Bloodline (27 page)

So that's it, I thought. She was killed because she was short on credit hours.

I looked at the second number and dialed again. Waited.

One ring. Two. Three. Four.

“This is the office of Wheaton, Hinckley, Prine, and McSalley, attorneys. The office is closed right now. If you know the number of the extension you want, and you are at a touch-tone phone, you can dial it now.””

A lawyer. A Portland lawyer. A Portland adoption lawyer? What other reason would Missy Hewett have to contact an attorney?

The Falmouth number was next. I dialed and waited. It rang twice and a woman answered. “Hello.”

“Hello, is Dean there?”

“I'm sorry?”

“Dean. Is this the right number?”

“No, you have the wrong number.”

“Oh, I'm very sorry,” I said. “Didn't mean to—”

Click
.

The voice had been young middle-aged. Fortyish, maybe. Cool and assured. Like somebody with money. Great. I could just keep asking for Dean until she broke down and told me who she was and how she knew Missy Hewett.

I sat there in the quiet and looked at my pad, which was more or less blank. A lawyer and a rich woman. I wrote that much on my pad and decided it looked pretty meager. Picked up the phone again and dialed the first Providence number to try to fill things out.

One ring, with different tone. Another and another. Then a click and a hiss.

“Hello,” a young man's voice said. “This is the Department of Classics, Brown University. The office is closed, but at the tone, you may leave a message.”

It beeped and I hung up. Brown University? Could Southern Maine have been Missy's second choice? Did she know a professor?

I scrawled a question mark and picked up the phone again. Call to Rhode Island number two. It rang twice, a woman's voice answered, and, ready for a recording, I almost forgot to answer.

“Hello. I said hello,” she said.

She sounded exasperated or annoyed.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Scott Fitzgerald with the Providence Home Improvement Company. How are you this evening?”

I waited.

“I'm quite fine, thank you. And—”

“Good,” I interrupted. “I'd like to tell you about some of the services we're offering this season, including our pre-winter button-up special. Does your home have aluminum combination storm windows, ma'am, or does it have the newer insulated models?”

“Listen,” she said.

“Well, with either type of window, an imperfect fit can cost you hundreds of dollars in unnecessary heating costs.”

“Now you listen,” the woman said. “I know you're just trying to earn a living. I understand that. But l really don't think I need anything you're selling.”

“I'm not selling anything. Providence Home Improvment offers services for the homeowner that can result in sizable savings down the road. We like to think of it as an investment opportun—”

“Listen, you jerk,” the woman said, her voice shrill and loud. “Do you know how I spent the last hour? I spent the last hour trying to get a very colicky baby to go to sleep.”

“Oh, I'm very sorry. I really am. I have four children and I know what that's like. I mean, I really do. I'm sorry. I apologize. A new baby—I … know where you're coming from. How old is your baby?”

“She's four months, but that's really none of your business. You people always call at the worst times, imposing on me and my family when I couldn't care less about whatever crap it is you're trying to peddle.”

“Ma'am, we don't peddle crap.”

“Don't tell me what you do or don't do. What you do is wake a baby who was just about asleep. Thank you very much.”

Thank you very much, I thought to myself after she hung up. And my best to your four-month-old baby girl.

24

M
y mind churned all night, and no amount of bedtime beer could have numbed it. I heard the clock in the hall chime two o'clock. And three. And four. At two, I was on my back, staring up at the blackness where the bats, contemplating the bat bliss of hibernation, only occasionally rustled. At three, I was making mental lists of everything that had happened. I made mental lists of everything I knew. I made mental lists of everyone even remotely involved. The idea was to impose order on the chaos that was now everywhere around me, the chaos that was my life, that, no exaggeration, could cost me my life, or at least a big chunk of it.

At four I concluded I couldn't do it.

There was no clue in what I knew that could tell me why Missy had been killed. There was no clue as to why this Kenny kid had taken such a passionate dislike to me. There was no logical pattern. But stretched out there in my underwear in the dark, it occurred to me that maybe the pattern wasn't in what I knew, but in what I didn't know.

I didn't know where Missy's baby was, though I suspected she was keeping her mommy up in Providence. I didn't know what adoption procedure she'd used, though I did know she hadn't gone through
channels in her home county. I didn't know why I didn't know, why the whole thing seemed to be such a well-kept secret, at least from her family. But she had to confide in someone, didn't she? She had to have had help finding this lawyer in Portland, having the baby, just going through the process. If not her sisters or her mother, then who?

When I woke up at seven o'clock, after a fitful couple of hours' sleep, the question miraculously still was preserved. If not them, who?

I got up and eased myself stiffly down the loft stairs. After a shower and a bagel with peanut butter, I eased myself back up the stairs and got dressed in jeans, chamois shirt, and boots. Grabbing another bagel on the way out the door, I went out and climbed in the new truck. The old one sat in the driveway like a dead body, the skeleton of a self-immolated monk, a casualty of battle that could not be dragged away because the war still raged.

It was a coloring-book kind of day—blue sky, white clouds, orange and yellow trees—as if the artist only had four colors and wasn't allowed to blend. The air was cool and brisk and seemed to carry an extra dose of oxygen that wired me like no drug you could buy in lower Manhattan. I drove the little truck with what seemed to me to be aplomb, buoyed by what little plan l had come up with for the day. Any action is better than inaction. I thought. Or as an old editor at the
Times
used to put it, motivating her metro reporters, “Get your ass out of this building and hit the streets.”

So I was hitting the closest thing to streets that you could find in Waldo County, Maine. I stopped at the post office and checked my box, but it was empty. I held the door for an old woman coming into the post office and she said, “Thank you, dear.” From there, I drove out of town to the north, stopping at the general store on Knox Ridge to buy gas and a coffee.

“So how's Jimmy?” the woman at the cash register asked the guy in front of me. I'd been coming there for months but she didn't ask, “How's Jack?” Another thirty years, I'd be in like Flynn.

The coffee was still hot when I pulled into the parking lot at Waldo Regional High. I circled once like a dog going to sleep and picked a space directly across from the front door. A small sign said
RESERVED FOR FACULTY
. Professor Jack McMorrow, at your service.

There in the parking lot, I sat and drank the coffee, and thus fortified, went in the front door, easing my way through the between-classes rush like a New Yorker leaving the subway. Remembering my original directions, I took “like, a right” and “like, a left” and soon was standing at attention in front of the guidance department secretary, who asked if I had an appointment.

I lied and said yes. With Janice Genest.

She came back and said Miss Genest was with a student. I said I'd wait and went to a plaid easy chair in the corner to make good on my promise. I looked at college catalogs and the secretary looked at me. When I got tired of her staring, I held up a pamphlet on sexually transmitted diseases and said “Yuck” out loud. She found something else to do.

In ten minutes, Genest's door opened and she stepped out. When she saw me she stopped, turned, and went back inside. I got up and went to the door and looked in to see her sitting at her desk, hair pulled back, a finely knit cotton sweater tied by the arms around her neck. It looked like a serial killer had dissolved in mid-strangle.

“Got a minute?” I said.

“And not much more,” Genest said, picking up a folder.

“The secretary said you were with a student so I waited.”

“Considerate of you.”

“But I guess she was confused, because there's no student in here.”

“Apparently not.”

“Unless he or she went out the back door.”

“There isn't one,” Genest said.

“Apparently,” I said.

I smiled. She still hadn't looked up. I took a step in and sat in the green vinyl easy chair beside the door. Genest kept working.

“I didn't see you at Missy Hewett's wake,” I said.

“That's because I wasn't there.”

“I thought you were pretty good friends.”

“We were, and that's why I wasn't there. Unlike people who might have known Missy only superficially, I was too upset to see her. That way.”

“I can see that,” I said. “You were pretty close, weren't you?”

“For a counselor-student relationship, yes,” Genest said, putting her file folder down.

“I'm sorry.”

“About what?”

“About what happened,” I said. “To her. What happened to her.”

“Bullshit,” Genest said suddenly. “Christ, don't give me that. You're just as glad, 'cause now you'll get a juicier story. Am I right? Isn't the death of Missy Hewett a lot sexier than the life of Missy Hewett? Come on, you can admit it. Missy being murdered was your lucky break.”

“The cops don't think so.”

“No?”

“No. They've got this idea that maybe I did it.”

“Did you?”

“Nope.”

The secretary came in and put a folder on Genest's desk. I gave the secretary a big smile.

“She's not with a student anymore,” I said.

The secretary glared at me and turned and went back to her desk.

“Makes your day to catch somebody in a lie, doesn't it?” Genest said.

“I spent ten years trying to catch people in lies,” I said. “After that long, it just wasn't fun anymore.”

“So what do you do now?”

“I try to catch people telling the truth.”

“Caught any lately?” Genest asked.

“Yeah, I have, actually. It isn't so hard, if you know where to look.”

She gave me a long look.

“Must be nice to be so cocksure of everything.”

“It's a facade,” I said. “Compensation for raging insecurity.”

“Somehow I find that hard to believe.”

“You'd be amazed.”

“That I don't doubt,” Genest said.

I half expected her to announce that she had a class or a crisis or whatever it was that took her out of her office and into the field. But she didn't, and instead rested her chin in her hands and appeared ready to talk until I got tired of standing. This was where all those years of leaning against bars paid off.

“I'm serious about the cops,” I said.

“That they think you might be the one?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I suppose they have to start somewhere.”

“That doesn't bother you?” I asked.

“Will you be insulted if I say no?”

“No,” I said. “I'd be insulted if you said yes.”

“Well, no, it doesn't bother me. And to be honest, Mr. McMorrow, a detective came and talked to me. Kind of a quiet guy. Poole or Houle or something like that. Not very coplike.”

“Most of them aren't,” I said. “Except on television.”

“Yeah, well, he wanted to know if you really came here looking for information about teen pregnancy and all that, and I said, yeah, you did. He seemed disappointed.”

“He's the one who tries to catch people in lies.”

“I'm not saying he's given up trying with you,” Genest said.

“Of course not. It's not like one character reference is going to clear me.”

“I didn't say anything about character. I just said that in this one particular case, you seemed to have accurately portrayed at least the basic facts of our brief acquaintance.”

“Thanks,” I said.

She almost smiled and I jumped in before her mood could swing.

“But I've got another question. If you don't mind.”

Her eyes narrowed, as if maybe she minded after all.

“It's about Missy, of course. I just wondered if you could tell me more about her baby. How she came to give it up. I mean, what she did after she decided that. And how she decided. The whole process, I guess.”

“I can't talk about that,” Genest said, leaning back in her chair. “Students' records—what they say to me, what I say to them—that's confidential.”