Authors: William G. Tapply

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Shadow of Death (9 page)

BOOK: Shadow of Death

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“That's ridiculous.”

“Think about it.” I sat back, folded my arms, and looked at him.

Randy glowered back at me for a minute. Then he shook his head and smiled. “Damn you, you're plagiarizing from the Old Testament.”

I shrugged. “I happen to know that Judge Kolb is a big fan of the Old Testament. So what do you think Susan would say?”

Randy let out a long breath and nodded. “She loves those damn paintings. She'd rather I had them than they got ruined.”

“Let her have them, then,” I said.

“I hate to lose,” he growled.

“If it's your idea,” I said, “it's not losing.”

He looked up at the ceiling for a minute. Then he leaned back in his chair and sighed. “Okay. Fuck it. She can have the damn watercolors. I wouldn't know what to do with them anyway. I don't even like them. Seagulls and sand dunes and old rowboats and shit.”

“You want to think about it for a couple days?”

He hesitated. “You think Susan's going to change her mind?”

“About the divorce, you mean?”

He nodded.

“No,” I said. “Susan's got her mind made up.”

Randy waved the back of his hand. “I don't want to think about any of this crap anymore. Let's just get it over with.”

“I'll give Attorney Cooper a call, then,” I said. “We'll work out some language for it.”

“I hope she appreciates it,” said Randy.

“Attorney Cooper?”

“Susan,” he said.

“I'm sure she will,” I said. “But it's not going to change her mind about divorcing you.”

After I walked Randy to the door, I went back into my office and changed into my jeans and sneakers. Henry roused himself from his midday snooze, took a few laps at the water dish Julie kept full for him, and looked at me with big hopeful eyes. He always assumed that jeans and sneakers for me meant an adventure for him.

I told him to be patient. If he behaved, we'd go somewhere in the car.

With that, he promptly lay down in front of the door and plopped his chin on his paws.

The word “car” was one of those magic dog words that bore deep and complex meaning for Henry. “Dinner” and “run” and “outside” were others. These magic words, I imagined, conjured up in his mind entire sagas. They contained the collective unconscious of his species. They were imbedded deep in his DNA and had been passed down through countless generations of Brittany spaniels.

Well, maybe not. Brittanies, after all, originated in the
province of Brittany where French had always been the primary language.

Pavlovian conditioning, more likely.

I called Evie's office, and when her secretary gave me her voice mail, I told her that I had Henry with me, that I wasn't sure what time I'd be home, but that I hoped she wouldn't eat supper without me, and especially that I loved her.

When Henry and I went out to the reception area, Julie looked me up and down. “You're really leaving, huh?”

I nodded.

“Going fishing, are we?”

“Sort of.”

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You're off sleuthing again, aren't you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess I am.”

“And which client is this for?”

“It's not really for a client,” I said. “It'sâ”

Julie held up her hand. “You going to be gone for a week, like you were that time when Evie ran off, or that other time you went to Maine, almost got yourself killed? Or is this one of those adventures where you're going to keep calling me every day telling me to cancel your appointments? I just need to know.”

“I'll be in the office tomorrow, bright and early.”

She nodded skeptically. “Or else you'll call, right?”

“Right,” I said. “I'll keep you posted. Definitely.”

She rolled her eyes. “Did you talk to Evie?”

“I left her a message. Told her I loved her, might be a few minutes late for supper.”

“Well,” said Julie, “I suppose that's progress.”

And on that relatively positive note, Henry and I got the hell out of there.

NINE

I
opened the sunroof so Henry could stretch his neck and snuffle the breeze, loaded the CD player with Beethoven piano concerti, and aimed my BMW at Southwick, New Hampshire.

This promised to be one more in a long series of Brady Coyne wild-goose chases, windmill jousts, and white-whale hunts. But Gordon Cahill's deathâmake that murderâwas a leaden weight in my heart. I needed to know if it was connected to the job I'd given him, and the only way I could think of to learn that was to talk to Albert Stoddard.

If I was going to talk to Albert, I had to find him. The only way I knew to find him was to find his hunting camp in or near Southwick and hope he was there, hiding out from the turmoil of his wife's campaign, fishing in his pond, maybe, or reading an old history book, or writing a new one. If I knew Albert, he'd be amused when I told him that Jimmy D'Ambrosio had asked me to hire a PI to tail him, and he'd surely be saddened to learn that Gordon Cahill had been killed.

In the back of my mind, of course, I acknowledged the possibility that Albert knew all about it.

Okay, the possibility, even, that Cahill had caught Albert doing something scandalous and unforgiveable in his hunting camp, and that Albert had murdered him.

The fact that he had skipped class troubled me.

From Charles Street I curled onto Storrow Drive, which took me along the Charles River and past Fresh Pond and the Alewife T station to Route 2, where the afternoon rush-hour traffic had not yet thickened, and from there I had clear sailing.

At the rotary in Concord I turned onto 2A, and a little over an hour after I'd pulled out of my parking garage, I found myself entering the Willard Brook State Forest on Route 119 west of Townsend. Here the woods were dark and cool. The roadway was lined with tall pines and maples and oaks that arched overhead, forming a narrow, shaded tunnel. The road twisted and turned back on itself as it followed the random meanderings of the rocky little brook that gave the forest its name.

By now Henry was pacing in the backseat, so I pulled into a picnic area and let him out. He headed straight for the brook and flopped on his belly in the shallow water. I sat at a picnic table and waited for him. Henry drank lying down, then stood up, shook a shower of water out of his fur, and peed on several tree trunks.

When we headed back to the car, Henry was soaked. I always kept my old army blanket spread over the back seat for him. He knew that the front seats were off-limits. We had a territorial understanding about the car, Henry and I. He'd probably growl at me if I tried to sit in back. A couple
growls from me early in our relationship had established the front as mine.

I pulled back onto the road and continued on. I drove slowly. I was looking for the place where a load of buckshot had blown out Gordon Cahill's left front tire and he'd swerved off the pavement and slammed into the tree. I was heading west. According to Roger Horowitz, Gordie had been traveling eastâheading home to Boston, I assumed, from wherever he'd beenâthe night he died, so I expected to see a ring of yellow crime-scene tape somewhere alongside the eastbound lane on my left.

I'd've missed it entirely if it hadn't been for the pair of black rubber skid tracks that were burned into the pavement in front of me. They began to my left in the eastbound lane and veered acutely across my side of the road, and it was easy to visualize the little tan Corolla traveling at high speed suddenly losing control, and Gordie standing on his brakes and fighting the wheel as he skidded and squealed across the incoming lane.

There was no crime-scene tape. Either the state police experts had finished their investigation here, or else Roger Horowitz had been unable to convince them that the scene was worth securing and investigating. By the time they'd figured out that a load of buckshot had blown out Gordie's front tire, it would've been too late.

I pulled over a hundred feet past the place where the burnt rubber angled across the pavement, told Henry to wait in the car, got out, and walked back.

I wasn't the first one who'd tromped around there. The soft sandy shoulder was trampled with footprints. EMTs working to get Cahill out, tow-truck operators hooking up
the blackened corpse of the Corolla, cops poking around for evidence, passersby sating their morbid curiosities.

Even with all the footprints, you couldn't miss the pair of deep troughs in the sand where Cahill's little car had slewed off the pavement. They ended abruptly at a white scar about bumper-high on a pine tree that was as thick as a telephone pole.

There were shards of glass and flakes of chrome scattered on the ground at the base of the tree. But what struck me was the rectangular patch of black on the sand. It was roughly the shape of a small carâa small car that had spilled its gasoline and burned with enough heat to sear the sandy soil.

As I interpreted it, Cahill's Corolla had hit the tree so hard that it actually bounced back two or three feetâwith enough force, I guessed, to rupture the gas tank. The gasoline spilled onto the sand, and some spark from the engine ignited it, and it exploded in a great, sudden, black-and-orange ball of flameâwith Gordie behind the wheel, cocooned and imprisoned by his air bag and his seat belt.

I wondered if he was still alive then, if it was the flames and the heat that killed him.

I hoped to hell he was unconscious, at least, when he gasped fire into his lungs.

Well, maybe it hadn't happened that way. But that's how I imagined it, and it made me shudder.

The medical examiner would know, and I intended to convince Roger Horowitz to tell me, even if it meant promising him information I couldn'tâor wouldn'tâgive him. I could always renege.

I scooched there beside the road thinking about Gordon
Cahill and imagining the horror of what had happened to him. If I'd had any reluctance to do whatever was necessary to find Albert Stoddard and learn what I could about where Gordie had been and what he'd been doing on the Sunday night he went up in flames, seeing this place dispelled it.

I just needed to know if Gordie had been on Albert's case the night he died.

I went back to my car and slid behind the wheel. Henry licked the back of my neck. He was happy to see me. I was happy to see him, too. I reached behind me and patted his muzzle. It felt good to be loved unconditionally. It felt very good to be alive.

I started up the car, pulled back onto the road, and resumed my trek to Southwick, New Hampshire, backtracking Gordie's route, I assumed. Route 119 emerged from the western end of the Willard Brook State Forest at Route 31, which went south to north. I turned right, heading north, and entered New Hampshire a few minutes later. When I got to Route 101, an east-west highway that paralleled the Massachusetts border about twenty miles into New Hampshire, I went leftâwesterly.

A few minutes later, as I approached Mount Monadnock and the range of lesser mountains around it, the highway began climbing and then descending through some foothills. I remembered that on Saturday when I talked to Cahill on his cell phone, he said he was driving in some hills, and we'd eventually lost our connection.

I figured these were those hills.

Assuming I was tracing his route, assuming Gordie knew what he was doing, and assuming he'd been looking for Albert Stoddard that day, it was a good bet he'd been heading
to Southwick, most likely to Albert's hunting lodge on the pond, where he took some photos and later e-mailed them to me.

When I found myself approaching the outskirts of Peter-borough I pulled over and conferred with Rand McNally. According to Mr. McNally, the way to Southwick involved several secondary roads and many turns. I studied the route until I had it memorized.

A woman would have asked directions. Not me. We guys pride ourselves on our map-reading skills and our uncanny sense of direction. We never get lost.

Sometimes we discover creative ways to get there. But we always know where we're going.

The countryside approaching Southwick was pastoral as hell, especially now, in late September, with the peak of the foliage season only a week or two away. The serpentine two-lane roads were lined with ancient stone walls and clumps of white birches and giant sugar maples aglow in scarlet and gold. In places the rolling wooded landscape opened to a sloping green pasture where a few cows or horses or sheep grazed under the watchful eyes of a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse and a weathered, tin-roofed barn.

The winding road into Southwick followed alongside a rocky stream. I found it hard to keep my eyes off the water. The stream was running low, but even so, I spotted some delicious little runs and pools that had to harbor trout. Brookies, maybe, New England's only native trout. The male fish would be in their spawning colors, more beautiful even than the New England autumn foliage that reflected on the water.

I drove slowly. The stream passed under narrow bridges in a few places where dirt roads cut away from the paved
road I was driving on, and it was hard to resist the temptation to turn onto one of those dirt roads and stop, get out of my car, and peer over the bridge railing. Surely I'd spot a trout or two.

I always kept an old fiberglass fly rod and a box of trout flies and a pair of hip boots in my trunk for unexpected trout streams. You should never spit in the face of serendipity.

Well, maybe on my way home â¦

The village of Southwick appeared without warning. One minute I was driving alongside trout streams and past meadows and through forests, and the next minute I found myself in what I guessed was the heart of the village, such as it was.

Southwick was as Ellen remembered itâtiny and quiet and postcard-prettyâand once again I was struck by the many different worlds that lay within a two-hour drive of my townhouse on Beacon Hill in the heart of the city.

Like many New England villages, Southwick was an old mill town that had grown up on the banks of running water. Sometime back in the early nineteenth century, the little stream that paralleled the road I'd followed into town had been dammed to provide water power for a factory. The old red-brick building that had housed the town's industry was still there, rising straight up from the banks of a pretty millpond. Now the margins of the pond were a little manicured park, with fieldstone paths and well-mulched flower gardens and mowed grass.

According to a sign, the old factory building that overlooked the millpond had been converted into an independent-living facility. During the Civil War they had manufactured gunpowder there.

I crept through the town, taking its measure. The window in the general store promised beer and wine, night crawlers
and shiners, newspapers and rental videos, along with its very own ATM machine. The carved sign hanging in front of the Southwick Inn across the street announced that it had been accommodating wayfarers since 1789. There was a real estate office, a two-bay auto-repair shop, a Congregational church, a garden store, a library. I counted two antique shops and one art gallery. On a little round hill overlooking a cemetery studded with weathered headstones stood a big square white building that had once probably been a grange hall and now, according to the sign, housed both the town offices and the police station.

Beyond the cemetery, the town's main drag sloped down the hill and curved back into the forest.

And that, apparently, was the entire village of Southwick.

I wondered what the kids did for excitement.

BOOK: Shadow of Death

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