Shattered Shell (3 page)

I unlocked the front door and did the winter two-step, which is trying to remove heavy boots at the entrance without falling down or stripping off your socks. Before me was the rear landing of the stairway that led to the second floor. I shook off my coat and breathed in the cold air of my house. The building first served as quarters for the supervisor of a lifeboat station that was operating at Samson Point sometime in the middle part of the 1800s, and has belonged to the government ever since. How it got from the U.S. government to my ownership is a depressing tale that I've not told anyone since I moved here some years back

I padded across the hardwood living room floor, decorated in some parts by oriental rugs. There's a living room with a fireplace and big kitchen on the first floor, along with an outside deck. Upstairs is a bathroom, my study, and a bedroom. There are a lot of bookshelves, some antiques and historical memorabilia, and on this January night, not much heat. There's a lot to be said about living in a house that's almost a hundred and fifty years old, but its ability to retain heat is not one of them.

I sniffed as I went up the stairs. I smelled of smoke, and I knew it was shower time. In the bathroom I stripped off my clothes and jumped in the shower, suddenly feeling weary about having been out in the cold for such hours, watching something as awful as a family's business burn to the ground. I stood under the hot water for some long minutes, feeling the cold seep from the bones and muscles. I stepped out and rubbed myself down with a white fluffy towel, and then started checking my skin, an activity that's almost a habit, but not quite. There's a scar at the small of my back, on my right knee, and two lengthy ones on my left side. The skin was smooth and supple, and I felt no bumps, lumps, or other disturbances, souvenirs from my previous career. I live in this wonderful house rent- and mortgage-free, but this shower routine is one payment that I make, almost every day.

Some days, I almost think it's worth it.

The bathroom is between the study and bedroom, and I went into the bedroom, still tingly and slightly wet from the shower. There's an old four-poster oak bed in the center of the room, with matching bureaus and bookshelves, and a reflector telescope standing in one corner on a black tripod. A sliding glass door leads to a small deck on the south end of the house. I turned on a reading light and slid under the covers, shivering a bit, and then I picked up last month's issue of
Smithsonian
magazine. I hardly got past the letters page when my eyelids started drooping, and I switched off the light and let the magazine drop to the floor. My breathing started to slow and I listened to the wind and the whispering sounds of snow or sand striking the windows. The waves were there, always moving, never once letting up in their movement to my shore and my house.

And then I fell asleep, on an evening that was to be my last quiet and peaceful night at home for many weeks.

Chapter Two

When it happened, I had been dreaming, dreaming about my other life, the one before I came to Tyler. Back then I was a research analyst in an obscure section of the Department of Defense, and I was dreaming about one of the weekends we used to have, the ones called screamers. The screamers happened during crisis times, at a moment when the world's attention is focused on Kuwait, Bosnia, or a group of insignificant islands in the China Sea. Ships begin to move, aircraft begin to fly, surveillance satellites are moved in their orbits, the news media broadcasts a lot of loud words and threats, and a lot of late-night lights get burned in government buildings in DC. Sometimes a screamer meant working through the weekend, or catching a few hours' sleep at home, or napping whenever you could on cots brought into the office.

I had been dreaming about one of the latter screamers, a time when a heavy deadline was approaching, and I remember bells ringing and someone saying, "Holy Christ, we're bombing," and I sat up, breathing hard, sitting on a cot, a wool blanket falling off my trousers and stockinged feet, looking around at the cubicles and terminals and the other members of my section, from Cissy Manning to Carl Socha, and more bells were ringing and I gasped, closed my eyes and opened them again, and I was at my home.

I looked at the digital clock. It was just past two-thirty a.m, I shook my head and ran my fingers through my hair, and the ringing, came back, seemingly louder.

It was the phone.

I swiveled off my bed and threw on a heavy terrycloth robe as I shambled out of my bedroom, yawning but feeling the adrenaline surge through me, making my heart roar along and my hands tingle. I took the steps downstairs rather quickly, not thinking of who was calling, only knowing that the damnable ringing was blasting through my head and I had to turn it off.

Grabbing the phone, I sat down on my couch, just across from the darkened brick fireplace, and I said, "Yeah?" and the static on the other line was loud. My caller was outside at a pay phone.

"Hello?" I said again, ready to hang up, and a tiny, strained voice said, "Lewis?"

My God. "Diane?" I asked. "Is that you?"

"Oh, Lewis," she said, sobbing, and I sat very straight and still, for in the few years I've known Diane Woods, I could only remember seeing tears on her face twice.

"Diane," I said, trying to keep my voice level. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, Lewis," she repeated, trying to say words between the gasping sobs. "It's Kara. She's in the hospital."

"Diane --- "

She interrupted me and it felt like a chunk of ice from the roof was now in my chest.

"Lewis, oh, shit, Lewis, she's been raped."

Within five minutes I was dressed and ready to go back outside It had been hard, locating clean pants and a heavy shirt and sweater and socks while my hands were shaking and I was trying to keep focused on what I was doing and where I was going. Diane was at the Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, Kara Miles's home town, and she would meet me in the emergency room. About a hundred and one questions were Swirling through my mind, bill they would have to wait until I got there. I tossed on my coat, still smoky from the corpse of the Rocks Road Motel, and I stepped outside.

It was snowing, a light squall that wouldn't add much to the accumulation. I trudged through the packed snow trail that led my garage and I clambered into the Rover. In another minute I was in the plowed

parking lot of the Lafayette House, and in another minute I was heading south. I turned on the radio and then I just as quickly turned it off. What I had just learned was nothing that could be ignored through early a.m. talk radio or music. Instead of listening to imported noise, I listened to the noise inside my mind as I returned to the nearly empty roads of Tyler Beach.

A few years ago I had gotten to know Diane, soon after I had moved into my home, newly liberated from the U.S. government.  Though three new scars --- on my side, back, and knee --- were freshly healed, other wounds I had were proving to be stubborn indeed. I wasn’t sleeping right or eating anything during the day, save for canned and take-out food. I was no longer working for the Department of Defense --- officially, that is --- and I had a new job as a columnist for a magazine based in Boston, called
Shoreline.
I was responsible for the monthly "Granite Shores" column, which covered the eighteen miles of New Hampshire's coastline. The deal with the magazine was highly lucrative and highly unusual. Six hundred words a month, subject of my choosing --- so long as it had to do with to do with the seacoast ---and if I submitted crap or submitted nothing, another column would appear under my name, and my substantial paychecks would continue. Some people might call that a hell of a deal. Others might call it a bribe to keep my mouth shut for what I had seen one horrible day in Nevada. Both would probably be right.

Earning this substantial salary meant researching and writing the column, which took about a week every month. This led to an increasingly fat bank account and an increasing amount of free time, which was quickly becoming a burden. There is only so much reading and cleaning you can do, and during the long and empty days, I was beginning to feel worthless, which was the first step on a slippery slope that would lead me to strike out for a swim to England one fine summer day and not turn around.

Instead I began researching and writing other columns, on matters that interested me and that would never appear in the pages of
Shoreline
. The first was about a group of surfers at the North Beach who didn't seem to spend a lot of time in the ocean, but who were preoccupied with making furtive exchanges among hands, plastic bags and folded currency, with local passersby. This column took a couple weeks of work and some photographs, which I passed along to Diane Woods. I think she was surprised when I showed up with this information, and I know I was even more surprised when she didn't toss me out on my butt for interfering in a police matter. Since then our relationship ---  on a personal and professional basis --- has grown.

After it had developed somewhat on the personal basis, she invited me out one day on her sailboat,
Miranda
, which she keeps in Tyler Harbor. We spent the day cruising up to the Isles of Shoals and back. It was a hot August day and Diane had on a skimpy pair of blue jean cutoffs and a white bathing suit top. She showed off an impressive amount of skin, and three or four times during the day she had asked me to rub suntan lotion on her light brown, muscular back. She had returned the favor, too, which is why I was feeling a bit slap happy when we got back to the harbor.

When the gear was stored and we went up to her condominium, she made us both frozen strawberry daiquiris and quite gently brought me back down to earth.

"Lewis," she said, sprawled out on her couch, "you've been a perfect gentleman all day, and I appreciate that."

I raised my glass to her in a salute, sitting on the floor, leaning against the couch near her feet. "Is this my only reward, or do you have something else in mind?"

When Diane is angry, her face would have caused Ted Bundy to shy away, but when she laughed, as she did then, it warmed something inside of me that I thought was dead. "Very good," she said, a wide smile on her face, "but there is something I have to tell you, just in case you're thinking about what's going to happen between you and me. Just so you know, my heart belongs to another."

Oh. "Well, I understand."

She was still smiling, and she shook her head. "No, you don't. Let me explain it to you. We're becoming friends, and I like that very much, but do know this about me. When I said my heart belongs to another, I didn't mean another person. I meant another gender. My gender. Understand?"

Oops. I took a swallow from the daiquiri, and it was a delicious cold slipperiness that traveled right down my throat, and also gave me a second or two to recover.

"Does that mean no date for this Saturday night?" I asked with some innocence.

She laughed and said, "Absolutely not. If you want to come here Saturday night, I'll cook you dinner, so long as you wash the dishes. Deal?"

"Deal," I said. "And I suppose I don't get to spend the night."

Diane winked. "If you want to, but it'll be on the couch."

"Best offer I've had all summer."

She kicked my hand. "How about another daiquiri?"

A pleasant nod. "Sure."

And we've been friends ever since.

The roads were nearly empty and my mind was surprisingly clear as I drove south, heading to Newburyport. The shock of an early morning phone call can make you as alert as a deer smelling gunmetal during hunting season. The headlights made the snowflakes look thin and transparent as I drove over the sanded roads. There were only a few other cars on the road at this hour of the morning, and I wondered if we cold and numb drivers shared a common, dreary drive heading to some awful home or catastrophe during those few dark hours that remained of the night.

Newburyport was built right on the banks of the Merrimack River as it passes out to the Atlantic, and the city's hospital is on Rawson Street, which is just off High Street, a heavily traveled avenue that runs east to west through the city. The hospital building is tucked away near a warren of residential streets, and some of the homes still had the bright red and green lights of Christmas decorations in their windows. It was a cheery enough scene, but I couldn't imagine living there, on a street leading to the city's hospital, seeing the ambulances or police cruisers come by at all hours, emergency lights flickering into your bedroom or living room windows.

After parking I hurried across the slippery pavement, heading to the peaceful and shiny red letters of EMERGENCY ROOM, my hands moist in my coat pockets, thinking of what was going to happen in the next few moments. As I got closer to the entrance the doors slid open and Diane came out almost at a run, and I had guilty thoughts of how I should approach or touch her, or what should I do, and Diane took care of the matter by nearly slamming herself into my arms.

She was sobbing, great heaving cries that had no words or syllables, and I put my arms around her and let her burrow her face into my shoulder. I pulled her in tight with my arms, and her arms were across my shoulders, and I felt little thumps of her fists striking my back. I murmured into her hair and then she stepped back, tears rolling down her face, her mouth curled back, and she said, "What did you just say?"