FrostLine
FrostLine
Copyright © 2003 by Justin Scott
First Edition 2003
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003100088
ISBN-10 Print: 1-59058-062-1 Hardcover
ISBN-13 Print: 978-1-59058-062-2
ISBN-13 eBook: 978-1-61595-189-5
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.
Poisoned Pen Press
6962 E. First Ave., Ste. 103
Scottsdale, AZ 85251
We bury footings deep in New Englandâbelow the frost lineâand hope that ice won't heave our walls or wedge water under dams.
Contents
Picture an angry New England farmer: red face; lantern jaw; gray hair sweeping bony shoulders; arms like braided wire. He roars into his neighbor's motor court, which is paved with Belgian cobbles, and skids his twenty-year-old salt-rotted, bald-tired pickup truck to a screeching stop beside a fleet of Range Rovers. He's got a shotgun in a rack in the rear window.
Richard Butler owns little on earth but land. Cedars are taking his outer fields. Now and then he earns some cash blasting ledge for a builder surprised to find granite where a cellar was anticipated, and he sells firewood when he finds time to split it. When the VA deposits his monthly check, he jokes that the only way a dairy farmer can make a living is to get shot serving his country.
His neighbor is a celebrity statesmanâHenry King, the “Silver Fox”âwho cut his diplomat teeth negotiating a long, bloody end to the Vietnam War. Retired from public service, King earns millions advising governments and international corporations.
Their lands intersect like crazed pottery. King has named his Fox Trot and enclosed it with an electric deer fence. Mr. Butler's hardscrabble acres cap the summit of Morris Mountain and sprawl to boundaries stacked of stone half a century before the American Revolution.
He mounts marble stairs, fails to identify a brass fox head as the bell pull, and bangs on the door. Neither he nor King's morning-coated houseman know what to make of each other. But when Henry King rushes into the foyer Mr. Butler shouts, “Get those pipes off my land.”
“They're only temporary,” King starts to placate him. “For drainage while I build my lake.” But it galls King that he has to oblige a hostile neighbor whose net worth is less than he earns in a day, and the statesman blunders: “As it's not precisely
your
land anyway, I presume you'll accommodateâ”
“If you cross my fences again, I'll sue you.”
King flushes darkly, the memory of a stinging defeat in the local court fresh in his mind. “Show him out.”
The houseman hesitates, unsure whether the farmer's eyes burn with rage or insanity. There's a shotgun in his truck.
***
That's where I came in.
Although at the very moment they were cementing their feud, I was up a treeâsteeple high in a Main Street elmâtrying to rescue the Meeting House cat, who was stuck where the branches got thin. A voice loud enough to hail friends across an interstate boomed up from the frozen ground.
“Hey Ben! Guess who just got out of Somers.”
Somers Correctional, security-five state prison.
Far below, my audience had doubled: Alison Mealy, the skinny eleven-year-old shivering in a hand-me-down ski parka who had talked me into this mercy mission, had been joined by Scooter Mackay, publisher, editor and ace reporter of the
Newbury Clarion
. Bulky as a bear in Eddie Bauer goose down, he had brought his thirteen-megapixel digital Kodak in case I fell.
A gust of wind set the flag thundering over Church Hill. My branch began to sag. I extended a gloved hand to the cat, a brindly calico that looked like a dirty tablecloth.
“Hear me? Guess who just got out of Somers.”
Scooter's family had owned the
Clarion
since the invention of linotype. The weekly earned him an awful lot of money, but few opportunities to wow the town with breaking news.
“Dicky Butler,” I told him.
“How the hell did you find out?”
None of Scooter's business.
My reticence provoked explanatory roars: “Appellate Court threw out the intent-to-sell conviction. He'd already served enough time on the assault.”
“Tell that to the assaulted.”
Dicky Butler was a vicious brawler. He had a screw or two loose that made him violent. But he wasn't stupid, and the possession case had been shaky from the start: Newbury's resident state trooper Oliver Moody had stretched Supreme Court guidelines to lengths that would have raised Saddam's eyebrows; then the jury refused to disregard Dicky's reputation for punching the lights out of innocent Newburians while roaming the town between convictions and voted that Connecticut would be a safer state with Dicky Butler behind bars.
The cat hissed. I faked a tail yank, and, when the dummy fell for it, scooped her off the branch and into the laundry bag I'd tied to my belt.
Horns blared. Brakes screeched. Startled, I slipped off my branch as a speeding caravan of Range Rovers forced Hopkins Septic's tanker off the road. Arrogant DPL-plated sons of bitches from Henry King's Morris Mountain estate. I hung for my life like a three-toed sloth.
“Don't drop her,” screamed Alison, and the Kodak's shutter began clattering eagerly.
Upside down, from elm height, Newbury looked like a Currier and Ives New England miniature enameled on Grandma's brooch: clapboard churches clustered around the tallest flagpole in Connecticut; snug colonials; snow white mansions; barn red general store; a sturdy bank; and Town Hall. All crisp in the piercing March sunlight. No one had had the nerve yet to unwrap their winter-burlapped rhododendrons, but a breath of yellow on the willows in the Rams Pasture warned country house shoppers to buy soon or spend summer in the city. So if I were in my office, instead of up a tree, I'd be answering my telephone with high hopes of business, “Benjamin Abbott Realty.”
I slothed my way down toward a friendly fork. Scooter, conceding he had lost the photo opportunity of the winter, yelled, “Dicky's dad says they're going to sue for false arrest.”
“You want to hold the ladder?”
Branch to branch, then down the rungs, a smile ready when Scooter snapped my landing: “Realtor Rescues Cat”âthe kind of front page advertising you just can't buy.
Alison unbagged the animal, which eluded her consoling hug and ran into the road in the path of a pickup truck, survived that somehow, and started up a tree in my Aunt Connie's front yard.
My knees were shaking. “What does Ollie say?”
“Nothing I can print. He says he'll tear Dicky's head off if he steps out of line.”
“That should be exciting.”
Dicky was like Joe Frazier: he got an adrenalin rush when someone hit him. Trooper Moody enjoyed inflicting pain.
“I thought you'd want to know,” said Scooter. Then he got embarrassed and looked away.
“Thank you. I appreciate it.”
Dicky and I had hung out the summer we were twelve, the summer before Scooter and I were enrolled in Newbury Prep as day students and Dicky was shipped off to the Manson Youth Institute at Cheshire. We'd not seen a lot of each other since.
Except when I was released from Leavenworth Penitentiaryâthree years for the sins of an overly meteoric yuppie career on Wall Streetâand Dicky had stopped by with a six-pack to see how I was adjusting to hometown life. So I owed the man a visit.
Scooter's stage whisper was audible at the flagpole. “I hear Alison wants a cat.”
“Actually, she wants a dog. But she can't have a dog because it would bark all day while her mother's working and she's in school.” I winked at Alison. She snarled back, braces flashing like razor wire. “And she can't have a cat because her Mom's allergic.”
They'd lived in the old stablehand's apartment over my barn since I'd found them hitchhiking and homeless on Route 7. By logic beyond my grasp, I was in line for a proxy pet.
“Naomi's pregnant, again. Should I reserve a kitten?”
“Send the whole litter. There's a Mongolian hotpot recipeâ”
Scooter said goodbye. I carried my ladder back to the barn. Alison trailed me into the house. I nuked us a couple of mugs of hot apple cider, which we took to my office in the glassed-in front porch.
“A cat would help out by eating scraps.”
“I have a compost heap.”
“You get lonely in this great big empty house.”
I reminded the child that while Abbott Houseâa Georgian Colonial with ink-black shutters and snow-white clapboardsâ might dwarf Newbury's older saltboxes, it was modest compared to my great-aunt Connie's Federal mansion across the street and the Greek Revival and Second Empire residences that the fast-money crowd had thrown up in the nineteenth century.
Nor did it feel empty, crammed with furniture that frugal Abbotts never threw out. But how to explain to my prepubescent friend that when lonely, I hoped less to connect with a cat than with a fellow human of the warm and feminine persuasion? (Hopes dashed of late.)
The telephone rang, cutting short my hunt for euphemisms and halting an unwelcome lapse into mournful reflection.
“Benjamin Abbott Realty.”
“Mr. Abbott,” said a woman who sounded used to being obeyed. “Henry King wants you to come up to Fox Trot.”
I took my feet off my desk.
Henry King was pouring serious money into the old Zarega place, which he had renovated, rebuilt, and added on to. I had heard that he was trying to run some land deals by his neighborsâ“buying to the horizon,” as WASP New Englanders put it.
Not that King was old Connecticut. Far from it, despite elocution and polo lessons. But having cashed in a career in personal diplomacy for Republican presidents, this Harvard-educated son of a Red Hook longshoreman had earned the means to acquire the
accoutrement.
My aerial photo map indicated several possible sales of unused pastures and woodlots. But the prize was a hundred acres on the summit, which belonged to, of all people, Dicky Butler's father.
My gut told me that's what King wanted. It also told me that Mr. Butler wouldn't sell. And yet, farmers got tired. He had struggled alone for yearsâno wife to bring in steady cash with a part-time job, no kids to share the chores, Dicky being incarcerated most of the time and raising hell when he wasn't. He just might appreciate a way out. If so, I would earn a handsome commissionâbut from a buyer I wouldn't be proud to do business with.
I didn't hold with former public servants augmenting their pensions by selling publicly paid-for contacts. The practice devalues their office and skews their judgement in favor of their future benefactors. By rights, I should tell Henry King to take his business to my competitors.
But face it, I needed the business. Wall Street's collapse had downsized my natural customers, while those still employed were spending differently than well-off folk used to. McMansions and Mega-mansions wired for wall to wall wide-screen TV were the hot items now for those who could still afford them. My listings of “antiques”âauthentic colonials and nineteenth century farm housesâhad all the appeal of
ris de veau
in a rib joint. (Unless the antique had a extra slice of land that a builder could get permission from Planning and Zoning to grace with a gross new neighbor.)
I weighed a potential good deed for Mr. Butler. I reminded myself that I cared more about swinging deals than the money involvedâignoring memories of hot water
that
had landed me in in the past. I told myself I was curious for a peek at King's estate, rumored to rival Kublai Khan's.
“Mr. King has people coming for lunch. Join us at noon.”
Alison was watching, her big eyes guarded.
“Hold on, please.” I covered the phone. “Is your Mom working?”
“Yeah.”
“âYes,' not âyeah.'”
School days, Mrs. Mealy cleaned houses; Saturdays, she helped Main Street matrons prepare their dinner parties. “There's tuna in the fridge. Why not invite Dora and Patty for lunch?”
Dora and Patty were
capo
and
consiglieri
of the girls-only Main Street bicycle gang. Alison,
capo di tutti i capi.
She pretzeled deeper into her chair and studied the pattern on the worn oriental carpet. “We're not talkingâ¦.We had a fight.”
“Call a peace conference. Frozen yogurt for dessert.”
“Can't. They're riding Patty's horse. With Patty's mother.”
I'm rarely violent. But if Patty's parents had walked in at that moment I would have slugged them. Alison had enough problems with an abusive drunk for a fatherâabsent, on my orders, until the day world peace was declared and he got soberâand the frightened daughter of a hardscrabble farmer for a mother. She didn't need more grief from social climbers.
“Go on, Ben. I'll watch TV.”
I said to the lady on the phone, “I'm afraid I'm tied up. I'll be there after lunch.”
“Mr. King specifically requested you come to lunch.”
“Please give him my regrets. I'll see him at two.”
“Make it one-thirty.”
A point getter. “One-thirty it is, Ms.â?”
“Julia Devlin. They'll have your name at the gatehouse, Mr. Abbott.”
I hung up thinking, gatehouse? Gates alone were considered a tad pretentious in Newbury, more appropriate to strivers' driveways in commuter towns like Greenwich.
Alison said, “A compost heap won't curl up in your lap.”
“If Mr. King offers me a ride to Washington D.C. in his helicopter someday, I won't have to say, âSorry, Mr. King, I have to go home and feed the cat.'”
“
I'd
feed her.”
“What if you had band practice? Or stayed late for your computer course? By the time one of us got home we'd be down to compost anyway.”
We settled around the kitchen table for tuna sandwiches, Aunt Connie's bread-and-butter pickles, and a little chat about Dora and Patty. It didn't help much.
***
Henry King's gatehouse looked like an English country railroad stationâa fanciful structure of stone, steep gables and leaded windows. An iron gate sufficiently strong to keep locomotives out was guarded by Albert and Dennis Chevalley, rambunctious young cousins of mine from the wrong side of the tracks.
I'd heard they'd found work dynamiting tree stumps for Henry King, until some government killjoy, obliged to report back to the Department of Homeland Security, ruled that the argument that Dad and Granddad “always blew stumps” did not automatically qualify the boys to be state-licensed pyrotechnicians. Particularly with explosives borrowed from a highway construction site. Nonetheless, it appeared they had been promoted to full-time Fox Trot retainers: parked by the gatehouse gleamed a jet-black four-by Chevy diesel pickup with “Fox Trot” emblazoned on the door; the boys themselves were decked out in their first-ever garments from L.L. Bean, “Scottish tartan” flannel shirts.