Liberty or Death (6 page)

"It's that obvious?"

"Been in restaurants since I left the army," he said. "You notice things."

Carrying my basin, I limped upstairs, took off my shoes and socks, filled it with water, and sat on the edge of the bed, soaking my feet. Then, unable to keep my eyes open, I dried my feet and lay down. I was asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

At eleven p.m. I was parked in the garage of a small ranch-style house about ten miles south of Merchantville. As promised, the door had opened upon the command of the remote in my glovebox, and, as instructed, I had closed the door behind me and stayed in the car, waiting. Normally, I didn't wait well. I inherited impatience genes from both sides of the family, and in combination, they make me as restless as a Mexican jumping bean. But tonight, after working breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Mother Theresa's, the only thing that was holding me up was the steering wheel. I didn't care if the trooper I was supposed to be meeting never showed up. All I wanted to do was sleep.

I was wrested from Morpheus's gentle arms when the lights came on and the garage door began to lift with a series of creaks and moans so fearsome it sounded like a metallic monster rising from the depths. By the time the door had opened, I was a trembling wreck. These days, my nerves seemed too close to the surface. I was used to being driven and under stress; what I wasn't used to was this constant state of subhysteria, this sense that anything could knock me off balance and send me spinning out of control.

Under the circumstances, it wasn't an abnormal reaction. Two days ago, I had been laughing at my own bridal giddiness and reflecting on the chain of circumstances which had led me to be marrying Andre.

Couples always like to ask each other, "How did you two meet?" Our answer is a bit of a conversation stopper. We met because he was the detective on the case when my sister Carrie was murdered. We'd started as enemies and look where we'd ended up. Or would have ended up. My whole life had been put on hold. All I could do was wait and hope, things I was terribly bad at. And trembling atop the whipped cream of my frenzied nerves like the cherry on a bad sundae, was fear. The fear that something would go wrong and I'd never see him again. Fear that the baby I was carrying would grow up without a father. I was so scared I felt like my insides had been through a Mixmaster. And I didn't do scared. I was a tough guy.

If I was this consumed by fear, how must it be for him? It had been a revelation for me, his overwhelming joy at impending fatherhood. Such a contrast to my own ambivalence. I'd been sulky, confused, feeling trapped by this accidental pregnancy. His delight and unconditional acceptance had been like a life raft, sustaining me through my confusion. I hoped that now it would do the same for him, that however miserable his circumstances, the thought of me and the baby, waiting, might give him strength.

Oliver, Mason, or Claudine. Not names I would have picked. When he found out I might be pregnant, they had rolled off Andre's tongue with a fluency and readiness that stunned me. While I was still dithering about being pregnant at all, he was happily naming our child. While I was still in a snit because I hadn't gotten to choose whether I would be a mother, he was dragging me into the children's book sections of bookstores and picking out "must have" books for the baby. While I was throwing up and feeling too miserable to live another day, he was pricing fleecey baby bags and L.L. Bean baby backpacks. He had already begun to make a tiger-maple cradle.

Though he was the constant centerpiece of my life, I skittered over my thoughts of Andre the way I'd rush across slippery ice, not pausing for fear I'd trip on a memory and fall, unable to regain my footing. It had happened to me once today. Catching sight of a departing man's broad back and shoulders, his bristling dark hair, I'd temporarily become deaf and blind to the clamoring of my hungry customers. Instead, I'd seen Andre, my tough, burly state trooper, kneeling in the breakdown lane beside the car, oblivious to the passing traffic, asking me to be his wife.

I shut my eyes against the wash of tears, biting my lip and fighting for control as a nondescript brown car pulled in swiftly beside me. As soon as the garage door was shut, a slim, handsome, red-haired woman came around to knock on my window. I opened my own door and got out to meet her. My legs felt shaky and undependable. I felt like a total scatterbrain next to her neat, self-contained calm. Maybe it only made sense that I wouldn't feel like myself, when I was pretending to be someone else.

"Norah Kavanaugh," she said, shaking my hand firmly. "You look beat. Hard day?"

"I'm not as young as I used to be. If they had asked me to carry one more teeny sandwich, I would have burst into tears and quit."

"One day and you're ready to quit?" Maybe she didn't mean it, but I heard an implicit criticism of someone who was ready to quit after just one day. Another time, I might have gotten my back up, but tonight I was too tired to take offense. She didn't know me, and probably my tenacity wasn't legendary in the state of Maine yet. It wasn't the kind of information Jack Leonard was likely to share. I shrugged. It must have been a pitiful gesture, because she actually put a comforting hand on my shoulder. "None of us do very well," she said, "when stuff like this is going on."

She pulled out a notebook and flipped it open. "Got anything for me?"

I shifted my aching shoulders and searched my weary brain for information. "I don't know. Maybe." I told her about the break-in where the guns had allegedly been taken, pleased to note that she wrote that down, and then I told her about Jed Harding's mother, Mary, and the trouble she was having with his son, Lyle. She wrote that down, too.

"There are a lot of people, not just militia people, who think Jed Harding's a saint. They can't understand why we don't let him go."

I realized that in the craziness of the last two days I'd never learned about Jed Harding, other than his name and the fact that Andre's kidnappers had demanded that he be let out of jail in exchange for Andre's release. Five pounds of remedial reading about militias and the religious right, black helicopters and the New World Order, and one sentence about Harding. "They never told me anything about Jed Harding. What's his story, anyway?"

"Jack didn't tell you?"

"Jack wants me to stay home and crochet pink and blue baby blankets."

Kavanaugh's eyes dropped to my waist. "You're pregnant?"

It sounded a little too much like, "You're stupid." I folded my arms over my chest and glared. "The failure rate of even the best birth control is eight to ten percent. I'm a statistic."

"Don't get your back up," she said calmly. "I'll bet Lemieux's happy as a clam digger at low tide. He loves kids. I just didn't know and I like to know the facts about my witnesses." She stopped and stared down at the floor.

Funny. She thought I was her witness. I thought I was a spy and she was my contact. Possibly we were both wrong and I was just wasting our time on this wild-goose chase when we should have been doing more useful things. I could have been unpacking my new office while she went out hunting bad guys. There were always plenty of bad guys and there was always plenty of work to be done, especially with the whole office in chaos.

How odd,
I thought. That was the first time I'd thought about work—my own work—in days. Normally, I'm an obsessive workaholic. And since we'd just moved the whole shebang from outside Boston up to Maine, there was plenty to obsess and be a workaholic about. Yet despite the boxed-up files and the waiting desks and cabinets, I'd thought about little beyond pie and coffee all day. But awash with hormones and steeped in fear, who knew what I was turning into?

"Jed Harding," I reminded her.

"Vietnam vet," she said. "Fifty-one years old. High-strung. Taciturn. Weird but decent. Partially disabled. Six years ago, he was knocked off his feet by a sweet young girl who came to town to work in a restaurant for the summer, name of Paulette. Mother Theresa's restaurant, same place you are. She got pregnant. They got married. But when the baby was born, it wasn't all right. The baby boy, Lyle, was born with spina bifida. Harding was convinced that the baby's problems were a result of his exposure to Agent Orange while he was in Vietnam, and he went to war against the VA, trying to make them responsible for the baby's care. The harder he pushed, the more they resisted."

She shrugged. "The mother stuck around a while, trying to care for the boy, but she was young and interested in having fun. Eventually, seeing that her summer adventure had landed her in a lot more trouble than she could handle, she moved out, started seeing other guys. I guess Harding and the child were both pretty upset about it." She hesitated. "Recently, she... uh... disappeared into the sunset, leaving Harding and his elderly mother with this poor little boy."

"Sad," I said, "but how did he end up in jail?"

"Guess they pushed his buttons one time too many," Kavanaugh said. "The VA, I mean. Government decides they will cover Vietnam veterans' spina bifida children, some Agent Orange exposure thing, but some asshole down at Togus—that's the state VA hospital—decides he still won't take care of Harding's kid and won't approve Harding's paperwork. Kid needs a lot of stuff, special braces, physical therapy, things like that. So, after he tries working through the proper channels and running into a brick wall every time, Harding loads up his shotgun, gets in his pickup, and drives down to Chelsea to have a chat with this guy at the VA."

"And?"

"Shoots out the guy's window and executes his desk, his bookcase, and his chair. I think the only reason the bureaucrat survived is that he jumped out the window while Harding was reloading."

"No bail?"

She shook her head. "Can't let him out. Harding swears that he'll go right back there and finish the job."

"So his mother is left holding the kid, so to speak?"

"So to speak. And she's none too healthy herself. Nor young. He's a sweet little boy, is what I hear. Smart as a whip. Great disposition. Only thing is that he can't walk very well, so he's stuck in a wheelchair. And maybe he could, if he'd gotten adequate medical care. Still might. I don't know. It's a lousy business. And I can't help thinking..." She stopped. Whatever it was, she wasn't ready to share it with me. Not surprising. Cops don't share their speculations with civilians. She tapped her notebook with the pencil. "Anything else?"

Even though I had no idea what it meant, I told her about Roy Belcher and his mysterious message about someone named Jimmy needing the truck. I told her that the pastor of the Salvation Baptist Church had expressed sympathy for Jed Harding over his bran muffin and coffee, and the chair of the Board of Selectmen, Germaine Janelle, had expressed a similar sympathy over a piece of apple pie. "I might hear more," I said, "but Theresa won't let me work in the bar."

She nodded. "I don't think you'd want to," she said. "You know you're right in the hotbed of militia sympathy. If they could, many of the good citizens of Merchantville would form their own state, the Democratic Republic of Merchantville. Not, given the way these guys think, that it would be very democratic. Unless you're a guy..." She smiled wryly. "Which we aren't. Since the papermill closed, there's been a lot of paranoia around here, which has gotten worse with this talk about a national park or a national forest. Lot of people aren't too keen on more government employees telling them when and where they can and can't do things they've done all their lives."

She cleared her throat. "Excuse me. Allergies. I'm afraid I tend to make speeches, but this is a serious subject and you need to know what you've gotten yourself into. Paranoia's what feeds into this militia frenzy. Poverty, paranoia, change, fear of outsiders, and fear of change, anger against the government. Bad things happen, people start looking for someone to blame. Enact some very basic, reasonable gun control, and suddenly people see a conspiracy to disarm them so the United Nations can take over the world." She paused. "You know about this stuff?" I nodded. "We've been trying to get some insiders... infiltrate the groups... but the people who are attracted to this stuff, they tend to be pretty paranoid. I wouldn't be surprised to find out the whole town's in on it. Lemieux could be in the town hall basement."

She frowned and rubbed her neck. She looked good, but she looked tired. Everyone was working this thing 24/7. Cops don't like it when one of their own is at risk. "And that shooting in Jackman didn't help any, though any time you've got a crazy woman with a gun, the cops can't win. Sorry. Don't get me going on this stuff. I'm pretty much a law-and-order type myself. Guess that's kind of obvious, isn't it? Just because the system doesn't always work doesn't mean we have to tear it down, or that if we disagree, we get to opt out of following the rules. Better we should work to fix it." She smiled. "I ought to carry a soapbox, huh?"

She had a nice smile. It looked friendly, but Andre said some of her coworkers called her the Ice Maiden. I could understand that. I'd been called some names myself when men found out I wasn't a sweet and easygoing pushover. I'd been called "bitch" often enough I could have come to believe it was my name. It used to sting until I started regarding it as an acronym. BITCH. Babe In Total Charge of Herself. And Kavanaugh had it worse.