Nervous Water (18 page)

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the truth. That Norman was a good-for-nothin' bum who dealt drugs and knocked up a high-school girl and ended up in the river with a bullet in his head, and that Mary was just a child at the time, barely sixteen, and didn't want to raise a baby, so she gave it to her brother and his wife, who couldn't have kids of their own and who were wonderful, loving parents. I told her how Mary ran off with a baseball player and never came back to Moulton, and how she died of cancer, living in Iowa of all places with her second husband, a month after she turned forty.” Aunt Faith shrugged. “I told Cassandra all that. She has a right to know.”

“Yes,” I said. “I agree.”

“Well,” she said, “evidently Moses don't agree, or he would've told her himself.”

“Maybe he just never got around to it.”

“Well,” she said, “it's about time he did.”

“Was that all you talked about?”

“She didn't bother to ask about my children or my husband or the rest of our family, if that's what you mean.”

I shrugged. I took that as a hint. I would ask the polite questions before I left. “Anything besides that,” I said.

Aunt Faith turned her head and looked at me out of the corners of her eyes. “She wanted to know about Norman,” she said after a minute.

“What about him?”

“Everything. Where he came from, what he was like, if he loved Mary.” She hesitated. “Who murdered him.”

“What did you tell her.”

“I told her the truth. That he came from Kittery, quit school at sixteen, got in with some bad people, got Mary pregnant, married her, knocked her around. I told her that nobody was sad when Moze found him in the river.”

“How did Cassie respond to that?”

Faith shook her head. “I couldn't tell you. She just listened and nodded her head. She didn't say anything.”

“She wanted to know who murdered Norman?”

She nodded.

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her the truth. It's an unsolved mystery. That's all.”

“There must have been suspicions and rumors.”

“There were. Sure. Cassie asked, but I didn't tell her about them. That's all they were. Rumors. Gossip. It was a long time ago. It's over with. Nobody cares anymore.”

“It sounds like Cassie cares,” I said.

“I guess so. She kept prodding and poking. I tried to explain to her that it didn't matter, that she should just forget about it. Finally I just told her it was time she started to get on with her life.”

“What did she say to that?”

Faith looked at me and shook her head. “She got mad.”

“Mad how?”

“She stood up and gave me this—this look, like she was looking holes into me—and she actually made a fist at me. She scared me. She said I had no right to keep secrets from her. I told her I didn't have no secrets. I just had old gossip, and I wasn't going to spread it. To her, or to anybody.” She shrugged. “After a minute, Cassie calmed down. She said she was sorry she got upset. She thanked me for talking to her. And she left.”

“Aunt Faith,” I said, “those rumors and suspicions you mentioned, they might be important.”

“Important how?”

“I don't know,” I said. “The doctor thinks that Moze's heart attack was caused by somebody punching him.”

“Oh, dear,” she murmured. “Who'd do a thing like that?”

I shrugged.

“You don't think Cassie…”

“I don't know.”

“And you think old stories about Norman getting a bullet in the head had something to do with what happened to Moses?”

“I don't know that, either.”

“Well,” she said, “I ain't going to spread gossip now, any more than I did with Cassie. You can get mad, you can threaten me, you can try to trick me. It don't matter. Norman is dead and buried, and that's that. Good riddance.”

I held up both hands. “I'm not mad. Maybe you'll think about it and change your mind. If you do, will you call me? I'm a lawyer. I know the difference between gossip and fact.” I took out a business card and put it on the coffee table.

“I don't intend to think about it,” she said. “And even if I do, I can tell you right now, I ain't going to change my mind, lawyer or no lawyer.”

I smiled. “Okay,” I said. “That's fine. I understand.” I sipped from my Coke can, then leaned back in the sofa and smiled at her. “Catch me up on your life, Auntie. I want to hear all about it. Tell me about your new husband. Orville, right? Start at the beginning.”

She smiled. “Poor old Orville,” she said.

Her kids—my cousins, all four of them from her marriage to Harry—were scattered across the country, and except for Jerry, her youngest, she hardly saw any of them. After Harry died, she married Orville, a nice man from Rhode Island who owned a Ford dealership across the bay in Portsmouth. This here—Faith waved her hand around at the room where we were sitting—was Orville's old family house. He inherited it from his parents, and he'd lived here with his first wife. They were divorced. No kids.

Two years ago last March they had to move Orville to what Faith called “a retirement home.” The reminiscence wing, she said, which I understood to be for Alzheimer's patients. It was quite lovely, she said. The people who worked there were very caring.

I should have been bored, hearing all those details about people I didn't know and had no particular reason to care about. But I wasn't bored. I was interested. This was my family.

I asked Aunt Faith questions. I probed her for more details. I made her write down the names and addresses of her children, my cousins. She found her Christmas-card list and was able to give me the names and addresses of a few of my other cousins, too. Aunt Charity's kids, and Uncle Jake's.

We talked until late in the afternoon. When I finally said I had to get going, Aunt Faith stood up and walked me to the door.

I turned and gave her a hug.

“Bless you,” she said, and when I straightened up, I saw tears brimming in her eyes.

“Are you all right?” I said.

She nodded. “I get lonely sometimes. I miss old Orville. It was awfully nice of you to come visit. I hope you'll come back sometime.”

“I will,” I said. And I meant it.

Back at the car, Henry was happy to see me, and even happier to be let out so he could pee on the fence post.

As we drove north on Route 24, heading home, I told Henry about my visit with Aunt Faith.

“Cassie was there,” I said. “She was asking about her parents. Faith told her about Mary and Norman, her real parents. I'm thinking that Cassie was furious at Moze for keeping that from her all those years. I'm thinking that's why she stopped talking to him. It was about the time she married Hurley, because that's when she would've needed to get a birth certificate. That's when she would've seen Mary and Norman listed as her parents. That's when she would've looked up Aunt Faith, hoping to learn the truth about herself.”

I paused. Henry didn't say anything. He was sitting on the front seat beside me with his nose pressed against the cracked-open window. It was hard to tell whether he was paying attention to me or not.

“Maybe Cassie was so mad at Uncle Moze for keeping secrets from her,” I said to Henry, “that she broke into his house and punched him.”

Henry was ignoring me.

“Maybe that's why Moze doesn't want to talk about it,” I told him. “But even if that's true, it doesn't explain her running off and leaving her husband, if that's what she did, and it wouldn't explain him—or somebody else—doing her harm. And it certainly doesn't explain who shot Grannie Webster in the head, and whacked me, and kicked you. Hey!” I gave Henry a poke. “What do you think?”

Henry turned and looked at me with those intelligent eyes of his. Then he sort of shrugged and stuck his nose back at the crack at the top of the window.

Sunday morning. Henry was licking my face. I opened my eyes. His nose was about six inches from mine, and his ears were cocked up in full-alert mode.

Evie was snoring softly beside me. I looked at the clock. Eight fifteen. I never slept that late, even on Sundays. Neither did Evie.

I slipped out of bed, went downstairs, and let Henry out. He was limping noticeably. His leg where he'd been kicked had apparently stiffened up overnight.

I made the coffee, showered, got dressed, and took a mug of coffee back up to the bedroom.

Evie was sprawled on her belly hugging her pillow. Her long auburn hair curtained the side of her face. The sheet was twisted in her legs. Both of us had gone to sleep naked.

Her skin was silky gold. I remembered how it felt on my lips, and my breath caught in my throat.

I bent over, lifted her hair, kissed the back of her neck, and whispered, “I brought you some coffee.”

“Mm,” she mumbled into her pillow. “Nice.”

“It's on the table.”

She rolled onto her back, looked up at me, smiled sleepily, and closed her eyes. She had sworn to me that today, Sunday, she would not be going to the office. She wanted to just hang around the house, she said. Dig in the garden. Read. Listen to music. Sleep late. Take a nap.

I hadn't seen her this relaxed in a couple of weeks. It was nice to see that old sexy smile.

I pulled the sheet over her chest, kissed her forehead, told her to go back to sleep, and went back downstairs.

I poured myself some coffee, picked up the portable phone, and went out to the garden. If the phone rang, I could grab it quickly before it woke up Evie.

A mourning cloak butterfly fluttered down onto an orange daylily blossom and sat there opening and closing its translucent purple wings. A nuthatch clung upside down to the sunflower feeder. A couple of song sparrows scavenged seeds that had fallen to the ground.

Henry sprawled beside me, watching all the wild things with his predatory eyes.

After a while Henry got bored with the birds. He flopped onto his side, let out a big sigh, and began snoozing in a patch of morning sunlight.

When the phone on the table beside me rang, it sounded like a gunshot.

I picked it up and said, “Yes?”

“Mr. Coyne?”

“Yes. Who's this?”

“It's Charlene Staples. Moulton PD?”

“Sure,” I said. “How are you? What's up?”

“I'm here at Maine Medical in Portland,” she said. “Out in the parking lot, to be exact. They won't let you use a cell inside. I've just been up to your uncle's room.”

“In the ICU, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was hoping—”

“How is he?”

“Huh? Oh. He seems okay. I heard that he had a little setback, but the nurses said he's doing better. Something about adjusting his medication. They said he was complaining about his eggs being too runny and asking for tide charts. He seemed pretty feisty to me.”

“Well, good,” I said. “You said you were hoping…?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was hoping he'd tell me who broke into his house and punched him.” She paused. “He won't.”

“Won't?” I said. “Or can't?”

“Well,” she said, “my guess is won't. He refused to say anything one way or the other. When I walked into his room, he looked me up and down, checked out my chest pretty carefully, and gave me a big grin. I asked him how he was feeling and he said he wasn't complaining, but when I told him I was a police officer and asked him to tell me who hit him, he just turned his head away and wouldn't talk.”

“As if he knew but wasn't saying.”

“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”

“Why wouldn't he just say he didn't know?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Maybe he doesn't want to lie.”

“Is he…” I fumbled for the right word. “Does he seem to be competent?”

“The nurses seemed to think he's plenty competent.”

“I know what you're thinking,” I said.

“What am I thinking?”

“You're thinking it was Cassie who broke into his house, smashed up those photographs, and punched him in the chest. You're thinking my uncle saw her and recognized her and is refusing to be a witness against his own daughter.”

“That's exactly what I'm thinking,” she said. “He said it was Cassie the day they brought him in. So why won't he say it now?”

“Because what he said that day was just a hallucination in the mind of a man who'd just had a heart attack and was drugged to the gills?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe she really did it.”

“So you're calling me because you think he'll talk to me.”

“I'm calling you,” she said, “because, to tell you the truth, I can't think of anything else to do. I've been investigating my ass off here, and all I'm left with is some busted-up photographs and your half-dead uncle for a witness.”

“Tell you what,” I said. “I was going to visit him today anyway. I'll ask him what he remembers. If he tells me, I'll ask him if he'll tell you, or if he minds if I tell you. I'll do it however he wants. Okay?”

“You're going to play lawyer?”

“I never
play
lawyer,” I said. “I
am
a lawyer. I'll respect Moze's wishes, protect his privacy, that's all. I'd do that whether I was a lawyer or not.”

“Well,” she said, “whatever. I'm only a simple country girl, you know. I just want to catch criminals.”

I laughed. “Hardly simple.”

I told Charlene that I probably wouldn't get there until early afternoon. She said she wanted to be there when I was there. We agreed that I'd call her cell phone when I knew what time I'd arrive, and she'd meet me at the hospital.

 

I called her right after I drove across the bridge that spanned the Piscataqua River, which separated New Hampshire from Maine. It was a little after two on that Sunday afternoon. She answered her cell phone on the first ring. I told her where I was. She said she'd meet me in the hospital parking lot.

When I got there, I found her leaning against the wall outside the main entrance smoking a cigarette. She was wearing snug-fitting blue jeans and a snug-fitting T-shirt and sandals. Her toenails were painted pink. No gun, no badge.

I leaned against the wall beside her. “I remember the days when patients could smoke in their hospital rooms,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled. “You must be way older than me.”

“Oh,” I said, “I was just a little kid in those days.”

She tapped her forefinger on her forehead. “What happened to you?”

I decided not to tell her the whole complicated story. I figured Grannie Webster's murder and Uncle Moze's heart attack were connected. The link was Cassie. Horowitz knew about Uncle Moze, and I'd mentioned Charlene Staples to him, too. But it wasn't my place to open up the Webster piece of the case to Charlene. If it needed to be done, Horowitz would do it.

I touched my butterfly bandage. Under it was a lump the size of Mount Monadnock. At least that's how it felt. “This?” I said. “Nothing. Tripped on the rug, hit my head on a chair. Clumsy.”

She smiled. “You don't strike me as the clumsy type.” She stubbed her cigarette out in the tub of sand. “Let's go.”

We took the elevator up to the ICU. When we stepped out, she said, “I'll be in the waiting room.”

“Lest you inadvertently eavesdrop on a privileged conversation,” I said.

She smiled. “Exactly.”

“I'll come get you if he's willing to talk to you.”

She nodded and headed down the corridor.

As I turned the corner to the hallway leading to the ICU, a man coming around the corner bumped into me.

“Hey,” he said. “Watch where you're going.”

“You, too,” I said.

Then I saw who it was. Uncle Jake. His face was red, and his eyes were slitted and angry. His hands were balled into hard fists.

He pulled back and glared at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Visiting my uncle.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Me, too.”

“How is he?”

“Alive, unfortunately.” And with that, he shouldered his way past me, went over to the elevator, and began jabbing at the button.

“Nice talking to you,” I called to him.

He looked at me, shook his head, and turned back to watch the light over the elevator. He was clenching and unclenching his fists, as if he were disappointed that he hadn't had the chance to hit somebody.

I rang the bell to the ICU, and after a minute, a nurse opened the door. I didn't recognize her.

“I'm Moses Crandall's nephew,” I said. “My name is Brady Coyne. I'm here to visit him.”

She frowned for a moment, then said, “Oh, yes. We've talked on the phone.” She hesitated. “He just had a visitor. You might find him a bit, um, agitated.”

“His brother?” I said. “Jacob?”

She nodded.

“What happened?”

“I don't know. They were talking. Then Mr. Crandall—Jacob, that is, the brother—he started yelling, and then he come storming out of there. I went in to check on my patient. I was afraid, a man with a heart condition…”

“Is he all right?”

She nodded. “He was spittin' mad about something. Didn't say what. I asked if I could get him something, and he said a glass of whiskey would be nice. So I guess he's okay. Why don't you come on in and see for yourself.” She held the door open for me.

I went over to Uncle Moze's cubicle and pulled up a chair beside his bed. He was lying on his side, facing away from me. “Hey? Uncle Moze? You awake?”

He turned and looked at me. “Hey, sonnyboy.” His voice was a gravelly whisper. “What in hell are you doing here?”

“I needed to see for myself that they were taking good care of you.”

He lifted a hand and let it fall. “No complaints.”

“The food's okay?”

“Food is food.”

“Jake was here, huh?”

“Don't know why he bothered,” he said. “Come to harass me, is all.”

“Harass you about what?”

He shook his head. “Nothin'. It don't matter. Jake's a hostile sonofabitch, that's all. Always got some chip or other on his shoulder. I told him, I said, don't bother coming back here. Told him I didn't want to see him no more, brother or no brother. The hell with him.”

“Is that why he got mad?”

“I s'pose so.”

I hitched my chair closer. “Uncle Moze,” I said, “I want to know who did this to you.”

“Who did what?”

“Hit you.”

“Somebody hit me?”

“Somebody punched you in the chest. It caused you to have a heart attack. That's why you're here.”

He frowned. “I got punched, huh?”

I nodded. “Tell me what you remember.”

He shook his head. “I don't remember nothing.”

“It was early in the morning,” I said. “You were home in your bedroom sleeping. You heard something. You got up and went into the living room. Somebody was there. They punched you in the chest and you had a heart attack.”

He shrugged. “If you say so. I got no memory of it.”

“Something woke you up, caused you to go out into the living room. Remember?”

He shook his head. “Nope.”

“Maybe you didn't see them,” I said. “Maybe it was just a shadow. Maybe they said something.”

“I don't remember nothing about it, sonnyboy. You can keep askin' me in as many different ways as you want, but I ain't going to suddenly remember. It's just a blank. Nothin'.”

“Well,” I said, “if it comes back to you, tell me, okay?”

“It don't make no difference anyways,” he said. “I know what's going on. I'm a goner, that's what. I'm on my last legs.”

“Oh, you're a tough old buzzard,” I said. “You've got a lot of mileage left on you.” I bent closer to him. “Uncle Moze, listen to me. This is important. Don't hold back on me, okay? Was it Cassie? Is she the one who hit you?”

“Why in hell would you think that?” he said.

“I don't think it. I just wondered.”

He narrowed his eyes at me for a moment. “Leave Cassie out of it,” he said. “I'm tired. Go away.” He rolled away from me.

After a minute, his breathing became slow and regular. If he wasn't sleeping, he was pretending to sleep. Either way, he was done with me.

I stood up, gave his shoulder a squeeze, and walked out of the ICU.

 

Charlene Staples was standing in the little waiting room with her back to the door, looking out the window.

“Hey,” I said.

She turned around and arched her eyebrows.

I shook my head.

She shrugged. “You think he really doesn't remember what happened to him?”

“I don't think it matters whether he remembers or not,” I said. “If he does, he's made up his mind not to tell us. If you want to catch the bad guy, it looks like you're going to have to do it without Moze's help.”

“Oh, never fear,” she said, “I'll catch her.”