I sat up in bed.
“Go back to sleep,” Angie mumbled, her face pressed into the pillow.
“Pearse didn’t drive to the cranberry bog,” I said.
“He didn’t drive,” she said into the pillow. “’Kay.”
“He walked,” I said. “From his house.”
“Still dreaming,” she said.
“No. I’m up now.”
She raised her head slightly off the pillow, looked up at me through blurry eyes. “Can it wait till morning?”
“Sure.”
She plopped back to the pillow, closed her eyes.
“He has a house,” I said softly to the night, “in Plymouth.”
34
“We’re driving to Plymouth,” Angie said as we turned onto Route 3 at the Braintree split, “because your son spoke to you in a dream?”
“Well, he’s not my son. I mean, in the dream he is, but in the dream Clarence is alive, and we both know Clarence is dead, and besides, you can’t step off a curb downtown and end up in Plymouth, and even if you could-”
“Enough.” She held up a hand. “I get it. So this kid who’s your son but not your son, he babbled on about four plus two plus eight equaling fourteen and-”
“He didn’t babble ,” I said.
“-this told you what again?”
“Four-two-eight,” I said. “The Shelby engine.”
“Oh, dear Jesus!” she shrieked. “We’re back to the friggin’ car? It’s a car , Patrick. Do you get that part? It can’t kiss you, cook for you, tuck you in, or hold your hand.”
“Yes, Sister Angela the Grounded. I understand that. A four-two-eight engine was the most powerful engine of its time. It could blow anything else off the road, and-”
“I don’t see what-”
“- and it makes one hell of a lot of noise when you turn it over. You think this Porsche rumbles? The four-two-eight sounds like a bomb by comparison.”
She banged the heels of her palms off my dashboard. “So?”
“So,” I said, “did you hear anything in the cranberry bog that night that sounded like an engine? A really goddamned big engine? Come on. I looked at the map before we followed Lovell. There was one way in-ours. The nearest access road on Pearse’s side was two full miles through woods.”
“So he walked it.”
“In the dark?”
“Sure.”
“Why?” I said. “He couldn’t have guessed we’d be tailing Lovell at that point. Why not just be parked in the clearing where we were? And even if he was suspicious, there was an access road four hundred feet to the east. So why’d he go north?”
“Because he liked the walk? I don’t know.”
“Because he lives there.”
She propped her bare feet up on the dash, slapped a palm over her forehead and eyes. “This is the dumbest hunch you’ve ever had.”
“Sure,” I said. “Bitch. That helps.”
“And you’ve had some monumentally dumb hunches.”
“Would you prefer wine or beer with your crow?”
She buried her head between her knees. “If you’re wrong, screw the crow, you’ll be eating shit till the millennium.”
“Thank God it’s approaching fast,” I said.
A map took up most of the east wall in the Plymouth Tax Assessor’s Office. The clerk behind the counter, far from being the dweeby, bespectacled, balding type one would expect to meet in a tax assessor’s office, was tall, well built, blond, and judging by Angie’s furtive glances at him, something of a male babe.
Himbos, I swear. There ought to be a law that keeps them from ever leaving the beach.
It took me a few minutes to zero in on the bog we’d followed Lovell to. Plymouth is absolutely rotten with cranberry bogs. Bad news if for some reason you don’t dig the smell of cranberries. Good news if you cultivate them.
By the time I found the correct bog, I’d counted four separate times I’d caught Himbo the Tax Stud checking out the places where the frays of Angie’s cutoff jeans exposed more than merely the backs of her upper thighs.
“Prick,” I said under my breath.
“What?” Angie said.
“I said, ‘Look.’” I pointed at the map. Due north of the center of the bog, about a quarter of a mile, I estimated, sat something marked PARCEL #865.
Angie turned from the map, spoke to Himbo. “We’re interested in purchasing parcel eight-sixty-five. Could you tell us who owns it?”
Himbo gave her a brilliant smile of the whitest teeth I’d seen on a man this side of David Hasselhoff. Caps, I decided. Bet the bastard wears caps.
“Sure.” His fingers zipped over his computer keyboard. “That was eight-sixty-five. Correct?”
“You got it,” Angie said.
I peered up at the parcel. Nothing around it. No eight-six-six or eight-six-four. Nothing for at least twenty acres, maybe more.
“Spooky Land,” Himbo said softly, his eyes on the computer screen.
“What’s that?”
He looked up, startled to realize, I think, that he’d spoken aloud. “Oh, well…” He gave us an embarrassed smile. “When we were kids, we used to call that area Spooky Land. We’d dare each other to walk through it.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long story.” He looked down at his keyboard. “See, no one’s supposed to know…”
“But…?” Angie leaned into the counter.
Himbo shrugged. “Hey, it’s been over thirty years. Heck, I wasn’t even born then.”
“Sure,” I said. “Thirty years.”
He leaned into the counter, lowered his voice, and his eyes glinted like a born gossip about to dish some dirt. “Back in the fifties, the army supposedly kept a kinda research facility there. Nothing big, my parents said, just a few stories tall, but real hush-hush.”
“What kind of research?”
“People.” He stifled a nervous laugh with his fist. “Supposedly mental patients and the retarded. See, that’s what scared us as kids-you know, that the ghosts running around Spooky Land were the ghosts of lunatics.” He held up his hands, took one step back. “It could all have been a ghost story used by our parents to keep us away from the bog.”
Angie gave him her most lascivious smile. “But you know different, don’t you?”