Playing God (37 page)

He went back to the letter. "That other girl was a babe. Made me feel fat and ugly. But she was no whore. She came there to hook up with Pleasant and she wasn't leaving without him. Don't worry about me. I'm not going home. I'm gonna stay with a friend. See if I can get my head straight. Then I'll call you. Love always. Alana. P.S. I don't know who grabbed me. The guy from the truck or that asshole O'Leary. He was all wrapped up in a coat and hat and everything. Same with the guy who was watching the house. I just said it was the guy from the truck because that made the best story. And he was there at DD dropping the girl off. DD. Ha! Just like me. Tits to die for. Right, Copman?"

He caught a glimpse of white on the back stairs. "Hey, pipsqueak," he said. "Get in here and give your old uncle a hug."

His niece came in, totally unselfconscious about the body budding under her red and white Minnie Mouse nightshirt, and gave him a hug. She was going to be drop-dead gorgeous. And he was aware of the irony of his reaction—the same loathsome cop who would sleep with Alana Black would kill any boy who dared to put his hands on this girl. She surveyed the bandage on his head and his unshaven face with disapproval. "You look like hell, Uncle Joe," she said, her voice surprisingly low and husky. She wanted to be a singer.

"You get some pie?" He nodded. "Mom makes good pie." She cut herself a piece and curled up on the chair across from him. Eating like a kid. Crumbs around her mouth, spilling onto her nightshirt. She bounced up, poured herself a glass of milk, and sat back down. "Mom's mad at you again, isn't she?"

"I'm a jerk."

"She says. Mom likes things orderly. Proper. Normal is a word she uses a lot. You aren't orderly and normal. Neither's Alana. Do you want to know where she went?"

She didn't look at him when she said it. She was bent over her plate, her dark hair forming two great wings along her face. All he could see was her forehead and the arches of her brows. Her brows were darker now, but her forehead was as smooth as that first day Sandy had dumped her into his arms, saying, "Here. Take her. This is probably as close as you're ever going to get to kids. Time to learn to change a diaper." He'd been amazed at the perfection of those tiny arched brows in her funny little face.

"Where?"

She looked up, her eyes dancing. "What'll you give me?"

"A night in juvenile detention if you don't spit it out."

She made a face. "Tough guy, aren't you? She's got a friend. Denise something, up in Brunswick. She wrote the number down on a pad of paper. Tore it off, but the number went through. You want it?" She held out a folded sheet of paper, crisscrossed with pale pencil illuminating a scrawled phone number. "She was picked up in a maroon and white Plymouth Duster about nine-thirty. There was a guy driving and a woman in the passenger seat." She gave him the license number.

He reached across the table and shook her hand. "You're a fine detective," he said. "I can't wait until you join the department."

"I'm holding out for FBI."

"Those stiffs? Give me a break."

"Mom'll have a bird if I don't go to college."

"Most cops go to college these days, kiddo."

"I know. You going to find Alana? Because, like, I really worry about her, you know? Sometimes she's more of a little kid than me."

"Than I," he corrected.

"Yeah," she agreed, cocking her head like a bird. "Even more of a kid than you."

He took the papers she'd given him and Alana's letter, put his dishes in the sink, and let himself out. Walking to his car, a thought hit him like a sudden sharp pain. If Sandy was becoming their mother, was he becoming their father? A blunt, selfish man who rode roughshod over everyone in his life? With that pleasant thought to ponder, he got back in the car, contacted dispatch, and asked for a name and address on Alana's phone number and the car license. Then he headed back to the highway.

Chapter 28

The truck noted on Aucoin's field observation card was registered to a Randall Noyes, with a Warren address. Knowing he was going into unfamiliar territory with a maze of back roads, Burgess called the Knox County Sheriff's Department for directions. The response he got was cooperative, detailed, and remarkably uncurious. He appreciated that. This time of night, he wasn't interested in spending time on the phone.

He took Route 1 north to 90, turned off 90 onto something small and twisty, and from there onto something smaller and twistier, winding its way uphill and down on pavement the texture of crunchy peanut butter. Even with snow on the ground, he could see the crumbling edges drop off abruptly into deep ditches. If he got a wheel over, it would sink through the snow into sand and gravel so soft not even frost could hold it together. Not a road for the faint of heart. He thought of Maude Libby, with her proper hat and the pleasure she took in driving her Oscar's truck.

Eventually he rounded a steep curve and found the mailbox he was looking for. He pulled into the yard, engine running, taking it in. A small bluish-white box of a house with a porch on the end. A snow-covered shape in the yard might have been a bird feeder, another a dog house. Closer to the porch, a tarp-swathed mound was almost certainly a motorcycle. Despite the doghouse, there was no dog in evidence. No truck, either. The small outbuilding wasn't big enough for a garage. House and yard were still and dark.

Leaving the car running, he mounted the steps and knocked. After a decent interval, allowing for the hour, he knocked again. No answer. He got his flashlight and circled the house, peering in the windows. There were four rooms, kitchen, living room and two bedrooms. Both beds neatly made and empty.

He went back up the steps and tried the door. Unlocked. Wiping his feet carefully, he walked into the kitchen. It was a spare place, nothing on the counters but a microwave. The floor and counters were clean. No dishes in the sink. A bare table with two chairs. A few papers and bills addressed to Randall Noyes in a kitchen drawer. He opened the refrigerator. A little food, fairly fresh. Three beers. Four jars of Hellman's mayo. No mold, rot, spills or crumbs. So far, this guy was up for the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award.

Living room was the same. Sofa, chair and TV. One lamp. No books or magazines. No pictures. No shoes on the floor, no dirt on the carpet. And he'd thought his place didn't look lived in. He checked the bigger bedroom, hearing the words "monk's cell" in his brain. Clothes on hangers or neatly folded. There was no life in this house other than the bare necessities of food, clothing and shelter. By leaving no stamp of his personality, Randall Noyes had left the indelible stamp of a man withdrawn from life.

Burgess had stopped using the flashlight. There were no neighbors and there was no traffic. He went into the other bedroom, turned on the light and looked around. It had the unused quality of a guestroom. Everything was neat and slightly dusty and impersonal. Everything except a large framed picture on the wall and a few more on the small dresser beneath it, the only pictures in the house.

He studied the picture on the wall. The woman he'd seen in photographs at Sarah Merchant's house. Carman Merchant. She was sitting in a chair in the living room he'd just passed through, backed by soft green curtains, her elbow resting on the arm of a chair. She wasn't beautiful. Not even as pretty as her sister, Sarah. But she had a memorable face. Humor, lurking, impish, mocking, danced in her dark blue eyes and around her mouth. A deep, wry wisdom at people's foolishness. Look at that face and you had to know. Why are you laughing, Carman? What do you see that we don't? She'd probably made a lot of people uncomfortable. But not the man who lived here.

On the dresser top beneath the picture were a few more photos, a folded bit of black lingerie, a small silver earring shaped like a feather. A bowl of smooth rocks, beach glass, fish hooks, and other odd items. A black metal candleholder with a large cut-out of a starfish held the melted remnants of a candle. He looked around the room, at the spare furniture, the enlarged photograph, the small collection of items and he knew. These were her things. This was her bed. Carman Merchant had been dead six years and this was still her room. He was looking at a shrine.

For the second time that night, he felt recognition as a sharp pain. A sharper pain this time. He closed his eyes and turned away. He understood about shrines and honoring your debts to the dead. About life getting stalled and roadblocks in the mind. How a major life event can suck up all your emotions and leave you stuck in an endless loop of what ifs and if onlys, praying for something to change the unchangeable.

He stumbled down the steps and across the icy yard, jumped in the Explorer and backed out of the driveway, skittering noisily over the rutted ground and onto the rough pavement, then slammed it into gear and headed back the way he'd come. Too fast for the road and a man with only one good arm. Trying with foolish, adolescent speed to get away from something inside his own head.

The rest of the drive was a blur. Luckily there were no deer or moose in the road and no wavering drunks. He was alone in the darkness, gripping the wheel with unnecessary intensity as he rushed through the yellow cone of light and the surrounding blackness toward Boothbay Harbor. That long drive down the peninsula was torture, just as the road to Randall Noyes's house had been. Most Maine roads needed at least two hands on the wheel, clear eyes, and a mind on the business at hand. He had none of these.

It was willpower that finally brought him to a stop in Sarah Merchant's driveway, in the chilly stillness of the ending night. He turned off his lights and crept along the last bit of road, switched off the dome light and got out, leaving the door slightly ajar. He let his eyes adjust to the dark and went up the walk, hoping a patch of ice didn't send him ass over teakettle.

The door, when he slowly turned the knob, opened as though he were expected. The dim entry was lit by a candle in a holder with the cut-out of a moose. He went carefully down the stairs, instinctively finding the knob at the bottom, and walked into the big room that had startled him earlier, a time that seemed not hours but eons ago. As he'd imagined, the stove's red eye glowed in the darkness and the dragon's steam rose in an eerie plume.

He stood with his back against the wall, unsure why he'd come down here when his goal was to find Sarah Merchant. Maybe because even when he was breaking rules right and left, marching into a woman's bedroom in the middle of the night went too far? More likely because, even with a tired brain and body, his cop's instinct still worked. He would find her here.

"Come sit down," she said, only a voice in the darkness. "Don't put the light on. It is you, detective, isn't it?" She sounded resigned. He was expected even if unwelcome.

He sat where he had sat earlier, the weight of his body sinking down into the cushions, rested his head against the sofa back and closed his eyes. No longer energized. He felt a million tired years old and saddened by what he was about to do. He took a deep breath, acutely aware of his chest expanding, of the fact that he was still alive, though this night was filled with the dead. His body seemed starved for oxygen. Had he been holding his breath, anticipating this moment?

"Tell me about Randall Noyes."

There was rustling in the darkness. The scratch of a match. She leaned forward and lit a candle. This holder had the silhouette of a loon. "What about him?" she asked. Her shadowed face seemed youthful and mysterious. "Why can't you leave this alone? Leave us alone?"

"You know why," he said.

"There's nothing I can do to help you. I said I'd think about it. I did. I have nothing to tell you."

He wanted to grab her and shake the complacency out of her voice, reacting not to her certainty but to his own. "That's not all there is to it. A man is dead."

"So what? Lots of people are dead." There was a scent rising, from her or from the candle. Something green and soothing.

He didn't want her soothed. "Maybe you think it's all right, what happened to Dr. Pleasant, because of what happened to your sister, but it's not. It's like Romeo and Juliet," he said. "The Hatfields and McCoys. Somebody harms one of yours. You've been wronged, so to get revenge, you harm one of theirs. Now Dr. Pleasant's wife, his children, the innocent victims of your hate crime, are hurting like you did. Have a reason to want revenge of their own. Where does it stop, Sarah?"

"It wasn't my revenge crime. And anyway, people aren't like that."