Death Benefits

37

Walker made his way across the yard behind Gerald Bowles’s house, staying close to the rear wall so that a policeman at an upper window would have to lean out in order to see him.

He did not hear a window opening, so he moved to the next yard. It was a colonial house, but the back had been opened up a bit to accommodate a pair of French doors leading onto the patio. He could see into a dining room that had been decorated in an eighteenth-century style, with bright red walls and framed pictures in rows that went from just below the fourteen-foot ceiling nearly to knee level, a table with gracefully curved legs, and a huge sideboard. At the far end of the room he could see a narrow doorway that led down a corridor into the kitchen. There was a young woman in a green sweater, her shining blond hair pulled tight into a short ponytail. She turned to a counter, lowered her eyes, and poured two cans of cola into glasses. Walker slipped across the French doors and into the darkness beyond.

The next three houses had lighted windows too, but they were all smaller and higher, so he was able to crouch and move under them without slowing his pace. The fifth house was dark, so he turned and trotted down its driveway to Maple Street. He glanced back up toward Gerald Bowles’s house, but he could see no sign of the policemen inside, and the angle had become oblique enough so that the upper windows were less threatening. He hurried to a spot where the shadows on the pavement were deep, and rushed across to the other side.

He moved to the bush where he had last seen Mary, but she was not there. He whirled, staring frantically to all sides, then heard a low, breathy whistle, and followed it to the next house. She was up on the front porch, crouching behind the balustrade. He moved toward her, and she came down to meet him. He took her arm and hurried her toward the far side of the house, leaning close to whisper, “There are cops inside the house.”

She whispered back, “That’s a relief. I saw Stillman come out of a yard a block away and leave, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Walker kept scanning the street, now and then glancing back at the Bowles house to reassure himself that he was not taking Mary into a spot that was easily visible from the upper windows. When they had gone around the house to the back yard, he stopped and pointed. “The next street this way is Constitution. We’ve been up and down it a couple of times without seeing anybody.”

Mary moved across the next few back yards with him until they emerged beside one that faced Constitution Avenue. Walker stepped out onto the driveway and stood still for a moment, staring up the street toward the police station, then down toward the river. There seemed to be no cars out this late on the residential streets, and it had been at least two hours since he had seen his last pedestrian. He beckoned to Mary, then waited for her on the sidewalk.

When they had walked in silence for a block, he said quietly, “We don’t know what’s going on. We knew the police were putting a team at Scully’s house, but not this one.”

Mary looked at him in amazement. “You talked to the police, and then decided to pull a burglary?”

“It’s not what we had planned,” said Walker. “I guess that’s what’s been wrong since the beginning. We don’t have a strategy. We just react. Something bad happens, and we fall all over ourselves to get into the middle of it as fast as we can.”

He walked on a few paces. “We saw two men here, going into the coffee shop on Main. They were the same two who cornered us in an alley in Pasadena. We figured—or Stillman did—that they must be here for the same reason we were: to look for evidence that would connect them to Scully and the other dead man, who turned out to be Bowles. So we tried to get the police to arrest them. When the cops tried and the two men didn’t turn up right away, Stillman mentioned that they were here to break into Scully’s house. The police chief said he’d put cops there to catch them at it.”

“It seems as though you don’t have much to complain about,” she said. “They’re doing more than you asked them to.”

“That’s the problem,” Walker said. “We didn’t know about Bowles until you told us. How did they?”

They were coming up to Grant Street. Walker moved ahead, looked to the left, then the right, and froze. A man was turning off Main Street onto the sidewalk on Grant. As he moved away from the bright lights, he broke into a run. He was coming toward them.

Walker said quietly, “Try to look normal. If he’s okay, he’ll go past us on Grant. If he’s not, run for your car.”

He stepped off the curb to cross the street, his arm around Mary’s waist as though they were simply a couple out walking on a summer night, but Walker kept the man in the corner of his eye.

Mary said, “If I run, what are you going to do?”

Walker didn’t answer. He took a couple of deep breaths and looked at the next hundred feet of Constitution Avenue to pick the best spot to turn and fight, then looked back at Grant Street.

The man passed under the street lamp at the intersection, and Mary said, “Stillman.”

They stopped and Stillman trotted up to them, breathing heavily. “Glad I caught up with you,” he said. “The Explorer’s gone.”

“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.