Archer Mayor - The Ragman's memory

I motioned toward the thick book. “That the appointment calendar?”

She looked down at it as if it had snuck up on her. “Oh, right.” She flipped it open to the correct page, turned it around so we could read its contents, and tapped an entry with her crimson fingernail. “That’s her-Davis, S.-that’s when she came for the cap.”

She placed a Post-it note on the page to mark it, spun the book back around, and reopened it at a later page. “And here’s where the callback appointment shows up. There’s another one a week later, but then we gave up.” She handed the book over to us so we could study both pages at leisure.

As Ron returned to the first entry, I asked, “Do you have any memory of her?”

Alice made a face. “Kind of. I’ve been trying to remember ever since you called, but you know, it’s hard. We see a lot of one-timers, and I guess she just didn’t stand out much.”

I glanced over Ron’s shoulder. “What’s the date?” I asked him softly.

He ran his finger along the line opposite Davis’s name. November, year before last-about fourteen months ago.” He flipped to the next page mark. “And the callback was in May of last year, six months later.”

“You have an address on her, maybe in your billing records?”

She sat back, looking embarrassed. “We might, but with records going that far back, Dr. Williams keeps them in storage. That means they’re in his attic at home. We’re told to say ‘storage.’ Sounds better.”

“You have a phone book?” I asked her.

“Sure.” She handed me a medium-sized directory for North Adams and surrounding towns.

Ron read off the number on the callback sheet as I scanned all the entries under “Davis.” I finally found a match, predictably near the bottom, next to “Wilma.” The address was local.

“Know where this is?” I asked Alice, showing her the listing. Her face soured. “I should. It took me years to get out of that neighborhood.”

Fifteen minutes later, I was sympathizing with Alice’s appraisal of her old home ground. The street we were on looked ready to break off from the rest of the town and drift away into oblivion. It was narrow, hemmed in by snowbanks piled between haphazardly abandoned vehicles, and lined with serried ranks of sagging, gray, almost collapsing wooden buildings-remnants of worker housing dating back a hundred years. The few porches still intact were piled deep with snow-covered firewood, the windows were either curtainless, too filthy to see through, or fully boarded over. Occasional wisps of smoke trickling up from a few metal stove pipes were the sole signs of life.

I parked opposite the address we’d found in the phone book. Actually, given the street’s condition, I just rolled to a stop and killed the engine. There was no place to park, and no traffic to avoid in any case.

We both left the car and stood soundlessly in the street, staring at the house before us-a patched-together wooden box, single-story, its small windows opaque, a glimpse of tattered blue tarp showing through the snow covering the swaybacked roof. If Shawna Davis had once lived here, it took no great imagination to see why she might have left.

The street was eerily bereft of the usual clatter of civilization. I could hear no dogs, no children, no cars, no voices raised in joy or anger. For all intents and purposes, it seemed like this small portion of hopeful North Adams had missed out on the dream and simply died.

I motioned toward a narrow, crooked, shoveled trench in the snow, connecting the front door to the street. “Somebody’s been at work since the last storm.”

We walked cautiously in single file up to the door and listened. I couldn’t hear a sound. Suddenly hesitant to make a loud noise in this funereal setting, I finally knocked on the door.

“Who is it?” The question was hostile, immediate, from just beyond the thin paneling. Its abruptness made us both jump. I noticed Ron unbutton his coat for easier access to his gun.

“Mrs. Davis?” I said to the closed door, “My name is Joe Gunther. We’re police officers from Brattleboro, Vermont. We wondered if we could have a few words with you.”

“What about?” The voice was cracked and hoarse, as if from underuse.

“Do you have a daughter named Shawna?”

“Maybe.”

Ron and I exchanged glances. I chose my words carefully, skirting the truth of our mission. “You’re not in any trouble, Mrs. Davis, and neither is Shawna. We’re just looking for some information. No harm will come to you.”

There was a long pause before the voice came back. “You have a warrant?”

Ron sighed and visibly relaxed. I resisted telling Mrs. Davis that she’d been watching too much TV, and instead used her own preconceptions against her. “We don’t need a warrant for a conversation. We can get one, though, if we think you’re trying to hide something from us.”

The lock snapped angrily and the door swung back to reveal an angular, bitter, pale woman in her thirties with a dirty face and several missing teeth. She was dressed in a pair of tight blue jeans and a red-and-white wool shirt, pulled out to disguise a malnourished, swollen stomach. The hot smell that swept out to greet us made me realize how lucky we’d been to be chatting through a barrier.

“Fucking cops,” she said and turned her back, vanishing into the gloom.

Ron and I tentatively followed, instinctively moving to opposite sides of the door frame once we’d entered. Both of us had spent too many years exploring similar buildings to feel any safety within them.

I narrowed my eyes to see into the darkness, breathing shallowly until I could get used to the stench. I heard the creak of sofa springs as the woman’s dim shape folded into a dilapidated couch against the far wall. My vision improving, I saw by the live cigarette in the ashtray by her elbow that she’d been sitting there before our arrival, presumably in the dark, doing nothing.

I didn’t bother looking for a seat, not wishing to overexpose myself to my surroundings. “You are Wilma Davis?”

She snorted and then coughed, reaching for the cigarette.

“You don’t even know that much? This is going to be great.”

“And your daughter is Shawna?”

“You already said that.”

“She went to the dentist’s office under a year and a half ago to have a cap put on one of her teeth. Do you remember that?”

“Sure I do. Figured she couldn’t get boyfriends if she didn’t have all her teeth. I told her men don’t give a fuck about a woman’s teeth-not what they look for anyway. Cheaper to have ’em pulled. Cost a god-damn fortune.”

She dragged on her cigarette.

I paused, waiting to see if she’d say more, but she’d apparently run dry. I was struck by her lack of curiosity about why we were here. “Why didn’t she go back to get the job finished?”

“It was finished enough,” she answered disgustedly. “She got the fucking cap. Where did she think the money would come from?”

“You paid for the cap?” I asked.

“Who the hell else was going to? Of course I paid for it.”

I thought for a moment, filtering her words from their meaning.

Despite the overstated anger, she’d acquiesced to her daughter’s desire to get her tooth fixed and had obviously paid for it at great sacrifice. “You knew it was only a temporary repair-that the tooth would rot unless a permanent cap was put in?”

She crushed the cigarette out as if she wished my eye were beneath it. “I’m no fucking moron. That’s what got me so pissed off. I was playing ball with the little jerk. I was going along with the whole deal. I had the goddamn money.”

She finished in a snarl, and hurled the dead butt into the darkness of a far corner.