I OPENED THE BPD FOLDER on Beth. She had been born Elizabeth Boudreau in a shabby little town on the Merrimack River, east of Proctor. She was thirty-six. In the month she graduated from Tarbridge High School, she married a guy name Boley LaBonte, and divorced him a year later.
Nobody was paying me to do anything. On the other hand, no one was paying me to do nothing, either. Business was slow. I was nosy. And I had kind of a bad feeling about this long-running mess I’d wandered into and hadn’t done a hell of a lot to improve. So I got my car from the alley where I had a deal with the meter maids, and headed north from Boston on a very nice February day with the temperature above freezing and stuff melting gently.
You enter Tarbridge on a two-lane highway from the south. The town is basically three unpainted cinder-block buildings and a red light. A few clapboard houses, some with paint, dwindle away from the cinder block. Up a hill past the red light, maybe a half-mile away, stood a regal-looking redbrick high school. The fact that Tarbridge had a municipal identity was stretching it a bit. That it had a high school was jaw-dropping. It had to be a regional school. But why they had located a regional high school in Tarbridge could only have to do with available land, or, of course, graft.
The town clerk was a fat woman with a red face and a tight perm. She had her offices in a trailer attached to one of the cinder-block buildings. The plastic nameplate on her desk said she was Mrs. Estevia Root.
I handed her my card, and she studied it through some pink-rimmed glasses with rhinestones on them, which hung around her neck on what appeared to be a cut-down shoelace.
“What do ya wanna see Mrs. Boudreau for?” the clerk said.
“I’m investigating a case,” I said. “In Boston.”
“Boston?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What the hell are you doing up here?”
“Just background stuff,” I said. “Where would I find Mrs. Boudreau.”
“Probably in her kitchen, where she usually is.”
“And where is the kitchen located?”
“Back of the house,” Estevia said.
I nodded happily.
“And the house?” I said.
“Passed it on the way in, if you come from Boston,” Estevia said. “’Bout a hundred yards back, be on your right heading out. Kinda run-down, looks empty, but she’ll be in there.”
I felt a chill. If Estevia thought it looked run-down…
“Did you happen to know her daughter?” I said. “Beth?”
“She run off long time ago, and no loss,” Estevia said.
“No loss?”
“Best she was gone, ’fore she dragged half the kids in town down with her.”
“Bad girl?” I said.
Estevia’s mouth became a thin, hard line. Her round face seemed to plane into angles.
“Yes,” she said.
“Bad how?” I said.
“Just bad,” Estevia said.
It was all I was going to get from Estevia.
“Thank you for your time,” I said.