Out Cold (21 page)

“Where is the truck now?”

He stared at me for a minute, then shrugged. “Trucks,” he said. “Plural. My company had three panel trucks with our logo painted on their sides. When I dissolved the corporation, I turned the trucks, along with all the furnishings and the laboratory equipment, over to a firm that specializes in liquidations. I have no idea where those trucks are or who owns them now. I must say, though, I would find it odd if the new owners didn't paint out our old logo.”

“Where'd that logo come from?”

He looked away for a moment. “Ursula designed it. I told her I was naming my new company after her. She knew that her name derived from the Latin word for bear. She sketched the design herself, the two bears, a mother and a cub. She didn't really remember her mother. Greta was her name. Greta died when Ursula was a baby. Ursula was very curious about Greta, and I know not having a mother was important to her.” He shrugged. “My designer took Ursula's sketch and created our logo. She was very proud of it.”

“Why did you dissolve your corporation?”

He gazed into the fire. “When Ursula died, I guess I just lost my…my zest for doing business. My motivation. We were making a lot of money. In my mind, that money was for her. For her future. Her…her life. Do you see?”

“Sure.”

“Without Ursula, making money seemed…frivolous.”

I nodded. “And now?”

He turned his head and looked at me. “What do you mean?”

“You're not working? Doing business?”

“I work,” he said. “I cut firewood, and I split it and I stack it. I patch holes in the roof of my barn. I repair my stone walls. I grow vegetables and flowers. Albert helps with the heavy lifting. Jeanette takes care of the house.” He shrugged. “I have more money than I can use. I don't want any more. I like to give it away. I'm trying to live a quiet, anonymous life here in Churchill, New Hampshire. Simplify, simplify, Thoreau said. I try to be a good neighbor. Really, all I want is to be left alone.”

“To avoid being bothered by people like me,” I said.

He shrugged.

“I'm sorry.”

He waved his hand. “It's all right. I understand. I suppose I'd do what you're doing if I were you.”

I took a sip of coffee, then put down the mug. “Thank you for seeing me and helping me to clear this up.”

“You haven't cleared up anything,” he said. “I haven't told you anything that helps you.”

“No, I guess you haven't. But you've helped me to eliminate some possibilities. That's a start.”

“It's a shame you had to come all this distance.”

“It was doing something,” I said. “Doing something is always better than doing nothing, even if it doesn't pan out.”

He looked at me for a moment, then said, “Now you won't have to bother me anymore.”

“Sure.”

“Good.” He nodded. “Albert will take you back.”

“Thank you.”

He stood up, went over to the door, and pushed it open. “Jeanette, dear,” he said, speaking into the other room. “Mr. Coyne is ready to leave.”

A moment later, Jeanette came into the room. She was carrying my coat in both arms like she might lug a load of firewood.

I stood up, took my coat from her, and put it on. Then I held out my hand to Judson McKibben.

He took it. “Good luck on your quest.”

“Thank you.”

“Please,” said Jeanette. “Follow me.”

I followed her through the house. She opened the front door. Albert Cranston was waiting there on the porch for me.

“This way,” he said, and he turned and went down the front steps. The big Lincoln SUV was parked where he'd left it.

“Have a nice evening,” I said to Jeanette.

She dipped her head slightly. “You, too, Mr. Coyne,” she said. Then she smiled, went back inside, and closed the door.

I went down to the car. Cranston got in behind the wheel, and I opened the door on the passenger's side. As I bent to get in, I glanced up at the attic dormer. The light was still on up there, and as I looked, I thought I glimpsed a shadow sliding away from the window.

Albert Cranston turned on the ignition. The lock on my door clicked. “Seat belt, please,” he said.

I buckled up.

He rolled down the long curving driveway. It had stopped snowing, but the night was dark, and all I could see was what the headlights showed straight in front of us. Snow and woods.

At the foot of the driveway, he turned left, which meant he was taking me back a different way. I wasn't sure why he felt he needed to confuse me. I'd already indicated that my interest in Dr. Judson McKibben had been satisfied.

The clock on the Lincoln's dashboard read 11:22. I'd been there a little more than an hour.

I watched the clock and the odometer and kept track of the lefts and rights that Cranston took. We didn't talk at all. By the time he pulled up in front of unit four at Sweeney's motel, I had a clear mental map of the round trip from the motel to McKibben's house and back, even though I hadn't identified a single landmark along the way.

“Here we are,” said Cranston.

I unsnapped my seat belt. “Thanks for the ride.”

“Now you'll leave him alone,” he said. “You have no more business in Churchill.” It was neither a question nor a request. It was a statement.

“I'm pretty tired,” I said, “and I've got a long drive facing me tomorrow.”

“I hope you sleep well,” he said. “Have a pleasant trip home.”

The locks clicked. I opened the door and got out.

Cranston sat there in his big square Lincoln SUV with the headlights blazing on the front of the motel while I went to my door, unlocked it, flicked on the light, and went inside.

I stood there for a minute, as if some sixth sense might kick in and tell me if somebody had snuck in while I was gone. Not surprisingly, I received no subliminal messages.

I went to the bed and dug around under the mattress. My Chiefs Special was still there, as nearly as I could tell in exactly the same place it had been when I hid it there. I slid it out and put it on the table beside the bed.

Nor did it seem that anybody had been digging around in my duffel. Nothing was missing or out of place.

I tossed my parka onto the chair, sat on the edge of the bed, and pried off my boots.

It was almost midnight on a snowy Saturday night in January, and here I was, alone in a motel room in godforsaken Churchill, New Hampshire. If there had been a phone in the room, or if my cellular was functioning, I would've called Evie again. I could've pulled my boots back on, hunched into my parka, gone out to the pay phone and called her. Maybe she'd be happy to hear from me. Maybe not. Most likely she was already asleep, flopped on her belly, hugging her pillow, with Henry curled up against her hip, and if I woke her, she'd be grouchy, and I'd end up feeling lonelier than I already did.

So I turned on the television, found an old Clint Eastwood movie, took off my clothes, and crawled into bed…and the next thing I knew, gray daylight was filtering in around the blinds and the digital alarm clock on the table beside me read 8:23.

I plugged in the coffee, and while it was brewing, I showered and got dressed. Woolen long johns, woolen socks, heavy woolen shirt, woolen turtleneck sweater, wool pants. I was a big fan of wool. No space-age synthetic I'd ever tried could match wool for warmth. Even when it was wet, wool continued to do its job.

I watched the news while I drank my coffee. Then I packed up my duffel, pulled on my boots and parka, and went down to the motel office.

A pretty gray-haired woman was behind the counter. She looked up and smiled when the bell over the door dinged. “Mr. Coyne?” she said.

“Yes.” I held out my hand. “You're Mrs. Sweeney?”

“Joanne, please,” she said. “Everything was okay, I hope.”

“Great,” I said. “Slept like a log. Thanks for leaving the key for me.” I took out my room key and my credit card and gave them to her. “Do you know anyplace around here where a man could rustle up some bacon and eggs and hot coffee on a Sunday morning?”

“Nick's,” she said as she slid my card through her machine. “She's open all the time.” She gave me my card and a receipt to sign. “Heading back today?”

“Right after breakfast,” I said. “It's a long drive.”

She smiled. “Come back soon.”

 

I ate at a small table by the front window at Nick's. Three eggs over easy, home fries, double order of bacon, wheat toast, a giant glass of orange juice, two mugs of coffee. A fisherman's breakfast, loaded with proteins and fats and evil carbohydrates. It would keep me going all day.

Four or five men—they might have been the same guys in flannel shirts and baggy blue jeans and faded baseball caps who'd been there drinking beer the previous night—were having breakfast at the bar. A young couple with a baby in a high chair occupied one booth, and a middle-aged couple sharing a Sunday newspaper sat at one of the tables. Nick waited on all of us.

I was on my second mug of coffee when she came over and sat across from me. “How was the motel?” she said.

“Good. Comfortable.”

“So you heading back home?”

I nodded. “By popular demand.”

She arched her eyebrows. “Huh?”

I waved the back of my hand. “Everybody seems pretty anxious for me to leave.”

“That's not what
I
meant,” she said.

“It's okay. I'm just hoping I can get back to Boston before it starts snowing again.”

She pushed back her chair and stood up. “It's in the forecast for later. Drive carefully.”

“I will.”

I paid my bill, and when I stepped outside, I saw that tiny little flakes of soft snow had begun sifting down while I was inside. Already a thin coating had covered the vehicles in Nick's lot.

I climbed into my car, turned on the windshield wipers, pulled out of the lot, and turned south. The sky was low and gray, heavy with moisture, as it had been quite consistently since New Year's Day. It looked like it was planning to snow for a while.

I stopped at the Exxon station next to the post office and filled up my tank. Inside, I found two bottles of orange juice and three Hershey's bars and took them to the counter. When I paid the old guy who was sitting there working on the Sunday crossword puzzle, I asked him how long he thought it would take me to get to Boston.

He scratched the side of his neck and pondered the question, then said, “If it don't snow, four and a half, five hours. If this snow decides to get serious, who knows? What in hell you want to go to Boston for, anyway?”

“I live there.”

He nodded, as if I'd said something profound. “Good reason, I suppose.”

I pulled away from the gas station and continued south. I passed the intersection and crossed the bridge by the frozen millpond, and a little over two miles later I came to a side road that veered off to the left.

I slowed down, checked my rearview mirror to be sure nobody was behind me, and took that left. According to the map in my head that I'd sketched from the clock and the odometer in Albert Cranston's Lincoln SUV the previous evening, in about two minutes I should come to another left that would take me north, parallel to the road that cut through the middle of Churchill, and if I kept my odometer on thirty, it would take me thirteen minutes to get to the right turn, and another minute-and-a-half to find the left that would take me past the long driveway that curved up the hill and through the evergreens to Judson McKibben's big farmhouse.

I drove past a couple of roadside farm stands bearing “Closed for the Season” signs, and a little over thirteen minutes later I came to the right turn I was looking for.

An old metal building shaped like a small airplane hanger sat on the corner. I hadn't seen it the previous night in the dark. Twenty-five or thirty snow-covered vehicles—sedans, sports cars, SUVs, pickup trucks, and one yellow school bus—were parked haphazardly in a big side lot. The sign over the door read “Don's Auto Body.” The area was surrounded by a tall chain-link fence, but the front gates, I noticed, hung unlocked and half open. No lights glowed from inside the garage. It was Sunday. Even tin-knockers took Sundays off.

Perfect.

I continued following the map in my head. The narrow road twisted through woodland and swamp, and according to my odometer it was one-point-two miles from Don's Auto Body to the rocky ice-rimmed stream that tumbled out of the woods and passed through a culvert under the road about a hundred yards before I came to the end of Judson McKibben's driveway.

I continued past the driveway for another half mile, then made a three-point turn and headed back to the auto-body shop.

McKibben was smart and suspicious, and I was pretty sure Nate Harrigan, the chief of police, was no dummy. My impression was that Albert Cranston was the smartest of them all.

If I'd done everything right, McKibben and Cranston now believed that they'd satisfied my curiosity, and Harrigan believed he'd intimidated me. Joanne Sweeney at the motel and Nick at the cafe and the guy at the gas station would all be able to report that the nosy lawyer from Boston had said he was going home, and in fact, they'd seen him driving south. He was worried about getting back to Boston before the snow got too heavy.

I stopped in front of the auto-body place, got out, and pushed the chain-link gates all the way open. Then I got back into my car and drove into the lot. I found a space between a Dodge pickup and a Ford Explorer and nosed my BMW into it. The front of the Dodge was pushed in as if it had plowed straight-on into a brick wall. The sides and roof of the Ford were dented and crumpled, and all the windows were smashed, as if it had rolled down a rocky slope.

By comparison, my BMW looked—well, it looked like a spiffy new BMW amid a bunch of banged-up old American vehicles, not even taking the Massachusetts plates into account. But like the other vehicles that were parked there, the roof and hood of my car were covered with snow, and I was fairly confident that nobody driving by would take a second look at it.

I dug around in my duffel, found my digital camera, binoculars, tape recorder, Leatherman, Swiss Army knife, Smith & Wesson .38, extra bullets, flashlight, and Space blanket. The aluminum-lined Space blanket was an amazing invention that folded into a neat little square about the size of a pack of cards and weighed less. I looped the binoculars around my neck and tucked them inside the front of my parka. Everything else went into the deep pockets, including the juice and candy bars. I tried to distribute the weight evenly.

I pulled on my black knit hat and fur-lined leather gloves, then slid out of the car and locked it. I walked to the front of the building, then turned and looked back. Aside from the tire tracks I'd left in last night's snow leading into the auto-body lot, nothing looked amiss. At the rate today's snow was falling, those tire tracks, plus my boot prints, would disappear in an hour.

I adjusted the gates so that they hung half open the way they had when I'd driven in. Then I began trudging along the side of the road toward McKibben's house.

It was a snowy Sunday morning in January, and this appeared to be a little-traveled roadway. If everything went perfectly, I'd be able to walk the mile and a half to McKibben's without anybody driving by. Moving briskly under normal conditions, I knew I could walk a mile in twelve to fifteen minutes. On this snow-packed road wearing my heavy insulated boots and many layers of woolen clothing, I figured it would take me closer to twenty minutes.

It was probably asking too much for nobody to come along in twenty minutes. Nothing ever went perfectly.

The snowbanks along the sides of the road were about waisthigh. The forest—a mixture of hardwoods and hemlocks, with alders and swamp maples in the low places—crowded close to both sides.

A soft breeze murmured high in the hemlocks. In the distance a couple of crows cawed at each other. My boots crunched on the snow-packed roadway. Otherwise, the snowy world seemed uninhabited and still.

I had been walking for about five minutes when I heard the growl of an engine in low gear coming from around the bend behind me. I didn't wait to see what it was. I launched myself over the snowbank, rolled under a hemlock bough, and lay flat on my belly.

I peeked up as the vehicle came close. It was a dump truck with a yellow light revolving on its roof. A logo on the door indicated that it belonged to the Churchill department of public works. A plow was mounted up front and the truckbed was piled with sand, but the plow was up and it wasn't spreading sand. If the snow persisted, it would soon have to go to work.

I waited for the truck to pass and for the sound of its engine to fade around the corner before I slipped back out onto the road.

A few minutes later I heard another engine. The sound was muffled by the snow and the hemlocks, and I couldn't tell whether it was coming from behind me or ahead of me. I didn't wait to see. I again slithered over the snowbank and crawled behind a brushy clump of alders.

It was a big square SUV coming from the direction of McKibben's house, and as it got closer, I saw that it was the same Lincoln SUV that Albert Cranston had driven when he shuttled me from the motel and back the previous night.

Cranston was behind the wheel. He was driving very slowly, and I could see his face behind the windshield. He was hunched forward, tense and alert, and it looked like his eyes were darting from side to side, although I could have been imagining that.

I lay flat on my belly behind the alders and tried to burrow into the snow. My parka was olive, my jeans were faded blue, my cap was black—all neutral natural colors that should not draw attention.

If Cranston spotted me, I'd have to do some quick thinking to explain why I was hiding in the woods beside the road that led to Judson McKibben's house with binoculars around my neck and a .38 revolver in my pocket.

I tried to think quickly, just for practice, but nothing occurred to me.