Love Nest (6 page)

“And the other one?”

“She was OK, but she wouldn’t let me smoke. She said she didn’t care about my lungs but was damn concerned about her own.” An ash tumbled between them. “She somebody you know?”

“What do you mean?”

“She kept bringing you up, called you ‘Sonny.’ ”

“Yes, she would,” he said dryly.

“Wish I had your luck.”

“No, you don’t. What are you staring at?”

“Lapels on your jacket. Left one doesn’t hang right.”

“That’s the least of my worries,” he said and slipped on his topcoat.

“Don’t you get cold in that?”

“Why should I?”

“No lining.”

“Never noticed.”

“You should, Sonny. Good grooming gets you somewhere.”

“Look at yourself, Billy. You’re a sack.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Neither am I.” Dawson fastened his coat. “At least not far.”

Outside the station, his hair leaped up in a stiff breeze and stayed up until he reached his car. Despite the cold, he drove with a window open. Downtown traffic sputtered and stalled from an early overrun of commuters returning from Boston, symptomatic of a renewed splurge of growth, houses mushrooming up everywhere, bulldozers blitzing through Turner’s apple orchard, Sid White’s cornfield, Dargoonian’s farm. With a strenuous thrust of the wheel, he escaped into the lot of Barcelos Supermarket and, lucky to find a space, parked in the deepest reach. Inside the market he poked about, impeding the progress of other customers. Some had carriages with staggering loads, as if their lives were consumed with eating. At the frozen-food bin he snatched up a meat pie. When his turn finally came at the check-out, the female clerk’s luxuriant hair and fresh skin stopped him cold. For an insane instant he thought she was Melody.

“Please don’t do that!” he said over his shoulder. Someone’s carriage was digging into his back.

“Your change,” the young clerk said in a haunting tone.

He left the store and commenced hiking through the lot. The day seemed done in before its time, the cold, unsettled air dense with murmurings. Each shadow was progressively more substantial, as if one might abruptly leap to life. Sensing the approach of a car behind him, he stepped aside to let it pass. Instead it jolted to a stop beside him, somewhat closer than was safe. The face that looked out hung heavy from one bourbon too many.

“Got something for you.”

Dawson said, “What is it?”

“Gift certificate. Macartney’s. Compliments of Mrs. Gately.”

“Errand boy,” said Dawson.

“We don’t want to keep Mr. Bauer waiting. Get in.”

“Only if
I
drive.”

“Be my guest.”

The door opened wide. Seconds later Dawson was behind the wheel listening to the melancholy purr of the motor and sinking into old leather. He gripped the ball of the gear shift. “First time I’ve driven a Mercedes.”

“My only luxury.”

“I think you’re forgetting Melody.”

“Yes, of course, you’re right. She was my other one,” Attorney William Rollins said.

• • •

Paige Gately sat in the office of the president of Andover Citizens Bank. The office contained no frozen steelwork of the present but had been restored to the gilt woodwork of the past. The desk, filigreed at the edges, was a dark expanse of mahogany polished to a depthless shine. Mrs. Gately sat before it in a chintz-covered chair, with her attractive legs crossed and her kidskin gloves in her lap. Her mouth, freshly painted, was very red. She aimed it at the president, whose name was Ed Fellows, a graduate of Phillips and Harvard and once one of her more ardent suitors.

“You look good,” she said simply.

“I feel good,” he said. He had returned three days ago from the sunshine of Antigua, and the lines in his brow looked like chalk marks against the deep tan of his face. His eyes hung pale over half glasses, which he removed.

“And Claire?”

“Fine,” he said. His wife had been a classmate of Mrs. Gately’s at Abbot Academy years before the all-girls school vanished into the campus of Phillips. Claire Fellows — her name was Beland then, her family one of the town’s wealthiest, her wedding one of the biggest — had been his second choice.

“And the children? They’re doing well of course?”

He nodded. He had two sons who had followed him to Phillips and Harvard and were living in New York. With mild interest, Mrs. Gately had followed their progress in the pages of the Andover
Townsman
. She knew that the older one, whose name she could not remember, was working on Wall Street.

“I suppose,” she said, “I’d better not take up too much of your time.” Then, in a businesslike voice, her enunciation crisp and precise, a product of Abbot, she spoke swiftly and surely of the assets and liabilities of the Silver Bell Motor Lodge. Everything was in her head, and her face swelled as she went on. The owner, of course, was Alfred Bauer, but she knew to the penny how much Rita O’Dea had put into it and the degree of influence that unpredictable woman exerted.

“Your point.”

“I want to buy it.”

He withdrew his elbows with a flinch and retreated into the accommodating red leather of his chair, which had been his father’s. “My advice is to walk away from it.”

“I’ve worked too hard for that.”

“Do they want to sell?”

“Not yet.” As she tilted her head, a light played on the short cut of her hair, and the clean, ageless line of her jaw shot into prominence. “But I have my ways.”

The set of his mouth was not happy.

She recrossed her legs, her spellful eyes fixed on his. In essential ways he was a copy of her late husband, each of the same soft stuff, each the crushed son of a powerful man whose ghost had lingered. In the quiet conversations at her husband’s wake, mourners had forgotten the son and resurrected the father, who had been a selectman for nearly thirty years. Fellows’s father had owned the bank.

Fellows said, “Why do you want it?”

“I know something they don’t,” She was casual. “Inside information.”

He was wary. He did not want to ask any more questions.

“A major hotel chain has been looking at the property,” he said.

“But now it has an odor. A stigma.” It was his first allusion to the murder, the news of which had spread through the bank from Fran Lovell’s desk into the tellers’ cages and over to his secretary. “It could kill the interest.”

“I doubt it.”

He started to say something and checked himself. His lips were taut, his eyes noncommittal. Slowly he returned his elbows to the desk and brought his soft brown hands together. “I’d have to see the books.”

“Naturally.”

“I can’t promise anything.”

“Of course not,” she said. Their voices were mere murmurings, but each word was charged.

“You’re playing with fire,” he said from a sealed face.

“When an opportunity comes, Ed, you take it.”

“They’re not your kind. You don’t know what they’ll do.”

She smiled faintly and rose from her chair. “This isn’t their territory. It’s ours. Our town, Ed.”

He also stood up, his pinstriped knee banging the desk. He fetched her coat and unconsciously traced a finger over the cashmere before helping her on with it. He started to touch her hair but pulled back at the last instant. She turned around slowly, screwing a slender hand into one of the gloves and then stretching her fingers.

“I remember when you wore a blazer with the Phillips cachet on the breast pocket. You and Biff. Neither of you knew what to make of me.”

“I still don’t. You scare me, Paige.”

“I knew I would. Sorry.”

He watched her turn toward the door, trim and compact, self-contained. He spoke to her back. “Our lives have taken such odd turns.”

“True,” she said.

Her gloved hand was on the doorknob when he spoke again. “What was her name?”

“Who?”

“That poor girl.”

“Melody,” she said forcibly. “I thought the world of her.”

• • •

Harriet Bauer was in the study when her son came home, scarcely a sound from him. “Wally!” she said when he tried to slip unseen up the stairs. He stopped instantly and turned around reluctantly with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his green athletic jacket. She gripped the banister and looked up at him. “You don’t skip school unless you tell me. That understood?” His nod was almost indiscernible. “And you don’t go to her. You come to
me
.“

“She’s my aunt.”

“Godmother. There’s a difference.” She gestured. “Come down here.”

He did so sluggishly, in jeans that were too tight, too small for his muscular legs, and in sneakers with leather-cupped heels, padded ankle collars, and loose laces. His hair hung over his forehead like Joe Palooka’s. She pushed it caringly to one side.

“Let’s go out.”

“I just came in.”

“Wait for me at the door,” she commanded.

They went walking through nearby woodland owned by the town. The sun had lost its glare, and the sky, seen through the fretwork of naked branches, was empty except for a single cold-weather bird winging west. Harriet Bauer wore a parka and leg-warmers. Wally tramped beside her with his jacket open and the loose laces of his sneakers snapping from side to side. He kicked at dead leaves. The path they followed was tortuous and narrow, roots erupting at eccentric angles.

She said, “Zip your jacket.”

“I’m not cold.”

“You will be.”

The air smelled of mosses, of a creeping wetness just below the ground, and of stagnant water brimming a hollow. They stopped near a granite boulder where, a few years ago, he had spied on birds with binoculars she had bought him for his birthday. She remembered his particular excitement over the glimpse of a scarlet tanager inside the spring leaves of a maple.

“I found something of Melody’s in your room.”

His head came up sharply.

“It was tucked away in your dresser.”

“You had no right.”

“I have every right. Time you got rid of it, so I burned it.”

“It wasn’t hers,” he protested.

“Yes, Wally, it was.”

“How do you know?”

“Darling, I bought it for her.”

A sound was heard far to their left, beyond birches that appeared poised to spring out of the ground. Someone wearing red was walking a dog along another path.

“Come on,” she said, and they pressed on.

He said, “Do you think I did it?”

“It wouldn’t matter. You’re my flesh.”

They heard the dog bark, but the animal and its owner seemed farther away now. She reached out and made him take her arm, which disturbed his footing. She wished she could wave a wand and make him insensible of threat, invulnerable to retribution.

“Will we go to the funeral?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, for she had not thought that far ahead.

“I worry about her. I wonder where she is.”

She flipped him a curious look.

“Whether she’s anywhere,” he explained. “Do you believe there’s a life afterwards?”

“There’s nothing.”

“What does Dad say?”

“The same.”

The sky was a deepening gray-rose, and shadows made the pitch of the path difficult to follow. A broken branch got in their way. His voice reverted to a tenor. “Then why does Dad bother with church?”

“He’s in business. People pigeonhole your character by what you do on Sunday, rest of the week doesn’t matter.” She slowed their step. “I think we’d better turn back.”

He was glad to, as if the surroundings were no longer familiar or friendly. He had a pale, dehydrated look and was tense at the shoulders. When she tried to encourage a tighter grip from his arm, he resisted.

“Don’t!” she said. “Don’t ever turn from your mother.” She made him walk faster. In the dim his hair seemed ghostly at the edges, and his eyes were inked out. She freed his arm when she saw his nose drip. “Wipe it.” There was a search. “No hankie?” She gave him a tissue and watched him use it.

“Everybody has a soul,” he blurted out.

“Are you telling or asking me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Nobody knows,” she said and heard the dog bark. It was closer now. “Listen, Wally, in time you’ll have to talk to the policeman. We can only delay it so long. Can you face it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sergeant Dawson. He was good to you before.”

“I don’t like him.” His nose was running again, more tissue needed, which she provided.

“Why not?”

“He looks right into me,” he said with trembling lips.

“Then you must learn not to let him.”

She pushed him along until they were near the street that led to theirs. Soon they saw the dog, a golden retriever, and the red-jacketed man who was walking it. “It’s nobody,” she whispered, meaning the man was merely a neighbor of shy habits and uncertain health. They cut across his expansive lawn without speaking to him. “Wally, wait.”

He was sprinting ahead of her, avoiding the lights of a passing car, vanishing into extending shadows. He reached the house well before she did, though she could have caught up, probably could have even outrun him. He left the front door open. She shut it quickly and shed her parka. For a minute she stood still, letting her own quiet self feed into the silence. “Where are you?” she called out and began switching on lights.

A sound from the far end of the house diverted her from the stairs. Her tread was soft on the rich carpeting. She peeked into the game room, which was equipped with a pool table, a dart board, and a video game of the sort and size usually played in arcades. She would have been surprised had she found him there, for the video game had long ceased to amuse. With darts, he was lucky to hit the board, and he could not properly crook his finger around the tip of a cue stick. She trekked on, stepping over his jacket and then his sweater and shirt.

He was in the exercise room, bare to the belt and supine on a padded bench with a rigging of steel tubes rising over him. His hair was already full of sweat, his teeth clenched, his nostrils distended. “That’s it, baby, work it out!” she cried. “Clear your head!” He was pumping heavy-duty steel, his young chest rocking and the muscles in his arms lurching. A vein flared in his forehead. “Burn it off!”