That earned me a swat on my tired bottom. “You’re out of service for the foreseeable future, Mr. Cole, until I get a note from your doctor. So in the meantime, behave.”
Back in the bedroom, she tidied up the sheets and pillows, and I slid back to my regular position on the bed. This time I patted her on the bottom as she went back to the bathroom, which got me a soft laugh, and soon enough, the clothes washer was running.
Paula came back and sat on the edge of the bed. “You eat today?”
I nodded to the tray on the nightstand. “I did. Thanks for leaving me lunch.”
“Good. Now, I’m sorry to do this, but I’m going to have to leave you dinner. Something broke this afternoon, and I’ve got to get back to the story.”
“What’s the story?”
“Homicide.”
I was stunned. “In Tyler?”
“Yep,” she said. “Our little New Hampshire town. Maggie Tyler Branch, who ran Border Antiques on the Exonia Road. Got murdered sometime last night.”
“Holy shit. I knew her. I even wrote a couple of columns about her for Shoreline.”
“Of course you knew her,” Paula said. “Practically everyone in town knew her. Hold on, let me go downstairs, get something together for dinner.”
Paula went downstairs and I listened to her work in the kitchen, heard the refrigerator door open and close, the microwave start whirring. I blinked and looked out at the ocean again. Maggie Tyler Branch, whose middle name marked her as one of the descendants of the Reverend Bonus Tyler, who settled this strip of New Hampshire seacoast more than 350 years ago. Widowed, no kids, she owned a large farmhouse on the main road leading to Exonia. She sold antiques and gave out sharp opinions for a living. In my years here in Tyler, I had done two columns about her. The first was just a feel-good piece about her being descended from one of the first settlers, but the second was a newsier story. It was about how she had purchased a framed reproduction of the Declaration of Independence at a yard sale up in Porter, and later found out the reproduction was one of the very few printed in Philadelphia back in 1776, and worth a lot of money.
I still remembered talking to her in her cluttered and dusty barn. Smoking a Marlboro—and nearly a half-million dollars richer—she had shrugged and said, “You get old enough, and eventually instead of being shat upon, a unicorn will drop by and crap out gold coins in your lap. It was just my turn, that’s all.”
I heard Paula trot up the stairs, go into my bathroom, and put my clothes into the dryer. She went back down before I could ask her anything.
Maggie Tyler Branch.
Damn.
Some long minutes slid by until Paula brought up a covered plate on a tray, with a salad bowl nearby. “All right, favorite patient, best I can do. Hot steak and cheese melt, on French bread, with a side of salad and some healthy potato chips, if such a thing could exist.”
She put the tray down on the empty nightstand, where she knew I could reach it with no difficulty. “Any questions?”
“A couple,” I said. “How did she get murdered, and any word from the police on who did it? Or why?”
Paula stood up, brushed her hands together. “No suspect, so far as I know. As for a motive … you’ve got an elderly woman living alone with lots of pricey antiques and jewelry kicking around, plus whatever spare cash she might have gotten from that Declaration of Independence sale back in the day. Plus she’s located about five minutes from I-95. In these troubled times … Lewis, our fair state is now number one in the country, per capita, for opioid deaths. For someone needing cash to score a good supply of heroin, Maggie’s place would be a good place to start.”
She checked her watch. “All right, time to go back to the cop shop,” she said. “I’ll see what I can pry from your best pal, Detective Sergeant Woods.”
“Tell her I said hello.”
“Will do.”
Paula leaned down, giving me a nice look at her cleavage—I hoped it was a deliberate move on her part—and gave me a nice long kiss. She stood up and said, “Leave the laundry alone. I’ll see you sometime tomorrow.”
She had made it to the door leading out of my bedroom when I called out, “Hey! That other question. How did Maggie get murdered?”
Paula turned, grimaced. “Yeah. A bloody mess. Somebody blew off her head with a shotgun.”
Later that night, after eating my dinner and pushing the tray back on the nightstand, I turned on the television, and I lucked out with HBO rerunning its Band of Brothers series. I watched for three hours, enjoying the great actors and well-written, realistic scenes of the invasion of Normandy, as well as the moral clarity of a time when enemies controlled a state and, most of the time, wore uniforms.
When episode three, “Carentan,” wrapped up, I yawned and switched the television off. I swung from the bed again and made it to the bathroom to do my evening business. I checked the dryer and saw that my clothes were dry. I dragged them out, winced again at the pain, but managed to fold the T-shirt, underwear, and pajama bottoms, and leave them on top of the machine.
I knew Paula had told me to leave the clothes, but I wanted to prove to her—all right, to myself—that I wasn’t totally helpless.
Back to the bedroom I walked, and then got into bed, switched off the lights, and looked out the window to the Atlantic. It was dark, with no lights out there, and I managed to fall asleep.
I woke up about an hour later, when my second problem of the day made itself known.
The house was quiet, with only the sound of the waves’ endless march, until I heard the noise of the front door gently opening.
I cleared my throat. “Paula?”
No answer.
I
