Death Benefits

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 van, she pivoted to face one of the cops. She stood straight with her shoulders back, and Walker could see from the way she held her head up to look down her nose at the cop that what she was saying was not calculated to make him happy.

The cop finished guiding the older man into the opening of the van, then turned to reach for the woman’s arm, as he had done with the others. She twisted her body angrily to pull the arm out of his reach, but the cop seemed to have been waiting for this. He extended his reach, spun her body around, and gripped her hair from behind. He jerked her head back and dragged her to the van. Instead of stopping at the side door as he had done before, he stepped up into the van without letting her go. Walker could see her legs working quickly to keep up with him, then to push herself up into the van to stop the pain. The feet slid inward on the floor, and one of the cops from the patrol car pushed the door shut and banged the side of the van twice before he went back to join his partner.

The van pulled forward, swung around in a wide circle and out of the parking lot, crossed the bridge onto Main Street with the patrol car behind it, then was lost to sight behind the buildings.

Walker whispered, “They’re tourists. How can the police think they have anything to do with this?”

Mary said softly, “What if they’re looking for us?”

“We’re just witnesses. I don’t think they’d look this hard for witnesses,” Stillman said. “Besides, they’ve seen us. Two of us, anyway. They know what we look like. Nobody’s going to mistake that girl down there for Max Stillman.”

“Then what are they doing?” asked Mary.

“Probably something happened in the restaurant,” said Stillman. “A fight in the bar or something. If you’re looking for two men, you don’t arrest four and throw in a girl for equal-opportunity purposes.”

“You mind if we get away from the river?” said Walker. “Everything seems to be going on down here.”

“Hold on a little longer,” Stillman said. “If you’re not where everything’s going on, you won’t know what it is.”

They crouched between the two houses, watching. After the disturbance at the Old Mill, the night subsided into quiet again. Walker could hear frogs peeping somewhere in the shallows on the other side of the river. The men who had been walking the banks with flashlights had long ago moved beyond his sight, and had not returned. Time passed, and its passage was soothing, making the shock and alarm of the scene outside the restaurant slowly diminish. He sat down beside Mary near the back of the house, and after a time she leaned on his chest and burrowed to place his arm over her shoulder. She whispered, “Walker, are you scared?”

The question should not have surprised him, but it did. It was what he had asked Stillman once. He had no answer at first. The word didn’t seem to describe what he felt tonight. He was aware that there was danger out there in the riverbed and maybe even on the streets in this neighborhood, but he had begun to feel that he knew how to stay away from it for the moment. He searched for another term, but each seemed to be unsatisfactory because it complicated the feeling rather than elucidating it.

“I think it’s probably not as bad as it feels right now,” he said. “Seeing the cop grab that woman by the hair, that was horrible, upsetting. Maybe we’ll get to testify for her when she sues the town.”

“If they can get a jury around here that isn’t related to the cop,” said Mary. She sat up in sudden frustration and looked toward the front of the house. “What’s keeping him?” Her body became very still, and she slowly rose to her feet, not taking her eyes away from the slice of clear space between the houses. As she took a step forward, Walker heard her mutter to herself, “What now?”

Walker was on his feet, moving past her to Stillman’s side at the front of the house. Beyond the river and the Old Mill, far across the open fields where the road cut between the hills, there were headlights. He saw lights moving into the woods where the loop in the river brought it back and the covered bridge crossed it. The lights came out of the woods toward the empty fields, past the two old barns. He counted eight sets of lights, then ten, then fourteen. The first of them made the final turn and the headlights swung and settled, aiming along the straight stretch so the brightness seemed to build and the glow cast shadows of trees on the walls of the old buildings on this side of the river.

“Have you figured out what it is?” asked Walker.

“It’s not our two burglars,” Stillman answered. He pointed at the parking lot beside the Old Mill. “They seem to be expected.”

There were police cars in the lot again, this time four of them. There were a couple of policemen out of their cars and standing by the entrance to the lot. When the headlights of the first car to arrive shone on them, the cops waved the driver into the lot, and kept waving. As each car after it came within range, the cops waved it in toward the row of parking spaces at the wall of the building near the front door. “It looks to me like the party of forty they were getting ready for this afternoon has arrived,” said Stillman.

As each car parked, the occupants opened their doors and got out. They all seemed to be men, most of them in pairs, but some in threes or fours. There were cops near the door of the restaurant who moved along the row of cars, shaking hands with the newcomers, talking, gesturing. A few of the men went into the restaurant, but most of them walked around in the lot, talking with men from other cars. As more cars arrived, the drivers and passengers gathered into an amorphous crowd.

They did not look to Walker as though they had come for a party—at any rate, not the same party. Some of them wore jeans, some pressed pants and sport coats, and a few wore ties. One of the police cars started and made a wide turn, throwing its headlights on the row of parked cars. “The cars all look new,” said Walker.

The police car pulled to one end of the row and stopped, and another pulled up at the other end. Stillman said, “Now, why do you suppose the police would come to the party?”

Something else was going on now. The men were moving, forming themselves into two ragged lines near the two police cars. Policemen opened the trunks of their cars, and the lines began to inch forward. As each man arrived at the back bumper of a police car, the cop leaning into it handed him a short-barreled pump shotgun. The man would move around the car and stop at the hood, where there was a big cardboard carton. He reached in and took a box of shells out of it, stood apart a few yards, filled his pockets with shells, and handed the rest of the box to the man nearest him, who would do the same. Others would stop to push a few shells into their shotguns’ magazines before they did anything else.

“Looks like reinforcements,” said Walker. “Maybe cops from other towns?”

Mary tapped Stillman and Walker both on their shoulders. “Can we please go now?”

“I’d like to see which direction they’re going first,” said Stillman. “When you see a man with a shotgun, it’s better to be behind him than in front.”

Almost all the men were carrying their shotguns differently now, with the muzzle upward, so Walker could tell that they were loaded. The men began climbing back into their cars. There was a discussion between one of the cops and the driver of the lead car, and then they began to move. The first one came up over the bridge, turned right onto Washington Street, and stopped to wait for the others, only fifty or sixty feet from their hiding place.

Stillman said, “Now we can go.” He hurried back the way they had come. When he reached Mary, he pulled her along with him. They moved through the yards they had crossed on the way to the river. When they reached the first cross street, Stillman stopped and looked both ways, then ran across, and kept running up the sidewalk on Constitution Avenue. It was several blocks before he decreased his pace.

“What is it?” asked Mary. “What are they doing?”

“They’re getting ready to make a sweep,” said Stillman. “It’s not a good time to be outdoors. We’d better head for the church.”

Mary said, “The church?”

But Stillman set off again at a run. Mary let out a sigh and set off after him. Walker kept his eyes on Mary as they ran, but he sensed that she was not having trouble keeping up. He knew that she was frightened and confused, but she seemed to have made a decision to hold those feelings apart for now and concentrate on the need to run. After a few more blocks, Walker could tell that Stillman was beginning to feel the strain of the long hours and the running, but Mary looked like any young woman out for a jog on a summer night. She ran with her fists clenched and her head up, her knees rising high. He found himself wishing she had a dog, or a pair of earphones over her ears, instead of two male companions.

When they reached the back of the church, they stopped in the shadowy space behind the building to let their breathing slow and their hearts stop pounding. Walker said, “I’ll go around and see if it’s still open.”

Mary’s hand came up and pressed against his chest. “I’ll go. They haven’t seen me.” She slipped around the building toward the front. Walker and Stillman followed as far as the front corner, staying close to the wall to avoid straying into the lights from Main Street. Walker waited a few seconds, but found waiting unbearable. He stepped around the corner and saw her leaning hard to push open the heavy front door, and hurried across the facade and up the steps with Stillman’s breaths huffing in his ear. When they were inside and the big door closed behind them, it was too dark to see anything.

Mary whispered, “I’ve still got the little flashlight.”

“It’ll show through the windows,” said Stillman. “Let your eyes get used to the dark.” His voice told Walker he was slowly edging toward the doorway of the cloak room.

Walker took Mary’s hand. “Come away from the entrance.” They found the wall and the doorway by touch. When they were in the cloak room, she slipped her hand out of his. “This isn’t a great hiding place.”

Walker said, “The steeple is above us, and there’s a belfry at the top. We’ve been up there.” He lifted her hand and set it on one of the varnished slats attached to the wall. “This is the ladder.”

She was silent for a few seconds. “I think I see it. That square way up there?”

Walker asked, “Are you afraid of heights?”

“Of course I’m afraid of heights,” she snapped.

“Stillman can go up first, and then you,” said Walker. “I’ll be under you, and if anything . . . happens, I’ll catch you.”

Stillman’s voice came out of the dark. “He’s easily dumb enough to do it, you know.” Stillman set his toe on the lowest wooden slat and began to climb.

Mary said to him, “If you fall, don’t expect me to catch you.”

“I’ll use extra caution.” He kept climbing, and soon they heard him lift the cover off the hatch. Their eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so they saw his legs grow shorter and disappear into the deeper darkness above.

Walker started to guide Mary to the ladder, but she shrugged his hand off. “I see it,” she said. She reached to the highest rung she could and climbed. Walker watched from below, trying to discern the exact position and attitude of her body in the dim light so he could judge her trajectory if she slipped and fell backward. She kept her head up and climbed like a person who hated it and was determined to get it finished before she had time to think. In a minute only her legs were visible. She suddenly rose out of sight as Stillman took her hands and lifted her up.

Walker climbed quickly too, then carefully replaced the hatch cover and looked around him to find the others. The open square on the third level above them seemed brighter than the second level, even at night, but he could see little. He heard a shuffle of feet and moved toward it. He whispered, “I’m up.”

Mary said, “Good for you. I’ll go first this time, and you can both catch me.” She was already climbing. Her body momentarily blocked the light in the opening above, then disappeared again, and Stillman began to climb. Walker waited until he was up before he climbed too.

He reached the upper level to find Stillman standing at the western side of the belfry, staring out between the slats, and Mary, at the eastern side, looking at him. “This isn’t as bad as I expected.”

“It’s not the sort of place where somebody will just happen by and stumble on us,” Walker agreed.

Stillman said, “They’re moving.” Walker and Mary stepped close to Stillman and looked down. The cars had spread out along Washington Street, and now they were taking positions at each of the streets that ran up from the river into the heart of the town. At some signal that Walker could not see, they began to cruise up all of the streets at once. On each street there was a lead car with its high-beam headlights on. Behind it at least a hundred feet was a second car with its headlights off.

Stillman said, “See what they’re doing? The first car comes along, trying to light everything up. If it goes by you, and you’re an optimist, you think you’re in the clear. You break cover and move. Only you’re not in the clear because there’s another one coming along that you didn’t see.”

“I hope those two guys are optimists,” said Walker.

“Come here,” said Stillman. “When the cars coming up Main get right below us and close to the street lamps, see if you can make out a license plate.”

Walker knelt on the floor and put his face close to a louvered opening. He could see the two cars coming slowly up the brightly lit commercial street. Both of the cars on Main had their high-beam headlights on. Each time the lead car reached a corner, it would pause briefly while the driver looked up the cross street and the car behind caught up. Then the lead car would move forward again. The lead driver seemed to be trying to stay abreast of the cars on the other streets.

As Walker stared at the white license plate, a suspicion formed in his mind. The print on it seemed to be green. He squinted and leaned forward as the car approached the block where the church was, trying to screen out the glare of the headlights and keep his eyes on the plate. It passed the church and stopped at the corner. As the car behind it came closer, its bright headlights made the reflective surface of the rear license plate glow more and more brightly. “It’s not New Hampshire,” said Walker. He could see that the green numbers were outlined in orange. “The first plate looks like . . . Florida!”

Stillman nodded. “That’s what I was afraid of. When the first one crossed the bridge, I thought that’s what the plate looked like. But I figured you had seen a lot more of them lately than I have. It explains why they’re all new. They’re rental cars.”

Walker said, “The second one is something else. Maybe Georgia.”

“What does that mean?” asked Mary.

Stillman said quietly, “It means we came to the right place. It looks like everybody involved in those murders is turning up here at once.”

“It seems that would make it the wrong place,” she said. “I wonder why they’re all here now.”

Stillman answered, “This afternoon, before we saw those two guys, we were in the Old Mill. Waiters were setting up for a party of thirty or forty. We couldn’t figure out why. It must have been for them. They’ve been away—down in Florida, where the hurricane was—stealing more money. It was going to be a welcome-home party. I guess the two we saw this afternoon were just the first ones to arrive.”

“They must all live here,” said Walker. “It wasn’t just Scully and Bowles.”

“So nobody down there is searching for those two killers, right?” said Mary. “They’re searching for us.”

Stillman nodded. “I think the cops figured that as soon as they told us the two killers were gone, we’d leave. Only when we didn’t leave, the plan had to change. They decided to wait until after dark, when these guys got here and they’d have the manpower to find us. By then the rest of the town would be asleep, most of the strangers would be gone—”

“Those tourists,” Mary interrupted. “The ones in the restaurant.”

Stillman said, “I think they were supposed to be gone, back to wherever they were staying, before those guys got here. They weren’t. They couldn’t be allowed to see forty men show up, get guns from the police, and search the town. The cops will probably keep them in a holding cell overnight, where they won’t see or hear anything. In the morning they’ll tell them it was a case of mistaken identity, apologize, and let them go.”

Mary was quiet for a few seconds. “How are we going to get out of here?”

Stillman said, “If we look closely enough, we’ll see an opportunity.”

“To do what—shoot our way out?”

“Those men down there appear to be prepared for that sort of thing,” said Stillman. “We, on the other hand, are not.”

“We’re not?”

“No guns,” said Walker.

Her eyes widened. “You came here looking for killers, and you didn’t even think to bring a gun?”

“We weren’t looking for killers,” said Walker. “We were looking for a dead man’s house.” When she remained rigid, he added, “We were just doing research.”

She glared at him, then at Stillman, and folded her arms across her chest. Then she turned to face the slatted panel beside her, clearly only because it was a way to end the conversation. After a moment, her arms unfolded and she grasped one of the louvers as she brought her face close to it. “Uh-oh.”

Walker stepped to her side and looked. Some of the cars had reached the spot at the east end of town where the streets ended and a long fence separated the town from a vast, grassy expanse of field. The cars were moving toward Main Street. “They’ve come to the end,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“Not the cars,” Mary said. “Down this street. The houses.”

Walker bent lower and looked out between the two louvers that were at Mary’s eye level. He could see that on Oak Street, something new was going on. There were police cars with their red and blue lights flashing, creeping slowly up the street. There were other cops on foot, walking quickly from house to house, knocking on doors. He raised his head one level to see the block on Oak where the police cars had already been.

Lights shone from all the windows, and the porch lamps and driveway floods threw broad patches of light on the ground. In the new illumination, he could see people. There were pedestrians coming out into the middle of the quiet block, walking in small groups. Sometimes there were pairs or small knots of people, but all walked toward Main Street. They looked like victims of some disaster streaming out of a city.

He moved his vantage again. The police cars had left the block where he had first seen them. Lights were turning on there, too. Doors were opening, and people were coming outside. As they reached Main they passed under the bright street lamps, and he could see them better. There were men and women, and some who appeared to be teenagers. A pair of men who passed directly under the steeple before they crossed the street had white hair. Every person he saw was carrying a gun.