and realized that was how we all began, shedding as we went, till we pared the tools of our trades down to an essential few. I'd like to have added a shovel.
The rain made the sand sticky and had chased the lovers away, so that the beach belonged only to the seagulls and to me. The tide was on its way out. I approached the abandoned nightclub from the side that faced the ocean. Padlocks still secured the double doors, and weathered particleboard was in place over what had been the big picture windows. There was no sign that Rand had made any move here at all. Not yet, anyway; or maybe that was how he wanted it to appear. Or maybe I was wasting my time. Part of me hoped that I was, because an image of what might be hidden here had begun to darken my mind. Then I saw the rib marks of heavy tire treads in the damp sand, where some kind of vehicle had recently drawn up close to the building. They seemed too big for a pickup or an SUV, but I couldn't determine what they belonged to. The tide had washed them away farther down.
In close to the building, I examined the latticework of boards nailed across the foundation windows. I bent close and shone the flashlight through a crack, into the gloom, but there wasn't much to see besides the dull gleam of broken glass. The air had a tang of corroding stucco and urine. At my back, the small, receding waves made a low hissing.
According to Andy Royce, this place had sat on the market for years; then, just days ago, Ted Rand had taken a lease. Why? With his energies focused so on Point Pines, why bother with this? I knelt and wriggled my fingers in behind one of the boards, took hold of it, and tugged. The board resisted awhile, but it had been put up to keep out the elements and the errant beach bum, not a determined man. With a groan and a
skreek,
one end pulled loose. I levered it off and set it on the sand, nails down, and shone the light in again.
Between the concrete foundation and the overhead floor joists,
the crawl space had been partly filled with sifting sand. A section of the sand in front of where I knelt had been plowed away, as if something rigid and heavy had been dragged through it. My heart beat faster. Farther in, in the gloom, lay a long wooden box.
I killed the flashlight. Hastily, I pulled off more boards, until there was a space large enough to slip through on hands and knees. I hesitated a moment, then went in. I crawled through the damp, cold sand, using the light to scan the area. The crate was about four feet long, sturdily constructed of wood and fitted with heavy hinges, a hasp, and a padlock. With my pulse hammering hard, I knelt before it. As I ran my hand along the top, I saw beyond it were two smaller crates, equally solid in their design. Sweat was oozing from my brow from my labors, and from the churn of dread in my chest. The boxes hadn't been there long; the wood and the hardware were new. More interesting, stenciled on the ends of each box was MASSACHUSETTS STATE POLICE.
I took out the screwdriver, but I realized that the screws were Phillips head. Ever ingenious, I inserted the blade of the screwdriver under the corner of the hasp and levered. The plate didn't budge. I exerted more force. The screwdriver snapped in half. Outside, a seagull laughed. But actually, the bird gave me an idea. I squatted beside one of the two smaller boxes, got my arms around it, and lifted. The weight surprised me; it felt like a hundred pounds. In the low space, I couldn't stand erect. I angled the box and dropped it corner-first onto a bare patch of cement. The wood creaked. It was a method I'd seen gulls use with hard-shelled clams. I got the box up again. The third time, the top of the box split with a cracking noise. With eager hands, I pulled away the broken boards and shone the flashlight inside.
The dull gleam of steel in rectangular and cylindrical shapes came back at me.
Guns.
There were dozens of them, pistols and revolvers. Some were partially dismantled, but it wouldn't take much to get most of them working again. I tried to imagine what they were doing here.
I heard some fast, hard breathing and shut off the light. I crab-walked over to the opening I'd made. A dog was out there, its nose
down, sniffing back and forth, moving my way. I froze. Then I heard a whistle, followed by a distant voice. The dog lifted a hind leg quickly against the foundation, then swung around and loped off into the drizzle. I went back to my discovery.
None of the weapons was new. My guess was that they had been confiscated, perhaps by local jurisdictions, which had turned them over to the state police, who would've sent them to the state crime lab to be checked for connection to any crimes. If the weapons cleared, they were boxed and prepared for disposal. Back in earlier days, they were dropped in the harbor; though that was before we realized that in cleaning up our own neighborhoods we were trashing the fishes'. Now guns were shipped west, melted down, the metal recycled to some further use, maybe to make little replica muskets to give out at NRA banquets. Only I had the feeling that this time someone had altered their destiny in order to put them back into circulation. Perhaps in my town or yours.
The question was, Who? And how did this relate to Michelle Nickerson? And what the hell was I doing here, if it didn't?
Some people passing by not far from the building drew my attention. I watched them as they moved on past, oblivious to the old ballroom. When they'd gone, I did one more quick scan of the crawl space, still looking for what I didn't want to find. Satisfied, I slipped back outside through the opening. The rain had thinned but was still falling. I put the boards back in place as best I could, hammering them into place with my hands. I ought to have done the same with the lid of the box, but it wouldn't have fooled anyone. Anyway, my cover-up didn't need to be too good. The police were only going to take the crates away as soon as I called and told them. Check thatâas soon as I told someone I could trust.
In the Chevy I used my cell phone. Ed St. Onge answered this time. “I'm packing,” he said. “For New Mexico.” He made a low whistle when I told him what I'd found.
“There must be fifty or more in the one crate. I didn't open the other two, but I don't think they hold pruning hooks and plowshares. The longer box looks like it could be rifles, submachine guns, maybe.”
“What about the missing girl? No sign of her?”
“No.”
“It adds up,” St. Onge murmured.
“What does?”
“Guns. Inner-city buyback programs in Springfield and Worcester put together their semiannual haul. Only it disappeared from a state police lockup last weekend. We got a bulletin.”
“I think this Rand is behind it.”
“Is he involved in what you're after?”
“It's looking like it. I'm just not sure how. He tried to kill me tonight.” I told him about the swim.
St. Onge swore. “You fell for his story?”
“It was convincing at the time.”
“And he left you out there.”
“He thinks I'm swimming with the fishes.”
“Damn. Where are you now?”
“Going back to Standish.”
“And the hardware?”
“Where I found it.”
“Bad idea. You need to get hold of the state police.”
Ironically, as he said it, a cruiser went past in the gray rain, a local. My impulse was to draw farther down in the seat. With the taillights fading in my rearview, I said, “I don't know if that's a good idea.”
“Tell me why the hell not! All of a sudden you're the best judge of ideas?”
No, but I was possessed suddenly with a foreboding, like a cloud hanging darkly in the distance. An unexpectedly pregnant girl would be a problem for an ambitious man, older and married and with a reputation to uphold. How might he have handled it? Sometime after Ginny Carvalho drowned, Rand had deeded the old motel to her father. Payment? A hush fund? Had he pressed the local police to cover up the inquest? I said, “You don't understand, Ed.”
“The hell I don't. You want me to call the staties?”
“No. No, don't.” I was practically whispering now, a constriction of paranoia making my throat tight. I wasn't the one who had voted for cell phones over the old accordion-door pay booths, but
I hammered down the door lock and felt slightly better there inside the two tons of steel.
“It's a matter for the cops to handle,” he insisted.
“I think there may be problems with that.”
“You care to be specific?”
“I'd rather not just now. Let's just say there may be some conflicts of interest.”
“Whose? Yours?”
“Rand golfs with the governor. He
owns
Standish. And probably some of the local cops, too; maybe even some of the state police. I can't. I can't call anyone until I know for sureâhe might have Michelle.”
He mulled that a moment. “Then the state should definitely step in. Goddammit, there are mechanisms for that.”
As there were to keep illegal guns off the streets, wildlife habitats out of the hands of developers, and kids safe from monsters. I said, “Maybe they can appoint a blue-ribbon panel that'll investigate for a year or so and forward a list of recommendations to a grievance board that can schedule public hearings ⦠A splendid idea, there's only one problem. Time. His hand's been forced. If what I fear is going to happen
does,
it'll be soon. Today.”
“All the more reason. Let's call ATF.”
He wasn't getting it; nor was I. There was sense in what St. Onge was telling me; he wasn't stupidâthe government was a big potent machine that could get things done, but you didn't kick-start it to life. It was a Rube Goldberg device. You had to overcome the friction of special interests and crooked politicians, the inertia of an indifferent public. And St. Onge didn't know Ted Randâ
I
didn't really know himâbut I did know he was powerful, and cagey, and maybe crazy, too. In the past half hour, an idea had been growing in my head, a bad cancer of an ideaâRand and Ginny Carvalho, the two of them out skinny-dipping, and maybe she'd decided things had gone much too far between them and was calling it off. Or maybe she wanted to write to Teddy and confess to him what was going on. But it was one further thought that rattled me all out of proportion to the others. “If he's got Michelle Nickerson and he got word that I'm on to himâ”
“He thinks you're dead!”
“âif he got word,” I repeated, “and I think he may already have itâno one will ever see the kid again.”
That took a bite out of Ed's certainty. “He's that cold?”
I thought of Van Owen's story about the cinder blocks. “He's warm and fuzzy, and people take him for what he seemsâhell,
I
didâand he'll swim with you and smile into your eyes, he'll give you moonlight and poetry. He's smooth as a silk stocking, and if he feels he needs to, he'll wind the stocking around your throat and kill you.” I didn't tell Ed what Rand had done to his wife and his own son. There wasn't time to reckon adequately with the villainy of it, and it would have made me too angry. All at once, I didn't want to be angry. I wanted to be smart, and rational, and ice-cold. “Do what you have to,” I said. “I'm going back.”
“Hold on, Raz, is that the best way?”
“Give me another,” I said, and I meant it. I didn't like the idea one bit. The town gave me the major creeps, and I was a total outsider, but time was ticking away and I couldn't think of an alternative. I paused, allowing a moment for Ed, with his intelligence, to come up with a game-saving plan that I simply hadn't thought of. But he was silent, and when the WELCOME TO STANDISH sign floated by in the wet dark, I said, “I'm going to talk with Delcastro. Maybe he's straight, maybe notâmy gut feeling is he's okayâbut either way, it's his turf. He needs to know. I'll take him over and show him the guns.”