The Girl with a Clock for a Heart: A Novel (16 page)

Then he told her about his trip down to Florida and what had happened during the past two days. When he got to the part about staking out Liana’s house, George said: “Now you need to tell me about that guy who was there.”

“Dale.”

“Right, Dale.”

“Okay. I suppose you’ve earned this, but you’re not going to like it much.”

“He’s a friend of yours?”

“Sort of.”

“He’s a boyfriend?”

“Not really, but in a way. Just let me tell it. First off, as I said, my dad gambles. Majorly. He used to go to the races, but then he started betting on sports through a bookie in Tampa. Honestly, I don’t even know the name of the guy he calls, but he used to be on the phone all the time, more than me when I was in middle school. He owed a lot of money, and when he wouldn’t pay it, scary guys would show up. And one of those guys—”

“—was Dale.”

“Right. He was a collector, and he used to come by pretty frequently. He’s very good at inflicting pain and not leaving any marks apparently—”

“That’s not what he told me. He told me there’d be marks.”

Liana gripped his forearm. “I’m sorry you had to deal with him. I’m sure that was less than pleasant. He’d been away for a while. He wasn’t around the summer before school started ’cause my dad had started going to Gamblers Anonymous. That’s partly why I felt I could leave and go to Mather. I told my dad I was driving cross-country with a friend, and that I’d call him and check in. He said he’d be fine. I made him promise he would keep going to Gamblers Anonymous, but he didn’t make it.”

“That’s why Dale was back.”

“Partly, but he was also back looking for me. Can I have one of those? I’m out.” George lit a cigarette for her. “This is the hard part to talk about,” she continued. “Things got really bad for a time, and we owed a lot of money. Dad owed it, really, but I felt it was my problem as well. Dale was talking about severely disabling him, maybe even killing him. Dale knew me ’cause he would come to the house. And he liked me. So, eventually, an arrangement got worked out.”

“What kind of arrangement?”

“What do you think?”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah.”

“How old were you?”

“When it started, sixteen, but then I got my dad to quit gambling, pretty much my whole senior year, so Dale wasn’t around so much.”

“Jesus.”

“You think I’m sick?”

“No . . . yeah, I think
it’s
sick. I think Dale is sick and your dad. It’s awful. Jesus, I’m so sorry. For you.”

“Well, it wasn’t
Little House on the Prairie,
but it’s over now. My dad’s going to quit gambling—he already has. Dale’ll stop sniffing around—”

“Did you and he, this Christmas . . .”

“Yeah, that’s why he showed up, but
no,
nothing happened. It’s weird, even though it was coercion, in a strange way he really does think of me as his girlfriend. He protects me. That’s why he went after you this afternoon. My dad spotted you in the car out the window, and he called Dale, and Dale did his thing. I wasn’t even at the house today.”

“There must be something you can do about it.”

“Don’t worry. It’s over with. Let’s talk about something else, or let’s get out of here. This place is depressing.”

They stood outside in the dark parking lot, a spill of yellow stars above them. Liana had parked her car next to George’s, and they stood between them, hugging and kissing. George felt like he was a million miles and a million years from any other part of his life.

“I’ll only say good-night tonight if I know I can see you tomorrow,” he said.

“Okay. But you need to go back to Mather eventually.”

“I don’t know. Maybe I could stay here with you.”

“I won’t let you stay here. I don’t care how much you like me, this is not a place for anyone.”

“What? Florida? Or with you?”

“Both.”

“Florida’s not so bad. Where else can you buy fireworks and oranges at the same place?”

“Ah, fireworks and oranges. The perfect definition of my state. Let me tell you: oranges are not all they’re cracked up to be. I used to have to drive past a juice factory, and do you know how bad they smell, those places? Made me never want to see another orange, let alone drink a glass of orange juice. And don’t let me get started on fireworks.”

“What have you got against fireworks?”

“They’re meaningless. A bunch of people ooh and aah at some stupid explosions in the sky. A few flashy lights and everyone’s IQ drops twenty points.”

“I don’t remember you being so cynical.”

“Now you see the real me.”

He hugged her tighter, and she kissed his collarbone. “Will you come and see me tomorrow at the motel I’m at?” George asked.

“I promise. What time do you want me to come?”

“As soon as you can.”

“I’ll be there at noon. We can have lunch.”

“Okay. And we can talk about options.”

“Okay. Options. I like options.”

“We could move somewhere together, but not right away. I think the police are going to want to know what happened between you and Audrey.”

“I know. I’ll deal with that later,” she said.

“No,
we’ll
deal with it.”

“Right. We.”

Liana got in her car first. She rolled down her window, and George leaned in to kiss her good-night. “You haven’t called me by my name yet.”

“Good-night, Liana,” he said before she drove away. “It sounds strange.”

“Well, it’s my real name. Truth is, I prefer Audrey. You can still call me Audrey if you want.”

“No, I want to call you by your real name.”

He watched her taillights bounce their way out of the gravel driveway, then cut a steadily dimming swath down the pasture-lined road. He wondered later if she had just kept driving all through that night, all the way to wherever she went, or if she had stopped in one more time at her father’s house.

Chapter 19

A
rapping on the door awakened him. George lay there for a moment, confused, the facts from the past few days rapidly assaulting him. They were like remnants from a dream except that they were real, underlined by the knocks coming from the other room. No one in his previous life would come unannounced to his door, especially early on a Tuesday morning.

He put on a robe despite the fact that his skin was still damp and sticky from his humid room. In his exhaustion the night before, he had forgotten to put his air conditioner on; the air throughout the apartment had the thick quality of a sauna. As he walked through his living room his head and stomach both felt light; he couldn’t remember when he had last eaten. There was another loud knock, seven exasperated raps; he hoped it was the police and not Bernie MacDonald or Liana coming to finish the job.

“Who is it?” he asked through the locked door.

“Karin Boyd.” It took a moment for him to place the name, not because he’d forgotten MacLean’s niece but because he was still swimming up from the deep sweaty grip of last night’s sleep. He opened the door and was about to invite Karin in, but she pushed through and entered on her own. “I’ve been out here twenty minutes,” she said.

“I’m sorry. Come on in,” he said and shut the door.

Her face was flushed a deep red, and her jaw seemed locked in place. “You heard what happened to DJ,” George said.

“I saw him this morning. He’s lucky to be alive.” The tone of her voice suggested George was the one who had run him over with a car.

“I heard he has a concussion. Does he remember what happened?”

“He remembers following you and finding you. He said that you were going to tell him everything you knew, but then he doesn’t remember anything. The police said you were attacked.”

“We were attacked by the man who probably killed your uncle. Look, I need to get myself a coffee, and I need to sit down. Come in and have a seat. I’m not going to give you the runaround. I’m on your side now.” In middle school he’d suffered an entire year under the tyrannical rule of a female bully a year ahead of him. She used to glare at him with the same unchecked aggression that Karin Boyd was currently expressing. George moved away from her and toward the kitchen. “Sit anywhere,” he said and was relieved when she followed and perched herself on the edge of one of his Nora-shredded easy chairs. “Can I get you anything? A glass of water?”

Karin declined, and he went into the kitchen, filled a pint glass with water, and drank it down. The pot of coffee, still on its hot plate, held four fingers of black liquid that was several days old. He poured it into the pint glass, then added ice and milk before returning to the living room. Karin was looking around his space with what looked like disdain, or maybe that was just her regular expression.

“Just like your uncle’s place,” he said, then immediately regretted it.

She raised an eyebrow. “It’s a good location,” she said, apparently unfazed by George’s attempt at a joke.

“Yeah, it is. How did you find out about DJ?” he asked, sitting down.

“He was supposed to check in with me yesterday, but I never heard from him. I finally got through to Detective James late last night, and she filled me in. She said she’d had you in for questioning but released you. I came directly here from the hospital to hear what you were going to say to Donald.” Karin crossed and uncrossed and recrossed her legs while she spoke. She was more casually dressed than the last time George had seen her—a short black skirt and a faded blue polo. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and her face was not made up. As she talked, color gathered on her chest and on her cheeks. Her skin was the delicate bluey white of skimmed milk, and George imagined she avoided the sun.

“You’ll probably be disappointed. I don’t have a lot to tell, but I’ll tell you what I know. I already told the police everything.”

“I take it you didn’t tell the police where Jane Byrne currently is?”

“I would’ve if I knew. I have no idea. My guess is she took everything that was in your uncle’s safe and now she’s far, far away. The only reason I think that might not be the case is that her partner is still around.”

“He’s the one who attacked you last night?”

“I think so. I mean, I know so, but I didn’t see him.”

“How do you know it wasn’t Jane?”

“The car was the car I’d seen this guy in before. . . . Should I start at the beginning?”

“Okay.”

For the third time in twenty-four hours, George told the whole story, everything that had happened to him since seeing Liana again on Friday night. Like Detective James, Karin was particularly interested in the abandoned cottage in New Essex and the other house down the lane where he’d met the strung-out-looking young woman.

“Do you think that’s where they’re hiding?” Karin asked. She was still perched on the edge of the chair. During the course of his story the sun had edged westward enough to sneak through one of the narrow living room windows and light half her face, making one of her tiny ears seem almost translucent in the glare.

“As I said, I can’t see any reason why they’d be hiding around here at all, unless one of them screwed over the other one. I think it’s possible that the house near the cottage was where they were staying. It makes sense. Let’s say one of them knows who lives there. They find the rotting cottage and use it as a staging place where I could meet Bernie MacDonald pretending to work for your uncle. He’d scare me enough that I would agree to help Liana . . . Jane. If anyone went back there, as I did, they’d just see a dump by the water.”

“Will you take me there?”

George knew the question was coming but hadn’t decided yet how to answer. Despite a full night’s sleep, he was exhausted and his nerves were shot. Although he was still curious as to the whereabouts of Liana and the diamonds from the safe, he felt relieved in his decision to hand over everything he knew to the authorities. “I can tell you where it is,” he said. “Or better yet, we could tell the detectives what we’re thinking. Let them go.”

“But you already told them everything, right? You told them about the cottage and the house that’s near it. If they want to go, they’ll go.”

“So we’ll let them go instead of us,” George said.

“It’s a long shot, right? It’s probably nothing. It can’t hurt for us to check it out.”

“I can tell you where it is.”

“I don’t think I want to go there alone. I’d feel more comfortable if you came along.”

“Look—”

“I think you owe me. My uncle is dead, and you’re partly responsible. If Donald were well enough, I would just go with him, but you’re responsible for that too.” Her voice was rising in pitch, and George realized that, rightly or not, she had cast him as a primary player in the crime that had occurred.

“I’ll take you,” he said. “But if anyone’s there or I see a suspicious car, we turn around immediately and call the police.”

“Okay.”

“I need some time to get ready. I have to make a couple of phone calls.”

Karin checked her watch, as though deciding whether to allow him the few minutes he’d asked for. “I’ll wait,” she said.

George brushed his teeth in the bathroom, ran wet hands through his hair, and applied an extra amount of deodorant in lieu of a shower. In the bedroom, while dressing, he called his office first, got hold of the receptionist, and told her that he was still feeling sick and wouldn’t be coming in. Then he called Irene’s cell phone; after several rings she picked up. “Where are you?” he asked.

“On the road. My sister and her kids are actually visiting my dad in Rochester, so that’s where I’m headed. You put my life in danger at a good time.” She sounded relentlessly cheerful, and he chose not to mention the incident that had happened outside her apartment building the night before.

“Drive safe, okay?”

“I will. Everything okay on your end?”

“Dull as dishwater. I called in sick to work, but only because I’m exhausted. Say hi to your family for me.”

“I will.”

Karin had parked her car, a metallic gray Audi, in front of George’s building in a resident-only spot. George slid gingerly into the passenger-side bucket seat, still tender where Bernie had punched him. It was a perfect late-summer day, the temperature having dropped about ten degrees and the humidity suddenly not uncomfortable. Karin started the car and electronically lowered both windows before pulling out of the spot.

“You know how to get to New Essex?” he asked.

“I can get to the town center. You can direct me from there.”

They were both quiet as Karin negotiated her way through the Monday morning ant farm that was Boston traffic. There was a sluggish jam where 93 North spilled onto 95, and Karin cursed and hissed at it as though New Essex were due to disappear at any moment. But once they were safely onto 95, the roads cleared and the silence in the car became noticeable.

“How’s Mrs. MacLean?” George asked. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember her full name.”

“It’s Teresa. She’s rebounded slightly. Still dying, of course, but temporarily pretty lucid. It’s actually a huge shame, because we had to tell her that her husband was dead. We chose not to tell her that he was murdered in their own house. We said he had a heart attack, and now we’re just praying she doesn’t get well enough to want to start looking at newspapers or watching television. She’s still in pain, and she’s still dying, but now she can feel grief-stricken as well.”

“You’re close to both of them?”

“I was close to my uncle. I was the smart child he never had, the one who got an MBA. I was actually working for Lehman Brothers during the crash. My uncle, probably out of guilt, offered me the job as his assistant when I couldn’t find work. It was a nice bridge, I guess.”

“What do you mean, ‘out of guilt’?”

There was a discernible pause before Karin spoke. “I’m not sure my uncle did anything illegal, but in the economic climate before the mortgage crisis he made a ridiculous amount of money. It’s possible some people got hurt while he got rich. So there might have been some guilt involved. I’m saying too much.”

“He ran a Ponzi scheme?”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I didn’t,” George lied. “It just sounded like the type of thing you were describing.”

“More or less, I guess. This is all off the record, I trust.”

“I have no stake in this. I don’t really care how your uncle made his money.”

They were talking over the hiss of rushing air that came through their open windows. Karin hit a button to make both windows rise and seal. Suddenly the car was an almost noiseless space. Karin fiddled with the temperature controls, putting the AC on low. She was quiet again. George sensed that she was uncomfortable talking about her uncle’s wealth, but he was interested. It was MacLean’s money, after all, that was at the root of everything that had happened. “Did your uncle keep all of his diamonds in the safe in Newton?” he asked.

“God, no. A lot of them, though. We begged him not to, to put them in a safe-deposit box in a bank, but it had become a passion of his, those diamonds, and he liked to take them out and look at them. He was collecting them by color; they come in many colors, you know, not just white.”

“All I know about diamonds is that they cost a lot of money.”

“Yes, and they’re easy to steal, and fairly easy to sell.”

“And they are an easy way to hide how much money you have.”

“Look, even if some of his methods were less than ethical, my uncle made plenty of money legitimately, through his furniture outlets and through his investments. You don’t think I’m just pursuing this because of the money that was in the safe?”

“I figured that was part of it.”

“My uncle got set up, robbed, and murdered. I want to find the scum that did it. I’d still be doing this if all he had in that safe was his childhood train set.”

“I understand. I’d feel the same way.”

“It’s not my money, anyway, if we get it back. The money goes to his wife, and God only knows what her will stipulates.”

As Karin’s voice rose in pitch George noticed a corresponding increase in the speed of the Audi. They were easily cresting ninety miles per hour when he pointed out the exit to New Essex. She expertly crossed three lanes of traffic and downshifted into the hairpin curve of the off-ramp. He directed her toward and then away from New Essex center. Once they were on Beach Road, he told her to look out for the stone church. She rolled both windows down again, and the car was filled with the briny smell of ocean air. George looked toward the Atlantic, pinpricked with sunspots and glossily blue. Even though it was a Tuesday, a multitude of sailboats were out, pleasure boaters taking advantage of the high-pressure system that had swept away a week’s worth of smothering humidity.

George was suddenly scared. While he believed that the house and cottage down Captain Sawyer Lane were probably dead ends, he considered the possibility that they weren’t, and that Bernie MacDonald would be waiting for them, armed with his shotgun. He reminded himself that if there were signs of habitation at either the house or the cottage—Bernie’s car, for instance—they would turn around and leave. Call the police. But something else was driving George, and he realized that it was Liana. There was a chance he would see her again, a small chance that she was being held against her will by Bernie MacDonald, and George, despite the lack of any evidence, still held out some hope that Liana might actually need him.

It was a hope he had nourished for two decades.

They passed the church, its small lot empty of cars. George pointed out Captain Sawyer Lane, and Karin slowed down and made the sharp turn. Even with the brightness of the day, the lane was dark under its canopy of trees. Karin hit one of the ruts too hard, and the bottom of her car scraped the road. She slowed to a crawl.

“Do you want to see the cottage?” he asked.

“The abandoned place?”

“Yeah, down by the water.”

“No. Let’s go straight to the house where you saw the girl. If it’s a dead end, we can check out the cottage.”

He pointed out the driveway, and she turned onto it. As before, high weeds sprouted from the broken gravel and dirt. The deckhouse was as dark and unreadable as ever. The garage was closed, and no cars were parked in the driveway; the windows seemed as brown and blank as the walls, and except for its relatively good condition, it looked as abandoned as the cottage by the water.