around him.”
“Do you want to know what your problem is?”
“Aside from the fact that you’re breaking my hand?”
Bella released her. “You have no faith in happiness. People without faith are lonely, bitter people, my dear. You are not such a person. Tell me, it’s not the sex, is it?”
“No, that part is fine. More than fine. The best.”
“Speaking of which…” Bella leaned over the table toward her. “Any idea who our moaner is?”
Des glanced at her sharply. “You can hear her, too?”
“Tattela, they can hear her in Flatbush.”
“Good morning, ladies,” interjected Colin Falconer, who stood there before them with a shy smile on his long, rather pinched face. Colin wore a pair of birdwatcher’s glasses around his neck and clutched a brown-bag lunch. The innkeepers made one for him every morning. “What a pretty time of year, is it not? I thought I’d ride out to Peck Point to see the terns before school.”
“I took a nice long walk myself before breakfast,” Des responded, smiling up at him. “It was beautiful.”
Colin lingered there, his tongue flicking nervously across his thin, dry lips. “I’m guilty of having a terribly awkward question for you,” he murmured at Des.
“Go right ahead.”
“I was wondering… That is, are you hearing noises in the night?”
“Do you mean like animals?”
“Of a sort,” he said, reddening.
“You, too?” Bella exclaimed, beaming at him conspiratorially.
“I haven’t slept all week,” Colin blurted out. “It’s so unsettling. I don’t suppose it would be appropriate to have the innkeeper ask them to enjoy themselves a little less… enthusiastically.”
“It’s not as if they’re breaking any laws,” Des said, her eyes falling on that blond hunk of muscle seated by himself across the room, tearing into a plate of blueberry pancakes and sausages. She couldn’t tell if he was hearing what they were saying or not. He gave no sign of it. “I guess we’ll just have to live with it.”
“I guess we will,” Colin said ruefully before he headed out the door to fetch his bike.
It was time for Des to get moving, too. She went upstairs and stripped and jumped in the shower. She didn’t take long in the bathroom. She kept her hair short and nubby these days, and had never been into war paint. Never needed it, really. She had almond-shaped green eyes, a smooth complexion, a wraparound smile that could melt titanium.
Her charcoal-gray trousers were cut full for comfort. The contrasting stripe that ran down the outside seam was royal blue with yellow piping, same as the epaulets on her light gray shirt. Her necktie was that same shade of royal blue, her tie clasp gold, her square-toed oxfords black and gleaming. She tucked her shirt neatly into her trousers, found her horn-rimmed glasses on the dresser and wiped them clean and put them on. Then she unlocked the dresser drawer that she kept under padlock and key. Inside was her crime girl kit-her nameplate and badge, her eight-pound black leather belt complete with radio, her holstered Sig-Sauer semiautomatic weapon.
The last but by no means least thing Des put on was her great big Smokey the Bear hat. Armed, dressed and dangerous, Resident Trooper Desiree Mitry of Dorset-formerly Lieutenant Desiree Mitry of the Major Crime Squad, the highest-ranking black female homicide investigator in the entire history of the Connecticut State Police-headed out the door to perform her first official duty of the day:
Directing traffic outside of Center School.
CHAPTER 3
Hangtown led Mitch home on Dunn’s Road, which twisted its way through a cluster of old, family-run dairy farms. These were genuine working farms, complete with silos and animals and fragrant smells.
And they were an endangered species.
Even over the flatulent putt-putting of Hangtown’s vintage motorcycle Mitch could hear the big bulldozers flattening a nearby stretch of forest. And then he could see them-they were like giant, grotesque yellow insects devouring the landscape in starved bites. A tastefully lettered billboard announced that this soon-to-be ex-forest was soon-to be “Sweet Hollow Farms, a Bruce Leanse Concept for Living, featuring 23 Grand Manor homes.” Mitch had seen the glowing ad for the development in his paper’s real estate section. Each home, it promised, would enjoy its own seven-acre wooded parcel, classic architecture, handcrafted detail. Floor plans ranged in size from 5,800 to 7,600 square feet.
Prices started at $1.35 million.
As the great Wendell Frye wheeled past the workmen on his Indian Chief, cutting quite the raffish figure in his leather helmet and goggles, several of them waved and gave him appreciative thumbs-up.
In response, he treated them to a good look at his own upraised middle finger.
Dunn’s Road ran into Route 156 at the crossroads at Winston Farms. Hangtown crossed over onto Old Ferry Road, scooting past the proposed site of the new elementary school. Mitch followed. Just before Old Ferry Road ran smack into the Connecticut River, the old man turned in at a private dirt road called Lord’s Cove Lane, sending a flock of wild turkeys scattering. Lord’s Cove bumped its way a half mile or so deep into the woods before it broke into a clearing marked by two twenty-foot-high totem poles made of junked personal computers stacked one atop the other and spray painted Day-Glo orange.
As they passed in between these they were met by a forty-foot-tall grasshopper made of fenders and hubcaps, a Wendell Frye creation that stood guard over several acres of meadow filled with junked cars and buses, stacks of bicycles, airplane propellers, dinged-up aluminum garden furniture, bedsprings, rain gutters-a virtual junkyard, or it would have been if it weren’t also home to dozens of immense, half-completed Wendell Frye mobiles and whirligigs that had been left to rust in the tall weeds along with everything else.
Around a bend they approached a rambling center-chimney colonial that backed right up onto the river, affording it a panoramic view across the marshes all the way to Essex. The house had been added on to numerous times and painted the brightest shade of pink Mitch had ever seen. Or maybe it was just that he’d never seen a historic home that was painted hot pink before. An ancient, tan-colored Land Rover was parked out front, alongside a Toyota pickup and a spanking-new red Porsche 911 Turbo.
A German shepherd started streaking toward Hangtown’s motorcycle from the front porch, barking with unbridled glee. Two women immediately came out of the house, gesturing frantically at Hangtown, who waved and kept right on going, the dog sprinting alongside of him. Mitch followed. The dirt road took them past a row of sagging one-room cottages, past apple and pear orchards, past a fenced meadow with sheep. Past a chicken coop, a pigsty, a vegetable garden.
They finally pulled up alongside a huge old barn, which was also painted hot pink, the shepherd hopping into its master’s sidecar, tail thumping.
“This is an amazing place,” Mitch marveled as he got out of his truck.
“You should see it after the first snow,” Hangtown wheezed, yanking off his helmet and goggles. “You’d swear you’d gone to heaven.”
“You believe in heaven?” Mitch asked him.
“Of course I do, Big Mitch. All children believe in heaven.”
Mitch dropped the tailgate of the truck, the big dog sniffing at the cat scent on his legs. Back at the house, one of the women started determinedly across the meadow toward them.
“Not that any of this is really mine,” Hangtown went on. “My granddad married into it. Plundered himself a local girl with good Teasman bloodlines and no damned sense. Hell, she mm-rr-married an artist.” Wendell Frye was a third-generation Dorset artist. It was his grandfather, an eminent landscape painter, who founded the Dorset Academy. His father, also a fine painter, ran it for many years. “There’s eight hundred acres in all. My dad nearly lost it to the tax man when I was a boy, but it’s still ours. And it’ll stay ours as long as there’s enough fools out there who’ll pay good cash money for my contraptions. The developers would love to get their hands on it. All they see is the dollar signs. Me, I see what granddad saw-the freshwater tidal marsh with osprey and great blues, the eagles nesting in our cliffs. He used to come out here from the city every summer to paint them. That’s what those
