“Gone? How can it be?” said Mary. “It was there when I drove into town. That can’t have been a half hour ago.”
Stillman’s breathing was already slowing. “Well, it’s sure as hell gone now. This would have been a hard place to steal a car today, so I’d say it’s been towed. I’d call the cops and ask, but my cell phone was locked in the glove compartment.”
“I don’t remember any ‘No Parking’ signs,” said Mary. “I remember looking, because I was going to—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Stillman interrupted. “We’ll just use your car and get out of here.” But Walker could tell that Stillman had concluded that it did matter.
They walked more quickly for the next block. Stillman was silent, but he seemed to be much more cautious than he had been earlier, and his face was grim. He would halt the others long before each intersection, then slowly move ahead while they waited. When he was still partially hidden by the corner house or its hedges, he would survey the cross street, peer up it toward Main, and then hurry across, not pausing to let Walker and Mary catch up until he was on the next dim stretch of sidewalk.
The second time he did it, Mary said to him, “When you went to the police station, whom did you talk to?”
“There were two rank-and-file cops and the chief of police,” said Stillman. “Look, don’t let your imagination run away with you. The cops in a town this size could hardly not know a guy like Scully, and probably anybody who would hang out with him. If they heard he was killed, they would naturally look for the other guy.”
“So why didn’t they tell us?” asked Walker.
“Why should they?” said Stillman.
Mary said, “Did you pick up any of their names?”
“Who?”
“The cops.”
Stillman was distracted, concentrating on the sights around him and the sounds on Main Street. “Uh . . . Raines. That was the chief.”
Walker said, “Another one was called Elton. And Carlyle. I remember hearing the name and wondering if he was related to the people who own the clothing store on Main.”
“Great,” Mary whispered to herself. “Just great.”
“What?” asked Walker.
She shook her head. “It’s nothing. This place is just giving me the creeps.”
Stillman turned to look into her eyes. “Anything I don’t know about?”
“It’s probably just me,” she said. “I spent a whole day in Concord reading old records and having Jonathan Tooker’s tall tales rattling around in my brain.” She walked on. “When I was doing Scully’s family tree, Myra kept bringing me all the papers she could find that came from Coulter. About twenty names kept popping up over and over. Coulter was a family name. And there were Scully, Holbrooke, Bowles, Ames, Derby, Perkins, Griggs, Starke, Fairweather, Gates . . . ” Her voice subsided.
“And?”
“Elton, Carlyle, and Raines,” she said reluctantly. “They’re all related to each other in six or seven ways by now. For all I know, if we did a blood test on the police chief, his DNA would be closer to Scully’s than Bowles’s is.”
“Let’s not scare ourselves,” said Stillman. “You could probably say the same in any small town east of the Appalachians. And in small towns, the police know who a man’s friends are. That’s probably the reason they knew enough to check Bowles’s house. Anyway, they’re doing it, so there’s nothing more we can do here except get into trouble.”
They were all silent as they reached Adams Street. Walker noticed that Stillman was making his precautions even more elaborate now. He did not cross Adams until he had stood and watched for at least thirty seconds.
When they caught up with him again, he was waiting beside a tree on the lawn of a dark house. Walker whispered, “Did you see something?”
“Not see,” said Stillman. “Feel. Maybe it’s just listening to Serena. What do you say we cut through a couple of back yards and pop out beside the car?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Walker. They moved to the space between two houses and turned to go across the back. The houses closer to the river seemed to be older, and the spaces between them larger. They moved through the next three yards; then Walker caught a glimpse of the street and recognized the spot. He said, “I’ve got the keys. Wait for me. When you hear the car engine start, you’ll know it’s okay.”
He slipped silently along the grassy side of the house. He could see a few of the lights in the windows of the Old Mill Restaurant across the river, and now he picked up faint voices floating across from its parking lot. It seemed terribly distant and unreachable, like a place in a painting. He moved closer to Washington Street, and now he could tell that the voices weren’t coming from the restaurant. They seemed nearer. He reached the corner of the last house, bent low, and moved forward to get a view of Washington Street. Mary’s car was gone.
38
Stillman and Mary followed Walker along the side of the house toward the front and looked out onto Washington Street. They could see the lighted windows of the Old Mill Restaurant across the river. Stillman slowly, cautiously sidestepped farther out, his back still to the clapboard siding, and peered up the street and along the banks of the river to the south.
Mary moved up beside Walker. “Why would they tow my car?”
But Stillman said, “Look at that.” He pointed and they looked to see the men walking along the riverbed. “Five lights,” he said. There were two wide-beamed spotlights that shone ahead of the men on the pebbly shoreline, two that played along the opposite bank, and one that swept methodically back and forth on the surface of the water. The lights on the ground ahead made the men’s dark silhouettes stand out clearly. There were six walking abreast, and each carried what appeared to be a short-barreled pump shotgun like the ones police used.
Stillman leaned out farther and craned his neck, then pulled back to let the others see. There were lights from a second group of men about the same size moving away from them in the opposite direction. Stillman stepped back along the side of the house a few feet and leaned close to whisper.
“That’s probably why they towed the car,” he said. “They seem to think those fellows are hiding along the river. They may even think it’s their car. It’s possible somebody saw the two of us down there and called the cops.”
“Wait,” said Walker. He was staring over Stillman’s shoulder at the Old Mill Restaurant. A dark blue van had pulled over the bridge and into the parking lot. Two uniformed policemen climbed out and walked into the restaurant.
Behind the windows, they could see that there was some kind of commotion going on. People were standing up from their tables. Others passed quickly across a window, as though they were getting out of the way. A police patrol car crossed the bridge and parked at an angle by the van, and two more cops hurried inside.
After a few minutes, the door of the restaurant swung open, and people began to appear. There were a pair of policemen, then a waiter, who pushed through the door and held it open. The two cops went to the van. One slid the side door open while the other climbed up into the driver’s seat.
The next one out was a man in a plaid short-sleeved shirt wearing handcuffs that kept his arms behind him and made walking awkward. Behind him was a policeman gripping his biceps. Walker said, “He’s not one of them. They got the wrong guy. He’s just a tourist. I saw him at lunch today with his wife and kids.”
The next one out was the wife, and she was handcuffed too. Walker waited in dread. When he had seen them earlier, they’d had two children with them. But none of the next three prisoners were children. There was an elderly couple, and a man who had a fishing hat that looked as though it had been placed on his head by somebody else.
Walker waited for the two children to appear, but the waiter who had been holding the door open went back into the restaurant and swung it shut behind him. Walker didn’t quite dare feel relief. The five prisoners were moving their heads and opening their mouths as though they were talking loudly, but Walker could not hear what they were saying. The young mother appeared to be the most angry. As the policemen pushed the others into the
