Foursome (10 page)

“Then what?”

“Well, Steve comes over, things kind of”—Ramona Paine made a holding-the-baby gesture—“tumbling out of his arms onto the counter. I had to catch a can of pineapple, I remember. He bought two bottles of that Sterling you had tonight, and some bacon, and a dozen eggs—we carry them fresh here and at the store, thanks to Dag Gates. Probably Steve bought some other things, too, but not …”

“Memorable.”

Ramona took a little more coffee. “Right.”

“You have any idea why Shea bought his wine by the bottle when it sounds like they drank it by the case?”

“No, no, I don’t. I know he used to bring it up here himself from down to Boston for sure, account of I’d never seen such good wine this far north before. Just not enough market for it. Steve said, though, that it was such a pain to have to bring it up with them that he’d appreciate our stocking it for him, and he was a regular enough customer, we were glad to do that.”

Just didn’t sound right. “Did Shea mention any of the others that night?”

She looked troubled. “I thought about that, long and hard after we heard what happened. I think the only thing he said to me was, ‘They’re champing at the bit back there, Mona. I got to hurry.’ ”

Ramona blinked her eyes quickly and got up without finishing her coffee. As her back disappeared into the kitchen, I heard Ralph say behind me, “Whyn’t you bring that last glass of wine out to the porch, enjoy the pond?”

I followed him onto the big screened porch. Its long axis was perpendicular to the shore, half a dozen elephant chairs in green wicker bolstered with yellow cushions. There were two wicker coffee tables, magazines and books on top and an oval, braided rug of a hundred colors underneath. Outside the screens, fireflies winked messages at each other in blips of chartreuse neon.

Paine arranged two of the chairs so they faced the night-skied water. I went toward one of them, Ralph drinking from an old-fashioned glass, Scotch, from the whiff of it. His hand was big enough I hadn’t seen the glass in it when he’d moved the furniture.

As we sat down, a monstrous beetle with an orange belly and black carapace banged against the outside of a screen, its wings beating furiously on the mesh, a sound like a baseball card clothespinned to the wheel spokes of a 1950s Schwinn.

“What the hell is that?”

Ralph didn’t need to look up. “June bug. Good thing God didn’t give them teeth, there’d be none of us left.” Then he changed tone. “Mona’s still pretty upset about what happened down the pond.”

“Understandable. You don’t have to see dead bodies to feel them.”

Paine nodded. “Why do I have the feeling you’ve seen more than your share?”

“Because you’re an observant man, Ralph.”

The wicker creaked a little as he resettled himself in it. “You get that way on the road, John. You get so you notice a lot of things, because basically the road never changes much until it reaches out to grab you. That means you have to notice things along it as you drive, make sure you’re spotting the changes coming.”

“You see changes coming here?”

“Oh, some. Probably not for the better, either. Don’t get me wrong, now. I’m not like Ma Judson, or even Dag Gates. Some development’s good, and it sure as hell will improve the profit from the store. But it’ll take away a little from the inn.”

“Take away how?”

“Oh, not from the place itself, that’s always been in a village with other things around it. But from the people who’ll stay in it, who won’t ever get to see Maine the way Mona did or I did or even you did today. Loon and heron, eagle and hawk. They’ve been forever, but they won’t be forever.”

Ralph Paine finished his drink and stood slowly, creaking as much as the wicker. “Enjoy that wine, John, and just turn off the lights when you go up to bed.”

T
HE SIGN AT THE
driveway for the county jail bore the subtitle DETENTION CENTER. I drove the Prelude into the parking area.

The building itself was a red brick juncture of two quadrangles, like a squared-off hourglass. There was a sprinkling of cars in the lot around me, about enough for a skeleton shift of corrections officers and sheriff’s deputies. Loading bays dominated the near end of the building, a chain-link fence enclosing some old picnic tables. There were broad windows looking on to the area, probably made of bulletproof Plexiglas. Mounted about ten feet above the ground were a series of video cameras that I bet had interlocking fields of vision. Sheriff Patsy Willis spent her budget wisely.

I left the car and walked to the double glass doors under a small portico that looked more designed to slow the snow than shade the sun. A woman came out as I got there. Fat and short, she wore a gaudy dress in blues, reds, and yellows, arms puffy above the elbow and jowly beneath it. I got the impression she’d worn the dress to cheer up somebody inside the place, and I held the door for her and gave her a smile I didn’t feel as she said thank you.

Beyond the second set of glass doors was a waiting area like a bus station with fixed, plastic chairs. A windowed counter and steel-barred door occupied one wall, wanted posters another, and a row of vending machines the third.

I went up to the counter, a male deputy in brown uniform shirt and pants behind it. His crewcut head lifted in question, and I gave him my Maine identification card under the glass like a bank customer making a deposit. He studied the ID, nodded once, then again, and motioned with his hand toward the steel door. I walked to my side of it while he walked out of sight, then reappeared on his side with a brass key the size of a mallet. He used the key on the old cylinder dead bolt in the door.

“Deputy Carl Higgs, Mr. Cuddy.”

“Deputy.”

Higgs locked the door behind me. “The sheriff, she’s out right now, but she said you could see Steven Shea whenever you come by. I have to ask you, are you armed?”

“No.”

“Anything metallic?”

“Belt buckle, parts of a pen and pad.”

“May I see them, please?”

I showed him.

Another nod. “This way, please.”

I decided I liked the way Willis or her husband had trained her people.

Higgs opened a twin to the first door, then a triplet beyond it. A simple, two-trap system that would make it nearly impossible for an inmate to get out. Just past the third door was a small rectangular area with linoleum on the floor and glass-walled rooms on each side.

Higgs pointed to the room on the left. “Just make yourself comfortable in there, and I’ll have one of the officers bring Shea in to you. The officer’ll stay in sight but not earshot. No passing of anything between you and Shea. Any questions?”

“Time limit?”

“Much as you want.” A small smile. “This is Maine, Mr. Cuddy.”

“Thanks.”

As Higgs clanged the doors behind me, I went into the room. Centered there was an oak table that somebody could turn into a showpiece once the chewing gum, pen etchings, and sweatstains were sanded off. Two old secretarial chairs, one missing a wheel, kept company with a low pine bench worn down at both ends. I sat in the chair that was short a wheel, figuring Shea could use the extra comfort. I took out my pad and pen to wait, but it didn’t take long.

An older deputy who could have been a young uncle of Carl Higgs came through a trap on the far side of the visiting area with an inmate in front of him. I recognized Steven Shea from the television coverage. He wore a bright orange short-sleeved shirt and orange pants faded a shade lighter. Whether they were stopped or walking, there was always an arm’s-length distance between him and the guard. Shea appeared pale and thin from jail light and food, but he started smiling as soon as he saw me, a smile that was supposed to tell the person meeting him that he could sell anything.

Even his story.

The older deputy recited the same concise instructions as Higgs and then left Shea in the room with me, closing the door and moving to the opposite wall outside to stand at parade rest and watch us.

Shea waited until we were alone before extending his hand and pumping mine when I took his. “Boy, am I glad to see you.”

“John Cuddy, Mr. Shea.”

“Hey, what’s with the ‘mister’ stuff? You’re here to save my life, the least we can do is go on a first-name basis, right?”

I looked into his smiling face. Lots of laugh lines at the corners of chocolate brown eyes. Even features, cleft chin, hair that looked dry and lifeless but still retained some of its styled-every-week contours. An employee who’d been out sick and now wanted to reestablish himself with an open manner and some snappy patter.

“Let’s sit down, Steve, talk a while.”

“Sure, sure.” Shea eased into the seat, but looked behind him doing it, as though he were making sure nobody would pull it out from under him. “Just sorry it has to be in here. Gil Lacouture told you they’re holding me without bail, right?”

“He told me.”

“Yeah, well, at least they’re right about that, you know?”

“About what?”

“About denying bail. They let me out, I’d run like a thief, John. I’d run as far and as fast as I could from this nightmare.”

His voice cracked a little on the last word, and Shea coughed to cover it. Not to accentuate it for dramatic effect, but to cover it, a genuine emotion.

He suddenly came back with, “Hey, you hear about this busty Brazilian stripper who left the stage to spend her time saving the Amazon rain forest?”

“No. Steve—”

“They call her ‘The Lungs of the Earth.’ ”

His laugh was hollow, and when I didn’t join in, it broke off abruptly.

I sat a little straighter in my chair, compensating for the missing wheel. “Since you’re not going to be readily available to me, I’m going to ask you a lot of questions. Some answers I may not need now, but they might help me if I’m in Massachusetts and can’t get back to you.”

Shea grew businesslike. “Right, right.”

“Start with the Vandemeers. How did you meet them?”

He clasped his hands in front of him on the table. “Okay, let’s go back twelve years. I was working for a computer outfit then—made minicomputers for large, industrial applications—and I hit a few big accounts, like a lot of guys did back then. This builder had three lots on a cul-de-sac in Calem—you know the town?”

“A little.”

“Well, each house on the horseshoe was special, built from a different set of plans. An old couple, the Epps, moved in first. He’s dead now, but she’s still there. Sandy and I bought the lot in the middle, Hale and Vivian the other one. I really felt like I’d made it, you know? This older rich couple on one side, a doctor and his wife on the other.”

“You didn’t know the Vandemeers till they became your neighbors?”

“No. Sandy was in the insurance business, but not selling it. More like an office manager for a department of Empire.”

“You remember which?”

“Accounting, all her time in Boston.”

I closed my eyes for a second. Sandra Newberg would have overlapped with me at Empire. I tried to match the crime scene photo with a live employee’s face, but Claims dealt with Accounting a lot more than I did in Claims Investigation.

Shea said, “John?”

“Yes.”

“You okay?”

“Yes. Fine. You hit it off with the Vandemeers?”

“From day one. It was like back in college, you know? Freshman year, you meet some guys, it’s like you’re blood brothers? Well, that’s the way it was. ‘The Foursome,’ we called ourselves.”

“Vacation together?”

“Everything together. Dinners at the new restaurants, shows, symphony. Patriot games at Sullivan, Red Sox at Fenway, the Celtics when you could still buy tickets.”

“About the vacations—”

“Vacations? Sure. We used to go on cruises, fly to the islands. Anywhere there was a beach, before Hale got religion about getting cancer instead of a tan. In fact, that was one of the reasons I bought the place on Marseilles Pond. With Hale all of a sudden sun-shy and his practice booming, we figured we needed a place we could all get together without reservations or hassles, kind of away from it all. So, when old man Judson heard I was interested in a lake place, he showed me his, and I jumped for it.”

“How did you meet Judson?”

“When I was with the computer outfit, I sold him a new mini for his lumber company. He loved it, and he and I got to talking.”

“Judson offered you his summer place because he liked the computer you sold him?”

A shrug. “I didn’t press him on why, John. It was like love at first sight for me.”

“But you tore down his place and built your own.”

“Well, sure. I told him I would. You couldn’t ask Sandy and Vivian to …
live
in the shack he had there. Besides, you could barely see the fucking lake.”

I’d already been down that path with Ma Judson and Dag Gates. “Where did the crossbow come from?”

Shea darkened. He moved his tongue around inside his mouth before speaking. “One of Hale’s toys. He was always doing that, always trying to pay us back for having him and Vivian up to the lake by bringing something for us to play with.”

“He brought it up that weekend?”

“That … ? Oh, no. It was last summer … August, maybe? He bought it down in Mass someplace, then brought it up with him one weekend. We had some laughs with it, target practice, making the chipmunks kind of … scatter, you know?”

Shea grinned, then dropped it when he saw I didn’t like that joke, either.

I said, “Where was the thing kept?”

“In the garage. Or shed, is what it is, really. Left over from when old man Judson had his place. Solid fucking thing, too big to move, too strong to dynamite.”

Shea was getting jovial, trying to recover from the chipmunk remark. I was beginning not to like him very much.

I said, “Tell me what happened that night.”

The jovial look disappeared, replaced by more clasping of hands on the table. “We kind of caravanned up, stopping at the Kennebunk rest stop to pee and then Augusta to food-shop. Everybody was feeling good, like we always did coming up to the lake. When we got to the house, though, I forgot we were low on wine. Should make a fucking list after each weekend, you know? But we hadn’t been up on account of the black flies—bloodsucking little vampires—and I just forgot. So I got in the four-wheeler and drove back to Ralph and Ramona’s store, got some wine and a couple of other things.”