Bloodline (10 page)

“You never sent me the one on the irises,” she said.

“Oh, yes,” I said. “My horticultural debut. The phone's been ringing off the hook.”

“I'm sure you did a nice job.”

“And it's gonna lead to all kinds of opportunities,” I said. “The
Inquirer
called. They want a piece on botanic cults.”

Roxanne laughed. She had a nice laugh, sort of low and throaty. When I heard it, I almost winced.

“So what's this new story about?” she asked.

I was at the counter, opening a beer.

“Babies,” I said. “Kids who have babies. Right up your alley, Miss Social Worker.”

“The vicious circle, you mean?” Roxanne said.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “What it's like. Where it leads. Are kids in rural New England any different from the four generations before them?”

“Sounds like a big project.”

“Nah,” I said. “I went out yesterday afternoon and did the research. I'm gonna have a few beers tonight and write it. At that rate, I'll be making about five hundred dollars an hour.”

“Finally somebody recognizes your true worth,” she said.

“Finally,” I said.

The irony, unintended, made us both pause.

We had a nice talk. Roxanne said she was working for the local school system and taking some courses to get certified as a counselor. She was thinking of getting her master's in psychology. I almost made a joke about her getting me on the couch, but decided not to engage
in double entendre. Those days were over—or at least on long-term hold. I wondered if somebody else was holding her now.

Roxanne didn't say so and I didn't ask. We talked for fifteen minutes and when we hung up, with no plans to do anything but talk again sometime, I wondered what I had done in tossing her away.

The feeling was still there, I thought, as I wandered into the living room and stretched out on the couch. Not the lust, though that was lurking about a millimeter below the surface. No, make that half a millimeter. But what was still there was this feeling of comfort, that I could open all the doors for Roxanne and not worry about what would happen when she came in.

The guard I raised for everyone else all came down with Roxanne. There was no filter for my thoughts, my impressions, my bad jokes. And talking to her, I realized what hard work it was to be with anyone else.

Oh, Jack, I thought. You blew it.

But maybe not. There was something still there, a fondness at the very least. At the most, she still was in love with me. When she had her fill of tall, good-looking, wealthy adventurers, she'd be back. I wondered if I should wait up.

The thought of her made me smile to myself. And I had lots of thoughts of her.

I sipped my beer and crossed my feet on the end of the couch. The sun had dropped below the hills out back and the house was still and dim. In the quiet, I remembered snippets of our six months together, subliminal flashes of making love, walking down a street in Portland, having dinner, Roxanne leaning over to kiss me good-bye as I slept. I remembered the smell of her, the feel of her, her shoes on the floor in the living room, the way they'd be strewn where she kicked
them off as I uncorked the wine and she started to tell me about the day's social morass. I remembered all of it, and then remembered it again and again until finally I dozed off.

And woke up in a shower of glass.

The first boom sent me off the couch, onto the floor on my knees. The second dropped me to my belly with my hands over my head and the room disintegrating all around me. I waited for another but there was nothing. Silence. A clink of glass as shards dropped somewhere. A cool breeze on my hands, clasped behind my head. Something warm running down my temple. I touched it with the back of my right hand. In the dark, the blood looked black.

I listened. Heard a motor start somewhere in the distance, in the direction of the dump. It revved once and then it was in gear. First. Second, then third, then a hush. They must be going around the corner. Now a roar again, fading into the night.

Still, I didn't get up. I got myself to my knees, waited to feel if there was any pain. The blood from my temple had dripped onto the floor, but it was a low drip that already was stopping. I touched my hands to each other and felt a sting on my left palm. Paused. There was no other pain. No other blood that I could tell. I turned toward the couch and could see the stars where the window had been.

The bats were going to like this.

I waited and listened. Heard a night bird and nothing else. Crouching, I made my way across the room and into the kitchen, glass grating under my socks. In the kitchen, still in the dark, I found the phone. My hand went to the dial.

The phone book was on the counter, I thought. I patted my way along the counter and found it under some papers. Should I turn on the lights? Probably not. I opened a drawer and felt around for
matches. Miraculously found some. Struck one and opened the front cover of the phone book. There were little symbols for cops and fire and poison. The cop number was the Waldo County Sheriff's Department. An 800 number. I dialed it as the match went out. A woman answered as I shook my singed fingers.

“Hi,” I said. “This is Jack McMorrow on the dump road in Prosperity. I think somebody just shot a window out of my house.”

It was a shotgun, Clair Varney said. He held up a pellet he'd found on the floor.

“Buckshot.”

“Teach me for wearing those antlers around the house,” I said, dabbing a wet hand towel at the cut on my forehead.

“Not even in season,” Clair said.

He'd gotten there as I hung up the phone. First he'd called to me from the yard, and when I said I was okay, he'd walked in the kitchen door slowly and silently, holding a deer rifle with the barrel pointed at the floor.

“Somebody didn't like what you wrote about those flowers,” Clair said.

“But they seemed like such gentle people.”

“Those are the ones who'll backshoot you every time,” he said.

Clair said he'd had a good idea what the first shot was, and knew for sure with the second. Unless I'd taken up night skeet shooting, he figured I was in some sort of trouble. And I would have been, if I'd happened to sit up.

“How far from the house do you figure they were?” I asked him.

We went into the living room and looked at the window. Actually, it was two windows, side by side, with twelve panes in each. Both window were shot out, the panes mostly shattered, the wooden mullions splintered at the center.

“Thirty feet, maybe,” Clair said. “Sure as hell not much more than that. You can tell by the spread. Buckshot doesn't spread like lighter shot.”

“Would have taken my head off,” I said.

“Or at least a good chunk of it.”

“Would have been the end of my modeling career.”

“Have to find some honest work,” Clair said.

The question hung there in the air even before anyone said it. Finally it was Clair who broke the silence.

“So what's the deal, my friend? Those flower guys play rough or what?”

I told Clair about the kids at the pit. We talked as we walked out to his truck, which was parked in the road about fifty yards from the house. Clair had said he wanted to put his rifle away before the sheriff's deputies got there. Save time by avoiding a lot of questions.

As we stood out front I told him about the high school kids. Kenny, who didn't seem to like me. The other boys, who didn't seem to care one way or the other. The girls, who seemed nice enough but probably had this way of stirring things up.

“If it was them, it didn't take 'em long,” Clair said.

“They're not procrastinators.”

“If this is their idea of a joke, they're not too sane, either.”

“What's the old saying?” I said. “Boys will be homicidal maniacs?”

As we walked back toward the house, one of the college girls came out and walked up to us. She was wearing gym shorts and a sweatshirt that said
YALE
.

“What was that big boom?” she asked.

“Oh, somebody who forgets that people have to get up in the morning,” I said, smiling.

She looked at me quizzically. I supposed I had an obligation to tell her.

“Somebody took a shot at the house,” I said.

“With a gun?” she said.

“Either that or a cannon.”

“Oh, my God. Was anybody hurt?”

“Not really,” I said. “A couple scratches. And of course my belief in the innate goodness of people was tragically shattered.”

She had the quizzical look again.

“No, nobody was hurt. Just somebody's idea of a joke, I guess.”

“Jeez,” she said. “What do they do when they get serious?”

“Good question,” I said.

It was fifteen minutes before we heard the rush of tires on pavement and then saw the flashing blue strobe lights of the police cruiser. A quarter-mile down the road, the blues went out and the car slowed. It rolled up to where we stood and stopped. The radio rasped once and the deputy got out warily. He was very big and very young, with a Marine haircut and shoulders that seemed nine feet wide.

“Mr. McMorrow?” he said, approaching us.

“That's me,” I said.

“Deputy Franckel. Waldo SO. You reported a shooting?”

“Right.”

“And who are you, sir?” he said to Clair.

“Varney. A neighbor.”

“Well, Mr. Varney. I'm going to ask you to—”

“That's okay,” I said. “He can show you the buckshot.”

Which Clair did. After we showed the deputy the window, the couch covered with glass and splinters. Told him there were just two shots, then the sound of a car or a truck taking off. I briefly told him about the kids at the pit. He said he'd been there many times.

“I'm gonna go see if I can come across them, sir, in case they've been drinking or something and are still out there cruising around,” Franckel said. “Also, I'm the only one on patrol in the northern half of the county. What we'll do is notify an investigator from our department. I'd say he'll probably be out in the morning to talk to you and take the report. I could do it, but we'd be better off with a cruiser on the road. I'll try to stay somewhere in this area in case they come by again. You have a place to stay?”

“Right here,” I said. “Don't want 'em burning the place down while I'm gone.”

“Don't want 'em burning the place down while you're here, either,” the deputy said.

I spent the night tossing and turning and listening to the night sounds through the broken window. Clair suggested I put plastic over it to keep the bugs out, but I figured any bugs that might stray in would be eaten by the bats. This wasn't a house. It was an ecosystem.

Franckel seemed like he was on top of things, and sure enough, at about quarter to nine the next morning, a brown Chevy sedan pulled
up out front. I wiped the last of the dishes and went to the door. After a minute, I heard the car door slam and steps and then he was there.

“Mr. McMorrow,” he said. “I'm Mark Poole. Waldo County Sheriff's Department. I understand you had a little excitement here last night.”

“Good thing, too,” I said. “There wasn't anything on TV at all.”

He was sort of small and maybe even slight, though it was hard to tell because his sport jacket, a bland brownish tweed, was a size too big. He was about my age, with thick straight hair parted on the side, a small sheepish smile, and the general air of a Scout leader or someone who might have come to the door handing out religious tracts. I asked him if he would like a cup of coffee and he said no, why didn't we just go and view the damage.

Poole looked the window over for what seemed like a very long time. He picked at the glass with a pen and another shard fell onto the couch.

“Sorry about that,” Poole said.

He took a small black coil-bound notebook out of his jacket pocket and wrote something in it.

“Find a clue?” I asked.

Poole just smiled. Jotted and then put the notebook away.

“I found some buckshot,” I said.

“I was gonna say buckshot. Somebody standing maybe twenty or thirty feet away. You said it was two shots?”

“Both barrels.”

“You're probably right,” Poole said, and gave me that small crooked smile again.

“Mr. McMorrow,” he said, “are you employed?”

“I'm a writer,” I said. “Used to work for newspapers, but now I'm doing freelance writing for magazines.”

“There much work in that?”

“Some. You have to look to find it.”

“What paper did you work for?”

“Different ones,” I said.
“New York Times
, mostly.”

“Huh. What magazine do you work for?”

“Right now,
New England Look.
I did a story for
Down East
.”

“About what?”

“People who grow flowers,” I said.

After each question he smiled and looked at me with mild curiosity. Then he turned and looked around the room. His gaze ran over the shelves of books, the Nikon binoculars. He seemed to pause at the stereo. A very nice digital receiver that cost eight hundred bucks. State-of-the-art speakers. A double-dubbing tape deck. High-end CD player.

Hey, I found myself thinking. So I don't watch TV. Gimme a break.

“You like music,” Poole said.

“Jazz,” I said. “And lately, more and more classical. You?”

“My wife likes country. Kenny Rogers. I don't really know much about it. Whatever station comes in clear in the car is fine with me. When I have some time at home, I take my boys fishing. You fly-fish?”

“No. Never tried it.”

He smiled again. Took a couple of steps toward the bookshelf and read some titles.

“Okay, Mr. McMorrow. Now tell me about these kids you said you had this problem with. And tell me, how exactly did you come to meet them?”