“I think we can stand the expense of a few long-distance calls,” Harry Shrewsbury said. “And listen. Do you have something you can take? Anything of a, you know, calming nature?”
“Nothing like that,” she whispered. “Only Ambien.”
“Then Arlene will loan you one of her Valiums,” he said. “You should take one at least half an hour
before you start making any stressful calls. Meantime, I’ll just let her know we’re coming.”
“You’re very kind.”
He opened first one of her kitchen drawers, then another, then a third. Darcy felt her heart slip into her throat as he opened the fourth. He took a dishwiper from it and handed it to her. “Sturdier than paper towels.”
“Thank you,” she said. “So much.”
“How long were you married, Mrs. Anderson?”
“Twenty-seven years,” she said.
“Twenty-seven,” he marveled. “God. I am so sorry.”
“So am I,” she said, and lowered her face into the dishtowel.
Robert Emory Anderson was laid to rest in Yarmouth’s Peace Cemetery two days later. Donnie and Petra flanked their mother as the minister talked about how a man’s life was but a season. The weather had turned cold and overcast; a chilly wind rattled the leafless branches. B, B & A had closed for the day, and everyone had turned out. The accountants in their black overcoats clustered together like crows. There were no women among them. Darcy had never noticed this before.
Her eyes brimmed and she wiped at them periodically with the handkerchief she held in one black-gloved hand; Petra cried steadily and without
letup; Donnie was red-eyed and grim. He was a good-looking young man, but his hair was already thinning, as his father’s had at his age.
As long as he doesn’t put on weight like Bob did,
she thought.
And doesn’t kill women, of course
. But surely that kind of thing wasn’t hereditary. Was it?
Soon this would be over. Donnie would stay only a couple of days—it was all the time he could afford to take away from the business at this point, he said. He hoped she could understand that and she said of course she did. Petra would be with her for a week, and said she could stay longer if Darcy needed her. Darcy told her how kind that was, privately hoping it would be no more than five days. She needed to be alone. She needed . . . not to think, exactly, but to find herself again. To re-establish herself on the right side of the mirror.
Not that anything had gone wrong; far from it. She didn’t think things could have gone better if she had planned her husband’s murder for months. If she had done that, she probably would have screwed it up by complicating things too much. Unlike for Bob, planning was not her forte.
There had been no hard questions. Her story was simple, believable, and almost true. The most important part was the solid bedrock beneath it: they had a marriage stretching back almost three decades, a good marriage, and there had been no recent arguments to mar it. Really, what was there to question?
The minister invited the family to step forward. They did so.
“Rest in peace, Pop,” Donnie said, and tossed a clod of earth into the grave. It landed on the shiny surface of the coffin. Darcy thought it looked like a dog turd.
“Daddy, I miss you so much,” Petra said, and threw her own handful of earth.
Darcy came last. She bent, took up a loose handful in her black glove, and let it fall. She said nothing.
The minister invoked a moment of silent prayer. The mourners bowed their heads. The wind rattled the branches. Not too far distant, traffic rushed by on I-295. Darcy thought:
God, if You’re there, let this be the end
.
It wasn’t.
Seven weeks or so after the funeral—it was the new year now, the weather blue and hard and cold—the doorbell of the house on Sugar Mill Lane rang. When Darcy opened it, she saw an elderly gentleman wearing a black topcoat and red muffler. Held before him in his gloved hands was an old-school Homburg hat. His face was deeply lined (with pain as well as age, Darcy thought) and what remained of his gray hair was buzzed to a fuzz.
“Yes?” she said.
He fumbled in his pocket and dropped his hat. Darcy bent and picked it up. When she straightened, she saw that the elderly gentleman was holding
out a leather-cased identification folder. In it was a gold badge and a picture of her caller (looking quite a bit younger) on a plastic card.
“Holt Ramsey,” he said, sounding apologetic about it. “State Attorney General’s Office. I’m sorry as hell to disturb you, Mrs. Anderson. May I come in? You’ll freeze standing out here in that dress.”
“Please,” she said, and stood aside.
She observed his hitching walk and the way his right hand went unconsciously to his right hip—as if to hold it together—and a clear memory rose in her mind: Bob sitting beside her on the bed, her cold fingers held prisoner by his warm ones. Bob talking. Gloating, actually.
I want them to think Beadie’s dumb, and they do. Because
they’re
dumb. I’ve only been questioned a single time, and that was as a witness, about two weeks after BD killed the Moore woman. An old guy with a limp, semi-retired.
And here that old guy was, standing not half a dozen steps from where Bob had died. From where she had killed him. Holt Ramsey looked both sick and in pain, but his eyes were sharp. They moved quickly to the left and right, taking in everything before returning to her face.
Be careful,
she told herself.
Be oh so careful of this one, Darcellen.
“How can I help you, Mr. Ramsey?”
“Well, one thing—if it’s not too much to ask—I could sure use a cup of coffee. I’m awfully cold. I’ve got a State car, and the heater doesn’t work worth a darn. Of course if it’s an imposition . . .”
“Not at all. But I wonder . . . could I see your identification again?”
He handed the folder over to her equably enough, and hung his hat on the coat tree while she studied it.
“This RET stamped below the seal . . . does that mean you’re retired?”
“Yes and no.” His lips parted in a smile that revealed teeth too perfect to be anything but dentures. “Had to go, at least officially, when I turned sixty-eight, but I’ve spent my whole life either in the State Police or working at SAG—State Attorney General’s Office, you know—and now I’m like an old firehorse with an honorary place in the barn. Kind of a mascot, you know.”
I think you’re a lot more than that
.
“Let me take your coat.”
“No, nope, I think I’ll wear it. Won’t be staying that long. I’d hang it up if it was snowing outside—so I wouldn’t drip on your floor—but it’s not. It’s just boogery cold, you know. Too cold to snow, my father would have said, and at my age I feel the cold a lot more than I did fifty years ago. Or even twenty-five.”
Leading him into the kitchen, walking slowly so Ramsey could keep up, she asked him how old he was.
“Seventy-eight in May.” He spoke with evident pride. “If I make it. I always add that for good luck. It’s worked so far. What a nice kitchen you have, Mrs. Anderson—a place for everything and everything in its place. My wife would have approved. She died four years ago. It was a heart attack, very
sudden. How I miss her. The way you must miss your husband, I imagine.”
His twinkling eyes—young and alert in creased, pain-haunted sockets—searched her face.
He knows. I don’t know how, but he does.
She checked the Bunn’s basket and turned it on. As she got cups from the cabinet, she asked, “How may I help you today, Mr. Ramsey? Or is it Detective Ramsey?”
He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “Oh, it’s been donkey’s years since anyone called me Detective. Never mind Ramsey, either, if you go straight to Holt, that’ll work for me. And it was really your husband I wanted to talk to, you know, but of course he’s passed on—again, my condolences—and so that’s out of the question. Yep, entirely out of the question.” He shook his head and settled himself on one of the stools that stood around the butcher-block table. His topcoat rustled. Somewhere inside his scant body, a bone creaked. “But I tell you what: an old man who lives in a rented room—which I do, although it’s a nice one—sometimes gets bored with just the TV for company, and so I thought, what the hell, I’ll drive on down to Yarmouth and ask my few little questions just the same. She won’t be able to answer many of them, I said to myself, maybe not
any
of them, but why not go anyway? You need to get out before you get potbound, I said to myself.”
“On a day when the high is supposed to go all the way up to ten degrees,” she said. “In a State car with a bad heater.”
“Ayuh, but I have my thermals on,” he said modestly.
“Don’t you have your own car, Mr. Ramsey?”
“I do, I do,” he said, as if this had never occurred to him until now. “Come sit down, Mrs. Anderson. No need to lurk in the corner. I’m too old to bite.”
“No, the coffee will be ready in a minute,” she said. She was afraid of this old man. Bob should have been afraid of him, too, but of course Bob was now beyond fear. “In the meantime, perhaps you can tell me what you wanted to talk about with my husband.”
“Well, you won’t believe this, Mrs. Anderson—”
“Call me Darcy, why don’t you?”
“Darcy!” He looked delighted. “Isn’t that the nicest, old-fashioned name!”
“Thank you. Do you take cream?”
“Black as my hat, that’s how I take it. Only I like to think of myself as one of the white-hats, actually. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Chasing down criminals and such. That’s how I got this bad leg, you know. High-speed car chase, way back in ’89. Fellow killed his wife and both of his children. Now a crime like that is usually an act of passion, committed by a man who’s either drunk or drugged or not quite right in the head.” Ramsey tapped his fuzz with a finger arthritis had twisted out of true. “Not this guy. This guy did it for the insurance. Tried to make it look like a whatchacallit, home invasion. I won’t go into all the details, but I sniffed around and sniffed around. For three years I sniffed around. And finally I felt I had enough to
arrest him. Probably not enough to convict him, but there was no need to tell
him
that, was there?”
“I suppose not,” Darcy said. The coffee was hot, and she poured. She decided to take hers black, too. And to drink it as fast as possible. That way the caffeine would hit her all at once and turn on her lights.
“Thanks,” he said when she brought it to the table. “Thanks very much. You’re kindness itself. Hot coffee on a cold day—what could be better? Mulled cider, maybe; I can’t think of anything else. Anyway, where was I? Oh, I know. Dwight Cheminoux. Way up in The County, this was. Just south of the Hainesville Woods.”
Darcy worked on her coffee. She looked at Ramsey over the rim of her cup and suddenly it was like being married again—a long marriage, in many ways a good marriage (but not in all ways), the kind that was like a joke: she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew. That kind of relationship was like looking into a mirror and seeing another mirror, a hall of them going down into infinity. The only real question here was what he was going to do about what he knew. What he
could
do.
“Well,” Ramsey said, setting down his coffee cup and unconsciously beginning to rub his sore leg, “the simple fact is I was hoping to provoke that fella. I mean, he had the blood of a woman and two kiddies on his hands, so I felt justified in playing a little dirty. And it worked. He ran, and I chased him right into the Hainesville Woods, where the
song says there’s a tombstone every mile. And there we both crashed on Wickett’s Curve—him into a tree and me into him. Which is where I got this leg, not to mention the steel rod in my neck.”
“I’m sorry. And the fellow you were chasing? What did he get?”
Ramsey’s mouth curved upward at the corners in a dry-lipped smile of singular coldness. His young eyes sparkled. “He got death, Darcy. Saved the state forty or fifty years of room and board in Shawshank.”
“You’re quite the hound of heaven, aren’t you, Mr. Ramsey?”
Instead of looking puzzled, he placed his misshapen hands beside his face, palms out, and recited in a singsong schoolboy’s voice: “‘I fled Him down the nights and down the days, I fled Him down the arches of the years, I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways . . .’ And so on.”
“You learned that in school?”
“No ma’am, in Methodist Youth Fellowship. Lo these many years ago. Won a Bible, which I lost at summer camp a year later. Only I didn’t lose it; it was stolen. Can you imagine someone low enough to steal a Bible?”
“Yes,” Darcy said.
He laughed. “Darcy, you go on and call me Holt. Please. All my friends do.”
Are you my friend? Are you?
She didn’t know, but of one thing she was sure: he wouldn’t have been Bob’s friend.
“Is that the only poem you have by heart? Holt?”
“Well, I used to know ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’” he said, “but now I only remember the part about how home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s a true thing, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely.”
His eyes—they were a light hazel—searched hers. The intimacy of that gaze was indecent, as if he were looking at her with her clothes off. And pleasant, for perhaps the same reason.
“What did you want to ask my husband, Holt?”
“Well, I already talked to him once, you know, although I’m not sure he’d remember if he was still alive. A long time ago, that was. We were both a lot younger, and you must’ve been just a child yourself, given how young and pretty you are now.”
She gave him a chilly spare-me smile, then got up to pour herself a fresh cup of coffee. The first one was already gone.
“You probably know about the Beadie murders,” he said.
“The man who kills women and then sends their ID to the police?” She came back to the table, her coffee cup perfectly steady in her hand. “The newspapers dine out on that one.”
He pointed at her—Bob’s fingergun gesture—and tipped her a wink. “Got that right. Yessir. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ that’s their motto. I happened to work the case a little. I wasn’t retired then, but getting on to it. I had kind of a reputation as a fellow who could sometimes get results by sniffing around . . . following my whatdoyoucallums . . .”