Outwitting Trolls (6 page)

Henry woke me up, whining to go outside. I asked him nicely if he couldn't hold it for a while, but he made it clear that an accident was imminent if I didn't get up and let him out.

It was about quarter past nine on this Sunday morning. I figured I'd had less than four hours of sleep.

I pulled on a sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, followed Henry downstairs, and let him out into our walled-in patio garden. I put together a pot of coffee in my electric coffeemaker, and pretty soon the aroma filled the kitchen. I poured myself a mugful, took it out back, and sat in one of my wooden Adirondack chairs. Henry wandered over and lay down on the brick patio beside me.

It was a warm late-April morning in Boston. The sun bathed my little backyard in its warmth, and the spring bulbs were blooming—tulips and daffodils, crocuses and hyacinths—and the irises and other perennials were poking through the earth.

Evie had always been in charge of the flower beds. She'd planted them when we first moved here, and she was the one who'd tended them. This was the garden's first spring without
her. I liked flowers, but I had little knowledge and less enthusiasm for taking care of flower gardens. I figured they'd make it through this one season all right if I remembered to keep them weeded and watered. After that, they'd need serious attention. With perennials, you had to dig up, thin out, cut back, fertilize, separate, replant, reorganize. You couldn't ignore perennials. They kept coming back at you, year after year.

Evie had liked gardening, and I'd liked the fact that she liked it, because it meant that I didn't have to do it. I used to enjoy coming home from court, after a day of explaining reality to angry clients and arguing points of law to skeptical judges, and finding her on her knees in our garden digging and troweling and grubbing around in the earth. I'd bring out beers for both of us and urge her to take a break, and we'd sit at the picnic table, Evie in her cutoff shorts and baggy T-shirt and gardening gloves, smudges of dirt on her face, her auburn hair tucked up under one of my old Red Sox caps, and me in my pinstripe suit with my necktie pulled loose.

Sometimes she'd slither onto my lap and nuzzle my throat and unbutton my shirt and get my clothes dirty, which I didn't mind at all. That's why God invented dry cleaning.

Well, Evie was gone, and she wasn't coming back. Once in a while something—like seeing the spring bulbs that she'd planted two autumns ago now rioting in our flower gardens—would remind me of her, and I'd remember something specific, like how she'd stick that excellent butt of hers up in the air when she kneeled in the garden to pull weeds, or how the skin at the nape of her neck tasted when she was sweaty after gardening on a warm afternoon in July…and then, for a few minutes, I missed her.

But mostly I didn't think about her. She'd been gone for a long time. Almost a year.

Sometimes for no apparent reason Henry would suddenly scramble to his feet and trot over to the front door and press his nose against it, and nobody would be there. He'd stand there for a while, staring at the door, whining softly, and it would seem to me that he was missing Evie and hoping—maybe expecting—that she was about to open the door and come back home.

After a while, he'd kind of sigh, and then he'd wander into some other part of the house and curl up and go to sleep.

When my mug was empty, Henry and I went inside. I fetched the Sunday
Globe
from the front stoop and took it to the kitchen. I dumped some dog food into Henry's bowl and put it down on the floor for him. Then I filled a bowl of my own with Cheerios. I sliced a banana on top, added half a handful of blueberries, sprinkled on some brown sugar, and ate it that way, crunchy, without milk.

While I ate I skimmed the news sections of the paper. Ken Nichols's murder had apparently happened too late on Saturday night to make the Sunday papers. I was curious to see how the press would handle it, how Roger Horowitz would be quoted, how Sharon's role would be described, if Ken's gym bag full of ketamine would be mentioned.

I remembered Josh Neuman, the persistent young
Herald
reporter. I was a big believer in the free press, and an informed public, and the inalienable right to express opinions without fear—but no way was Sharon going to talk with this guy, or any other reporter. It could do her no good and possibly a lot of harm.

 

It was early in the afternoon, and I was in my backyard raking last fall's leaves out from under the bushes and packing them in big plastic trash bags—not my idea of a fun way to spend a
Sunday in April, but it had to be done. Anyway, the sun was warm on the back of my neck, and the Red Sox were playing the Orioles on my portable radio, and I had a half-empty bottle of chilled Sam Adams lager sitting on the picnic table, so it wasn't so bad.

I was taking a break, sitting at the table sipping my Sam, when my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.

It was Sharon Nichols.

“How are you doing today?” I asked.

“Not that great,” she said. “I think I had some kind of delayed reaction. When I got home last night, I thought I was fine. I called Ellen, woke her up, and I started telling her how her father was, um, was dead, how he'd been…murdered, and suddenly I started shaking, and my throat got all tight, and I was seeing all that blood, remembering how it smelled in that room, and poor Ellen on the other end of the line, she kept saying, ‘Mother? Are you all right? Mother? What's the matter?' Like that. Anyway, she came over, and we stayed up until after the sun rose, drinking wine and crying and reminiscing, and eventually, talking with Ellen, I started to get it together again. I'm better now. Still kinda shaky, I guess. But better. I just woke up, can you believe it? I mean, it's after one in the afternoon.”

“This is all to be expected,” I said. “You held it together for a long time last night. You did very well. That was all pretty traumatic.”

“Yes, it was.” She was silent for a minute. “So how are you?”

“Me?” I asked. “Oh, I'm good. I've been through things like this before.”

“Murders, you mean. Dead bodies. Blood. Hysterical women.”

“Yes. All of the above.”

“I'm so sorry for…for messing up your weekend.”

“I'd say your weekend was messed up worse than mine,” I said.

“Mm.” She chuckled softly. There wasn't any humor in it. “Well, the reason I called…last night you said if I needed anything?”

“Sure,” I said. “What can I do?”

“Well,” she said, “like I said, Ellen came over, so she knows about it. What happened to Ken. I haven't been able to reach Wayne yet, but I'll keep trying. It's Ken's father that I'm worried about.”

“Ken's father's still alive?”

“Yes. He has outlived his only child. Isn't that sad?”

“It is,” I said. I thought of my sons, Billy and Joey. I hoped I wouldn't outlive either of them. “So you want to tell him, is that it?”

“I think I should,” Sharon said. “Before somebody says something or he hears about it on the news.” She hesitated. “His name is Charles. Charles Nichols. He's in an assisted living facility. It's a really nice, um, very expensive place out in Ashby. Charles is quite frail, and he's been fading for the past year or so. Probably doesn't have a lot of time left. He's somewhere in his mideighties. Eighty-five or -six. He's got congestive heart failure and diabetes among other problems, and I'm afraid this news could, you know…”

“I'll go with you,” I said.

“Oh, I couldn't ask you to do that.”

“You didn't,” I said. “It was my idea.”

She laughed softly. “Well, of course, it
is
why I called you. Really, though, it's a Sunday afternoon. You must have plans. I honestly don't want you to—”

“No plans,” I said. “I'll go with you. It's what we lawyers do.”

She laughed softly. “Somehow I doubt that.”

“It's what this lawyer does,” I said.

“Would you? Thank you, Brady. I could really use some moral support. It'll make me feel much better if you're with me. I don't know how Charles will handle it. He and Ken had their issues, and I don't think Ken visited him very often, but still, Ken was an only child, and Charles's wife is gone, so Ken was all he had left.”

“Aside from you and his grandchildren, you mean,” I said.

“Well,” said Sharon, “Charles and I always got along just fine, but I'm not family. Not now, anyway, not after the divorce. I haven't seen him for a long time. But still. I think I'm the one who should tell him what happened.”

“You want to do this today?”

“Yes,” she said. “The sooner the better, don't you think?”

“I do,” I said. “I'll pick you up in about an hour. How's that?”

“You're my hero,” she said.

When they ran their veterinary clinic and kennels in Wellesley, Ken and Sharon Nichols lived with their two kids in a gorgeous old Victorian on five or six acres abutting some conservation land off a country road on the west side of town.

Now Sharon was living in a third-floor condo unit in a boxy brick building on Route 2A in Acton about a mile west of the Concord prison. A different lifestyle, usually a less lavish one, was the price of freedom, and more often than not, both parties in a divorce ended up paying it.

Condominium buildings had popped up like mushrooms along 2A in Acton during the real estate boom of the late seventies and early eighties. Speculators bought six or eight units at a time, and sometimes entire buildings, with the intention of renting them out while the market continued to grow and then flipping them for big profits. Then pretty soon the boom busted, and a lot of smart investors were suddenly stupid and ended up stuck with big mortgages and depressed rents and scarce tenants and high maintenance fees and no buyers.

I parked in the lot behind Sharon's building, told Henry to
wait in the car, went to the back door, and pressed the button beside her number.

A minute later her voice came to me from a speaker beside the door. “Brady? Is that you?”

I leaned to the speaker and said, “I'm here.”

“I'll be right down,” she said.

“Take your time,” I said.

I went over to my car and let Henry out. He proceeded to investigate the weeds that grew amid the trash along the chain-link fence that bordered the parking lot, and he was still at it when Sharon emerged from the back door about five minutes later.

She waved at me and came over to where I was leaning against my car. She was wearing a pair of snug-fitting jeans and a red-and-white-striped long-sleeved jersey. Her blond hair was artfully tousled, and she'd done some neat tricks with makeup to hide evidence of the previous night, when she'd found the murdered body of her former husband, answered the hard questions of suspicious police officers, and then drunk wine and cried and stayed up till after sunrise with her daughter.

She looked, in other words, spectacular.

She put her hand on my shoulder, tiptoed up, kissed my cheek, and gave me a quick one-armed hug.

I returned the hug but not the kiss. “You look nice,” I said.

She smiled. “Thank you.” She had the jacket I'd loaned her folded over her arm. She handed it to me. “For this, too. Again. It was very gallant of you.”

“Gallant,” I said. “That's me, all right.” I whistled to Henry, who came trotting over. “This is Henry,” I said to Sharon.

“Hey, Henry,” she said. She bent over and scratched the special place on his forehead, and her ease with Henry reminded
me that she used to work with Ken at their veterinary hospital. She obviously understood and liked animals.

“That's his G-spot,” I said. “Right there in the middle of his forehead.”

Sharon straightened up and smiled. “Everybody's got one, even dogs.”

I opened the back door for Henry, and he jumped in. Then I went around and held the passenger door open for Sharon.

“Oh, thank you,” she said as she slid in. “
Gallant,
as always.” She pronounced it with the accent on the second syllable, making it the French word. “Chivalry is not dead.”

“My mother again,” I said, “reminding me to hold the door for the lady.” I shut her door, went around to the driver's side, and got in. “Ashby,” I said. “I assume you know how to find the place?”

“It's not that far from here,” she said. “I feel terribly guilty that I haven't visited Charles more often since he's been there. I mean, Ashby is only about an hour up the road from Acton. He's been there four or five years now, and I can count the times I've visited him on one hand, mostly the first couple of years he was there, to bring him Christmas presents. Good dutiful Ellen came with me each time. Ellen still visits him once in a while. I'm ashamed to say, I don't. Charles never did make me feel overly welcome, but that's no excuse.”

“He's not your father,” I said.

“No,” she said, “and he's never been a very loving—or lovable—father-in-law. Still, he is my children's grandfather, and he helped Ken and me out when we were getting started.”

“With money, you mean?”

“That's right,” she said. “We couldn't have done what we did without Charles's help. Buying the house and the land, building
the kennels and the hospital, getting the business up and running. We all pretended it was a loan, and maybe we would've eventually paid him back, but then we got divorced and money was a different kind of issue, and I'm sure Ken didn't give Charles a penny of what we owed him. Not that he needs it.”

The village of Ashby, Massachusetts, was a straight shot north-westerly on Route 119 from Sharon's place in Acton. Ashby was the last town before the New Hampshire border, and it had the feel of a rural New Hampshire village.

Charles Nichols's assisted living place was a big rambling two-story redbrick structure at the end of a long country road. It sat on the edge of a meadow that sloped up to a woody hillside. To the north a range of round-topped mountains pushed into the sky. A pretty little rocky stream meandered alongside the building, and there were paved walkways and patios along its banks so that wheelchair-bound residents could sit out there and listen to the water music and bask in the sunshine.

The stream looked like it would hold trout, and seeing it reminded me that springtime had come to New England, and soon the trout would be rising to mayflies, and that reminded me once again that it was time to call Charlie McDevitt and J. W. Jackson and Doc Adams and make some fishing plans.

A sign directed us to the visitors' parking area, and from there another sign pointed to the entrance.

A fortyish woman sat behind a desk in the foyer. When we walked in, she looked up, smiled, and said, “May I help you?” She wore a plastic nameplate over her left breast. Her name was Joan Porter. Her smile was well practiced and automatic.

“We're here for Charles Nichols,” Sharon said. “I'm his daughter-in-law.”

Joan Porter looked Sharon up and down, glanced at me, then
turned back to Sharon and gave her that professional smile. “Charles is in the dayroom. Do you know where it is?”

Sharon shook her head.

“Down that corridor and around the corner on your right,” she said with a vague wave of her hand. “They're watching the Red Sox game.”

“How is he?” Sharon asked.

“Charles is a lovely gentleman,” said Joan Porter, “and he rarely complains. He's recovering from his accident.”

“Accident?” asked Sharon.

“You didn't know?”

Sharon shook her head.

“He fell and broke his wrist a couple of weeks ago,” said Joan Porter. “He's been having some pain, not sleeping well, and of course a man his age, he heals slowly.”

“Why did he fall?” asked Sharon.

Joan Porter frowned. “Excuse me?”

“I meant, how did it happen?”

“He was alone in his room. People Charles's age, they tend to lose their balance.”

“Nobody was with him when it happened?” asked Sharon.

Joan Porter shook her head. “It was in the evening. He was alone. In his own room. In the independent living wing.”

Sharon nodded. “This is my friend Brady Coyne, by the way,” she said. “He's a lawyer.”

Joan Porter held out her hand and smiled. “It's nice to meet you.”

I gripped her hand.

“Please don't sue me,” she said.

I smiled quickly.

“Oh,” she said. “I bet everybody says that to you.”

“Just about everybody,” I said.

“Down this corridor, is it?” asked Sharon.

Joan Porter nodded. “Before you jump to conclusions,” she said, “you should talk to Charles's physician.”

Sharon turned and looked at her. “What do you mean?”

“You're his daughter-in-law?”

Sharon nodded, although technically she was the old guy's
ex
-daughter-in-law.

“Do you know about Charles's…condition?”

“Condition?”

“Well,” Joan Porter said, “I know Charles's son has been informed, and I believe Charles himself told his granddaughter. She was here a week or so ago. Neither of them has shared the news with you?”

Sharon shook her head.

Joan Porter hesitated, then said, “Mr. Nichols—Charles—he has recently been diagnosed with a brain aneurysm.”

Sharon blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, dear. What will they…?”

“There's apparently nothing they can do for him.”

“No operation?”

“Evidently not. You might want to talk with his physician, get a professional opinion, but as I understand it, a man Charles's age, with all his other infirmities…”

“That's why he fell, Ms. Porter?” Sharon asked. “The brain aneurysm? He passed out or got dizzy or something?”

Joan Porter shrugged. “That's what the doctor thinks. Charles doesn't really remember what happened. It may never happen again. There's no telling with aneurysms.”

“It could, um, burst anytime?” asked Sharon.

“As I understand it.”

“Which would kill him.”

“Oh, my, yes,” said Joan Porter.

“Can he continue living here?”

“Certainly,” Joan Porter said. “This is his home. If he falls and hurts himself again, we'll have to think about moving him to the assisted living side. Charles would hate it, of course. We're hoping we won't have to go that route.”

Sharon looked at Joan Porter for a moment, then said, “Well, thank you for telling me. Thank you for your candor.” She held out her hand.

Joan Porter took Sharon's hand in both of hers, and I read genuine kindness in the woman's eyes. “You're one of his relatives,” she said. “You have a right to know. Knowing Charles, I'm not sure he would tell you.”

Sharon hooked her arm through mine. We started down the wide corridor, turned a corner, and came to a big open area furnished with comfortable chairs and sofas and a giant wide-screen television showing a baseball game. A few white-haired people were sitting on the furniture, and some others were parked in wheelchairs, facing the TV, where a pitcher in a Blue Jays uniform was peering in to get the sign from his catcher, and a Red Sox runner was taking his lead from first base.

Sharon stopped and looked around for a minute. Then she said, “There he is.”

I followed her over to a man sitting in a wheelchair in the back of the room. He had wispy white hair and a little white mustache and transparent skin. A cast covered his right arm from his fingertips up past his elbow. It hung from a sling around his neck. His lap and legs were covered with a brown blanket. He was wearing a green cardigan sweater over a white dress shirt that was buttoned to his throat.

As we approached him, I heard him say quite loudly, “Try a bunt, for Christ's sake. They
never
bunt. What's wrong with a
bunt now and then?” Nobody else in the room was paying any attention to him. He seemed to be addressing the television set. “It's a perfect spot for a bunt. God damn prima donnas. Nobody makes them practice the fundamentals. They don't get those big contracts for laying down a nice bunt. Ha. Come on. Play the game right.”