The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (11 page)

Chapter 14

L
unch with Irene was interminable.

In the time it took to enter the restaurant, give his name to the hostess, and be seated by the disorienting glare of a window table, George had decided that there was no way he could tell Irene that the man who punched her in the face was actually sending a message to him. It would only alarm her, and he would be forced to tell her the whole story, which would only make it more dangerous for her. His plan was to survive a pleasant, run-of-the-mill meal, take the rest of the day off from work
. . . 
and then what? If he could somehow find either Liana or the man who was pretending to be Donnie Jenks, maybe go back to the cottage in New Essex, then he could make sure that Irene was left out of it, whatever
it
was.

Despite a sudden loss of appetite, George ordered the shredded-beef burrito as he’d planned. Plus a rum and Coke. He managed to get about half his food down even though his stomach felt like it had shrunk to the size of a shriveled lemon. George asked questions, wanting to make sure that her assailant who had identified himself as Donnie Jenks was the small skinny man with the grayish teeth and not the portly employee of Gerald MacLean. Her description left no doubt. She had been assaulted by the same man George had met in New Essex. Irene seemed strangely calm, as though she had finally seen the dark side of city life and it wasn’t so bad after all. It was clear that the incident had already become a humorous anecdote that she would be telling at cocktail parties and in the office kitchen. The more she talked about it, the more George could feel pinpricks of sweat breaking out along his hairline.

“You don’t look so hot,” she said.

“I’m just worried about you.”

“Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever see him again. My guess is that he did to me exactly what he wanted to do. Punch me and introduce himself. I was lying there on the pavement, and my first thought was that I hoped he would just kill me and not rape me first, then kill me. Isn’t that terrible? And it wasn’t a panicky thought; it felt commonsensical.
Let it be straight-up murder, because I don’t think I can handle being raped.
I thought of you too. My mother first, of course, and then you, second. I just wondered what you would do when you heard that I was dead. Isn’t it strange? I had all these thoughts in about five seconds, and then he just ups and leaves. I feel like I’ve been granted extra time. What’s that you’re drinking? A rum and Coke? Maybe I’ll have a margarita.”

George looked around for their elusive waitress.

“Seriously, you don’t look so hot. When was the last time you went to see a doctor?”

“For a hangover? Never,” George said.

“Hungover on a Monday. I haven’t asked you anything about your weekend.”

“It’s all a blur. Hey, I actually don’t feel well. I think I ate some bad calamari at Teddy’s last night. Do you mind if we cut this lunch short?”

Back on the pavement, George was able to talk Irene out of walking with him back to his office. They hugged good-bye, and George held on a little longer than he normally did. Irene pulled back and looked at him quizzically. He kissed her gently on the side of her head, just above the dark blond fuzz of her eyebrow. “You’re beautiful,” he said. “Even with the one eye.”

“Now I know you’re not feeling well.”

“No, I mean it. It’s scary what happened to you.”

“Call me later if you start to feel better. Okay? And call me if you don’t. Call me either way.”

He watched her walk away and felt a complicated surge of love and protectiveness. He knew that if he saw Donnie Jenks at that very moment he wouldn’t be scared of him, he would just be angry. When it had just been him on the chopping block, it was terrifying, but now that Irene had been brought into it, some vestige of gallantry was coursing through his veins.

G
eorge drove to New Essex. He didn’t know what else to do. There was no way to get in touch with Liana, and there was no way to track down Donnie Jenks. The only real information he had about either of them was that they were somehow connected to that run-down cottage along the shore. Donnie Jenks had been there, and Liana had at least claimed to be there, although George now took anything she had said with a very large grain of salt.

He called the office and said he felt lousy and had gone home. He put the air conditioner on high and sports radio on low. It felt good to drive, the mindless routine allowing him time to think. It was obvious that the money George had returned to MacLean was somehow directly or indirectly connected to his murder. But none of it made any sense. It was possible that little Donnie Jenks had somehow found out that George was returning the money and that he went to the house and killed MacLean to get it. But he’d had opportunities to take the money before. From Liana. According to her, he’d come right up to her at Mohegan Sun. He could have taken it then. George considered the possibility that Liana and Donnie had been working together, but that made even less sense. If they had been, then they could have just split the money. Why go to the trouble of returning it to MacLean and then killing him for it? There could be a third party involved, someone he didn’t even know, maybe someone who was working at the house and saw the suitcase full of money and decided to take it. The real Donnie Jenks? A murderous nurse in charge of the ailing wife? The niece who had let him into the house?

He cruised slowly through downtown New Essex. Tourists were out in full force, mostly retirees ambling from gift shop to ice cream stand to gift shop. George saw several men slumped on sidewalk benches, waiting for their wives to finish shopping. They had the sagging, unmoving quality of men who expected nothing momentous to ever happen to them again.

Beach Road was quiet till he reached the old stone church, where cars were double-parked along the already narrow road. He eased by, caught a glimpse of a gleaming black hearse and dark-suited men standing at the church’s entrance.

He found Captain Sawyer Lane and turned onto it. The ruts in the dirt road seemed deeper, and some were still half-filled with the previous night’s rain. Shafts of light penetrated the pine canopy, and in them George could see swirling clouds of the tiny bugs that pollute New England’s marshland in summertime. There were no cars in front of the cottage when he pulled up, but everything else looked the same. He parked his car and went up the front steps, knocked on a rotting door, its paint long worn away. He peered through a grimy side window, the inside of which was thickly covered with a spiderweb. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust, but when they did, he could see that the cottage was essentially an abandoned property. The walls were blackened by mold, and the only piece of furniture he could make out was an upholstered couch with yellow stuffing oozing from its seams. He heard a sound behind him and quickly turned, but it was just the click of his car engine cooling down.

George went around to the back of the cottage, where the rotted pier listed in the marshy water. Roped to the sturdiest section of the pier was a fiberglass boat with an outboard motor. The boat, no more than twelve or fourteen feet long, didn’t look particularly new or expensive, but it still stood out in its neglected surroundings. He tried to remember if he’d seen it the first time he’d been to the house. He remembered seeing the pier but couldn’t recall a boat.

He turned back toward the house. There had once been a screened-in porch, but half of the screen had been pulled off, and one side of the porch had sunk down to the ground. White bloated mushrooms sprouted on the two-by-fours.

The porch door was latched, but he pushed on it, and the latch gave way in its rotted wood. The door from the porch to the cottage’s interior was open but harder to move. It had come off its top hinge, and its bottom corner had dug into the floor. He kicked it, and it swung inward, ripping wood away from its frame. The smell of acrid dust billowed into George’s face. He took a step inside but decided to go no further. The floor was covered with Styrofoam ceiling tiles that over time had molded and dropped onto the cracked and blistered linoleum. The couch that he had seen from the other window looked even worse from this new angle. It was clear that it had been hollowed out by wild animals. Yellow curds of stuffing were scattered everywhere.

He turned around and went back out to his car. He might not know a lot of things about Liana Decter, but he did know that she would never have spent a night in this cottage.

He drove to the end of the lane, passing the only other property, a brown deckhouse that was almost invisible in the piney darkness. He was about to pull back onto Beach Road when he shifted the Saab into reverse instead and backed up to the driveway of the deckhouse. A recently painted mailbox had the number 22 on it, and above the mailbox was a plastic box for the
Boston Herald,
its lettering faded to the point of being almost unreadable. He drove the short distance down the driveway, scrubby weeds scraping at the underside of his car, and pulled up in front of a garage. The house was bigger than it had looked from the lane. It had a stone foundation, a barely sloping shingled roof, and boxy floor-to-ceiling windows that were as dark as the stained siding. It was impossible to tell if anyone was home, but the low hedges around the front steps had been trimmed recently, and as George got out of the car he thought he could detect movement in one of the narrow windows that ran the length of the front door.

He rang the bell and heard a deep gong from within the house. About ten seconds passed before he heard the sound of a security chain sliding into its groove. The door cracked open about three inches. Above the taut chain were two of the largest, spookiest eyes George had ever seen, so pale blue that they were almost the color of skim milk.

“Sorry to bother you,” he said. “I was looking for someone down the lane, at the cottage by the water, and I was wondering if you had any information about whether anyone’s living there.”

The woman took a half step back, and George could see her better. She could have been twenty-five or forty-five or somewhere in between. She had long, stringy hair, parted in the middle. She wore a patterned housedress, the kind that zips up the front, but it was too large for her and slid down off one shoulder. Her skin was so white, it was almost transparent. You could tell that she had once been beautiful; she had elfin features and prominent cheekbones. Her lips were wide and flat, but they were deeply dried out, lined with tiny cracks and fissures, and one side of her mouth had a white crusty appearance.

She grasped her housedress with one hand and bunched it together at her chest. “I don’t really live here,” she said. “It’s a family house,” she added.

“No worries. I was just wondering about that cottage. My friend told me she had been staying there, but I just went and looked at it, and it seems pretty unlivable. You don’t know anything about it?”

She leaned her large head forward and shifted her eyes in the direction of the cottage as though she could possibly see it from inside the house. Her head was so close to George’s that he could smell her breath, sour like wet grain. “No one lives there. At least no one that I’ve ever known has lived there.”

“Do you know who owns it?”

“No.”

“Who owns this house?” he asked and watched her lean back fractionally from the door, her puffy eyelids lowering. George knew he had asked too much.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she asked.

“No, sorry, I don’t.”

“Okay. Well, I should go.” She shut the door. A cloud had passed over the sun, and it suddenly felt like dusk under the spread of trees. In the stillness, George could hear two gulls squawking at each other over the marsh. It seemed an odd sound in the dark shadows of the pines. He returned to his car and drove back to Boston.

A
fter parking in his garage, George walked slowly back to his apartment. He planned to sleep. To ignore doorbells and raps on the door. To ignore ringing phones. He didn’t know what he planned on doing after he’d slept, but he’d worry about that then. The ride back from New Essex had been sludgy and surreal, the tiredness catching up with him.

George had lived in his neighborhood long enough to be able to instantly detect an unfamiliar car. In front of his building was a white Suzuki Samurai, its removable hard top still on. It had racing stripes on its boxy sides in black and red and the word
SAMURAI
was still stenciled in white across the top of the windshield. There were two occupants, one large and one small, behind the shielding glare of its front windshield. George slowed down, knowing with all certainty that they were there for him, and as he slowed both doors opened. From the driver’s side emerged the large, pear-shaped man George had met at MacLean’s house in Newton. The other Donald Jenks, or DJ, as MacLean had referred to him. He looked toward George, held up a hand in what seemed a gesture of friendliness, and turned toward his companion, the woman getting out of the passenger side. She was familiar to George as well. He recognized her as the young woman who had let him into MacLean’s house. The police detectives had mentioned a name, but he’d forgotten it.

“George Foss,” she said in a querulous manner.

George nodded and came forward. She moved around the Suzuki to stand by the man. “I’m sorry . . . your name?” George said.

“I’m Karin Boyd. We met yesterday in Newton. I let you into Gerry MacLean’s house.”

“Right. Of course.”

She looked less officious than she had before. She wore black capri pants and a white sleeveless shirt with a scoop neck. Her blond hair was down and slightly frizzy in the humidity. Her eyes looked smudged and red, as though she’d been crying, and George remembered that the detectives had told him that she was MacLean’s niece.

“Do you mind if we talk with you for a moment?”

The driver of the vehicle stepped forward. “We met as well. It’s Donald Jenks. DJ.” He produced an ID from his wallet, identifying himself as a private investigator. Close up, he was a handsome man, his face tanned and poreless, and with a trimmed dark mustache above his upper lip. “I’m a private detective who was employed by the deceased. You are aware that Gerald MacLean is now deceased?”