Tips for Living(9)
I began to click through other news channels mechanically. None of them had live coverage—the major media hadn’t arrived in Pequod yet. I clicked back to the local station. With her windswept hair, orange rain poncho and exercise pants, their reporter was more the type you’d see covering the annual Bike for Breast Cancer race, not a murder. Or in this case, a double murder. While she addressed the camera, another woman in a hooded rain jacket waited nervously at her side.
“I repeat, police aren’t telling us anything except that two Pequod residents, the internationally known artist Hugh Walker and his wife, Helene Westing Walker, were killed,” the reporter said. “A neighbor confirmed that the housekeeper discovered the bodies around six thirty a.m. when she arrived for work. In fact, I have that neighbor right here. Sue Mickelson. Thank you for speaking with us, Ms. Mickelson. Can you tell us about what happened here this morning?”
Ms. Mickelson stepped forward and straightened her posture for the camera. She had an air of self-importance about her.
“Well, it was unbelievably awful,” she said dramatically. “It was still dark and I was walking Jupiter, my Lab, when I saw a figure running down the Walkers’ driveway into the street. She was screaming, ‘Dios mio! Los están muertos! Los están muertos!’ I know Spanish. She was saying, ‘My God. They are dead. They are dead.’ I called 911 on my cell.”
“You didn’t hear anything else before that?”
“No. We live next door.” She pointed off-camera beyond Hugh’s driveway. “But you can see there’s a huge stretch of woods between our place and theirs.”
“How well did you know them?”
“Sometimes on weekends our daughter has playdates with their little girl, Callie. I saw their car yesterday afternoon and realized they’d come out, so I called to try and set something up for the kids. Thank God Callie was staying in the city with her aunt last night or she’d probably be dead, too. It’s horrible. Just horrible.”
“Yes, it is. Thank you, Ms. Mickelson.”
The reporter did a recap and signed off so the regular news could begin. The facts were beginning to sink in. I felt panicky. Then another wave of disbelief washed over me. My mind wouldn’t accept the killings, even as my body was trembling. Was I in shock? Was that the mind-body split I was experiencing? I wanted to talk to Grace. Talking to her would help ground me. Had she heard yet? I tried her landline. No answer. I tried her cell, and then Mac’s. The same. Nobody picked up. Then I remembered that it was Sunday and sometimes the family went to an early church service with Mac’s parents and out to breakfast afterward.
I couldn’t just sit there. I should be doing something besides clicking the remote from channel to channel, shouldn’t I? But what? I finally grabbed my trench coat, pulled on my Wellingtons over my pajama bottoms, and got into my car. I had no idea where I was going.
It was a damp, cold, foggy morning. I could see my breath. British moor kind of weather. I drove fast, speeding past the entrance to the nature preserve. Then I remembered the police often lay in wait behind the bayberry bushes nearby. I slowed down.
The roads were nearly empty. I just kept driving and trying to absorb what I’d seen on television. What they were saying still didn’t seem possible. The man I met when I was twenty-five, the man I’d lived with and loved for more than twelve years had been murdered? Grief stabbed my heart. Then I remembered how Hugh betrayed me with Helene, and the jabbing stopped. The questions surfaced again: What kind of a monster had killed Hugh and the mother of his child? And why? I could practically hear Grace’s voice in my head saying, “Karma, baby. You can always count on karma.”
I reached into my pocket for my phone to try calling her again. But my phone wasn’t there. I tried the other pocket and came up with a crumpled five-dollar bill. Damn. I must’ve forgotten it.
I switched on the radio to hear more details on the crime. Static. Dense woods on either side of the road interfered. It began to rain and I turned on my wipers.
“What the hell?”
They were making annoying clicking sounds, like a desperate smoker flicking a Bic low on fuel, and they moved intermittently, maybe one stroke for the usual three.
“In four hundred feet, turn left,” my GPS ordered.
“Not now,” I said under my breath.
My Toyota was a lemon. I bought it used, and within a month the GPS jammed—it wouldn’t turn off. The electronic female voice gives me random instructions at random times. Fixing it would cost almost half of what I paid for the car, so I live with the malfunction. And now the wipers had decided to act up, too? I glowered as they made one of their irregular thumps.
“Turn left,” GPS lady ordered again. “Turn left.”
“Please shut up. If I turn left, we’ll drown.”
The woods had thinned out, and water appeared on my left. Dark gray water, stirred up and angry like the sky, which was now a moldy gray-green. The air began to smell briny, like sour pickles, as the road curved toward the bridge that connected the neighborhoods on this side of the harbor with downtown Pequod. Through my blurry windshield, I saw waves crashing into the harbor’s stone breakwater. The dozen or so sailboats that remained in the water late in the season rose and fell violently with the surf. Sirens screamed somewhere in the distance. Could the police be chasing down the killer? I tried the radio again and found better reception on WPQD, catching the middle of a report on Hugh: