upset. She particularly wanted me to let her know if you were OK.” He took a scrap of paper from a pocket. “That’s her phone number. Of course I could give her a call myself, but if you want to speak to her then you’ll be saving the police department the price of a long-distance phone call.” Nickerson held out the piece of paper.
I took it. “Thanks, Ted.”
“Just being neighborly, Paul.” He hesitated. “I suppose you’re not going to tell me what this is all about?”
“One day, maybe.”
“Yeah, and maybe one day the Red Sox will win the Series.” He climbed into his car and wound down the window. “The Goddamn town wants to declare police cars a public facility and therefore smoke free. Fuck ’em, I say.” He waved his cigarette at me, reversed the car, then drove away.
I stared at the piece of paper. It felt like one last chance. Or, of course, it could be another trap to snare a fool, just as Kathleen’s last visit had been, but my future was not so golden that I needed to take care of it and so I drove the truck up to the main road and, with my last few quarters, placed a call to Maryland.
Kathleen Donovan lived in a small house on the ragged outskirts of a one-street country town. The house had two storeys, a wide verandah, and a windbreak of scrub pine. Behind it was a meadow with an old tobacco drying shed decaying in its center. “None of it’s mine,” she said. “I just rent it.”
“It’s nice,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.
“Not when the wind’s in the south. Then you can smell the chicken farm beyond the swamp.” She laughed suddenly, knowing I had lied out of politeness. “I just wanted to get away from Baltimore.”
“To be near your folks?”
She shook her head. “To get away from them. I spend three or four nights a week up there, and it’s good to get away. It’s real nice here in spring, you know, when the dogwood is out?”
“And in summer?”
“Hot. Too hot.” She sounded resigned. “I don’t know. I guess I won’t renew the lease. This was an experiment. I always wanted to live in the country, and I thought once David and I were divorced that it would be a real good time to do it, but it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not one of my carrots came up, not one! And the deer ate all the lettuce and the bean bushes had bugs and there were worms in the tomatoes.”
“That’s why God made supermarkets.”
She laughed. Then looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” We were standing beside my pick-up. I had only just arrived, and we were both feeling awkward, and I guessed she was regretting her impulsive agreement to let me visit her. I was nervous, and the ten-hour drive from Cape Cod had given me too much time to anticipate the failure of this meeting. I wanted to fall in love with Kathleen, maybe I had half convinced myself that I was already in love with her, and I had even half convinced myself that it was not simply because she was her sister’s ghost. I had not been truthful about my reasons for visiting, but instead had told her I had business in Washington and could I perhaps take the chance of dropping by? She had hesitated, then agreed, and now I asked her once more why she was apologizing to me. “Why?”
“For agreeing to help those people. Who were they?”
“You didn’t know them?” I asked.
“Not really.” She turned away. “That’s why you came, right? To find out about them?”
“Yes,” I lied. I had come because I wanted to resurrect Roisin in her sister.
“You want to walk?” Kathleen asked.
“Sure.”
“If you go five miles down that track you come to the Chesapeake Bay.” She pointed eastwards. “I had this idea that in summer I’d bike down there and have lazy days on the water.”
“You and a million mosquitoes, right?”
She nodded. “And the ticks.” She led me to the road and we walked slowly toward the small town. The landscape was very flat, accentuating the sky and reminding me of Flanders. “It was the girl who came to me, Sarah Sing Tennyson?” Kathleen said. “She said you’d thrown her out of the house, and that she wanted to get inside to rescue her paintings, and that if I took you for a walk then she knew she’d be safe.” Kathleen blushed slightly. “She was very persuasive.”
“I can imagine.” I kicked a dry pine cone ahead of me. “I wonder how she found you?”
“That was easy. You remember I hired a private detective to find out about you? Well he visited the house when she was there, and I guess he and she talked. But she never told me she was taking men with her, or that they planned to beat you up. I couldn’t believe it!” Her voice rose in innocent protest as she remembered the violence. “I phoned the police!”
“I know, thank you.”
“So what happened?”
“They locked me up for a while.”
“Who were they?”
“They were from Ireland,” I told her.
“So what happened?”
I shrugged. “They were looking for something. And when I told them where it was, they let me go.”
She looked up at me. “I felt badly. I didn’t feel badly when I agreed to help Sarah Tennyson, because I thought she was being real straight and you’d been a pig to me in Belgium and I thought I’d enjoy getting back at you. But you were different on Cape Cod.”
I walked in silence for a few paces. The bushes beside the road looked dead and dry, the meadows were pale. “I wanted to tell someone the truth,” I said, “and I’d decided to trust you.”
She nodded, then laughed as she realized that I had trusted her when she had been deceiving me, and vice versa. She bit her lip. “What fools we all are.”
“I thought that after so many years of lies it would be a change to tell the truth,” I explained, “like giving up smoking, or going off the booze.”
“And is it a change?” she asked.
“It makes life less complicated.”
“Like I thought small-town life would be, only it isn’t really less complicated, there’s just less of it. This is it.” She nodded at the main street. “Two churches, a town office, a bank, feed store, convenience store, coffee shop, and a post office. The movie house closed down, the service station moved to Route Five, but you can buy gas from Ed’s feed store if he really likes you and his son isn’t watching.”
“What’s wrong with Ed’s son?”
“He’s in the State Police and he can’t stand his dad, not since his mom told him about his dad’s fling with Mary Hammond who used to deliver the mail before Bobby Evans’s dog bit her leg and it went septic. The leg not the dog.”
“And you like living here?” I asked.
“I hate it.”
We both laughed. “And you’re too stubborn to admit you’ve made a mistake,” I challenged her, “because you’re so like Roisin.”
“Am I like Roisin?” she asked. We had stopped in the main street and were facing each other. “Am I really?”
“Yes. In looks, anyway.”
She frowned. “Does that make it hard for you?”
I hesitated, then told the truth. “Yes.”
“Don’t,” she told me. She was frowning.
“Don’t?” It seemed the world trembled on an edge, and I knew it was not going to fall my way. I had built a dizzying scaffold impossibly high and had dared to think she would want to share it with me.
“I’ve got a guy, Paul,” Kathleen said gently. “He teaches school in Frederick.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said, but I had meant it, and she knew I had meant it, and suddenly I felt such a fool and just wanted to be out of this damn chicken town.
“He’s a good man,” she went on.
