The Siege (28 page)

Donna shrugged. With all the excitement out by Casey’s Corner, she had forgotten all about the suspected problem out at her old home.

“I guess it could wait ’till tomorrow,” she said.

Winfield nodded. “I may take a spin by tonight, anyway. So, what can I do for you?”

“Actually, we’ve got a complaint and a question for you,” Dale said. “We had a little run-in with someone out on Route 2-A.”

“What do you mean, a run-in?” Winfield asked. His voice suddenly tensed, and he sat forward in his chair. The grip he had on his pen tightened.

Dale quickly told Winfield what they had done after Larry’s funeral, how they had gone out to Casey’s Corner and then been chased by someone. Winfield listened attentively. It looked like he was taking notes, but in actuality he was merely doodling as he listened.

“You never got a good look at the car though, huh?” he said when Dale was finished.

Dale shook his head. “No, but it was big and bulky.”

“What I could see of it,” Donna added, “it looked like it might be a black, or dark blue, limousine. The headlights were wide apart, and when we first saw it, it wasn’t quite night, but the car was a dark color, real dark.”

Winfield leaned back in his chair, scratching underneath his chin as he looked up at the ceiling. “And you think this someone in a black limousine was out there to stop you from looking around at the crash site?”

“Have you got a better explanation?” Dale asked sharply. He hadn’t mentioned finding Larry’s dictating recorder yet; he wanted to listen to it first, before Winfield or anyone else heard what was on the tape.

Winfield shrugged. “No. Not really.” His eyebrows were furrowed, casting his eyes into shadow as he pondered.

“So,” Dale said after the silence had grown uncomfortably long. “Who do you know around town here who drives a black limo?”

Winfield opened his mouth, about to say something, then clamped his lips shut and sat back. He sighed shallowly, shook his head, and brought the back of his hand to his mouth.

“I, ummm,” he hesitated. Winfield fell silent for a moment before continuing. “The only person I know is someone you know, too,” he said at last. When he saw Dale react, he quickly leaned forward, tapping his forefinger on his desk. “I don’t want you to go jumping to any premature conclusions, now,” Winfield said, his voice harsh, commanding.

“Rodgers,” Dale concluded. There was a note of conviction in his voice that told Winfield he had already suspected it was Rodgers, and that he had just been waiting for confirmation.

“Well, it’s pretty thin ice, if you ask me,” Winfield said. “We’re talking about very flimsy circumstantial evidence.”

“That car, no matter who owns it, almost ran us off the damned road!” Donna said. In her voice, there was still an echo of the stark fear she had felt.

“But I can’t very well go arresting someone just because you think it was a dark limousine, now, can I?” Winfield said. He was thinking, if it had just been Dale Harmon alone, he might have been less likely even to listen; but he had known Donna her whole life, and he liked and respected her. If she confirmed it, that put a whole new light on the matter!

“Is there anyone else in town who you might think would do something like this?” Dale asked intensely.

“I’m not saying there is or there isn’t,” Winfield replied. “Granted, I may not be Rodgers’ biggest fan in town, but I certainly don’t intend to go over to his house and ask him where he was this afternoon. You have no evidence.”

“Why?” Dale asked. “Why can’t you just question him?” He paused, and in the awkward silence that followed, quickly added, “You could probe a little deeper than you did yesterday.”

Winfield tossed both hands into the air. “Because I happen to know where Rodgers was the same time you say you were out on the road.”

“Oh?” Dale said. He couldn’t deny a wave of disappointment that Rodgers might somehow wriggle off the hook.

Winfield was nodding his head with assurance. “Yes sir. There was a harvesting accident up on Bates Ridge this afternoon, and a fellow named Reginald Perry was taken into the hospital in Houlton. After he was treated for his injuries, he seemed to be doing all right, but sometime late this afternoon, he got a blood embolism and died. I think it was just around sunset that Franklin Rodgers drove to the Houlton hospital and picked up the body.”

III

M
rs. Appleby nearly fainted when she saw Lisa, Angie, and a woman she didn’t immediately recognize coming up the walkway to the house. The blood on Lisa’s face had dried to thin, brick-red flakes, but she still looked more dead than alive.

“You have to keep in mind that head wounds look a lot worse than they really are,” said Joyce Carter, the person who had been driving by and had stopped to help. “There are a lot of blood vessels in the scalp, so there’s going to be a lot of bleeding.”

Mrs. Appleby thanked her profusely for helping the girls get back home. When she left, Angie left with her to unload the bicycles from her trunk, where they had stuffed them for the short drive up Main Street. The night was cool, almost downright cold. Overhead, the stars glittered with a sharpness Angie had never seen before, and directly over the house, the rippling glow of the Northern Lights swung like heavy curtains. She felt cold and alone and miserable as she wheeled the bikes up to the garage one at a time. She wished her father was around so she could talk to him, but lately, since Larry died, she had found him distant. She thought it was because he was spending so much time with the woman he had met, Donna LaPierre.

Back in the house, Mrs. Appleby sat Lisa on a chair in the middle of the kitchen floor beneath the harsh glare of the overhead light as she gently washed Lisa’s head wound with warm, soapy water.

“I think Mrs. Carter was right. These look a lot worse than they are,” Mrs. Appleby told Angie once she had rejoined them in the kitchen. She was standing, tensed, in the kitchen doorway, feeling rotten that she had made something like this happen!

Lisa winced every now and then as her grandmother’s fingers probed the patch of scraped skin. A few scratches started bleeding again, and blood tickled her when one thin stream ran down beside her eye.

“What in the dickens were you two doing, anyway?” Mrs. Appleby said angrily. “You’re both grown-up girls. You should know better than to fool around like this!”

“It was my fault,” Angie started to say, but Lisa quickly cut her off.

“It was an accident! I should never have taken that junky old bike out in the first place!”

“Well, we’ll make sure it goes out with the trash on Wednesday morning, if it’s all the same to you,” Mrs. Appleby said with finality. Lisa nodded agreement, then winced when the motion of her head made her grandmother pull another cut open.

“Other than the cuts, are you feeling all right?” Mrs. Appleby asked. Head wounds may bleed easily, but she also knew that bumps to the head could be quite serious. Her own brother had fallen when he was a boy, and ever since then, due to some kind of scrambling to his brain’s wiring, he had suffered with epilepsy. Head injuries, Mrs. Appleby knew, were nothing to fool around with.

Lisa closed her eyes, taking a silent physical inventory. Although the ringing in her ear was very faint and seemed to be fading, it was still there; it rose in volume now and then, sometimes actually masking what her grandmother was saying to her.

“I—umm,” she started to say, then fell silent when she glanced over at Angie, who still stood in the doorway, nervously biting her lower lip.

Lisa gave her head a tentative shake, and winced with the pain that bolted up the back of her neck. “I think I could use some aspirin or something,” she said as her eyes began to water from the pain.

“If it’s really bad,” Mrs. Appleby said, “we could drive up to the hospital in Houlton. Maybe we should have it X-rayed.”

Lisa protested and shook her head gently, so the pain wouldn’t rocket through her.

“I think I’ll give Doctor LaChance a call. He’ll make a house call if I ask him, I’m sure. I know he has that young man from Houlton working for him now, too. One of them should be able to come out to the house.”

“I don’t think that’ll be necessary,” Lisa said. “I think if we get the cuts bandaged up, and I take a couple of aspirin, I’ll be just fine in the morning.”

“Well,” Mrs. Appleby said, giving her granddaughter a kiss on the cheek, “you make sure you let me know if it starts hurting any worse. I don’t want to take any chances.” She couldn’t dispel the image of her brother during one of his seizures: eyes rolled back, body stiffened, blood-flecked foam running down his chin.
Please God
, she prayed silently,
don’t make me have to deal with it again!

Lisa promised she would let her know if she started feeling any worse, but when she looked at how guilty-looking Angie seemed, Lisa resolved that she wouldn’t say anything that might get either of them any deeper into trouble, no matter what. In a couple of days, she was sure, the pain would recede and maybe even that high-pitched ringing in her ear would go away.

IV

I
f there was one thing Winfield prided himself on, it was the goodness of his given word; so as soon as Dale and Donna left the police station, he got into his cruiser to drive out to the old LaPierre house and have a look around. He knew, that with the harvesting just getting started, it was entirely likely that someone had decided to get free housing for a few weeks, to save on renting a room in town. He decided it would be smart to keep his pistol handy, just in case Donna had been right about the prowler.

Once he turned onto Mayall Road from Main Street, the dark night seemed to come crashing in on him. It always struck him as remarkable how, with the town lights lost behind a single curve in the road, the darkness thickened and the stars got intensely brighter. He liked to imagine how the world looked to the Indians who had lived here before Europeans settled the land. He shivered, thinking how stark and lonely it must have been, out beneath the star-sprinkled stretch of sky with nothing more than a campfire to push back the darkness.

For reassurance, he patted the metal tube of his flashlight on the seat beside him. Although he knew it had three fresh batteries, he gave the button a quick flick anyway and grunted satisfaction at the bright yellow oval that lit up the side panel of the door. Even with the security of a powerful flashlight in his hand and his service revolver at his side, though, he couldn’t repress a shiver when he pulled into the driveway of, the abandoned LaPierre farmhouse and looked up at the cold, moon-washed siding.

Winfield flicked the switch on his alley light from inside the car, and aimed the strong beam at the house. Wherever the light went, it lit up the house brighter than daylight, but from the outside, there was no indication of any trouble. There were no broken windows, and the front door wasn’t hanging off its hinges. The screen on the outside door was torn, but it had been like that for a year or more. The house looked secure to him, desolate and lonely as hell, but secure.

Taking a deep breath, he got out of the car and eased the door shut. A peculiar loneliness swept over him as he started up toward the house, his feet crunching the gravel of the walkway sounded like crackling ice. Winter was on its way, he knew, and the weird feeling he had about this place, he told himself, was just that—the quiet, cold, early autumn night. When he reached the steps leading up to the front door, Winfield snapped on his flashlight, flooding the entryway with a harsh, yellow glare. His right hand drifted slowly down to his revolver, undid the snap, and firmly grasped the handgrip. It was reassuring, but not much. There might be something wrong here. He thought he could sense it.

“Yeah,” he said, under his breath as he went up the steps, “that and a quarter will get you a cup of coffee.”

The stairs creaked underfoot, and as he stepped under the shadow of the porch roof, a small gust of wind sprang up. It whistled shrilly in the gutter overhead, sounding like someone calling to a dog from far away.

Winfield’s oval of light darted around the front door, then swept both lengths of the house, pausing to make a quick circle around each window. The windows seemed to suck up and hold, rather than reflect, the light, making them look as though they were made of black marble slabs instead of glass. The land around the house was washed with powdery, gray light as Winfield went slowly down the length of the porch and rounded the corner to the back of the house.

As he was walking past the kitchen window, he thought he saw something moving out in the field, over by the woods to the left. He froze in mid-step and stared, wishing to God he had waited until daylight, to come out here. For a second, he considered going back to the cruiser to radio his location; he could ask Ernie to drive on out, so he’d have a little backup, just in case…

Gettin’ old or somethin’?
Winfield thought angrily to himself.
Startin’ to let the ole imagination run away on you!

But still he didn’t move as he looked out across the field toward the woods, waiting to see if something else moved.

“Oh, boy,” he muttered when he saw something: it looked like two or three people, walking up the length of the field, away from the house. They kept to the fringe of the woods and moved slowly, so Winfield couldn’t be sure if they had seen him. If they had broken into the house, though, they might plan on returning. Then again, he had driven up in the driveway and walked up to the house with his flashlight on, in clear view. If they had seen him coming, they sure as hell would leave.
And if they had half a brain
, Winfield thought,
they would keep away
.