Bloodline (26 page)

The door was big and heavy and opened inward with a quiet
whoosh
. I walked into a corridor with white painted trim, dim lights, and that funeral-home carpet that's thick and spongy as sphagnum moss. Two sets of curtained French doors led off the corridor. I walked to the first doors and looked into an empty room, small, with five or six rows of straight-backed wooden chairs with upholstered seats. Taking a deep breath, I walked to the next door and peered in at an identical room with the same five or six rows of chairs. This time, a dozen or so faces peered back.

Because—and only because—there was no turning back, I walked in and took a seat at the rear. The teenage boy and girl turned in their seats and stared at me. A couple of guys did the same. They were big and bearded, in their late twenties, maybe, wearing plaid flannel shirts. They stared at me and I stared back, and then they turned around to face the open casket where Missy Hewett lay still.

She looked like Sleeping Beauty, bathed in some sort of rosy funeral-parlor light, her cheeks rouged and her skin very white, as if
she were an actor wearing stage makeup. Her hands were crossed on her chest, her fingers interlocked. They had painted her nails a pale translucent pink. Her dress was dark blue like a nun's and looked borrowed.

There was organ music playing softly from hidden speakers so that the whole thing had the air of a phony séance during which we would be expected to ask the deceased a question. I had a few questions, but Missy Hewett wouldn't be able to answer them now.

One of the guys coughed, breaking the silence. As if a precedent had been set, everybody else started fidgeting and clearing their throats. From the front row came a sob. A woman with long dark hair put her arm around Missy's mother. The music droned on.

It was one of those formless rituals, like kneeling at an altar to pray. How do you know when you're done? How much is enough and how much is too little?

But one by one, they went up to a small kneeler in front of the casket, where there were a few flowers, not an abundance. When Missy's mother went, the dark-haired woman went with her, holding her by the shoulder. I wondered how many times Joyce Hewett's children had held their mother up over the years, but for different reasons.

After twenty minutes or so, the wake seemed to be winding down. A pallid, expressionless undertaker in the standard black suit padded silently in and whispered something to one of the sisters. She nodded and he stepped to the front of the room and picked up a thick black prayer book.

“Dear God,” the funeral home man began, “may the soul of Melissa Jean be buoyed by our heartfelt love. As she lived her life on this Earth, may she live her life in Paradise. And may all of us who knew her cherish her memory forever. Amen.”

“Amen.”

Everyone sat there until the undertaker left. Then they turned to each other before rising stiffly. The mother and four other women went to the casket and said good-bye. The men turned toward me again and stared.

They left the room one by one and because I was in the rear, I left last. Before I left, I paused and took a long look at Missy. It was only her stillness that made her look dead; that, and the serenity that had come over her. In life, she had never known that luxury.

When I walked out into the corridor, they had gone. I pulled the big door open and stepped outside. Cars were starting. Headlights were flicking on. I took a step toward the sidewalk and slowed. The two bearded guys and the women from the car were waiting by the curb. They looked up and kept looking, their faces hard and grim. They were waiting for me.

There was no time for preparation, mental or physical. It was about thirty feet to the curb and the committee. Ten or fifteen steps. I walked them in a straight line and stopped. The men stared, their deep-set dark eyes locked onto mine. I stared back. This went on for what seemed like three or four days. Finally, one of the guys, the shorter of the two at about my height, nodded. I nodded back. One of the women—stocky and busty, pretty face, cigarette in her right hand, hand at her right hip—formed what could have been called a half-smile.

By a dreamy-eyed optimist.

“Hi,” I said.

That brought nods and abbreviated guttural sounds that sounded like “heh.”

The women looked at the shorter guy. I looked at the women. The two bigger guys looked at me.

“Jimmy, you do the talking,” the busty woman said.

The shorter guy nodded.

“You the reporter?” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“The one who came to see Joyce?”

“If you mean Missy's mother, then I'm the one.”

“Right. And you talked to Missy?”

“That's right,” I said.

“About her baby, right?”

“Yeah,” I said again.

“How'd you come to do that?”

I hesitated. Looked into the faces of my sidewalk dissertation committee. Wondered what the penalty was for failure.

“I write stories for magazines,” I said slowly, keeping eye contact with the shorter guy, noticing a long thin scar on his left temple. “They wanted me to do a story on teenage girls who have babies. What it does to their lives. I went to the high school and a couple girls gave me Missy's name. They told me she was in college. I was in Portland anyway so I looked her up.”

“Did she want to talk to you?”

“After I explained. Not at first. I mean, she didn't know me from Adam.”

“At her apartment?” the shorter guy asked.

“Yeah.”

“How long did you stay?”

“I don't know. Not long. Twenty minutes maybe.”

I glanced at the others. They looked at me unwaveringly. The ladies and gentlemen of the jury.

“What did she say?”

“Well, she said she put the baby up for adoption because she thought it would have a better life. She said she didn't think much of the father, didn't even think of him as a father. She didn't say who it was. She didn't come right out and say this, but it seemed like it was a tough thing for her to do. And to live with after.”

“And that was it?”

“Yeah. I said I'd like to talk to her again. She seemed to think that might be okay. A few days later, she called me back and said she wanted to get her baby back.”

“Then what?”

“Then the next morning they found her. Found her …”

“Dead,” the shorter guy said.

The word just sat out there. Mean and sad and sordid. They looked at me right through it.

“What did you think of her?” the busty woman said suddenly.

“What did I think of her?”

“Yeah,” the shorter guy said.

“I liked her. I thought she was a tough kid. A lot of determination. Guts. She was gutsy.”

“What did you think of what she did?” the woman said.

“What, with the baby? I don't know. I guess I just think it was hard on her. But she did it for the right reasons. She wasn't thinking of herself.”

“You kill her?”

It was the other guy, the bigger, with the longer beard.

I looked at him.

“No,” I said. “I didn't kill her.”

“Why should we believe you?”

His tone was demanding, as if I should have a good answer.

“I can't make you. I just know I didn't kill her. I met her once. Talked to her maybe twenty minutes, total.”

“Did you want to screw her?” the bigger guy asked.

“No.” I said. “She was a little kid.”

There was a pause. The women looked at the men. The men looked at the women. The busty woman sucked hard on her cigarette and dropped it glowing onto the sidewalk. The street was dark and deserted and quiet. The lights in the windows of the big old houses seemed far away.

“I think we should do it,” the busty woman said, breaking the silence.

“Yeah,” the shorter guy said, turning to me.

The others nodded in agreement. I steeled myself for the execution of their sentence, figured I'd try to make it back into the funeral home. At least go down swinging. I tensed as the shorter guy reached into his pocket and dug out …

A piece of paper.

“This is Sue's phone bill,” he said, motioning to the busty woman. “That's her. There's numbers on there that Missy called. She stayed with Sue at their trailer for a while before the baby. 'Cause Sue's her sister. Nine years older. I'm her brother-in-law. Jolene's my wife. Before it was born Missy moved to Portland. I got the numbers all marked.”

He held the bill out. It was three pages. I took it but it was too dark to read. The shorter guy pulled out a cigarette lighter and held it out so I could see.

“They're Portland. A couple to Providence, Rhode Island. I think it's three to Falmouth. A whole bunch to the same number in Portland.”

“You try to call 'em?” I asked.

“Nope,” Sue said.

“Why not?”

“We ain't detectives. Or what is it—investigative reporters?”

“Show them to the cops?”

Sue looked at Jimmy. The others looked at him, too.

“I don't talk to cops,” he said. “Let's just leave it at that. Last time I tried to talk to cops I got three years in the Windham correctional center. Now I'm on goddamn probation. Can't even have a friggin' beer. That's what you get when you talk to cops.”

Sue cut him off.

“So we're giving them to you. You can do whatever it is you do with 'em. Find out who they are or whatever. Maybe it'll have something to do with who killed her.”

I looked at the bill, then folded it once and put it in the inside pocket of my jacket.

“You people know the cops have talked to me about all this?” I said. “I get the feeling they think I might be a suspect. I just want you to know that.”

“Well, they're wrong again,” Jimmy said. “'Cause you can tell what a man is by looking him in the eye. I ain't been wrong yet.”

“Nope,” Sue said. “Maybe this'll help Missy and keep your ass out of jail.”

“We'll hope so,” I said.

Jimmy nodded.

“You better do more than hope, mister,” he said. “'Cause I been there, and they'd eat you up.”

I drove back slowly in the dark, partly because the truck just had an old plate stuck on it and wasn't registered, and partly to think. Once I got home, I'd feel a need to do something. Driving, I was relegated to contemplation of my situation.

Which sucked. To slip into the vernacular of the time.

I didn't want to go to prison. I didn't want to be a suspect in Missy's murder. I didn't want to be a murder victim. I didn't want to shoot someone with Clair's big rifle. I'd seen what it had done to plywood. I didn't want to see what it would do to flesh and bone. I did want to talk to somebody. About all of this.

By the time I hit Montville, on Route 3, I'd decided to call Roxanne. She was flying to Boston the next night. If I saw her on Friday or Saturday, that would be too late. I needed to start on this soon. Tomorrow morning. Early.

I took the phone bill out of my pocket, unfolded it, and held it down under the pale green light of the dashboard. It was too dark so I groped for the switch for the dome light. I found it alongside the light and switched it on and off several times. The light flickered once and went out. I jerked it back and forth some more, reaching over my right shoulder with my left hand. The truck veered to the left and forced an oncoming car to swerve into the breakdown lane and blast the horn.

Kenny wouldn't have to kill me. I'd kill myself. I put the phone bill back on the seat and drove.

When I got home it was a little after seven. The hulk was waiting in the drive and the ashes and smoke smell still was in the air. I walked through it, went inside, and grabbed a can of beer from the fridge and a bowl of cold pasta with tomato sauce. Half the beer went down in two gulps. The pasta followed in lumps until the gnawing pain in my belly was smothered. One pain down. Several to go.

I took another beer out of the refrigerator, which left only two, and went to the table. The two beers went to the left of the phone. The phone bill went to the right. I spread out the three pages and looked over the calls Jimmy and Sue had marked.

There were four calls to Providence, to two different numbers, lasting from six to thirty seconds. Nineteen calls to Portland proper. Three different numbers, but one number was called only twice. The calls to that number lasted from three to five minutes.

The second number was called five times. Times ranged from fifteen seconds to thirty-five minutes. The three calls in the middle range were from two to four minutes.

It was the third number that Missy had spent some time with. A dozen calls had been made, but they were almost all long. One was an hour and twenty-five minutes, and all but two were over a half-hour. Most were placed in evening hours, but the long call had been made a minute after ten, at night.

I couldn't envision grim-faced little Missy waxing on that long with anyone. But if Jimmy and Sue were to be believed, she had.

In the movies, detectives who needed to trace a number always had a source at the phone company whom they'd call. I'd always wondered why the detectives didn't just call the number and say “Who's this?” If there was a reason why this direct approach didn't work, I figured I'd find out.

I finished my first beer, opened the second, then got up and went to get a pen and notebook. When I came back, I sipped the second beer and, pen in hand, dialed the phone.

This was the number Missy had called twice. I finished dialing it, and waited as the round thing rolled back around.

It rang once. Twice. Three times. Then a click and the hiss of a taped message.

“Hello. You have reached the office of the registrar, University of Southern Maine. The office is closed now. Office hours are from eight-thirty a.m. to five p.m., Monday through Friday, and Saturday from nine until noon. Thank you.”