No Way Home (2 page)

“Tell me this hasn’t happened,” she said, and MacGregor’s face went helpless.

“Lydia …” His voice faded into frustration. He wanted to squeeze her in his arms and show her that the strength of his love would sustain her, but she gazed through him as if he were no longer a presence.

“I can’t stay inside,” she said and walked woodenly toward the back door through rooms that now seemed alien. Outside, the sun pounced at her. Rambunctious hornets flew like stunt pilots over the shocking pink of a rhododendron. MacGregor hovered, useless, unwanted.

“You don’t want to be out here,” he said and was ignored.

Lieutenant Bakinowski of the state police was reconnoitering, eyes fastened on the grass, as if he were tracking somebody’s spoor. Troopers were scouring the woodlot for evidence, footprints, a casing from a shell. So far they had come upon only poison ivy and woodchuck holes. One of the troopers, a bird lover, paused to observe the flight of an oriole.

“Please, Lydia.”

The bodies were still on the ground, for Lieutenant Bakinowski, deaf to Chief Morgan’s protest, did not want them removed yet.

Sergeant Avery had taken pictures with an old Speed Graphic, but Bakinowski had then assigned his own man to do the job. To the chief he said, “Your guy comes up with blanks, where does that leave me?”

Morgan, unwilling to wait for the county medical examiner, had summoned nearby Dr. Skinner, semiretired, who pronounced the victims dead — Flo Lapham of the bullet that had torn through an artery and Earl of an apparent coronary, most likely massive. Morgan had then covered them with blankets, one from the sergeant’s car and the other from his.

Lydia stood rigid from an inner spring that had tightened. Had it tightened more her head would have snapped back. From the distance the chief was staring. Clearly he did not want her out here, but he made no move. He had known Earl and Flo Lapham all his life and Lydia since she was a child knock-kneed in a ruffled dress, her father showing her off at a Memorial Day ceremony on the green, shots fired into the air, which scared her. She bolted to her mother. After all these years he remembered that and tried to catch MacGregor’s eye, a signal to get her back into the house, but MacGregor was staring at the ground.

Turning her face, Lydia gazed at a loose drain pipe her father would never fix and at a bed of Alpine strawberries her mother would not see ripen. At the hospital, where she was accustomed to terminal illnesses, to pain and suffering, death was often only a breath away. Here it had been less than that, without warning, without rhyme, leaving only the riveting weight of loss.

Lieutenant Bakinowski finished his reconnoitering and approached the chief. He wore a blue business suit and had deep-set eyes that came out of their cages when he spoke. “Think I’ve figured out the line of fire.” With a shout and a strenuous wave, he redirected the troopers in the woodlot.

“Could’ve been a stray shot, some kid playing around. What d’you know about the family?”

“Good people,” Morgan said.

“But these little towns are funny. You were born here, weren’t you?”

“And I’ve lived here all my life,” Morgan said with loyalty and pride but with less force than usual, his voice sharp but sad. Tragedy, he firmly believed, is bred into every triumph. The stunning loss of his wife and the scattering of his father in the final victory blasts of a war had proved that. Happiness has nowhere to settle except in sadness. That, he felt, was a given.

“Something the matter, Chief?”

“I just wish to hell you’d get the bodies out of here, make it easier on the daughter.”

“Not yet.”

“Why not?”

“They keep the scene real.”

“This isn’t a stage set.”

“That’s exactly what it is,” Bakinowski said with authority and a deep-fixed impatience with local cops, whom he considered unprofessional, incompetent, and obstructive. Over Morgan’s head he also hung a cloud of moral laxity, for he had heard stories about the chief’s personal life. “Look here, Chief, I don’t care if you’re not a help, just don’t be a hindrance.”

The minister from the Congregational church appeared. Lydia was not a churchgoer, but her parents had been faithful ones. “Please don’t say anything,” she said with a raw awareness of his presence. His well-intended face was solemnly set and his gray hair smartly combed as if in celebration of saintly thoughts. Officer MacGregor, in deference to him, had slipped away.

“I just want you to know I’m here,” the minister said. “And to help if I can.”

“Nothing will bring them back,” she said in a hollow voice.

“But we know where they are.”

“Yes,” she said. “Somewhere in the nowhere.”

A trooper scratching his bug bites came out of the woodlot. He was sweating; his skin poured through his shirt. “Look what I got, Lieutenant.” He laid open a broad hand and showed a shell casing, which Bakinowski eyed closely. “I know what it’s from,” said the trooper, a sharpshooter who once had picked off a deranged man holding hostages. “So do you, Lieutenant.”

Bakinowski turned to Chief Morgan. “Know anyone in town owns an F-l sniper rifle?”

• • •

Meg O’Brien stayed at the station past her shift to help answer telephones that did not stop ringing. As soon as she put her phone down it would jangle in her hand, the sound vibrating into her arm. There had not been this much excitement since two youths from out of town had held up the Sunoco station, shot the owner in the leg, pistol-whipped the attendant, and were apprehended in the woods two miles from where their car broke down. That night the chief took her and Eugene Avery to a restaurant in Lawrence, where they ate scampi and drank wine, and the waiter, his fly not properly zipped, sang a little song in Italian.

On the lighted steps of the town hall, overlooking the green, Lieutenant Bakinowski fielded questions from the media, including reporters from Boston’s three major television stations. In Boston, scarcely twenty miles away, a killing was simply part of a count that rose each year, but in a hamlet like Bensington it was an event. Unremarkable in their sockets, Bakinowski’s eyes emerged electric for the cameras. The eyes of the man beside him stirred soupy blue under brows in need of a trim. Randolph Jackson, his family Bensington’s oldest, was chairman of the selectmen and a former state legislator. He was losing some of his sandy hair, one sizable bite on the crown, and with a freckled hand he smoothed strands over the spot. Sotto voce, he said, “Where’s the chief?”

“Who the hell knows?” Bakinowski whispered back. Then the same query was posed by a reporter from the Lawrence paper, whose circulation included Bensington. “Probably having his supper,” Bakinowski offered in his public voice and went on to the next question.

Sergeant Avery, on the chief’s orders, sat in a cruiser outside a white frame house flanked by lilacs with a scent that pervaded the growing dark. Beside him was a twelve-gauge Mossberg shotgun and the wrapping from a sandwich he had consumed. On the dash was a can of root beer. An empty mayonnaise jar awaited his need to relieve his bladder. His head was tipped and his eyes focused on the porch light, which was collecting moths at a rapid rate. The house belonged to Lydia Lapham’s unmarried aunt. Lydia was spending the night there, perhaps many nights.

Matthew MacGregor stood with Chief Morgan in the half-lit parking lot of the library, which had closed at eight. Morgan’s car was unmarked except for the town seal on each side and a noticeable scrape that had defaced one of the seals. MacGregor said, “It must’ve happened when I was trying to call her. I wanted to catch her before she left for work. Christ, Chief, I should’ve gone there instead.”

Ten years his senior, Morgan regarded him somewhat paternally. With certain expressions MacGregor looked like a schoolboy fitted into a policeman’s uniform. The sidearm he carried could have been a heavy toy. A pug nose caricatured wholesome looks, and a muscular build evoked days he played three sports at the regional high school, a letter earned in each.

“She saw them drop.” He snapped his fingers. “Like
that,
they were gone!” He snapped his fingers again, so hard they must have hurt. “Like
that!
”

“Take it easy,” Morgan said with a strong sense of connection. Each had lost his father young. MacGregor was ten when, without warning, without even an explanation, his father abandoned the family, simply walked out the door with a packed bag, and was never heard from again.

“I know what she’s going through, Chief.”

“I know you do.”

“I want the son of a bitch who did it.”

A mosquito whined between, and both batted it away, MacGregor with the faster hand. Morgan spoke quietly. “I’ve been mulling over what Lydia told us. I don’t think her mother was the target. I think she got in the way.”

MacGregor’s face faltered, and the boy in it vanished. “You’re saying Lydia.”

“Makes more sense, doesn’t it?”

MacGregor agreed without speaking, without moving a muscle. Then he disagreed. “Makes no sense at all. Who’d want to hurt her? Christ, no one. At the hospital she puts doctors in their place, but they respect her. Patients love her, everybody loves her.
I
love her, Chief. She’s the world to me.”

“Exactly,” Morgan said in a slow voice meant to drive home the meaning, which MacGregor resisted.

“I don’t know what you’re telling me.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Then say it plain.”

“It’s like I always said. Somebody wants to hurt a cop, he goes after the family.” Morgan averted his head and sneezed. Oaks and birches were disseminating their pollen. “Or a person just as close,” he added.

• • •

The driver stopped, idled the motor, and squinted through the windshield. Pitched high, the headlights burned a tunnel through the dark of the steel bridge spanning the Merrimack River, which was muscular from recent rains. The driver dimmed the lights and squeezed a smile he did not know was there. His breathing, like the motor, ran rough. “Give it here,” he said, and the sleek pieces of a dismantled rifle tumbled weightily into his hands. The stink of the shot was still in the barrel. Then he pushed open his door.

The night air was rife with the taste and smell of the river, and from everywhere came the racket of peepers. Walking along the rail to the middle of the bridge, he reassembled the weapon with amazing dexterity and speed. He wanted to see it whole again. A fearsome piece of workmanship, it had proved a rewarding instrument of business.

He pricked an ear when he thought he heard the sound of a car coming, but it was merely the rumble of the river, which brought up more of its taste and a deeper odor. For a moment he was struck by the thought that the river had a voice and was saying things to him. But he had no time to listen. Stepping back, he gripped the rifle by the barrel and with a whirl threw it over the rail.

The splash was insignificant.

2

The morning broke bright over the town, which had wakened early. Crows scavenged residential streets to feast on the remains of unlucky woodlot animals. A boy on a bicycle slung yesterday’s news over lawns still moist from the night. Here and there front doors opened tentatively. A woman in a robe rushed to pick up her paper, and across the street a man in an undershirt retrieved his. A bread truck, on its way to Tuck’s General Store, rumbled around the green, where a few souls had already gathered as if expecting a show. They trained their eyes on the police sign protruding from the far side of the town hall.

The Blue Bonnet restaurant opened at seven and filled by quarter-past. The breakfast menu, chalked on a blackboard screwed into a wall of knotty pine, offered muffins straight from the baking tins, doughnuts hot from the oven, and eggs fresh from Tish Hopkins’s chickens. A communal table of regulars ate with their eyes aimed out the windows. Mitch Brown, preparing a dozen orders at once, turned from the grill and scanned the faces at every table. “I don’t see the chief,” he declared.

The chief, usually there, was not, which surprised no one.

At an hour when most men were leaving for work, a number of wives made their husbands stay home. The school bus ran half empty. At eight-fifteen Fred Fossey, commander of the local VFW, lowered the flag at the town hall to half mast. He and Earl Lapham had fought in the Korean War, and Flo Lapham, nee Westerly, on whom he had had a crush since childhood, was a third or fourth cousin. Entering the town hall, where he held the part-time position of veterans affairs officer, he bumped into the Congregational minister and grabbed the man’s upper arm. “Something we have to ask ourselves, Reverend. Is God always on duty?”

Meg O’Brien, with little sleep, was back in the station, with a mug of coffee at her elbow. Sergeant Avery, arriving late, peeked into the chief’s office, which was vacant. “Not in yet?” he asked.

“Been and gone,” Meg O’Brien said.

“Say where?”

“You want him, you can reach him on the radio. You want him?”

Sergeant Avery shook his head, poured coffee from the Silex, and had an unwanted memory of Chief Morgan gently draping a blanket over Flo Lapham’s body. For a stunning moment he had thought the chief, for the comfort of each, might shift her closer to her husband. His voice went small. “Doesn’t make sense, does it, Meg?”

“World sort of made sense once, but I was a kid then,” said Meg, who had suffered her own losses.

At nine o’clock, Lieutenant Bakinowski assigned troopers to requestion neighbors of the Laphams’. Hours leading to the shooting, had they noticed anything unusual, no matter how insignificant? Think hard. Some, desperate to help, made up things, citing strangers on the street and noises in the yard, figures fleeing in the woods beyond.

Near noon, Bakinowski spoke with Randolph Jackson in the front seat of Jackson’s Audi, a replacement for one cracked up a month before. “You must have a few hunters in this town,” Bakinowski said, and Jackson immediately challenged the inference.

“What would a hunter have been doing in that little woodlot?”

“He could’ve been testing his weapon. Could’ve fired it accidentally.” Bakinowski’s eyes came forward. “Let me remind you of something, sir. Fellows who hunt animals, who are big for blood sport, aren’t like you and me. They’re a shade less.”