“Show me something,” Duckworth said. “Emails, paperwork, anything that proves that Mrs. Beecham is moving to a seniors’ residence, and that someone here has been given legal permission to act on her behalf. Do you have a power of attorney for her?”
Norma and Harvey exchanged looks. Norma said, “I’m sure we have that somewhere. Tell the man, Mrs. Beecham. Tell them we’re helping you. But first, let’s get you off your feet.”
She helped the old woman back into the house, but once inside, there was no place to sit. The living room had been cleared of furniture, marks on the faded carpet indicating where the couch and chairs and coffee table had once been. Norma led Mrs. Beecham to the stairs that climbed to the upper level and got her settled on the second step.
In the distance, a siren wailed.
“I don’t understand,” Mrs. Beecham said. From her perch on the stairs, she looked into the living room. “Where’s the sofa?”
“We can get those documents you want,” Harvey said to Duckworth. “It just might take a day or two. Give me a card and we’ll be in touch.”
Duckworth said, “Mrs. Beecham, I have some people coming to check you out. That’s the first thing we want to do, is make sure you’re okay. Then we want to sort out what’s going on here.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Harvey asked. He was standing right next to Duckworth now, crowding him as he spoke with Eleanor Beecham.
“Stand over there, sir,” Duckworth said.
“I’m asking, did you hear me?”
“And I said, stand over there.”
“You give us a couple days to get the paperwork you want.”
Duckworth viewed him with undisguised annoyance. “Why don’t we just phone Pine Acres right now and confirm what you’re saying? How about that?”
Norma and Harvey exchanged looks once again, but this time there was a higher level of concern.
“I don’t know if there’s anyone there today,” Norma said.
“Why? It’s not a weekend.”
The siren grew louder.
When Duckworth returned his attention to the old woman, Harvey reached out and grabbed him by the elbow. Duckworth turned suddenly, shook off Harvey’s hand, and pointed a finger in the man’s face.
“Sir! Do not touch me. I’m warning you, if you touch me again, I’ll place you under arrest.”
“This is bullshit,” said Norma, who was behind Duckworth. Without warning, she extended her arms, placed her palms on the detective, and gave him a forceful shove. He stumbled forward into Harvey, who shoved him back in the other direction. Duckworth feared he was going to fall right onto Eleanor Beecham and injure her — he might have lost some weight, but he was still a pretty heavy guy — so he tried to pivot in mid-fall. He landed hard on the step next to her.
Harvey’s face flushed red. He brought back a leg to kick the detective, but Duckworth shifted quickly and Harvey’s shoe connected with the stairs.
“Stop it!” Mrs. Beecham screamed.
Harvey decided another kick was not the way to go. He formed a fist and swung at Duckworth, connecting with his chest as the detective attempted to get back up. He was thrown back onto the stairs again.
Duckworth pulled back his jacket and reached for the gun holstered at his side. The last thing he wanted to do was discharge his weapon in the close quarters of this house. Harvey was causing him a lot of grief, but he was not armed. But Duckworth believed he needed the persuasion that his gun would provide to get things under control.
As he was about to draw his weapon, however, the odds got a little more even.
Albert Gaffney, dressed casually in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, had run into the house. He charged Harvey from behind and threw him into a wall, hard enough that the man’s head dented the drywall.
Harvey went down like a rag doll.
He put a hand to his head. “Son of a bitch!”
Albert looked at a somewhat stunned Duckworth and extended a hand to help him to his feet.
“Constance said you had something you wanted to ask me,” he said.
Fifty
Cal
If I’d known we were going to end up at the movies, I’d have gone back into the beach house for my cell. It was a long time to be without a phone.
After heading into Sandwich for some ice cream, Jeremy continued to complain about the cable not working at Madeline’s place. I grabbed a discarded newspaper on a nearby table and found an ad for a Cape Cod movie complex. The seven o’clock shows were already under way, but we could hit one that started after nine. I handed the paper to Jeremy — he was working on a banana split with enough whipped cream to bury a Volkswagen — and asked him if any of the shows interested him.
He pointed. “That one.”
It was some superhero thing. When I was a kid, the only costumed crime-fighters on my radar were Batman, Superman and Spider-Man. I knew there were more, but they were the only ones I cared about. These days, though, there were so many, it was a wonder there was enough evil in the world to keep them all occupied.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“What if someone recognizes me?” he asked. “Like at the hotel?”
When we got back to the car, I gave him the Blue Jays baseball cap he’d worn in the grocery store and told him to keep it pulled down hard until we found our seats and they killed the lights. That seemed to do the trick. No one gave us a second look.
On the way to the theater, Jeremy said, “I could probably come up with a list.”
“Huh?”
“Of people at the party. People you could talk to.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But I don’t know what the point is.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“I mean, it’s not really your job, anyway.”
“I’m an investigator. I investigate.”
“It’s not what you were hired to do. Don’t expect my mom or Bob or anyone to pay you for doing something extra. Especially Bob. He’s all business. Everything done by the book. They’ll say you’re trying to pad the bill.”
“I’m not charging them anything extra,” I said.
“I’m giving you a heads-up. They’ll be pissed.”
Maybe he was right. Maybe this wasn’t my concern. I’d been hired to look after him, plain and simple. I hadn’t been hired by the defense.
But I couldn’t help but feel bad for the kid. Outside of his family and Bob, I thought I might be the only one on the planet who felt that way. His father sure didn’t seem to have much time for him.
“We’ll talk in the morning,” I said. “Maybe you can give me some names then.”
He shrugged.
We got our tickets, a bucket of popcorn big enough that it could have served as roofing insulation for a medium-sized house, and some Cokes. Jeremy and the rest of the audience were pretty taken with the movie, cheering at the end, especially when there was a teaser about the next instalment in the series. I knew I’d only be attending under threat of death. All these flicks were the same. Regular guy somehow gets super-powers. Comes up against villain with even greater super-powers. Big fight at the end where hero prevails, but not before the two of them have engaged in an epic, never-ending fight that pretty much levels a city. But it doesn’t matter if thousands of innocent people are killed in the crossfire, because the superhero’s girlfriend is okay.
It was nearly midnight when we got back to the beach house. I wished I’d left some lights on. I kept the headlights shining on the back door long enough for me to get the key in. As soon as I had it open, I flicked on the inside and outside lights and gave the high sign to Jeremy, still in the car, to kill the headlights.
There was a smell in the air I didn’t like. I thought it might be gas, or something chemical. I wondered if it was blowing in off the water, or coming from one of the nearby cottages. While the houses close to us didn’t appear occupied, they all had boats of varying sizes sitting on trailers in their yards. I wondered if someone had spilled some fuel getting a boat ready for an outing. Or, worse, someone had tried to steal some gas by siphoning it out of a tank.