StoneDust (7 page)

“Did you tell everybody what happened?”

“No. I mean, they saw Reg's lights as he drove away, but I didn't tell them the whole thing. It wasn't their business. Reg had a lot of problems, and he was our friend, and I wasn't about to start badmouthing him in front of the rest of them.”

I said, “I see.”

“Do you see why I lied to you?”

“To protect him.”

“No one else will.”

“But that's why Janey asked me to check him out.”

“Janey wants the life insurance, for God's sake, Ben. Are you stupid? She wants the money…Hey, if she can get it, more power. Right? She's got kids. They'll need it. So I'll tell you this, Ben: If you keep quiet what I told you and it doesn't get around, then maybe I won't have to tell it again to some insurance investigator. You know what I'm saying?”

“I hear you.”

“Good. Listen, I gotta go. I'm sorry you got caught in the middle of this. I hope we're still friends.” Tentatively, she extended a hand. I took it.

“Hopefully it won't come to an insurance investigator. But word around town is there was a gatecrasher here. If they start hunting, they'll hear it.”

“If you'll stop hunting, now that you know what happened, maybe it will all settle down.”

“Was Reg the crasher?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Look, Michelle. Everybody's talking about your party. Rumor has a bunch of people having fun and games in your Jacuzzi. Rumor also has a mysterious gatecrasher—possibly a woman—running into the woods. Was there another crasher, or just Reg?”

“I told you what happened.”

“Yeah, right…Listen, could the stuff you saw him snorting have been coke instead of heroin?”

“It could have been Sweet 'n' Low, for all I know. Except who snorts Sweet 'n' Low up a twenty-dollar bill?”

“Would you mind if I tried to find any traces of it on the table? I could take it to a lab.”

“I cleaned the table twenty times since then.”

“Maybe something in the cracks. Like here between the boards.”

“Ben, you're really pissing me off. I want you to leave.”

I stood up and left.

She watched from the kitchen door, arms crossed, face dark with anger. Just before I reached the car she yelled, “You really take advantage of being friends, Ben.”

“Hey, did he snort up what was on the table or put it away?”

“Screw you!”

“Did he?”

“Every goddamned grain of it. Right up his goddamned nose. Satisfied?”

***

I was not satisfied. The sensible half of my brain believed Michelle. But I didn't want to. I suspected I'd be more sensible, though not happier, after I talked to Ted Barrett. But I couldn't do that until school let out, which left me three hours to go bother someone else. Debating whom, it occurred to me that since I was talking to everyone in town about Reg, why not try to touch base with Reg himself?

I drove out to his cottage.

Some vandal had knocked over Fred Gleason's For Sale sign. I propped it up, then stood back to admire Reg's handiwork. His thatched roof was an oddity, but oddity or not, the roof, stucco walls, and tiny deepset windows were proportioned so authentically that no one would have been surprised to see Richard the Lion-hearted bang on the door demanding
droite du seigneur
.

Fred's lockbox held the key.

The house had the cold feel empty houses get even in summer. Things looked a little messy, as if the state police had half-heartedly searched for a major stash they knew they wouldn't find. And it was clear that Reg had holed up in the combination kitchen-fireplace room in the back of the house since Janey took the kids. I found an empty box from Lorenzo's Pizza Palace on the counter, unopened bills and junk mail, and some of last week's newspapers.

He had mounted elk antlers over his fireplace, but the rack was a mite small to dominate the room. In fact, had the animal they bagged been any younger, the Rocky Mountain park rangers would have bagged Reg and Duane for statutory poaching. Their swordfish on the wall opposite, however, looked big enough to sink a Montauk charter boat and sufficiently irritated to shish kebab the crew.

I sat in a big lounge chair that faced a twenty-seven-inch TV. On the table beside the lounger was a coffee cup growing mold on the dregs, and an Eric Sloane book about barns and covered bridges, lying open, facedown.

I closed it so the covers wouldn't warp and in doing so found that Duane Fisk had inscribed the flyleaf on July 17, 1989: “Happy birthday, Old Buddy. Thatch this!”

I owned the book myself. My father had given it to me. Sloane had written it back in '55, when he was one of the first to realize that suburbs and interstate highways would steamroll nineteenth-century New England into oblivion. As a birthday book it was a hell of a reminder of mortality. But for a craftsman like Reg, what better gift than a story in words and pictures about the vanished skills that were once universal in these parts?

I hit the TV remote. He'd been watching CNN last. There was a telephone. I pushed Redial, listened to it tapdance Reg's last call.

“Lorenzo's. Laura speaking.”

Brilliant. “Hi, Laura. Ben.”

“Hi, Ben…Do you want to order?”

“Hey Laura, do you remember when Reg came in for a pie last?”

“The Friday before he died. It was the last time I saw him.”

One thing I continued to be brilliant at was
not
filling in the nearly five-hour gap between the time Vicky saw Reg cruise past the cookout and Dr. Mead fed him pistachio ice cream.

I wondered how he got all the way from Michelle's kitchen to the covered bridge before the hotload killed him.

For that matter, why had he gone to the bridge at all? I opened the book again. The pages fell to the spot he'd been reading. But it wasn't about bridges, it was about barn structure. In the margin, he'd sketched a framing plan. He was losing the cottage in the divorce, which meant he needed a home. Why not a hand-hewn barn?

Maybe what Michelle saw him snort wasn't the hotload that killed him. Maybe Michelle and Duane weren't the last people who'd seen him alive. Did he meet somebody at the bridge? A good question.

I levered myself out of his lounger, locked up, and drove out to the covered bridge.

***

Sloane had described it in his book.

It had been built in 1851—the third to span this ford, the previous two having been washed away. This time the farmers and iron miners had gotten it right, constructing a new patented lattice frame that had allowed them to build it longer, and therefore higher above the floodwaters that had wrecked its predecessors.

It was cool and dim inside. I estimated where the Blazer had been by the windows. I sat on a convenient timber and tried to imagine the moment he drove in and stopped. The problem was, no matter how I concentrated, I couldn't imagine why he had stopped. Old wooden bridges, even quaint covered bridges, are a little creepy. Who knows when they're going to fall down? Why stop inside, particularly when you'd block the road to the Indian reservation, whose oft-abused residents had every reason to be surly?

I mulled these and related inconsistencies while square patches of sunlight from the windows crept along the wooden roadbed. Had they troubled Sergeant Marian while she conducted her investigation? Had Trooper Moody grunted “Something's fishy”? Had Marian—a pro through and through—confirmed the old warhorse's insight with a startling piece of evidence?

Somehow I doubted that, particularly as she hadn't requested the state police Major Case Squad crime-scene truck. It was easy to accuse her of mistaking Reg's death as a cut-and-dry overdose. The difficulty lay in the fact that Marian had not risen to sergeant making mistakes. Maybe she hadn't needed the truck.

Scooter had published a good photograph of her and Ollie crawling beside the Blazer on their hands and knees—Ollie, shaped like a rhino that lost a contact lens; Marian, shapely. So I got down on my hands and knees and crawled beside where the Blazer had been. I found wood splinters, dried mud, dust and pebbles, all dropped and scattered by a week of traffic. I poked between the floorboards. And where a sun-square had moved, I saw a glint of reflection. I pried out a tiny chip of blue paint from Reg's Blazer.

It stood to reason that in their search, before traffic had passed through, Marian and Ollie had found similar chips, proving the S10 had received its scratch on the bridge. Still, I felt sort of proud about my little piece of evidence. Though not proud enough to cash Janey's check yet.

Chapter 8

The acid scents of oak sawdust and nostril-searing molten aluminum rocketed me back to seventh-grade shop class. Old Mr. Tyler had retired and now Ted Barrett, the handsome failed builder turned teacher, sent boys and girls home to their mothers with pig-shaped carving boards, water-pump lamps, and sand-cast letter openers. As I stood in the doorway inhaling it all, he was instructing a group of Alison's classmates never to stand behind the table saw.
Never
.

Ted had a deep, commanding voice. “Once,” he told them, “it threw a four-foot-long two-by-eight through that window.” The kids turned and
ahhed
at the window some thirty feet behind the saw. “Through the shade, through the glass, through the storm window. It flew all the way across the parking lot and landed on the principal's car.”

The kids gave him a giggle. The next instant the bell rang. I stepped aside and they were out the door like rabbits.

I had to admire him. Most contractors who went belly-up pulled a vanishing act, leaving the lumberyard and the hardware store holding the bag. Ted had had Tim Hall organize an orderly Chapter Eleven and was paying down his debts; tough on a teaching salary, even with Susan nursing in a New Milford daycare center.

“Ben.” Ted nodded warily, and I knew Michelle had beaten me to him.

“Mr. Tyler told that same story when we were in seventh grade.”

“Whatever works. That saw's lethal if it binds.”

“Except for the part about the principal's car. That was a nice touch.”

Ted turned and walked away. I followed him to a far corner of the shop. He sat at his desk and gazed a moment at Susan's picture, which hung on the wall. Scooter MacKay had shot it for the
Clarion
's Christmas issue the winter that Susan chaired Newbury's Adopt-A-Family committee. Posing with a heap of stuffed animals people had contributed, she looked about as beautiful, and beatific, as you'd expect a God-sent angel to look on Christmas Eve—deep, warm eyes, a veil of platinum hair, cheekbones to convert for, and a mouth to write home about. (Those who didn't believe in angels assumed she was Santa's chief of staff.)

“I think we better have a talk, Ben.”

“Great. I think so too.”

He looked at the clock on the wall. The bell had rung the end of the school day. I had wanted to get to him before Susan did.

“Here okay?” I asked.

“I'm meeting Bill and Duane out at Gill Farm. Want to follow me?”

I'd heard they were dismantling an old dairy barn, intending to move it to one of the homesites Duane owned on Mount Pleasant. “Let me ride along with you, if you can drop me back at my car.”

“No, you better follow me,” said Ted. “I gotta stay and help out.”

I hesitated. I'd do best alone with Ted, but I was due at Rita Long's at six for a drink, with expectations of dinner or something afterward. As she was both busy and mobile, it had been weeks since we'd gotten together.

“How late you going to stay?”

“We'll work 'til dark.”

“I'll take my car.”

Aware this was not the swiftest move, I contrived to excuse myself on the grounds that I hadn't cashed Janey's check and didn't expect to learn much more from Ted than Michelle had told me, anyway. I was equally aware that when it came to Rita Long, my ethical standards had degenerated to those of a starving man with a rock discovering pheasant under glass.

Ted locked the shop and signed out at the principal's office, and I followed his Honda out of town and up Mount Pleasant Road. He drove sedately, more like a retiree than the hotshot contractor who used to race his Corvette down to Long Island Sound where he had docked a cabin cruiser. With his beautiful Susan at his side, they had been one of the sights of the town.

They still were, for that matter: Susan Barrett didn't need Corvettes and cabin cruisers to knock male socks off; driving a rusty compact these days, she still stopped traffic; while to go drinking with Ted was to have women whisper in your ear, “Who's your friend with the blue eyes?”

***

An encampment of Amish folk, up from Pennsylvania in modest vans and RVs, were building a brand-new ultra-modern dairy barn for Gill Farm. The men had split into two crews—masons pouring the perforated concrete floor and carpenters erecting the frame. Their women were cooking supper under some maple trees.

I pulled up a moment to say hi to Fred Gill, who had recently bought Ellis Butler's herd when Ellis retired. Fred was beaming like a new father. The huge concrete basin behind the barn, he explained, was a holding-mixing tank for a cow manure slurry, piped from under the cows, that he would spread on his fields; by feeding them indoors, he figured to double production and halve costs, as the cows would be fertilizing their own corn.

I congratulated him and caught up with Ted's Honda behind the old barn where Duane Fisk and Bill Carter were pulling nails and stacking siding. I wasn't quite prepared for my initial reception.

When Duane saw me, he hurried over, calling, “Hey, Ben. Perfect timing. Things are moving real fast all of a sudden.”

Duane was broad and beefy, a little shorter than I, and making excellent progress on a beer gut. In fact he had been putting on new weight for several months. Now when he smiled his jowls got big and his eyes nearly disappeared in slits of flesh.

I got out of the car. He slipped his hammer through his nail apron and tossed his catspaw nailpuller on the grass so we could shake hands.

“You look happy. What's moving?”

“We're going to pick up Reg's half of the Mount Pleasant subdivision. Me and Bill and Ted. Rates low, the market's coming back. We'll throw up four houses to start; first one we sell we start two more.”

“Terrific,” I said, curious what bank owed Duane a favor, and somewhat glad for them. As I've noted, I had never liked the Mount Pleasant deal; but the damage had been done already, in the course of clearing the lots and building the road, so there was little point in the scarred-up hillside eroding further as it sat empty. The people who bought their houses would make their own mark planting new trees and gradually erase the bulldozer scars with lawns and gardens and barbecues.

In fact, I was so glad for them that I didn't see the bribe coming until it was wrapping around me like a gaucho's bola. “Thing is, Ben, we'd like you to handle it with an exclusive.”

“That's a decent offer.”

“You've got the kind of buyers we'll need. Right, Bill?”

“Damn straight,” said Bill, and Ted chimed in with a less-than-convinced, “Absolutely.”

This was absurd. I specialized in country homes—second homes for well-off New Yorkers—and I hadn't met one yet who'd buy a house in a subdivision, much less one with a gravel pit for a front door.

“You sure I'm the guy for you?”

“No question.”

“Okay. Let me sit down with my Rolodex. I'll get back to you.”

“Good man.”

“In the meantime, can I ask you something?”

“Shoot,” said Duane, though Bill was reverting to his earlier irritated-bear look, and Ted was turning dark.

“I got a little bit of a problem. You see, Janey Hopkins—”

“Poor Janey's a problem. But she'll deal. She wants out. Guaranteed.”

“Good, but she also wants me to tell her that Reg really wasn't snorting heroin.”

“But he was.”

“Well, I know that now. Michelle told me.”

“So what's your problem?”

“Well, aside from the fact that Michelle first didn't tell me—”

“Later, she did. So what's your problem?”

“My problem is, she doesn't know what Reg was snorting. It could have been Sweet 'n' Low—her own words.”

“He's dead,” said Duane. “Why don't you leave him in peace?”

Bill Carter said, “The autopsy said heroin. What do you want, Ben?”

“I want to believe that and I don't.”

“Michelle told you what she saw. Why you bugging us?”

“How'd he look when he left the house?”

“I didn't see him,” said Ted.

“Me neither,” said Bill.

“I saw him and he looked stoned,” said Duane. “Come on, Ben, I've known Reg my whole life. Believe me, he was stoned.”

“Then how did he drive twenty miles—eight miles of dirt road—to the covered bridge?”

“Who the hell knows?” demanded Bill.

And Ted added, “Who cares?”

I looked at Duane. “You care, don't you? Your best pal. For crissake, you guys were like brothers.”

“Ben, if you don't shut up about Reg, you're not getting this job.”

“Or any other job,” said Bill. “None of my houses.”

Considering what I'd seen this morning, that wasn't the biggest threat to my happiness. Ted grew darker and quieter, mourning, I assumed, that he had no houses to take back from me now that he taught shop.

Duane stepped closer and started pointing with a finger he'd cut while pulling nails. “None of my deals. And none of my friends' deals.”

This
was
a threat. Newbury Pre-cast had continued to prosper in the same economy that cost Ted his cabin cruiser and that Bill Carter blamed for his woes. Shrewdly bartering concrete work for a piece of the action, Duane had garnered shares in every new project in the county, as well as some dead ones recently rescued from grateful banks.

While it was true that I concentrated on selling country houses, there weren't enough of them to count on for my entire income, which Duane knew very well. So perhaps I spoke harshly.

“You've just reminded me of a piece of Newbury history. Mount Pleasant wasn't always called ‘Mount Pleasant.' My great-grandfather changed the name to toney up the neighborhood. Sounds like your project ought to go back to the original.”

“Yeah, what's that?”

“Slut Hill.”

“What the
hell
is that supposed to mean?”

“Reg was my friend too. If the situation was reversed, he'd tell the three of you to shove your business sideways.”

To my absolute astonishment, Duane balled his fists and told me that if I knew what was good for me, I'd back off. Big Bill Carter shouldered beside him, forearms up like a defenseman looking for blood.

I laughed.

“You're kidding—Come on, you guys, what are you doing?”

They lunged shoulder to shoulder. I couldn't believe my eyes. But it was suddenly clear to me that Duane was going to take a swing. I looked around. Bill appeared to be winding up to blow me into the next county. Ted was watching. Still amazed, I tried to catch his eye, but he looked through me like I wasn't there. The old barn blocked us from the busy Amish. Fred Gill was nowhere to be seen.

***

I slipped off my Academy ring, which would make an awful cut, and punched Duane Fisk in the eye. There's nothing quite so disorienting as a punch in the eye, particularly if a guy's not accustomed to getting punched. He reeled back, clutching his face.

Bill moved between us. “What the hell did you hit him for?” he asked, throwing a big arm around Duane's shoulder.

Sensing a rush, I went cold. Ted had picked up a two-by-four stud. Red with anger, he stepped into his swing like a long-ball hitter.