Rehab Run Page 6

  EIGHT

  Laurence and I drove in silence, back toward Rose’s. A police cruiser followed at a respectful distance, presumably keeping us safe from any more dismembered body parts being chucked in our direction.

  Evan’s head. Evan. I shivered and rolled the Mustang’s window up, but it wasn’t the night breeze that was bothering me.

  “The yellow pickup,” I started to say, but Laurence shook his head.

  “Thinking,” he said.

  Great. Just when I needed him to be chatty, he’d disappeared somewhere in his head. Normally, I respected this, but my adrenaline was still pumping and I desperately wanted to do the post-mortem on what had happened. I held out my hand and he passed me his smokes.

  All the way back into town, I glanced through the rear view. I knew the cop car was there, and the chances of the yellow truck making another appearance, with law enforcement blanketing the area, was pretty much nil, but I couldn’t help feeling it – or its occupants – were close by.

  “Tell me about this Evan kid,” Laurence finally said. We had left the dirt road behind and were on the paved descent down into town.

  “I don’t know much.” I passed him a cigarette. “I think it’s his first job. I think he was a student, maybe a grad student? Psychology or something? Very quiet-spoken kid. Seemed nervous a lot, actually.”

  “Nervous?” Laurence said quickly. “How?”

  “I don’t know. Not the most social creature. Most of the staff and counsellors tend to be pretty chatty. Evan is security, though.” I took the cigarette back from Laurence and inhaled deeply, rolling the window back down.

  I tried not to think about crack. I tried not to wish that the smoke I was exhaling was going to make my ears ring and my brain burst with euphoria. Instead, I coughed.

  “Was,” Laurence said. He gripped the steering wheel. “Was security.”

  I nodded. I knew the memory of seeing his head tumbling toward me, not knowing what it was, and then, in that sickening moment, realizing what I was looking at, would stay with me forever. Especially without any help in making it go away.

  Say what you will about narcotics, but they do make bad stuff easier to bear. For a little while, at least, until the high wears off, and then God help you when you have to face your demons.

  “Beanpole,” Laurence said. “Change of plan. I’m going to stay with you at Rose’s.”

  “Uh. Okay,” I said.

  “I can’t face a B and B,” he said. “There must be a couch somewhere. And under the circumstances, I don’t think I’m going to be letting you out of my sight for the foreseeable future.” I knew he was half reading my mind. An addict’s sobriety is a delicate thing at such early stages; I had been told over and over again in the last couple of weeks. And I may not be an expert on addiction recovery, but even I know that having body parts chucked at you isn’t ideal when one is trying to find a peaceful place to get one’s head back on straight.

  “Okay,” I said. “Good.” I looked straight ahead, but I saw Laurence glance at me. He was probably expecting me to put up a stink about my independence and my general toughness at handling situations like these. Had I not, mere months earlier, tracked down and exacted bloody revenge on some pretty bad guys? Yes, but not wholly successfully – Michael Vernon Smith was still a free man, living under who knew what name – and I hadn’t been able to stop my husband from being killed by one of his acolytes.

  I watched Laurence as he skillfully drove the car and dialed the B and B to cancel. Probably against the law here as most everywhere else, driving and talking on the phone. I was pretty sure we’d get a pass, though, under the circumstances.

  I was doubly glad to be keeping my brother close. That yellow truck had followed us from the airport when I picked Laurence up. I hadn’t noticed it on the way there, and I think I would have; as Laurence had said, traffic in these parts was light enough that a canary-yellow pickup with tinted windows would stand out. So whoever had sped past us at the lake knew that Laurence was coming here, in all probability. And Laurence might be big and tall, but he spent his life behind a desk or in a boardroom. Like the rest of the Clearys, he did have a natural athleticism (though as our mother had always liked to say, for such a supposedly athletic group, we sure were a bunch of klutzes; none of us had ever gotten through a winter without falling on ice in the middle of the street), but I doubted he did much in the way of working out. And of all the Cleary kids, he was always the least eager to learn to shoot with Dad at the gravel pit when we were kids.

  I thought of Darren and me in California. Darren had trained with guns, gone to shooting ranges when he was on the road with his band. And he had the benefit of youth and rockstar vanity on his side; he cared very much about his body and spent a good amount of time in the gym and, nowadays, doing some light sparring. Laurence had always been more cerebral and quiet, lived in his head more. Even back in high school, he excelled at track and diving, uninterested in team sports. I hadn’t worried quite as much about Darren, and besides, when things started down in California, I was blinded by my grief over Ginger’s murder, and, of course, by my old pal, crack cocaine. But sitting in the car with Laurence, driving down a beautiful country road that a couple of hours earlier had seemed like paradise, all I could think about was keeping Laurence safe.

  No more Clearys were going to die. Nobody else I loved was going to die of anything but old age. Preferably – very preferably – after me. And if that meant that Laurence was going to be my shadow until we found Dickie, and the authorities found the killer, then fine. There were worse people I could be stuck with.

  For a minute, I thought of Dave. While we hadn’t started off well – he had been undercover, and I did break his nose at one point when he was holding a gun on me – in the end, he had been an ally to me when I needed one. And while I didn’t know exactly what he was – undercover cop, private citizen, Interpol, spy, whatever – he had offered to help me if I ever needed it again. From the inside of my left knee up my thigh, I had a tattoo, a beautiful mandala of color, woven into which was a telephone number that only someone inspecting the artwork very closely would be able to notice. It was Dave’s emergency contact number, and for reasons I didn’t fully know, it could be given to no one. I trusted Dave without knowing what or who he was, and he trusted me. The rest of the world, including members of my family, thought he could somehow be involved with Michael Vernon Smith. I knew the number by heart, though I hadn’t had to call it, but I also knew that if I was in a situation where I really needed to use it, I might not be able to remember it. I knew the man who wanted revenge on me, and I knew that if he got the upper hand, I could very well be in a state where I barely remembered my own name. The tattoo was insurance, and a talisman.

  I hoped very much I wouldn’t need to use it.

  But sitting in the car next to Laurence, driving back to Rose’s, I couldn’t help but think how it would be great to have him with us. And this time, I would endeavour not to break his nose.

  “Something funny, Bean?” Laurence said. “Do share.” I must have snorted out loud. I may have a tendency to do that when I’m lost in my own wee brain.

  “Just thinking about the time I broke Dave’s nose with my elbow when we were at Joshua Tree with Darren, going to meet Fred and that fucking cop,” I said. I never mentioned Miller’s name.

  “Good times,” Laurence said. “Also, interesting. This Dave guy pops up in your thoughts often, does he? Hmm?” He wiggled his eyebrows, which made me happy. Things couldn’t be too, too dire if my brother was wiggling his eyebrows at me. Fact.

  “Phhhffft,” I said, eloquent as usual. Note to self, I thought: Don’t let Laurence see my thigh, ever. He was a puzzle-meister; if anybody could see a phone number in the pattern, it would be my big brother.

  “You guys emailing? Keeping in touch? Exchanging recipes and so forth?”

  “Drive the car, dickwad,” I said. “And, no. We are not. So don’t get any fancy ideas of h
acking into my email and seeing if you can get his contact info to give to the Feds. And you know,” I added, “if he really had anything to do with Michael Vernon Smith, I’d be dead by now. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.” Then I laughed. Pipes. Smoking. Rehab.

  “God,” he said. “Everything comes down to drugs with you, doesn’t it,” he said, and I swatted his arm. He held out his hand for the cigarette pack. “Home sweet home,” he said. We pulled into the driveway of Rose’s, waved past by the cop at the end of the drive, past the news trucks and yet another ambulance.

  “And the evening started so well,” I said. “Welcome to Nova Scotia.”

  Laurence turned into the parking area and turned off the engine.

  Two ambulance attendants were carrying a body bag on a gurney, out of the back door and into the back of their vehicle.

  “No lights,” I said, nodding at the ambulance. My mouth was dry. “It’s a body.”

  “Dickie,” Laurence said, and bolted from the car.

  NINE

  One of my fellow residents, a former dancer called Sarah who had a problem with pain meds after years of cartilage damage slaving away in the corps de ballet, had made her nightly pilgrimage to the basement to smoke a joint. Upon discovering that the light had burned out, she used the flashlight function on her phone to descend the stairs. Apparently she was planning to grab the joint and lighter she’d left in a baggie behind the canned goods and crouch on the stairs to have a quick toke before bed.

  When she got to the foot of the rickety wooden stairs – the basement was more of a cellar, used for storage and supposedly off-limits to residents, with damp walls and a very low ceiling – poor Sarah made the mistake of shining her light straight ahead to where she was going, instead of the floor in front of her. She was used to the room, and moving quickly, she said.

  Of course you were, dear, I wanted to say. You were on your way for your nightly fix.

  “I tripped over something. I fell flat on my face,” she said. We were sitting in the kitchen, all of us: three police, half a dozen residents, a female counsellor whose name I could never remember, and Laurence and me. She showed us her scraped elbows and forearms. She had a smear of blood on her forehead, but I didn’t want to tell her. I doubted it was hers. “Well, on my arms. And then I thought I heard something behind me, some noise, and I have no idea why I didn’t scream. No idea.”

  I didn’t, either. When Sarah, terrified, had scrabbled around on the cement floor and found her phone, she turned it back to the foot of the stairs where she had fallen.

  The noise she’d heard was a rat. A rat, feasting on what was left of the body of Evan Sinclair.

  “I didn’t know it was Evan, though,” Sarah continued. She was chain smoking in the non-smoking kitchen, and shaking a bit, but I had to hand it to the girl; there were no hysterics, no tears. She’d probably had those kinds of emotions drilled out of her at ballet boot camp, I thought, looking at her. She was in her late twenties, a bit younger than me, and while she had the body of a fourteen-year-old gymnast, she had a face that had seen things.

  Then again, at Rose’s, most of us did.

  “I don’t remember getting up the stairs,” she said. “I just know I was up here and calling 911 and then… everybody was here.” She nodded at the police and looked outside, where the ambulance had been. “Why would somebody do that to Evan? Do you know?” She was looking at one of the cops in the room, the oldest one. Not friendly-looking. Not Des Murphy.

  “Not yet, miss, but we will,” he said. He looked long and hard at Laurence and me. He seemed to be sizing us up, wondering if we could have done the deed, driven out to Ferryman Lake and left Evan’s head in the woods, while I pretended someone had thrown it in my direction. I looked back at him, keeping my face neutral. I wanted to say, You can try to intimidate me all you want, honey, but I’ve had men a lot tougher than you try to shake me up. I wanted to sit him down and tell him the whole story, from soup to nuts, but I’d already done that with Des, and I didn’t feel much like getting into it again. A poor kid who didn’t seem like he could do any harm to anybody had been killed, decapitated, directly underneath where we all sat.

  When we had first arrived, once we learned that it was not, in fact, Dickie in the body bag, the cop had taken us aside and said he knew about what had happened at the cabin. I imagined that every cop and reporter in this part of the country probably knew all about this by now. I closed my eyes for a second, hoping that my name would be staying out of this story. Somehow, I knew I wouldn’t be so lucky. I sighed out loud.

  “Is Des coming here?” I asked.

  “Sergeant Murphy is leading the search at Mr. Doyle’s property at”—he looked at his notebook; he couldn’t be a local—“Ferryman Lake.”

  “And no one has found Dickie?” Laurence said. He had already asked, and the cop looked like he resented being asked.

  “No. Mr. Doyle is still at large.”

  “‘At large’ suggests that you think he’s a suspect,” Laurence said.

  The cop didn’t say anything, just kept staring. He really needed a new schtick. The long cold looks were getting pretty old already.

  I thought of the rat in the basement, feasting on Evan, and I suddenly felt the carbonation start in my brain, the pre-faint nausea. I quickly stuck my head between my knees.

  “Ms. Cleary?” the cop was saying, but I waved him away. I sat up quickly, my vision blurring a bit. I tried to bite down the nausea.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “The forensics guys are down in the basement, right?” I obviously hadn’t ventured down there – not that I’d wanted to; I was happy to take everybody else’s word on what it looked like – but we could hear voices downstairs, and there were lights set up at the top of the basement stairs. “So they must know – was Evan killed here? Or somewhere else and brought here?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential to the investigation,” he said. He smiled, a nasty sort of smirk. “You might have a reputation down south, but you do know that you have nothing official to do with this investigation. We don’t want any Nancy-Drew-meets-the-Manson-family antics here.”

  My heart started pounding, and I wanted to punch him. For a minute, it took every single ounce of whatever limited self-control I possessed to stay in my chair. Great, I thought. He’s heard about the freak show that happened in Maine, and he’s one of those law enforcement types who hates private investigators. I didn’t even bother pointing out that I wasn’t one; half the papers had identified me that way, and who was I to argue with the media. Or maybe he just hated women who could handle themselves. In any event, he was obviously a jackass.

  And either way, I didn’t trust myself to speak without saying things that could get me into trouble. And trouble was something I didn’t need any more of.

  Crack, however, I could use. I would be very, very happy to have some crack.

  “Excuse me?” Laurence said quietly. He sounded remarkably like our father when he was about to tear a strip off somebody. “Listen, I am not sure who you think you are, or who you’re talking to here.” He held his hand up to stop the man from interjecting. “You are either a rude idiot, or simply misinformed. So let me help you out, and make a couple of things clear.” The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. This was my brother, the power broker. This was his boardroom voice. He hadn’t risen quickly through the ranks of high-end cable television in New York City because he was a pushover. “My sister was a hero, and risked her own life to save the lives of our nephews, who had been kidnapped by an evil man and his followers. Our sister – her twin,” he continued, and I couldn’t look at him, I knew I would cry if I did, “was brutally murdered by these people, and her husband Jack MacRae was also killed by them, in front of her, while trying to rescue our nephews. Our other brother was nearly fatally wounded by these people, and Danielle was kidnapped and drugged, along with our late sister’s husband and their sons. She managed to rescue both of our twin nephews – ch
ildren, we’re talking about here – from these people. So don’t you dare speak to her that way again. Officer.” He said the word with the same inflection I might use to call someone a fuckwad. I glanced up and it looked like everyone in the room, residents and cops, had their mouths hanging open. I could feel eyes on me, and tried to refrain from sticking my head back between my knees.

  Crack, please.

  “We, her family, helped choose this particular place for her to recover, after everything she has endured, because I roomed with Richard Doyle at Bennington, and we kept up a friendship over the years.”

  Oh, he was Richard Doyle now. From Bennington. And I was Danielle, all of a sudden. I thanked God Laurence was on my side. And found myself thinking he was wasted on the cable TV world; he should have been a lawyer.

  “After my sister discovered the… body part on the property here, I wanted to come and be close to her. She has gone through far too much in the last year to be handling such a shock on her own.” Now, I was trying not to sob like a baby. I thought it would look bad, though, since that Sarah chick had managed to keep her composure after tripping over a headless corpse being eaten by a rat.

  “And in my communications with Mr. Doyle in the last months, while securing a place for Danielle here at Rose’s, he had mentioned to me that he thinks he is being followed.”

  I looked at Laurence quickly. This was what he wasn’t telling me. Why hadn’t he told me this?

  The arrogant cop started to say something, but Laurence held up his hand. “He didn’t advise the authorities, no. Mr. Doyle has suffered with major depression and anxiety since his wife died. He finds it difficult to talk to anyone at the best of times, and he is aware that because of his lifestyle choices and what have you, he may have a reputation around here as… eccentric.”

  Lifestyle choices. For some people, living in that little cabin with an outhouse, when he could afford nearly anything he wanted, would be enough to deem him crazy. And I was pretty sure that Laurence was a bit worried about that himself, whatever he might be saying now.