Shattered Shell Page 2

Jerry took another picture and shook his head. "Who could blame them for being scared?" he said. "Read once about arsons in New York City. Sometimes the arsonists, they'll cut holes in the floors and cover 'em with linoleum, so the firefighters fall through when they go in. Bad enough to go in a burning building; must be ten times worse when you know someone's busy setting the fires and setting you up."

  "True enough," I said. "Good luck in getting the story. It's time for this magazine writer to get going."

  Paula nodded and said, "Lunch soon?" and instead of looking at her, I quickly caught a glance of Jerry Croteau, seeing something pass over his face. Maybe it was concern, maybe it was jealousy, and maybe it was just a passing wisp of smoke.

  "Sure," I said. “I’ll call you."

  I left the two of them there, and they bent heads together to talk, and I wondered if my name was coming up in the conversation.

  It took a few more minutes of walking through the snow and looking at the backs of firefighters' turnout gear before I found the man I wanted. Mike Ahern was sitting on the hood of his car, smoking a cigarette. His fire helmet was off and the top of his sweaty head steamed in the cold air. He was writing with some difficulty on a notepad, wearing fingerless gloves, and he looked up at me and went back to work as I came over.

  "Wish you'd change your mind about an interview, Mike," I said, standing in front of him. His pullover pants and fire boots were wet and black with soot and debris.

  "And why's that?" he said, not looking up again from the pad.

  "What advantage would I have in talking with you?"

  "Maybe not an advantage to you, but an advantage to others. Readers of my magazine. People in town. This is becoming a story, whether you like it or not."

  "Hah." He put down the notepad and stretched. Mike was about as tall as I was, but was easily a foot wider, with thick forearms and hands. His black hair was trimmed short and was streaked with gray, and on the side of his face, above his left ear, his skin bore the shiny and wrinkly marks of burned skin that had not healed well.

  “Let me tell you this: I don't have to tell you anything," Mike said, removing his cigarette and pointing it at me. "Newspaper writers, maybe. They’re here in town and taxpayers like to read them, and since the taxpayers have an unholy grip on my balls every budget time, I gotta keep them happy and amused. But not magazines from Boston. I don't owe you, I don't feel like wasting my time with you, and you can't hurt me."

  Even without looking, I knew that the battle for the motel's timbers was almost over. The heat on my back from the flames was easing up. I said, "You're probably right in everything you said, and it’s true I can’t hurt you, but maybe I can help you."

  His eyes narrowed at that and he took another drag from his cigarette. I’m not sure why so many firefighters smoke. Maybe it's just fatalism.

  Mike said, "Yeah? How? Free subscriptions?"

  I shrugged. "Information. Let's just say I do a lot of research for my columns, and not all of my research appears in print."

  That seemed to get his attention, and he looked away and said quietly, "This is the fourth major fire in as many weeks, and I’m getting mighty tired. A winter like this, you plan for maybe a couple of suspicious fires, when a guy who runs a restaurant decides to cut his losses and move to Orlando with an insurance check in his back pocket."

  Then he looked to me, the light from the flames and the strobes from the fire trucks and police cars making his face look like it was shimmering with some emotion. "But not this time around. This time, it's crazy. No link. None of these guys who owned these hotels had a bad year. But here we are. With four hotels burned to the ground in a month. So far we've been lucky, with nobody getting hurt. They've all been closed for the winter and were empty. But next time?"

  Mike stood up from his car and put his fire helmet back on, tugged at the chin strap. "Next time, we might need flatbed trucks here to pull away all the bodies, if our nut friend decides to try his or her hand at a motel with people in it. You say you can help? All right. We'll talk next week, when I catch my breath from this latest disaster."

  After some fumbling on my part, I passed over my business card, which lists my name, home phone number and my post office box in Tyler, and my job at Shoreline magazine: columnist. I'm not sure if it's against the law to lie on business cards, but so I’ve gotten away with it. The IRS and a few others think being a columnist is all I do, and I've never been one to discourage that fantasy.

  Mike Ahern trudged across the snow to meet up with Diane Woods, and I gave her a half-wave as my own thermostat told me it was time to go. I silently wished her luck on her hot date, and then I began to walk away from the rubble that used to be a business that contributed something to this town. Maybe not a big deal as far as disasters went, and I knew that only the local papers might cover it, but for many lives, this was a big story. For those vacationers who came back to the Rocks Road Motel each summer, that place was now gone. For the chambermaids and clerks and short order cooks for its restaurant, their jobs at the Rocks Road Motel were gone. For the other businesses that supplied the motel with towels, soap, and food, one big customer had just been lost.

  A lot of losses, all due to a man, woman, or a gang who was having too much fun with flammable liquids and incendiary devices this past month. As I walked to my Range Rover, parked skewed near a snow bank, I passed Sam and Amy Keller, still holding each other, still grieving at seeing so many years of work and effort being reduced to ashes.

  For the drive home I took Atlantic Avenue --- also known as Route l-A --- and the road hugged the beaches of Tyler as it headed north. Driving here in winter is always disorienting. It's like going back to your childhood home and seeing a garage has been added and the familiar red paint has been replaced by ugly ivory siding. All along the beach road there were hundreds of empty parking spaces, and except for a set of taillights far ahead, I was the only one on the road.

  Six months earlier I would have been in bumper-to-bumper traffic, at a time when fistfights sometimes break out over the privilege of parking near the sands. Instead of nearly a hundred thousand vacationers and moms and dads and kids and bathing beauties of both sexes, I had an empty road, flickering streetlights, closed-up motels and, and beach sand and snow blowing across the pavement.

  It was a cloudy night, promising more snow, and I saw not one star as I neared the border between Tyler and North Tyler. Near that dividing line is a resort motel that stays open year-round, the Lafayette House, and I pulled into the tiny parking lot across the way. A large sign at the entrance said PRIVATE PARKING FOR LAFAYETTE HOUSE ONLY, and I turned into the lot and went to the north end, passing a few parked cars, BMWs and Volvos. The lot was plowed clean, which wasn't the case for my destination.

  At the end of the lot was a low stonewall and an opening where some of the rocks had fallen free. There was a narrow, snow-covered path there, just wide enough for my Rover. The path went to the right past two homemade no-trespassing signs, and my house came into view. It's a two-story house that's one step above a cottage, that’s never been painted, and that has a dirt crawl space for a cellar. The snow-covered lawn rises up to a steep rocky ledge that hides my home from Atlantic Avenue, and I parked in the sagging shed serves as my garage. Just beyond my house is another outcropping of land called Samson Point, which used to be a Coast Artillery station, and which is now a state wildlife preserve.

  I unlocked the front door and did the winter two-step, which is trying to remove heavy boots at the entrance without falling down or stripping off your socks. Before me was the rear landing of the stairway that led to the second floor. I shook off my coat and breathed in the cold air of my house. The building first served as quarters for the supervisor of a lifeboat station that was operating at Samson Point sometime in the middle part of the 1800s, and has belonged to the government ever since. How it got from the U.S. government to my ownership is a depressing tale that I've not told anyone since I moved here some years back
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  I padded across the hardwood living room floor, decorated in some parts by oriental rugs. There's a living room with a fireplace and big kitchen on the first floor, along with an outside deck. Upstairs is a bathroom, my study, and a bedroom. There are a lot of bookshelves, some antiques and historical memorabilia, and on this January night, not much heat. There's a lot to be said about living in a house that's almost a hundred and fifty years old, but its ability to retain heat is not one of them.

  I sniffed as I went up the stairs. I smelled of smoke, and I knew it was shower time. In the bathroom I stripped off my clothes and jumped in the shower, suddenly feeling weary about having been out in the cold for such hours, watching something as awful as a family's business burn to the ground. I stood under the hot water for some long minutes, feeling the cold seep from the bones and muscles. I stepped out and rubbed myself down with a white fluffy towel, and then started checking my skin, an activity that's almost a habit, but not quite. There's a scar at the small of my back, on my right knee, and two lengthy ones on my left side. The skin was smooth and supple, and I felt no bumps, lumps, or other disturbances, souvenirs from my previous career. I live in this wonderful house rent- and mortgage-free, but this shower routine is one payment that I make, almost every day.

  Some days, I almost think it's worth it.

  The bathroom is between the study and bedroom, and I went into the bedroom, still tingly and slightly wet from the shower. There's an old four-poster oak bed in the center of the room, with matching bureaus and bookshelves, and a reflector telescope standing in one corner on a black tripod. A sliding glass door leads to a small deck on the south end of the house. I turned on a reading light and slid under the covers, shivering a bit, and then I picked up last month's issue of Smithsonian magazine. I hardly got past the letters page when my eyelids started drooping, and I switched off the light and let the magazine drop to the floor. My breathing started to slow and I listened to the wind and the whispering sounds of snow or sand striking the windows. The waves were there, always moving, never once letting up in their movement to my shore and my house.

  And then I fell asleep, on an evening that was to be my last quiet and peaceful night at home for many weeks.

  Chapter Two

  When it happened, I had been dreaming, dreaming about my other life, the one before I came to Tyler. Back then I was a research analyst in an obscure section of the Department of Defense, and I was dreaming about one of the weekends we used to have, the ones called screamers. The screamers happened during crisis times, at a moment when the world's attention is focused on Kuwait, Bosnia, or a group of insignificant islands in the China Sea. Ships begin to move, aircraft begin to fly, surveillance satellites are moved in their orbits, the news media broadcasts a lot of loud words and threats, and a lot of late-night lights get burned in government buildings in DC. Sometimes a screamer meant working through the weekend, or catching a few hours' sleep at home, or napping whenever you could on cots brought into the office.

  I had been dreaming about one of the latter screamers, a time when a heavy deadline was approaching, and I remember bells ringing and someone saying, "Holy Christ, we're bombing," and I sat up, breathing hard, sitting on a cot, a wool blanket falling off my trousers and stockinged feet, looking around at the cubicles and terminals and the other members of my section, from Cissy Manning to Carl Socha, and more bells were ringing and I gasped, closed my eyes and opened them again, and I was at my home.

  I looked at the digital clock. It was just past two-thirty a.m, I shook my head and ran my fingers through my hair, and the ringing, came back, seemingly louder.

  It was the phone.

  I swiveled off my bed and threw on a heavy terrycloth robe as I shambled out of my bedroom, yawning but feeling the adrenaline surge through me, making my heart roar along and my hands tingle. I took the steps downstairs rather quickly, not thinking of who was calling, only knowing that the damnable ringing was blasting through my head and I had to turn it off.

  Grabbing the phone, I sat down on my couch, just across from the darkened brick fireplace, and I said, "Yeah?" and the static on the other line was loud. My caller was outside at a pay phone.

  "Hello?" I said again, ready to hang up, and a tiny, strained voice said, "Lewis?"

  My God. "Diane?" I asked. "Is that you?"

  "Oh, Lewis," she said, sobbing, and I sat very straight and still, for in the few years I've known Diane Woods, I could only remember seeing tears on her face twice.

  "Diane," I said, trying to keep my voice level. "What's wrong?"

  "Oh, Lewis," she repeated, trying to say words between the gasping sobs. "It's Kara. She's in the hospital."

  "Diane --- "

  She interrupted me and it felt like a chunk of ice from the roof was now in my chest.

  "Lewis, oh, shit, Lewis, she's been raped."

  Within five minutes I was dressed and ready to go back outside It had been hard, locating clean pants and a heavy shirt and sweater and socks while my hands were shaking and I was trying to keep focused on what I was doing and where I was going. Diane was at the Anna Jaques Hospital in Newburyport, Kara Miles's home town, and she would meet me in the emergency room. About a hundred and one questions were Swirling through my mind, bill they would have to wait until I got there. I tossed on my coat, still smoky from the corpse of the Rocks Road Motel, and I stepped outside.

  It was snowing, a light squall that wouldn't add much to the accumulation. I trudged through the packed snow trail that led my garage and I clambered into the Rover. In another minute I was in the plowed

  parking lot of the Lafayette House, and in another minute I was heading south. I turned on the radio and then I just as quickly turned it off. What I had just learned was nothing that could be ignored through early a.m. talk radio or music. Instead of listening to imported noise, I listened to the noise inside my mind as I returned to the nearly empty roads of Tyler Beach.

  A few years ago I had gotten to know Diane, soon after I had moved into my home, newly liberated from the U.S. government. Though three new scars --- on my side, back, and knee --- were freshly healed, other wounds I had were proving to be stubborn indeed. I wasn’t sleeping right or eating anything during the day, save for canned and take-out food. I was no longer working for the Department of Defense --- officially, that is --- and I had a new job as a columnist for a magazine based in Boston, called Shoreline. I was responsible for the monthly "Granite Shores" column, which covered the eighteen miles of New Hampshire's coastline. The deal with the magazine was highly lucrative and highly unusual. Six hundred words a month, subject of my choosing --- so long as it had to do with to do with the seacoast ---and if I submitted crap or submitted nothing, another column would appear under my name, and my substantial paychecks would continue. Some people might call that a hell of a deal. Others might call it a bribe to keep my mouth shut for what I had seen one horrible day in Nevada. Both would probably be right.

  Earning this substantial salary meant researching and writing the column, which took about a week every month. This led to an increasingly fat bank account and an increasing amount of free time, which was quickly becoming a burden. There is only so much reading and cleaning you can do, and during the long and empty days, I was beginning to feel worthless, which was the first step on a slippery slope that would lead me to strike out for a swim to England one fine summer day and not turn around.

  Instead I began researching and writing other columns, on matters that interested me and that would never appear in the pages of Shoreline. The first was about a group of surfers at the North Beach who didn't seem to spend a lot of time in the ocean, but who were preoccupied with making furtive exchanges among hands, plastic bags and folded currency, with local passersby. This column took a couple weeks of work and some photographs, which I passed along to Diane Woods. I think she was surprised when I showed up with this information, and I know I was even more surprised when she didn't toss me out on my butt for interfe
ring in a police matter. Since then our relationship --- on a personal and professional basis --- has grown.

  After it had developed somewhat on the personal basis, she invited me out one day on her sailboat, Miranda, which she keeps in Tyler Harbor. We spent the day cruising up to the Isles of Shoals and back. It was a hot August day and Diane had on a skimpy pair of blue jean cutoffs and a white bathing suit top. She showed off an impressive amount of skin, and three or four times during the day she had asked me to rub suntan lotion on her light brown, muscular back. She had returned the favor, too, which is why I was feeling a bit slap happy when we got back to the harbor.

  When the gear was stored and we went up to her condominium, she made us both frozen strawberry daiquiris and quite gently brought me back down to earth.

  "Lewis," she said, sprawled out on her couch, "you've been a perfect gentleman all day, and I appreciate that."

  I raised my glass to her in a salute, sitting on the floor, leaning against the couch near her feet. "Is this my only reward, or do you have something else in mind?"

  When Diane is angry, her face would have caused Ted Bundy to shy away, but when she laughed, as she did then, it warmed something inside of me that I thought was dead. "Very good," she said, a wide smile on her face, "but there is something I have to tell you, just in case you're thinking about what's going to happen between you and me. Just so you know, my heart belongs to another."

  Oh. "Well, I understand."

  She was still smiling, and she shook her head. "No, you don't. Let me explain it to you. We're becoming friends, and I like that very much, but do know this about me. When I said my heart belongs to another, I didn't mean another person. I meant another gender. My gender. Understand?"

  Oops. I took a swallow from the daiquiri, and it was a delicious cold slipperiness that traveled right down my throat, and also gave me a second or two to recover.