Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery Page 3

  Over time, the rowdy regulars aged and the Barnstormers matured, but the core remained a group of hard cases with an Old Testament credo. Barnstormers believed in an eye for an eye, and they never turned the other cheek.

  One mid-sixties Wednesday, during a meeting at a dairy farm, some joker flipped his cigarette butt the wrong way and burned the host’s barn to a cinder. Twist: The host was the town fire chief. Once they realized the barn was a goner and nobody was hurt, everybody (including the chief) laughed their asses off, and the Barnstormers instantly renamed themselves the Barnburners.

  Time passed. AA National sanctioned the group. Saint Anne’s became the regular meeting spot. But the take-no-shit mentality hung on, boiling down to a kernel called the meeting-after-the-meeting.

  It took me six months to earn my way in. I hit Saint Anne’s every Wednesday. Got there early, set up chairs, made coffee, doled out raffle tickets. Spoke a couple times a week, driving to Ashland, Upton, Clinton, Hudson with a carload of Barnburners to tell my story. Got my first steady job in five years, working the muck pit at a Jiffy Lube.

  The commitment I showed was half the picture. But you needed skills to get into the meeting-after-the-meeting. As I got to know the old-timers, they realized I had skills. Skills I’d picked up in rail yards, alleys, county jails.

  One Wednesday, as I finished stowing the little banners we hang on the walls next to the picture of the pope—ONE DAY AT A TIME; LET GO, LET GOD; like that—Butch Feeley said, “Conway.”

  I turned. Butch had never spoken to me. I didn’t think he even knew my name.

  “Why don’t you stick around?” Butch said, softly kicking the chair next to his.

  I was in.

  No shoulder-claps, no “welcome to the group,” no initiation. I was just there, one of them. Pretty soon I learned why.

  “Rosie Fagundes,” said Mary Giarusso, glancing at a reporter’s notebook. “Brazilian girl, three months sober, sits in back by the long radiator?” Mary had a hellacious Boston accent: three months sobah, long radiatah.

  “Why’s she still sitting in back if she’s got three months?” Butch Feeley said. Serious AA for serious people.

  “Be that as it may,” Mary said. “She waitresses at the Early Bird over on Fay Court. The owner’s all right, but the manager knows she’s an illegal. He’s been helping himself to half her tips right from the get-go, and now he wants to help himself to some blow jobs, too.”

  Far as I could tell, I was the only one surprised at how easily this woman, who looked like a retired school principal, said “blow jobs.” Lesson: A lot of things got talked about in this room, and none of them were dainty.

  “Manager’s name?” Butch said.

  “Oswaldo. He’s Brazilian too, but legal.”

  Butch turned to me. “Want to take this one, Conway?”

  Every head turned. Every eye locked.

  “Hell yes,” I said.

  By dinnertime the next day, Rosie had 100 percent of her tips, retroactive. Oswaldo had a busted nose and a dislocated shoulder.

  And I had a purpose.

  * * *

  Phigg had a five-minute head start, but there weren’t many roads up here. Hell, there weren’t many places for roads to go. Rourke became boonies real quick. I saw the occasional ranch house or trailer, sad little vegetable stands, a state forest to my right. To my left I caught glimpses of the Souhegan River, which paralleled the road.

  In ten minutes, I came to a crossroads. Straight would continue northeast, a right would pull me southeast, a left would cut back northwest. On pure gut I took the left. This road was a little wider and a little faster, with occasional slow-vehicle lanes for trucks working their way into the White Mountains.

  I was passing a semi when I flashed past a Gulf station, so I damn near missed Phigg. As I cleared the semi I cut a glance over my right shoulder—and saw, around the side of the Gulf, a red car that might be an old Sentra.

  It took me another couple miles to find a safe turnaround, so it was ten minutes before I eased to the shoulder a hundred yards north of the Gulf. It was a shitty spot: I couldn’t even see most of the gas station’s side parking area, and if it was Phigg in there and he pulled my way, he’d spot my truck.

  But I didn’t want to drive past a second time, and if I pulled any closer, I’d draw attention. So I lit up my hazard lights, left the truck, scrambled uphill to a layer of tall pines that shielded me from the road, and walked toward the Gulf until I nailed a view.

  And it was a hell of a view.

  Phigg’s shitbox had its tail to me. Phigg sat in the driver’s seat, elbows resting on the sill of his open window, talking with somebody in the next car.

  That car, a silver Jetta, was backed into a parking space, making for easy driver-to-driver chat.

  Huh.

  I sat in pine needles and watched. The sun on the Jetta’s windshield made it hard to see the driver, so I focused on Phigg, reading his body language. He seemed tight: He listened more than he talked, made small nods from time to time, checked his rearview mirror a lot.

  After five minutes of this, Phigg gave a final big nod and they started their cars. Phigg reached through his window like he wanted a high five or a handshake, but he got nothing and pulled the hand back in.

  I gritted my teeth. If Phigg swung north, he’d see my F-150 at the side of the road and any edge I’d just earned would evaporate.

  I got lucky: He took a left and drove south.

  The Jetta headed north with its window still down, and I got a good look at the driver. A black woman, youngish, with short hair.

  Huh.

  * * *

  Ninety minutes later I pulled into Charlene’s driveway, my stomach tight. With the truck’s windows busted out I hadn’t bothered to run the AC, so my shirt was sweat-pasted to my back. I saw nobody was home, and my stomach loosened. I tried not to think about why an empty house relaxed me.

  It’s a Cape Cod–style place in Shrewsbury—not far from Framingham, just east of Worcester. I’ve dated Charlene Bollinger on and off. We’re both divorced. We both have eighteen-year-olds. That turned into a soap opera a while back when my son, Roy, and Charlene’s daughter, Jesse, fell in love. For now, Jesse was in Chicago getting help for anorexia. Roy just finished high school out in western Massachusetts, where his mother raised him. He didn’t want to commit to college until Jesse came back and graduated. Their plan: Go to the same school. True Love Always.

  As the goddamn world turns.

  I keyed my way into the air-conditioned house, took my shirt off, tossed it in the laundry hamper on my way to the kitchen, fixed an ice water, looked at the clock.

  I smiled. Just past four. Charlene’s other daughter, Sophie, would step off the late bus from middle school any minute. Sophie was going on twelve, smart as a whip, funny, my pal.

  I thought about calling Charlene. Decided not to. Instead: made sure I’d left the front door unlocked, headed up to shower.

  Ten minutes later I came downstairs, followed sound to the big kitchen–family-room combo where we spend all our time. The sound was a Hogan’s Heroes rerun. Sophie was sofa-splayed, sunburned nose, spray of freckles. Her tank top and her Popsicle were lime green. I looked at the TV for a few seconds. Sophie and I both laughed at Schultz. I said, “My father loved that show.” First time I’d thought about my old man in years.

  “Was it on when you were a kid?”

  “Yeah, but past my bedtime,” I said. “Not sure when your mom’s coming home.”

  “By seven. She texted me.”

  “We should make dinner, have it on the table when she gets here.”

  “Oh … oh my!” Sophie had finally peeled her eyes from the set, had spotted the bump on my head. She sprang up and bounced on the sectional, beckoning me over. “What happened?” she said. “Jeez, it’s near your good eye. Can you see all right?”

  A few years back, someone tried to put my left eye out. Didn’t, but wrecked it. The eye tracks ok
ay, so people don’t realize it’s useless.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “How about I tell my story over dinner, so I only have to say it once?”

  “Conway Sax, always tight with the words.” She smiled as she said it.

  When Charlene came home she got to watch Sophie and I finish grilling chicken, peppers, and onions. She kissed Sophie and asked about school. She didn’t make eye contact with me.

  Not even over dinner, while I told them the whole thing. Charlene was interested—she was a Barnburner and she knew Tander Phigg—but cool. Mad at me.

  Sophie was too smart not to notice all this. She filled conversation-space, kept everything smooth. It was her default role, always had been. I felt bad for her. I wanted to say Knock it off; let your mother be mad at me, but that would make everything worse.

  I was bad at families.

  Later, as the dishwasher ran, Charlene and I drank seltzer on the deck. She watched me scrape clean the grill. The day’s heat faded quickly; we switched off the AC, opened the sliding-glass doors.

  “You’re mad because I slept in Framingham last night,” I said.

  Charlene sipped, looked over her small backyard. Everything was full-throttle green, the chain-link fence to the back neighbor’s yard barely visible. She said, “It’s a symptom.”

  “Symptom.” I scraped.

  “A symptom of your inability to commit.” She set her glass on the deck railing. “You said you wanted to spruce up the Framingham house and flip it. But you’re taking your sweet time, and you’re pumping in money you’ll never get back. You sleep there at least half the time. When you do, you don’t even have the guts to call and tell me. You text me instead.”

  My throat felt tight. I scraped, said nothing.

  “Conway, if you’re unhappy here, just say so and go. Batch it up. Live by yourself in your shitty neighborhood in Framingham.”

  I scraped like hell.

  “Sit there all alone watching TV every night,” Charlene said. “Watching TV and wondering why you feel like a clenched fist all the time.”

  I whipped the grill brush to the deck, slammed shut the grill cover, spun. “Don’t call me that. You know I hate that.”

  Charlene looked at me over her seltzer, held out a hand, made a fist, tightened until the hand was white and shaking. Then she opened it like a magician showing me my quarter. “Unclench,” she said.

  I wanted to tell her I knew she was right. I wanted to tell her it was hard. I wanted to ask how to do it.

  Instead, I wiped my hands on my pants. I stepped into the house. I closed the screen door quietly, precisely. I walked through the hall and out the front door. I climbed into my truck and drove to Framingham.

  * * *

  The next morning at eight, I sat outside Dot’s Place in Rourke. My stomach felt lousy—had since I left Charlene’s—and I didn’t want to face the grease-and-burned-toast smell until I had to.

  I was in the handicap-equipped Dodge van my friend left me along with the house. It was barely roadworthy anymore, but I’d left my F-150 in a glass-shop parking lot with a note taped to the steering wheel.

  No sun today—thick gray mugginess instead, the kind where you hope it’ll rain soon but it doesn’t. I watched townies go in and out of Dot’s.

  At ten past, I called Phigg’s cell. I got no answer, left voice mail.

  At twenty past I dug through my wallet and found the scrap of place mat Phigg had given me. For an address he’d written only Jut Rd., no house number. He’d said it was on a river. The river had to be the Souhegan. It defined Rourke and all the nearby towns; you couldn’t miss it.

  I fired up the van and tracked the same road I’d used yesterday to follow Phigg, looking to my left more carefully this time. Finally came to a dirt road I hadn’t noticed before. There was no street sign, but it seemed a little too wide and a little too tamped to be a driveway, so I turned and eased down a steep hill, hearing the river before I saw it. I cut hard right, felt scrub oaks scraping both sides of the van, and popped into a clearing.

  Phigg’s car and the beginnings of a big timber-frame house told me I’d found Jut Road.

  As I parked next to an outbuilding, I checked out the dream-house-in-progress. Or formerly-in-progress. I’m no contractor, but the skeleton told a story.

  First, I saw it wasn’t genuine timber-frame construction. It was a hybrid: impressive old rough-cut timbers at its center, where they’d be visible in the house’s public spaces, but conventional two-by-four framing for the outside walls. When finished, the house would seem like a genuine timber-frame job, unless you knew what to look for. But deep down, it’d be a dime-a-dozen stick-built house.

  I half smiled: That suited Phigg perfectly.

  It would have been a cool home, I thought, turning to look at the Souhegan. The outbuilding in front of me would be knocked down, I assumed, to clear the view. And it was a damn good view, especially this time of year, with White Mountains runoff rushing and forest as far as you could see.

  The thing was, though, this house never would be finished; the framing and the site had “ran out of dough” written all over them. The two-by and the presswood flooring were warped and grayed by weather. The electricians had started their rough-in but had up and quit, disgusted one day, leaving a spool of cable. To my right, at the edge of the woods, a three-foot-tall stack of additional presswood—probably for second-story flooring that never got installed—sat waterlogged, a blue tarpaulin having blown off months ago.

  It was easy to see why Tander Phigg had stopped bragging about his dream house.

  I called his name, quieting bugs and frogs for a few seconds.

  Called again, with a question mark at the end this time.

  Then I turned to the shack, thinking this couldn’t be where he lived. He’d said he was living at the construction site in a guesthouse, but this was more like an outbuilding. Twelve feet by twenty, built over the bank of the Souhegan. There were no windows on the narrow side I was looking at, and the two good-size windows on the front were boarded up. The door, a rough-cut plank job with a Z brace, sagged open.

  I called Phigg’s name again.

  Nothing.

  Over the years, the woods had closed in too much for any river breeze to chase bugs away. Mosquitoes sniffed me out and strafed me.

  Underfoot it was dank clay, not like most New England soil. I stooped, picked up a handful, looked at the river, figured things out. I bet there had been a house here, years before. A nice home, a river house like the one Phigg had begun. But the original house was built too close to the Souhegan. It wouldn’t take much rain to push the riverbank up there. After a couple hundred years, whoever owned the house got tired of cleaning up after floods and abandoned the place. If I walked ten yards past the stack of presswood, I’d probably find the remains of that house. The outbuilding had to be a mill or storage shed. It survived because it was built on brick piers high enough to stand clear of most floods.

  If Tander Phigg lived here he had fallen further, faster, than any of us knew—and was too proud to tell anybody, to ask for help.

  I stepped toward the shack and spotted something odd on the downriver side. I checked it out and saw a couple of toothed wheels, cast iron, the bigger one as large as a hula hoop. Click: Back when the original house stood, they likely used the river for power, making their own electricity. The outbuilding was a primitive generator. Good idea.

  I shoved open the sagging door, called Phigg’s name again. Nothing.

  I stepped in. Felt the floor sag—not creak, but sag—beneath me, and thought how easy it’d be to drop straight through into the river.

  Inside, it was dark as hell. I paused, let my eyes adjust. I wrinkled my nose at the smell—your grandfather’s basement multiplied by ten. It seemed you could reach for anything in this room, tear off a chunk, and ball it up like a sponge.

  I thought all this for maybe twenty seconds, slowly turning clockwise, finally looking past the door to the north
side.

  Tander Phigg was hanging from a stub of cast-iron pipe that came through the wall.

  He’d dressed up, then hung himself by his necktie. One of those preppy striped ones, orange and black.

  His khaki pants were stained with piss.

  He’d kicked over a double stack of milk crates. Not far from the crates was a green sleeping bag on an old door supported by a cinder block at each corner.

  Home sweet home.

  Atop the sleeping bag was a blue hard-shell Samsonite suitcase. It was open. Both halves were filled with folded clothes. Topping the stack was the yellow polo shirt he’d worn Monday, a thin black wallet, a wristwatch, the key to his shitbox Sentra. I looked at Phigg’s blue-black face. “Oh hell,” I said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I stepped outside. Realized I’d stopped breathing when I saw Phigg, gulped air. I squatted at the riverbank, splashed double handfuls of cold water on my face. It felt good. Helped me think.

  My gut said vamoose. My head said that would be a bad move. I rose, looked around the back of the van. Sure enough, I’d left strong tire tracks in the clay. Plus the locals had seen me and Phigg in Dot’s Place Monday. Plus me and Phigg were all over each other’s cell phones. Plus the guy at the Exxon would remember us, would remember my truck.

  If I split now, the cops would pick me up before dinner.

  I sighed, pulled my cell, started to punch 911.

  Then a stray thought hit me and I stopped dialing. What if Phigg’s body just went away? That might stir things up, might put pressure on whoever drove him to hang himself.

  It would be interesting to make Phigg disappear, then keep an eye on Ollie.

  But as I played with the idea I saw how stupid it was. Start with logistics. Even if I could get Phigg down from that pipe stub and clear all signs of him from the outbuilding, what would I do with his car? I’d wind up with his DNA inside the van. When somebody wondered where he was—and somebody would—Dot’s Place and the Exxon guy would point back to me.