The Narrows(88)

“This whole thing gives me the creeps,” Eddie said from his desk.

Ben flipped the phone open. The phone was on but the battery icon in the corner of the screen was red, indicating that it needed to be charged. Was there enough juice left to make a call?

“I’m gonna dial your desk phone,” he told Eddie. “Tell me whose name appears on the Caller ID.”

Eddie swiveled around in his chair and watched Ben dial. A moment after he hit Send, Eddie’s desk phone rang. Eddie leaned over and examined the narrow digital screen on the top of the phone. “That’s weird,” Eddie marveled. “It says Tom Schuler.”

Ben ended the call and flipped the phone closed.

“He’s my goddamn mechanic,” Eddie said, turning back around in his chair to face Ben. “How come you got Schuler’s cell phone?”

And then it hit him: Tom lived off Full Hill Road, up the hill on the outskirts of town—the same road where Maggie’s accident had taken place last week. On the night of the accident, Maggie had claimed to have been heading home from Crossroads in town. Full Hill Road was not only out of her way, it was at the other end of town.

What had she told him back at the Morelands’ place? He accused me of sleeping around on him. And when he’d asked her if this was true, she hadn’t responded.

Things in his head began to turn and snap together with a series of nearly audible clicks.

“Ben?” Eddie stood. “You okay?”

“Wasn’t that Tom Schuler’s car that Dorr Kirkland had towed recently?” Ben asked, though he already knew the answer.

“Yeah, Ben. What’s wrong? What’s that mean?”

Maggie appeared in the doorway. Her face blotchy and her hair stringy and wet, she looked like a corpse that had just washed up on a beach somewhere.

“What happened to Tom Schuler?” Ben asked her from across the Batter’s Box. Eddie’s eyes jumped in her direction.

“Maggie?” Ben said.

Maggie said nothing.

Ben turned to Eddie. “Go out to Tom’s place, see if he’s home.”

Eddie picked his campaign hat up off the corner of his desk. “Sure thing.”

“You won’t find him,” Maggie said from the doorway.

“Where is he?” Ben asked.

“He’s gone, too. Just like Evan.”



6



After Eddie left, Ben sat opposite Maggie at a table in the small kitchenette that also functioned, when needed, as an interrogation room. He asked Maggie various questions—about her relationship with Tom Schuler, about the argument with Evan, about whether or not she believed Evan had done something to Tom or if Tom had done something to Evan—but she provided no responses. Her eyes grew increasingly distant. Ben began to think that she could no longer hear him speaking, that his words were barrages of nonsense that whistled uninterrupted and undigested through the hollow space at the center of her mind. After ten minutes of this foolishness, Ben told Maggie to stand up. He had to repeat this command two more times before she actually complied. It wasn’t that she was being deliberately insubordinate; to Ben, it seemed that some vital fluid was slowly leaking out of her, leaving nothing but a glaze-eyed zombie wearing Maggie Quedentock’s clothes.

He led her into lockup. Poorhouse Pete still occupied the third cell, and as Ben and Maggie entered, Pete perked up and watched them intently, like an owl in a tree. Maggie said nothing when Ben led her into the first cell. She went and sat down on the bench and stared out at him with dead eyes as he closed and locked the cell door.

I think I’m currently witnessing someone on the verge of losing their mind.

“My baby did it,” she said, startling him. “That’s the big secret, Ben. That’s what got Evan and what got Tom, too. My baby.”

“Who’s your baby, Maggie?”

“He died before he was ever born, back when I was just a girl. But now he’s back and he’s making me pay. He got Tom and he got Evan and now he’s coming for me next.”

From memory, Ben recited Maggie her Miranda rights. Then he went to Poorhouse Pete’s cell and unlocked it.

“Hey,” Pete said, his old face suddenly slack and innocent. “What’d I do?”

“Time to go. This isn’t a boardinghouse.”

“You said I could—”

“I’m not in the mood tonight, Pete. Please.”

Pete rose and shuffled out of the cell. Ben gave him a few dollars and one of the rain slickers they kept in the supply closet then ushered him out the front doors of the station. The rain was coming down harder now, the sky deepening toward dusk. Before passing through the front door and out into the rain, Poorhouse Pete gave Ben one last doleful look from over his shoulder. Under his breath the homeless man muttered, “You really gonna make me go back out there, ain’t you?”

Ben sighed. “Have a good night, Pete.”

Pete shuffled out into the night, his body trembling beneath the rain slicker. His longish hair hung in wet ropes around his face as he peered up at the darkening sky. That was how Ben left him.

He went back to the dispatch office and leaned exhaustedly in the doorway. The look on his face must have been one of pure misery, judging by the empathetic look Shirley gave him from over her magazine.