The Fixer

41

He took precautions.

It had become almost second nature to him now. He’d traded in the Zipcar-after removing the GPS tracker from the rear left wheel well and sticking it on a nearby car-for a Suburban from Avis. When he returned to Boston, he’d check out of the DoubleTree and find some other place, maybe in one of the towns outside Boston, like Newton.

But he had to keep moving, had to avoid comfortable habits and routines, until…

Until he’d found out who was going after him and why.

He welcomed the long drive up 93 North to New Hampshire as an opportunity at long last to think. The driving was repetitive and dull, and his mind wandered; he couldn’t help falling into a reverie.

He found himself thinking about what Joan Breslin had revealed, that Pappas had been taking care of Lenny all these years. For what possible reason? It couldn’t be out of the goodness of Pappas’s heart.

And he found himself wondering what Joan was hiding. She’d never volunteered Pappas’s name when Rick had asked who “P” might be. That couldn’t have been an oversight. She was covering something up, he felt sure. He wondered if she, like Lenny, was afraid of Pappas.

Such payments could be made to buy silence. Maybe hers had been bought. Then why pay off Lenny, who couldn’t talk anyway?

After about an hour and a half of driving, the expressway cut a swath through the White Mountain National Forest, dense with pitch pines and red oak and cinnamon fern. It reminded him of the woods on Paul Clarke’s property, which must have been twenty or thirty acres at least. The sugar maples, when they visited one winter weekend years ago, all had spouts dug into their trunks, dripping clear sap into tin buckets. Mr. Clarke, tall and silver-haired and distinguished-looking, showed them how the full buckets of sap were collected.

Rick remembered walking into the sugar house where the sap was boiled down in the giant evaporator over a roaring fire, the sensation and the aroma of being hit by the wall of steam heavy with the sweet smell of maple syrup. It took forty gallons of sap, Clarke had said, to make a gallon of maple syrup.

Paul Clarke had seemed oddly hip and handsome for a friend of Dad’s. He looked, in his barn coat, more like a senator running for reelection than a farmer. They’d gone out for dinner at the only pizza place in town. Over pizza, Mr. Clarke showed Rick a trick with a pencil. He started with his hands together as if in prayer, a pencil grasped under both thumbs. Then somehow he swiveled his hands around and suddenly the thumbs pointed down, the pencil underneath his hands. It looked simple, but it was impossible to do. Wendy and Rick tried repeatedly. They asked him to do it slowly. No matter how many times he did it, they were unable to replicate it. Naturally they kept nagging him to show them how he did it.

“What’s the trick?” Rick had demanded.

“There’s no trick,” Mr. Clarke had replied with a poker face. Only later did Rick come to understand. It looked like a trick, but it wasn’t a trick at all. It was all about technique. Nothing was hidden. What you saw was what you got. No trick.

He remembered his father and Mr. Clarke going off for long conversations in Mr. Clarke’s book-choked study. Rick and Wendy and their mother were left to read or hike in the woods. Rick, budding investigative journalist at age eight, got curious and stood outside the study door, listening, unable to make sense of their low voices. Rick woke early the next morning and found Mr. Clarke in the sugar shack, hard at work with the buckets of sap. At breakfast he finally persuaded Mr. Clarke to show him how to do the pencil trick, and he went around the house crowing to his younger sister, “I know the trick! I know the trick!”

But to this day he had no idea who Mr. Clarke was, this man who was one of his father’s closest friends. With the typical obliviousness of kids, Rick and his sister couldn’t be bothered to learn how Dad and Mr. Clarke were connected. Classmates? Colleagues? Was he an old client? What, exactly? They had no idea and never asked. For some reason Lenny had stayed in touch with Paul Clarke, had even gone to see him the week before his stroke. Rick wondered why.

When Interstate 93 emerged from the White Mountain National Forest, he drove past Franconia, then exited at Littleton and took 116 northeast along the curves of the Ammonoosuc River until he reached the town of Redding, New Hampshire.

All he knew was that Paul Clarke lived in Redding. He didn’t know where. He had nothing more than a post office box. But as he drove through the town, he began to recognize landmarks. They’d visited Clarke a few times, long ago, but it had been often enough that Rick remembered the town, in a sketchy sort of way.

He drove past a book barn that looked familiar, and next to it a general store. He remembered his mother and father browsing in the book barn for what seemed like hours while he and Wendy had gone to the general store nearby and shopped for candy and comic books. Then came the strip of storefronts, the art gallery, a children’s clothing store, a coffee shop, a place offering web and graphic design services.

He stopped into the coffee shop, called Town Grounds, bought a cup of Sumatra-fancy artisanal coffee, even in rural New Hampshire!-and asked the young woman at the counter if she knew where Paul Clarke’s house was. She smiled apologetically and said she had no idea. When he came out of the coffee shop he saw, across the street, Town Pizza. It looked like the same one where they used to go for dinner when they visited Clarke, who was a bachelor and didn’t cook much.

He crossed the street and entered the pizza parlor. Behind the counter, a middle-aged bald guy was sliding a pizza into an oven with a wooden peel. He looked as if he might be the owner.

“Do you know Paul Clarke?”

“Paul? Sure.”

“Do you know where he lives? I’m an old friend.”

“I think I have a pretty good idea,” he said, and he drew a map on a paper place mat.

Rick got back into the Suburban, drove past a white-steepled church, then a small town hall building, then an off-brand gas station. There he turned left and continued on straight for a mile or so until he dead-ended at Chiswick Road. He turned right and drove along a tree-lined road with modest wooden houses set back from the street, every quarter mile or so. Then he came to a big, unpainted aluminum mailbox that said CLARKE in large stick-on letters.

The mailbox stood at the mouth of a narrow unpaved road that disappeared into thick coniferous forest. But there were also plenty of maple trees, he knew. He saw the ruts of large tires in the dirt that looked fairly recent.

After only a moment’s hesitation, he turned into the private road, which twisted through woods for what seemed close to half a mile and then opened out into a gravel drive bordering a scrubby lawn and then a sprawling white farmhouse. Stones popped under the Suburban’s big tires as he drove over gravel. A couple of well-worn vehicles were parked side by side, a Ford F-150 truck and a Subaru Outback.

If nothing had changed in the years since the family had last visited, Clarke lived here alone. So the odds were good that he was at home.

He parked and got out of the car.

Suddenly he heard a gunshot, and a tree trunk just a few feet away exploded. Startled, he ducked. “What the hell?” he said aloud, realizing in a moment that a bullet had come close to hitting him.

He rose slowly, hands up in the air. “I’m here to see Paul Clarke!” he shouted.

A man was standing in front of the house, holding a shotgun pointed directly at him. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Rick Hoffman. Lenny’s son.”

“Oh, Jesus.” The man lowered the shotgun. He approached Rick. He was wearing a green-and-black plaid woolen shirt. “We’ve got a serious home invasion problem around here. Some meth heads live down the road, and they’ve got a black Suburban just like yours. Can’t be too careful. The downside of living way out in the boonies is nobody can hear you scream.”