I.O.U Page 16

  I dropped the bag onto the floor beside my bed.

  And then I used the button to lower my bed to a prone position and I crawled deep inside the covers with only the top of my head—my eyes and my forehead and hair—showing. I lay under there and shivered with the worst fear I’d ever experienced. I felt like an earthquake victim who had lived through the worst, main shock, only to feel terrorized by the mild aftershocks that recalled memories of the big one.

  He’d been waiting for me.

  Maybe even by the time I left The Buoy.

  While I drove. While I sang idiotic songs to myself. While I traveled further and further from the lights of the city, while I entered the dark, two-lane blacktop highway, while I drove and drove, my headlights picking up the bare trees at the sides of the road, meeting other cars coming in the opposite direction, and none of those drivers knowing that I needed help, that there was somebody waiting for me who wanted to hurt me, who wanted to kill me, who waited until I was inside the garage, who walked in quietly and pulled the garage door down by the rope, with his hands…

  I stuck the blanket and sheet and my own fist into my mouth and screamed and screamed, a thin, high little shriek that nobody else could hear, screaming, screaming as I would have screamed that night if I’d known what he was trying to do to me.

  All the fear I didn’t feel then, I felt now.

  Oh, God, I almost died, somebody almost killed me.

  Into my hospital sheet, my blanket, my fist, I screamed and screamed and screamed, until my throat shrieked with pain and my eyes felt as if they were dammed with backed-up tears, and then the screams turned to sobs and I cried and cried for myself, for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons, for a long time. The only comfort I felt was that my horror was final proof that I would never have tried to kill myself, because I wanted too much to live.

  Finally, I fell asleep.

  When I woke up in the morning, I felt cold, and clear, and awake. And I knew that the evidence that Geof sought was not lying on the tinfoil on the floor beside my hospital bed. But it should have been. It should have been there. The Port Frederick Fisheries annual report. That I had picked up and started to read before I fell asleep. The report that had shocked me with its revelation that Downeast Marine, Inc., whose president was Cecil Greenstreet, was a wholly owned subsidiary of PFF, whose chairman was Peter Falwell.

  The first thing I did that last morning in the hospital—before going to the bathroom, before brushing my teeth, before eating breakfast—was to phone my husband at home and ask him to pick up a copy of the PFF annual report before he came to get me.

  “Please bring those black slacks of my mother’s, too,” I requested. “And her black turtleneck. And see if you can find any black loafers in my closet, I think I’ve got an old pair that are presentable. I’ll need some thin socks, and you’ll find those in the third drawer in my dresser. Oh, and look for a hair-holder-backer in my drawer in the bathroom, will you?”

  “A what?”

  “You know, those fat fabric things I use to tie my hair back sometimes. Get the red one if you can. Um, and something gold for earrings, in my jewelry box.”

  I was going home.

  “Did you bring it?” I asked Geof when he arrived.

  He held out a small suitcase containing, I presumed, the clothes I had requested, but that wasn’t what I meant.

  “No, I mean the annual report.”

  “It’s in the car.”

  Geof was dressed more casually—in jeans, waffle stompers, and blue plaid lumberjack shirt—than he would have been if he’d been going in to work that day. I hoped none of his fellow (or sister) officers saw him, because apart from looking tired, he sure didn’t look like anybody with a “roaring case of the flu.”

  It only took me about three minutes to dress. I’d already showered and washed my hair, in an attempt to scrub off the hospital smell, and done my makeup. (After a two-day stay in the hospital is no time to go cold turkey on blusher.) While I tied back my hair, Geof placed the flowers I had received on a metal cart he had borrowed for the purpose.

  “Ready?” he inquired.

  “Yeah.”

  I glanced around, checking to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything, and then preceded him out of the room. The “flower lady” with the real flower cart was making her deliveries to patients on my wing, and she stopped me as I came out the door.

  “Hello,” she said, brightly. “Are you 1242?”

  “I was,” I said.

  “Um.” She bent over to read the outside of a little white envelope propped against a long-necked vase which held a single white carnation, and then she peered up at me again. She had white hair and a gray uniform in about a size 16, and I was reminded of a chubby little silver squirrel that sometimes dug for acorns in our yard. “Jennifer Cain?”

  “I am.”

  Still am, thank God.

  “Oh, good, I’m glad I caught you.” She tried to hand me the vase with one hand and the envelope with the other. “This is for you.”

  I started to reach for it automatically, but then paused, as my mind raced to catch up with my hand before it could grasp the vase. A single flower. Odd. And a carnation at that, the bargain basement of florist’s choices. A white carnation. Like those in the floral arrangement that was sent anonymously to my mother’s funeral. I heard myself give an almost imperceptible gasp, and I drew my hand back as if from a spider.

  I looked back at Geof, who was already removing a white cotton handkerchief from his pants pocket. Under the curious eye of the flower lady, he managed to take both the vase and the card from her with his hand that held the handkerchief.

  “Thank you,” he said, when she seemed inclined to linger, but then when she started to roll her cart away, he said, “No, wait.” She looked back at him, then at me, her left eyebrow raised inquisitively. Geof said, “Did you see anybody put this on your cart?”

  She shook her white head, no.

  “Would you mind waiting another minute, please?” He set the vase on the floor and, using his handkerchief, opened the card. After reading it, he looked up at her again. “There’s no florist’s logo on this card or on the envelope. Do you have any idea who could have put this on the cart?”

  “Nooo,” she said, drawing the vowel out, as if she wanted to give this crazy young man the answer he needed, but she didn’t know how to do it. “This cart just stands against the wall in the lobby and the florists’ delivery people come in and place their deliveries on it, and then we— the volunteers—come by at our scheduled time and take the flowers around to the rooms.” She glanced at me. “Is there anything wrong?”

  “No.” Geof said it for me, and then smiled reassuringly at her. “Not a thing. It’s just that there’s no name on this card, and I’d like to know who to thank. That’s all.”

  Her glance dropped to the handkerchief that separated his fingers from the card and envelope, but she nodded and then quickly pushed her cart on down the hall, away from us.

  “Probably thinks we’re germ freaks,” I said, when she was out of hearing. “Let me see the card, Geof.”

  He turned it so that I could read the typing on it:

  LIVE FOR TODAY.

  “What the hell?” I said, angrily. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean—”

  “Jenny—”

  “—live for today because tomorrow I’ll die? Or live for today and stop nosing into the past? Damn them! Whoever! It’s a good thing you’re holding that thing, because I’d tear it to pieces and then I’d hurl that goddamn vase against the wall!”

  As if to forestall any such unwise and precipitous action on my part, he quickly bent over to retrieve the vase, and started back into my room with it.

  “What are you doing, Geof?”

  He glanced back at me. “Calm down. I’m only going to empty the water out, and find something to put all of this in, so I don’t have to carry it out of here in my handkerchief.”

  “Calm d
own!” I muttered sarcastically to his back, “Sure, right. Calm fucking down, Jenny!”

  I was ready to give him hell when he came back out, but he forestalled me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I shouldn’t have said that. Sometimes I forget you’re not a cop.”

  That mollified me, by making me laugh a little.

  He held my gold plastic vomit pan in his hands, and the vase, flower, envelope, and card lay inside it.

  “Nicely symbolic,” I said. “And it lends verisimilitude to your claim that you’re the one with the flu. Let’s go pay the bill. I’m tired, and I want to go home.”

  15

  BUT FIRST GEOF HAD TO CARRY HIS STRANGE PACKAGE AROUND the lobby of the hospital, inquiring whether anybody had seen someone come in with it or place it on the flower cart. He asked the volunteers at the information desk, he asked patients in wheelchairs and their family members seated on benches, he asked the waitresses and the hostess in the coffee shop that had a view of the flower cart, he asked a couple of doctors passing by. But nobody could help us. The hospital was too busy, the lobby was too crowded, and everybody there had their own personal concerns that were much more pressing to them than any question about floral deliveries.

  And then, before we headed home, we had to sit in his BMW, in the hospital parking lot, letting the cold car warm up while we studied the Port Frederick Fisheries annual report. My sister’s potted plant leaned against my right pants leg, on the floor of the car.

  “Here it is.” I handed the booklet to him, and pointed. “Here’s where it says that Downeast Marine is a wholly owned subsidiary of PFF. That means that Cecil Greenstreet is, in effect, an employee of Peter Falwell. Does that strike you as suspiciously coincidental?”

  “What are you thinking, Jenny?”

  “That Greenstreet colluded with Pete to wreck my father’s business, so that PFF could buy it cheap, and that this was his reward,” I said, bluntly. “Now you play the devil’s advocate. Tell me where I’m wrong.”

  He thought a moment before saying, “Experienced canning company executives are probably not exactly a dime a dozen in this world. Maybe Pete saw the opportunity to hire one, and so he did. Moving from vice president of one canning company to the presidency of another seems like a pretty natural corporate climb, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, “it does, but then why in the world did Green-street deny knowing Pete Falwell?”

  “He did?”

  “He told me he didn’t know Pete, yes. But Pete told me that he’s known Greenstreet for years.”

  I related for him as much of my conversations with the two men as I could recall. Geof thrumbed his fingers on the steering wheel before saying, “The devil ain’t got no advocate for that one, Jenny.”

  As he started the car, I paged through the rest of the report, starting at the back and ending at the list of directors at the front, and there I found several familiar, local names, including my dear old trustee Jack Fenton, who was also the chairman of the board of First City Bank, and Samuel Hayes, Jr., publisher of The Port Frederick Times newspaper.

  Once the car was moving, I stopped reading, so I wouldn’t get carsick. If I didn’t throw up again for another fifty years, it would be too soon. But I kept my thumb in the page with the names of the men on the PFF board of directors, and I mused, for several blocks, about their presence there.

  The storm that Geof had expected to blow down from Nova Scotia had not materialized, but there was a pretty, glittery frosting of ice on the trees, bushes, and dead grass. The streets were dry, having already been warmed and melted by the traffic, so they were passable. The temperature was in the low 20s, but the wind was still blowing about twelve miles an hour from the north, so it seemed much colder to me than the temperature gauges indicated, especially after leaving the hothouse warmth of the hospital.

  I looked at my watch: 10 A.M.

  “Geof? I don’t want to go home yet. I want to stop by the newspaper to talk to Sam Hayes, Jr.”

  “What about?”

  “I’ve been reading the articles that The Times published about the bankruptcy, and I’m puzzled about them. When Cain’s failed, we were the biggest employer in town, and so it must have been the worst economic disaster to hit this area since the death of the whaling industry. But The Times covered it as if it were about as important as a Saturday garage sale.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “No, that’s what I want to ask Sam.”

  “You sure you’re up to this?”

  “No,” I confessed, “but what the heck, if I faint in Sam’s office, it’ll just be more grist for the local gossip mill.”

  “It’s good of your family to supply so much of it.”

  I reached over and hit his arm.

  “Sorry,” he laughed. “Speaking of fishy situations, what killed the whaling industry?”

  I groaned. We shared an embarrassing habit of committing puns that were so terrible they ought to be illegal. “Somebody discovered oil in Pennsylvania.”

  My family had not been whalers. Neither had they been part of the “Codfish Aristocracy”—like the Cabots and the Lowells—those fantastically rich New England families who had fattened on the “China Trade,” with merchant ships that opened new lanes to the Orient after America’s traditional sea commerce was killed off by the Revolutionary War. We Cains sailed along later, after whale blubber was no longer needed for lighting lamps, and we’d made our relatively modest fortune on the shells of mollusks instead of the backs of whales. I recall this, not as a point of pride, but as a point of fact: which was that my father didn’t have Pennsylvania to blame. Only pollution and the EPA and the cost of tin. But now I wondered, as Geof made a right turn leading to the newspaper, instead of a left turn leading home: Was it possible that my dad had somebody much closer to blame, somebody whom he might even have called a friend? Or maybe even friends? It was a sickening idea, especially considering how subserviently grateful I’d been to some of those friends—my esteemed employers—for my job at the foundation.

  Geof turned in between two vertical parking lines out in front of the newspaper building. “I’m going in with you,” he announced. “I’ll sit in the lobby.” I didn’t feel it was necessary to ask why he, a most independent cuss, suddenly wanted to stick so close to me. I started to get out of the car, but he stopped me by putting a hand on my arm. “Listen,” he said, catching my glance and holding it. “There’s something you should know. I don’t really think you’re in any immediate danger. It wasn’t premeditated, that’s what I want you to know. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’ve decided that it couldn’t have been premeditated, it wasn’t even possible for it to be. For it to be premeditated, he’d have to have known about the dead battery in your garage door opener. I think it was a crime of opportunity, and I think he’s horrified at what he almost did, and he’s lying low, praying nobody will ever discover anything that leads us to him.”

  “Still,” I said, although I was mighty happy to hear his professional opinion of my safety, “he had to have some reason—”

  “Yes, and that’s what we’re after.”

  “—and, Geof, he still has that reason—”

  “But right now, he’s paralyzed with fear—”

  I laughed a little. “Like me?”

  Geof squeezed my shoulder. “I understand. But I’m telling you that he’s paralyzed with terror at what he nearly did to you and what that could have resulted in for him. He’s picturing himself in prison. He’s seeing himself being executed. The needle. The gas. The chair. He’s imagining himself behind bars, probably being beaten and raped by other prisoners. His fantasies are running away with him, and he’s scared shitless. While it’s true that we’re not going to take any chances for a while, neither is he. If you want to, you can picture him trembling and panting and hiding under a chair—”

  I faked a cower. “Like me.”

  “—like a cat being chased by a dog.”

  Oddl
y enough, I found that homely little image convincing. I smiled at Geof and reached across the car to kiss him. “Thank you.” As I got out of the car, and then as we forced our way through the bitter wind, up the salt-scattered concrete steps to the newspaper office —I felt perfectly safe. Except, that is, for that creepy suspicion you tend to get, after somebody has tried to kill you, that there’s a rifle with a high-powered scope leveled at the center of your back at all times. Or, as the bad old joke goes, “Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?”

  “One more thing,” Geof said, putting a hand on my arm before I opened the door to The Times. My skin crawled involuntarily, and I fought the urge to step fully in front of him, in order to hide my back from view. “I guess I ought to say this, too. When he recovers from the immediate terror, he’s going to realize that he got away with it. He’ll feel unbelievable relief. He won’t want to tempt fate by calling any attention to himself. So he won’t make any other attempts, unless—”

  “Ah, there would be an unless.”

  “Unless his relief turns into a feeling of invincibility. That could happen. Or unless another opportunity presents itself. If I’m right that it was strictly a crime of opportunity, then opportunity is the key. And we don’t want to hand him that key.”

  “But we don’t know—”

  He pulled me to him for an instant, and pressed me into the warmth and protection of his own body, just as I had wanted to do for myself. “I know, honey. Since we don’t know who he is, and we don’t know where you might encounter him, we don’t know what might constitute an opportunity for him, and what wouldn’t. We’ll try to be careful, that’s all we can do until either he makes a mistake or we get smart.”

  “Or lucky.”

  I slipped quickly, regretfully, from his embrace into the shelter of the building.

  Samuel Hayes, Jr., the owner, editor, and publisher of The Port Frederick Times newspaper, had one of those offices that seemed to me to be tailor-made for paranoids and exhibitionists: From floor to ceiling, it was glass on three sides. Never ones to waste a penny on amenities, the Hayes family had supplied themselves and their staff with strictly utilitarian gray metal desks and plain swivel typing chairs. The file cabinets were the same green metal ones that his father’s reporters and advertising staff had used, and some of the telephones were still dial models. I’d once had a good friend on the reporting staff, but Lewis Riss had gone on to bigger and better things, which, no reflection on Lew, wasn’t too hard to do when you started out at The Port Frederick Times.