She took up my hand. “Wasn’t this an accident?” Her voice was barely audible.
“I don’t think so.”
“But why?”
“I don’t know. The other attempt kind of made sense-if youe amp;mpt kind o were a little nuts-but not this one. We thought he was trying to stimulate us-to get us interested in the case.”
She stared at me in shocked silence for a moment. “What do you mean, ‘the other attempt’? What does that mean?”
I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to get into that. “A few days ago someone turned on the gas in my apartment after I went to sleep. Ski Mask pulled me out.”
Her mouth opened and shut. “I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that?”
“I didn’t tell you. Only Frank and Brandt knew about it. There was no harm done.”
“Ski Mask saved your life?”
“Maybe. We don’t know. I thought so at first. That’s what he said; that someone was trying to derail the investigation into the Harris thing by killing me and making it look like an accident. Frank thought that was all baloney-that Ski Mask was just trying to stoke up our interest and keep us off balance. Makes sense.”
“So you think Ski Mask ran you off the road.”
“Who else?” I shut my eyes again. The effort of keeping them open was wearing me out.
“Isn’t it possible he was telling the truth?”
“Why would anyone involved in the original murder stir every thing up when the best thing would be to lay low? It’s just too farfetched. That’s why we figured the attempt on me was just Ski Mask throwing out red herrings. There couldn’t be anyone except him out there.”
“That may have been true then; it’s hardly true now. Why would Ski Mask kill the two people most helpful to him? And why would he try to destroy the very evidence that might reopen the case? It seems to me there probably is somebody else, trying to hush the whole thing up. And they almost succeeded.”
I pushed against my temples with my fingers. This conversation wasn’t helping things. “Frank was starting to think that Ski Mask killed Kimberly and was daring us to catch him. That he was playing a kind of help-us-here, hinder-us-there game. That might explain driving us off the road. He was convinced Ski Mask had followed us to Connecticut. Jesus, this thing is such a mess.”
Gail wouldn’t let it go. “I think Frank was right, at least partly. Ski Mask probably did follow you, saw the other people force you off the road, and anonymously called in the accident.”
It was bad enough having one loony in a mask; now we were staring at a whole separate bunch of them. And nobody knew what the hell any of them wanted, or why this whole bloody mess had been started in the first place. “Jesus, Gail. I don’t know.” I put my head back on the pillow and looked up at the brown spot.
Gail put her cool hand on my forehead. “Why don’t you take a nap?”
I didn’t answer. She pushed the button on the control box and lowered the bed. She bent over and kissed me again. “I love you, Joe. I know you miss Frank, but I’m happy you’re alive.”
I lifted my hand and toucheandn the contd her breast with the backs of my fingers. My head weighed a ton. “I love you too. I wish I could get you into this bed right now. How long have you been here?”
“From the start. The hospital’s not too full, so I took the room next door.”
That made me smile sleepily. “Must be costing you a fortune.”
“It ain’t cheap. I’ll send you the bill when you’re feeling better.”
She stayed by my side, rubbing my forehead until I went back to sleep.
I did stay two more days. In fact, it took me that long to feel halfway solid on my feet again. Gail would help me walk around the room and later down the hall, and then I’d pile back into bed as if I’d spent the entire day doing push-ups. Most of the time I just lay there, reading, talking with Gail, seeing visitors-mainly cops-and watching television. I never got to see it, but Gail told me that right after the accident I’d been a feature on the local news, complete with a file photo that made me look twenty years younger. Katz, of course, had gone wild, running a story each day on the goings-on at the police department; Gail showed me the back issues. He didn’t have anything new, of course, but on his daily visits, Brandt let me know the publicity was making for some pretty frayed nerves among Tom Wilson and the selectmen. It was typical of Gail that she never commented on what was happening at the board meetings.
On the morning of the seventh day, Levin-the doctor with the hip dialogue-told me to “take a hike.” The release was provisional, however. I had to spend at least two additional days away from the office and, as he put it, eyeing Gail, “any sexual temptations.” In other words, home to Mother.
Gail had contacted her and my brother the same night I’d been brought in, and I had phoned them as soon as I was able. Leo had volunteered to drive them both down, but I’d told them to stay put. My mother’s traveling days, whether she admitted it or not, were over, and I knew Leo would be nervous leaving her behind. Besides, I saw little point in disrupting their lives just so they could see me lying in bed.
I did, however, promise to visit as soon as I could, and by Levin’s stern look, that time was apparently now. I went to my apartment, packed enough clothes for two days, and was driven north by Gail, again under doctor’s orders. As it turned out, he knew his patient well. As soon as we were on the interstate, I went into hibernation for the duration of the trip.
The family farm is no more. The house remains by the side of a dirt road branching off from the main drag between Thetford Center and Thetford Hill, but a row of trees now stands between the home I knew as a kid and the fields Leo and I and my father used to till long ago. The land was sold after Father’s death, clearing his few debts and setting Mother up with a nest egg that had served her adequately ever since. Romantic notions aside, I don’t think any one of us ever missed those fields.
The degree of Mother’s comfort, of course, wasn’t guaranteed by the money. We had Leo to thank for that. For reasons none of us had ever discussed, and probably never would, Leo had decided to stay at home. He worked as a butcher at the grocery store in Thetford Center, tooled around in an ever-changing menagerie of exotic and impractical cars, chased as many women as he could simulta co as many neously and took tender loving care of our mother. He was, as far as I had ever been able or willing to probe, as happy as he could possibly imagine.
Mother was not as easily read. Her life since early youth had been a series of roles imposed by circumstance and other people’s needs. The only girl in a large family of boys, she had filled her mother’s shoes at age nine when that exhausted woman had been done in by her eleventh childbirth. She cooked and cleaned and mended and nursed and virtually carried her small male army as far as she could take it, and on her eighteenth birthday she ran away with the only man she was ever to know in bed.
I’m sure it was her decision. My father was not a passionate man. Older than she by a good twenty years, he had walked behind his plow alone for as long as anyone could remember. When my mother’s family discovered what she had done, it never crossed their collective mind to blame my father, and I don’t doubt they were right.
As far as Leo or I could tell, marriage and fatherhood never had the slightest effect on the old man. He continued doing what he had done all along, and treated us with the same solid neutrality he handed out to the occasionally hired day laborers. I have often thought that it was in an effort to reflect his stolidity that Leo had never married and I had evolved the way I had. It hadn’t worked for either of us, of course. Certainly, as I came to realize following Ellen’s death, I had aimed for the image of a man untouched by events all around him and instead had ended up like a fish in a sea of complexities. I became so immersed in seeing at least some value in every viewpoint that I began to wonder if my father’s aloofness hadn’t perhaps been rooted in some less-than-human brain dysfunction.
I never saw my parents touch. I sensed a mutual respect, but I could never tell if that was based only partly on the fact that they both did their jobs to perfection. For even in the gloom of the Depression, life didn’t vary at home. Our farm marched ahead at my father’s steady pace, good times or bad, reflecting as much of reality as he did. Had Leo and I not left the house to go to school and grow up, I think the Depression, World War II, the atomic bomb, McCarthy, and all the rest would have passed us by without notice. And through it all, Mother did as she had done before, only now the children were her own and far fewer in number.
That, of course, was the crucial distinction, and one she had set out to create by choosing my father. Because despite his machinelike lack of emotion, ours was a happy home, made partially so by his stolid ability to make every new year as predictable as the last. Her role was to make those years pleasant and fulfilling, and as Leo’s caring for her now testified, she’d made it a success. When the phrase “earth mother” cropped up in the sixties, my picture of Mother was forever titled.
