The fog hung over the shoreline like a scrim separating the land from the sea. McGuire crept the car along Oyster Pond Road, pausing at each intersection to peer out at road signs. He located Hannaford’s Real Estate and turned left onto Old Queen Anne Road. Away from the shore, the air grew clear, but where Old Queen Anne Road meandered close to the sea again, he encountered banks of fog across the road, massive gun-metal clouds that brooded in the lights of his car.
After about a mile, he slowed for a line of cars leading into a fog bank ahead of him. Flares sputtered on the shoulder of the road and lights flashed red, blue and yellow. He inched around an ambulance, two towing vehicles, a Compton Police cruiser, a tangle of three cars and a mangled pickup truck. A young police officer was directing traffic past the accident site and McGuire noticed Bob Morton, his head down and a notebook in his hand, walking toward the cruiser.
McGuire lowered his window and called Morton’s name. The officer glanced up, leaned forward with his eyes narrowed and burst into a smile at the sight of McGuire.
“You got a bad one here?” McGuire asked when Morton arrived at his car.
“Couple of bumped heads, broken nose. Nothing serious but they called me out anyway.” He stepped back to wave the driver following McGuire around the demolished cars and emergency vehicles, then returned to McGuire’s window. “What brings you out here on such a lousy night?”
“Had dinner with Blake Stevenson,” McGuire said. “Just heading back.”
Morton nodded. “Bit of a pompous bastard, isn’t he? Stevenson, I mean.”
McGuire had a thought. “You going back to the station from here?”
“Long enough to finish this report, then home,” Morton replied.
“I want to look at another file—”
“Oh, boy,” Morton interrupted. He straightened, looked around, and shook his head. “I don’t know. . . .”
“Where’s the file you showed me today? The one on the Sanders murder?”
“Locked it in my desk. First thing tomorrow, I’m putting it back downstairs.”
“Let me look at it again. While you’re filling out this report.”
“Okay,” Morton agreed. “I’ll be another ten, fifteen minutes here. That’s all you want, right?”
“Almost.” A horn sounded behind McGuire and he slipped the car in drive. “I want to see if you’ve got anything on my cousin, Terry Godwin.”
It was almost half an hour before Morton appeared at the police station where McGuire had long since finished reading the staff notices on the bulletin board and scanning a two-day-old copy of the Cape Cod News. A police officer who appeared too young to handle any responsibility more demanding than a paper route sat at the switchboard dividing his time between answering telephone calls and watching the World Series on a portable television set.
Morton entered the station at a brisk walk and motioned McGuire to follow him around the counter. The officer on the switchboard handed Morton a small sheaf of messages, none apparently urgent.
In his office, Morton unlocked a desk drawer, withdrew the Sanders file and tossed it on his desk. “What else you looking for?” he asked.
“Anything on Terry Godwin,” McGuire said. “He was my cousin. Lived on Miner’s Lane in the house I’m in now.”
“Where’s he now?” Morton swiveled in his chair and switched on his computer.
“He died in sixty-seven.”
Morton turned back to McGuire, his eyes wide. “Well, hell, nothing in our computer files goes back that far. We’re only good to 1980.”
“So where would it be?”
“Downstairs.” He gestured at the file in McGuire’s hand. “Same place I got that.”
“How long will it take you to dig it up?”
Morton rolled his eyes to the ceiling. “Come on, man. I was supposed to stay home tonight and watch the World Series. I get called out because some jerk in a pickup figures he can do sixty through a fog bank, I haven’t eaten yet, I find out my team is down five runs in the sixth inning and now you want me to dig up some twenty-five-year-old crap out of the basement?”
McGuire stared at him in silence.
“Okay, okay,” Morton said, holding both hands up as though stopping traffic. “If you want it, it’s gotta be important. But do I really have to get it now? I’ll be half an hour writing up this accident as it is. Come by tomorrow and I’ll have it before lunch for you. How’s that?”
“Sure.” McGuire gave Morton a smile. “I’m fishing a bit. Might not be anything to it.”
“Atta boy.” Morton flashed a smile. “Get you a coffee?”
McGuire said no, but he wanted to scan the Sanders file once again. He sat in Morton’s office, reading again the report of Cynthia Sanders’s thirty-year-old death, finding nothing new.
McGuire had left the house on Miner’s Lane without extinguishing the lights. It shone like a beacon in the darkness, each window on the ground floor lit from within, the second story in darkness.
At the front door McGuire fumbled for the key, found it and entered the cozy warmth that recalled memories of his aunt. Once again he regretted not having visited her in the last years of her life. He walked from room to room through the first floor, switching off lights and pausing in the kitchen long enough to savor a drink of orange juice. Then he darkened the kitchen and climbed the stairs.
Reaching the second floor he turned to enter Cora’s bedroom, then hesitated before striding to the room at the end of the hall, the one facing the small woody grove in back of the house. Terry’s room.
He remembered the sudden chill that had swept over him when he entered the room two days ago, as though the air hadn’t changed for over twenty years, and the same sensation returned when McGuire flicked the switch for the overhead light.
Cora had sealed the room, McGuire believed, because it was the only remaining tangible evidence of her son’s existence. And because it would always be waiting for Terry if she should awake and discover it had all been a nightmare and her son was even now calling from Logan Airport to say he was boarding a Cape-bound bus, returning from the madness of war to the safety and sanity of home.
But it wasn’t nostalgia for his dead cousin that brought him here. It was Ellie Stevenson and her suspicions about Terry.
Ellie was a strange and angry woman. Neither quality, McGuire knew, meant she was a liar. In his experience, such people were often addicted to absolute truth, as cruel and painful as it might be.
He began pulling books from the shelves, flipping through their pages, the action releasing a musty acidic aroma that rose from the paper and irritated his nostrils. With the third book in his hand he froze at a noise from downstairs, a sound firm but yielding, like wood sliding on wood.
McGuire walked softly to the top of the stairs and listened. He heard nothing for a moment until a rafter in the roof creaked above his head and a tree branch, tossed by the evening breeze, brushed against a second floor window.
Still, he descended the stairs, switched on lights in each of the rooms, checked the locks on the front and rear doors and stood silently in the centre of the living room before climbing the stairs again.
Old houses, McGuire told himself, are like old bodies. They creak and groan and cause alarms.
The musty, closed-in smell of Terry’s room seemed stronger than ever. McGuire walked to one of the windows, pulled aside the antique sash lock and, ignoring the pain in his back that warned him he was midway between forty and fifty, hefted the window open.
He returned to the bookshelf which extended along the wall facing the window. Several issues of Sports Illustrated were stacked in one corner. “Can Ali Come Back?” asked the cover of one. “Fran Tarkenton and Those Amazing Vikings” shouted another. McGuire flipped through the magazines, pausing to smile at a feature story or an advertisement for outdated clothing and cars.
He glanced at the book titles on the shelves, located Terry’s high school yearbook and spent the next few minutes studying graduation photographs of Terry and his friends. A thin, athletic Blake Stevenson looked almost handsome with a head of thick, wavy hair. He saw a shy Parker Leedale without his silly mustache and a smiling Mike Gilroy, perhaps the least changed of the group.
At the bottom of the grad photo page an engaging face stared out, the jaw dimpled, the smile lopsided, the eyes laughing, the hair curly and full and coal-black. Charles “Sonny” Tate. Ambition: Millionaire. Probable Destiny: The White House. Activities: Football, Basketball, Orchestra . . .
From the darkness beyond and beneath the open window, a peculiar sound alerted McGuire’s senses: soft yet metallic. Precise, familiar, threatening.
He looked up from the high school yearbook and frowned.
The hell.
He didn’t hear the shot, could never recall the sound of the rifle firing or the next snick-snick of the bolt action being worked or the noise made by the second bullet slamming into the wall beyond him.
Because the first shot found McGuire and burrowed its way into his shoulder and out again, and the rush of adrenalin released with the warning sound of the bolt action propelled his body in a twisting, falling motion away from the window, fueled by fear and pain.