Be careful, she told herself. Be oh so careful of this one, Darcellen.
“How can I help you, Mr. Ramsey?”
“Well, one thing—if it’s not too much to ask—I could sure use a cup of coffee. I’m awfully cold. I’ve got a State car, and the heater doesn’t work worth a darn. Of course if it’s an imposition…”
“Not at all. But I wonder… could I see your identification again?”
He handed the folder over to her equably enough, and hung his hat on the coat tree while she studied it.
“This RET stamped below the seal… does that mean you’re retired?”
“Yes and no.” His lips parted in a smile that revealed teeth too perfect to be anything but dentures. “Had to go, at least officially, when I turned sixty-eight, but I’ve spent my whole life either in the State Police or working at SAG-State Attorney General’s Office, you know—and now I’m like an old firehorse with an honorary place in the barn. Kind of a mascot, you know.”
I think you’re a lot more than that.
“Let me take your coat.”
“No, nope, I think I’ll wear it. Won’t be staying that long. I’d hang it up if it was snowing outside—so I wouldn’t drip on your floor—but it’s not. It’s just boogery cold, you know. Too cold to snow, my father would have said, and at my age I feel the cold a lot more than I did fifty years ago. Or even twenty-five.”
Leading him into the kitchen, walking slowly so Ramsey could keep up, she asked him how old he was.
“Seventy-eight in May.” He spoke with evident pride. “If I make it. I always add that for good luck. It’s worked so far. What a nice kitchen you have, Mrs. Anderson—a place for everything and everything in its place. My wife would have approved. She died four years ago. It was a heart attack, very sudden. How I miss her. The way you must miss your husband, I imagine.”
His twinkling eyes—young and alert in creased, pain-haunted sockets—searched her face.
He knows. I don’t know how, but he does.
She checked the Bunn’s basket and turned it on. As she got cups from the cabinet, she asked, “How may I help you today, Mr. Ramsey? Or is it Detective Ramsey?”
He laughed, and the laugh turned into a cough. “Oh, it’s been donkey’s years since anyone called me Detective. Never mind Ramsey, either, if you go straight to Holt, that’ll work for me. And it was really your husband I wanted to talk to, you know, but of course he’s passed on—again, my condolences—and so that’s out of the question. Yep, entirely out of the question.” He shook his head and settled himself on one of the stools that stood around the butcher-block table. His topcoat rustled. Somewhere inside his scant body, a bone creaked. “But I tell you what: an old man who lives in a rented room—which I do, although it’s a nice one—sometimes gets bored with just the TV for company, and so I thought, what the hell, I’ll drive on down to Yarmouth and ask my few little questions just the same. She won’t be able to answer many of them, I said to myself, maybe not any of them, but why not go anyway? You need to get out before you get potbound, I said to myself.”
“On a day when the high is supposed to go all the way up to ten degrees,” she said. “In a State car with a bad heater.”
“Ayuh, but I have my thermals on,” he said modestly.
“Don’t you have your own car, Mr. Ramsey?”
“I do, I do,” he said, as if this had never occurred to him until now. “Come sit down, Mrs. Anderson. No need to lurk in the corner. I’m too old to bite.”
“No, the coffee will be ready in a minute,” she said. She was afraid of this old man. Bob should have been afraid of him, too, but of course Bob was now beyond fear. “In the meantime, perhaps you can tell me what you wanted to talk about with my husband.”
“Well, you won’t believe this, Mrs. Anderson—”
“Call me Darcy, why don’t you?”
“Darcy!” He looked delighted. “Isn’t that the nicest, old-fashioned name!”
“Thank you. Do you take cream?”
“Black as my hat, that’s how I take it. Only I like to think of myself as one of the white-hats, actually. Well, I would, wouldn’t I? Chasing down criminals and such. That’s how I got this bad leg, you know. High-speed car chase, way back in ’89. Fellow killed his wife and both of his children. Now a crime like that is usually an act of passion, committed by a man who’s either drunk or drugged or not quite right in the head.” Ramsey tapped his fuzz with a finger arthritis had twisted out of true. “Not this guy. This guy did it for the insurance. Tried to make it look like a whatchacallit, home invasion. I won’t go into all the details, but I sniffed around and sniffed around. For three years I sniffed around. And finally I felt I had enough to arrest him. Probably not enough to convict him, but there was no need to tell him that, was there?”
“I suppose not,” Darcy said. The coffee was hot, and she poured. She decided to take hers black, too. And to drink it as fast as possible. That way the caffeine would hit her all at once and turn on her lights.
“Thanks,” he said when she brought it to the table. “Thanks very much. You’re kindness itself. Hot coffee on a cold day—what could be better? Mulled cider, maybe; I can’t think of anything else. Anyway, where was I? Oh, I know. Dwight Cheminoux. Way up in The County, this was. Just south of the Hainesville Woods.”
Darcy worked on her coffee. She looked at Ramsey over the rim of her cup and suddenly it was like being married again—a long marriage, in many ways a good marriage (but not in all ways), the kind that was like a joke: she knew that he knew, and he knew that she knew that he knew. That kind of relationship was like looking into a mirror and seeing another mirror, a hall of them going down into infinity. The only real question here was what he was going to do about what he knew. What he could do.
“Well,” Ramsey said, setting down his coffee cup and unconsciously beginning to rub his sore leg, “the simple fact is I was hoping to provoke that fella. I mean, he had the blood of a woman and two kiddies on his hands, so I felt justified in playing a little dirty. And it worked. He ran, and I chased him right into the Hainesville Woods, where the song says there’s a tombstone every mile. And there we both crashed on Wickett’s Curve—him into a tree and me into him. Which is where I got this leg, not to mention the steel rod in my neck.”
“I’m sorry. And the fellow you were chasing? What did he get?”
Ramsey’s mouth curved upward at the corners in a dry-lipped smile of singular coldness. His young eyes sparkled. “He got death, Darcy. Saved the state forty or fifty years of room and board in Shawshank.”
“You’re quite the hound of heaven, aren’t you, Mr. Ramsey?”
Instead of looking puzzled, he placed his misshapen hands beside his face, palms out, and recited in a singsong schoolboy’s voice: “‘I fled Him down the nights and down the days, I fled Him down the arches of the years, I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways… ’ And so on.”
“You learned that in school?”
“No ma’am, in Methodist Youth Fellowship. Lo these many years ago. Won a Bible, which I lost at summer camp a year later. Only I didn’t lose it; it was stolen. Can you imagine someone low enough to steal a Bible?”
“Yes,” Darcy said.
He laughed. “Darcy, you go on and call me Holt. Please. All my friends do.”
Are you my friend? Are you?
She didn’t know, but of one thing she was sure: he wouldn’t have been Bob’s friend.
“Is that the only poem you have by heart? Holt?”
“Well, I used to know ‘The Death of the Hired Man,’” he said, “but now I only remember the part about how home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in. It’s a true thing, wouldn’t you say?”
“Absolutely.”
His eyes—they were a light hazel—searched hers. The intimacy of that gaze was indecent, as if he were looking at her with her clothes off. And pleasant, for perhaps the same reason.
“What did you want to ask my husband, Holt?”
“Well, I already talked to him once, you know, although I’m not sure he’d remember if he was still alive. A long time ago, that was. We were both a lot younger, and you must’ve been just a child yourself, given how young and pretty you are now.”