“April called,” he said, “and left a message on my machine.”
“When?”
“Today. I called home for my messages and there it was.”
I spread my hands. “Well?”
Billy said, “You’ll hear it. We’re almost there.”
We had turned off 29 onto 214, a winding, gently rising road between the towns of Scaggsville and Highland. Only twenty minutes north of the District line over the Patuxent and into Howard County, the area was a mix of farmland broken by the creeping beginnings of development. Livestock dotted the landscape patched with last week’s snowstorm as the sun burned down in the west. I lowered the passenger visor and sat back.
About a mile past a small shopping center that housed a pizza parlor and video rental store, Billy hung a right onto a gravelly two-lane road. He eased into a circular driveway and cut the engine. The sun had dropped now, leaving his house, a long rambler of brick and stone, in shadow.
“Nice,” I said.
“I stole it,” Billy said. “Come on.”
We walked to his door, behind which we heard three deep barks and then some impatient crying from what sounded to be a large breed of dog. Billy turned the locks and a brown-eyed shepherd-Lab mix with a yellow coat appeared, her tail wagging slowly. She licked Billy’s glove and smelled mine, and we entered the house.
I followed Billy through a marbled foyer and past a living room elegantly but rather self-consciously appointed in Louis Quatorze furniture. The dog walked clumsily beside me, bumping my leg and looking up at me as she did it. We reached a kitchen done in white custom cabinetry with white appliances and a white Corian countertop ending in the shape of a modified mushroom cap.
“Take your coat off and have a seat,” Billy said. “Want a beer?”
“Sure.”
Billy pulled on the weighted door of the built-in refrigerator and withdrew a bottle of Sam Adams. He removed the cap with an opener and handed me the bottle. I had a pull of the cool, sweet lager and then another.
Billy said, “Listen.” He went to a small oak table with scrolled feet, on which rested an answering machine, telephone, large notepad, and a Ball jar of pencils and pens. He pushed the bar on the answering machine.
A female voice began to speak on the tape. It was a calm voice, the words spoken plainly and without anxiety, with the upward inflection at the end of each sentence that is the vocal trademark of the mid-Atlantic South.
“Hello, Bill… It’s me, baby. You got my note I guess… I guess the note kinda said it all. But I wanted to tell you, ’cause I figure you’d want to know… I figured you’d want to know that I’m all right, Bill. I went to see Tommy one last time and then I left, and now I’m… away. But I wanted you to know that I’m okay. Take care of Maybelle, baby, that’s all I’m going to ask… I’m not scared, Bill… Take care.”
Billy stopped the tape and hit the rewind. I stared at him as I listened to the whir of the machine.
“That her?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“She sound all right?”
“She sounded real calm, buddy. Real calm.”
“Who’s Maybelle?”
Billy chin-nodded the Lab and said, “Her dog.”
“And Tommy?”
“An old friend. An old boyfriend, I should say. In southern Maryland.”
“Then we’re headed in the right direction.”
“I’d say so,” he said unemotionally.
“You gonna play this for the cops?”
“Should I?”
“Don’t erase it,” I said. “But I don’t think you need to bring them in again, not yet.”
Billy nodded. “Relax while I get some things together. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
When he was gone I walked to the kitchen’s bay window and looked out into the dusk that was rapidly turning to darkness. Maybelle stayed with me and smelled the leg of my jeans. “That’s my cat you’re smelling, girl.” I scratched behind her ears and rubbed the bridge of her snout. She licked my hand furiously, cementing our friendship.
Walking to the phone, I dialed my landlord. Still no answer. I finished my beer and tossed the bottle int che widtho a wastebasket that I found under the white porcelain sink. I drew another Sam Adams from the Sub-Zero and moved a chair to the bay window, where I drank it facing out into the night. Maybelle lay at my feet, breathing slowly.
Fifteen minutes later Billy emerged from the shadows of the hall and dropped a duffel bag at my feet. “Road trip,” he said, smiling. “Like the old days, Greek.”
“Right.” I found a black cotton turtleneck and navy shakerknit sweater in the bag and put them on. Billy handed me a blue Hollofil jacket. I zipped that up over the sweater and transferred my smokes from my overcoat to the jacket pocket. I patted the pocket. “What about Maybelle?”
“My neighbors can walk her tomorrow.”
“Let’s bring her.”
“She’ll be a pain in the ass.”
“She’s April’s. Let’s bring her.”
The mutt’s tail was already wagging. Billy shrugged and the dog woofed and trotted to the front door of the house. We followed and Billy locked the door behind him. Out in the driveway we walked to the car, where Maybelle waited patiently for Billy to release the front seat of the Maxima. Maybelle leaped into the backseat as I entered the passenger side.
“Thirsty?” Billy asked as he ignitioned the car.
“I could stand it.”
“We’ll stop in the old neighborhood on the way out,” he said, a trace of boyish mischief peeking through his smile. “For a short one.”
Billy tapped on the brights as we pulled out onto the gravelly road. In the vanity mirror of the visor I saw Maybelle staring out into the blackness. Her breath formed crystal gray spiders on the tinted glass.
ELEVEN
At 29 we stopped at a deli for a six of Bud cans and drank two of those on our way into Silver Spring. Billy talked about the soft real estate market the whole way in, shaking his head solemnly between swigs of beer. He was wearing jeans and oilskin Timberland boots and a logoed, royal blue jacket over a heavy wool shirt. We kept the radio off, the low, steady hum of the engine the only sound around our silences.
Billy parked in Wheaton and cut the engine in front of Captain Wright’s, near the intersection of Georgia and University. Captain Wright’s had stood stubbornly at that corner through twenty years of modernization, and though it was in the geographical domain of the now-closed Northwood High, it had always been the hangout for students and “alumni” of Blair. Blair boys liked to think that their Territorial Wrights (as they called them) had evolved from the fact that the place was just too tough for Northwood boys, but in truth many of the bars in that part of the county, from Silver Spring to Aspen Hill, were roughly alike. It was a headbanger’s bar, with the stale, vinegary smell of cheap liquor oiled into every wood fl, en crack. A suburban boy on his way to a rotten liver could maybe get laid here, and if not, he could always skin his knuckles. The sign outside read CAPTAIN WRIGHT’S, but every teenager who gunned his glass-pack Firebird or muscle car Malibu up Georgia and University in the seventies had called this place, with some misplaced degree of affection, “Captain Fights.”
I patted Maybelle on the head and cracked a window for her before we headed into Wright’s. Over the door a plastic marquee announced that the Jailbaiter Boyz (from Frederick, no doubt, in that all the boogie/glam-metal outfits from that part of the state substituted their s ’s with z ’s) were the headliners that evening. We pushed on a thick door and left fresh air behind for stale as we entered.
