The Shadow Box (14 page)

A bicycle?

He had climbed on, shifted to a lower speed, and started
down the hill toward the center of town.

“
That would be Parnel,” said Millie Jacobs.

Fallon had stopped by her office, said yes to a cup of
coffee, and was almost out of small talk when he blurted
a reference to the man in the hooded black slicker.

“Parnel?”

“Tall and skinny? Rides a green twelve-speed with two
wire baskets?”

Fallon remembered the baskets. Mounted over the rear wheel like saddlebags. He also remembered realizing, after
his heart stopped pounding, that on the first day of assassin
school they probably teach you not to take your bike on
hits. He answered her question with a nod.

“Parnel Minter. He builds lobster traps mostly, but he's
also a sensitive.”

“Sensitive?” Fallon repeated stupidly.

‘‘It's like a psychic. He gives readings during the tourist
season. Goes into a trance and leaves his body but he's
back in five minutes with the keys to your success. Likes to tell that body leaving’s how he met his wife. He was
flying over Marblehead one day, felt her psychic energy,
and swooped down for a look-see. Liked what he saw, came back to get his body, and drove back up to court
her.”

“Millie
…”

“Wife reads Tarot cards when she's Madam Cassandra.
When she's just Helen Minter, she stacks produce over at
the A&P.”

“U
m
. . . why would Parnel Minter have been . . .”

“Staring at the Taylor House? Hands up like this?” She
mimicked his pose. “He's listening for the children.”

Fallon blinked.

”A few days of that and you're bound to come ask him
what he's up to. That's when he'll tell you who the ghosts
are and offer to get rid of them. He tried that with Polly
Daggett. She wasn't interested, even when he cut his price
to fifty dollars but she let him paint her fence for that
amount.”

Fallon felt a headache coming on.

“Millie
...
am I going to get much more of this?”

“Oh,
Parnel's harmless.”

Yes, but a Colt Python isn't. Fallon winced at how close he'd come. If he had been a little more frightened, if his
adrenaline had been pumping any harder . . .

“And he's not exactly a fake. I mean, Parnel does hear
voices but my husband thinks they come through his den
tures. The barometer falls enough, he can pick up NOAA
Weather Radio.”

Fallon closed his eyes. He rose to his feet.

“If you want the real thing,” Millie said, leaning back,
“you might try to see Megan.”

“Megan?”

“She's close by. Lives over in Woods Hole.”

“Thanks all the same.”

“Of course, your happy little ghosts wouldn't interest
Megan. She's big time. The Massachusetts State Police
use her when they're stuck. One time she described a
murderer for them. All she did was walk around some
woods where two of the victims were found and she told them what he looked like, the house he lived in, the kind
of car he drove, and even part of his name.”

Fallon's skepticism showed on his face.

“It was in all the papers, Michael.”

“What papers? The rags at the A&P checkout?”

Millie's eyes became cool. “If you're done with your
coffee, Mr. Fallon . . .”

He spent the next five minutes apologizing.

No, he told her, he was not some smart-ass New York
know-it-all who thinks all islanders are rubes and all real
tors are talking heads. He had no doubt that much of that
murder story was true—the papers, it turned out, were the
Boston Globe
and the
Providence Journal
—and that cer
tain people do seem to have unusual gifts. His apology
offered and accepted, it seemed only polite to show a
modicum of interest in the subject that led to it.

Millie softened as well. She told him that she had never
given much credence to ESP either, especially when its
primary practitioners were Parnel and Cassandra. But if
there
was
a genuine article, it would have to be Megan.
For openers, the man she described had been totally un
known to the police. That means she could not have been
influenced by some investigator who already had a suspect
and hoped to panic him into confessing by getting a psy
chic to finger him.

“You'd never guess, to look at her,” Millie added. “She's such a pretty little thing.”

Fallon arched an eyebrow. “You know this woman?”

Millie shook her head. “Seen her on her boat, is all. She
lives on it. Seen her handle it, all by herself, in weather a
gull won't fly in.”

She's pretty and she sails. Fallon was instantly in
trigued. “Megan what?”

“Just Megan. They don't use last names.”

“Show biz, right? Like Cher or Madonna?”

The realtor shook her head. “Makes it harder for the
weirdos to find them.”

This exchange had aroused Michael's interest because,
until now, he had envisioned another Madam Cassandra.
Probably fat, wearing a tasseled shawl, a turban, about
two pounds of rings on her fingers, and at least one hairy
mole on her lip. Certainly not pretty and not athletic. Nor gutsy enough to drive a good-sized boat through a gale.
“Where did you say this boat is?”

No, Michael. Don't even think about it.

He spent that day and the next trying to clear his head of the pictures Millie Jacobs had put there.

”A pretty little thing,” she said. And a hot sailor. Out
of that dim sketch, Fallon had begun to create a total
image. There are no fat sailors. Pretty little Megan, there
fore, would be about five-three, a hundred eighteen
pounds. Living on a boat, she'd have a year-round tan.
Her hair, bleached by the sun, would be a dirty blond and
she'd wear it in a low-maintenance cut. A ponytail, most
likely. Fastened with a simple rubber band. Megan would
be about twenty-six years old. Her eyes would be
...
what? Dark and piercing? No
...
something softer. Her
eyes are gray, the color of a winter sky.

He saw those gray eyes dancing as she drove her boat
through a dangerous blow. It's gusting to fifty. She knows
she's carrying too much sail. She ties off the wheel, then
scrambles forward onto a pitching bow to set a storm jib
and reef in the main. She moves like a cat. Keeps her
whole body flexed and fluid. Now she's dancing back to
the cockpit. Back at the wheel, jaw set, she's brave and
purposeful, ignoring the salt spray that's stinging her face.

But those eyes. There's pain in them. A longing in them.
She's thinking
...
if only the right man would come
along. Someone to share this with. Someone like Michael
Fallon. Even now, she sees him in her mind just as he
sees her. She's picking up his psychic energy. But she has
no idea that he's this close. And that he's coming to
Woods Hole to meet her.

Yeah, right.

In your dreams, Michael.

More likely, she'd tell him to get lost. That was Millie's
opinion as well.

Millie said that over the last two summers, several of
the Taylor House regulars, all of whom had heard of her,
had tried to arrange consultations with her. A couple of
them offered some fairly big bucks for just a thirty-minute
session. She had turned them all down. Nor would she
talk to reporters, doctoral candidates doing theses, psychic
researchers, or representatives of any federal agency.

“Feds? What would they want with her?”

“They probably never got a chance to say.”

“Hmmph.”

About the last person she would speak to, therefore, is
a New York dropout whose inn makes funny noises. She
was probably a pain in the ass anyway.

Chapter 11

Th
e Pakistani
had been released on a Friday morning. A Department of Corrections van delivered him to the homeless shelter floors of the old Lenore Hotel in
time for breakfast. He was last seen hobbling outside for
a smoke. Two days later, it was the Giordano brothers'
turn to ask Brendan Doyle to lunch.

Doyle arrived at Villardi's Seafood Palace to find them already seated. Fat Julie, imposing, immense but not actu
ally fat,
sat on the right. He was dressed in leather sneak
ers and warm-up suit of green velour because he played
handball on Sunday mornings while Connie, his wife, and
the children were in church.

People wonder, thought Doyle, how mobsters get their
nicknames. Julie, who was nearing fifty, had been seri
ously overweight while in his early twenties due to two
years of inactivity while recovering from an attempt on the life of his father, whom Julie had shielded with his
body. Big Julie became Fat Julie.