Outwitting Trolls (18 page)

When Sunday morning dawned sunny and sweet-smelling and rife with vernal promise, another in a string of delicious late-April days, Alex, Henry, and I piled into my car and drove out to Concord, where we rented a seventeen-foot double-ended aluminum canoe at the South Bridge Boathouse on the Sudbury River.

Alex wore cutoff shorts, a tank top, and one of my faded old Red Sox caps with her ponytail sticking out the back. From my seat in the stern, I enjoyed watching the clench and flex of her shoulder muscles as she paddled. Henry sat straight upright at the middle thwart, his ears cocked and his nostrils flared as we passed pairs of mallards paddling in the lily pads and a couple of great blue herons high-stepping along the riverbank with their necks bent like bows ready to release their arrows.

The river was wide and flat with no discernible current, and we glided along upstream, paddling easily, all the way to Fairhaven Bay. There we beached the canoe, spread my ancient army blanket on the grassy bank, and had a picnic of the freshly baked and still-warm Anadama bread and extra-sharp Vermont
cheddar that we'd picked up at a farmstand at Nine Acre Corner, washed down with cold bottles of root beer. We fed each other green grapes for dessert.

After we ate, Henry sprawled on his side in a patch of sunshine, and Alex and I lay back side by side on the blanket with our faces turned up to the sky and our eyes shut.

She found my hand with hers, interlaced our fingers, and held it tight against her hip. “What's going to become of us?” she asked.

“We're going to live happily ever after,” I said.

“Ever after
what
?”

“After we slay the wicked stepmother,” I said, “and escape from the castle and outwit the trolls at the bridge.”

“All that, huh?”

“Nobody ever said that happily ever after was going to be easy.”

She gave my hand a squeeze, then let it go. “Well, I don't see why it has to be so hard,” she said.

 

We got back to my place on Beacon Hill a little after four in the afternoon. Alex went upstairs to pack. Henry and I went out back. I thought about Wayne Nichols. He said he had something to show me. As soon as Alex left, I would climb back into my car and drive up to Websterville, New Hampshire, to see what it was.

“And you can't come,” I said to Henry.

He was lying on the bricks with his chin on his paws and his ears perked up, watching me. It was approaching his suppertime, so nothing would escape his notice. Henry lived with the chronic fear that I'd forget to feed him, or that he might sleep through dinner. It kept him alert and anxious.

Now, when he heard my voice, he lifted his head. Had I just uttered a
food
word?

“Sorry,” I said to him.

He sighed, and his ears went flat on his head. He dropped his chin to his paws and closed his eyes. He knew that “sorry” was a bad word, an antonym of “cookie” for example, or “bone,” or “dinner.”

After a few minutes, Alex came out and sat in the chair beside me. She'd changed into khaki pants that stopped halfway up her calves and a dark green cotton shirt, which she wore untucked with the tails flapping.

“All packed?” I asked.

“Yep.” She smiled. “All set to go.”

“What about next weekend?” I asked. “My house or yours?”

“I don't know,” she said.

“Let's make it yours,” I said. “It's my turn to do the driving.”

She shrugged. “I don't know, Brady.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm in a place where I don't like to interrupt my writing,” she said. “I was in a pretty good groove for a while, and now I feel like I've lost it.”

“Henry and I can stay out from underfoot. You know that.

We've done it before.”

“We can talk about it,” she said. She was gazing up into the afternoon sky.

“What's going on, babe?”

She turned her head and looked at me. “Nothing, really. I don't mean to be grouchy. It's been a lovely weekend. I know as soon as I get into my car I'll start missing you terribly. You and dear Henry.”

“But now…?”

She pushed herself to her feet. “Now it's time to leave. I want to get home before dark. Gonna walk me out to my car?”

Her duffel and backpack were sitting on the floor by the front door. I picked them up, took them out to her Subaru at the curb, and loaded them in back.

Alex was leaning against the driver's door. I went to her, and she hooked her arms around my neck. “Thank you, sweet man,” she said softly.

“For what?”

“For putting up with me,” she said.

“Hey,” I said. “I love you.”

She smiled. “I know. Me, too.”

“Call me when you get home?”

“Sure,” she said. “Will you be here?”

“Actually,” I said, “maybe not. Call my cell. I want to know you got home all right.”

“I will.” She tilted up her face and kissed me hard on the mouth. When she pulled back, I saw that her eyes were glittering.

“What's this?” I asked. I touched my fingertip to the dampness on her cheek.

She smiled. “It feels like I've been trying to get away from trolls all my life,” she said. “I'm ready for the happily ever after part.”

“You deserve that,” I said. “Let's make it happen.”

 

After Alex left, I gave Henry his supper and then let him out back. When he finished his business, we went inside, and I gave him a bully stick. He took it in his mouth and looked at me, and it wasn't hard to read his expression.
You give me these treats,
it said,
as a sop to your conscience because you're going somewhere
and not bringing me. I like bully sticks, even if they are dried bull penises. But I'd rather be going with you.

“Sorry, pal,” I said. “Guard the house. I'll be back, I promise.”

There were stretches of the two-lane east-west highway from Boston to Websterville, New Hampshire, where the descending April sun hung low in the sky, dead ahead, and the glare on my windshield almost blinded me, even though I was wearing sunglasses and had the window visor flipped down. I felt the beginnings of a headache blossom behind my eyes as I squinted and strained to focus on the lines on the middle of the road so I could stay on my side and avoid a headon.

I pulled up in front of Daniel Webster's Trout, the coffee shop on the main drag in Websterville, a few minutes after seven. I needed a shot of caffeine to banish my headache, and I wanted to get out and stretch my legs after the tension of driving half-blind into the setting sun.

Unfortunately for me, a sign hanging on the door read that Daniel Webster's Trout closed at four o'clock on Sunday afternoon. That was how they did business in New Hampshire college towns.

So I got back into my car, and ten minutes later I turned into the cul-de-sac where Wayne Nichols lived. Now the sun had sunk behind the wooded hills in back of Wayne's house. A dim light shone through the front window, and his rusty old Taurus sedan crouched in the cracked driveway.

I parked out front, went to the front door, and pressed the bell. It went
bong-bong
inside. When Wayne didn't come to the door, I hit the bell again, and still he didn't answer.

I went around to the carport and banged on the side door, and then I tried the back door, the one that opened into the kitchen.

Either Wayne wasn't home, or he'd decided he didn't want to talk with me after all.

There was another, more ominous explanation. I pulled open the storm door and tried the inside door. It was unlocked. I pushed it open, hesitated, then stepped inside.

I stood there in the doorway. No music was playing in some other room. No television droned. Somewhere a clock ticked hollowly. The refrigerator motor hummed. It was gray and shadowy. Yellow light filtered in from the next room.

“Hey, Wayne,” I called.

No answer.

I moved into the kitchen, and that's when the familiar harsh odor of burned gunpowder hit my nostrils.

“Oh, shit,” I said.

I found Wayne in the living room. A floor lamp shone on him and made the rest of the room seem dark. He was slouched on the sofa with his chin on his chest, his arms at his sides, and his legs stretched out in front of him. A round brick-red splotch the diameter of a grapefruit stained the front of the gray sweatshirt he was wearing. The blood looked dark and sticky—not quite dry, but not wet, either.

I went over to him and pressed two fingers against the side of his neck. I didn't expect to find any pulse, and I didn't.

When I straightened up, something rubbed against my leg. I whirled around and clenched my fists and started to drop into a defensive crouch. Then I blew out a breath and smiled.

It was a black cat with white boots and a white blaze on her chest. She was sitting there on Wayne's living room floor twitching her tail and looking up at me with her greenish yellow eyes.

I picked her up and held her against my chest. I could feel the vibrations of her purring. “I wonder what you saw,” I said.

She was wearing a collar with a tag. The tag read
SPARKY
and had a phone number.

I put Sparky on the floor, then reached into my pants pocket,
took out my cell phone, and flipped it open. I hit the nine and the one. Then I stopped, snapped the phone shut, and put it back into my pocket. Another few minutes wouldn't do Wayne any harm.

Sparky came padding along behind me when I went to the wing on the left side of the one-story ranch house. In the early evening twilight, the shadows were growing dark inside the house, so I took my handkerchief from my pants pocket and held it over my finger as I flicked on some lights. There were two small bedrooms and one bathroom. Only one of the bedrooms appeared to be used for sleeping. A king-sized mattress with a tangle of blankets, pillows, and sheets on it took up most of the floor space. There was a bureau and a closet, and I prowled through them and found nothing but clothes.

The other bedroom was evidently Wayne's storage room. Some wooden chairs were stacked in a corner. There was an un-made twin-sized bed and a drop-leaf dining table with a couple of lamps and some boxes sitting on it. Half a dozen big cardboard boxes sealed with packing tape were piled against one wall. I wondered what they held but decided that it would be imprudent to cut them open. The closet had sliding mirrored doors that were half open. A couple of winter-weight coats hung inside. Otherwise it was empty.

In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet was empty except for a bottle of Tylenol, a tube of Crest, a container of Right Guard, and some hair gel. Towels and extra rolls of toilet paper were stacked on shelves in the shallow linen closet, and a kitty-litter box sat next to the toilet.

Sparky followed me back to the other side of the house, which included the living room, a dining room, and the kitchen. In the living room were the sofa, where Wayne hadn't moved, a couple of mismatched easy chairs, a faded braided rug, and a flat-screen
television on the wall. A rectangular wooden table sat in the middle of the dining room with four matching chairs around it. Dishes and gravy boats and serving platters filled a glass-front built-in cupboard.

I found nothing of interest in the kitchen. Milk and orange juice, eggs and bread, jelly and spaghetti sauce, and a few containers of leftovers in the refrigerator. A tub of ice cream and a tray of ice cubes in the freezer. Cans of soup and beans and Diet Coke in a little pantry in the mudroom.

The entire house, with its cheap, impersonal furnishings and black-and-white cat, seemed somehow incongruous for a young guy who'd recently dropped out of college. Except for the wide-screen TV and the mattress on the floor, his was a house that should have been inhabited by an old widow lady on food stamps.

Maybe the furniture came with the house. That would explain it. Still, there was nothing intimate in these rooms, nothing that revealed the person who lived here. There were no framed family photos sitting on the shelves, no paintings hanging on the walls, no music posters tacked to the backs of doors.

On second thought, I guessed that the house and its contents probably revealed a great deal about Wayne Nichols.

I clicked my tongue at Sparky, and she followed me down the stairs into the basement.

A washer and dryer sat against one cement wall, and a furnace and an oil tank stood next to another wall. An unfinished plywood partition sectioned off half of the basement, and behind the partition was a small office. When I flicked on the wall light, my finger covered with the handkerchief, I saw that it had been trashed. Papers and manila file folders littered the office floor. The desk drawers hung open. They'd been emptied, and so had the drawers of the head-high file cabinet.

On the corner of the desk sat a surge suppressor with six sockets and two empty cords plugged into it. A laptop hookup and a cell phone charger, I guessed. No computer or phone, though.

So much for whatever it was that Wayne had wanted to show me. It looked like whoever shot him had got there first.

I climbed back up the cellar stairs and took one last look around. Sparky jumped onto the sofa and lay on the cushion beside Wayne with her tail curled around her face, and the question occurred to me: How could somebody who'd tortured animals as a kid grow up to be a man who kept a pet?

I went outside and sat on the front steps, where I'd sat a few days earlier. I took out my cell phone, dialed 911, and told the dispatcher that I'd found a dead body at a house in the cul-de-sac at the end of Blaine Street.

She asked my name and told me to wait there, don't touch anything, and somebody would be along in a few minutes.

Then I called Roger Horowitz's cell phone.

“You again,” he said when he answered. “What is it this time?”

“Ken Nichols's son, Wayne,” I said. “His body. It's here, at his house in Websterville, New Hampshire. Shot in the chest.”