I got in the Subaru, calmly put the key into the ignition, started it up after three tries, and then exited the parking lot, heading south.
The condo unit that Diane and Kara lived in was about fifteen minutes away.
I took thirty minutes.
Those thirty minutes weren’t wasted. I spent them driving, backtracking, and sitting for a few minutes in parking lots, looking about me. Nobody seemed to be following me; but then again, nobody had been in my house, but my presence had obviously alerted a ready-response team that came roaring in about ten minutes after I had unlocked my door.
That meant staffing, that meant money, and, above all, that meant a lot of patience.
And smarts.
So the lack of cars following me meant nothing. A GPS unit of some sort could have been tagged on the Subaru’s bumper, or some sort of stealth platform made up to look like a seagull was now floating above me, taking real-time photos and data acquisition.
Maybe I was being paranoid, but so far it had been paying off.
I made one more stop at a tiny grocery store, picked up a copy of that day’s Tyler Chronicle and Boston Globe, and got to Diane and Kara’s place.
They resided in Tyler Meadows, a set of condominium units built right up to Tyler Harbor. I parked the Subaru and took in the view, and my chest ached at seeing the concrete structures and lights of the Falconer nuclear power plant on the other side of the harbor and a wide expanse of marshes. That’s where it had all started, less than a week ago.
And something else bothered me. Out in the harbor were some fishing vessels, and one lonely sailboat, sail furled, at anchor. The fishing boats belonged. They would go out any time they could, all fall and winter, to make their catch. But the sailing boat didn’t belong. The name of the sailing craft was the Miranda, it belonged to Diane Woods, and it should have been hauled out by now.
Lots of things were being left undone.
I walked over to the entrance to the condo unit where I had spent lots of time over the years, for brunch or a quick lunch or some lengthy dinners. I unlocked the door, closed it behind me, and went up the short staircase to the first floor. It opened up into a living room that had an adjacent kitchen and dining area with a grand view of Tyler Harbor. I sat down at the round oak kitchen table and sat there for a bit, just thinking, brooding.
So many memories here, of lots of laughter and long conversations and the occasional cross word, as Diane’s professional life sometimes got mixed up in my oddball personal life. But through it all, our friendship had deepened, had grown, and had gotten to this point.
I unfolded the papers but could not read them. I looked over at the living room and saw the photos of Diane and Kara, sharing their moments together, and photos were up on the refrigerator, some curling over magnets holding them up. The place was musty and smelled of old cooking scents and soap and perfume.
I looked around again, stood up and folded the papers together, put them under my arm. My original goal had been to stay here for a while, lie low, think things through and try to figure out what the hell to do next.
But I didn’t belong here. It belonged to Diane and Kara. Though I was sure they wouldn’t think so, I felt like an intruder, a stranger.
I looked once more at all the photos, seeing the smiling faces, wanting to see them in my mind’s eye instead of the drawn face of Kara and the unconscious face of Diane.
Then I left, making sure the door was locked behind me.
After a couple of quick errands, I drove back to the Tyler Inn and Suites in Exonia and, still having the upset spouse look on my face, I managed to get my room for another night while paying just cash. In my room I stretched out on the bed, started going through that day’s Boston Globe.
I went through the first section.
Then the second section.
And the last section, the sports pages.
I shook my head. Went back to work.
And then I found it, in a tiny paragraph buried deep within the Metro section.
UNAUTHORIZED MOVIE SHOOTING SCARES BU
Unbelievable.
I had to read the story three times before it sank in.
The shootings on Bay State Street near buildings belonging to the Boston University campus were officially reported as a student filmmaking project gone awry. Two BU students were being held in custody, names not yet made public. Quotes from witnesses about how realistic the entire episode had been, with shot-out windows, two people being shot, blood everywhere. “Even though they should have gotten the right permits and made the right notifications, whoever did this deserves an Oscar,” said Harry McDermott, twenty, a BU student.
I folded the paper shut. Went to the other side of the room, went through a plastic bag with the cheery blue Wal-Mart logo on its side. I removed a disposable cell phone, read the directions, powered it up, and made a phone call to Massachusetts. It was answered after one ring.
“Yeah?”
“Looking for Tinios.”
“Yeah?”
“Give him this number, all right?”
The man hung up on me. I put the phone down and paced the room, thinking things through. I looked at the Tyler Chronicle, which had a recap of last week’s bloody events at the Falconer nuclear power plant. There were four photos on the front page. The largest showed Curt Chesak, face masked, among a group of protesters, holding up a police helmet in celebration after ripping it off Diane’s beaten face. Three smaller photos, with a headline over them saying: THE DEAD AT FALCONER. Two were of an older man and woman, who had been shot and killed by persons unknown at about the same time Diane Woods was being beaten nearly to death. The third was of someone I had met a couple of days prior, a John Todd Thomas, who had been a student at Colby College up in Maine. John had brought me to an encampment belonging to the Nuclear Freedom Front to meet Curt Chesak, and he then disappeared, his body being found later in the nearby marshes, a gunshot wound to his head.
THE DEAD AT FALCONER.
The other two were a man and a woman, both active in the NFF, one from Massachusetts, the other from Pennsylvania. He ran an organic food store. She worked in a knitting collective. And John Todd Thomas originally came from Arlington, Virginia, a place I once had known extremely well.
The ringing of my new phone startled me. I looked at the incoming number, saw the ID was being blocked. I answered it by saying “Hello,” and a man on the other end said, “What’s up?”
I sat in one of the two chairs in the room in relief. Among the numerous things Felix and I had gone over before embarking on this little adventure in justice was setting up a procedure to contact each other, using a middleman that Felix trusted and had used many times before. Even though the phone number I used said it was in Massachusetts, there was no guarantee the man lived there. Felix said he was a genius with the intricacies of the phone system, and when he was eleven or twelve he’d had a pitch-perfect whistling ability that enabled him to fool the phone system, to make free long-distance phone calls.
“You okay?”
“Hanging in there.”
“How’s your relative?”
Felix said, “No change, thankfully. But she’s off to Florida for a while. Good for her bones and other things.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“And you?”
“Things are getting more interesting.”
“Do tell.”