Close to the Bone (26 page)

“I’m glad I got the chance to meet you,” I said. “I hope Jack gets better.”

She reached in and touched my arm, smiled quickly, then stepped back. She narrowed her eyes and opened her mouth as if she wanted to say something. Then she shook her head. She lifted her hand. “Good-bye,” she said. Then she turned and trudged down the roadway.

As I watched, an orange cat popped out of the bushes. Charlotte bent to it and scooped it into her arms. Then a black cat with a white blaze on its chest appeared, and then a tiger cat, and then another orange one, and as she disappeared into the woods, more cats joined the parade behind her.

F
IFTEEN MINUTES LATER, I
pulled into Alex’s peastone driveway. The yard had been neglected when she’d moved in a year earlier, but now geraniums spilled out of window boxes and the boxwood shrubs were trimmed and the lawn was green. Alex spent mornings at her computer and afternoons puttering around the yard. “Decompressing,” she called it. She had a pretty view from up there on her hilltop. Out back facing west, a meadow sloped down to a brook, then rose to a hillside planted in corn. On a clear day you could sometimes see the round-topped purple-and-green New Hampshire hills humping up on the horizon.

I took my newspaper inside, careful not to let the door slam, and poured a mug of coffee. Alex had set up her office at one end of the open downstairs, partitioning it off with chest-high bookcases. There she worked at her big flat-topped desk with her computer, her files, her telephone and fax machine, and her tape recorders.

I heard the soft buzz of voices coming from behind the partition and guessed she was listening to tapes of her interviews.

Alex’s publisher had given her a nice advance for her book, which was to be an elaboration of a series she’d written for the
Boston Globe.
She was calling it
The Legacy of Abuse.
Her thesis, as I understood it, was that spouse abuse was symbiotic, that abusers and victims sought each other out, that both abusers and their victims tended to come from abusive families, and that abusive parents provided models for their children: Boys tended to emulate their abusive fathers, and girls sought out boys who behaved just like their daddies, the way their mothers had.

It wasn’t, she said, a particularly original idea. Sociologists and psychologists had explored it thoroughly. But Alex’s publisher believed that her powerful case studies would “popularize” it, and that her book would be a big seller.

She’d been working on it for almost a year. She’d moved to Garrison the previous Labor Day. The
Globe
had given her a two-year leave of absence, and she figured she could live that long on her advance, so two years was the deadline she’d set for herself to finish her book.

She’d given up her apartment on Marlborough Street in Boston’s Back Bay, and she’d given up our nightly sleep-overs at my place overlooking the harbor. For almost a year I’d been driving up to Garrison, Maine, on Friday afternoons.

“Brady? That you?”

I peered over the bookcases. She was staring at her computer monitor through her big round glasses.

“I’m back,” I said.

“Cool,” she mumbled, still peering at the screen. “Have fun?”

I smiled. “I’ll tell you all about it when you’re done.”

“Absolutely. Right.”

Alex had the remarkable ability to write and talk at the same time, a talent she’d picked up in the
Globe
newsroom. But her conversations didn’t always make much sense, and afterward she never remembered a thing we’d said to each other.

I took my coffee and newspaper out onto the deck that spanned the back of the house, sat in a rocking chair, and admired my woodpile. In the fall, we’d had three cords of hardwood dumped in the back. Got them cheap because they were green logs twelve feet long. It took me all winter with the chain saw to cut them into sixteen-inch woodstove lengths, and when I finished that, I’d begun splitting and stacking them. Now I was about half done.

Splitting and stacking wood was engrossing and rewarding work. I imagined that my shoulders and back had grown bulky and knotty with new muscles from the repeated, rhythmic lifting of the heavy splitting maul. I liked studying the grain on a chunk of cordwood, deciding where to hit it, then dropping the maul precisely there with just enough force to send the two halves flying. And I enjoyed stacking it, adjusting the split pieces of wood so they fit together, and watching my woodpile grow. It was like building a sturdy old New England stone wall that would withstand a hundred winters of frost heaves without toppling. It was good, healthy, old-fashioned Robert Frost New England work, a welcome relief from writing separation agreements and probating wills.

Splitting and stacking firewood was hypnotic and relaxing. It demanded my full attention on one level while allowing my mind to wander on another, and I didn’t mind the backache that always followed. It gave me an excuse to drink a beer, take a hot leisurely shower, and afterward sprawl naked on the bed while Alex straddled me and gave me a long, languid backrub that usually ended with both of us under the sheets.

I would split no wood today. It was too damn hot. I sat on the deck on the shaded back side of the house, rocking and sipping my coffee and reading my
Globe
back to front. About the time I had turned to page two, I felt Alex’s hand on my neck.

I reached up and steered her face down to mine.

She kissed my cheek. “Hi, babe,” she said.

“Done for the day?”

“I’ve got a little transcribing I want to finish up.” She plopped into the rocker beside me and put her heels on the deck rail. Her legs were smooth and tanned and shapely. She was wearing gray gym shorts and a dark blue sleeveless T-shirt. Her work clothes. Alex claimed that the best thing about holing up in a house in Maine to write a book was that she didn’t have to wear panty hose or bras or high heels or makeup.

“Thought I’d take a coffee break,” she said.

I lit a cigarette and offered her one.

She waved it away with the back of her hand. “How was your morning?” she said.

“I took a sick dog to the vet. Met a friend of yours.”

“Oh?”

“The lady with the sick dog. Charlotte Gillespie.”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know her.”

“Well, she seemed to know you.”

“Hey,” she said. “I’m a famous journalist.”

“And soon you will be a famous author,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe.”

“She’s an African-American woman,” I said. “Forty, maybe. Very attractive.”

She shrugged. “I haven’t met any African-American women up here. Attractive, eh?”

“Yes. She reminded me of Lena Horne. She keeps a lot of pets, and she’s got a No Trespassing sign by the woods road that leads to her house.” I hesitated. “Somebody spray-painted a swastika on it.”

“Huh?” said Alex. “A swastika?”

“Yes. A big hateful red one.”

“Jesus,” she murmured. “What a world.”

Alex and I slept in the next morning. I made Canadian bacon and French toast for breakfast, which we drowned in real Maine maple syrup and ate on the deck. We lingered there sipping coffee, smoking, and watching a little flock of early-migrating warblers. We admired the way the slanting morning sunlight painted the countryside in vivid colors, and it was after nine by the time I climbed into my Jeep to fetch my Sunday
Globe
at Leon’s.

I remembered Jack, Charlotte’s dog, and decided to swing around to the animal hospital. When I went in, Dr. Spear was talking to a teenaged girl and a man in overalls who I assumed was the girl’s father. A shrouded birdcage sat on the counter.

Dr. Spear glanced at me, lifted her chin in greeting, then turned back to her conversation.

A minute or two later, the girl picked up the birdcage and they left. Dr. Spear took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, put her elbows on the countertop, and shook her head.

“The dog?” I said.

She nodded. “He died. He only lasted a few hours after she brought him in. Didn’t surprise me. He was in bad shape. There was nothing I could do.”

I let out a long breath. “That’s a damn shame,” I said. “Charlotte will be devastated. She really seemed to love that dog.”

Dr. Spear shrugged. “Of course she did.”

“What was it? Distemper or something?”

She leaned toward me. “Mr.—I don’t know your name.”

“Coyne. Brady Coyne.”

She nodded. “Mr. Coyne, I’m not sure what killed that dog. She told me he was fine the day before she brought him in. He got sick and died within twenty-four hours. I’ve been doing this for over thirty years, and I don’t know as I’ve ever seen an animal disease that works like that.”

“So…?”

“Poison,” she said. “That dog got into some kind of poison.”

I remembered the swastika on Charlotte’s No Trespassing sign. “Or someone poisoned him,” I said.

She nodded. “That’s certainly possible.”

“Jesus,” I mumbled. “Who’d do something like that?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised,” said Dr. Spear.

“It was a rhetorical question,” I said. “I assume you’ll report it.”

“To whom? Report what? That I think the dog swallowed something poisonous, or maybe somebody fed it to him? Where do we go with that?”

“I don’t know. What about running some toxicology tests on the animal?”

“I’d like to,” said Dr. Spear. “If it was poison, it’s not anything I’ve ever seen before.” She shook her head. “I’d have to do an autopsy, and I’d need the owner’s permission—if she can pay for it. I can’t autopsy dead animals unless the owners give their okay, even when we don’t know why they died. Pet owners can be pretty sensitive about things like that. What we normally do, Mr. Coyne, is, we offer to cremate the animals. Many people prefer to take the body back and bury it themselves.”

“What does Charlotte say?”

Dr. Spear shrugged. “I don’t know how to get hold of her. She left no address or phone number. I tried looking her up, but she’s not listed. I don’t even know where to send the bill.”

“I’d like to know what killed him,” I said.

“Oh, so would I. If somebody did poison the poor creature, you can bet I’d like to string him up.”

“Me, too,” I said. “I’d be willing to pay for the autopsy.”

“I’d still need her permission.” She pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a long breath. “When you see Ms. Gillespie, you might ask her.”

“I’m not sure I will see her,” I said. “I don’t really know her. I just saw her carrying that dog, so I gave her a ride.”

“Well,” she said, “I can’t keep the dog forever. If she doesn’t tell me what to do, I’ll have to incinerate it.”

“I’ll drop by her place,” I said. “Try to get an answer for you.”

“That would be a big help, Mr. Coyne.”

“Look,” I said. “I’d like to take care of the bill.”

She smiled, and I realized it was the first time I’d seen her smile. “That’s very nice of you.”

I handed her my Visa card and signed the stub after she’d run it through her machine. Eighty-five dollars.

“A lot of people bring in sick animals and never come back for them,” she said.

“And never pay their bills.”

She shrugged.

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

I picked up my paper at Leon’s store, then drove over the dirt roads that led to the plywood sign with the evil spray-painted swastika.

I left my Jeep under the sign and began walking down the narrow rutted roadway where I had seen the cats come out of the woods and trail behind Charlotte. It followed a curving stone wall, crossed a dried-up streambed, climbed uphill through a stand of second-growth poplar and alder mixed with juniper and old apple, and ended about a mile into the woods at a rolling meadow on a knoll.

Charlotte’s house sat with its back to the dark pine woods, facing across the meadow to the south. It looked as if it had originally been a hunter’s shack—a simple square, shingled cabin with a door in the middle flanked by two small windows with an aluminum stovepipe sticking out of the roof. Flat-roofed ells had been added onto each end. No electric or telephone wires led into it.

It was a pretty spot, with a long view across the sloping meadow to the hills in the distance. A stream snaked its way through the valley. A good place for somebody who liked the outdoors and wanted a heavy dose of solitude.

Charlotte was doing her best to make a home out of it. The door was barn red, recently painted, and a variety of annual flowers—petunias, marigolds, impatiens, and several that I didn’t recognize—were blooming along the field-stone path leading up to it. A mud-spattered mountain bike—the kind with knobby tires and about a hundred gears—leaned against the side of the house next to the door.

I walked up the path and knocked on the door. I waited a minute, then knocked again and called, “Charlotte? It’s Brady Coyne.”

A moment later I heard a voice behind me. “Mr. Coyne,” she said softly. “Hello.”

I turned. She was wearing overalls over a gray T-shirt, work boots, and cotton gloves. Her hair was tucked up under a wide-brimmed straw hat. “I was out back tending my vegetable garden,” she said. She tucked a stray strand of hair up under her hat and started to smile, then stopped herself. “Is it about Jack?”

I nodded.

She tugged off her gloves. “He died, didn’t he?”

“I’m afraid so, yes.”

She took off her hat, dropped her gloves into it, and shook out her hair. “He wasn’t even two years old,” she said. “I made sure he had all his shots.”

“The vet,” I said, “Dr. Spear, she thinks it might’ve been poison.”

Charlotte looked at me. “Poison,” she said softly. “Oh, dear.” She shook her head, then went to the steps that led up to her front door and sat down. I sat beside her.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands. “You’re very kind to come by, Mr. Coyne,” she whispered. “He was the cutest little dog. Who’d want to poison a sweet little dog like Jack?”

“He might’ve just gotten into something.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “Antifreeze Rat poison. Mushrooms. Maybe somebody put out something for coyotes.”