Dead Dogs and Englishmen (26 page)

“Cruelty,” I said. “Stupid.”

He tipped his head and tsk-tsked prettily at me. With his hands clasped in front of him, he clucked one more time. “Ugly, yes. But surely not stupid. You know better . . .”

I shook my head, then shook it again. A weak gesture but I'd never dealt with a man like Cecil Hawke before. Nothing was right—not his reactions, his emotions, his sympathy, his humor. Everything in this world I'd entered was skewed, turned on its head. If I stayed here, in Cecil's idea of life, I'd be a mess. He was so much about death, and dying, and cruelty. It wasn't a place where a normal human being would choose to exist.

I pulled out through
Hawke's front gates, ignoring the guard who tipped his uniform hat at me. Not far down the road, I pulled over, my hands on the wheel. I gulped in fresh air and leaned back against the seat. There was no way to stop the overwhelming sense of helplessness rushing through every inch of my body. That scene in the barn. Maybe not slaughter, but something so close.

I picked up the new manila envelope, hoping for something explicit, for the details of Amanda's murder, a kind of ending for Cecil and for me.

What I read, sitting there, was nothing. Cecil was back to where he'd left off when Tommy and Nelson were in their twenties. More sex. More celebration of bigger and bigger thefts. The book had stagnated. Cecil had become boring. How I would love to tell him that fact. I imagined boring to be the most painful barb I could throw at him. I tucked that fact back in my brain. I was going to need a bigger arsenal to go after him, but ‘boring' was a beginning.

I put the pages back in the envelope. What I had to do, I told myself as I gripped the wheel and stared out at the thick woods on both sides of the car, was think. First: why was I feeling sick to my stomach and scared in a way I'd never been scared before? Down in my brain, at a center, something was misfiring. What had happened back there? That wasn't a routine farm procedure. Not some glorious rite of summer. Maybe in Australia it was legal, the way Hawke said, but here, in the United States? Were we still at that level of cruelty?

Something bothered me but I couldn't pin it down. It was like chasing a worm crawling in my head—always just out of reach. An evil so deep I couldn't face it.

I tried to relax. This wasn't who I thought I was. This shaking, scared woman.

I held my hands out and made them be still. I took three deep breaths, had a good talk with myself, and went for logic. What I'd just been through wasn't pretty. It wasn't only those mutilated animals—that was bad enough—but something else. If I hadn't gotten so scared I would have seen it. And if I hadn't let myself dissolve into jelly I would have hit him with a knee to the groin.

Well, maybe not …

But the message had been so clear. It lumped me with Lila, and even Freddy—alive only through Cecil's mercy.

Those sheep had been me to Cecil Hawke. I was the thing bought and sold. He could harm me at will, he was telling me. Hurt me whenever he wanted. Teach me some terrible lesson he thought I needed to learn.

I tightened my hands into fists. How did I begin to fight a monster like Cecil? Futility took on new meaning.

And I was fighting darkness, a kind of shutting down. Or giving up.

Everything in me shouted: Run. Be an unapologetic coward—for just a little while. This was my life. And possibly my death.

I looked at the woods around me, dark between the tree trunks, movement in lower branches. Something could materialize at any minute.

I rolled up the car windows, not caring about the heat. I locked the doors.

I could be murdered by a ghost, I told myself. Toomey was out there, waiting for word from Cecil. Yesterday—that dead dog was the opening shot.

I put the car into gear and pulled out into the road. Behind me I saw only a thick cloud of dust from the gravel road, but there could be something there, at the center of the dust, something dark and formed.

I drove home and called Bill first thing, to warn him Cecil knew where Courtney was.

“I'll take care of it, Emily,” he promised.

“How is she?” I asked.

“Fine. She's told me a lot of things I think you and Dolly need to hear. Whatever the Bristol police said about her, they're wrong. Courtney has letters her mother wrote to her when she was away, visiting an aunt in Cornwall. Her mother called Hawke an evil man. The will, leaving everything to him, has got to be a fraud. What the kid needs is a good lawyer. What you need to do is protect yourself. This Hawke is smart. But no conscience. Let the cops handle it.”

“I'm in it, Bill. Lo's missing. I've got to stay at the center.”

He sighed. “Be careful. And don't worry about Courtney. We're getting out of here right now. Call my cell from here on in.”

I threw a few things into a garbage bag—in lieu of a suitcase—and packed dog food and dog bones, got Sorrow, happy as usual, into the car and drove away from my house.

_____

I picked Jackson's cottage out on Spider Lake because I didn't have a lot of choices. Maybe I could have gone back to Ann Arbor, but that was too far. Cecil Hawke, along with his friend, Toomey, wasn't a problem that would go away. I could run forever and still know they were around the next corner, able to find me whenever they wanted.

Jackson wasn't exactly happy to see me. I explained about the dead dog left in my drive, about what happened at Cecil's that afternoon. I left out the fact that Jeffrey Lo was missing, in case we were wrong and he'd left for reasons of his own. I did use Jack's phone to call Lo's cell again and got the same voice mail. I called the Leetsville police station, but Lucky's wife told me Dolly was off duty and hadn't called in. I left a message for her to call me at Jackson's number.

“Of course you can stay with me,” he said when I got off the phone. He warmed when I explained how Sorrow and I needed a safe place.

He caught on fast, that I was a damsel in distress.

“And Toto too …” he added, nodding at Sorrow, then laughing, liking his
Wizard of Oz
joke.

Jackson became solicitous, urging me to sit on the deck and put my feet up. He brought me a glass of pinot grigio and a bowl of grapes. Jack's form of solace. When I'd settled down a little I watched fishermen out on the lake, and kids floating by in kayaks. Amazing, how ordinary the world looked here, away from my life.

I told Jack the whole story and about how I felt Cecil and Toomey were connected and that Toomey probably did Cecil's killing for him.

“When you first met him, you told him things about our divorce.” I looked around at Jack who had settled in an Adirondack chair beside me. “If he thought I was some grasping woman …”

He shrugged. “I might have painted you as a little bit grasping. Maybe I mentioned how much you drained my resources …”

“Your resources! We split everything down the middle. I got exactly what you got. It wasn't like I hadn't worked …”

He waved a hand, stopping me. “Just talk, Emily. Just talk.”

“Well, you got me into this. Back when he was your friend he probably thought killing me would be a favor to you.”

“That's insane.”

“Yeah. My point exactly.”

After a long quiet time, Jackson, looking contrite, reached from his chair to mine and took my hand. “I'm truly sorry, Emily.” This was an unusual Jackson, more the man I'd once thought was inside there. “If I can do anything, make it up to you in any way …”

“I thought you were leaving,” I said. “You know you've been cleared of …”

He shook his head. “I won't leave. I'm staying … for you. And for me, of course. I should have seen what a phony he was. This Noel Coward business … really. Says a lot about me, doesn't it? Maybe I'm learning …”

“Not Noel Coward,” I told him. “Not his book.”

I explained about Hawke's book—a long, sick confession by a sick man—then watched as Jack's face turned a muddy shade of gray beneath his tan.

When the phone rang I leaped out of my chair. It wasn't my house but I was expecting someone to call me: Lo, Dolly—anyone. I ran into the living room and grabbed up the phone.

“Emily?” Dolly. I was almost disappointed.

“Yes.”

“What in hell are you doing there?”

“I had to find a safe place. We've got to talk. It's Cecil Hawke …”

“Okay. Listen,” she interrupted. “I've got something to tell you. I don't know yet if it's what I think it is, but it's bad any way you look at it. Timothy Chesney, out on Valley Road, just found a body, dumped in the ditch in front of his house.”

“Oh, my God, no!” I dreaded asking what I needed to know. “Man or woman?”

“It's a man's body, Emily. I only hope …”

“Where?”

She gave me directions. I promised to be right out, that I'd meet
her at the site. I hung up and told Jackson, who wanted to go with me. I'm not sure what I said, but I brushed him aside. I could only keep one thought in my head: that the dead man in the ditch not turn out to be Jeffrey Lo.

Dolly was out at
Valley Road ahead of me. I parked in front of an old stone house, jumped out, and headed for her broad blue back. She stood, along with other officers, at the edge of the ditch, among tall weeds and black-eyed daisies. Lieutenant Brent was there, little Omar Winston, and a lot of other cops I knew. As I walked toward them my feet grew cement shoes. I picked them up and put them down, not much wanting to get to that place where I might see a dead guy in a nice blue suit and Nikes.

I tried to read Dolly's face. She looked back at me, giving me a blank stare, deep in thought.

“Dolly?” I asked, drawing closer, and trying not to look at the body laid out at the bottom of the ditch, face down in a slow, moving stream of water.

She nodded at me. “Take a look,” she said.

The body was laid out lengthways, partially covered with dirty water and grass. The face lay in the murky water. No blue suit. No sneakers.

From what I could see of the side of his face and his hands, turned up and tied behind him, this man was tall, dark haired, and olive skinned.

Brent followed the medical examiner into the ditch and turned the body.

In death the face was benign—no sneer, no menace. I recognized who he was. Certainly not Jeffrey Lo, which almost knocked the wind out of me. I'd been so sure. This man wore dark work pants and a blue, short-sleeved shirt with a huge, wet stain covering most of the front. I recognized the boots on his feet—scuffed, heels worn away. I recognized him. Toomey, the man Lila hated; the man I'd seen at the Hawkes's party.

Murderer and ghost.

My house was still.
And lifeless. Jack was bringing Sorrow home later. I walked through my few, small rooms and remembered how it felt when Jack and I were officially divorced and I'd stood in the middle of my Ann Arbor dining room, listening to a clock tick somewhere, and thinking, then, the worst thing that could happen to me was to be alone. I knew better now. There are worse things.

Like being so confused I couldn't finish a thought before an opposite thought took over.

The guy I feared most was dead. Who did I fear now? Cecil? But he was the puppet master—he'd pulled Toomey's strings, sent him out to kill.

Toomey was dead. Was there someone else I didn't know coming at me? How did you fear an empty face? A void? How did you fear a thing without substance?

I looked over at the kitchen counter and saw Cecil's manila envelope, with his check on top, and I knew with every inch of skin on my body, with every pore, every strand of hair, every organ—that I was in a fight for my life.

Maybe he would come. I didn't put it past him. Or maybe I'd go to him—to return the envelope, the last of his filthy manuscript, and the money he'd given me. Face him down and take my soul back.

It was all such a bad joke. I'd been so thrilled to read his destructive prose. For what? To pay a gas bill? To buy sheets? Maybe get an oil change? Can a person really sell bits of herself for next to nothing?

It wasn't just my life anymore. There was still Jeffrey. Cecil had him. I knew it the way I knew the sun was coming up in the morning. There was nowhere but Cecil's, unless Jeffrey was dead and rolled, like Toomey, into a ditch, down a ravine, into a shallow grave in the middle of a thick wood.

If I could have cried, I would have welcomed it. But there's a point beyond tears; a place so hollowed out and empty that to go there meant the end of self pity, maybe the end of all pity. A place where I stood at that moment, thinking of murder.

The French doors were wide open. I didn't bother to close and lock them. Overhead the fan turned with a solid creak, not stirring much of the hot air in the room. A whippoorwill sang his forlorn and cruel song in one of the maples down by the lake; one of the trees that refused to die, coming back to life, new leaves fuzzing the branches. The trees looked lacey now, in silhouette against the red, sunset sky. A kind of resurrection.

They were all coming to my house, after Courtney identified Toomey. She was the only one who knew him. I'd had only glimpses of the man. One in his farmer's clothes at Cecil's front door. One as Abe Lincoln at the
Blithe Spirit
party. But I knew who he was. I'd thought, for those first few minutes after seeing his dead body, that it was all over—for us, for the migrant workers, for Courtney.

From the corner of my eye I saw the light on my answering machine flash. I checked, hoping, stupidly, it could be Jeffrey. That Madeleine Clark had called was more than I could take right then. There wasn't even a question in my mind what she wanted. Life's jokes are always huge, and often cruel. This one would be no different.

Dolly, Lucky, Courtney, and Bill were the first to arrive. Straight from Gaylord and Toomey's stiff body laid out on a metal table. Courtney'd probably never seen him with his eyes closed. Probably never saw him when he couldn't stare her down and seem to promise more of what he'd given to her mother. I felt bad for the girl, but no more than I felt for all of us.

They shuffled in single file, Dolly—who swore she hated dogs—hunting around for Sorrow. “Where'd he go?” she asked. “Thought you at least had a dog here with you.”

I told her Jack was coming with him and offered cold drinks, chairs—all the caretaking things a woman does.

Bill was more subdued than I'd ever seen him, that mop of thick hair wild from his hands running through it again and again. He looked over at me and tried to smile. I shook my head at him. These weren't normal times. And we weren't normal people.

“How you holding up, Emily?” Bill asked finally, settling his big body down in a corner of the sofa.

I shrugged. There are times in life that have no words. This was one of them.

“I'd like Courtney, here, to take a look at that manuscript you told me about,” Dolly said, breaking a kind of silence we'd imposed on ourselves.

I nodded and went to get everything I'd copied. I gave her the chapters about her, and about her mother.

Only the squeak of the overhead fan broke the silence as she read, her neat head bent to the papers in her lap. From time to time she turned sad blue eyes up at us and took her bottom lip between her teeth, chewing at it, then turning back to the manuscript. She skimmed some of the pages, and reread others. When she'd finished she lay her hands on top of the manuscript and looked around at each of us, as if afraid to talk.

“That's my home,” she finally said, slow words consciously formed. “The house on Church Road, Sneyd Park, back in Bristol. He describes it here,” she said to everyone; each of us in turn. “He sold it after she died, along with all her things—the lovely things she'd touched and cherished. There was a clock from my great-grandmother, and my father's chess set. Her will left him everything. No one would believe that it was forged. That my mother would never have done that to me.”

She bent back to the pages, read, and looked up again.

“And that's my mum, the woman he's talking about. I know that dress, and her favorite brooch. How he tricked her, because she was lonely and she thought Cecil was funny. Not a serious man, she said to me one day, telling me not to worry, he'd never be my stepfather. She swore to me Cecil wasn't someone she might marry—until she did, and it was too late. Before she went into that coma, she'd told me, even wrote to me while I was away with my aunt in Cornwall, that she was going to divorce him. He wasn't the man she'd thought he was, she said. I wish I'd kept her letters but how was I to know it would be the last time I'd ever hear from her?”

Courtney's eyes glazed with tears. She'd had her mother taken from her, her family home, all the money that should have been hers. There was a lot to cry about. I didn't blame her.

“The murders, did you ever know anything about what he'd done before your mother met him?”

She shook her head. “But that bit, about losing his finger, I know I asked him once and he told me a dog bit it off. Of course, he'd laughed so I thought it was just one of his jokes. But now …”

“What about the friend in the book?” I asked. “Could he be Toomey?”

“The description of the man matches Nelson Toomey. And the cruel eyes, and that laugh he'd give—not very often, but then you didn't want to hear it often.” She shuddered. “If this is real and not fiction—I wouldn't put it past either one of them. And this—here at the end.” She leafed back through the pages, pulled out two and held them out to me. “About him being in Cannes when this fictional woman dies? That's where he was when my mum first went into her coma. Out of the way, he was. Nothing to do with it, of course. But here …” She pointed. “And here … he calls her Amanda. That was my mum's name. And the daughter …”

She looked at me, eyes wide, something of what I'd been feeling settling there. “He's called her Courtney.”

Nobody spoke. Finally Dolly shuffled her feet and slapped her hands together. “Gotta do something.”

Lucky agreed, then turned to greet Lieutenant Brent, Omar Winston, and two other state police cops as they filed in and stood behind the sofa.

“How are we going to handle this?” Brent looked around at the others.

“We've got a missing agent here, Lieutenant,” Dolly snapped.

“You have reason to believe he's out there at Hawke's?”

“Hell, yes.”

“Somebody saw him? He said that's where he'd be? He left a message, a note, something back in his motel room? Lord, Dolly, give me anything.”

“Let's at least go talk to Hawke,” she demanded.

“That'll just warn him. Could force his hand. Maybe even make him kill Agent Lo.”

After a long silence, I spoke up. “I'm going back.”

“Don't be nuts,” Dolly said without even looking at me. “You're not goin' anywhere.”

“I can get in.” I came around to sit beside her, looking from Lucky, to Brent, then back to Dolly. “He'll be happy I'm back. I know him now. He'll think it's some kind of victory …”

“That man's the worst kind of crazy,” she said. “He's smart, and insane. That's as bad as it gets. No civilian is stickin' her nose in …”

“I can get in the house, Dolly. You can't—not without setting him off. With me in there you've got an excuse to break the doors down if you have to. I'll back all of you, say I asked you to come get me if I wasn't out in fifteen minutes, that I felt threatened, knew the man was a killer …”

“Dolly's right, Emily,” Brent finally said. “I can't, with good conscience, let you get anywhere near him. That's not a civilian's job.” He shook his head again and again.

“So? What about Jeffrey?” I kept my voice low and tense, the way I was feeling. “You want to find him dumped in a ditch?”

Nobody answered.

Soon, with nothing settled, they all got up to go. Bill put his arm
around me and squeezed. I hugged Courtney and told her not to worry. They got out to their cars just as Jack's white Jaguar pulled down the drive with Sorrow in the front seat.