It was an Escalade. From a distance, and in the darkness, he couldn’t tell whether its windows were tinted like the Escalade he’d seen earlier in the day, outside the donut shop. The odds of it being the same vehicle were small, he realized.
But if it was… He didn’t want to be tailed to the B &B. Best not to take a chance. Forget about parking. He had to make sure he hadn’t been followed.
He pulled out of the space, passed the Escalade, then signaled right. When he looked in his rearview he saw the Escalade moving back into traffic, behind him, and signaling right, too.
As if it were following him.
He turned right, and looked in his rearview, and the Escalade seemed to hang back. He caught part of its license plate: CYK-something. Then the vehicle made a right turn as well, and then Rick felt a prickle of anxiety.
He turned right again at the next block-and the Escalade didn’t, and for a moment, Rick relaxed. He’d probably just been paranoid. He completed the circle around the block, this time passing the Eustace House without stopping.
Then, as he kept going down Mass Ave, the realization settled on him that maybe he wasn’t in the clear at all. Maybe the Escalade had pulled away because its driver decided he’d been detected.
And as his stomach clenched, he tried to figure out how they’d found him, but he couldn’t. He’d rented a car to avoid being tracked, and he’d been careful when renting the car not to be spotted. Or so he thought.
The fact was, Rick was an amateur, and he was dealing with professionals. He was dealing with relentless, possibly cold-blooded people. People who threatened him with dismemberment, threats that seemed all too plausible.
He thought he’d lost them at the Charles, and he was wrong. Somehow they’d found him again.
He had to take more extensive measures. He had to make sure.
He drove straight through East Cambridge to a shopping mall, the CambridgeSide Galleria. It was a perfectly ordinary, semi-high-end mall with a J.Crew and an Old Navy, an Abercrombie & Fitch and a Body Shop and a California Pizza Kitchen.
And a Zipcar office.
He parked on the second level, got out, went into Macy’s and came right back out. He went down to the Apple Store and pretended to study the iPads. He went abruptly into Newbury Comics, where he acted as if he was browsing the DVD selections. He was anxious and trying hard not to let it show. No one seemed to be following him, but again, he couldn’t be sure. There was no way to know. He went into Best Buy on one level, bought a flashlight, and exited on another level.
After forty-five minutes of this he felt jittery and paranoid and still not one hundred percent sure he wasn’t being followed.
Then he rented another car at Zipcar. From the old car, he retrieved the file carton he’d taken from Joan Breslin’s basement. Then, leaving the old rental car in the parking mall garage, he drove the new car out of the mall and across the Mass Ave Bridge near MIT into Boston. He found a bed-and-breakfast on Beacon Street in Kenmore Square that he’d seen a few times before, on his way to or from watching the Red Sox play at Fenway Park, and paid for a night in advance. He called Hertz to let them know where he’d left the Ford Focus. There would be stiff penalties for failing to return the car to a Hertz desk, but money was one thing he was no longer short of.
He wondered whether he was indeed safe. There was no way to know.
And then he realized he had to go back to the house on Clayton Street. And soon.
24
At two in the morning, Rick awoke, as if to an alarm, got dressed, and went down the dark stairs of the bed-and-breakfast to the empty street below. He’d parked on a side street a block away. The traffic lights were flashing yellow. The sidewalks were empty. The streets shone, slick after a late-night rain shower.
He took his keys to the house and the floppy disk from Joan’s basement and the Maglite he’d bought at Best Buy.
He drove over to Clayton Street, past the house, and around to Fayerweather. The neighborhood was dark. A few porch lights were on, and the widely spaced streetlamps. He parked and rounded the corner back onto Clayton and stood at a distance, looking at the house. He felt almost silly doing it. There was no one in the house, of course, and no one outside of it. No one waiting for his return. Not at 2:20 in the morning.
He unlocked the back door and quickly entered, navigating the interior blindly, by rote, a route he’d taken countless times in high school, also in the middle of the night in the dark, hoping not to wake his ever-vigilant father or his sister.
He had to use the flashlight to get down the basement stairs without stumbling over the brooms and mops that hung on the stairwell walls. In full daylight, with the overhead lights on, this staircase was a trip hazard.
Down here it smelled of mildew and laundry detergent and something loamy, fungal. The furniture from upstairs was stacked high and covered in clear plastic tarps-couches, chairs, the kitchen table. Along the cinder block walls were old plastic shelves from Bed Bath & Beyond, heaped with junk: old toys, a bread maker, a food dehydrator, a sewing machine that probably hadn’t been used since his mother was alive. Pots and pans and Igloo coolers and Tupperware containers. In the far corner was his father’s workbench, rarely ever used, in front of a pegboard mounted on the wall, which was hung with rusty old saws and hammers and mallets and screwdrivers, an orange extension cord, a DeWalt power drill. Another shelf held turpentine and spray paint and cans of paint and wood finish.
He found the section where the furniture from Lenny’s office had been relocated. His father’s desk had been thoughtfully covered with a clear plastic tarp, now coated with a fine layer of white plaster dust. The plaster dust seemed to be everywhere, even down in the basement where no destruction had taken place.
He lifted the plastic tarp, then took an extension cord from his father’s workbench and plugged in the old computer. He flipped the switch and was relieved to see it come to life, grunting and groaning. Green numbers and letters appeared on the monitor. It booted up slowly. As he waited for the computer to boot up, he looked around. There was all kinds of junk here on the plastic shelving-toys, appliances, old cell phone bills. His father never threw anything away.
He pulled a big box off the shelf that held stuff taken from Lenny’s desk. There was that antique brass paper clip in the shape of a hand, which once belonged to Lenny’s father. An envelope moistener, a blue plastic bottle whose yellow foam top had grown crusty with envelope glue and age. Did anyone use those anymore? A red heart-shaped glass paperweight, a gift from Rick’s mom. A Swingline stapler. An empty tin can with rotelle pasta glued onto the outside and painted all over with light blue tempera-a crappy arts-and-craft project Rick had brought home from fourth grade. His father had always kept his pencils in it, though he had far nicer things to hold pencils.
Then he pulled out a large piece of white foam core with a lot of small rocks affixed to it. Rick’s old, once cherished, rock collection. He was surprised to see it here. As a kid, Rick had for some reason collected rocks and minerals and had once painstakingly glued his best specimens to a poster board: rose quartz, obsidian, shale, mica schist… Then he’d carefully labeled everything with one of those old-fashioned Dymo label makers, the kind with the alphabet dial and the embossing tape. (Click, click, click, squeeze!) But Rick distinctly remembered tossing it when he entered high school, purging his room of childish things. Len must have rescued it from the trash and brought it into his office, holding on to it for all these decades like a curator of Rick’s childhood.