The morning arrived brilliant with sunshine and noisy with birds squabbling in the thick evergreens at the rear of the house. Both combined to wake McGuire sooner than he might have chosen. He rose, showered, dressed and went outside where he sat on the porch of the house, sipped at a cup of instant coffee and listened to his instincts vibrate.
More than any other faculty, McGuire depended upon intuition to guide him. Ollie Schantz once explained the success of their partnership to a senior police official by saying, “I think and he feels. I can’t do what he does, he can’t do what I do.”
McGuire began by reviewing what he knew for certain.
Cora dies quietly. Too quietly, according to the instincts of Dr. Hayward. McGuire trusted Hayward and his instincts, which were supported by a lab test on Cora’s blood and a missing prescription container.
And there was more.
Cora keeps a newspaper clipping of a thirty-year-old murder which may not have been a murder at all.
Then she invites three friends of her dead son, all of them familiar with the murder, to her memorial service. One of the wives may be having an affair. So what? Life in suburbia.
McGuire stood up, stretched and returned to the house for the property survey Hannaford had requested.
Nothing fit. Time to start poking around with a sharp stick again.
Driving into town, he thought momentarily of Barbara. Where she was. Why she hadn’t called.
“Nothing yet?” McGuire leaned on the counter at the Compton police station and watched Bob Morton sip black coffee from a heavy earthenware mug.
“Nope.” Morton set the cup on the top of a gray metal file cabinet. “No time. Two traffic accidents last night, one a DWI, plus a break-in out near the pond. Getting the paperwork done on those.”
“You know where to look?”
“For what?”
“For the Sanders murder I told you about.”
“Oh, yeah, that one.” Morton made no attempt to hide his lack of enthusiasm. “I think so. Some boxes of stuff in the basement look like they go back to the pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. Why’nt you come back about four, maybe five o’clock?”
McGuire smiled tightly. “Sure. About five.”
“Things don’t move around here like they do on Berkeley Street,” Morton said.
McGuire responded with a grunt.
Leaving the car in front of the police station, McGuire walked down to Main Street in sunshine that wore a golden sheen in the unseasonably warm autumn air. He passed young mothers wheeling small children from shop to shop and elderly men sitting cross-legged on wooden benches who leaned inward to each other, discussing the weather and dead friends.
McGuire bought a Cape Cod News, found a coffee shop cluttered with plaster figurines and lace placemats, and ordered a breakfast of eggs, bacon, toast and coffee.
Almost an hour later he emerged from the shop, the newspaper tucked under his arm. A brown Audi sounded its horn and pulled to the curb in front of him. McGuire bent to look through the lowered passenger window at a red-eyed Parker Leedale.
“How you doing?” Leedale asked.
McGuire shrugged.
“Give you a lift?”
“No, thanks.”
Leedale stared ahead and nodded absently. “Uh, that stuff we talked about last night,” Leedale said, still looking through the windshield. “You know, about June? I think maybe that was the alcohol talking and, um . . .”
McGuire finished the sentence for him. “You want me to forget about it.”
Leedale closed his eyes and nodded.
“Good idea. See you around.”
“Sure I can’t give you a lift?” Leedale asked. He had visibly relaxed. “I’m on my way to Orleans, but . . .” McGuire slapped the roof of Leedale’s car with his hand. “I’m sure, Parker,” he said. “Got a car around the corner. You have yourself a good day.”
Leedale smiled. “You too, McGuire,” he said, and drove slowly away.
Old Queen Anne Road rolled on its meandering course past salt ponds, tidal flats and inlets. Admiring the scenery, McGuire almost drove past the small gray and white clapboard house converted by Sam Hannaford into his real estate office.
Hannaford was on the telephone when McGuire entered. “Well, now, I think it’s time to make your move, see,” the agent was saying. He winked at McGuire, who carried the survey paper in his hand. “Tell you what,” Hannaford said, “I got an important fellow here just dropping off a document for me, see, so hold on there a moment.”
The agent covered the receiver mouthpiece with his hand as McGuire dropped the paper on the desk.
“Now that’s the sweetheart I need,” Hannaford said. “Knew old Parker wasn’t spinning pipe dreams on me. Thanks a load, McGuire. You’re a gentleman and a scholar and I might have an offer for you before the week’s out.”
Without answering, McGuire turned and left the office as Hannaford resumed his telephone conversation. “Tellin’ you, I’m getting busier ’round here than a one-armed paper hanger with a case of hives . . .” he was saying as McGuire closed the door behind him.
Planning to return to town, McGuire made a wrong turn leaving Hannaford’s office, turned down a twisting side road and was soon hopelessly lost. Just when his instincts told him he was heading west, away from Compton, the road enticed him with a long slow left curve and he would grow certain that the town was just beyond the next hill, only to discover the road turning right again.
He smiled at his predicament, knowing he had the rest of the day to himself. And it was a stunning day, McGuire noted with approval, the kind of Cape Cod day that made the Bahamas, for all of their serenity, seem far away, in another time, another world.
But suddenly not that distant. Barbara, he frowned to himself. Where the hell was she?
Ahead, he saw a telephone booth in an ugly strip plaza, the sight of it proof that he was well beyond Compton where strip plazas and indoor malls were artifacts of an alien, less sophisticated world.
He stopped at the booth, dialed Barbara’s number on Treasure Cay, entered his credit card number on request and counted four rings before hearing the Bahamian lilt of the maid’s voice.
No, Mrs. Mayall was not in, the maid reported, she had left for Nassau that morning. No, she did not leave an address or telephone number for Mr. McGuire. Yes, the maid would be sure to tell Mrs. Mayall that McGuire had called and is waiting to hear from her.
Well, shit, McGuire thought, hanging up the receiver.
He leaned against the inside wall of the telephone booth. The floor of the booth was sticky with spilled soda, and an empty cigarette package had been left on the counter beneath the telephone. He swept the package aside angrily and stared sullenly at the graffiti on the walls of the booth: a crude drawing of a naked woman, several telephone numbers and a puzzling declaration: “Matthew Arnold lives!”
The arcane literary reference made McGuire smile in spite of his sour mood and he lifted his eyes to stare through the booth and along the line of shops in the strip plaza. As he did, a woman emerged from a florist’s shop, a bouquet of white Shasta daisies and rust-coloured mums in her hand, and trotted toward a battered red Civic, keeping her head and eyes in constant motion before sliding behind the wheel.
It was June Leedale. And she was fearful of being seen.
McGuire opened the door of the booth to say hello and ask for directions back to Miner’s Lane.
But he paused and climbed behind the wheel of his car instead. Whether because of Parker Leedale’s suspicions or June Leedale’s furtive manner or simply the product of a prying mind nurtured by twenty years of police investigations, he decided to follow her. To see if she would lead him back to town. To satisfy his own curiosity. To fill time in an otherwise empty, lazy afternoon. Or perhaps simply to dilute his anger and frustration at not reaching Barbara.
Perhaps even, McGuire admitted to himself, to discover if Parker Leedale’s suspicions of his wife’s infidelity were correct.
By the time McGuire started the car’s engine, June Leedale was already speeding away on Old Queen Anne Road, and he kept several car lengths in back of the red Honda. Within half a mile, Old Queen Anne Road intersected Route 28, which McGuire knew led east to downtown Compton. But June Leedale swung right, toward the west, and after permitting two cars to pass and fill the space between him and the Honda, McGuire continued following her.
Through Harwich and Dennis Port, McGuire pursued her, staying within the speed limit. Just beyond South Yarmouth she pulled into another roadside strip plaza and McGuire drove past it to the next intersection, swung right onto a parallel road and right again to emerge just east of the plaza, where he parked on the shoulder, the Honda in clear view.
The engine of McGuire’s car was still cooling, making its fragile tick-tick sound, when June Leedale emerged from a small gift shop in the plaza. She had made no purchases, and as she walked casually to her car she glanced around, a slight smile on her face, as though looking for another shop to visit. Pausing at the driver’s door of the Honda, she gave one last look around her before entering the car and pulling away.
Again, McGuire permitted three cars to pass and fill the space between them before setting off again.
It’s her goddamn business if she’s screwing somebody besides her husband, not mine, McGuire reminded himself. But he continued following her, fascinated by the well-practiced routine she seemed to be observing.
They drove through West Yarmouth and past a strip of discount T-shirt shops, factory outlet malls and cheap furniture warehouses, and McGuire was again reminded of the general tackiness of much of the Cape beyond exclusive communities like Compton.
Just ahead of the exit to Hyannis, the red car swung north on a narrow side road.
The road crested a low hill beyond the highway. With no cars between them, McGuire slowed his speed to avoid revealing his presence. Beyond the hill, trailing a cloud of gravelly dust, the Honda turned and drove through an open gate leading to a low grassy rise dotted with granite stones and brickwork crypts.
He continued past the entrance to the cemetery. At the next intersection he turned right, parked the car and twisted in his seat to look behind him.
Silhouetted against the sky, the slim figure left her car and followed an oyster shell path between the tombstones, head down, the flowers held lightly in front of her. She disappeared over the rise and McGuire, telling himself, you don’t have to do this, damn it, but ignoring his own advice, left his car and entered the cemetery along the same path.
He halted at the sight of June Leedale kneeling in front of a gray granite tombstone at the far corner of the graveyard, then stepped behind a brickwork crypt.
Removing a group of dead flowers from a glass jar at the base of the monument, June Leedale tossed them aside and emptied the gray-green water on the grass, then rose to fill the jar with fresh water from an upright faucet thrusting out of the ground three rows of tombstones away.
McGuire moved deeper into the shadow of the crypt. He lowered his head and felt foolish, ashamed. And curious. The curiosity burned within him like a sexual longing. Or something else perhaps. The emotional echoes of twenty years as a police detective, his instincts abuzz at the sight of someone acting surreptitiously, the scent of betrayal following like a spoor.
Returning to the tombstone, June Leedale knelt again to place the flowers in the jar and she arranged them with care, the Shasta daisies bright and proud in the hard-edged sunlight, the mums dark and dignified. Then she lowered her head, supported herself with one hand on the ground and sobbed, her shoulders heaving in silent shudders of agony and sadness.
McGuire strode quickly away, embarrassed at the sight, as though he had entered a room without knocking to discover two friends making love. But within a few paces he realized he couldn’t return to his car without the risk of June Leedale seeing him, either within the cemetery or on the shoulder of the road when she stood to leave.
He stepped behind another crypt, positioning himself so he could watch her Honda while tiny Stars and Stripes placed on the graves of war veterans stirred in a salt-scented breeze.
He took a long, deep breath and watched June Leedale rise to walk slowly along the pathway leading across the crest of the hill and back to her car, her dirndl skirt flowing gracefully around her legs. McGuire slid crabwise to the other side of the crypt, leaned against it and listened as the car’s engine came to life and faded in the distance. Then he approached the tombstone where the woman had placed the floral bouquet in a discarded glass jar and shed her tears with such passion.
“ELWOOD,” the bold marble letters declared. “To the memory of our beloved son David Raymond,” McGuire read beneath the surname. “Taken too soon 1964–1983.” He squatted to examine the letters as though they might reveal why a middle-aged woman would be drawn to mourn at the grave of a young man who had died a decade earlier.
Then, fingering the flowers absently and feeling a wave of compassion for the sad, haunted person who was June Leedale, he stood and winced at the cracking of his knees before setting off for his car, marveling at the sad secrets carried in the hearts of so many people he had come to know.