“Not with paint,” I said, “but I think the Provos put her in my house to act as a tripwire.” And she had played that part so cleverly! By acting shocked and being tough when I returned she had convinced me that she was an innocent bystander. Christ, I thought, but I had even asked Gillespie to warn her of trouble, and she was a part of that trouble all along.
“So did she get the gold?” Johnny asked.
“The Provos did. It was meant for them anyway.”
He shook his head in disapproval, then, being Johnny, he found a silver lining on the cloud. “But at least you got the electricity put into the house, didn’t you?”
“But why?” I asked that question aloud, suddenly struck by an incongruity. Sarah Sing Tennyson had been in my house three years already. That made no sense, not if she had merely been placed there as a tripwire for my return—for who could have foreseen the Gulf War three years ago?
“Why what?” Johnny asked.
“God knows.” I was suddenly disgusted with myself and with everything I had done in the last few weeks. What did it matter whether the girl had been in my house three months or three years? I had played the game and lost. It was over.
I stayed that night with Johnny, and next day went home and began clearing out my house. I took Sarah Tennyson’s daubs, piled them on a patch of sandy ground beyond the deck, splashed them with gasoline and slung a match at them. The oil paint burned well, making lovely colors in its flames as the black smoke plumed thin across the marshes.
I took the dust-sheet off the oak floor, then sanded and waxed the boards. I scrubbed the kitchen, dusted the stairways, and aired the bedrooms. I had lost the Colt .45 when I was snatched, but I found the carbine under the bed. I hid it away, then replaced the broken kitchen window and put new locks on the doors. When a telephone bill arrived addressed to Ms. Sing Tennyson I sent it to Herlihy’s law office, then had the telephone disconnected. I neither wanted it, nor could afford it.
I lived spare. What small supplies I needed I could buy every day at the convenience store. On the days when the tides were slack I went trawling for cod with Johnny and he paid me wages from the pile of money I had given him for Rebel Lady. I used a chunk of my own cash to buy myself a cheap pick-up truck and debated whether I should equip it with a golden retriever or a black labrador. I was one of at least a hundred people who applied for a mechanic’s job at an Upper Cape marina, but at forty I was reckoned too old for the position. My remaining cache of money dwindled and it was painful to remember that, just a year ago, I had been sole proprietor of Nordsee Yacht Delivery, Services and Surveying, with a handy cash flow and profit enough for my needs if not for those of the unlamented Sophie. Now, thanks to my own greed, I was down to my last few bucks, though I still owned the renamed Roisin in Ireland and, come the spring’s revival in the boat market, I decided I would order her sold and use the money to eke out a few more months on the Cape.
One fine March morning Sergeant Ted Nickerson, the policeman who had rescued me from Sarah Sing Tennyson’s ammonia on the night of my return to the Cape, dropped by the house. “Just keeping an eye on the place,” he explained as he climbed out of his cruiser. “So you’re home for good now, Paul?”
“Yes.”
“The CIA finished with you?”
“Ask them, Ted.” I was not feeling sociable.
“But you’re OK, Paul?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
Nickerson walked to the edge of the drive and stared southward across the bay. He noticed the remnants of the bonfire on which I had burned Sarah Tennyson’s canvases. “I could probably arrest you for lighting that fire. You must have broken at least a dozen federal regulations, not to mention the state laws and the national park rules and the town ordinances.” He spat in disgust. “A man can’t even piss over the side of his boat these days without breaking the law.” He took a cigarette from a pocket and shielded the lighter with his free hand. “We got a telephone call a while back. From a young lady called Kathleen Donovan. She was kind of distressed. Said she thought you were being kidnapped. Were you?”
“Yes,” I said, but did not add that she had been a part of it.
“But we had orders not to interfere with you. If anything happened we were to talk to a guy in the Washington office of the FBI. So we did, and he seemed to think you could look after yourself. And if you’re here now then I guess he was right?”
“I guess so, too.” The FBI, I surmised, had acted for the CIA who had sensibly not wanted a small-town police force to tangle with international terrorists. But I also noted that neither the CIA nor the FBI had seemed unduly worried by my disappearance. No one had inquired about me since, evidently no one had looked for me while I was gone, and I could only surmise that van Stryker or Gillespie considered that I deserved whatever mischief came my way. I had been useful to them, now I was useless and discarded.
“But I thought you ought to know about the young lady,” Ted went on, “especially as she sounded kind of upset. She particularly wanted me to let her know if you were OK.” He took a scrap of paper from a pocket. “That’s her phone number. Of course I could give her a call myself, but if you want to speak to her then you’ll be saving the police department the price of a long-distance phone call.” Nickerson held out the piece of paper.
I took it. “Thanks, Ted.”
“Just being neighborly, Paul.” He hesitated. “I suppose you’re not going to tell me what this is all about?”
“One day, maybe.”
“Yeah, and maybe one day the Red Sox will win the Series.” He climbed into his car and wound down the window. “The Goddamn town wants to declare police cars a public facility and therefore smoke free. Fuck ’em, I say.” He waved his cigarette at me, reversed the car, then drove away.
I stared at the piece of paper. It felt like one last chance. Or, of course, it could be another trap to snare a fool, just as Kathleen’s last visit had been, but my future was not so golden that I needed to take care of it and so I drove the truck up to the main road and, with my last few quarters, placed a call to Maryland.
Kathleen Donovan lived in a small house on the ragged outskirts of a one-street country town. The house had two storeys, a wide verandah, and a windbreak of scrub pine. Behind it was a meadow with an old tobacco drying shed decaying in its center. “None of it’s mine,” she said. “I just rent it.”
“It’s nice,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster.
“Not when the wind’s in the south. Then you can smell the chicken farm beyond the swamp.” She laughed suddenly, knowing I had lied out of politeness. “I just wanted to get away from Baltimore.”
“To be near your folks?”
She shook her head. “To get away from them. I spend three or four nights a week up there, and it’s good to get away. It’s real nice here in spring, you know, when the dogwood is out?”
“And in summer?”
“Hot. Too hot.” She sounded resigned. “I don’t know. I guess I won’t renew the lease. This was an experiment. I always wanted to live in the country, and I thought once David and I were divorced that it would be a real good time to do it, but it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Not one of my carrots came up, not one! And the deer ate all the lettuce and the bean bushes had bugs and there were worms in the tomatoes.”
“That’s why God made supermarkets.”
She laughed. Then looked up at me. “I’m sorry.”
“Why?” We were standing beside my pick-up. I had only just arrived, and we were both feeling awkward, and I guessed she was regretting her impulsive agreement to let me visit her. I was nervous, and the ten-hour drive from Cape Cod had given me too much time to anticipate the failure of this meeting. I wanted to fall in love with Kathleen, maybe I had half convinced myself that I was already in love with her, and I had even half convinced myself that it was not simply because she was her sister’s ghost. I had not been truthful about my reasons for visiting, but instead had told her I had business in Washington and could I perhaps take the chance of dropping by? She had hesitated, then agreed, and now I asked her once more why she was apologizing to me. “Why?”