Past Tense (2 page)

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Authors: William G. Tapply

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Past Tense
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He looked to be in his late twenties, which would make him a few years younger than Evie. He had pale eyes and a shy, expectant smile.
I don't think he expected Evie to walk right up to him and slap his face.
It was no love pat. She started it somewhere around her hip
and pivoted her body into it, and when her palm cracked against his cheek, it rang out like a gunshot, and the murmur and mumble of voices in the place suddenly subsided so that everyone could hear Evie growl, “You son of a bitch. God
damn
you. You better leave me alone.”
The guy barely reacted to her slap, but he flinched at her words, then shook his head and held up his hand. He tried to smile, and I heard him say, “Come on, honey, just listen …” before the other conversations in the room resumed and his voice was drowned out.
Evie stood in front of him, pointing her finger at his face and spitting words at him, and I recognized her anger by the hunch of her shoulders and the angle of her neck. I'd seen it before.
He looked at her with a little bewildered smile, and when she was done, he leaned toward her and said something. Evie lifted her hand as if to hit him again, and he held up his hands, stepped back, nodded quickly, turned, placed his glass of beer on the bar, and walked out of the place.
E
vie stood there with her arms folded across her chest and watched him go. Then she turned, came back to the table, sat down, and picked up her fork.
“What was that all about?” I said.
She scowled at me. “I'm so mad I could explode.”
“That's pretty obvious. So who was that?”
“I don't want to talk about it.” She blew out a quick, exasperated breath, then picked up an onion ring and stuffed it into her mouth. “I just want to enjoy my dinner.”
“But you can't—”
“Brady, goddamn it, I do
not
want to discuss it. Okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Okay.”
A minute later our waitress came over. “Are you all right, miss?” she said to Evie.
Evie waved her away without looking up. “I'm fine.”
“The manager wants to know if—”
“Tell him I'm sorry if I made a scene.”
“That's not—”
Evie lifted her head and glared up at the girl. “Look,” she said. “It's private and it's over with, all right?”
The waitress, who looked like a high-school kid, hovered there for a minute, then shrugged and wandered away.
I had the good sense not to say anything.
We ate in silence. After several minutes, Evie reached across the table, touched my hand, and said, “Let's leave that girl a nice tip, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I'm sorry if I bit your head off.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“I just don't like being stalked.”
“Is that what that was?”
“What else would you call it?”
“If that guy's stalking you, we should tell the police.”
“A lot of good that'd do.” She shook her head. “He's harmless. Annoying, that's all.”
“Stalkers—”
“Forget it, okay?”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”
We finished eating without saying much, and when we were done, we went outside and strolled down to the long T-shaped dock that extended out over the tidal creek. A few sailboats and sportfishing boats were moored there, along with several blocky craft that might've been lobster boats.
We walked out to the end of the dock and stood there watching the water. The afternoon clouds had blown away, and now the tide was coming in and the moon was rising over the marsh. Night birds were swooping around chasing mosquitoes. The air was still and quiet. Somewhere out there a fish sloshed. Some lights glowed from the cockpits on a couple of the sailboats, and from them came the soft murmur of
voices, an occasional burst of laughter, the clink of glasses, all muffled by the damp, briny night air.
I lit a cigarette. “You okay?” I said to Evie.
“Yeah, I'm all right.” She found my hand and held on to it, and we stood there in silence, watching the boats and the night birds and the rising moon.
After a few minutes Evie said, “Did you ever spend the night on a boat?”
“No,” I said. “I don't think I ever did.”
“I've always wanted to live on a houseboat,” she said. “Get rocked to sleep every night, hear the slosh of waves on the other side of the hull, inches from your head. If you don't like where you are, you just start up the engines and move your house and your whole life somewhere else.”
I flipped my cigarette butt into the water. “It's a lovely notion. Impractical, maybe, but lovely.”
She chuckled. “Mr. Practicality.”
“I fight it constantly.”
She squeezed my hand. “I'm sorry, Brady.”
“For what?”
“For making a scene.”
I shrugged. “It was your scene.”
She chuckled. “For being a bitch, then.”
“You were angry. You're entitled.”
She snuggled against me. I put my arm around her shoulder, and she laid her head against my shoulder.
“I went out with him a few times,” she said quietly. “His name is Larry. Larry Scott. It was three or four years ago. He worked where I worked.”
“In Cortland?” I said. “The medical center?”
“Yes. He was the janitor. He'd been a Marine. Served in Desert Storm, where he had some hairy experiences, I guess, and after he got out he tried several jobs. He's a good-looking
man, terrific body, all that. But it didn't take me long to figure out that he was a little weird, and pretty boring besides. Self-absorbed, narrow-minded, a bit paranoid. So I stopped going out with him.”
“And he didn't like it,” I said.
“No.” She was quiet for a minute. “He started calling me on the phone at odd hours,” she said. “Sometimes he'd wake me up late at night. He had this idea that I'd dumped him because he was just a janitor and lived at home with his mother and didn't have much money.”
“How did you handle it?”
“At first I tried to reason with him. Told him I thought he was a nice man but that we had no chemistry, and that money had nothing to do with it. He'd argue with me, insist that we did have chemistry. He knew it, he said, because he could feel it, and I was a bad person for rejecting him because he was poor. At the time, I was going out with a doctor who was quite a bit older than me, and Larry figured it was all about money. I told him I didn't give a shit about money, but he never would believe that. After a while, I told him to stop calling me, he was annoying me. He kept calling anyway. I got so I stopped answering my phone. I screened all my calls, and Larry would fill my answering machine with … I don't know what to call it. Crazy stuff. He loved me, he'd always love me. I loved him, he kept saying, and I should just admit it. We were destined for each other. He'd rant on about how he was going to have money one day, and then we could be together. And sometimes he'd talk about how he couldn't take it, I was driving him insane, that he was going to kill himself if he couldn't have me.”
“Did he ever threaten you?”
“No, not really. I mean, it all felt threatening. But he never actually threatened to hurt me or anything.”
Evie put her arm around my waist and burrowed against me. I held her tight against me. She was shivering.
“Finally I got an unlisted phone number,” she said. “Within a few days, he somehow got ahold of it. Sometimes when I went out, Larry would follow me. Like tonight. I'd be in a restaurant or a store or something, and I'd look up, and there he'd be, watching me. And I'd find him hanging around my office pretending to change a lightbulb or something when I was working. Sometimes at night I'd look out my window and see him parked outside, sitting there in his car. He'd stay there for hours. Just sitting there, watching my window.”
“You should've called the police.”
“I did,” she said. “They were nice to me, and understanding and all. But the Cortland cops were mostly local guys. They all knew Larry. They grew up together. Old small-town buddies, played football together in high school. So when Larry would be out there in his car, I'd call, and the police would come by in their cruiser, stop, talk with him for a while, and Larry would leave, and a few minutes after the cops left, he'd show up again. One day I went to the police station, told them he was stalking me. They asked me some questions, then told me that what Larry was doing wasn't stalking. He was surely bothering me, they said, but that was no crime, and there was really nothing they could do about it.”
“If he didn't actually threaten you with death or bodily injury,” I said, “it's not stalking according to Massachusetts law.”
“Yes,” said Evie. “That's what they said. I even talked to a lawyer about taking out a restraining order. She asked me a lot of questions and was very sympathetic, but she said no judge would go along with it. Larry and I had never been married or lived together, and he'd never hurt me or threatened to hurt me or anything like that. She said the bottom
line was, ours wasn't a domestic relationship, and besides that, I wasn't in fear of him. I guess there's no law against driving somebody crazy.”
“It sounds like a nightmare,” I said.
“It got worse,” she said. “He began leaving me gifts.”
“Gifts?”
“Jewelry, lingerie, perfume. Stuff like that. Personal, intimate things. I'd come home, and there would be a giftwrapped box on my kitchen table.”
“He got into your house?”
“Yes.”
“How? Did he have a key?”
“I don't know how he got in.”
“Jesus,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I called him. I pleaded with him to leave me alone. I threatened him. Said I'd get a lawyer, take him to court. He just laughed. See, I was playing into his hands. He'd made me call him. It seemed to convince him that I cared about him.”
“You should've told your lawyer. I mean, he was trespassing.”
“Oh, I did,” she said. “Problem was, I couldn't prove it was him leaving those gifts.” She blew out a long breath. “It got so I was convinced that I was the crazy person, that it was all my fault. I even started feeling sorry for him, guilty about the way I was treating him. I was going nuts. Fortunately, I knew I was going nuts, and I knew why. So finally I found the job at Emerson, and I left Cortland, and I didn't tell anybody where I was going. That was over three years ago, and until tonight, I thought I'd left Larry Scott behind forever.”
“You haven't seen him since you moved?”
She shook her head. “Tonight was the first time. It's way spooky.”
“Maybe it was a coincidence,” I said. “He just happened to be here and spotted you.”
“No. He followed us. I'm sure of it.”
“Well,” I said, “we'll have to put an end to it.”
“How?”
“When we get back I'll talk to some people. I know some state troopers who'll put a scare into him.”
“Well, I wouldn't mind if you did that.” Evie hugged me, then tilted up her head and kissed me. “I'm getting chilly.”
“Hot tub, glass of brandy,” I said. “I'll fire up the woodstove.”
“Mmm,” she said. “Then a warm bed.”
“Mmm, indeed,” I said.
We held hands and walked back to the car in the moonlight. The restaurant parking lot was still jammed with cars, and Friday-night laughter and loud voices filtered out from the screened windows. We'd parked in the far corner of the lot, and when we came to my car, we both stopped short.
Larry Scott was leaning against the fender.
I squeezed Evie's hand. “Stay right here,” I said. I walked up to Scott. “Get away from my car.”
He didn't move. “I need to speak to the lady.”
“The lady doesn't want to speak to you.”
He looked over my shoulder. “Come on, honey,” he said. “You gotta listen to me.”
“She's not your honey,” I said. “Now move.”
“This is none of your business, Mr. Lawyer,” he said. “This is between Evie and me.” He looked at her. “I gotta tell you about your saint. And I got money now. So—”
“I said get away from my car.” I grabbed his arm.
He shook it loose. “You don't wanna mess with me, pal.” He started toward Evie.
I stepped in front of him and put my hand on his chest. “Stay away from her.”
He hesitated for a moment, then gave me a shove with both hands.
I staggered backwards, got my balance, and went after him. I was several inches taller than him, but he was stronger and younger and quicker, and I didn't see his fist coming at me. He caught me on the side of the head and followed it with a punch to the middle of my chest, and I went down.
Lights flashed in my head, and Evie was yelling, and my brain was whirling, and then there were people around us, and loud, angry voices.
Evie knelt down beside me. “I'm sorry, baby,” she said. “Are you okay?”
I took a couple of deep breaths. My chest and my head both hurt. “Sure,” I said. “Aside from my masculine pride, I'm fine.” I sat up, rubbed my head, and looked around. “Where is he? Where'd he go?”
“Some people from the restaurant took him away,” she said. “He's gone.”
A couple of men were hovering near us. “You gonna be all right?” one of them said.
I waved my hand in the air. “I'm okay.”
“Want me to call the cops or something?”

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