Stash (32 page)

After speaking with Jude for a few minutes, she decided that telling him about the police was the right thing to do. He thanked her for explaining the situation: the accident, the arrest, the charges. He told her the police would be bored following him. He told her to forget the whole episode.

She was so relieved by his words that she missed the transition in their conversation when it stopped being about Gwen explaining what she did and Jude understanding 100 percent, and started being about Jude propositioning her again.

When she did notice, when he reminded her about the intensity of their brief relationship years ago, when he asked about her coming to see him again, she still was so grateful he wasn’t angry that she relaxed her guard. She protested his advances, but not too much. Rather than ending the call, she allowed herself to listen to what he had to say. Didn’t she? She couldn’t help wondering what triggered his interest in her. Why her? Why now?

The thing about living in Morrissey is that you can lose your sense of uniqueness. You probably could swap places with almost any other woman you knew and no one would notice. The Morrissey wives. The names and faces and little problems and joys would change, but ultimately it reduced down to kids, school, home, taxi service, and if you were lucky, occasional intimacy with your husband.

You were no more special than your neighbor. No one made passes at you. No men told you how beautiful you looked. And each year the likelihood of being noticed seemed further past, which 90 percent of the time didn’t matter because you were already 90 percent fulfilled with your life. You could harbor fantasies to close the small gap, but there really wasn’t anyone to be the object of your fantasies. The husbands were as interchangeable as the wives. Those key parties Gwen had heard about taking place in the seventies weren’t as daring as they sounded. So you went
home with someone else’s spouse for a night; you might not even notice.

So she let Jude flatter her. It was hard to resist having her ego stroked this way. And it was only over the phone; she wasn’t going to take it any further. She knew she wouldn’t see him again. In any event, it was much better than being frightened because he was angry with her over telling the police.

But then he asked where she was at that moment, and she recognized his intent to find her and be with her right now. His question snapped her back to reality, caused her to look up and shift her focus. What she saw was unfamiliar.

And then the line went dead.

She stared at her phone. The battery had drained. No charge, no signal. She studied the blank display a few seconds longer and then looked up again. She took a moment to catch her breath, and then turned and looked behind her, in the direction she’d come from. At least Gwen thought it was the direction she’d come from. She walked a few yards that way. Where was the trail? She stood at the edge of a small meadow, with dense stands of trees on three sides and on the fourth a rocky outpost that grew into an escarpment as it curved out of sight into forested land. A breeze flitted the treetops, but otherwise a silence surrounded her like a solid wall.

A shot of adrenaline surged through her, leaving her stomach queasy and throat hot and dry.

She looked at the sky. When had the sun disappeared behind the clouds? She turned in a circle, trying to decide which way was back down. None of them looked down. There was no horizon, no view. Only trees and boulders.

One skill she had never learned was how to avoid getting lost. She was terrible at following directions and often took wrong turns driving in unfamiliar areas. She didn’t remember landmarks.
Once in New York City she’d taken the subway to Brooklyn to visit a friend in Marine Park but turned the wrong way when she emerged from underground and walked for blocks and blocks until she realized she’d ended up in a decrepit neighborhood where no one looked like her and everyone looked at her. Fortunately, she spotted a policeman in a squad car and enlisted his help. Brian wanted to know what it was about women and their sense of direction. She resented his sexist generalization but in her case it was true. One of her earliest memories was being lost. She was three or four and playing outside and was supposed to stay in front of her own house and she always did, but that day she happened to see a beautiful black cat on the lawn next door and she went over to pet it and the cat started to purr but then the cat started to walk away and without thinking, Gwen followed. She followed it down the sidewalk all the way to the corner, which was only three houses away, and then around the corner. When she turned the corner, the cat had disappeared.

Gwen had told this story to the kids once.

Did you go back home? Nora asked.

I tried, Gwen said. But the problem was that a tall hedge bordered the corner house, and as soon as Gwen had turned the corner, the hedge blocked the view of her own house and she no longer knew where she lived. She was lost. And scared. She sat down on the sidewalk right at the base of the hedge and started to cry. She didn’t know how long she cried for. Then a lady walking down the sidewalk approached her carrying a shopping bag from the market and she asked why Gwen was crying, and Gwen answered she didn’t know. The woman said, I know you, you’re Irene Cassert’s little girl and I know where you live. She reached into her groceries and came out with a whole bag of Hershey’s Kisses which she gave to Gwen, and she walked her home around the corner and back to her mother.

How many Hershey’s Kisses did you eat? Nate asked.

I shared them with my brother and sister.

You got lost just around the corner?

I was little.

Now she was grown up. But her sense of direction hadn’t gotten much better and so she was lost again, and instead of being just around the corner from home she was in a mountainous wilderness and could see no guardian angel with a bag of Hershey’s Kisses who would take her hand and lead her home. If Gwen was going to be saved, she’d have to do it herself.

Okay, then. She’d just have to find her way back to the trail. One thing she remembered from Girl Scouts was how to find a trail you’d lost. You walked in a rectangular pattern, small rectangles, then larger ones, fanning farther and farther out with each pass until you came upon the trail. That’s what Gwen would do, although she’d never had to do it before.

A hawk circled overhead, pierced the air with a long screech, then drifted away.

Gwen set out, somewhat confident, but the terrain varied up and down and she had to detour around thick brush and rock formations. It was difficult to know if she’d covered the same territory or was working a proper grid. Her feet grew sore in her thin shoes.

An hour later she’d walked many rectangles. An hour after that the rain started falling.

After getting off the phone with Mr. Raine, Keller returned to the Yankee game he’d been watching with his son, Andy, and told his wife he had to go out for work. The Yankees were losing, 6–1, to the despised Red Sox, and it was only the fourth inning, their starting pitcher already chased after giving up two home runs, two doubles, and three walks. The team stood four back with three weeks to go, and after tonight would be five back. If he’d been watching alone, Keller would have turned the game off earlier, knowing his team faced a long and painful night, but Andy would stick it out until the end, whatever the score, reminding his dad their team could always come back no matter how far behind, since the clock does not wind down in baseball.

Patty said, “Say good night to your father, Andy.” When Bill went out at night for work, he stayed out for a while, sometimes until the next day.

“Are you going out to catch bad guys?” Andy asked.

“That’s the plan,” Keller told his son.

“Can I come and help?” Andy said hopefully.

“You know the answer to that.”

“Good night, Dad.” The boy kissed his father.

“You should think about getting ready for bed.”

“It’s Friday night, Dad. Falcone is pitching now. Is he good?”

Falcone was a young middle reliever just up from the minors. “I guess we’ll find out,” Keller said.

He kissed Patty, telling her he’d call at some point. She whispered to him to be careful.

Despite his team’s poor showing, he listened to the game in the car. By the time he got to Gull, the score was 8–1, the young Falcone getting in trouble right away.

At Gull, he asked the pretty hostess at the front desk if he could speak to Jude Gates. She was short and thin, with small breasts squeezed together to create a narrow canyon of cleavage. She reminded Keller of a girl he dated in high school, back when he played baseball and believed that someday he’d be the second baseman for the Yanks.

The hostess informed him that Mr. Gates wasn’t in tonight.

“Do you know where I can find him? At home maybe?”

The hostess shook her head. “I don’t know, and I’m not allowed to say. We don’t give out that kind of information.”

“No, of course not. That’s a good policy.”

She smiled and tilted her head, as if he’d paid her a personal compliment.

“What about Andrew Cole? Is he here tonight?”

“He’s in the kitchen, but he’s pretty busy.”

“Sure, okay,” he said. Probably true. Most of the tables and all of the bar stools were occupied. The staff moved quickly with trays and plates and glasses. He considered trumping the hostess by pulling out his badge, but decided against it. No need to trip the alarm at this point.

He left and walked down the alley to the back of the building. He noticed Gates’s Lexus parked there. The van that Brian Raine’s son had identified by plate number was not here; it had been here last time Keller poked around this lot, and he’d run
the plates afterward and found it registered to the Upstate Dining Company. The kid had gotten his numbers right. He remembered Nate Raine from the first-grade breakfast, a dreamy kid wearing a gadgety spy watch Andy had been begging for ever since. Andy had taken to him right away and told his father he’d been hanging out with Nate at recess all week. Andy wanted a play date, but that wouldn’t happen if Patty had any say in the matter, which she did. She would not allow her son to hang around with a boy whose mother smoked pot. On the other hand, if for some reason Gwen Raine’s children were taken from her or Gwen taken from them, Patty would be the first to offer a foster home to the boy. That’s just the way she worked. Over the past couple of years they’d had two foster children staying with them, temporary placements—a six-year-old girl for two months, followed the next year by a ten-year-old boy for six months—and while it hadn’t been easy on the family dynamic, it had been the right thing to do and a good experience for everyone in learning to get along with others from different backgrounds and circumstances.

He looked through the screen door at the back of the restaurant down a hallway leading to the kitchen. The crew passed in and out of his view, waiters and cooks. Orders barked, swearing, plates and pans banging in tuneless percussion. Keller caught a glimpse of Andrew Cole when the chef stepped around the cooking line and checked a plate one of the waiters held, adjusting the arrangement of a garnish.

No point in calling him out. Keller doubted there would be anything to discover from him.

Keller next drove to Gates’s house. The windows were dark, at least those that he could see. An eight-foot hedge hid most of the façade of a grand-looking Victorian in the oldest neighborhood in town. Big wraparound porch, fussy moldings and trim over the
windows and doors. Exterior lights on the porch and over the garage, likely on timers. So Gates had his van up in the mountains. What was he doing? Cruising the Adirondacks in a love mobile with a married woman from Morrissey? That didn’t compute.

He drove to the station to get the file on Gates. The dispatcher, who was the newest member of the Morrissey police department fresh and squeaky from the academy, greeted him as Detective Keller. Williams, the night sergeant, sat at his desk, talking on the phone. He nodded when he saw Keller.

He closed the door to his office and went through Gates’s file containing the same shuffled papers he’d been through a dozen times. Nothing added since he’d begun the investigation, except a handwritten note that Gates had dinner with Daryl Sweet, owner of Sweet Fitness, the same night Keller had taken Patty there. After observing Sweet and Gates at dinner that evening, Keller ran a background check on Sweet; nothing unusual came up. Former NFL player, arrested once in his playing days for DUI and speeding (103 mph in his Mercedes), also suspended for two games after having failed a drug test. While that might be a red flag, the substance in Sweet’s blood was a steroid, considered standard operating procedure for many football players. Now that he owned a chain of health clubs, Sweet could be hawking steroids, but Jude Gates—a restaurateur—seemed an unlikely source for them. Drugs channeled through restaurants were typically the traditional recreationals: pot, coke, ecstasy. Prescription meds usually involved rogue physicians and pharmacies.

Still, Sweet was worth keeping an eye on. His home address was listed in Chappaqua, well south of Keller’s jurisdiction, but he knew someone in the Westchester County sheriff’s office he could place a call to if he needed help.

He went through the other information in Gates’s file to see if anything stood out. The crossings at the Canadian border had to
be significant; Gates was likely getting supplied from up north, at least partially, which was odd because most drugs sold upstate came up from the city, and it didn’t make sense to risk a border crossing.

Keller checked his computer. There was an alert that the van had hit U.S. Customs earlier that day. He’d previously put a flag on both the Lexus and the van.

So Gates had gone up to Canada and picked up a supply, but why was he hanging around up in the mountains? Think about that. Mr. Raine had told Keller that his wife had told him that Gates had told her that he had a place up there. Jesus, that’s too many he told/she tolds to be credible.

He flipped through more paper in the file; his eye caught a photocopy of Gates’s marriage certificate, to a Claire M. Dumont. What the hell ever happened to her? No record of a divorce, no evidence of her at all. That gave him an idea. He went back to the computer, logged in to the Franklin County property database and searched on the name Dumont, Claire M.