Jesse pulled his Explorer up the stone driveway and parked next to Moss’s Range Rover. Jesse had always liked the Carpenters’ place, a large but simple farmhouse design with cut cedar shingles that the salt air had turned a lovely shade of silver. Many of the houses on Stiles were designed by famous architects and exuded about as much warmth as a dull steel blade. But Moss’s house, garage, and studio seemed natural to their surroundings, almost as if they had grown up out of the ground on which they stood.
By the time Jesse got to the door, it was already open and Etta Carpenter was standing on the front step.
“Jesse Stone,” she said, smiling at him. She was a lovely, dark-skinned woman with an oval face that was beginning, finally, to show her age. Etta, an English lit professor at the local community college, had that eternally young quality about her. Even now, with her age more obvious, she had a youthful exuberance. “Get in here and let me fix you some coffee and some breakfast.”
Unlike the previous day, Jesse was in the mood for coffee and confessed to Etta that breakfast sounded great. She put a mug in front of Jesse and got to work at the stove.
“I’d like to think you came to flirt with me, Jesse, but I guess you’re here to talk to Moss.”
“Never could fool you, Etta.”
She placed a fork and a plate of scrambled eggs, peppers, onions, and cheese next to Jesse’s mug and sat across from him with her own mug of coffee.
“Now, what have you come to talk about with my husband?”
“The guitar he reported stolen last spring... We recovered it.”
But instead of Etta reacting joyfully at the news, she stood up and went back to the stove, then to the kitchen sink, to be busy and not to face Jesse.
“You did?” she asked, washing the pan she’d cooked the eggs in. “Where?”
“In the closet of a missing teenager.”
That stopped Etta cold. She turned to Jesse. “Moss will be pleased.”
But there was nothing about her expression or the tone of her voice that reinforced the words coming out of her mouth. Mostly she just looked and sounded unnerved.
“Excuse me, Jesse, I’ve got to go upstairs for a moment. Finish up your eggs. There’s more coffee in the pot if you’d like. Good seeing your handsome face again.” She tried but failed to put a positive spin on her demeanor.
Jesse finished his eggs and coffee, retrieved the bass from the back of his SUV, and headed over to Moss Carpenter’s studio.
Jesse knocked, but no one answered. He could hear the music coming from inside. He took a moment to let the beautifully complex guitar work wash over him as Moss would play a long riff, stop, start again. It was as if he was searching for something he just couldn’t yet find. When there was a long pause, Jesse let himself in. There, on a high stool in the middle of the room, sat Moss Carpenter. His bald scalp and ears were covered with headphones. He held a blond-bodied Gibson Super 400 on his knee. Jesse waited for him to again stop playing before he approached.
“Jesse, man. How are you?” Moss said, carefully placing the guitar down and removing his headphones. But before Jesse could answer, Moss noticed the Fender bass in the evidence bag. His expression was a little bit more positive than Etta’s had been, but it was clearly mixed. “You got it back?”
“Uh-huh.” Jesse was careful to let Moss talk.
“If the people who had it only knew its value. That bass there used to be owned and played by the great James Jamerson, most talented rock bass player I ever knew. All those Motown hits from the sixties, that’s him playing. But the man had demons.”
“Older I get, Moss, the more I realize we all have them.”
“True that. So are you here to return it to me?”
Jesse shook his head. “Still evidence. It will be returned to you, probably within a few months.”
“If you’re not here to return it and you could’ve just called me to let me know, then there must be another reason why you’re standing in my studio.”
“There is.”
“I like solving musical mysteries, Jesse, like finding just the right key or chord. That’s what I was doing when you came in, but generally, I just want things straight out.”
“Fair enough. I came here for the truth about how this got stolen.” He held up the bass. “And before you twist yourself up, let me say I’m not looking to hurt anyone or get anyone into trouble with the law.”
Jesse then explained about Heather Mackey and what they had found in Chris Grimm’s room. Moss, a slender man with a handsome face that might’ve looked like Sam Cooke’s if he had lived long enough to make it into middle age, listened intently.
“Shame about the girl,” Moss said when Jesse was finished.
“There’s nothing either one of us can do for her, but I can’t let it happen again in my town, in our town. I noticed that three weeks after you reported the bass stolen, Etta came down to the station and claimed the bass had just been misplaced. Yet here it is, Moss. I know your boy Django’s down at Berklee, studying trumpet. He’s nineteen and I don’t need your permission to talk to him, but I’d like to go armed with the truth, so I don’t have to waste time.”
“You give me your word you’re not looking to get anyone into trouble.”
Jesse stuck out his right hand. “Unless he dealt the drugs, I’m not interested in him. I just need to find out as much as I can about what’s going on with the stuff in town.”
Moss took Jesse’s hand and shook it. Then he detailed for Jesse how Django hurt his shoulder playing pickup basketball the previous autumn. Like Heather, he’d seen Doc Goldfine, who referred him to another doctor at the hospital. From there it followed almost exactly the same pattern as it had with Heather. The initial treatments didn’t work and the pain got intolerable. Oxycontin had been prescribed and things seemed to have improved. Eventually, Etta discovered that Django was hooked and tried to wean him off the drugs. She thought she had done it and that Django was fine, but things started going missing from the house. Moss had been too absorbed in his work to notice until his James Jamerson bass had vanished.
“We got him help, Jesse. He did rehab over the summer. Thank God, it never got to where he was shooting heroin. I’ve seen what that does to people, close up.”
“He ever tell you who was supplying him with his pills?”
Moss hung his head. “No, and we never asked. We just wanted our boy back and healthy. You got a boy now, so you understand.”
“Moss, I would have understood anyway. I’m just glad you got Django some help. I know how hard it is to beat something alone. Tell him I’ll be down in a day or two to talk to him and tell him not to worry. One thing I ask is that he doesn’t hold anything back. You can tell Etta everything is cool. She looked scared.”
“Will do, Jesse.”
They shook hands again. Outside the studio, Jesse stopped and listened to Moss playing. Moss seemed to have found the answer to what he had been searching for when Jesse first knocked on the studio door.
Thirty-four
That night, after attending an AA meeting in Salem, Jesse went home, wondering about the odd conversation he’d had with Brian Lundquist about Cole. Jesse wasn’t even aware that Cole and Lundquist were acquainted. Still, Jesse supposed it was good that Cole was making friends and contacts in town. It had been a little claustrophobic, just the two of them living in Jesse’s condo. It wasn’t that Cole never went out, but for a while there it had been a struggle.
Cole was in his usual position, on the sofa, watching some show on TV. But Cole seemed antsier than usual. He wasn’t normally a fidgety person, but as soon as Jesse came into the apartment, Cole began shifting his position on the sofa.