Bitter Crossing (A Peyton Cote Novel) (28 page)

Or did it just distract her?

What had just taken place between her and Pete? Had each of them confused their longtime friendship for something more?

She pushed that thought away. There was work to do—there could always be work to do, even at 5:25 p.m. on a Thursday. The odds of Professor Jerry Reilly being in his office in the Dumont Building were slim. But Reeds was a twenty-minute drive from Garrett, and she’d been just down the street, so she pulled into the parking lot at the University of Maine branch.

Her footfalls echoed as she climbed the concrete stairs. Reilly’s office door was closed, but she could hear voices within and knocked.

Reilly didn’t ask who it was. He poked his head out, tilted it slightly, and paused before registering her face.

“I’m out of uniform.”

“Ah, yes. Um, what can I do for you?”

“I’d like to talk.”

Behind him, someone asked who was there.

Reilly’s red hair fell in front of his wire-rimmed glasses. He brushed it away. He wore what might be the now-infamous tweed jacket over a pale blue T-shirt, faded jeans, and sneakers. The guy wasn’t one for making a fashion statement.

He glanced behind him to whoever was in the office, then turned quickly back to her.

“I enjoyed my classroom visit,” she said, stalling.

He smiled broadly. “Really?”

She felt bad about playing on his social ineptness. But her colleague was still in the ICU, a baby had been killed, Kenny Radke was now dead, and now someone she assumed to be at Garrett Station was pushing the investigation into her shooting of Radke. The proverbial push had come to shove.

“Maybe I could talk to your students about the professional opportunities available to them in the Border Patrol. We never got to that.”

The hallway was lit by narrow overhead lights suspended from the ceiling. They were covered by pebble-textured plastic and hummed incessantly.

He cleared his throat and stood stiffly, ever formal. “I’m kind of tied up right now.” He glanced over his shoulder again, then looked down shyly.

“Oh,” she said, “I can wait.”

“No.”

“No?”

“I mean, I anticipate being tied up a while.”

“I’m not leaving, Jerry.”

“Let me finish with this student, then you may come in.”

He closed the door. His schedule was on it. If she read it correctly, the guy taught only three classes, worked something like nine hours a week.

When the door reopened, she couldn’t believe who stepped out.

Morris Picard, the Garrett High School history department chair and Jonathan Hurley’s boss, tried to avert his eyes as he passed her, the way he would bypass a homeless person waving a cup. The man behind Picard was familiar as well. She’d seen him the last time she’d found Reilly in his office: the pitted-faced man, dressed, once again in a suit and still toting a briefcase.

“Mr. Picard, how are you?” she asked. “What are you doing here?”

Picard slowed as if unsure of what to do. Could he keep walking, ignore her altogether? Did he have to stop and chat? He paused and looked quickly to Reilly, saw no help there, then turned to the other man.

She watched closely. Picard’s face lost color. He seemed to physically shrink. She thought he might return to the office and lock the door.

The hallway was narrow. The scent of perspiration wafted among them, the tension palpable. What was going on?

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything. Is this an academic mee-
ting?”

Picard was no taller than five-feet-seven. The square shoulders of his navy blue blazer made him look even shorter and block-shaped. He started to say something, but the man in the suit clamped a hand on his shoulder.

She shot the pitted-faced man a look. “I don’t believe we’ve formally met.”

“No,” he said and smiled, “we haven’t.”

She extended her hand. “Peyton Cote.”

“I know who you are,” he said, his hand remaining at his side. Then he steered Picard down the hall, out of view. She and Reilly watched them go, footfalls on the linoleum tiles fading away.

When they were gone, Reilly turned back to her, his eyes des-
perate.

“Let me buy you a cup of coffee,” she said.

He looked at her, eyes narrowing.

“It’s just a cup of coffee, Jerry.”

“And if I say no?”

“Then someone else will talk to you,” she said, “and it won’t be over a cup of coffee.”

She didn’t wait long to put the question to him.

“Just a couple of my friends,” he said. “That’s all. Actually, I’d much rather talk about something else.” He smiled shyly. “Like us.”

She didn’t return the gesture.

They were seated at a table in the Northeastern Hotel bar. There’d be no kiss at this bar—of that, she was sure.

“I am talking about us. I’m talking about the mutual friends we seem to share. How do you know Morris Picard?”

“I don’t know him well. He works with a friend of mine.” His eyes scanned the interior of the bar.

“Who’s the friend?”

“Tell me about the job opportunities you want to tell my students about,” he said.

Then something clicked for her. “Is your friend Jonathan Hur-
ley?”

He turned and looked at her, eyes quickly darting away.

She recognized the gesture of admission. “Small world. Hurley is my brother-in-law. Is that an English accent, Jerry?”

He seemed relieved to change topics. “Not much of one anymore. I’ve been in the US for twenty-one years.”

“Interesting. How do you and Hurley know each other?” Her voice was pleasant, casual.

He cleared his throat. “We both teach history.”

“And the guy in the suit,” Peyton said, “does he teach history, too?”

Reilly looked around again, clearly uncomfortable. He shrugged halfheartedly. She’d seen variations of that reaction hundreds of times. He didn’t know which way to go and had no time to stall. He wasn’t quick on his feet—she’d asked a question to which he had no answer.

She noticed something else about Jeremiah Reilly. On the way to the bar, he’d sat in the passenger’s seat, shifting uncomfortably, remaining silent. The classroom leader, who’d put her on the spot in front of nearly twenty kids, wasn’t the same guy who’d sat quietly in the Jeep managing barely a nod. Maybe, away from his area of academic expertise and his college-campus comfort zone, he no longer felt powerful. Or maybe, and Peyton liked this theory better, Reilly was never quite as strong as he’d led her to believe that day in his classroom. He’d just been dealing with nineteen-year-old kids.

A waitress came by to take drink orders.

When Peyton asked for a draft, Reilly looked as if he’d brought her to meet his mother only to have her show off a tattoo.

“Scotch,” he said, “on the rocks.”

“Scotch?” The freckle-faced waitress chewed gum vigorously. “Like, for real?”

“Yes,” he said. His brows narrowed, his tone becoming suddenly confident. Kids posed no intellectual challenge to him; he could push them around.

“Kind of a beer crowd here. I’ll see what we have.”

“Please do,” he said.

The girl walked to the bar, leaned toward the bartender, and whispered. The bartender made a face. The waitress pointed at Reilly. Both looked over, and the bartender, a tall wiry guy with a shaved head and a dark blue tattoo of barbed wire on his bicep, laughed.

Peyton shifted gears again. “
Hablas Español
?”

Reilly smiled. “
Muy poco
, a little.”

“Oh, a cultured man like you? I bet you’re fluent.”

“Actually, I am. You must be, too. All Border Patrol agents speak Spanish, right?”

She nodded. The girl oddly known as Jane Smith had sat with an academic type at Tip of the Hat, speaking Spanish. That man looked like Reilly. Now, apparently, he talked like him, too.

But first things first.

“So who is this man in the suit, the guy you, Jonathan, and, I guess, even Morris Picard share as a mutual friend?”

Reilly thought for several long moments, eyes squarely on her, his wheels turning. Across the room, a group of young men watched a hockey game on CBC, a Canadian network. Someone scored a goal, and they let out a roar. Reilly didn’t even glance in their direction. His focus never left Peyton, which affirmed her instinct: something in her questions regarding the man in the suit bothered Reilly.

He looked around the room again. Looking for his scotch? Or checking the faces? She couldn’t tell, but he shifted in his seat.

His thick red hair was still parted to one side, cheeks still dotted with freckles. But now the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes stood out, the wrinkle lines more severe than she’d remembered, as if accentuated by the stress of her question.

Reilly stood and walked to the bar, got a small paper napkin, and returned. He sat and put it before him.

“The waitress will bring napkins, Jerry.”

He didn’t respond.

Jonathan Hurley, their “mutual friend,” also tried hard to look the part of the well-educated man. Her beret-wearing brother-in-law would rather talk about his Harvard degree than his baby. Reilly’s tweed jacket was, likewise, quite a statement—he was a college professor, and he wanted everyone to know it.

He took a peanut from the bowl, ate it, and leaned back, crossing his legs as if thoroughly relaxed.

“His name is Alan McAfee,” he said.

“No wonder he said he knows who I am.”

“Not sure how he would,” he said. “He’s from Boston.”

“Then why did it take you so long to say his name?”

“What? He’s not important. Why don’t you tell me about yourself, Peyton?”

“I was in El Paso for a while.” She smiled. He did, too. “But you knew that already. I have a young son from a former marriage. I grew up here.”

“Seeing anyone?” he said.

The guy was direct; she’d give him that. For a split second, Pete Dye’s kiss returned, and she genuinely considered the question.

“Hard to meet single and interesting people in this area,” he said.

“That’s one opinion.”

“Oh, I forgot you’re from here. That came out wrong.”

“Did it? Sounds like you’re being honest.”

“Do you agree?” he asked.

“Not at all,” she said. “In fact, you seem to have found an eclectic mix—a Boston lawyer, a Garrett schoolteacher, a high school department chair, and yourself. How about a Border Patrol agent named Scott Smith?”

He looked at her, then toward the waitress.

“The scotch isn’t coming yet, Jerry. Why don’t you tell me what all of you have in common?”

He examined the back of his hand thoughtfully for several moments. Finally, his head shook back and forth. Then his eyes rose to meet hers.

“Peyton, I spent a decade accumulating degrees. It wasn’t exciting. Many nights, in fact, were lost to libraries. I earned my Ph.D. only to find the college teaching market saturated. Only job I could find was up here.” He shrugged. “I took it.” He stood, reached in his pocket, and pulled out his wallet. “You have no real interest in me. That’s pretty apparent.”

He tossed a ten-dollar bill onto the table.

“I’ll walk home,” he said, and left.

THIRTY
-
FIVE

S
HE PULLED INTO A
slot marked “visitors” at St. Mary’s Hospital and got out. The night air had become brisk with the fading sunlight. The doors to the lobby whirred open and she entered, her thoughts swimming in rough seas.

The Spanish-speaking teen who’d asked about the abandoned infant was supposedly named Jane Smith.

Jerry Reilly, who had said, “Americans should be more aware of what’s happening around the world … isn’t that why nine-eleven really happened?” was friendly with Jonathan Hurley, who similarly had told students at a Boston Catholic school that Muslims had the strongest faith and that 9/11 occurred because Americans failed to understand other cultures. And both men hung out with fellow history buff Morris Picard. The obvious link between the three was history, but Picard, seemingly, had a strikingly different personality than the two others. Did Picard, too, share an anti-American stance?

All three had attended a poker game with the late Kenny Radke and a man wearing a suit. Was that Alan McAfee, who was from Boston? Hurley had worked in Boston. But what could McAfee’s connection to the others be?

When she entered Stan Jackman’s hospital room, he was sitting up in bed, staring at the window like a man looking into a dark reflective pool, his face pale. She knocked lightly on the open door.

“How are you, Stan?” she said.

“Place is like a jungle,” he said, motioning to the flowers lining the windowsill.

She kissed his cheek. “Lots of people care about you.”

He nodded. “Thanks. I got the bouquet from you and Tommy.”

She waved that off and grinned. “Elise was upset that you stood us up for lunch. Refused to put her name on the card.”

“Hey, I never said I was reliable.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m relying on you to continue being a pain in the butt for a long time, so get better and get out of here.”

She sat in the recliner next to the bed. A rolling tray table was beside the chair, a brown cafeteria-style tray atop it. Silver covers topped plates like hotel room-service meals. The plastic wrap covering the drink hadn’t been removed.

“Eat anything?” she said.

“Ever try the food in here? They don’t need to worry about me gaining weight.”

“What did the doctor say?”

“I had a heart attack.”

“I see you smoking again and you won’t have to worry about having another heart attack because I’ll shoot you.”

“You got no idea how bad the pain was. Cold turkey.”

“Good.”

“For someone with shitty luck, you’ve been in the right place a couple times this week. Thanks for coming to my house. You saved my life, Peyton.”

“
Wrong place, right time
. It’s on my business card.”

“I go home tomorrow or the next day, start cardiac rehab in a week or so. That’s a pretty image—me on a treadmill. At least I can work half-days. I told the doctor to give me that much, or I’d gain twenty pounds sitting at home.”