Chapter 53

IT WAS A very small house. It not only looked empty, it looked like it should be empty. There wasn’t enough paint left on the front to indicate what color it might once have been. The roof-line was bowed. The windows were closed and dirty. Something that might once have been curtains hung in tattered disarray in the windows.

I parked and went to the front door. There was no path shoveled. The uncut weeds of summer, now long dead, stuck up through the diminishing snow. There was no doorknob, and the hole where there had been one was plugged with a rag. I knocked. No one answered. I pushed on the door. It didn’t move. I’m not sure it was locked; it was more likely just warped shut.

I went around to the side of the house and found what might be a kitchen door. There was a screen door and an inner door. The screening had torn loose and was curled up along one side. The inner door had a glass window that was so grimy, I couldn’t see through it. I knocked.

From inside somebody croaked, “Go ’way.”

It didn’t sound welcoming, but I figured the somebody didn’t really mean it, so I opened the inside door and stepped in. She looked like a huge sack of soiled laundry, slouched inertly at the kitchen table, drinking Pastene port wine from a small jelly glass with cartoon pictures on it. The table was covered with linoleum whose color and design were long since lost. There were pots and dishes in the soapstone sink, piles of newspapers and magazines in various corners. A small television with rabbit ears was playing jaggedly. The scripted conviviality and canned laughter was eerie in the desperate room. A black iron stove stood against the far wall, and the room reeked of kerosene and heat.

“Mrs. Boudreau?” I said.

“Go ’way,” she croaked again.

She was very fat, wearing some sort of robe or housedress. It was hard to tell, and in truth, I didn’t look very closely.

“My name is Spenser,” I said, and handed her a card. She didn’t take it, so I put it on the table.

“You’re Elizabeth Boudreau’s mother,” I said.

Her glass was empty. She picked up the bottle of port with both hands and carefully poured it into the jelly glass. She put the bottle down carefully, and picked up the glass carefully with both hands and sipped the port. Then she looked at me as if I hadn’t spoken.

“Could you tell me a little about Elizabeth?” I said.

“Elizabeth.”

“Your daughter.”

“Gone,” the woman said.

“Elizabeth’s gone?”

Mrs. Boudreau nodded.

“Long time,” she said.

“What can you tell me about her?” I said.

“Bitch,” her mother said.

I nodded. If Beth was thirty-six, this woman was probably sixty, maybe younger. She looked older than Angkor Wat.

“Why bitch?” I said.

“Whore.”

This wasn’t going terribly well.

“How about Mr. Boudreau?” I said.

She drank port and stared at me.

“He around?” I said.

“No.”

“Dead?”

“Don’t know.”

“Can you tell me anything about him?” I said.

“Bastard,” she said.

“Could you tell me where to find him?”

“No.”

I had hung around in this reeking trash bin as long as I could stand it. There was nothing I could find out that would be worth staying any longer.

“Thank you,” I said, and turned and went out.

I took in some big breaths as I walked to my car. The air felt clean.


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