“You want to crash at my place for a few? Maybe whoever it was will come back. I wouldn’t want those biker methheads catching me at home alone.” I could see by the sudden change in expression that he’d just made the connection. “Shit, I was with you.”
“I wouldn’t worry about it. If someone is looking for that hard drive, my apartment makes sense, yours doesn’t. Plus, I’m not totally convinced it was those guys from the shop.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But if my brother wasn’t blowing smoke and this isn’t all a bizarre coincidence, there has to be something pretty damning in those files.”
“Did he have the hard drive with him at your place?”
“Not unless it fit inside his filthy brown backpack.”
“So, Pete had it?”
“My guess.”
“And now Pete’s dead.”
The pretty Greek waitress brought Charlie’s burger, which he immediately began doctoring-salting, peppering, slathering in sauce.
I watched the waitress wriggle away in her tight blue skirt. Nineteen, twenty. Man, I was only ten years removed from that age and I might as well have been a hundred years old.
“Maybe Fisher will turn up something,” Charlie said, chomping down on his burger, gobs of mustard, mayo, and ketchup squirting out the sides and dribbling over his fingers.
“If you talk to him, tell him sorry. I was a little high-strung last night.”
“No worries,” said Charlie, through the wad of masticated hamburger mash. “So, what’s the plan now? Head back to that computer shop?” He snorted at his own joke.
“Maybe later.” I gazed at the roaming nomads schlepping through the roadside slush. “My brother has to be around here somewhere.”
Charlie sucked the meat juices off his thumb.
“We don’t have any soup kitchens or shelters in town,” I said. “Maybe he’s over in Pittsfield. But that’s a long haul just for a place to sleep. I know he crashes at some of these motels on the Turnpike when he gets enough money.” I gestured out the window. “There is this one girl he used to hang around with, Kitty something.”
“Kitty?”
“That’s how he introduced her to me. Kitty. Used to bring her around a lot. Shit, this was, like, a couple years ago. I normally don’t pay attention to any of his friends, they come and go so fast, but she seemed to mean more to him than most of the ones he runs around with.”
“Girlfriend?”
“I’m not sure guys like my brother have girlfriends. Anyway, she stopped coming by. Hardly a prize, as strung-out as him. She had a room in a boarding house over in Middlebury. Middle of fucksake nowhere. Had me drop her off there once.”
“Who lives in a boarding house? What is this? The 1940s?”
I shrugged.
“Why haven’t you checked there before now?”
“Because it was three fucking years ago,” I said. “I doubt she even still lives there.”
“I thought you said it was two years.”
“I don’t know, Charlie. Maybe it was two. Maybe it was a year. It’s been a while, though. I haven’t given it much thought until now. Why would I? I have my own fucking life, y’know?” Out the window, a bum struggled to keep from slipping as he pushed a shopping cart across the icy parking lot. “You don’t understand what’s it’s been like dealing with my brother.”
“I think I have a good idea.”
“He’s like a child. You can’t take his plans or his friends seriously. Everyone he hangs around with is like that. They all live in a fantasy world, as whacked out as he is.”
Charlie’s phone on the table started to vibrate. He checked it, glumly muttering, then hopped up and extracted a wad of bills from his hip pocket. “Gotta run. Call me this afternoon. Let me know what you find.” He left a ten-spot, slipped on his work coat, then shoved the last bite of bacon and burger down his gullet. “And I mean it, if you want to crash at my place, got an extra bed and everything.”
I nodded my appreciation. He double knocked on the table and hurried out the door.
Buried deep in the valley cuts, Middlebury oozed so much backwoods’ backwater it made Ashton seem like a bustling metropolis. Small, spread-out dairy farms and gummed-up slaughterhouses, broken-down harvesters rusting in untended fields, distant houses where the top floor lights never went out. Murders of big black crows perched high in treetops, suspiciously eyeing strangers. They’d wait for the shotgun blasts to echo in the distance, before scattering in fifteen different directions.
At the end of a tortuously long, one-lane road that carved through granite gullies and dense thicket in the rugged northern outback, Middlebury’s town center comprised a tiny grocery market, a gas station with one pump, and a restaurant that closed at two in the afternoon. That was it. Even by rural standards, Middlebury was Hicksville.
The people who lived in Middlebury fell into one of two camps: radical militia types who didn’t like the government telling them what to do, so they stockpiled firearms and refurbished land mines, collected canned goods by the crate-load, burrowing deep underground, prepping for doomsday. You’d spot them on patrol, making rounds, trolling compound perimeters in camouflage fatigues, sporting subterranean tans like extras from The Hills Have Eyes, hoping for some poor bastard to mistakenly wander onto their property.
Then there were the rehabilitated.
I knew of at least two halfway houses and one transitional living facility. I guess they thought by sticking addicts in the middle of nowhere it would be harder for them to score dope or get drunk. But if my brother had taught me one thing about addiction, it was that when an addict wants to get high, ain’t hell or high water going to stop him.
Back when I’d try to fix my brother, a doctor mentioned these homes as possible landing points, should Chris manage to stay sober long enough to warrant transitional housing. He never made it past twenty-seven days.
I wouldn’t have known the boarding house existed at all, had my brother not roped me into dropping off his girlfriend late one night. Took forever. The farther the road stretched, the longer I knew it would take to get back, and the more enraged I’d become. The girl, Kitty, tried being friendly, attempting to strike up a conversation, undeterred by my lack of response. Which only made me seethe more. What could she and I possibly have to talk about?
Who’d choose to live in a boarding house anyway, especially one so far off the beaten path? Public transportation didn’t run in these parts. These people never had their own car. It was like self-imposed exile. Hell, even the idea of a boarding house struck me as odd, like a leftover relic from a World War II love story, a sailor down on his luck in an old film noir. Who couldn’t get their shit together enough to at least rent a goddamn motel room on the Turnpike?
I steered down the wooded drive, and the boarding house, a once-grand, two-story American Colonial, rose into view. I’d dropped Kitty off in the middle of the night that first time, and I hadn’t gotten much of a look. With its sprawling acreage and tree-lined entrance, the home might’ve passed for a plantation in the 1700s, if shutters weren’t dangling by their hinges, and weeds and vines hadn’t choked everything. Tall, white columns framed a long rocking porch, where, despite late-afternoon, frigid winds, five old ladies sat shawled in rocking chairs. Wrapped in cheap-looking coats, hidden beneath Goodwill hats, each smoked a cigarette with frail, palsied hands.
When I exited my truck and slammed shut the door, the women collectively jumped, before clustering together and staring, wide-eyed.
As I drew closer, I realized I’d been mistaken. These weren’t old women-they were girls, barely out of their teens.