Дэвид Гейтс - The Blue Mirror

“Oh my God,” she said, shocked. “That’s why Andy isn’t at the office. He should have said something.”

It occurred to me why he hadn’t, and Kitty worked it out in the next heartbeat.

“He didn’t want Max to know,” she said, staring up at me.

I was already standing, fishing for my wallet. I dropped a ten on the table and put my glass on top of it.

Kitty was right behind me as I made for the door. “What is it?” she demanded, catching up with me on the sidewalk.

“I don’t think Andy’s at the hospital with Stanley,” I told her. “You have a cell phone?”

She pulled it out of her handbag as we hoofed it down the block to my car. I unlocked the passenger door, and Kitty climbed in, reaching across the seat to unlock the driver’s door as I limped around.

“I don’t know the number,” I said as I got behind the wheel. “It’s a listing in Ayer. See if you can get through to Admitting.”

Kitty was already punching up directory assistance.

I pulled out into the traffic, headed for the expressway. It was the wrong time of day and we’d be fighting rush-hour on the Mystic Bridge approaches, but I figured the McGrath & O’Brien was our best bet to get to Route 2. It was the same road I’d traveled that morning with Tony.

“You want to know whether Andy’s there?” she asked me.

“No harm in asking,” I said, jumping an intersection, “but I want to find out where the EMTs picked Stanley up. If you can get directions, that’s a plus.”

The Central Artery was gridlocked. I inched along until I could take the Storrow Drive exit.

“Stanley’s only visitor is his wife,” Kitty told me, her hand over the phone for a second. I heard her tell the nurse on duty she was an insurance adjuster looking for time and mileage on the emergency call. “Right,” she said, listening, and noting it all down on a legal pad. She disconnected with a thank you.

Traffic along the river was moving faster. I could pick up Route 2 in Cambridge.

“Pepperell,” Kitty said. That’s where Stanley was picked up. ‘“Volunteer fire department, ambulance on call. I’ve already got the number; you want me to give it a shot?”

I should have known Stanley wasn’t just joyriding. He’d been on his way to see the beekeeper.

“Try my brother first,” I said. I gave her Tony’s number.

She started to explain who she was when he answered; I interrupted impatiently. “Ask him how the hell we’re going to find Creek Fortier,” I said. “Tell him I screwed up, and we’re behind the clock.”

“He heard you,” Kitty told me, listening to Tony. Then she laughed. “You got that right,” she said into the phone.

We were past the Magazine Street railroad trestle, closing on Soldiers Field Road and the Eliot Bridge. I was shifting back and forth between lanes, picking every gap I could, leaving some exasperated commuters behind me, giving me the finger.

“He’ll have it for us,” Kitty said, speaking to me with exaggerated calm as if she were talking a kitten off a ledge. “Tony wants to know how soon you think we’re going to get there if we survive the ride?”

“Forty-five minutes, an hour, if we’re lucky.” I let my foot off the gas incrementally. “Make that an hour and a half.” It was sort of an apology to Kitty for being so abrupt.

“Okay,” she said to Tony and flipped the cell phone closed. “He says to be cool, Jack.”

“I’m working on it,” I said, but I was stirred with unease and a sense of urgency.

~ * ~

My brother used a livery service out of Lexington on a regular basis. They had handicapped-accessible vans, and a fleet of cabs to cover the suburban area beyond Route 128, and they bid on school bus contracts, filling in between assigned stops. If you were too far off the beaten track or had a special-needs child who wasn’t being mainstreamed, Tony’s taxi guys would carpool you, mileage paid by the state. Their dispatchers knew every secondary road in Middlesex County, including this poverty pocket outside the 495 loop. Tony was passing us directions.

“Stanley’s been helping Creek Fortier out ever since Vietnam,” I explained to Kitty. “He’s lent him money he never expected to be paid back, given him tools, kept him afloat. I don’t mean Fortier’s a user, but Stanley was a soft touch because Creek was a link to his dead son, something Stanley wouldn’t want to let go of. My guess is that Stanley cosigned a mortgage for this property Creek’s got, and when Creek didn’t keep up the payments, Stanley took title or something like that. Creek’s on the dim side, I hear. Or not of this world, anyway, which Stanley wouldn’t take as a handicap. And he wouldn’t want to see Creek lose the place. He must have told Andy to make sure the land got transferred to Creek’s name, but he didn’t tell Andy the punchline, which is that he was dying. Andy got curious.”

I glanced over at her. “I guess that’s an occupational hazard. Besides, you don’t want to see your grandfather make foolish moves when he’s getting along in years. That’s why Chip McGill put the heat under Stanley. He thought Andy was trying to roust him because, like any paranoid, he made it for a conspiracy.”

“When all it is is miscommunication,” Kitty suggested.

“All it is is Stanley trying to protect this guy.”

“From the rigors of the modern age,” she said.

“Yeah, well, my guess is that Creek Fortier has been lured into the modern age in a big way,” I said. “I think it’s the biker connection. Creek builds custom bikes. So long as people leave him alone to raise bees and build bikes, he’s got no kick with the twenty-first century. Stanley insulated him, but with Stanley gone he’d be on his own. If he didn’t think about it, somebody might have suggested it to him.”

She was ahead of me. “Chip McGill,” she said.

I stood on the gas to get around a pickup loaded with drywall. Kitty dug her feet into the floorboards as we swerved back into our own lane. “Creek was in the biker loop,” I told her. “I don’t mean he’s a card-carrying member of an outlaw club, but gear-heads know about each other, it’s word of mouth. So a Disciple comes by to talk bikes, and they hit it off. The guy sees an opportunity. Here’s a reclusive motorcycle freak living out in the sticks, no near neighbors. Kind of a Luddite even, except when it comes to tuning bike engines.”

“Which is what? Basically his only real social skill?”

“Exactly. And the Disciples persuade him his interests lie in diversification, expanding his horizons.”

“Including?”

“Better living through chemistry,” I said.

Her cell phone beeped. It was Tony. I’d slowed down coming into Groton. Kitty, the phone to her ear, pointed me up a back road north that led along the Nashua River, a tributary of the Merrimack. The narrow blacktop followed the contours of the hillsides that supplied the watershed and crossed the river on a covered bridge, coming into the foot of the village.

Pepperell is another one of those settlements that time forgot after the mills closed. It was as if the waters of a great flood had lapped at its doorstep and then left it high and dry. It was a dry town, literally. You couldn’t buy liquor there.

“Got it,” Kitty said into the phone. She glanced at me. “We go through town past the elementary school and take a right-hand fork at the Congregational Church,” she said.

I followed her instructions.

“Bald Hill Road,” Kitty said. “Okay.” She turned in her seat. “He’s starting to break up,” she told me. “We’re getting out of range.”

Cell coverage overlapped, but we were in a blind spot.

“I’m losing you,” Kitty said to Tony. “Say again.” She listened, had him repeat it a third time, and then broke the connection. “We look for a side road up here on the left,” she said to me. “Unpaved but graded. There should be horse barns and a riding ring maybe half a mile in. A mile or so past that, there’ll be a split-rail fence and a dirt driveway and kind of a shed. I didn’t quite get that, but it’s the best I could do.”