“No one steals from me,” he whispered to himself. “No one takes what’s mine.”
Catherine Frazier pulled her fleece jacket a little closer and watched her breath like smoke curl in front of her. The night air had an edge that predicted the evenings to come. Vermont is like that, she thought, it always gives a warning about what is coming, if one is only careful enough to pay attention. A cold taste of the dark sky on her lips, a sensation of numbness on her cheeks, above her a rattle of tree branches, a thin edge of ice on the ponds in the morning. There would be flurries in the next few days. She made a mental note to check her store of split wood piled up behind her house. She wished she could read people with the same accuracy as she did the weather.
The Boston bus was a little late, and instead of waiting inside the bowling alley and restaurant where it made its stop before heading on to Burlington and Montreal, she had stepped outside. Bright lights made her strangely nervous; she was more comfortable in shadows and fog.
She was looking forward to seeing Ashley, although, as always, she was a little nervous about how precisely she was to refer to her during her visit. Ashley wasn’t her granddaughter, nor was she a niece. She wasn’t related through adoption, although that was closest to what she was. Vermonters, as a rule, rarely butted into anyone else’s business, having that Yankee sensibility that the less said, the better. But Catherine knew that the other ladies of her church, and the folks behind the counter at the general store, the Ace Hardware, and other places where she was well-known, would have their questions. Like many in New England, they all had fined-tuned radars for any small act that suggested hypocrisy. And something about welcoming her daughter’s partner’s child into her home, while silently but obviously condemning that relationship, put some feelings on edge.
Catherine put her head back and let her eyes sweep over the canopy of night sky. She wondered if one could have as many conflicted feelings as there were stars in the heavens.
Ashley had been a child when she had first entered Catherine’s life. She remembered her first meeting with Ashley and found herself smiling in the darkness at the memory. I was wearing too many clothes. It was hot, but I had on a woolen skirt and sweater. How silly. I must have seemed like I was a hundred years old.
Catherine had been stiff, almost arch, stupidly formal, holding out her hand for a handshake, when she had been introduced to the eleven-year-old Ashley. But the child had disarmed her immediately, and so, in some respects, what truce she had with her own daughter, and the civility she displayed outwardly toward her daughter’s partner-Catherine hated that word; it made their relationship seem like a business-stemmed from her affection for Ashley. She had attended raucous birthday parties and dismally wet soccer games, watched Ashley play Juliet in a high school production, although she hated it when the character Ashley played died on the stage. She had sat on the edge of Ashley’s bed one night while the fifteen-year-old had sobbed uncontrollably at the breakup with her first boyfriend, and she had driven fast, far faster than ordinary, to get to Hope and Sally’s home in time to snap pictures of Ashley in her prom dress. She had nursed Ashley through a bout with the flu, when Sally had been preoccupied with a court case, sleeping on the floor next to her, listening for her breathing throughout the night. She had hosted Ashley when she’d shown up, camping gear in tow, with a couple of college friends, heading toward the Green Mountains, and entertained her at dinner in Boston on a couple of happy occasions and one truly wonderful time in the bleacher seats at Fenway, when Catherine had found an excuse to go to the city and had offhandedly called, although she had inwardly known that seeing Ashley was the real reason for the trip.
She pawed at the gravel in the parking lot, waiting for the bus, and thought to herself that life had not delivered to her the grandchildren that she had wanted and expected, but instead fate had delivered Ashley. She believed that in the first moment that she had met Ashley, and the child had peered out shyly and asked, “Would you like to see my room? Maybe we can read a book together?” that she had entered into a wholly different realm, where Ashley was exempted from all the disappointment and difficulty that Catherine and Hope experienced.
“Damn it,” Catherine said out loud. “How late can a bus be?”
In that moment she heard the wheezing noise of a big diesel engine, slowing to make a turn, and she saw headlights cutting across the darkness of the parking lot. She stepped forward quickly, already waving her arms above her head in greeting.
Sally’s secretary buzzed her and said, “I have a Mr. Murphy on the phone who says he has some information for you.”
“Put him through,” Sally said.
“Hello, Mr. Murphy. What have you got for me?”
“Well,” he said, speaking in a world-weary, cynical tone, “not as much as I can get, and will get, assuming you want me to continue, but I was figuring that you’d want an update sooner rather than later, given the, ah, personal nature of this particular inquiry.”
“That would be correct.”
“You want the bottom line? Or details first?”
“Just tell me what you know.”
“Well, I don’t think you’ve got too much to worry about. You’ve got something to worry about, that’s for sure, don’t get me wrong, but let me put it this way: I’ve seen worse.”
Sally felt a surge of relief. “Okay, that’s good. Why don’t you fill me in?”
“Well, he’s got a record. Not a real long one, and not one with a whole lot of red flags, if you know what I mean, but enough to be concerned.”
“Violence?”
“Some. Not too much. Fights, that sort of thing. No weapons that I can see from the charges filed against him. That’s good. But it can also mean he just hasn’t been caught.
“Look,” Murphy continued, “this guy O’Connell seems like a bad guy. But I’ve got the feeling that he’s a lightweight. I mean, I’ve seen his type a million times, and with a little no-nonsense pressure, they fold up like a stack of chairs. You want to put up the cash, I can arrange for a couple of my buddies and me to go pay him a little visit. Put the fear of God into him. Make him understand that he’s screwing around with the wrong sort of folks. Maybe help him to understand that a different approach to life will be healthier for him, all around.”
“Are you saying threatening him?”
“No, ma’am. And I would certainly not advocate violence in any regard.” Murphy paused, letting those words sink in, and letting Sally understand that he was saying exactly the opposite. “Because that would be a crime. And, as an officer of the court, I know, Counselor, that you would never hire me to injure someone. No, ma’am. I understand that. What I’m saying is that he can be, ah, intimidated. That’s it. Intimidated. All well within the absolute letter of the law. As you and I understand the law to be. But something that definitely will make him think twice about what he’s doing.”