All That I Have (16 page)

So it was five, six years later on another early summer day during my first year as a trooper that I saw Clemmie again. I was patrolling on the river road in Cardiff, a quiet two-lane, just cruising along, when this little VW Beetle comes flying by me on a double line, I mean flying, doing about seventy. For a second I didn’t believe it, thought I’d been asleep dreaming: nobody blows out a state police patrol car like that, not unless they’ve just robbed a bank. But there was the VW, in the distance ahead, getting smaller fast. I lit up and took off after it, pulled it over just at the Gilead line. Walked up to the car, and here’s Clemmie, digging her license out of her handbag, her hair in her face, and her summer dress pulled up into her lap on top of about five miles of bare legs. There she was. Some days in May, June, being a speed cop is the best job in the world.

“I know, I know,” Clemmie said when I was standing beside her window. “I was over the speed limit.”

“You were over it by about a hundred percent, ma’am,” I said. “Didn’t you see me? A police car? That was a police car you just passed. You were doing at least seventy when you went by me.”

“I was in a hurry,” said Clemmie. She handed me her license, and I read the name on it and looked at her again — at her face — to find her doing the same to me.

“I know you,” Clemmie said.

“Yes, I guess you do.”

“My Lord, Lucian Wing,” said Clemmie.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Where have you been?”

“I’ve been around.”

“No, you haven’t.”

“Well, I’ve been in the service.”

“I had the biggest crush on you,” Clemmie said.

“You did?”

“I did. You were older, though. You were out of school. You didn’t know I was alive.”

“Sure, I did.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Clemmie. “You didn’t then. But you do now.”

I gave her her ticket and sent her on her way. We began to see each other here and there, first by chance, then not. Things moved along, I guess, and by and by we began talking about making the business official. We did that, and we also bought our little place here, started getting set up.

One night, when we’d been married a year or less, we were lying there half asleep, talking things over, the way you do, and Clemmie started recalling when she first knew we were into something, the two of us.

“I’d had a crush on you,” Clemmie remembered. “But that was nothing. That was years back. I was a little kid then. Later you were away, and later still, you were here and I liked you well enough, I guess, but I didn’t think much about it. You were older.”

“Older?” I said. “What? Six years?”

“It seemed like a lot then,” said Clemmie. “And it was odd, because even though I wasn’t all that attracted, wasn’t thinking about you all the time or anything like that, still there was something about you that was stuck in my mind and that I couldn’t put my finger on. It wasn’t anything you did, or said, or any way you looked or didn’t look. It was just this thing about you. This question.

“I didn’t know what it was,” Clemmie went on. “It was like trying to remember something, like a name, and you can’t, you can’t quite reach it, you can’t quite say it. I mean, it drove me nuts. Was it something you’d done that I’d forgotten? Was it something somebody had said about you? Was it that you were funny, or serious, or nice, or not-nice? No, I knew it was nothing like that. I couldn’t place it. And then one day — I think I’ll always remember this — I hadn’t seen you for a couple of days, wasn’t thinking about you at all, and I came downstairs in our house and there was Daddy standing on a chair hanging a picture on the wall in the sitting room. He was up on a chair and he was pounding a nail into the wall with a hammer, for the picture. But the chair was uneven, and so was the floor. He was unsteady up there. And I watched him, and I thought, he’d better watch out, he’s pretty shaky, he could fall. What if he should fall? He’s all alone. And that second, bingo. It came to me, not about Daddy — about you. And I said, My Lord, that’s it. That’s what it is about Lucian. He’s not funny or serious. He’s not strong or weak. He’s not good or bad. He’s not the right guy or the wrong guy. He’s my husband.”

By the time I got back to the department from the Ethan Allen, I’d about decided that, for now, I’d go ahead and work this thing like a job of sheriffing. I’d sit tight and wait for what was going to happen to happen. Then I’d see. “Let it come to you,” Wingate said, “whatever it is.”

It was a good plan, it usually is, but it didn’t work. It didn’t have a chance to work. I didn’t get to try it. When I got back to the department, I found Beverly had lost contact with Deputy Keen. His patrol car was at the Russians’ house, but he wasn’t with it. He’d gone missing. Where was he?

15

MORE COSSACKS

They’d found him by the time I got there. He was unconscious and badly busted up, but he was alive, though how long for you didn’t know. Deputy Keen looked like he’d walked into the buzz saw. As I pulled in at the Russians’ house, the medics had just loaded him into the ambulance when his heart had quit. They had put the electric paddles to him to start him up again, and I found the deputy flopping around in the back of the ambulance like a big bass in the bottom of a rowboat.

There was quite a crowd at the scene. Beverly had put out that an officer was unaccounted for and presumed to be in trouble. So by now the Russians’ place was like a law-enforcement zoo, with every kind of cop there is, including a couple of officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who’d been passing through.

I found Trooper Timberlake. He said Buster Mayhew, the Russians’ caretaker, had come by to check the house and found Lyle’s patrol car there. The door was open, the engine was running. No sign of the deputy. Mayhew had used the radio in the patrol car to call the department — and here we all were.

Deputy Keen had been found quickly, at the end of a blood trail where whoever worked him over had dragged him into the woods maybe a hundred feet from the house. His sidearm was on his belt; so was the rest of his equipment. He had a big gash on his forehead, a broken leg, and possibly a broken neck. Now he was on his way to the emergency room in Brattleboro. If he got there alive, he had a shot, one of the medics said.

Buster Mayhew was standing around a little apart from the others, looking like he’d forgotten why he was there. I went over to him.

“You didn’t see him at all, then?” I asked Buster.

“See who?”

“The deputy. Deputy Keen? The one just left in the ambulance?”

“Oh. No, I didn’t see nobody.”

“Did you look in the house?”

“The house?”

“That’s right, the house. This house. The house you caretake. Did you look inside at all, see was anybody around?”

“Oh. No,” said Buster. “I mostly take care of the outside, you know.”

“Okay,” I said. Making good use of Buster was not something that got easier with time, it didn’t look like.

I decided to follow the ambulance to Brattleboro, see how Deputy Keen made out. Then, on the way down, here came Beverly on the radio about a disturbance at the trailer park in Monterey, Crystal Finn’s place. That made me think of Sean. Was he not taking off, after all? Was he still out in the high grass somewhere? He’d better not be. I turned off and went over to Monterey with the lights going.

Sean wasn’t there, but he had been, and not long since. His clothes and other belongings were scattered all over the yard in front of the trailer: jeans, shirts, underwear, socks, sweatshirts, caps, a shaving kit, a set of barbells. Crystal Finn had thrown them all out the trailer’s door. Then she had kicked some of the clothes into a pile, and now she was on her knees before it with a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand and a cigarette lighter in the other, trying to set fire to Sean’s clothes. She was having a hard time getting it to catch. When I got out of the truck and came over to her, Crystal looked up at me and said, “Oh, fuck, it’s you. You got any kerosene?” She was not sober.

“Where’s Sean?”

“Not here.”

“When did you see him last?”

“About five seconds after he told me how he’s been two-timing me with some stuck-up bitch slut whore from Mount Zion.”

“You mean Morgan Endor?”

“I don’t know her name,” said Crystal. “If I did . . .”

I remembered the shotgun Crystal had used on the Cossacks a couple of days ago. I didn’t see it. Maybe it was in the trailer. That was fine by me. It looked like Crystal had come down on the opposite end to mine of the range of choices open to the two-timed.

“What happened?” I asked her.

Crystal drank deeply from her beer and nearly tipped over backward. She sat on the ground in front of the pile of Sean’s clothes. A thin curl of smoke had begun to rise from the pile where she had been trying to light it.

“What happened?” I asked her again.

“What happened?” she said. “What happened is that that sack of shit, that pig, just got around to telling me he’s been sticking it to what’s-her-name, in Mount Zion, for four months. Four months.”

“Let’s get you inside,” I said.

“No,” said Crystal. “Go away.”

“Come on,” I said. I got her elbow and started to lift her to her feet.

“No,” said Crystal. “Cut it out.”

“You’d rather be arrested?”

“For what?”

“Unpermitted burn,” I said.

“Fuck you,” said Crystal. But she stood up, and with my arm around her waist so she didn’t fall, she made it to the trailer.

“Get some sleep,” I told her.

“Four months,” said Crystal. “Four months he’s been porking that whore. Four months. We only been together for six.”

“Is he at her place, probably, then?”

“I think I’m going to throw up,” said Crystal.

“Go on inside,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”

“I won’t be okay,” said Crystal. “I’ll never be okay.”

“I need to know if Sean’s in Mount Zion now,” I said. “Is he?”

“No, he’s gone,” said Crystal. “He left. He’s gone.” She started to cry. “Four months,” she said again. “Almost our whole time. It really fucks with your head, you know?”

“It does,” I said. “I know.”