Croaked

Chapter Two

Chapter TwoWell, well, Dinah Rowan thought as she slapped burgers on the grill. Pope scores again! Where the heck does he find ‘em? This girl couldn’t be much past thirty, and way too hip for a horny old snake like Al. Now he was showing her the menu, his hand on her back. What’s the matter, Al, can’t she read?

My prices are low, Leo liked to say, because I don’t pay babysitters. You want to eat? Write up your own damn order. You want the table set? There’s the cutlery. Soda machine, too. Be grateful we supply the grub and a place to park your back end.

Dinah swiveled to shred a purple cabbage with a cleaver. Back off, Al! She don’t need your big paws all over her just to find a spoon.

Even Edgar Rowdey was watching them over his newspaper. No wonder: Al had been lobbying all winter to do a documentary on him, and sometimes would trot over the girl du jour like a dog fetching slippers. Or (more likely) just to show off.

What it showed (Dinah shoveled the cabbage into a bowl) was Al’s lack of common sense. For one thing, Rowdey was as famous for living like a hermit as for his creepy stories and finicky drawings. For another, Al had shot himself in the foot when he tried to steal Rowdey’s gardener, J.D. Thought he’d grow some vegetables and get a dish named after him on the Back End’s menu, like the Rowdeyberry Tarte. What Al failed to figure was that squash, tomatoes, and corn don’t go wild in the sandy Cape soil like blueberries and blackberries. Pope’s plot failed, in both senses: J.D. turned him down, and Al barely could grow grass by himself.

Now, having plowed under his doomed garden, he pretended the whole thing never happened. Same as he pretended his name was Alistair when everybody knew he was plain Al, short for Albert, short for Fat Albert, till he went off to college.

Rowdey was too much the gentleman to bust him. Or tell him where he could stuff his documentary; so Al hung on like a bulldog, even though most of Quansett knew the Atlantic would have to freeze over before a camera crew ever crossed Edgar Rowdey’s threshold.

With a precision that would make her the envy of bomber pilots if any should stray in from the base at Otis, Dinah flipped each burger in one swift swoop. Was Leo feeding soup to Al’s girl? Hussy! He’d better get his buns over here before the burgers burned, with no Sue to man the toaster.

But it was Mudge who scrambled around the counter, all arms and legs. Hired as a part-time dishwasher, he’d expanded to all-purpose gap-filler. Right now he was cashier, which he liked because he got to honk the tip horn. Leo kept a bucket on the counter for his ill-paid staff. Spare change won a honk from a brass bicycle horn; folding green, a rousing clang from a firebell.

“Dinah!” Mudge grabbed buns; splayed them on the revolving toaster. “Did you hear?”

“What?”

“Leo’s hired that girl to take Sue’s job!”

It would have been beneath her to show shock. “Well. Can’t really call it Sue’s job when she didn’t want it.”

“She did, though. He named it Sue-Chef for her. She just—oh, you know. And he didn’t even ask her!”

“Nor us.”

“Nor us,” he echoed.

As each browned bun fell from the toaster, Mudge forked it onto a paper plate and slid it to Dinah. He lived—impatiently—with his family in Mashpee, where his father was some kind of chief in the Wampanoag tribe. His mother, now dead, was rumored to have hitched a ride to the annual pow-wow one summer from Roxbury and stayed. Nobody but Leo and the bookkeeper knew how old he was. Dinah guessed over eighteen but under twenty-one.

“She ever done any cooking?”

“Up in Boston. One of those chi-chi places—Legal Seafood?”

“Better be Durgin Park if she wants to work here. Where’s himself?”

Leo always delivered the burgers personally, one in each hand, manually anchored to their plates: the Back End’s famous Thumburger.

“Coming. He gave her back to Mr. Pope. He looks—both of ‘em—kind of …”

“Thunderstruck?”

“Well,” said Mudge. “Did you see her?”

“Don’t you start!”

But Mudge, Dinah wagered, could hold his own. As tall and lean as Leo, Mudge had the potent edge of youth. He didn’t go fetch women, retriever fashion, like the tireless and tiresome Pope; they came after him. As so would I, she admitted, if I was sixteen again. Never mind that he’d scare the bejesus out of you in a dark alley, with his look of a Cherokee in a John Wayne movie. It was his eyes you fell into, deep and dark as a kettle-hole pond. Bewitching eyes!—like a deer’s, like a dog’s, so that you felt you could tell him anything at all and he would understand and still trust you.

He was staring at that girl again. Those eyes of yours, she warned him silently, will get you in trouble some day!

Within a week she would recall this thought and wonder if she was psychic.

If you turn left out of Leo’s, continue through Quansett center, and take a left onto Willow Street, you may notice a long, low L-shaped building with white vinyl siding, blue doors and shutters, and a faded sign: Blue Moon Motel. Vacancy. No Turnarounds Police Take Notice.

After Labor Day, when the tourists have gone home, the average Cape Cod motel has no jobs for the maids, busboys, launderers, and receptionists who gave its customers a carefree summer vacation. Workers who can’t afford to head north, to the ski resorts, or south, to the Florida beaches, move into the empty motels and squeak through the winter on unemployment.

At nine o’clock on this last Wednesday evening in May, the Blue Moon parking lot was sparsely scattered with cars. Beyond it, the swimming pool in its chicken-wire cage lay empty under a blue tarp. The office window was lit, although no one could be seen inside. Along the rest of the row an occasional slatted yellow window shone; an occasional TV muttered to itself, loud and incoherent.

In Room 5, Lydia Vivaldi spoke into her cell phone.

“This is so fucked.”

She had muted the sound on her TV and sat cross-legged on her bed. Blankets enveloped her legs. Beside her on the floor lay an open pizza box. A street light slanting through the venetian blinds lit up the white cardboard circle under the pizza’s remains like a half moon.

“What’s my procedure here? Do I go see them? Do I call them? Or what?”

“Why do you have to do anything?”

“Because she was my friend, Karin! My business partner! She was their daughter, and she’s dead! At the age of f*****g twenty-two! From falling off a f*****g ladder for christ’s sake!”

“Well, but, Liz—”

“Lydia. Please.”

“Lydia, then. Am I right?—they don’t even know you exist.”

“So that lets me off the hook?” Lydia shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, if you want to talk to them, I’m sure they’d be glad to meet you.”

“To hear about DeAnne. Don’t you think? Her life in Cambridge, her artwork, the Fix-It Chix and all that. The house.”

“Yeah. I’m sure they’d appreciate that.”

“She sent me a postcard, Karin. A month ago. She wanted to patch things up. What was wrong with me? I should have called her!”

“You would have. How could you know?”

“I don’t even remember what she said! Something like Hey, sorry, things are great here—which at the time just pissed me off, with my life in a total train wreck—”

“Hey. Which was totally not your fault.”

“—And now I can’t find the friggin’ thing. I just spent like an hour searching through every inch of my stuff.”

“It’s OK. Stop blaming yourself.”

“How can I help it? Anyway, that’s not— Oh, hell.”

“What?”

“I don’t get it! How could that happen to her? DeAnne! With her, you know, spatial sense? Coordination?”

“You said it was night, a smooth floor, she was wearing clogs. It could happen to anybody. Her foot slipped, or the ladder. She fell and hit her head. Right? You said that’s what was in the police report.”

“Yeah, well. That’s what Leo said was in the police report. But I’m thinking, shouldn’t I ask the cops? Do I, like, owe it to her? To make sure?”

“How do you owe anything to anybody on this? It’s over. You’re right, it sucks. But, you know, we just found out. Everybody else, like her family?—went through this a month ago. Whatever there was to do about it, they did. Case closed. They’re like five weeks along in their grieving process. You want to open that up again?”

“f**k. I don’t know.”

“No need to decide right now. Go back to sleep. Think it over when your head’s clear.”

“Right. You’re absolutely right, Karin. Hey, how are things up there? You, I mean. And Ricky?”

“We’re good. He found your note. That was quite the big shock.”

“To him? Everybody?”

“Well, sure. Paul and MJ just about flipped. Christophe doesn’t know yet. He’s working a double shift.”

“Well, say hi for me. Just to them, you know? Not—anybody else.”

“Got it.”

“I don’t even want to hear if he’s alive.”

“Course not.”

“In fact I hope he isn’t. I hope the shithead fries in Hell, the sooner the better.”

“Yup.”

“And his little bimbo, too.”

“Especially her.”

“So if he asks you if I asked about him, the answer is no. I didn’t.”

“No, you definitely did not.”

“Karin, are you sure you’re OK with breaking the news about DeAnne?”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve got a choice, do I? Yeah, I’ll go knock on doors tonight. Whoever’s here. Dinner kind of fell apart without you here to, you know, rally the troops.”

“Tell them I’m a professional cook now. That ought to get some laughs.”

“Take care of yourself, Liz. I mean, Lydia. And don’t worry about her parents or the cops or whatever. Give yourself time to get settled. See how it goes.”

“Thanks, Karin. You’re a true friend.”

“Keep in touch, OK?”

“You too.”

But we won’t, she thought as she hung up. Liz is over. Dead as ashes, like her pal DeAnne.

On a side street in Hyannis, Mudge Miles sat on a barstool. His right hand gripped a beer bottle; his left arm was slung around the waist of a girl he remembered was cute but whose name he’d forgotten. Talk ricocheted around him like pool balls. Mudge was (as he liked to think of it) multitasking: laughing, joshing his buddies, drinking, teasing the girl.

In the privacy of his brain, two thoughts buzzed like mosquitoes.

One: beer bored him. He drank it because everybody did, and it was a hell of a lot cheaper than the tequila shot he’d kicked off with. But who picked this piss as the default drink for men? Why couldn’t a man order a sombrero, a Cape Codder, or a pina colada without getting laughed off his barstool?

If the girl pressed against his side had broken the rules, however, and asked what he was thinking about, Mudge would have said: my truck. That was a problem that verged on the eternal. It was a running joke among his buddies: Well, Mudge could pick us up in the truck, except she’ll be broke down. Tonight he intended to leave the worthless piece of s**t in Leo’s parking lot. He’d hitched here from Mashpee; somebody would give him a ride back. Then, well past midnight, in beer-elevated spirits, plus some weed if he got lucky, he’d figure out how to get her running.

Or not. His father’s girlfriend had snapped at him worse than usual this morning. She hated being woken up, he knew that, but the house was so small that he couldn’t be as silent as he meant to. Some days she just yelled, some days she threatened. Today she’d ordered him to have his lazy good-for-nothing butt at the dinner table by 6:30 or don’t come home at all. Which meant either sneak in after they were all asleep, or go home with this girl, or sleep in the truck. He’d thrown a couple of blankets in the back just in case.

You’d think she’d give him credit for holding down a steady job. Most of these guys were in and out of work like a revolving door, jumping from restaurant to gas station to construction to unemployment faster than they switched girlfriends. You’d think she’d be glad he was saving up for college. If it pissed her off that he didn’t put money in the kitty, let her b***h at his dad. The education fund was his idea. Let her just tell Lincoln Miles to get off his high horse about being the family provider, and see whose lazy good-for-nothing butt got kicked out the damn door!

The girl was ruffling his hair, tickling his ear with her long fingernail. He grinned at her. Darla, that was it. He could see she was drunk. Cute, though. He felt a little drunk himself.

Not liking beer didn’t—couldn’t—mean you were gay. Did it? You’d know that about yourself, wouldn’t you, by the time you were old enough to drink? If you were gay, you wouldn’t get hot around girls, which Mudge definitely did. You’d want to grope guys, which he definitely didn’t. Wouldn’t you? Homosexuality wasn’t something that could sneak up on a person, was it?—like the cancer that had killed his mother, or the Alzheimer’s that put his grandmother in a home. Even if you didn’t always want to spend the night with the girl. Even if you secretly thought the coolest thing you’d ever done in your life was create the semi-famous Rowdeyberry Tarte. There had to be straight dessert chefs somewhere, right? OK, sure, fancy restaurants and Provincetown and gays, everybody knew that; but it wasn’t, like, built into your genes, was it?

Oh, screw it. s*x was too f*****g complicated anyway. Somewhere it had gotten twisted, from too many rules to none. From where you couldn’t do anything, to where somebody gets hurt no matter what you do. Like that girl who worked for Caroline and Carlo. DeAnne. Whenever he thought about her he felt guilty. Not that it could possibly be his fault what happened to her. They’d stopped seeing each other weeks before. Well, he’d stopped. She claimed to be fine with it, and after one awkward meeting at Leo’s, she acted fine with it. The last time she came in for lunch, with the film crew, he couldn’t tell if she was showing off or if she really thought somebody had turned that toad Alistair Pope into a handsome prince.

One of his buddies was into a shoving match at the far end of the bar with some redneck Irish asshole who’d made a loud comment about Indians and firewater. Darla nuzzled his neck. Mudge leaned past her and caught his friend Justin’s eye. Two minds with the same thought.

Mudge fished out his wallet, disentangled himself from Darla, and braced for a cold cramped night in Leo’s parking lot.