“You’re not a putz, Dylan, but I’m real tired of owing you.”
“That’s the joke,” I told him, “you never owed me anything.”
“I’ll take the case,” he said almost before I finished my sentence.
“Don’t you wanna know if I-”
“You didn’t do it, so shut up and stop wasting my time.”
“Okay.”
“Dylan, just one thing. Why do you need a lawyer?”
“I want to turn myself in.” The words came out, but I couldn’t believe I’d said them. “There’s some people I need to protect.”
“This have anything to do with your nephew? Don’t tell me he whacked the girl.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Larry.”
“I have to meet you and talk,” he explained, “then we can arrange terms with the cops to turn yourself in. Where are you?”
“I’m in-”
MacClough stepped out of the shadows and depressed the phone button before I could finish. I could barely make his face out in the dark, but I knew it was him. I continued to hold the mute phone to my ear like a stage prop.
“No one,” MacClough whispered, taking the phone from my hand, “is turning himself in. No one.”
I thought about arguing with him, but his face told me not to bother. That face of his made me think twice. MacClough wasn’t an unreasonable guy. You could sway him sometimes. Then there were times, times like this, that you just knew he wasn’t moving. You would have better luck lifting the Statue of Liberty on your back and walking it to Prospect Park. I was just as glad to go to bed right then. I wasn’t so eager to surrender that I needed to throw myself at the cops in the middle of the night.
Cancer Face
For the first time since I’d gotten to Guppy’s underground palace of Red paranoia, we ate breakfast together. I whipped up some omelets and bacon and toast, keeping Guppy as far away from the kitchen as possible. We dined in the bunker. The fact was, we had spent little if any time as a group. We all seemed far too preoccupied with our own guilts and ghosts to bother with socializing. And when we did attempt to make small talk, the small talk tended to degenerate into anger, the anger into silence, the silence into separation.
The only noise at breakfast was the scraping of silverware on cheap china. No one mentioned my phone calls or my plans of surrender, though I felt sure that Zak and Guppy had some sense of what was going on. The weather had broken finally and Guppy could no longer avoid work. With the better weather came the paper. As we ate, it sat folded and untouched like a boobytrapped centerpiece at your cousin Mary’s wedding. Everybody wanted to take it home, but were afraid of what might happen if they made the first grab. I thought I caught Zak’s arm twitch as if he had decided to go for it only to change his mind at the last moment.
“For chrissakes!” MacClough growled, unfolding the paper to show us the front page. “Take a gander.”
I looked like hell in black and white. Sometimes I think newspapers purposefully hunt down your ugliest photo before going to press. The Riversborough Gazette had nearly succeeded. It wasn’t my investigator’s license photo-Sorry, MacClough. It wasn’t my bar mitzvah portrait-I’d burned all the copies. What it was was a head shot of me at Sissy Randazzo’s prom. I sported an afro the size of a small asteroid, no beard, and a mustache that could have been a caterpillar, but never a moth. The grainy reproduction made it impossible to differentiate between my acne and freckles. The lapels on my polyester tux were piped in dark felt and wider than the thirteenth and fourteenth fairways at Augusta. The ruffles on my shirt added three inches to my chest and my bow tie looked like two yield signs welded together. The fact that one of my eyes was half closed when the picture was taken did nothing to enhance my already splendid visage and attire. It did, however, make me look like an escapee from an Ed Wood movie.
And all along I was thinking that Sissy Randazzo had forgiven me for grabbing her nipples that night and pretending to tune in Radio Free Europe. You never can tell. On the other hand, as Guppy was quick to point out, no one would ever recognize me now from that picture. We all actually had a pretty good laugh at my old self. MacClough stopped laughing first. We were quiet again.
“What?”
“They think you’re here,” Johnny said.
“Here!” Guppy was disbelieving.
Zak jumped up. “Let’s get-”
“Not in this house,” MacClough shoved Zak back down in his seat. “In Riversborough.”
“So what?” I was curious. “We know that from TV.”
“From what it says here, the cops are thinking of starting a house to house for you now that the weather’s calmed down.”
“I’m safe down here,” I said.
MacClough sneered: “Yeah, Hitler had the same idea.”
“Maybe I should not go to work.”
“No!” Johnny and I chimed. “You go. We can’t afford to raise any suspicions,” he finished.
Then something hit me. I don’t know, it was like stepping into a hole that was camouflaged by fallen leaves. You’re not expecting to fall and all of a sudden boom, you’re down.
“Why?” I asked.
“Why what, Uncle Dylan?
“Why here?”
“Why here what?” Guppy joined in.
“Don’t mind him,” MacClough teased, “the pressure’s gettin’ to him.”
“No. Listen, we’ve been going round and around, asking ourselves a thousand questions, but not getting the answers we need. Why do you think that is? It’s because we haven’t been asking the right question.”
“So,” Zak wondered, “what’s the right question?”
“Why here?” I repeated.
“Jesus, that shit again.”
“Why Riversborough?” I screamed at MacClough. “Why here? What makes Riversborough the Isotope capital of the northeast? What’s here? Come on guys, what’s here?
“The school,” Zak said.
“The ski resorts,” Guppy added.
“Canada,” MacClough chimed in unenthusiastically.
“Exactly.,” I counted off on my fingers.‘ “The school, ski resorts, and Canada’s just a few miles north of here.”
John was unimpressed. “So what? There must be twenty places in northern New York within pissing distance of Canada that have schools and resorts of one kind or another. Look at Plattsburgh.”
“But Valencia Jones didn’t go to the state university at Plattsburgh. She wasn’t arrested for drug smuggling leaving a ski resort near Plattsburgh. No one in Plattsburgh felt threatened enough by our presence to have people murdered, MacClough. No one felt they had to burn down a ski resort in-”
“Okay,” he relented, “you’ve made your point, but how does this get us any closer to anything?”
“Guppy, you think you can find out who owns Cyclone Ridge and the Old Watermill?”
“When I arrive home from work, I will set out to accomplish what you ask. I believe I should be able to get into some systems which will-”
“Yes or no?” I cut him off.
“Probably.”
“I’ll settle for probably.”
Guppy thought about expanding on his answer, but one look at MacClough and me convinced him to skip it. He excused himself and went off to work. Johnny admonished him to keep his eyes and ears open and to try and get hold of the New York City papers. When Guppy had gone, we finished our breakfasts and passed the paper around.
“I know who owns the Old Watermill,” Zak said almost sheepishly.
“You do?” I asked. “Who?”
“The school.”
“The school!” MacClough puzzled. “Your school?”
“My school.”
MacClough was skeptical. “I never heard of such a thing. You sure?”
I answered for Zak and explained how it made perfect sense for a college to own a hotel, particularly in a small town. Schools often have to put visiting faculty up for a few days or for a few months. On parents’ weekends, you could guarantee a large number of rooms. I confessed that I had never thought Riversborough the kind of school that needed its own hotel. Usually, it was the sports powerhouse schools that invested in hotels.