The Railroad (36 page)

As I got back into my car after stashing the tools back in the trunk, I caught sight of the waitress looking at me through the window. For some reason I smiled and waved happily as though that would take some of the sting out of my embarrassment. She raised her hand hesitantly and looked somewhat stricken. Driving away from there was a very pleasant experience.

*

I found a motel about fifty miles away. By that time I was already back in Massachusetts which somehow made me feel better about things; leaving New York State gave me some odd sense of relief. The motel wasn’t much to look at and neither was my room, but it was a place to sleep.

I had just settled in and was watching a movie when the phone rang. Not my cell phone, but the room phone. I stared at the phone and waited through a couple more rings before picking it up. My heart was beating quickly.

“Mike?” the male voice asked.

“Who are you?”

“I’m someone who is looking out for your welfare. You need to go back to the City.”

“Why do I need to do that?” I was trying to sound tough.

“What you’re doing is only going to be unpleasant and I can assure you that you won’t find what you’re looking for. If you have any sense you’ll listen to me.”

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said one word that I thought would get me a reaction. “Moskowitz.”

There was a pause at the other end. “We know about him. We know about everything there is to know about you. You’re a hero but you‘re out of your league. Go home. Do it tomorrow. We’ll know if you don't.”

We?
“I’ll think about it.”

“Be sure you come to the right conclusion.” And then he hung up.

I went through my options. I could go to another motel, but it seemed likely I would be followed. I could go back to Manhattan and regain my old life. That seemed to make sense to me, but I wasn’t really interested in making sense. I lay there feeling like a lost little boy and I asked myself once again if I thought I could really kill someone if I had to. I didn’t quite know the answer.

*

Years ago, when the summer would come, my father would drive us north to Vermont to visit my grandparents. My grandfather had decided to move up to New England after he had retired from the engineering firm he’d started and eventually sold. I’d asked him once why he’d moved so far away and he’d told me it was like living in some timeless part of America, more real in some ways than the manicured lawns of Westchester County.

In the first few years I was too young to see what he’d been talking about, but later I’d get this excited feeling knowing I was going up there. Once we hit route 91 going north from Connecticut, I’d feel like my blood was racing. There was something about seeing the land shift from its normal dull green to a green that was more vibrant than any I’d ever seen. Once those primordial humps and hills began to jut up from the soil, I’d feel like I was in a fairy land. My sister and I would joke, saying, “hump to starboard, hump to port” all the way through the Green Mountains to my grandparent’s house. It drove my parents nuts, but I think they found it amusing.

I felt some of that same throat catching excitement that day as I took the same route, feeling the land rise gently as though I was about to reach the summit of some magical mountain realm. I seemed to gain some strength from seeing the hills jutting up around me, as though I’d come back to a second home. The road was as I remembered it, clean and even, graded better than anything I’d seen back in New York. And there was almost no traffic; it really was like an older America.

I felt optimistic as I left route 91 and took a smaller state route to the town of Selaquechie. So many of the towns in the Green and White Mountains had names that had been left by the natives; many of them sounded funny to English ears. My sister and I had even made up a fictional substance called “quechie” that we decided was on all the trees in the area and that we would avoid at all costs. She would run up to me and rub her hand across my back, declaring that she’d covered me with quechie and I would rot.

I had looked at the map and found that I was no more than twenty miles from where my grandparents had lived. In many ways it looked like the town I remembered them living in, all white clapboard and craft stores. Like Covington, Selaquechie was an artsy little town. But unlike the contrived little confection that I’d found in Covington, Selaquechie achieved the status of real Americana without trying. This
was
a country town and these really were people who eked a living out of an unstable rural and manufacturing economy right out of the great American novel. The crafts stores were usually in people’s homes and though they weren’t always sophisticated, they were a bit more real than what I’d seen at the Merkison Crafts Festival.

I spent the first two hours there buying a new tire. The prices were a lot better than New York, but things went a little more slowly. I had them take the spare off and mount and balance the new tire. They offered me a special deal on a full set but I wasn’t in the mood.

In some ways The Selaquechie Inn was one of the only jarring elements in the town. In the postcard I’d received, it looked every inch a New England bed and breakfast, but the owners were not true Yankees. I had remembered flatlanders coming up to Vermont and buying inns and hotels and that trend seemed to be flourishing now. The Inn was owned by the proverbial couple who’d packed it in to open a bed and breakfast, leaving behind their professional yuppie roots. This particular couple was from Boston where the husband had been a financial advisor and the wife had run a trendy alternative children’s school. They belonged in Vermont as much as I did. I wondered what the locals thought of them.

My initial impulse had been to stay in a motel nearby. I wanted to be anonymous to the people I questioned and, hopefully, evade anyone who was pursuing me. But a moment’s thought persuaded me otherwise. Anyone following me would know where I went, especially in a town as small as this one. I reasoned, if I was staying at the Inn, seemingly for recreational reasons, the owners would be much more likely to trust me and answer my questions.

All this in mind, I chatted both of them up, hoping that I’d seem a lot more enthusiastic about the Inn than I was about finding a mother and her daughter. We talked about making the transition from professional life to a life in the country. As far as Beth and Bob thought, they fit in just fine in Selaquachie and the neighbors loved them. I had to wonder if the people they’d been talking about were people that they had given some work to.

They gave me a tour of the Inn and I was a bit shocked. First I was asked to take off my shoes which rankled a bit, but I wasn’t about to get on their bad side. Then they took me through several rooms that looked like a cross between an Italian Villa and something Salvador Dali might have come up with. It was all ultramodern and stark and the room they finally put me in seemed more like a museum than anything else.

I weighed questioning Beth and Bob right away against letting them get used to me, at least for a while. My decision was made for me when they told me that I would most likely be the only guest who would be at the Inn that night for dinner.

Beth tended to dry wash her hands a little when she talked and I had to control myself so I wouldn’t stare at her while she did it. “You’re from New York so I know that you’ll appreciate our Inn. Did you know that we continue to find arrowheads in the yard? You wouldn’t believe how many we found while we were building the place.”

“It was a mess,” Bob assured me. “You wouldn’t believe the shape it was in. But the joists are amazing considering how old the place is and how long it’s been since anyone did any serious repairs to the place.” He gestured for me to follow him and soon we were standing in front of an arch that was small and not very impressive. “Can you believe that the former owners had this covered up? When we broke through the wall and saw this wood...”

He let the implications hang in the air.

I nodded my interest. By the time another hour passed, they both seemed ready to stop talking about themselves and their Inn. Beth stopped me as I was walking out the door. “We like to eat with our guests and share with them. That’s what all this is about to me. Do you think you’ll be here?”

She seemed so anxious that I almost felt guilty accepting, knowing that I had ulterior motives; I knew it would give me an opportunity to pump them for information. I decided that wine might help so I walked across the street to a crafts shop called New England Notions to ask where the nearest wine shop was. The woman running it looked at me as if I had two heads. “No shop, mister. There’s a state store at the edge of town.”

“What’s a state store?”

She smiled. “Alcoholic beverages are sold by the state and only by the state.”  She gave me directions to the store.

On my way out, I stopped to take a look at the shop, wondering if it was a place that Eileen and Megan might have visited. Unlike some of the other tacky shops I’d seen recently, this one was a whole different universe. There were dolls made from found items. I was used to that type of thing from New York; dolls made of apples, paper clips, rubber cement, etc. But this was different. There were ladybugs made of flecks of jade embedded in some kind of resin. There were snails hand painted on papier-mâché. There were ducks made out of sea glass.

I turned back to the cashier. “Who made these?”

“I did. I’ve been doing it since I was a child.”

“Have you considered selling these on the Internet?”

“I’ve had people tell me I should.” She shrugged her shoulders.

“You could make a ton with these. You should go to New York and find a shop, probably in SoHo. They’d take your work on consignment.”

“I don’t know much about New York. I’ve never been there.”

“Oh. I think it would be worth your while to at least set up a website and do some mail order. I know what this kind of stuff would sell for in New York.”

“I do all right here.”

“I’m sure you do. Well anyway, thanks for the directions.”

In the end I turned back and bought one of the snails. If I ever saw Megan again, it would be hers.

Chapter Eighteen

              As I would have expected, Beth and Bob took great pains to make their meals as baroque as the interior of their little empire in Selaquachie. Their culinary enthusiasm led me to believe that they’d hoped they’d get a larger portion of the yuppie travel market from cities like New York, Boston and Philadelphia coming to their Inn. I supposed that they hoped I’d pass on the news if they proved to me that they were superior innkeepers.

We started with some pretty decent hard bread dipped in olive oil. The music was sedate; mostly Mozart at a civilized volume. The next course was prosciutto with melon. I pulled out my wines just at what I considered the right moment and I immediately knew it was a mistake. They looked crestfallen and it hit me that they must have chosen wines carefully to fit the meal. I tried to toss it off as a gesture on my part. “You know I didn’t know what you’d be serving, so these are for when you need them,” I told them.

Over the squash soup we got off on a conversation about Beth’s trials while running her upscale children’s school. “It all should have worked. I have a degree in both Child Psychology
and
Education. I taught for 10 years in the public school system and four in private schools. If they’re going to entrust their children to an expert, they need to let her do the work she was meant to do.”

Bob nodded. “It was as if the parents wanted to run the school themselves. What did they need Beth for?”

Beth grunted her approval. “There was one parent who told me that my methods weren’t flexible enough and that her daughter didn’t feel comfortable being part of a program. I think she said something about running a little fascist dictatorship.”

I nodded sympathetically. “I suppose she must have known what your goals were when you enrolled her daughter,” I said, doing my best to placate her.

“Of course! If she wanted standard “let the chips fall where they may” education for her daughter, she could have easily sent her to public school and saved a lot of money. People pay me good money for something different because most public schools, and most private schools for that matter, are lacking.”

“I know it’s a problem,” I parroted. “My sister has been having a hell of time finding a decent school for her daughter. The girl was a little bit of a discipline problem. She put her in Montessori in New York.” I shrugged my shoulders. “In fact you probably met the little girl. She’s the reason I’m here. She and her mother stayed here."

I fished around inside my jacket pockets, pretending I was searching, and pulled out the postcard I’d put there. “I didn’t know anywhere to stay up here, but I figured if they liked it here..." ” I held out the postcard.

Beth took it in her small, very white hand. “That’s my handwriting. Wait! I remember the little girl. I can see what you mean about her being a discipline problem. I remember thinking that I’d like to get her into a class for a few months. She’s a little bold if you don’t mind my saying so. Not enough structure and security in her life I’d venture. I suppose the parents are distracted easily and don’t deal with her in a consistent manner.”

I smiled blandly. “Something like that.” I felt relief wash over me. Now I knew
all
the postcards were from Megan and I was on the right track.

Beth nodded, pleased with her deductions. “She asked me to write the address because she said she had bad handwriting. That’s often a sign of other problems.”

“Well it got to me, so I thank you. Actually I was wondering if you heard them say anything about where they might be traveling. I’d like to surprise them.”

“In what way?”

“Well, we were supposed to be meeting in Maine in a week or so. I got off early and I’d like to find them sooner. It’s not really important, but I know they’d like to see me.”

There it was: my latest gambit. I had turned it over in my head all day and it had the advantage of being simple and non-threatening. To my great joy, neither of them seemed suspicious. Bob raised his eyes to the ceiling in a parody of thought. I guessed that these practical details were his forte. “I did hear the little girl say something to her mother about glass works or something like that. It seemed she liked colored glass.”

“I found it telling that she was glued to that stuffed animal,” Beth added, the educator strong in her voice.

I smiled dismissively. “You mean the surfer bear?”

“Yes. She held on to it like it was some kind of father substitute. Does she have some problem with her father?”

I let my anger pass and hoped it didn’t show in my face. “Nothing serious. She happens to like stuffed animals. And she is only seven.”

Beth smiled condescendingly and I realized I hadn’t really liked her from the beginning. I was tempted to ask her why I didn’t see any children around the Inn, but decided against it.

Bob stepped in, sensing a problem that he’d probably encountered with his wife many times before. “Beth has mapped childhood development over the years. She’s done a good job. She even wrote a couple of books on the subject."

His wife smiled proudly, feeling she had somehow scored a point. “I got some strange feelings from your niece. I had hoped to discuss them with your sister but she seemed in a hurry. She gave me the impression that she was trying to cover something up.”

It hit me that the reason that neither of them had expended any effort on finding out if I was legitimate was because Beth was so preoccupied with psychoanalyzing Megan. As much as I hated cheapening myself, I decided that I’d use it my advantage.

“She did? We’re not very big on airing the family laundry,” I said sheepishly, as though I’d been found out. “Well what feelings did you get?”

Beth looked triumphant. “So there is something wrong?”

“Well. I guess there’s no harm in telling you. I’ve never really thought there was anything we could do about it. I did say something about it to my sister once.”

I let the silence hang. Beth was waiting and ready to pounce.

“You see,” I continued. “The father cheats on my sister and he has a cocaine problem. When he gets bad enough, sometimes they have to send Megan away. Or sometimes he goes away.” I said it all very softly, as though I was ashamed to be uttering the words.

I looked appropriately stricken, I suppose, which seemed to spur her on even more. “What I found most telling and what seemed to be an indication of serious systematic abnormalities in her family, was her obsession with a place she called
The
Farm
. She’d bring it up out of nowhere, telling me that when she got to
The
Farm
she’d be able to sleep in a real bed and that she wouldn’t have to have any more bad dreams. There was also talk of big dogs that would protect her and a tower where she could see the whole world and tell what was coming from miles away. And a barn shaped like
Noah’s
Ark
. All these are security issues, Mike. The tower, the
Noah’s
Ark
to take her away from the rain. It’s pretty obvious. The fantasy was so persistent that her mother had to tell her to be quiet. I think your sister was embarrassed.”

Noah’s
Ark
, just like in Megan’s last postcard. I felt my pulse quicken; maybe I could find Megan and her mother “Yes. We’ve dealt with this before. Sometimes I think I should just tell Eileen to let Megan go on with her fantasies. She’s just a little girl. How long can they last?”

Dinner ended soon after. I made the standard excuses and went to bed.

*

My clock said 3:44 when I was awoken by the sound of a crash. I ran to the window just in time to see an extremely beat up blue tow truck take a second or third swipe at the front end of my car. There was steam coming from the front and I had to assume that it would be a miracle if the car ran at all.

I pulled on a robe and raced outside before anyone else could get there, my eyes scanning the inside of the car for what I expected to be there. I noticed that the right front window had been smashed with what was probably a tire iron. There on the seat was a piece of paper, the numbers
4-5-1
written on it in bright red. It seems that I had stumbled on the
Chapter and Verse
Killers
for sure. I grabbed the paper and stuffed it in the pocket of my robe; I didn’t need the police to make any connections between me and a news story with national attention.

Beth made it outside before Bob and somehow I wasn’t at all surprised. “I called the police,” she shouted breathlessly just as Bob ran up. When the police arrived, they began by shining a light in my face as though they assumed I was at fault, but seemed to calm down when Beth assured them I was a guest of the Inn. I gave them a sketchy description of the truck that had hit my car. To my surprise, I realized that there was no license plate, something that made sense after a moment’s thought.

That fact seemed to bother the officer who was questioning me. “Do you know anyone up here?” he asked, a hint of hostility in his voice.

“He just came up here today,” Beth chimed in. “He’s on the way to meet his sister.”

The cop looked at her with some mistrust and I was reminded that she was barely better than an outsider in a town like that. “When he got here has nothing to do with why his car’s just been wrecked,” he said firmly.

“I have no idea why it happened,” I lied.

He took a deep breath. I could see the wheels turning in his head; he didn’t like outsiders, but the town needed them. I could cause him trouble. “We’ve had a lot of people come up here to make drug deals,” he told me.

“I understand.”

“Well then do you mind if we search your car?”

“Certainly.” I handed him the keys and immediately got a bad feeling.

“Really, officer, there’s no reason for this,” Beth said. “He’s a guest of the Inn."

I waved my hands negligently. It would satisfy their curiosity and now I was committed. “I’m going to get a thermos of tea,” Beth said suddenly, and bolted back into the Inn. In fifteen minutes, I was watching them dig into the back seats, sipping herbal tea, beginning to relax and expecting I’d be back in bed in a half an hour.

“Shit,” one of the officers said. He had pulled up the back seat and was working his hand around behind it. In seconds he had pulled something up that looked like nothing more than a few joints in a plastic bag.

Beth looked at me with the most profound look of disappointment I’d ever seen. “Oh Mike,” she moaned.

“It isn’t mine,” I said, knowing no one would believe me.

It took a few hours before they got around to processing me. Of course they offered me a legal aid lawyer, but I figured Dennis would be better, and I couldn’t afford to be stuck in bumfuck when I had to find Eileen and Megan.

I sat in a cell with someone who looked like he’d lost the title bout. To my limited amusement he wore the regulation plaid New England hunter’s jacket. His face was red from booze and getting seriously pounded by someone. I figured that fighting was a form of recreation for someone like him.

He seemed to drift in and out of consciousness. Once when he was awake he smiled at me. “They deny your Gold Card? Is that why you’re here?”

“No. Sorry to disappoint you. They didn’t have my vintage in the local restaurant. So I pissed on the waiter.”

It was stupid humor born of desperation, but he loved it. He spent at least two minutes laughing until he passed out again.

Around seven they let me make my phone call. Dennis was at home and just developing his first awareness of the day, compliments of his Kona coffee blend. He didn’t quite seem to understand me at first, but then he got serious. “Okay. You’re all right?”

“Fine. Someone just trashed my car and planted a few joints under the back seat.”

“Oh god. Okay, Mike. They’re not going to like me up there so I’m going to have to find some friend of a friend who works up there. I don’t mind coming up, but I’d just be a New York lawyer with an attitude.”

“I see your point.”

“Let me try to find some people before they go to the office. If I can’t find anyone good, I promise I’ll fly up there.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“I’m glad to see you’re brave. I suppose you still have some business to take care of, right?”

“True.”

“Okay. There’s an airport near Okemo that I know. You should either hear from someone who lives up there or see me by two at the latest.”

“Thanks, Dennis. I’ll pay you back some day.”

“At least you’re talking and okay.”

“Doing my best.”

“Okay. I’m going to make some calls. Talk to you later.”

*

In the end it turned out that Dennis didn’t have to fly up after all. I was sitting in my cell, munching on some breadsticks that Beth had brought me. I’d shared them with my cellmate who I’d found out was named Ken. We’d formed quite a friendship and he’d promised to take me to the bar where someone had beaten the shit out of him.

I could feel Eileen and Megan drifting away from me and there didn’t seem to be much I could do about it. That was when Layton Grant walked up to the bars and smiled at me. “You’re Mike Dobbs?”