Bad Men (2003) (16 page)

She looked to the refrigerator, where she still had a bottle of unopened wine in case one of her new friends called and offered to curl up in front of the TV for an evening of comedies and talk shows. She so wanted to open it now, to take a single glass, but she needed to keep her head clear. On the kitchen table before her were spread the household accounts, abandoned since the previous night in the hope that a little sleep might make them less forbidding. She wasn’t earning enough from her job at the Casco Bay Market to cover her expenses, and Sam Tucker had already asked her to stay home for the rest of the week, promising to make up the hours within the month. That meant that she would either have to look for another job, possibly in Portland—and that was assuming that she could find a job and someone to baby-sit Danny after school or in the evenings—or she could dip back into the “special fund.” That would necessitate a trip to the mainland, and the mainland always made her nervous. Even the larger banks were a risk: she had already dispersed the funds into accounts in five different banks over three counties—no more than $7,000 in each account—but she was always worried about the IRS or some strange bank inspector of whom nobody had ever heard spotting the connections. Then she would be in real trouble.

And there was the fact that she didn’t like using the money. It was tainted. Wherever possible, she tried to get by on what she earned. Increasingly, that was becoming harder and harder to do. True, there was the knapsack itself, hidden among boxes and spare suitcases in the attic, but she had vowed not to touch that. There was always the chance of succumbing to temptation, of taking out too much and giving Danny and herself some treats, thereby drawing attention to herself. This was a small community, and even though Mainers didn’t go interfering in each other’s business, that didn’t mean that they weren’t curious about that business to begin with. It was the downside of living in such a comparatively isolated community, but a sacrifice worth making.

There was also the fact that the money was their escape fund, should she and Danny ever need to move on again quickly. If she began dipping into it for little things, there was the danger that she would come to take its contents for granted, and the little dips would become big dips, and pretty soon the fund would be gone.

And yet there was so much money in it, so much: nearly $800,000. How bad could it hurt to take a little, to buy a decent television, some new clothes, maybe even the game console that Danny wanted? Such small things from so much…

She forced the temptation away. No, a bank trip was the only option. She folded her glasses and put them back in their case, then began to gather the papers together.

She was almost done when the knock came on the door.

It had been decided that Leonie would knock. Anyone looking out would see an attractive black woman, smiling brightly. She could pose no threat.

Leonie heard footsteps coming toward the door, and a curtain moved aside in the semidarkness. She smiled in an embarrassed way, and raised the map that she held in her hands. Hey, I’m lost, and it’s a cold night. Help me out here. Tell me where I went wrong, huh? She didn’t even glance to her left, where Dexter stood holding a gun by his thigh, Braun behind him, or to her right, where the boy-man Willard waited, unblinking, his left hand shielding the blade of the knife in case a porch light caught it and drew attention to them. Moloch had remained apart, for the time being, with Shepherd, Powell, and Tell.

Seconds passed, followed by the sound of a chain being undone, and a lock being turned.

The door opened.

Joe Dupree stood on Marianne’s doorstep, out of uniform. She had to look up slightly to see his face, his eyes shining brightly amid the shadows that congregated around them.

“Joe? Is there some problem?”

But Dupree merely shook his head. “I was just passing. I brought this for Danny.”

From behind his back he produced a small wooden gull and handed it to her. She took it carefully in her hands and held it up to the light. It seemed almost crudely carved in places, but it was clear that it was not from lack of craft or care. Rather, the primitivism of the carving was designed to capture something of the bird, a reflection of its nature. He had taken great pains, with the head in particular, depicting the beak as slightly open. She could even see a tiny carved tongue in its mouth. The paint was newly dry.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, and she marveled at how the big man’s hands had created something so small and wondrous, for she had difficulty imagining him even holding the knife in his fist. It must have taken him hours to do it, she thought. He killed the bird, then spent hours re-creating it in wood.

“Would you like to come in?”

“I don’t want to disturb you.”

“I’ve finished what I was doing. I was about to open a bottle of wine,” she lied.

He hesitated, and she pressed home her advantage.

“You’re not on duty, right?”

He didn’t need much persuasion, just a little. She recalled again all those months that he had spent circling her, like a small male spider working toward a female, unsure of the safety of approaching, in fear of his life. In this case the physical proportions were reversed, but she still had the power. She had wondered why it was taking him so long to approach her, for she had seen the way he’d looked at her when she’d begun working in the market, the bashfulness with which he spoke in response to her polite remarks. She had the answer almost as soon as she asked herself the question. She knew it was because of how he looked, his consciousness of his own difference, and so it was she who had broken the ice between them, taking the opportunities, when they arose, to talk with him, walking with him along Island Avenue when their paths crossed, attracting nudges and smiles from the locals. She wasn’t sure, even then, that she was interested in the man himself. Instead, it was his timidity that drew her, the fragility of his self-esteem strangely enticing in such a huge figure.

She stepped aside to let him enter and caught the scent of him as he brushed by her: he smelled of wood and sap and saltwater. She breathed it in as discreetly as she could and felt something tug inside her. He was not a conventionally handsome man. His teeth were gapped in places, seemingly too small to create a single wall of enamel in his great mouth. His face was long, but widened at the cheeks and chin. She could see wrinkles around his eyes and mouth, and knew at once that they were the consequence of some pain, perhaps physical, perhaps psychological, and that this man was frequently in distress. She was a little surprised when she began to find him attractive and guessed that it was, at least in part, a combination of his power and size along with the capacity for gentleness and subtlety that had enabled him to carve the bird out of a piece of driftwood; to deal sensitively with Jack the painter and his problems; in fact, to interact with most of the islanders in such a way that they both liked and respected him, even when he was forced to come down on them for some minor infraction. Marianne Elliot had spent so long among the kind of men who used their power to hurt and intimidate that Joe Dupree’s graciousness and humanity naturally appealed to her. She wondered what it might be like to make love to him, and was surprised and embarrassed by the surge of warmth that the fantasy brought. She had not considered her own desires for so long, subsuming them all in order to concentrate on Danny and his wants, and on their combined need for constant vigilance.

Now, as she watched the big policeman gingerly sit down at the kitchen table, the chair too low for him so that his own legs remained at an acute angle, she was conscious of the muscularity of his shoulders, the shape of his chest beneath his shirt, the width of his arms. His hands, twice as large as hers, hovered in the air before him. He cupped them and placed them on the table, then unclasped them and moved them to his thighs. Finally, he folded his arms, jolting the table as he did so and causing a china bowl to tremble gently. He seemed even larger in the confines of the little kitchen, making it appear cluttered even though it was not. She had not seen the inside of his house but was certain that it contained the minimum of furniture, with the barest sprinkling of personal possessions. Anything fragile or valuable would be stored safely away. She felt a great tenderness for the big man, and almost reached out to touch him before she stopped herself and turned instead to the business of the wine. There was a bottle of Two Roads Chardonnay in the fridge, a treat for herself bought in Boston. She had been saving it for a special occasion, until she realized that she had no special occasions worth celebrating.

Marianne was about to open the bottle, by now instinctively used to doing everything for herself, when he asked her if she would like him to take care of it. She handed over the bottle and the corkscrew. The wine looked like a beer bottle in his hand.

He read the label. “Flagstone. I don’t know it.”

“It’s South African.”

“Robert Frost,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“The wine. It’s named after a Robert Frost poem. You know, the one about the two roads diverging in a forest.”

She hadn’t noticed, and felt vaguely embarrassed by her failure to make the connection.

“It’s hard to forget a poem like that on an island covered by trees,” he said, inserting the corkscrew.

“At least you can’t get too lost if you take the wrong road,” she replied. “You just keep going until your feet get wet.”

The plastic cork popped from the bottle. She hadn’t even seen him tense as he drew it out. She placed two glasses on the table and watched him pour.

“People still get lost here,” he said. “Have you been out to the Site?”

“Jack took Danny and me out there, shortly after we arrived. I didn’t like it. It felt…sad.”

“The memory of what happened still lingers there, I think. A couple of times each summer, we get tourists in to the station house complaining that the trails out to it should be more clearly marked because they went astray and had trouble finding the road again. They’re usually the worst ones, the loudmouths in expensive shirts.”

“Maybe they deserve to get lost, then. So why don’t you signpost it better?”

“It was decided, a long time ago, that the people who needed to find it knew how to get to it. It’s not a place for those who don’t respect the dead. It’s not a place for anyone who
doesn’t
find it sad.”

He handed her a glass and touched it gently with his own.

“Happiness,” he said.

“Happiness,” she said, and he saw hope and sadness in her eyes.

If Marianne was curious about the giant, then he was no less interested in her. He knew little about the woman, except for her name and the fact that she had brought with her enough money to rent her small but comfortable house, yet he had recognized an attraction toward her and thought, however unlikely it might at first appear, that she might feel something for him too. It had taken all of his courage to propose a dinner date, after months of gentle probing, and it had taken a moment or two after she replied for him to realize that she had accepted.

Yet something about her troubled him. No, that wasn’t true. It was not about
her,
precisely, but to do with some undisclosed element of her life. Joe Dupree had learned to read people well. His father had taught him the importance of doing so, and life on the island, with its exposure to the same faces, the same problems day after day, had enabled him to hone his skills, weighing his first perceptions against the reality of individuals as their characters were inevitably revealed to him. He glanced at the woman’s fingers as she put the cork back in the bottle and replaced it in the fridge. She sat down opposite him, and smiled a little nervously. Her right hand toyed with her ring finger, yet there was no ring upon it.

It was something that he had seen her do a lot, usually when a stranger came into the store or a loud noise startled her. Instinctively, she would touch her ring finger.

It’s the husband, thought Joe.

The husband is the element.

Bill Gaddis was not a happy man. There were a lot of reasons why Bill was unhappy even at the best of times, but now he had a specific reason. He was leaving a fine woman in the sack to answer an insistent knocking at his door, and that made him very unhappy indeed. He might even have been tempted to ignore the knocking, under other circumstances, but around here people had a habit of being good neighbors and the good neighbor at the door might take it into his or her head that, what with the lights being on and no reply coming from the Gaddis house, maybe somebody had had an accident, taken a tumble down some steps or slipped on some water in the kitchen, and nobody wanted to be the one who had to say, “Hell, I was out there just last night, knocking and knocking. If only I’d checked through the windows, or tried the back door, they’d still be alive today.” And Bill didn’t want old Art Bassett or Rene Watterson coming in the back way, hollering and nosing about, expecting to see someone lying on the floor with blood pooling, only to find Bill with his ass in the air and his mind on other things.

He wondered now why they had even decided to settle here. It was Pennsylvania, goddamnit.
Pennsylvania.
As far as Bill was concerned, the only people who settled here willingly were religious zealots who regarded buttons as sinful, and folks who regarded buttons as sinful were likely to cast a harsh eye on Bill Gaddis’s activities. Compared to those people, Billy Gaddis was virtually the Antichrist. Camp Hill, Pennsylvania, didn’t even figure on most maps, but Bill knew that was why they were here, precisely because you had to look hard to find it.

It had its good points, though. His wife had picked up a job at the Holiday Inn in New Cumberland, just off the turnpike, working the desk a couple of evenings each week. On weekends, she worked a few hours at the Zany Brainy over at the Camp Hill Mall, Saturdays, as though spending time in a children’s store could make up for the fact that she was never going to have any of her own. Two Sundays a month, she worked in the Waldenbooks at the Capital City Mall. The manager there, a guy named Jim Munchel, gave her books to take home and read, and she seemed to get along with the other folks who worked in the store. She told Bill that they were good people. Bill got the feeling that they knew just enough about him to not like him, so he stayed out of their way. A little independence of spirit on his wife’s part was a small price to pay for keeping her out of his hair.