No Way Home
Authors: Andrew Coburn
Andrew Coburn
NO WAY HOME
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
For my wife, Bernadine Casey Coburn, and our four daughters; my sister, Julie Coburn Masera; and to the memory of my mother, Georgiana (Dolly) Coburn Ford; and my great-grandmother, Georgiana Burnham McLane. And, of course, for my friend and agent, Nikki Smith.
1
The sun lay warm on Flo Lapham’s shoulders and colored the woodlot bordering the back lawn. The woodlot was home to rabbits, raccoons, weasels, squirrels, and a family of red foxes. A pair of hooters, along with peepers, kept nights alive. Jays and robins vied for the bird bath. For Flo, each spring was the first ever. She could find newness in anything, even her rumpled husband, whose bottom teeth were in his shirt pocket.
A gray curl dangled irrelevantly over Earl Lapham’s forehead. He was ensconced in a lawn chair with a cup of coffee beside him and the local weekly in his lap. With affection he watched Flo stoop to yank a weed from the tulip bed. A dicky heart, which had forced him from the insurance business, made him more aware of her. He watched intently as she straightened with a smile that brought out the little cracks in her face but in no way lessened her appeal. The flaws complemented the design.
Their heads turned in unison when their daughter emerged from the house to say good-bye before leaving for work. Lydia was a hospital nurse, second shift. In her uniform, the whitest white, she could have been a bride without the fancies.
Lydia strode to her father first and kissed his cheek. She was thirty years old. At home she was still the child. At the hospital she was a respected professional, with something swift and vague about her and little that was public. One would have been hard put to explain her, not least of all doctors who were rotten to the other nurses but held their tongues with her.
“How are you doing, Dad?” She rested a hand on the curve of his shoulder.
“Fine,” he said, the warmth of her touch pressing through his shirt.
“Honest?”
“Honest.”
He saw not the high-strung woman in lipstick but, in the watercolors of memories, the little girl in pigtails who had thrilled to the workmanship of a spider’s web, the harmony of music given the wind, and the aura of mystery surrounding a common cat.
Flo, watching her daughter move smoothly toward her, relished the sight of her: the hasty, boyish figure and soft, straight hair that seemed to be brown. The tones were assorted. In childhood the hair had held the hue and scent of hay. Flo extended an arm.
“Are you seeing Matthew later?”
Lydia’s voice had a husk of irony. “I’m probably the only gal in town who gets courted in a police cruiser.”
“When are you going to make an honest man of him, my dear?”
“Soon as we grow up.”
“If you wait that long, you might lose him.”
“I doubt it, Mom.”
Flo smiled indulgently. She and her only child had a good relationship. She could ask questions and not feel left out, and she could render advice without fear of rebuff. She had hoped that Lydia might marry a doctor, but she no longer had objections to Matthew MacGregor, despite his look of an overgrown schoolboy.
Earl reached for his coffee, wistful eyes on his wife. Memory resurrected her enormously pregnant, her belly a globe of the world, his young ear pressed to it. Then he shifted his gaze to the burgeoning woodlot where, rustling their leaves, maples and oaks spoke a language he was almost beginning to understand. Insects sang, reaffirming the sweetness of life. Lowering his eyes, he sipped his coffee. The gilt around the mouth of the cup was vanishing, as all things do.
“Gotta go,” Lydia said cheerily.
Flo heard movements in the woodlot and glimpsed bits of color, sparks. A breeze sweeping through the branches seemed to have something to say but slurred the words. Lydia, who had taken two strides, turned and looked back.
“Did you hear something?”
Earl, as if nudged by an invisible hand, rose too fast and spilled coffee. His teeth fell from his shirt. Flo, with a warning from the oldest part of her brain, started toward her daughter. That was when the report of a high-powered rifle obliterated every other sound.
The shot disturbed leaves, scattered birds, and tore through the back of Flo’s neck. Earl disbelieved his eyes. Stumbling toward his wife, he suddenly clutched his chest and felt the final pain he always knew would come. Lydia, poised between her mother and father, both on the ground, froze.
Inside the house the telephone rang and rang.
• • •
At the police station, which was snugged into the rear of the Bensington Town Hall, Meg O’Brien, the daytime dispatcher, answered an outside call. The voice on the other end, a woman’s, was abrupt, peremptory, and scathingly sweet: “Chief Cock, please.”
“Cut the crap, Mrs. Bowman.” Meg spoke without taking the cigarette from her mouth, so that the cigarette gave flutter and fire to each word. “Chief’s not in — and don’t call again.” She slammed the receiver down. “The gall of that woman!”
Eugene Avery, who wore his sergeant stripes with pride, said, “I won’t ask what that was all about.”
“Best you don’t.” Spilling ash, Meg took a final puff on her cigarette and smashed it out. She was a stringy woman, somewhere in her fifties, with the face of a pony. Her mouth was a rupture of heavy teeth.
“I won’t even ask where he is,” Sergeant Avery said, though his whole face posed the question. When the chief was away from the office, the sergeant was nominally in charge but took direction from Meg, seldom diplomatic in rendering it.
“Tuck your shirt in, Eugene.”
He was short and squarish and did not wear his uniform well. The shirt was baggy, unlike the trousers meant for a trimmer man. Before joining the police department some twenty-five years ago, he had driven a laundry truck, which had put him through Mcintosh Business School, now defunct. Stuffing in a side of his shirt, he said, “But I could make some guesses.”
“So you don’t bother your brain, go get us some root beer.”
He picked up his cap, the perforated summer one, and pushed it flat down on his head. “Who’s paying?”
“Who always pays?” Meg dug into her bag, which held a snub-nose revolver, though her civilian status did not necessitate her carrying one. She reduced her eyes to kernels as Sergeant Avery approached in an uneasy gait with his hand out.
“What’s the matter?” he asked.
“Those pants are so tight I doubt you got any balls left.”
“Don’t worry about my balls,” he said, offended. “Just worry about yourself.”
She came up with a dollar bill so worn it felt like silk, but before she could surrender it the telephone shrilled in their ears. Her teeth erupted. “If it’s that bitch again I’m swearing out a warrant.”
• • •
James Morgan entered the private air of Christine Poole’s bedroom, which gave out significant hints of her husband, as if he might be lurking in the closet or under the bed. Jeweled cuff links glinted like eyes. A shaft of light shot through a half-used flask of aftershave, giving it new meaning and a life of its own. A glance in the mirror made Morgan feel vaguely like a fugitive.
“Relax, James.”
Christine spoke from the bathroom. Then she appeared, without her robe. She had a strikingly intelligent face, at once pronounced and refined, and a nonchalant body with swooning breasts and a belly she did not try to gulp in. Morgan, who considered a woman’s nakedness a sacred image, reached for her head, loaded his hands with her hair, and kissed her.
“I haven’t seen you in a while,” she said.
“I always come when you call.”
“Sometimes it might be rewarding for
you
to call.”
He sat on her husband’s side of the bed and slipped off his loafers and socks. Once, scrambling for his clothes, he had retrieved one sock but failed to find its fellow, and Christine had lent him a pair of her husband’s, not yet returned. Now he laid his own neatly in view, one on top of the other, and stripped off his narrow-legged chinos. His Jockey shorts were tangerine, a gift from another woman, her joke. When he lifted his shirt, Christine traced a finger across the small of his back. He was lean and long, with the hint of a roll around his middle that occasional tennis, swimming, and other activities kept from spreading. He had all his hair, which refused to gray.
Under the covers his hand went to her.
“Don’t hurry it, James. At this stage of the game the warmth is more important than the thrill.”
She was Morgan’s age, forty-six. Mr. Poole, much older, was her second husband, an unfortunate placement, for she gauged all men by romantic memories of her first husband. Morgan apparently measured close.
“May is not a good month for me,” she said, and he could guess the reason. Everything was connected with that first husband of hers, while Mr. Poole, out of sight, failed to matter, perhaps even ceased to exist. She counted Morgan’s ribs. “We’ve both been disappointed, haven’t we, James? No, that’s too weak a word.
Struck down
is more like it.”
He would not argue that, nor would he discuss it. What she sought to recapture, he tried to keep in perspective, with probably no more success than she achieved. But he had come a long way, he liked to remind himself. He had survived that solitary drive ten years before when the speedometer jittered past ninety and would have crept to a hundred if the hand of God or that of his dead wife had not touched him in a way that woke him. The skid marks ran wild, but he missed the tree.
Christine spread her fingers over his chest hair. “Seems we’ve known each other forever.”
Six months, that was all, but she had revealed so much about herself that it was like forever. And she was always probing to learn more about him, occasionally assigning traits that had never been his. Some he assumed.
“Your other women are younger than I, aren’t they?” Her voice was curiously neutral, yet still warm. “I imagine you’re the magic bullet in their lives. Are you, James?”
“There’s no such bullet,” he said.
“Are they married like me, divorced, what?”
“What,” he said.
She leaned sideways to scratch her bottom, then rolled back to him with eyes that were ready. A kiss held them together, and in moments they were immersed in each other. Always in her lovemaking was a blazing touch of theatrics. She kicked hard and high, moaned dramatically, and dug her nails too fiercely into his flesh. His back bloody, he always felt entitled to a Purple Heart.
Later, the bedside phone rang, a subdued tinkling, like chimes, but loud enough for him to come awake as if water had been flung in his face.
Her eyes remained closed. “I don’t intend to answer it.”
“It might be for me,” he said.
“How could it be for you?”
“They know I’m here.”
“Oh, that’s nice, James. Really nice.” She blindly flung out an arm, snatched up the receiver, and spoke clearly into it. An instant later she dangled it over to him. Her voice was wryly formal. “Miss O’Brien wants to speak to Chief Morgan.”
“Yes, Meg,” he said, rising with the phone clamped to his ear. As she spoke, his entire jaw tightened. “Christ,” he said, catapulting to his feet and tripping over his loafers. The cord stretched precariously. When he grabbed his chinos with his free hand, loose change spilled from a pocket. “I didn’t hear that, Meg. Say it again.”
“What is it, James?” Christine asked in a harsh whisper and was shushed.
Quarters and nickels felt like ice under his soles. A breeze burned his body. “Make the calls, Meg. Bakinowski last, I want to be there first.”
• • •
They wanted her to stay inside the house, to sit down, to lie down if possible, but nothing was possible. Matthew MacGregor’s arm was a weight, not a comfort, and she avoided it. He was her sweetheart but seemed a stranger. At the front window her hair slumped over half her face, which gave her only one eye to look out of, more than enough. Police cars, local and state, some with doors left open, clogged the street. Horrified neighbors lined the far sidewalk. She pulled back when she realized they could see her as well.