Sing It to Her Bones

15

I accelerated away from the doctor’s office, feeling relieved, even though I had just lost my second job in less than four months. On my left, halfway down High, I could see the low brick and cinder-block building of the Volunteer Fire Department, its oversize garage doors rolled open. A single fire truck had been pulled into the drive, and someone had bathed and polished the vehicle until its yellow paint and chrome grill gleamed in the sun. A volunteer dressed in blue jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt was washing down the drive with a hose. At the end of the drive stood a sign on wheels with removable letters: WEDNESDAY NIGHT SPAGHETTI SUPPER-ALL YOU CAN EAT. My stomach rumbled.

I wasn’t in the mood for one of Connie’s PB and Js. My mouth was all set for a thick, flavorful tuna fish sandwich on whole wheat (with fries) from Ellie’s when I remembered I had no money or credit cards to pay for it. I’d last seen my purse as the pond gulped down my car. I checked my watch. Bill Taylor was usually working the afternoon shift at Ellie’s. The last time I’d seen him he’d been standing in water up to his waist, rescuing my car. As a volunteer fireman I knew he would be tuned in to what was going on at the fire hall. Maybe they’d found my purse. He also might sell me a sandwich and an iced tea on a smile and a promise. I wanted to ask him about Katie and his former teammates anyway.

I pulled into the parking strip in front of Ellie’s and breezed into the store. Neither Angie nor her mother was about. Somewhere a radio played softly, but otherwise, the place was deserted.

I stuck my head into the kitchen. “Hello?” Nobody was there, either.

I was about to leave, when I smelled cigarette smoke. Curious, I ambled through the kitchen and stuck my head out the back door. Bill was sitting on the back porch, smoking.

“There you are!”

“Just taking a break, Mrs. Ives. Been kinda slow today.”

I didn’t want to hit him up for a sandwich right off the bat, so I asked, “Any news about my car?”

Bill took a drag from his cigarette and held the smoke in his mouth for an extraordinarily long time. “We towed it to the Exxon station,” he said as he exhaled. “Rutherford doesn’t want anyone to touch it until his forensic team’s been over it with their tweezers and magnifying glasses.”

“That’s good. How about my purse, though? Any word about that?”

He shook his head. “Probably sitting in the muck at the bottom of that old pond, Mrs. Ives. If I were you, I’d just buy a new one, claim the expense on your insurance. That’s what insurance companies are for.”

I slapped myself in the forehead. “I was here to pick up a sandwich for lunch, but I don’t have any way to pay for it. How can I have been so stupid?”

“You’ve had a lot on your mind lately.” The way he looked at me, one bushy eyebrow raised, made me wonder if he had heard about Paul’s predicament. “I think I could rustle you up a sandwich.” He crushed out his cigarette, and I followed him into the store, my mouth already beginning to water.

“How are you feeling today?” he asked from the kitchen as I nosed around the empty store.

“A little stiff.” In point of fact, I was a mass of scars, scrapes, cuts, and bruises, old and new, and my right arm was aching again. “But I’ll do.”

“You need to be careful, Mrs. Ives. First you fall off that boat; then you wreck your car. Makes me wonder.”

Is that how he saw me? Ms. Klutz? I wasn’t sure I liked this guy, even if he was making me lunch. “Makes you wonder what, Bill?”

“Wonder if they might not have been accidents. You come into town and all, pretty much a stranger, and the next thing you know, all these bad things start happening to you. Don’t you wonder why?”

I had wondered about that, but I didn’t feel like sharing my suspicions with Bill. No telling what he’d do with them. They might even end up in his book. “I can be just as careless or unlucky as the next person, Bill,” I said, peering into the kitchen as he scooped tuna fish salad onto thickly sliced bread.

“I’d just watch who you’re being friendly with.” He squinted back at me. “That’s my advice.”

“Bill, I hardly know anybody in Pearson’s Corner.”

“Sometimes it’s the people closest to you that you least suspect.”

“I think you’ve been staring at your computer screen too long. You can’t mean Connie.” Bill shook his head.

“Dennis?” Bill met my gaze with steady, unblinking eyes. “You think Dennis had something to do with my falling overboard? Or the accident? That’s impossible. He’s a cop, for Christ’s sake. Besides, I saw the guys who ran me off the road. I didn’t recognize either one of them.”

“You don’t have to be driving to be responsible for something.”

I felt a sudden chill, as if a shadow had passed over the sun and the wind had picked up. My intuition had been telling me the same thing, but I couldn’t make it fit. “Bill, I think you’re wrong. What possible reason could anybody have for bumping me off?”

“I don’t think they’re trying to bump you off. I think they want you to go home. Mind your own business.”

“Who’s ‘they’?”

“Don’t know. Just a gut feeling I have.”

Don’t know or won’t tell? I checked off the people I knew: Connie and Dennis. Angie and her mother. Frank Chase and Liz. Bill here… and, Lord help me, Hal.

“Surely you can’t mean Hal? I hardly know the man.”

“That’s not what I hear.” He was folding waxed paper around the sandwich, making surprisingly crisp and neat edges.

“Well, you heard wrong. What is it with this place? Go sailing with a fellow once and every busybody in town has you heading off to Las Vegas for a quickie wedding.”

“There’s a lot you don’t know about him.” He slid the sandwich over in my direction and wiped his hands on a dish towel.

“I’m sure there is, and it will probably stay that way.” I couldn’t protest too strongly without sounding sweet on the guy.

“Let me tell you something about that boyfriend of yours.”

“For the last time… he’s not my boyfriend!”

“Did you know that he used to be the coach of the high school basketball team?”

This was his big secret? A wave of relief washed over me. “Yes. Hal told me all about that. He was very proud of winning the state championship.”

“And did he tell you why he left?” I didn’t say anything. Bill wore a self-satisfied smirk. “I didn’t think so. He was forced to resign.”

“Forced? Why on earth?”

“Oh, it was all very hush-hush. Didn’t want to upset the parents, create a scandal.” Bill seemed to be enjoying himself, dragging out the telling of it.

“A scandal about what, for heaven’s sake?”

“It was never proven, of course, but he was suspected of providing some of the team with amphetamines and anabolic steroids.” The corners of his mouth twisted up in a hint of a smile. I wanted to smack it off his face.

“But you were on the team, Bill. Surely you’d have known if the allegations were true or not.”

“Not me. I was second string, one step up from water boy. Nobody told me anything.”

“I can’t believe Hal would do such a thing.”

“I believe the rumors, Mrs. Ives, because there’s more to it.”

“There’s more?” I hadn’t even begun to recover from the first revelation before he zapped me with another.

“I’m fairly certain that Hal was pushing other drugs, too.”

“You can’t be serious!”

“Marijuana. Cocaine. Even heroin. That’s what I heard, anyway. Katie had to be getting them from somewhere. She was high as a kite at her sweet sixteen party, and she was high at the homecoming dance, too, if you ask me.”

My God! Maybe that’s what Angie was getting at when she told me that Katie was totally spaced out at the dance. “Amphetamines and steroids aren’t in the same league with hard drugs,” I reasoned. “Why do you think it was Hal who supplied Katie with the hard stuff? Couldn’t she have gotten them from someone else? Her sister perhaps?”

“Naw, Liz was a straight arrow. Had to be, didn’t she, to get into Harvard Law?” I thought that Bill’s confidence in the selection criteria of the admissions board at Harvard was a bit naive, but I didn’t say so.

“If you know all this, why don’t you take it to the police?”

“It’s just rumor. There’s no hard evidence.”

“Why are you telling me about it then?”

“I like you, Mrs. Ives. You’ve been real nice to Angie. I’d really hate to see anything happen to you.”

I picked up my sandwich and prepared to go. “If you ask me”-I jerked my head in the direction of the doctor’s office-“young Dr. Chase over there would have been in a much better position to supply Katie with drugs than Hal Calvert ever was!”

“You don’t have to take my word for it.” I watched while he took a deep breath and held it while he decided what to say next. “Check out the boat.”

“What boat? Pegasus?” Bill didn’t answer but started to walk across the kitchen. “You have some sort of grudge against Hal?” I aimed my remark at his departing back. The screen door slammed behind him, leaving me standing there alone in the store, except for a calico cat curled up, napping, on the front counter.

Connie was fixing dinner when I arrived, assembling lasagna in an oversize pan. “Thank goodness you’re back! And still in one piece.” She wiped her hands on a paper towel and studied me. “So, how’d it go with Frank Chase at the office today?”

“I was fired.”

“Imagine my surprise.”

“There wouldn’t have been any point in staying on. The man could never trust me again.” I told Connie about my conversation with Dr. Chase and about what I’d learned from Bill.

She ran the back of her hand over her forehead, damp from the steam rising from a pot where the lasagna noodles were boiling. “Do you think I’d have left you alone with Hal if I’d heard even a peep about him dealing drugs?”

“My thoughts exactly.”

“But I sure didn’t know that Liz and Frank were so tight.” She handed me a can of fruit cocktail and a hand-crank can opener. “Drain it in the sink.”

“I need you to come with me, Connie,” I said as I opened the can.

“Where?”

“Bill’s suggesting there’s something not quite kosher about Pegasus.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. And he looked so smug.”

“What could be wrong? Last time I saw Pegasus she was up on jack stands being repaired.” Connie had slipped into sailing jargon again.

“What’s a jack stand?” I asked.

“Sorry.” She dumped a container of sour cream into a bowl and folded the fruit cocktail and a cup of miniature marshmallows into it. “They’re metal braces that prop a boat up when it’s out of the water.”

My stomach growled, despite the sandwich I’d gulped down in the car. When I thought Connie wasn’t looking, I snitched a marshmallow from the bowl and popped it into my mouth. “I don’t know anywhere near as much about boats as you do,” I said, “so if I’m going to check out Bill’s ridiculous theory, you’ll need to come with me.”

Connie looked as if she wanted to rap my knuckles. “Hannah, you are trouble on wheels. Leave it be. I want to live to fifty, dah-link. Hanging around with you could be dangerous.”

“But Bill was so insistent, so… triumphant! It made me wonder what kind of ax he has to grind with Hal.”

“Can’t imagine, unless… Bill used to work for the Calverts as a ship’s carpenter until Hal laid him off and started doing the repair work himself.”

“I thought Bill had gone to work for the army.”

“He did, but not until after he’d been laid off. There was a six-month period in there when he had to take a succession of odd jobs just to eat while he waited for the government paperwork to go through.”

I could sympathize with that, but as much as I despised Coop for laying me off, I doubt I’d have turned him over to the cops. Then I remembered the way he didn’t even look at me when he ushered me out of that conference room in Washington, D.C., all those months ago. On second thought, maybe Leavenworth was too good for the miserable worm.

“C’mon, Con. Dinner can wait.”

“No, Hannah. It’s a complete waste of time. Hal and I go way back. Bill is totally off base.” She ripped a piece of plastic wrap off a roll, stretched it over the bowl, turned it, and smoothed the edges down all around before putting it in the refrigerator.

I picked Connie’s car keys up from the kitchen table where I had laid them not five minutes before.

Connie opened a jar of spaghetti sauce, threw the lid into the trash, and turned to scowl at me. “And you can forget about taking my car.”

I tossed her keys back on the table and scowled back.

“Grow up, Hannah. You should see yourself. Pouting like a three-year-old.”

I didn’t feel like a three-year-old. I felt like a teenager who’d just been told she couldn’t go to a party because her mother knew there would be boys and booze there.

Connie stood at the sink, arms folded, the cleft in her chin deepening and becoming more prominent by the second. Emily had inherited that chin from her father. How many times had she glared at me the way Connie was glaring at me now? Hundreds probably. When I’d grounded her for lying about attending a mixed-sex slumber party, I got the full sulk treatment; we didn’t speak for days. But we Alexanders can be stubborn, too. I was now doubly determined to check out Hal’s boat.

I stomped over to the kitchen door and grabbed a key ring off its hook. “If you don’t go with me, I’m going to take that old truck out of the barn and drive over there myself.”

Connie snatched the truck keys out of my hand. “What the hell are you doing? You should be doing everything you can to get out of here and go home to Paul. He needs you, Hannah!”

“I told you. I don’t have his number.”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to me that you’re trying very hard to find it. You seem less interested in patching up your marriage than you do in running around Pearson’s Corner trying to clear the name of some potential lover!”

“Lover! And how about you and Dennis? Don’t think I haven’t noticed what’s going on between the two of you.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why not? It’s not as if either of you are married.”

Connie stared at me with wide eyes, looking as surprised as if I’d slapped her. She opened her mouth to say something, then apparently thought better of it. “If you’re that determined,” she said at last, “then let’s go. Let’s get it over with.”

Connie stooped to pick up Colonel’s water dish, then thrust it in my direction. “Here. Fill this up while I lock up the house.”

I stood there for a moment, feeling foolish, holding Colonel’s dish in both hands. As I ran water into the bowl with Colonel frisking about my legs, I was determined that it would take more than a few dead bolt locks and an unreasonable sister-in-law to keep me away from the truth.