We were back in the car, and Valerie's were the first words spoken since we'd left Miss Pitts.
"Actually, I'd love a picnic," I said; she smiled broadly. "As long as the conversation level is low enough to give me some time to sort things out."
"Terrific!" she said, and shook her hair down onto her shoulders.
"But first," I said, "let's be sure we can reach this Thomas Doucette character, class of '61."
We stopped at a gas station and I called Boston information. No Thomas Doucette nor T. Doucette. Then I tried the elder Doucettes. Again, no listing in Meade. We decided to stop at Moody Street and see the Doucettes on the way to the beach.
Valerie directed me up and down and left and right through semi-rural, increasingly narrow roads. If there was a poorer section of Meade, this was it. We pulled onto Moody Street and up to a small and old, but neatly kept, ranch house to which someone had added a little greenhouse. The mailbox had "Doucette" in paste-on letters. There were three or four similar homes on the street, but no sense of development or planning. It was as though the distance between houses was less a function of privacy or exclusivity and more a reaction to the undesirability of the intervening and uneven scrub-pine land.
A small, four-door American subcompact sat in the driveway, and a small woman stood at the screen door. We left our car and started up the path toward her.
She had been watching us leave the car and approach her. She stepped outside and looked around. She had light blue hair and a troubled expression.
"May I help you?"
"Yes," said Valerie. "Are you Mrs. Doucette?"
"Yes."
"Mrs. Doucette, I'm Valerie Jacobs. I teach eighth grade at the Lincoln Drive School. This is a friend of mine, John Cuddy. We'd like to contact your son Thomas."
By the time Valerie had finished, we were nearly to her. At the mention of Thomas, Mrs. Doucette stiffened and eyed us both very carefully.
"Thomas doesn't live here anymore," she said carefully.
"We know," I said.
"He also likes his privacy," she continued.
"And he's entitled to enjoy it," I said.
Before I could continue, Valerie broke in. "Mrs. Doucette, we simply need to speak with him about a news story he covered years ago. A young boy's safety is at stake."
Mrs. Doucette's eyebrows shot up. "The Kinnington boy?"
"That's right," said Valerie, flashing her most ingratiating smile.
"Goddamn him!" Mrs. Doucette bit off her words.
"Goddamn him and his whole family!" She stormed into the house, slamming the screen door behind her. She whirled. "And you! Goddamn you for reminding me of them!" She slammed the inner door.
"What the…" began Valerie.
"Face it, Val. You blew it. You're just not cut out for this kind of work."
I was back in the car and had it started by the time a frowning, frustrated Valerie tired of knocking at the Doucettes' door and began walking down to me. Valerie had gotten over my teasing by the time we reached the parking lot of the swimming beach. We respectively entered a rustic, large cabin, "Men" on one side and "Women" on the other.
Coming out of the women's side of the locker building, Val's legs looked a little thicker than they had in the other outfits I'd seen her wear to date. The rest of her looked triple A, however. I got a slight flush when she flickered an appraising eye over my new physique. This was the first time I'd worn a pair of trunks in quite a while, and I decided I liked sporting the results my conditioning had produced. We walked toward the water.
The long, manmade swimming beach edged into trees and picnic tables at one end and into a parking lot at the other. The beach was nearly empty, most people being under the trees at the tables. Owning no sandals, I toughed out the blistering sand in bare feet. We finally pitched our blanket at what looked like a quiet spot about fifty feet to the left of a perfectly tanned elderly couple sitting and reading in half-legged sand chairs.
We talked around Mrs. Kinnington for a while before I brought her up.
"You know, Val, I'm on the verge of leaving this case."
Her face was stricken. "Oh, please, John-please don't!"
I rearranged my legs Indian-style on the blanket.
"Look, I won't be violating any confidence by telling you that my client did not mention word one about Miss Pitts and the scene with Stephen and Blakey. That could be an important link in the chain of Stephen's disappearance, and if Mrs. Kinnington knew about it, she should have told me."
She faked casualness by stretching out on her stomach, longways to the just-past-zenith sun. "Is the reason he left really that important to your finding him?"
I leaned back. "Possibly, yes; probably not, if he's gone voluntarily."
"But Mrs. Kinnington said she told you that the things he took were only things he'd know to take."
I closed my eyes. "Yeah, but that suggests only that he voluntarily decided to leave. It doesn't go far in suggesting what might have happened twenty feet from his back door."
She came up to her knees with a start. "Do you really believe something happened to him?"
"That's just the problem, Val. I'm not being helped by anybody in this case, or even permitted to gather the facts I could use to reach a decision like that."
She put her hand on my right forearm and squeezed, a little too long and a little too hard. "John, you know that-"
The moment was broken by a loud and worthy curse from the elderly man next to us. Three boyish bruisers, built like college football players, were laughing at him and his wife. He rose from his chair and shook a book-clutching list at a sign I could barely read while he and his wife brushed sand off themselves.
"The goddamned sign says no goddamned ball playing on the beach!" he yelled.
The biggest of the three, cradling the ball professionally in the crook of his arm, replied, "Fuck you."
"We'll get the cops!" yelled the old man.
"And the lifeguard!" yelled the old woman.
"The fuckin' cops are off drinking and the fuckin' lifeguard knows I'll kick his ass if he lets his shadow fall on me." The other kids laughed, and they continued their running and passing drills up the beach. The big boy had the right moves; the other two were barely adequate. The old man sat down sputtering.
"Nice kid," I said to Val.
"Craig Mann," she said disgustedly. "His father's a selectman, so nobody will do anything about him. He was a real high school star, tight end, I think. Last fall the local paper was full of his gridiron heroics at U Mass/Amherst."
"Why wouldn't the local paper have been full of Stephen's disappearance?"
She frowned. "Judge Kinnington probably owns most of it."
I leaned back down. "A few more questions, then some fuel and reflection," I said. I felt her settle her bottom on the blanket like a witness on the stand. I also felt a stirring in my trunks that I hadn't expected.
"Did you ever have reason to believe that Stephen was involved with Blakey in any way, with or without consent?"
"No. I mean Stephen is not exactly average, but he's not abnormal. At least, not that way. I don't mean I think that… that that is abnormal, you know, if that's what an adult, two adults, I mean, decide to do, but…"
"Okay. Assuming Stephen left involuntarily, he could have been taken to a place none of us would ever guess or stumble on. So let's assume that Stephen's on his own. We don't know where he went, but we have to start somewhere. So how would he get where he's going?"
"Hitchhiking," said Val as she squeaked open the Styrofoam chest. "John, I'm sorry, but I'm starving. Can we start just a little bit early?" I didn't like her voice when it wheedled.
"Yes, we can start," I said, "but hitchhiking, at least toward his destination, isn't likely. He's smart enough to fear he'd be remembered and recognized. He might have hitchhiked away from here, though, and toward some other form of transportation."