Fixer (11 page)

“I didn’t share it with him.”

“Really. Why not?”

“Didn’t want to sound crazy.”

Hicks laughed. “I don’t blame you. You going to eventually tell him?”

“That depends on whether or not he says yes.”

He nodded and closed the file, tossing it back on the desk. “Let me know, then.”

“You’ll be the first,” she said, getting up to leave.

“Oh, and Maggie?” he said, just before she’d managed to get the door open. She wanted a cigarette so badly she was ready to chew off her lower lip.

“Randy?”

“You still sleeping with him?”

She ran through the possible responses to this question, which went from not answering at all to shooting him in the forehead with her service revolver. Something in between those two seemed to be in order. “Sometimes,” she said. “You still sleeping with Helen?”

Helen being his wife. He pulled off the difficult task of smiling without actually smiling, which was a rare talent. “Not so much nowadays. With the separation and all.”

“Heard about that. So sorry.”

Maggie pulled open the door and got out of the office before the discussion escalated any further. The elevator to the street couldn’t have come fast enough.

*  *  *

It was nearly 6 p.m. and Maggie had just about given up on getting anything else accomplished that day. Pleasant visions of a bubble bath and some Nina Simone danced in her head. She wondered if that would do the trick. Then she wondered if Corrigan would mind her stopping by a second time. Which was when the phone at her desk rang.

“I’m at Downtown Crossing. How soon can you be here?” It was Corrigan. The man attracted coincidences like dead bodies drew flies. 

“I was just thinking of you. Where are you?” 

“I’m near the Dunkin’ Donuts on Washington Street.”

“Sounds like a strange place for a date,” she said lightly.

“Maggie,” he said flatly, at which point she picked up on the stress in his voice. “Something’s gone wrong.”

“What is it?”

“Difficult to explain.” In the background, she could hear an ambulance siren.

“I’ll be right there,” she said before hanging up.

She called Stan on her cell while waiting for an elevator. Stan was the office’s resident computer genius, which wasn’t saying much given that the FBI’s budget didn’t really allow for actual geniuses on the payroll. His computer lab had a police band receiver.

“Stan, Maggie. Anything happen tonight in Downtown Crossing?”

“Hey, Maggs,” he answered. “Aren’t you like right outside my door? You could just knock.”

“I’m at the elevators, on my way out,” she explained. “Downtown Crossing. Somebody need an ambulance?”

“You know that doesn’t make any sense, right? If you’re heading there you must know something’s happened, so why—”

“Stan!”

“Okay, okay. Hang on.” She heard papers rustling. A year ago, Stan had hooked up the police radio to a VRU-enabled printer, just to see if it could be done. It recorded everything that came out on reams of continuous printouts that served no purpose other than to kill trees. “Yeah, some kind of accident,” he said, reading. “Injured woman. Looks like the ambulance just left.”

“That’s all you have?”

“Initial reports are always pretty sketchy.”

“All right, thanks,” she said and hung up.

Once on the street, she could see the ambulance from the Crossing speeding by and began to understand what it was she had heard in Corrigan’s voice. One did not typically see ambulances coming from places where Corrigan Bain had been. What she’d heard had been fear.

*  *  *

Thirty-Eight Years Past

There were seventeen of them in the farmhouse, and as Violet quickly learned, not one of them had a survival skill that complemented their current circumstances. And the weather continued to worsen as the calendar crept closer to January.

Charlie Bluff’s grandparents had owned the place, and according to him, he’d inherited it and the twenty acres it rested in the middle of. Charlie was characteristically vague with the details, but the impression he gave Vi was that this inheritance had taken place sometime in the past year. This explained how a bunch of hippies trying to keep alive the dream of the commune had ended up in an empty farmhouse in southern Maine and how nobody had tried to chase them off while firing large guns at them. 

Somewhat less explicable, was the fully stocked walk-in freezer. They’d been grazing happily on the goods in there since they had arrived, which only forestalled what would soon be a problem. As possibly the only person there who’d remained straight for over twenty days, Violet had found the time to do a little math. Unless there was a second walk-in freezer elsewhere in the house, the Bluff commune would run out of food entirely sometime around the middle of December. 

She tried to bring this up with Charlie in case there was an equally impressive supply of cash stowed somewhere in the place, but all she got out of him was a lengthy, very one-sided discussion on the evils of money, capitalism, and the fascist tendencies of the government of the United States, not necessarily in that order. Then he offered her a tab, which she politely declined.

So the whole food thing was a problem, and one that Violet—as a
mother
—was going to have to deal with eventually. She was perfectly happy to go without food for an entire winter, but little Corry needed his nutrition. 

Vi’s template of motherhood was crafted out of twenty years’ worth of detergent commercials and
Leave It To Beaver
-type programs, which explained both why she was consistently unprepared for any issue that could not be resolved between thirty seconds and thirty minutes and why she always felt so thoroughly inadequate. But she knew enough to understand that children needed healthy food that two-month drug benders couldn’t replace. These were the thoughts that occupied her as she walked from room to room, casually looking for her son. This was nothing like the panic that had overtaken her on their first night in the house; she knew he was around somewhere. If there was a good thing to be said about the people Charlie had collected for his Grand Walden Experiment, it was that everyone was cool. She didn’t have to keep a constant eye on Corry, because wherever he was, an adult was watching out for him and not in any weirdly inappropriate kind of way. And little Corrigan was an easy child to keep an eye on.

The house was actually pretty big. It had seemed to her that she was in much more drastic straits when she woke up on that first night, but she’d actually been in the largest bedroom upstairs, and the reason she’d been sharing that room with everybody else in the place was that they’d lost the fire. The fireplace was very temperamental, meaning it wouldn’t work if nobody remembered to pull in some wood from the yard and give it time to dry. They had all been together because it was warmer that way. 

There were a total of fifteen rooms to the farmhouse, not counting the barn across the yard. Miraculously, one of those rooms was an indoor bathroom with a standing shower. Hot water was at a premium, and the toilet backed up all the time, but all anyone had to do when they felt like complaining about it was look out in the middle of the backyard and see the snow-covered outhouse for an idea of what things were like here before Charlie’s grandparents had decided to spend a little cash on creature comforts. 

Electricity was a wondrous thing when they had it, which was only about half the time. The electricity only reached the house via aerial wires, and if any wire in the county went down, so did the entire county’s electrical supply. With the weather as it was that happened pretty often. They had a phone that also relied largely on the caprice of the weather, but since nobody there ever had a dire need to make a phone call—anyone they might have wanted to phone was already there—this was less of a noticeable problem.

She started on the first floor, in the living room. As the second largest room in the house and the only one with a functioning fireplace, it was where most of the commune’s occupants could be found during the day, especially given the fire was the only source of heat they had. It had been argued that as the bathroom had a moderate supply of hot water, there must ergo be a device somewhere in the home that heated said water. It had been further argued that the presumption of a water heater also led one to infer the existence of other devices somewhere within the confines of the farmhouse which might heat the rooms, possibly via the perpetually arctic radiators. Charlie, being of a stubborn and charismatic sort and clearly unwilling or otherwise unable to admit to any failure—in this case, a failure to locate the furnace—insisted somewhat stridently that the hot water came from the tap that way via some kind of wondrous unknown process that heats well water naturally. Thus far, nobody had been either brave enough or adequately non-stoned to challenge this position. 

“Anybody seen Corry?” Vi asked. In doing so she interrupted a profound discussion regarding whether the Vietnam War would have still happened if Dylan hadn’t gone electric. Conservatively, this discussion had been going on for two days. As this was a day when they had no electricity it was the best anyone could do by way of music; Charlie had neglected to recruit anybody who could play guitar, or at least anybody who owned one.

A half dozen dazed faces looked up at her. None of them seemed to be familiar with the name. Finally, Harriet—Vi was almost positive that was her name—asked, “The boy?”

“Yes,” Violet said patiently. “Have you seen him?”

They looked around to see if he might just happen to be in the room, in case Violet was in the habit of asking deep questions without provocation.

Having confirmed his absence, and just to make sure this was not a philosophical inquiry, Mondo—definitely not his real name but the only name he ever gave to Vi—asked, “Recently?”

“Yes.”

“Dunno,” he declared. “Don’t think so.”

A young, chubby girl named Gingham held a lit joint up in the air without even turning to look at Violet, which was who she was offering the smoke to. This was her way of saying, “Hello, won’t you join us?” and might have been construed as a friendly offer except Vi knew if cops kicked down the door and burst into the living room they’d find Gingham sitting in that exact spot, offering them a toke.

Violet was tempted. There was only one thing worse than being straight and that was being straight in a house full of people who were not. Somehow everything smelled worse, and nobody was half as pretty or a quarter as smart as she’d taken them for previously. She wondered, not for the first time, what Corry thought of all of them.

She passed on the offer, reluctantly and without comment, and moved on.

The dining room was spacious, and seemed to have been designed with a vast number of houseguests in mind. It was dominated by a crude wood table with an uneven surface and a finish that was peeled off in several places. Not that one could see the tabletop; stoneware dishes that practically screamed out for somebody, anybody, to clean the half-eaten food off them covered the entire space. It was a good thing it was the middle of winter; otherwise, the room would be a warren of flies. Surrounding the table was a collection of a dozen chairs, love seats, and hassocks, with no two seats alike. Charlie’s grandparents had furnished their home via flea market.

Tyrell and Charlie were sitting in the corner of the room in a heated discussion that might have been called an argument if they weren’t both ripped. Vi could pick out words like
proletariat
and
common good
and figured it was nothing she hadn’t heard before. 

As the most with-it guys in the house, these two banged heads regularly on all matters. Traditionally, Vi came down on the side of Tyrell, and not just because they were fucking. The truth was Charlie, being the ostensible host, had certain dictatorial tendencies that laced every speech he gave about
power to the people
a degree of irony he didn’t quite have the intelligence to acknowledge. In the past, Violet had acted as a mediator, but this was not the time for that.

“You guys seen Corry?” she asked.

“Hey, Vi,” Tyrell greeted her. “You all right?”

“Been sleeping, baby.” She had been sleeping quite a bit of late for some reason. “You seen my boy?”

“I saw him out back about an hour ago,” Charlie said, jerking his thumb toward the back yard.

“An hour?” she said, surprised. “Cold out, isn’t it?”

“Wind’s died down,” Charlie said in a somewhat apologetic tone.

“Sure he’s fine,” Tyrell insisted. “Want me to check on him?”

“I’ll do it,” she said.

Leaving the two men to continue acting like little boys, she headed through the unattended kitchen to the back door. Next to the door was a small walk-in space that in more antiquated times had served as a jelly room but now was mostly used to store an array of random winter gear. The aggregate of the equipment there would not sufficiently protect all of them from the elements, but fortunately they’d yet to encounter a situation that would require them to leave
en masse
. She quickly threw on the nearest overcoat, slipped into a pair of boots that were, conservatively, two sizes too large, yanked on a pair of mittens, and headed out.

To call the space behind the farmhouse a backyard was to do a disservice to real backyards, if only by comparison. The house stood on a small hill overlooking a vast untended apple orchard, but that was only the half of it. The vista beyond the orchard was truly breathtaking, opening up on a valley of snow-covered pine trees that bottomed out at a river half-frozen on most days and fully iced over on the really cold ones. Some mornings the ground fog was so low over the valley it looked as if the farmhouse was drifting atop a cloudbank.

Violet shouldn’t have been surprised to find Corry out back; he liked the view. This part of the outside world was very languid, a marked difference from anything going on indoors. She’d found him more than once just standing atop the hill and staring. If she’d been thinking about it, she’d have checked the yard first.