“Not a thing’s left.”
Parker Leedale sat on the chair next to McGuire’s bed, fingering his mustache nervously.
Bob Morton leaned against a wall near the window, his hands in his pockets. He was in civilian clothes: polished cotton slacks, open-necked shirt and sweater.
“We saved your car,” Leedale added. “The rented one. Two guys from the fire department and I, we pushed it across the street.”
“The doctor says you can check out today,” Morton said.
“You were there?” McGuire said to Morton, and when the police officer nodded he asked, “Arson?”
Another nod. “Plain and simple. Found the empty can. Somebody splashed gasoline, kerosene, whatever, against the back wall then hightailed it through the woods. Probably back to the street behind you.”
Leedale’s eyes shifted from McGuire to Morton and back again. “You think whoever set Cora’s house on fire was the same person who shot you?” he asked.
“Why would I think that?” McGuire said.
The lawyer shrugged, then grinned sheepishly. “How many enemies can you make in a couple of days?” he asked.
“You’d be surprised,” McGuire said.
“June . . .” Leedale began, paused and started again. “June and I have a spare room downstairs, back of the house. Overlooking the garden. We built it for her mother but she, June’s mother I mean, decided to stay in Florida when her husband died. She never came north again. Anyway, it’s got an en suite bathroom and a private entrance at the back. You’re welcome to stay there if you want.”
“I’ll work something else out,” McGuire replied.
“Why?” Leedale’s eyes clicked toward Morton before meeting McGuire’s again. “Look, you’ve got one arm out of commission, nowhere else to stay. No clothes, right? All your clothes were burned in the fire?”
McGuire nodded.
“What are you, about a forty-two regular? Thirty-four waist?”
Another nod from McGuire.
“Used to work in a clothing store, my summers in high school,” Leedale said proudly. “I’ll call Sanfords—that’s a good men’s wear shop near my office. Have them send over a couple pairs of slacks, shirts, jacket maybe. And some socks and underwear. Put it all on my account. You can pay me out of escrow funds.”
“That’s good of you,” McGuire said.
Leedale nodded, either in agreement that it was good of him, or with satisfaction at McGuire’s acquiescence. “I wish you’d think about staying with us. For a day or two anyway. June and I, we’d feel terrible about you going to a motel.” He studied his shoes, looking there for his next words. “We really liked Cora,” he said, his voice low. He added a dry laugh. “We were among the few in town who still did. And, uh, it would be terrible, it would be unacceptable, to have you stay in a motel after what’s happened. To Cora’s house.”
“Sounds like a good idea to me,” Morton offered.
A nurse leaned in the doorway, smiled warmly at Morton and spoke to McGuire. “You have a long distance call, Mr. McGuire,” she said. “From the Bahamas. A woman named Mayall. Would you like me to wheel you out into the hall?”
Her voice was tense with concern, like a taut piano wire, and she seemed on the edge of tears.
“My God!” Barbara said. “Who did this to you? Are you all right?”
McGuire said he had no idea who did it and, yes, he was all right and he expected to leave the hospital today. He was out of the wheelchair, standing with his good shoulder against the wall.
“When they called and told me you were shot . . .” Her voice caught in her throat.
“It’s only my shoulder, Barbara.” He pictured her near a window, a view of the ocean behind her, seabirds wheeling in the soft morning air. “How’s Nassau?”
“It’s . . .” Another catch in her voice. “It’s all right.”
“When are you going back to Treasure Cay?” McGuire asked. Something tore along the length of his emotional antennae, a tingle of warning, an intuition of things not being all they appeared to be. He recalled one of Ollie Schantz’s observations made years before, when McGuire and Schantz were the cut-loose homicide team, the ones who carved their own trail through red tape and regulations to score the best arrest-and-conviction record on the Boston police force. “Experience,” Ollie said after he and McGuire encountered an obstacle not even their doggedness could overcome, “is what you get when you were expecting something else.”
An empty space in his ear, a ceaseless vibration in his intuition.
“Soon,” Barbara replied.
“How soon?” Then, as though to justify his question, he added, “The house I inherited burned down last night.” He heard a sharp intake of breath, but when she said nothing he continued, “I want to see you again. Come up to Boston, we’ll stay at the Copley. . . .”
“I can’t,” she said. “Not yet. Not right now.”
“Why not?” He felt anger boiling upwards within him. Hell, after all he had been through, how could she tell him this?
A sobbing noise on the line, high and almost metallic, yet plaintive, involuntary.
“Barbara, what’s going on?” he asked, willing a softness into his voice.
“Joe, things have changed. . . .”
“I haven’t.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll call you from Treasure Cay.”
“How can you?” McGuire’s hand was shaking. “I’m out of the hospital today, you don’t know where I’m staying.”
“Your friends in Boston,” she said, and he felt her panic, her need to escape, across the wires. “I’ll call you there.”
“At Ollie’s house?” She had the number. He had given it to her before leaving.
“Yes.”
“When?”
His voice echoed back to him across the empty line.
“Can’t let you do it.” Ivan Hayward stood with his arms folded, watching McGuire slip into the clothes sent over by Parker Leedale. The nurse with the heart-shaped face and streaked hair was helping him.
“It’s a two-hour drive,” McGuire said. The nurse slipped the sleeve of a red gingham shirt over his left arm, which he still couldn’t raise above shoulder level. “Three at the most.”
“And you’re crippled in one arm and still sedated with analgesics,” the doctor added. “Give it another day, let your body get rid of the drugs and grow a little stronger.”
McGuire straightened up, closed his eyes against a sudden attack of dizziness and began buttoning the shirt. “Okay,” he said. “Maybe you’re right.”
Hayward looked pleased with himself. “Good. Where can I drive you?”
“The Leedales’,” McGuire said. “I want to see what’s left of my house. And I’ve been invited to spend the night there. I think I’ll accept.”
The spare room at the back of the Leedale house was furnished like guest quarters in an expensive New England inn. The wallpaper was a pattern of white forget-me-nots against a Wedgwood-blue background, and the same shade of blue appeared in the woven rug and the heavy cotton quilt on the white iron bed. A graceful oak rocker sat in a corner on the exposed wide-planked pine floor; a pine washstand topped with a bouquet of dried flowers in an earthenware vase and a walnut chest of drawers completed the furnishings. Three Victorian watercolours in identical oak frames hung on one wall. A large bay window with an upholstered window seat looked out upon the rear garden where two white lawn chairs were positioned beneath a tamarack tree. A windowless door provided access to the garden; another door on the opposite wall led to the interior of the Leedale house. Beside it stood a narrow closet crowded with winter coats. Both doors, McGuire noted with satisfaction, were equipped with heavy dead bolts.
Facing the bed, a third door opened into a large modern bathroom with an oversized tub and expensive brass fixtures.
“This was to be Mother’s room,” said June Leedale, bending to pull back the quilt and reveal two oversized goose-down pillows. “We decorated it for her summer visits with us. Or the ones she planned to make. It’s the old summer kitchen of the house. I think she stayed here a week one autumn. Then she went back to Florida and never came north again.” Standing to survey her handiwork, she had yet to look directly at McGuire, who sat watching her from the rocking chair.
“My mother died three years ago,” June Leedale said. She removed some folded towels from the top of the chest of drawers. “We were never really that close. Maybe that’s why she preferred not to stay here, I don’t know . . .”
“Mrs. Leedale.”
She entered the bathroom, the towels draped across her arm. “I would prefer you to call me June.”
McGuire stood and walked to the open doorway. “I’ll be here overnight,” he said. “That’s all.”
“Mike Gilroy said it’s better if you’re around for a couple of days while he files the claim on the house.” She was hanging the towels from a heavy brass rail on the wall. She straightened and inspected the bathroom for all the necessities: a full roll of toilet paper, fresh bars of Ivory on the sink and, in the tub enclosure, a clean bath mat on the tiled floor. Then she walked to the door, where McGuire waited silently.
“June,” he said, and for the first time she looked into his eyes, then abruptly away. “If this makes you uncomfortable . . .”
She stared into a distant corner of the room. “Give me your word that you won’t say anything about seeing me that day.”
“In the cemetery?”
June Leedale whispered, “Yes.”
McGuire nodded. “Like I told you. None of my business.”
“Thank you.” She edged past and paused in the doorway, looking back at him again. “I loved Cora very much and I know she loved you. And I feel terrible about these things happening to you. Being shot and then the fire . . . Anyway, we feel, Parker and I, we want to help any way we can. It wouldn’t seem right to have you stay in a motel or somewhere. And it’s nice to have someone new here to talk to. Sometimes . . . sometimes we get too isolated here on the Cape, I think.”
“I appreciate it.”
“Who would have done these things to you?” June Leedale asked, her arm gesturing first at McGuire, then in the direction of the ruins of Cora’s house where ribbons of smoke still danced upwards from the ashes. “You hardly know anyone here. How could this happen?”
Without responding, McGuire sat on the edge of the bed. His left arm was in a sling.
“It’s terrible,” she continued. “And I’m so very sorry. Would you like some soup? I could bring it in here and you could sit in the window seat—”
“Where were you last night?” McGuire asked. “When the fire started.”
“Out there.” She angled her head toward the bay window. “Sitting in one of the lawn chairs, looking at the stars.”
“It must have been chilly.”
“I wore a heavy sweater.” She folded her hands across her chest and lowered her head. “I’ll get your lunch,” she said, and walked away.
She brought him a large bowl of thick beef soup, a basket of buttered fresh rolls and a mug of hot tea, and he sat in the window staring at the garden, where the perennials had overgrown themselves and lay, top-heavy with dried blossoms, awaiting the killing frost.
He reached for the telephone and dialed a familiar number in Revere Beach. Ronnie Schantz answered on the second ring, her voice strong, warm, reassuring. When McGuire told her what had happened to him she reacted exactly as he knew she would. “Get over here where somebody can take care of you,” she ordered, and he promised he would.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
“Sooner than that.”
“Early tomorrow.”
Later he sat on the edge of the bed staring out at the garden while his mind flew like a shuttle between Cape Cod and the Bahamas, weighing the threats. The threat to his life here on the Cape. And the threat to his happiness, the first small kernel of happiness he had felt with a woman for a very long time, somewhere down in the Bahamas.
And then he recognized the truth about Barbara and why she was where she was, why she had said the things she had. It was a recognition at once clear and familiar, like seeing an old friend’s face across a room crowded with strangers.
Barbara’s husband had returned to claim her, to ask forgiveness, to take her away with him, to restore their marriage.
The weight descended within McGuire’s chest again, and he knew he would carry it with him there for some time.
Think about the other thing, he willed himself. Don’t grow obsessed with something you can’t deal with right away. Think about someone trying to kill you, someone destroying Cora’s house.
It wasn’t me they were after, McGuire pondered. It was something in the house.
More than that. Something in Terry’s room.
He rose and carried his empty dishes into the kitchen, where June Leedale glanced up from her mixing bowl and smiled at him, the warmest smile he had seen on her face since his arrival. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked. She was stirring a heavy brown batter with a wooden spoon.
McGuire told her he had. Outside, on Miner’s Lane, Morton’s police car was still parked on the shoulder of the road.
“I’m making muffins,” June Leedale said from the kitchen. “Parker likes them.” She looked at her watch. “He should be home by now.” Her eyes began blinking furiously and she drew the back of her hand across them. “I’m sure he’ll be home any minute. . . .”
McGuire opened the front door. Lady, he said silently, keep me out of your domestic problems. Please.
“Splashed the gasoline, that’s what they figure it was now, not kerosene, against the back wall there.” Bob Morton was leaning against the side of his cruiser. He pointed to the rear of what had been Cora’s house. Among the charred and blackened beams the old brick fireplace and chimney stood upright and proud, like a monument to the dead. Two volunteer firemen were saturating the rubble with a fine spray of water. Neighbours stood in small groups, their arms folded, their conversation quiet, shaking their heads in dismay at the destruction.
Cora’s furniture, all of it so lovingly collected and maintained, was reduced to ashes and blackened coil springs that jutted from the ruins like the fossilized skeletons of small animals, long dead.
“You find anything else about those people who owned the house on Sea View?” McGuire watched a vintage Mercedes approach and pull onto the shoulder of the road.
“One of the older families around here.” Morton glanced absently back at the German car to watch Blake Stevenson heave his heavy body from behind the wheel, his eyes wide in shock and surprise. “Rader, Ryder, something like that.”
“My God, what happened?” Blake Stevenson walked toward McGuire and Morton, extending an arm toward the ruins. “This is terrible. Are you all right?” he asked, looking with concern at McGuire.
McGuire nodded. “I was safe. In a hospital.”
“What the devil is going on around here?” Stevenson looked at Morton. “You must have some idea who did this. This is a tragedy and an outrage. Shootings, fires . . . I can’t remember anything like this happening in Compton for years.”
Morton ducked his head and scratched the back of his neck. “We’re following up leads,” he said, and McGuire snorted at the comment, a remark he had used so often to placate the press, the captain, the commissioner. There were no leads. There was nothing to follow.
“Parker says you’re staying with him and June,” Blake Stevenson said to McGuire. “That true?”
McGuire nodded. “For tonight.”
“If you need anything, I expect you’ll let me know,” Stevenson said. “This is terrible, just terrible. . . .” He turned to the smoldering wreckage and thrust his hands in his pockets, his head shaking from side to side.
“Looks like you’ve got some more company,” Morton said, watching a gold Volvo station wagon approach to park behind the Mercedes. “I’ll be on my way.”
“Stick around if you can,” McGuire said. “I want everybody to see you with me. In the house.”
Morton shrugged and looked at his watch. “Sure, if you like.”
Mike Gilroy emerged from the Volvo, a clipboard in his hand. “Jesus, what a mess,” he said as he approached McGuire and the others. “You ever see anything like this, Blake?”
Blake Stevenson shook his head solemnly.
“I’m sorry about this, Joe.” Gilroy stood looking at the ruins. “The good news is, Cora carried a healthy policy on the place. And she kept up the premiums. Let’s see if the Leedales can give us some place to sit down and talk about it.”
McGuire walked across the road and, in spite of his will, he caught himself thinking of Barbara again, picturing her on a beach at dusk, walking barefoot in the sand with her husband.
“With contents and all, it pans out to just over a hundred and ten thousand.” Mike Gilroy handed McGuire a sheet of paper headed Gilroy & Associates, Insurance Agents.
McGuire and Gilroy were side by side on the sofa in the Leedale living room, across from Blake Stevenson who sat in an upholstered chair near the fireplace, watching and listening intently. Bob Morton stood nearby, hands in his pockets. June Leedale, after serving tea, withdrew to the kitchen. McGuire could hear the small noises of cutlery, dishes and cupboard doors being handled.
“With arson, there’s always a few hurdles before the company issues the cheque,” Gilroy added. “But Bob and I can work together, get the forms ready, clear you of any suspicion. Could have the money sooner’n you think.”
McGuire assured Gilroy he was in no rush. The telephone rang in the kitchen and June Leedale answered it, her voice speaking softly in the background.
“Sam Hannaford’s still interested in the place,” Gilroy went on, “as a building site. Figures he’s looking at maybe fifty thousand dollars for the lot. You might give him a call.”
“I might,” McGuire nodded.
“Joe, this is so unusual here.” Blake Stevenson leaned forward in his chair, his eyes fastening on McGuire’s and his deep textured voice speaking almost as though he didn’t want the others to hear his words. “This town has the lowest crime rate on the Cape. Isn’t that right, Bob?” His eyes shot past McGuire to Morton, who was lifting a cup of tea to his lips, pinky finger extended.
“’S’what I hear.” Morton nodded in agreement and sipped his tea noisily, making a sound like a small drain being emptied.
“Mark my words,” Stevenson continued, fixing his eyes on McGuire again, “we’ll find whoever did these things and see that he’s brought to justice. I think this is simply outrageous.” He looked up and scanned the eyes of the other two men, seeking their agreement.
“We?” Mike Gilroy grinned. He had tucked the insurance documents back into their file folder. “What, Blake? We’re all going to ride herd through town like a posse behind Sheriff Morton here?”
“I meant ‘we’ as a community,” Stevenson replied stiffly. “That’s what we have to do in a situation like this. Act as a community. Right, Bob?”
Morton nodded. “Can always use civilian help. Tips, that kind of thing,” he said.
Blake Stevenson smiled his approval. “I’d better be on my way,” he said and rose stiffly from the chair.
Mike Gilroy slid his papers back into his briefcase. “We’ll be in touch,” he said, following Stevenson through the door.
Morton’s eyes swung to McGuire. “No need for me to hang around any longer, is there?” he asked.
“Guess not,” McGuire agreed.
As Morton drove away, McGuire stared through the bay window at the rubble across the road that once had been Cora’s pride and legacy. Now both she and the house were gone.
The evening newspaper arrived, tossed against the front door by a young boy on a bicycle. McGuire retrieved it and sat in the chair by the window, reading about the fire—“Arson Suspected in Late Night Blaze” screamed the front-page headline—and of Bob Morton’s continuing efforts to solve the wounding of “a once-prominent Boston homicide detective.”
He finished the newspaper and checked his watch. It was almost seven o’clock and there was still no sign of Parker Leedale.
June Leedale came downstairs holding several tissues in her hand. Her eyes were red from crying and when McGuire asked if he could help with something she waved him away.
McGuire walked back to the guest room, slid the dead bolts in place on both doors, pulled a Frank Yerby novel from the bookcase, lay back on the bed and began reading. He felt fatigued, his head still buoyant from the effects of the drugs, and the plodding story line of the Yerby book made his eyelids heavy. He heard the front door open and close. The Leedales’ voices drifted back to his ears in urgent conversation, the words unintelligible but the tension evident. The voices ceased, there was the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and a door slammed somewhere on the second floor.
“Joe?” Parker Leedale’s voice was followed by polite tapping on the door. “You awake?”
McGuire rose to unlock and open the door. Parker Leedale had removed his suit jacket and pulled his tie aside. He grinned in embarrassment. “Had a little domestic problem, June and me,” he said. His breath smelled of alcohol. “Hope it didn’t disturb you.”
McGuire shook his head in silence.
Leedale swung his eyes from McGuire. “I, uh, thought I might go downtown, get a steak maybe at the Pines, nice little restaurant over near the lighthouse. Care to join me?”
“I’m calling it a day,” McGuire said. “I’ll be on my way to Boston first thing in the morning. Thanks anyway.”
Another embarrassed smile. “Sure,” Leedale said. “How long’ll you be there?”
McGuire said he didn’t know.
“How’s the shoulder? The wound?”
“Getting better.”
“See you when you get back?” Leedale asked.
McGuire nodded and watched the other man turn and walk toward the darkened living room before closing and locking the door again.
Within minutes of undressing and sliding beneath the sheets, he was sleeping soundly.